#28 Nick "Machine" Lavery - Active Duty Army Special Forces Amputee

Nick Lavery is an active duty member of The United States Army Special Forces. Nick is not just a warrior on the battlefield, but a warrior for the common American. In this episode we learn of the greatest battles you have never heard of. From small arms gun fights to being ambushed by trusted allies, Nick is an example to any person who has been pushed to the ultimate limit and emerged victorious. This is the greatest story you have NEVER heard. 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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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Ally here with cash when you need it. Like when your stylist just did the most. Fresh cut and zero cash. Don't be an asshole. Ally has 75,000 fee-free ATMs nationwide, so you're never without cash. Ally Bank Member, FDIC.

• 0:46Shawn Ryan?

  This next show is a show about overcoming the impossible.

• 0:53Shawn Ryan?

  It's a story of perseverance, dedication,

• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  and pure patriotism. All the things that make America a great place to live. It's one of the best stories I have ever heard in my life.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Please welcome Nick Lavery to the show. And I only have one ask for you. Please go to iTunes and leave us a review if you get something from this episode. This is amazing.

• 1:32Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get to it.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  We just pumped Nick full

• 1:38Speaker 03

  of like six units of the wrong blood type. There's no way he survives the flight. So just be prepared to receive his body.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  We would be getting dudes that were coming in from these other elements for us to work with.

• 1:53Shawn Ryan?

  Did that bother you? That can get tricky.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  One of the individuals that was inside that Ford Ranger, jumped up on the back of the truck and engaged into the group with that PKM.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I see what's happening. I gun up fifteen or so feet away from the group, ripping into the crowd. Guys are dropping, guys are scrambling, things are blowing up kind of all around. And I just feel the impact.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  I have to cauterize your face back together, taking an AK-47 round to the side of my face.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Young kid, first deployment, fresh out of basic. And he's fifteen feet in front of a guy who's shooting machine gun in his general direction.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I know everyone in the truck is dead and my right leg is just fucking mangled. It's just like hammered meat and tissue and exposed bone. And there's just a river flowing.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  It's the ultimate mass cowl scenario. To this day, considered the most catastrophic insider attack since the global war terrorism began.

• 4:20Shawn Ryan?

  Nick Lavery, welcome to the show, man.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, Rilla.

• 4:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor. So, you're the only active-duty guy that I've ever had on. You're still active.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  As an SF guy.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 4:33Shawn Ryan?

  Chief War Officer?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  You'll probably be the last one that I have, too. We don't get very many active guys.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:41Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, one to come on. Actually, I've never had one. But, um, so, I want to just run through, I want to run through your entire career as much as you can, and with, uh, with, with the audience, I just want everybody to keep in mind that Nick is an active, you're on an active ODA, active SF guy, and so topics can be, uh, limiting.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 5:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know, because, because you are still active and you're, and you're in it. So, uh, we'll definitely respect that, and if, if we do happen to go into anything that you're uncomfortable, then just, just let us know, and, and everybody gets it.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and before we go any farther, I just want to say thank you for your service. I know that's weird to hear, but...

• 5:24Speaker 03

  No, I appreciate it. Likewise, man.

• 5:26Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Thank you, man. But, um, so, Abject Secure.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 5:32Shawn Ryan?

  New book came out, what, a couple of months ago?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, late January.

• 5:36Shawn Ryan?

  How's that doing?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  It's doing well.

• 5:39Shawn Ryan?

  Is it?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, and you asked me that question, uh, kinda when I first got here, and I based my response to that question solely off of the feedback that I've been given from those that have checked it out and read it, and through that lens, it's been absolutely tremendous.

• 5:58Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of feedback are you getting?

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, so it, you know, it can vary, uh, kinda from the, the one end of the spectrum to the other.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Something as simple as, hey man, I took something that you that you wrote about, and I recently applied it to my life in terms of setting goals and achieving goals. So, thank you for that, which is great. And then I'm kind of on that farther end of the spectrum. Even just recently, about a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from a woman who told me that her husband had attempted suicide a few months back. He failed at it, fortunately. He was on a real destructive path. He stumbled upon my Instagram or something, found the book. She bought him the book.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  He took a look at it, and he's made relatively a 180, and he's doing really well. Now, I don't claim to be the catalyst for that, but from her perspective, myself and what's in this in this book, was a part of that process for that individual. And that's quite powerful, man. You know, you get a message like that from somebody, you're able to really reach out and touch somebody and positively affect someone's life. So, kind of the entire range of the spectrum, but it's been it's been really humbling, and it's an honor to be, you know, part of people's process.

• 7:24Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. You know, the other thing is, you're the first amputee that I've had on here, and I've been looking for the perfect guy or woman that to come on here and and and share that, share their story with with the audience, because it's, I mean, it's just, I can't imagine, you know, the stuff that you've gone through and the rehabilitation, and and we've had a lot of guys that have had a lot of struggles, you know, with separation and transition out of the military, and I mean, what you have been through, without a doubt, has got to be one of the toughest things to overcome.

• 8:09Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I just I just have a tremendous amount of respect for you.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Thank you, bro.

• 8:13Shawn Ryan?

  And for that to happen, and then to to still be an active.

• 8:18Shawn Ryan?

  Green Beret is just, it just speaks volumes of who you are as a man.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  I appreciate it, man. Thank you.

• 8:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but um, and we'll get into all that a little bit later, but so tell us a little bit about the book. What was your goal in writing the book?

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, first I'll start off by saying what it isn't, and it's not an autobiography. It's not uh, my memoirs, and it's also not a story or a group of stories in combat, right? Like the buried up to our knees in hand grenade pins type story. That's not what it is. And I think oftentimes when you see a military author, that's kind of your general thought, that that's what the book's going to be about. And there's some amazing stories out there that I've read. That is not what this, what this project is. The, the short answer of what it is,

• 9:17Speaker 03

  it's a, it's a personal development piece. And really, I think the greatest way to, to explain it is to just briefly talk on the genesis of it, how it became a thing. And if you go back, which we'll get into, um, following my first deployment as an APT, coming back from that, it was, uh, it was publicized pretty rapidly. Uh, it was unprecedented for that to have happened, so it caught a lot of people's attention. As, as things progressed and I became more involved in social media and kind of gradually being comfortable with putting myself out there into the public space, uh, the questions start coming in, mostly revolving around two.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  One being, why do you still do what you do, given what you've been through? And then how did you do that? How were you able to function on a special forces detachment with one leg? Two reasonable questions, and I'm responding consecutively, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And after a couple hundred or a thousand of me basically writing the same thing over and over and over again, over the course of a year or so, I decided to just jot this down into a Word document product. Solely for the sake of efficiency. So that when that question comes in, I can just copy, paste, attach, send. And then there you go. There's your response.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  So it was about efficiency and then it was also about taking an actual closer look at what that process looked like for me. So I kind of grew in a sense because of me doing that. Right. I really analyzed like, how did I do what I did and how do I do what I do now? And it was short, man. It was maybe eight, nine, 10 page Microsoft Word doc, nothing fancy. Boom, boom, boom. Kind of outlined the process. And I used it that way for about a year or so, a little longer. And fast forward to 2020, right? Summer of 2020, COVID is going crazy, right?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  People are working from home. People are teleworking, even us in the military, which was a strange time for everybody. And I was about a week out from graduating dive school down in Key West, which I'm sure we'll talk about as well. And a really good buddy of mine, been one of my best friends for 20 years, went to college together, played football together in college. He calls me up and he says, hey, man, there's something I want to talk to you about. I got about a week left of dive school and I'm an absolute train wreck, right? Physically, mentally, I'm just beat to shit. So I'm in no condition to have any kind of serious conversation with anybody at this point. I'm like, hit me up, you know, in a week when I get home. And he does. And short version of the story is his mother's been in the book industry her whole life.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Uh, worked with different publishers, worked as a librarian. And he brings it to me and says, hey, man, I think you need to write a book. And I'm like, get out of here. No, I'm not doing that. Uh, what would I even write about? Like, what are we talking about? My initial thought was he wanted me to do, you know, the Nick Lavery story, like an autobiography. And I had no interest in doing something like that. So I'm like, get out of here. He's like, no, man, I really think you need to think about this. And as one of my best friends out of respect to him, I said, okay, I'll mull it over, fine. And over a few days. I thought about this Word document that I had sitting on my computer. I'm like, you know, I kinda already have something on paper that I did put a lot of time into and effort and energy. Uh, that's been working. I've been using it and it's been effective. The feedback from this has been positive.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  So we get back on the phone and I said, you know what, man? I kinda already have something. It's about 10 pages. Uh, but there's something there. I know there's something there because I've, I've felt and seen the results of it. And he's like, keep going with it. Now again, we're in the middle of 2020. It's COVID. I got a lot of extra time on my hands and energy that I normally would be spent, you know, in the gym, which they were closed. I normally would be at work, working 12 hour days. But now we're doing crazy, you know, on off schedules, limited time in the office. So I had extra time and energy on my hands, uh, which I took advantage of and I just began writing. And if you had asked me a week before that point, if I enjoyed writing, the answer would have been no.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  But having put myself into that position, I caught the bug for it, man. And it became one of those things that, you know, I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning and I just have to get out of bed and write. And I caught, I caught the fever and I had a, I had a backstop of December of that year where we were on our next rotation in. And I kinda gave myself that timeframe to see what I could come up with. And it got to the point where I was doing five, 600 words a day, uh, borderline obsessive, probably completely obsessive. And, uh, fast forward two, three months from that point and I'm sitting at, you know, 70,000 words. Wow. Now you're looking at something that actually has the contents of a book.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Um, and at that point, it was just a, a matter of, of getting it, you know, polished. Learning the process of, of self-publishing. How do you get it out there? How do you create a cover? How do you create the layout? So learn that and then, uh, and then, and then hit the send button, man. Man, that is, uh, so are you still writing every day? I write every day. Yeah, I write every day. You know, there's something great about it in terms of from an analytical perspective, you know, looking at what we've done, what we're doing, how we're doing it and documenting that process. Uh, which for me began with just my training log in the gym, like sets and reps. Well, 10 years ago with sets and reps

• 14:58Speaker 03

  and grams of protein has morphed into something with much more substance, um, journaling, right? And then more creative writing. So I do write every day, um, because it's got that analytical value that I enjoy, but it's all, it's also, you know, therapeutic for me as well, which has become a great mechanism for me to leverage in terms of maintaining my own, you know, mental wellness and, and wellbeing.

• 15:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Man, that's, I, there's a lot of guys that I've been, uh, that I'm friends with that say that they get a lot of therapeutic value out of, out of journaling. I haven't started it yet. I, the only thing I've ever journaled is my, uh, my psychedelic experience. But, um, but I, I should probably start.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  There's a lot of value in it, man. And I know for, you know, for us type As, us warriors, you look at journaling as this kind of like soft, uh, task to do. Like, I'm not like, I'm a warrior. I'm not gonna write in my diary, right? There's like a sense of weakness that's associated with doing that.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  But if you can, if you can force yourself to go down that road, allow yourself to be vulnerable, even with just yourself. You don't need to necessarily publicize it, but, uh, I, it's one of the, one of the first things I typically recommend guys that are struggling with whatever it may be. It's like, are you writing? Are you writing stuff down? Um, most time the answer is no. I'm like, give a shot.

• 16:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  You know, give a shot, cut out five minutes a day and just throw some words on a page and just see where it goes.

• 16:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm gonna start doing that. But, um, Alright, let's, so kinda how I wanna do this interview, I think I already said this, but wanna do your life story, get into as much as your career as possible. But before we do that, everybody always gets a present, so.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 16:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, uh, Merry Christmas.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  There you go. Awesome. Christmas-themed box, too.

• 16:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Perfect. Want me to open this right now?

• 16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Open it up. What do you, you got any guesses?

• 17:00Speaker 03

  I'm guessing it's some kind of apparel.

• 17:02Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  My way off.

• 17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Way off, way off.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  You're wrapping this thing up like you're shipping it off to NASA.

• 17:08Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  We're just gonna get savage with this thing here, man. Some gummies, we were just talking about the gummies.

• 17:17Shawn Ryan?

  There you go.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:18Shawn Ryan?

  Now you got some.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Look at this. This is awesome, bro.

• 17:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  You know who's gonna go bananas over this? Is my five-year-old. He's gonna immediately assume that daddy came home with some presents for him. I appreciate it, bro.

• 17:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 17:33Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Those are hard to come by.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, right?

• 17:37Shawn Ryan?

  Those are hard to come by. But, um, so, I try to, I always take questions from my patrons. Patrons, uh, are my biggest supporters over on Vigilance League Patreon, and I always give them an opportunity to ask the upcoming guest a question. Sometimes we get a lot of questions, sometimes we don't. I do wanna go through a Q&A with you after this, uh, this is for Patreon only, but this one's from Beren Smith, and I was a little hesitant to ask you this, but, um, I do think it's actually a good question, it's something I never would've thought of. He's asking, when you became an amputee, when you lost your leg,

• 18:20Shawn Ryan?

  now, are, is there anything, did you find any benefits at all from that experience?

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Great question.

• 18:30Shawn Ryan?

  Any, any positivity that came out of that?

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, a, a, a ton. We could probably spend an hour on that. Um, and I'll just start off by saying that I firmly believe that there is positivity to extract from the worst of circumstances, the worst of events. I think it's simply a matter of time, uh, to be able to see them. Uh, we'll get into some of that too, with some of the more traumatic events that I've been through within my military career, but there is positivity to extract, and I certainly grasped a lot from this.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  If I were to hop on, you know, maybe one or two.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  First would be efficiency. And the best way to describe this is, you know, when you put a prosthetic on your body, imagine a clock that starts to tick immediately, the second you put it on. Clock starts to tick. At some point, you will have to take that limb off of your body. Right? And at that point, you will be less capable, more than likely, to do what you do on two feet, or at least things will change. So clock starts to tick and the the speed in that clock ticking is based on a whole variety of factors, but most significantly, level of activity and temperature are like the primary ones. Those of us that operate with a prosthetic that has an actual socket

• 19:53Speaker 03

  that your that your residual limb goes into. Sweat is the ultimate enemy for a pro for an amputee. That is, or anyone with a prosthetic that is working with the more with a traditional socket type system. Everything starts to get slippery, it starts to it starts to slide around. These things are shaped to your limb under normal circumstances, but just imagine when you're in a pool of water for an extended period of time, you know, your fingers start to prune, your skin starts to get damp, moist, feathery. That that happens to the limb itself based on the sweat. So it's that the fit starts to get worse over time. Pain starts to increase, functionality starts to decrease.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  So that clock will start to speed up based on level of activity and temperature and then a variety of other variables. So I realized very quickly that I needed to maximize as much as possible what I'm able to do while I have the leg on my body. And that's amplified when you live a very physical lifestyle, physically training, obviously, my job in the military is one that's physical. We spend a lot of time outside where it's hot. So just. Dissecting minute by minute, hour by hour, what am I doing? Once I get upright and making that as efficient as possible, eliminating as much white space as possible.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  And it got to the point where I was, I was almost OCD about it. Where if I would, if I would grab some items to leave my house and then I got to my truck and realized that I forgot something. I was kicking myself in the ass because now I gotta go back and I gotta get it, right? Those are 15 steps that I'm not getting back because I was inefficient. So I need to update that system to make this as streamlined as possible. So I got, I got OCD admittedly, uh, drove my wife crazy at times. She's gotten used to it now. Uh, so just efficiency being one. And then the second I'll just touch on is, uh, is resilience, man. And this began from the moment I got my leg for the first time.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  You know, the, the, the second time in my life where I took my first steps. And you, you get set up with this thing. You have no idea how it's going to work, how it's going to fit. It's brand new. I'm 30 years old at the time, got a lot of life experience with two limbs. Now I'm down to one and they set you up in these parallel bars in the prosthetic office. Just for something for you to, to hold on to while you're taking your first steps, right? For the second time and a prosthetic straps it on. He's like, okay, now go ahead and walk. Like that was his instruction. And I'm looking at him like, I don't know, how do I operate this thing? I don't know what I, what, what, what is all this? He's like, just go ahead and take a step.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  So I'm, I'm fumbling around, I'm gripping with as much strength as I can, right? I'm nervous, I'm scared. Uh, family members are there. Eventually I figure it out, I kind of kick it forward. I'm all awkward, you know, I'm all, I'm all messed up. Eventually I start to get a bit of a rhythm. I'm going down, I'm going back, I'm going down, I'm going back. I'm, I'm loosening up that grip on those parallel bars. I'm feeling more confident. Like, oh wow, I can do this. Okay, things are good. I'm getting more and more confident and loosening up. Next thing you know, I'm not holding on to the bars at all. I'm just going down and back, down and back. And then the inevitable of course happens, which is me falling flat on my face, right? Leg kicks out, leg goes one way, I go the other way. Boom.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  And I look up at my prosthetic, um, who knew this was coming, right? And he said, okay, now get yourself back up. And I just like to use that story because not only did he teach me in that moment physically how to get back up off the ground as a one-legged guy, but more so the mentality behind getting knocked down, falling down on your ass, right, feeling embarrassed, feeling like you just failed, um, having a whole bunch of doubts coming into your mind, all of that stuff starts to come bombing in in that one moment in time and being able to get back up and go again.

• 24:07Shawn Ryan?

  Damn dude, that may be one of the most powerful fucking things that have ever been said on this show.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it paints a great picture. I know it's really difficult to conceptualize what it's like to lose a limb, right? I couldn't do it until I lived it, but I think a lot of people can just put themselves in that position uh, about trying to function with a robot appendage for the first time, you know, and then wiping out massively. And uh, and what that can, what that can do to you because whether or not you have lost a limb or not, we've all been knocked on our ass uh, to varying degrees of severity and having to find the will and the physical means to get back up and keep moving. So I think it's relatable uh, to a wide audience.

• 24:57Shawn Ryan?

  Definitely, definitely. Wow. Um, well, let's, let's go ahead and start with your story. So I can tell by your accent, you grew up in South Texas.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Actually, uh, yeah, a little, a little town outside of Little Rock down in Arkansas. That's what I call home.

• 25:18Shawn Ryan?

  But, but seriously, where, where did you grow up? What was family life like?

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. Um, I claim Boston, Mass. Uh, because that's where I spent most of my time as a, as a child and as, as, as an adolescent. Uh, the, the truth is I'm, I'm a nomad of Massachusetts. And uh, myself, my parents and my younger sister, we moved.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  About every 12 months, I think 18 months was the longest I was in any single location for any given time. And most of that was based on my parents, you know, two young parents. My father had me when he was 21 and struggling, grinding it out, you know, with two young kids. So a lot of job transitions and then therefore geographic changes based on what they were doing to survive and to feed us. And, you know, they did an amazing job at that. So I moved around a lot, man, north, north of Boston, south of Boston. And we can circle back to this, Sean, but you know, that process. If I put myself on the couch.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Played an enormous factor in even specific events years later, like in combat, like specific moments. I can, I can unpack that to the way I was raised and the experience I had as, as a young person moving that frequently. Being the new kid in school every, every year. Damn. Is difficult, right? What did your old man do? He did a lot of different. Whatever he could find? Things, yeah, a lot of different things from working at places like FedEx and UPS to work in, in different other factories, distribution warehouses. Uh, my mother was mostly in the social support industry where she worked at different shelters. She worked as a teacher.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  So different specific industries, different specific jobs. Wherever they could find the work that they needed to support us and they did.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  And you know, back then, man.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  The term bullying wasn't taken as seriously as it is today. Yeah. Right? Back then, when I was a young kid, it was kind of just part of growing up and it wasn't, it wasn't looked at with, with the level of granularity that it's looked at now. And the type of psychological impacts it can have on young people. Um, and I experienced that, you know, and I was, people see me now and they, they, they tend to have a difficult time grasping this, but I was a really small kid. I was a ti- I was a peanut. Really? Peanut. Yeah, yeah, peanut. Little dude. Um, eventually, late high school, I hit this like ridiculous growth spurt and shut up, but I was really small kid. I was a new kid every single year, getting picked on, difficult time making friends, difficult time keeping friends.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  You know, self-esteem really, really low. Uh, that was just how I'd have grown up though for me, and I obviously struggled through it. So I moved around a lot a- as a kid. Ended up going to high school in Dorchester, which is a borough just, uh, connected to Boston. And, um, and that was when I started looking at the military. I think it was my sophomore year of high school. I started looking at the Marine Corps and that was kind of a general direction that I had to go in. And that was based solely off of commercials, right? Yeah. The Marine Corps has historically been phenomenal with their marketing. They still are today. Very enticing. Even that, that, that dress, class A uniform they have, it's crisp, it's clean, it's captivating.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  It's not done by accident. And the commercial, I'll never forget with this guy, he climbs this mountain. And he breaks out this sword and he takes down this like lava monster. And he snaps around, he's in the, he's in the dress uniform. And I'm like, as a young kid, you know, sophomore in high school, I'm like, this is the ultimate badass. I think I want to be that guy, you know? So striving to be, you know, a warrior and striving to be strong and striving to be respected. All can be generated by, you know, my time as a kid where I was a scared, young, insecure child. And I was like, I was striving for that level of respect and authority and strength. And I was drawn to the Marine Corps as a sophomore in high school. One year, one day, I skipped school, I go downtown Boston, I meet with the Marine Corps recruiter.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  And he says, yeah, man, you know, graduate, um, high school and then come back and we'll get you taken care of. So. I had kind of a general direction at that point. Yeah. The only thing that I was really interested in as a kid and through high school was athletics. You know, that was the one thing that I had, no matter where we lived, there were athletic programs. So that's really where I dove in, where I spent most of my time. I played just about every sport there is, you know, in high school. Uh, football, cross, ran track, wrestled, played basketball. Um, football was, ended up being my primary sport. And that's the one thing that derailed me from going into the Marine Corps at high school was I started getting recruited to play football in college. Oh shit, you were good at it. I was good enough. Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  I was good enough to get, to get recruited, um, by D two and D one double A programs. Wow. So, um, I ended up going to college, I went to UMass Lowell, which is a D two program. Solely because I got recruited to play football. I was not an academic. I struggled through high school, uh, in terms of my grades and taking studying seriously. I had despised it. I did just enough to be able to stay on, you know, on the team.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  So, uh, football is what brought me to college. So I, I went to college, this is in two thousand. Um, and then sophomore year was nine eleven. So the very beginning of my sophomore year of college was, uh, September of two thousand and one. So I'm on the way to class one day and every, which was kind of rare for me, but I'm on the way to class. And everyone is heading back towards the dorms, just droves of students. I stopped one dude, I'm like, what's going on? He's like, yeah, all the classes are canceled. And I'm excited. I'm like, perfect. I didn't want to go anyway. I'm already mapping out the rest of my day.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  How am I just, how am I just gonna waste the rest of this day? And I head back to the dorm. Uh, so obviously I snap on the television and the same thing is on every single channel. And that's when things got, got real. And once I was able to process what, what, what I was seeing, um.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  I was angry, man. I was really angry and uh you know I didn't grow up in a military family. So I didn't have this sense of of patriotism like buried into me as a child. But by the time I was in college, you know, eighteen years old at this point. Uh I was very proud to to be an American and uh the red, white and blue meant something to me. And seeing that happen uh infuriated me. I felt I felt like the planes were flying into my body physically was the level of of frustration that I had. Um and it was how fucking dare you just do this?

• 32:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  How fucking dare, do you know who you're fucking with? Pardon my language, but if I'm being authentic, that's what I'm thinking. Do you know who you just fucked with is what I'm thinking? Um I and we are gonna hunt you down and fucking annihilate you in your entire lineage. This is my, this is my thought process at that point. And um and I really struggled to stay in school because I I knew what was gonna happen and I wanted to be a part of that. I struggled to stay in school. I ended up meeting and talking to, you know, some mentors and some family. And I ended up deciding to stay in and grind out the rest of my degree, uh which I did. Um ended up earning my bachelor's degree in criminology.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  And then um immediately after graduated, graduate, uh graduating college. I started looking at options to to enlist.

• 33:31Shawn Ryan?

  Where did, where did you start? Did you start with the Marine Corps again or?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  I didn't. I started with the Navy.

