#51 Chris VanSant - Delta Force Operator / Killing Off the "Deck of Cards" & Capturing Saddam Hussein | Part 2

Delta Force Operator Chris VanSant is back in Part 2 of this two-part series. This episode dives deep into his role in the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein. VanSant vividly recalls an engagement with over 300 enemy combatants after a goat herder revealed his team's location. We get a first hand account of the operational tempo it takes to hunt down each player of the infamous "Deck of Cards," and what happens when a handful of Delta Operators are outnumbered in the Horn of Africa with only the Navy Destroyer U. S. S. Chafee for cover. VanSant tells stories of loss and grappling with the survivor's guilt that would ultimately change the course of his life. Chris serves on the board of the All Secure Foundation and is on a multi-year effort to complete the seven summits to raise awareness for veteran mental health and support All Secure. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://mudwtr.com/shawn - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://mypatriotsupply.com Chris VanSant Links: All Secure Foundation | Instagram | LinkedIn Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram 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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• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. This is part two of the Chris Van Zandt episode. Chris is a former Delta operator with a phenomenal career. If you guys haven't checked out part one, I'd highly recommend it because it threw us back into the top 100 of all podcasts. That's out of over 8 million podcasts. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. If you haven't left us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, please head over there, especially on Spotify. Alls you gotta do is click that five-star review, and that's it. And on Apple, if you don't mind, just leave us a one-word review. Tell us how we're doing. We love you all. Please like, comment, subscribe, share the episode.

• 1:44Shawn Ryan?

  If you're getting something out of this, share it. All right. Love you all. Enjoy the show. Lots of good stuff coming. Cheers.

• 1:54Shawn Ryan?

  Previously on The Sean Ryan Show.

• 1:58Chris VanSant?

  So I went to the regiment as a young private and a year after being there, I had an alcohol-related incident. I had a DUI. So I left the regiment after about a year and change for having this alcohol-related incident. So even though I served there, I trained there and I was a part of that organization, I left.

• 2:17Shawn Ryan?

  What's the culture like at the Ranger Regiment?

• 2:19Chris VanSant?

  I mean, it was the hardest training place in the Army. Yeah, it was some hard charge and hard training dudes, which wasn't necessarily the case in the rest of the conventional Army. My platoon sergeant, and if he ever hears one of these things, I hope to God the man finds me on social media and reaches out to me. This kid, he reached out and grabbed an AK. And I basically went from the high ready to on him to off safe. And he threw the AK on the ground. They cuffed his wrists, you know, so he was in the back of the van with his wrist cuffs and he slid the window open and hopped out. I don't know how many more people that dude killed. Like, how many more people his bombs killed? How many more people he taught had to make bombs?

• 2:57Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break.

• 2:58Chris VanSant?

  Okay.

• 2:59Shawn Ryan?

  And when we come back, we'll get into Iraq.

• 3:07Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we're back. You just did a pump in Afghanistan, your first one at the unit. Come back, now you're going to Iraq. How long did you come home for before you're heading over to Iraq?

• 3:21Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, we got home in July. I think by mid-fall, we were in full-blown, we knew that we were potentially going to invade Iraq and we were doing a full-blown, you know, prep, training for doing a long-range desert mobility and invading the country. And then I think we deployed in February of '03 to RR Saudi Arabia, which was our staging point to kick off the invasion.

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit. When did, so, I mean, how did that feel, knowing that you're gonna go?

• 4:01Shawn Ryan?

  Be on the initial front for invading a country.

• 4:06Chris VanSant?

  Wild, yeah, I mean, we were excited.

• 4:10Chris VanSant?

  One, there was the historic nature of it. So, take away all the sides of going to war or not going to war. When you train to be a part of one of the most elite organizations on the planet, you know, it's like practicing to play in a football game. You know, you want to play in the football game. So, we were, we were pumped, we were excited, we were excited that we were chosen to be the, the, the force that did that particular mission set. There was some legacy there, so the unit had done long-range desert mobility in the first Gulf War, basically hunting scuds in the western desert of Iraq to try to eliminate that threat and Saddam's ability to influence things outside of the country and shoot those missiles into Saudi Arabia and other countries.

• 4:53Chris VanSant?

  In this particular case, it was a different mission set, but along the same lines. So, we were basically hunting WMD throughout the western desert. Current intel believes, and hindsight does a lot of things to the Iraq war, you and I both know, but at the time, we firmly believed that he had some type of WMD in whatever form. We assumed it was chemical at that time, and that if he was gonna have it, that it was gonna be stored not in Baghdad or to Krit, but it was gonna be outside of the city, in one of their outstations or their ammo supply points that were moving west out of Baghdad and into the western desert. So, yeah, we were excited, nervous, I think, but the legacy piece, you know, having been

• 5:36Chris VanSant?

  done in the first Gulf War, and then, you know, the last time a desert mobility was done prior to that was like way back in World War II, like in North Africa. So, it was a pretty neat thing to train and prepare for. It was different, it's not like you covered desert mobility in, in OTC. You know, I'd never, I think I probably had as much experience as anybody in that, you know, I had done that, that rotation to Kuwait with a mechanized unit. So, I personally, I understood what it was like to be out unsupported in the middle of the desert and crossing long distances. So, yeah, I was super pumped and excited for it. Uh, the weird part was when I got to RR Saudi Arabia, this is, here's our universe discussion

• 6:18Chris VanSant?

  right here. So when I got to RR Saudi Arabia, there were two other units that were co-located with us. One was some components of Third Range Battalion, one of which was Charlie Company, Third Range Battalion, which is the company that I was a part of. No shit. The other was a one company from the 82nd Airborne Division, which were accompanying like a High Mars Detachment or something else, but it was Alpha Company, 2nd 325. Damn. So literally, two of the three other organizations I had ever been a part of were all in that same spot at that point in time in history. And I, I've thought about that over the years. I'm like, what are the odds? If I'd have stayed in Third Range Battalion

• 7:02Chris VanSant?

  and I, you know, I don't know what I would have been at that point, probably a squad leader or something, but I would have been right there. If I would have stayed in Alpha Company, 2nd 325, I would have been right there. Damn. That's a really weird. That is crazy. Yeah. So that, I think that even at the time, I think I took that like, this is where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think I had a lot more, at least personal conference, confidence going into that than I did going to Afghanistan because I had deployed once, I'd gotten to know my team. Um, I felt like we had trained and prepared very well for that. And, uh, we were ready to go.

• 7:40Chris VanSant?

  How long were you there before you guys crossed the border? A couple of weeks, I think. Yeah. Um, it was not a very good, it was a kind of miserable existence. They slowly but surely shoved a bunch of people into that area and we didn't have the support structure to do it. So like in the beginning, we had like four porta potties for like 400 dudes. Oh. So they were literally overflowing. It was disgusting. Uh, it was cold, like the weather wasn't great. It was winter still on the desert. Um, yeah, but I think it was a couple of weeks before we, uh, yeah, got our like last mission brief and speech from the JSOC commander and, and off we went. Damn, I can't even imagine the, the anticipation of.

• 8:27Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is it gonna be today? Did you guys know when it was gonna be?

• 8:31Chris VanSant?

  No, like the exact day? No, not that I recall in the beginning. I mean, they would do team leader meetings and stuff every day and they would talk about things. But I don't remember us having a hard date till shortly before we left. But like I said, we weren't there that long. You know, there's, there's a, in most of the portions of that border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, there's a double berm system. That's really all that separates it. It's not like there's fencing or anything else. And so there's two berms and then at various intervals with miles and miles between them are Iraqi outposts that are like towers where they would post, you know, Iraqi military guys to sort of keep watch on the border. So we knew we had to cross those two berms. We were gonna do it in between outposts.

• 9:16Chris VanSant?

  That aviation assets, helos, you know, 160th guys were gonna take out the two outposts on either side and a radio communications point to hopefully silence their ability to say, hey, someone has crossed into our country.

• 9:31Shawn Ryan?

  How did it go?

• 9:33Chris VanSant?

  Uh, good. Yeah, like we started out, I think we drove most of the first night just getting to the border from where we were. So we spent a night out in the desert in Saudi Arabia where we all just sort of bagged out. And it was really cold. Like we actually, I think we got a little snow that night. Like nothing that stuck, but you know, you're in the middle of the desert and it snows. And it reminded me of, I read SAS guy, Andy McNabb's book, Bravo Two Zero. And he talks about it in that before their incident where they got snow. And I remember thinking, wow, that's weird. Like you don't expect to get snowed on in a desert. But, but yeah, we had a little snow. It was cold. We had every piece of snow gear we owned on. I was driving most of the time, like as a newer guy on the team.

• 10:13Chris VanSant?

  I drove the Pens Gower, the six wheeled on armored vehicle that our team was on. And we had an ATV in our team as well. So I drove the Gower. In this case, Brad drove the ATV and we would rotate positions, he and I, driving one or the other because you couldn't drive the ATV every night because we had thumb throttles.

• 10:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Chris VanSant?

  And you'd get that Jell-O thumb from holding that throttle down all the time. But yeah, we spent the night in Saudi Arabia, moved up to the berm. They had done some aerial reconnaissance and they had found a bulldozer that was sitting all by itself in a location on the Saudi Arabian side. Who knows who it belonged to, but we had mechanics with us, which is interesting too. But in order to support our element, we needed that technical expertise. So those guys invaded right along with us on our vehicles.

• 11:00Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 11:00Chris VanSant?

  And they hotwired the bulldozer and used the bulldozer to plow down enough of the berm that we could drive the vehicles over. And so after they had finished plowing the berm, we kind of coordinated efforts. 160th came in and all we heard, you know, was the calls over the radio. But they basically smoked the two guard towers on either side and we drove into Iraq.

• 11:25Shawn Ryan?

  Did you start gauging people?

• 11:27Chris VanSant?

  No, no, so we didn't.

• 11:28Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take?

• 11:29Chris VanSant?

  Uh, I don't remember if it was the first night or the second night. So we had a series of targets planned along the way. We would drive all night, basically under night vision. We had some other technology on our side, like we had, we had ground-based FLIR balls at the time. And it was the first time they were used. You know, other than that, it was like helos and aircraft and stuff like that. But they didn't have them on ground-based vehicles. And so we actually had them on like every, I think we had three total for the squadron. And my vehicle was one of the ones with the FLIR. So I had this big LCD screen between me and Chili, who was the team leader at the time. And he was sitting in the TC seat, you know, in the passenger seat of the Gower. And so I could see everything he looked at with the FLIR ball. So that was nice.

• 12:13Chris VanSant?

  But either the first or second night, we had bedded down for our rest over day site. So we'd find a wadi or a depression or something to hide in, put camo netting out, put out security and then get some rack for the day, eat some chow, et cetera. And we woke up to an aircraft fire. Um, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it went on for like thirty minutes. And it sounded like it was just over like the next rise, like it was really close. And that was probably the first like, okay, we're in a, we just invaded a country and we're at war. Um, and it won't be long before we're involved in something. And I think if we had a big fear during all that time, it was that we were in unarmored vehicles.

• 12:55Shawn Ryan?

  You guys were in unarmored vehicles?

• 12:57Chris VanSant?

  No armor whatsoever.

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  All that technology and you had unarmored, why did you have unarmored vehicles?

• 13:02Chris VanSant?

  Uh, the, because the platforms were built for long range desert mobility.

• 13:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 13:06Chris VanSant?

  Um, you know, we had a lot of guns, you know, like I think our defense was we're gonna put more stuff in your direction than you can put in ours. We had some anti-tank weapons, you know, with, that we brought with us. Uh, we had some cruise surf stuff on top of each one of the vehicles. But yeah, unarmored vehicles, there really wasn't an option other than that to cover that kind of distance. And we were having to drive thousands of miles.

• 13:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I guess, um, I mean.

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck, I guess IEDs weren't like a huge thing.

• 13:33Chris VanSant?

  No, it wasn't even on the radar yet. Um, and we were literally driving across the desert. It wasn't like we were on roads, like we were navigating across open desert.

• 13:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 13:42Chris VanSant?

  Um, and then, yeah, so that anti-aircraft fire that, that first morning. Um, and then shortly after, I think we hit our first target. Uh, which was an Iraqi outpost, uh, an ammo supply point. So it was basically just like you see at airfields, like in the US where they have like all of the bunkers all over. It was one of those that was used for storing ammunition. Um, and yeah, we did a hit on basically the guard outpost where they were. Uh, it was the first time some shots were fired and, uh, I wasn't, I was driving. So I drove up to the target house. Some stuff happened in the beginning and, you know, some, a couple of Iraqi guards were shot. And then we made entry into the facility, but it was minimal skeleton crew out there.

• 14:24Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and then we proceeded to clear basically every bunker in the ammo supply point looking for WMD. So don't know what we were tasked to do. Uh, and that sort of continued for a while. We did that at numerous locations, some with a little more activity than others. In a lot of cases, we would pull up short, use the flare ball, uh, and call in CAS, call in close air support. And drop a bunch of bombs on an objective before we would move in. So different mindset than we were used to, you know, as a. Counterterrorism force or hostage rescue force or whatever we were, we were basically doing infantry tactic raid style missions on these compounds. So that was a little different.

• 15:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Chris VanSant?

  And, and kinda cool just to do full, you know, the full gamut. But we definitely owned the night. We could see them miles and miles before they could see us. And we definitely had, you know, there wasn't anybody in country yet. So we had all the air assets. It was, I think we were in country for four days when the first volley of Tomahawk missiles and all that stuff got fired into Iraq and when they started the push from the south. So we had been in country for a little bit and done a few things before any of the regular invasion actually started.

• 15:35Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's pretty, that's pretty fucking cool, man. I mean, that's, that's, that's US history.

• 15:41Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, it was pretty neat. It was neat to be a part of, like, you know, I don't know, unless you were at that specific time and place, you never ever have an experience like that. And guys in my lifetime probably won't again.

• 15:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Chris VanSant?

  But yeah, we, and I think we understood that. Like, I think we felt like we were a part of something substantial.

• 15:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I know the majority of your special operations career, I believe, was in Iraq. And I know you were in some extremely, some very high profile operations that I hope we dive into. But after that initial target package where you guys were going after fuel depots, ammunition depots, what led on after that?

• 16:23Chris VanSant?

  The first big engagement was April 2nd. So I don't know what we were a few weeks in, I guess. We pulled into a rest over day site a little later than we normally did. We used to do it before the sun came up, try to find one, but you couldn't always find one. And we were trying to cover a little more distance probably than we should have. And so we drove into daylight and basically didn't get to our rest over day site until after the sun had came up. And in coming into that area, we passed a goat herder out in the desert. And he definitely saw us. He saw a armada, for lack of a better term, of vehicles that were definitely not Iraqis. And he went into the town of Baji, I believe

• 17:05Chris VanSant?

  it was. And about 8:30, 9 o'clock that morning, we found ourselves in an engagement with, I don't know, two, 300 Fedayeen fighters that had come out of the various towns and cities near there. So that day.

• 17:22Chris VanSant?

  You know, six, seven hour firefight. Um, we were sort of hit on three sides and we were kind of in two different bowls. Um, we took uh some casualties early on. Um, that was when when Andy Fernandez was our first loss of the Iraq war. Um, Andy was shot basically a through and through from a PKM up over a little hill. Uh, he was wearing a plate carrier. You know, we were doing desert mobility, so we had no side protection at the time. And took one in one side out the other. Um, and then we took quite a few RPGs and some guys had some fragmentation injuries from RPGs, but nothing too serious. But um, ended up getting close air support. Like, we were the only show in town out west, so at one point, I think we had like twenty-five aircraft just wheelbarrowed overhead. Oh, wow.

• 18:06Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and the Air Force Combat Controllers that were with us had a field day dropping bombs. Um, and Kazevac came in for Andy. Uh, it took quite a while to get from where they were in Saudi Arabia to us. But they were escorted by two um, direct action penetrators, two U H sixty DAP helicopters, so, you know, Blackhawks with guns and rockets and uh, those guys shot every single round of ammunition and rocket that they had. Um, while the Kazevac bird picked up Andy and a couple of other wounded guys uh, and evac'd him. Um, when the Blackhawks, right as the Blackhawks were running dry, or black on ammo, as we said, a couple of A-ten showed up and they had

• 18:46Chris VanSant?

  some fun for a while. Um, but at the end of the day, like, you know, there was forty of us or whatever and some crew-served weapons. Uh, and some radios and some planes. Um, and the bad guys basically had small arms, machine guns and AKs. And then overmatch won the day. Like, once we got a handle on where we were in the position. Um, and were able to utilize all the stuff that we had with us to our advantage, uh, they just kept coming and we just kept killing.

• 19:15Shawn Ryan?

  How did that feel to see your first casualty, see guys getting shot? I mean, you'd done some stuff in Afghanistan. Doesn't sound like it was a whole lot of action. Then you get here and it's, fuck, this shit's real.

• 19:29Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, that was, there's two, a couple of things from that day. I didn't see Andy get hit, so we were, he was in one troop, I was in another. He was a brand new guy. It was just like me in Afghanistan. It was his very first combat rotation. He'd just gotten to his team. And we were separated by a small hill. So one troop was in, or actually two troops were in one little bowl and we were in another. The guys that ended up shooting Andy, they actually came up on a, a piece of high ground to our right flank and didn't even see us where we were indefinitely. And they shot over us into the other two troops. So my, my troop ended up moving some guys up and killing that, the first guys that got to us. But the things that stood out to me that day were, one, okay, this is real.

• 20:11Chris VanSant?

  Like, we, yeah, sure, there'd been some things at the various targets, but it was small scale and we were well capable of handling it, but we just came up against an overwhelming number of people. And they wanted to kill us and we were forced to defend ourselves. That was one. Two was what we can bring to bear when we needed to, which was a little bit confidence building. Three was when Andy was killed, it was the first time I ever heard eagle down over the radio. And so that was a moment, I think, for everybody. You know, then, we lost Chris Spear in Afghanistan, who was a unit medic, but it was a weird scenario. It wasn't like this. And they hadn't lost anybody since 1993.

• 20:56Chris VanSant?

  So when Andy was shot, we heard eagle down over the radio. We found out later that he had passed either shortly before or shortly after they had lifted, lifted off with the medevac from wound sustained and blood loss. But Andy was so new, we didn't know who it was. So they just said, call sign over the internal net. And, you know, he was like Bravo six or whatever. You know, he was the last, newest guy to the team. And we weren't sure who that was. And that felt kind of shitty, like.

• 21:28Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 21:29Chris VanSant?

  You know, you know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't, it wasn't anybody's fault. It was just, it was a new guy and he was in a different troop and, you know, you hadn't really gotten to know each other yet, so.

• 21:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Chris VanSant?

  But you know, the rest of us, you know, we we ended up finishing that day.

• 21:44Chris VanSant?

  And and drove out of there and continued the mission. And I think that was like my fourth thing of the day was like, okay. Nothing changes. You just had a major engagement. You dealt with the threat. We still have the job to do and we need to continue on. And that's what we did. So.

• 22:00Shawn Ryan?

  I heard you talk about.

• 22:03Shawn Ryan?

  In another show or another podcast, or maybe something I've read, but I heard you speak about. An operation you're on when you realized how many people were coming in from out of country. It wasn't just.

• 22:16Chris VanSant?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:17Shawn Ryan?

  Iraqis. It was.

• 22:20Shawn Ryan?

  I bet there was. Everybody was coming there to fight Americans.

• 22:24Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. So so fast forward. So we ended up pushing all the way into to to Crit. And we hit some palaces and stuff into Crit at the end of that desert mobility, which is wild, driving into a palace in an unarmed vehicle and getting out and hut hut hut doing an assault on a palace. I laughed because like to create was basically deserted, like the enemy had pushed out to the outskirts and we had had some skirmishes and some more closer support and some A ten love. Getting into the city. But once we're in there, it was like a ghost town.

• 22:54Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 22:55Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, yeah. And so what we ended up bumping out with another squadron about at that point. They flew out into the desert. H one landed in airfield, unloaded all their vehicles, tagged us out. And about a week and a half later, we rotated out. So and they continued on. That turned into progressing into establishing the MSS down in Baghdad after they had rolled through. The conventional forces had rolled through all the way into Baghdad. Some funny stuff in there where we thought at one point regiment was going to jump on Baghdad International Airfield. You had the, what was her name? The SEALs did the rescue.

