#88 Chris Miller - Former Secretary of Defense on Toppling the Taliban | Part 1

Chris Miller is the former Secretary of Defense with a 27 year career in the United States Army. Throughout his career, he oversaw multiple special operations organizations, culminating with his command of the 2nd Battalion, 5th SFG(A). In Part One of three part series, we cover Miller's background spanning his impressive career. Miller breaks down one of his most important tasks–toppling the Taliban government and supporting the local resistance initiatives. This is an inside look at United States' strategy in the Global War on Terror. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://puretalk.com/ryan https://blackbuffalo.com - USE CODE "SRS" Chris Miller Links: X / Twitter - https://twitter.com/cmillertigerhwk Book - https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Secretary-Warnings-Battlefield-Dangerous/dp/1546002448 Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 1:03Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, what's up, everybody? It's that time of the week again. And this week, I'm interviewing the former Secretary of Defense. We cover his military background and some of the decisions that he had to make as Secretary of Defense. Ladies and gents, if you get anything out of these interviews, please like, comment, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. Some of you know we also have a clips channel, Sean Ryan Clips. And if you can't do that, please head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you're listening to this, leave us a review. Tell us who you'd like to see on the show and how we're doing. Patreon, thank you for all the support.

• 1:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's because of you guys that this show rolls on. It really, really is. In fact, the team is expanding because of you, new equipment because of you, and we may have a potential new studio because of your support. So, much love to you. Thank you for being our top supporters. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Chris Miller to the Sean Ryan Show.

• 2:23Shawn Ryan?

  Chris Miller, welcome to the show.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  I can't believe I had to write a book to get on your show, Sean.

• 2:30Shawn Ryan?

  I can't believe I'm sitting across from a former SackD.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Please, please. I saw, I did my research, of course. I've heard, obviously knew about you.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Did my research before, went through their 53 podcasts. You've got more in the can, I know, but 53 are posted. I didn't look at every single one of them. Looked at a lot of them.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  And like legendary figures, and I can't believe I'm here with you. Seriously, I'm just like kid from Iowa and here I am with, on your podcast, number 10 in the country. Let's get this, we're gonna get this thing juiced up. Like, what do you think? Can we get to two or three on this one?

• 3:12Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, we'll, we'll see what happens. We are currently sitting at the number 10 slot on Spotify and out of all categories in the country.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Congrats.

• 3:22Shawn Ryan?

  Which I believe there's over 8 billion podcasts, so we're good.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, everybody and their sister has a doggone podcast right now and you're number 10. It's gotta be really rewarding. I just, hey, can I go off script for a minute?

• 3:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Thanks. Thanks for being a veteran. Thanks for serving, but more importantly, thank you for being an example of what veterans can do because a lot of us get out and the military is kind of beat into our head that we're only good at one thing, being in the military. I think they do that on purpose, actually. I think like, like if you're a business person, you'd like, I don't want to incentivize these people to leave after I spent millions of dollars on training them. I get them all this experience and this leadership. I send them all over the world and then they just get up and go away. So I think there's an incentive structures built to keep people in for 20, 20-plus years. You had the courage to leave the service after your initial couple tours and you're showing people.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  That veterans like, hey, you can do things other than the old, oh, I'll go be a contractor for Booze Island. Oh, I'll go, you know, work it, do it, do security work and all that. You've done that, I know. And that's important. I think it's really important to know, like, the first job you get when you leave the service is not the job that you're going to have for the rest of your life. And you know how we were raised, like, oh, I went into the Navy, you went in the Navy, I went in the Army, and you, you stick with them, and they have one employer, right? That's not how the world works once you get out. So that first job is not the one that is going to be your last job. And you, my friend, have threaded the

• 5:06Speaker 03

  needle. I think Navy SEALs do it a heck of a lot better than the rest of us. But you, your journey is, to me, is an example of how talented veterans are. And dude, you're self-taught. Did you go to film school? Did I miss sending your resume? Did you go to film school? No, I didn't. You didn't go to Columbia? You didn't go to UCLA? They wouldn't let me in there. They will now. I went to a community college for a year.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Well, the, I had a buddy. I got out. 2014, left, left government. You know, I was enlisted in the Army in 1983 in the Army Reserve. Seventeen years old, got out of high school, wanted to serve. Uncles had served, my dad had served. I was just like, I guess you serve. I didn't know any better. You just serve, right? Yeah. What do you do now? Like, I guess I joined the military. I was going to college, too. So I went into the Reserve, you know, one weekend a month, two weeks during the year. And did that, retired in 2014. Go into details if you want. Stayed in government, though,

• 6:19Speaker 03

  because I didn't know anything else. And I needed a job. So I just basically took off my uniform one, one day, showed back up at the office the next day, wearing, well, it was a little later, you know, wearing a crappy suit from Joseph A. Banks. So I got five of those things for like, 200 bucks, man. Because I didn't have any money, right? Yeah. So showed back up.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  And then I finally get done with government in 2014 at 12:01 on the 20th of January 2021, when the administration changed. I was the acting secretary of defense at the Pentagon. You walk out one minute after noon because officially, the new president gets sworn in at 12 noon. President Biden went like three minutes early. So I had three minutes where I really didn't have a job and just sit around yucking it up with the people. Walked out, didn't have any job, didn't know what I was doing. And I met a Green Beret buddy of mine

• 7:19Speaker 03

  from this special forces group, Scotty Neal. He runs Horse Soldiers Bourbon. I didn't want to talk to him, but I ran into him because he's busy. He owned this restaurant in St. Petersburg. I forgot the name of it. Really nice place. Went in there. I was like, wow, this is nice. Ran into him and I said, wow, this is a really nice place. He goes, Chris, what did you expect? That it was going to be half-assed? Because I'm a Green Beret. I said, well, yeah, actually, I thought it would be kind of half-assed. I was like, yeah, I mean, I thought it'd be good enough. He goes, we're a premium brand. We're a top shelf brand. Everything I have to do, everything we do, has to reinforce that brand. And at

• 8:04Speaker 03

  that point, you know, I'm like, this guy knows what he's talking about. I said, how'd you learn this? He goes, spent one year, one year, asking questions, listening. Hey, so when you're making bourbon, why do you do it that way and not this way? When you're asking the bank for a loan, why do you structure it this way? So I was just, just Green Beret, asking questions, listening. Said after one year, I figured it out. And I was like, okay, it's time to go. And I thought about that. So I gave myself a year just to learn. And you kind of did the same thing, I think. Did you feel the same way with when you decided to go into this business? How long did it take before you decided like, I'm starting to figure this out?

• 8:51Shawn Ryan?

  It probably took about a year, you know, I am very big on self reliance and

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I noticed you do everything here, man.

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, I do.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  I know you have staff now.

• 9:02Shawn Ryan?

  I have a, I have a staff now. I have a very small team. We're very extreme. My team's like a family. We don't, nobody gets in or out of here. We, you know, once you're in the circle, you don't leave. Uh, unless you do something really bad, but, but I, I work with, I'm not the kind of guy that if you show up and you fuck something up, I kick you out. I, I, I'm gonna work with you. In fact, um, sometimes my team gets a little annoyed with me because I'm, once I invest in you, I'm, I'm gonna continue to invest in you.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  I suspect that somewhere in your career, maybe in the Navy, somebody said, I'm gonna give this guy another chance. I just suspect, and then that kind of was ingrained into your leadership ethos. I'm just ma, I'm guessing.

• 9:51Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I wish you were right, but um, maybe a couple of times at the agency, but not in the teams, not really much in the agency. And, and that's, that's something that I learned is that shit doesn't work, just going through people. Cause I, you know, I see potential in people and I want to bring that potential out. And I would rather invest my time and work to bring that potential out than just kick them to the fucking curb like everybody else does. And, and it worked, but um, but as far as starting my business, yep, you know, I'm, like your guy that you were just talking about that started the whiskey, uh, bourbon company. You know, he, he sounds like he's an observer. I'm also an observer. I observe what everybody's doing.

• 10:36Shawn Ryan?

  I see that 99% of the population goes one direction, like a bunch of sheep. And I find, I find something to make everything that I do different than what everybody else is doing. And um, And so that's kind of how I built it and and and I don't have the money, you know, like I said, when I, when I was talking about self reliance, I didn't have the money to hire a crew and I, and when we moved up here from, from South Florida, I had one film crew that I would, it was extremely affordable, uh, you know, but then it was flying them up here, putting them in hotels and, and that just wasn't sustainable for

• 11:18Shawn Ryan?

  the income I was making. So I flew them up. One time I made them teach me everything that they knew about cameras and video editing, which I knew nothing about. And they gave me a very, a very, um, basic baseline about it. And then it was YouTube University and, you know, and it started with a two camera setup on the, on the first show to, and my wife was running back and forth because the cameras that we have were cheap and they had a 30 minute time limit. So

• 11:51Speaker 03

  She's running back and forth, rebooting this crap?

• 11:54Shawn Ryan?

