The Real Marine Behind Generation Kill | Brad Colbert

Brad Colbert, retired Marine Force Recon veteran and one of the real Marines behind Generation Kill, joins us to talk about his path into the Corps, recon selection, 9/11 while forward deployed, Camp Rhino, and the early days of the war in Afghanistan. We also get into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, how recon Marines were used as shock troops, his Royal Marines exchange, HBO’s Generation Kill, and the lessons he carried into life after the military. Find Brad here:⬇️ https://bradcolbert.us/ Today's Sponsors: GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! Blue Chew ⬇️ https://bluechew.com/ Get 1 month free when you buy 2 of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL" Quince⬇️ go to: https://www.quince.com/house for free shipping and 365 day returns For ad free video and audio and access to live streams... 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 ___________________________________________________ GRAB JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured Jack Murphy's 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 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 — Start 03:04 — Carry On Podcast and Generation Kill Connections 04:08 — Rough Childhood and the Road to the Marines 11:06 — Recon Selection and the Recon vs. Force Recon Divide 15:52 — Okinawa, MEUs, and a Rare Marine Port Call in China 22:37 — 9/11 While Forward Deployed 25:25 — Camp Rhino and the Longest Amphibious Assault 32:31 — First Real Recon Missions in Afghanistan 40:34 — Afghanistan Lessons and the Ramp-Up to Iraq 50:00 — Iraq Mission Changes: Recon Marines as Shock Troops 55:54 — Crossing the Berm on Iraq D-Day 59:07 — Evan Wright, the Embedded Reporter, and Generation Kill 01:21:16 — The Royal Marines Exchange 01:29:04 — Fallujah 2007 and “Garrison Combat” 01:48:39 — HBO’s Generation Kill and the Legacy of the Story 01:58:37 — Leaving the Corps for the Intelligence Community 02:15:05 — Closing Thoughts: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants 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.

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• 2:16Jack Murphy?

  Hey everyone, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest in studio today, Brad Colbert. Brad is a retired Marine, served in Force Recon, did a stint with the Royal Marines.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  Did.

• 2:29Jack Murphy?

  And numerous other things we'll talk about. Your platoon, of course, was the inspiration for the book and subsequent television show Generation Kill. And you have a podcast called The Carry On Podcast.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  I do, yeah.

• 2:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, just right off the bat, you want to tell people what that podcast is, where they can find it?

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, Carry On Podcast is available either video through YouTube or whatever platform they use to consume audio podcasts, Spotify, or Apple, or iHeart. And we do a couple of things on the show. We talk to guests, authors, policymakers, discussing current events, treatments for veterans' health. We talk about some fun equipment things. And we also look for reconnections with Generation Kill cast members to sort of give people where they now look. And maybe some stories that weren't originally portrayed in the book or the TV series.

• 3:27Jack Murphy?

  So you try to interview the Marines you served with in the platoon, and do you try to interview the actors also that portrayed them?

• 3:34Speaker 04

  We haven't actually had any of the actors yet, but I certainly wouldn't put it past them. I do keep in somewhat contact with the individual that portrayed me, Alex Garzgard. So maybe I can ask him if he wants to come on the show.

• 3:47Jack Murphy?

  All right, cool. We'll get deeper into all of that in a bit. But if we're to start at the top, you know, I always ask people about their origin story. Tell us a little bit about like how you grew up and what was that path that took you towards military service?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Well, I had a pretty rough childhood, not because of my parents. I was just, I was a pretty shitty kid. So, and I think my parents would probably agree with that if I was to ask them. They may couch it a little differently, but I was a difficult child. I was fiercely independent. I was probably smarter than my own good for my own good. And I got in trouble a lot. In fact, I was expelled from every school that I ever went to. I was expelled from elementary school, which is pretty hard to do, by the way. Junior high, I was expelled from high school. I ended up finishing school at a military academy that was in Missouri.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  All that to say that I was very rebellious and I did not handle groups well and I wanted to give myself

• 4:49Speaker 04

  a challenge. I wanted to find a place where I could fit in. I wanted to, I originally wanted to be, and I've told this story before, but I wanted to be an astronaut. And in order to be an astronaut, and I'll short, I'll short circuit the story. Most astronauts were pilots. Pilots come from the military. Okay, so I have to be an aviator. Well, what do I want to fly? I want to fly F-18. So that's Navy or Marine Corps. The Navy has shitty uniforms. Sorry, guys. Marines, like that's, that's it. And this is, you know, 10, 11 years old. That's my path.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  And I just didn't, I didn't have the personal discipline to stay in college. I tried it for a little while after high school. And just said, F it, I'm just gonna enlist. So.

• 5:31Jack Murphy?

  I was gonna say, this isn't one of those scenarios where like the parents brought the Marine Corps recruiter to the home. It was like, sign.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  No, in fact, it was the other way around. And, and again, I like, I had a rough go of it, you know, I, I had got in trouble with the law. I was on unofficial probation. So, so I got in trouble and I had to sort of like keep my nose clean for a little while. So I went to the recruiter and the recruiter says, I can't take you. You've got this thing. And I'm like, okay, cool. Well, what do we have to do to get this thing? You have to go in front of a judge and, and so I did. And I got it cleared up, but I was a recruiter's wet dream because I marched right in and said, I want to be, you know, O311 infantry. That's one of those things where the recruiter's like, I don't know. I'll try to pull a few strings. We'll see what we can do, you know?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  You know, meanwhile, it's like, that's the hardest thing they have to get people to, to do. I did really well in the ASVAB and he's like, there's a lot of other jobs.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  So I did. I enlisted. I wanted to be a recon Marine. I knew it. If I wasn't gonna fly, that was the only other option. It is, to this day, I think, one of the better decisions I've ever made in my life. And it has served me well, not just in character development and personal growth and interpersonal, but, you know, I think it's good for the soul. People who have done what we've done and worn the uniform, service, the sacrifice that comes with it. There is nothing else that you get anywhere in our life.

• 7:03Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  From that experience. And I, I mean, it was, it was beautiful for me. And I did it for a long time. And it was, it was amazing. So.

• 7:13Jack Murphy?

  What year did you enlist?

• 7:14Speaker 04

  I enlisted in 95.

• 7:16Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  October of 95. And I left in October of 16.

• 7:23Jack Murphy?

  So 1990's Marine Corps.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jack Murphy?

  What was that like?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  You know, that was still where a lot of us expected it to be like Full Metal Jacket. Or, you know, and that is not what it was like, at all. Or Platoon, or a lot of the movies that Hollywood dramatizes, Marine Corps Boot Camp. I had come from doing several years in, at military school. And that was hard. Believe me. You, you know, kids can be very cruel to one another. And when you give them implied authority over each other, you talk about hazing. Marine Corps was, was a walk in the park. Like, I was hung upside down by my ankles the very first day I was at military school. I was 15 years old. Like, boot camp was, you want me to stand in these yellow footprints and you're gonna scream

• 8:14Speaker 04

  at me for a little while?

• 8:17Speaker 04

  And so it was fine. And I, I mean, I found it, I found it actually to be easy. And I was also older. I was 21 when I enlisted. The average age, you know, 17 and a half, 18 years old. So I had life experience. I had a little maturity. I had some experiences that a lot of the other recruits didn't. And I found it really fairly easy, to be, to be perfectly honest. I think Marine Corps Boot Camp, out of all the services, is still the most challenging. It is the longest. It has the, the greatest amount of attrition.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I left knowing that this is what I wanted to do. I had no regrets. A lot of people may leave their initial entry training and say, ah, this was a mistake. No, I didn't have that. So it's good.

• 9:06Jack Murphy?

  And you shot iron sights?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Yes, we did. Yes, we did. In fact, really, the Marine Corps, I want to say recently, within the last couple of years, transitioned away from the iron sights to using an optic, but all the way back from the 60s, Marine Corps shot the M16 with iron sights at basic training and then every year to requal.

• 9:30Jack Murphy?

  I always bring that up. I can get Marines really wound up about the iron sights. That was pretty good.

• 9:36Jack Murphy?

  But I mean, to speak to the Marine Corps, I mean, jokes aside, they do train, what do you shoot out the 500 yards in basic? In boot camp? That's really good.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  It is. Yeah. So it's different positions, you know, you start from 100 and then 200 and 300. Each yard line is a different body position. So, you know, at the shorter distances, you're standing and then you're doing kneeling and then prone at 500. But make no mistake, shooting a high score on iron sights in the prone, it's still, it's not easy.

• 10:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, 500, you're struggling to see the target.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  You are struggling to see the target. Yeah.

• 10:13Jack Murphy?

  But I mean, shooting iron sights, again, jokes aside, like, it is really good to learn all the fundamentals like that.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  And the Marine Corps is huge into that. That adage of every Marine is a rifle man or rifle person, whatever the adage is today. I mean, it holds true. And I think that is something that some of the other services are struggling with when it comes to identity. You know, every Marine is a rifleman. So but what about the Air Force? What do you say is every?