• 33:36Shawn Ryan?

  You started with the Navy?

• 33:37Speaker 03

  I wanted to be a SEAL.

• 33:39Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Started with the Navy and you know, similar to the Marines in a lot of ways. When you think of, now my education has come along quite a bit since my sophomore year of high school. Now I just graduated college. I'm twenty four years old, right? The internet is now a thing. Access to information is now a thing, right? Um at that point in time, which isn't much different than it is now, when you think of like the ultimate badass. The Navy SEALs come to mind very, very quickly. And that's what happened to me. And I said, I wanna be in special operations. I wanna be a SEAL. I wanna be at the front of this fight. So I walked into a recruiter station in Boston. And they had three branches in the same building.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  They had the Navy, the Marines, and the Army. And I went in that order. I walked into the Navy office first and talked to a recruiter and said, hey, man, I want to be a SEAL. He said, great. Let's uh, let's get you enlisted in the Navy. And then you can place a request to, you know, go to BUDS and go that route. And I said, okay, thank you, and I left. And I went to the Marine Corps office, I had the same exact conversation. And I essentially got the same exact answer. I said, thank you, and I left. I went to the Army office. And I got a different answer when I walked into the Army's office. He said, we actually have a program called the eighteen X-ray program. Otherwise known as the Special Forces Recruit Contract Option.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Which gives guys off the street the chance to bypass the conventional Army. And go straight into Special Forces. I said, okay. I'm, I think I'm interested in that, but let me go home and do some homework. Uh, so I left, I went home and I just got on the Google machine and I started looking up like, what do Green Berets do? I really didn't know. You know, at that time, I, John Wayne, right, Rambo, like I've seen stuff in movies, but I really didn't have an education on specifically what these different units did. So I just dug in and just spent the next day, two, three. Um, researching what these entities do.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  And although the Army gave me the fastest route to get into SF, into SOF. It was the mission that I was also drawn to more than the other options. And that primarily being unconventional warfare, right? Which is a very sexy term. Uh, there's a ton that goes into it. Um, and even just on the unclassified side, you start to extract and peel back the layers of what UW is. There's a lot of really interesting and enticing stuff within that. Uh, so I was drawn to that. And I said, okay, I think this is the route I want to go. This is the mission I want to execute. And it gets me there doing it the fastest.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  So that was the, that was the ultimate, the route that I went.

• 36:29Shawn Ryan?

  Is there one particular thing about unconventional warfare that caught your attention?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  I think it was probably the term denied area, which is where the definition ends, right? Activities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In denied area. You know, verbiage like sabotage, subversion, resistance, movement, insurgency. Like, these terms jump out, but when you think about operating in a denied area,

• 37:02Speaker 03

  that was enticing to me. And then, within that, I eventually learned more about the OSS during World War II.

• 37:11Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  When the Jedberg teams jumped in behind enemy lines into France to set the infrastructure, to set the groundwork and the conditions to enable the D-Day invasion. Right? And that literally is the origin, the genesis of Army Special Forces, comes from the OSS. You know, Colonel Aaron Bank, he was a member of one of those Jedberg teams. And at the conclusion of World War II, he recognized that there was a value there that needed to be maintained and grown. And then in 1952, the United States Army Special Forces became a thing. So when you look, you know, again, to answer the question, I looked at denied area and that kind of led me down the learning more about the history of the OSS and what they did and the way that they did it.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  That, that, that's kind of what closed the deal.

• 38:00Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  For me, yeah.

• 38:02Shawn Ryan?

  Being the fact, the fact that you graduated from, from college, did you look at going the officer route?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I did, only because my recruiter mentioned it to me. He said, you know, you can, you can go the OCS route and become an officer because you have your college degree. The 18X-ray contract is not an option to become an officer. If you want to be an SF officer, you have to enlist, go through whatever means you go through to get your commission and then spend time in the conventional Army. And then you can drop a packet to go to selection.

• 38:34Shawn Ryan?

  You just had no interest in that?

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Zero. And, you know, I was I'll say I was inaccurate. There's some accuracy to this, but my perception at that time was that officers were the guys sitting behind desks telling other people what to do and the enlisted guys were the guys that were physically doing it, which is true in a lot of sense, in a lot of ways that is accurate. On an SF detachment, that's not the case, right? The captain, the detachment commander, the team leader is right there doing the stuff with the boys. But that was my perception at that time and I wanted to be, I wanted to be one of the guys doing the thing, not one of the guys telling someone else to do the thing.

• 39:13Shawn Ryan?

  You want to get your hands dirty.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 39:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that definitely happened.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  It did. I got, I got what I asked for, man.

• 39:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So how long after you made your decision, did you join? Was it immediately?

• 39:29Speaker 03

  It was pretty quick. Yeah, man. I don't remember the exact timeframe, but I signed that contract and I was heading down to Fort Benning for basic within a month or two. Pretty fast. Yeah, it was pretty fast.

• 39:42Shawn Ryan?

  What did your parents think?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Scared? I laughed because, you know, my parents are my biggest fans right now and they, they live Green Beret history and they're all into what we do and how we do it to the best of their abilities. I laughed because I'm 24 years old. I'm a college graduate, okay? I'm a man with some life experience. I had made my decision and I called my father and I tell him, who's my best friend in this world? Because again, he's, we're not that far in age. So he's my father, but he's my best friend. I call him up and I say, hey, dad, I made a decision. This is what I'm gonna do. I'm going 18X-ray special forces recruit, enlisted in the United States Army. I'm gonna get myself to the front of this fight as fast as humanly possible. And his response to me was, no, you're not.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  He said, no, you're not. And I said, Dad, listen, man, I love you, but uh, I'm not asking you for your permission. I'm just telling you what I'm gonna do. So in his mind, you know, he's like, he's my father. So he's like, just try to send me to my room. You know, go to your room and think about what you just said, kind of thing. Which came from a place of concern and fear, right? Cause he saw what was going on. He knew where I was going. And he's, you know, he's my father and my mother, right? So they were, they were, uh, they were petrified of what was gonna happen.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Fast forward again, you know, to today, and they're obviously extraordinarily proud, you know, they're, they, they will bleed to keep the stripes on the flag red. Based on, you know, mostly the work that I've done and being alongside me during, during the entire journey.

• 41:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 41:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, going into your military service, so you signed the contract, you're gonna go to the SF program. What's that, what does that pipeline look like?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's, it's changed multiple times since then. Um, this is back in oh seven. And uh,

• 41:46Speaker 03

  basic training, which technically is called one station unit training or OSIT for X-rays. Uh, where, and also for infantrymen that are gonna go basically back to back. So rather than going to basic training and then going to AIT, which is Advanced Individual Training, where you learn your actual job or your MOS. They're combined. So at the time, I think it was sixteen or seventeen weeks straight at Fort Benning. You go basic, straight into AIT. Knock that out, and then from there, just go right down the street at Fort Benning to Airborne School. Knock that out, uh, and then from there, head to, uh, Fort Bragg to begin the SF pipeline process. And I'm quite certain it still exists today. The name has probably changed.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  But at the time, it was called SOPC, and of course, an acronym, stands for Special Operations Preparatory Course. And it was this, I think it was a five week or six week block of training specifically for X-rays to help get us ready for selection, right? An enormous asset to take advantage of over guys that are already in the Army that don't have that. Those guys still have to work and do their job and then get ready for selection. We had the chance for this program, which was great, and it was mostly just a bunch of PTs, LAN nav, not tying, right, some SF history type stuff, but it was very physical. You'd go down to Fort, if you'd leave Fort Bragg, go down to Camp McCall, be there Monday to Friday, come back for the weekend, and then repeat for five, six weeks.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Well, at the end of the first five days that I was in SOPC, our lead instructor came down and said, okay, we have a selection class that's beginning next week, and they don't have as many bodies as they can hold. So, uh, who wants to go to selection early? And, um, I was like, immediately like, yep, like, I'm ready to go. Like, I feel confident that I'm ready to go right now. Uh, so myself and then another like six or seven dudes left SOPC after just the first week. And then we were in selection that following Monday. So it was kind of a Oh, wow. fast turnaround. Yeah. But I had been mentally preparing for this for quite a while, right? Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  So I was, I was ready to go. I was primed and ready to go. At this point, I was 25 years old. After making it through all the stuff prior to that. So I was ready to go. I was excited. I, I bombed into selection with the highest level of confidence. Probably more borderline, if not completely cocky, that I would annihilate it. Um, went through selection, which at the time that I went was 14 days. Got that done, and then straight into the special forces qualification course, mostly referred to as the Q course. And at the time, for us, us meaning the weapons guys, the commo guys, and the engineers,

• 44:40Speaker 03

  that the Q course could take anywhere from 12 to 15 months was the timeframe. If you just went straight through, that's how long it would take. For the medics, it was even longer because they had an additional like nine months of medical training in their MOS phase on top of all the other stuff. So I was in the Q course for, ended up being a little over a year. Um, and then I was assigned to third special forces group as an eighteen Bravo, which are the weapons sergeants. And I signed into group the beginning of twenty ten.

• 45:18Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to selection. We just breeze through all that. So selection, can you give a brief description of what

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 45:23Shawn Ryan?

  selection actually is for, for people that aren't that familiar with the top, with the pipeline?

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, special forces, um, assessment and selection, you know, it's, it's what it sounds like. It's really the, the chance for the cadre to determine if the individual has the foundational character traits and physical capabilities to be trained into a Green Beret.

• 45:51Shawn Ryan?

  How long is that process?

• 45:53Speaker 03

  When I went, it was fourteen days.

• 45:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's fourteen days?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  I think now it's closer to twenty.

• 45:58Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Twenty twenty-one. It's fluctuated as they've kind of played around with it a little bit. Um, immediately before I went, it was twenty days. And I want to say I was the second or third class after they had cut it down by a week, down to fourteen. And you would think that that meant that they just removed six, seven days worth of stuff. But what they really did was just sandwich it into a fourteen day period as opposed to a twenty-one day period.

• 46:27Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  So the downtime that you would have in between evolutions and iterations basically disappeared. Um, and they ran it that way for a while. And I think that over time, the data showed that it was just slightly too aggressive of an op tempo for that amount of time. Uh, and they were breaking dudes off unnecessarily. That would be viable candidates, great candidates. Um, because it may have just been a little too much.

• 46:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  It was a lot. Um, and what that looks like is it, there's a lot of physical assessments. Um, some even basic, just your basic army physical fitness test, a variety of other physical tests. Um, it's heavy on rucking, right? You have a rucksack on your back most of the time, which is kind of connected to the SF lineage of being entirely self-sufficient and requiring minimal, if any, support to conduct operations. You have what you can carry in on your body. So they really, they really amplify that. Based on historic operations and the way we oftentimes do conduct operations. And then, um, and it's really leadership heavy as well.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Is what they're evaluating on is leadership and not solely. One's ability to effectively lead. Once you are put in that position. Cause that those positions will rotate day to day, you know, you're now you're you're in charge, you're in charge, you're in charge for this thing. Um, not only your ability to lead, but also your ability to support a leader.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Two very different things. And so they're looking at your, your abilities to do that. And then lastly, I'll just say on the, on the more technical side. Uh, land navigation is a, is a big portion of that. Can you navigate dismounted cross country on foot at night? With nothing more than a map, a compass and a protractor.

• 48:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Man, that's, um, that's pretty smart that they're looking at. How can you support a leader? I've, I've not heard anybody else doing that and, uh, or maybe they're doing that and I just never picked it up, but. I think that will be definitely beneficial for, for all branches. But what, when you say, what, what, would they just create? A scenario for you as a leader? And what would that scenario look like to see? I mean, if they're assessing how you're going to lead. How do they do that?

• 48:55Speaker 03

  I'll just say that. They do take a chunk of time. Where they group. The students, the candidates together to work as a unit. And solve. Problems. Under extreme physical and mental, mental duress.

• 49:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Um, problems that are, I'll go ahead and say. Unsolvable.

• 49:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Um, and. It doesn't take much time to recognize that as a candidate. Like what you just tasked us to do is as close to impossible as it gets. I know that. Therefore, okay, I see what like this really is about here. It's not about can I get from point A to point B successfully within the allotted time? It's about how do we interact as a unit? During that process, knowing that what we're trying to do is not going to happen.

• 49:50Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:51Shawn Ryan?

  How many guys were in selection roughly?

• 49:54Speaker 03

  My class had around three hundred.

• 49:58Shawn Ryan?

  Three hundred?

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Around three hundred. Um, that started on day one. And I want to say around ninety made it to the end. And then out of that ninety, they actually selected maybe forty, forty-five.

• 50:15Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  So it's a pretty high attrition rate.

• 50:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I was not expecting that number.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:22Shawn Ryan?

  Three hundred guys, wow.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:24Shawn Ryan?

  What, what did you find to be the, the toughest portion?

• 50:29Speaker 03

  The toughest portion? Well, for one, on the physical side.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  I did not properly plan for nor deal with my feet. Foot hygiene is a very real thing. And it's not just keeping them clean, like bathing your body, but keeping them in working condition. I, my stubbornness and immaturity as blisters would begin. I just kind of put on this like, let's just suck it up and keep going forward kind of thing. Uh, you know, strong ranger versus smart ranger. And I, I let it get to the point where it almost forced the cadre to remove me from training.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Uh, because my blisters on the, on my, on my little pinky toes were so badly infected and raw. That the medic took a look at them and was like, I may have to remove you. So just improper planning, uh, failure to recognize the need to like, take care of this machine that is my body. Keep it in working condition, same way I take care of my rifle. I need to be taking care of my body. Uh, so the, the pain and discomfort at that point, this is towards the end wa- was quite high. I brought that on myself. And then from a leadership perspective, we talked about.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  That was challenging for me as well.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  You know, being an aggressive, like dominant type personality. When you see what you firmly believe right looks like and someone else sees it differently. I had struggled with accepting that. Right? So in terms of being evaluated as your ability as a leader and your ability to lead. But then conversely, your abilities to effectively support and enable and influence a leader. I struggled on on that side of the house where I was like, no, that's wrong. I'm right and you're wrong and I know that. So like, let's get to the finish line.

• 52:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Like, I was like, we can do this.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  If we do what I think is right and, you know, that's just, that's just not the case. So that was, that was, that was a struggle for me. But at Lodge, man, it, uh. I thought it would be worse than it was.

• 52:53Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  I thought it would be worse than it was. I think I just put it on such a high pedestal. That it was in this kind of unrealistic stratosphere of pain and suffering and difficulty.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  It just didn't lead up to how challenging I thought it was gonna be.

• 53:10Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. How many, how many guys did you go through that with? Like, um, did you have any friends that were in there with you? And did they make it?

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. Actually, some guys that I was even in basic training with were in my selection class. It was a real small group because like I said, SOPC, they only plucked like five or six or seven of us from that class early. I knew all of those guys because we had been together the entire time from basic to airborne to Fort Bragg to SOPC. And now we left early to go to selection. So I did know a handful of dudes. And I want to say all of them were selected at the end.

• 53:52Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's impressive.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah.

• 53:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's real impressive.

• 53:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Nick, let's take a quick break and then when we get back, let's go into the Q course and what that was like.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 54:03Shawn Ryan?

  How you got through that.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 54:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

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• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

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• 55:42Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, we're back from the break. You just graduated, or not graduated, got selected. Is that correct? Yeah. Got selected, and now you're going to the Q course.

• 55:55Shawn Ryan?

  So let's pick up right there. Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Q course at the time when I went through, you would go down to Camp McCall from Bragg proper for, you know, a chunk of time, for whatever phase you were in. And that could be, you know, a couple of weeks, two weeks, three weeks, six weeks, nine, whatever. And then you would come back to Bragg and just kind of be in a holding pattern until the next phase initiated.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  And, uh, and that's what that looked like. So I mean, I ended up taking maybe a year, a little over a year. And at the time that I went through,

• 56:36Speaker 03

  scratching through my memory, you kind of begin with kind of a leadership training phase that I believe, actually I'm certain, I forget what it was called. But, um, it's what qualified you to become a an NCO was the first thing that you did. So to be an SF, it's all, it's, it's, it's an 18 series in SF to be an SF guy, a team guy, they're all, it's all NCOs. So regardless of your rank, when you start the Q course, you will graduate the Q course as a sergeant. So the first phase of that was that kind of collective leadership training or whatever they called it.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Kind of NCO professional development level two, whatever it is, to credential you to become an NCO on the backend of the Q course. That was the first phase for us. Um, this is again, back when I went through. And then, um, I believe the next phase was small unit tactics, which kind of mirrors like a Ranger School style where you conduct squad and platoon ops as a, as a unit. You're in the field for seven, eight weeks. And then after that, I believe is when we went to CIA school. Survive, evade, resist, escape.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  That course, we went to that. And then I believe after that, we went to language training. What's your language? My language now is Persian Farsi. My language in the Q course was Russian. Do you speak both? I would say I have a working knowledge of Farsi. My Russian has since gone almost completely away. Well, you might need that soon. Possibly. I may have to get back into the books. I don't know why I'm laughing, but. Yeah. That could come in handy. Maybe it's like riding a bike. I don't know. See if I can't pick it back up. So the language, uh, which for the more difficult languages like your Arabic or your Mandarin

• 58:47Speaker 03

  or your Russian, it was six months in language school. For the easier languages, Spanish, French, you know, like Latin based languages. I believe they went to for like four months. Oh, good. Where you go through language phase, every 18 series guy or girl, um, has to be language qualified. That's like one of the most

• 59:11Speaker 03

  critical skill sets of an 18 series is to be able to speak a native language based on your area of operation. So, uh, six months of Russian. And then after that was Robin Sage, which is kind of the final culmination exercise, uh, within the Q course, still exists now. And it's, um, you, they create an actual SFODA with 12 individuals. Um, actually, I'm sorry, I forgot my MOS phase was in there as well, uh, which I was an 18 Bravo, which are the weapon sergeants. So that was like a 13, 14 week POI that you go through to actually learn your job. So once you get to Robin Sage at the end,

• 59:55Speaker 03

  they put together an actual ODA with the actual MOSs, the way an actual team is built. And that's the first time that you really get to experience these other skill sets. Because up to that point, you're just kind of in these stovepipes as a general candidate or you're learning a specific job. You get to Sage and now you have an actual team leader, an actual captain. You have the commo guys, you have the medics, you have the engineers that are all on that team. Um, which was really kind of cool. I'll, I'll never forget that. We were actually able to see what these guys can do, like what they learned. And they're actually able to employ it. Yeah. Those commo skills. Those demo skills, those medical skills, even for just something as small as we're doing,

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  you know, our initial infill, which is typically hell, uh, where you're, you know, you're rucking over a hundred pounds to get to your operational area. And, uh, you know, you're cramping or you got twisted ankle or something and like a medic shows up. And prior to that point, we had never experienced that, you know?

• 1:00:59Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Like someone's like medic, you know, and like an actual dude shows like a medic shows up. So at one point I was cramping and overcomes our medic and he actually like knows medicine. He's like, okay, I'm like, wow, you guys are really a thing. Okay, cool. So it starts to feel real.

• 1:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  You do exist.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you guys do exist. This is a real thing and you see, you kind of experience and for the first time, what an O D A brings to the table because you got all these, you know, advanced skills within each individual. Um, and then that's the end of the Q course, man. Graduate, don your beret and then to the team you go.

• 1:01:36Shawn Ryan?

  So I got a couple of questions about Q course. So if, if you can't answer them, great. If not, I totally understand. But so you said you graduated or you got selected with about forty out of three hundred guys.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Something like that.

• 1:01:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is, are they, after every selection, is that who is in your Q course? Or do they, is it more, is it more selections? Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  I do, yeah. And at the time that I went through, when you had those, those areas of white space, those gaps in between phases, it was so that other candidates that were coming into the Q course would, would arrive and then you could get enough bodies to put into that next phase. So for example, like when we needed to go into S U T, small unit of tactics, we would go in, I think it was like eighty or so students.

• 1:02:26Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  That would go in at a single time. So you'd have more guys that had just come out of selection or the phase prior to that. But then you'd also be losing guys along the way, guys that didn't make it through the previous phase. So guys were coming and then guys were going throughout the duration of my Q course experience. Some will obviously stay with you, those that just went straight through without any issues. But you know, injuries happen where guys have to, have to recycle a certain phase or guys just flat out get dropped from the course for whatever reason. So it is, it is a little bit of a revolving door where people are coming and going.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  But I, I had, you know, a good group of dudes that I was with from the very beginning that I ended up graduating with.

• 1:03:14Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:03:21Shawn Ryan?

  With the, with the, with your job specific training, you're an A-Team Bravo Weapons guy. Or, and I think you said, how long is that?

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  I want to say when I went through, it was maybe thirteen, fourteen weeks.

• 1:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  So are all the different jobs, all the different areas of expertise, are they all that same length? So you guys jump back in for Robin Sage together?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  All except for the medics, which was about twice as long. The medical, the, for the medic, their MOS phase, I want to say it was like twelve months or nine months long. So the rest of the groups would be continuing to advance while the medics that you started MOS phase together were still in MOS phase as you're pushing past to the next phases.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  But then also language was thrown in there too. So some of them are six month courses, some of them were four month courses. So by the time you get to the back end of that, now you've got different bodies.

• 1:04:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Because each phase could be a different length depending on the MOS and the language that you were learning.

• 1:04:27Shawn Ryan?

  Shit, this program is a lot longer than I originally thought.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Well, now it's much different. I want to say maybe three years ago, they optimized the Q course. And it's much more streamlined now where that, those gaps that existed in between phases have been drastically reduced. Where they're intentionally giving guys enough time to rest and recover, but then they're not waiting for the next group to be able to catch up. So guys are going through the course now almost as a single entity the entire time unless someone gets dropped for some reason.

• 1:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  So now it's much more streamlined and the likelihood of you starting and ending with the same faces is much more likely than it was when I went through.

• 1:05:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Did you guys lose a lot of guys then?

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  And the Q course? We did, and that's kind of one of the things that that has shifted with the Q course is, you know, when I went through, there were a whole variety of different gates that you needed to successfully complete. In a lot of ways, it was a, you know, 12, 18 month assessment and selection. Cause there were a lot of different times when you didn't meet the standard and you would have been removed.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Now, the Q course is looked at more so as a training course where you're there to learn. You're, we've done the assessment and selection on you already. That's what selection's for. We've determined that you have the character traits and physical capacity to be molded into an entry level Green Beret, and we will do that through the qualification course where we will teach you the foundational aspects of being an SF guy. So it's, it's the attrition rate now in the Q course is much lower than, or higher than it was when I went through.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  We, we lost more dudes in the Q course when I went through than is lost now.

• 1:06:33Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Shawn Ryan?

  How things are evolving. With your weapons training, what, can we go into that a little bit?

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Shawn Ryan?

  What, so what is a daily, what, what are you doing there? Is it sniper school? Is it, or are you going through all these different weapon systems and, and, and you're just becoming an expert on all of them?

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, expert's certainly a strong word, but you do gain kind of an entry level knowledge of the majority of the weapon systems that we're going to use that are organic to an ODA and or the ones that we would be working with in country alongside of a partner force. So for a variety of different small arms, both domestic and foreign sniper systems, crew serve weapon systems, sniper systems, and then indirect systems such as like mortars. So you get kind of a baseline understanding of how they function, how to troubleshoot them, and how to incorporate them into training. So the bravos, well, the Bravo section, the bravos themselves

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  are kind of your weapons experts on how they, how they work and how to keep them working. They're also the

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Their primary support function on the team is that of training and operations. So actually planning and executing training as well. So they do give you an introduction into what that looks like. How to actually set up a training event and then also incorporate all these different weapon systems that we're teaching you how to, how to use.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  If you wanted to go to sniper school, so you're not going, becoming a sniper during that

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  time. So say if a communications guy wanted to go to sniper school, once he, once he was accepted into the O D A. Would he be able to, or did they only take bravos?

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  He absolutely could.

• 1:08:25Shawn Ryan?

  He could?