  I'm talking to my friend, Mike Glover, and she's running back and forth resetting cameras. If he was talking, she would reset mine. If I was talking, she would reset his. I'm running the sound while I'm trying to interview him. And then that, that went into a three camera setup and then into a four camera setup.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  I don't even know.

• 12:14Shawn Ryan?

  Four to five, four to five.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  You got like secret cameras all over this place?

• 12:18Shawn Ryan?

  I, sometimes I have a, a guy that'll come in and do some gimbal, uh, like some moving shots.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Hey, you know what you need to do next?

• 12:26Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Drones. You should have like, like inside here. Um, hey, I'm just saying.

• 12:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we thought about doing-

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Inside you could have like, you know, get a micro drone.

• 12:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. They have, um, they have these 360 cameras. We thought about maybe doing a 360 camera setup so people can see all the-

• 12:44Speaker 03

  You could do the lines too, like, uh, NFL games.

• 12:46Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  That's probably better than the drone because the drone, you're going to have that buzz.

• 12:50Shawn Ryan?

  You're probably, that's a good idea.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  This is your show and I'm, I'm already doing, hey, two things. So thanks for, thanks for showing what veterans can do. Thanks for helping veterans out now. Third thing, you brought up a great leadership point about underwriting people. And that first episode, I went, last night, I'm a little tired now because I got addicted to watching your podcasts and your first one with Glover. I never worked with him, but you had a kid on there that you had mentored that you were like, the kid with the beard you talked about, remember? And you had him on your cell phone where he called in and talked to Glover. It was really, really cool, man. It was really, really awesome.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, ah, man, that hurts those, that hurts. Like, not again, man. Did you really do that again?

• 13:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, and I appreciate the compliment and, and, and bringing light to what I'm doing here. I really appreciate it. And to elaborate on it.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Veterans, veterans.

• 13:56Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think, and not just special operations veterans, just veterans across the board. Nobody, I don't think, I don't think the civilian population understands the drive and determination and, and how quick veterans are to pick up what it is they're doing and run with it, especially if they're, if they're driven and they like what they're doing. And I don't think veterans give themselves enough credit either. You know, the drive and the determination and the, and the loyalty, you know, that you can get from

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Work ethic.

• 14:34Shawn Ryan?

  From veterans, you know, we tend to discredit ourselves a lot.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  You got any theory why that is? Like, you know, my book, I highlight only 7% of America, Americans are veterans now. I think that's a great problem to have, by the way. Isn't that great? Like, we're not in our society anymore.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  So I'm not like, oh, only so this is ridiculous, you know. But there is, that does create a gap because probably back in the day, like what in the 50s, 60s, I'm guessing 50%, 40, 45% of Americans, probably higher than that, either had served or were a family member of somebody who had served either in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera. And there's an understanding about how the military worked and the things that you talk about, people intuitively know, knew. And now I think that's really incumbent on us is to like, share our experiences. And I know we don't like, I don't like to talk about myself, man. I know that's crazy. I'm on your podcast. I hate talking about myself and I speak for one veteran.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  I don't speak for any other veterans community. I speak for myself. But I wonder right now, it seems like there's a disconnect with what you said, like the American public, we're not all crazed, you know, psychopaths. You know, we're just Americans, you know? And sure, we volunteer to serve 99% as you know, 99% of serving in the military is absolutely a gas, so much fun, right? I mean, come on, deploying, pretty good life. 1% gets, 1%, really kind of, the scales even out on that one. But that's all right. That's what the nation asked us to do.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  But I was, I wanted to ask you, do you, what can we do better to like, show the American public and people that are hiring, like, no, you, this is the right person to invest in because I, I'm telling you, there's this undercurrent in a lot of places that, you know, oh, do we want to take the risk on bringing this veteran in? You know, he could go crazy.

• 16:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  You know, there is out there.

• 16:52Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I know.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  We don't, we're not supposed to talk about that, though.

• 16:55Shawn Ryan?

  The police departments, the government agencies, every, any government organization. I mean, it's, it's, it's been, it's been leaked, you know, that. Especially during the Obama administration that the veteran resumes go at the bottom of the stack.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at Macy's.com.

• 18:12Shawn Ryan?

  That's a fact. That's not conspiracy bullshit. That is a fact. But to show people, you know, I don't know how you bring that out. I guess things like this show, you know, but I mean, look at, look at, one thing that I like to talk about, or actually I have never talked about it publicly, but look at, look at all of the vetrepreneurs out there and how, and how fast some of these companies have found success. I mean, I mean, I'm a hard worker. I'm very determined.

• 18:52Shawn Ryan?

  We now have a top 10 podcast in the country out of over 8 million podcasts, you know, Mike Glover with Fieldcraft Survival, Black Rifle Coffee.

• 19:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, there's just, there's tons of veteran entrepreneurs that have just taken off. And just think, and, and this is after an entire career of going to war and serving this country. And we're already rising to the top of the food chain again, starting a completely new career that we know nothing about. I don't know shit about business. I still don't think I know shit about business. You know, and I'll bet if you ask all these other guys that are, you know, DJ Shipley's running G B R S. That's only a couple of years old. He's, he's the top trainer, top tactics and tactician in the country right now. You know, couple of years old, rose right through the ranks like it was nothing, blew past everybody.

• 19:48Shawn Ryan?

  You know, uh, Travis Kennedy, very successful business. Uh, David McCormick, CEO Bridgewater.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  They do, they, they make any money at Bridgewater? No, I watched that one. I was like, you got David McCormick?

• 20:02Shawn Ryan?

  Sold his initial company for $500 million at age 37. Just talked to another guy, uh, he's not a veteran, but wanted to be a SEAL. Then did some stuff, uh, with the agency, sold a company at age 29 for $4 billion. You know, now he's making these energy weapons. So he's not technically a veteran, but he did serve the government, you know, he did, or he did serve the country, excuse me. Uh, I think he did some stuff with NSA maybe, or the, or CIA, but you know. But anyways, you watch these guys just, you know, hit the ground running and rise so fast. Just think if we would have never gone to war and we would have just been entrepreneurs the entire time.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

• 20:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 20:47Speaker 03

  How much help did you get from other veterans?

• 20:51Shawn Ryan?

  From other veterans?

• 20:52Speaker 03

  How much help did you get when you decided to go off and, and leave, uh, government service? I got two calls. It's really nice. They were both 160th, uh, special operations aviation regiment guys. Uh, both very successful. They called me, said, hey, they were the only two people. I didn't get anybody from my community. Like I, I kind of thought. Shit, kind of put the work in, kind of nice if somebody called.

• 21:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  No, had to figure it out myself. And that's where I'm really committed. I don't do well, and I probably every day feel guilty for not doing more, but our generation of veterans is different. I've noticed, and you've seen this.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I love the American Legion, love the VFW, very hierarchical, top-driven organizations. They did unbelievable work for veterans in America. Our generation, you know, I'm a different generation than you. I should say our generation of veterans, it seems to me, I've noticed, it's very much more organic, it's very much more bottom up, it's very much more collaborative, and we don't like, we don't want, we don't need some hierarchical, top-down thing. Have you noticed that?

• 22:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think it's also, I think the, I think it's very detrimental to our community, but I think that the competitiveness within the veteran community is way more competitive than it needs to be, whereas if we could come together, we could run this shit, you know?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  I still, hey, I've stumbled in because I, we think a lot the same way, and I'm like, how come we have three special forces charitable organizations? They're all balkanizing, they're all trying to recruit off the same population, they're all balkanizing the donor base. You just described it. It's like hyper-competitive. And I'm like, why don't we, why doesn't everybody just, why don't we have one group?

• 22:56Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think the competitiveness comes from?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Of course, it's in our DNA, right? I know, because that's a good point, and that's something I always try to take into consideration is like, these are the things that made us extremely successful as an army, as a special operations force, a military service. So, that's, yeah, that is exactly it. So how do you, how do you use that?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  For more positive reasons and maybe you just can't do it. I'm literally at the point now, like, maybe it's just Sisyphus, you know, pushing the rock up the hill. I mean, maybe you just don't do it.

• 23:32Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's just, you know.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Navy SEALs got their stuff right. I mean, it was a, it was a food fight when they joint, merged their two organizations. Like, I'm sure there are people, I, I know it was a huge emotional issue, but you finally got it together and, and I think you guys do it really, really well. But, oh, man, somebody should do a Netflix series about that.

• 23:56Shawn Ryan?

  If only you could see it from the inside.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  But, uh. Good on you that you keep it inside.