• 10:38Jack Murphy?

  They're not a pilot. They're not.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Right?

• 10:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the Marine Corps, I think, nailed it pretty early and has kept consistent all this time.

• 10:48Jack Murphy?

  So after you graduate from boot camp, what unit do you get assigned to?

• 10:52Speaker 04

  So after, uh, boot camp, you, you, I, I went to infantry school because I, I did enlist as an O311. At that time, the reconnaissance community was what we would call a secondary MOS.

• 11:03Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  You, you couldn't get into recon at the point of enlistment. There, there was a pathway. So you had to be in a, in the combat arms, preferably O311. And then you had to try out and go to selection and pass selection, which I did. I did that at the School of Infantry, which was another three months of training at Camp Pendleton. And then from there, my first unit was, uh, Third Reconnaissance Company in Okinawa, Japan.

• 11:28Jack Murphy?

  Oh, cool. Uh, I didn't realize that back then you could go kind of like straight into the recon community.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  You could, provided that you passed assessment and selection.

• 11:37Jack Murphy?

  Yep. Out, out there at Paris Island.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Well, this would have been Camp Pendleton, but they had it in both.

• 11:42Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. They had, um, screening teams that would go around and, and screen people. They try to get them as early as possible before the unit scoops them up. Because once they get embedded into an infantry unit, those units are very reluctant. Well, you want to take our best, our highest PTers, our smartest people. There was a GT requirement. So there's a general technical score that the ASVAB will kick out. So when you go to the recruiting office, you have to take a test and it assesses you on all these different things. Part of that test is a general technical score, which rates your aptitude for, you know, cognition and a whole bunch of other factors. It's a number.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Recon needs that number to be, you know, 115 or above. And you need to have a high PFT, your physical fitness test. So if you go to an infantry unit, they're gonna probably hide you. Like, no, you're not leaving. So they go to the School of Infantry where you're not yet assigned to a unit and they screen you there.

• 12:48Jack Murphy?

  So you get to the recon community and, and do you want to talk a little bit about like what the difference was at that time between recon and force?

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was really, there was a huge cultural difference and one that was rigid. It's.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  A lot of people at that time would say, you know, the reconnaissance community is the JV team and the force reconnaissance community is the varsity team. And I would say that's really childish to categorize it like that. Guys, we both go through the same schools. It really comes down to mission sets. The force reconnaissance unit typically operates outside of the artillery fan. So we're talking, you know, close air support range. They support a MEF, which is a higher echelon of table of organization. The reconnaissance community works within the artillery fan, so up to 30 kilometers in most cases, and works for

• 13:49Speaker 04

  the division. I mean, that doctrinally, that's your difference. Now, culturally, night and day. They didn't like us, we didn't like them. We wanted to go over to force recon, force recon felt that they were, you know, we're up here, you figure it out. And there was another vetting process, you know, you have to screen again. And they usually took you when you were a little senior, you know, now you're an E5, maybe an E4, and they wanted you to have a little experience under your belt. And I, looking back, I understand the need for that type of progression. But there was a huge difference in culture. Now it's a little more homogeneous. Both of those units are now organized pretty much under

• 14:34Speaker 04

  the same house because of MAR SOX creation. But, you know, in the 90s, it was a different Marine Corps. They also had better equipment in many cases because they had access to a little bit more money. And we were still coming off of the heels of not really understanding what would be over the horizon.

• 14:56Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Right? Like, you know, we always trained for the last war. So we still did a lot of jungle tactics.

• 15:02Jack Murphy?

  Patrol base activities, yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  We did a lot of things that we did in Southeast Asia that we would not be doing in OIF, OEF.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  But the forest reconnaissance community still had, you know, the Chenaworth dune buggies. They had a lot of the equipment that you just, we don't use anymore.

• 15:22Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  And a mission set to go along with it. Not that it's still not pertinent, but it's not as pertinent. It's, you know, especially modern warfare with drones and yeah.

• 15:33Jack Murphy?

  So what did they have you doing in recon at that time? Did you end up going to Thailand, anything cool like that?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Yep, did a lot of Cobra Golds, did some marine expeditionary units. If that's when you go on ship. A lot of people don't realize that the Marine Corps has an infantry battalion up to three at any given time, patrolling the waters of the ocean, available for immediate dispersion anywhere that the president deems they're needed. And Okinawa has a Mew and I did that twice. Um, I did a special purpose MAGTAF, a marine air ground task force to China. So we went into China for about a week and a half into the port of Qingdao. And this was the first time that Marines had been to China since World War II.

• 16:16Jack Murphy?

  I was gonna say the Boxer Rebellion.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yep. The China Marines were the last Marines to be there and it was surreal. I'm, we could, we went on liberty, we, we worked, it was a working port call. But we were allowed to leave the ship in groups and we went out into the city. And I remember I'm wearing my, um, my, well, we would call them Charlies, your class C uniforms. So khaki, long sleeve shirt, um, no, I tell a lie, sorry, short sleeve shirts. No tie, green trousers, piss cutter hat. Oh, I couldn't say that, should, it doesn't matter. We're, we're walking around and the Chinese had not, in many cases, seen Americans before. They certainly hadn't seen Marines.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  And I'm walking and people would come up to me and they would, they would stroke my arm because of the, you know, the, the body hair. Cause they're just not used to seeing, it would fascinate them. Strangers were calling us into their homes. They just wanted to talk. They wanted to practice their English. They wanted to, um, offer us food. And so we could, you, we wanted to go on liberty, but you couldn't. Cause you're just getting mobbed.

• 17:26Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  But it was amazing and it was fascinating. And this was 97. And I remember we pulled into the port and I'm looking around at their ships and their subs are just rusted at the water lines. Their, uh, surface fleet was not in great shape. I was young, but I was pretty into military hardware, tables of organization. So I'm looking around and I'm like, these guys are not in great shape. Now, fast forward, they are arguably ahead of us in many of those same categories. So they have incredible growth in their military industrial complex. But back then, we toured their ships, we did some exchange and

• 18:09Speaker 04

  they were not a concern.

• 18:13Jack Murphy?

  I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, first off, that's something that would never happen today. Um, there's no way they'd have Marines going on liberty in China.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:22Jack Murphy?

  Um, but then, I mean, just what, a couple of years after this, we had that surveillance bird.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 18:29Jack Murphy?

  Go down with Hanan Island, I think?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. If I'm not, I'm pretty sure that's the name of it. It was a bit of an embarrassment. We did, um, get it cleared up diplomatically, but you know, there was also, there were some other instances as well. There, there were some missile tests that they had done against Taiwan that covered the strait. Uh, we did some GPS jamming that caused those missiles to splash into the water. They were horribly angry about that. They knew that it was us, um, but you know, neither side publicly admitted it because they didn't want to save. They didn't want egg on their face. So there were a couple of things.

• 19:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  You're right. It, it wouldn't get done today, but what an amazing experience for me. Um, out of the uniform, we got to go see the Great Wall of China, got to go to the National Art Gallery, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City. It was.

• 19:19Jack Murphy?

  That's so awesome, yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  I mean, like, that's one of the great things about the military is that those, those intangibles, those travel opportunities. You can't get that anywhere else.

• 19:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, it's kind of sad that something like that wouldn't happen today.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  It is, it is because I I get that they're our adversary. But there's a lot of opportunity there as well.

• 19:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a culture that's been more or less intact for like a thousand years.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:46Jack Murphy?

  Um, I I I wouldn't, unfortunately, I wouldn't go as a private citizen. I'm afraid of, you know, it's like going to Russia.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:53Jack Murphy?

  What's gonna happen to me?

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Not not gonna do that, not gonna do that at all.

• 19:56Jack Murphy?

  I'm fascinated by like the history and the culture. I think it's super cool.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  It is. It's incredible. I mean, they they do have, and it's there's very similar parallels with Japan as well. You know, it's a very rich culture with a long history. And, you know, China for many centuries was the cultural epicenter of the world. They created a lot of, a- and as did those in the Middle East, you know? Um, and then somewhere along the way, things just, oh, we're gonna do communism. Oh, okay. Cool, cool.

• 20:30Jack Murphy?

  I, so.

• 20:33Jack Murphy?

  Um, you're in recon. What when did kind of you get the opportunity to start thinking and taking action about going to force?

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Uh, it was actually kind of an accident, really, and and I didn't spend, to to be perfectly honest with you, I really didn't spend that much time in the force community. I I dipped my toe into it because when I left the British Royal Marine Exchange Program in oh.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Seven, oh, six, oh, seven, yeah. Um, I was assigned to First Force, um, but only for about six months before. Marsoc stood up.

• 21:11Jack Murphy?

  Ah, gotcha, okay.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  And then I found myself back with, uh, First Reconnaissance Battalion. Um, and then they stood up the force company in. First reconnaissance battalion because you know there was Marsoc.

