From Marine to Army SMU Operator | Varpas De Sa Pereira | Ep. 382

This interview features Varpas, a decorated, retired Marine Corps officer and Tier 1 Special Operations operator, detailing his intense career and the harsh realities of transitioning out of elite service. He discusses his unique psychological model, Warrior Withdrawal, which maps the emotional and identity struggles of leaving the hyper-focused warrior life onto the 11 symptoms of Substance Abuse Disorder. The discussion centers on the dramatic loss of purpose and community, and his advocacy for solutions while serving as a psychologist helping veterans navigate these exact challenges. Grab Varpas' book "Warrior Withdrawal: When BAMF No Longer Means Bad*$$ M^ther#u@!er" here: https://a.co/d/j8NT8Fv Today's Sponsors: Praseidus Watch Company https://praesidus.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:09Jack Murphy?

  Welcome to episode 382 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with tonight's guest on the show, Varpas Desa Pereira. He served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and then jumped over to the Army and served in a USASOC unit. Multiple deployments to Iraq, Middle East, Africa, and ended up getting out of the Marine Corps and is now a clinical psychologist working at Veterans Affairs, obviously working with veterans and veterans issues. So we're going to talk about the whole spectrum of all of that in the interview. Varpas, thanks for joining us.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:49Jack Murphy?

  I should also mention upfront, too, he is also the author of the book Warrior Withdrawal. It's a, well, you tell, you tell the audience, Varpas, what's your book about?

• 2:00Speaker 04

  So the book is about this cluster of symptoms that I found that sort of is in between this idea of adjustment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Having gone through school and looking at the diagnostics and statistics manual, kind of what happened to me as like patient zero of getting out of the military didn't really fit in either of those diagnoses. The cluster of symptoms for PTSD, one of them is avoidance. I didn't have avoidance of combat. I sought out combat. You know, I had an affinity for, for being with veterans and being in the military. So that would be a disqualifier for PTSD. And then the other thing that could be described, you know, explain the symptoms would be adjustment disorder. That has a time limit though of about six months.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  And so 10 years later, I'm still struggling with wanting to be back on the front line. So it's like, that can't be it either. So what is the, what is happening here? And ultimately, uh, closest thing I could find was substance abuse disorder. And so there's something about being a warrior that feels like you're addicted to something. And so then when you get out, you experience withdrawal symptoms. So the book is about my experiences, the multiple tours that I did, getting out, the struggles of getting out and then going through school and working at the VA and sort of finding a way to help veterans recognize what has happened to them, the training that

• 3:30Speaker 04

  they went through, that they get spit out into the world with no untraining. And then, uh, how do you manage it?

• 3:37Jack Murphy?

  Well, we'll get a little bit more in depth on that, um, further along in the show. Um, but I'm going to start you off at the beginning. You mentioned to me before the show, your first name is Lithuanian, your last name is Portuguese. Tell us about the origin story of Varpas. Uh, where did you grow up? How did you grow up? How did that eventually take you towards the Marine Corps?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, uh, I guess both of my parents are immigrants, both naturalized American citizens. Uh, mom is Lithuanian by way of Canada. Her parents fled the communists, uh, and so we're stuck in between the Nazis and communists during World War II. Displaced persons camp, ended up in Canada, and then it moved down to, uh, Chicago with this big Lithuanian population. Where she met my dad, who was born and raised in Rio, went to school in Rio, became a physician, and then moved to, um, Chicago, seeking basically freedom. Like, he talks about how, "We don't understand this in the US." The first time he could vote, there was only one person he could vote for, because it was a dictatorship. So he was like, "I'm out of here."

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Showed up in Chicago. My parents met, um, ended up moving to the East Coast, Massachusetts. Big Portuguese population there. They needed a Portuguese-speaking doctor. Um, so that's predominantly where I grew up, is in Massachusetts. Um, speaking Lithuanian to mom, Portuguese to dad, and sort of thinking that that was everybody's life, house life. Like, we just used English in, in school, and then we all went home and spoke in our native tongues. Yeah, I think it was in third grade when I realized that's not, that's not the case, everybody's house. Um, so the last name, Brazilian Portuguese, first name, it is a Lithuanian word. It is not a common name. It's not like Joe.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  It's, it's literally translated to Large Bell. And so, uh, I think I joked about it before, like, my mom was, um, Gwyneth Paltrow before, Gwyneth Paltrow's naming her kid Apple. So she named her second son Large Church Bell, basically.

• 5:48Jack Murphy?

  Well, what did the first one get?

• 5:51Speaker 04

  So he's got my same, his dad's name, sorry, our dad's name and our dad has the same name as his dad's name. It's just not much better because it's

• 6:01Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so he's the third.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  C Y R. So he's sort of the third, except he also grabbed my mom's dad's name for his middle name. So he's not technically the third, but Mosier means article of pain in Amazon Indian.

• 6:17Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  So, so we go, so they're like article pain, um, large bell. And then my two younger brothers, uh, Skydris, which is like sort of a made up ish name of like clear. And then my youngest brother, they were sure he was going to be born a girl. So they only chose the name Lima, which is actually a common girl's name for luck. Then he popped out a boy. They're like, okay, well, we can't have a female name. So they gave him the masculine version of Lima, which is Limas, which you can imagine basically means male fairy.

• 6:56Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so your parents maybe need a little work on, on the naming conventions, uh, for the children.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  But yes, my mom was not a Johnny Cash fan. A boy named Sue was not in her, uh, not in her eight track, you know, player. So I definitely tried not to do that with my own kids.

• 7:17Jack Murphy?

  So you grow up speaking Lithuanian and Portuguese, um, growing up in Massachusetts. Um, what piqued your interest in military service? How did that come about?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  So I was actually born in Maryland, uh, at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Because my dad, in, in order to try to fast track his citizenship, um, took, uh, commission, got commissioned in the reserves as an army, uh, physician. And so he's immediately promoted to major as an internal medicine infectious disease specialist. And so he was sent out to, uh, Port Dietrich. And so my dad was in the army. Um, I don't know why, but I had an affinity for the Navy and then through high school, I was pretty sure I was going to go to Annapolis. It's really the only place I applied.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Uh, and then the senior year I had to have surgery and so I was DQ'd for for Annapolis. And then I got a scholarship to Boston University. So, all right, I'll, I'll do that and then I'll go to Annapolis. You know, after the year I'll reapply. Um, but BU had a ROTC program and so they gave me the Navy ROTC scholarship. And after a year there in Boston, I was like, I have three years of college now, like a year's worth of AP credits. Or two years worth of AP credits plus a year's worth of actual college. I'm not going to go back and restart at zero at the academy because all roads lead to. Uh, for me, Quantico as a, as a Marine, so, um.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  At that point, I was like, all right, I'll just stay here.

• 8:59Jack Murphy?

  So you commissioned through ROTC?

• 9:03Speaker 04

  I did, and just like every other boy, basically, you know, G I Joe's camouflage, I did it all. Squirt guns, water guns, capture the flag was my favorite thing to play. Uh, and through grade school and high school, playing three sports, you know, a sport every season, uh, and then continue to do that through college.

• 9:23Jack Murphy?

  And so you came into the Marines, nineteen ninety-nine, you got commissioned. Um, and now you have to go through infantry off, uh, basic infantry officer course, what do the Marines call it?

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we do something a little bit different. Um, we, we have officer candidate school and then, uh, all Marine officers go then through the basic school.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  So depending on your commissioning program, whether it's the academy or OCS, everybody goes to the basic school and everybody shows up with no MOS. So all officers go to Quantico. Nobody has an MOS. Some people have flight contracts, but then over the course of those six months, depending on how well you do, you get ranked from one to whatever it is 100. And then you select your MOSs. Now, in order to ensure quality spread, they cut that 100 into thirds and then disperse the MOSs sort of equitably, which means that in the top, if you're in the top third, you need to be in the top of the top third to get combat arms.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  And if you're in the bottom third, usually it's the bottom guy, your Mr. Irrelevant usually gets infantry.

• 10:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I think the Army does something similar so that you don't end up with purely just dumb asses in the infantry. Otherwise, I mean, it's bad enough as it is.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  I think what they try to do is they know just about everybody wants to be in infantry, combat arms, and then they don't want like your logisticians to be the lowest, all of the lowest performers at the basic school or your logos, your supply guys, because then things don't get done.

• 11:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  As the generals say, you know, we think logistics, not tactics. Then from TBS, I got, I was high enough to choose infantry. Then I went to the infantry officer course for about 10 weeks. Got my orders to my first unit. So First Battalion, Fifth Marines out of Camp Pendleton and linked up with them as they're preparing to do a boat package. So I went right away to Coronado for a month doing the scout swimmer school and then stayed there for probably another month doing the small boat raids.

• 11:39Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool. I mean, it must have been exactly what you were looking for, right?

• 11:44Speaker 04

  It was, and it was basically a Rochambeau to determine who was going to get to go be the scout swimmer.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  And luckily I won, and I was only in the Rochambeau because I had already done like the maximum swim qual that you could. Still struggled with the brick.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  You know, part of the qual for the scout swimmer course, so managed to do it. And all of that boat rating stuff was to prepare us for a deployment at the front end of 2001 to Okinawa.

• 12:15Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. Did that Okinawa deployment materialize or did other things take precedence?

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, no, no. So 2001, so we flew out January of oh one. Sort of standard rotation. It's a 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. Sailed around Australia, Iwo Jima.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  And it was only a six month tour, so we fly back around July of oh one. And then we're on our off cycle, basically. So we're looking at doing like Operation Bright Star, I think in Egypt.

• 12:50Jack Murphy?

  Sinai.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, September 11th happens and then, you know, everybody starts to get, think that things are going to change. For me, they did because, so here's the funny story. In 2000, 2000, I was the youngest Marine officer in the first Marine Division.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  So if you're not aware of how we do our birthday balls, it's the oldest Marine present and the youngest Marine present share the first piece of cake. And of course, we're Marines, so we, everything has to be done and rehearsed and practiced. So as the youngest officer present, I had to go to the practices for the honor guard to like practice eating the cake. Or at least receiving it from oldest Marine present.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  That put my name, so you can imagine that plus my name got me skylined with the general's staff. And so then when I came back, when we came back from the deployment to Okinawa, from Okinawa, the chief of staff and the staff sec were already like, oh, hey, that, that guy's good to go. You know, he's a first lieutenant, like we were to pull him up. And I show up to my interview with the general, General Cowdery, and the staff sec's like, and the general was also like, do you want to be here? And I'm like, hell, no, you know, I want to go to recon, you know? And he's like, oh, well, you know, that's exactly who we want here. You want the guys that don't want to be here because if you wanted to be here, that would be a problem.

• 14:20Jack Murphy?

