#21 Mark Turner - Inside Ukraine (Recon Marine)

Former Recon Marine Mark Turner who went to Ukraine on 18 hours notice at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine joins us on the show. He gives us an inside perspective on what's happening in country as the war continues on. After speaking with high level Ukrainian Politicians they've asked him to train both Ukrainian military and civilians to go fight the Russians on the front lines of the war. Mark is now recruiting more former US Special Operations Veterans to train both Ukrainian military and civilians to fight the Russians through his nonprofit The Overwatch Foundation. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, everybody. I just want to welcome you back to the Sean Ryan Show. We have another phenomenal guest this week. His name's Mark Turner. He's a former recon Marine. He was in Ukraine at the start of the war. He's going to give us his perspective on what was going on over there and what exactly he was doing in country. Before we get started, I'm going to ask you guys a solid. If you liked the episode, if you're listening to it on Spotify or iTunes, please, just take just a second, leave us a review. If you can, type in at least one word. Let us know what you think. I really appreciate it, guys. That absolutely helps me out. Now, let's get to the show.

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  Enjoy it.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  So when you're in the Ukraine,

• 2:22Speaker 05

  and you're in a church, cathedral, steeple, trying to look at sniper possessions.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  We're not going to war, we're just helping here. And if the war comes here, that's fine, but the war's not here.

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  So some of them still just don't get it. It's like, they're in your country, and you still think it's not coming here.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  It's surreal though, isn't it? Imagine if in New York, the Russians invaded.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  It's an unbelievable thing. You think of 9/11, when that happened. You're sitting watching it, it's real, but it's unbelievable. Our instructions were basically, "Find this guy, or find the priest." It's not how we work. I told Zach right away, I said, "Look, man, we would never run something like this." "It's okay, it's okay, we'll be alright, we'll be alright." These two guys come out with a car, they're almost tripping over their own feet. AK's drawing on us.

• 3:41Shawn Ryan?

  Hey guys, let me tell you about this subscription service that I've been working real hard on, called Vigilance Elite Patreon. Basically on Patreon, we have it broken up into three different tiers. We got Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Let's dive in. Our Tier 1 patrons get all the behind-the-scenes footage of The Sean Ryan Show. That could include behind-the-scenes photos, that could be side conversations that we have in between breaks, that could be specific questions that our patrons give us for the guests on The Sean Ryan Show, and a ton of bonus content that doesn't really fit into any specific category.

• 4:21Shawn Ryan?

  For our Tier 2 patrons, they get access to our Tactical Training Library, which consists of well over 100 videos. We've broken those videos up into separate categories, and those categories are Rifle Fundamentals, Pistol Fundamentals, Drills, Tactics, Driving, Gear and Weapon Setups, and everybody's favorite, Mindset. Also on Tier 2, you will get a live update from me on the 1st and the 15th of every month, where we talk about the upcoming guests on the Sean Ryan Show, plus all the benefits of Tier 1.

• 5:03Shawn Ryan?

  Our top tier, which is Tier 3, gets full access to all the other tiers, plus they get full access to me, where we do Video Teleconferencing, VTC. Once a month, we discuss anything from tactics, to current events, to who's coming on the show. I take suggestions, and it's very interactive. No matter what tier you choose, the support is greatly appreciated, and it is the only thing that makes this show drive on. So, thank you for all the support. See you on Patreon.

• 5:45Shawn Ryan?

  Mark Turner, welcome to the show, brother.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:49Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you are like my favorite type of guest to interview on here. You're really quiet, not a whole lot of people know who you are, or what you've been up to, and we got a message on Sean Ryan Show Instagram account, saying that you had been in Ukraine since the war started, went on 18 hours' notice, and you were coming back to recruit some guys to go back over with you. And so, I cleared my schedule, I wanted to get you here as fast as possible. So, here we are, six days later, and you're in the studio. I'm really excited for this interview.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, thanks for helping us get the word out, and we're trying to do a lot there. And you've been great with your time and your effort to help us get the word out, so thanks.

• 6:36Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you're welcome. It's gonna be a real pleasure interviewing you. So I just want to knock out some of the business stuff right up front. So the reason you're coming here is you're not looking for any credit or anything like that. You came here because you are training Ukrainians in basically more fighting. And so you came back to hopefully recruit special operations types to go back over with you and train these guys. And you're also looking for equipment. So any of these tactical gear companies, flashlights, magazines, whatever they've got that they can donate to you guys

• 7:17Shawn Ryan?

  for your mission over there, you're welcoming. So where, before we start, where can everybody find you?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Uh, my Instagram, MarkTurnerBJJ. Um, my email is, my personal email is good as well. I know, uh, might end up regret putting that out there, but, uh, MarkTurnerBJJ@gmail and then the Overwatch Foundation is our nonprofit. Um, you can, that's, uh, the Overwatch Foundation on Instagram as well. And all the links will be on there for the website and all that kind of stuff as well.

• 7:49Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. I'll link everything below. So if you are looking to get over there and help Mark train some of the Ukrainians and, uh, get these guys spun up for the Russian threat that they're dealing with. There's your guy. He got, he has all the logistics figured out. And, um, and you're also going on Mike Ritlin's podcast, who gives a phenomenal interview. I don't know when that's airing, but I'm going to link that, his podcast below to, uh, drive traffic because there's no doubt in my mind, whatever I don't cover, Mike will definitely pick up the ball. So, uh, great interview and our great interviewer, Mike's just a solid dude. But, um, so how I want to kind of go through this interview is

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody really knows what's going on other than mainstream media. And as time goes on, more and more people are realizing mainstream media is not putting facts out. There's an agenda behind it and a lot of people aren't watching it anymore. And so I haven't given any opinions, anything on Ukraine-Russia conflict, because I don't trust anything that the mainstream's putting out. In fact, they've already been caught in lies. One of them was the fighter pilot that wound up being a video game fantasy that they put out there as fact. And then there was another one too. I can't remember what it was, but, um, which you're unaware of.

• 9:20Shawn Ryan?

  Because you said you don't even know what's going on on mainstream. So I want to get your perspective of what's actually going on on the ground over there. What some of these guys are saying, what you're seeing on the ground. I know you talked to some high-ranking diplomats and government officials that are giving you intelligence about what's happening over there. And so I want to kind of intertwine that with what you're actually doing over there. And then at the end, we'll talk about what you're doing with your nonprofit.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:52Shawn Ryan?

  But always give everybody a gift.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Do I open it now or what?

• 10:00Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead, open it up.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Goodness gracious. I come on marine, you're giving me a box to open here. This is, uh...

• 10:09Shawn Ryan?

  You can rip it. Don't be bashful.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. I don't even know if I should show these. These are like worth more than gold at the moment, aren't they?

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  We just got those back in stock.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So this is the first of the new batch?

• 10:24Shawn Ryan?

  That's the first of the new batch.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Wow. Fantastic.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if they'll be on the website yet, but they're back.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  There's how many bags here? Four bags? These are not gonna make it to the airport.

• 10:36Shawn Ryan?

  We'll give you some more.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  These will make it back home. I'm gonna destroy these. Thank you very much. That's fantastic. Good stuff. Thank you.

• 10:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome.

• 10:49Shawn Ryan?

  So let's dive right into it.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:51Shawn Ryan?

  So just day one, where were you when you got this call?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um, a little bit of background on me, I was in the Marine Corps ten years, started in infantry, finished off in the reconnaissance community, um, been out longer than I was in at this point. Um, you know, combat veteran, all that good stuff. Uh, I have a jujitsu academy now in the Chicago area. Uh, and we have a huge kind of veteran community in the academy. Uh, some special operations guys, some veterans, a lot of police first responders, that kind of stuff. So we have a good community there, um, of guys. One of the guys in the academy is a Ukrainian guy.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  No military experience or anything, actually brand new American, his name's Yuri. Uh, you know, I'll talk about Yuri quite a bit. Um, brand new American, naturalized citizen, um, I'm a naturalized citizen as well, I'm from Scotland, obviously. And, um, and, and we're good friends. And leading up to the war, obviously there was a lot of stuff on TV and, you know, chatting back and forth, checking in with a friend, how's everything going back home? And, you know, kind of going back and forth. When the war kicked off, he like obviously completely changed, right? I mean, that's real now, I mean, it was real before, but now there's Russians in his country, kind of thing.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So, and, and I could see it was affecting him. And I said, it was at the weekend, I said, look, let's go to the range, let's shoot a little bit. You know, he's, he's, he's kind of getting into his rights as an American. Got his concealed carries, learning how to shoot, this kind of stuff. So I thought, we'll go to the range, couple of hours, it'll get your mind off the TV and out of your phone. Right? Just clear your head a little bit.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  So we're doing our thing at the range as you do and he's like, I think I'm just gonna go home and check on my family. And I said, well, Yuri, you can't, you can't go back there right now, you know, I mean, obviously a lot of uncertainty, it's war, you don't have any experience. He said, I really wanna go back. I said, well, let me see if I can get some guys together. And we'll do, you know, we have this nonprofit, we do a lot of disaster relief. Um, like kind of fast action type stuff with hurricanes, these kind of things. Um, I said, let me see if I can get some guys together and we'll do some kind of humanitarian thing there and we'll go with you, make sure everything's okay. Um, not to like protect them really, but kind of, right, to go with them.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  And uh, and he's like, he was kind of blown away by that and I mean, we move fast. Part of it with, why we're so good at what we do is because we're quick, quick to act when these things happen, right? So yeah, so eighteen hours later, we were uh, pretty much on the way to Ukraine. From that conversation to getting on the boat, I mean, it was that fast.

• 13:59Shawn Ryan?

  And you have, you're married?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Married.

• 14:01Shawn Ryan?

  With two kids?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, three kids, one's eighteen. But yeah, two little ones, four year old and three month old.

• 14:07Shawn Ryan?

  And you're over there with eighteen hours notice?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:10Shawn Ryan?

  How long was this going on? How long had the war started before you guys got in country?

• 14:15Speaker 02

  I think three days.

• 14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Where did you fly into?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Um.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  A neighboring country, we'll say. I don't really want to say it because of kind of what we're doing there and what we're doing in that neighboring country as well. But yeah, neighboring country. Drove to the uh, to the border, so it was all in all with all the travel and the connections, it was close to like seventeen, eighteen hours.

• 14:40Shawn Ryan?

  Oh wow.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Uh, airport plane. And then seven hours drive, uh, which ended up being nine hours drive because we made a few stops and and gathered humanitarian supplies on the way, so a nine hour drive to the border.

• 14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Throughout the interview, if there's anything that I I understand that there's a lot of sensitive uh material that you don't wanna reveal, so. Um, just say, you know, as much as you can, and if you can't go any farther than just say.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm I'm here to be as as open and transparent as possible. There is obviously for opsec stuff. Names and and some places I I won't say, just because we're still actively doing things there. Um, and we are planning on going back and obviously you have a massive audience, so um. But yeah, I'll be as transparent with as much as I can.

• 15:29Shawn Ryan?

  What type of equipment did you take with you?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Um, we went pretty slick, right? Um, we didn't take any weapons with us. We had. Connections to that kinda stuff in country if and when we needed it. Um. We didn't even check any bags. It was um, yeah, didn't check any bags uh. Partly because, I mean, look, we're we had a lot going on. We're doing stuff kinda quick, hard and fast and. I mean, imagine getting stuck trying to do something like that because an airline lost your bag, right? So, um, yeah, as much as you could pack into a carry-on bag uh is what we had. We also knew when we stopped and got a bunch of supplies in the neighboring country.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  We carried all that stuff across the border. We walked across the border.

• 16:19Shawn Ryan?

  You walked across the border?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  With stuff in hand, yeah.

• 16:23Shawn Ryan?

  Was anybody there to receive you?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what happened when we arrived in the neighboring country? We started building our network there before we even left. Um, people always say, how can you do that stuff so fast? And I say, well, you know, we had nineteen hours of kinda. Airport flight time to prepare stuff and to coordinate, and then we had that drive. So like you can get a lot done. If we would have taken all that time and planned it here stateside, you're missing a day or two days, right? So it's kinda punch out and go and work the plan as you're going. So we had that network to get us from the airport in the neighboring country to the border. And it was very funny because.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yuri obviously speaks Ukrainian, but we didn't have anybody that spoke the language in this neighbouring country. And we tried to set it up to where the guy who would come and pick us up, it was kind of like a bad game of telephone, right? I'm coordinating with you, but you're coordinating with a guy who's gonna come meet us. So, we're planning it and we say, look, we have this long drive, we're arriving kind of in the late afternoon, early evening. And now we have to do that drive to the border. It would be fantastic if this guy could fill the car up with as much medical supply, because that's what we were doing. We took basically medical supplies that you would put in an IFAC, like combat trauma type stuff, uh, stuff for packing wounds.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Uh, tourniquets, we ended up not being able to get tourniquets in country. I brought a bunch of tourniquets and then we sourced a bunch more. But that kind of stuff, uh, compression bandages, gauze, uh, you know, the same kind of stuff that you'd imagine is in an, in an IFAC. Uh, so be, give the guy a list, it'd be good if he had the car packed full of that stuff. So we just get in the car and we can go to the border. So, he comes up and the guy, it's so funny, we called him Rambo because, uh, he showed up, he had like the olive drab gear on and the hat, like, you know, standing there at the airport, it's like, that's, that's our guy for sure. Like, he stuck out, he thought he's James Bond or something, right? Yeah. Coming to pick these guys up.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  So, he shows us, he's all excited to show us what he has in the trunk and it's like, everything we had on the list, he got like one of.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  So it's like, oh man, you know, heart of gold, fantastic, thank you. We need more, like, we need this car bursting with stuff. So we proceeded to stop at every pharmacy that we could find. And it's two American marines and Yuri go into these pharmacies and we're like, we just need to gut your pharmacy of all the stuff. And, you know, imagine you're in a Eastern European country, one, two people working in these pharmacies and we come rolling in and just gut the whole store. They're thinking like, what in the world is going on here, you know? Once they kind of caught on to what we were doing. They were incredibly helpful and just started, you know, giving us more than we were even asking for.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Um, so we did that five times. We basically kept stopping until it was time for pharmacies to close.

• 19:44Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And we filled up the car and, you know, continued on to the border, got there really late. Ran into, uh, we're about a mile or two away from the, the border and ran into. Federal police of that neighboring country.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Told them who we were, what, what we were doing and they were like, look, the border's kind of dodgy at night and all this kind of stuff. We, you probably don't want to go right now, really late at night. I think it was like two in the morning, three in the morning. You don't want to go right now and we're not gonna let you go right now. Um, in the, in the morning, you guys can go ahead and, and punch over. So we just kind of hung out on the side of the road, snowing, you know, cold, middle of the night. There was all kinds of other cars there. You can imagine there's a lot of Ukrainian people trying to get out.

• 20:37Shawn Ryan?

  What, how many people did you estimate? Was the, was the border flooded with people like?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Uh, coming, coming out, there was a lot of people. Um, at the time we crossed, we were the only ones crossing in.

• 20:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  There were some people on the outside, like I said, maybe a mile away staged, kind of waiting for people to, to come out. Um, you know, but a border, you've had some experience with borders. Borders can be a dodgy place, you know? Kind of reminds me a little bit of the, the cantina from Star Wars.