• 23:32Shawn Ryan?

  Lynch.

• 23:33Chris VanSant?

  Jessica Lynch. That happened. There's some animosity there because we're like, we're already here. Why don't they just take us, you know, and fly in some birds and we'll go do it. But. But yeah, those guys did that. And you know, there was like some things that were going on elsewhere in country. But but yeah, we came home. We went back. For what they call the first surge. Uh, so whenever we got home from that, I think we were back in August. Um, for a 30 day stint. Uh, where we had two squadrons and we did some two squadron hits on things. We're chasing deck of card stuff. So Saddam and all of his minions. Uh, but then came home for like two weeks and then deployed again for our, our true second rotation. Um, so now you're in October of oh three.

• 24:16Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and Halloween night, um, of oh three. So pre Saddam capture. We were on a hit in Fallujah. Uh, and two, two SAS. I was just laughing about this the other day with the two, two SAS guy, but two, two SAS was working with us. Um, so the Brits had joined the fight now and they had a contingent, a tier one asset in country. And we were, they were doing targets and we were doing targets basically all over the country. Um, and we were in Fallujah this night. And they had a block and we had a block chasing some high value targets in Fallujah. Uh, and they ended up, you know, drawing the short straw on the blocks and they were manually, manually breaching the gate of a house to get into the courtyard and all hell broke loose.

• 25:00Chris VanSant?

  Um, they, house full of bad guys. I mean, RPGs and machine guns lined up on the roof. Like it was just, it was bad timing. Uh, the Brits took, took some casualties in that initial engagement. Um, we ended up covering their exfil of those casualties and withdrawal from that space. From across the street, I was on the rooftop of a building across the street. Uh, we brought in, we had Bradley's, uh, tanks in blocking positions. Um, and rather than just go heavy and try to assault this house that was obviously heavily fortified and heavily armed and full of bad guys. We started shooting tow missiles from the Bradleys into this house. Um, and we had a couple of little birds in support and so a lot of two, seven, five rocket, a lot of machine gun into this building.

• 25:44Chris VanSant?

  I think we shot 11 tow missiles into the building. Uh, Middle Eastern buildings are notoriously resilient, as a lot of us know. So, you know, there's some holes in the fence. There was a lot of holes in the house. Every time they would shoot more rounds, it would be quiet for a minute and then a bunch of, you know, rounds would come out. It would erupt again and that went on for some time. Um, but eventually we got to the point where we had like shot all the tow missiles and the little birds ran out of ammo. And we're like, all right, well, we gotta go assault this house because that's what we do. Uh, so we did. Um, there was a funny moment out front where we tried to send the dog in, uh, just to see if anybody was still up and moving around and it was early on in the dog days. Um, and the dog,

• 26:30Chris VanSant?

  uh, teammate and I, my team, we drew the short straw and were the first ones to enter this compound. And, uh, so I'm standing behind my two I C at the gate. And Mikey actually called for it. He's like, let's send the dog in and see what happens. And so one of the dog handlers sent the dog in. He went in the courtyard. We can't see him. Couple of minutes go by, comes back out. Nothing. We're like, and Mikey's like, send him again. Dog goes again. Couple of minutes go by, comes out, nothing. No barking, no, like, we don't hear anything. We're like, that's weird. Tried it one more time, still nothing. I think we tried three times. Well, hindsight, what we found out was the dog was going into the courtyard. He was getting tangled up in all the tow missile wire that was laying on the ground. And they had never dealt with that.

• 27:14Chris VanSant?

  So the dog would get all tangled up in the wiring that was laying on the ground in the courtyard and he would get confused and he would just come back out. Instead of going into the house because they'd never dealt with it. So they'd never trained the dogs to deal with obstacles in route to make an entry into a building or whatever. I was never a dog guy, so forgive me dog guys if I'm, you get the point. Yeah. And so, yeah, so at that point, Mikey like leaned over my shoulder and he was like, you got a flashbang? And I pulled one off his back and he went, fuck it. And I threw the flashbang over his shoulder into the courtyard. We made entry. We ended up, one of the teams ended up killing a guy that was still alive in the house. And then we started to, we cleared the first floor, started to go to the second floor. And there was a suspected ID on the landing on your way up to the second floor.

• 27:58Chris VanSant?

  You know, protocol was to get out of the building. So there's a code word that we used to get out of the building. So they called that code word, thinking the building was rigged. Even then, we were paying attention and it was before any of that had ever happened. So we exited out of the building, ended up clearing the building next door, going up to the roof. And there were still guys alive on the roof and we ended up engaging. My team, we ended up on the roof of the building next door and ended up engaging those guys. And at the same time, the Brits had gotten back in the fight. And we're coming up the backside and they were pissed. They'd lost a couple mates. So they were like wall charge, grenade in courtyards, grenade in rooms, like they were full blown. It doesn't matter who you are, you're dying. And yeah, they made entry in the house behind us, came up onto the roof.

• 28:41Chris VanSant?

  And I see tac lights. So two two S A S wasn't running nods back then, which is insane. No shit? No shit. Tac light, no nods. Wow. No nods, no lasers. Yeah, 2003. And, and so their, their wall charge, entry, frag, entering rooms. They end up in the house behind us. They come up. I see the tac light coming up the stairwell. And I'm yelling across the rooftops, eagle, eagle, eagle. And I get an answer back, right, eagle, eagle. I'm like, cool. They know we're here. And I made a mistake. I go, hey, whatever you do, don't throw a frag. There's ordinance all over the roof. You know what's coming. The call that came back to me was, right, mate, frag out.

• 29:23Chris VanSant?

  Grenade comes out on the roof and Brad and I both hit the deck. Luckily it didn't set off any of like the RPGs or anything that were sitting up there. But yeah, so what ended up coming out of that was the SSE of that target after everybody was, was killed. They were all wearing like tracksuits, like somebody had, like out of a movie, like someone had given them clothes. In the house was nothing but like sleeping mats, some food and water and ammo. And what it was, it was the first foreign fighter target we ever experienced. So they were guys that had been brought in through what eventually became the rat lines coming from Syria into Iraq, through western Iraq, and then into the cities.

• 30:06Chris VanSant?

  And so they were the first true foreigners that we ever encountered, and to my knowledge, they were the first ones that were encountered in Iraq. And that was a weird moment because it was early in the war, like we hadn't even caught Saddam yet. But it was a really good snapshot of things to come.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 30:53Speaker 01

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

• 30:56Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 30:57Speaker 01

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

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 31:09Speaker 03

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

• 31:14Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 31:23Chris VanSant?

  And so, yeah, that was, that was my second rotation, like I said, Invasion, Surge, and then my second rotation. But it was a good indicator that things were about to change.

• 31:33Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. So, so your team was the one that discovered that was happening?

• 31:37Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, like I said, to my knowledge, that's the first time that happened. And we knew it, like, it was like, this is weird. Like, why are these foreigners coming from other countries? And why are they armed to the teeth? And what's their goal? What's their objective? But yeah, that was, that was the first realization that.

• 31:56Chris VanSant?

  People of similar beliefs are coming to where we are specifically to kill Americans that are in Iraq.

• 32:03Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 32:04Chris VanSant?

  Yep.

• 32:05Shawn Ryan?

  You were on the Saddam raid.

• 32:07Chris VanSant?

  Yep.

• 32:08Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go into detail on that.

• 32:10Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, that one. So, so that happened Halloween night. Um, and then in the, that was so October 31st. So the month of November, we call, it was like whack a mole. It was like, we'd get some intel hit here or there. Some guy that was connected. I mean, we were all over the country trying to catch Saddam. Uh, it got to the point where it was comical, like where we were laughing about it, you know, we would pre-stage it. At this point, they've got FOBs established in various points of the country. So we would pre-stage at these FOBs, do a broad daylight helo assault to an objective. And then that evening, we'd get another hit and we'd do a, you know, ground-based vehicle infill and hit a target in Baghdad. And then we'd fly back to Ramadi

• 32:55Chris VanSant?

  and we'd hit a target in Ramadi. It was like one after another, after another 24-hour ops. We were literally exhausted. And then low and behold, uh, early December, so it was December 12th of 2003. Um, we got a hit on a guy, uh, came up, it doesn't matter how they figured it out, but Signal Intelligence, a guy popped up and on a phone and it was a guy that we had been tracking named Mohammed Ibrahim Al Muslil. And Muslil is who our intelligence analysts, uh, it's not unlike the Bin Laden story in that there was really one person that had been working the problem set from day one.

• 33:35Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and they were really the key person for tracking down an individual. Um, we had an intel guy that, that tirelessly poured over information and details and data and background and history. And had a pretty good idea of how and where Saddam would be, who would be connected to him, and then had further developed how he was getting information out, giving orders out, whatever, and who was hiding him. And Muslil was the key to this. He was the key courier or messenger, if you will, that probably knew where Saddam was and was responsible for giving.

• 34:10Chris VanSant?

  Saddam's orders out to, you know, the, the sort of network that was spread around Iraq. Uh, so we called him the golden ticket. And so they told us that, that we had a possible for Muslil and it was in Baghdad, um, which we were surprised. It actually wasn't far from where we were based out of our, our mission support site, the house that we lived in in Baghdad in the green zone. And so we rolled out on vehicles.

• 34:36Chris VanSant?

  We hit the initial target. It was a troop plus, so it was three teams plus a team from, from another troop. They hit the initial target and it was a dry hole, like the, Muslil wasn't there, n- nothing of value was there. They didn't know anything. But while we were there, you know, we were dead silent. It wasn't like we blew doors and all that stuff. It was a pretty quiet hit. I think they got a, they got a hit, another hit and they narrowed down his location and it was a couple of blocks away. So we moved. It was a kind of four apartments in one house. So it was two upstairs, two downstairs with a stairwell that ran up the middle and then split. So you had one apartment on the right and one apartment on the left. I ended up being the, the lead team on the apartment on the right.

• 35:20Chris VanSant?

  And I was the breacher at the time and another team had the door on the left.

• 35:26Chris VanSant?

  Putting a charge up on the exterior door. It was a dual door, so I had to open the exterior and put a charge in between the two to get them to blow both directions. So I'd opened the door, placed my charge. The team behind me on the other door had done the same and somebody in there had like bumped something and made a noise. So I was on a knee and just put the charge on the door and a guy came to my door and like looked at me. And I'm weapon slung because I'm putting the charge on the door, but I pulled my pistol out and I just stuck it up in his face. And I said in English, basically I mouthed, "Open the door." And he looked at me and he went, and so he opened the door.

• 36:06Chris VanSant?

  I basically just rode the door into him as soon as he turned the handle, pushed him against the wall and just held him there as the team made entry behind me. Cleared the room, cleared the first room. I think it had a bathroom and maybe one or two bedrooms off of it. All secure, nothing. You know, no, nobody in the house. Progressed to SSE, so we're talking to the guy that I've had against the wall. Cuff that dude, they're doing a little battlefield interrogation with him. And the other guys are going through portions of the house and we hear a call from one of the back bedrooms and it's a teammate. He's like, hey, I need, I need a guy. There's somebody under the bed back here. And so a guy went, pulled the mattress up and laying underneath the bed on the floor

• 36:47Chris VanSant?

  was a guy like this, as flat as he could be, and he had a toy, plastic AK-47 laying next to him. A toy? A toy, a kid's toy. Shit, you're not. And so picked this guy up. He didn't look like the photos. We had a mooselet. We didn't thi- we on the ground didn't think it was him. Ah, whatever. It's another one of those dry holes. But they were both a little weird and a little shady and there was a few things on target that didn't make sense. And one of them was in the SSE and Mooselet's wallet, he had, you know, couple thousand dollars worth of cash and it was in US hundreds. The US hundreds were sequential. So the serial numbers on the bills were literally in order. So like, Wow.

• 37:31Chris VanSant?

  00851, 00852, 00853. You guys figured that out right there on the spot? Yeah. So the, the, you don't see that, right? Like unless it came out of a large sum of money that was withdrawn from an institution at one time. That just doesn't happen. But regardless, like, it didn't look like our guy. We didn't think our was guy. And then we'd been chasing Saddam for a year. So we're like, it's just another dry hole. So we drove the detainees back to Biap.

• 38:01Chris VanSant?

  Handed them off to our intel analysts and some of the interrogators that had set up shop there at Bagdad International Airport. And we went home and like I said, 24 hour ops. You know, at the time it was commonplace to like pop an Ambien when you got back from a mission. So you knew you could get three or four hours of sleep before they woke us up to go do the next one. So I think we popped an Ambien, maybe had a beer or two, went like up, another dry hole and we went to bed. About four hours went by, our intel guy comes running back in to the MSS. He comes back to where our troops rooms are because we were the ones that had just pulled this dude out. And he goes, it's him, man. It's totally him. And we're like, what? Walt, you're ridiculous. There's no way it's him. Yeah, no, it's him. It's Mooselet. It's the golden ticket and he is spilling his guts.

• 38:44Chris VanSant?

  He knows where he is. He knows who's with him. You guys need to get your shit on. Get ready. We're going to Tukrit. And we're like, all right. So we had a, our, another one of our troops, our recce troop actually was in Tukrit. So they stuck Mooselet on a helicopter in Biap. They flew him up to Tukrit, handed it off to them. We loaded up in vehicles and started the drive, couple hour drive up to Tukrit from Baghdad. Uh, they took Mooselet out and did a close target reconnaissance in a couple of different areas. Um, and what it was, was what our intel analysts thought all along. He was going to be near Tukrit, near Samara, or whatever the town he grew up in was. That he was going to only have a tight knit group of people around him, that he was going to be near the river.

• 39:25Chris VanSant?

  Because Saddam loved fish, like, and he, he had a real strict diet and he only ate fish. And he had a personal chef and that chef had a family farm. And Walt always believed that those were going to be the people closest to Saddam because he was paranoid. And this dude had been with him forever. So we identified the cook's house and we identified the cook's farm. The house was in town. The family farm was outside of town. Uh, and we came up with a plan, um, after those two were pointed out based on the reconnaissance. Where we were going to split up as a squadron. My troop was going to take the house in town. The other troop plus snipers was going to take the farm. Um, and we did a simultaneous hit on both those, uh, places.

• 40:09Chris VanSant?

  Um, while we were doing the hit on the house in town, uh, I think the guys finished up on the farm about the same time. Uh, and the call came back from the farm that it was a dry hole, that it wasn't the right place. It wasn't the cook's family, like something was off. Um, but we had case the chef. Uh, and he identified himself as case, although he didn't say he was Saddam's personal chef. Um, battlefield interrogation right there very quickly led to, yep, I'm case the cook. I'm Saddam's personal chef. Uh, and yeah, he's been hiding out with my family. Um, so what had happened was Mooselet in a last ditch effort to defend Saddam had pointed out the wrong farm, knowing he was on another one.

• 40:49Chris VanSant?

  Um, so after some work and driving the guy out and confirming locations, they realized they were one farm off. Well, luckily, C one had hit the first farm. Total blackout, no charges, no flashbangs, no nothing. They had done it completely silent. So they hadn't spooked anybody. Uh, they shifted over and hit the next farm. Uh, and then, yeah, shortly after that, they uncovered the rug with the rope to the cork plug in the hole. Uh, pulled the cork out and saw this looking down on a guy. Pulled him out of the hole and it was Saddam.

• 41:22Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 41:23Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Shawn Ryan?

  Were you surprised he came back alive?

• 41:28Chris VanSant?

  Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, uh. You know, during that phase of the war, your, your marching orders were killer capture. Um, you had rules of engagement that warranted either one. Um, I think with Saddam, it was understood that, that we weren't bringing him back. Um. That being said. It's a unit operator and we're the good guys and they pulled the cork out of the hole and there was an unidentified male with his hands over his head.

• 41:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Chris VanSant?

  The guys are gonna put a bullet in him and they certainly weren't gonna pull him out, look at him and put a bullet in him. Because that's not what we do.

• 42:04Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:05Chris VanSant?

  So, um, yeah, I mean, friends of mine, guys, so this is secondhand. I'm still in town going, man, I hope this is it. You know what I mean? We're like sitting in the vehicle at this point, just waiting on the radio call. And, uh, but yeah, they, they pulled him out of the hole. Holy shit, it's Saddam. Um, and yeah, that, that was kinda it. So they, the radio call came. And, uh, I think the squadron commander at the time said, I have a possible for BL number one.

• 42:31Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 42:33Chris VanSant?

  And so, yeah, we were pretty fricking ecstatic. The joke was, is on the way there, we were like placing bets with each other, like, do you think this is it? And in the beginning, when we first left Baghdad, we were all like, bullshit, that's not it. There's no way. It's gonna be another dry hole. By the time we got there and like the CTR had happened and all that stuff was going on. We were all kinda coming around like, alright, maybe this is it.

• 42:58Chris VanSant?

  And I remember there's so many weird moments from that night, you know, just besides being a significant part of history and it obviously means more now than even it did at the time. But I remember like kitting up to go do that originally. And I remember the dogs, you know, when you put your kid on the dogs would get fired up because they knew it was go time. And it was like the one time that I really noticed it, like they were like panting and like ready to go just because we were putting our gear on and it just felt different. Like I just was like, yeah, this is, this might work out.

• 43:28Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 43:29Chris VanSant?

  So, yeah, so, you know, brought him back.

• 43:32Shawn Ryan?

  Did you see him?

• 43:33Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, a few cool things happened. Like there's some pictures that exist. There's some pictures that made it out from that. But one of the cool things that happened was we brought him back to Tukrit and we had him in our detention facility there. We had next to the house the guys were staying in there. And they let us basically all come into the open hall of this house when we walked him out to put him on the helo to fly him down to Biap. So there was an opportunity for everybody that was a part of the operation to physically see him and be close to him and understand the significance of the event. And I thought that was a cool call by the leadership. The pictures that made it out were actually taken by a, by a interpreter that worked for a three-letter agency. A lot of pictures were taken that day and the understanding was these are for

• 44:17Chris VanSant?

  years and years only and they don't, they're not for public release, but she immediately emailed those to someone and they ended up finding their way onto the internet. But it's ancient history now, so it doesn't matter. But at the time, it was a big deal.

• 44:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 44:29Chris VanSant?

  But yeah, so flew him down to Biap and, and, uh, yeah, he, he stayed there. It was a different animal than years later with Bin Laden, but Saddam sat basically in a prison cell for a year till they hung him after publicly trying him and the whole thing that happened after that.

• 44:47Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, did you feel anything when, when they hung him? I mean, when they kicked him off, what a two or three story thing and?

• 44:54Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. I mean, when they hung him.

• 44:58Chris VanSant?

  You know, there's an element of wanting to be there.

• 45:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Chris VanSant?

  I mean, we personally witnessed a lot of the horror that that guy was responsible for. Like, we'd seen the scars from it, you know. It was, he was a ruthless, ruthless dictator. And right, wrong, or indifferent, you know, as a soldier, as a service member, you're an extension of US foreign policy, right? And you are there to do what they ask you to do. And we were asked to complete a mission, and we did. And so, even years later, with all the hindsight on the Iraq war, I still think that what we did is the right thing, even if the reasons for getting us there weren't necessarily just. He was a horrible, awful person responsible for brutally murdering thousands of people.

• 45:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to talk about any of the stuff that you saw? Because I'm gonna, I'm gonna share some of my experience. I didn't see anything when I deployed. I didn't see anything that he had directly caused when I was in the SEAL teams in Iraq. And it wasn't until, actually, my last deployment at the agency, when I got to see just a site where things happened. And, I mean, I knew that he had tortured people. I knew he killed and murdered thousands and thousands of people. In my last deployment, I went to Duhuk. And right around there, there was this compound that he,

• 46:28Shawn Ryan?

  with these hooks that came out of the walls. And he would take pregnant women and hang them on the hook, and they would just be hanging there on the wall until, until they fucking bled out and died.

• 46:42Chris VanSant?

  Yep.

• 46:43Shawn Ryan?