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, oftentimes we get kind of pigeonholed based on our, our M O S. On what advanced skills is best suited for that individual. There's an argument to be made that if you're a weapons guy, you already have a found, a solid foundation, understanding of how weapon systems work. Sending that, that dude to sniper school makes a lot of sense because it's obviously it's a weapon. Let's not, let's advance this guy's skillset.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  But also there's an argument to be made to send someone else to bring them more up to speed on how weapon systems at lodge work. Um, and also if this dude's operating the mortar, he can't be operating a sniper rifle. So let's get someone else that knows how to operate that sniper rifle. So we'll send our, you know, our commo guy to sniper school. You'll see the same type of argument, uh, when it comes to going to become a J TAC, like get J TAC certified. Right? A lot of times it makes sense to send your, your commo guy to go become a J TAC because he's familiar with operating radio systems.

• 1:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  And that's what J TAC's use. You could also have the same, the same argument the other way and saying, if this guy's managing comms at lodge for the commander or for the element. Maybe it's best to get someone else who knows how to operate a radio, who's then able to do JTAC-ery while our Echo, while our commo guy is managing kind of general comm systems. So essentially, you are not limited by what advanced skills that you can obtain based on your current MOS.

• 1:10:00Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. What other, what other jobs are there? What other specialties are there? We've got weapons guy, communications guy.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  On the ODA?

• 1:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Yes, you've got your team leader, your detachment commander, which is a captain, so your officer. You've got an assistant detachment commander, which is filled by a warrant officer, which is what my position is. Um, you have your team sergeant, which is your senior enlisted leader, your highest ranking enlisted guy, who really runs the team, like he runs the boys. All the, all the NCOs in the team, they answer to that man. Um, you have your intelligence sergeant, which is not one that you can obtain in the qualification course. That's something that you would do after the fact. You then have your, uh, your weapons guys, your commo guys, your engineers,

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  which focus on both building things and then blowing things up. Um, so demo.

• 1:10:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so they would be a breacher?

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  They would be the subject matter expert in breaching and, uh, their job is to create breachers on the team.

• 1:11:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Um, and then you have your commo guys. So that's the just kind of general breakdown of your, of your NCOs, your weapons, uh, your medics. So your weapons, your commo, your engineer and your medics, uh, there's two per team, a senior and a junior. And then you've got one, um, intel dude, you've got one, um, assistant detachment commander, one team sergeant, and one captain to make up the 12.

• 1:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

  So you finish up the Q course, what's graduation like?

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  You know, it's a historic moment, right, for, for every SF guy. It's something that you've been dreaming about, putting this little green hat on your head uh for multiple years, probably. So, uh, yeah, you know, it's exciting, it's like thrilling. And then very quickly after that, you realize that you're back at the bottom of a, of another massive mountain and a lot of uncertainty. It's like, things just got real, man. Like, you're no longer a student, you're no longer a candidate, you're the guy. And you knock on that team room door for the first time, nervous, not knowing what to expect. And, uh, and then real work begins.

• 1:12:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What, what is, being so close with your dad, with your old man, what was his reaction when you told him, hey, I've, I've made it through this pipeline? I'm go, it's, I'm done.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, thrilled, you know? He was booked his, his flight to Fort Bragg for my graduation, probably before anybody else. And, uh, extraordinarily proud. And then also nervous, man, you know, because now things are getting real. You know, and when you're going through that pipeline, or really any pipeline within SOF, there's a chance that you don't, they don't make it through the other end. You know, it could happen to anybody. And, uh, I think he was confident that I would be successful, but there's still that, you know, that degree of uncertainty on whether or not my son's actually gonna go to Afghanistan as a Green Beret, there's a level of uncertainty.

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  You've done that, you've done that little green half for the first time, and now you know it's gonna happen. So as proud as he was in that moment, I'm sure that he would tell you that he was also equally petrified.

• 1:13:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So you go to the, what, what ODA do you go to?

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  I went to, um, an ODA in First Battalion, Third Group.

• 1:13:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Do you guys have any choice in where you're going or it's just?

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Manning.

• 1:13:55Shawn Ryan?

  This is where you're going?

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. And you, you know, you show up to group for the first time, especially as an x-ray. I had never even been on like a real like unit compound before. You're just kind of meandering around, lost. You get a little bit of guidance, like go check in at the, you know, the CQ desk up front and they'll get your squad away. But you get this list of in processing requirements. When I showed up, my entire company was forward in Afghanistan. So there was just a few kind of rear detachment guys that were around um that I I'd linked up with on my first day. And they're like, all right, go, you know, go through all the the different sections and in process.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  And I'm like, okay, so I have no idea what any of these things are. Like, I gotta go to S1, S2, S3. I'm like, what is that? What is that? And uh, so I'm just kind of meandering around, getting getting familiar with the area. Um, and I was met my sergeant major and he told me, you know, the entire company is forward right now, uh, minus one team. And they only have about a month left. So we have a couple of options here. One is I can wait until these guys get back and then they're going to go into a reset phase and I can put you on one of those teams. Or I can put you on this other team that's here now that's set to go over in, it was like four or five months.

• 1:15:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  And I said, okay. And you asked if you had a choice. And I really, I really didn't like initially. But once I got to the company level, he brought this to my attention. And he's like, the team that is here, they're a unique team. Um, they don't do what like the other ODAs do. They're different and it's not uh, a good fit for everybody.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  I said, okay, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. Um, like I came to group, you know, to kick down doors and shoot bad guys in the face. Like, that's what I wanted to do, and that's what most of the teams did. This team was, was a little different. So he's like, go over and talk to the team sergeant and uh, see if it's a good fit. And I said, okay, I had no idea what to expect. So I do that. And this particular O D A, which is why they deployed on off cycle from the rest of the company. Um, was because of their actual, their mission, right? And rather than being a direct action focused O D A, which is what just about all of our O D As in third group were doing, focused.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  Which you talk about kind of the lineage we talked about earlier of the O S S and kinda where S F came from. Those guys weren't the ones that were, you know, raiding machine gun bunkers. Those guys were the ones that were facilitating those that would be coming in to do that. Preparation in the environment is one of the S F missions that um, that this particular team focused on. So I still didn't quite grasp all of that at that time. I just knew that these guys were the next guys out the door. And I wanted to go. So team sergeant and I kicked it off, you know, we were good. He's like, you know, I'd like you on this team if you want to come do this. And I said, yeah, let's do it.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  You know, so my first deployment to Afghanistan in early two thousand eleven was um, was on a unique team that was comprised of entirely senior, senior S F, S F guys. That spent a lot of time on kind of more of your traditional S F O D A. And then migrated over to do these types of activities. Um, later in their careers. Here I come in as a brand new cherry E five X ray with no experience in anything. And I'm surrounded by dudes that are on their, you know, seventh, eighth combat deployment.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  A lot of upsides to that, a lot of experience and knowledge for me to attempt to consume. But the bar was also raised really high as this young dude who really didn't know much.

• 1:18:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  And it was a nine month rotation and I'll pause here for just a second, but I'll just say that.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  I was fortunate to be put in that position because although I was having to outpace my headlights. The entire trip and I was drinking through a fire hose. Because of the type of team it was, I was exposed to such a wide range of what SFODAs are capable of doing. All the way from, you know, getting into an armored gun truck with machine gun barrels sticking out everywhere. You know, in multicams to go do that kind of thing. To being in a soft skin Corolla, you know, driving through downtown Kandahar. And then everything kind of in between. So it was a lot to try to take in and process. But I'm fortunate to have been in that position because it opened up my aperture quite a bit.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  From a very early stage in my career to what ODAs can actually do.

• 1:19:06Shawn Ryan?

  I think this is one, I don't know if you remember, we were co-located together.

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:19:12Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, once is this, is that?

• 1:19:16Shawn Ryan?

  Was that your first deployment?

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Can I mention where I was?

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:19:22Shawn Ryan?

  Spin Bulldog?

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:23Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is a small, I forgot that we had mentioned that before. Yeah.

• 1:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  So that was your first deployment?

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:31Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Hmm. We were split, um, between Spin and then, uh, Downtown Kandahar, our team was.

• 1:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Where'd you like going most?

• 1:19:42Shawn Ryan?

  On that deployment?

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  I think I, I spent most of my time down at Spin, um. I'll, I'll say that we had a, like a really great compound. Our living conditions were unbelievable, uh, which set me up for failure. You know, not to fast forward too far, but once I, I only did that one trip with that team. And then I switched, um, when we got back and I went to a DA team. And then my subsequent rotation was, you know, doing VSO up in the mountains with nothing. But my first trip was real cush. Like we all had our own chew. I had, you know, a full-size bed. I had air conditioning, um, great food. Couple different gyms to choose from. It was like, oh, this is, this is great.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Like this is the way you guys live. This isn't living off the land, right? I'm not having to catch snakes and eat them for dinner. Like I got a chow hall right there. This is beautiful. You know what I mean? That's the way I lived, uh, for nine months. And then the rude awakening happened, you know, the following year, once I went to a different team.

• 1:20:47Shawn Ryan?

  Well, so I'm, I'm really curious if you can go into it because I, I remember shooting the show with you a couple of times. But you guys were like fucking hermits there. I, we never saw you. I don't think you really saw us either, but, but, um, cause of that. I don't know if it's gotten any better, but nobody likes sharing information with other organizations, which I think is ridiculous, but that's my opinion. But what were you guys, what were you guys into down there?

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it starts to get, uh, pretty sensitive pretty quick, man.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, let's, we'll fast forward then, since that's so sensitive. And, um, so you come back, you go to another team.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:21:34Shawn Ryan?

  How long are you home for?

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  I was home for.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Maybe six months, seven months. Um, but I really wasn't home much in terms of my head on my own pillow. I dove directly into advanced schools and, and training. Um, ended up going back overseas once during that time period and then came back. So I want to say it was around seven, eight months that I was, I was not deployed in a combat environment, um, or at least I was not on a combat rotation. It's probably the best way to say that. Uh, but I wasn't home much, man. I was, I was obsessed with just being the best SF guy I could be. And nothing else really mattered to me much than that.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  So if I wasn't in a school, you know, I'm in the weight room or I'm on the track or I'm in the fight house or I'm reading training manuals. Um, because I knew where we were going back to. So I just wanted to go completely all in on that.

• 1:22:41Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense, you know?

• 1:22:44Shawn Ryan?

  So you, you were home for eight months?

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Something like that.

• 1:22:47Shawn Ryan?

  Go right back out the door. That's not long. I mean, where did you go?

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  That was quick. Yeah. So my second, um, my second combat pump now on this new team, DA focused team was in, uh, late 2012. And then we went to Wardak province, which is historically, uh, known for its heavy fighting. So we got the mission we wanted, got the exact that we wanted. Uh, three teams went in along the chalk valley in Wardak to, uh, to conduct our operations. And at the time we were doing, a lot of teams were doing VSO, which stands for Village Stability Operations, a term which has since gone away. Um, and one that makes a lot of sense conceptually.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  And the idea behind VSO is, is you go into these areas to link up with your partner force and conduct operations with these guys. But. You can't build up massive infrastructure. You can't build a FOB. You have to live and operate within the conditions that they live and operate within. Mostly so that when we transition out, we don't leave behind something that is unsustainable for them. So let's keep the footprint very small. Let's mimic what they do and how they do it. And then build them up based on their abilities to build and grow. Rather than coming in and setting up massive

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  towers and walls and gates and like all this force pro stuff that won't exist when you leave. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. It does make a lot of sense. And we loved it. It was like the most authentic SF mission that we could get. It's like perfect. Like this is living off of the land. This is living. This is us assimilating to our environment and our partners. And then organically and and bilaterally building that up together to whatever degree is sustainable for them. Makes a lot of sense. The downside, the risk that comes with that is something that can't be ignored because if it's just you guys at a very small footprint

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  and you don't have this infrastructure to rely on for your own personal security. It exposes you to be vulnerable in a lot of ways. Yeah. But we got, that's exactly what we wanted, man. You know, we got exactly what we wanted.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  And that turned out to be, you know, just a wildly different type of deployment than my previous one. Where rather than living in a, in a, in a chew with the heat and air conditioning in a, in a full bed with a television, you know, um, my, my living quarters is this old half blown out semi structured hunk of clay that I'm able to try to get like.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Tucked my head underneath it and like that's where I lived.

• 1:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Until we built up something that was, um, you know, more suited for us, both for us and for them.

• 1:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  Was, were all three teams co-located at the exact same spot?

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  No, no, no, we were pre-positioned, um, kind of in a triangle, uh, two on one side of the valley and one on the far side. And, uh, we really just had each other to support each other for operations. You know, there was a, there was a large surface to air threat in the area at the time. So they were real hesitant in terms of resupply. The frequency into the scale of what they could safely fly in for us. So you're talking like LCLA like type resupply drops, speedballs coming by quick. Like that's how we were resupplied. Uh, the occasional convoy would come out, but they would almost always just get obliterated with IEDs.

• 1:26:34Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  That it just became a point. It was like, we can't afford to do this. But you know what? This is why we have ODAs. Like you guys can thrive in these environments.

• 1:26:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  So in a kind of a sick way, even just after a couple of months, we almost wanted like less support. Like leave us alone. Like we will take care of this ourselves.

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  And just the three ODAs really mutually supported each other most of the time. So we would conduct an op, they'd be our QRF. They'd do one, we'd be their QRF. So we just kind of coordinated with each other, obviously through HIA. Um, how we would kind of stagger different ops so that we, one of us was around to come in if we needed to for the other one.

• 1:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. How, how many indige guys were roughly were you guys with running?

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that trip, we were partnered up with a, an A, an ANASF team. So Afghan National Army Special Forces Detachment, which we built to mimic exactly what an SFODA looks like. Same MOSs, same breakdown, carbon copy. So 12 of those guys. And we lived together in the same blown out area that we had as our camp. We lived together.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  When it came time to run different ops, depending on a variety of variables, more than likely the threat or the size of the objective, we would bring in conventional Afghan elements from the Afghan Security Forces elements. So standard Afghan National Army guys, Afghan National Police guys. At that point, there was an Afghan local police force that was also in the area. So at any given moment, when we would be conducting ops and/or training, we would be getting dudes that were coming in from these other elements for us to work with.

• 1:28:28Shawn Ryan?

  Is that every operation you would have these outsiders coming in?

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:32Shawn Ryan?

  Did that bother you? I mean, because that's, that's, that's, that's, that can get tricky. A lot of guys get, you know, they tip off Taliban, tip off Al Qaeda.

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:28:44Shawn Ryan?

  Did that happen?

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. Yeah, it did. Um, it of course made us nervous anytime we would be bringing in these outside units. It's one thing when you're living amongst someone, you know, the threat is mitigated even just because you're geographically co-located with them 24 hours a day. These other guys, you have no idea.

• 1:29:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Where they're going, who they're talking to, you know. To say that the Afghan Security Forces lacked corruption would be a drastic understatement.

• 1:29:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  You know, so it certainly increased the risk to us by bringing some of these entities in. So based on the objective, the need for additional bodies was certainly at the beginning of that. Do we need more humans to conduct this op? But you also can't ignore the need to enable and increase report capability amongst the partner force at lodge, which is, you know, what ODAs really do. Like, we're trainers and advisors. We're warriors and we can go in the door when we need to. But when you really put an ODA someplace is because we're force multipliers, right? So.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  There was, I want to say, pressure for us to incorporate some of these more conventional elements, but there were times when it was mandated that we would roll with other elements.

• 1:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Even just, I remember, I've not had to do that. I've been co-located, but it's always been, you guys were always there first, and it built a team, and maybe we took over or whatever. But I remember hearing a lot of different, a lot of times, that Green Berets co-located with the partner force. You know, guys were getting killed, you know, interpreters were killing you guys, guys on the team were killing you guys. Were you worried about that? Did that happen yet?

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  It had happened. And during, you know, during that timeframe, this is now 2012, the insider attack threat was considered to be the greatest threat that we dealt with.

• 1:31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  As ODAs, yeah. I saw firsthand what that, what that looks like.

• 1:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  You know, and at the time, I felt like, especially as a Bravo, who's, one of our primary responsibilities is base defense. I felt like we had sound TTPs, SOPs, systems in place to mitigate these threats. I was wrong, and there were gaps, and we paid some heavy costs because of that. We've learned from them since, but the reality is, is there's no way to eliminate that threat from happening, regardless of how many dudes you're working alongside of, or where they're coming from. The reality is, SFODAs go in and we work

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  with Indigenous personnel. That's like, that's our job, man. So there are certainly techniques and practices to reduce those threats, but it's, you are going to take on that risk if you want to do, you know, this kind of work.

• 1:32:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Shawn Ryan?

  How much work were you guys getting there?

• 1:32:30Shawn Ryan?

  How much were you going out? How much, how many hits were you doing?

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  Just about every day.

• 1:32:34Shawn Ryan?

  Every day?

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, every, every day is strong. If we, we would reset as we needed based on how difficult or how taxing the previous op may have been. But multiple times a week for the duration of the deployment. And most of which

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  we encounter contact on most of them. Sometimes multiple times a day.

• 1:32:59Shawn Ryan?

  Multiple times a day?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's a lot of, that's a lot of work. What?

• 1:33:06Shawn Ryan?

  Like I said, I know it's sensitive, but what, what kind of? What were you guys targeting? What were you looking for?

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  So I, I, I, one of our primary objectives, again, keep in mind, this is 2011.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  One of our primary objectives was to open up white space to allow some freedom of movement for our conventional forces to begin to work towards extraction.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  So opening up roadways and creating a white space bubble of a reduced threat. So some of these entities could get to places like Bagram or Kandahar, or be able to get to a place to get out of country. All right, 2011, we had decided we were at least looking at drastically scaling down

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  in the future, in the coming months. So we needed to create a bubble. And within our, within our area. When we first got there, there was no bubble. I mean, we got there in the middle of the night, like 2 a.m., got dropped off on a Chinook. Set up patrol base style, living situation, complete unknown environment. No team, we didn't rip with the team. We were the first team to go to this location.

• 1:34:30Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, first team at this location. So, there's nothing there. Uh, the team, there was a team on the ground that was physically there, but they had just got there two days prior, or a day prior, just to meet the logistics to start pulling them out. So it was like a high five kinda thing. Um, a couple of their dudes stayed back, a couple of their leaders, senior guys stayed back to give us like a lay down of the land that they knew of, for having only been there for like forty eight hours. But it was uninhabited prior to us really coming in. So, we're there, I think, maybe we were there two, three days before we even left our little, our little area.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  And I will never, I'll never forget, I think we had like a four, like a four or five truck convoy, uh, and a couple raises, a couple side by sides. And I was in the trail vehicle, and my vehicle didn't even get onto the road and we were in contact.

• 1:35:32Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  So, and I'm like, is this seriously happening right now? So, we, they literally dropped us in the middle of a, of a hornet's nest with no white space, no freedom of movement. And our, one of our primary missions was to expand that, us and the other two ODAs along that valley, to allow some maneuverability for some of these other units, pr- primarily to give them an option to evac out of country.

• 1:35:59Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. So you had, wow. So right off the bat, it's on.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  Right off the bat. Like, welcome to the show.

• 1:36:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  And it's kinda that holy shit moment, uh, but then also the, this is exactly where we wanna be right now, so.

• 1:36:17Shawn Ryan?

  How often are you guys taking contact?

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  Basically, every time we went out, um, most times we went out, at least for the first half the trip. First three months, um, we were taking contact, just but every time we left our camp. Um, but then the winter came in, you know, January timeframe comes in. And when you're at that altitude, the snow is epic. So, things, everyone kind of takes a time out, right? You've heard the term the fighting season, right? So like at that point of time, really no one can move when there's nine feet of snow on the ground and you're in the mountains. So we did kind of go into this six, eight week kind of like hibernation phase.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  From, you know, call it January, uh, through February-ish timeframe. But up until that point, it was, uh, it was busy anytime we, just about anytime we left, we were, uh, we were being engaged.

• 1:37:17Shawn Ryan?

  How did that first contact feel? It feel good?

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  On that rotation?

• 1:37:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. That's the first time you've been in contact, correct?

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  No, um, I was in some prior.

• 1:37:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  Um, when I was in the year before. Um, so it wasn't my first time, but it was certainly was my first time with that level of frequency. You know, there was a couple of things that we experienced the year before, but we weren't that trip. We weren't, uh, designed to be in those types of fights. It just happened.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  That trip, um, it became normal, right? But so, I think just like a, a, a, an awakening that this is real. And you're about to get everything that you ever wanted or thought you wanted.

• 1:38:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  You know, out of being on a team, doing this kind of thing.

• 1:38:14Shawn Ryan?

  What was the, what was kind of the, the, um, would you guys pursue the threat? Or would you break contact? What was, what was the deal that?

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, you know, the, the, the term it depends is, is used a lot, man. It's probably the most accurate.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Most of the time, we would go into fire maneuver and we would advance.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  You know, the term the bearded ones was one that was used in Afghanistan for a really long time. And that term was referencing soft guys, like guys that were able to grow beards. And your conventional guys, for a while, if not the entire time they were there, were doing the army thing, right? And they would, if they would engage a standard army or military convoy, most of the time, they would kind of circle the wagons, deal with the threat, maybe calling some support, and then re-button up and then move. Well, they started realizing that if you engage the bearded ones, those guys are going to come after you. So just know what you're getting yourself into.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  So most of the time, we would, we would advance on whatever the threat was. Obviously, if you're dealing with some kind of a T S T on an objective that you need to get to, then the commander leadership would make that call, like, we're breaking contact so we can continue to chally Mike over to what we really need to do today. So you'd see, you know, you'd see both.

• 1:39:42Shawn Ryan?

  When you guys were taking contact or when you'd walk into an ambush like that, what, how many, how many guys was it on average? Was it, was it the, you know, you get everything over there. You get the local farmer who's just trying to get his jihad on with an A K. Then you, all the way up to a full-blown coordinated ambush. What was typical?

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  I'd say, um,

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  typical would probably be five, six guys.

• 1:40:10Shawn Ryan?

  Five, six guys?

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. If I had to put a number on it, we, of course, would get the random pop shot from the dude, you know, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, and then he'd take off and whatever. Some larger, more coordinated ones, twelve, fifteen, um, individuals. I'd say, I'd say if I put a norm on it, I'd say probably like five or six is what we'd see on any, within any particular engagement.

• 1:40:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:36Shawn Ryan?

  Man, like, how the hell did you guys even, I mean, you get dropped off in the middle of Afghanistan. How do you find?

• 1:40:47Shawn Ryan?

  Indig motivated enough that believes in the cause to I mean, how do you build a team out of nothing? Where do you find these guys?

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So on that trip, we didn't need to find, recruit and build our partner force.

• 1:41:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  They existed prior to us. The team that was operating in another location for their entire rotation were partnered up with the AN ASF team that they handed over to us. So those guys were mounted. They drove to our location. They were there a couple of days. We came in. They handed over all their equipment to us and their SF team, their ANASF team to us. And that's who we ran with.

• 1:41:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  And then the conventional units, you know, they obviously already existed at that point. They were just in different locations throughout Wardak province and then they would move to us for whatever ops that they were coming with us on.

• 1:41:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  So we didn't have to go through the like find, recruit, like validate, vet, train like that and early phase zero, phase one, you know, UW campaign style stuff. We didn't have to do those types of activities because we had a partner force already.

• 1:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  How long would the typical engagement last?

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  Typical engagement, maybe an hour.

• 1:42:09Shawn Ryan?

  An hour?

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  Maybe an hour. Yeah. You know, typical, some again, much shorter, you know, pop, pop, pop. We return fire. Everything goes quiet. We're good. Let's just move on. Some hours where, you know, dudes are just digging in and they're not, they're not stopping.

• 1:42:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  More coordinated ambushes, coordinated attacks, usually reinforced with an IED or two or 10. Those could go for multiple hours. By the time we get the situation under control, you know, get medevac in if need be, get QRF on station, you know, sometimes that could be a long night or a long day.

• 1:42:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Shawn Ryan?

  Anything about this deployment that stands out in particular?

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  Uh, well, the way it ended, which was the result of not only me ultimately ended up losing my leg, but much more significantly, our team leader was killed. Our infantry squad uplift squad leader was killed. We had a squad of infantry guys that would there to support us, mostly for base defense stuff. But we got to a point where we were bringing them out on some ops. Our, our dog was killed. This is at the tail end of the deployment. I was wounded twice in action before that, in two different times. The first time, we'd only been in country a few weeks. You know, I took some shrapnel to the back of my shoulder.