• 21:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  You know, it's just, you have all kinds of people there and, and you don't really know. So, yeah, we had kind of a watch and. Keeping an eye out and all that. We had to sit there for a couple of hours, kept checking with the police, hey, let us go now, let us go now. And then, then they let us cross, yeah.

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  Did you know where you were going before you crossed the border?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we had some contacts on the other side, obviously because of Yuri. Um. He actually, we couldn't have done what we did to the level that we did it without him. Because it's kind of like the hometown guy bringing us there, a ton of doors opened. You know, like if you yourself was like, hey, I'm just gonna go to Ukraine and try and save the world kind of thing, it would be difficult. It would be really difficult, so.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  We had some guys pick us up on the other side. It's funny, like I said, we walked across the border. All that stuff that we packed the car with in hand, in boxes and in bags. And we're just walking and uh. We're we're crossing over and there's this little shack, like a little guard shack. Looks abandoned or whatever and uh we start walking, guy's like, hey. Ukrainian guy, like, what's this guy doing? Let me see your papers, all this kind of stuff. Middle of nowhere, checks our papers and we're like, alright, now what? And he's, it sounds so funny. He's like, alright, now you just go to Ukraine. Alright, I guess I guess we're here, right? So two guys come in a van to pick us up and it was kind of like they pull up, the van door opens, get in kind of deal.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  We don't know these guys, Yuri knows of these guys. Turns out one of the guys is named Sasha, just an incredible human, right? Patriot for his country. Um, he has this kind of underground network of.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  It's it's kind of like a humanitarian group. They do a lot of humanitarian stuff for people, for the army, getting stuff out to the front. Um, and getting, helping with refugees, kind of getting them to that area and helping them get to the borders. People that are leaving some of the the the areas where the fronts are, um. So he came, picked us up and, you know, you get into the van with these with these guys, I don't speak Ukrainian, just kind of like, alright, let's go, we're doing this. You know, I didn't know how influential and how incredible he was at that time.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, having a contact like that was was great. From there. We are, we went to the area, kind of like our A O, that we were operating out of into his. And I can mention the place now because they've since moved in the last few days to a different location. But it was a window and door. Sales place, like patio doors and windows. And they basically just turned it into this. Incredible network, like underground network to support the war effort and. You know, we we get to the town, we went there, we went to our safe house, kinda got settled in. And, you know, started working the plan from there.

• 24:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, what kind of, when you, did you see kinda who was leaving the border? Was there, was it a lot of women and children? Was there a lot of fighting age males leaving?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not a lot of fighting age males, um, it was mainly women and children. The males there are required to stay. I think there are some exceptions. I think it's from eighteen or sixteen to sixty is the age that has to remain in country. They all are joining the army right now, um, many are just doing it, you know, they're, they they don't have to be told. They're, they're, they want to do it, the same way, if something happened here, you and I, we don't just sit by, right? I mean, it's, their patriotism's incredible, um, but yeah, that. On one side to me, that's, that's pretty incredible, heroic and patriotic. But the families are being split, right?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Because the women and children are are getting out. And even the women and children that are staying in some of the, the areas where the front is not. Like where the actual fighting's not, they're still set, their family's still broken, because the men are all going to the front.

• 25:26Shawn Ryan?

  Would, how are they, are they being put in camps? Where are they staying?

• 25:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, the refugees.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Um, some of them are moving, so let's say that the fronts are more kinda out east, let's say. So as they move west, some of them are going to towns that are not affected heavily by the fighting yet. Um, or that aren't as bad of a threat as where they're coming from. Some of them that are actually going to the borders. And this is kind of the problem they're having now and and and what I've heard about how we're looking at it as Americans. So let's bring them to America, let's bring them to other parts of Europe and help them. That's fantastic idea, but these people don't want that. They want to stay close to the border.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  So that when this clears up, they go back to their life, right? I mean, I'm sure some of them would love to come here, but many of them. Again, their husbands, their fathers, their brothers are at the front.

• 26:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So they don't want to come to Tennessee or Chicago right now. They want to be close to home, so. It puts a lot of stress on those border areas of those neighboring countries. Because it's not just processing them and moving them on. They don't want that. So you have to. In my opinion, you have to kind of help facilitate that, but it puts a lot of pressure on those border areas.

• 26:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so they want to be as close as possible.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I I I probably would too, right?

• 26:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  You know, but we don't think like that really. We think of it as, hey, let's get them out of there and start them over.

• 27:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  You know, give them a new life kind of thing, and and that's not really what many of them are interested in.

• 27:07Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. That's interesting. I'm glad we just went into that. So you're at the underground facility and what's and so what starts to develop there? Who are you meeting?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a. So to set the scene of that, like I said, it's this kind of underground war effort thing. Kind of reminds you of like a World War Two movie when you see that kind of stuff going on. The whole town is involved, right? You have women and children making camion net in the gymnasiums. You have everybody helping out. Anybody that has any kind of, you know, there was a steel guy there talking to us about making plates and and. Seamstresses helping out with this, that, or the next thing. Uh, doctors, nurses, everybody's helping out. And uh.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  We go in there and just start, okay, how can we help? We do our med drop with the supplies. We're explaining to them like, look. Explain to them about like an IFAT kit. Here's what you need in there. Here's a box of stuff. You need to make these kits up. Here's what goes into that. And we just start making connections, looking for stuff to do, looking for ways we can help. And somebody mentions about the the military. Uh, there's a military base in town. And what happened was when the war kicked off, they had about two hundred thousand people join the armed forces in a weekend. Wow.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  So you can imagine the strain. I mean, if two hundred thousand people enlisted in our military on a weekend, we'd struggle to process all that, right? So they had a lot of guys who had no experience, no training, anything like that, no uniforms, um, no gear. And we had heard the military had some strain. They set up these territorial defense units. I think. Most of the people listening to this will have heard the like the foreign legion thing that Ukraine started, right? Where. Anybody can come over and we'll arm them and all this kind of stuff. We weren't in contact with any of that. Um, but these territorial defense units originally were set up to protect local areas.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  So like your town would have a territorial defense unit made up of people from that town. And they would protect the area.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Turns out with everything going on, these territorial defense units are also getting sent to the front. No training, no gear. Some of them haven't even touched a rifle till they get there. How far in are you into Ukraine? Um, from the from the border? Yeah. We'll say a couple hours, let's say. Can you name the town? No. Okay. No, just because there's so and and the reason why is what Russia's doing right now. To these western areas, they know they're getting a lot of help from the western areas of Ukraine. They know they're getting help from the neighboring countries. So they're sending saboteurs out to those areas to mark targets, right? I mean, there's already been some issues where.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Some of the areas in the west, there's there was that location kind of close to um the Polish border that just got bombed. Yeah. Because they found out they were training these kind of units there and you know. So I don't want to say the area. Understandable. Those kind of reasons um for for those people's protection and then for mine as well, because I'm probably going back there um. And if they know that Americans are there, obviously that's bad as well, so um. We found out this this army base and basically just went knocked on the door and told the guard like, hey, here's who we are. Who's in charge? Get us in front of somebody who's in charge.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  So we end up in front of this Colonel and uh you know, he was a tank commander. Now he's dealing with all these infantry type guys. The major that was working under him. Was uh in the army a long time ago.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  When he was done in the army, he was a salesman for like aquatic type stuff like aquariums. Fish and and aquariums. Yeah. All of a sudden ominous, ominous, you're a major in the army now, right? Running these guys and he was an artillery guy.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  So we go in and we told the Colonel, we said, look, we're gonna be here for the next X amount of days. Here's who we are. If you need any help, let us know. We were not going there to train Ukrainians. We weren't going there to fight. You know, we were going there to take Yuri home. And this is kind of part of how everything spiraled and we, you know, got more involved and more involved. Um, he was very kind of skeptical of us at first. I mean, I don't think he thought we were up to anything. Um, like he didn't think we were Russian saboteurs or anything, but he just kind of was. Who are you and why are you doing this, you know? Um.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And he said, I'll tell you what, we're doing defensive positions around the town and around the base. Kind of, we know what we're doing, but we'd like some advice on what we've done. And if you have any advice on improvements we can make, let's talk about it. So he starts showing us around the base. We like this, we would add that, we'd get rid of this, kind of giving them our opinion on it, like a site survey. And he says, after that, he's like, okay. So he starts showing us surrounding buildings in the area that they have kind of taken over and set up defensive positions in. And I was kind of impressed with that because you couldn't tell, I mean, I hadn't been in

• 33:00Speaker 02

  the town that long, but you couldn't tell there were, they were doing this stuff in these adjacent buildings and other buildings. And then, um, some other places, uh, like I, with the video we had with the clock tower and that kind of stuff. Is this the one where you're, uh, setting up a sniper hut? Yeah, and like a, like a, you know, OP kind of thing for, for them.

• 33:23Shawn Ryan?

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• 34:05Shawn Ryan?

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• 34:47Shawn Ryan?

  Now let's get back to the show.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  So when you're in the Ukraine,

• 34:53Speaker 02

  and you're in a church cathedral steeple, trying to look at sniper positions, and there's pigeon shit everywhere.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  This is part of the deal. At the top of this tower,

• 35:14Speaker 02

  it's a pain just getting up here.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  All right, we're back.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  So we're on top of the

• 35:25Speaker 02

  observation post sniper position for the

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Ukrainian army in this town.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  And they're getting set up for a potential attack. So we're helping them scout some positions. And, uh, hey Zach, come over here. And, uh, take a look at some good vantage points for them.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  And, uh, you know, we're looking at that stuff, giving them a good site survey, helping them out, changing some stuff. And he's like, okay, kind of building trust with them then. And again, in the beginning, he was very short with us. Very, wasn't being rude, wasn't being dismissive, but you could tell he didn't really know. And then by the end of doing all that site survey, he's like, okay, I think these guys can help. He goes, would you guys be interested in training the men?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, we'll help you. Um, start asking him about experience, this kind of thing. And he kind of was like, almost embarrassed and being like, look, no experience, they don't know what they're doing. We don't really know how to train them. It's not our thing, but we have these guys and if you can help. So, okay, come back tomorrow and we'll start training them in, right? So he connected us with the major and uh. And then that was that. So we did a lot of our training in the mornings. How well equipped are they? What are they? They're not, I mean. We went there on the first day and it was, it was like a movie, right? We show up, two hard-charging Marines ready to train these guys.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And you had fathers and sons, you had old men, you had uh. Yeah. People who never would have joined the military, never would have set up to fight. I mean, they're there with Adidas tracksuits on and gym shoes. And it's three inches of snow and twenty-five degrees. And, you know. Because they just didn't have enough uniforms and. Our thing was like, okay, what these guys are doing is pretty incredible. Like I said, you and I would do it, but it's still incredible. It's incredible that you have to do that. Yeah. Join, join the military because people are invading your country. So. But then imagine you do that, you know, you served, imagine you served and you don't even have a uniform.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? I mean, I'm a Marine, uniforms are important to us, right? I mean, our uniforms special to us. It make, it, it helps make you be who you are as a, as a warfighter, you know? And they didn't have that. Some of them, they, they didn't have weapons. They don't have deuce gear, they don't have chest rigs, they don't have armor, they don't have ifax, they have, they don't have boots. They have nothing. Some of them didn't have rifles. We had guys that were using icicles during training. Icicles. For mock rifles? Yes, sticks. A guy used a water bottle. Could you imagine doing a workup? To go on deployment? Using an icicle as your rifle?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  No, I mean, no, I can't. And so you're standing in front of thirty-five guys on that first day.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  And the only thing they have is a piece of yellow ribbon tied around their arm. To show that they're Ukrainians. When they're.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  That's how they're identifying each other.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And the Russians are wearing red. Red. Cause some of them don't have. Uniforms either. So they're wearing a red piece of ribbon. Ukrainians are wearing, it's like paintball in the backyard.

• 39:02Shawn Ryan?

  The Russians don't have uniforms?

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Some of them know because they they're do they've had a lot of conscripts. It's not all Russian army, they have a lot of conscripts that they're. Using from.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  From some of the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine that. The Russians have basically been there since two thousand fourteen. Um, and they're bringing people in from all over Syria. You know.

• 39:25Shawn Ryan?

  They're bringing people in from Syria?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's Chechens there, there's Chechens on both sides as well, so. One of the ways they're identifying.

• 39:32Shawn Ryan?

  Chechens are probably the most nasty. Warfighters known to man.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we dealt with some of them in Iraq, obviously as well, right? I mean, whatever something's going on, those guys pop up, but. Very interesting for me to learn that. They're actually on both sides, there's Chechens fighting for Ukraine and fighting for Russia as well. Um. But yeah, that's what they're running around with ribbon on their arm and. No gear, you know, and it's it's cold and we're gonna be out here training and we were. We were pretty tough on them.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Um.

• 40:06Shawn Ryan?

  How many?

• 40:09Shawn Ryan?

  How many? What is like the man to gun ratio? How many men are there? How many guns are available for this particular?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  For, so we trained, we ended up training two different units. One was a little more equipped than the other, um. Because one was kinda. Was fed from the actual army. The other one was this. Straight territorial defense that was. Spun up in a couple of days. Um. I'd say.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Let's say you have a platoon size thirty people. You'd have.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Ten, twelve of them with no rifles.

• 40:49Shawn Ryan?

  Ten to twelve with no rifles.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  You'd have the odd like PK sprinkled in, um, you know, but no. No kinda squad set up, no team set up.

• 41:02Shawn Ryan?

  Where did they get the guns?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  They're getting whatever they can, they're they're getting them through kinda logistics, supply type. Stuff, right, um, nobody was using like personal weapons or anything, it was, um. It's all whatever they could scratch up from the military, right, and and you know.

• 41:23Shawn Ryan?

  They're just scrounging, trying to protect themselves. This is why the second amendment's so important.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's it's incredible. On the first day, they're all running around. These guys have no training, they're running around, magazine and condition one with an AK. They're like, clear and safe, right, fucking now, right, like, I'll help you, but I'm not taking around here. Cause some guy doesn't know what he's doing, so, um, yeah, even weapon safety, weapons handling. It's kinda like, here Sean, here's a rifle.

• 41:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  You know.

• 41:53Shawn Ryan?

  Day one, week one.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  You're hoping they're.

• 41:55Shawn Ryan?

  Where's the trigger?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Hoping they can point it in the right direction, you know, so it was a lot of that, um, and you know, we were tough on them just because of the.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  The kinda gravity of the situation, right, and and it was kinda long training sessions. Putting them through their paces on stuff, basic stuff. Fire maneuver type stuff, basics of patrolling, hand and arm signals, weapons handling, uh. You know, weapons manipulation, that kinda stuff, very basic, like to say you or I. Um, but it was difficult for them, obviously, and you know, they're not in the greatest of shape. Few days ago, they were whatever they were in life, now all of a sudden, you know, and. We kinda good cop, bad cop that, you know, the same way, you know, you experienced it at your selection processes. We experienced that our selection processes.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  You're not really mad at them. You're motivating them, you're pushing, the same thing that that we've seen. Um, and we just kind of naturally good cop, bad cop that, and I can get pretty fiery and emotional. And so Zach was kind of playing the the good cop. Um, you know, but it was serious and we had to, if we saw they were losing focus or we saw that they were getting tired, it's like, hey. There's no Russians in my country. Right? They're here and you're, and they're not next door, they're here. Take this shit serious and let's get to work, right? Because this is gonna happen, you're gonna go to the front. And I always thought, like, I remember eighteen years old, you know, you're at boot camp. And this was before nine eleven. Nothing really going on in the world, right? And I remember the drill instructors like, hey, you guys are going downrange and in boot camp you have.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Obviously your infantry, your combat MOS is in there with like supply in there with guys who are, you know, handing out towels at the rec center for the next four years, whatever. And you're like, come on, the guy, we're not going to war, kind of thing, there's no war, right? Then nine eleven happens, everybody goes, it's, so for them, it's that they may be thinking, look, we're territorial defense.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  We're not going to war, we're just helping here. And if the war comes here, that's fine, but the war's not here. We had to set that expectation for them and I'm glad we did because now those units are at the front.