• 24:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Um, you know, I just, I think, I think it could be changed just by leading from example, you know, there's, I've been, I've always been raised to root for the underdog and, and, and lift people up that are lagging behind. And, and maybe that'll come back around in the future, you know, but, um, but not a lot of people do that because they, they see other vets as come, as competition. And, and I think a lot of guys get left behind and they don't get the exposure they deserve because, because the space is so competitive. And, uh, and I personally think that that competitiveness, I, I can't say that for all

• 24:44Shawn Ryan?

  the veterans. I can say that for special operations veterans, uh, because that's, that's our community, right? But I, I feel that the come, that the competitiveness comes from day one, week one of training because everything is a competition. The runs are competition, the swims are competition. Who's the best shooter? Who's the best sniper? Who's the best in the kill house? Who's the best driver? Who has the most kills? Who's got the most deployments? Who's, you know?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 25:11Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I think that.

• 25:14Shawn Ryan?

  And that's what drives us and builds a camaraderie when we're in, right? But then when you come out, it just turns into a disaster.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  My, one of my favorite aphorisms that I share with my children is, and everybody, greatest strength is your greatest weakness, right? And that competitiveness truly is. I think maybe that's, I love to tease that out because I, like, some people, I got to, I was obviously the same way, but you hit a point where you're like, no, it's about giving back now. And, and that happens at a different time in everybody's life. Some people are blessedly, you know, decide this at a very early age. It wasn't that for me, because you're like, gotta put food on the table. Gotta do well, gotta do well, gotta do well. Because it's personal, professional standards, it's the way I was raised. You know, anything you do, you do it the best you can and all those things.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, probably too late in life, I came to the conclusion like, no, it's all about giving back now, you know? And maybe, maybe some people just never get there. But, you know, I'd hope that we all kind of hit that point. We, because as veterans, we're, we're growing up together now. We're all kind of out now, handful of people still in. But what I, I try to share and I try to fail to do with a lot of the people is, we can't do, we gotta do better than, like you said, you didn't get any help. It's like, maybe you didn't, you probably didn't need it, to be perfectly honest with you. At the end of the day, I, I was gonna figure it out myself anyhow, but it still would have been nice, it still would have been nice.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  I said, we can't, we gotta do better than the last generation, and we can't leave people behind, man. And I don't know how to do it, I'm trying where I can. And all you can do is like, where you sit is where you stand, right? Which I can't believe I'm sitting in this great chair. Been watching, dude, I went so dark last night watching all of your podcasts. I'm like, two in the morning, I'm like, I need to get some sleep. It was just amazing. And of course, the legendary chair. I'm like, I'm in the legendary chair. So, okay, thanks for having me. We kind of went off script, I know, but I just wanted, you know, one of the key themes you always bring up is veteran stuff. And it's not topical, it's not superficial. It's like, for real. And I think those are the conversations

• 27:33Speaker 03

  that we need to have and share with, share with other people that don't understand, don't understand us.

• 27:39Shawn Ryan?

  I agree with that. Going back just real quick.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  What do ya?

• 27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Real quick, you were asking at the beginning, did anybody step up and help? And the answer was no. There is one person who I've always relied on for help, though, and I'm going to give him credit.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Please?

• 27:54Shawn Ryan?

  My best friend, David Rutherford, he's always been there to pick me up when I'm down.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can I, so, I end up, you know, serving, that's what I did, end up, you know, I accepted, I was asked to be the, I had a great gig. I was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. And I was, I got like, sickeningly focused. I made a mistake in Iraq in 2006, '07. You were there. Sadr City was, was an enclave of Shia militants. There was this guy named Murtado al-Sadr. They had the Sadr Fed, they had some name

• 28:44Speaker 03

  for his fighting force. And there was, you remember, there was civil war going on. Every night, you know, Shiites were killing Sunnis, Sunnis were killing Shiites. They called it extrajudicial violence. I called it a civil war, but that wasn't cool. They're like, we can't, we can never say it's a civil war. Heaven forbid, you know, we tore this country apart, and now there's a civil war. We'll call it extrajudicial killings, EJK. Did you do any work on that?

• 29:11Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Not that I know of. I think you did and didn't even know it because we were kinda, our, our tours there overlapped. And I just remember, like, uh, you know, we've got this civil war going on. And we're working it. And then, um, where was I going with this? I completely forgot. A mistake. What's that? A mistake. Oh, yeah. So, um, 10th Special Forces Group, we, we rotate between 10th Special Forces Group out of Fort Carson. We were 5th Special Forces Group out of Fort Campbell. We just rotate every six, eight months. And the guy I replaced had become hyper-focused on killing this guy.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  I forgot his name, Haji something. He had a white camel. That's all I remember. A white camel? White camel. I was like, white camel? This dude had a white camel and he would feed it Coca-Cola because it's on YouTube. You can find it. I forgot this guy's name. My buddy became obsessed with killing this guy. And we, they go up into Sodder City every night. I got there, I'm like, hey, you know, like, come on, let's, we gotta think more than just this one target. And gotta be bigger picture, you know? The way I was trained. And I realized he had the right idea. It's like, you gotta get hyper-focused on one thing. So when I had the opportunity to get back into counterterrorism after I left

• 30:39Speaker 03

  the government, or after I left the service, I was like, we need to defeat Al Qaeda. Everybody was like, you can't defeat terrorism. It's like, I didn't say defeat terrorism. Terrorism, noun versus verb. We can defeat Al Qaeda, noun. We can't defeat terrorism, verb. Got it. Al Qaeda's a fighting force. Definition to defeat is to render your enemy incapable of, you know, imposing their will on you. It can be temporary state. It's not always, you know, it's not always forever. They can bounce back. So I got fixated on

• 31:21Speaker 03

  that because of the mistake I'd made in Iraq, not focusing on those, that key leader, right?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  So I'm at the National Counterterrorism Center. I had been in the National Security Council, which is the staff that works for the president, right next door to the White House. His head, I got a job from my buddy, dear friend of mine, got me the job as in charge of counterterrorism and transnational threats, drug, human trafficking, all that stuff, for the president. And I had this crazy idea. Always do your net assessment, right? You go in, you look at your enemy. And, hey Sean, don't tell anybody. Oh, we're on TV. I had lost the focus on counterterrorism after I left the service. I left in 14, it's now 17, 18.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  So I need to get back up to speed in what the enemy's doing. Find out. Focus on talking to the young intelligence analysts. Don't talk to the head people because they have to give the party line. Go down to the people that like, how long you been studying this? Six years, sir. Nobody's ever asked me a question about, you know, whatever. Go listen to those people. Determine that there are seven key leaders left in Al Qaeda. Zhao Heiri, number one. Go all the way through, his son Hamza. I can go through the names, but no one cares. I said, what happens if we kill those seven? Like Al Qaeda ceases to exist. Remember, Al Qaeda is like a hierarchical, charismatic-driven organization, very elite. It's like special operations, let's be honest.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  So like you can't replace special operators quick. Al Qaeda was the equivalent of special operations, extremely elite, well-trained, loyal, et cetera. So what happens if we kill off these seven? They're like, well, Al Qaeda will no longer, they'll be defeated. So I came up with this insanely stupid idea. I said, why don't we kill off the final seven?

• 33:23Speaker 03

  By the 20th anniversary of September 11th, 2001, and we'll drop the mic and declare victory and be done with this thing. I got so much pushback, but I was like, I don't care because-

• 33:37Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you get pushback from that?

• 33:39Speaker 03

  You want to know what I think it was, seriously? Bureaucracy. We had created, you know, we talk about the military industrial complex. We had created a counterterrorism industrial complex where budget, budgets went to organizations. We expanded the intelligence community incredibly. I think they were like, I don't think it was malicious, you know, like, oh, we want this war to continue forever. I just don't think I was helpful, you know, by saying, no, we haven't, we're going to win. You know, we, we don't want to go political, but, you know, I, I served, you know, 37 years in uniform or as a civilian for any president. Left, right, in between, didn't care.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  I spent one years working for President Trump. Obviously, very partisan times. We don't even have to go there. It's not, that's not your show. I got that. But, you know, he did say, we're about winning. He did say that.

• 34:39Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  So I was like, well, let's go win. I think there was just like, we had gotten so used to just like, the grind. You lived the grind, man.

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  It seemed like nobody knew what the hell the goal was, you know, where, where it, when I was in, it appeared that we were going after low hanging fruit and they're just, I just, and then, and then you have this plan where you want to take out the last seven Al Qaeda leaders and nobody gets behind it and it's, and it's, I've always wondered, not always, once I left and I started looking into all this stuff.

• 35:21Shawn Ryan?