  Reverse psychology is bullshit. They got you.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So fortunately for me though, that ended up being a second deployment because he was the assistant division commander. And we got flown to Kuwait for four or so months as part of a CJTF for consequence management.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  As far as I understand it, I think we were sort of kind of trying to build the backbone of the eventual division command for an eventual invasion into Iraq. So from around Christmas oh one through oh two, you know, I'm in the Middle East, flying around with the general, going to all of the embassies in, in the Middle East, talking about whatever they wanted to talk about. And then we come back and the, the benefit for me was, it was only going to be for six months that I was the aide. And then I would in theory sort of have a choice of duty station coming home. So I wanted to go to recon, interviewed with the recon battalion commander.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  And he's like, I'm only going to make you the H and S CO. I don't have any platoons open for you.

• 15:33Jack Murphy?

  What's H and S?

• 15:35Speaker 04

  So HHC.

• 15:36Jack Murphy?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Headquarters. Hot, hot dogs and sodas company.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  So that was not a deploying unit and none of us at the time. So this is like mid 2002. Thought that the entire divisions were going to get deployed for for Iraq. So I said, no, thank you to that and took a job as an executive officer for another boat company. So I found myself back in Coronado for a couple of months. Getting ready to set sail in January of oh three.

• 16:10Jack Murphy?

  So you kind of hit it just right.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, basically so set sail in January. Full speed ahead. I think we had 36 hours in Singapore between San Diego and Kuwait. I got flown ahead. Into Kuwait and then it was, you know. All of February and most of March, kind of waiting, waiting for the green light to go.

• 16:36Speaker 05

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• 18:31Jack Murphy?

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• 19:13Speaker 00

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• 20:10Jack Murphy?

  So what was sort of like your platoon's mission and your idea of how the Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to unfold?

• 20:20Speaker 04

  I had no idea. I mean, I was an executive officer. Our specific job, so we're, because we're part of the new, we actually got attached to a British Commando Brigade, so the Three Commando Brigade, as their, part of their combat element. And we were tasked with crossing the border and then securing the deep water port facility of Umm Kasser. While the 40 and 42 Commando, the Royal Marines, I think we're taking the Al-Fal Peninsula to our eastern.

• 20:51Jack Murphy?

  This is down in like Basra?

• 20:53Speaker 04

  South of Basra.

• 20:54Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Right, so literally right across the border is Umm Kasser.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  And then we moved, my battalion ended up moving further north up to Azerbaijan and then a little bit further north. And then we got detached from the Brits because of Jessica Lynch, that whole fiasco. So we all moved north up to Naziriyah. And so my battalion was part of the diversion attack to go rescue Jessica Lynch out of Naziriyah. Now, me specifically, I was probably asleep in my, in my black bag while all this stuff was going on.

• 21:36Jack Murphy?

  Were any interesting incidents that happened during that deployment, though, that you were involved in?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  There are a few.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  I try not to, to speak ill of other people, but it does matter.

• 21:52Jack Murphy?

  You don't have to name names, it's okay.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  There, there was one specific incident that I, I'll, I'll talk about this one because I bring it up in the book where we're in Azu Bayir. We strong pointed the port because it's just our company providing security. And I'm driving around with my company gunner sergeant, which in the army, it's like your first sergeant. Cause he's the logistics guy. Uh, and we hear 50 cal fire or sniper fire in my company gun. He's a, a former sniper. So he's like, that's outgoing. We're trying to figure out what, what are we shooting at?

• 22:27Speaker 04

  I get down to the, the platoon that's on that strong pointed to the south. And the platoon sergeant asked me like, hey, what's the, what's the drama, sir? And I'm like, I don't know. That's why we're here. The platoon commander tells me, you know, what's going on? They've got eyes on a target, but it's not a target. It's women and kids, you know, maybe some men in vans and they're just kind of looting a warehouse. And, uh, the platoon sergeant of that platoon tells me that our company commander had just called for a, a mortar mission. So he was going to use his 60 mortars on, on that target. And, uh, it's in that point in time where I was like, no, that's not happening.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  I had inscribed on my, my cover or my hat, no women, no kids borrowed from Leon, the professional. And so I threw the platoon commander in our truck and we drove to the CP. And I just asked them like, hey, did my CO just ask to, uh, Do war crimes?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Ask to shoot a fire mission and they, and they said, yeah, but we're going to deny it. And I was like, okay, good. And I was getting ready to walk out, but there had been some other incidents that had happened a couple of days before. So the battalion gunner, the chief warrant officer is like, no, no, you know, you, you tell him everything that's going on. And, uh, so I said, okay, out of, out of, uh, just curiosity. When you call for fire, you have to give a target description. And so I said, what was the target description that my CO gave? And he said 10 to 14 men in black with AKs. I said, okay, that's, that's not what's there. Here's the platoon commander that had eyes on. It's women and kids and they're looting.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  And I thought that was sort of done. I thought that justice would sort of square things away. I did not expect what happened next, which was I got called in as insubordinate. And then, uh, one of the other things that had come up was that that company commander had pointed his rifle at the fire support team leader. Like if you should call another fucked up fire mission, I'm gonna kill you because I should backtrack. As soon as we crossed the border, we stopped and then we had incoming. My company commander was sure that there's no way the Iraqis could be shooting already at us.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  So he just was so sure that this was blue on blue fire, that he was gonna, you know, cause harm to the fire support team leader.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  And he, he actually called the training timeout. So the fire for effect went, you know, we, we got away. I got away, we all ran away. So I actually have my platoon commander's tactical notebook as Iraqi shrapnel embedded in it. And, uh, he, he kinda calls a training timeout, pulls the app out on a Humvee, calls all the platoon leaders and me to the Humvee. And it's like, how did, how did this happen? And like, uh, we can't stay here. Like if that was, if that was their adjust fire mission, you know, we're bracketed now. And, and we're not in a good place. Sure enough, we got hit again.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Eventually we moved and, and then our counter battery or somebody else took care of that D30 battery. So that came up and then back to the mortar incident though, my company commander asks me, like, didn't you? So did you hear the call for fire on the radio? I said, no, I didn't. Oh, so you didn't hear what the grid was that I called in? I said, no, no, sir, I didn't. I didn't hear what grid you called in. And he said, aha, see, so you didn't realize that I had actually offset the grid.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  He was gonna use the 60 millimeter mortars as warning shots. Danger close to our own troops. Warning shots and I he got me with that. I was speechless. But anybody who knows anything about fire support is like, that's just preposterous.

• 26:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's not how the fire support center works.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  That's not how any of that works and your warning shots with the 50 cal already are not working. So I really wasn't sure what to do in that scenario. Um, but he said he could work with me or I could go to another company and I had to weigh that decision. It's actually maybe one of the first times that I I selected to or I chose to do what's better for everybody else and what's best for me. I called in my fellow platoon commanders, all the other lieutenants, and I said, what's best for me is to leave this company.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  And I don't think that's what's best for you because I can I can withstand this.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  And so I did. I stayed. Go to Naziriyah. Basically, I don't see the company commander anymore.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Fly home or sorry, not fly home, fly back to Bahrain, get on the ships and sail home. I get I get in more trouble for for the shenanigans that allegedly I did. In combat and at at that point, it's like late 2003.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Most all and most if not all of the Marines are gone from Iraq and I'm like, that was it. That was my combat. Wars wars over for us. It's it's a. It's standing operations now, big army time like we that was and all of my peers are like getting their awards with V and Bronze Stars and all that stuff. And I get a big fat zero. Um, because of all the things that happened. So I was like, that's gonna hurt me down the road. But no matter, I still was thinking I can get over to recon or force recon.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  The path at that point in time for me was going to be through through FAST Company, which is the Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Teams. So I get orders there.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  I show up. And the Al Rashid Hotel had been rocketed. So it pulled in the two platoons from FAST that were that were already, I mean, they're always forward deployed, but they pulled in two platoons that were forward deployed into Baghdad to reinforce the, what would eventually become the embassy. And the hotel. And so in order to maintain that force protection posture, they started to grab platoons from stateside. So I had, you know, within a month or so of showing up to Virginia with FAST, I was back in Baghdad.

• 29:13Jack Murphy?

  And what, can you tell people what the mission is of the FAST teams?

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's anti-terrorism, whatever form anti-terrorism can take. Usually it's going to be like a heightened security, heightened force protection measures. They're used for whenever there's submarines that have nukes on them, they bring out these marine platoons to help secure those areas for refuel, defuel. They're forward deployed, you know, when I was in Bahrain with FAST, we're on a pager to reinforce embassies, to go provide expeditionary security. We come with a ton, FAST platoons come with a ton of skillsets to do all of that.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  They're kind of like a SWAT team, if you will. The naval SWAT team.

• 30:04Jack Murphy?

  And so the first assignment was you were going back to Iraq, you said, for this, this hotel was getting hit?

• 30:11Speaker 04

  So the hotel was multiple, you know, was hit with a bunch of rockets. And so the concern became that what was then the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is Al Rashid, Alice, I think, was going to get hit. And it is now the US Embassy there on the Tigris. So they wanted to bring in a company's worth of FAST Marines to provide better security for that place.

• 30:32Jack Murphy?

  And how did that situation unfold for you guys?

• 30:37Speaker 04

  It was so drastically different from OIF one, like I was in the green zone. I mean, I was eating catered food made by Pakistanis, you know, in, in a palace with marble floors and toilets, which was a far cry from going two months without a shower and then, and then only getting kind of a quasi shower because they brought the NBC truck and like, hey, you guys need to be decontaminated.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  The, the palace had a pool, David Letterman visited our palace, some motivated cab officer and his Stetson jumped into the pool to catch a football that David Letterman threw and it was different.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  It certainly was a different side of the war and, um, and still, you know, the Brown Irish was a big deal going from, from Bi- from Baghdad to National to, to the CPA. We were rolling around in SUVs that are unarmored and Sodder City was still not really secure. But this was, this, it was a unique time in late oh three and into, I guess, a little bit early oh four there in Baghdad, where you, you could actually go to the souk, um, not far from the Combat Surgical Hospital with no body armor, no weapon.

• 31:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, this before things got really bad.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So then that changed.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  It was basically guard duty for a few, for three or four months for us. So I came home from that, we got, we got relieved in place so that I could come home with the platoon and then make a regularly scheduled deployment to Bahrain where we would be on the pagers for everywhere else.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  And so on that deployment, there was an American who was beheaded in Saudi. And so there were some additional concerns about threats to the embassy. So they launched us to go reinforce Riyadh for about a month in July.

• 32:41Jack Murphy?

  And

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Same with.

• 32:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  And then we got sent down to Africa. So I got I got my taste of the Horn of Africa in oh four.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Again, different than like Al Fager and what was happening in Fallujah.

• 32:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, what did they send you down to the Horn of Africa for?

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Some of it was training and some of it was just to, you know, make sure the embassy there was fine. It was good to have a platoon of Marines there to reinforce whatever might be going on. And that also kind of started to make me aware of how wild west it is out there. Like, they they sent us down to this one range where I think it took us like 13 hours to drive.

• 33:29Jack Murphy?

  This is out in Djibouti.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Djibouti.