• 1:43:36Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about that incident.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  What happened?

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, um,

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  we're, we're driving to an objective. We get ambushed. Three or four of us dismount. We grab a handful of our partner force guys. We're in the maneuver element into a village.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Probably an aggressive maneuver at that point. We were a real small element. And I believe that was the first time we'd ever actually stepped foot in that particular village. So a lot of unknowns.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  And as we ended up having to clear our way all the way to this two-story compound where we were taken heavy machine gun fire from.

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  IDF's kind of coming in. There's, they're, they're cracking off mortars.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  Grenades are going off around from us, from enemy to us. So this, this particular village ended up being one that we went back to multiple times over the course of that trip. I think this was the first time we'd actually entered into it. Realized quickly that we were in essentially a completely and totally Taliban owned and run village.

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Something exploded. We were getting ready to breach the entryway into a courtyard of this structure that we were trying to get to. And, um,

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  Something had blown up behind me. Things are blowing up kind of all around. And I just feel the impact into the back of my shoulder. It was like someone hit me with a baseball bat. And I looked back and sure enough, there's like a lemon sized hole in the back of my shoulder. And

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  it didn't really hurt. Who asked like, what's like getting shot, you know, so it didn't really hurt. You know, adrenaline is pumping up, but it's like a shock to the system. When you see a hole in your body like that big, it's like, oh my God, like, am I okay?

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  And then just kind of go into medical training. Training took over at that point. One of my teammates got to me. He bust out like some gauze. He just like plugs it, wraps it up real quick. And I wanted to keep going. My team sergeant was was with me on that element. And I'm like, I'm good. Let's roll. He's like, now let's, let's, uh, let's break contact. Let's get back to the trucks. And let's like, take a look at you. I was the first guy in that deployment to be wounded. So it was, it was a shock to everybody. Our leadership was like, holy shit, someone's actually hurt for real. I certainly wasn't the last, but I was the first.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  So team sergeant's like, no, I don't like this. Uh, let's, let's get out of here and let's like reconsolidate and see what's going on. And I remember throwing somewhat of a childish temper tantrum right there. And then I'm like, no, man, we just, we just fought all the way to get to that door. They're still engaging the trucks from the structure. We're right outside the structure. Shit. I'm like, let's go. And he's like, no, man, I don't like it. Probably the right call to make, not because of my wound per se, but I think that we were over aggressive with where we were to begin with. And at that small of an element. Exactly. You were down. Yeah. Been very detrimental.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so in a lot of ways, I think this may have been a blessing that my team sergeant was like, that's, that's the, that's the indicator. That I think we need to

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  wrap up and, uh, and kind of reconfigure this thing. So, you know, get back to the trucks, mount up, my medics, one of my medics is back there. He takes a look at it. He's like, yeah, it's not that bad. You'll be okay. Ended up going back to the house. We aborted that mission because we were on our way to an objective. So we canked it, went back to the house. Medic took a look at it. He's like, yeah, I want to get you medevac and get you in front of an actual doc to take a look at this. And then I really threw a temper tantrum. My good child, toys are rusted, didn't get his toy. I mean, like kicking and screaming.

• 1:47:58Shawn Ryan?

  You have a lemon sized hole in the back of your shoulder?

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Shawn Ryan?

  And you're throwing a temper tantrum for somebody to take a look at it?

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did not want to leave. I did not want to leave. I was really, really upset, childishly upset. But I did what I was told, got in a helicopter, first time being medevac. Get to one of our forward surgical teams, an FST, that was located somewhat close by. They took a look at it and they're like, okay, the way we treat this is we pack this thing with this antiseptic gauze two, three times a day so that it closes from the inside out. We can't just sew it shut because it's going to leave this cavity inside your body that will fester and infection will happen.

• 1:48:45Shawn Ryan?

  What did you get hit with?

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  Shrapnel.

• 1:48:48Shawn Ryan?

  Shrapnel?

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, grenade would be my guess.

• 1:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I mean, imagine if it was just, you know, because it hit right here, man. Imagine if it was just a couple inches over. Probably would have been game over. So the, the initial plan was to keep me at this location, which is where our AOB leadership was located. AOB leadership is like the company level leadership. So your primary support element for the ODAs is where the, the AOB was at. And that's where this forward surgical team was located. And the docs are like, oh, we're going to keep you here until this thing closes to make sure that you don't get an infection. And I was like, okay, cool.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  And after like three days, man, I really started to get fidgety and uncomfortable. And you know, I'm in the talk and the guys are, the guys are carrying on, they're going on ops. And for the first time, I'm watching some of this thing, some of these things happen through ISI Sensors, which was a weird perspective, you know, just sitting in there and the jock going, is this what, is this what, this is what we look like while we're out doing our thing? This is what we look like. I'd never seen it before.

• 1:50:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  And I'm just getting more and more frustrated day after day after day. Maybe six, seven days goes by and I've had enough. I'm at my breaking point. And, uh, I grabbed one of my buddies who's on, was on the B team. And I said, bring me down to the, to the Tarmac. The only way that we could get into,

• 1:50:27Speaker 03

  for the team to get resupplied was for rotary wing or fixed wing to come out of Bagram. That's where they all generated from. There were no flights that were coming out of where I was located to back to where my camp was. So I needed to get to Bagram at some point to get back to the team. And after a week or so, uh, I convinced one of my buddies to drive me down to the Tarmac at that base. And I went from one C-130 to another. And I think on my third one, just talking to the crew, I'm like, are any of you guys going to Bagram? And he's like, yeah, we're about to go to Bagram right now. I'm like, can I come with you? And they're like, sure. So I get on a plane and I take off to, and I land at Bagram. No one knows that I'm gone.

• 1:51:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:16Speaker 03

  So I end up at Bagram and I'd only been at Bagram like once before. And that was just when we first got into country and we were there like a day and then we were flown out to our actual site. So I really wasn't familiar with Bagram. I land at the airport. I'm like, uh, I don't know what I'm doing here. I meander my way over to the soft compound. And, uh, I walk into the jock. Now this is where the SOTF is located, like our battalion level command. I walk into the JOC and the SOTF commander is like, "What are you doing here?" And I'm like, "I need a flight back to my team." And he's like, kinda confused, and the SOTF sergeant major, my battalion command sergeant major is right there.

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  And he's like, they're all trying to figure out, "What am I doing there? How did I get there?" And as I'm standing there, the phone rings. And remember, I just left where my company level command was located. The phone rings and Sergeant Major picks up the phone, and it's my company sergeant major. And I can hear him screaming on the other end of the phone. And he's, CSM's looking at me, kinda smiling. "Yep, no, he's right here in front of me." And I'm like, "Oh yeah, okay, this definitely is about me." So I'm like, "Am I about to be like court martial? I have no idea what's gonna happen, but I know I'm in trouble." Like, "This is about to suck." And, uh, CSM hands me the phone. He's like, "Your sergeant major wants to talk to you."

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  I'm like, "That's okay, get off my..." "Hey, Sergeant Major." He just comes completely unglued, you know? "What the fuck are you doing here? What are you thinking?" Yelling and screaming. "So Roger that, yes, Roger that, Sergeant Major, nope, I know you're right." And then at the end of that, he's like, "Listen dude, I totally, I get it, man, like I get it. You wanna get back to your guys, um, don't ever fucking do that again." And I'm like, "Roger that." So I hang up. CSM kinda thinks it's funny, trying to be professional, but also kinda snickering. I'm like, "I need a ride back now." And, uh, the doc, who had made the initial decision to keep me at that base until this healed up completely, he had entered the JOC.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  And, uh, he's like, "No, I told you, like, we're waiting until you're completely healed." And in that moment, right around that time, my team is out on an op and they get into an engagement. And now I'm watching it on a screen in the jock. And my team sergeant takes a round, which ended up being to his abdomen. Shit. So I'm watching this happen. These guys are reacting to contact. They're in a fight. And now my team sergeant's hit. And I come completely and totally unglued in the jock in that moment. Yelling, screaming, like throwing chairs, right? Like an immature temper tantrum. And, uh, demanding that I, someone gets me a helicopter to get me back to the guys like now.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  And the doc, the doc dug in. He's like, no. And then my commander was like, hey, dude, I don't, I don't know how you're gonna tell this guy, no, like, good luck keeping him here.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  So, um, it was maybe a day or two later that, uh, they, they put me back on a bird. I was still dealing with the wound, but I knew it was relatively easy to treat. You know, my medics were more than capable of packing this thing twice a day themselves. Yeah. I didn't think that there was a real risk to me, my health. Uh, and they, you know, they, they saw it that way with a little convincing from me just kind of flipping out. But, uh, then I was back with the guys after that and then right back to, right back to work. Damn. You know? So then it was just, you know, two, three times a day, they're packing this thing. We're going out on ops. You know, I'd bleed through the bandage, whatever. I just like, we just kind of managed it. It wasn't, it really wasn't that big of a deal.

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  That went on for another couple of weeks and then it was closed up and then, you know, we were good. And then right around that time is when I was wounded for the second time. First time was in September. Um, we infilled in September. This happened in September. And then in November was when I was wounded for the second time. Right around the time my shoulder had closed up mostly anyway. Uh, I ended up taking an AK forty seven round to the side of my face. Jesus. Yeah. And, um, sounds a lot worse than it is. So you hear someone say like, I got shot in the face. You imagine that if they're talking to you, like half their face would be, you know, removed. Mine, it just grazed my cheek. And, uh, the, the quick story is we're coming back from a, from an op.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Let's do the long story. Okay. Coming back from an op.

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  I'm in the trail vehicle. Lead vehicle has my detachment commander in it and some other dudes and they hit estimated three, four hundred pound IED.

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  Decimates this mat V, right? And all I see is the truck. I'm working out of a hatch, so I'm up with the visual above the vehicle. Here the boom. Truck is airborne. Just picked this thing up and tossed it like a rag doll. And I'm, I see bodies literally flying through the sky. Uh, one of which was, uh, my buddy, another one of my weapons guys teammate who was in the turret of that truck, just like a, like a lawn dot. Truck, him, smoke, obviously. And this thing lands off to the side of the road off of an, in a depression inside of an apple orchard is what it was. So a lot of really small trees.

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  I had never seen an IED like that. Cause that much destruction before. We had hit some prior to, but nothing nearly to this scale. Uh, so it's obviously a shock. And, um, we've obviously rehearsed, you know, react IED hundreds and hundreds of times. I know what my job is and I don't, uh, execute on that requirement. I don't, I don't do my job. Instead I jump out of the hatch in a moving mat V and jump off the side of the truck and take off in a sprint on foot towards the vehicle. A lead vehicle gets hit, I'm in a trail vehicle. I think we had maybe four trucks out that day.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  So it's like a two hundred to two hundred fifty ish yard distance between me and where this vehicle has now landed. And, uh, I'm in a balls out sprint towards the vehicle.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  I get to it, um, this was the initiation of a complex ambush. So we're getting Dishka, PKM, indirect and RPGs all at the same time. Fuck. So the trucks are maneuvering, doing the right thing, getting into support by five positions. Right. Captain, the captain's in the lead vehicle. So he's down. Our warrant officer immediately takes command of the element. He's gathered information. Team Sergeant's getting ready to start making tactical decisions. But they're, they're getting the trucks set to then decide how we're going to, how we're going to respond. And I'm already on foot, moving towards this truck. I, I get maybe, maybe thirty, forty meters from it.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  And I, I slide off the side of the road into this depression. This apple orchard. And, uh, it's, you know, it's November. So it's, there's not a lot of vegetation on these trees. It's mostly branches. So you can see through the orchard pretty good. I can see the truck and it's on its, it's on its driver's side. Okay. It's on its driver's, the driver's side door is pinned against the ground. Passenger side door is facing the, the sky. And I'm maneuvering towards it, um, recklessly. Right. This wasn't like a tactical, like I wasn't, I don't think I was even at the low ready. I think I was just like sprinting towards this thing. Rifle in hand, you know?

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  And I trip and fall. And what I had tripped on was the, my teammate who was in the, the turret. He had landed about thirty-five or so meters from the truck. So I trip and fall, didn't see him. Eat shit, turn around and it's my boy Nate. Um, I know everyone in the truck is dead before I get there. I'm convinced of it. Like when I saw that destruction, I'm like, I'm going to roll up on five or six, uh, bodies. That's what I'm about to see. Trip on Nate, turn around and he's alive. And I'm like, holy shit. Okay. He's incoherent. He's obviously dealing with some severe blast injury.

• 2:00:11Speaker 03

  His leg is snapped in half, just below his knee.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Um, but he's alive. And it takes a second for me to be like, what the fuck am I looking at? Okay. So I do like a quick sweep on him, right? Training at this point does what it's supposed to do. And uh, do a quick sweep on him. And he's like making sounds, he's gasping, but he's, he's able, he's breathing and he's not bleeding profusely from anywhere. Which are two good signs to get pretty quickly. And uh, within just a couple of seconds, the truck starts to get engaged by, by three dis- dismounted fighters, enemy fighters. They hadn't seen me yet.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  They were just aimlessly or just kind of irrelevantly just shooting AKs at the truck. Right? And I can hear it, um, my back is to the truck, but I hear like ting ting ting ting ting. It was a new sound. So I snap around and I see these, these three uh, these three combatants shooting at the truck.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Uh, so I have to make a really difficult decision to leave my friend and go deal with this threat. That was the first time I was put into a position like that. I did what I was trained to do at this point. And uh, and I leave Nate, who's like asking me for help, which was really hard to do. Uh, eliminate two out of three. Alright, boom. The third takes off running. And I'm maneuvering through these trees. He's kind of running on an angle away from me. And he's firing his AK over his shoulder while running away. And I'm trying to get an angle, you know, through these, through this orchard. And next thing you know, I'm on my ass and I'm looking up at the sky.

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  I just see, I just see blue, the blue sky. I'm like, what the fuck just happened to me? And my initial thought was that I had run into one of the branches of one of these trees. And it just knocked me down. I didn't even, I didn't find out for a while later, like hour, like over an hour later, that I'd actually been clipped by one of the AK rounds that this idiot was just spraying over his shoulder. Right?

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  Um, I get, I get up not knowing what had knocked me down. And I, my initial thought is to continue to engage on this guy. But I, I noticed that the vehicle, that the truck that had, that had hit the IED was now on fire. So the back of the cab is cooking. Visible flames, smoke, flames. And I don't know who's inside the truck.

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  I know Nate got ejected from it, but other than that, I haven't seen any of the other guys. So I let this, I let this threat go. Uh, which even in that moment, I was like, fuck. Yeah, but I, I feel like I need to check this vehicle. And it's like rubble, man, you know, even the turret was completely collapsed in. Fortunately, the passenger side door had been blown off the hinges. And that's again facing the sky. So I climb up the side of the truck. And we're still taking rounds now that now our trucks are engaged. Couple guys got some 60 millimeter mortar out. So like we're returning fire. But they're in a firefight and I'm kind of in between all that.

• 2:03:41Speaker 03

  I climb up the side of this truck and I look down into the cab. And, uh, the only thing I see is our captain. Who's buried. Kind of where the driver's seat would be. And he's talking on the radio. He's got comms up and he's trying to relay the situation. Which says a lot about that dude. Yeah. You're in a completely obliterated truck that is on fire. And what you're doing is telling Haya what's going on. It wasn't communicating to anybody because everything had been destroyed. But, uh, he was just that fixated on doing his job.

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  Wow. Remarkable. Our captain is a big boy. All right. Captain's like six, seven, like 290. Played offensive line at West Point. Oh shit. It's a big cat. With kit, with equipment, he's over 300 pounds. Big boy. In fact, we used to joke. Um, that the captain and I can never be in the same vehicle. Because we were the only ones that were capable of lifting and moving the other one.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  It's ironic. Yeah. That this ended up kind of playing out. So, you know, I look in and I see this. No one, I don't see anyone else in the truck. Truck's on fire. Rounds from inside the vehicle are now cooking off. Pop, pop, pop. Like looking inside of a, like a bag of popcorn while it's popping.

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  You know, I do like this real fast assessment of the situation and like we're still taking rounds. Rounds are taking off the side of the truck. Truck's on fire. Rounds are cooking off on inside the truck. And I got a dude who's 290 pounds, who's wedged inside just a pile of metal. And I'm like, damn, neither one of us are making it, making it out of this. Like this is it. But, but okay.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  So I climb in through the door and I start shimmying this massive dude. Uh, kind of upright and I managed to just wedge him kind of where like the dash would be. And I climb myself back out, um, grab his, grab his kit and I'm able to just like yoke this dude up out of the passenger side door onto the top of the truck now.

• 2:06:05Speaker 03

  And some teammates had showed up at this point, some partner force guys had showed up at this point. And I just chuck them off, you know, the side of the vehicle and, uh, they took control of them.

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  He, uh, one of his legs was essentially completely severed below the knee. Uh, he had severe damage to his other leg. Uh, he had an arterial bleed in his arm. And he's just mangled with, you know, shrapnel and burn, uh, injuries. Should have, probably should have died. Didn't.

• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  He's alive and doing well today, but, uh,

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  get him out, get him, you know, to the guys and then do, at this point, the, you know, almost the entire truck is engulfed in flames. So we all get away from it and now we're just searching the remote area for, uh, for the rest of the guys that were in the truck. We round up all of them. They were in different locations. All of them were alive, which to this day. Blows me away. It's like, I don't know how any of you guys survived. You know, they were ranging in different severity of injuries. They were all obviously wounded to a, to a degree, but consolidated, you know, got a CCP together, uh, created a HLZ. And then, you know, we, at the, at, right around that point, we had, uh, air support that came in. So things calmed down.

• 2:07:26Speaker 03

  And it was while I was treating one of our attachments that was, that was with us. His eye had, um, completely come out of his face. His eye was hanging like where his cheek was. And, uh, so I'm putting his eye back into his head at the CCP. I'm treating him and I'm wrapping him up. And, uh, one of my teammates comes over to me and I just feel like a piece of gauze go against the side of my face. I look up and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? He's like, you're like gushing blood. So I, and I, and I know I'm covered in blood, but I had just been manhandling. You know, my team sergeant who was bleeding from like nine different places. It still hadn't registered to me that I had actually been shot. But it had clipped an artery inside my cheek. So I'm pissing blood, not knowing it.

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  One of my teammates slaps this against, so he's holding this against me and I'm working on, uh, this other dude. And, um,

• 2:08:20Speaker 03

  we get everyone prepped for medevac, get them loaded up. They all go out. Uh, QRF showed up on ground, on the ground. They launched a couple of vehicles from one of our sister teams that came over. So they get there. And, uh, senior medic's looking at me and I still hadn't seen it. And he's looking at me and he's like, I gotta get you medevac, man. You're like, you need to get this taken care of by a doctor. And I'm like, fuck, no, I'm not, I'm not going anywhere. You know, we play this game once again. I lose that battle once again. Eventually I get on a medevac bird that they picked me up and, uh, they take me to Bagram this time. Which is where they had taken the rest of the guys.

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  I'll I'll never forget, I'm on the flight to Bagram and the the the flight medics. Uh, he's he's handing me a fentanyl lollipop. Do you remember fentanyl lollipops? Yeah. Did you get those? We used to get fentanyl lollipops. Uh, they stopped issuing those a while ago, but he's like, hey, man, take this. And I'm like, no, I'm like, get it, I get, I don't need that. He's like, no, man, like, it's gonna make you feel good, like, it's gonna chill you out. I'm like, no, I I'm I'm I'm fine. I'm pissed. I don't need anything. Uh, not only was I just really angry, but I knew I was going to where the rest of the boys were at, and I wanted to be coherent and like, be able to be there with them. I don't know if these guys are gonna drop dead, right? There were some severe wounds and shit, so I'm like,

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  no, I'm fine, I need to be lucid, I need to be able to like be there for these dudes, so I'm good. Flight lands, and I'm still in full kit, I got all my shit on, I got all my stuff, man, I get off the bird. And, uh, you know, some poor, you know, private is is waiting for me with a wheelchair, I think that was just kind of their protocol. And I like kick that out of the way, and I go storming into the hospital, looking for my team leader and my teammates to see what their status is. And I get like bum rushed by like four or five medical staff that work there. And, uh, they had a protocol that they that there was no like weapons and grenades

• 2:10:31Speaker 03

  in like the actual treatment room, like in the ICU where they brought guys in. And I got grenades and I got my pistol and I got all the toys still on me. And they're trying to get me to relinquish my weapons and my kit to them so they can secure it according to their protocol. Meanwhile, I am furious, and these guys are just in between me and my teammates. Yeah. So things got real heated, real quick. Uh, to the point where some people had some legitimate concerns that I was gonna like go lethal on some people. I didn't, right? Um, one of my good, good buddies, real senior guy, happened to be there.

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  And he came over and like grabbed me and like, you know, pulled me in real close, like eyeball to eyeball. It was like Nick, like, you need to just like calm down, man. Uh, so I did, I played nice, you know? Found found some of the guys, some of the guys are in surgery, some of the guys were just kind of out in treatment beds, so I'm, you know, on bedside checking on them. And a doctor comes over to me and he's like, hey, man, come over here and let's like, let's get your face taken care of. I'm like, okay. I'm like, first off, like, I gotta take a piss. I haven't done that yet. They're like, sure. So I walk in, I take a piss, I'm washing my hands. And I look in the mirror. This is the first time I saw myself and it looked like a zombie had taken like a bite out of the side of my face. It was ugly as shit.

• 2:11:58Speaker 03

  And I'm still leaking. And it was in that exact moment. I was like, man, I owe my medic an apology. Cause in my mind, this was just like a scratch and he was overreacting.

• 2:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  But once I saw it, I was like, yeah, I'm I'm kind of an asshole. Okay. Note to self, go tell Elliot that, uh, he was right and I was wrong again.

• 2:12:19Shawn Ryan?

  So you got shot in the face. You hadn't seen it yet. You look at it. It looks fucking horrible.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  And the the first thought is, I owe the medic an apology.

• 2:12:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  It's not, holy shit, my face is fucked.

• 2:12:31Speaker 03

  No, no, no. It was, I was a complete dick.

• 2:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, my god.

• 2:12:34Speaker 03

  Now for the second time on our senior medic, who's a phenomenal medic and knows what he's doing and made the right decision once again. And I, uh, had a lot of like negative things to say about him in that moment. So I'm like, yeah, I owe him an apology.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  So they take me over to get treated. And there was a plastic surgeon who was in country, who was an army reservist. A doctor in the army reserves in his civilian practice. He's a pro- plastic surgeon. He owns, he runs his own plastic surgery clinic. This is the guy that is there to treat me. He obviously did a phenomenal job. You can barely tell it's even there, right? You really have to look. So he's like, okay, um, I'm going to give you, uh, some local anesthetic and then I'm going to get you on, uh, some pain management intravenously.

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  Because this is gonna suck. And I'm like, you're not giving me any, um, any pain meds. Nothing that's gonna like affect my clarity, my ability to like see what's going on and talk. I don't want to be sleepy. And my guys are in surgery, I need to be there with them. Hit me with some local. That's fine. And then like, let's go. And the doc's like, yeah, man, like you're gonna want some, um, like morphine or, or Dilaudid or whatever it was that they wanted to give me. Like this is gonna, like, I have to cauterize your face back together, which is just this little welder, like a medical welder. Like, that's how I have to do it because it clipped an artery.

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  Um, there's also some shavings from the, from the round that I have to extract. So I have to go in there and pull out these little, these little pieces. And then I need to melt your face back together. You're gonna want, uh, something more than just a local. And I'm like, fuck off. No, like, just do it. And my commander had showed up.