  It just, and I continue to wonder, what was the goal of this?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  I thought it was the win. And we came up with a plan and I was like, let's go do this and work back and forth and just kept working and working at this, just grinding away because in government, it's all about endurance. It's a war of attrition. It's like, I'm just gonna outlast them and we'll keep going on this. But, you know, I'm just random, there was a point of where I was trying to go with this. I know it's, I'm just like, it sounds like I'm rambling. Just got absolutely fixated on this idea of defeating Al Qaeda. Cause I thought it was, I talked to all, I did an informal survey of like, tons of veterans. It was like, what do you think we should do in Afghanistan? Like, it's time to come home.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  And I was really, was really worried about what those who had lost loved ones there thought, or those that had been injured. Across the board, everybody's like, we gave it our best shot. But I thought that by doing this, we could, we could declare victory, pull out meaningfully. So that was a whole, that was a whole hustle. That was a whole idea of like, okay, gonna do this. I know it sounds ridiculous, like, my dumb ass comes up with this idea. So we kept pushing on that. And I ended up going to the National Counterterrorism Center. I was like, this is perfect. I can have more of a role because it's a higher position.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  But then, the president, the president was unhappy with Mark Asprey, Secretary of Defense at the time. Wanted to change. So, there were only three of us to serve in an acting capacity. This is gonna be legalistic, but it's important to understand for some people, like the three people that actually care about this, that are listening.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  You have to be appointed by the president and you have to be confirmed by the senate, meaning you have to go up there and they wire brush you, you know, and then they vote you out. You can't just take over a cabinet position, a high level position, like Joe shit the ragman off the street. You can't do that. You can, but it's not going to work. You have to be presidentially appointed senate confirmed. That way the senate has had their, congress has had their say. So there were only three of us. I was one of them. President called and asked that I replace him. So obviously, I accepted that because that's what we do, right? Go in there, and I'm like 73 days. Like, I've been to Ranger School. Ranger

• 37:57Speaker 03

  School, 60 days. You know this, I know, because you had some Rangers on the show. It's really good. I liked that episode a lot with the, with your, with the Delta Breacher. I forgot his name. Van-

• 38:07Shawn Ryan?

  Chris Van Zandt.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was really cool. He gave a great description about the difference between being Ranger qualified and being a United States Army Ranger. I love that. Best, best description I've ever heard. So, I'm like, I can stand on my head for 73 days, done it for 60, not realizing everything that was going into this that would happen. But that's how I ended up doing that. But I left, then I left. Like, boom, you're done.

• 38:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  And I had no, I had no understanding, no idea what I was going to do, not a clue. And didn't really, like I said, I got two calls and that, had to figure it out myself, just like you. And just off we go. And here, here we start again.

• 38:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  We'll figure it out, right?

• 38:55Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, um, I haven't even given you an intro yet, so we'll start the, we'll start now. But, so I just want to give a brief intro, just so everybody knows who you are, if they don't already. But, military career 1983 to 2014, enlisted in the Army Reserve as an infantryman in 1983, and served in the DC National Guard as an MP.

• 39:22Shawn Ryan?

  Then you commissioned to become an officer in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in history from George Washington University. You transferred to Special Forces in 1993, honor graduate from Army Ranger School, numerous command and staff positions within Fifth Special Forces Group, multiple deployments during the GWAT, both to Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 39:49Shawn Ryan?

  Company Commander of Fifth Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2001, many more deployments in other theaters. I know you worked extensively with CIA in Bosnia back, I believe in the 90s. Post military career, defense contractor for Clan Verestine, Special Operations and Intelligence under Secretaries of Defense for Intelligence and Policy, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict, Deputy Assistant, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism,

• 40:31Shawn Ryan?

  Director of National Counterterrorism Center, former Acting Secretary to Defense, and finally, the author of Soldier Secrety, or Soldier Secretary, Warnings From The Battlefield And The Pentagon About America's Most Dangerous Enemies, which I cannot wait to jump into that. And just some other stuff, you oversaw the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, I would love to talk about that, oversaw personnel reductions in Iraq and Afghanistan, handled requests and questions, and testified about the January 6th response, massive activation of the National

• 41:12Shawn Ryan?

  Guard members, and you took out some of the top terrorists in the world throughout your career. And most I can breathe again. That's quite the career.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  And a quarter, well, if you're at Starbucks, it'll be like $4.50, we'll get you a cup of coffee, man. You know, most importantly.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Try to be a good husband, try to be a good father and try to be a good American.

• 41:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  So, thanks, man. Thanks. I always get bored listening to that. It's really just, you know, kid from Iowa who came from a family of public servants. My dad was a cop and my mom, he said, there's, there's, there's, there's intrinsic value in public service, you know, get paid a lot. And he, he, he literally answered JFK's call. He was drafted, serving the Korean War as an 11 Charlie Mortarman. And like really got in it, you know, like Korea War, come on, man. Like, what did they do? A couple of years and it was just like high intensity war. And came back and literally he said, I heard that JFK, what, what, asked not what

• 42:22Speaker 03

  to do, blah, blah, blah. And he said, I'm gonna go into government. I'm gonna try to make a change. And he's always like, there's, there's intrinsic value in public service. I took that, I took that shit to heart, you know? So, just was really incredibly fortunate to be able to serve our country, man.

• 42:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's a-

• 42:42Speaker 03

  I know that sounds like really cliche.

• 42:44Shawn Ryan?

  That's an incredible career.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Man, I just did my job, dude.

• 42:48Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody that comes on gets a gift.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  What do you, what?

• 42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you were up till 2 AM watching the show last night. Any guesses?

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Nice. Nice.

• 43:01Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:04Shawn Ryan?

  Those are amazing. And believe it or not, they're legal in all 50 states.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Well done.

• 43:11Shawn Ryan?

  And they're made in the USA.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  It's what you do.

• 43:15Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Giving it back. And, yeah.

• 43:19Shawn Ryan?

  Made in the USA. You don't hear that very often anymore, right?

• 43:22Speaker 03

  I really appreciate it. And my wife will be tickled pink. Usually, cause come on, Sean, usually I go on these things, I don't know. Walk away with like lost six hours. Not this one, though. This is, I'm really excited about this one because you talk about things that matter and are important.

• 43:40Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  I don't think I have anything to add to tell you the truth, but we'll let, we'll let your audience decide when, you know, we get like, wow, we got 20,000 viewers. We went from five million last week to 20,000.

• 43:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. But I, I do not think that's going to happen. We have a lot to talk about. I want to, I don't want to spend too much time on your career because we'll be here a week covering all of that.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 44:09Shawn Ryan?

  But I do want to stress some of the important things that you're a part of. So let's, let's kind of start with where you grew up. We'll talk about some of the big missions that you did and some of the key leaders that you've taken out. And then we'll dig into some of the shit that's going on in the country and in the world today. So I know you grew up in Iowa.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Yep. Iowa City, Iowa. Spent some time in the East Coast in Newark, Delaware, moved back to Iowa City. I think I was probably 10. My parents are from there. Dad decided to go home. I think my mom probably pushed him a lot harder than that. I'm just guessing. They're still alive, 94 years old, living in Iowa. Mom still lives alone. Dad, dad, father has the opportunity to live at the nursing home now because he's no longer as mobile as he should be. So, but yeah, just like kind of that, I got, I got no, I got no bad news from my youth. Like it's bucolic, man. It was like great parents, great community. It was that, it was that like age of where you just went off and did crap all day long

• 45:12Speaker 03

  and your parents didn't care and you didn't have a cell phone. It was just like magical and just, and then just was like, I gotta get out of Iowa City, Iowa. What about you? You were in Missouri, man.

• 45:24Shawn Ryan?

  I was in Missouri.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Did you, like, I just got this thing where I was like, it's a big world out there. And I was really fortunate that my parents like always instilled in my sister and me like this sense of adventure, this sense of inquisitiveness, you know, like there's a big world. I'm like, I gotta go see it. This little town's gonna be the death of me, you know, I was gonna, I was gonna be a Bruce Springsteen song, you know? What, what, what about you?

• 45:50Shawn Ryan?

  What about me?

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Why'd you leave Missouri?

• 45:53Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I just left Missouri for the military and I joined.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  You did seventeen, you were seventeen or eighteen?

• 45:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I joined at seventeen in the.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Had to get your parents to sign off for you.

• 46:05Shawn Ryan?

  Had to get my dad to sign off for it. You know, I I joined, I didn't feel like I had any other options. I wasn't a great student. I didn't really take sports very seriously, nor was I very good at any of them. I was pretty much into chasing women and drinking beer.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. What kind of cards you have?

• 46:26Shawn Ryan?

  I had a Ford Probe.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Dude, I thought you were gonna give me Trans Am.

• 46:33Shawn Ryan?

  I wish.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 46:34Shawn Ryan?

  I had a nineteen eighty-two truck that I destroyed immediately by taking off-road and then I got a Ford Probe.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  You're not taking that off-road once.

• 46:44Shawn Ryan?

  Nope. And, but, but yeah, that's, I didn't feel like I had any other options and and, and, and honestly, I was always drawn to the military.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, why?

• 46:56Shawn Ryan?