• 44:12Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, so that. So some of them still just don't get it. It's like. They're in your country. And you s- you still think.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  It's surreal.

• 44:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's not coming here.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  It's surreal though, isn't it? I mean, imagine right now, we're sitting here. Imagine if in New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. The Russians invaded.

• 44:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  But we're here, right? It's an unbelievable thing. You think of nine eleven, when that happened, you're sitting watching it, it's real. But it's unbelievable. Yeah. So I think, and it was so early. I don't really think they had really hit them yet. They had done this incredibly patriotic thing, they had signed up. And this was before they were, I mean, these guys signed up before, now everybody's kind of forced to sign up, right? But these guys signed up before that was even put in place. So they've done an incredible thing.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  But they just. You know, the same way you or I, you wouldn't feel the full aspects and the full kind of gravity of that at that time. Yeah. So we're trying to paint that picture for them and, you know, like. A funny story, when the, the air raid sirens would go off every night. And one time they went off during the day when we were training. And the guys were kind of freaked out, you know, what should we do? Should we take cover? Should we, you know, they're talking to the major, they're talking to kind of their platoon leadership and all this. And I lost my mind, right? I'm like, look. We're not hearing any, we're hearing sirens, we're not hearing any impacts. We're not stopping and going inside and going to a basement for a siren.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  We had to give them a little bit of a chewing, give them the whole, if you don't have any, if you don't hear any impacts, we don't really care. I mean, we care. But unless that stuff's landed near us, we're all right.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  But this is, uh, this is life in the Ukraine at the moment.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  You know, if a round lands there, we'll go inside. We're training, right? Rounds are gonna be coming at you down range, you're not going inside. Yeah. When that starts happening. So setting that expectation with them, because they're civilians. And getting them into that, you know, kind of trying to pump them up. You know, we never broke them down. We weren't thrashing them. We weren't, you know, making life miserable for them, like we've experienced. It wasn't about that. It was about lifting them up, getting them the right training so they could perform. Breaking them down is not gonna, they're already broken down, their country's been invaded, right?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  So it was, it was building them up and kind of enabling them. To be able to fire and move in the right direction and, you know, defend their country when they have to, when they have to do it. So. You know, I think we hit the ground running training those guys, but we definitely got better at it as the days went by. And, you know, the two groups that we trained were very different. Um. Funnily enough, the actual military unit that was fed from the military unit. It was a few days into the war, but they already were starting to get burnt out because their command, their leadership had them doing patrols, stand and watch.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Training and they were not living in the best of conditions at all. Um.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  And they were pretty burnt out. So even talking to the leadership and saying like, hey. Think of the threat level where we are right now. Yeah, they need to protect the base. They need to be patrolling properly, like sentry type patrols. And they need to be standing guard properly, but you can't be burning them out right now because by the time you get to the front, you know. Yeah. They're they're gonna be gassed out. The actual volunteers, we'll call them, they were more motivated, more inspired, more energetic. Than the regular army guys. Wow. Which was pretty interesting because we had to train them differently because of that. Yeah. You know, we had to treat them differently because of that. Um, so yeah, that was, that was pretty interesting. I mean, the first day we went to the regular army base.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And we met a captain there. We met the major there. He was pretty locked on, but, um, and you could tell. His head was spinning. He had a lot going on and he actually cut a meeting short with us. To go see a friend of his that had been shot on the front. And and we were kind of thinking like, what do you mean you're leaving your men to go see your friend at the front? Yeah. You you know what I mean? If if it was a, you know, an O five that just up and leaves the guys to go see his buddy. We wouldn't do that here, right? I mean, that's terrible. Your friend got shot. Hopefully he's okay. Everything good, but you don't leave your guys to go do that.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  But he did, I mean, it was just interesting, right? Yeah. That's something I hadn't seen before. And we worked with the captain there and the first few days we were there, you could tell that guy was just wrecked. So stressed out, so strung out, um, you know, the weight of the world's on the guy. And we just told him, look, man, your guys need you to be effective. You need to get your sleep, you need to, you know, get yourself, you need to be eating. And, and by the end, he kinda, you know, the, the good thing was they were very receptive to whatever we told them.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And on the, same with the defensive positions, we'd be in town the rest of the day, working our humanitarian stuff and our contacts and our network and all this. And you'd see the guys filling sandbags, building, you know, bunkers and, and changing some stuff up and, and all this. It was, I mean, they took what we said.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Seriously and right away got into action with the stuff, you know, when we left a group in the morning, we would tell the officer. Here's how you need to train the guys the rest of the day. And basically gave them their training plan for the rest of the day. Here's what we want you to work on for tomorrow. And say like, we'd have you demonstrate it, not let the rest of the guys do it, practice it. But you need to work on this for tomorrow. It's the first thing we're gonna do when we come back.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  And we did that as a way to evaluate. How well they were training, because if we came back the next day and they looked like garbage, we, we, you'd know. If you showed somebody how to clear a room and said, okay, practice on something back tomorrow. And you come back tomorrow, let me see it. And it was garbage, you know, they didn't practice the day before. Yeah. So we put these kinda things in place just to, number one, help us see where the guys are at. And to make sure that they were training, you know? And we're not getting paid to do this. We're not, we didn't go there to do this, you know what? We just saw that need and tried to plug that hole. Yeah. You know, and and we, you know, we, I'm proud of those guys, cuz.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  In the, in the days that we were there, they got exponentially better. You know, and by the end I told Zach, I said, look, if if something kicked off in this town right now. I mean, they're not good, don't get me wrong, right? They're they're not good. They're not like if it was you and I running and gunning. But I'd stand with them. The day one. I mean, they gotta be a hundred times better than what they were. Exactly, yeah, and it was like day one, oh geez, right? But by the time, and I think you've seen some of the videos, the fire movement stuff, we had them doing some of the I A drills and all that. Um, you know, for contact, we had them break in contact, uh, we didn't get too crazy into any ambushes and and all that kinda stuff.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  But um, as far as fire movement goes, they were pretty locked on by the end of it communicating. You know, it was uh, it was impressive. They took it, both groups took it very seriously and and got to a decent level and. You know, it's kinda emotional because when we left, it was like two, three day, I've only been back for like a week. Two, three days after we got back, we got word that that unit, the one unit went to the front already. Wow. And so you're like, man, it's, it's pretty heavy, right? Cuz I think if we weren't there.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  The army unit went to the front? Army unit went to the front, yeah, and uh, if we weren't there and didn't train those guys. Imagine how they would have been going to the front. Yeah. You know, at least now they had something. How far were you guys from the front? Um. We'll say, I don't know, maybe.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Five hour drive? A five hour drive? Well, to go way out east, yeah, I mean, four, five hours. Okay. Now, I mean, the the some stuff's moving. Obviously. Um. And how long ago was that? How long ago were we there? Today, today is. Today is the eighteenth, so we were there end of February through like, we got back the ninth. Okay. Of March, so um.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Well, we got done with them, ninth, ninth of March, with, with those units. So, yeah, a few days after that, we'd say, beginning of this week, we got word that they were at the front. Wow. Still with no, no, uh.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Body armor, no helmets. And they're going to the front. Going to the front, yeah, hopefully, you know, God willing, they, they, uh, had some gear like that for them there, um. But these guys were running around with AK mags in their pockets. You know, I mean, could you even imagine training without gear, let alone, you know. And we, uh, one story that happened at the, kind of the underground place was, he said, look, there's a team of seamstresses in town. They wanna know how they can help. And my partner, he had done some R and D for some nylon companies, since he's been out.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Um, designing different things and, and he actually tested some of them with the Marine Corps, some, some products.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  So he's like, hey, let's see if we can get these seamstresses to make chest rigs. So we, we start designing this chest rig, showing it to the seamstress and she's kind of looking like. Never made anything like this before, but let's give it a crack, you know.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  And she comes back the next day and it kind of was a disaster, right? It was not up to scratch at all. It was a prototype, but it was, it was terrible, right? Good effort, but no.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  So, and I remember in Iraq, when we were doing vehicle borne stuff, I was often in the turret.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  And so I kind of went slick with gear when I was in the turret, right? My gear was all down inside the, inside the gun truck. So what I did have though was a bandolier, one of those old school. I knew you were gonna say this. Slinging it over, right, with the three mags in there. So I said, maybe we just make a bandolier. She, you know, and so we designed a bandolier. And she comes back the next day and it was fantastic, right? It was, they were worried about it like moving, obviously, so it was slung across. And it had a tie around the waist as well to secure it, so it's sitting on your side. You know, obviously stuff you could use in a vehicle as well, right? Like, remember like, training in a, inside a vehicle.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  So we saw it, we loved it and we have pictures, right? Uh, and you can show those. Um, we took it to the Colonel and we walked in, we told, he didn't know we're doing this, we told him, hey, what do you think of this? And this is a guy, again, weight the world on his shoulders. He has all this stuff going on in his town. You know, imagine the stress of that guy, a Colonel during wartime, right? And he just lit up like a Christmas tree. He was so happy. And so we went back and we told her, we said, look, make as many of these as you can. Twenty-five people and she just started bursting out crying. And she goes, and it's, it's very emotional. She was like, I can't believe that I'm gonna have such an effect on the war.

• 56:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? I mean, tears.

• 56:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  You know, I'm, I'm crying about that because she just broke down and something she made with her hands. These guys have nothing, but now they have that because of her and her team. And so they've made videos, um, I'll see if I can get you the video of them like actually sewing them. Sewing machines, it's not commercially produced, right? Sewing machines by hand, making these bandoliers. Velcro, I, I mean, fantastic, nice kinda same material like our camis are made of. You know, pretty heavy duty, they'll, they'll be, they'll be fine, they'll be, uh, good, but those guys are using those at the front.

• 57:10Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  So they went from AK mags in their pockets to at least now they have a piece of gear.

• 57:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  You know, so, and that's why we need companies, you know.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  When, when I was in the Marine Corps, there were a lot, you know, you had your Blackhawk, you had some of these aftermarket type nylon companies that. Make incredible gear nowadays, my goodness, it's, it's, I look at some of the gear or somebody. Tells me about some of the gear that's out there now, I'm like, man, that's fantastic, right? Makes, makes you wanna go enlist again. Just to use, just to use some of that gear, right? Um, and I know. Many of these companies are started by veterans who have used or needed this gear. And everyone talks about, hey, we're doing this for the end user, we're doing this for the end user. Well, you know what? These guys are the end, end user.

• 58:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  And they need that, they need that stuff and. Look, I get it, it's a business, I get it, the pandemic's happened. It's, it's tough. I'll try and raise, you know, I'll raise money and. Buy at cost or whatever, but if any of these companies can donate. It's going to the end user, like the real end user, who who has nothing else. It's not like, hey, I have this stuff that supply issued me and I just want better kit. It's not that. These guys have nothing.

• 58:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  You know, so and there are some guys that have already contacted us, like the guys at GBRS of uh are. Putting something together to try and help with some gear and you know, those guys are incredible and and. That's gonna be great if if that pans out, but they need more.

• 58:53Shawn Ryan?

  You need big companies.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need, we need companies, we need, and like I said, we'll figure something out, you know, I I I under, I'm not saying. Give everything away. If you can do that, that's amazing, but I understand these, it's business, right? We'll try and make it happen. We have connections to. Diplomats in that country, um and you know, some high ranking officers that. They know it's a desperate need.

• 59:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  If we can get these companies money, we will. If they can donate, that would be incredible as well, but.

• 59:28Shawn Ryan?

  This is anything too, this is, this is plague carriers, this is cammies, helmets, flashlights. Boots, socks, all this kinda stuff.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  We have the um, we have the the pattern for the.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Camouflage uniforms that they have, I think it's MM fourteen is the pattern, I think. Um, so if anyone can mass produce. Tops and bottoms in that pattern, that would be fantastic as well. They don't have uniforms and like I said.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Something as small as a uniform makes a big difference.

• 1:00:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:00:09Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, it boosts the confidence.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Exactly, and and.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  You know, same with any kind of gear, anything. If you, if you're a company there now.

• 1:00:20Shawn Ryan?

  Gloves.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Gloves, everything that you have, you have. These stuff that you know you're not gonna move. Hey, this product just didn't sell. Nobody. Hey, maybe this is a product, something new came out, this is the older version. These guys will take it. You know, I'll take it.

• 1:00:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, I mean, I'm not. I'm, uh, I'm interjecting here with a plug, but like, get a hold of me if you're one of these people.

• 1:00:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  You can really make a, a difference to these guys, cause. Um, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty incredible what they're doing with what they have as well.

• 1:00:53Shawn Ryan?