• 33:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  So we go way down south, it's like a 270 degree range where they're on our own. My one assistant or one of the other platoon commanders was supremely afraid that we were going to get overtaken by baboons. So he wanted to make sure that the fire watch had a fully auto M4.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  But in my mind, I'm like, hey, we're doing this live fire training. And if we have a casualty, there is no medical support.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Like, our CASA that plan was the CH-53s, they're on 180 alert. Meaning that if we have something bad happens and we get on a sat phone and we call up to Camp Le Monier. 180 minutes later, a CH-53 is flying 30 minutes down south to come get our casualty.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Interesting foreshadowing because when I was back in Djibouti in oh nine, we had an event where we had some casualties. And so it became fortunate for those guys that the French Foreign Legion was there and they could land one of their Lynxes anywhere. And that's how they got those guys to the hospital.

• 34:41Jack Murphy?

  Well, this is a bit of a sidebar, but I worked on a story a few years ago and it was a Army National Guard unit in Djibouti and they were making that same trip, driving from the base out to the range, through all these canyons and valleys and everything. And what none of them knew, and you know, what surprised them was this huge rainstorm came through. It just poured rain and they got trapped out in the, you know, driving through these wadis, going through, driving LMTVs. And I actually got video of one of the LMTVs rolling over in the water and they had four, three or four soldiers end

• 35:22Jack Murphy?

  up in the water and they recovered, like three of them managed to make it back to the shore. One of them got washed all the way out to like the ocean and the French picked them up, but survived. Thank God.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  I believe it. Even with light rain, didn't seem like anything. And if you're used to, I mean, if you're from the East Coast or wherever, you know, Seattle has rain all the time, the lightest amount of rain. And then we had about 48 inches of water that we had to afford in our Land Cruisers.

• 35:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. It's wild. And after the FAST teams, you did six months on division staff?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I came back from that deployment and they told me, I was the captain and I was too senior to take another platoon. And rather than, you know, to suffer on battalion staff, I volunteered for it to be an individual augment with my goal to be, to go on a military transition team.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  My initial set of orders were to be for G4 logistics in Kuwait. So I check into Camp Lejeune with those orders and I'm like, hey, I'm a infantry guy from FAST. I don't know anything about logistics. Can we change that? I'm here to be a MIT. And luckily they swapped me for some logistics officer and put me into G3 down at the division. So I deployed as a frag order rider. Within a few months, it became clear in Ramadi that. That's not a really difficult job. So the intentions message writer took up the frag order writer duties and I got pulled as an out of hide mitt to go out to further west in Ambar.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  With the two seven, so the second brigade, seventh Iraqi infantry division with our three battalions and hit Aditha and Rawa.

• 37:22Jack Murphy?

  And this is two thousand five ish.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I spent just about all of two thousand five in Iraq, which is great because then I could pretend like the Red Sox were still World Series Champions.

• 37:35Jack Murphy?

  And Iraq was kind of like deteriorating pretty seriously by this timeframe.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  You know, so oh, five, I think, started the a little bit of the awakening. I remember being on Camp Blue Diamond when they brought in, I think, the the tribes there to start negotiating with them so that we could all focus on AQIZ and or AQIM instead of, you know, fighting, fighting the Shia.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Everybody wanted against our Kawi. And then when I moved further out west, they were still fighting out in Al Kaim, a little bit around around Rawa.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  But most of the really, well, I want to say that. You know, Fallujah was basically done. Second Fallujah was done. Rockets would still hit Camp Blue Diamond and there wasn't a a lack of combat happening in Ramadi. It just was not, I think, at the same level that it was in oh, four.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  For me personally, it was a lot of driving on like raw bronze, raw uranium between all of the different Iraqi battalions. And that was also a different experience because it's, you know, minimum minimally staffed Humvees with you break all of the of the requirements and minimums just to get out the door. Where we're basically going with nine Americans, three vehicles.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Out to wherever it is that we're going. And then that really came to a point when we got, you know, I was lead truck. And so our truck got hit with a small IED. Not enough to disable us and I we're pretty sure that this pickup truck in front of us is the one that dropped it. So we chased it down, we shoot at it to get it to stop. It pulls over. We have three trucks, so one goes far side security, one stays backside security. And then my truck with the 50 cal is oriented to the target. And it's really only at that moment that I realize I am the dismount.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  I'm the vehicle commander and the dismount. And the only other dismount is my TURP, who's not armed. And so I was like, oh, all right, well. We close on the truck. I don't need my TURP to be armed, but then when we get closer, I have him come with me. We flank the truck to guys get out. And at that point, I realized I'm going to have to search them because although I trust my, it's like, which, which way do you go with that? Do I trust my TURP to do the searching? And I cover him or do I have? So I handed my M4 on semi to the TURP and I'm like, you pulled the trigger, it's going to go. Please stand in emphyseid, you know, and I, I closed the last, whatever it is, 10 meters with my M9 and, and search these guys.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  I know they dropped the IED through the, there's a hole in the passenger side floor wall or floor. But, you know, there's, I had no evidence. And so I wasn't going to detain these guys on a hunch. Even though I was, oh, no, they're in the wrong place. They don't know where they're going. Their, their story, their cover for action doesn't check out. It's like, nah, you guys missed your turn Albuquerque back there. So I know you're lying about this, but what was I going to do? There was, there was no, there were no explosives. And so it might've just been an 82 millimeter mortar rigged to blow that hit us. So we sent them on their way.

• 41:18Jack Murphy?

  Jeez, what a mess.

• 41:21Jack Murphy?

  I, and then after that deployment, you did the captain's career course?

• 41:27Speaker 04

  I did, went down to Benning. Again, the, the

• 41:32Speaker 04

  common theme of my military career is deploy as often as possible and stay stateside as little as possible. So I took the Army's course because it's six months instead of the Marine course because it's 13 months.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Went to, so went to Benning for that. Finished, got my orders to back to Camp Pendleton as a company commander.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  And then it was a matter of a few months, caught them on the tail end of their workup. And by, I want to say July of 07, I'm back in Iraq.

• 42:09Jack Murphy?

  Wow. Where, where did you guys go?

• 42:13Speaker 04

  So north of Fallujah, this place called Sakwa.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  And

• 42:21Speaker 04

  you know, no offense to Cav guys, intended beyond you know what your job is and your job is not coin. So you know, the 57 Cav mechanized Cav unit that's there really did no patrolling in the AOR that I inherited.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Anytime they need to dismount, they'd have to borrow them from the Marine Italians that were nearby. And so what ended up happening prior to me showing up was the Cav unit would go out and they'd hit IEDs. And so they stopped patrolling. And then they would only patrol if route clearance, like 224 engineers would come clear their route. Then they would patrol from their Bradleys and then, you know, then they would go back right up until they had like a catastrophic event where I don't know if it was even combat related, but they had about 13 heat casualties.

• 43:16Jack Murphy?

  Oh, man.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  That had to get evacuated because they got stuck. And, you know.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  I inherited that AOR. It was the Wild West, so August of oh seven, we start clearing it. And that's the, you know, one of my patrols goes out and hits an IED.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Into a canal. We go to reinforce them. My QRF kind of blows past them. It's a second IED. And so now I have two down trucks. And we're trying to find where, where the trigger guys are. So. Patrolling through the area, can't, can't quite find them, recover the vehicles best as we can, leave them in place. So we can come back the next day. With some wreckers to pull these things out of the, one out of the canal and then, and then the one off of the side of the canal. And as we're driving that back, we get hit with another IED.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  Recovering that vehicle.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Complex ambush. So this is sort of the unfortunate drawing of boundaries. The boundary was the canal. Which was maybe 10 meters across. And so not my AO is where I'm getting RPG fire from and, and you know, probably where the command was detonating all of these IEDs. So it's like I get authorized to cross though. And the rickety mud. Bridges didn't really look like they'd hold up for us to cross. So I'm like, I'm, we're good on our side. And you fire support, we're troops in contact. They're like, okay, well, we can support you with artillery from Fallujah. And I had. Done the math already. I was like, no, thank you.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  We're kind of at their max range and I'm looking to hit somebody who's 20 meters from me. So. What else you got? Sent us some Cobras. And so it's Cobras I could manage because I could say, hey, keep all your fires north of the canal. Well, I mean, we were so close that my Mark 19's gunner. Like his 40, his 40 millimeter grenades weren't detonating.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  There weren't, yeah, we wouldn't hit their minimum spins to arm. And my 50 cal, like we, as he pulled the rear cotter pin, everything, try to free gun that thing. He couldn't depress it far enough to hit. Where the bad guys were so.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  You put your mind to use and I was like, well, shoot all your flares, shoot all our pop ups into the reeds. So they catch fire and then we'll shoot them as they're running out of their, out of the reeds.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  They're not that flammable because they're right by the now. But the bad guy, so I, bad guys, you know, whatever they were, they, they decided to uh try to egress out of the area. Hopped into a vehicle, the Cobra saw it and so that was the end of them.

• 46:14Jack Murphy?

  Smoked them. Yeah, Cobra pilots don't screw around.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  They do not. Um, after that, kind of the, the rest of the tour just progressed in the way that you wish it would in counter insurgency operations. So we cleared the area, got some host forces or some host nation people to stand up a provisional security force. Uh, I start working with them, partnering with them. They run the checkpoints near the end of my tour there. They give me a call, like, hey, these two guys that we know are bad guys came into the area. They're both suicide bombers. Uh, we, we took care of them. One guy detonated himself, but the other guy didn't. And so we're asking, can you, can you shoot some alum so, and bring out your EOD?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  So like, sure. This is awesome. You know, local people saw the local bad guys, called the local law enforcement. They managed it. And so now all they need is like our support with alum and EOD. And then I get told, I actually can't shoot a loom because this is almost 2008, or it might've been 2008 and uh, the ROE was like, no, no. That the tiny little base plate could land on somebody and kill them. So no more looms allowed. It's like, all right, well, how long were we waiting for EOD? Two hours. And so finally I go out there with EOD.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  And you know, talking to my Iraqi counterparts there and they're like, you guys took so long, like, I wish you would have told us you were going to take this though. We would have just blown them up.

• 47:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was always like that with EOD.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. So to me, that was a success story, right? Like the, the tour started with the Wild West, you know, we cleared it out. We, we took our licks, uh, we gave back. And then by the end, you know, the locals are managing their own stuff.

• 48:08Jack Murphy?

  And go ahead. I'm sorry.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Well, and it, you know, you, you leave thinking that everything went great. And then, you know, I don't remember what it was, like three or four months later, you're like, oh,

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• 50:16Speaker 04

  There's still IEDs going off at ECP5 or whatever it is outside of pollution.

• 50:22Jack Murphy?

  And you, uh, I don't, this is kind of rare in the army. I don't know about the Marines, but you got to pick up a second company command?

• 50:30Speaker 04

  I did, right? So when I was at Benning, I went to that no form brief and kind of wanted to go to that unit and they asked recruiters, hey, do you take Marines? And they said, yeah. And I was like, great. How do I join? And they said, you gotta be branch qualified. And I said, I, I eat crayons. I don't know what that means. And they said, you got it. If you're infantry guy, you gotta be a company commander. So I did that first tour as a company commander. And then, uh, kind of called headquarters Marine Corps and said, hey, let me go try out for this other unit. Um, and they said, no, you're not up for PCS orders. So then I was like, all right, well, what do I do now? And, uh, what I did next was I went over from a line company to weapons

• 51:13Speaker 04

  company and kind of became the fire support coordinator for another deployment.