• 21:24Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  So they took what was first force. You're now Marsoc, but we need a group of you to be.

• 21:30Jack Murphy?

  To do your job.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  That job. We don't know what we're gonna call it yet, and that's what I did. So was I still force? Was I not? I guess it's, I don't know, it's a matter of semantics, but in a very short time, I found myself as a platoon sergeant going back over to Iraq in oh seven. So my stint in force was fairly short, just because of the circumstances, you know, three years in England with the commandos, right on the heels of the invasion of Iraq, and then Marsoc changing in oh six. So maybe seven months with force.

• 22:08Jack Murphy?

  Okay, okay.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Maybe another three at the reconnaissance battalion in a force platoon. And that was it.

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• 23:55Jack Murphy?

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• 26:34Jack Murphy?

  To back up then.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 26:35Jack Murphy?

  Let's, you're in recon. What was sort of like the experience like being in recon when 9/11 happened?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  That was, that was...

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Everyone has their where were you when 9/11 happened story, right? That is the where were you when Kennedy was assassinated version of our generation. For me, I was on a marine deployment. I was on a marine expeditionary unit. So we were in the coast of, sorry, we were in Darwin, Australia when 9/11 happened. And as one of the platoons...

• 27:18Speaker 04

  I'm trying to think if the SEALs, I don't remember if the SEALs, I'm sure they were back then. Yeah, they were. So we had a force platoon, we had a reconnaissance platoon. I'm pretty confident we had a SEAL platoon as well. So I think those three groups were pretty confident that we were going to do something. And we were right. We all did separate things. But I don't think any of us were privy to any more intelligence than anyone else was privy to. I mean, the world...

• 27:46Jack Murphy?

  What was on CNN?

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty much open source and then whatever, you know, the captain of the ship was being told and whatever the battalion commander was being told.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  It was surreal though. Being forward deployed when 9/11 happened was surreal.

• 28:05Jack Murphy?

  And what did you guys end up doing? How, what was the Marine Corps' response to it in those, you know, weeks and months after?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Well, we immediately pulled, we, we sailed out of port. It was late when it happened in Darwin. So it was probably 20, I want to say 2,300, liberty expired at midnight. They were dragging people back to the boat, half drunk. Nobody would say what was taking place. They're seeing some things in the news, on the bars. From what I gathered, bringing the ship's complement back was a nightmare. I was already on the boat. The next day, we left. We weighed anchor. We basically went, no one knew what had taken place. Was this the opening shot of a war?

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Is this some kind of asymmetrical attack that is going to repeat itself? So we left and went into the open waters, 50, 60, 100 miles off the coast, and just cut squares for a couple of weeks. Then we went into Eastamore, did a humanitarian mission, and then it was in very short order apparent that we were going to go into Afghanistan, that they were the ones responsible. So we made an amphibious landing into, well, we hung out in Pakistan for a while at an airbase, and then we did an amphibious assault into Afghanistan, and it was...

• 29:32Jack Murphy?

  Amphibious assault into Afghanistan?

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Right. The technical amphibious assault was because we, we departed from ship and we landed in Afghanistan. And that, by definition, is amphibious, and it's the longest amphibious assault that's ever been made in the history of America.

• 29:50Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. So you had to refuel a few times in the air on the way?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Also, one of the scariest flights I've ever had. We landed at Camp Rhino, which was a compound in the middle of the desert. It was a hunting preserve for some very rich individuals, but it had a private runway.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Unimproved runway. It had a big hangar. It had a little mosque. It had all these ancillary buildings and it was surrounded by this wall. And we're like, that's it. So C-130, I mean, we are packed in. I, no doubt you've been on a C-130 before. I don't know if you've done a mass tac.

• 30:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  But it's that kind of cramped. And I mean, you're, you got your gear, your pack is on your legs and you can't move. And we flew high threat tactics, which means you're assuming you're going to get a lot of ground fire. There's also going to be surface to air missile threats. You got to fly basically nap of the earth. So C-130, we did receive some ground fire. We don't know where, but the plane did get shot a little bit. But that wasn't the problem. It's you're going from this really high altitude and then it goes screaming down to like a thousand feet. And you're just sardined in. You can't move. And then the runway is made of this, like, moon dust.

• 31:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  You know what I'm talking about. Cause you've walked that, you sink into it. It's up to your ankles. But here's a C-130, fully loaded, full bag of gas, and it's coming in on this runway and it's not getting purchased. And it's just sliding and yawing. And I'm like, oh, this is it. This is how it's going to end. The plane is going to clip the ground. It's going to cartwheel and I'm wedged in between, you know, 60 other fuckers. I'm, I'm done. This is, this is it. This is my story. It didn't turn out that way.

• 31:43Jack Murphy?

  I mean,

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Spoiler.

• 31:44Jack Murphy?

  This is basically kind of what happened to the C-130s in Iran.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:49Jack Murphy?

  A few months ago. They got stuck in the dust essentially.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:52Jack Murphy?

  Sunk in because of that. Whatever. It's that certain type of soil.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  It's unique. And then, you know, so fast forward, I had a, a guest on the show, Alexander Lemons, and he did some research to find that the soil in Iraq is unique from all of the soil in the world. I know that we're talking about Afghanistan, but there's some property about this particular type of sand where it just recirculates due to the, you know, the, um, the dust storms and stuff. It does something to grind it down. But yeah, so Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, it's all that same type of dirt. Um, yeah. I thought it was over.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  It didn't turn out that way.

• 32:34Jack Murphy?

  And so you guys kind of spearheaded into Camp Rhino?

• 32:39Speaker 04

  We did, yes. There was um us, um and then it turned into like the who's who of Special Operations Forces. Because it became the beachhead for everyone to flow in. So there was, you know, British SAS, there was Australian, there were French, there was German, um clearly the Marines, uh Navy Special Forces. There was um, I think for a very brief time, I want to say there was an ODA team, but it all kind of blends in at this point. We're talking oh one. And we ran operations out of there. The infantry was dug around the perimeter.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  It was just weird, you know, it was weird because

• 33:24Speaker 04

  nobody enlists in the military under any illusion that you are not gonna potentially go to war.

• 33:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  But I enlisted in ninety five, there was no war taking place. I mean, we had some people that were concerned, but it was like, oh, that's, you know, Nicaragua or that's, uh, you know, Somali era, that's

• 33:42Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  The United States getting attacked on its home turf and then retaliating was unheard of.

• 33:50Jack Murphy?

  And then finding yourself in like such a third world country, uh, what, what's going on here?

• 33:57Speaker 04

  It was so weird and we didn't have any of the equipment to, to really do this type of thing, you know, you're still wearing, we had just transitioned, we didn't have them yet, but the Marine Corps had just transitioned to that new digital pattern.

• 34:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  We still had the old classic tri-color uh woodland pattern or chocolate chip, like ninety one

• 34:19Jack Murphy?

  Desert Storm.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Desert Storm. So that's what we had and that was our desert uniform. And we didn't have vehicles that were really tailored towards what we were doing, which was, you know, some long-range desert patrol. We didn't have the, uh, we didn't have the equipment for it. So, I mean, we made it work, but it was very weird.

• 34:39Jack Murphy?

  I, I remember working with Marines in, uh, this was a little later on. This would've been, what, 2004, Marine Infantry. And I mean, they had like one pair of nods per squad. They didn't have any sort of organic intelligence attached to their battalion. And there's, again, not trying to throw shade on them, it's just, they didn't have a lot.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  The infantry operates under very austere conditions. They always have. So much so that it's really a point of pride to them at this point.

• 35:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I know.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, like we can do everything with nothing. And the Marine reconnaissance community had a lot more. It did. But now, when you compare Marine Recon or even the Force Platoon to say, a Ranger Battalion, or an ODA team, or, you know, CAG, oh, yeah, like, night and day. Like, don't even get it started. But we did have more equipment. You know, we had, um, some, some laser rangefinders, laser designators, everybody had NVGs, we had M4s, um, we had suppressors, we had a lot more hardware than your run-of-the-mill. And we had reach back. And that was one of the things that reconnaissance is able to do

• 35:51Speaker 04

  in the Marine Corps is, you're in, all of the other services put an officer in charge of their smaller SF units. Marine Corps doesn't run that way. Now, MARSOC does, but there was no MARSOC in 01. So this was six enlisted Marines with an E5 in charge. You will go out to 20 kilometers and get eyes on a target, and then we want you to talk to that aircraft overhead and lays ordinance on it. Can you do that? Yes, I can do that. The Marine Corps is the only one that does business that way. It's a tremendous responsibility, and one we took serious.

• 36:30Jack Murphy?

  They were sending you out on those kinds of missions?

• 36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:32Jack Murphy?

  What was that like going out there and now it's for real?

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, now it's for real and it was it was fun because you're finally getting to play the game you have practiced for.