  Then inside, this is like a, just a square, or maybe a rectangle, two or three stories. I actually have pictures of it. And there was like no railing or anything on the top floor. And then directly off the drop-off were these huge, like, concrete blocks. And we were with an interpreter, and I was like, what are these blocks all around for? And he said that...

• 47:11Shawn Ryan?

  They would put heads, they would put, you know, a body, right, lean them over the block, have their head on that concrete block and they would throw cinder blocks off the third story, crush people's heads. And that, you know, I, I saw a lot of traumatic shit, whatever, it's combat, right? I didn't see anything, I never encountered anything like that. And, um, just hearing that and being in that, in that fucking place was, made me realize how evil that son of a bitch actually was. Did you see anything like that?

• 47:48Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, similar experiences. So, locations and places that things occurred, absolutely. Uh, just talking and interacting with people. Um, but honestly, one of the ones that I think had the largest impact on me was Christians in the Middle East had been persecuted for years. Saddam was one of those people that was a part of that process. Uh, the first Christmas that we were in Iraq, we had a number of Iraqis that worked for us, um, in the MSS that we had vetted that were friendly to why we were there and supportive. And they did various things for maintenance tasks and, you know, we had, we had an Iraqi plumber, we had an electrician, you know, it was what we had and we needed to support that infrastructure.

• 48:31Chris VanSant?

  And so we had two or three guys that had been around the mission support site a bunch and I didn't know anything about them. Christmas Day, 2003, so we had caught Saddam on December 13th. This is two weeks later and it was Christmas morning and Brad and I were outside on like the front balcony and we hear people singing Christmas songs, like Christmas carols.

• 48:59Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 49:00Chris VanSant?

  And we're like, what the heck is that? And we're like listening and we walk and we look over and we look over the balcony and down on the lower level is these guys that work for us that are singing Christmas carols. For the first time probably ever.

• 49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 49:17Chris VanSant?

  In English, because they were so happy that they were in a place where they weren't going to be prosecuted for their religious beliefs. And that stuck with me.

• 49:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's fucking powerful.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 49:36Shawn Ryan?

  What was your deployment cycle like after, I mean, that's like the pinnacle, you know? Get it down to number one.

• 49:43Chris VanSant?

  I mean, so that was, that was neat. Like historically, that was neat to be, to be able to do what you were tasked to do. I think we all knew and thought we were going home after that. We really did. We had a big party that night when we got back to Baghdad.

• 49:59Chris VanSant?

  We had a good time.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 50:46Speaker 03

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

• 50:51Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 50:55Speaker 02

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

• 51:02Chris VanSant?

  That didn't happen. I think we did hit like the next day.

• 51:06Chris VanSant?

  And it was like a dose of reality, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, keep going.

• 51:10Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations. Get back to work.

• 51:11Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I think we, we chased, uh, Aldery. He was like BL number six, blacklist number six. You know, he's the bald guy with like the red mustache that was always on TV back in the day. But we chased him for a while. I don't know if that dude was ever caught or captured or whatever. But, uh, yeah, we did hit a couple, a day or, I think it was the next day, we did hit, chasing Aldery. Um, and then we ended up redeploying, um, a couple of weeks after that. So after Christmas, we deployed, I think first week or second week of January, got bumped out by another squadron. Uh, and yeah, the conversation was like, are we, are we done? But so quickly it progressed into the resistance and the firefighter movement and all that stuff.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  You guys thought the war was gonna end.

• 51:57Chris VanSant?

  We thought we as an asset were leaving. Okay. Like the US had, we had occupied, we had bases all over the country. Like we had all this, you know, like I said, an extension of foreign policy going on with US forces, but that's not what we're there for. At least that's what we thought. Um, but that just wasn't the case. Like the insurgency grew and built and continued from there. Uh, and then that turned into a whole resistance movement and a whole new target set and a whole new set of bad guys that, um, that we were tasked with going to get. Wow. Yeah. So came home for, I don't know, six months, I guess, redeployed summer of oh four.

• 52:39Chris VanSant?

  Uh, that was the first rotation of the exchange where McChrystal had forced, um, Dev Group and, and us to, they gave a team to us to go to Iraq. We gave a team to them to go to Afghanistan, um, to kind of cross pollinate between the organizations. And I think the thought process was, I need, I need these two tier one assets to be interchangeable. And both units had incredible capability, but they weren't necessarily interchangeable. They were different. Um, but the targets that we were working on was the same. So he wanted to kind of cross pollinate information, um, and skillsets to make sure we were all on the same page. So he could use whatever, wherever. Uh, I think he foresaw the, the op tempo stuff becoming an issue.

• 53:23Chris VanSant?

  There's only so many of us and the targets just kept getting greater and greater and greater. Uh, and I think it was brilliant. So that oh four rotation was the first time I deployed with, with a Navy SEAL on my team. Um, and that was a fun rotation. Like we called it Baghdad SWAT. So we were rolling up dudes every day, um, that were on our targeting list, that were responsible for the firefighter movement, that were responsible for targeting US troops. Like we were literally making a difference every day. And it was so early on, they weren't well trained. Like they weren't experienced in fighters. They weren't, uh, we could get away with doing a lot of things that we couldn't later on in the war.

• 54:05Chris VanSant?

  So we were doing a lot of commando shit, like land on the X Hilo assaults, like fast roping on the rooftops and, you know, all the stuff that everybody thinks is really cool. Uh, and it was fun, you know, we were doing Hilo and ground force at the same time and hitting the target at the exact same moment. We. Started urban assault climbing and we were climbing buildings and moving building to building to do top down entry, you know.

• 54:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 54:29Chris VanSant?

  They never knew we were there. Like that was really kind of an evolution phase where we started doing a lot of that stuff. Uh, and it was fun. You know, we weren't, you know, we're getting in gunfights occasionally, but honestly, we were doing things, you know, it's one of the elements of CQB, speed, surprise and violence of action. Like we were executing those to a T uh against an inexperienced fighters, group of fighters. And um, so it was easy pickings for the most part.

• 54:55Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned earlier that most all the missions as you were going on, on the all these hits were capture, kill. How do you determine whether you're gonna kill them or capture them?

• 55:05Chris VanSant?

  Uh, it's based on the threat.

• 55:06Shawn Ryan?

  Based on the threat?

• 55:07Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 55:08Shawn Ryan?

  The threat at the exact moment?

• 55:10Chris VanSant?

  I can tell you, we never put, we never put a bullet in an unarmed person.

• 55:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 55:14Chris VanSant?

  Not once. Um, in my career,

• 55:18Chris VanSant?

  I've been shot at a few times by friendly forces, you know, blue on blue on accident. I have never seen anybody shoot uh, an unarmed person or a person that wasn't a threat. So, you know, I know that mistakes happen in combat and I know of a number of them that have happened over the years, but yeah, to me, kill, kill necessitated a enemy combatant that was armed.

• 55:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 55:42Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of captures there early on. Um, that was that rotation in oh four. We finished up that one. I think my next one was in early oh six. Yeah, that was summer of oh, or oh five, sorry. Summer of oh four, home for the fall. About six months later, I was back in oh six. Um, oh six is when things, or oh five, sorry. Oh five's when things started to change. Um.

• 56:09Shawn Ryan?

  I heard you say you never felt fear until two thousand and five. And that's when you started feeling fear and things started changing for you.

• 56:18Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I think I had a level of confidence from things that had happened. And if I said never felt fear, I don't think I, I don't think I was conscious of it. There were times when I felt fear, but I quickly got over it because I'm like, you know what? These are the best trained dudes in the world, like around me, like they got my back. It was a myriad of things. I've always said, guys, there's faith-based guys. There's, there's ego guys that just think that they're better than everyone else, which gives them a tactical edge. And then there's guys that are a little bit of everything. I, I was a little bit of everything. I believed in my training and the people around me.

• 56:50Chris VanSant?

  I knew that there's a power higher than me and that hopefully it was looking out for me. And then if it was my time to go, it was my time to go. So I kind of drew strength from that. But, but yeah, I say that because in oh five is when we, we started losing guys. We started facing a more experienced enemy combatant. The IED threat had escalated and was rampant and everywhere. And that was scary, you know, getting in a vehicle to go conduct an assault is one thing. Blowing the doors and entering a house of armed combatants is one thing. But riding down the road completely helpless in the back of a vehicle waiting to get blown up? That's fear. And I think we all felt that. And then you couple that with some incidents that happened in oh five with IEDs and a lot of guys getting killed or, or maimed.

• 57:35Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to talk about that incident at all?

• 57:37Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I mean, well, for me, so oh five was a weird year. So we'd, we had done a rotation. We had come back. I had a, I was an 11 Bravo at the time. And I wanted to go to the SFQ course. I wanted to be a, I wanted my MOS, my job to be a Green Beret. So that if anything ever happened to me, or I wanted to leave the unit that I was in and I, and go out to a different force, I could at least go to the special forces command community and be a Green Beret or be on an ODA or, or be an instructor somewhere or whatever. I didn't want to have to go back to the conventional army. So about that time is the same time that my team leader changed out. So a guy rotated

• 58:19Chris VanSant?

  out to selection and training, Chili Palmer, like his team leader time was done and Chili was moving on. Brad, at the same time, Brad Thomas stepped away and went to combat development directorate, went to CDD. So we had some of the same guys and then some new guys. And I said, hey, I really want to go to the Q course, you know, are you guys cool with me going? And it was like, yeah, like, there's no good time, just go. So I tried to go in between rotations, but I ended up going, you know, the course is six months long. So towards the tail end of me being in the course, the squadron deployed. Well, that turned out to be like, C squadrons, the squadrons at the time turned out to be like their worst

• 59:00Chris VanSant?

  rotation. So in the beginning of that rotation, the guy that had replaced me on my team, that I hadn't even trained with. So he showed up to squadron, just like I did, immediately deployed. So like, we met each other in passing, but we didn't even know each other. They trained him up and he became the team breacher, which was what I did for a long time. One target, they were driving in, he was on an ATV and he took a round between his helmet and his nods, so through his nods mount. And then shortly thereafter, they were on a target and he was putting a charge on the door and a bell fed opened up in the hallway through the door and Steve was killed. So that was one. So I'm not there. The guy that

• 59:45Chris VanSant?

  replaced me was in what would have been my position, ended up dying on his first rotation of combat. The second one was, and this is not very long after that, they were hitting another target, hit the house, dry hole, ended up doing a follow on target that was close by. So they had already lost speed, they'd already lost surprise, all they had left was violence of action. The bad guys knew they were there. Teams approached the house. My best friend at the time, a guy I went through OTC with, Mike McNulty, and another guy that's a unit legend named Bob Horgan. Bob was basically the first dude up at the door with Mike. Mike was breaching, but as they breached and made entry, same

• 1:00:29Chris VanSant?

  kind of thing, machine gun setup, just waiting on guys to come in the house. Mike and Bob both got hit and Mike and Bob both ended up dying. So I'm in the Q course and I'm in the tail end, I'm in the field exercise to graduate the particular phase that I'm in, which is like the MOS phase. And I was in the 18 Echo course, I was in training to be a special forces communication sergeant or whatever. And we were out in the field and like the primary instructor, the first sergeant for that phase of the course showed up out of the field and he came up to me and he said, you got a minute, I need to talk to you. And I said, yeah.

• 1:01:12Chris VanSant?

  Every time, doesn't matter. Every time I've ever told this story. So, uh, yeah, a guy named Lonnie Blevins and Lonnie pulled me aside and he said, hey, I don't know who it is, I don't have names, but I know that, I didn't even know about Steve yet at this point, but I know two guys from USASOC were just killed in Iraq. And he goes, and I know it doesn't say United States Army Special Operations Command unless it's you guys. Because USASOC is a staff organization and it's usually used as the descriptor for a unit guys deployed. If they were from one of the groups, it would have said seventh special forces group, first special forces group or whatever. And he said, so I don't

• 1:01:54Chris VanSant?

  know who it is, but I'm assuming you do. He said, do you want to take some time and like leave and go see if you can figure it out? And I was like, yeah, like I'm not sure what to do, but, but yeah, I really appreciate that. And I'm like, but what about the course? And he's like, you're doing great. I'm not worried about it. He's like, you know, I've been to combat for a bunch of years. Like they gave me a little bit of a pass, which was one of the coolest things that's ever happened in my career. And so I left. I, uh, I stopped at a gas station and saw the paper and same thing that Lonnie had seen.

• 1:02:33Chris VanSant?

  And I went to the payphone and I called staff duty at the unit and you know, there's a, you have to identify yourself and whatever. And so once they confirmed, I said, who is it? And they said, it's Mike McMillian and Bob Horgan. So.

• 1:02:56Chris VanSant?

  To this day, I don't remember like what happened in the next like 24 to 48 hours. Like I think it's one of those things where my memory has chosen to like get rid of that. Um, and I cannot recall going home or talking about it. The next thing that I remember sort of in that phase of events was I called back to the Q course and I said, hey, it's, it's two guys that I know, one of which I went through school with, and it's one of my best friends in the unit.

• 1:03:25Chris VanSant?

  Are you cool with me like attending the funerals and, and being a part of this stuff? Cause these guys are coming home and they said, yeah. So, so yeah, Mike, Mike and Bob's um, remains came home. Um, we buried Mike at Arlington, we buried Bob in Texas. Uh, and then I went back to the Q course.

• 1:03:46Chris VanSant?

  They were basically done and I had to go right into Robin Sage. So I went into, you know, phase, whatever it is, the last phase of the SF qualification course.

• 1:03:56Chris VanSant?

  With that, uh, and I, I think it's because I didn't have time to process it and I didn't understand what was going on, but, and I found out about Steve. Um, I think it was, uh, now looking back, it was like survivor's remorse or survivor's guilt. It was the guilt of not being there and Steve dying when that should have, could have, would have, or maybe not been me, but that that happened because I wasn't there. It was not being on the ground or on target when your best friend and another guy that you really looked up to were killed. It was, it was just a, it was a really weird thing that I didn't understand and I didn't know how to process. Um, and I felt guilty, I felt like I let my guys down. Um, should I, I mean, I skipped over the part.

• 1:04:42Chris VanSant?

  So Mikey, who was my teal at the time, they hit a target out in Western Iraq, same rotation.

• 1:04:48Chris VanSant?

  Mikey ended up in a house, basically by himself, trading rounds and grenades with a guy. Uh, ended up with like 37 holes in his body from fragmentation injuries. Uh, and two other guys on the team were shot and a couple of other guys in the trooper shot, uh, all in one target house. And so same thing, finished up the Q course.

• 1:05:10Chris VanSant?

  Graduate, if you can call it that. Um, and the first thing I did was I drove up to Walter Reed to see Mikey in, in intensive care in the hospital full of holes. So.

• 1:05:22Chris VanSant?

  It was like a thing I went to do to take a break from deployment and to better myself and professionalize myself and add some skills, I thought.

• 1:05:31Chris VanSant?

  And what it ended up being was this huge, like, heavy burden guilt trip where I felt like if I'd have been there, some or all of that shit wouldn't have happened. And it's silly, like, you see, I still carry it. And I've come to grips with it over the years and I realize that that's ridiculous. And, you know, I'm therapy and talking to people and communicating with folks. And no one's ever said anything to me like, man, if you were there, like, thank God. And like, nothing like that has ever happened. And I don't think anybody ever thought that. But, but I've carried that for, well, as many years as that's been, almost 20 years now. And it's still as, it's still as painful as it was then. I just deal with it a little better now than I used to. And that, that was a triggering year for a lot of things.

• 1:06:16Chris VanSant?

  So when I went back to squadron after that.

• 1:06:19Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on. There's a lot of people that deal with that.

• 1:06:23Chris VanSant?

  Sure.

• 1:06:25Shawn Ryan?

  What are some pointers? What are some, something that can help somebody that's getting over that?

• 1:06:29Chris VanSant?

  Talk to people. Communicate. You are your biggest enemy. If you stay in your own head and your own mind and you compartmentalize that shit and you don't share it with anyone, you will convince yourself that they are thinking those things. Like, man, he let us down. It's just not true. It's never, ever true. But if you don't discuss it, you don't get that reinforcing assistance of someone going, no, man, no. Like, that shit was gonna go down no matter what. Like, that happened because of a myriad of circumstances that are beyond your control and had nothing to do with you. But if you don't communicate, you're gonna continue to hold that in yourself and think those things. You know, it's like when you're, when you're in a relationship, like with your spouse, like I say this to my wife all the time.

• 1:07:14Chris VanSant?

  I'm like, if, if I know something's bothering you and I say, what's bothering you? And you say, nothing. My head turns it into the worst possible thing of whatever the situation is. She's mad at me because of this, she's mad at me because of that. It's probably all completely false. But because we're not communicating effectively, because I'm not openly discussing it and you're not openly discussing it. We don't get to dispel with all of the the super negative and figure out what the root of the real problem is. So, yeah, my advice would be communicate with people. I think the combination of me being in the middle of the Q course and having to go right back to that. Basically bury a bunch of dudes and then go back to work. I like I never took a minute to go, how do I feel?

• 1:07:58Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and it's also why I think I lost two days of my life. Like, I think those days are gone because I physically and mentally did not know how to deal with what had just happened. And that was far worse, weirdly, like that was far worse for people out there that have been through it. You know, I've seen guys get injured, I've taken a lot of lives, like all of that, like combat trauma. Uh, it wasn't really that stuff that that truly stuck with me. Like, it was, it was that year, it was things like that. You know, it was, it was post-career when, when another one of my best friends that took me in when I got divorced died in a base jumping accident. You know, Brandon Jackson, phenomenal operator, amazing dude, one of my best friends.

• 1:08:39Chris VanSant?

  He died post-service, jumping, like chasing the adrenaline high that he had from all those years of being an operator.

• 1:08:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Chris VanSant?

  Like, the difference was is I had a bunch of years later to get better and get healthy and understand how to process it and needed to talk about it.

• 1:08:56Shawn Ryan?

  After that discussion and knowing what you know now, would you have changed any of your decision-making when it comes to the Q course?

• 1:09:04Chris VanSant?

  No, no, I mean, everything that's happened to me in my life and all the decisions I made have led to where I am right now. Um, so all the good and all the bad had to happen for me to meet my wife, end up with my wife. Um, for me to get better, get healthy, understand better who I am.

• 1:09:25Chris VanSant?

  Um, yeah, no, I don't think I would do anything different. I mean, obviously, if I could take back the loss of those people, I would. Um, and those are, you know, we're hitting high points. I mean, I'm sure you, like a lot of people out there, like I stopped counting, but I, you know, we just, just lost a couple more guys out of the community in the last thirty days. The last time I counted, I was up to like forty some dudes in the last twenty years that, not all best friends, right? Like, but guys that I work with, guys that I went to schools with, guys that, you know, I was professionally connected to, and in some cases, some really good friends.

• 1:10:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Chris VanSant?

  But that's forty some folks over the course of twenty years. That's a lot of loss.

• 1:10:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Chris VanSant?

  Um, and it happens and it's part of what we do and it's part of the lifestyle we chose. Um, but the way that you deal with it isn't by shutting it all down and sticking it in a box and never talking about it.

• 1:10:23Shawn Ryan?

  Just the fact that you're able to say that you wouldn't go back and change anything and the advice that you're giving to other people, I mean, that's gonna help, that's gonna help thousands of people and it's proof, it's very obvious you're still in pain over it, but it's proof that you can fucking move past that kind of stuff and it's not your fault. And, um, I think that's gonna help a lot of people.

• 1:10:46Chris VanSant?

  And it's okay, right? Like, uh, like we laughed about it, not on camera, but I'm cool with that. Like, I'm okay with my emotions as it relates to those things. Why? Because they are horrible, traumatic experiences that are difficult to deal with for anybody. Uh, and the second thing is, trauma is trauma. Like, I, I shouldn't even quantify it. Whether it's one or fifty, whether you're in a car accident or your parents get divorced and it's a shitty situation, trauma is trauma and the impacts of that, of trauma are by and large the same across the board. The symptoms are similar and people try or want to, or you as an individual want to quantify like, well, that guy's been through so much more than me, so I can't relate. Bullshit.