• 51:19Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome. Back to Iraq?

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Well, so we set sail. Uh, this is 2009. And so I really don't know what we thought we were gonna do. I sort of figured maybe we get pulled into Afghanistan or Iraq. That's sort of the tendency with marine expeditionary units is they just go to places for 30 days and ruin it for all the people that have to stay there for longer. That's the experience that I had as the MIT guy. Like, hey, this marine unit comes in, like, you're just gonna like eat and defecate in my area for 30 days, blow up stuff, and I'm gonna have to live with the, the results. Like, you're gonna shoot a Mclick to clear possible IEDs. Like, do you know what that's gonna do to all

• 52:01Speaker 04

  my locals? Like, no, no, thank you. Um, so what we ended up doing is we got attached to the counter piracy guys outside the Horn of Africa.

• 52:11Jack Murphy?

  Ah, interesting.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  And, uh, in a fun fact, uh, my ship was hit by a submarine for crossing through the Straits of Hormuz.

• 52:20Jack Murphy?

  Who's submarine?

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Our submarine.

• 52:23Jack Murphy?

  Oh, no shit.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I was on USS New Orleans and we were hit by these USS Groton.

• 52:31Jack Murphy?

  Did you have to like go and go into port for repairs after that?

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the USS New Orleans had to go dry dock in Bahrain, which meant, you know, you had a half of battalion's worth of infantry guys just twiddling their thumbs. So they ended up shipping most of us down to Africa again.

• 52:51Jack Murphy?

  Someone got relieved for that. I don't think you can crash a submarine without getting in trouble.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, the sub captain got relieved for that. Our captain did not. And in reality, like normally you think if you hit something like that, you'd go to general quarters, you know, to deal with all the damage. But that didn't happen. And I know that didn't happen because I didn't even wake up when the sub hit us.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  This is also then I got so I got sent over to the boxer and this is 2009. So part of what we were doing is is the boxer ended up getting a whole bunch of guys from Dan Neck parachuted in to deal with the Marist Alabama.

• 53:36Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah. So you you guys were down in the Horn of Africa when that happened?

• 53:43Jack Murphy?

  Cool. And I mean, how did it? How did that unfold from your perspective?

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Well, so from my perspective, I basically had nothing to do with it. And, you know, because I was just a regular guy and they're going to bring in their on fires guys. And it sort of kind of escalated that way where all of these Marines in this in this new thought like, hey, we'll get to participate in this in some fashion. And then one by one, their whoever thinks that they're going to do something kind of got written off, like the recon guys were like, hey, we're the visit board search and seizure people. This is what we train. We're the experts on this. No, thank you. We got this other asset that's going to do that. Even my buddy, the Cobra pilot was like, well, I'm the I'm the forward air controller airborne, you know, like I will be the guy who's flying fire support for these guys.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  And he thought he was going to get to play. And then here's the, you know, the units air controller like, hey, they have this stuff and bring in these little birds and all of that. So he got frustrated that he wasn't going to get to do anything. And so I think the only Marines that ended up supporting that at all was probably the carrier pilots sort of flying with ISR over Somalia while the Bainbridge did.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Work with the life of.

• 55:02Jack Murphy?

  So let's uh, let's circle back around here like now you're getting to the point where you're able to go to assessment and selection. Um, so you, you mentioned that they came in and gave you guys a brief while you were down at Fort Benning in the captain's career course. Like I, I know you can't get into the details of, of the brief, but what, what was it that kind of sparked your interest in the, in this organization?

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Uh, so I, I had known about all those organizations. Well, I had known about that organization before, um, mostly through, I guess Hollywood, um, and, and reading Eric Hany's book. Uh, it was, it seemed up until that no form brief that it just wasn't in my cards. They don't take Marines and Marines are kind of like a bucket of crabs sometimes where if you want to go do that thing, some of the Marines are going to pull you down and say, no, you can't. They'll never take you.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Which is why I was, I had, I would not have even gone to the no form brief, except it was required. So I went and then I was just kind of on a whim. Let me ask the army guy, hey, do you take Marines? And he said, yeah. So I was like, all right, well, what do I need to do? That was always my goal. Yeah.

• 56:18Jack Murphy?

  And so the Marine Corps kind of stymied you for a little bit, although I mean, again, being a company commander twice is pretty awesome. Um, you finally come up for PCS orders and you had to go camp out in the school of the infantry until you could go to ANS?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, you know, because we're sometimes not able to see second and third order effects. When they told me I wasn't, I wasn't up for PCS orders. I couldn't apply for ANS. Um, then when I was up for PCS orders, it was like, okay, well now you can start your application for ANS and it's going to take a while. So it's like, all right, well, I have to find a job in the interim. So they stashed me in the ops shop for the regiment for a little bit. And the monitor, the detailer, branch manager, I don't know what you call it in the army, but the guy who cuts your orders, it's like, hey, I can't. They're deploying to Afghanistan, RCT, their regiment is, you're not. So I need to cut you orders somewhere else while you square all this stuff away.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Um, so I got PCA orders to the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton. I show up there as I'm getting my invitation to go to selection. Um, so I show up and I'm like, hey, I'm gonna be your XO for the Infantry Training Battalion. And also I'm gonna go away for 45 days. And then at the end of this year, you know, I'm up for orders to somewhere else, probably.

• 57:43Jack Murphy?

  I, and so tell us about assessment and selection. What was that experience like?

• 57:51Speaker 04

  That's a good question. Um, because a lot of ANS, we rely on novelty in order to get good reads on people. So the general things that happened there, they don't really want to talk about. However, I will say that allegedly after I finished, uh, the woman that I was married to at the time said, would you do it again? And I said, absolutely not. Now I'm like, of course I would do it again, right? Um, and occasionally I will go back to help them out with ANS. And it's only like now 10 or 15 years later, almost that I'll hear things.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  And I, and then in my mind, I'll think like, um, you know, here are some of the cadre talking about this candidate messed this thing up. And I'll be like, oh, that must be new. And it's only then that I realized, no, no, I also did that task. I just don't remember it because the stress level is so high.

• 58:48Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  That some of these memories don't encode.

• 58:51Jack Murphy?

  And they're throwing, like, when you say novelty, they're like putting you in scenarios that take you outside your comfort zone, basically.

• 59:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  So there's your stress phases. Um, you know, everybody uses land navigation as a great tool because it's sort of self correcting. If you, if you have a good sense of, um,

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Geography, it's a simple task that should be simple to accomplish. And it's hard because of the terrain and the distances. And so it's self correcting, like if you choose bad routes, it becomes apparent because you don't make your times and all that stuff. So land navigation's a piece and then there's all these other things that come up that you weren't prepared for, you didn't know you were going to get tested on. And I really liked how in the instruction phase, it was basically like med school where it's see it.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  So see it, do it, teach it is med school. And that was basically how it was. So, you know, like an IV, like you see somebody doing it. Okay, here's your fake arm, practice it. All right, turn to your buddy, stick them. I'm like, all right, let's see how this goes.

• 1:00:10Jack Murphy?

  And so you make it through assessment and selection. And then there must be the whole train up process. Must have been pretty cool. Now you're getting to do commando stuff, right?

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  Well, so, so Marine Corps had us a little bit of a pause there as well. Cause even though I passed ANS, they're like, ah, but you, you still, you still owe us some time here at Camp Pendleton. So I had to wait, I had to defer for a year to go to, to OTC.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  So I did, and then went to OTC and it was.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  It was fantastic. Like, I mean, really, really hard work. I think in a year I had 17 non-consecutive days off.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  It was all, almost all new and all challenging and no feedback, almost no feedback.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  So to me, like somebody who strives or thrives on criticism or feedback or whatever it is, or validation, if I'm doing it well, like that was difficult. It's like, did I do a good job or did I not do a good job? Like, I need to know what the ham sandwich is, what does it look like that you're looking for so I can produce it? And I did pretty well at the captain's course. So it's like, I know the doctrine, right? I can, if what you want is a ham sandwich, I can do that. I can do, you know, light infantry combat brigade tactics. You're not asking for that. So I'm stepping outside of that comfort zone. But, you know,

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  this is so nebulous. And they're like, just, what do you think? Like, I don't know. You tell me, is this a good idea or a bad idea? I have, you know, I'm a straight legged dude. Basically, I have no concept of, of, you know, if this is good or not. And they're like this, you know, use your imagination. All right. Well, then we'll do it this way.

• 1:02:07Jack Murphy?

  And that was usually good for them?

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  I mean, apparently.

• 1:02:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they liked it. They liked the creativity.

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  And I, you know, you would learn from your classmates because some of them had, had, there are other courses that you can take that can help prepare you for, for some of that work. I had none of them. And so, you know, it was all OJT for me. And then, you know, even within that, that class, I could see that rookie mistakes that I had made in the beginning, I was no longer making them at the end.

• 1:02:40Jack Murphy?

  I, is this mostly like human stuff that you're working on?

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  It's like close target reconnaissance work.

• 1:02:49Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm. And what is, you know, do you know what, I mean, you have to have some conception of like, the job you're training for. Like, what is the actual position that you're going to be doing?

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  So at A and S, I had no idea. I had none, really. And then when I got to O T C, I started to get a sense of what the job would be if I was the person, if I was the operator on the ground.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  And they were a starved for officers at the time. So it started to become a little bit more clear to me that what I was gonna do is gonna be troop commander. And so while, while I could also be a trigger puller or Humvee driver or whatever, more likely than not,

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  I would get staffed into task force positions.

• 1:03:39Jack Murphy?

  And this is kind of, I can't remember if we, we mentioned it here, but it's kind of interesting that the Marine Corps kind of suggested that you go this route instead of going to the other army unit that they felt you would have like better command time in this one?

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Uh, I think it's sort of like rewind all the way back to the beginning when you grow up speaking three languages and your parents are immigrants. There's a, a preference to send you to, to one place over the other.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  If you desire, so the question to me is like, do you want to be a super soldier? But in the reality is, is that if you go there, you're, you're really just gonna be a, a troop handler in some respects. Or you could go to this other place where there's the possibility that you could also be the guy that operates. And so to me, that was a little bit of a no brainer, even though I didn't know what the, the job was. I was like, all right, let me do that.

• 1:04:38Jack Murphy?

  And after you finished O T C, like what was it like when you took this position when you arrived there?

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  It was a little bit of a shock. And so the, the standard line that I use when I would go forward to talk to people at the, the T S O X, the Theater Special Operation Commands is I would, they would all want to be read into the unit and the SAP and all this stuff. And I would say, you know, ninety five percent of what we do. And then that last five percent is uninteresting. And also, I borrow the line from the Disney movie Aladdin. It's like, we have infinite cosmic power in an itty bitty living space.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  The breadth of the things that we can do is massive and you know, the actual what we can't, what we're allowed to do is is very, very constrained. That came up a couple of times because this was during the Obama administration. And so there were two events, which I can't remember the dates of.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  But I definitely got called into the office on a Saturday in the snow to sit down and come up with, I think we called it like the Chinese food menu of like, what can we do to strike back? Because the president's embarrassed by what Soleimani said about, you know, him.