• 36:43Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  You know, it is that pro athlete who never gets off the bench and now finally I'm off the bench. Let's see what it's about, but it's also incredibly naive because you hadn't been shot at yet. You didn't understand any of the fog of war. It was very sterile in many cases because the desert was the only opposition that we had. We did drive into a minefield at one point. That was interesting. We did call in some some ordinance on occasion. That was fun. But a lot of it was just spent doing what reconnaissance Marines do, which is quietly getting eyes on and just reporting.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  But it was fun. It was really a relief to be able to finally do what we had always practiced.

• 37:32Jack Murphy?

  And were you guys inserting on Humvees like walking, setting up a observation post and that sort of stuff?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Humvee, we had a single Humvee for the six of us and we would drive it out there. Leave it, camouflage it, make the rest of the movement on foot, establish an observation post and then monitor. And it was a lot of monitoring MSRs, you know, we understood Taliban at that point. We understood who our enemy was. I'm talking strategically. And the infantry battalion had a CIA case officer assigned to them when we went in. So we were getting intelligence, you know, the larger we from a couple of different sources, military intelligence, as well as the intelligence community at large. And it was early on in oh one, so the sky was just filled.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  I mean, they were dropping 2000 pounders off. You could you could see the light flashes, right? So there was a massive air campaign, but overhead you had all kinds of enablers, all kinds. I mean, we would see.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  The planes overhead and then you could just, you could pick up the radio and, and talk to the AWACS or, you know, talk to the command and control bird. If there was fixed wing aircraft checking in, they would push it to you. And it, it was, that was pretty cool. Yeah.

• 38:52Jack Murphy?

  Any of those operations that kind of got a little dicey?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  I don't think so. There was, there was a firefight with the force platoon. They were out and they got into a bit of a scrape. Um, should they have is a matter of some disagreement?

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I know the guys that were there at that time. They, they did exchange, uh, they did get into a firefight, but nothing, I don't remember anything that was like dicey, other than our own, our own dangerousness. We, we were, I've told this story before, we modified the Humvee with a pintle mount to hold the, um, belt fit. Okay. When I say we modified it, we took a piece of tubular steel. We welded a flat plate on the bottom and then we took the caster off a refrigerator and welded it to the top. That allowed for a swivel, which the gun sat on with

• 39:54Speaker 04

  a pin through it. You now have a pintle mount once it's ratchet strapped to the Humvee. Any machine gunner knows that you have a device under the barrel or attached to the weapon in such a way called a traverse in elevation. It's a fixed piece of metal that keeps the barrel from free flowing. We didn't have that. So there was a gun in the bed of the Humvee, which could pivot to shoot the floor of the Humvee or between the driver and the A driver. And, uh, there was a moment where the gun was used and it was like, oh my God, you just riddled the hood of the Humvee. And it was between me and the A driver of the Humvee and I'm like, oh God, this is so fucking stupid.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Um, that was the worst thing I think that took place. Um, as far as the enemy contact and anything, no. No, there were some other very surreal moments like getting into Kandahar Airport and, um, we did watch one of the Marine infantry step on a mine and get blown up. Um, there was a couple of other instances as well.

• 40:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. It was a period of time, uh, I guess a brief period of time when the Taliban was essentially defeated.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:05Jack Murphy?

  There may be some holdouts we're still looking for. Uh, and there were, really wasn't an IED threat.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:11Jack Murphy?

  Yet. Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  It was nice because that changed and it changed relatively quick. I mean, any, any adversary that is going to survive will learn asymmetric warfare against the United States. I mean, that is the only way that you are going to survive. And it's not just unique to the American culture. Ukraine's doing it against Russia right now. And yeah, it was a matter of time, but in oh one, there was no, there was no such animal. That was great. Yeah.

• 41:47Jack Murphy?

  And tell us about rotating back home from that trip.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  That was great. It was so weird too, because I compare my retrograde from oh one and my retrograde from like the Iraq war in oh three, complete night and day. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan, we went in with a full combat load. I mean,

• 42:14Speaker 04

  fricking you name it. It was like shopping cart. I want one of those and I'll take two claymores and I'll take that law rocket. I need seven fragmentation grenades. Uh, nope, not enough ammo, more ammo. We never downloaded that stuff. Like we got out of Afghanistan on a, um, helicopter and then leapfrogged back to Pakistan and from Pakistan back to the ship. And we've just got, our pack is filled with stuff, like, I mean, just stuff, man. And our deuce gear, filled with ammo and fragmentation grenades, and I've got two or three rounds, I mean, I just, and it just all gets dumped into a quadcon.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  And that quadcon gets closed up, not locked, not secured, not like, sign here, just, hey, go put your gear in your team quadcon. And then it gets back to Pendleton and it's like, you know, that's all full of ammo, right? And explosives and C4 and claymores and rocket launchers, we should probably turn that into the armory. Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll do that. We were the only platoon to see any kind of combat, any kind, and, and make no illusions, I'm, I'm not saying that we, you know, we're six months constantly getting shot at, it was, it was a very short period of time. And for all intents and purposes, it was pretty innocuous. But we were the first platoon to see combat.

• 43:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  So you walk back to a unit who is operating at a very high level and is itching to get some from 9/11 and you're treated like, I don't want to say heroes, because that's not what I'm saying, but you are definitely like, you're the cock of the walk right now.

• 43:52Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, we want to hear what happened, we want to hear your lessons learned, we want a PME, you're going to talk to everybody. What did you do? How did you do it? What worked? What didn't work? And in the process of articulating all that, I started absorbing all of those lessons. Because I'm now, you know, it's an oral story, this is what worked, this is what works in the planning process. Yeah, that technique right there, screw that, that doesn't work. So now I have this great database of things that we fast forward to 03 and I'm like, okay, this is what needs to change. We are going into Iraq, we can't do this, but we are going to keep this, this needs to change. And that made all the difference in the world.

• 44:33Jack Murphy?

  When you got back home, were you already hearing stuff about Iraq?

• 44:37Speaker 04

  A little bit.

• 44:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Yep. There was discussions about Iran while we were still in Afghanistan. There was a lot of talk on the, on the high side about possibly remaining and just crossing the border into Iran.

• 44:55Jack Murphy?

  We're going to do the rest of the Middle East.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, let's just, it, let's just get it taken care of. And I think, my God, how different would the world be today if that had actually come true?

• 45:04Jack Murphy?

  The Iranians were scared shitless after nine eleven, not not because they were involved, but they were afraid we're gonna catch some retaliation from this.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a lot of blowback and a lot of people were, like you said, running scared because we were not messing around. The United States was on a war footing and we don't get on war footings very often. I mean, we will get into engagements, but as a country, we were galvanized. Everybody, I mean, especially this city.

• 45:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, it's something about like the the American character. And I mean, when you get the entire country pissed off, like we'll do scary stuff, we'll do stupid stuff, too. I mean, I'm and yeah, I it's like I have this conversation with people sometimes that about Taiwan that people are like, well, we're not going to go and fight over like some rocks that you can barely see at low tide and and the South China Sea. It's like, yeah, no, I get that. You're right. We wouldn't. But if an American aircraft carrier gets sunk in the South China Sea.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:05Jack Murphy?

  This entire country will go batshit.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  It's 5000 people. That's more than we lost in nine eleven.

• 46:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, people will lose it.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Yes, they will. They absolutely will. And it's it's a conversation that I have had on my show as well with some policy experts who are who that's their job to to talk about that subject. And not to get you off track, but the most likely scenario is China blockades Taiwan, and we are forced to somehow try to break that blockade. What does that look like? A Berlin style airlift?

• 46:37Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  But their response, their most likely COAT is probably going to be just that. And God help them if they sink one of our aircraft carriers.

• 46:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  That's that's a that is a red line that you don't come back from. And I talk more about.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  You can theorize what the battle is going to look like. That is great, and that's academic. I don't care about that. I want to know, what is the world going to look like after? What does this do to the globe?

• 47:07Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  How is it piece out different countries? What is the alignments is going to look like? You know, what is six months, nine months, a year after Taiwan do? That's what I think is interesting.

• 47:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the same question for Iran right now.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:23Jack Murphy?

  Um, so talk us through a little bit the ramp up for Iraq.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  We had a period of time after Afghanistan. We get back, we, we, um, you know, we do all of the post deployment things, like put all your gear away, you know, go talk to the shrink, um, take all your welcome back classes, and then you need to take some leave. You know, you go on leave and you do all the things, and then it's business as usual. We went back into a training cycle. I went to a couple of schools. Um, but we knew that there was something coming. And it was definitely on the front of everyone's minds. And we formed, um, you know, people rotate in, people rotate out. We formed a new platoon with new leadership.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  And we start preparing for ground operations. We start preparing for Iraq. It was, it was known that we would be, that that was the target. It, it wasn't, you matriculated down like this is the line of departure and this is where we're going to stay. But it was like, that's the X. That is the target. So we started practicing a lot more vehicle ops. We started modifying the vehicles. I got my vehicle prepared to do what I knew based off Iraq or Afghanistan, it would be needed to do. And, um, we practiced. I mean, that's what you do, right? You train. Um, vehicle operations and contact drills and down driver and all of the other things. And then medicine, I mean, lots of medicine.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  And.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Once we had a date for deployment, that really, I think, solidified everybody's resolve. Because that's like, okay, it's real. Yeah. This is not some buzzword. It's not something to rally the troops like, oh, we're going. And this is the date that we're leaving.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  And I think

• 49:25Speaker 04

  because it's not just a platoon now, and it's not just a potential. It's real and we're taking everybody. The whole battalion is going. You know, a couple of hundred very well-trained men are going into with the rest of the US military into this little country. And we're gonna, we're gonna take it over. And I, I remember, and I don't know how your experience was, but I just remember the sheer number of body bags they ordered.