• 1:11:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's all relative.

• 1:11:32Chris VanSant?

  It's all relative. Trauma is trauma. The, the mechanisms for recovery and getting better and getting past it are all the same.

• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for saying that. That means a lot to a lot of people. But, well, that's pretty heavy. Let's take a break.

• 1:11:49Chris VanSant?

  Cool. Thanks.

• 1:11:53Shawn Ryan?

  You alright?

• 1:11:54Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I'm good. I told you, like, I literally can't stop it. I thought I was gonna get through it that time and nope. As soon as I think about Lonny coming up to me and going, "I don't know who it is." Like, it feels like it was yesterday. Like, that pit in my stomach of fuck. And then, when I found out, that phone call, that it was Mike. Like, Mike had four kids. Four young kids.

• 1:12:21Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck, man.

• 1:12:22Chris VanSant?

  And I was like, "Why that guy?" Like, of all the dudes in Squadron that it could have been, why is it the dude that is a phenomenal father, a phenomenal husband, a guy that probably worked harder than 75% of the guys to get here, because he's a fucking regular Army guy. You know, he's not a Ranger, he's not an SF dude. And a guy with four young children. Like, why does it take him?

• 1:12:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Chris VanSant?

  And, you know, there were a lot of guys after that, but for some reason, man, like that-

• 1:12:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's fucking weird, man, I mean...

• 1:12:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I used to, when Adam Brown got killed, uh, at Dev Group, I didn't go to Dev Group, but I did a platoon with him and he was that guy. He was, I don't know if you've ever heard of Adam Brown, but whatever, he was... I mean, he's just a fucking good dude.

• 1:13:13Chris VanSant?

  Good dude.

• 1:13:14Shawn Ryan?

  He's a faithful man to his wife. He's there for his fucking kids, like, he's a Christian, he's a-

• 1:13:19Chris VanSant?

  And it sounds awful-

• 1:13:20Shawn Ryan?

  He's a perfect fucking role model.

• 1:13:21Chris VanSant?

  It sounds awful, but let's face it, we weren't all great role models.

• 1:13:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Chris VanSant?

  Some of us were fucking shitheads for a good portion of our life. Like, not to say one guy deserves it more than the other, but it's like it's always that guy.

• 1:13:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Chris VanSant?

  The dude that isn't like that.

• 1:13:35Shawn Ryan?

  It's fucking weird.

• 1:13:37Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Shawn Ryan?

  It is really weird.

• 1:13:38Chris VanSant?

  And that fucked me up, like, I think, I think I was getting pretty messed up by that point anyway. And I think, I always felt like I was gonna die in combat. And so, like, that added piece of, "Why wasn't that me?"

• 1:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Chris VanSant?

  You know, like, because I didn't think I was a good person at that point. Like, I really didn't.

• 1:13:58Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you weren't.

• 1:13:59Chris VanSant?

  Maybe I wasn't.

• 1:13:59Shawn Ryan?

  I wasn't.

• 1:14:00Chris VanSant?

  You, but you know, you get what I'm saying, like, like, that's all part of it too. That, I don't even know how to talk about that shit, so I don't say that part often. But yeah, like Mike, just like you said, like Adam, like they were just good dudes.

• 1:14:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Chris VanSant?

  Like they were examples, like good ones. So why the fuck was it them?

• 1:14:19Shawn Ryan?

  We'll keep this portion in. We just talked about it. Seriously. Let's take that break.

• 1:14:28Shawn Ryan?

  I want to take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes this show possible and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and support The Sean Ryan Show today.

• 1:14:49Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:15:11Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we're back. Let's...

• 1:15:16Shawn Ryan?

  We left Iraq, you went to the Q course. We talked about all that stuff. Then we just had a conversation outside about your next deployment to Iraq and all the vehicle interdiction stuff you're doing. Let's go into some of that.

• 1:15:30Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, so came back from the Q course. The next rotation over was a different one. So the, you know, things had kind of evolved. We weren't doing 24-hour ops anymore. We were running day-night at a different outstations around the country.

• 1:15:44Chris VanSant?

  But a couple of weeks into that rotation, we decided we were going to stand up a daylight vehicle interdiction cell. So we were going to use helicopters and intelligence collection to target individuals. And when they left structures or houses, wherever they were, and they were mobile, we could hit them in the right spot at the right time. You know minimizing external threat and civilians and everything else and maximizing our ability to get exactly who we were after. So at this point in the war, you know, intelligence collection was fantastic. Like we had a lot of air assets. We had a lot of drones and things that were providing real time information and visual stuff that we could see. So we

• 1:16:28Chris VanSant?

  would build target packets on folks. We would watch guys, we'd pattern a life them. And basically, we were pre-staged at Balad. And when they got into a certain area where we felt like we could go get them, we'd load up on the helos and we'd go get them. My team was a completely new batch of folks at this point. So I was a two IC roughly at the time. And basically, we had a bunch of fresh guys out of OTC. Weird thing about the unit, it doesn't mean they were all young guys. Some guys don't end up over there till way late in their career. Some guys end up there early like I did, you know, earlier in their career. So it was kind of a mixed bag, but they were new to the unit and had never been overseas

• 1:17:09Chris VanSant?

  with us. We were really good at what we were doing. So we were aggressively targeting foreign fighters, terrorists, and folks that were a part of the network. And we did so.

• 1:17:22Shawn Ryan?

  And these are, these are key players.

• 1:17:24Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, all of them.

• 1:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's not your everyday fucking ground fighter. It's not, you know, we're gonna set an ID up and then go to a party. These are, these are key players that you guys are going after.

• 1:17:35Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Shawn Ryan?

  And a lot of them.

• 1:17:37Chris VanSant?

  A lot of them. Yeah, a lot of them. It led to a lot of very successful mission sets where you knew exactly who you were after. You were watching that individual, you watched them get into a vehicle. And then you flew up alongside them and confirmed that, hey, there's nobody but exactly who we think it is in that vehicle. They're all military age males. They're all our primary targets and we're gonna, we're gonna deal with that threat.

• 1:18:04Chris VanSant?

  Um, so very successful. You know, we had some funny ones in there just to lighten it up after that like heavy last segment.

• 1:18:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Chris VanSant?

  You know, one time, I think it's my one and only hostage rescue, although a number of them have been done over the years by, by the Navy guys and, and by us. Uh, one in particular during this daylight vehicle interdiction phases, we were watching a couple of bad guys and they had left the structure they were in and they weren't, they hadn't quite broken the box of where we needed them to be to launch yet. Um, but while they were in route to that location, they stopped off at a gas station. We watched, it was a car full of four dudes. We watched them get out of the vehicle. They went up to a semi truck and they basically carjacked the semi truck. So they took the two Iraqis out of the semi truck, the driver, driver and passenger. They stuffed them in the back of the trunk of the car. Two guys got in the car. The other two

• 1:18:55Chris VanSant?

  guys got in the semi truck. Semi truck went one way. The car went the other and we went, well, guess we're doing a hostage rescue for a couple of Iraqis. Um, so literally within nine minutes of these two shitheads kidnapping two random Iraqis and stealing their truck. Uh, we had stopped the vehicle, killed those two, and I popped the trunk and let the two Iraqis out. And I thought, man, no wonder, no wonder they think.

• 1:19:21Shawn Ryan?

  What did you say to them?

• 1:19:22Chris VanSant?

  I don't think I said anything. It was a couple of us, you know?

• 1:19:26Shawn Ryan?

  Hey guys.

• 1:19:27Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. It was like, come on, come on. And they were freaked out like they had no idea. Like they got carjacked at gunpoint, got stuffed in a trunk, probably thought they were gonna, gonna die the next time the trunk opened and opened the trunk and there's two Americans fully kitted out, standing there over top of them, helping them out. And I thought, man, no wonder the bad guys think we are the greatest nation in the world. Like they just did this and nine, 10 minutes later, we were on them.

• 1:19:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and so that was a kind of a neat point. Um, but yeah, there was a lot of good things that happened in that stretch. A lot of bad guys taken off the map. Um, it was a bit cathartic in that, uh, that was kind of the anger phase. Um, for me, you know, I was really upset about things that had happened in oh five and guys that we had lost.

• 1:20:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, before we get into that.

• 1:20:16Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds like you guys have just killed an entire deck of cards.

• 1:20:19Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, easy.

• 1:20:22Shawn Ryan?

  Do you get numb to that? I mean, do you even fucking care anymore? That, I mean, these are all key players or does it just, is it just going to work?

• 1:20:33Chris VanSant?

  I think it depends. You know, some guys get more involved in the intelligence picture and exactly who and what and why. We're doing what we're doing. Um, I think I got a little more numb as the years went by. Uh, I think there's an evolution in empathy that occurs in combat that people don't talk about very often. Um, it doesn't mean that you're making bad decisions. It means that the decision matrix or the amount of time that it takes you to get to that decision to pull the trigger gets less. Um, some of it's, I've said it before, like spidey sense where you just know this is bad and your, your reaction times get quicker or you feel like something's about to go bad or whatever. But some of it's just, yeah, it's just a reduction in empathy. So no, for me, I didn't. They were just bad guys.

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• 1:21:48Chris VanSant?

  You know, they were guys that were gonna kill me if I didn't kill them.

• 1:21:52Chris VanSant?

  And I felt the same about my teammates and all the things that they were doing. So yeah, you know, like I said before, like we're the good guys and I always felt like we conducted ourselves as such. You know, whether you're on a target and, and you just, you know, put some rounds in a guy and then you, you picked up his young child and gave it back to the mother. Um, to, in some effort of consoling the trauma that they just went through. You know, they don't know any better, but, but yeah, I think, I think you do over time, get a little cold and lose a little bit of empathy as time goes by. And I think that kind of happens to everybody.

• 1:22:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Chris VanSant?

  We can move on. All right.

• 1:22:31Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, so that rotation, yeah. That was probably one of our better rotations in that it was one of the healthiest cycles we ever had while we were there. You know, we were staging in Balad. We were getting up, we were working out, we were eating three squares a day. We weren't doing night ops. It was all daylight stuff. It was all daylight? All daylight. Wow. And it was effective. And it, you know, it hadn't been done. Nobody done a daylight vehicle helo born interdiction since like the one that they did in Somalia in 93. Chasing Mohammed Fard Adid, you know, and or whatever the guy's name was, Otto, or whoever they rolled up doing one. But, um, but yeah, it hadn't been done in a long time. It was

• 1:23:14Chris VanSant?

  really, really effective, not just for that rotation, but it was effective for the rotation after us. The guys continued to do it for another 60 days. So we literally like cleaned the board in terms of, you know, bad guys and influencers on the battlefield, you know, high value targets. Like we really cleaned house in a, in about a 90 day period. For us, you know, like I told you, the fun one was the hostage rescue, but sort of towards the tail end, we had one where it was some guys that we were tracking related to, to AMZ, Abu Musab Alzarqawi, right? But, uh, yeah, one of the few objective names I remember, it's like objective mayor, but it was a daylight vehicle interdiction that turned into a full

• 1:23:57Chris VanSant?

  blown daylight helo assault. And so whether they had gotten used to our pattern and activity and what we were doing to engage them, or it was just pure dumb luck, they broke off of the road that we were intending to interdict them on and ended up pulling up to a house in a rural community, a couple of structures together. And they got out and went in the house. Well, they were fairly significant, high value individuals. So our daylight vehicle interdiction turned into a daylight assault. So. We changed course, started heading towards the the objective. Uh, about one minute out, um, I was, as they say, I was like the lead nav guy is the two I see on the team.

• 1:24:41Chris VanSant?

  Uh, my particular team was responsible for navigation to the target. Uh, whether it was a vehicle or whether it was housed or whether we were walking or whatever it was. So I was in the door of the helo. Uh, I had a, a tough book next to me, a laptop, you know, running some map software, tracking our location and had the target house. Pinned on there and then we had a predator overhead. So we had a display in the helo also with what the pred was seeing. So I'm watching this, looking out the window, watching this, looking out the window, looking where the target house is. And the pilot flies right by the house. And it's out in the middle of a farm field. So I'm screaming and I'm slapping the crew chief and I'm pointing, it's right there. It's right there. It's right there. Well, the pilots, you know, the crew chief says something to the pilot.

• 1:25:23Chris VanSant?

  Pilot banks hard, comes back down, sets down in the field and the trail bird comes in, sets down behind us. Well, there's a, uh, there's a, um, irrigation ditch, like a great big irrigation irrigation ditch between us and the target house. And as we got out and started moving, we all like collectively, like the, I don't know, two and a half teams worth of guy, two teams worth of guys. Hit this ditch and we're all just standing there because we know it's like chest deep and nobody wants to cross this thing.

• 1:25:53Chris VanSant?

  And like a, like a scene out of a world war two movie, our troop commander at the time goes, get over there.

• 1:26:03Chris VanSant?

  And I remember laughing because here's a bunch of commandos, you know, afraid to cross this little body of water. But we did, and, uh, we crested the other side of the, of the trench line. And then luckily for us, um, the guys just sort of starburst out of the house. And so there was a lot more than we thought. It was eight to 10 guys. And they came out guns blazing. So as we're trying to close the distance and deal with some of them, the, the two little birds that we had in support had caught up to us because the Hawks were a lot faster than the little birds. So when it turned into a, a helo assault, we didn't want to waste any time. We wanted to get them while they were fresh in case they were spooked and trying to go arm themselves, which is what they did. But, uh, so as they squirted out, the little birds came in. And so this is weird daylight thing where we're firing, maneuvering

• 1:26:46Chris VanSant?

  across this field towards the house as these guys go in every direction. The little birds came in with guys on the pods and they're shooting down and the bad guys are shooting up. One of the pilots took one through his foot, straight through his foot, didn't tell anybody, finished the whole operation. And it wasn't until we got back, we found out he had a bullet hole right through the bottom of his boot. Just kept flying the mission. Uh, we had another guy take one and it was weapon. Uh, so didn't penetrate his rifle, but hit him right in the rifle. Damn. On the pod. Uh, but so anyway, target goes down, you know, we're all good. Everybody's okay minus the wounded pilot. Uh, and the bad guys are all dead, but every single one of those guys had a body bomb on. Every one of them. All of them. Every single one, um, was wearing a rigged body bomb. None of them detonated. The two

• 1:27:31Chris VanSant?

  vehicles that were in basically the front yard where they had parked the car were like two of those like mini buses. Both of them fully loaded with explosives. They were VBIDs that were, they were getting ready to use. Uh, and the realization hit us that when we flared and turned, when we missed the target and came back in, if they would have just happened to be able to clack off one of those two trucks, it would have taken down both helos and probably killed everybody in our troop. Shit. Um, but fortunately for us, and this is the way it works, what is it? What's the saying? Better to be lucky than good or whatever. Yeah. We were lucky that day. And, um, yeah, the intel that came off of that, uh, in particular was, was some of the intel that was utilized to target AMZ, which we had

• 1:28:15Chris VanSant?

  rotated out, but the very next rotation is when they, they dropped all those bombs and killed him, uh, and confirmed that he was killed. So, yeah, it was a really successful rotation.

• 1:28:25Chris VanSant?

  Mentally, it was probably good because we were really getting after it. And, you know, we all had a lot of baggage from oh five. Um, so, you know, we were really effective. We were really engaged and, uh, and yeah, it was, and we didn't lose anybody. So it's a good trip.

• 1:28:39Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you've been a part of a lot of high profile stuff.

• 1:28:43Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, weird, lucky timing.

• 1:28:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. It's funny how it all plays out, but you look back on it and you go, wow, I was, I got to do some significant things that not a lot of, a lot of guys got to do. And I, to this day, I, you know, now I can look back and realize how fortunate I was, not just to live through all that, but to experience it all that and to do it with the guys that I did. So, yeah.

• 1:29:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's not just luck. There's a lot of hard work that goes into getting that, you know? So, but let's move. I know you, um, you went to Africa.

• 1:29:15Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Shawn Ryan?

  Towards the end of your, towards the end of your time.

• 1:29:19Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, so the end of the oh six rotation, um, I came back. A guy that I had worked with that had been my team leader for a brief stint, had moved to a different place in the building, um, doing more clandestine work, um, or, or advanced forces, AFO stuff. Um, so in the years leading up to two thousand and seven, um, General McChrystal, who was the JSOC commander, had been slowly but surely spreading out intelligence collection kind of around the globe. Uh, and I think, you know, the phrase was you need a network to fight a network. Um, and he was smart enough to identify that. Outkite has got cells all over the world. There's a, a network of folks that are communicating. Uh, the long and short of it is, is a lot of people out there that want to kill Americans and that have been a part of that.

• 1:30:02Chris VanSant?

  Um, and we need to be forward and collect intelligence in other countries besides Afghanistan and Iraq. Um, so in, in, uh, late oh six, um, I got asked to, to try out, to come up and try out for this other part of our organization. Um, that was really focused on stuff outside of, of Iraq and Afghanistan. Uh, and at the same time that I had gone through that and done that and, and joined that part of the building, um, they stood up a new task force in DC. And the task force was designed with combating AQ threats, um, greater GWOT stuff outside of the Middle East. Uh, the Horn of Africa was a particularly big hotbed.

• 1:30:46Chris VanSant?

  What they had figured out was that Somalia being the lawless land that it is, um, was the perfect place to not only recruit from, but to ship foreign fighters from various countries around Africa and the Middle East down to, to train them, prepare them, give them skills like IED building and marksmanship and whatever. Um, and then put them on boats, ship them up to Yemen, and then via Yemen back into the Middle East to, to go kill Americans wherever that may be. So it was an integral part of the foreign fighter network, um, and we wanted to do something about it. Um, so in early oh seven, or I guess early spring of oh seven, um, I got to deploy to the Horn of Africa, um, working out of the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

• 1:31:31Chris VanSant?

  Uh, we had, you know, intelligence collection in various countries throughout the horn. Um, but I was one of two guys from my organization. Uh, we had two guys from, from Dev Group, um, two guys from, from the Air Force equivalent of those two organizations. So a combat controller and a pararescue guy. Two guys from another army organization, um, based out of Virginia. Uh, and then a couple of Ranger Recon Detachment, um, operators. So we called it the Rainbow Coalition because it was two guys from each color of the rainbow. Two guys from green, two guys from blue, two guys from red, two guys from white. That was our little joke, along with a bunch of other assets that were involved with, uh, really intelligence processing and understanding.

• 1:32:13Chris VanSant?

  Um, yeah, Africa was different in that it was new. I wasn't surrounded by my squadron mates. Um, I was lucky in that the SEALs that I ended up with were guys that were a part of the exchange back early on in the war. That McChrystal had directed, and we were all kind of at the same points in our career. Um, so while they were moving into the, you know, the clandestine element of their organization, I was doing the same. So when we met in Africa, it wasn't the first time we'd ever seen each other. Um, so it made for a very easy, comfortable environment where. We could do some high level stuff together without a whole bunch of time to train together, if that makes sense. Yeah. Limited assets, we didn't have much. We had no like ISR, we had no predators, we had no

• 1:32:56Chris VanSant?

  close air support, we had no AC-130. Our intelligence collection was human, was meeting with people on the ground and gathering information. We had a signal intelligence platform, so we had one airframe that flew overhead that listened to real time voice calls via their iPhones and other handheld satellites that the terrorists were using. And we had a couple of indigenous speakers that we would put on the plane and would listen to those real time phone calls and had been doing it for the last five years and could recognize key players' voices.

• 1:33:32Chris VanSant?