• 2:14:35Speaker 03

  Um, the doc looks over at him and he's like, just go ahead, just like do it. So I'm laying, you know, I'm laying on my side. And, uh,

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  he starts cauterizing it back together. Smell, right, like burning flesh. It, it hurt. Smokes coming out of my face. It was more of just kind of like a weird, uh, a weird moment. But what abruptly ended that weird moment was, who is now my wife, walked in the room. So she was deployed as well. Wow. And her and I were really, really close. And, uh,

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  I had been now wounded twice. And she walked in to the hospital. And, uh, she had a look of both fear and anger on her face. She was like pissed that I'd now been

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  shot up twice. So I'm looking at her as they're doing this. And I'm like, oh, man, she's like really angry at me right now. Okay. Um, well, we'll have that conversation.

• 2:15:50Speaker 03

  Obviously, they put it back together, man. And, uh, it wasn't, it wasn't that big of a deal, really. Uh, it obviously could have been a lot worse. So I was, I was at that location for another week or so. They were also, again, concerned about infection. I spent most of that time in the hospital because the guys were still there the entire time before I, uh, got back on a helicopter and then went back out to the boys. And at this point, really, no one tried to, no one tried to keep me there for any longer than, than a week because I had kind of already displayed some insubordination to find a way to get back anyway.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  So it was about a week, maybe eight or nine days, and then I was back with the guys.

• 2:16:37Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus, dude. Well, going back to the guy that shot you, do you have any idea if he's dead?

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  No idea.

• 2:16:46Shawn Ryan?

  No idea?

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  No. No idea. My,

• 2:16:51Speaker 03

  I'd say no. I'd say my chances are he's dead, but, um,

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Roger that.

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's take a break and then we'll get into the rest.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 2:17:03Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:18:28Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:18:50Shawn Ryan?

  This is getting real heavy.

• 2:18:53Shawn Ryan?

  So let's go ahead and walk us through the third incident.

• 2:18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, so

• 2:19:02Speaker 03

  snow comes in,

• 2:19:05Speaker 03

  December, January-ish timeframe. Everything kind of just takes a pause tactically because no one can really move around. So kind of, everyone just kind of goes into hibernation mode where we were. And then things picked back up again, maybe late February. You know, so this is the same deployment. We came in in September of 12. Now we're in February, going into March of 2013. And we got, we're getting ripped out, I think it's end of March timeframe-ish. So March 13th, I'm sorry, March 11th, 2013.

• 2:19:46Speaker 03

  And we were getting ready to go on a larger operation, joint mission. So we had Afghan National Army guys. We had Afghan National Police guys. We had Afghan local police guys all coming on this thing. And at this point, we had developed our camp. You know, we built it up again to the level that we could, that was appropriate with our mission. And we essentially had two tiers built within it. We had a, we had an external wire. That was some busted up HESCO and some chain link fencing. You know, nothing, nothing extravagant. But we had a perimeter. And then within that initial perimeter,

• 2:20:31Speaker 03

  we had our motor pool area, which is where we pack our vehicles, you know, storage, fuel, whatever. And then there was a separate set of force protection. Between that and then where we actually lived and where our operation center was and those kinds of things. And we had developed an SOP, a standard operating procedure, where when we would do these larger missions with these other elements, they would show up and they would stay outside of our compound completely. The leadership that was necessary would come into our motor pool so that we could brief

• 2:21:15Speaker 03

  them on what it is we were going to go do. They didn't know until that point, which is part of our force pro and operational security measures, was to tell them basically at the last minute to try to minimize the chance of them making that public, right? So the elements would stay outside, their trucks would stay outside, and then leadership would come in, our leadership would brief them on what we were doing, then we would go through our final, you know, our final brief, our final comps checks, and then we'd roll. We developed that system months before, and it worked. It was, you know, it was effective.

• 2:21:56Speaker 03

  Well, on this particular day, the leadership rolls in as well as a Ford Ranger pickup truck that has a truck-mounted PKM machine gun on the back of it. Truck rolls in with two dudes in it, and immediately I see it. And I know that this is a violation of our SOP. So I'm immediately annoyed, like, these guys, you know? I'm at a crossroads. On one side, I err on the side of security, and I addressed that problem right there and then.

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  Either directly walk up to the dude that drove the truck in and say, hey, get your truck out with the other vehicles, or talk to my team sergeant, talk to my captain, and then they address that through their chain of command. One way or another, I address that right there and then. So I err on the side of security.

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  The other option is to err on the side of rapport and relationships. And let it ride. I'll bring this up with my leadership after we're done with this thing. They'll address it with their leadership. It'll get corrected.

• 2:23:18Speaker 03

  I end up going that route.

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  You know, in hindsight, which we can talk about.

• 2:23:27Speaker 03

  It seems like it was an obvious mistake that was made. And the results of what ended up happening would be indicative of that being true.

• 2:23:39Speaker 03

  That said, you know, when you operate by, with and through Indigenous personnel, there's a constant balance between security and efficiency, or security and trust, or security in that relationship. We require rapport and a successful, amicable working relationship with a partner force in order to be successful. We SF guys rarely if ever do anything by ourselves. It's always along with another group of people. So the development of that relationship and the maintenance of that relationship is critical to our mission's success.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  It's something that's important, you know, for the layperson or civilian out there that doesn't quite grasp that. We're only successful if we can foster and maintain relationships with other human beings. So that makes those decisions just that much more difficult to make. Yeah. And, you know, you're also conditioned to erring on the side of rapport and relationship maintenance and nothing bad happens. You know, you're successful. Like that was the right decision to make in that moment, only because there was no negative effect that happened because of it.

• 2:25:02Speaker 03

  So I decide begrudgingly, even in that moment, like, you know, these guys, all right, fine, I'll deal with this later, you know, I'll get this taken care of, let's just get through today, get through this mission and then we'll address that. So we're in, we're essentially this massive circle. Once the partner force leadership is briefed on what we're doing, we're in this massive circle going through our final pre-mission brief as a unit and our final comms checks, which our SOP was, we get into a circle and uh, someone would initiate, you know, they're up on comms, everyone gives like the thumbs up, you know, I can hear you, and then just go around the circle, everyone's just checking their comms, everyone good, good, good. Well, it gets to me and uh, you know, I'm like Bravo two and uh, like good.

• 2:25:47Speaker 03

  So I know my comms are up, I can hear them, they can hear me and being the somewhat insubordinate soldier, lack of discipline, I turn and start walking towards my truck, which is behind me, truck's running, I start walking towards my truck. As the comms checks are continuing and as I'm walking away from the group is when I hear the rounds crack off for the first time. So one of the individuals that was inside that Ford Ranger, who was an Afghan National Police Officer, someone that we had actually been training with and working with for the

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  duration of our deployment, jumped up on the back of the truck and engaged into the group with that PKM from, you know, 15 feet away. An extremely vulnerable position that we're in, we're lumped together, it's just an ideal timeframe to initiate an attack like that with that kind of weapon system at that close proximity. The likelihood of success is really, really high.

• 2:26:57Speaker 03

  Rounds are clacking off behind me. And my first thought was that one of our partner force guys just N D'd their rifle, like just fingers slipped on the trigger, clacked off a round. It wouldn't be uncommon for that to happen. But after the second round, third round, fourth round, right, I'm registering that it's a it's continuous fire. It's coming from a belt fed. Uh, this isn't a negligent discharge. This is someone's intentionally shooting at something. I don't know what it is. Someone's shooting on purpose.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  And I s- I snapped my head around. And I see what's happening. Right, gunner fifteen or so feet away from the group ripping into the crowd. Guys are dropping, guys are scrambling. Um. Chaos.

• 2:27:52Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  My training tells me to move to cover and eliminate the threat. Essentially, just a reactive near ambush type scenario, which we'd rehearsed on hundreds of times.

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  A key point is. When I'd initially come out.

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  To get the trucks turned on. My go bag, my primary weapon system, and I had positioned those inside the vehicle. And then I left them there and I went to do our final comps checks. So the only weapon system I had on me was my pistol. To an important note.

• 2:28:31Speaker 03

  Move to cover, eliminate the threat. Is what I'm trained to do. Well, what prevented that from happening? Is I was able to see in front of me, six, seven feet. One of our infantry uplift soldiers who was scheduled to come out on that mission with us that day. He was one of our drivers. Young kid, uh, first deployment, fresh out of basic.

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  He's frozen. And he's fifteen feet in front of a guy who's shooting a machine gun in his general direction. And he's like a deer in headlights. And uh. Seeing that is what prompted me to move towards him rather than. Move to a piece of cover which I had right next to me. So I take a couple real aggressive steps in his direction.

• 2:29:26Speaker 03

  And uh.

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  Kind of I put myself in between him and the shooter. So I'm facing this kid. And my back is now to the shooter. And I came at this kid with such velocity that when I hit him. I hit I hit him. I made contact with him. And then I was hit in the back of my leg for the first time. And I end up just falling straight down on top of him. So I'm laying on top of this kid on the ground where chest to chest. I know I've been hit. A PKM from fifteen feet feels like. A sledgehammer. Smashing into your body, not so much a penetration type feel, but just impact. And I've been shot, you know, before I've been blown out before. I was familiar with it. I'm like, okay, I know I was hit. I'm not sure the severity, but I'm hit.

• 2:30:15Speaker 03

  And then I feel a couple more impacts. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Shit. So now I know I've been hit multiple times. I'm like, this is okay. This is this is different than the times before. Already.

• 2:30:29Speaker 03

  Um. I drag myself and this kid. Four or five feet wasn't very far for us to get behind. The corner of another one of the vehicles that was parked right there. It's a shade of cover.

• 2:30:45Speaker 03

  So I drag him and myself, whatever it was, four, five, six feet. And uh. Shooter's still engaging.

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  I go to grab my rifle instinct and it's not there.

• 2:31:03Speaker 03

  One of my teammates who had also been hit went was down right next to me. His rifle was on the ground right next to me. So I grabbed his rifle, I put that in action.

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  I take a couple horribly placed shots at this shooter. And then one of my teammates came in and eliminated that threat. So the primary threat has been eliminated. But we're now receiving rounds and rockets from outside of our compound. So this was a coordinated attack that was initiated by this insider attack.

• 2:31:42Speaker 03

  Well, I'm in no position to address the the incoming rounds from outside of our compound. So I move into my next course of action and I check this infantry soldier that I'm still basically laying on top of. He's in shock, pale, but no holes in his body. He's breathing, he's just frozen.

• 2:32:09Speaker 03

  Okay, he's okay. So now let's see what is going on with me. So I roll over and I I rip what's left of my pants leg, my pant leg open. And my right leg is just fucking mangled. And it's just like hammered meat and tissue and exposed bone. The docs estimated that it was at least four rounds that hit my right leg.

• 2:32:38Speaker 03

  I also took a round to my lower left leg, which I didn't realize until weeks and weeks later. But my right leg was clearly the problem. And I am pissing blood out of my thigh. And I looked at where I had been hit originally to where I was at that point. Again, four, five, six feet. And there's just a river flowing from where I was to where I was originally struck. So I know my femoral artery has been severed. And we had a ton of medical training leading up to that deployment. And we got a lot of medical training during that deployment, right? In real time.

• 2:33:21Speaker 03

  So I know that I have maybe eight, nine minutes left before I'm completely bled out.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Tourniquet. Pull a tourniquet off my kit. I get that up on, wrench that down as tight as I can. Lock in the windlass. And bleeding doesn't stop. It's like visibly still pouring out of my leg. So I grab a second tourniquet and I slap that on, wrench that down.

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  It's mass hysteria at this point, right? Our senior medic had been clipped, so he was down. Our junior medic was a National Guard SF guy who was attached to our team for that deployment.

• 2:34:08Speaker 03

  His first deployment, fresh out of the Q course, fortunately, in kind of a sick way, he got a lot of on-the-job training up until that point, because guys were getting banged up quite frequently, us in the partner force. So he had a lot of medical training and experience just within the five months of that timeframe that we were out there. So now he's, he's running the show, right? He's trying to triage and manage a situation. Young kid, fresh out of the Q course, attached to an SF team that he just met when he showed up in country. And he performed spectacularly. I mean, truly remarkable what this dude did. His name's Connor.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  He's managing it, but people are screaming, people are crying, people are, it's, it's, it's the ultimate mass cow scenario. To this day, considered the most catastrophic insider attack

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  since the global war on terrorism began. Wow. So 12 US casualties total, including three killed, and then another dozen or so Afghans that were killed or wounded. So there are bodies everywhere. You know, mass cow is dictated by your ability to manage a situation medically based off of your personnel and resources. And we were wildly inverted on what we were able to actually manage, just the number of casualties on the ground.

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  I have a second tourniquet on that I applied. And then at that point, one of my teammates got over to me.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  And he uh. He looks at me and the look on his face. Said everything. That he's like. Nick's not gonna make it. You could see that. And um.

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  I could see that in him. And I was like. Listen, man. Go work on someone that you can. That you can save. Like I am in the expectant category here in triage. Don't waste your time. Precious seconds. And resources on me. Because I'm done here. I. Accepted that entirely. I was convinced of it. He uh, so I'm like trying to fight, I'm like trying to tell him to go away and he's obviously ignoring me. He applies a third tourniquet. And he gets IV access. Uh, for blood or meds or whatever needs to come on board. And. Then his work was pretty much done. He was kind of at the limit of what.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  He was able to do. And then he moved on, you know, we said a quick. Goodbye. And then he uh, he moved on. So I'm laying there. And.

• 2:36:54Speaker 03

  I can still feel myself leaking. I'm convinced I'm still bleeding. And uh, I try to move my leg, it's not moving. My femur was completely shattered. Can't move my leg, but I just reach underneath it with my hands and I just lift, I just lift it up. To try to see if I can see any blood kind of come out the bottom of it. Uh, and this was where the pain first really set in. At that point, it really didn't, I really didn't feel much pain. The adrenaline was just pumping so hard that I didn't feel much. When I lifted that leg up, then it was just this searing. Holy shit moment. Where it was like the inside of my body was trying to explode out of my eyeballs.

• 2:37:41Speaker 03

  And I could sure enough, I could still see blood kind of trickling out of one of the wounds. So I'm like, okay, man, have I, time's getting like real short here. Have I done everything? Is there anything I can do? And I decided that there was, so I loosened up one of the tourniquets. I grabbed some gauze out of my kit and I balled it up into what we call a power ball. And I just rammed it inside my thigh and I'm kind of reaching upward, almost towards my hip. And I'm trying to feel for the pulse of the femoral artery. Well, a few minutes had gone by and

• 2:38:23Speaker 03

  your blood starts to shunt inward to your body to protect your organs, to keep you alive as long as possible. So I have very little, you know, dexterity in my hands. But I think I feel something, you know, I'm brushing past broken bone. Um, the pain's really kicking in, I'm starting to lose consciousness. The light, the lights are starting to go out, like I'm on the, I'm on the way to see the wizard. And I think I feel something and I kind of just go all in and I just ram down as hard as I can. And I just feed the rest of the gauze in on top of that and then resecure the tourniquet, lock that in. Um, and then I passed out.

• 2:39:03Speaker 03

  For

• 2:39:05Speaker 03

  fifteen, twenty seconds, maybe a minute. It wasn't very long.

• 2:39:10Speaker 03

  But for I came to and then, uh, I'm like, okay, now my work here really is done, like I am out of options. So I, uh, just, I just kind of drug myself over to where some of my teammates were that were dealing with some injuries. I got to my senior medic who was not that far from me. He had taken a round through his calf, tourniquet was on, bleeding had stopped. He was just in a lot of pain. You know, so I just was, uh,

• 2:39:39Speaker 03

  talking to him, trying to comfort him. Knew my time was, was coming to a close and wanted my last moments on earth to just be alongside these guys, like doing whatever I can to kind of ease their discomfort.

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  And that's a, that's a trip.

• 2:39:59Speaker 03

  Like knowing you're gonna die. It's a trip and.

• 2:40:05Speaker 03

  I was surprisingly content with it. I remember feeling an enormous level of frustration that after all the engagements and all the all the gunfights and all the explosions and shit that we had been through, that I was gonna be killed as the result of someone that we had been working with. That was, that really irritated me. You know, like, man, really? Yeah. Really?

• 2:40:35Speaker 03

  So, just kinda, well, that sucks. But, okay. Um, and then my thoughts were with my, my parents, my sister. Uh, you know, visualizing what they were gonna have to go through. Military funeral with honors, Arlington, right, like the whole thing, I, I can see it. So, some guilt for that.

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  You know, my, my parents, my father told me, no, right? You're not enlisting. Because I don't want you to be killed. And, uh, he would have, he was gonna be right. So I was, I was, I was really, I was upset about that. Um, but then I moved to this really relaxed state of contentness and, and calmness. And, you know, I got what I asked for. This is where I wanted to be. I, I, I worked really hard to be here. And if I'm gonna die, it's gonna be alongside, you know, my boys. And I'm okay with that.

• 2:41:39Speaker 03

  It took the Medevac bird, uh, almost an hour and a half to be able to land. Because it was an ongoing engagement. They can't risk the bird. It was on station within minutes, but it couldn't land until we got the situation on the ground under control. So our JTAC went to work. Um, earned the Silver Star that day for his actions. He obliterated this valley. Obliterated. They sent every single air platform that we had available. And he annihilated anything that was moving within that area. You were deemed a threat. Uh, it still took some time, though. So Medevac bird comes down, hour, hour and a half after the initial incident. And I'm on the first,

• 2:42:24Speaker 03

  I'm on the first lift. Me, my team sergeant, who, uh, was hurt badly as well. And one other dude.

• 2:42:34Speaker 03

  At that point, they had two options. One was to fly us to where that forward surgical team was located. The same place that initially treated my shoulder. They could fly us there because it's closer, it's a shorter flight. Or they fly us directly to Bagram, which has a higher level of medical care because it's a full blown hospital. But it's farther away. So they decided to go with speed versus level of care. Which isn't a wrong decision to make. It actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Like, we need to get these guys in front of a doctor now. Send us to that location where the F S T is located. They rip us off, throw us right into, um, into the surgery clinic.

• 2:43:18Speaker 03

  I need a blood transfusion, bad. The, the fact that I was still alive ninety minutes later with the severed femoral artery, without direct intervention on that artery in itself, uh, is unusual, to say the least. I need blood, bad. So they put me on a transfusion and start pumping me full of blood. And they, they pumped me full of quite a bit. I want to say it was like six or seven units. It was a lot. Wow.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  The problem was it was an incompatible blood type.

• 2:43:56Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 2:43:59Speaker 03

  So, everything in my body begins to shut down. My lungs, my liver, my kidneys, they're all dying. And the docs are assuming it's because of the trauma that I've experienced and the length of time that I was on the, on the battlefield that is causing that. But they, they don't, they don't know for certain, but they know I need to get to Bagram immediately. So they put me back on a helicopter and they fly me to Bagram. Which was maybe a six or seven minute flight, relatively quick.

• 2:44:31Speaker 03

  And it's while I'm on the flight to Bagram that they realized what happened with the blood. And what it is was they they mixed up my name with my team sergeant's name. We have similar last names. They both begin with L and A. They gave me his blood type. They gave him my blood type. Well, I'm O positive. I'm a universal donor. So I I can give blood to anybody and it'll be okay. He's like AB negative or just something crazy.

• 2:45:02Speaker 03

  I think whatever it is, it's like the most incompatible blood type that we have. It's like the most specific type. Uh, is what they gave me. And they realized it because they were looking at his transfusion. They were going, oh, we're giving this guy O positive. And then they said, oh shit, what did we just give Nick? Oh, we gave him AB negative. So they call Bagram Hospital. I'm airborne. I've coded at this point. They call Bagram Hospital and they say, we just pump Nick full of like six units of the wrong blood type. It's incompatible. There's no way he survives the flight. So just be prepared to receive his body. No, he's not gonna make it. And they're like, okay.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  Uh, so I show up. I'm by myself on this flight. I've coded. Uh, flight, you know, med flight crew panels, like the whole thing. They're getting real creative. Trying to keep me clinging to the thread that I'm hanging on to.

• 2:46:01Speaker 03

  Uh, pull me off, rush me right into surgery anyway. I don't have a heartbeat.

• 2:46:07Speaker 03

  Panels. They hack my leg off below the knee. Try to minimize how much damage my body is attempting to recover from.

• 2:46:18Speaker 03

  Transfusion, dialysis, innovated. The works. And you know, I was obviously able to survive.

• 2:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus dude. I've I've never fucking heard anything like that.

• 2:46:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, and you know, it took me a while, Sean, to be able to comfortably talk about the blood transfusion incident, what happened? Because it's a more than likely the the response to that is, man, how the fuck could you do that? You know, it's it's met with confusion. How could you make such a mistake, really? You almost killed this guy, really should have killed this guy. Uh, and I am extraordinarily protective of our medical community for the work that they did on me and my friends, both in that moment, in that incident, one's prior, one's after. I'm very protective of that, of that community.

• 2:47:20Speaker 03

  And I was, um, concerned about sharing that portion of the event to, because it would paint them in a negative light. Uh, the reality is, man, you know, we we live in the world of the human dynamic and nobody, um, is above making mistakes. And when adrenaline's pumping high and stress is at the all time high, regardless of what it is you're doing, and in this particular incident, these guys are trying to save three people who are dying. Um, mistakes happen. I've made countless of them. Uh, so it happens. And I just think

• 2:48:01Speaker 03

  being able to to share that, there's there's value in that, in the incident, because immediately following that happening, they sent out a mass distro to the entire medical community and the entire A O R saying, this is what happened with this dude. And because of that, they updated their protocols when it comes to administering blood. Uh, protocols that still are exist today.

• 2:48:28Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:48:30Speaker 03

  We tend to learn solely through failures, period. We learn through making mistakes and feeling the pain and the consequences of those mistakes is how we get better. I was fortunate that I was strong enough physically and got real lucky that they could make this mistake on me and I was able to survive it. But if that hadn't happened to me and it happened to someone else who was unable to survive that for whatever reason, uh, that would be a tragedy. But because it happened to me and I'm here to share it, we've made the necessary corrections.

• 2:49:12Speaker 03

  We've lowered the risk of working with blood, um, to mitigate that happening again in the future. So there is positivity. I'm, I'm grateful that it happened to me because I was able to come out the other end of it.

• 2:49:30Speaker 03

  But cause, you know, it certainly complicated things.

• 2:49:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34Speaker 03

  It took things from a position where it was, and you were already clinging by a thread and your entire right leg is mangled to now we have to treat this, your entire biological system that is crashing.

• 2:49:51Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. I don't, I don't even know. I'm speechless, man. I, uh, wow.

• 2:50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:13Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 2:50:14Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 2:50:18Shawn Ryan?

  What's going on Patreon?

• 2:50:28Shawn Ryan?

  Join me on Vigilance Elite Patreon for a live video teleconference.

• 2:50:35Shawn Ryan?

  Alright, we're back from the break. So how long were you at Bagram?

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  I was at Bagram five, six days.

• 2:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  And then where did you go after that?

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  Uh, from there, so I needed to stay in Bagram long enough for them to stabilize me enough to survive a fixed wing flight to Germany.

• 2:50:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:58Speaker 03

  So five days in Bagram in the intensive care unit.

• 2:51:02Speaker 03

  And then on a flight to Germany. I was in launch stool for a day, I believe, just a day. It was that launch stool that they amputated my leg up to the knee. Technically, it's called a knee disarticulation, where they kind of just take your knee apart. They did that in Germany. I was there just a night.

• 2:51:23Speaker 03

  One or two nights. And then I was at Walter Reed.

• 2:51:30Shawn Ryan?

  How many surgeries total?

• 2:51:33Speaker 03

  Man, on my right leg alone, somewhere between 30 and 35. But by the time I got to Walter Reed, they were really battling infection. That was the concern. When you're laying exposed, especially in a country like Afghanistan.

• 2:51:51Speaker 03

  Bacteria, fungus, it's all growing inside my body. And I'll never forget this, crystal clear, even though I was on a whole host of medication, my surgeon comes in, the chief of ortho at Walter Reed, and he's like, hey, man, here's the deal. My staff wants to take you into the operating room down the hall right now, and they want to amputate your leg at the hip.

• 2:52:16Speaker 03

  To just get rid of the infection and get you moving on with life.