• 49:51Jack Murphy?

  Oh shit.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Because they expected massive casualties. I mean, massive casualties was expected, anticipated. Um, not, I mean, I'm not talking about for the Marine Corps or First Reconnaissance Battalion. I just mean the US military. They were expecting a lot of casualties. There was anticipation of

• 50:10Jack Murphy?

  Anthrax.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, chemical, right? So we got before 2003, the full anthrax regime, which was an 18-month shot sequence.

• 50:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was like six or seven.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a lot. And, um, I think we had two people in the unit that refused and were, they were out. They were gone because it was non-negotiable. This isn't COVID. Like, you're gonna be taking anthrax. It's so weird. I mean, just to go down a rabbit hole, how different everybody's attitudes were towards anthrax compared to COVID?

• 50:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. No one gave, no one gave second thought.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  No, like completely untested, untried, experimental anthrax.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  And you compare it to COVID, which had rigid Anyways, it's not important.

• 50:57Jack Murphy?

  I was so fortunate that I got the anthrax series and but it wasn't recorded in my records. So I got it like 1.5 times, you know, I probably got like 12 instead.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  You're extra inoculated or extra your DNA is screwed up. I don't know.

• 51:14Jack Murphy?

  Probably I'm pretty screwed up. You know, it's a good thing I'm registered with VA. I'm probably gonna get something weird down the line.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Like I seem to remember something about you couldn't donate blood for a period of time after the anthrax vaccine.

• 51:26Jack Murphy?

  That was also depending on certain parts of the world that they sent us to. Like if you were like probably Afghanistan was one of them, but I remember I've heard that story also. Like, oh, you've been hanging out in Central Africa for six months. Like nah, we're not taking your blood.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  I had so many inoculations though, like from all of the different places that I had been to. And that's one of the things that blows my mind because again, tangential. I worked in my last job with all former military guys, you know, and when the COVID kerfuffle came. Everybody starts complaining about it. I'm like, really? I know where you guys all served. I know what your shot records look like. You've had like 25 vaccinations for stuff that is a one in a billion chance you're ever gonna get it. Like Japanese encephalitis and God knows.

• 52:16Jack Murphy?

  It's, I mean, it really is dependent on the person's media diet and what they're consuming and what they're hearing. Because yeah, when we went through basic training or boot camp, we lined up and they had the guns. And they injected us with all kinds of shit. I don't know what the hell it was.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  No idea.

• 52:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. You remember the shot that they put in your ass cheek where it's like they inject like it feels like there's a golf ball?

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Peanut butter. It feels like like somebody is injecting peanut butter into it. Yeah.

• 52:41Jack Murphy?

  I don't remember what that shot is for. We got smallpox too, which Americans don't get except for military.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Yep. I remember my smallpox vaccination. Still have the scar from it. I'm sure we all do. And so like all of that stuff, right? It was all part of the workup to that 03 invasion. And because we expected the royal week, so many casualties from KEM.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  A lot of people didn't know any better. I don't want to say didn't know any better because they were ignorant. But I think the assumption is is like this is not Afghanistan 01. This is not 2001 or sorry, 1991 first Gulf War. Like we are going to get in the fight.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  And we were prepared for that and we weren't reticent. We weren't afraid. It was just this very pragmatic resolve like some of you guys aren't going to come home.

• 53:38Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  And that's not the way it worked out, at least not in oh three. That is not the military's experience during the duration of the conflict over there, but for my battalion, we lost no one with only, you know, one, one real casualty.

• 53:59Jack Murphy?

  When you deployed to, I'm assuming Kuwait first, what was sort of like your concept of what your unit's mission was?

• 54:07Speaker 04

  It was really weird. We, we were supposed to drive through and find a route through a very specific, um, trying to think how to describe it. There was a sort of like this damn network of levees. My job was I was going to be the lead platoon, lead team, lead platoon for the entire battalion that would then lead the division through.

• 54:38Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  So I had to, and I was looking at U2 photographs, you know, with a magnifying glass and just like, and I'm charting it and rehearsing and rehearsing. And that was supposed to be what my team's job was. You're going to go through the line of departure, engineers are going to blow the berm, and then you are going to navigate this route, proof it, and then everyone's coming in behind you. None of that fucking happened. No, no. And that, that was what we were supposed to do. Um, we worked at the time, General Mattis was the, the division commanding general for first Marine Division of which first recon fell under. Brilliant strategist. I still think he's

• 55:19Speaker 04

  one of the brightest minds of our generation as far as a warrior goes. Um, and, and it ended up that, that's not how things played out, but that's what we were supposed to have been trained to do. We must have been to Kuwait.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  I mean, it was over a month. I'm sure it goes by very quick. I can't remember.

• 55:43Jack Murphy?

  And so what did they have your team doing in actuality?

• 55:48Speaker 04

  In actuality, the battalion still spearheaded movements, but we did not have a lot of infantry or in many cases, any infantry behind us. We acted as shock troops. We did more of what a Ranger Battalion would do in many ways. That is not what we were trained to do. Not to suggest that we weren't capable, but I think that's a lot of what the friction was for the unit and really for the lower ranking, the rank and file, you know, men like myself who were in E5 at the time. Because I'm like, this is not what recon Marines are supposed to be doing. You know, our job is recon pull.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  We're going to go over here. We're going to locate the target and then you do whatever you want to do. If that's infantry, if that's rockets, if that's an airstrike.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  You were using us as shock troops. We're flowing en masse. We're making contact with the enemy. We are destroying the enemy and we are continuing to move. And if that's what the general wanted to use us for, that's great. Like in retrospect, who the F was I to sit there and be like, I'm sorry, I don't do windows. You don't say that. But you complained about it and we did. And that did not go over well at the end of events, but.

• 57:11Jack Murphy?

  Was the idea that they wanted you to sort of be like a blocking force, like go out there, see what's going on and kind of like guard the flank of the movement?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  In many ways, yeah, we were and we were way out front. I mean, way out front. In many cases, and it's not just us. I mean, the military to a whole, but the Marine Corps specifically moved so fast. There were several times where they just had to say, you guys have to stop. You've outstripped your supply lines.

• 57:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. I don't know where you were.

• 57:46Jack Murphy?

  I wasn't within the invasion. I joined the army in O2.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Got it. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

• 57:52Jack Murphy?

  I was in, I was actually in Ranger selection when the invasion happened.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  God.

• 57:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, when the guys came home with like a bunch of broken ankles and stuff from that jump, they're like, hmm, maybe.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Yes. Um, I, I never jumped a combat jump and I'm really kind of glad, you know, I have a lot of parachute jumps to my name.

• 58:16Jack Murphy?

  We'll get one of those guys in here. I mean, they, they told me the static line was at waist height because they were so weighed down.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  No, thanks.

• 58:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  I'm good.

• 58:25Jack Murphy?

  Kind of, kind of my thought about it.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, even, even jumping a square and with combat load is not, it's not a fun ride. Um, I don't know how it was for you. We jump, uh, front mounted rocks. We don't typically jump back mounted rocks.

• 58:39Jack Murphy?

  We, in free fall, we did front mounted.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Okay. Front. Yeah. And it's like that beach ball until that is lowered and it's just such a pain in the ass. Um, we trained for it. I'm just really glad that I never did it. I'd much rather just walk.

• 58:54Jack Murphy?

  I'd, I'd do a free fall jump, but, uh, like a static line jump into combat. I mean, it sounds pretty cool. You know, Band of Brothers and all that, but in reality, that's scary as hell.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  You've got, I did a, uh, JRTC at Fort Polk years ago, and I say years ago because the C-141 was still flying. So you know, it's years ago and they did a mass tac with like 16 or 17 C-141s over Fort Polk. You could walk across the sky from one canopy to the next. There were so many Joes in the sky and they assume a 10% combat injury rate. And that was legit. And this was a training jump. I mean, broken ankles. They had a couple of casualties and I, I'm not celebrating that, but

• 59:44Speaker 04

  combat now, so let's take that template. And now you've got guys on the ground potentially shooting at you. No, thanks.

• 59:51Jack Murphy?