  Well, plug whatever you want. That's why you're here and that's why we're doing this show. So. Um, on that note, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about some of the diplomats that you were talking to. And I want to talk about some of the intelligence that you gathered while you're over there and what's actually happening on the ground in the front.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 1:01:35Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Mark. So we're back from the break. We're gonna talk about, you talked to a number of high level diplomats. We're talking about the Ministry of Defense, correct?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  So let's go into some of that and let's, let's go into some of the intel that you're getting about what's actually going on on the front.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we, um, how we got connected with these people was we built. Quite an extensive network, had a lot of like good connections to. To a lot that was going on in country. We kinda happened to fall into it. We, um, you know, we did some work to cultivate that a bit, but. We just kinda met the right people at the right time and it opened up a lot of doors and, and you know, when you're doing something like that, you, you take advantage of those opportunities. So.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  How we, or when we spoke to the diplomats was, um, we were leaving. Uh, on our way home, had crossed the border and was. Driving through the neighboring country to get back to the airport to head home. And we get seven hour drive, couple hours and we get a phone call.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  You, we want you to meet at the embassy in this country, the Ukrainian embassy in this neighboring country. Okay, right, I mean, let's go, right. Zack said, hey, they want us to go there. I'm like, alright, might as well add this as well to what we've been doing, you know. So we go there, um, we met up with the contact that we had and then we start sitting down with these diplomats. The first was, we'll say she was involved in, we'll say like civil affairs type stuff. Very concerned about refugees, she was dealing a lot with that and our point of speaking to her was the logistical chain.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Obviously, I'm sure many people are familiar with, hey, sending stuff to Ukraine, send, donate, all this kind of stuff. It's coming from neighboring countries, all the neighboring countries. You can't send anything directly to Ukraine right now for obvious reasons. There's massive logistical issues getting any kind of supplies in. Because of kind of bills of lading and manifests and just how all that international. Red tape. Yeah, all that stuff.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  So we were kind of telling her, she was, she wanted to know from us what we saw on the ground and and what people need. So that she can better maneuver in those channels, like by law, right, and by regulation. And it's very messy, it's very difficult, um. We had, we were in contact with a lot of people, other NGOs and just a lot of people who were really motivated to try and get supplies in country and that could be anything from, you know, bullets and Band-Aids type stuff, gear for the guys, down to diapers for kids in in war, right?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  And it's just very, it's very muddy on getting that stuff. So these organizations in America and around the world are very motivated to do it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  And I'm not saying if you send a box of stuff, if you do a fundraiser in your local community for Ukraine and you get boxes of stuff and you send it to one of these neighboring countries, I'm not saying it sits in a warehouse somewhere. But it might sit in a warehouse somewhere. You know, I mean, it's and and that's tough because. It's tough for me to think about that because like I've been there in Ukraine and I see the need for this stuff. And I obviously know especially Americans how big our hearts are and how. Motivated we can be and how actionable we can be when people are in need. And, you know. That warm and fuzzy like, hey, we donate.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  There's a. Sticky side to that eh on the other end and so. We wanted to meet with her or we were lucky enough to meet with her to try and clear some of that stuff up and. It was very circle talky because. You you know, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we make this happen? Can we have that happen? And God bless her, she's trying her best, but there's just a lot of roadblocks for that kind of stuff. We have a network where. We can get stuff to those to a specific border and we can have our guys. Pick it up at that border, so it'd be like you handing it to me. Okay. It's not done through any red, I mean.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  And you say, yeah, but that's gonna be much smaller in scope. But it's not, we can do this with big eighteen wheeler trucks, we can do this with, we have a network for this.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Right now, they are in the process of taking some airports that are close to the borders in these neighboring countries. Shutting them down to commercial travel and to to things like that and using it simply for humanitarian type. Action, which I think will help. Because you're, you know, some of that transportation stuff is where the red tape is, going from. You know, plane to truck to border crossing over and how all that goes. I'm not a big logistical person. But I'm obviously living some of this out now and see the red tape to me, it's like, let's just do it, you know, you know what I mean? It's frustrating, so they're they're trying, uh hopefully some of that's been cleared up since we had the meeting with her.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  But these are some of the problems that they are having. Our solution is to use our network. Right, um and kind of do it the old fashioned way, you know, getting the elbows, knees dirty and and getting it done that way because.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Some of the other ways are more challenging. We're still working on those other ways because uh and they are getting supplies in there. I mean, I'm not saying they're not. It's just that a lot of it is very sticky and it's ever changing. So but our network works and um. You know, we're trying to lean on that as heavy as possible. One, because it does work and two, because. Hopefully, if if we can continue doing what we're doing, getting stuff in there, like we just got hundreds of tourniquets in. Our way, which we tried to get the tourniquets in another way and it was it was just a nightmare.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Um, we're hoping through kind of validating it that it becomes an example. Mm hmm. Right? And that somebody sees it, someone else sees it, someone else sees it and. And um, you know, I'm not saying it's the best way, but it works. And the guys that we have on the Ukrainian end, these two guys, uh Max and Sasha, I mentioned Sasha earlier, they're incredible with what they do. And they were just two regular guys, patriots for their country that are. Literally moving stuff from all over Europe, from the U from the US, from places like Holland, from Italy. From neighboring countries, these kind of places, um.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  And they're getting it to their little area, to their little shack, um, you know, their little kind of underground shack. It's not a shack, I'm just, you get what I'm saying? And supply shack and moving it to the front. There's networks of priests that they use that are moving back and forth. Secret priests priests that are moving stuff back and forth, um, and this goes. So you've set up a right lines. It it's unreal. And and here's here's why it works that way is, you know, you and I were in places like Iraq, Afghanistan. Where the war is pretty three sixty. It's it's all around you. This is very old school. This is very, there's the front line and then there's all the lines behind the front.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  And it's moving things back and forth to the front. And it's like stuff you read in history books, you know, World War Two type stuff, it's that kind of warfare. It's very conventional. Yes, so setting up these kind of lines is, it's very important and it's. I'm sure the military's doing it, obviously, right? I'm sure there's government types that are doing it, but these civilians over there are doing it. And, you know, a motivated citizen can be pretty strong. I mean, you know, military government, there's a lot of hurry up and wait. There's a lot of red tape, there's a lot of, well, we can't do this just because we can't do it. These civilians, they're not, they're not putting up with any of that. They're getting stuff done every single day.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  And it's, it's very impressive. Like I said, we walked into that. Establishment that they had, and it was day three or four of the war when we walked in there. I, you know, you could swear they were doing that for a year. Everything was so well oiled, people moving left, right, center. This stuff's coming in, this stuff's going out, this stuff's being organized and distributed. These people are moving through, like, we were helping a lot with, uh.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Moving people, refugees, people that are escaping the front. Kind of, we did a little processing thing there. We'd interview as many of them as we could to gather intel on what's going on at the front. What's going on in those towns? What do the people need? Um, and those interviews are tough, right? Because. And, and I think, you know, I have some of those, I've shared them with you, that they're tough because that person. Let's say one example, there was a man that left an area under heavy combat with his wife and daughter. She's thirteen, fourteen, the daughter. And he's pretty shaken up, right? And you're sitting there and you're poking him for information.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  And, you know, he's, he's no, he's not involved in this, he's not in the military, he's not a government guy, he's, he's just a guy.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  But he's an intel source and if it's me talking to him. I'll poke out, you know, I'll stick the finger in that hole, right? But there's one interview specifically that we have on video where Zach's interviewing him. And I just remember sitting there and you know, he's, he's doing what a good marine does, right? He's getting the intel from the guy. And I'm just sitting there like, shut up, man. Leave the guy alone, like, let him, let him be, let him breathe, let him think. But you have to get that intel because then we take that and we use it for those supply lines. We use it for helping get other people out. Um, and that's all done through this network that we've kinda.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Cultivated, you know, and when we're there, hey, can we do this? Hey, can this happen? Hey, they need this. Alright, let's do it. What kind of intel is he giving you? Troop movements, um, weapons that are being used, what's being hit. Transportation uh, out of the city, you know, like, hey, can you get out in a car? Is there train lines that are working? Um, you know, during your movement, did you see any Russian troops? Um. What, let's go into all of it. What are they hitting?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Kind of everything. I don't think they're being too discriminatory on what they hit. Um, it's obviously. They're attacking some of these big cities, we're talking about it, right? The major cities. And, um. Are they differentiating between civilians and? No. And military? Not from what we've seen or heard, no. They're killing everyone. Yeah, I think. What I last heard was there's been more civilians killed than Ukrainian soldiers. Wow. So, um, and I'm sure I. I can't really speak to what's being shown in the media. Like you mentioned, I'm not really following a lot of it.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  I followed it before we went and since I've been back, I've been. Ear to the ground with the guys that are there and that's kinda where I'm getting my stuff from. The media there, just to clear up kinda, okay, yeah, well, you're talking to guys in country, they're just giving you their end of it. From what their media says. The media there, because we watch the media every night there, the Ukrainian media, it's very positive, it's very patriotic. Obviously, it's propaganda, but it's very, i- it's there to inspire. They're not talking about. This many Ukrainians got killed in this town on this front doing this, it's. Here's the tanks that we blew up, here's the gypsies stealing tanks, um, which I'm sure those videos are making the rounds, it's pretty funny, right?

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  These gypsies are stealing Russian tanks, um, I'll never not laugh at that. It's incredible, it's incredible, right? Just driving down the street in a tank, um. Their media is very, to inspire the people, to keep the spirits up.

• 1:14:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  I don't know if I completely agree with that, I, if it was me, I'd prefer, if it was me putting out that kind of media, I'd prefer it to be. Unbiased, here's our wins, here's our losses, because I think you run the risk of, um. When you're only talking about the good things your country's doing, if something bad happens. You know, it's war, you're gonna win some battles, you're gonna lose some, something really bad happens, you run the risk of the morale of the people taking a nosedive, I think.

• 1:15:10Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:15:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  But yeah, everything over there is very positive, which, again, I'm not. Eh, they're not lying to the people, they're just kinda not.

• 1:15:20Shawn Ryan?

  Reporting everything.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're getting a lot of the negative stuff on Instagram, there's some channels set up on Instagram, Ukrainian channels that are.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Kinda showing a lot of live footage, a lot of the humanitarian disaster stuff that's going on in cities like Mariupol and and all this kinda stuff. Where it's just, I mean, they're drinking water out of the drains at this point, like out of the drains, out of the sewer drains. There's no water, there's no electricity, there, it's disaster, yeah, it's it's humanitarian disaster and they're just leveling the city, right? I mean, think of Russia's history, you know, even the wars they had, the Tuchenshian wars they had, their plan is to go in and decimate everything. Like, tear your whole town.

• 1:16:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Because that's gonna break you.

• 1:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's a war.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean.

• 1:16:10Shawn Ryan?

  People, people don't understand war. Don't understand it and especially Americans don't understand it. You know that we've come up with all these, these rules.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:22Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and there are no rules. We're the only ones.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  And you know, it's, it's very funny. I mean, you've been there, you've done it. I've been there and done it. We follow those rules. Those rules do get gray sometimes and you do things that sometimes are off the reservation a little bit. But by and large, we're not attacking civilians, right? I've never seen anybody attack civilians when we were in Iraq or anything like that. We don't attack or destroy towns just for the sake of doing it, right? I mean. It, it, but that's different there.

• 1:16:58Shawn Ryan?

  They're there to win.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we follow. We follow these rules and when one mistake happens, God forbid, it's everywhere and it's like you guys are shitbags. Hey, look, a mistake happened. I get it. We don't, we're, we're not in the business where we can afford to make mistakes, but that happens. It's war. It's not like that there. There, there's no rules like you said, and that's their game plan.

• 1:17:21Shawn Ryan?

  The rule is to win.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Yes. And Russia's history has been full of.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  You know, when they start to stall on an offensive. They can't take a city if they're taking heavy losses. All throughout their history, it turns to the civilians. Because that breaks the people. And that's gonna make the army back off, the opposing army back off and it's gonna. It's gonna get people talking. And that's what is starting to happen in Ukraine as we're sitting here.

• 1:17:58Shawn Ryan?

  What are they worried about? Are they, are they? Are they worried about the chemical weapon threat?

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Now, I'd say the last.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  I mean, like I said, we're we're talking about this real time, the last twenty four, thirty six hours. Yes, because from what we're hearing. Everything's pretty much stalled when it comes to uh Kiev and uh Kharkiv. Uh Mariupol, like all the big, heavy front lines, the Russians are. Have been pretty much stalled and are starting to dig in, right? I mean, they're getting blown up, their tanks are getting blown up with javelins and they're putting tanks in defensive positions, which. Now your tanks are just sitting there, at least to me. Look, I'm not a, I was never a general level officer, obviously, I've never planned wars, but. That doesn't make sense. So they're digging in.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  And it's kinda, they're showing signs of this desperation. Their morale is low from everything that we're hearing. They're losing. They've lost more people since the Ukraine war started in twenty twenty two. I'm not including everything from two thousand fourteen, but this year. End of February to now, mid-March, as we're sitting here, they've lost more people than we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan over twenty years.

• 1:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  You know, Putin is, this is what I've read, you know, Putin is actually. Cause a lot of Russians are upset about what's going on too.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  And he is actually cremating the bodies. So that the Russian people don't see how many deaths there are actually, they don't wanna, he doesn't want his own people to see the stacks of bodies coming back that were killed in Ukraine. So he's actually cremating them in Ukraine. And just bringing ashes back, so it doesn't look as devastating as it actually is.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've been doing that kind of thing since um two thousand fourteen and. Not to bore people with all the history, but there's been Russians in Ukraine fighting since two thousand fourteen secretly. There is some information about this. If you dig, you'll find it. Um they're not supposed to be there. Down in the south and in the east, there are. Military groups and paramilitary groups and militias that have been fighting kind of this secret war, Ukrainian groups and Russian groups since two thousand fourteen.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  A lot of people watching this will have heard Vladimir Putin talk about we're doing this special military military operation in Ukraine now. To denazify the country and all this and a Western can look at that and go, what are you talking about denazify Ukraine their president's Jewish. Doesn't make any sense. He's crazy. He's not crazy. What's happening with that when he says that that I think he's referring to. Based on obviously all the research you can do, you'd have to ask the man. But there's a, there was a militia battalion from two thousand fourteen. Down in that area of Mariupol called the Azov Battalion. There's about eight, nine hundred of them.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Some of them. Like if, if you've heard of the Azov Battalion, you say, okay, they're Nazis, neo-Nazis, Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Not entirely true. Some of them were or are of the eight or nine hundred. And it's nowhere near a hundred percent of them. I don't know exactly how many, but I know for a fact that's not all of them.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  And that's what he's talking about. So if you're saying you're going to war with the entire country of Ukraine. Over a small fraction of eight to nine hundred people in that city, that doesn't make sense to me, right?

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  You say, well, okay, I, we never saw any neo-Nazi, any white supremacist stuff anywhere in country. We obviously were very observant Marines. We're checking all the graffiti in towns. We're checking. Posters and pictures and you know, as you would, right? We're checking everything and like going over everything, fine tooth comb, nothing. We interviewed many people, spoke to many people, none of that going on there. Again, your country gets invaded in two thousand fourteen. Everybody fights against it. You're good guys and if you have neo-Nazis in your country, they defend the country too.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Uh, same thing would happen here. Doesn't mean, it's kind of that saying, uh. All Dalmatians are dogs, but not all dogs are Dalmatians.

• 1:22:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Right, it it's that kind of thing. So I get it, the Ukrainian government, it's a government, it's it's probably not squeaky clean. Obviously, think of the, think of some of the stuff we've uncovered that our government's done with the Ukraine. Ukrainian government and all that. It's not squeaky clean, but in times of war and when your country gets invaded. Some of that has to go out the window. We're not talking, it's not about politics at this point. Um, so. Yeah, that whole area down there is being decimated and and and people are saying, why Mariupol? Obviously, it's down there by the sea and it's an important kind of location there, but the war's been going on there for the last fourteen years.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  And like you said, they're sneaking bodies back. There are shallow unmarked graves in some of these areas in Ukraine. Of Russian soldiers that were there between two thousand fourteen and now. And you're like, well. Then you get into the long conversation of, well, were they ordered to go there? Are they breaking away from the military and just doing ops across the border in Ukraine? Like, how is all that? That all plays into the war, and I don't think the West is portraying that. Right? It's just Russia, Ukraine, NATO, how does that all play out? And we're not getting the full story on the why for all of this.

• 1:23:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Because I don't think Vladimir Putin's crazy. The guy's been pretty sharp his entire career. I don't think he's a madman. I don't think he's nuts. Seems pretty calculated. He always has.

• 1:24:10Shawn Ryan?

  I think they've wanted to do this for a long time, you know, this is, and and. I mean, I I believe you're right, he's very calculated and and and the same with China is very calculated. And they don't have to worry about elections and they don't have to worry about power changing.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:24:31Shawn Ryan?

  And I think they've had this planned for a very long time. And they've, all they've been waiting to do is just push the button. It's all been in place.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  For the circumstance where they can push the button.