• 2:52:22Speaker 03

  They're right in a lot of ways because this infection could kill you at any moment. You're riddled with bacteria and infection and it could kill you. But I think that I can save more of your leg. But it's gonna be a street fight slugfest that I need you in the fight with me. If we're gonna have a shot at it. And I'm all whacked out, man, on ketamine and Dilaudid and I'm like, I'm looking up at this guy who I had just met. Who's telling me that his staff wants to remove my leg at the hip. And I'm dealing with an infection that could kill me. But he wants to save more of my leg. What do you want to do? And uh, I was like, yeah, man, let's do that.

• 2:53:02Speaker 03

  He's like, okay, cool. We're gonna go into the operating room and uh, I'm gonna see what I can do. So it was, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday was kind of my typical schedule. Where it was in surgery, they would amputate just above the infection, cut out any of the muscle or tissue that was deemed unsavable. And pump me full of antibiotics. And then rinse and repeat day after day after day for like six weeks.

• 2:53:33Shawn Ryan?

  So, hold on, so that, so you're literally just watching your fucking leg disappear?

• 2:53:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, bit by bit.

• 2:53:42Shawn Ryan?

  Bit by bit, day at a day at a time?

• 2:53:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, three, four days a week, you know, go in, wake up, come out, there's just that much less there.

• 2:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  Oh my god.

• 2:53:52Speaker 03

  You know, and because my femur had shattered, the way that they were, they pieced that back together, they were using what's called an external fixator. Which is literally this metal components that you can see sticking outside of your body. That are penetrated into your body, that are holding all of these pieces together. So picture like an erector set that's attached to your thigh, in my case.

• 2:54:16Speaker 03

  Every time I would go into surgery, that, that piece of equipment would look a little different because they were, they were shortening the limb. So that was kind of my first visual cue every single day to just how much less leg I had. Cause I'd be all bandaged up, you know, I really couldn't see my limb itself. But I could see that external fixator. So every time I would come out of surgery, you know, anesthesia would wear off, I kind of get my bearings. I'd look at that, we call an X-fix, I'd look at that X-fix to see just how much it had changed. Um, you know, in the course of the last four hours that I was in surgery.

• 2:54:51Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:54:56Shawn Ryan?

  When you got shot

• 2:55:00Shawn Ryan?

  in your leg for this incident, did you?

• 2:55:05Shawn Ryan?

  Was there any feeling in the leg at all?

• 2:55:10Shawn Ryan?

  Like, did you feel your leg at all, or do you remember?

• 2:55:13Speaker 03

  The only thing I remember is when I started moving it around and I started I started applying that pressure dressing was when I would feel the pain. And it was excruciating. Other than that, it was kind of just like a dead part of my body that was just attached to me by skin and some tissue.

• 2:55:36Shawn Ryan?

  Did you feel any phantom pain?

• 2:55:40Speaker 03

  Not at the initial point, but I felt that very quickly once I started weaning off the massive dose of ketamine that I was on. When they started weaning me off of that was when the phantom limb pain kicked in. And that is a son of a bitch.

• 2:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  What is it? Can you describe it?

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  I can, man. It's a crazy concept, you know, from like a biological perspective. Your nerves are connected to your brain and it really works as a two-way street all the time. Your brain is sending messages down through the nerves to different parts of your body and they're expecting a return signal. Well, when that all of a sudden stops, the response to that is phantom limb pain. The response is pain and discomfort because it's not receiving that return message because the limb doesn't exist anymore, right? The nerves are gone. It's something I still experience, you know, to this day. In the early stages of it, it felt like my foot, my non-existent foot

• 2:56:45Speaker 03

  was being crushed by a vice.

• 2:56:48Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:56:49Speaker 03

  It's like a crushing sensation. Yeah, it's a crushing sensation. And it makes it even more difficult when you can't see it or touch it. You know, you smash your hand with a hammer. Your immediate response is to grab the hand that hurts. You're like, oh, you know, and you kind of rub it out, whatever, put some ice on it. Well, when you've got excruciating pain in an appendage that doesn't exist anymore, you just have to bear it out and just deal with it. You know, there's medication that I was on that would help kind of calm that a little bit. There's other therapies that you can try, uh, which I did. None of them really worked all that much. But phantom limb pain is a sneaky son of a bitch that you don't think about when you

• 2:57:29Speaker 03

  think about losing a limb. Uh, that sneaks up on you pretty quick and it, uh, it's tough to deal with, man. Today, the way what I feel, most of the time, it's kind of like a pins and needle kind of feeling like if your hand went numb or if your foot went numb for sitting awkwardly for a bit of time, kind of has that tingle sensation, like this ginger ale in your foot, kind of fizzy. That's what it feels like most of the time. Uh, it spikes for me, however, at night. When my, cause this is, it's a neurological, it's a neurological issue. It's all in your brain. Uh, at nighttime, when my brain is trying to turn off, is when

• 2:58:11Speaker 03

  it'll go up. Because while I'm up and moving and doing stuff, neurologically, I'm focused on whatever it is I'm doing at that time. So it's really not focused on the lack of return message coming from a nonexistent extremity. When I'm trying to sleep, is when it'll, uh, it'll spike.

• 2:58:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:58:34Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 2:58:38Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I got a lot of questions. I hope nothing's off the table.

• 2:58:40Speaker 03

  Send it.

• 2:58:41Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know.

• 2:58:42Speaker 03

  Oh man, you're good.

• 2:58:42Shawn Ryan?

  What is, I mean, what's going through your, what's going through your head? You know, with, is you're watching your leg disappear bit by bit, day by day? I mean, what, what is going through your head as far as, you know, what the rest of your life looks like?

• 2:59:02Shawn Ryan?

  Are you going back? I mean, I'm assuming you, you were not thinking you were gonna continue to be a Green Beret.

• 2:59:10Speaker 03

  I actually was.

• 2:59:11Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:59:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, I was, I, I, I fixated myself to that end state. Even in these early, these early days. And you know, there's a lot there, man. One is I absolutely love what I do. Uh, two is I feel like I was put on this earth to do it. But more acutely, I was kind of conditioned, man, to getting wounded. And then recovering really, really fast. And then going back to conducting operations. I had been wounded twice before. Obviously not nearly to the degree of severity of this. But in my mind, it was, yeah, man, you've, you've been hurt before and you got past it. So this is just another one of those hurdles that you need to get past.

• 2:59:58Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a little bit more comple- complicated and complex, but no, you're going back, man. So that was, that was what I focused on.

• 3:00:07Shawn Ryan?

  You are one stubborn son of a bitch.

• 3:00:09Speaker 03

  Completely.

• 3:00:09Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, my god.

• 3:00:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, completely, man. And that's like a big part of like my success. And then, you know, kind of transitioning away from that, like degree of self, of self-ishness. Terms of why I wanted to go back, but in those early stages, those early days and weeks and months. Uh, it was a lot about me, um, going back to doing what I want to do because it's what I want to do. So stubbornness, competitiveness, kind of drove me from the very early moments.

• 3:00:37Shawn Ryan?

  You, did, did you ever feel self pity or did you fall into that at all?

• 3:00:44Speaker 03

  I really didn't. And you know, it's not something that I'm really that proud of. And I say that just because it's nothing to be ashamed of if, if that happens. Um, and of cour- you know, Walter Reed, man, it's, I call it the greatest place you never want to go to. It's an amazing facility. Every single medical professional you can imagine was there. And kind of their whole of wellness approach to recovery. You meet with, uh, with psychs, behavioral psychs, just part of your regiment. You know, obviously, once I was out of the ICU and I was a bit more stable. These guys would come in and sit down and how you doing? You know, they're evaluating your psychological well being. And I was telling these guys from the very first time I met with them.

• 3:01:28Speaker 03

  You know, I'm fine and I just need to get whatever. New leg you're gonna give me and then uh and then I'm gonna go back to my job. And at one point he had a conversation with my father who was there who met me when I got to Walter Reed. He was there already and he stayed with me for the first six months that I was there. He grabbed my father at one point. I was in surgery or I was in physical therapy or something. And he said, hey dad. Um, you know, your next like primary support mechanism here. And I just want you to be aware that he fully believes that he's going back to his team and going like right back to normal for him. I don't think he's quite grasped the severity of his injury yet. I think he's in a state of denial.

• 3:02:12Speaker 03

  Or he just can't process it. He doesn't know how bad it is. They're still cutting pieces of his leg off of his body. And he's talking to me about going back to Afghanistan to conduct combat operations. Like it just doesn't make any sense. And I just want you as his father and as his primary support means that's here. To be ready for when that light bulb goes off. Cause it could very easily trigger him going down a really dark road into depression. Or whatever that may look like. And I want you to be prepared for that. And my father is like. Hey doc, I hear what you're saying. Um, thank you for that. But I think he does know what's going on.

• 3:02:56Speaker 03

  Uh, this is just kind of part of who he is. He's a stubborn dude who wants to win, but really, really hates to lose. Uh, so I'll certainly keep an eye on it, but um, I do think he knows what's going on. This is just where his mind is right now.

• 3:03:15Shawn Ryan?

  Did your dad have any idea that you you had a lemon sized wound in your back and you got shot in the face?

• 3:03:22Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 3:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  He knew that prior to being there?

• 3:03:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, he knew about both of those within a day or two after they happened. Call home, tell them what was going on.

• 3:03:32Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:03:33Speaker 03

  And a lot of ways, those kind of set them up for failure when, you know, when they got this phone call. Because, you know, part of the, that kind of next of kin notification protocol is they'll get a phone call typically from someone other than, than the injured person. From someone in the chain of command that's like, hey, you know, your son's been injured. This is the status. He'll con- he'll contact you as soon as he can in the next 24 hours or whatever. So he had received a phone call like that twice prior. You know? Hey, Nick, Nick got hit with some shrapnel. Nick got shot in the face. I know it sounds bad, but he's actually fine. He'll call you tonight. Um, they get that third phone call and he'll tell you, in a lot of ways, he was expecting it to be

• 3:04:16Speaker 03

  very similar where it was Nick got banged up again, but he's going to call you tonight. And which of course was not the, not how that played out, you know, it was like Nick got, Nick, Nick's like really uh, hurt right now and he might not make it. If he does, he's going to be at Walter Reed, you know, the day after tomorrow. So we need to get you there.

• 3:04:40Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. How long were you at Walter Reed? What's, what, what, what is, I mean, what is the?

• 3:04:48Shawn Ryan?

  When was the last cut?

• 3:04:51Speaker 03

  I got there March. I want to say I was done with my surgeries in

• 3:04:58Speaker 03

  June? Timeframe ish? I needed a couple revisions after the fact, which is really frustrating and, you know, and, and when you get it, when you take that step backwards. You know, I, what I mean by that is surgeries end, swelling goes down. They begin the process of fitting me for a prosthetic. I start to make progress working with my leg. And then, hey man, we got to go back in and open you back up again and correct this issue. And it just like resets the entire clock. That happened with me a couple of times. Um, but I'd say around July, August timeframe was when I was done with surgeries. And I was full on in physical recovery

• 3:05:44Speaker 03

  mode. Working with the PTs and the, and the strength coaches at Walter Reed.

• 3:05:51Shawn Ryan?

  Total, how, how long were you?

• 3:05:54Speaker 03

  About a year.

• 3:05:55Shawn Ryan?

  It took a year?

• 3:05:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was there a year, just, just over a year. Um, and it's kind of a phased model, at least it was for me. It was, you know, intensive care unit, where they were trying to make sure I would stay alive. Inpatient status where I lived in a hospital bed and that was where I was continuously going through surgery, surgery, surgery. And then you move into outpatient status where you live on Walt, the Walter Reed compound. And essentially like this little apartment. And then your job is to just go to all your medical appointments every single day. So you're kind of gradually moving away from that, that hospital environment. And learning how to live on your own and kind of start to develop your routines and your habits and kind of restructure a normal day to day life for you. All that happens at the hospital.

• 3:06:41Speaker 03

  Uh, but all in all, it was just over a year before I returned back to, to Fort Bragg.

• 3:06:51Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. What, um, when you got back to Fort, I mean, how, what, did you know you were gonna be back in, in the team?

• 3:07:02Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 3:07:03Shawn Ryan?

  When you got there, when you got back there?

• 3:07:05Speaker 03

  No, not, not at all, man. I mean, that was my intentions from like the very beginning, but I hadn't a clue what my future held. If it was, if the, if I could even stay in the army, can I stay in the army? Can I stay in SF? Administratively, is this even allowed? Am I gonna be forced to, to become a civilian? I had no idea, um, what was in front of me. But when I got back to Walter Reed, I sat down with the third group command team, group level, um, all the way down to battalion, company. And, you know, they were, I say, hey, welcome back. Good to see you. You know, you look good, that kind of stuff. And they said, hey, man, like, what are you, what are you trying to get into here? And I told them right there and then in that conversation, I said, I'm going back to the team.

• 3:07:51Speaker 03

  And I think that they probably struggled to hold back the crazy looks that they probably wanted to give me like, cause it's still really early on, man. I think I just, no, I mean, I wasn't, I didn't need a cane to walk around all the time, but I was still like early on, you know, clumsy walking, like limping, like I was not this like walking in, physical specimen, like ready to go back to work. I was still, I still had a long way to go. And I'm telling these guys, the group commander, like I'm going back to an O D A. And they were like, okay, um, well, when do you think that you want to try to do something like that? And I

• 3:08:31Speaker 03

  said, not anytime soon, you know, so I need a job here in the meantime. And, uh, I know that a med board is going to be triggered because of the level of injury. So I'm going to have to manage that administratively, but I'm just letting you know like what I'm trying to do. And they said, okay. And then they asked me, where do you want to work? I said, I'd like to go over and be an instructor on the combatants committee within our advanced skills company. You know, I've been in combat sports most of my life, boxing, wrestling, jujitsu. So I was big into jujitsu at that point in time. So it was a great fit. And uh, they, they allowed me to do that. So I began working as an instructor, teaching

• 3:09:09Speaker 03

  combatants and CQB stuff. And initiated my, my, my med board was initiated, which was about an eight month process. Uh, an administrative slugfest with the army who had every intention of forcing me to medically retire. And I had to dig my heels in, uh, several times. And I, you know, refused to work with some people who just were convinced that that was my future. I needed to make some phone calls and get some paperwork and get some memos from some people that had some rank that would vouch for me. So at the end of that med board, I was found unfit for duty as per the department of the army standards

• 3:09:51Speaker 03

  as it's associated with my M O S as an 18 Bravo. Like these are the list of things that you need to be able to do to be found fit for duty. And I couldn't do all those, you know, 12 mile ruck in X amount of time, two mile run, like the physical things. I hadn't even come close to trying those things yet, but I was confident that I could do it. So I was found unfit for duty. But I had learned that there was another alternative option, if that ends up being the case, which is referred to as the continuation on active duty request or called COAD, which basically takes the onus and the risk off of the Department of the Army and it places it on the unit. So the Department of Army can say, Nick is unfit for duty, and the group commander,

• 3:10:36Speaker 03

  and I think that needs to be endorsed by the first G O. in the chain of command, can say, yes, we recognize that, however, we still want to retain him. That's ultimately what ended up happening with me. It took them eight months to determine that I was unfit, and it took five days for my unit to say that they wanted to keep me anyway. So now that that was all done, but an eight-month process, all of which time I'm working as an instructor, and I am out of my mind obsessed with getting back. Everything had been removed from the equation.

• 3:11:18Speaker 03

  I knew that if I was going to have a legitimate shot at being successful at this, I would have to train at the highest level of my life. I would have to cut out every single thing and every single person that didn't need to be there to have a shot. That's just what I truly believed. Yep. And that's what I did. And my regiment for that eight-month period, and really some time beyond that, was meticulous and just completely dialed in with my nutrition and my sleep and my training, my studies, my reading, was all centered around getting back to the team, everything. And.

• 3:12:05Speaker 03

  You know, I said that, you know, my, my now wife was in Afghanistan when, when all this happened. When I left the hospital, I moved in with her and we weren't married. So we're kind of in the early stages of, of our relationship. And I remember sitting her down, I'd only been home for a couple of weeks. I'm in her house and living in her house. I sit down with her and I say, babe, like, this is what I'm gonna be doing. And I need you to like, understand that. And what that means for us is, I will not be traveling for weddings or birthday parties. Uh, there's no dinners going out, we're not going to the movies.

• 3:12:48Speaker 03

  Like, I'm cutting, I'm punting everything, everything. It's train, eat, sleep, repeat, that's it, period. I don't know how long it's gonna take. Like, this is what my future looks like. And there is no plan B. And I just wanna be very transparent and honest with you. Because if that's something that sounds crazy to you, uh, which I would understand, but something that you don't wanna be a part of, then I understand that and I'll find a new place to live and we can just kinda go our separate ways. And, uh,

• 3:13:17Speaker 03

  it's like emotional to talk about that. Yeah. Because, you know, you fast forward from that point, um, now like, almost ten years. And we have just a beautiful family. And we've got, you know, two young boys. Like, we have a five-year-old and a fourteen-month-old. And I live a very fortunate, loved and loving life. And all that could've, could've just ceased to existed if, uh, she had decided, which would've been understandable, that, hey man, what this dude is talking about is, is crazy. And I, I don't think I wanna be a part of that.

• 3:13:58Speaker 03

  So, very fortunate that she had the strength to be alongside me and remain supportive during that, um, during that journey. Uh, cuz that's, that's what my life looked like, man. So, you know, after eight months of living just the ultimate, you know, spot and minimalist, eat, sleep, train lifestyle, uh, at times reckless, you know, reckless, went past that point, um, into the realm of recklessness.

• 3:14:31Speaker 03

  I uh, I decided I was, I was ready to give it a shot to get back to the team. You know, I vocalized that with my chain of command. I said, hey, I think uh, I think I'm ready to do this. What, what does this look like? Like, what do I need to do? And, you know, there had been some guys before me that were wounded. Their group again, we, their group owned Afghanistan. So there were a lot of dudes that were wounded. Uh, several amputees that stayed in service, stayed in the unit. That uh, had sensitized, you know, the chain of command and decision makers to what amputees can do. Before I ever became one.

• 3:15:08Speaker 03

  Which was, I think, I think it's important to recognize that. Because when I brought it up, I wasn't the first amputee that said, I want to go back to combat.

• 3:15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:15Speaker 03

  Right? None of the ones prior had been successful at making it all the way to that point, but they had certainly trailblazed some of that path for me. So when I bring this up and say, hey, man, I want to, I want to go back. What do I got to do?

• 3:15:29Speaker 03

  There really wasn't this like structured pipeline for me to go through step by step by step. You know, my chain of command just kinda began throwing different tasks and tests and assessments at me. And it started off relatively basic. It was like, okay, go do an army physical fitness test. You know, just that standardized fitness test. Let's see how you do. You know, and I knocked that out and it's like, okay, well, let's go have you go do a 12 mile ruck. So I've just, you know, your basic army standardized physical assessments is really where it began. And as I'm, as I'm doing these things, you could feel like the nervousness within the unit. You could feel the tension, like these decision makers are like, he's still, he's still going?

• 3:16:15Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, like, let's make him do that now. Um, it got to the point where they had me go in for another psyche eval. Because I think people genuinely thought I was crazy. People genuinely thought that I had like a clinical, like diagnosable, delusional problem. And they're like, let's get this guy's mental wellbeing checked out real quick. Which they did and the psychs came back and they're like, yeah, he's, you know, he's no more crazy than he already was. Or the rest of these guys. So he's good as far as I'm concerned. You know, and then they, you know, they gave me a proficiency evaluation to test my abilities to function as an 18 Bravo.

• 3:16:54Speaker 03

  Um, so my, my schedule at that point looked like one or two assessments a week for about 12 weeks.

• 3:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:17:04Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, about 12 weeks, about three months worth of time. And it was just boom, boom, boom, boom.

• 3:17:12Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have any other amputees that like as a mentor or motivation or hey, you know?

• 3:17:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 3:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  Can be done?

• 3:17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, several, you know, and I met a bunch of them at Walter Reed. There were a few that were in third group that uh, I was able to leverage and you know, learn from.

• 3:17:32Speaker 03

  And that information is great and helpful. But you really have to, you have to walk the journey yourself, man, you know, so I was, I had an enormous amount of support around me. But I could also feel the hesitation and the concern, both with my leadership and those that, that love me and care for me. They're like, are you really going to go back to doing this? You know, like, we didn't think this was even remotely possible. We wanted to support you to be a positive support mechanism for you and your goals, but you're actually making kind of some legitimate progress towards the, like this thing may actually become real. This thing may actually become real that no one really thought could happen.

• 3:18:18Speaker 03

  And one event after another, that just starts to get more and more amplified until, you know, I hit that last physical assessment, which third group had created, because they had so many wounded guys, they created a separate physical assessment specifically for wounded guys that wanted to try to go back to operational status. They built this themselves. And it wasn't just so much a standardized PT test, pull-ups, running setups. It was like tactical type movements to try to replicate those types of physical requirements within a combat scenario. And it was brutal. And it was absolutely brutal assessment. And our uh,

• 3:18:59Speaker 03

  Group CSM, he took it himself, uh, the day before I did with a, just as a battle buddy, with one of my, with one of my other buddies who he took a round through his hand. He was trying to go back to the team. The group CSM took the test with him, just alongside him, just to be kind of a support for him. And I walk in the gym after they had finished and they're both laid out on the turf, um, exhausted. Our group CSM, um, he just recently retired, he was the most recent, um, USASOC CSM, his name is Mac. He's a stud, PT stud, able-bodied dude. He's laid out on the turf, smoked after this test.

• 3:19:42Speaker 03

  And I walk in, just to loosen up, you know, I'm taking the test the next morning. And he sees me and he's like, "Hey Nick, how you feeling good?" And he's like, "You doing this thing tomorrow?" I said, "Yeah," he's like, "I just took it and it just kicked my ass." I said, "Yeah, it's tough. I've been training for this thing specifically now for like four weeks. It's brutal." I had never taken the entire assessment to standard once before that point. Cause I knew it was gonna destroy me. I just, when I was training, I would break it down into little chunks. And I would do like event one, two, and three, back to back to back, like in repetition. And then event four, five, and six, that's how I did it. So I didn't know how I would do on it, but this was like my Super Bowl. After 12 weeks of all these other stuff I had to do, this was it. And he's like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna be here tomorrow, man, so, you know, good luck."

• 3:20:28Speaker 03

  I said, "Thanks," showed up the next day. And there's like 50 people at this thing. My entire chain of commanders, our group commanders there, everyone's there, my teammates are there. A bunch, all my combatives, colleagues are there. A big crowd. And, uh, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, I, I go through the whole thing. And I get done and I have no peripheral vision. I'm on the verge of passing out, trying to look tough, standing there, right? Like I could do it again if I needed to.

• 3:21:01Speaker 03

  Mark Akkert comes over, CSM comes over and he says, "Hey man, you know I just took this yesterday myself." I said, "Yeah." He's like, "If I wasn't here personally to witness you do what you just did, there's no way I would have believed that that was possible." And I said, "Well, thank you, but uh, like what else do you guys need from me, man? Like really? Like can I go back to my team now?" And uh, he looks, which got kind of a chuckle out of my teammates who were like, "He really just said that to the group CSM." You know? He looks over at the group commander, um, who's kind of smirking and he's like, "Hey CSM, this is a Manny decision, this is your decision, but I don't know how, after what we just put this dude through, I don't know how you're gonna tell him no.

• 3:21:46Speaker 03

  Um, but it's your call." And uh, CSM looked at me and said, "Alright man, I'll have your orders done uh, tomorrow." And the following week, I was, I was back on the same, the same ODA and they were way late in their train up. They had already done all their collective stuff. They had already done their PNT, uh, cause they were pushing out the door. We were pushing out the door just like five weeks later. So they were just getting ready to go on block leave and then head over. So, but a month after that, I was back.

• 3:22:17Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 3:22:18Speaker 03

  In Afghanistan.

• 3:22:19Shawn Ryan?

  You, you went back to Afghanistan?

• 3:22:21Speaker 03

  Right, back to Afghanistan. This was now in 2015, so from flash to bang was right around two years. From point of injury to uh, to my return to back to Afghanistan.

• 3:22:33Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. Let's, let's take a break, when we pick up, we'll pick up right there.