  I'm good. Tell us about, uh, you know, the D-Day, the day of the invasion, pushing across the berm.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  So cool. I mean, it was, they did all of these preparatory fires, surface fires and aircraft. They did tomahawks. I mean, all kinds of.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Soft and they did, um, you know, some diversions and try to draw the Iraqis to confuse them where we were going. And the engineers blew the berm very shortly before we crossed the LD and it was at night. So everyone's on nods. We did so much drivers training on nods and it still sucks because these are the old single tubes, seven bravos.

• 1:00:32Jack Murphy?

  PVS sevens.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  PVS sevens, um, you have zero depth perception because there's one tube. And that takes a lot of practice in order to get good at, but it was surreal. It's just like you're with your friends and you have trained with these guys for a long time. You trust them. You know how they're going to react, but it's still not been proven. So there was a lot of that anxiety, like what's going to happen? Not fog of war because you don't know what the enemy is going to do, but you're, there's this little like Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder like, don't fuck up. Hope you go really well.

• 1:01:10Jack Murphy?

  Hope you don't die.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Jack Murphy?

  Good luck.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Um, you just don't know how you're going to react. So I think there's a lot of not, not at the forefront of your mind, but there's that little voice like, what if I screw up? What if I panic? What if I freeze? What if I'm not as competent as I hope I am? Um, but it was just weird, you know, bombs are going off. There's explosions way off in the distance. You can hear gunfire. Is it ours? Is it theirs? Is it a firefight? Is it misdirection? Like what is all that? And you don't know and you're just, you're just driving and that's what we did. I, I mean, we left at oh, dark 30 and we drove and we did not stop driving for a couple of days.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  But like all through the night, we just drove and it was very, um, like staccato, you know, you drive for like 20 minutes and then for some reason you had to stop. Sometimes our vehicles were in front. Sometimes we were in the back of the convoy. Um, sometimes we spread out, sometimes you have to come together, but it was clunky for all night and it's got to the point.

• 1:02:19Jack Murphy?

  Accordion effect. Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  And then it's just anticlimactic and you're like.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  There's nothing going on. There's nothing to see. It's all just like, just desert, right? Um, and it was that way for, until the next day. And then suddenly, it's daytime and the nods are off and you're, you know, wiping the crust out of your eyes and you're like, oh, this is Iraq, huh? Well, this is cool. Oh, look, there's a goat herder. And then there's more people. And then you come to this little mud hut town and village and people were just kinda looking at you and like, there's a war on. Do you get? It's, it was just, it was weird.

• 1:02:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unexpected.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  I've never invaded a country. That was my first time. So it was a lot of firsts.

• 1:03:08Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, you guys had an embedded journalist, right?

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  We did, yes.

• 1:03:12Jack Murphy?

  What, what was that like? Was he specifically with you?

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  He was specifically with my, well, he was assigned to first reconnaissance battalion.

• 1:03:21Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  And just through this weird twist of fate, well, I consider it to be a twist of fate. I have talked to some other people that say, actually, no, you were specifically chosen because they wanted him to be with your team or you specifically because they felt you would be a good fit, that you could handle it and all this stuff. But I felt, and I'm still, that is my position is it was just dumb luck. I had an empty seat. Um, we had four Humvees. We had three teams. So that means one team of six is going to have to be split into two groups. A Humvee has four seats. So if you take six people and you have eight seats, you're going to end up with an empty seat somewhere.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  I had an empty seat in my Humvee. Reporter, you're riding with him.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  Again, there is another side to that story, but that is my version of events.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say that I wasn't crazy about having him, but I was not super enthused. He grew on me because he's very personable and he's very likeable. But I'm like,

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  I'm not going to be responsible for this guy. You can't give me a civilian. And like if we get into a firefight, I'm not dealing with this person. You know that, right? And all of that was explained like, nope, you're you do you. He'll look after himself. If he gets hurt, that's that's on him. But then of course you have this. You have this implied responsibility.

• 1:04:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  Like, I'm not just going to leave you helpless. So, all right, let's talk about it. Where's your gas mask? Where's your mop suit? Let's talk about tupam chloride and atropine. Let's talk about, you know, speed drills. Where's your weapon? He had no weapon, but we would give him access to one from time to time. If we felt like, hey, I think we're probably going to be in a firefight. If one of us gets shot, you need to pick up his M4. Let's just make sure you understand how to use it. And he was keen across the board on all of this. He came with his own mop suit. He had his own body armor. He had his own gas mask. I have no idea where he got any of this stuff. Um, the corpsman hooked them up with some of the stuff that he basically needs, you know, tourniquets. In those days, they were all homemade tourniquets. It was a crevasse and popsicle sticks to make the windlass.

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  And they gave him the atropine and the tupam chloride for chem attacks and just like all the stuff. And, uh, he did well. And he was a big dude. I don't mean like where he was a little, but not a lot. He was just tall. He's like six, four. Uh, so he was not small.

• 1:06:06Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting that, you know, uh, at the time, you probably didn't even think about this, but like someone had once told me that Magellan was not the first person to circumvent the world, but he was the first person to do it with a historian on the ship.

• 1:06:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Jack Murphy?

  That wrote about it.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Jack Murphy?

  That's why everyone remembers Magellan. And, you know, your, your team, your platoon had a historian along for the ride.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  We did. Yeah. And another interesting footnote about this is that he was the only.

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  Print journalist in the entire Marine Division.

• 1:06:42Jack Murphy?

  No shit.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  He was, I wanna say he was only one of two in the entire theater. Everyone else was news or TV.

• 1:06:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  Or, you know, film. They were all film. He was the only person that was there as part of a, a printed publication. Which meant that he wasn't in and out, and that changed things too. It would have been very different if it was like an embed from CNN or BBC or Al Jazeera or, you know, whatever. Um, because he was gonna be there for the duration. He was. He was there for three months and just hundreds, hundreds of notebooks.

• 1:07:18Jack Murphy?

  And he got to know all the guys and, yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Intimately.

• 1:07:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Heard the stories, was witness to everything. And we didn't censor ourselves, which bit a lot of people in the ass later, right? A lot. But, you know, early on, and I've said this before in, in some other interviews, but I made this decision very, very early on. I could take one of two approaches. I could bring the platoon or the, the team together and I say, all right, listen, guys, we've got a reporter with us. Everyone's just gonna have to shut your mouth and not say anything. Or I could just say, don't change a thing and just be yourself.

• 1:07:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Let history be the judge.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  Let history be the judge because what I didn't want to happen was I knew what we were getting into, right? I did, I didn't know if somebody was gonna die or if we were gonna get shot. I didn't know if we were gonna get blown up or witnessed whatever, but the last thing that I wanted to do was to tell them not to process it. And a lot of people, when they are nervous or when they are scared or when they are whatever, you know, they're gonna verbalize.

• 1:08:29Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  That's just how we process.

• 1:08:31Jack Murphy?

  And there are probably some things that they could talk to a reporter about that maybe they wouldn't say to like a teammate, you know? Like you wouldn't tell your teammate like, man, I was scared shitless, you know?

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  So I just felt that the easier thing to do between those two linear choices would just be like, just treat him like one of the guys.

• 1:08:48Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. Um, and I stand by it. Yeah.

• 1:08:53Jack Murphy?

  And so in those subsequent days, um, what, what was the story that he, that he was capturing? What was it that you guys went out and did?

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  I think everything that, you know, the Generation Kill the book and Generation Kill the series talks about is, you know, it's out there, it's the story, it's pretty self-evident. But it was all of the, you know, the day-to-day, it was driving from one position to the next, it was interacting with people, it was helping sometimes, it was treating wounded, it was collecting POWs, it was uncovering weapons caches, it was sometimes getting in firefights, sometimes being ambushed, or calling in helicopter strikes. It was war, it was all of it, it was the good, the bad, the ugly, and he was there for its entirety.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  And I think it was really great to have somebody narrate that history, I think.

• 1:09:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, somebody's got to capture those stories and capture that history.

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, we've had so much published on Vietnam, there were so many journalists, it was a long campaign, and it was a bloody campaign, and it was, you know, somebody said to me the other day that one of the generals made a comment recently that the United States has been in combat for the last 20 years, but we have not been in war for decades.

• 1:10:28Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  And I said, "That's brilliant, because he's right, we haven't been in war." And I mean, I would argue Southeast Asia, I would say Vietnam was our last American war.

• 1:10:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Where you had an entire generation baptized in combat. We've had hundreds of thousands of men and women over the last 20 years be in combat, but it's different, it's different. And so you had all of these stories come out about Vietnam, on the air side, or the Navy side, or the ground side, from every walk of life, from men and women, old and young. You didn't have that in OIF and OEF, not to the same level. You certainly didn't have anyone writing the type of story that Evan Wright did at that time and place.

• 1:11:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's, my opinion is that there's very little coverage of that like Lance Corporal perspective. Boots on the ground and it sounds like he did that very well.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  He did it and that is one of the reasons why I think so many people identify with the story because it is the every man's story. It doesn't matter if you are a, you know, an army eleven Bravo. If you are a coasty, you know, National Guard reservist, it doesn't matter. If you were an E5 and below in Iraq in two thousand and three, that's your story.