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  So what are our options? It's like, okay, like you tell me like, no limits?

• 1:06:08Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Like, yes, no, no limits. It's like, okay, man, we're gonna be here all day.

• 1:06:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Here are

• 1:06:15Jack Murphy?

  Poison the kushkara.

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  A plethora of things that I can do, you know, from, from A to Z. And then we're going to start adding numbers to these things because we're in all of these places. And we generated the list. And then nothing was selected. It's like, no, thank you. Just have water. The other was the Syria gas attack. Now that I think about it, it was the red line had been crossed. And then the question was, I think we may have just been in the front leaning rest there because we leaned so far forward. So we got called in and it's like, hey, that's, it's my area. What have you got that can go assess all this stuff?

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Go find everything. So we got ready and then no call came. And then by 72 hours later, you're like, hey, our, our information is probably no longer accurate. And I don't know that I can get anybody in there now.

• 1:07:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I remember when that happened and there was some movement that they like Ranger Regiment, like they were like gonna drop the hammer for a minute there. But then, yeah, Obama decided not to do it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Which is why it's interesting to hear the guys talking about it now, like Marisc, Alabama, that was his timeframe too. I mean, I was, I wasn't on the boxer.

• 1:07:37Jack Murphy?

  And a, and a bottom pad too.

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  But yeah, so he allegedly gave the green light on that. And then, uh, what is unknown is there was also a German ship that was taken by Somali pirates. So the boxer, for a brief period of time, had a bunch of German commandos on it as well. And then as the Germans are briefing their chains of command about how this is going to go down, I think they, they do the standard army of like, hey, we expect 10% casualties. And, uh, this is VBSS, you know, the number escalates to, I don't know, 15 or whatever. And their chain of command started to balk a little bit, like, whoa, whoa, you know, casualties? Like, no, the Americans is, they did this with no casualties, no problem. This is different, you

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  know, it's the big deck. Um, from what I hear, and this is hearsay, the, the way that kind of went down is the Germans asked the, the president, hey, you know, what do you think? And he's like, I don't know, it's your ship. And so they kind of took that as don't, don't do the strike.

• 1:08:42Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha. Yeah, it's kind of interesting what you say about the, the Chinese food menu, because I've had, as I understand it, even when the president signs a finding for the CIA and it has all this stuff on there from like cyber warfare to assassination. But then it's like, hey, hold on, Skippy, you gotta read the fine print down here where it says, if you want to use any of this, you have to go back to the president and get permission. Uh, so, yeah, the, I mean, I don't know what your opinion is, but I mean, is there like Jason Bourne really is not a thing? Like, that's a fantasy.

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a fantasy. There's no Treadstone project. Um, you know, to my knowledge, there's nobody who walks into, you know, the cafe and, and knows the numbers of all of the vehicles that are in the parking lot. It's like, I mean, if you, if you have that kind of idyllic memory or that autistic, then great. I mean, maybe we can make use of that, but then we also don't have the charisma if you actually do a job.

• 1:09:40Jack Murphy?

  Well, speaking of which, because of your background, did you ever do any work in Europe? Sitting in a cafe, smoking a cigarette, speaking Lithuanian?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  No, um, near the end of my tenure, uh, was the invasion of Crimea. So of course the Baltic States got very nervous and SOC PAC hosted a few working groups. And I got sent out there since Europe was my AOR or part of my AOR. Uh, and the kind of the questions came up like, well, what have you got? That can help there. And I said, nothing, but if you want something built there, I can build it. It's going to take about two years and you need to tell me now because the guy who's going to do it is retiring.

• 1:10:26Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:10:28Jack Murphy?

  Uh, did, did any of that go forward as far as building like clandestine infrastructure for them?

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Not to my knowledge, no.

• 1:10:36Jack Murphy?

  That's too bad.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Uh, there may be, and I, you know, I just may have been on the outside of the gate by the time it started to happen.

• 1:10:44Jack Murphy?

  Hmm. Um, so I, I take it you did two, three years as troop commander? And, um, before we move on to the next thing, anything, any final thoughts on that period of your career? Anything that's interesting that you're able to talk about?

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Um, not, not really. The only interesting things are the parts that are uninteresting, how the Marine Corps really doesn't like guys that go and become special. And so, uh, ironically, like as soon as I finished OTC, they're like, hey, you're going to get orders to command and staff school. I was like, no, I'm not. There's, there's no way like I, I didn't just finish this program to get yanked into, you know, yanked over to Quantico for, for a command and staff college.

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  And I think this is a problem that we often have is we anthropomorphize, you know, big army or Marine Corps. Like Marine Corps has needs, like no, it doesn't. It is, it's not an entity. There's somebody who wrote this piece of paper directing this thing to happen. I just need to go find that person and talk to them. And so I, I got myself TDY to Quantico, found the guy who wrote the order that was going to send me to school. And I said, uh, what, what I needed you to get off of this list? Because I know person X and person Y aren't on this list. Like, yeah, we scratched them off because this guy needs to get back into the cockpit. And this guy's over at Marsoc and I was like, I don't have Marsoc. You know, give me a freaking break, like, scratch my name off the list. So they did.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  I did still have to do

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  distance learning program. And because I got enrolled into that, I got pulled off of going to be the task force commander in Afghanistan. They just ended up sending someone else. That comes up later as I talk to guys that got out because I would make the comment. Now that I was so frustrated that I did command and staff. It's a waste of time because I didn't end up becoming a lieutenant colonel or go on to a staff. I could have been the task force commander. Within a year or two years of having gotten out, now I would say, well, command and staff was still a waste of time. But I could have been my son's soccer coach.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  Or I could have put work into who I am that's going to persist after the uniform is gone. And I didn't.

• 1:13:19Jack Murphy?

  And because of that, were you getting to the point now where like you're kind of done with the Marine Corps?

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Well, so in order to to work for that organization, I had to be a geographic bachelor. The woman that I was married to at the time didn't want to

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  leave her job and travel to to the East Coast. So I left her and the kids, you know, just north of Camp Pendleton.

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  And then when the Marine Corps was calling back and saying, hey, you need to go back to regular infantry. I said, that's fine. I'm more than happy to. Please send me to Camp Pendleton. That's where, you know, at the time, my wife and kids were. And they said, no, you're going to go to Twenty Nine Palms, which is the Marines' version of NTC.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  So at that point, I was like, no, thank you. I'm just going to take, again, the Obama administration offered early retirement, so I took it. And and then was the I got the lived experience of how when you decide to get out. Because that is so contrary to the value set of the people staying in, you kind of become persona non grata.

• 1:14:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  And even now, as I talk to veterans, I've lived on both sides of that. So if you go back to my first company, Command Corps, going to outside of Fallujah, like I had a E5 Sergeant that was, you know, literally the best Sergeant in the division because he'd won the Super Squad Challenge. He'd done his two tours, even though we were going back to the same place, all he wanted to do is go to Texas and open up a business that was a fitness gym slash strip club. I don't know how he's gonna make it work, but I thought he could make it work.

• 1:15:06Jack Murphy?

  God bless.

• 1:15:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I, I went through all of the same, you know, all of the

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  pressure that I could put on him to make that enlistment, guilt tripping him, like, hey, we're going back to the same place. If you don't, if you don't also go, people are gonna die. You know the area. Don't you want your guys to succeed? Like, you gotta come with us, reenlist, reenlist. And good for him that he didn't.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  And then I realized like, oh, this is, this is a problem of ours. And we're, we're a lot of, what have you done for me lately?

• 1:15:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  I also saw that in, in Baghdad, when there was a couple of guys that,

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  you know, they were partying at the Al Rashid Hotel and were not in the place where they were supposed to be when the, when the rockets hit. And so their commander was so embarrassed that he basically, you know, wrecked their careers and wouldn't give them a combat action ribbon. Um, so they all left the Marine Corps. It's like, wow, you know, this is what we do to, to, you know, allegedly our brothers. And now, at that point, I was feeling it. You know, feeling that weight on myself, like my 06 Colonel was treating me like a liar about how I was trying to separate, um, trying to, trying to, uh, check my story with the other Marines at the unit. Oh, this doesn't make sense. No, it totally makes sense.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  And so it was a little bit of a, that seems to be common enough of a theme. If it's not ubiquitous, it's at least, you know, the preponderance of guys that get out, the departure is, is not pretty. And so that's, that sets you into that six months to a year timeframe post-service where you're kind of lost. And so we, at the VA, that's the danger zone, I think, where we see a lot of guys that start with substance abuse, major depressive episodes. Uh, most divorces will happen within those first six months because, you know, you lose everything. You lose the, your sense of purpose, who you are, identity.

• 1:17:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, the, the military kind of treats you like a leper when you're getting out. Uh, but expanding on that, so you begin the retirement process. What, what was your transition like out of the Marine Corps?

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  It was like immediate, you know, I got my orders. Maybe, maybe it was in the springtime and so I fought in every way that I could to try to modify and change them, um, find loopholes, you name it. And then I think I basically had two months to separate.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  The other thing that the Marine Corps did, which was so awesome, was they, that's when they audit your record. And that's when they decided that my pay entry base date was wrong. And so they had been overpaying me for 15 and a half years.

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• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  And so they just stopped paying me.

• 1:20:01Jack Murphy?

  What?

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  They're like, you owe the government, we overpaid you $60,000. So we're just not going to pay you for your last two months of service. And, uh, and by the way, here's your bill for, for what we overpaid you. Luckily, uh, I ended up, you know, filing paperwork that said, it's a no pay due. Like, hey, man, I didn't intentionally, um, you know, defraud the government. Like I had no idea that, you know, the extra $5 you were giving me for paycheck or whatever would amount to 60 grand. At the end of my career, but you know, for, for the months of October, November, I was like, where's my paycheck?

• 1:20:45Speaker 04

  And it just didn't exist.

• 1:20:47Jack Murphy?

  They just cut you off like mommy and daddy say no more, your allowance is canceled.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So with that kind of departure, it's like, go F yourself Marines. And for a while I was like, I will, I will never work with Marines again because I couldn't, I couldn't believe it that this brotherhood would do this to you. You know, an alleged brother. Um, but that's how it went.

• 1:21:14Jack Murphy?

  Yep. But years later, when they need you again, you're a brother suddenly. We're family, right? We're family.