  And so that was literally how we were targeting. To fast forward, in, I guess, the tail end of May, early June, we started getting some traffic in Mombasa, Kenya. So we had some human intelligence that directed us to there. And then we put some asset, that one asset that we had overhead. And lo and behold, they got a hit on, on the two, probably two of the most wanted guys in the world, which were a guy named Harun Fazul and a guy named Saleh Nabhane, which were responsible for the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1993. And so, long time target, spent on the list for

• 1:34:14Chris VanSant?

  a long time. This is 2007, so it was a long time later. But what they were involved in was basically that foreign fighter trafficking into and out of southern Somalia, and the training of those guys, and then subsequently moving them back into the Middle East. So we knew we needed to do something. We just didn't have the assets to like go interdict anywhere. And we certainly couldn't do a hit in downtown Mombasa, Kenya. So we got lucky. The last communication we had from them was that they were boarding a boat, and it was 18 to 20 terrorists or so, and that they were headed north. They were stopping in southern Somalia and then continuing on to Sanaa, Yemen, where they were going to

• 1:34:54Chris VanSant?

  dump their guys off for movement into the Middle East. So on the onset, we had what we thought were the number two and three most wanted dudes on the planet, Osama bin Laden being number one, this was two and three. And outside of the Middle East, we had them on a boat, we had them moving north along the coast of Somalia, but we had no way to interdict them at sea. So we came up with a hasty plan. We had been working. The CIA, over the years leading up to that, had developed a relationship with some folks in Somalia. And one of them was the Puntland Defense Force, so northern Somalia in the town of Basaso. These are

• 1:35:34Chris VanSant?

  basically Somalis that were recruited via various means, but mostly money, to help us achieve things in that country. So they were the best friends money could buy at the moment. But yeah, we ended up flying from Nairobi, Kenya, up to Djibouti, where there was a US naval base. We dumped half of our guys there. And then three of us flew from Djibouti, when I say half, it's like, so six guys. Yeah. We left three in Djibouti to coordinate some assets, or what we had, you know, like an aircraft, if we needed it for Kazakh, start talking to our higher headquarters about

• 1:36:16Chris VanSant?

  what's going on and what we're trying to do. And then we flew and forward staged in Basaso, Somalia, and linked up with the PDF, as we called them. The PDF there was led by a guy that was basically a former Somali warlord. But again, he was sympathetic to our cause and was not a fan of foreigners and foreign fighters coming into Somalia to train. Like that just wasn't, he wasn't good with that either. So his name was Bashir. And so we linked up with Bashir, handful of his guys, and we basically tried to figure out what we were going to do about this boat moving north. And we were kind of hoping and praying that we would pick them up again and get a good fix on their location, or that they

• 1:37:00Chris VanSant?

  would stop and they would give us some course of action. Well, about the time that all this is going on, we're flying a plane up the coast of Somalia, you know, trying to gather some whatever we can. And they catch them on the phone. And they had, so high sea state off the horn, which is notoriously bad, like shipping lane, in terms of sea conditions. They had rough seas had forced them aground uh on the coast and actually damaged their ship. It was in the town of Bargal and they got in a shootout with locals in the town. They stole a bunch of supplies like water and food from the townspeople.

• 1:37:42Chris VanSant?

  And then they moved up into the hills just outside of town. So they couldn't get back on their boat because their boat was damaged. All we got, so now we're getting real time human intelligence. All we got out of the townspeople was that, hey, these guys are all foreigners, like they're all from other places. And they they're heavily armed. They have a bunch of guns. There's a bunch of them. Um, and we don't understand why they're here. Like this is the conversation that's going on. So, you know, the three of us that were in Basaso, it was me, um, a guy from Dev and a CCT guy. Uh, we're like, well, we gotta do something like we have an opportunity to get, you know, number two and number three most wanted dudes on the planet. Like we, we gotta do something. So we came up with a plan with, with, uh, with Bashir and the, and the PDF guys

• 1:38:27Chris VanSant?

  that we were gonna fly, um, and get as close to Bargal as we could, stop about two hours west of the town. And then he was gonna coordinate for some folks in the area to come pick us up. And then, you know, we were gonna drive into Bargal and figure out, you know, what we were gonna do with this. So that all went down. Um, when we were on the way out of town, uh, Brady and I, the CCT guy and I were in one vehicle and, and, and Phil, the, the Navy guy was in the other vehicle and we're with Somalis and we're driving down the road and this vehicle comes screaming down the road behind us. Like high rate of speed, like dirt spilling out everywhere and we're freaking out. Like none of the guys in the car are speaking English. The only person that does is Bashir. He doesn't know what's going on and this car is chasing us down.

• 1:39:12Chris VanSant?

  So they're honking their horn, they're honking their horn and our guys pull over and we're like, what are you doing? So we're ready to go thinking this is somebody that spotted us coming out of town. And they pull up, stop, get out. It's guys that they know. What it was, was they had forgot their big bags of cotton and they didn't want to leave without them. They forgot their drugs. Yeah. So, and that was typical working with Somalis, you know, about midday, they would start chewing cotton. Mid-afternoon, they were useless. So if you didn't get it done in the morning, it wasn't happening. But, uh, yeah, so that was a little high stress moment leading up to that, but we ended up getting on a plane, flying out. Um, his guys showed up, so it was the three of us, uh, Bushir and a handful of his, of his loyalists.

• 1:39:54Chris VanSant?

  Uh, and we drove into Bargal. Um, on the way into Bargal, we were kind of working on a hasty plan. And we had nothing, you know, so we just kind of worked with what we knew to be true. Well, we had hard facts on and we kind of backwards planned from there. So, you know, Brady, the CCT guy was like, look, man, we need a way to get out of here. Like, what are our options? Like, we've got a fixed wing plane in Djibouti that could come get us. We got our guys that are coordinating there and we've got some PJs that were stationed there. So we've got some options, but it's like five hours away. I mean, he's like, well, there's a Russian airfield that's south of the city that I saw on the map, old dirt strip. He's like, why don't we stop on the way into town and survey that airfield and make sure we can land that bird there just in case? Perfect. Great idea. So we stopped, surveyed the airfield.

• 1:40:38Chris VanSant?

  It was probably the quickest airfield survey a CCT guy's ever done, but he felt good enough that we could land a plane on this dirt strip. So we picked up, we left from there. Phil, the Navy guy's like, hey, man, there's a Navy destroyer off the coast. Can't see him, but he's out there somewhere doing anti-piracy operations. So this is before Captain Phillips, the year before that all went down. But, so they're out there just burning holes in the ocean, trying to deter Somali pirates from doing what ended up happening a year later. And so he's like, why don't we call that destroyer? It's, it was the USS Chaffee. And Brady's like, cool. He's like, I can do that. Like, we'll call them in the blind and be like, hey, you got US forces on the ground. He's like, I can pre-plan some targets. You know, they got deck guns. Like, if we get in trouble, we've got some naval gunfire. Awesome. Great.

• 1:41:24Chris VanSant?

  And they're like, well, how are we gonna do this? And I'm like, well, I think we just basically need to get there with our dudes. We need to set up a patrol base between the town and wherever we think they are, because we don't have an exact on their location. I said, it's a hundred and ten degrees outside. Let's bring the aircraft down so they can hear it. Let's bring the boat in over the horizon line so they can see a US naval warship off the coast instead of a patrol base out of small arms range, but where they can see us. Just wait them out. I'm like, there's nowhere to go. There are thousands of miles in any direction from the next town through the desert. It's a hundred and ten degrees outside. Their boat's damaged. I go, they're gonna start being heat casualties soon. Like, they weren't prepared to be here. We are. We have the ability to access the town, whatever. And we've got some friendlies, Somali friendlies with us. We'll just wait it out.

• 1:42:08Chris VanSant?

  So we pull in. Everybody's good with it. The three of us feel good about it. You know, it's basically the three of us and, and eight or 10 Somalis. So to our knowledge, there's eighteen to twenty some of them, and they got bellfeds and a bunch of other stuff. We ended up shit. We had rifles and pistols and a handful of Somalis with AKs. We, we did have two machine guns, but not a ton of ammunition for either one of those that the Somalis brought with them. And so we set up our little hasty patrol base and we're waiting. And in the early days, early part of the day, it's hot and we're dying. And Bashir's like, we need to go get these guys. And we're like, nah, man, we can't do it. And again, he's the only one that speaks English. He's like, no, we need to go do it. And he keeps pressing.

• 1:42:53Chris VanSant?

  And like, we can't figure out why. And he keeps pressing, keeps pressing. Still can't like, Bashir, just calm down, man. And what it was is he didn't understand. He's like, he can see the boat too. We didn't say anything about it. He can hear the plane. And he's like, at one point, he's like, why don't you just drop a bomb on them? And we're like, one, we don't know exactly where they are. We have no way of geolocating them. Two, the battery died on their phone. They're not talking anymore. So we don't know if they moved. We don't know what's going on. We just know they're in those hills somewhere. Or like three, like we haven't worked a whole lot together. So like this is a dangerous thing. Like we just need to wait these guys out. Well, he loses patience. So it's probably two thirty, three o'clock in the afternoon. And he comes over to the three of us. So

• 1:43:36Chris VanSant?

  the Somalis are kind of spread around just doing their thing, chewing cotton. And the three of us are like, just trying to figure out like, what's next? Because we can't just shoot naval gunfire. Like, we basically have to get in an engagement to do anything. And we're in a country we're not supposed to be in. We got no air assets, no cast, no nothing. So Bashir walks over and he goes, I'm taking my guys and I'm going over the hill to kill them. And I go, what? And he goes, you can come with me if you want, unless you're scared. He punked us, literally punked us. Holy shit. And so I'm like, all right, Bashir, you know, straight face. I'm like, I, I, I get it. I get it. Like, we, we need to do something. I understand. I go, can you give us a minute? Let us talk and come up with a little hasty plan here. And I'll, and I'll

• 1:44:21Chris VanSant?

  be right back with you. He says, fine. So he walks off to his guys. And I turn around where he can't see me and I started laughing. And Phil and Brady are like, what are you laughing at? And I go, you guys aren't going to believe this. I was like, but when you go through Robin Sage in the Q course, you have a G chief, a guerrilla warlord guy that's pretending that's his thing. And he has his little G's. And I go, and they act like complete assholes and they do things like this. And when you're in the Q course, you're like, no way this ever happens. And here we are in Somalia. And this former warlord is going, are you too scared to come with me? And so, you know, we had a quick conversation and I'm like, look, we're gonna lose the faith of these guys. These are our only security. We're a five hour flight, a really long swim to a boat. We got no assets, no nothing.

• 1:45:05Chris VanSant?

  Like, we can't lose this. Like, we need to keep these guys on our side. We didn't trust them to begin with. You know, we hadn't worked with them a whole bunch. And it wasn't a very comfortable feeling. It wasn't like we had been training these guys and working with them for months on end. Yeah. Supposedly the CIA trained them for the last few years, but I can tell you, what we saw was not a highly trained force. So anyway, so we end up pulling Bashir in and we explained to him that basically we're gonna do a movement to contact, you know, bounding overwatch. And we ended up putting the gun teams on either side, not so much because of the tactics, but because we were afraid about having them too close to us. Yeah. And what would happen. So we had a gun team to the, to our right flank, a gun team to our left flank. The three of us were staying together no matter what. And then

• 1:45:50Chris VanSant?

  we had a couple other Somalis and Bashir with us. And so we start this bounding overwatch. We'd move a gun team up, move another gun team up, and so on and so on. And so we crest over the first hill. About the time we get over the first hill headed up to the larger ridge, we hear a Belfet open up. And it's to the north of us. And they're shooting at our, the guys on our right flank. Can't tell exactly where it's coming from, but we can tell that that's the only ones that they can see. So we continue to move up to gain the high ground on this ridge line to try to get a better fix on their position. About the time we get up there, we realize where they are, not too far from our position. We engage those guys, but then all hell breaks loose. So in the draw behind the ridge that

• 1:46:31Chris VanSant?

  we're on, we're taking heavy fire. Ineffective, we're behind like this ridge of rocks. So we've got some cover, it's good cover, but man, they are just hammering the ridge line. So the impression is that this is exactly what we thought. This is a lot of guys. So we got a couple of dudes that have been dealt with on the north side, but they have shot and wounded both of the guys in our gun team to our right flank. About the time that we're trying to figure out exactly where they are below us. Now, we got no grenades, we've got nothing, like I said. Shit. Small arms. About that time, bullets come. I'm here, Phil and Bashir over there. The two Somalis are a little bit further to his left, and then the gun team is beyond

• 1:47:13Chris VanSant?

  them. And then Brady's on my right, and then the wounded gun team on his right. And so rounds come cracking right across the front of me, the cover I'm standing at, like skip off the rock right in front of me. And Brady and I both look left at the same time, and dudes are maneuvering up the ridge line. There's four or five guys that are coming up the ridge. And so all this in a split second, that first like barrage of fire, Bashir is like just standing out in the open, get shot three times. So Phil grabs him, pulls him down behind cover and is like packing like Kurex and gauze in his holes. Brady and I both turn and I move to a piece of cover between me and the guys on the left flank, yelled at Brady, hey, move to me, move to me,

• 1:47:56Chris VanSant?

  move to me, suppress the fire, Brady moves to me. Now it's the two of us, the two Somalis that are up here with us are now cowering down behind the rocks and terrified, like not returning fire, not anything. And I think, well, at least they're not going to shoot us, right? They're there. The gun team between us and them are now in the shootout with the guys. So half the guys that are coming up the ridge are shooting at the two Somalis on our left flank. The other half of the guys are shooting at Brady and I. It's kind of whack a mole. Brady and I ended up shooting rounds between a bunch of rocks and just ricocheting a bunch of rounds into the dudes and they would peel out to one side of the other. And, you know, we kind of dealt with it. But anyway, in the midst of that portion, we ended ended up dealing with all those guys, but they had wounded not just Bashir,

• 1:48:41Chris VanSant?

  but the other two guys. So now I've got five wounded Somalis, including the only one that speaks English and the three of us. So everybody on the ridge is down. I'm not worried about, it doesn't seem to be we have good visibility that we've got any more threat coming up the ridge line above or below, but we're still getting hammered from down below. And I'm like, I don't like, I don't know what our move is from here. Like the three of us were like, we don't have a lot of options here. And Brady goes, about some naval gunfire?

• 1:49:15Chris VanSant?

  And so, you know, we kind of, the three of us kind of looked at each other and we're like, all right, yeah, we can do this. Like, let's just have, they're all in one spot. Let's hammer this draw. We had already talked to them, pre-planned targets. So the boat was ready and aware and they were jacked up. Like, they didn't even know we were there. I'll bet they were fucking pumped. We called them in the blind. It was a really funny, like 20 minute conversation before we had gotten into that position. And, and you could hear them in the background, like, yeah, like they knew they were getting ready to get some. And so. Brady is on the horn with the boat. I have a handheld satellite radio because I'm like, we can't do this unless I call troops in contact over the satcom. Like, they gotta know,

• 1:49:55Chris VanSant?

  we've been engaged, that we didn't just shoot naval gunfire into a country we're not supposed to be into. And so, yeah, so Brady's talking to the boat, calling in naval gunfire. I'm calling in troops in contact over satcom. I said that we had wounded, but I didn't say who, because I was worried that if it was just Somalis, we weren't gonna get the same reaction. Which, I don't know if that was the right call or the wrong call, but it was the call that I made at the time. And so, we ended up grabbing up as many of the Somalis as we could, and we started pulling back off the ridge, right about that time rounds come overhead. I think Brady shot, had him shoot like 24 rounds or something off the deck guns into the valley and walked him up and down as we pulled back off the ridge. So, we get back down to our patrol base. There's

• 1:50:38Chris VanSant?

  no more fire coming from the hills, other than, you know, the smoke and everything that's left, dust from the naval barrage. We get in the patrol base. Phil basically, like, almost on his own, I think I helped him with like, the first two guys treating casualties, but Phil basically patched up all them dudes by himself. I was talking to Basaso, Basaso was talking to Djibouti, Djibouti was talking to Nairobi, Nairobi was talking to JSOC at Bragg, JSOC at Bragg was talking to SecDef in DC. So, this was like,

• 1:51:13Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:51:14Chris VanSant?

  Like, it was wild. And again, they asked me twice about casualties, and I said, you know, we're currently, we have a casualty collection point, we're treating our wounded, we're unsure of their status at this moment, but that we were working on it and we were all right, but we needed CASVAC, and we needed it now, because they were a five-hour flight away. So, we patch up the Somalis, it's getting dark now. There's no sounds, there's no fire, there's no nothing coming out of the hills, and basically, we don't have the ability to like, go over there at night. We've got no workforce anymore. We had three Somalis, I think. Down in the village that had weapons, but they weren't really a part of what we were doing.

• 1:51:57Chris VanSant?

  So we had those three stay in the patrol base. We commandeered a couple of vehicles from town. We loaded up the wounded and we drove the, you know, 10 minutes down the road to get to the dirt airfield. However, many hours later, they landed a Casa on the dirt airfield. And our guys from Djibouti got out, along with a bunch of PJs that they brought from Djibouti to secure the wounded and treat those guys. They got off with us, so ammo resupply, brought some other stuff with them. The bird left with the wounded to fly back to Djibouti. And then the five of us went back to the patrol base and basically just camped out for the night until the sun came up.

• 1:52:36Chris VanSant?

  We

• 1:52:39Chris VanSant?

  didn't tell anybody that there weren't any Americans on the plane, the wounded. So when it showed up in Djibouti, it was PJs with a bunch of wounded Somalis and no one in Djibouti was even aware of the operation. So they ended up, they ended up in the hospital there on the naval base in Djibouti. And all those guys ended up living, which is cool. But, but yeah, we kind of surprised them with that one. So the sun comes up next morning, we ended up going over the hill as a, as a more capable force, because now there were six of us. And we had one local that we had recruited out of town that spoke enough English that we could at least communicate with the Somalis that were with us.

• 1:53:23Chris VanSant?

  They weren't really willing to go over the hill again because they had witnessed what happened the day before. But they eventually and reluctantly came with us and we thought at least they could help us with recovery of some of the bodies if it was two and three or whatever. Yeah, no, they're Arabs and they weren't touching a body after that much time later. So we ended up moving through the area, um, a couple of guys dying, most of them were already dead. We had a guy that we thought for sure was Harun Fazul, uh, looked just like him. I mean, same skin tone and had a pair of glasses. Like it was a lot of similarities that we thought it was him.

• 1:54:05Chris VanSant?

  Nobody that looked like Nabhan, um, and the rest of the guys were like a who's who of bad guys from around the globe. Like two guys with British passports, uh, like legit British passports. No shit. A Yemeni, a Syrian, like it was this random collection of, it was exactly what we thought it was. Um, and so we're on the radio, we've got a possible for, for, you know, Harun Fazul, whatever his call sign was at the time. And they're like, all right, well, uh, we're going to fly in an SSE team to do DNA testing and confirm. We need you to take them up to the site. And we're like, we're not doing that. And they're like, why, why wouldn't you do that? And I'm like, I'm not taking an FBI team that's never been to combat, never been trained into the hills of northern Somalia,

• 1:54:49Chris VanSant?

  where I don't know how many guys are still running around out here. Like I had no way to confirm or deny if we'd gotten them all. I knew we had a bunch of bodies, but I had no way of knowing if we had gotten everybody. And so there's some back and forth on the radio. What we ended up agreeing on was we bagged up the guy that we thought was Harun Fazul, and we carried him off the mountain, threw him in the back of a truck and then drove him down to the airfield. So when they landed, all they had to do was get off the plane and deal with the possible. Um, and then we could give them all the other intel we collected. So passports and money and computer, they had laptops and all kinds of stuff. Smorgasbord of intel was a decent, decent hit in that respect, but, but yeah, so the FBI guys get off the plane.

• 1:55:29Chris VanSant?

  Unzip the body bag for him. You know, they peel it back. It took them two seconds. They grabbed him, they rolled him up on his side, they pulled his shirt up and he had no scar and they said, it's not him. And I, we were like, what? And they're like, it's not him. I'm like, how do you know that fast that it's not him? You didn't do anything. And they go, yeah, Harun Fazul had appendicitis. He had his appendix taken out in whatever year. He's got no scar where his appendix was removed. And we're like, damn, that quick? They just shut like all for nothing, you know? We're all proud of ourselves. Um, so we're bummed out. We're like, all right, well, let's wrap it up. Like the rest of those bodies, we got plenty of intel. Like it is what it is. Like the Somalis are all still alive. They're back in Djibouti. Let's get out of here. So we loaded up and flew back to Djibouti.

• 1:56:14Chris VanSant?