• 1:11:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it resonates.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, we all get it. Um, the same food, the same conditions, the same fog of war, the ambiguity that can, like all of it. Yeah, it's like everybody gets it. If you want to know what it's like to be in the military. That's a pretty good way to do it. Yeah.

• 1:12:12Jack Murphy?

  So it sounds like they kept you incredibly busy, like you were kind of like doing it all.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  We were doing it all. I wouldn't say that I was bored, but combat for anyone who's been in it is long periods of boredom interrupted by intense periods of violence. That's combat. Um, and that was two thousand and three. There were long stretches of just like, fuck.

• 1:12:36Jack Murphy?

  Very flat out here.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very flat or like this is boring. We have to wait and. You know, you don't know where the goalpost is. It's just like, well, what are we going to do today? Well, today we're going to, you know, we're going to drive five miles or five kilometers or whatever the case may be. We're going to go check out this thing over here and then we're just going to wait around and there's just a lot of it, right? And it's just day after day of that kind of, um, unknown goalpost, unknown objective and. Um, but it's.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Busy, yeah.

• 1:13:09Jack Murphy?

  And you guys ran into some like Iraqi military holdouts?

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  We ran into a lot of different people. The Iraq war was kind of this um bellwether to anyone who wanted to fight Americans.

• 1:13:22Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  You know, it was, we got into some firefight in particular and then when we did the the post firefight analysis and we find passports from like Syria and other countries. Fighters who had crossed.

• 1:13:35Jack Murphy?

  I didn't know that was happening already. I thought that came a few years down the line.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  No, that was right then and there.

• 1:13:40Jack Murphy?

  Right in the big, right in the beginning.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  Right in the beginning. We got into a pretty good ambush, um uh trying to cross a bridge one time and then that's that's where I fired a two oh three that didn't blow up because it was too short of an army distance and just went right through the chestal cavity.

• 1:13:55Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  It was, I'm like, well, I didn't didn't know it could do that. But then again, well, why didn't I know it could do that? And why haven't I done that before?

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  But yeah, they had Syrian passports and a couple of other foreign fighter passports and it was all over. That was Iraq. Anybody who wanted to come in and get their jihad on.

• 1:14:16Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  That was the place to do it at that time and place. But we did, we we came into contact with a few um Iraqi regulars, but most of it were militia fighters.

• 1:14:27Jack Murphy?

  That's so weird.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  It was and

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  you know tactically now, or I should say not now, but like oh four, oh five, oh six, that would have, we would have stopped and we would have been like, okay, let's let's prosecute that whole.

• 1:14:44Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  The back then, it's like, not our problem. Just keep moving.

• 1:14:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Shoot as many as you can, mitigate the threat. If it's not a threat or it's a mitigated threat, or I should say reduced, we're just gonna keep pushing.

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  I, yeah, yeah. It was weird.

• 1:15:02Jack Murphy?

  So, when was it that you did find that goalpost? I mean, that your unit must have stopped you at some point.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  We stopped at Bakuba, Bakuba? I'm probably saying it wrong. I cannot pronounce a lot of these words the right way.

• 1:15:16Jack Murphy?

  I think Bakuba is.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  That's as far north as we made it. It's on the other side of Baghdad. And then, um, we kind of declared it was game over. Like, not first reconnaissance battalion, but.

• 1:15:28Jack Murphy?

  Mission accomplished.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Mission accomplishment. I think that's when America said, okay, the, um, Saddam regime is toppled. They are unseated. Saddam was in hiding. We'd captured the palaces. We'd captured some of the family members. They have no functioning system of government. They can provide no real opposition. And truly, when you're fighting war, that's the measure of success is when opposition ceases to happen. At least at that time and place, it was declared, that's it. Um, that was the goalpost. So then it was just a matter of, well, fuck, I guess we gotta drive all the way back south.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  We didn't drive all the way back to Kuwait. We drove, um, basically back to Baghdad. We kind of made an assembly area there and, uh, later slowly retrograded back to Kuwait and then back to America.

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  Should that have been the goalpost? Oh, wow, this is a great conversation.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  The way that we fought that entire war, I think, was probably myopic.

• 1:16:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Many people would agree.

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  Um, back then in 2003, we probably did the best that we could. But, yeah, I think no one would disagree. If we were to do it again, we would do it differently.

• 1:16:55Jack Murphy?

  Well, I would hope. It seems sometimes like we're the United States of amnesia and we just do these things over and over again.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  American suffers, I mean, that's just our culture. We are shortsighted.

• 1:17:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, to say the least, yeah.

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Jack Murphy?

  And tell us about the reception back home this time, because you said it was different then.

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  Very different. It was an amazing, so America still had a lot of jingoism. You come back and there's parades in America, you know, you could not be more patriotic. We had vindicated, you know, supposedly nine eleven.

• 1:17:32Jack Murphy?

  The dicks and chicks, fuck them.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. But Camp Pendleton is right outside of Oceanside, California, and you've never seen a more patriotic little town than that. And I'm sure it was the case, whether it was Fayetteville or anywhere.

• 1:17:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  America was grateful. We could not get a better reception. But then the magazine article came out, Evan Wright's Home. He was a freelance reporter for Rolling Stone. He was originally commissioned to do one article in one issue of Rolling Stones. They end up loving it so much, they make it a three-part series into three articles. So the first issue comes out and then it's like, oh, yeah, yeah. They don't like that. The Marine Corps doesn't like it. General Mattis doesn't like it. First Reconnaissance Battalion Leadership doesn't like it. Because it openly criticized a lot of the decisions that the officers made. It openly criticizes

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  the decisions that the Marine Corps as a whole was making, whoever wanted to be the face of the Marine Corps. It was critical because, again, you are talking about a E5 and belows version of events. And look, if you don't know anything about the military, let me tell you one thing.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Members of the military, especially at that rank, do nothing all day long other than complain. That's what people do. You will sit around and you will find something to complain about. It does not matter if you have lobster and steak and caviar and all the free booze you want. And that's what we did. And now you're not just doing it in peacetime garrison, you're doing it in combat. And that's, you know, where everyone is hyper vigilant and you are stressed. You are scared in some cases. You are hungry. You are a whole host of emotions. Yeah, you're gonna complain and there's a guy documenting everything. Oh, this person said that Lieutenant so and so is a... The Marine Corps didn't like that.

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  It has since been re-looked at, but at that time, you know, you're talking, what, winter of 2003? They didn't want to hear that shit.

• 1:19:57Jack Murphy?

  Well, yeah, and what it is too is, I mean, they're worried about their own career progression and this makes, you know, our command look bad and this and that.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Command is what is this gonna do to the Marine Corps' public relations? And is potentially any of this actionable? Did you violate anything in the UCMJ?

• 1:20:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, I was gonna ask, like, did they, did they try to retaliate against any of you?

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  So I had, while in Iraq, I was nominated for a meritorious promotion. A combat meritorious promotion to Staff Sergeant, to E6. For, for the entire division, so it wasn't in the battalion. They had one meritorious combat slot for E6, one for E7, one for E8. I competed against I don't know how many people for E6 and I won. I was the first meritorious combat promotion since Vietnam.

• 1:20:51Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Yep, so my warrant is date of rank on the second of the month instead of the first, and it says in combat. Should have said that, it got taken away. General Mattis rescinded the promotion warrant in light of what had taken place in the article. Now, I ended up getting it, but it was gone for about six weeks. Yeah, and it wasn't just me, there were other people in the platoon as well, and the prevailing attitude of the leadership at the time was, "Well, you should have kept your mouth shut."

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  You didn't have to say anything. I'm like, "Okay, hold on a minute." You put this person in our group.

• 1:21:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you put a Rolling Stone reporter in the midst of our recon team.

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  Yep, freelance reporter, be that as it may, former publisher for Penthouse Letters, New Flint personally, like, he's got a great street reputation. He was not the liberal Ivy League, axe to grind Democrat. No, he was who was fuck, but come on, man, he was still a reporter. What did you think was gonna happen? That was the first thing that I had sort of stood on. And secondly, I'm like,

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  what was really so bad?

• 1:22:04Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  I mean, really? Um, I had known and had conversations with General Mattis prior. I spoke to him many times in Afghanistan when I was reporting directly to him in Kandahar.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  I'd had a couple of other conversations on other times through a weird set of circumstances. It's not important. He knew me. General Mattis has a great memory, by the way. He will meet somebody one time and he will always remember you, which is incredible because I was a nobody. He knew me. I had a very, very unpleasant, one-sided conversation with the general,

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  and this was the conversation that was gonna determine whether or not I was allowed to be promoted to that next rank, under the circumstances that I was. It worked out, but mm, it was painful.

• 1:23:02Jack Murphy?

  He was pissed.