  So, uh, my dad did a stint in the military when I was in, or when I was a young kid, fourth grade, I think he joined. And at that time, the Gulf War was going on. We got deployed to Germany. My dad was in the medical field, so I saw a lot of these guys coming in and out of Germany. I saw all the books. I bought all the books. I bought all the G I Joes and I just, I was just always infatuated with.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird? Like somehow that triggers something in some of us and other people like, yeah, don't care. So I had the same thing, man. It was, you know, Vietnam had wrapped down. I was born in sixty-five. And I remember there were only three TV channels then, remember? You could get like the fourth UHF, you could get some weird thing out of Philadelphia where you could watch Speed Race or something. But you know, when my dad came home, it wasn't like now, my kids watch whatever they want, two thousand channels. Watch whatever you want. Uh, in those days, the old man came home, my mom. I'm never allowed to call my dad the old man. I said that once to my mom.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Only time she got upset with me, she's like, you do not refer to your father as the old man. I was like, whoa. So I take it back. Mom, my father would come home from work.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  And guess what? He took over the TV. You're gonna watch CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. It was like, I don't wanna do homework. What are you gonna do? You're gonna watch the news. So I'm like, I was just this weirdo kid who was watching the news and, you know, and then you had to read the paper. That was like one of the things, like some assignment. So I'm reading like Vietnam and stuff. I'm like, holy crap. And somehow that just, you know, and then my uncles, my dad, I, I, I just like, I guess you have to serve. And, but it didn't, you know, it bothered me at first, you know, when you're like, when you're younger and you're seeing caskets coming home with flags on them. And I remember asking my dad, I was like, what are they?

• 49:05Speaker 03

  I mean, flags. He goes, uh, flags are put on caskets only if you've served. And I don't know if that's true or not. I have no idea. I don't think it's actually true. But that, you know, when you're like five, six years old, you had these weird things, like that resonated. I'm like, so if I don't serve, I'm not gonna have, this is the connection I made. So adolescent, you know? It just terrified the thought, but I was like, I'm gonna serve. I mean, this is what we do. It's what, I don't come from a family of like, oh, you know, my great grandfather serving in the Civil War, you know, or Revolutionary War. As a matter of fact, my family left Germany in 1848.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  They were draft Dodgers because that was like when like the Prussians or whoever the hell it was, you know, fighting and they got drafted and they're like, we're out of here. So I think it's hilarious that I come from a long line of draft Dodgers. So, but, but you know, I, I always wonder, like something triggered in us, this desire to go serve. Combat, yeah, that's what we do, right? That's, why would you join if that wasn't the goal? Oh, I wanna get my college money. Hey, good with you if you want your college money, but you know, going to Navy SEALs or Army Special Operations, if you're looking for college money, right? Yeah, you don't. Yeah, it's just, I think it's one of those, those questions. I still kinda wonder about it. And then, then, uh, I'll tell you the.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  The one, only thing that really mattered in my military career was response to September 11, 2001. I, you know, I say in my book, I was, I'd, let's see, I'd been an officer. I got commissioned in 87, go through public math, 13, 14 years. And I was in fifth special forces group just up the road. I'm heading up there after this to see, see some folks. And I just, um, I had a really tough boss, Italian commander, not gonna, not gonna tell you his name. He's really, really tough, man. And I was like, why am I putting up with

• 51:14Speaker 03

  this bullshit anymore? And I went home on the 10th of September. I swear to, I swear this is true story. Got two little, we had three kids. They're all just growing up. My wife and I always have a cocktail, kind of, day's over, you know, let's catch up. Man, I got, that day I got really deep. I was, had, I was probably into my fourth beer. And I said, these are small times for small people. I said, we're getting out. I'm leaving, I'm leaving the service. My wife is like, good, about time. My wife, you know, you're way

• 51:59Speaker 03

  more talented than this stupid army crap. And of course, I didn't believe her. And I lit, September 11th, I went into work and I was gonna resign my commission that day. Go run, have you been for Campbell? There's this thing called Clark's, there's this thing, you gotta go. You gotta go up there. There's this thing called Clarksville Base. It's Cold War Legacy, crazy story, won't bore you, hilarious. I'm out there with the sergeant I worked with. I was a company commander, he was a company sergeant major, just magnificent man. Went for a run, just the two of us. Didn't go with the unit or anything. It was our time to like, talk shop, right?

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Got in the car and I'm driving back to work and John Boy and Billy Show, that's still on. The John Boy and Billy Show is still on. It was new then. It was really this edgy, edgy, you know, morning talk show. And they were always hooting it up and comedic and whatnot. And all of a sudden they stopped and they're like, hey, we have a report of a plane hitting one of the towers of the World Trade Center. And like the whole tone of the discussion, it went from jocular, like, oh, you know, fart jokes or something to like, just stopped and it was completely, and it got serious. And I was like, oh, damn. Then somebody came on. They're like, oh, a plane hit the Empire State Building in

• 53:27Speaker 03

  1944 or something. Maybe it's just an accident. I was like, this isn't an accident. Got back to work, walked into the military intelligence shop, because we didn't have TVs everywhere then. Crappy barracks, crappy workspace. And the only TVs were in the military intelligence section. I walked in there and I saw the second plane hit. And I was like, is that a rerun? And everybody was like, no. So was that a rerun of the first attack? So saw that. And at that point, I was like, I guess I'm not getting out of the service. And the most important thing I did in my entire professional life was respond to that attack.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  And went in, was, went down, went down to Tampa, Florida, where the United States Central Command is, the command that oversees the Middle East. And United States Special Operations Command is there as well. So I went down. My boss, who I'd known from a previous assignment, asked me to go down with one sergeant to be our, to be the planner. So we get down there. It's called Special Operations Command Central, SOCS, Central Command's.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Special operations component and they were out in this old Cold War bunker, ammo bunker, show up out there, I'm a major, new major, you know, pretty junior. And the counterterrorism task force had taken over and they're lead planners and I'm a green beret, so I'm nothing, right? I'm not special mission unit guy. I'm just like, oh, you're like, they called it white soft then, you know, white and black soft, black was the secret, like, you know, SEAL Team Six and Delta Force and all those folks, right? So there, they take over the planning space. Fortunately, I knew a buddy who was, and

• 55:24Speaker 03

  he let me in. So I'm like, shit, green beret, man, I figured this stuff out. And I'm in there and they planned the initial operations where they took, Rangers jumped into that airfield, Objective Rhino out in the desert. You had a guy on that talked about it. And then they also stormed, uh, Mullah Omar, who was the head of the Taliban. He had this beautiful compound that he built in Kandahar. They raided that thing and Omar was gone, but they shot the shit out of the place. It was brilliant operations. It was a kind of our first big operation of the war. Helicopter hard landed, had some bad problems. I don't think we, and nobody got killed. A couple of people got injured on some hard landings.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  So I go down to, go down there to help plan. All of a sudden, one day, this counterterrorism experts just disappear. They're gone, poof. And somebody yells, do we have any green berets here?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  What do you need? They're like, we need to plan an unconventional warfare campaign. Unconventional warfare is where green berets go behind enemy lines. Think World War II, France, where small commandos jumped in behind enemy lines, linked up with the resistance, the McKee, the French Resistance, got them ammunition, helped them train, help plan, and then help lead them to tear up the rear, the, the German forces that were behind the beaches that we were landing at. That's unconventional warfare. Go behind enemy lines, link up with the resistance force or to overthrow the government. And we had never done that before in the history of special forces. We were founded in 1951.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  It's like, I know how to do that. So we planned, we did the campaign. Uh, I was part of the planning element that did the campaign. Then I got to go do it. You got to do it. So I always, always find your replacement. I'm like, I'm going to get stuck down here missing another war. I missed Panama, I missed Desert Storm. I'd missed everything and you taught, Sean, you brought it up. You're like, that's Super Bowl, right? You don't join like, oh, I just want to stay here and, you know, for Campbell and, uh, you know, take my kids to the daycare center and coach soccer. I, I missed everything. And I saw it happening again. I'm like, I'm going to get stuck down here while my unit goes

• 57:57Speaker 03

  and prosecutes this war. Always find your replacement. Got a guy to come in to backfill me. Off I go, pick up, uh, the remainder, so the entire group had deployed to Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, which was our forward operating base or advanced operating base. So we set up in Uzbekistan, which we now know is a toxic waste dump with radiological material. I can go on all day about that, but at the time we didn't care because like we were going to bring vengeance on behalf of the United States, the people of the United States. We are going to be in vengeance to these sons of bitches. So we go to Uzbekistan. The group's over there. I show back up, you know, do do, do do, do do, I'm back.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  There are five A teams left. A team is 12 special green berets. It's the unit of choice for special forces, you know, you got, you've heard this before. You got two weapons experts, you got two medical experts that are like doctors. You got two engineers that know demolition and construction. You have two communicators that know how to do signal, you know, that to work the radios. You've got a, uh, two senior NCOs that do intelligence and operations. And then you have two officers, you have a warrant officer. And those 12 people go behind enemy lines and they can train, they can lead up to 1,200 indigenous forces, you know, guerrillas. So that's what we're going to do, right?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  I show up, everybody's gone. We have five A teams left. Get the call, Miller, bring over the final five A teams.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Go over, fly over, and get to Uzbekistan. This is Thanksgiving Day of 2001.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

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• 1:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  Those of you that have been around SRS for a while know that we take mental health very seriously here. So seriously that in almost every episode, you'll find a segment where we discuss how to improve your mental health. And part of improving your mental health is keeping your mind sharp. And part of keeping your mind sharp is giving it the fuel that it needs to balance energy, focus, cognition, and just regenerating your brain. That triggered me to go on a journey to find the supplement that supports brain health with the cleanest of ingredients on the planet. And I found it. I was actually going to start my own company and do this, but I found Laird Superfoods.