  You know, there's a little bit of a reception there from the handful of people that did know where we were. We get to the hangar and, you know, all three of us are just covered in blood, you know, not our own, but I've got cuts all up and down my arms from the sharp corally rocks that we'd been moving around on the ridge line. And then, you know, the Somali, the wounded Somalis and all that stuff.

• 1:56:36Chris VanSant?

  So we looked quite a sight to people that saw us coming into the hangar that we were in. And about five minutes after we're there, a little Navy dude comes knocking on the door, opens the door, comes in, he says, hey, uh, the Admiral that is in charge of the base needs whoever was just involved in whatever went down to come brief him. And we're like, uh, okay.

• 1:57:03Chris VanSant?

  Can you give us a few minutes like to clean up, like whatever? And he's like, well, I, he just said as soon as possible. And we're like, okay, whatever. So we'll tell, it's tell them we're coming. So the kid leaves, we like run through the shower, put on a fresh set of DCUs or whatever we were wearing pants and shirts. And so we leave, we walk onto the main compound there off the airfield.

• 1:57:24Chris VanSant?

  We finally find where his little headquarters is. We walk in and his, one of his staffos or secretary or somebody's like, you know, the Admiral's back here, blah, blah, blah. So they take us in this little conference room and he's sitting at the head of the table. He's standing up and a couple of his staff officers, you know, junior guys are, are in the room with him. And he's like, gentlemen, how you doing? Come on in and have a seat. And so we go in and we sit down and he's like, and mind you, the whole way over there, we're like, we're screwed. Like this dude is gonna flip a gasket. Like, who are you? How was I not aware of this? How did you involve my warship that I'm responsible for? Who cleared this? We're assuming no conversation has been had and it hasn't. So he's like, look, he's like, you guys have had a pretty wild, uh, rough, uh, 24 hours, huh?

• 1:58:10Chris VanSant?

  And we were like, yes, sir. Like just waiting. And he's like, so, so tell me the story. Like, how did you get there? And we're like, well, and we kind of gave him the brief, like, we've been doing some targeting. We've been working on this. We've been in and out of Somalia a number of times. We had an opportunity, um, at some really important folks and, and to disrupt the network in a substantial way. And we just felt like it was an opportunity that we needed to take. And he's like, well, you know, had you been planning this? We're like, nope. It was pretty much a hasty decision that was supported by three-letter agencies and DC in the moment because of the significance of the targets. And, and yeah, they asked us if we were okay doing it and that's what we did. And again, I'm waiting for the reaction and he goes, that's the coolest shit I've ever heard.

• 1:58:57Chris VanSant?

  That's awesome. And Phil, who's hilarious, Phil busts out laughing and then it's a comfy conversation. And he's like, so you guys, the three of you just decided you were gonna go do this? And we're like, yep. And he's like, man, you guys have some huge balls.

• 1:59:16Chris VanSant?

  And so to this day, if that man, whoever it is, and I don't know, I don't remember his name, but if he's ever out there and ever hears this, I've said it once before. I would love to hear from him, just, just to like have a conversation about that day and how funny it was and get like more of his perspective. But, but yeah, so it ended up being a really good engagement and, and he was grateful. We were grateful that his guys reacted the way that they did, that they shifted mission. You know, they had no clue and they were spot on, their rounds were spot on. I mean, all their training and anything they'd ever done in peacetime came to fruition. That's some of the coolest shit I've ever fucking heard.

• 1:59:55Chris VanSant?

  So we got home and it was a, I think all of us collectively, within our organizations, we ended up briefing various elements within our different commands about what went down, how it happened, why, because this was the first thing outside of GWI. This is the first time guys had been engaged outside of Iraq, Afghanistan, and a little bit in Pakistan, right? So it was a big deal in terms of getting in a gunfight somewhere like that. But we didn't really understand the significance of the impact. Like to us, we didn't get the guys we were after, like we missed our mark. Yeah, we killed some bad guys that needed to be killed, but we missed our mark.

• 2:00:38Chris VanSant?

  Well, I didn't find out for, I don't know, a month later, I'm having dinner with a JSOC intel analyst that's a friend of mine and. She's talking about, do you understand what, what went down? And I'm like, no. And I'm like, we didn't get our guy. And she's like, no, no, no, they haven't even told you guys? And we're, I'm like, no, what are you talking about? And she proceeds to tell me that what happened was after that engagement, one of the guys that we killed um was a Yemeni dude and they called him the bear. And he was the chief like movement officer for all foreign fighters coming into and out of the Middle East and Africa. So he was basically the gatekeeper for bringing guys in, depositing them in Somalia.

• 2:01:21Chris VanSant?

  After they were trained up, bringing them back to Yemen and then facilitating their rat line movement into the Middle East. The Sudanese guy that we thought was Sarun Fazul was like AQ's primary like IED teacher. They called him the professor. So he had been in southern Somalia for years, teaching guys how to build IEDs. Uh, the two British passport holders were like dudes that had, that were actual British citizens that had had some level of training and had been teaching shooting and marksmanship in southern Somalia to foreign fighters. Like it was like this. Holy shit. And so conversations and intelligence that was collected, right on the heels of that was that AQ leadership in the Middle East had completely lost faith in the ability to traffic uh foreign fighters into and out of Somalia.

• 2:02:06Chris VanSant?

  And it stayed that way for nearly two years. So it shut down that whole pipeline for like two years after that event. Wow. So like when, when, a year later, when Captain Phillips went down, um, you know, Somali pirates, they had nothing to do with GWAT. That was just Somalis being Somalis in that part of the world. And uh, uh, yeah, like the guys had nothing, like it was, there was nothing going on anywhere. You had Somalia had its own issues, Al Shabab and all that stuff. But the connection between Greater AQ and the Horn of Africa had been completely disconnected. So yeah, it was, that was the last gunfight I was ever in.

• 2:02:46Chris VanSant?

  For me, it was one of the most significant, you know, with all the, the amazing things that I was lucky enough to be a part of. It stood out to me because it was, it was a handful of operators with different background and experiences that if it hadn't have been the three of us, if it hadn't have been an Air Force guy, Navy guy, and an Army guy together, I don't know that we would have thought of all the things to do that we did, and I just skimmed over it. But I don't know that collectively, we would have survived that day. Like, it, it literally took an idea from each guy. Uh, and all of us being a part of that to kind of effectively do what we did that day and then get out of it unscathed. And so, yeah, that, it really, the piece with the admiral at the end.

• 2:03:28Chris VanSant?

  Even funnier is, is it so like, I don't know, it's probably six months later. I get a phone call on my team room phone, which is a secure line that only people within certain elements of JSOC would even have the ability to look up and access. And I answer the phone and it's, I don't know, someone that works at JSOC, or maybe it was someone that works up at the beach. But basically, they were calling me to ask me if I would write the, the narrative to accompany, um, the SEALs to fill Silver Star recommendation. And I was like, absolutely. Like, my unit didn't do that.

• 2:04:10Chris VanSant?

  They gave us another Bronze Star with me, you know what I mean, in your inbox, but we, we, it was just, we were wired different. So I was happy. I was really excited. I was like, yeah, that's cool. So I hang up the phone. So like 10 more minutes goes by and the team room phone rings again and it's the Air Force guy. It's Brady and Brady's like, "Do you believe we both got screwed and they want us to write the narrative for Phil Silver Star?"

• 2:04:32Chris VanSant?

  And he wasn't upset about Phil getting it. He was upset that all three organizations didn't talk to each other and like do the same thing. And so, anyway, so we had a laugh about it. He was being funny. And I was like, "You're gonna do it, right?" He's like, "Absolutely." And so, yeah, so the three of us to this day, like it's a memory that we share that will never go away. And yeah, it was the last, the last real gunfight I ever got in.

• 2:04:54Shawn Ryan?

  That is, uh, that's a fucking hell of a way to end it. I mean, holy shit, that, that's. That's fucking cool, man. That's awesome.

• 2:05:04Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was cool.

• 2:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  Did you get to go to his ceremony?

• 2:05:08Chris VanSant?

  Uh-uh. No, of course not.

• 2:05:12Shawn Ryan?

  You guys keep in touch?

• 2:05:14Chris VanSant?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, we talked via text a while ago, but yeah, we're two different worlds, so I don't get to see him very often.

• 2:05:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool, man. Well, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, like the Admiral, your, all your info is in the description.

• 2:05:27Chris VanSant?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:05:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Damn. So how did you leave the unit?

• 2:05:32Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, so I, uh, came home from that trip. Um, everything changed. I ended up redeploying to the Horn of Africa the next year. Uh, and you know, at that point in my career, I, in spite of, you know, that all being a good story, um, when I got home from that trip, uh, injuries had caught up with me. I got home from that oh seven trip. I, um, I ended up having a total disc replacement, neck surgery, C5, C6. Um, I had had pain for years leading up to that and I was just wearing a helmet and not jumping. I just worn out the disc between those two vertebrae. Um, so I had that surgery in late oh seven, um, and leading up to it, I was on a lot of medication. Um, I was on a lot of painkillers and muscle relaxers and,

• 2:06:16Chris VanSant?

  you know, I wasn't sleeping, so I was on sleep aids. You know, I really, looking back now, all these years later, I wasn't myself. I was, I was drinking. Um, I think it was just years of, you know, it was 11 combat rotations, um, adding up to uh, some trauma and some mental health issues and some other things that I frankly, at that point I wasn't aware of.

• 2:06:38Chris VanSant?

  So yeah, I redeployed in, uh, in early oh eight to the Horn of Africa. Uh, we didn't have a lot to do because of everything that had went down the year prior. Um, we were still messing around with Al Shabab and some of the other, you know, terrorist elements that were within Somalia that were disrupting that. Somalia was kind of three, I don't know, almost three individual countries, if you will, at that point in time. You had Mogadishu and the surrounding area was sort of one element of control. You had Puntland in the north and then you had kind of southern Somalia that was kind of on its own, which is, and lawless, which is why they got away with running the training camps down there.

• 2:07:17Chris VanSant?

  But yeah, I went back, um, and yeah, I, I made a mistake while I was there. Um, I had a, a relationship, um, that I shouldn't have. Uh, and

• 2:07:30Chris VanSant?

  Sort of by happenstance, I was having some personality conflict with the guy that I worked with. Because I'd been there the year before he hadn't, and then I had all this mental health stuff going on. He probably did too at that point. And, you know, we just come from a competitive, alpha environment. Uh, and I think it just made things difficult for the two of us. So I had a great relationship with the SEALs that were there. He didn't because he was the new guy. Um, there was just a lot of things that led to some animosity and discomfort. So. I made this mistake, um, rather than like us talking about it and working through it, he in haste had sent, you know, some information to the rear and said that I had done this thing. Uh, and, um. He fucking dimed you out.

• 2:08:13Chris VanSant?

  A bit, yeah. Um. You know, was I in the right state of the mind at the time? Probably not. Was I drinking heavily? Yep. Was I, and, and like now I'll say, was I full on addicted to pain medication? Yeah. I was. I had been given a tackle box to deploy with because I was thirty days post-surgery. Uh, and I, yeah, I had a problem. Um, so my decision-making probably wasn't clear. His probably wasn't clear, but yeah, he, uh, in haste or frustration or whatever, he, uh, he sent an email to the rear. That ended up eventually in, in me getting let go from the unit. Um, and I was asked to leave for two years.

• 2:08:55Chris VanSant?

  Um, and, you know, when you've given everything you have to a place and all you've done in all your time there is deploy to war. Uh, it was a big shock to my system. Um, it was. Like having your, in everything that you are torn out of your body. And you're left standing there looking at a shell of what you thought you were. Uh, to make matters worse, um, you know, the unit's pretty cool about when you leave. Like it wasn't. This super severe thing. I didn't have an A D. I didn't shoot somebody I wasn't supposed to. I had an inappropriate relationship with a. With a person that was married and I didn't know it. And that was it. So I had to do my unit appreciation tour and leave.

• 2:09:38Chris VanSant?

  But I had gone through the Q course and when I was in the Q course, they changed the policy where if you didn't go to language school, you couldn't be awarded the MOS or the TAB. So when I left the unit, I had to pick a job out in the regular army. And the only one I could find with a with a HALO position where I could still do freefall was the the LURST detachment there in the 82nd. So I left the unit as an operator coming off of my 11th combat deployment and I went to the 82nd Airborne Division to be the LURST First Sergeant.

• 2:10:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:10:09Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, luckily, when I got there, they were about six months out from a deployment. So they were prepping to go to Afghanistan. They told me that and I said, I can't deploy. Like, I actually said, I can't deploy to the chain of command. And they asked me why and I said, look, I'm divorced. You know, I got these two little girls. I'm in a custody battle in this situation, you know, I'm trying to spend time with them.

• 2:10:36Shawn Ryan?

  Were you freshly divorced at that point?

• 2:10:37Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Shawn Ryan?

  Did the relationship overseas lead to that divorce?

• 2:10:43Chris VanSant?

  No, no, no, no, I was I was long separated when that happened.

• 2:10:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:46Chris VanSant?

  I just wasn't legally divorced. I was shortly after I got home. But yeah, I was separated for two years. That's a whole nother story, but yeah, my my marriage basically, yeah.

• 2:10:59Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think the marriage dissolved because of the op tempo and how many deployments you were doing?

• 2:11:05Chris VanSant?

  I think it's a contributing factor for sure. Yeah, I mean, the stress that it puts on your family at home is every bit as painful and difficult as the stress that it puts on you as an individual overseas, which is something that I'm very aware of now, that I wasn't necessarily then. So to to to operate, to work, to be at that level, you know, for me, like, I was just a regular dude. Like, even when I was in the unit, I felt like I was working every day just to be mediocre and stay there. And I think most guys feel that way. And so to let up even for a second or to take your take your eye off the ball and not focus on doing what you do and training and being focused on the next mission,

• 2:11:47Chris VanSant?

  even for your family, felt like it was going to be the end of your career. And so consequently, the people at home suffer. And I know there's some guys that navigated successfully. I was not one of them, but it was definitely a contributing factor.

• 2:12:01Chris VanSant?

  So yeah, yeah, so left, ended up in the 82nd.

• 2:12:07Chris VanSant?

  Eventually found my way back to SF Command through the help of some friends and some good leaders. I invented, ended up getting a 1-1 in Spanish, testing out, met all the requirements and then there were some hiccups with, could they make me an SF guy or not, but General Mahal and the USAC commander at the time ended up fixing it. Getting me my TAB MOS and said, pull me back in the fold. So yeah, I spent like six, eight months as a LRS attachment first hour and then I went up to USAC and ended up in Equipment Development. A good friend of mine, Pete Gould, was the G8, the CDD G8 there at USAC and said, yeah, I'd love to have you, man. Like, you want to come around targeting Gazer for me? So that was how I got into acquisition.

• 2:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you on pills?

• 2:12:56Chris VanSant?

  About two and a half years. Yeah.

• 2:13:01Chris VanSant?

  So, you know, I personally, I think the pill addiction started with the pain. I think it was the time 06 when we were handing stuff out like candy. I don't fault anybody for that part. They were just trying to keep us going and we didn't know what we knew about pain management and pain medications and prescription narcotics, basically at that point. So we threw pills at everything as a service. So I got pretty heavy on the pills, had surgery. They left me on the pills to recover. And, you know, six months into that, you find yourself where you wake up in the morning and you don't have any pain. You're just taking a pill because the pill makes you feel normal.

• 2:13:45Chris VanSant?

  And then as time goes by, the pills don't have the same effect. So you take a pill in the evening and you have a few beers. And that downward spiral just continues and continues. The thing with prescription pain meds like that is like you're a shell of yourself and you don't even know it.

• 2:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Chris VanSant?

  Like you're not there. So anybody in my life at that time, now looking back can absolutely tell you, yeah, man, he was not himself. So that stretch, leaving the unit, you know, getting divorced, leaving the unit, being hooked on prescription pain meds and self-medicating with other substances, having my identity stripped away, all led to suicide attempts.

• 2:14:26Chris VanSant?

  In about 2010.

• 2:14:29Chris VanSant?

  Uh, I sort of bottomed out at some point in there. Um, believe it or not, I had gotten myself off the pills shortly before that. But to get off the pills, I was heavily self medicating with alcohol. Uh, and I didn't really have a lot to do. Like I was. Work was, it wasn't like I was deploying. It wasn't like I was training. I was working in a staff job. So I could do whatever I did in, in nighttime, show up to work. It wasn't like anybody was really checking on me. So I could be late and nobody would catch it. Like, there was a lot of circumstances that added up to me being allowed to function like that for too long. Um, but yeah, I, uh. How long was it? That stretch? Yeah.

• 2:15:10Chris VanSant?

  Um, really from, oh, well, surgery in December of oh seven.

• 2:15:18Chris VanSant?

  To almost, yeah, the tail end of two thousand and ten was kind of a progressive downward spiral. And just self loathing, man, just feeling empty and awful and.

• 2:15:31Chris VanSant?

  Chasing adrenaline and, and you, you self, you have self destructive tendencies. So you get adrenaline any way you can. It's like a, it's like a barking dog that you beat. Like eventually, if you don't give a dog attention, it, even though it knows it's gonna get hit, it still barks because it wants some kind of attention. And it's the same thing with like trauma and those self destructive tendencies, or at least it was for me, where it didn't matter what kind of. Adrenaline spike I was getting, I needed something to feel like I was alive. Yeah. So whether that's getting in fights, whether that's, you know, drinking, or whether that's. Women or whatever it is. What was it for you? Uh, kind of all of the above. Fighting?

• 2:16:14Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I got in a fight in, in, um.

• 2:16:19Chris VanSant?

  I got in a fight in a house in Southern Pines one night where I went from zero to beating on the guy's face in, in seconds. And didn't know how it happened, like, and that, I, like, I just wasn't that guy. Like, I was a humor guy, like, sure, I've been in some fights along the way and. Frankly, kind of enjoy it, but, but I wasn't the dude to like pick fights in a bar. Yeah. Um, so that definitely wasn't me, but yeah. Yeah, the suicide attempt, I, I, um. Attempt's not the right word, but you know, I woke up one morning after a particularly rough evening, you know, blackout scenario where I didn't remember a lot. And I found myself sitting on the end of the bed with a pistol in my hand.

• 2:17:01Chris VanSant?

  Went back and forth a few times, a few different ways. And somewhere in that process, you know, like you and I talked about over breakfast, my kids kind of came to mind. And then that led down the rabbit hole of like, what is this going to do to them? And like, none of this is their fault. Like, yeah, they're going to be the ones that are punished if you do this. And that was enough. That was enough to put it down, to put it away, to go, what are you doing, man? Like, what is going on? And then the person I was dating at the time, God bless her, you know, convinced me to go get some help. And that was sort of like the day where the switch went off. And so I did, I called the Ususok psych at the time and I said, I need to come in and

• 2:17:45Chris VanSant?

  see you. And so I did.

• 2:17:49Shawn Ryan?

  You're still active at this point?

• 2:17:51Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, still active, still working. No one even knows that any of this is going on. Other than people really close to me.

• 2:17:59Shawn Ryan?

  I've been there, a lot of guys have been there. Let's talk about how often you're waking up after a blackout scenario where you don't remember, you don't know who you're supposed to be pissed off at, you don't know who you slept with, you don't know who you got to fight with, you don't know how the fuck you got home, you don't know why you're on the side of the road, passed out in the fucking ditch. How often was that happening?

• 2:18:23Chris VanSant?

  Regular.

• 2:18:24Shawn Ryan?

  Every day?

• 2:18:25Chris VanSant?

  Not every day, every couple of days for sure. I think, you know, you have one of those incidents, you'd have a blackout incident, and then like the self-loathing that comes the next day and you're exhausted because you're like, it would take a couple of days to recover enough to go, all right, I'm gonna go out drinking again.

• 2:18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:43Chris VanSant?

  You know, I lived in town, I was walking distance from the pub, like, there was a stretch in there.

• 2:18:54Chris VanSant?

  There was a stretch in there where I knew everybody in town. So it'd be two o'clock in the morning on Tuesday and somebody in the bar that knows me or the bartender would walk me outside and point me in the direction of my house.