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  And, uh, so, you know, at the beginning, I would say, as a contractor, I was like, I wouldn't work with Marines. And then even as a psychologist is like, I'd prefer not to work with Marines, except for, um, people that I knew before I got out. And so I would work with recon because some of my lieutenants went over there and I would do, you know, if they asked for a favor, I would do a favor. And even then, you know, like, uh, there's a recon platoon commander who went after those two, a recon company commander. And he's asking me like, hey, you know, what are the, what are the black ops that we can do on this Mew? Like, what are the black ops we can do in, um, in Southeast Asia? I was like, none.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  Like you, you do not, nobody's going to have you do that. And oh, by the way, like, where's all the O P E that these two guys I know before you did? Like they prepped your battlefield. They gave you all these things. Oh, no, no, no. Like we're going to do something different. And it's like, oh, I see. I'm also guilty of this. Like you can't teach a Marine anything. They, we're all experiential learners. So I can tell you to do the thing, but you're going to do it. Nope. I'm going to do it my way. And then, oh, my way doesn't work. No, I'll come over and try your way.

• 1:22:34Jack Murphy?

  And, and what were you doing as a contractor at that time?

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  I would contract for my old unit, either as a tactical instructor or as a role player.

• 1:22:45Jack Murphy?

  Cool. And at the same time, you are becoming acquainted with being a full-time or part-time dad?

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  Mr. Mom. Yeah. Daddy Uber.

• 1:22:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's how I feel now. My daughter's a teenager.

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Yes. So, yep, it was a drastic difference. I think I talk about it in the book, how I went from briefing Sacre on a kill capture mission in his AOR, probably early of 2014 to December 2014, my only responsibility is wiping my two-year-old's butt.

• 1:23:25Jack Murphy?

  And how is that going for you, you know, psychologically, that like this is a big, big adjustment that you're making?

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  It was a massive adjustment, which is one of the reasons why, you know, I got drawn to write this adjustment stuff into the book, Warrior Withdrawal.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  And, you know, I was trying to figure out, because, I mean, everything was, was gone, basically. So the 15 and a half years of, of service and no more thank you for your service. And also, you know, active duty keeps on active duty-ing. And I saw this one comment on LinkedIn the other day where some person writes in that she's been out for a year and her company commander hasn't called her once. Like, well, of course, and I laughed at it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's, maybe that's a problem. You know, like, they just don't care about you anymore because they have, they gotta keep, the army keeps marching along, right? As the song goes.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  So 2015, I was Mr. Mom for a year, a woman that I was married to at the time. You know, she could increase her travel, uh, so she did do that. And then by 2016, I was like, I, I gotta do something. And so contracting opportunities came up and, uh, as long as they're a Conan's based, I would take them. And it was on one of these contracting gigs that I chatted with my op psych, uh, from the unit. Um, I had a candidate that I was like, hey, this guy's a narcissist. How do I write that up? You know, and he's like, like, here you go, write it up this way, that way. And we had a longer discussion about how kind of I was in this, these doldrums having gotten out.

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  I feel more like myself on these contracts, you know? So that's why it's a, it's like a withdrawal symptom. Uh, and he's like, you should be a psych or a special operations units. Like he said, they'll talk to you in a way that they'll never talk to me because you've been to the corner. Now that you've gone through A and S, you've done all of these things. Uh, so I was like, all right, write me the recommendation. And I started school and then, uh, six years later I was done. Four years of academics, a year of internship and then, and then postdoc at the VA.

• 1:25:49Jack Murphy?

  What is, uh, what was kind of like your speciality when you went to psych school? Was it always, uh, you know, the idea that you were going to work with veterans or?

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. So initially that's, that's what my goal was. I had, uh, gone through the, the SIRGs, the FBI's crisis response groups, uh, hostage negotiator course. Cause I figured I would, I would do that. Well, um, I did actually try while I was Mr. Mom to volunteer to be a, a hostage negotiator. Here in Southern California and, uh, I got turned down because basically that's nobody's primary gig. In fact, at the FBI, there's only like six or seven or so full-time negotiators.

• 1:26:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. We had one of them on here, uh, Barry Nosner. Yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  For everybody else, it's a, it's a ancillary duty.

• 1:26:41Jack Murphy?

  Right, secondary job.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Right, so for the, you know, like the local townships, I was like, hey, I will, I will come be your negotiator. You know, you don't even have to pay me. I've got a pension. I just, you know, this is the work that I want to do. Uh, like I can't because of liability reasons. So that also sort of pushed me into the doctor route.

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  Almost as soon as I started psych school, though, that kind of soft guy, not soft, yes, special operations guy took over where you're always trying to get to the left of the boom. So, you know, with, with special operations, it was, all right, you know, before the ID blows up and then before the ID gets implanted and then before the hole is dug and then before the ID is made and then, you know, before the guy buys the parts, the ID, that's how we get to the left of, of the boom. And in psych school, I was like, to me, that means I should be a child psychologist.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  So help people out before they develop all of these problems, uh, because the adults are, uh, fully baked cakes. And I don't want to unbake the cake. You know, it's impossible. So just give me the raw materials of the kids and then we'll bake a good cake. So for three years, for three practicum years, I was a child psych, uh, working with at-risk teenagers at the Children's Hospital of Orange County. Then, um, and another intensive outpatient program with UCLA for kids that have, or teenagers, uh, kids that have OCD. And then over in San Bernardino County, an outpatient clinic.

• 1:28:18Jack Murphy?

  Th- this was your post-doc work?

• 1:28:21Speaker 04

  So that was practicum work and internship in San Bernardino County. And then when it came time for post-doc, I had gone to a buddy's retirement ceremony and, and paddle pass. Uh, I mentioned that kind of, uh, or actually I mentioned that exactly in the, um, in the books, um, introduction, how while I'm there, the, the thoughts of this warrior withdrawal piece, like that missing thing kept coming back. And I was back among all these veterans and spouses. And I was like, I, I feel like I need to. Something is calling me to write this thing.

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  And so I took a residency postdoc year at the VA to sort of flesh out my hypothesis, which was largely based off of Dr. Free's work, Operator Syndrome. So at the time, I had thought what I went through was because I was an operator. And so my hypothesis was, okay, it's going to be the same. It's the TBI, it's the constant deployment, it's all this stuff that's caused me to have this difficulty transitioning.

• 1:29:31Speaker 04

  And so I went to the VA to confirm that assumption and then very quickly learned that's not the case at all. Because right off the bat, I started to get veterans that had not gone to combat and then veterans who had not deployed. And, you know, all the way down to I had one soldier who was separated at AIT. And the symptoms were the same. So the loss of identity, loss of sense of purpose, why bother getting out of bed, communications issues, anger management problems, reliance on maladaptive coping skills like substance abuse, video games, isolation.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  So the way I, you know, all of those tend to be learned in the military because they're adaptive or effective. So like my tour to Okinawa in 2000, because, or 2001, nothing's going on. So the joke about Okinawa tours is you either become an alcoholic or a PT stud. And then some people like me try to do both.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  There's nothing to do, so you just try to fast forward through the deployment because there's an end date. And so if I can sleep twice as long, then the deployment's half as long. And so I'll get home as fast as I can. And then unfortunately, when you get home, usually it reverses and it's like, oh, I can't wait to be deployed again.

• 1:30:58Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  And so now you have a countdown to how can I get on this next deployment? And we fast forward through time with video games, substance abuse, you know, you name it. Unfortunately, when you get out, out and now you're a veteran, what am I fast forwarding to? You know, I'm just going to fast forward the rest of my life and drinking to fall, not to fall asleep and sleep well. I'm going to drink through the weekend to go back to work Monday to get to Friday to drink through the weekend because I don't want to deal with anything.

• 1:31:33Speaker 04

  So I saw all of that at all levels. And so my hypothesis shifted to, uh, basic training. Bootcamp is sufficient enough to drag you into this warrior culture. And I absolutely think that there's a, a significant cultural component to it. It's one of the smallest cultures we have in the country. So a few people are in it and it's so tightly bound that when you're out of it, um, you, you struggle with, you know, trying to be assimilated back into the civilian culture.

• 1:32:07Jack Murphy?

  I, I've described it in the, in the past that it's like, especially for like what you did, that you were part of a, like a sub, sub, subculture that probably there were certain things that you were read on to that thirty five people in the entire world were read on to. And so it becomes like this increasingly small circle of like people who can relate to your experiences.

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  That is absolutely true. And that, uh, I noticed that last November and this November, when I went back out to contract for my old unit and I, I'm sitting at a table and, uh, it's one of the few places where I can speak completely unguarded. Because everybody there, and there's I think less than three hundred of us or something like that, that have completed the entire thing. So to be in a room with forty or fifty of them, or just sitting at a table with five or six of them is, is, uh, it's really.

• 1:33:04Speaker 04

  De-stressing and they're in a good place to be. However, because I was seeing the same types of communications issues, you know, the, you know, it's, it's the guy that was the cook or the, you know, motor T guy that's walking around town with, you know, that US Army veteran hat and then the, you know, the nine line apparel T-shirt and then the don't tread on me sticker on the, on the back or the Atari DD 214 on the back of their pickup. And it's, this is the identification friend or foe. It's like, don't mess with me. And because, you know, I would see all of that, it's also IFF because I want veterans to approach.

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  Because again, that's when I, that's the withdrawal symptom. Uh, that's how I know it's a withdrawal symptom because when you chat with another veteran, all of that goes away. Same as me sitting at that table with all my unit buddies. It's like all of that, you know, the anger, everything, all of that goes away. It's like, I could just be me again.

• 1:34:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's incredible. Um, and one of the things you mentioned to me earlier, and, and I think you, you touched on it a little bit, was the sort of difference between PTSD and adjustment. Um, that there, there is this process of transition and adjusting out of that military culture, which is sort of separate from PTSD. You need not have gone through some sort of traumatic combat event.

• 1:34:36Speaker 04

  Right. So, um, had the opportunity to kind of really speak quickly through this at Austin for America. Um, what I, and the way that I do that is I just go through the symptoms. So with post-traumatic stress disorder, I know that as you were talking to Dr. Free, um, right now at the VA, we don't really even bother asking about.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  The trauma. I mean, we, we try to get the index trauma, but the post-traumatic stress disorder checklist doesn't bother. It only asks about the other four symptoms. So those major symptoms. So those are re-experiencing. So nightmares, flashbacks, that kind of thing. The, you know, the second one is avoidance. So I, I don't go to do the things that cause me to remember the traumatic experience. Uh, the third thing is negative thoughts about self, negative, you know, uh, emotions. So I, you know, um, I can't be happy. Uh, right. I didn't do the best that I could, or I could have done better. And then the last one is hypervigilance or hyper arousal.

• 1:35:45Speaker 04

  So is there a trauma? And then those, those four symptoms with the PCL only measuring those, those four. So when I looked at that for myself, it's like, okay, well, yep. I mean, I was around death and dying. Check. I have a whole bunch of veterans that weren't, and we have the same symptoms. So re-experiencing, do I have nightmares, flashbacks? No, I don't have those. Uh, you're not at all. So it's like, okay, well,

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  maybe mine's just a little bit different. The avoidance piece, um, I didn't avoid at all. I had the affinity for, like I said before, I will seek out veterans. I feel more like myself when I talk to veterans. Most of my friends are veterans. So I'm not avoiding those things that might remind me of the trauma. I go to Camp Pendleton. You know, I, I live close enough where I can hear the artillery fire. So it's like, okay. If I don't avoid, then I don't meet that criteria either. And so then the negative, uh, negative cognitions, negative emotions. And then the hyper arousal, it's like, well, that was my training. So we don't call it hyperarousal, we call it good situational awareness.