• 1:01:33Shawn Ryan?

  I've partnered with them. Now I'm a partial owner, and I really believe in these products. Here's my favorite product. Performance mushrooms.

• 1:01:45Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:02:27Shawn Ryan?

  you guessed it, functional mushrooms that support and regenerate your brain. Go to lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, you'll get 20% off. Guys, this is the real deal. These are the finest of ingredients. Check it out. lairdsuperfood.com, promo code SRS, 20% off.

• 1:02:53Shawn 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.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Attack went in, yeah, Thanksgiving Day. And then there's this book, Studs Terkel wrote this book called The Good War. This book about World War II. And he interviewed, his oral history, interviewed all these famous people, senators, titans of industry, you know, all these people that have been fabulously successful. And he asked, what was the most important thing you did in your career? They're like, June 6, 1944, I was an 18-year-old machine gunner in the 1st Infantry Division. They're like, holy crap, you're Speaker of the House of Representatives? Now you're one of the most powerful people in the world. They're like, none of this compares. That was the most important thing I did.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  I feel the same way about that operation. You asked, like, tell me about your career. None of it really matters, except that one operation where I was like...

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  I couldn't believe that I had been given the opportunity to be in the unit, this special forces group, which everybody made fun of. Like, why would you ever go there? You know, there are five special forces groups. Why don't you go to 10th group where you can go to Germany and or 7th group to South America? They're all regionally aligned, you know, and ours is the Middle East. Nobody wants, no offense, like, oh, I can go to, I can go to Cartagena in Colombia and make max per diem, like $200 a day, you know, have a really good time. Or if you're in the first special forces group in the Pacific, like,

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  hey, Thailand, training with Thai special forces, that's a pretty good gig, right? We had the Middle East. We were the laughing stock. But when the war came to us, you know, I was in the unit that went there. Just at the end, end of the day, it's just blind chance, work hard, holy cow, pure luck that I was there. But that, everything else I did in my, my career, my career, period, doesn't matter. Well, it's a pretty extensive career. How did that operation go? Uh, we took the, the Joint Special Operations Command was responsible for getting Bin Laden.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Our job in special forces was to take down the Taliban, unconventional warfare. We were overthrowing the government with indigenous forces, resistance forces, guerrilla forces. So our job was to overthrow the Taliban government. We were, let's see, they attacked us on September 11th. We took, the government changed on December 7th. So It happened that fast? Yeah. Yeah. So I thought we did. I think historically, it will go down as the most brilliant irregular warfare, unconventional warfare campaign, probably in the history

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  of the world. Hasn't really been studied yet. I'm kind of hoping somebody does some serious study on it.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  The issue is, we ended up losing, right?

• 1:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  We ended up losing.

• 1:06:32Shawn Ryan?

  Before we go the whole length, if you want somebody to study it, then let's dig in right now. So what was step one in your planning process? I mean, that's a huge task.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  I was, I was intimidated. I had checked this out. At a certain point, if you're an officer, you go to this thing called the Command and General Staff College, usually about 10 years of service, and you go and get your master's degree, and you learn about operational art, big war stuff, right?

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  I got to go to that Newport, Rhode Island.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  So I'd learned that stuff, but then all of a sudden, you're having to do it. And you're like, wow, this isn't schoolwork anymore. You know what I got lucky with, though?

• 1:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  It was this senior warrant officer. A warrant officer is between a non-commissioned officer, sergeant, and a commissioned officer, lieutenant, captain, et cetera. Here's this beautiful, and you have the Navy SEALs, limited duty officers and petty, or you, you have warrant officers? And we have warrants. Warrant officers are, they do one thing their whole career, so they become subject matter experts and professionals. Usually they're helicopter pilots or intelligence people. Special Forces also has warrant officers. So they are the continuity, they are the experts on everything. And there was this old, grizzled warrant officer, and he was, he was a little bit of an iconoclast.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  He used to paint one of his, his pinky fingernail. He would like do artwork on it. And I was like, that's moxie. I mean, you know, you've got some throw weight when you can paint your fingernail, and nobody says to remove this fingernail polish. This guy was a genius. And I said, chief, what do I do? You know what he, come on, sir. So he had it. He like figured it out. We worked together over two nights. And, because we were moving really, really fast, Sean. We were moving fast.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  This isn't like, oh, you know, do a concept development and submit it in 60 days, and then we'll review it and send you back feedback in 60 days. This is like.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  And I didn't, they talk about special forces, like you're gonna do strategically important things that will be tracked by the White House. And I was like, yeah, whatever. Come on. Save me the public relations campaign. We're doing that. Like, this chief and I are feeding, we're not the ones briefing, but we're feeding this concept in that literally is not taking 60 days. It's going from us, doom, doom, Pentagon, White House.

• 1:09:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we got it done, man.

• 1:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  So can we get a little, I mean, if we can't, can we get a little, if we can, I would love to get a little more elaborate. I mean, you've just been tasked with taking out the Taliban government, going behind enemy lines, linking up with a resistance force. Who's the resistance force? How are you gonna link up with them? How are you gonna overthrow that government? How are you gonna insert, I mean, where do you, this is huge picture. I mean, this is big picture, way above my pay grade.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Well, it was above mine, too.

• 1:09:56Shawn Ryan?

  What was, what's step one?

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Step one was, what is the resistance potential? Are there any groups that we can link up with that will accept us? And of course, there was this thing called the Northern Alliance. The leader of the Northern Alliance was Akhman Masood, who had been killed by this Al Qaeda attack, where they had a deception op, where they showed up on the 10th of September with a film crew from some Arabic television station. The film crew, the camera was rigged with explosives. They blew the thing up and killed Masood, destroying the leadership of the Northern Alliance, right? So there was already in existence, this resistance group that was all up north, that was really very segmented, balkanized, they'd been pushed

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  back, they were about to get defeated. So it was pretty simple at that point. Like, we got the north, right? Your point, though, like, how do you get there? My boss at the time was this guy named, he's now retired general, John Mulholland. Mulholland, just absolute epitome of commander, gentleman, really Vince Lombardi, that really, really hard on you, like, you're gonna perform. He's the commander of the 5th Special Forces Group.

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  And we got to fly, we got to fly helicopters through the Hindu Kush, the Himalaya Mountains, right? To link up with these groups of the Northern Alliance that had been selected. So you got a 12, 12 man A-team up into Uzbekistan. They're going to get on a helicopter, they're going to fly down, they're going to land in the middle of the night, literally middle of the night, on a grid coordinate with the expectation that when they get off that helicopter and they show, you know, they've got the red flints flashlight and do, you know, turn, like, when you come off the helicopter, turn to 62 degrees magnetic and click your flashlight four times.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  This is what these, this is what these kids are doing.

• 1:12:04Shawn Ryan?

  Man, this is old school.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  I remember these days. Sean, this is, like, this is old school. You know what our GPS were? We bought Garmin eTrex. It was the first generation of commercially available GPS. Government, what did the military have? They had this huge, like, low-tran, like, GPS things that was this big, remember? And you only got, like, one of those per 400 people, right? You didn't have that. We all had these first-generation eTrex, you know? But that was about as technologically sophisticated as we had. But here is where I was going with this. Mulholland is getting his ass beat by the Pentagon because each night, the weather

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  conditions would collapse and he wouldn't launch forces in helicopters because he's like, they're going to crash, right? And that's moral courage, you know? Can you imagine? He's an 06, that's relatively junior person in the whole scheme of things. We have four-star generals. He's in charge of the response. An 06 Colonel of Special Forces, and he keeps saying no to, and they call it infiltration, as you know, right? Conditions don't match. We're going to lose a helicopter. Finally, skies open.

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  And we make our first successful infill, a guy that, well, horse soldiers go on all day. But Mulholland, they, I understand they were planning, the Pentagon was planning to fire him because they didn't think he was aggressive enough. Gate, uh, who's the Sec that, Rumsfeld's the Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld comes out to Uzbekistan. Several weeks later, Mulholland has him fly on a 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. MH47 Chinook-like helicopter, big helicopter, the route that the first infiltration went in, there are pictures of them, you can find them online.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  Shaun, these, they're literally going through canyons like this with 10 feet on each side of the rotor. Because remember how high it was? Mm-hmm. They're, they're already flying it, you know, what's, you can probably get, I don't know, we're going to get some comments about, you don't know what an MH47 is capable of, but it's like a 20,000-foot bird. These things are working at the absolute extreme end of the envelope because they're in the Himalayas, right? And then, then anecdotally, and I think it's true, Rumsfeld goes, oh, I get it now. Yeah. Like, he's terrified. So, we get in there, right, the boys get in there, link up, and then it's game on.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  And big army, big military, I think the whole plan was like, this is going to take, you know, the whole idea was we would get resistance potential and we would winter over because they're like, no one's ever won in Afghanistan in the winter. And the idea was that we would link up with the Northern Alliance, make an enclave, secure enclave in the north, because there's this key bridge that runs between Uzbekistan, Freedom Bridge, I forgot the name of the river, I forgot all this stuff. But this key bridge, and then the military was going to bring down an armored division by rail.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  And they're gonna get off, they're gonna like move these arm, this armored division across this bridge. And then in the spring, you know, we were gonna have, we're gonna march on Berlin again. It was gonna be great. Tanks going through that tunnel. That was, did you know that was the plan?