• 3:22:45Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:23:26Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:24:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:24:49Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, so we're back from the break. We left off, you'd just basically been through all the rehabilitation and you got the ominous ominous, you're back on the O D A, back on the team.

• 3:25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 3:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  And you're going to Afghanistan. But we had a conversation offline that I found very interesting about, you know, what did the team want? And I would like to dive into that before we go on deployment.

• 3:25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Man, it was, it was an interesting ride because when I was at Walter Reed and, you know, I got this vision in my head of getting back to the team and going back to doing, doing the job. It was about me wanting to do what I want to do. Me getting back to the lifestyle in which I love, getting back into the fight, proving myself right, proving the naysayers wrong, you know, making the enemy regret not killing me. It was, that's where I was at. That was my headspace. Yeah, so it was very selfish, you know, stubborn, competitive, selfish, which I am grateful for because, you know, it got me through a lot of really difficult challenges in those

• 3:26:01Speaker 03

  early phases in the hospital. And then even once I got back to Bragg and I'm working as an instructor and I'm training like a maniac, I was still about me doing what I knew I needed to do. And once I started going through that 12-week process of evaluations and tests and assessments, I completed a handful of them, I don't know, three, four, five. And I'm doing well, confidence is high, I'm feeling good. I wake up in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., whatever, sweating, heart beating, and it

• 3:26:40Speaker 03

  had hit me in that moment that I was trying to go back to a team, to a team, trying to go back to a team. A team that has 11 other guys on it, most of which have wives, kids, and I didn't take them into consideration at a single point up until that moment. And it scared the shit out of me.

• 3:27:05Speaker 03

  All of a sudden, the aperture kind of opened up. And I said to myself, man, as badly as I want this, and as hard as I've been working for this, and all the sacrifices that I've been making to get to where I am now, is this in the best interest of the team? Didn't sleep the rest of the night. You know, wake up the next day, going to work. And, uh, meet up with a couple of the guys in person, make some phone calls to the other guys that weren't around, the senior guys on the team. These are the guys that were on the team while I was on it, before I had been wounded. They're still on the same team.

• 3:27:41Speaker 03

  So I, I talked to them. And, uh, and I'm like, guys, you know, is this, is what I'm doing the right thing to be doing? I, I know, I can't see it. I'm obsessed with this, but I got these blinders on, which all I can see and hear and feel is what's in front of me, because I know what is happening on the backside of that. I need your guys' input. And I, I apologize for having not even considered you guys up until this point. I've been that driven towards this thing. Is this in the best interest of you guys? Because I cannot come back to this line of work and be a liability on a team. And when you're talking about an element that's comprised of 12 dudes,

• 3:28:25Speaker 03

  every single dude carries a lot of weight, like figuratively and literally, and you are putting your life into that person's hands. That's a very real thing. I can't be a liability. As bad as I want this, if you tell me right now that the risk is just too high, I will index this thing right now, and I will find another lifestyle to live. Because I won't be able to sleep at night, knowing I'm putting you and your family's well-being in jeopardy. And this was like three or four different conversations, all the same day. And the response I got from these dudes was basically the, the same. And it was honestly, dude, we don't know. Like, we don't know what this, what this would look like if you actually make it back here to the team. We don't know. We've talked about it.

• 3:29:12Speaker 03

  But we don't know. But what we've all decided as a single unit is that we want you to keep going, to see if you can't make it back. And if you do, we'll take a hard look at it at that point. So just keep, just, just keep going, man. And, uh, you know, that was relieving, right? But it still wasn't quite enough for me. I was still, I still had like some massive concerns. And at this time again, I'm working as an instructor on the combatants committee. Well, we worked very closely with the SOFAIC committee, which stands for special forces, advanced urban combat, which is a course that's taught within all the active groups. That's what it sounds like. It's advanced urban combat, like a five, six week course that teams would just cycle through during their training cycles.

• 3:29:56Speaker 03

  And the NCOIC, the, the head NCO that ran that course at that time, his name's Jimmy. He was set to leave his tenure as the lead instructor for that course and go back for a second run as a team sergeant, which isn't common at all. Most team sergeants get one run at that and then now they're being, you know, groomed for sergeant major and, and senior enlisted positions. Jimmy got the opportunity to go back for a second run as a team sergeant and he was taking my old ODA as the team sergeant. I did not know that. Up until that point, about a week or so prior, I was made aware that he was about to go back

• 3:30:39Speaker 03

  and take my team. And he and I have been working together for months as I was working as an instructor, he's working as the SOFAIC committee, NCOIC, and we're doing training together. So I go into work and, uh, I'm in my office and we're getting ready to, to, to start working, start training in the fight house. And Jimmy happens to walk by and he looks in and I'm kind of sitting at this desk and I, he can tell I'm like disheveled and he like pops in, hey man. And he's like looking at me, he's like, are you, you know, you good? Like what's up? Something's up. What's, what's going on? He closes the door, sits down. He's like, what's up? I said, hey man, I just talked to, you know, Nate and Adam and Brandon and these other guys.

• 3:31:20Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, I didn't sleep last night because I'm, I have some concerns about getting back to the team and what that's going to do to the, for the wellbeing of the team itself and the guys on it. Um, I know you're going back to take the team. So this is probably the best time to have this conversation. Like what are your thoughts, man?

• 3:31:41Speaker 03

  I know as a team sergeant, as the senior enlisted leader on a team, your responsibility is that a team as a whole, above all else, you have to make the decisions in the best interest of that O D A. What are you thinking, man? Like, he knew what I was, he knew what I was doing. At no point did he come to me and, and bring it up. He was just another supportive dude that I was working with. And he said, you know, man, I, you know, I, I found out I was gonna go take that team, take your team, just like a few weeks ago, it became official, and I'll be over there in the next month or so, whatever it was. And so I've given it a lot of thought. And I've seen the way that you've been working here as an instructor, and I've seen the way that you've been training the last eight, nine months. And I've been seeing you knocking out all these different assessments, one

• 3:32:25Speaker 03

  after another. So, I have thought about this already. And, he and I had, you know, an emotional conversation. But, the, at the end of that, or really the point from him, was the same as the other guys. It was, I have an obligation to the team. I don't know if it's in the best interest of them, and the team itself, for you to be a part of that. But I genuinely want you to keep driving forward, and like, let's figure it out together. And if in fact, you do get back, and, it's not within the best interest of the team, I will be the first to tell you. And, uh, and we'll cross that bridge if we need to.

• 3:33:06Speaker 03

  You know, so I was obviously very grateful for that. But what happened at that time, man, was my, my entire mentality switched. Where I was, I was motivated by me obtaining my own desires and wants. And in that moment, it was about what's in the best interest of those guys, and their families. And, you know, I'll stand by this, regardless of what it is you're trying to do, if you're trying to do it for the greater good of someone that you love, chances are, you're gonna be a lot better at it. You're gonna take it up a notch. And I came out of that meeting with him, like I had a rocket up my ass. I

• 3:33:47Speaker 03

  mean, just completely and totally reinvigorated. You know, went to jiu-jitsu practice that night, and was just like, bawling people up. Cause I was so excited and eager. Not only that, I, you know, I had their support, which I knew of, but my entire mentality had just, had just completely rotated. And I was ready to take things up to a whole nother level. And I was already operating at a very high capacity, right?

• 3:34:13Speaker 03

  But that did bump things up another notch. As opposed to going into the weight room or under the track. Thinking about taking those first steps off the plane back in Afghanistan to beat my chest. You know, and be like, I made it back, you know, I did it as like, as glorifying as that would feel, as satisfying as that would feel. Rather than envisioning that, I was envisioning, you know, my teammate's four-year-old son. And I need to crush this workout right now for him, for that kid. And I just felt like a whole nother surge of energy that was like coursing through my body. That did take things up to another, another level, yeah.

• 3:34:55Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. So when did, when did you get the verdict? From the team?

• 3:35:02Speaker 03

  So.

• 3:35:05Speaker 03

  While in Walter Reed, I recognized very quickly. It was difficult, but I did see it that no matter how hard I trained physically, I would not be as physically imposing as I was with two legs. That was a difficult pill to swallow, right? Like, grew up an athlete, was an athlete in college. Into boxing, MMA, jiu-jitsu, high-octane, physical lifestyle is what I thrived off of. It's what I enjoyed doing. It's what my team asked me to do when I was on the team as a two-legged dude. Everybody won. Well, it took a minute for me to recognize that I was not going to be as physically dominant as I was. Okay. How do I? Bridge the gap that I'm going to lose physically?

• 3:35:50Speaker 03

  To ma- to maintain my status as an asset? How do I do that? And I began looking at kind of the softest side of our business. Right? There's the door kicking and the sprinting and like the high-octane, aggressive, physical stuff that we do. But especially in SF, there is a whole range of other activities and skillsets that make us thrive and make us successful. So I began looking at ways to invest my time and energy into those skill sets and begin building those skill sets, which began at the hospital, right? Where normally if I was reading something, it would be like kinesiology, or exercise physiology, or nutrition,

• 3:36:32Speaker 03

  right? That's what the type of information I would consume because I loved it. And it worked for me to help me with what I was doing in the physical realm. That shifted to me reading about cultural dynamics, geopolitics, increasing my foreign language capabilities. Like, this is what I was doing now, when I was studying and reading and researching, to build up myself as an asset within these other sections of being, you know, Green Beret. I rode that train aggressively, starting in the hospital and then all the way through once I got back to Bragg, and I was working as an instructor. Got myself into a bunch of schools, military schools, that are normally reserved for like senior leaders. I was going

• 3:37:17Speaker 03

  as an E6. You know, I needed waivers to go as a staff sergeant to get into these things. We're talking about operational art and design, campaign planning, targeting methodology, like nerd stuff, right? Like nerd shit. Because I was convinced that I needed to make up that ground that I was gonna lose physically, to remain as an asset. And what's important to know is that I disliked all of that stuff. I really didn't enjoy it. It was painful. Really, really painful. So I had to just rely on, you know, the faith that I had that it would be worth it in the long run, and then just the discipline to execute even

• 3:37:59Speaker 03

  though I really didn't feel like it at any point. I continued to do that throughout that entire time, and got credentialed with some other special skills that I otherwise never would have pursued. So, once I did get back to the team, right, now we're back in Afghanistan, it's 2015, two years or so from when I was wounded. Get off that bird. I did have that, you know, that glorifying moment that I had envisioned for months and months prior, you know, kind of that I'm back feeling, which was great. Extremely short-lived because it was time to go to work and it was August. So, the temperature is crazy. I talked earlier about kind of that clock that ticks with the

• 3:38:41Speaker 03

  prosthetic, especially in high temperatures. So, I'm dealing with, you know, 90s and the hundreds. So, even just from an APT perspective, I had a lot to learn and a lot to figure out. And then I also recognized a lot of gaps that I had in my tactical game. You know, although I had been training prior to on tactical, specific tasks, shoot, move, communicate type stuff, it wasn't the bulk of what I was doing. Most of my training was done within, you know, the weight room or on the track or in the pool type environments. Once I'm in Afghanistan and we're getting set up, I was like, okay, there's a lot of gaps that I have. I have a lot of work I need to do, you know, mundane stuff like getting

• 3:39:26Speaker 03

  in and out of an up armor truck. Like, I just never even thought that I need to train on something like that. Something you take for granted with someone with four appendages. Now, all of a sudden, it becomes kind of difficult, you know. So, just over the course of the deployment, you know, even just in the early month or two when we're there. And it was a kinetic mission. It was a CT mission. We're moving around quite a bit, running commandos, doing, you know, doing that stuff. For me, my employment was kind of a crawl, walk, run, where my team sergeant, you know, would take a real hard look at, you know, the objective and the logistics and the threats and just gradually started to include me in more and more and more things on the ground as we progressed.

• 3:40:11Speaker 03

  And as I made up the difference in those gaps that I was doing just off to the side, you know, during our downtime, I brought, I mentioned going in and out of a truck. There were times where literally just trained on getting in and out of a vehicle a hundred times, over and over and over and over again. I had my teammates out there competing for speed. Uh, they had me on a stopwatch, they're filming me, and this is me getting in and out of a truck, just countless times where I'm trying to, if I put my hand here, if I put my foot here, if I put this hand here, I can shave off a second. I can make it more efficient and then just repetition, repetition, repetition. So that was my life for that entire six month trip.

• 3:40:51Speaker 03

  But um, to your point and to your question, after the first maybe sixty or so days that we were there, and again, I'm kind of gradually easing into more and more of our kinetic ops. During that time, I was able to employ a lot of those skill sets that I had forced myself to learn um, during that train up process for me. And these were skill sets that didn't exist on the team, right? So unless they had gotten someone else in that had done those things, they would have, they would have had a gap, they would have had a void, one that I was able to fill in real time. And uh, and then I was recognized by, by the guys. So we kind of had, we had several kind of azimuth checks along that timeframe,

• 3:41:36Speaker 03

  but at, at about a halfway point through the trip, you know, two, three months in, we had kind of a full blown like team meeting, sit down about this specifically. So, okay, it's been about ninety days, we're here. This is how I've been employed, these are the things that I've done, these are the issues that I know that I still have. Like what, what are you guys seeing from your perspective? And um, the response to that was, hey man, we're, not only are we glad you, you're here, because you know, we love you, but that really doesn't matter. Uh, because we're, because what you're actually doing is, is making an impact within our mission. Like you are value added, and if you weren't here to do the things that you're doing, uh, we would be worse off.

• 3:42:19Speaker 03

  So um, we're good and Byron's something crazy happening.

• 3:42:24Speaker 03

  Let's just keep driving on. And I give my O D A leadership at that time a ton of credit because what I would, what I was doing was unprecedented. It hadn't happened before. Like there hadn't been an S F guy as an above the E A P T go back to a team and go back to combat. So there was visibility on us all the way up through the Beltway. Like senior, senior leaders were made aware that this was happening. Um, and no O D A or no soft element wants a lot of people looking at them. They want to be left alone to conduct their operations, right? Um, I give my leadership on the team a lot of credit because they absorbed that the incessant phone calls coming down

• 3:43:05Speaker 03

  from their boss's boss's boss because their boss keeps asking, hey, what's up with this one legged guy that's in Afghanistan? Like, how are things going? You know, a simple question like that, that's coming from a three star will get people spun up pretty fast. Um, so they dealt with that. Uh, the entire time I was there, almost to the point where if one thing happened, man, you know, if one thing happened, even something small, I think they were just ready to, to yank me off that team, yank me out of that mission. Hey, man, we tried it, you know, you gave it a shot. Congratulations for making it that far, but we, this beta test is done and like, we're going to remove you. I think that that's really where it was for the duration of the time we were in country.

• 3:43:48Speaker 03

  But fortunately, um, nothing to that scale, nothing, nothing happened that would warrant such a response.

• 3:43:59Speaker 03

  So overall, man, it was, uh, it was, it was successful.

• 3:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so it sounds, it sounds like it. How many more deployments did you do? As an amputee?

• 3:44:12Speaker 03

  Between then and now, um, another four?

• 3:44:17Shawn Ryan?

  Four deployments?

• 3:44:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:44:19Shawn Ryan?

  All combat deployments?

• 3:44:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:44:24Shawn Ryan?

  What was it?

• 3:44:27Shawn Ryan?

  Let's just say the first engagement that you got in after?

• 3:44:31Speaker 03

  As a one-legged guy?

• 3:44:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, as a one-legged guy.

• 3:44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 3:44:37Speaker 03

  Trying to think of the first one.

• 3:44:40Shawn Ryan?

  Any of them.

• 3:44:41Speaker 03

  Different, yeah, different.

• 3:44:43Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, were you 100% focused on what you need to be focused on? Or was the fact that you have one leg now constantly in the back of your head?

• 3:44:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was definitely um some hesitation and some lack of focus to where it normally would have been at 100%.

• 3:45:02Speaker 03

  Because I'm concerned about tripping and falling and stumbling down and, you know, I was still really early on in this amputee game, man. I'm like two years out. And you spent time at Walter Reed with some of these more experienced amputees that are coming back through to get new legs and new whatever, guys that have been amputees for a decade. One of the questions I would ask them would be, hey, how long does it take for this? For this just to become normal for you? This just to become the way things are and it's everything is just in sync? And the answers would vary, but it would usually hone in around seven, eight, nine, 10 years. It's kind of what it would take to for this to be just normal. I'm, you know, I'm just over two years out. And I'm running through, you know, the mountains of Afghanistan. Um, on my prosthetic, so.

• 3:45:48Speaker 03

  Nerve wracking in a lot of ways, it was almost like the first time I was in an engagement. Because it was just so different. And that same level of uncertainty, like where do I go? What do I do as a brand new guy? That's like looking at the seniors for guidance to like, am I doing the right thing? I kind of felt something similar to that.

• 3:46:09Shawn Ryan?

  You felt like you were being judged?

• 3:46:12Speaker 03

  No, not that I was being judged, just that it was, it was, it was, I was in a new body.

• 3:46:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:18Speaker 03

  Doing the same thing, but in a new body, it just felt different.

• 3:46:24Speaker 03

  And I in, and I was, I was thinking about things in those moments that I otherwise never would have thought of. I got my feet in the right placement.

• 3:46:36Speaker 03

  As I'm moving towards a piece of cover, as I'm approaching it, analyzing the terrain to determine the fastest way to get behind that piece of cover. As I am now versus if I was on two legs, that's something that would not even be my mind. I'm just moving and I'm gonna get down and it's gonna take care of itself. Here, I have to actually think about how to go about doing that as efficiently as possible. Um, so it was a learning curve for sure.

• 3:47:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:03Speaker 03

  Just like really anything else.

• 3:47:05Shawn Ryan?

  Um. Have you a hundred percent overcome that? Being in your head?

• 3:47:12Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't think about it as much.

• 3:47:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:47:15Speaker 03

  No, I don't think about it as much. You know, random obstacles will trip me up literally and figuratively at times. Still, you know, I've been in APT now just over nine years. So I still have plenty to learn and I still trip and fall at times. Um, but I don't, I don't expend as much deliberate thinking into my physical movements as I did, you know, when I was two years out.

• 3:47:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:43Speaker 03

  Trying to, trying to learn combat as a one-legged guy.

• 3:47:47Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man.

• 3:47:49Shawn Ryan?

  What, what was your, what was your team's response after the first, first engagement?

• 3:47:58Speaker 03

  It wasn't that much different than normal.

• 3:48:03Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 3:48:04Speaker 03

  There wasn't like a lot of focus on me and being like, let's sell, let's, let's spray beers on each other because you know, Nick just did his first, got through his first gunfight as an APT. There really wasn't much focus on me. Um, we had some junior guys on the team for that trip, their first team, fresh out of the Q course. So as, as a senior dude, uh, most of it was kind of focused on them and like letting them ride that high and kind of focusing on the lessons that need to be learned for their sake, more so than, hey, we got into a tick and Nick's here and like nothing bad happened.

• 3:48:45Speaker 03

  So like, let's celebrate. So it was kind of, it was kind of marginalized, really.

• 3:48:50Shawn Ryan?

  Were you expecting any of that?

• 3:48:53Speaker 03

  No, I really wasn't. In fact, if there was, I probably would have been annoyed.

• 3:48:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:57Speaker 03

  You know, like get it, like stop, like get away from me.

• 3:49:02Speaker 03

  Whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah. It probably would have irritated me, but it really wasn't anything to that, anything like that. There's a funny story to fast forward to my following deployment quickly. We were on Somalia and kinetic CT type op. We ended up taking a village and we were gonna run, we're gonna rest overnight at this spot. And we're getting set up, vehicle set up. I'm in a, I'm in an up armored, high lux, up armored pickup truck with one of the dudes that we were working with who was in a separate unit. It's just he and I, he wasn't one of my teammates. We'd been working together for the trip, but we didn't know each other really that well. And I'm like, hey, man, I gotta take a shit.

• 3:49:47Speaker 03

  And he's like, okay, cool. Like, why are you telling me this? You know, things are chill. Like, we just cleared the village. We got a couple detainees that are getting dealt with. Partner forces managing that. Partner forces setting up a perimeter for us. We're kind of managing cats, right? Doing what we do. And I tell this dude, I gotta take a shit. He's like, great news. Thank you for that. And I said, yeah, it's like a little bit more complicated for me. I need to detach my prosthetic in order to do that. Just by the way, this is physically attached to my body. He's like, okay. I said, here's what we're gonna do.

• 3:50:21Speaker 03

  You're gonna back this truck up to like that point right there where I'm gonna dig a hole and like get ready to do my thing. And I'm gonna use the tailgate to help me do a single leg squat backwards. So I don't shit all over myself. And I'm also not trying to hold a single leg squat and then shit. He's like, okay, cool, man. I got it. Makes sense. Like, I got you. Let's do this. So it was like a team effort. So he backs the truck up, you know? I take my prosthetic off, take my kit off, throw it in the back of the truck. Dig a hole. Good to go. I'm holding on to the tailgate of the truck. I lean back, using the truck to kind of brace me, some of my body weight. I'm taking a shit. Sure enough. Boom.

• 3:51:06Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta be fucking kidding me.

• 3:51:08Speaker 03

  Round stat clacking. And it wasn't this like crazy organized ambush, whatever. It was a couple of shitheads that decided to get creative. But still, and they're relatively close to us. Partner force is still setting up a perimeter, so they're still kind of scrambling. And a couple of rounds like ting off the like the hood area of the truck that I'm holding on to. He's in the truck. He's like yelling at me. He's like, we got, you know, we got contact nine o'clock, contact nine o'clock. Well, I just hurl myself over the tailgate into the back of the pickup truck just to get some cover.

• 3:51:44Speaker 03

  Pants down, kit in the truck, weapon in the truck, prosthetics in the back of the truck. I'm laying on top of all this stuff. It it was over within, you know, 10 seconds. But now I'm in the back of this pickup truck and I'm just covered in facies. And this dude, his name is Matt. He pops out of the truck and he comes back and he takes one look at me and he just starts laughing his ass off. Rightfully so. You know, so literally a shit show. And I'm kind of like looking around like this totally just happened. Okay, cool. You know, one of my teammates ends up kind of coming over. He sees what's going on. He's like, what just happened? And then he can see and visualize what happened. He gets on the radio. It was a good time all around, right?

• 3:52:29Speaker 03

  Um, but just kind of a funny, one-legged guy combat engagement story that obviously ended up being more of a more of a joke and something to laugh about.

• 3:52:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:40Speaker 03

  But something you don't think about until, you know, you're in the moment and it happens. It's like, okay, that just happened.

• 3:52:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:47Speaker 03

  You know?

• 3:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, good stuff.

• 3:52:52Shawn Ryan?

  So you you went to dive school as a one-legged guy?

• 3:52:57Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 3:52:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. That, um.

• 3:53:06Speaker 03

  And the reasoning behind that, this wasn't, this was just recently, and I just went back in 2020. Um, just over a couple of years ago. And when I went through the warrant officer course in 2019,

• 3:53:23Speaker 03

  I was the first amputee to go through the SF warrant officer pipeline. So I went through that. And with about a week left till we graduate is usually when you get assigned to a team you're gonna go to. And I get assigned to the team that I'm currently on now. And uh, there's four digits to an SF ODA. If it, if an ODA ends in the number four, then it's a free fall team. They specialize in military free fall or HALO. If the number ends in a number five, it's a dive team. So you know right off the bat, if it's a four or five team, what type of team it is. The rest within the company can be really anything. So I get told I'm going to the team that I'm on now. And I immediately know it's a dive team because it ends in the number five.

• 3:54:09Speaker 03

  Like, that's interesting. Okay. And I had the same response that most guys have when they get told to go into a dive team, which is, holy shit, you know, this is gonna suck, right? SF Combat Diver Qualification Course is widely considered the most physically and mentally challenging course in the Army. Probably by a mile, which I would agree with. Um, it's tough to argue against that when the human body requires oxygen above anything else to stay alive, including blood and water and food and anything. And in that course, you will go without oxygen for an extended period of time in repetition.