• 1:37:01Speaker 04

  And if you have good situational awareness and you spot the IED and you save people's lives, we give you a medal for that. And so what we don't realize then afterwards is if you don't train that away, the way that your brain works is it can modify that. So now I'm on the highway and I'm driving and so I'm hyper alert at all the other drivers. And then when I get home and I haven't had a car accident, that's sufficient for my brain to reinforce, well, that's because you were, you were hyper alert. So continue to be hyper alert. Or, you know, the, the classic one of I have to have my back to the wall when I go to the restaurant. Uh, you know, because somebody may come in and shoot up the place. Well, that almost never happens.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  And yet you're going to go home and say, well, but if it did,

• 1:37:49Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:37:50Speaker 04

  I was ready. So I'm, I'm, my brain is internally rewarding itself for maintaining that high level of, of hyperarousal. And, and that's why, you know, sometimes you have to get a reset on that, which is like the SGB or some other forms of therapy. So when you put all that together, it's like, okay, then if it's not PTSD, maybe it's just the adjustment, which is kind of a more nebulous diagnosis, which is, hey, you have, you have physical symptoms, emotional symptoms. Um, you know, maybe some somatic symptoms.

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  The problem with adjustment disorder is it's usually tied to, all right, well, six months after the, whatever the adjustment is gone, it's no longer adjustment disorder. Now it's like, it's something else. So if you lost your leg in combat, okay, well, for six months, you have adjustment disorder. And then if you're still sad about it, it's like, okay, well, it's not adjustment disorder anymore because the leg's gone, that's done. Now it is, you're just depressed. And so that didn't make sense to me either, because I was still having those same. Challenges 10 years after I retired. And then like 11 years after retirement now, and I'm still pulled to do and still contract for, you know, my old unit. So if it's not PTSD, it's not adjustment disorder.

• 1:39:10Speaker 04

  The only thing that made sense to me was, and I talked about this in the introduction too, I had a chat with a Green Beret buddy in our, in our team house, or our team room, about why do I have to deploy? Like that Afghanistan tour, why did it have to be me? Obviously, I didn't go and they sent somebody else. And I'm sure they did as good a job as I could have. But it had to be me and he felt the same way. And so I said, I feel like I'm an addict to patriotism or something like that. Like I'm just blindly doing this for something. I don't know why. Jump forward, whatever it is, eight years. And now I'm going through the substance abuse disorder symptoms. And I'm like, all of these fit me.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  If I just, instead of saying substance use, say being a warrior.

• 1:40:01Speaker 04

  So there, there's 11 symptoms for substance abuse disorder. And when I, I teach a class about warrior withdrawal, I would go through all 11. And I don't try to define it for anybody. You say, all right, whatever causes you to feel like a warrior, you label it for yourself. Is it positive reinforcement that I'm tough? Is that what I was looking for? And that's why I kept climbing the spear to be in the toughest, most selective unit. I don't know. Maybe that's what it was for me.

• 1:40:34Speaker 04

  But if you take that and then you go through the symptoms is, okay, was I deploying more often than was healthy for me? Did I continue to deploy even though it was causing me physical harm? And you know, was I deploying instead of spending time with family? Was I spending more time trying to go on deployments than is, is necessary? Was I trying to quit deploying and I was not able to? It's like, all of these are substance, that's substance abuse symptoms. And then the final two being tolerance and withdrawal. So for me, tolerance was one deployment, not enough, two deployments, not enough. So I did OF one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, in, into eight. Still not enough. Had to go to special operations. Still not enough.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  And then the last symptom is withdrawal, which is when you take that substance away. So when you're out of the military and you're no longer active duty, you're no longer, you don't, no longer feel like a warrior. You have all of these withdrawal problems, which that's what I catalog. Cause that's the anger management, communications issues, maladaptive coping skills, a loss of sense of self, loss of identity, loss of purpose. And then as soon as we put you back into a warrior event, either like a, um, you know, a martial hobby, like when we put you back into an MMA gym or we, you know, you, you become a law enforcement officer. And so you have a tribe again, and you wear a uniform again, and you have a sense of purpose again.

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  And you feel more like yourself, all, almost all of those things go away. So it's like, that's how it works with substances as well. If you, um, are an alcoholic and we take you off of alcohol, you have withdrawal symptoms and a small spit of alcohol that we give you back, those clear away, which is why we use this hair of the dog business. When you're, you know, had a wild night partying and it's like, just take a shot and you'll be regular.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  So when I go through all of the 11 symptoms with the veterans that I work with, I ask them, hey, just keep score.

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• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  And then at the end, I ask them, you know, just keep in mind what your score is. If you have three of those symptoms, you have a substance abuse disorder. If it's between three, it's more than, if it's between three and six, it's a mild, moderate range. If it's more than six, you get into the severe range. And then for me, I'm like, I'm at 11 of 11. And so right now, I'm like a sober warrior. And when I would talk to the Nexus guys or the Skillsbridge guys, you know, the DOD still thinks that the solution is you just need a job when you get out. Like, that's not quite it. That's a little bit antiquated, unless you just go ahead and identify with whatever the

• 1:45:19Speaker 04

  job is that you get next. If you stick with my substance abuse model, which is the only one that seems to fit, the solution has to be detox.

• 1:45:28Jack Murphy?

  What form does that take?

• 1:45:34Speaker 04

  So like, you know, so they're saying, well, that's skills bridge, isn't it? And I'm like, no, it's not because you still pull that guy back and make him do a PFT. You still pull him back and make him do all of these other things. Like, he's not, he's not out of the military. You're still in the military. You or she is still in the military. And then, oh, by the way, when they finish their skills bridge, there's no guarantee that there's a job for them there either. So it's like, you know, you, you may have forestalled something. Um, but that identity shift is still coming. So the detox has to be

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  zero warrior stuff. And I don't know for how long. I do know that it takes 13 weeks to make a marine, you know, basically trained marine. And, you know, it takes what 10 weeks to make a basically trained 11 Bravo.

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  And then we do zero on the backend to undo any of that. So, um,

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  somewhere in there, you have to do that, or you have to find a way to

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  help somebody get clear of that substance, educate them that that's what is happening. So that's what I try to do in my groups. So that you, if you want to go back to it,

• 1:46:47Speaker 04

  you go in there clear eyed. Otherwise, you do your skills bridge. It's like, hey, all right, yeah, yeah, we, we put you in rehab. And then as soon as you got out of rehab, we're like, we're going to a bar and we're all gonna drink. Uh, it's like, ah, okay. And we're right back at it.

• 1:47:06Jack Murphy?

  And you found some success in treating veterans in that nature?

• 1:47:11Speaker 04

  So it, it's not less of a treatment and more of what I try to do is increase. Uh, I mean, it does, it does work. It does reduce symptoms, but more what it does, I think, is it increases, um, someone's openness to therapy.

• 1:47:29Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Even though we're, like, I don't like saying therapist. I like calling myself a therapist because there's all of these connotations along with that word. Nobody wants to go to therapy. It's also why, you know, the, the second, um, the subtitle of my book is when B A M F no longer means badass motherfucker, because.

• 1:47:50Speaker 04

  PTSD is, is, means I'm broken. It means I need to be fixed. It is a symptom. It is a disease. It is a disorder that I have. And I, you know, I have to fix it. I don't want to have that title, whereas BAMF. Or I will take that title. Like, yeah. And so for the VA, I call it baseline adjustment due to military functioning. It's like, I will enroll into that group. I will learn about, okay, I was trained to be this way. I was trained to be hyper vigilant. We call it situational awareness. I was trained to think of myself as a bullet sponge. They scrubbed away all my personal boundaries.

• 1:48:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I was trained to jump on the grenade before anybody else. And so.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  You know, I was trained to seek the sound of the gun, so not avoid. I was trained to have affinity. So we trained you, and I cite this in the book too. There's, you know, young E3 who said PTSD is what you had to get to survive in Afghanistan. It's like, exactly. And then we never undid that.

• 1:48:53Speaker 04

  Nobody ever told you, you're a human being. You deserve to have X, Y, or Z. And it's okay to have emotions. You don't have to shove them all down and maintain your good military bearing.

• 1:49:04Jack Murphy?

  During the process of your work with VA, like, when was it that the idea for this book for warrior withdrawal came about?

• 1:49:14Speaker 04

  I had started to think through the, the cluster of symptoms. And, and trying to map it onto the substance abuse disorder. Uh, and then while I was working at the VA, two more things came up in my mind, um, one being, uh, Marsha's identity. Um, it's like a squirt or chart, quad chart, where you've either kind of know what you're going to be. Or you don't know what you're going to be. And then you either have gone through some things and tried some things out, or you haven't gone through some things and tried some things out. So where most veterans find themselves, because you're in that identity forming part of your life at seventeen, eighteen, when you enlist.

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  You become what's called identity foreclosed. It's like, you are going to be eleven Bravo. And you're going to be eleven Mike, and you're going to be eleven Charlie. It's like, oh. I don't want to do that. I want to be an MP. Sorry, your identity is foreclosed. You don't get to choose. You didn't get to be a rock star. You get to try out be as a carpenter, whatever. You're a soldier now. And that is who you are, identity foreclosure. And then when you get out, it's the Berry's acculturation model where civilians are the predominant culture and we want you to assimilate, which means you give up all of your warrior self. You give up all those values, values like integrity, accountability, responsibility, punctuality.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  You'd be like all the other civilians, especially here in Southern California. When you tell somebody to show up at three o'clock, it's like.

• 1:50:48Jack Murphy?

  Maybe they do, maybe they don't.

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  Three thirty is close enough.

• 1:50:53Jack Murphy?

  See, that's, that's an east coast thing.

• 1:50:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So then, you know, okay, well, what we, what we aim for is for you to be integrated, right? I'll keep those things that I like about my warrior self and I will make them work in the civilian environment. That's very hard to do. So we end up kind of going below the waterline where we're either separated, which is I only have veteran friends. I only hang out with veterans. I only do things. I'm a law enforcement officer or whatever it is. And I won't engage in the civilian culture. But more often than not, and this is why we have that problem at the six months to one year mark is you're marginalized. So I'm neither a soldier nor am I a civilian. And that's when we have the depression.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  All of the issues like my guy that failed A I T. It's like, I'm not even a soldier. Who the hell am I? So when I added all of that

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  sort of halfway through my postdoc year, I started the Banff groups. And decided to sit down and write the book.

• 1:52:01Jack Murphy?

  And I mean, I presumably the book is about all these things we've just been talking about. But I mean, what's in the book? Who did you write it for?

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  So I basically wrote it for the veteran who is just getting out so that they can understand. And I didn't want to talk about myself at all. And then I was told by the publishers like, yeah, you can't write a textbook. Nobody's going to buy it. You have to tell your story. And I accept that, as I note, I think in the book, like at the unit is the first time I ever got exposed to PTSD. And it's a sergeant major who came in and his, his version of what happened kind of manifested as alcoholism. And it was hard to track because the guys are so

• 1:52:51Speaker 04

  good that even his 70% was still, you know, enough to be some other guys 100%.