• 1:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  I did not know that.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not making this up, man. So, we're like, we're Green Berets, we're gonna exploit success. And we're gonna exploit success every place we get. And you've done Afghanistan. Once you have, once you have the momentum, everybody started surrendering. You got Green Berets, they got their Afghan Northern Alliance forces, got B-52s coming over. You've heard these stories where like, there would be a Taliban controlled town, or Al Qaeda controlled town. Green Berets with their guerrillas would show up. The guerrillas, they all had ICOM radios, you know, very simple, like walkie talkies essentially, right?

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  They would talk to the Taliban or Al Qaeda force who they already knew because it was their cousin or something. They're like, hey, man, like, shit's up for you guys. You really want to do this? Like, well, we have to, like, save face. So they'd be like, you know, Taliban, shoot a little, and then we'd just like, our guerrillas would just like, lay into them. And then you drop, you drop ordinance all around them, like, all around them. Like, you want to keep doing this because the next sortie is coming right on you. You see what we can do? They're like, we're done. So we got momentum, right? We're just moving, but the problem's the south. So we get Baghdad, Baghdad, oh my God, all these names. Is

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  that hilarious, dude? Hit Kabul.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  Get the Bagram, which is the major airbase Soviet setup. Okay, we got the north, problems the south, dude. That's where Mullah Omar headed the Taliban. Their government capital is in Kandahar. You been? And we're like, oh, damn. No northern alliance up there.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  There were some elements down there. Gulag ashur's eye, Karzai, Karzai,

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  who saw which way things are going. They're like, okay. When do we get some green berets? It's game on, dude. So we went down there. I went in. I was, I make, I make fun of this, but it's true.

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  Salt landing credit. You familiar with the salt landing credit? You get a special badge if you earn an initial assault. Like it's D day stuff. Like you get a special, like if you rolled into DD on June the 6th, 1944, you got a special ribbon. Really? Salt landing credit. It's a big deal, man. It's like one of those, if you see somebody with that ribbon, you're like, they're the real deal. You know, it's not an everyman medal. Salt landing credit ended on, I think the 5th of December of 2001. I literally, I end up, they say 200 people, 200 intelligence officers from CIA paramilitary

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  and special operators from the military. 200 of us are credited with defeating the Taliban. Dude, I am 199. I landed at literally the equivalent of 235959 on June 6th, 1944, where all the fighting's over, bodies in the water. I'm just like step, you know, I'm like, I was like literally the second to last person to land in Afghanistan to be part of that 200. So I want to be very, very clear. Such a small part of that operation. Like I got in at the, literally the last moment. We dropped on December 5th, we accidentally dropped a 2,000 pound joint direct attack munition bomb on our own position.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Uzbekistan, I had established a quick reaction force with the company, with the team I was with. On that day, I had been desperate to get a mission. Desperate to get a mission and I see the war ending, right? It's very easy to see the wars coming to an end. I'm like, it's happening again. And I would, every day I would go in and write up concept of operation and try to sell it to the leadership. Like, you know, I, we really need to go in, not I, we really need to go in to do whatever. It's having no luck. And it was December 5th.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  I got up that morning and I said, I'm not, I'm not doing it anymore. I'm failing. Went to the, we had this crappy tent for a gym with this like shitty Bowflex. Remember the Bowflex? And Sean, it had this exercise bike. They must've got it at JCPenney's in like 1965. This thing, it couldn't run because they, the Air Force Red Horse engineers that set up the camp had used these huge stones, like not gravel. The gravel was like this big. Couldn't run because you'd break your ankle. So I'm, I'm on that stupid exercise bike. It's dark out, freezing.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Then I'd go to the Bowflex thing and I walked back to go to the chow hall. Cause I was done for the day. You know what all my guys were doing? You know what all the guys were doing? They, they brought this huge big screen TV. Like this was before flat screens. It was the one, you know, that weighs like 600 pounds. Remember those things? With the vacuum, with the tubing back? They sat there, they set that up in our tent and they watched every episode. Still CDs, it wasn't Netflix. They brought like, they watched every episode of The Sopranos.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Friends, you name it. And here I am working, right? And they're just screwing off. They're like, screw the major, he'll figure this out. So that day I was gonna watch the doggone sopranos with everybody. And as I'm going to the chow hall, I see this frenzied activity over at the operations center. And I walk over and they said, ODA 574, uh, which was the A-team, 12-person A-team that was with Karzai's forces, just called, they've got mass casualty. I was like, oh damn, okay, what's going on? And I listened and the kid, Jason Amarine is the team leader.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Dude, did you ever see this? I read sometime, once about,

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  you can tell a true leader because the more pressure they're under, the calmer their voice is. I have. I'm not that way, man. I'm screeching. I'm like, ah, what's coming to an end? Help me. I hear Jason on the radio, and I knew Jason, he was team leader in the company I commanded. We had six A-teams, he was team leader of the free fall team. And Jason gives a situation report over the radio. Absolutely, as if he was talking on the phone to his girlfriend. Just completely smooth. I was like, I got emotional, man, still do. And it was like game on, man. He's like, uh, we've been hit by a large explosive. They didn't know at the time, it was a friendly fire.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Uh, I've got three dead, everybody's wounded, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just going down the list. I was like, okay, that's what we make the quick reaction force for. Walked over to the tent, all the fellows are like,

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  watching sopranos. I was like, get your shit on. And I'm like a happy-go-lucky guy, right? And I'm like laughing and joking and all. And they looked up at me. And they're like, ha, ha, ha. They thought it was a joke. I was like, I'm not bullshitting. Get your shit on, we're going. And then you can kind of see like people, and then the team starts like, get your shit on, let's go. And we flew down there and, and, and replaced the destroyed team. And then went to Kandahar and ended the war two days later. Damn. Well, ended the war. I should say, we ended that phase of the war. Yeah. That was way too long of a story, man. You need, you need to like, you need to like, give me,

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  you need to give me, you can, you can edit all that crap out. What, what happened when you got down there? Hit town. Landed, um, all right. So I'm in Uzbekistan. We need to get to Kandahar. That's like, what is that? Like 2,000 miles? It's a long ass way. Um, we get onto an MC 130 special operation, combat Talon, Talon, um, special operations, C 130. We, we, we get on the truck, we're all sitting there.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, the supply sergeant comes running out and starts giving us stuff. Like, hey, here's your radios. You got our blood shits, remember? You know, like, like when you go into combat, you have your blood shit, your get out of jail free card. Like if, you know, we will pay you, what is it? A million dollars now or whatever? You know what I'm talking about? So we're getting this in the back of this two and a half ton truck. We're all lined up in there. We got our kit. Uh, I take my rucksack. Nobody else does. They take small, I, I take my sleeping bag. Like, so Sean, I'm the guy with this big ass rucksack. Everybody else has three day pack. This is before this great kit that we have now.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  I mean, this is like pretty rudimentary. We're sitting there. We're like, okay, let's go. Supply sergeant starts giving us this stuff out. I'm like, wow, this is just great. We finally get all our kit when we're getting on the helicopter going to combat. But that's all right. Now we got our, got some radios, got our crypto, you know, all that crap. Drive out to the MC 130, ramps down, get on that thing in Uzbekistan. And there are a whole bunch of dudes on there already. All right, I don't know about you, man, but the way I was trained was like, train how you're gonna fight and all that stuff.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  It's like, I'm like, whatever. We get on, about 20 of us, and we're flying, dude. And it's a long flight, man. It's a long way. We're gonna fly into Rhino, which is Ranger, uh, the Marines had capped, Rangers had dropped in on Rhino, which is this airstrip in the middle of the desert that the Middle Eastern or Persian Gulf royalty would fly out to. It was their private airstrip where they would go falconing. I'm not making this up. Really? I'm not making this up.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  So we captured, Marines came up, captured that. So we're gonna fly in to, uh, Objective Rhino, which is now an airstrip. It's a long ass flight. And then I'm sitting there and the pilot goes, "Who's in charge here?" Kind of look around, you've been in this, like, you never want, you never want to hear who's in charge, right? Nothing good's gonna come from who's in charge, right?