• 3:54:49Speaker 03

  And to get through that course, you have to fight every single natural survival instinct that we have as humans and battle through those demons. Um, so mentally, that's where it becomes really challenging. And then physically, it's also a really challenging course. I had the same response that most guys have, which is mostly fear and concern and uncertainty. I said, okay, looks like I've now have my next two challenges in front of me. One is taking the team as the assistant's attachment commander as an officer, which is new to me. I've been an enlisted guy for, you know, at that point it was like 12 years.

• 3:55:25Speaker 03

  So that'll be new, but now I also gotta try to figure out this whole maritime ops thing.

• 3:55:31Speaker 03

  So left Brad, graduated the warm course, got back to Fort Campbell, had a meeting with my company command team. And within the first couple of minutes of that conversation, they told me that they had no expectations of me going to dive school, which I found interesting. And I said, okay. Subsequently, I had the same conversation with the battalion command team, just like a couple of days later. And they said the same thing to me. And in both of those independent conversations, my response was the same and said, well, okay, that's fine that that you're telling me that, but I'm gonna attempt dive school.

• 3:56:08Speaker 03

  And they were kind of like, okay, it looks like maybe some of these rumors we heard about this nut job, one-legged dude in group might be true. And they're like, okay, man, but like, we don't know if like you're even allowed to go to dive school based on the physical profile that you have and your limiting conditions as per the army, right? As an APT, we don't know if you can even if you're allowed to go. I said, yeah, I don't know if I'm allowed to go either, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure it out.

• 3:56:38Speaker 03

  So my first day with the team was in the pool. It just kind of so happened to work out that way where they were running, my ODA was running the pre-dive course, which is the prerequisite course you have to pass in order to be able to go to dive school. Different ODAs will run that within the groups. And my team happened to be tasked with running it and it started my first day on the team. So my first day with the guys, I'm in the pool and they're running the course with the students that were in it. And I was just kind of off to the side, trying to mimic what the students were going through and really just try to figure out how to do all these tasks and requirements that you need to be able to pass

• 3:57:22Speaker 03

  to demonstrate that you are a viable candidate to actually go to dive school to Key West. That was my introduction to the team, introduction to work as a warrant officer. And obviously my introduction into subsurface maritime operations on a dive team, all happening at the same time. And my teammates are phenomenal, you know, and they, they didn't quite know what right looked like because no one had played around with this before. Yeah. Some of these events, it's very meticulous, the way you do some of these things, you know, it's like left foot here, right foot here, it's, it's prescriptive because it's based on risk and efficiency. How do we, this is dangerous stuff we're doing. How do we mitigate that risk and increase efficiency?

• 3:58:03Speaker 03

  So they've described, they've created these prescriptions that you follow step by step by step. Well, some of that stuff just doesn't apply to me because I don't have a right foot to step right over there. So how, so we're kind of playing around with modifying some of these procedures and modifying some of these techniques to execute all these tasks. And it's just brutal, man. I mean, it's absolutely brutal. Not only is it physically exhausting, but you know, you're having to push yourself past the point of what your body is telling you to do, which is go to the surface and breathe because you're a land walking mammal and you have to ignore all that. So just an amazing struggle physically and mentally.

• 3:58:44Speaker 03

  Um, so I'm training physically to see if I can figure out how to do this. And then concurrently was kind of the administrative side of the house to get approval to actually go. And it's a great story, man. So I go down and I get my dive physical done, which is the most in-depth physical there is in the army. Is the one you need to do before you are given the green light to go to dive school. They check you for everything. Right? Blood work, EKG, all kinds of stuff that they normally wouldn't do. So I go through my full dive physical and I'm cleared hot medically. Well, then I need to submit a waiver that needs to get approved to go because I have

• 3:59:27Speaker 03

  a permanent physical profile because I'm an amputee. So that has to get approved by the SWIC surgeon, right? SWIC is Special Warfare Center and School, which is where selection, the Q course, and a lot of our schoolhouse programs all fall underneath the SWIC command, including dive school. So the SWIC surgeon is the approving authority for me to be able to go. He's an O6. So the clinic tells me, hey, we're gonna send off your waiver for approval. And they're like, we don't know if this is gonna get approved. We've never submitted anything like this before. No one had submitted a waiver for that before. So no one knew what was gonna happen. So they submit it and it's like a week later, man.

• 4:00:12Speaker 03

  And I'm training in the pool just about every day, just getting my ass kicked, brutal. I get a phone call from some random 910 area code number out of North Carolina. And I answer the phone and before I said, you know, before I can even say hello, there's just this yelling on the other end of the line. And I'm like, what? Hello? What is this? And it's like a dude is yelling about a profile that he's looking at for a one-legged guy who wants to go to dive school. And what I think had just happened was someone happened to inadvertently dial my phone number and that person's having a conversation about me with somebody else. Oh shit. That's what it sounded like I was hearing.

• 4:00:57Speaker 03

  So I'm going, hello, I'm yelling. That's not what was happening. The guy that called me, called me intentionally. He was just yelling at me. And eventually I realized who it was. His first name's Mike. And he was the, prior to being the SWIC surgeon, he was the third group surgeon back when he was a lieutenant colonel. And he was actually the first guy that operated on me at Bagram in Afghanistan in 2013 when I got brought in on that medevac bird. No way. Yep. First guy that operated on me was him. And he's a wild man. He's still in now, but he's a wild man. Awesome individual, you know, saved my life. One of the many that saved my life. He's now the SWIC surgeon. And eventually, I'm like, who the hell is this? And he tells me who it is.

• 4:01:42Speaker 03

  And I'm like, oh, sir, what is, who do you, what's going on, man? What are you doing? You know? Why are you calling me? What? And why are you talking about me? I was just completely confused. He's like, no, man, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm at SWIC now. And I said, okay, cool. Wait, are you the? Are you the approving authority for my waiver? He said, yeah, I am. I said, okay, well, are you going to approve it? And he's like, yeah, I already did. I says, I just sent it back, like, you're good to go. You know, he's like, I think you're out of your fucking mind that you want to go down to dive school. As a thirty seven year old warrant officer with one leg, all three of those things are extraordinarily uncommon to go, even go to dive school. Like dive school is a young man's game where dudes typically go right when they graduate the course,

• 4:02:27Speaker 03

  they get assigned to a dive team and then they immediately go through that process to get dive qualified to be on that team. So most of the, most of the kids that are at dive school are in their, you know, early to mid twenties. Um, as like, as, as junior NCOs is usually what you see. To be thirty seven years old as a warrant going to dive school just by itself is extremely uncommon. And then obviously, when you factor in the fact that I'm an APT and that an APT, no APT had ever attempted to go before. It puts me in this like crazy weirdo unicorn category. So the Colonel, um, he approved it.

• 4:03:10Speaker 03

  You know, I always wonder if, if that would have been denied hadn't I had, you know, a history with the dude that needed to say yes. So I got pretty lucky, I think, that it was him. And he knew enough about me to, that he was okay to assume that risk and let me go anyway. Um, so once that was, once that was greenlit, man, then it was, then it was really game on. Um, you know, from that point and.

• 4:03:36Speaker 03

  Things get even, things get even more complex because now we're in early 2020, right? I got to my team in

• 4:03:46Speaker 03

  the, in May of 2019. And I'm in the pool, I'm in the pool. And it's now early 2020 and I am, uh, I'm getting ready to go to dive school, right? Well, then COVID happens early 2020 and everything closes, like all the schools close, the gyms close, the pools close. I was supposed to go in, in May to dive school. And I was supposed to go to pre-dive in April and then dive in May. And right now we're in around March of 2020 and I'm getting prepped to go into pre-dive as a student. And everything shuts down. So I assume that dive school is canceled and we'll just see what happens with this COVID thing.

• 4:04:29Speaker 03

  And then I'll, I'll pick it back up once we know what this looks like. So I stopped training. I can't get into a pool. I don't think I'm going dive school. Up to that point, I had been training like a crazy person, very similar to the way that I was training. When I was trying to get back onto the team. You know, I locked myself into this dungeon and I was just pain and punishment. And I knew that I needed to push, especially my endurance capacity to just a whole nother echelon. If I was going to have a chance of making it through a, a course like that with that kind of curriculum. So I was training three, four times a day, doing dry breath hold training two, three times a day. It was just non-stop. All that stopped because COVID happens and everything shuts down.

• 4:05:14Speaker 03

  So I go about two, three weeks where I'm just kind of chilling. I'm doing these little like home workouts with what I had, you know, available to me. And the dive school sergeant major was a, is a third group guy who I knew. He was actually one of my instructors when I was a student in the Q course. He's now sergeant major in charge of dive school. He, uh, he calls me, calls my cell phone and he says, hey, man, um, we just got the green light. We're running dive school in May on schedule. We got a waiver to run it. We're running it. I'm like, dude, I haven't been training the last like two, three weeks. I can't even get into a pool. I haven't gone through pre dive. Like, how is this even supposed to work? He's like, yeah, we're working that out now, but like start training like now, because this thing's going off.

• 4:05:59Speaker 03

  So then we start scrambling, my team really, to try to figure out how to get me into a pool. So I can demonstrate all of the required events that you need to pass at the end of pre dive. To be credentialed to go to dive school. I needed, I still needed to do that. And what we ended up doing, we went a little off the rails, but we found a YMCA. That was up in Madison Fieldville, Kentucky. That one of my teammates used to work at when he was in high school as a lifeguard. You gotta be shitting me. Calls up this facility that's been closed for about seven weeks because of COVID. And they agreed to open up the facility to let us in to come in and train.

• 4:06:43Speaker 03

  Now I had four days before I met that endpoint where I needed to have my memo signed and submitted that I had. Demonstrated that I can pass all these events. Normally, which happens at the end of a two week training block. For me, I had not only not gone through that two weeks, but I hadn't been in the water for almost three. That's a very perishable skill. Yeah. Right. It goes away really quickly. So we have four days in this random pool in the YMCA in Kentucky. They opened the facility. We get in there and my whole team's there. And not only is it a deeper pool than what I had been training on, which makes a difference.

• 4:07:27Speaker 03

  But it's freezing because they hadn't, it hadn't been turned on. Like I'm talking, it's in the sixties. Oh shit. I'm like, oh my God. Okay. So I get in this thing and I'm training. For three days in a row, boom, boom, boom. I do not pass a single event in any of those three days. Not one. Fail, fail, fail. Failure after failure. Every day was like four or five hours a day. Three days in a row. Didn't successfully pass a single one of those events. Now we're on day four and our actual dive locker cadre. These are the guys that certify the candidates at the end of, or during pre dive. They show up to validate me. And I walk in there and I'm pretty disgruntled.

• 4:08:12Speaker 03

  I'm like, there's no way this is gonna happen. I've got my ass kicked the last three days.

• 4:08:20Speaker 03

  And I pass all the events. No shit. Pass all the events and the NCOIC of our dive locker, of our maritime support section detachment. He said, yeah, man, you know, you, you did it all. You're good to go. So that gets sent down to Key West. They're like, you're cleared hot. Medical, you're good to go. Waiver's good to go. Come on down, man. And uh, let's, let's see how this goes. Wow. Yeah. And then, you know, Key West itself, the school itself, it's six weeks long. You know, it's brutal. I was hanging on by a thread the entire time. Um, and like barely hanging on by a thread.

• 4:09:03Speaker 03

  You know, the cadre down there, uh, were very deliberate about not treating me any different than anybody else. Same standards apply, period. Uh, they, cause they have to, right? The, the events that you go through prior to getting into the ocean are there for a reason. And it's to mitigate those that are too much, too high risk to put in the ocean. Cause the ocean doesn't cooperate. And I'm talking to a SEAL, you know this better than I do. Things go wrong, especially when you go underwater. Things are gonna go wrong. So they, they go through that, that, that rigorous training prior to in the pool. Um, to weed out those that, that don't display the level of capability to remain calm under pressure under the most extreme circumstances.

• 4:09:44Speaker 03

  Um, but no one really knew how I was gonna complete some of these tasks. So it was a little bit of a learning curve for everybody where sometimes they would give me like ten minutes to try to figure out what body position I would need to go into. Where this is what students normally do. That doesn't work for you because normally they would be on their knees, for example, at the bottom of the pool for this event. Well, you don't have one of those, so try this, try this, try this, you know, I'm playing with different prosthetic attachments, different components to try to get somewhere close um to a position to be able to do it. And then it was like, okay, now we're going live, like, let's go.

• 4:10:27Speaker 03

  Man, so it was huh. It was a brutal six weeks.

• 4:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 4:10:34Speaker 03

  You know, brutal six weeks for sure. I, on the back end of that, I was completely and totally exhausted. But um, I, I, I made it through.

• 4:10:45Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta ask, I mean,

• 4:10:48Shawn Ryan?

  how the fuck do you do it? Do you, are you, do you have the prosthetic when you're in, when you're in the ocean and you're diving or?

• 4:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, so I, originally I, I went to my prosthetist who's a, you know, a, a private clinic is who I see. Cause there isn't a prosthetist section department on Fort Campbell. And uh, that's who I work with and they're, they're, they're amazing. They gave me a fin to use. And basically I would detach my prosthetic just above the knee. And then I would insert this fin into my socket, just a fixed fin. That's all it was, couldn't walk on it, there's no foot, it's just a fin. Um, that's what I used and it's this little baby thing, it's really small. Uh, my, and my teammates were calling it my, the Finding Nemo fin, cause it was just so, it was just so different to my leg, you know?

• 4:11:39Speaker 03

  It really didn't do much for propulsion. It really just kinda acted as a rudder. It would give me just enough stability for me to recock my actual engine, which was ninety-nine percent done through my left leg. That was what was propelling me, whether I was treading or if I was traversing or whatever it was I was doing. My left leg was the one that was moving me. My right leg was just enough to kinda give me a little bit of counterbalance to help me navigate. Or just keep me above water just long enough to recock the next guy, my actual leg.

• 4:12:12Speaker 03

  I get down to Key West and this is what I'm using. This is the equipment that I was given. It's like, I'm gonna make this work. And I make it through the precipice of dive school, which that precipices the one man confidence test,

• 4:12:26Speaker 03

  which is just an underwater hellish experience, kind of at the pinnacle of your entry pool section or phase of dive school. And usually, once you cross that threshold and you pass that test, the attrition rate drops dramatically. That's where most people get lost is in the phases prior to and then during one man

• 4:12:52Speaker 03

  is when most guys get lost. Because after that, you actually start diving. That's when you get run to the ocean. And now they're really teaching you how to do, you know, subsurface infiltration and navigation. So I make it past one man and now I'm getting ready to go in the ocean. Well, there's a nonprofit referred to, they're called the Combat Wounded Veterans Challenge. And these guys place a lot of emphasis on maritime activities for combat wounded vets. Mostly it's amputees. And they go down to Florida, down to Key West once a year for their kind of annual dive event. And they bring in all these vets, that most of which are amputees, and they take them diving, like recreational style diving. Well, they use the pool on Key West at CDQC

• 4:13:36Speaker 03

  as their train up area, as they're fitting these guys and girls with different prosthetic components. Put them in the pool, have them move around. So there's a relationship that exists between that nonprofit and the schoolhouse. Well, once I pass one man, the company commander of dive school calls up this nonprofit and says, hey, we got this guy down here. He just passed one man. We're about to put him in the ocean. This is the equipment he's using and it's not gonna work when he actually goes subsurface. Because there's a certain element of drift that happens when your two mechanisms of propulsion are so different. When I'm doing a surface swim and I have a visual representation

• 4:14:20Speaker 03

  of where I'm trying to go, I can correct for that. Once you go subsurface, you're just looking at a navigation board and a compass. You're just shooting an azimuth and you're going straight. You're not gonna notice or be able to correct that level of drift. And the commander down there knew that. So he calls this this nonprofit up and says, this is the situation. Can you help this guy out? And the next day, four of them jumped on a plane and flew down to Key West with us. The case of prosthetic components. And sure enough, I was in the, I was in the ocean that day. And we did some short dives, like 500 meter type dives. And when I was driving, meaning I'm the one on the compass, I was wildly off course.

• 4:15:02Speaker 03

  You know, you're above, you got your azimuth, you look at your target, you go subsurface, you shoot that azimuth and you just go. By the time I hit the shore, I would be, I was way off target because of that level of drift, because my propulsion was so imbalanced. So the commander was right. And I had no idea that this was happening in the background and this team shows up and they're like, okay, man, let's, let's get this figured out. So I spent about four hours that night in the pool with these guys that were trying all these different types of prosthetic components on me. And they ended up giving me one that basically we, I attach a freediving style fin, which

• 4:15:44Speaker 03

  is a really long, narrow fin that a lot of like spear fishermen will use. Really flimsy kind? Flimsy and long and narrow. Oh, good. Yeah, so I ended up getting a configuration where that was attached to my prosthetic side because it's much longer. And then I would use a standard one on my sound side. When I got back in the water in the coming days, once I got done kind of feeling it out and playing with it, man, it was like I had a, an engine because my left leg had gotten so strong because that's really what was driving me that once they gave me something that gave me some propulsion, I was like a rocket ship under there, so. No shit.

• 4:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my, my components changed while I was in the course. And then it was a matter of figuring out how to do like BLS procedures, like once we actually hit the beach, if I'm using a fin that doesn't have a foot on it, doesn't have a knee. I can't secure a beach tactically with, obviously with that. That was gonna be my next question. Yeah, so we get to, you know, we get to our BLS site to actually go through our procedures. Where you normally, you know, you take off your fins, you rig up your stuff, you get your rifle ready to go, you go through that as an element. Before you come surface and go on. Where it just, I had another step in the process. Which was to detach my fin. Secure that to my kit. Pull off my actual prosthetic that was secured to my kit.

• 4:17:12Speaker 03

  Reattach that. Secure that in. And then be able to walk up. Under the shore. No shit. Yeah. That's incredible, man.

• 4:17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was tough. Damn, how long ago was that? About two years? Uh, almost exactly two years. I graduated in June of 2020. Wow. Yeah. But you know, man, people ask like, why'd you go to dive school? You know, we, we just looking for kind of that next challenge? It was handed to me because. I was put in a leadership position on a dive team. It, it's a professional obligation to be a combat diver, to be dive qualified. To be on a dive team. Does it? And I'm not about to be treated any differently than anybody else. Especially in a leadership role. You know, the, the one thing that binds di- dive teams together. It's having gone through that additional filter. Of dive school and coming out on the back end successful.

• 4:18:07Speaker 03

  Rite of passage, if you want to use that, but it really is what makes dive teams special. It makes them great. Not just based on the maritime capability. But within all spectrums of operations, because you've just been through an additional. Layer of scrutiny. And have demonstrated your willingness to literally die. Put your life on the line. Uh, for your dive buddy and to stay calm under pressure. When you take 12 dudes that have all been through that additional screening. And lump them together, I don't care what kind of military operation you're conducting. You're gonna have a high performing team. At your disposal. Um, so I wasn't about to be. Held to a different standard or treated any differently. I was gonna exhaust every single possible option. To get down there and, and, and do it.

• 4:18:53Speaker 03

  So that's why I did it, man. I just happened to get tasked to a dive team and, okay. I'm on a dive team, that means I need to be a diver. So let's. Let's go. Damn.

• 4:19:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible. Your team has got to have so much fucking respect for you.

• 4:19:14Speaker 03

  I'd like to think so.

• 4:19:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can't even. I mean, wow, I'm just blown away, man. I'm blown away.

• 4:19:25Shawn Ryan?

  So what's next for you?

• 4:19:28Speaker 03

  What's next, man? So, you know, I'm still on the team now, but uh, but that's about to come, you know, to an end here pretty soon.

• 4:19:37Speaker 03

  The like, the next evolution of my career progression is on the horizon. So I'm going to savour what last moments I have, you know, being a team guy. And then I'm going to embrace that next phase of my military career. Uh, with open arms and with motivation and excitement. It took me a while to be able to be accepting of that. You know, I'm currently doing the only thing that I really want to do in the military is be on a team, but you can't do it, you can't do it forever, man. Like it runs its course. You know, I've had a really great run. It's been 15 years. Over nine of which has been on one leg. And that comes with a price, you know, physically it comes with a price. There's a lot of compensation that goes on here.

• 4:20:20Speaker 03

  Where I've got muscles and joints and ligaments and tendons that are operating, I'm forcing to operate in a way in which God really didn't intend for them to be used. And I've been very lucky, um, as well as had a sophisticated training program that I've followed meticulously that has allowed me to have this run that I've had. So, um, it's bittersweet, right, to say goodbye to the team life, but you know, that next thing, kind of moving up to to the next echelon of leadership really just kind of broadens your your level of influence and kind of what you can affect. So I'm actually at a place now where I'm looking forward to it. And that's kind of in the short term, man, you know, like I got another five years

• 4:21:02Speaker 03

  left of active duty time before I hit that 20 year mark, which buying something crazy is what I will do as a professional and personal goal that I've set, you know, years ago to see that thing through the finish line.

• 4:21:18Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna enjoy the time that I have, you know, learn as much as I can while I keep doing it. And then beyond that, you know, getting out of, you know, out of uniform. I'm, you know, in, in many ways, I'm really already doing it as kind of a passion project. Uh, where I will continue to write, um, consulting, uh, workshops, seminars, speaking. Um, so really, you know, doing what I do now as a, as an SF warrant officer. With most of what I do is, as, works is as an advisor to decision makers. Really just maintaining that, um, but taking it, you know, obviously out of uniform to a variety of different, you know, sectors and industries and individuals. So.

• 4:22:02Speaker 03

  I'm blessed, man, where I, I've lived the last 15 years and I live the lifestyle of one that, that I genuinely love. And it's one of purpose. And, uh, I've already identified what that next thing is. So. Where a lot of guys struggle with transitioning out, um, I won't have that. I won't have that struggle because I know what it is and I'm, I'm slowly and meticulously grinding towards that now.

• 4:22:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, there's, I was, you know, at the beginning of this, I wanted to talk to you about that, but I mean. You're just so resilient and you've overcome every, literally every fucking obstacle that you've come across. And I don't see how that could be any different at all, especially considering what you've overcome already. I mean, man, I, I just.

• 4:22:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. That's, that's, I just, I'm fucking speechless, man. Your career, everything is just. The resiliency is, it's nothing short of incredible. It really is.

• 4:23:10Speaker 03

  It's been a wild ride, man.

• 4:23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll say.

• 4:23:13Speaker 03

  It's been a wild ride, but, and I'll say that. I truly believe at the core of resilience is uh is passion and purpose and that's not kittens and rainbows kumbaya and the clouds shit that's that's real stuff and when you love something and when you believe that you were put on this earth to do something that enables you to get past the endless list of challenges and setbacks and punches to the face you know and falling literally on your ass over and over and over again you know when when that doubt starts to come in you start to question what it is you're trying to do when you are obsessed with it which

• 4:23:54Speaker 03

  for me is comes through the lens of the guys I get to work with just these elite men um when you love it that much it it makes it possible

• 4:24:07Shawn Ryan?

  yeah I'm just gonna say man you've got to be one of the most baddest motherfuckers that I've ever met in my entire life and I've I mean that's that's I'm not saying that lightly that is um you know I've been in the community I've I know a ton of guys and that that I've never heard anything like this it's incredible

• 4:24:31Speaker 03

  well no man well I appreciate it I'm glad I got a chance to yeah talk it out with you bro

• 4:24:35Shawn Ryan?

  yeah me too for real but um where can people find you

• 4:24:39Speaker 03

  yeah man um I have a website it's machinenick.com that's got access to um interviews podcasts the socials are all on there my Instagram is probably the most followed platform uh it's nick.machine.lavery

• 4:24:59Speaker 03

  get the book on there you can see the the nonprofits that I work with his support on the website as well so that's probably the one stop shop and then most importantly is uh how to get ahold of me so I'm meticulous about about going through my emails sometimes it can take a few weeks but uh by encourage people whether they got questions about being an APT or physical training or what's life like as a as an SF guy uh by all means send it man and uh and I will get get back to you guys personally

• 4:25:28Shawn Ryan?

  Roger that well I'll link all those below every all your social your website everything I'll link your book below as well so anybody that wants to purchase it can go and uh Let's get the hell out of here and go get some dinner. Let's do it, man. All right, man. Cheers. Cheers.