• 1:52:58Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:52:59Speaker 04

  Until we had a catastrophic OPSEC issue.

• 1:53:06Speaker 04

  And so he got fired and sent away. So he's talking to us about that. And it's at that point in time that I reached out. So I could do it in my OPSEC and I said, hey, I have some things in my mind.

• 1:53:17Jack Murphy?

  You were there when there were a couple suicides too in the unit, weren't you? Around that timeframe?

• 1:53:25Jack Murphy?

  2010?

• 1:53:28Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 1:53:29Jack Murphy?

  Ish?

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  Not that I recall, you know, my, my memories all jumbled.

• 1:53:36Jack Murphy?

  I don't recall the precise, the precise area either.

• 1:53:39Speaker 04

  You know, motor vehicle accidents as well.

• 1:53:44Speaker 04

  But yeah, I don't recall specifically.

• 1:53:48Speaker 04

  Either way, because that sergeant major had kind of been open about it.

• 1:53:55Speaker 04

  I feel like I owe it to all the other veterans to say like, okay, well, if this happened to me as a guy who climbed all the way to the tip of the spear, then you know, it's the umbrella that allows you to also then say it's okay to be sad. If that guy says he was sad, then it's okay for me to say that I'm sad.

• 1:54:13Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:54:15Speaker 04

  So that's kind of the beginning part of the book is a lot of what we talked about. And then the back end of the book is kind of going through the symptoms, how it's different from PTSD, how it's different from adjustment disorder, and then a little bit about the groups that I would run.

• 1:54:32Jack Murphy?

  So the book is out now. It's called Warrior Withdrawal. We'll have links down the description for folks who want to check it out. Where's the best place for people to go buy it?

• 1:54:43Speaker 04

  Probably Amazon.

• 1:54:44Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  It's probably the easiest, or they can go to the publisher, Dallas Books.

• 1:54:48Jack Murphy?

  And then another topic you had mentioned to me, I don't know if you want to get into it, or how deep you want to get into it, about the courts being in some instances prejudiced against veterans, but like just simply for their service that, you know, this guy's a highly trained combat killer, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 04

  So that's a great segue, too. Because I published a book and because there are some literary devices to sort of make manifest or make it easier to understand the challenges that are going inside of somebody's head, that my, the book that I published is being used against me in a court of law during my divorce. So thinking, you know, maybe this was unique to me again, I reached out to some peers and I realized that this is extremely common for veterans as a, as a community to struggle in the family court systems because my profession is being used against me. And, you know, there's some attorneys are sneaky,

• 1:55:53Speaker 04

  and they'll try to say like, all right, do you have a VA disability rating? Okay, well, isn't it true that you have PTSD and aren't you going to go shoot up the school? And I'm like, no, and no, or sorry, none of your business, and no. You know, the irony is that going back to that Aladdin line, infinite cosmic power, itty bitty living space. It's like, yeah, you know, you, I have all of the training in the world. And it's like that meme from The Patriot where, hey, if you don't have the capacity for violence, then you doing nothing is just being a pussy. You know, it's like. If you, so the guy who has all of the control to ma- manage all of this violence,

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  that's me. I'm the least, uh, the last person you should be afraid of. And yet the family courts don't understand that. And so anybody whose spouse goes to the family courts because there's, there's no requirement for actual evidence and you can just get a restraining order right away. And so it's so common that there's reddits about what's called the silver bullet divorce, where your spouse can just allege domestic violence, allege child abuse. And then that's sets in motion, uh, the dynamics of the court that now you're constantly on the defensive and you, you can't even do what you need to do.

• 1:57:17Speaker 04

  And then if you step out of line even slightly, so even if the domestic violence temporary restraining order is garbage, if you by accident broke the, the 300 foot boundary, now you have a criminal charge that's going to get upheld and you lose your rights to your kids. And so that's not just happening to me. I find that this is happening and among my patients,

• 1:57:41Speaker 04

  I do 20 to 25 unique intakes per week. I've done over a thousand intakes of veterans in the last couple of years. And almost always I will carry one or two who are in a similar situation where, I have a guy that I talked to not that long ago, who, uh, thinks he has PTSD because of a car crash.

• 1:58:08Speaker 04

  And he drives for Uber. So I'm like, okay, well, we're, we're back to that like, hey, avoidance and re-experiencing, these, these don't quite match up. And so we delve more into his, uh, personal history and he, he's got an extremely awful situation in his marriage. And, you know, there's events in his life that are going to cause it to come to a head here in the next year or two. Like that may be why you're having these nightmares.

• 1:58:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:33Speaker 04

  Your, your brain is unable to explain, you know, a pending divorce in a way that makes sense. So it goes back to the last time you were ever this scared and afraid of an impending wreck. And so it plays that out in your head as a car crash.

• 1:58:51Jack Murphy?

  It's, uh, unreal to me that.

• 1:58:55Jack Murphy?

  A person that goes out and gets treatment, you know, that goes through the process to get help and has a VA disability rating, they're going in to see someone like you, they're going to therapy, and the courts see that as derogatory information that they can use against you as if you're some sort of menace to society, even though you don't have a criminal record.

• 1:59:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so we're stuck with the conundrum again where I, so again, the book is written for the veteran to read, to learn more about themselves. And I almost, I believe that more likely than not, it's going to be the spouse that buys it, or somebody that cares for the veteran that buys it. And it's like, hey, you read this thing because this is you.

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  And it's another barrier to treatment for me. Already, I get veterans that don't want a PTSD diagnosis, or they're concerned about who can see their health record, because they're concerned that they'll lose their security clearance, or you know, everybody's heard some apocryphal story about somebody who had a PTSD diagnosis and it got leaked, and then they took away their weapons. It's like, that's not supposed to happen. That's not how, you know, your, your medical record is protected. And yet, you know, it is a barrier to treatment. Guys will not come in, they will not admit that anything is wrong, because they don't want to lose access

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  to these things. And so now this is just another one. And so somewhat ironically, or not ironically, I may be working on another book to try to create a guidebook for veterans in divorce to explain to them, you know, we've just added moral injury into the diagnosis statistics manual. So that kind of compounds the warrior withdrawal stuff, like, justice is not served, or I thought I was going over to Iraq to, you know, find weapons of mass destruction, and then that wasn't the case. And so, you know, in my mind, it's like, well, was it all worth it? Or more recently, we had all those guys that, you know, 20 years of combat in Afghanistan, and

• 2:01:04Speaker 04

  For nothing. And so that regenerates issues in veterans' minds of this moral injury. Because we do the right thing. We follow the rules. I mean, there's 10% of us that get Article 15. Of course, the majority of guys follow the rules and we believe in truth, justice, the American way. We have honor, courage, commitment, integrity, and the opposite side doesn't. And for, I mean, I can think of 10 cases off the top of my head. False child abuse allegations, false domestic violence allegations.

• 2:01:41Speaker 04

  Whatever technique, tactic, or procedure, they've got TTPs to box you into a hole where you can't even fight out of it. And, and the veteran, like me included. I, I trust that the system is going to figure this out. And unfortunately, the system still runs on money. It's like, what's going to happen first? Does the system figure it out or does the money run out? And that's an awful place to be. So, again, because most divorces happen within six months of separation from the military. You have the veteran who has loss of identity, loss of sense of purpose, is relying on substances, whatever it takes to get through the day.

• 2:02:25Speaker 04

  And now their spouse is accusing them of being a monster.

• 2:02:30Speaker 04

  And filing, you know, to move away and telling the court, this guy's crazy. He has all these guns. Uh, he's going to go kill everybody. And then, you know, all of those things that you left the military for. Get stripped from you. Your family, your kids.

• 2:02:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 04

  And then you're left with, you know, an empty house. And it's like, what do I do?

• 2:02:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And we know what a lot of guys do, unfortunately.

• 2:02:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:02:59Jack Murphy?

  Um, man, um. Anything else that we haven't talked about, Varpas, that you want to make sure we cover tonight?

• 2:03:09Speaker 04

  So I am on the board of this nonprofit called Operation Shield.

• 2:03:15Speaker 04

  It's we're trying to grow to more states. We're really only in California for now. And what we're trying to do is bridge that gap. So catch the, you know, active duty soldier, sailor, airman, marine, or guardian.

• 2:03:32Speaker 04

  Before they get out and there's that kind of dead space between their enrollment into the VA where we can provide mental health services for them.

• 2:03:44Jack Murphy?

  Um, so Warrior Withdrawal is out now. People can find it on Amazon. Maybe a second book coming.

• 2:03:52Speaker 04

  Um, yeah.

• 2:03:54Jack Murphy?

  Varpas, thanks for sharing your story with us tonight.

• 2:03:57Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. Thanks for having me.

• 2:03:59Jack Murphy?

  Uh, any final thoughts before we roll out of here tonight?

• 2:04:03Speaker 04

  I would just say to all the veterans out there, you're not broken. You don't need to be fixed. You just need training.

• 2:04:10Jack Murphy?

  Absolutely. Thank you, Varpas, and thank you, everyone who watches tonight. Maybe there's a veteran in your life that you want to share this video with, uh, or get, or get Varpas's book for.

• 2:04:23Jack Murphy?

  So we'll see all you guys next time. Thanks for joining us tonight.

• 2:04:28Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:04:59Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:05:05Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:05:25Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on.

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:06:20Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House Podcast, the Eyes On Podcast, and the High Side News Outlet, which I run with Shawn Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Eyes On and the Team House, and whatever's topical or current on the High Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you, as social media algorithms are pretty iffy, and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once-a-week email. It'll slide into your inbox, and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good. I'm checking it out.

• 2:07:04Jack Murphy?

  The website for it is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Go there, and you enter into your email list, or you enter your email into the little thing on the website, and you're good to go. And that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support, and hope you'll consider signing up. Where's the link? The link will also be down in the description, if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast.kit, K-I-T, Kilo India Tango, dot com, backslash, join.

• 2:07:48Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:08:02Speaker 00

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:08:13Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:08:19Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:08:24Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:08:44Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:09:12Jack Murphy?

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:09:51Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:10:06Jack Murphy?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:10:16Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:10:22Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:10:28Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:10:47Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:11:53Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:12:07Jack Murphy?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:12:18Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:12:23Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:12:29Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:12:49Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:13:17Jack Murphy?

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:13:52Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:14:07Jack Murphy?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:14:18Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:14:23Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:14:29Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:15:16Jack Murphy?

  Cash Flow Crunch on deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:15:54Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:16:09Jack Murphy?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:16:25Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:16:31Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:16:51Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:17:55Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:18:10Jack Murphy?

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:18:21Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:18:26Speaker 07

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:18:32Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:18:52Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:19:19Jack Murphy?

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:20:03Jack Murphy?

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause severe life

• 2:20:18Speaker 05

  Threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolaire should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire. This is an advertisement for Zolaire, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:20:50Speaker 00

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, Study Mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com/parents to learn more.

• 2:21:17Jack Murphy?

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.