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  It's like, shit, I guess I am. Then I realize who the other people are. It's a forward surgical team. These are all doctors. So they, because we had a mass casualty. So they loaded up, going to the guns, right? You gotta love that, right? Like, these dudes are like, there's some Americans in need. We're going. I don't even know if they had approval to tell you truth. I don't care. So you got like, you got all these doctors and medical technicians, and they all outrank me.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  I was like, shit, they're, they're not real, they are, they are real officers, but they're not tactical officers. So I pull out, you remember, your writing the rain, uh, pad, remember? Yeah, the green notebook. The green notebook.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Pull my pad out, I'm sitting there and I still have this, I write, "Mission." I can't remember what it is. "We will infiltrate to defeat Taliban, blah, blah, blah." Commander's intent. You know, I just do a really quick field order, really quick. Signed it and I just handed it off to the person. I said, "Pass it around." So, everybody reads this thing, it comes back to me. I looked at it recently. It was like the worst operation order I've ever written. I mean, it was pathetic. But I was like, "I have to make sure everybody knows what's going on and what we're going to do here and get everybody focused."

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Fly, fly, fly. You're like, "What are you going into, right?" And landed, uh, we landed at Objective Rhino. We're going to get off, we're going to run across about 75 meters to two, uh, MH53, uh, best helicopter ever made, special operations helicopters. We're going to get on those, we're going to fly to Can, north of Kandahar, where the mass casualty was. We would get off, casualties would get rolled on, we would then replace them and continue to fight. So, we get down there to Doggone. Man, I'm talking too much.

• 1:29:26Shawn Ryan?

  No, keep going.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  Get down there to Objective Rhino. I flashback to Ranger School and I was like, "I'll be the last one off the MC130 because one of these morons is going to leave something important. They're going to forget something." You know what I'm talking about?

• 1:29:46Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  It's like, so, they all get run off.

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  It's like talcum powder, brown. You've been in brown out. You know what I'm talking about. Like where it's literally, you can't see the sun. There's so much because those C-130 engines are ripping. Fifty-three rotors. This is like, it's dark. It's just really, you can't see shit. They literally go off into the dust with my surefire, checking everything out. Okay. Nobody left anything or somebody actually did leave something, but I was like, it's not that important. I was worried. So I could jump off the back of the C-130. Running, thinking I'm pretty cool, Sean, like thinking this will work in the movie.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Step in a pothole.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  Full of, couldn't see it, right? Because it's full of dust.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  I just flipped, dude. And I was like, oh shit, I just broke my ankle. Oh damn.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Have you broken? No. I was like,

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  damn. I'm like,

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  and I look in this marine.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  No T-shirt, wearing this, remember this shitty tanker goggles? Yeah. Comes running up because he sees me flip. He's right near me. He's like, Jesus Christ, are you all right? And I put, and I, I'm like, oh man, this is gonna hurt. Then he sees my rank because I had my rank on. And of course, like true marine, he's like, oh my God, sir, I'm so sorry. I'm like, it's all right. It's all right. It's all right. Sean, I look back. So I'm lying there. C-130 ramp down. I'm looking into that. I'm like, I could just get back on to that plane and just fly back to Uzbekistan and be done with this whole thing. I clearly have injured myself, right?

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  I was like, that was, it probably was a nanosecond, but it seemed like this really drawn out, like, you know, playing the whole video. And then I'm like, you, you dumb ass, get going. Stumble, like literally stumble onto the helicopter. All I can remember from medical training is don't take off your boot, remember? Cause it'll start swelling. I was a dumb ass and I didn't have my med kit was in, I had it in my back. Yeah. Cause we didn't know what we were doing then, dude. We didn't know what we were doing. I had my medical kit. I'm crammed onto this 53. I can't move. Certainly can't even get to

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  my, it's so loud. I can't tell somebody, hey, can you give me my medical kit? And I'm like, I'm just gonna ride this one in. We fly. And what I remember, I have photos of this, like the helicopter, you would, you would feel like your pressure was going down, like you were getting jammed into your seat. And then all of a sudden you go weightless. We didn't have, we're not, no seats in this, sitting training anymore. You're not belted in, you know, now you have those hooks that you hook into. We didn't have any of that crap then. Just like, man. And then I realized they were, you know, special operators never

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  fly during daylight. And we're doing a daylight and we're doing a daylight mission. So they're doing nap of the earth because the idea is the lower you can get, I don't know why we do this in the desert. I get it when you're doing it in like, in forest. The idea is you fly so low that they can't shoot at you or a surface to air missile can't lock on before you pass over. I'm like, I don't think that shit's gonna work in the desert. But hey, far be it from me, right? We were doing Cold War tactics, right?

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  They fly nap of the earth and then there, you know how they had the mountains? They'd like, like that. And that would be us getting pushed into the chair. And then dude, you would come off the knife's edge. I don't know, it was probably 10 feet. It felt like you could have reached out and touched the ground and then they would just dump it right back and then you'd go weightless, right? It was like that vomit comet thing for the astronauts. And I was like, okay, this is the real deal here, man. We're not, this isn't training anymore flat and level. Yeah. We land, get out on no shit, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon is what I thought.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  We get off that thing. I'm looking around, this, it's the Stone Age, man. I was like, holy shit. And linked up, there was a CIA officer there. So we get off, get off the helicopter. You know what you're supposed to do? Set up like a perimeter. You know how you run off and you throw yourself down. And there, dude, there are thousands of Afghans just rambling around.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  They don't, you don't, that's not a training scenario you get at BUDs, is it? Ready to work up? No. I'd never seen this scenario. We're like, well, are we supposed to shoot these motherfuckers? What are we supposed to do? And I'm like, we're not going to do a damn thing. So I said, we're not, I just walked off, said, come on, let's go. And now this is the leadership thing where I know the fellows are like, Miller, we always knew he was an idiot. We always thought he was an idiot. Now we know he's an idiot. Cause we're not doing the playbook. I just walked down, I see a road. I walked to the road and we just sat down next to the road, had a cigarette, just sat there. Commo guy puts his radio up, tries to make comms,

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  nothing. Doggone pickup truck, Hilux comes whipping by. This guy, legendary CIA officer, who I won't refer to here, but you've met, with this great bushy bust mustache goes, hey cowboy, need a lift? You could knock me over with a feather, right? So surrealist. And I'm like, yeah, we do. We load up in the truck. We go down to where Karzai's, Karzai is in this schoolhouse. 2000 pounder came out on this hill right above him.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  There's a schoolhouse, there's a medical clinic. Karzai like got, got, a mirror fell and cracked him in the head or some crap, whatever.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  But we get to the schoolhouse and we're like, Karzai, he's gonna be the next president of this country. Taliban are that way, got a mass casualty. We get off, they start hauling, there are two other forty-seven, fifty-three's. So we see, we get off and we see over here, they're moving all the casualties on these two other birds. So we didn't backfill them like we planned. I didn't care at that point, right? And final point, uh, it's like, so you're in combat now, right? Mm-hmm. Which, Super Bowl, right? Yeah. Got a bum leg already, I'm limping around, I'm like, oh my God, this is quintessential Chris Miller. Like, oh gee, I finally get to the big show and hurt myself, it's alright.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  So we put in, everybody was obviously pretty shattered, either injured, concussed. Well, that same thing, you know what I mean? But the force that was there was, we're like, we just gotta give them some time off. So we put in security around there, right? And I remember jumping into this hole. You know where this goes, it's like, this is a good fighting position.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  That's where the JDAM hit. And I remember looking down, Sean. And I was like, who the f**k's been eating hamburger out here? Oh, man. Dude, I didn't know that that's what happened to human flesh or human body when it's eviscerated. And I was like, damn, this is for real. And, uh, so that was, that was my arrival in Afghanistan. We moved on the, the capital of, uh, it was, I always like to say we captured, I, I was like, I captured Kandahar. Dude, it was just like a, we just drove. There was no, no resistance, the enemy was defeated and, uh, the war end, that stage of the war ended a couple of days later. Damn.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  Let's take a quick break. Sure. I'm spending too much time on silly stuff, I know. No, no, it's good, it's good. Let's take a quick break. Next, on The Sean Ryan Show. The leader of ISIS was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  So what I have to say to all my loved ones in the past, man, is that I will always love you.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  I mean, I usually don't do good, Ni, when you're talking about your enemy. I don't think it's helpful. I think it colors your judgment.

• 1:39:09Speaker 05

  I've been here too long. I've been very sick. It's very terrifying here. My name is Kayla Mueller. I need your help.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  This guy was the definition of evil. He was an evil man.

• 1:39:24Speaker 06

  He kept her in his captivity, his personal captivity.

• 1:39:32Speaker 06

  She was a beautiful woman, beautiful young woman. Helped people. She was there to help people.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  Baghdadi, evil of evil. But everybody's looking for him. His tradecraft is really good. He would burn people alive. He had them put kids in cages. When our intelligence officers put their mind to it, and our special operators put their mind to it, you can run, but you can't hide.