• 1:24:42Shawn Ryan?

  And they waited until the US was at its weakest point, that it's been in in a long time. And here we are, one year in, and they pushed the button.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, it has been building up, obviously, since before two thousand fourteen, but really at that point, it's kind of like. You know, he was working that plan, then two thousand sixteen happens and he backs off. Or or backs off, he doesn't do this, we'll say, right?

• 1:25:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he had it planned the whole time.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:25:12Shawn Ryan?

  He was just waiting for the weakness.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:14Shawn Ryan?

  And they got it.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:25:16Shawn Ryan?

  And they know it might take a little bit, and that's why they did it right now.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  And it's very tricky because along that eastern side of Ukraine. Many of those people don't consider themselves Ukrainians, they're Russian, they consider themselves Russian, they don't speak Ukrainian, they speak Russian. The line divides them.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  But they don't care, they want to be part of Russia, their local governments, their police departments, their. Everything there within their infrastructure of their towns and communities is Russian.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  And so that's sticky, right? I mean.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  How how does that work? Like, you can't just give that, if you're Ukraine, you can't just give that away. They might have to as part of clearing this whole thing up. But that's, we don't understand that whole side of what's going on. You know, I mean, there were things like this with Iraq and Afghanistan too, right? But um. I don't think, and like I said, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not watching a lot of the media here in the US. I don't think though that that is being put out there in the media.

• 1:26:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's not. I mean, I don't watch a whole lot of it either. Like I said, right from the beginning, they've already debunked. The media lying about all kinds, they they they actually found one story that they were putting out that was actually from a video game.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it was from a video game. They were calling them. There was some pilot they were saying that was running around killing all these Russians.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know the story, yeah.

• 1:26:45Shawn Ryan?

  And it got debunked and it was actually. From a video game.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  Like the character?

• 1:26:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:51Shawn Ryan?

  And I think they were even using footage from the video game. And that got, there was another thing that happened too, though they was like Miss Ukraine. Or somebody um.

• 1:27:04Shawn Ryan?

  Had a an AR fifteen or an AK or something and they're like, look, everybody's armed and it wound up that was like a. That was an airsoft gun from like five years prior, so- something and.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's what's good about the internet and the Instagram age and all that is you can get a lot of information very quickly.

• 1:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  But also you get a lot of that kind of stuff.

• 1:27:24Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that was mainstream media.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Shawn Ryan?

  Right there, but um Fox News, I believe. But I'm actually, I'm sure it was all of them, but anyways, I don't even wanna get into the the the.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're talking with these diplomats, you know.

• 1:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  One one thing, though, I'm sorry to cut you off, I wanna go back to the chemical weapons, cause that is one thing that's big. And they're finding all these labs, which um supposedly are pretty irrelevant now, but um. There is a big, and they just came out again today to saying that it's looking more and more likely that there is gonna be, he's gonna utilize chemical weapons.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Shawn Ryan?

  Are they prepared for this at all, are they worried about it?

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's a lot of worry for it, obviously, um and it's it's very worrisome that. You know, we see that they're attacking civilians.

• 1:28:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  I mean, if you're attacking civilians with tanks and missiles. What's a chemical weapon at that point, right? I mean, it's the next thing in line, it's not.

• 1:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that will that will demoralize them even more.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Because when you see what those chemical agents are gonna do to the human body.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  And he's used them before in Syria, right?

• 1:28:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  You know, um, yeah, that that changes everything, um. The nuclear thing as well, I mean, he has, and I just I just researched this in the last couple of days when when uh there were a lot of talk with the the nuclear thing was happening because. It was so funny, one morning, I can't remember what morning it was, but I woke up. It was like six AM in Ukraine. Getting ready to get the day going and I had like eighteen messages on my phone, it was when that uh. The day the nuclear plant got attacked, they were they were actually fighting at the nuclear plant, right? Had like eighteen messages on my phone, everybody back home like, you guys have to get out of there right now, that you know, the nuclear thing and all this, it's like.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Barely got to sleep out in my eyes, I'm like, okay, whatever, right? I mean, war, this is what we're doing here, um so the nuclear thing though is.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Russia, we are very kind of strict. As far as I know, protocols on when we would use nuclear weapons, right? Russia does have it in their charter, their. Kind of ways of doing their country, it's not like a constitution, but you know, I mean, where it does allow the president. The the smaller tactical nuclear devices. The ability to use those. Not freely, but more openly than like if he uses it on an ICBM type thing, right? So. That's obviously worrisome as well, especially the point they're at at the war where they're taking these heavy losses. And struggling to take over some of these towns that.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  You know, everybody thought he's just gonna run right in and take over Kiev, for example, it's not happening, they're stalled there, they're. Fighting like dogs there and and fighting the Russians back. You know, I'd imagine there's a lot in this for Putin, if he loses this whole thing. Where does a guy like that go from here, right?

• 1:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Our president's calling him a war criminal, right? I mean, I don't know if that's just rhetoric, but if you start calling people that. That's a legal term, international law type thing, right? So. If they pursue that, you know, and then if you're Putin and you feel your back's up against the wall and you have access and permission. To use these kind of weapons. I mean, I don't know the guy, but. Maybe he does use them, right? And I don't think anybody's really prepared for that, I mean. Where does our country, where does NATO fit if there's a nuclear or chemical attack? You know, if it's nuclear. And that gets in the air and crosses borders, is that an Article Five?

• 1:31:05Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, he's, what's NATO gonna do? They've al- he's already used him in Syria, did any, were there any repercussions? No. We've been fighting Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, for how many years? Do they fall under this?

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the diff- the difference is if, let's say he does a a nuclear weapon and some of that goes over into Poland, let's say.

• 1:31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  You know. Is that enough to trigger an Article Five thing? I mean, I don't know, they're gonna have to play all that out, but.

• 1:31:29Shawn Ryan?

  They're still gonna have to go get him.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  Is you hear that? That's the point, is you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to. Or you should go and do something about this guy. I'm not one for obviously saying put Americans there. I'm not one for saying Americans should be flying air missions there, American pilots.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  But my personal opinion is, you know, I I'm I'm also not for like at this point where we are today. The no fly zone thing's a big talk. You know, the Ukrainians are asking for it. All the people we're talking to are talking about it. I don't think that's even a thing because.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Who if i- if you're having that and it gets broken, you have to enforce it. We're not gonna enforce it. It's gonna be like the red line in Syria, right? Like, hey, we have a no fly zone. It gets broken. We're not gonna do anything about that. So don't even have it. Don't use it. Don't don't put it in there and then not do anything about it when it kicks off. Um, but I do think we should be.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Arming them more, which this week obviously steps were taken to to do that. A lot of money, a lot of. And I and I've read the report of what's actually in that aid package, the military aid package. A lot of good stuff, right? But the jets, you know, hey, there's even an opportunity where we're not giving them our jets. Other countries will give them the jets and we backfill the the other countries. I know there's a lot of talk right now that that's offensive action. I wouldn't think flying jets around your own country is offensive. I I understand if you take a Ukrainian jet, fly it into Russia and bomb Moscow, for example.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  That's offensive, but having an air capability within your own country is defensive. I mean, you agree, you know, giving a guy a javelin and having our intelligence department. Who have been in Ukraine for.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Over a month before this happened, just in the talks of that, the parliament, the. The CIA paramilitary organization was there teaching these guys how to use javelins, how to properly um.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  You sniper capabilities. Um. And I don't know if this has been talked about publicly or not at this point, but this has happened. Um. How can you say that that's defensive? And giving jets to defend your own airspace is offensive.

• 1:34:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  That doesn't make sense to me. Um. You know, they are doing a great job with the javelins right now, right? They're taking out a lot of tanks, a lot of aircraft, and that's been huge. But. I think we can still do more. It's kind of one of those things like, well, they're doing well, so we don't need to do anything else. No, they're doing well. Help them out on top of that.

• 1:34:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Um. So. When it comes to the nuclear thing, I think it is the more.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  The more Ukraine fights back, continues to do well, continues to defend their country. Puts a lot of pressure on the Russians and you don't really know what they're gonna do under that pressure.

• 1:34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is there a lot of chatter between these diplomats you were talking to and the the guys on the ground that are, I mean, is this a? A major concern?

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  We spoke to the uh, defense. The the defense diplomat we spoke to. Was. An attache to the ministry, to the minister of defense. At the Ukrainian embassy in this neighboring country. Um, so basically, the representative of the ministry of defense in that country at the embassy. At the time we spoke to him. Um, you know, stuff's changed now with the nuclear stuff. We didn't get into that. He was more concerned with, um, they needed warfighters. They obviously have that foreign legion thing going on. And you're getting all kinds of people joining that. He gave us some insight into that, um.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  And he says it's doing well. They're getting some people with experience, um, but they're getting a lot of people with no experience, kinda.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  People with very romantic ideas of just going over and helping and not just from America, there's. All kinds of countries being involved. He says it's great, we appreciate that, but he he basically said to us, he's like, we need guys like you. He goes if we he he said specifically, we need your warriors. If you have any warriors that want to come over here and help. Don't send them, don't tell them to go to this international legion thing.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Do you have them connect with you and you connect with me? And we'll get them set up to do their own thing. Um. Because they're very short of trained people, obviously, and their army in general was heavy outnumbered.

• 1:36:34Shawn Ryan?

  What does he want him for? Does he want him to train his guys or does he want him on the front lines killing Russians?

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Both, so we are um. We're gonna be helping a lot going forward with the training, we're looking for. Guys, as you mentioned, that the at the top of the show to go over and train. Um, we're working on how that's gonna all work. Again, this was not the plan, this was Zach and I stumbling into this. We made um some good strides, we it worked and so we want to replicate it. And we need proper guys to do it, um. And so we're looking with guys like that, that will be directly done through some of these channels that we're doing. Um.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  But he also is looking for people that want to go and fight like special operators that want to go and help. I don't know if that's like, I don't know exactly his plan for that. I know it's not. Joining a regular, though for those kind of guys, it's not joining a regular Ukrainian army unit, it's different. Um, I know as well, there are some groups of former operators that are over there. Obviously on the humanitarian side, but on the warfighter side as well that are on their own program and are working. Side by side with the Ukrainian military.

• 1:37:59Shawn Ryan?

  Actively engaging.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Yes, um.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna talk too much about who those people are and where they are, but they are there and. The the diplomats that we want and need more of that. Okay. I don't know, I I, you know, our government has said it's not illegal to go and do that.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  Obviously, things get gray and get muddy when you're working. On an official capacity with their government, I, you know, we're doing everything through that guy. So it's all kind of above board, kosher, all that kind of stuff, um, so yeah, if anybody is interested in that, reach out. And I know for a fact you won't be put into a regular Ukrainian army unit or some foreign. One of their foreign groups that they have, which are they're doing, you know, it's it's incredible. There are people from all over the world that are going to help. Um, I know some guys are kinda, there's been some reports of guys who do that, and when they get there, they're. Highly.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  They've they've really misunderstood what they were getting themselves into. Yeah. They went there for the romantic idea, maybe they're. Larkpers, maybe they're just, you know, former whatever and just wanna go help, but when they're there, they're seeing what it is and. Hey, this is not what I thought I was signing up for. It's war, right? Yeah. Um. And but they are appreciative of those guys from all the countries. They told us he named off eight or nine countries that they have people. Um. Going there, and I know there are some. Units, like I think there's a group of British guys that are, they're part of that foreign legion, but they've separated them out.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  I know there's a group of Canadians where they've done that and like, hey, now all you Canadians are a platoon or a, you know, company or whatever. And and they're, but they're still doing stuff for the army. This special operations mess- mission that they're looking for with former operators is gonna be separate from all of that. Um, and we can help get those guys in place. Okay. Um, so yeah, just reach out if anybody's interested there, but it's only, you know, there's a vetting process, so you're not gonna sneak into it, right? And that's kinda his, that was his focus when he spoke to us was the training. And basically, he he said on the training side, how many of you guys can you get to do this?

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  And we were basically how, how many guys you need and we can see what we can spin up, you know, um.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  Again, we don't really have the infrastructure for that. We're talking about how to do that, um. Kind of the intake, the the orientation here before everybody punches over, but we're working that right now and we're working it with, uh.

• 1:40:53Shawn Ryan?

  Are you talking about how to sift through and see who's who?

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then, um.

• 1:40:58Shawn Ryan?

  How are you planning on doing that?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Um, we have a couple of ways. We have some.

• 1:41:05Shawn Ryan?

  Are you gonna take like discharge, like DD two fourteen papers?

• 1:41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have a kinda protocol of what we're looking for. Um, but yeah, it's gonna be, we're gonna have to see your papers, references, all this kinda stuff, um.

• 1:41:17Shawn Ryan?

  What exactly are you working, looking for? Is it strictly special operations guys?

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, um.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, and we're not gonna budge on that, right? Because that's what we've committed to doing.

• 1:41:32Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  And we don't want, yeah, but this guy's good or this guy's trained, you know, he's done some uh fed stuff before, we're not. Playing that game. We need that, those levels of guys, um. And that's what we've committed to do and that's what they want, so that's what we're trying to give them.

• 1:41:48Shawn Ryan?

  Well, why don't we, why don't you just rattle off speci- specific units? That you're looking for or specific, specific MLSs.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:41:58Shawn Ryan?

  Obviously SEALs, Green Berets, Marine Reconnaissance.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Shawn Ryan?

  R-SOC.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:03Shawn Ryan?

  Tac P?

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:06Shawn Ryan?

  PJs?

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, any, any, any of the Air Force, um, special operations. Um, obviously, medical's a big component of what we did. We taught them medical classes, never they have no medical, like, simple stuff. Uh, like buddy aid type stuff, you know, to get to to higher levels of care that. Plugging holes, tourniquets, that kinda stuff, um, so anybody on that side, you know, like, uh. SARS, you know, um, eighteen delta type people, um. You know, corpsmen, regular corpsmen, we will not take but a SARC for sure, um.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  Air Force we mentioned and um Rangers, yeah, for sure.

• 1:42:49Shawn Ryan?

  Got it. What about SWIC?

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Shawn Ryan?

  SWIC, that takes what? So, as people email in, what do you suggest? Just black out the social security number and?

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, for now, uh, you know, on the initial contact, just contact, say, hey, this is who I am, I'm interested. And we'll get back to you with our kind of protocol and what we need and how we need it, right? Um, yeah, I mean, if you just start blowing up my email or your paperwork, I'm probably not gonna look at it. Before I want to contact back to you, right? So, so don't worry about flooding with that, just. Reach out, who are you and that you're interested in and we'll, we'll go from there, so. Um, we'll have a vetting process and the Ukraine will have a vetting process. Before these guys cross the border, they'll have to go to that embassy and, and do whatever process they have.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  That they need down on their side and then they'll, you know, facilitate getting to the border. We have a good network there for setting up safe houses and, and transportation and all this. I mean, the whole network's there that we have.

• 1:43:59Shawn Ryan?

  So, back to intelligence.

• 1:44:03Shawn Ryan?

  Now China is getting involved and it sounds like China and Russian. China and Russia are doing maybe a handshake deal and maybe China might supply Russia with military equipment. Was there any chatter of that? Was, was there any fear or? Any of that going on that you heard of from?

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  No, we, I mean.