• 2:19:09Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking A.

• 2:19:10Chris VanSant?

  And I'd make it, you know, because it was two blocks away.

• 2:19:13Shawn Ryan?

  Are these colleagues?

• 2:19:14Chris VanSant?

  Uh, no, no, a lot of them locals, like people that live there. You know, Southern Pines is a pretty protective town, so we all knew each other and people that lived there for years knew the guys from work and, you know, there's not a lot of regular army folks out there, so it's a pretty, a pretty protective community. Um, so yeah, some people looked after me and, um, but yeah, that was a rough stretch, uh, and, and difficult to talk about for a lot of years, like not something I was comfortable saying. Um, I've gotten there, you know, with help and understanding and, and counseling and, and just trying to move past it and use that experience to help other people, you know, maybe see it in themselves and go, man, I need to make a change and I need to talk to someone, I need to do something. So that's why I talk about it, but it's, it's still difficult. Um, the embarrassment is gone.

• 2:19:58Chris VanSant?

  It's like getting emotional, right? Things still make me emotional. The difference is, is I don't feel bad about it anymore. Like, like, like you asked me before, would I change anything? Nope, not a thing. And, you know, I've heard quite a few people along the way and certainly done enough damage to myself, but all of that stuff got me to where I am today and I wouldn't be here without it, you know, I wouldn't have met my wife without it.

• 2:20:21Shawn Ryan?

  How old were your daughters at the time when you attempted to kill yourself?

• 2:20:25Chris VanSant?

  Uh, so 2010, so they were, Taylor was, they made me do math. Taylor was born in 98, Kate was born in 2001, so one of them was nine, the other one was 12.

• 2:20:41Chris VanSant?

  And yeah, it was like 50 50, so like I had the kids half the time, so.

• 2:20:46Chris VanSant?

  Well, probably not half the time, but the time that I did have them, I would stay sober until they went to bed. And then I would drink myself to sleep and then get up and be dad. Like, you know, I don't think they had any idea either. But yeah, it's a pretty rough stretch.

• 2:21:04Chris VanSant?

  Did they know this now? Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, uh, they didn't for a long time. Um, a podcast I did a few years ago, one of the first one, really the first real one I ever did. Um, I talk about it a lot, uh, in pretty good detail. And my daughter, my oldest daughter, listened to it. That's how they found out? Yeah.

• 2:21:29Chris VanSant?

  Fuck, man. Yeah, you know, you don't think about it. And, and she, she called me and she's like, Dad, I listened to that podcast you did. And

• 2:21:40Chris VanSant?

  in a good way, we both got emotional. And, uh, but she said, you know, I didn't know any of that stuff. And I said, Yeah, well, like you were little girls. Like, I don't, I don't want to expose you to that stuff. It didn't really matter. Um, so it was kind of a dual hat. It was one, it was her as an adult, getting an understanding of the things that dad had done and where he was all those times that he went away. Like, they knew I was deployed, you know, and I was at war, but they didn't know what I did, how I did, where, you know, none, none of the details, because he just didn't talk about it. Um, but then on the other hand, it was, I didn't know my dad had a pill addiction and struggled with alcohol. And, uh, you know, I'm sure in hindsight, she looks back and goes, Dad

• 2:22:21Chris VanSant?

  drank quite a bit, or whatever it was. I'm sure she has her own, they have their own things from that. But, but yeah, it was a, it was a pretty profound moment. And I was glad that she listened to it. And if anything, it kind of fueled the fire for me about being open and honest about it and trying to get rid of that stigma. Like, hey, man, it's still hard. Like, I've been, we're talking about my road to recovery from 2010. It's 2022, getting ready to be 2023. I still have tough days. Yeah. You know, most people look at you and they hear the things that you say, and they're like, man, that guy's got it figured out. Nope. The only thing I figured out is how to accept the things that have happened to me and that I can't do it by myself.

• 2:23:00Chris VanSant?

  Um, but yeah, you still have, still have days, you still have times, you still have things that happen that bring that stuff back up. But, but yeah, I think them knowing that, I think it's made our relationship stronger.

• 2:23:11Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I think it's the, it's the right thing to do.

• 2:23:14Shawn Ryan?

  How fast after the, how fast after you tried to kill yourself, did you start to see a turnaround? And what was the, we'll start there.

• 2:23:22Chris VanSant?

  Uh, it took a while. Yeah, I mean, step one for me was getting help. Step two was a diagnosis.

• 2:23:32Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of help?

• 2:23:33Chris VanSant?

  Uh, seeing a psych is where I started. Um, and then subsequently seeing a counselor, uh, through, through the army. Um, I didn't do that for very long. Uh, I think I did that for six months or a year, uh, for a myriad of reasons, but, um, but yeah, that, that was step one. Diagnosis was really important for me because for the first time, somebody actually did an assessment and looked at me from a medical perspective and went, here's the damage that you've done. Yes, you have your exposure to low level blast for years and years and years. And the concussions that you've had and all this other shit has added up to you have traumatic brain injury. You have damage to portions of your brain.

• 2:24:18Chris VanSant?

  That trauma, that physical trauma, that physiological thing is manifesting itself in certain ways, which is causing some of your mental health issues. Additionally, you know, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I never felt like I had PTSD ever, but I didn't know what survivor's guilt or survivor's remorse was. Like, I think I laughed at that diagnosis at the time. It made more sense to me that my brain was damaged. I don't have post-traumatic stress because I was still doing that deny thing of, well, that's just weakness. Just mentally weak. And it takes some time. It takes education and understanding to get past that and realize that all that stuff's interconnected, man. Um, but then I had a, I had a hiccup with medication. So

• 2:24:59Chris VanSant?

  right in that first like thirty days of realization, diagnosis, therapy and path to get better, they prescribed some, some head meds, some, some, uh, yeah, some mental health medication. Uh, and I did feel better, like I felt great, like within a few days, I felt like this weight was lifted. I felt lighter. I'm like, man, I'm, I'm on it. I'm on the path. This is awesome. And a month after taking the prescription, I went to the pharmacy and I got my refill and they accidentally quadrupled the dose on my prescription. So instead of giving me like really low dose number of milligrams of whatever the drug was, they were giving me four times that.

• 2:25:45Chris VanSant?

  And so I went from

• 2:25:48Chris VanSant?

  almost dying to feeling great to literally like going postal, like breaking stuff in the house and just not having control of my emotions. And like, it was awful. Like the, the psych

• 2:26:01Chris VanSant?

  that I was seeing, figured it out. I called him in a panic, like I was losing my mind. And on a hunch, he made me read the pill bottle to him from my prescription, like just on a hunch. And when I read the milligrams, he went, holy shit. And I was freaking out and I was like, holy shit, what? And he's like, that's four times the dose I prescribed you. You were on like two milligrams of whatever it was. And I'm like, what does that mean? And he goes, that, that's what's going on with you right now. Like he talked me down right then and there on the telephone. He was like, I need you, can you drive? And I said, yes. And he said, I need you to come in and see me now. And I did hung up the phone and I went there because I was afraid I was gonna kill myself or somebody else. Like I had no control over my emotions.

• 2:26:42Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:26:43Chris VanSant?

  And so

• 2:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  So hold on. So he's the one that was prescribing you that. How did, how did it wind up being four times the amount?

• 2:26:50Chris VanSant?

  The pharmacy screwed it up.

• 2:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  It was the fucking pharmacy?

• 2:26:53Chris VanSant?

  It was literally a personal, it was an individual error. It was human error.

• 2:26:56Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:26:58Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I mean, we laugh that like he and I like, like I said, I find humor in weird situations. We had a laugh about it like if that happened in the civilian world, I wouldn't be working right now because I'd be a millionaire from the lawsuit that occurred. You know what I mean?

• 2:27:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:10Chris VanSant?

  But you're in the service, just human error. So you can't just come off, you can't just stop taking it or you're going to have withdrawals in a bunch. You're going to have another mental swing. So what ended up happening was he had to progressively wean me off of what I was taking now.

• 2:27:26Shawn Ryan?

  How fucking long have you been doing that? Do you have any idea?

• 2:27:29Chris VanSant?

  Uh, it was about five days, so enough to get it completely in my system because it takes a few days for it to start doing whatever. I don't know enough about it, but, but yeah, I think I'd been on it about a week when I like snapped. And yeah, had an episode for lack of a better term.

• 2:27:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:27:44Chris VanSant?

  Um, so yeah, wean me off of that over like the next four weeks, like we progressively reduced the dose over each week. And, you know, because you take it daily or I think I was taking it once a day, but, um, yeah, so came off of that. Well, that, that was like some scar tissue right there because I was like, you're not giving me a pill. Like that's never happening again. Like I said to you at one point, like I didn't take an aspirin for years because

• 2:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:07Chris VanSant?

  I was terrified that something was going to happen to me again. And so that was sort of the beginning of the awakening of I need to find healthy alternatives to healing and getting better, something that works for me that isn't medication.

• 2:28:25Chris VanSant?

  That can help me down that path. And so that again, wouldn't change it. It was an instrumental moment in, in my journey. Um, that helped get me to where I am today, but man, what a roller coaster.

• 2:28:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding. Have you talked to your daughters about, you know, some of the stuff that maybe they experienced that maybe you wish they didn't experience? Did they see a lot of um,

• 2:28:50Shawn Ryan?

  going through that?

• 2:28:51Chris VanSant?

  Sure. Some anger early on. Uh, no, honestly, like we haven't really talked a lot about it.

• 2:28:59Chris VanSant?

  I guess I was lucky or unlucky that I was either separated or getting divorced and that I could fake it when I was around them. Um, they were pretty young as I, you know, in the early years.

• 2:29:12Chris VanSant?

  So oh five, when that happened. Um, that was probably the year that I started really getting rough at home and having temper issues and things like that. So they were really young.

• 2:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of stuff was happening at home?

• 2:29:25Chris VanSant?

  I had some anger issues, uh, just nowhere for it to go. Like little things that set you off. Um, I've had anxiety for years like that. That still hasn't gone away. Like I do good in public spaces. I can go to a sporting event or whatever, but when it's over, I just want to be away from everybody.

• 2:29:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:42Chris VanSant?

  You know, I just came back from DC. I was at the AUSA show and I love it and I could be on and talk to people and it's part of what I do now, but, but when it's done, I'm drained. Like I just want to go curl up in my house, like and be by myself. And so some of those things have still held on, but I think that's why the outdoors is so appealing to me because I'm out there in big, open space with no one around me, but, but my significant other. But yeah, no, I haven't talked to the kids about it. You know, it's one of the, I guess that should be something that I should work on, but I think a lot of it was really early on. And then by the time we were separated, the kids weren't around that stuff very often.

• 2:30:18Chris VanSant?

  Or at least not that they've ever mentioned. So that's a good question though.

• 2:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Outside of therapy, have you done anything else to keep you going?

• 2:30:31Chris VanSant?

  Tons. Yeah. So, you know, I spent the last five years in the service, um, working for special forces command, uh, in the G8. I was a soldier systems commodity lead, and then I was the deputy chief of, of the G8 there for SF command for my last like two and a half years in service before I retired. That collection of guys there was really good for me. So I got there in, in, you know, 2010. I left in 2015 when I retired. That five year stretch, I got what a lot of guys don't get, which is time while I'm still in the service to focus on my recovery. Without having to deploy to combat, without all those other external factors that pull at you just because of the things that had happened to me and the mistakes that I made. It's just where I ended up.

• 2:31:15Chris VanSant?

  But I was surrounded by guys that were at similar points in their career that had struggles of their own. Um, and we were like this little family unit, man. We were like this little team of folks. Uh, you know, all SF guys all been at war a bunch where even if we couldn't talk to our friends or our family, we could talk to each other and it wasn't always like big profound stuff. It wasn't like we sat around and talk about, man, I'm really sucking today. Like I wasn't at that point in my life. It was more like you could say something to a guy like, man, you know what really sucks? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he got it and you knew he got it because he'd been in your shoes, walked in your shoes. And so it was a little bit of, uh, I don't know. I guess that was a little bit of therapy there early on, some team room therapy.

• 2:31:58Chris VanSant?

  Um, and at the same time, I was working a nine to five, I got to dive into work. I got to focus on the job of equipping green berets and, and being the best that I could be at that. And I think that was helpful as well. So, you know, losing my identity a few years earlier and going, man, what am I if I'm not a Delta operator? And then, you know, having a couple of years of success and doing well and getting, you know, the guys that are still in the fight, the kit that they need. I think that filled some voids for me. I think it made me feel competent again. Um, and I think it taught me the lesson that I say to people all the time now is what you do is just what you do. Like a career is just that little tiny portion of your life.

• 2:32:41Chris VanSant?

  The things that made you great at whatever you did in the service is the same stuff that can make you great at whatever you choose to do next. And we forget that. I think we, we strive so hard to be the best at a particular thing that somehow we get lost in, this is the only thing I'm ever going to be good at, and it's just not true.

• 2:33:00Shawn Ryan?

  I personally think a lot of the guys coming out of SOF units,

• 2:33:06Shawn Ryan?

  on top of PTSD, on top of traumatic, uh, TBI, on top of survivor's guilt. Now they're kind of lumping all this stuff into operator syndrome.

• 2:33:16Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Shawn Ryan?

  I think, which is a whole nother discussion, but, um, I think another factor that a lot of

• 2:33:25Shawn Ryan?

  guys coming out of a profession like that struggle with is reinventing themselves.

• 2:33:29Chris VanSant?

  Sure.

• 2:33:31Shawn Ryan?

  How did you kind of reinvent yourself?

• 2:33:35Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, uh, a few ways. So by 2015, right before retirement, a bunch of good stuff had happened. I had, you know, I wasn't on pills. I wasn't self medicating with alcohol or as often. I mean, still to this day, I have the, I have the ability to fall off the wagon and I have to be very conscious of that. But I was doing very, very well. Um, I had met my now wife. Um, I met her at the tail end of my career when I was on the path to getting better. Um, but I met her as a, as a pretty broken dude. Uh, and like I said to you this morning, like she loved me for who I was right then and there. That was a very instrumental step for me, like.

• 2:34:21Chris VanSant?

  Your self-worth is tied to so many things. And I think that's one of the things that was the hardest for me to pull out of is recovering that. Um, having somebody really enjoy me and appreciate me for me, I think was a key component of getting that back and going, I can do whatever I want to do and I can be good at it. Um, so she was a big step. How'd you meet her? Through work. Yeah. She worked for a company that, that made some equipment that we fielded. And, uh, so we had worked on a few, I worked on a few different projects with her company and that's how we met initially. Uh, and I had some ups and downs early in our relationship, um, but we were long distance. So she was in DC and I was in North Carolina. So,

• 2:35:03Chris VanSant?

  you know, I could, I could, uh, I'd be great for the three or four days that I was with her on the weekend and then I, you know, I sometimes would fall off the wagon a little bit in between. Yeah. Uh, but that got better and less and better and less as the years went by. But then, right after I retired, I knew I needed to reinvent myself and to reinvent myself, I knew I needed a break. I needed some, some separation between, okay, that's what I used to do. Now I'm going to go do something else. I needed like a mental marker. So what we ended up settling on was, was hiking John Muir Trail in California. I've always been an outdoor guy. I had introduced. My wife, Robin, to that world and she sort of fell in love with it early and liked doing

• 2:35:47Chris VanSant?

  it with me. And so originally, we were gonna like hike the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail, but it was just so much time. And I did have a job lined up, um, right, right there at the end. But I was like, okay, three weeks. So 21 days, 220 some odd miles, starts in Yosemite, finishes on the summit of Mount Whitney. Um, let's go do this. And, uh, the a few things happened. The second day of the John Muir Trail, we were both sucking. I mean sucking. Our plan was to average 10 miles a day, which we did. Um, our longest day was 17. Our shortest day was probably eight and a half. But walking 10 miles a

• 2:36:30Chris VanSant?

  day, even if you're a commando, especially one that hasn't done it in a while, with a pack on your back in the wilderness, with elevation and vertical up and down, will beat you down. And it's tough. And so the second day, we were both hurting and I was gonna propose to her at the end of the hike, but I got scared that I wasn't gonna make it that long.

• 2:36:53Chris VanSant?

  So, so, so I have this ring in my pack and I pulled it out. On day two, we were in this beautiful meadow, early on, like still in Yosemite. And I asked her to marry me and she said yes. And then I told her the story that, you know, I was gonna wait until the summit of Mount Whitney. Three weeks later, I was gonna have carried this ring, this ring the whole time, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and, and we had a laugh and I, you know, said, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself today and I wasn't sure I was gonna make it. And I really wanted to do it while we were on this hike because it's something that we love doing. And you know, this, you know, she's wonderful. And, and, uh, yeah, I was asking her to like change everything. Like she left her career. She moved down to North

• 2:37:38Chris VanSant?

  Carolina with me that last year. Um, we were moving across the country because career number two for me was out west in Arizona. So we were leaving family and friends and everything that we knew. And I felt like I needed to make some level of commitment back. So it was really me. We were totally good with where we were and what we were. We even joked about, maybe we'll never get married. We'll just stay just like we are. But, but yes, I did. But anyway, that happened. Um, and then what John Muir did for me was it.

• 2:38:08Chris VanSant?

  You, I was an insomniac for five years leading up to that. So the one thing that hung around, even after all the other stuff was starting to get better, was I didn't sleep. And not sleeping is torturous. So I would go several days where I'd get an hour or two sleep a night. And this is even during our relationship. I'd go several days and the exhaustion would just build up and build up and build up. And then I'd sleep one day where I'd sleep, you know, 12 hours or whatever. And then it would go back to the pattern. And it was torturous and I refused to take sleep aids because one, I'd only get two or three hours out of them if I did it anyway. Two, I felt weird and three, I had all those pill issues. So I wasn't, there was no way I was taking an Ambien or anything else. And so John Muir reset my clock. You wake up when the sun comes up.

• 2:38:52Chris VanSant?

  You walk all day and it's physically exhausting and beautiful and you mentally relax and you communicate effectively with your, if you're lucky enough to be with somebody like I was. And you finish the day and you're exhausted and you eat a big meal and the sun goes down and you go to sleep. And, and damn, you fall asleep because you're exhausted. And I did that for 21 days straight. And when we finished, we drove to Arizona now. We drove to our rental place in Arizona and we got home and like that first day, she goes, hey, tomorrow, let's get up and go straight to the gym. Well, I used to work out in the evenings, like after work or whatever. I, for whatever reason, I'd gotten that habit. And I was like, ah, like I really resisted and she pressed. She's like, no.

• 2:39:34Chris VanSant?

  She's like, you've been waking up at like 5:00 AM, it's sun up every day for the last three weeks. Let's start a healthy pattern. And so I did. So we got up the next morning, we went to the gym. I think it was Luke Air Force Base at the time, but we used to use the one on base because I, because I was close to it. And, uh, started that pattern, came home, ate a healthy breakfast, ate lunch, healthy dinner, and then just stuck with it. And I have not had a sleep issue since 2015. That's amazing. And it was so profound, like the hiking piece, the being in the outdoors that like for me, it's connection to spirituality. Like it's where I feel best. It's where my mind is the clearest. Um, yeah, like the cathedrals of nature, right?

• 2:40:17Chris VanSant?

  We always say like the back country is our church, like that's our saying.

• 2:40:23Chris VanSant?

  When you're out there and you truly spend some time in the wilderness, you get to enjoy it with all of your senses. And there aren't a whole lot of things that are like that. So when you're walking, it's the feeling of the ground on your feet. It's the pain in your muscles or the exhilaration or the tiredness or whatever. It's the smell of the trees and the flowers. It's the wind blowing on your face. It's the sun on you. Um, it's the sounds in nature. It's, it's all these things. It's overwhelming experience if you just give it a chance and appreciate it. And then it still fills the void of things that I missed from the military. So when we plan a climb or a long distance hike or something, it's like a, it's like an op order, man. You gotta think about logistics. When are you gonna resupply? Where are you gonna sleep at night? How far are we gonna walk today?

• 2:41:08Chris VanSant?