• 1:44:25Shawn Ryan?

  Defense Ministry?

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  Obviously, that's kind of a new development. I haven't talked to. Anybody about that. Um, I think they, being so close to Russia, I think they kind of understand the Russia-Chinese connection. That's kind of always been there, right?

• 1:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  So I don't think it's, that's a surprise to anybody, including them. Um, but yeah, I mean, that changes everything, right? I mean.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  I don't think China would give boots on the ground, but China's got a lot of money, a lot of weapons and, you know. A lot of ways they can help Russia, so I think that does change a whole lot of what's going on.

• 1:45:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, there's definitely a shift in power happening.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Maybe that takes away some of the nuclear and chemical threat, right? So it may be kinda strange to say, but maybe it's good on that. Side of things, right? Maybe Russia pulls off that or at least tables that for a little bit, right? Cause. If you think about it, he mentioned that a week ago or something, Putin did the nuclear thing, and then it's been kinda escalating. So maybe China getting involved takes that off the table a little bit, um. It's kinda one good thing and then a whole lot of bad having China help though. So that's why this whole thing's so complicated, you know? Because then what do, what does our country do? Are we okay with China getting involved with Russia if we know that it's.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  Helping Russia back off some of the chemical and nuclear stuff? Are we okay with that? And if we're okay with that, that's dangerous as well.

• 1:46:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't think we really have any recourse with China. They own our supply chain.

• 1:46:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:46:08Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, you start, you start kicking that door in and that could get, the hurt could come pretty quick. You know, when it comes to.

• 1:46:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Supply and all that. So, yeah, it's, it's complicated. It's very.

• 1:46:21Shawn Ryan?

  Very complicated.

• 1:46:22Speaker 02

  You know, um, you know, on those levels, it's complicated, but then again, you know, those guys on the front. Life's pretty simple for them, right? Shoot that way and it's, it's just strange how the whole thing's planning out. I mean.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  The China thing does change everything in my opinion, though.

• 1:46:42Shawn Ryan?

  It absolutely, it was only a matter of time.

• 1:46:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's a way for China to get some of their stuff done without directly having to do it.

• 1:46:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:54Shawn Ryan?

  Did you talk to any other diplomats?

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  Just those two, um.

• 1:46:59Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, those are big ones.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  No, it was, it was incredible. I mean, we were sitting there at that embassy. You know, two, two Marines who a week ago were sitting at home, not thinking of doing any of this. And uh, now we're sitting there talking with these guys and. You know, it was kind of the. The echo of the whole. Mission that we did there is just sure if we can help, let's do it. We're, we're in this now, right? And it kind of snowballed. Again, I, I, I just go back to, we went there to help a friend go home and see his family. He hadn't been home in eleven years. And this happens and it's just getting him home to see his family. And next thing you know, we're sitting with diplomats in a embassy in a third party country. You're like, this is, this is crazy, you know? Um, but.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  You know, we have, we have the ability to help. We kind of have a will to help people and we're, we're gonna keep, we're gonna keep pushing.

• 1:47:53Shawn Ryan?

  At what point did you go forward, observe? So you went from the Green Beret mission.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Shawn Ryan?

  To now you're doing your old job.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we, obviously when we were there, people kind of were hearing what we were doing. Um, we were, I mean, we were moving and shaking, doing a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of NGOs trying to get there, trying to help, trying to get supplies in.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Some of it is very romantic, kind of whimsical, like, hey, we want to save the world and all this kind of stuff. Some of it is obviously actionable and is gonna pan out, but we were contacted by a lot of people and there was one group that. Seemed to have a lot going and needed help. They had some guys, they had two Green Berets and two SEALs. That were gonna be on former Green Berets and SEALs. Have to make that clear. I don't want people thinking, uh. If I, if I mention that, it's former. I'm not saying there's, our, our active people are there doing anything. Um. That we're gonna be on the ground for this team, for this organization.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  So right then and there, I felt comfortable with like, hey, even if the organization is kinda, doesn't have all those ducks in a row, these guys will be good to go. I don't know who the guys are, I mean, I know their names, but I don't know these guys. Um, and we took, you know, Zach and I kinda talked, he was all for it, I kinda had reservations on jumping in and helping. Cause we had our own stuff going on, and we had a pretty strict routine on what we were doing when and how. Um.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  But they were gonna help us with some supply stuff, or they said they could help us with some supply stuff on their organizational level and, and again. You know, it's just that mission like, hey, you need help, we'll help you. And so part of our day involved setting up an easy transition for them to come in. Getting safe houses for them, locking on simple stuff like how they're gonna eat, right, getting food set up for them, um. Uh, transportation, translators, warehouses for their stuff and trying to connect them into our network, which I'm very protective of. Because of the people there, I love those guys, right, I, I love who they are, I love what they're doing.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  I don't wanna be sending them people that's gonna mess up what they have going on there, cause it's, like I said, it's incredibly. You have to see it to believe it what these guys are doing, and I don't wanna just hand over anybody to them.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  So kicking the tires on that handoff was kinda stressful, kinda intricate, it's still kinda dodgy, we're trying not to manage it. Because we're not there now, right, and, and we're not, these, this organization is not us. But trying to manage that, and so we actually, we actually got arrested because of the, because of what we were doing for, for them. They tell you the story, getting arrested.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  So in our A O, we were.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  We were pretty well known and very well helped. Anything we needed, there's a guy for that. Anything in the network, anything in town, hey, I need lunch. There's a guy for that, right? I need a car. I need this. I need that. There's a guy for that.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  This other organization was trying to set up a warehouse. For a lot of their supply that was gonna be coming in. Okay, we'll go and we'll recon that for you, no problem. It's about forty minutes away from our A O. We had been in that town the very first day. We arrived in country, we went there with Sasha and he made a very cursory kind of connection for us there. Through the authorities in that town. We didn't operate in that town. We didn't run any kind of, nothing. We didn't do anything to that point. We grabbed the driver. It was me, Yuri, our guy, obviously, he's gonna be our Terp, and uh, me and Zach.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  There was a connection that we had, um, that's. It's kinda, you know how it works, it's like layers of stuff. This guy said to this guy to talk to us, like, again, bad game of telephone. We know that connection was pretty legit. Former intelligence operative, US. Was connecting us through this other group to this contact in that town. Kinda complicated.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  We tried calling the guy. He says, call the guy. He's expecting you to call today. Calling the guy, calling the guy, no answer. We said to Sasha, hey, do you wanna come with us? Because we're gonna be, we want you connecting with these guys for the supply chain to get stuff to the front from this area now. No, I'm busy. I have other stuff to do. Thank God he didn't go. We get in the car, we punch out. Still trying to call the guy, still trying to call the guy. No answer. Alright, we, they have like an underground place there in that town. We'll look for it and we'll look for the warehouse. Our instructions were basically find this guy or find the priest, the priest that was working that area.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  Right, like two needles in a haystack, go find these guys. It's not how we work. I told Zach right away, I said, look, man, we would never run something like this. It's okay, it's okay, we'll be alright, we'll be alright. And not that I had a weird feeling about it, but it's just not how we. We were doing a job for another group. We wouldn't have done the job the way they were doing it, right?

• 1:53:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  So I didn't, I was kinda grumpy about it. But we go and uh.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  We get there, there's still no response from the guy. We can't find the place. We're out snooping and pooping, looking around, trying to like. If you, if you picture like, it's not like this, but like a strip mall where there's a bunch of different storefronts. We're back off the street, trying to see all of them. Buy some train tracks and buy some infrastructure. We saw some warehouses by a woodmill. Let's go see if any of those warehouses are a needle in a haystack. You know what? Let's go talk to the mayor. He'll know who we are. We'll tell him what's going on, see if he can connect us to this guy. So as we're kinda driving back around town, through the town to go to find the mayor.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  Does a police car not come screeching in front of us? Almost like almost head on collision with us. These two guys come out of the car, they're almost tripping over their own feet. AK's drawn on us, right? Weapons off safe.

• 1:54:44Speaker 02

  They didn't say anything to us. They didn't say get out of the car. They didn't give us any instructions. We get out of the car, hands up.

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  They start telling us to put our hands on the car at that point. And there's four of us and we're kind of positioned on the car. I'm kind of the back passenger side. Zach is the back driver's side. Yuri's kind of over the the driver's side door and the driver. Driver's a total civilian as well, probably peed down his leg. And uh these, and I'm looking straight at the guy. AK pointed, there's a guy behind me with an AK pointed. And these guys are shaking like leaves, Sean. And I'm thinking, as soon as these guys know who we are, we're gonna be fine, right? We're not Russian saboteurs. They're gonna know who we are. They've, they'll have heard of us and they can call the, they can call anybody that we've been working with, the Colonel, whoever, right?

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  But these guys are shi- like visibly shaken, weapon off safe, guns pointed at us, I'm gonna get shot here. In ten, in ten minutes or as soon as they can get me in front of somebody to explain what we're doing, we're fine. But this guy could shoot us right fucking here.

• 1:55:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  They didn't give a, they didn't search us. They were scared, didn't even search us, right?

• 1:56:06Speaker 02

  Put handcuffs on one of us, uh. They yelled to a guy in a store, convenience store, to come out, go into their police car and find other handcuffs.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  They were terrified. So they finally get enough handcuff, they didn't have enough handcuffs for me or Zach. They, they handcuffed the driver and poor Yuri and the two, the two Marines are the ones not handcuffed.

• 1:56:31Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Another, uh, and I'm just looking at Zach like, this is a, you know, this is a joke. Another cop car comes, we all end up in handcuffs, they get us back to the police station, they bring in the secret service. And uh the Ukrainian secret service and uh they start interrogating us and talking to us and all that.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Obviously, our story checks out. We give them our phones, they start uh kind of going through the phones and they can confirm everything that we're doing. We said, "Talk to the Colonel, blah blah blah." Now, Yuri at this point, he's been our translator. And for people at home that don't really understand, it's not as simple as like, "Hey, just tell me what he says when you're working with a translator," right? There's a there's a a way to it.

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  As we're translating with Yuri, it's Yuri, "Tell him exactly what I said, how I said it." Right? If I'm pissed off, you tell it to him like I'm pissed off. And then tell me exactly what this guy says back. I don't want your opinion. I don't want, you know, you giving him your opinion on what I've said. I want exact. That's how you work a translator, right? At this point, though, Yuri's kind of just, he's not translating, he's talking to them. And that's fine, we're sitting there in handcuffs. And by the way, they put the handcuffs on backwards. So we're sitting there like, you know, and that's not comfortable at that point when the handcuffs are on backwards and you're twisted up. And I'm like, maybe I'll ask them if they could fix the handcuffs, but I'm not gonna push my luck, right?

• 1:58:00Speaker 02

  So he's going back and forth and I'm just checking in with Yuri, like, "Okay, what's he saying?" You know, and I'm being quiet and uh he's asking about our contact. Who's this guy where Yuri's explaining?

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  Some time goes by, Secret Service guy's talking to us and interviewing us. And this guy comes in with the Chief of Police.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  And he goes, "Is this your guy?" And Yuri says, "I don't know, we don't know who our guy is. That's part of the problem." We, he, Zack said, "If you give me my phone, I'll text our other contact and see if they can send a picture of the guy." They allow him to do that. At this point, they know that we're, you know, not Russian saboteurs.

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

  They start talking to that guy. Are you their guy? No. Do you work for the, are you doing this kind of work? No, I don't know anything about that. Are you, and they say the name, are you this specific guy? No, no, no. Some other stuff starts going on. Yuri kicks off, gets like visibly like angry and animated. And I said Yuri, what's going on? He goes, that's the guy. I said, no, it's not the guy, you just, he said he's not the guy, well, he goes, no, no, that's the guy. He's been lying about the whole thing. And I'm sitting there in handcuffs. And I kid you not, I could have jumped up and bit that guy's throat. Right, I was so angry. The guy, the guy thinks he's in a James Bond movie, right?

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  And so they, and, and the secret service guys looking at me kinda laughing and winking and saying like, I understand why you're pissed off, man, you know? I was ready for charging across the room to the guy. And so we asked him. Like, why didn't you pick up your phone? You knew that people would be calling you, you were told that by your, by your contact that we'd be calling. And he goes, oh, I didn't recognize the number, um, you know, it's troubling times, I didn't wanna just pick up the phone to a random number. Okay, well, why did you lie and say that you weren't who you are? Oh, I thought this was a setup, he said. Again, I could have bit his neck.

• 2:00:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, I was, and then, you know, it was all hugs and kisses with the secret service and the police after that. And what's funny, those guys actually helped us, they gave us an escort out of the country. When we left. Um, and it was cool, we made secret service contacts through those guys and with the chief of police in that town. And they had obviously heard what we're doing, so we built a strong contact in that area through this, um. But yeah, that whole thing was, that whole thing was crazy and the, and the, the guys were so scared. The police officers were so scared, they had just found Russian, they found four Russian saboteurs. About three, four hours before they rolled us up. So they thought this is round two, there's you know, there's more.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  When they, when they rolled us up, they thought we were Russian saboteurs. Wow. So, I mean, it just, then we had to go and do the rest of Canada up with that guy. With the shady guy. And he wanted to be all hugs and kisses and I was like, man, get the hell away from me, you know. We had to go out to this area and recon this whole. Kind of safe house and warehouse and connect with this other guy and it was, I was like, just, I wanna get this done. Right, I wanna away from this guy and when we got back, I said. Get rid of that guy, don't use him again, he's scared. That's fine, right, I get it, but he. You know, now we're gonna be bringing other guys in. He's not the right guy for the job. The guy for the job and we don't.

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  Part of the whole turnover thing, we wanted to do turnover with that team of O D A guys and seals that was coming in. And their organization couldn't get them off the ground at time, you know, it's like. Eighteen hours we're there and you can't get these guys off the ground. Um, to, to do some of this turnover stuff. Um, which only, obviously only they were gonna have. The, the backlash of that, right, and then they weren't gonna have that warm kinda handover, but. Yeah, stuff like that, it makes you. It makes you realize like, there's a lot of people now that are just trying to go over there and help. If you don't know what you're do- we knew what we were doing, we had a, a, a very.

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  You know, net- I keep talking about our network, we had a pretty good way of, of being able to do things and we still got into trouble. So don't think you can just go over there and start playing, you know, war hero or humanitarian hero. It's not easy, you know, you have to have your ducks in a row or you're gonna get yourself in trouble. Yeah. Cause those people aren't playing around, there's Russians in their country. Right, this is not a hurricane, it's not a natural disaster, it's not, um. They don't know who's who. Yes. And you might get killed because of some confusion. Yeah, and it, I mean, it was, it was pretty real, I mean, I knew, like I said, I knew we'd be fine, cause of who we were and what we were doing. And it ended up being a great, we got great contacts out of it.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, it was kinda dodgy there for a while, but it was because of that group that. You know, we so then that's the other thing too. We probably made a mistake there. We should have called ahead. We did have a network there. We had contacts there with the rescue service and and with some people there. Um, outside of everything that we were doing with this other group. We should have called the head. Especially when we couldn't get that guy on the phone. We should have called and said, hey, we're gonna be here and everything would have been fine. So. I mean, you know, that was definitely a mistake on our end and, you know, luckily it didn't turn out too bad for us um. But yeah, it's just, it's one of those things you have to dot every I and cross every T when you're snooping and pooping, doing stuff like that, you know. Yeah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  Cause it wasn't our A O. And we just kinda took that for good. You know, it's one of those things where we we took for granted how. Like how loved we were in our A O and how everybody just helped us and facilitated everything for us. We. We we could do whatever we want in our A O and everybody supported us um from top to bottom. You know, I I think we kind of took that for granted when we went forty minutes down the road and. And uh, yeah, we just a simple call ahead to our contacts there. We wouldn't have been in trouble then, you know. But yeah, that was uh, it was kinda wild and and you know Yuri was kinda upset about it because there was some local Instagram.

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  Chatter about it. And some pictures of us driving around and and uh, like the vehicle we were in and all this kinda stuff and uh. So he was kinda worried about it on a local level, people here and all this kinda stuff. And it's like, you know, obviously he doesn't have any experience with this. And just trying to tell him like, look, hey, when you go and do this stuff in a foreign country, stuff happens. You know, it's. It's kinda part of the game. You don't want that to to happen. I'm sure you've been in situations that weren't I ideal. It happens um, but coaching him through that was again, pretty interesting on a personal level.

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  You know, cause he had never experienced that and we had good jokes about it as well. It was. It was unbelievable. So yeah, it's not, it's not kids' games over there at all.

• 2:05:26Speaker 02

  What an experience.

• 2:05:29Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any other intel that you picked up? You'd mentioned people getting shot outside of a grocery store, civilians.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a lot of um attacks on civilians happening now. I'm sure some of those stories are making it to our media, right? Um especially where a lot of the heavy fighting is and especially where the Russians are starting to run into heavy resistance. This was not happening in the beginning of the war. This is something that has developed and it's not by mistake. It's not, hey, we thought this was happening. We thought it was a military thing and it accidentally was a shelter. It's not that. Um, you know, there's one story where people were lined up outside the store to get food, like a convenience store, bread, whatever.

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  And Russians came, there was twelve, I think twelve people, ten, twelve people, just gunned them down. Um, the Ukrainians were starting to mark, when this started happen- happening, the Ukrainians started to mark civilian centers. So like if, if a bunch of civilians were sheltering up in a school, they would mark that school with something from the air, like on the ground, so they could see in the air, hey, there's children here, civilians here, whatever. And those places are, basically what happened is the Ukrainian armies marking targets, civilian targets for the Russians. And those places are getting hit now. So there's a change.

• 2:07:02Shawn Ryan?

  So the Russians are looking for the marks where the civilians are being held and then killing them.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  Or they're seeing the marks and not caring, right? And

• 2:07:13Speaker 02

  you know, that gets muddy as well because

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  for instance, the army guys, both of the army guy, like units that we were training, were living in schools. Right? They, that was like they turned these schools, there's nobody in the school, no kids there. The schools are not functioning right now. But they were using those buildings because they're big, they have open rooms, they have bathroom facilities and all this. They were using those as like makeshift army bases.

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  So I guess on one hand, if you're a Russian military commander, you can say, well, yeah, we target the school because it's a military target. There's army there.

• 2:08:00Speaker 02

  That to me is fair game. There's no kids in that school, right? The Ukrainian military is not using human shields to house their military. There's no kids in the school, no civilians in the school.

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  But if you clearly see it's civilians, you should not be obviously attacking those places. You know, and and that is. A new tactic that they're starting to do within the last forty, seventy two hours. They're really starting to do that, you know. Wow. Um, and that's a bad sign. That's a real bad sign. And and Russia historically has been known to do that, so, um.

• 2:08:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know where that leads. I don't know how involved we get to try and stop some of that. Um, I'd hope our diplomats are speaking to the Russians and saying, hey, you know. It's not a a red line, but don't do that kind of stuff, um, because that changes everything, I think.

• 2:09:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that definitely changes it. Yeah, and there's there's a lot of that, a lot of that happening and. You know, that's gonna be. A good way to break those people because the Ukrainians right now, one thing that both Zach and I still talk about and noticed right away was. How passionate the people are for the country and how much they want to defend it. Everybody, you know, I I I talk about that time we were in, everybody's helping in the war effort. Everybody, right? It's like an old school movie. It's like a World War Two story. Um, from the oldest to the youngest are helping somehow for the war effort.

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  Again, I I mentioned the TV is very positive and inspiring to the people. And they're getting great results, right? They're they're doing great with the javelins, they're blowing up Russian tanks, the gypsies have. All kind, they have a tank battalion now, these gypsies, right, for stealing the tanks, I mean, it's it's very rah rah, very motivational. And I'm sure that's helping the boys on the front get the job done, right? But Russia sees that. Obviously, and. You know, you start attacking civilians, especially behind, if if you notice, they're starting to, or at least what I'm hearing, I don't know if they're saying this. They're starting to attack these civilian centers behind the lines, behind the front.

• 2:10:26Speaker 02

  So with a missile, they're going over the front and hitting people in the rear.

• 2:10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:10:31Speaker 02

  Which you're you're not doing that by mistake.

• 2:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:35Speaker 02

  If it's at the front. And you think you're attacking a certain building and you miss and you accidentally hit civilians. Okay, we can talk, that happens. But now you're hundreds of miles away from the front, blowing up. This building or that building or, you know, that's that's done on purpose.

• 2:10:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  And that's not good if that's being done on purpose. And that, I think, could really, you know, I'm talking to some people uh every day and um.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  That's. Very troublesome for them, that's making them cry as they're talking to me.

• 2:11:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  That's affecting the people, obviously. Um. So, yeah, hopefully that gets cleared up and. Somebody can talk some sense into the Russians, like, look, hey, if you want to fight, fight, right? But don't do that.

• 2:11:31Shawn Ryan?

  I don't even know what to say to that, you know?

• 2:11:33Speaker 02

  It's unbelievable.

• 2:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  It's it's.

• 2:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  I just don't see anybody holding them accountable.

• 2:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and again, we've talked a lot on a couple of examples of this like.

• 2:11:48Shawn Ryan?

  It's a lot of talking.

• 2:11:50Speaker 02

  Here's a good thing, but then also brings a bad thing, right? This is one of those things because the Russians or the Ukrainians are doing so well. At defending their country and fighting the Russians. That is causing or it's making Russia use these kind of tactics. So then what do you do if you're the Ukrainians? Do you back off? I hope to God are. You know, look, I don't work in the government, I'm not a diplomat. But I'd hope they're not telling the Ukrainians back off so that Russia stops doing this.

• 2:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:26Speaker 02

  Because then you back off, you let them advance. You know, I think as you're mentioning, we should be a lot tougher on Russia. I mean, I think we should always should be tough.

• 2:12:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's tough, you know, I mean, not even just the US, but even Europe. I mean, they've allowed themselves to get forty percent of their gasoline from Russia. And so if Russia cuts that.

• 2:12:48Speaker 02

  We were in Germany, Germany gets, I think, a hundred percent of their oil from Russia.

• 2:12:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so I mean, what are they gonna do? Nothing. They're not gonna do anything.

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:12:57Shawn Ryan?

  Because they're reliant on Russia. You know, I mean, and now, I mean, you see our fuel prices, Saudi won't even pick up the phone for us.

• 2:13:07Speaker 02

  Imagine not picking up the phone.

• 2:13:09Shawn Ryan?

  Pick up the phone.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  For the United States of America.

• 2:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  I mean, and and what's funny about this? I say funny, um. You know, when I, back in my day, when I was running and gunning.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  I I didn't deal with any of this.

• 2:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:29Speaker 02

  Right? I was doing that job and, you know, a trigger puller. Go kick this door in. This patrol, that whatever, right?

• 2:13:40Speaker 02

  Now, dealing with it on this level is very different. And like I said, I'm not a diplomat, but I'm working with these people, I'm working with this network. We're doing this job now that we've stumbled into.

• 2:13:55Speaker 02

  It's complicated. It's, it's, you know, it's.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  You think, I mean, we think about it all the time. Zach and I are constantly checking in, what about this, how does this change things? We just heard from this guy about whatever. You know, my mind's full enough and now it's full of this stuff and, and, you know. It, it would be easy, it's not my, it's not my country, it's not my mission. It is now, but, you know, I, I could pull the plug and forget it, I suppose. But it's just a snowball, man. It just keeps getting bigger and more involved and changes every day. It's very weird to be on this end of it.

• 2:14:40Speaker 02

  Having been on the other end, it doesn't get to interact with, with that at all. It's very, I don't know, it's very interesting, but it keeps the head spinning for sure.

• 2:14:51Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like it.

• 2:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's take a break and then when we come back, we'll kind of get into your nonprofit and some of the other stuff you've done and, and done and, and wrap this up.

• 2:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Mark, so let's get in. We covered a lot on Ukraine, pretty much your whole experience over there, the diplomats, the intel you're getting on the ground. Let's move into your nonprofit, what you guys have been doing. And if I, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just now a 501(c)(3)?

• 2:15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, uh, we, the status is pending, obviously. It's the government, everything takes a little while, but yeah, we're, uh, it started off.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  It's pretty recent, fairly recent, when the Afghanistan pull up was happening. I was working with a team, or was working, yeah, working with a team to go over there and help with some stuff over there. We didn't have an organisation or anything like, like, like we do now. And so I was down in Virginia Beach, had, had taken some meetings about going to Afghanistan.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  Came home from those meetings and it was when the hurricane Ida was about to hit. So I just got back off the flight and was sitting, kind of watching TV, getting settled back into being home and was following the hurricane coverage, you know. I like watching that kind of stuff on TV when the disasters come to keep up with what's happening. And um. My wife at the time was five months pregnant. So part of me was like, how am I gonna tell her that, uh, going to Afghanistan, she's not. She's not gonna care, well, she's gonna care, but my wife kinda, she knows what she married, you know, and uh. I always say I don't ask, I just tell, but it's not bad, I'm not a asshole like that.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  It's more, she gets it. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? So okay, I'm gonna have to tell her, I might get a bit of an ear beaten, but uh, have to tell her. And I was just sitting there watching the coverage and they were talking about the hurricane.

• 2:17:32Speaker 02

  And I'd never really done any humanitarian type stuff before, right? And. I text one of the guys, he's uh, he's one of the guys on our team, he's a former Albanian special forces guy. He's a savage, right, I mean, he's one of those legendary, just savage guys.

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  And I text him, I say, hey, what do you think about going down to the hurricane and. Getting involved right in the beginning, like when people really need help, you know, like. Just going down there and throwing it at the hurricane and helping people.

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  And he just texts back, yes. I didn't tell him when, I didn't tell him what, I didn't say how many days, I just basically said, you wanna go help? Yes.

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  So now I go, alright, well, you can't turn a guy like this away, we're going. Rounded up a couple of other guys, the same kind of way that we did with Ukraine, fa- quickly, you know. Planned to step out the next day, the early morning.

• 2:18:41Speaker 02

  And I had most of it planned with the guys set up before I went to my wife. So I go to her and I say, hey, me and a couple of guys are gonna go down to the hurricane, so when this thing hits, we're gonna start helping people.

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  She goes, okay. And I was like, okay, like that. She goes, well, I thought you were gonna tell me you were going to Afghanistan. So I was, so she goes, on you go to the hurricane. So I was, easy, easy conversation there, right? And I didn't even tell her about Afghanistan. She didn't know why I went to Virginia Beach, um, I think she had a, obviously she had a suspicion. But yeah, so she was very happy to kick me out the door down to the hurricane. Uh, so we went and we, you know, we had no, we had a plan, we just got in trucks and drove south. That was the plan, till it rained. Wow. Um, and when we got there, halfway down, my wife sent an app and said, hey, have you guys seen this app?

• 2:19:37Speaker 02

  I can't remember what the app is, we you, we, basically was in a disaster area, you can fill out this app, it creates a ticket. Hey, I need help, I'm stuck, I, whatever, right?

• 2:19:50Speaker 02

  And we started looking at it like, hey, this thing, we could use this. Not for that purpose of going and helping those, but we used it to see where the mass amount of tickets are.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  Makes sense. Do you get what I'm saying? Like, we're not going through these individual things and coming and getting your cat out of a tree or doing this or doing that. We wanna see where all this shit is happening.

• 2:20:13Speaker 02

  We couldn't get into that town, um. Why not? Well, the, I can send you some pictures as well if you want to post them, the whole overpass and ramp. Completely underwater, uh, to go to this area. It's about eleven miles from, um, New Orleans. Couldn't get there, there were semi trucks underwater, the trailers under the water. And, uh, so, okay, we don't know what we're doing, we don't know where we're at, let's go to New Orleans. We went to New Orleans.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  Stop right outside the Superdome. It was like zombies, zombie apocalypse, nobody on the streets, bone dry. Right, bone dry. The power was out, so everything was kind of dark. And it was very creepy, it was like you wouldn't know the hurricane was there. Obviously, we learned that since Katrina, they've done a lot to the New Orleans area. To protect it from that happening again, because obviously that was horrendous what happened there.

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  And in my opinion, it seems to be whatever they've done in New Orleans has been to the detriment of some of the surrounding areas. Because we. Found a back way into that town that we couldn't get into, um, it was, I think thirty miles out of our way, we had to go around. It was a, a town called La Plas. And it ended up being one of the worst hit areas in Hurricane Ida, we didn't know that at the time, we just saw that these tickets were there. We went there, helping some people in the water, we, we got into the town, helping some people in the water and, and, you know, trying to get a lay of the land. We, the governor was going there to do a photo op, we were on the outskirts of town.

• 2:22:04Speaker 02

  Saw this commotion at this gas station, there was a CBS guy there, running this CBS guy, we're in his ear, tell us this, where can we do this? How's that going? He gave us the whole layout of everything that was happening in that area. And it was like, you know. It, it's kind of like some of the stuff we talked about with Ukraine, if you're just doing the thing, you run into opportunity.

• 2:22:27Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:22:28Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? The chances of us.

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  If, if we could have got off that ramp.

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  The the couple hours before, we never would have ran into that guy. You get what I'm saying? So just the fact that we were trying to do stuff, we we could have also said, oh, can't get into that town, let's go somewhere else. But you run into that guy, CBS News guy, who knows everything that's happening in that area. Nipping in his ear, he gives us all the information. Now we know what we're doing. Now we know where to go, who needs help, what can I help they need. And we just start hitting the town, you know, we were.

• 2:23:07Speaker 02

  We did a lot of stuff, we were clearing roads for EMS. They were running into problems with um. You know, say a fire truck, right? And there's a giant tree in the middle of the road. They're not gonna take care of it for a couple of reasons. They can't have that truck go down. And they can't get themselves hurt trying to get to the emergency. So they just don't go, or they try and find another way. So we said, okay, we'll help you, we'll go on ahead of you and get the chainsaws and start clearing roads and doing this and so they can move. Uh, cutting people out of houses, we had a couple of people, trees had fallen in their houses and they're stuck in the house.

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  So we're we're doing that kind of stuff. There was a family, old couple. Very overweight, I'm talking like four spins, like very obese, overweight. Stuck in the house, on oxygen, all this kind of stuff, and a tree had fallen on their house, massive tree. It got to the point we were cutting, we estimated twelve to sixteen hundred pound sections of this tree above our heads. To try and get that, because it was gonna cave their house in. They said, we've just been sitting here in the living room. And last night the roof started to cave in. You guys have to get out of here. And the news guy told us that, he said.