  What are we gonna do in inclement weather? Like you have to work through all those things to do a long distance hike. Um, that I think really filled a void for me that, that gave me something to focus on that I enjoyed, that felt good, that was physically challenging. And at the end came with a sense of accomplishment. Uh, and then as it went on, it got even better because then it's little things in between. It's that next pass, that next ridge and all the scenery changes. And you're like, wow, this is awesome out here. Doesn't cost anything except a little bit of sweat. Um, and it really, for me, was profound in changing uh, how I deal with things mentally. It gave me time to process. It gave me time to communicate with my significant other. I have the best conversations we have all week.

• 2:41:52Chris VanSant?

  Like I'm kind of a bump on the log, like at home. Like I can zone out and turn on a movie or whatever, and I'm just not very talkative. We get out in the wilderness, we're like two miles in, we'll, I'm talking about all kinds of stuff. Like we have really deep, meaningful, connective conversation in the back country. And so. That, what that taught me was you need to find your thing. You need to find your, your zen space, that thing that gives you the ability to relax, let go and let your mind wander and have open conversation. Like you, you need to figure out what that is and it's different for everybody. For me, it was, it was being in the outdoors. Um, it was doing all those things. For somebody else, it might be woodworking or painting or reading or playing golf or whatever that is. But you need to find something where you can get in that correct headspace,

• 2:42:37Chris VanSant?

  where you have a healthy environment without alcohol, without drugs, without anything else, without any pressure. Um, where you can get some of those things out and talk to people that matter.

• 2:42:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's weird to say that because, um, we just got back from Montana and did a ton of, me and my wife. And, uh, we did a ton of hiking and, and, um, it's just fucking weird. It's like nature just makes everything, it's like it's always supposed to be that way. It's that, that's how it's supposed to be. All this other shit, you know, it's, it's fucking healing.

• 2:43:15Chris VanSant?

  It really is.

• 2:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Very healing.

• 2:43:17Chris VanSant?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I'm better. Like when we go do something and I come home, I'm like it re, it's almost like a reset. So it's a healthy way to go to hit refresh. And go, okay. So if you're stressed, if you're whatever, you get out there, you spend some time away. Cause you, day one, you might think about, that's why multiple days, I think is important. Day one, you might think about work, you might think about stuff you forgot. But by day two with no cell service and I'm in the back country someplace, you have nothing else to do but appreciate your surroundings. And all that stuff just sort of melts away. And it allows you to like, think about things that you need to think about and what's really important to you.

• 2:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Were you guys sleeping in tents or?

• 2:43:59Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, tents.

• 2:44:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:44:01Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, we, we've expanded so. We do, we do a couple of long ones a year. We do a lot of smaller ones a year. Uh, and then each year that goes by, I've sort of pushed her to do bigger and bigger things. Um, so we started getting into some mountaineering stuff and we've done some big peaks. Orizaba in Mexico, we did Cotapaxi in Ecuador. Um, yeah, and we were on our way. Um, my, honestly, my plan was to do the seven summits. So I think I can get her to do five of the seven with me, but um, she says absolutely no to Everest, at least right now. And she says absolutely no to Mount Vincent in Antarctica, but I think, I think she's completely capable and will end up doing the other ones with me.

• 2:44:46Chris VanSant?

  Um, but a couple of things happened. Covid happened and then, and then, yeah, I had some heart issues. And uh, so that kind of put us behind. Uh, and then Russia invaded the Ukraine, which uh, one of the mountains is in Russia. So.

• 2:45:01Shawn Ryan?

  I won't be going there.

• 2:45:03Chris VanSant?

  I'm hoping, hoping to get back on track with that. Um, and I think it's just about. One, I love being in the outdoors. Two, I love the pushing myself, um, to kind of achieve something. Uh, and have like a goal to focus on. Uh, three, I get to do it with my spouse, which is friggin awesome. And I know how lucky I am. Like a lot of people don't have hobbies that coincide. There's nothing wrong with that, but I got lucky enough to find somebody that when I'm being the lazy one, she kicks me in the butt and says, let's get out and do something. Um, so I'm hoping to get back to that now that I feel good and I'm healthy again and, and see where it goes.

• 2:45:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, hey, if you do make it to Russia, at least it won't be the first time you're in a country you weren't supposed to be.

• 2:45:47Chris VanSant?

  We're supposed to be. But uh. Probably won't be the last time I get detained somewhere either, but yeah.

• 2:45:55Shawn Ryan?

  But um.

• 2:45:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know, let's, let's talk about, we took, we talked about your heart, uh, and the stents and everything at the beginning.

• 2:46:04Chris VanSant?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:07Shawn Ryan?

  I can't, I honestly can't remember if we talked about this at breakfast and at the beginning, or if it was just breakfast, but knowing what your limits are and knowing when you need to quit doing something. You're in another high-stress job, different scenario, you know, not combat, but very entrepreneurial-type job.

• 2:46:29Chris VanSant?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about knowing your limits and knowing when to stop, because you probably wouldn't be sitting here.

• 2:46:36Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, so when I left the service, phenomenal opportunity, I got the opportunity to go to work for a nylon and body armor company, Tier Tactical. I was Tier's Chief Operating Officer for really the last seven years, a lot of growth in there, learned a ton. You know, I was fortunate in that the owner kind of took me under his wing and I got to understand manufacturing and how that works and production and schedules and I really did, I got a 101 in business and manufacturing here in the United States and I'm really, really grateful for it. But what comes with growth and working, particularly with someone with an entrepreneurial mind and drive, is, you know, they need balance, right?

• 2:47:18Chris VanSant?

  They need somebody, they're the driver that's always pushing and then they need somebody that sort of cleans everything up behind them. And as you grow and get bigger, what comes with that is a substantial amount of stress. And it's a creepy stress, like it sneaks up on you and you don't realize it. I think as time went on, I didn't realize how much I was carrying around. Like the weight of, if this doesn't work out, like, are we going to be able to pay all our employees? Or, and I'm giving an extreme example, but I'm just demonstrating the point. You know, when you have to let somebody go, when, you know, it's all the baggage that comes with that. I think leaving the service and part of my recovery was I, because I lost all that empathy for so many years, I feel like the pendulum swung the other direction and it made me a more empathetic person than I've ever been.

• 2:48:03Chris VanSant?

  And I think I was carrying a lot of that around. So, you know, all those employees and all that stuff just started to add up over time.

• 2:48:17Chris VanSant?

  Having been through the trauma of

• 2:48:22Chris VanSant?

  your life changing and you not having a choice in the matter. So like I said before, having your identity ripped away from you like I did. Having been through that and recovered from that and then done some other things, then moving on to a profession outside of the military, being able to reinvent myself, being able to be successful in something completely different than anything I had ever done. When the hard stuff happened, those were lessons that I was fortunate to have in that I was able to pull the trigger right away. I was able to go, okay, um, I've had a great run. We've done really well. The company is doing very well.

• 2:49:06Chris VanSant?

  I'm doing very well, but I have a health condition right now that if I don't make some changes and address,

• 2:49:15Chris VanSant?

  I could die.

• 2:49:17Chris VanSant?

  And stress is a part of that, you know, I exercise, I eat well, I try to take care of myself. But I have a hereditary heart condition and anything I can do to lessen those issues, I'm gonna do. So it was a very short conversation between my wife and I. It was, I think I'm carrying around a lot of stress and I think that's contributing to this as much as anything. And it's time to make a change. And she was as fearless as I was. She was like, cool, do it. I didn't know what the next chapter held, didn't know what it was gonna be, but I knew I was gonna be okay because I'd been through it before. And so reminding myself that, like, hey, man, you're, it's cool. Like, you'll figure it out. Like, it doesn't have to be tomorrow.

• 2:50:02Chris VanSant?

  It's not like you're struggling to put food on the table. You saved your pennies. Like, it's fine. Just do it. And I did.

• 2:50:11Shawn Ryan?

  Good decision.

• 2:50:13Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's different now. I mean, I'm a team guy, you know, and I just started doing some private defense consulting and it's a different animal. I think the cool part is being able to share some experience and hopefully help some companies that are doing some innovative or some unique things, helping them bring those to the warfighter is is cool. And I definitely get some joy in that. There's some anxiety, like, what if I can't help them? What if, what if my advice isn't good? But I'm okay with it because I think I feel like, and I'm open and honest with them. Look, if I'm value added and you think I'm helping or doing things that are benefiting you and helping you achieve your

• 2:50:58Chris VanSant?

  end state, cool. If not, cut me away. No harm, no foul. Again, I'm good with who I am and where I am. And I'm comfortable with it because of all that stuff that's happened. And I know that if one doesn't work out, I can either find another one, or I can create a different opportunity. I can do something different. I can completely change what it is that I do in that path. And I'm gonna be okay.

• 2:51:22Shawn Ryan?

  When did you, when did you get involved with the All Secure Foundation?

• 2:51:27Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, a few years back. So Tom Satterley and Jen Satterley run the All Secure Foundation. Tom was a, one of my OTC instructors. He was a young Sea Squadron guy in 1993 during the October 3 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia. So he's one of my OTC instructors. When he finished his OTC instructor time, he came back to Squadron. He was my Troop Sergeant Major in Sea Squadron. So we have a military history together. And then we sort of maintain a connection loosely over the years and communicated a few times. Obviously, a lot more in recent years. I think we're all getting a little better at that. But a number of years ago,

• 2:52:09Chris VanSant?

  Tom called me and kind of out of the blue and said, hey, I want to talk to you about something. I said, okay. He said, I'm writing a book. And I was like, what? And you know, because there's a stigma in the community, or at least not so much now, but there really was then. And I said, what do you mean, you're writing a book? And he proceeded to tell me, you know, he's gonna write this book and he thinks he's gonna call it All Secure. And the reason is, is he's gonna use it basically to generate some initial resources to support the All Secure Foundation or this nonprofit that he wants to start. And so we talked about All Secure a little bit and you know what his goals were. And one was to be a go between between veterans and first responders and law enforcement and

• 2:52:51Chris VanSant?

  other entities. So kind of being a hub where hey, look, this is the struggles that I'm going on. These are my problems. Go to one place and then have them go, okay, you need to call these people or you need to call those people. Two was reducing the stigma of owning it, of going, yeah, man, I've been through some stuff. I have some issues and I want to get better. And that's okay. And in our community, that's not real common. Like when he did it, there weren't a lot of leaders out there going, look at me, man. Like I, I'm, I struggle. I struggled, whatever it is. And that's okay. And here's what I'm doing to get better. And I want to help others do it, too.

• 2:53:34Chris VanSant?

  There just weren't a lot of examples of that. The third one is they really wanted to focus on the family unit. So just like you asked me earlier, like about my, my ex and the kids. The veteran, male or female or whatever, is not the only person that's affected by post-traumatic stress and those issues that happen. The person on the other side of that, your spouse, your children, whoever, that's secondary post-traumatic stress, that's something recently that they're discovering is a huge thing. And then sometimes it's worse than what the veteran is experiencing. And All Secure is the first and only organization that I'm aware of that's paying attention to that, that's really focusing on the family unit and how war and combat and those injuries

• 2:54:17Chris VanSant?

  have affected an entire family unit and then how to heal the whole family unit. So that's how it all appealed to me. But when he called me about the book and so he's explaining all of that, and he said some really profound things. And I asked him about war stories, jokingly, like you and I were talking about. And I was like, aren't you worried like dudes are gonna get upset? And he was like, maybe they do, maybe they don't. He's like, but here's the thing, man. If we want people to pay attention to the problems and issues that veterans are suffering from, you gotta get their attention. And so if you don't bring them in with some, a little bit of background and context and story as to how you got here, how are they ever going to want or understand how to help us? Yeah, you have to validate it.

• 2:55:02Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, you gotta validate. I was like, man, you're right. Well, I was really impressed, A, that he called me. And he called me because I was involved in a lot of the events that he spoke about in the book. Um, and he called a bunch of guys, like it wasn't just me. Like I'm just one dude, you know? I'm really grateful that he thought enough of me to call me and, you know what I mean? Like, why are you calling me? Uh, this is this guy that I looked up to, you know, and idolized, honestly, when I was in O T C and, but, uh, but yeah, he did. And he explained all that. And that was a turning point for me as well. I was like, man, right, wrong or indifferent, there's gonna be haters out there. There's gonna be people that say negative things, but he was leading by example. And I'm like, man, if this dude that I looked up to, that I learned from, that I was educated

• 2:55:46Chris VanSant?

  by in school, that taught me things that kept me alive in war and kept my teammates alive, if he's man enough to go, these are my struggles. Like, look at me. This is how low I felt. This is how weak I was, for lack of a better term. Yeah. And I'm good with it. And this is what I'm doing to get better. And I wanna help other people do it too. Shit, if he can do that, I can do that. Um, and so that for me was a kind of a milestone where I, I started to

• 2:56:18Chris VanSant?

  start learning how to get better with being public about it, um, and being okay. And I have a funny joke, like I said to you earlier, like I tell guys, like particularly guys from the soft community, like you earn your man card, man. Nobody's ever gonna, gonna take away from the things that you've done, the sacrifices you've made. Like, you've done enough. And whether it was one or it was 20, like you've done whatever your part was, you've done your part. So it's cool, man. Now focus on the next mission, which is getting better, taking care of yourself and the people around you.

• 2:56:54Shawn Ryan?

  How many years has All Secure been been around?

• 2:56:57Chris VanSant?

  Three.

• 2:57:00Shawn Ryan?

  Three years relatively?

• 2:57:01Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I joined the board about a year and a half ago.

• 2:57:06Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I think about three years now and they're doing a lot of a lot of counseling, a lot of family therapy.

• 2:57:14Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I mean, I use one of All Secure's therapists, Stacy, she's amazing. My wife and I talk to her at least once every couple of weeks, not because we're having problems, but because it's healthy and it's good for us and because honestly, we both feel better having talked about some things because someone's not afraid, they understand the things that you've been through and they're unafraid to ask hard questions. And every year that goes by, I get better at answering the hard questions and that means I'm healing.

• 2:57:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. Is is All Secure, does it have a facility or?

• 2:57:49Chris VanSant?

  No, that's next phase.

• 2:57:51Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:51Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, no, they have a website. They're working on what's next. They do retreats throughout the years or during the year at a couple of different locations, but they bring in veterans and first responders. And basically, it's a

• 2:58:08Chris VanSant?

  it's an education-based retreat where therapists are on site, they talk about various topics. They talk about coping mechanisms and ways to deal with them. They provide some literature and some information, some research. You know, it's it's a lot more about going back to, like I said, that diagnosis phase, like how important step one is and it's helping people and families understand that it's okay to go do this, here are some resources to go do this. And then here are some resources when you're working on the path to getting better. So, yeah, they, like I said, I think it's three years now. Yeah, phase two, and I don't want to speak for them, you know, they both wrote great books, Tom and his wife Jen both.

• 2:58:50Chris VanSant?

  But I think phase two is, yeah, is established in a couple of different facilities on their own where they can bring veterans in and and do things that they need to do.

• 2:59:00Shawn Ryan?

  I hope they get it. Let's talk about real quick.

• 2:59:06Shawn Ryan?

  That needs help. They get referred to All Secure Foundation. They make the call. What does that process look like?

• 2:59:13Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, it depends. So if you, if you email or call or whatever, A, you're gonna get a response in very short order. Usually it's understanding who you are, what you are, and what's going on. In a lot of cases, like I'll give you an example, like let's say it's a veteran that's dealing with substance abuse problems. Great relationship with Warrior's Heart, you know, Tom Spooner's organization down in Texas. I was just talking to Tommy the other day, you know, he started that thing as a, just like us, as a veteran that was dealing with some issues. And he wanted a way to work through those and help others. He started Warrior's Heart, which is a professional treatment facility for veterans with TBI,

• 2:59:56Chris VanSant?

  PTSD, and suffer from alcohol and drug addiction issues. At any given time, they have 70 patients in there at a time. Like Tom told me that like they're, they're on the cusp of needing to do a second facility elsewhere in the country. Because they're treating so many people.

• 3:00:14Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:00:15Chris VanSant?

  With great success, you know, it's, it's phenomenal. But so, yeah, so where All Secure would do is they would say, hey, you know, is this a guy that needs some substance abuse help on the front end? That's phase one. Phase two is progressing into counseling and therapy, whether it be for the individual, for the family unit, or collective. I think it's just sort of that initial triage is where they're, they act best.

• 3:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:40Chris VanSant?

  Where's the best place to plug you in? So that you're not just going, you know, doing internet searches and trying to figure out, what should I do?

• 3:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:50Chris VanSant?

  So, yeah, my, my favorite thing is.

• 3:00:52Shawn Ryan?

  That's really smart.

• 3:00:54Chris VanSant?

  Being a vet that's public, you know, I'm not a mental health professional. I'm not, I'm not an expert. I'm not a doctor. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm, I'm working on me. I share my story to show people that it's okay and that there's other people just like you and that it's okay to want and need and seek help and that it does get better. But I'm not the person to make you better. But what I can do is I can refer you to the right organization and kind of slim down that process a little bit for you and help you identify the best way for you to get help based on what's going on.

• 3:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  And the families too.

• 3:01:31Chris VanSant?

  And the families too. Yeah, like I said, only one out there I know that's focusing on secondary post-traumatic stress as well and the family unit, so it's pretty cool.

• 3:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that is, that's, uh, I never would have thought of that, you know? Because you don't know where the fuck to look and it takes a lot of time to, to research and, and try to figure out what's going on and a lot of times you wind up in the wrong spot and, uh, so, yeah, that's, that's smart, that's very.

• 3:02:01Chris VanSant?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm really grateful because it gave me a resource. So when somebody does ask me, I can either say, hey, reach out to All Secure, I immediately send them a message and say, hey, this person's going to reach out to you. This is what I understand to be going on. Like it helps speed that process along. But I, like me too, like I don't always know, like, I don't know. Let me, and I call and ask, hey, what do we do with this?

• 3:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:24Chris VanSant?

  And you know, they've got that network established and connections with good organizations. There are several they're involved with, but I'm just giving a couple of examples. But, but yeah, it's, you, you really do need that because guys don't know what to do.

• 3:02:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, that'll be linked below in the description as well, bud. Well, Chris, I just want to say, man, it's, it's been an honor getting to know you. It's been an honor diving into your backstory and, and I think, I don't think I know this is going to help tens of thousands, maybe millions of people. And, um, it really will. I guarantee it. And, um, all your contact info, uh, is linked below and, and I also want to remind the audience, you know, we had a conversation out there, um, in the last break.

• 3:03:16Shawn Ryan?

  And I want to say, you know, some of these episodes get long. We're probably at five or six hours at this point. But, um, but we're just, we're just scratching the surface, you know?

• 3:03:30Shawn Ryan?

  Whether it's a nine hour episode or an hour and a half episode with you, with everybody that's been in that chair, you know? We're just scratching the surface. You don't know how many ops you've been on. You don't know how many times you've pulled the trigger. You don't, we don't know how much suffering you've done. We don't know how much suffering your family's done. All we get is six hour summary of

• 3:03:53Chris VanSant?

  The boys are stuff.

• 3:03:54Shawn Ryan?

  Forty something years, you know? And, um, and, um, and there's a lot more to dive into, but I think this paints a real good picture of, of what that life is like, what it's like coming out of that, some of the struggles that we deal with, that you personally deal with. And, um, I just really appreciate the honesty and the time.

• 3:04:15Chris VanSant?

  Thanks, man. You know, it's, it's a privilege to be here. I think what you're doing is great. I think you need to keep doing it.

• 3:04:23Chris VanSant?

  I think we're starting to see a shift a little bit in the community in that more and more guys are starting to come together. The connections are getting closer. We're there for each other. That like self isolation bubble that had gone on for, for decades really is, is starting to get cracked open. And it's because, you know, platforms like yours, like what you're doing, you know, bringing this stuff to the forefront, allowing people to talk about it and engage with each other, share their stories, share their message, uh, and hopefully inspire others to, to seek help, get help or, uh, or help their buddy out. So I appreciate it.

• 3:05:00Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. All right, man. Best of luck to you.

• 3:05:03Chris VanSant?

  Thanks. You too. Yeah, brother.