• 2:24:31Speaker 02

  He said, look, if you see people here, you have to tell them to leave. Like, people that haven't left, tell them to leave because we can't get. Emergency services in here, or food or anything to support them, so try and get them to leave. Well, these people in Louisiana are very tough people, they've been through this stuff, and they weren't leaving, right? This old couple, they couldn't leave. They were, they were struggling physically to, they they would have not been able to. But we tried to get them out of there, they're like, we can't go, we don't have a place to go and we can't go.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  And we're like, all right, well. Let's try and get the tree off the roof and we're it's above our heads, we're up on ladders, we're tying ropes to this thing. One bad move and we would have been crushed, you know. So we started doing some of that stuff, um.

• 2:25:21Speaker 02

  Getting food and water to some people, just what we had, uh, we couldn't give people our gasoline. Cause we needed it and we ran into a problem with gasoline because there was one gas station in the town and that turned into like, uh. The cantina from Star Wars as well. It was very, uh, rough there because it was the lifeblood of the town. And they were, you know, the gas lines were.

• 2:25:44Speaker 02

  I think one day we sat in a gas line for four hours to try and get fuel and we had brought fuel and then it got to the point where. As days went by, no electricity, there was no FEMA, there was no Red Cross in that area when we were there.

• 2:25:59Speaker 02

  Three, four days go by and people don't have food, they don't have water, they don't have electricity and they don't have gas. Our fuel supply was getting low and because what we would do is we would, for security reasons, we would stay outside the town on the outskirts. And then just punch in to do some work and then we'd go back. We, we basically took over an abandoned kidney dialysis. Building and just kind of set that up as our little base of operations and we, you know, had a watch and. Punch that at night and then punched out and did stuff during the day. We're running out of fuel though. It got to the point where if we can't get fuel on this day, we need to leave because the closest place to get fuel was a hundred and sixty miles away.

• 2:26:42Speaker 02

  So we're doing the math on how much fuel we have and we don't want to become part of the problem.

• 2:26:48Speaker 02

  So we couldn't get fuel, there was no fuel coming into the town that day. So we had to leave and, you know, we had done a bunch of good stuff there. Um, but by the, as the week went on, just society was deteriorating. Because of no food, no water, no electricity and people were pretty desperate. So we got home, we drove all the way home. We arrived home at like six AM, couple of hours sleep. And by noon, we had a plan to go back down. I just text the guys and said, let's go back and do like a food drop kind of thing. So we got another truck, a couple of other guys, rented trailers.

• 2:27:28Speaker 02

  And we're going down I fifty five from Chicago to Louisiana, hitting Walmarts on the way, right?

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think we stopped at five Walmarts in four or five different states. And we just walked in and said, I said, I need to speak to the manager. Nobody's in trouble. Everything's good. Just need to speak to a manager. Manager comes, I said, okay, we need pallets of water. She goes, yeah, there's cases of water back there. I said, look, ma'am, you're saying cases. I'm saying pallets. She said, okay. So they were fantastic, though, you know, getting us all the stuff. Um, and then we went, we're like, food, we're taking food. All right. Well, what food? How, how are we taking food?

• 2:28:12Speaker 02

  We decided on the Chef Boyardee pull top cans. Yeah. Of all the stuff they make, spaghetti, meatballs, right? All these are, because it's easy. You pull the top, you don't even need a fork. You just eat it out of the can. So we raided the shelves. I'm sure that day that we did that to those five Walmarts, if you were in the inventory management section of corporate, you're, you're thinking, you know, the alarms are going off, right? Because we raided everything and we had raised some money.

• 2:28:41Speaker 02

  Before we stepped off, we opened a GoFundMe. Like I said, we didn't have an organization. Yeah. We were just doing it through us. We had a GoFundMe. And people were donating and, and we have a, a, you know, my jujitsu academy in Chicago is, is large and great people and, and they did a great job of getting the word out and we, you know, we were getting donations. So. But I told the guys before we stepped off, I said, look, this is my thing. If nobody gives us a dime, I'll take the hit. It'll be my credit card. Wow. Right? I'm not, not asking anything of these guys, except for their time and their, and their effort. You know, I'll put it all on me, but I believed people would support what we were doing. And they did. It was great. And so we were able to get all that stuff. We filled the trailers and, uh.

• 2:29:27Speaker 02

  And I kept hitting the Walmarts and it was funny because again, we're just doing this on personal credit cards. My credit cards are locking up. I'm on the phone with somebody in Indonesia somewhere trying to get them to unlock my, cause I'm in different states. I'm doing what a criminal would do. Going right down the highway into all these different states, hitting item limits, hitting dollar limits on purchases. And I'm on the phone outside screaming like unlock, we need to verify. So I'm like, you're not verifying? No, I'm kicking off, right? It was, it was so funny. And then we get down there and we went back to that area. Where the um, gas station was, because everybody went to that gas station. Lot of shady stuff happening at that gas station, um.

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  Even with the local authorities, like the police would go inside and get food and all this kind of stuff, but outside people couldn't go in. Lot of shady stuff going on. You know, you had good people, desperate people, um. And we stayed there and we did a food drop there. I think we were handing out water and food. For nine hours. It was a hundred and six degrees heat index. Damn. And we were non-stop there. And it was, it was great because. People were in that gas line. They had gas that day. And I just walked right into the gas station. I said, here's what we're doing. We're not gonna interfere with people getting gas. We're gonna set up out by the street.

• 2:30:52Speaker 02

  And do you guys need any food? And these people looked at me, like, like they couldn't believe it. They, they announced, they said, look, I'd never, I haven't eaten all week. And she's in a gas station full of food and drinks.

• 2:31:08Speaker 02

  It's very strange. Yeah, that's kinda odd. And they weren't letting anybody go into that gas station to get stuff. All the pharmacy, like Walgreens type stuff, CVS, were all boarded up, cause people were looting throughout the week and all this. Yeah. It was a very strange situation, but we just sat there for nine hours and handed food out. I mean. My hands and feet and arms were all swollen. Like with the heat and, and just, I mean, I had pictures of my hands. It's like my fingers were sausages. We just, it was non-stop. We never took a break. And we, we just did that. And then we, when we were done, it was dodgy getting out of there because we only had so much food and so much water. And again, after nine hours. And I saw we were getting low towards the end of our drop and uh.

• 2:31:55Speaker 02

  See all the cars still and I'm like, it might be dodgy getting out of here. And we had to do the whole wrap everything up and punch, you know, it would have been nice to kind of sit there and savor. That moment. But it was pretty dangerous at that point because people were pissed. I mean, we were handing out food and water and when we had none left, people were getting angry. Yeah. Which is, I mean, it's desperation. Right. So then we got out of there and uh came home and stuff and I and I started thinking, I was like, you know what? We have the right type of people.

• 2:32:27Speaker 02

  The military guys we have. And the support people that we have, like we can do something with us, like we can. Keep this going and and we can help people, right? We. We can do all the stuff that either people can't do or won't do. Right? In in those kind of situations. That was the first one. That was the first one. Yeah, and um. So my business partners and I started. Putting some stuff together. To try and create a and and. Turn it into something. And then we started helping out with the guys from Save Our Allies with the Afghans. Uh, we were focused mainly on Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. We would do.

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  Clothing runs up there um and take a bunch of supplies up there for them. Spend long weekends up there, working in the kind of Afghan villages, connecting with people and. It was kind of messy up there, you know, they have what an undertaking that is with with those guys um.

• 2:33:28Speaker 02

  You know, and they've done a fantastic job and and it was great of them to kind of, because I came in, I said, look.

• 2:33:36Speaker 02

  Kind of selfishly, I said, I don't want to come up here and volunteer for Save Our Allies. I don't want to work for you. I want to work with you. On the stuff and they were very receptive to that and. They enabled us to do that and helped us and and we worked alongside their um volunteers and with the Team Rubicon. Guys that were up there with the Eighth Second Airborne and there was an army engineering. Company, I think, that was up there too. And then some of the State Department people, but that whole. The military, the NGO and the State Department. Intermingling is uh difficult to navigate. And again, I I don't have a background in NGO type stuff, so that was a good way to learn that there's

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  a lot going on when you start working at that kind of level, but that's that was a great experience.

• 2:34:26Speaker 02

  And then we were, so we were doing that and then November came and November was the the thing that happened with my daughter, right? So, long story, my daughter had a brain tumor and we found out in basically twenty minutes, she needed to have the first of two brain surgeries, like out of nowhere. And my wife was eight months pregnant at that time.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  So we start dealing with that and, you know, at the same time trying to really create something on this NGO side for Overwatch Found- or what is now Overwatch Foundation. Obviously, I took some time away from kind of being out in the field and and and doing some of the hands-on stuff for obvious reasons. Daughter with brain surgery at four years old and then uh new baby coming. But um, once that kind of cooled down, we start, you know, continuing to grow the thing, working on raising money and how to do that, how to do that properly and and effectively. Um, and just creating contacts and all that and then the Ukraine thing popped up.

• 2:35:39Speaker 02

  And so all the humanitarian stuff we've been doing has been through Overwatch Foundation. And, you know, it's still, our our five oh one C three is pending. You know, we have a good team that helped us on the legal side, working all that stuff out. And yeah, just looking forward to to the future and and having that infrastructure within that organization to allow us to do more of this kind of stuff, because we have, we have the guys that can get it done, so let's go, you know what I mean? Yeah, man, that's amazing. Yeah, I never thought of doing anything like this. I never, you know, I never had a plan to to do that and it's just working. You know, we can, we we can make a difference with stuff and

• 2:36:24Speaker 02

  we're gonna, we're gonna keep going with it. How's your daughter? She's good, yeah. I mean, she's uh she's incredible. She's uh, she's probably the

• 2:36:35Speaker 02

  The best human I've ever met, you know, and I have other kids, but there's something special about that little girl and she still is in her physical therapy and pushing through all that and you know it's the thing that's that's tough about it is it's a constant thing, right? I mean, you know, I think about I tore my pec a year ago and I had a year long recovery. That surgery, I had to reattach it to my humerus. And I did all the physical therapy for a year, but then once it's healed, it's healed, it's over, right? My pec now is better than before I tore it. With this, she can, God willing, be great for the next five years and then heaven forbid, something could pop up again.

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  So every win is a win for now. Yeah. And you don't know, you know, for tomorrow, but

• 2:37:27Speaker 02

  you know, I I and I and I told my wife, I said, you know, I mentioned this to you too, I said,

• 2:37:33Speaker 02

  this stuff happens to people. And it's better that it happens to us than somebody else, because we can take it. You know, it's enough to break people, something like that. I mean, can you imagine? So, yeah, it's a, you know, and and the Ukraine thing's tough, because now I'm halfway across the world or all the way across the world in a war zone. And, you know, families at home and there's heavy stuff happening at home with that with that. It's like, you know, why do you do that? Why don't you just stay home with the family? But, you know, part of being a father and, you know, is being an example. And and she knows that we went there. She's friends with Yuri's daughter.

• 2:38:17Speaker 02

  You know, my daughter's four, Yuri's daughter is three. And she knows that, you know, dad went with with Mia's dad to help him. Wow, that's powerful. And she'll know as we continue to do this stuff and, you know. It's just a good way to be an example for for the kids, right? Yeah. So, yeah, so that's where we're at and we're just trying to. You know, it's weird, the hurricane thing just kinda fell on the lap and and and we're gonna continue to do that. God, you know, heaven forbid there's any more hurricanes. I hope there never is, but um that affect people like that, but.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  You know, we'll be there to help and do what we can and the Ukraine thing fell on the lap as well and, you know, I I. This is the kinda thing we're gonna do. When these things pop up, we'll pop in, you know. Um, another thing that we're really doing with the foundation is we're using veterans. Guys who, you know, are out or, you know, we have a couple of guys who are more recently out. And it helps them scratch that itch a little bit, being around other veterans, doing something that's, you know, doing a mission that's worthwhile, helping people. Um, you know, we're not running around trying to do anything crazy.

• 2:39:40Speaker 02

  Some of the stuff we've done has been pretty dangerous, but it's not like it's a group of warmongers trying to. Do something stupid, you know, but I can see. Some of these guys light up when we're together, when we're doing this stuff and and that's pretty rewarding, so. As we grow, again, same for the Ukraine mission, we're gonna be looking for guys to. You know, special operators to do some of the crazy stuff we're doing, um. Military veterans in general that can help and and civilians support people. We have, for the foundation, we have a a great group of civilian. Support people that are very handy, very organized, that that are go-getters.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  That, you know, for for those kinda missions, it doesn't always have to be special operations vets, um. You know, I just want to help vets in general and give them, you know, a little bit of purpose, a little bit of a. A goal to be able to help people and use some of their life skills to to do that, you know. Yeah, man, you're doing.

• 2:40:44Shawn Ryan?

  It's incredible.

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  It's.

• 2:40:46Shawn Ryan?

  Really is.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  It's, uh, you know, we're in the beginning, but I think, I think there's something there for sure.

• 2:40:51Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's something there too. I mean, just by hiring veterans and, and, I mean, uh, on top of all the other stuff you guys are doing that's. I mean, saving lives, saving countries, say everything you're doing. And then you're also giving veterans who may be a little lost, you know, cause it is, it's tough.

• 2:41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:12Shawn Ryan?

  Transition, giving them a purpose again and, and something they can be proud of again. And. That's a, that's another big thing that's not really talked about is how do you find something that you're proud of what you're doing again after you leave.

• 2:41:24Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:41:25Shawn Ryan?

  Especially a special operations unit, you know?

• 2:41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I obviously, you know, I'm not gonna get into it right now, but like, yeah, I mean, I had a struggle kinda. When I got done personally, right? Um, just kinda dealing with life, dealing with people, what do I do next? And. You know, I mean, you've heard countless stories like that as well. It's, it's difficult and I suppose there are resources to help. But we don't go and use those resources until we, till we hit the wall, right? So, um. You know, it's being able to help with some of that stuff and, and help veterans. That's a huge bonus that I never even anticipated.

• 2:42:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:05Speaker 02

  Doing this stuff. We just, hey, let's get the guys that we have and go help some people. And then you see that side of it and you're like, man, this thing just, it's just. It's so reward, like there, it's like a reward snowball for everybody involved.

• 2:42:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:19Speaker 02

  You know, as far as the difference you can make doing something like this, so, yeah.

• 2:42:24Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we close it out, I just wanna again, say thank you for coming and, and sharing your experiences and. And, you know, if you're looking to get involved, the links are below. They need guys, they need special operations guys, you need equipment. All those links are below and, uh, man, it's just, it's a real honor talking to you. I'm so glad that. We could make this happen on such short notice.

• 2:42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, yeah, it, you're welcome. It's, it was truly an honor. So. Do you know when you're going back over?

• 2:43:01Speaker 02

  We don't know. We have a um kind of cursory plan right now. Um we're trying to get funding and raise funds for some of the bigger stuff that we're looking to do in Ukraine, but yeah, I mean, I don't I don't see how we don't go back. You know, I mean, they they need help, so.

• 2:43:20Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think you're gonna get a lot of support, so best of luck to you. Keep doing great things.

• 2:43:38Speaker 04

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