• 1:23:03Speaker 04

  He was furious. He was fucking furious. And again, it was a one-sided conversation. He didn't give a shit what I had to say. He was not asking for my version of events. And honestly, it was interesting because the general didn't care what the officers looked like. He didn't care that they were questioned or slandered or ridiculed. He's like, I don't, I don't want it affecting the enlisted men. I don't want your, I don't remember the exact words that he said, but you know, I'm paraphrasing. I don't want your cancer affecting the enlisted ranks. And

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  it worked out well, but really the only reason it worked out well is because he had a sergeant major and his sergeant major liked me and his sergeant major listened to me and he heard my story and he listened to my argument.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  But he was one of several. I had to go in front of every single sergeant major in the entire meth. Okay, that's a lot because remember a division is below a meth. First week I'm Italian is below the division. So there's a lot of sergeant majors. There's like eight of these dudes, the artillery, the infantry, like they're all in a room and there's sergeant Colbert. And I'm having to explain myself to senior enlisted people who don't like recon Marines anyways, because we're all a bunch of cowboys. And now here's an, an uppity little sergeant who thinks that he can just say whatever he wants about. Yeah, it was, uh, it was rough.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  But I won the day.

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  I won the day and, um, I got to keep my rank. I got to pick up my next rank and my next one. And you know, the story has aged well. I think people realize that like, one, there were a lot worse things to come.

• 1:25:02Jack Murphy?

  For sure.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, like in the grand scheme of our adventure in Iraq, Sergeant Colbert's mouth is not the thing that we are going to blemish.

• 1:25:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Jack Murphy?

  And does this have anything to do with your stint with the Royal Marines that they're kind of like, we need to get this guy out of here for a little while?

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  No, in fact, quite, quite the opposite. That is a, that is a coveted billet.

• 1:25:28Jack Murphy?

  I would think, yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  Highly sought after. You are completely alone. You have no higher headquarters. You are isolated. Like, when I say you're embedded, it's like, that's it. It's you. I have no American chain of command in the country. Not Marine. The only Marine in the country are the embassy folks up in London's embassy, and they have no association with me. My reach back was a officer, a major in Quantico. And so it was highly sought after, and I was selected and screened and found to be, yep, it was good. It was not universal. The angst over the Generation Kill magazine articles was not universal. There were a lot of people

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  that were like, yeah, dude, I get it. What could you do, right? You were in a tough spot. I don't think you did anything that was that egregious. It was really just the upper, upper echelons.

• 1:26:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and it all rolls downhill.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  And it all rolls downhill. So, to be selected for the British Exchange Program, I mean, it was great. Phenomenal opportunity. Really. Personally and professionally. It was great.

• 1:26:36Jack Murphy?

  Did you have to go through their training course?

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  I had the option to go through their training course. I started to go through their training course. There were some circumstances that prevented me from finishing the All-Arms Commando course. One of the unique things about the British Commandos is, the individual Royal Marine goes through their eight, I think it's eight months, eight enough positive things about their fighting spirit, their morale, their attitudes are, you just, you cannot demoralize this group of people. It is, I've never seen anything like it. They can't be miserable enough. They're just really good dudes. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that their training pipeline is incredibly long.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Eight months is a long time to be in basic. And they go through some very arduous, physical courses. They go through a lot of schooling. And there's not that many, you know, thirty five hundred, four thousand at any given time. That's small.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  And I, I mean, I found them to just be an incredible group of guys. And I've said this before, I think they could do so much better if they would un-ass more funding for them. If they had access to more money to pay for some really top tier equipment. And get access to some really good training. And their training's good. I don't mean to insinuate that it's not, but I compare it to US.

• 1:28:05Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  Right, like my platoon of twenty four recon Marines would typically have a range day where the ammo allotment was nine, ten thousand rounds. That's pretty average, really. I mean, flat range.

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• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  Maybe a shoot house, you know, maybe you do some live fire maneuvers, some immediate action drills. Ten thousand rounds of five five six and then some other associated belt fed and smoke. Like, that's nothing. That's a lot of ammo. For those guys.

• 1:29:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  That's a lot. So that's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. Not, not that they're not doing anything wrong, but like, bro. If you had, you know, the latest cutting edge communications equipment, an absolute top tier, like.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 1:29:49Jack Murphy?

  What did you think are the similarities and the differences between them and the American Marine Corps?

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  Well, they're still very much embedded into the Navy. One of the really weird things about the um

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  the British military on a whole is that their pay system is not the same across the board. Like in the in the American military, if you are an Army E1 or a Marine Corps E1 or an Air Force E1, you are getting the same amount of money. That's not the case over there. It's different.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  Their Navy pay is different than their Army pay, that's different than their Marine Corps pay. So that's the first thing that's weird. They also don't have an up or out policy like we do.

• 1:30:32Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  So you could potentially, so they sign up for, and I could be getting this wrong because my memory is a little fuzzy these days, but you basically sign up for a 22-year enlistment. And you can leave after a certain period. But it's that's it. And you don't have to be promoted to stay in like you do in the American military system. So you could be a corporal of 20 years. You just don't want the responsibility of leading and you're quite happy to be at that rank. That's a big difference. And I think that is

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  very impactful on their leadership. Because just because you're upwardly mobile doesn't mean that you were necessarily ready for that next.

• 1:31:18Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:19Speaker 04

  So I I don't I don't think that you're promoting

• 1:31:23Speaker 04

  the right way when you do it like that. I'm sure there's reasons beyond what I can see on the surface level, but those are some pretty pretty big glaring differences between our military, or at least our Marine Corps and theirs.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  We want everybody to have the mantle of leadership. And you are going to do it. You're probably going to suck at it, but somebody will teach you.

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  They're still in the Department of the Navy and in almost all ways their Navy controls their budget and their manpower and a lot of their other things whereas in the US Marine Corps yeah, we say Department of the Navy, but that's really just something that's still on the figurehead and the walls and it's not the case.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  I would love to see the British commanders or you know, the Royal Marines sort of separate themselves in more ways from their parent service.

• 1:32:27Jack Murphy?

  Did you end up deploying with them?

• 1:32:29Speaker 04

  No, I was at a training command.

• 1:32:31Jack Murphy?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:32:32Speaker 04

  So, the way that the exchange program works is it's one of theirs and one of ours and we swap. So, my counterpart went to a unit that was deployable and he did get a chance to deploy.

• 1:32:43Jack Murphy?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  I would have loved to have gone over to Iraq with those folks, but no, it was a training and education command, so I spent a decent amount of time teaching asymmetric warfare, amphibious, you know, operations, boat driving, VBSS, that kind of stuff.

• 1:33:03Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:05Jack Murphy?

  In three years, almost, in the UK.

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Jack Murphy?

  That must have been fun.

• 1:33:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was. I had a great place to live. I had a two-bedroom flat right on the water. Like, you could jump off of my balcony into the ocean if you wanted to. I don't recommend it. It's cold as fuck, but you could do it. And then it was right next to work, so I got up in the morning and I walked next door to the training compound. And it was great. I had two of my motorcycles went with me. I TMO'd them over there. So, I would regularly put a motorcycle on the ferry and go over to France, you know, and drive through the coast of Normandy. Or I would go over to

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  Ireland, you know, and ride the motorcycle through the countryside of Ireland. Or go up to Scotland and tour the distilleries. So, a lot of personal takeaways. Yeah, yeah, it was great. I had a good time. Learned a lot.

• 1:34:03Jack Murphy?

  And after that wrapped up and you got sent back to the mother Marine Corps, what was the next assignment for you?

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Well, so that's when I went to First Force. I was there for, you know, about six months.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  And there was unfortunately a cabal of people who were like, yeah, that whole generation kill thing, you're not going to be a good fit. I'm like, you know, I went to school with a lot of you guys, like, we all went through the same pipeline. We all treaded the same ground. Again, don't be a dick, but okay, if that's your attitude, then that's fine.

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I, I mean, I just came back to the mothership. I reintegrated myself, tried to do whatever was asked, whatever was needed. And then in short order, found myself back at First Reconnaissance Battalion, getting ready to go back to Iraq again.

• 1:35:08Jack Murphy?

  How'd that go?

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  It was a little rough. Yeah, it was a little rough. I mean, when I went to Iraq in oh three,

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  it was the Wild West. I mean, we were in combat, you know, now it's like we have forward operating bases and there's gate guards.

• 1:35:26Jack Murphy?

  What year is this by the way?

• 1:35:27Speaker 04

  Oh, seven.

• 1:35:28Jack Murphy?

  Okay, that's true.

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  So I'm in Fallujah in oh seven. And, you know, this is oh seven, so none of the really horrible fighting that was taking place in oh four, oh five, oh six was there. It was, well, we did combat operations and we got into some scrapes and, but for the most part, it was like, it's kind of what I call peacetime combat, garrison combat. It's bureaucratic, it's administrative, it's, it's, your hands are tied, you know, you can't do this and you can't do that. We still went out and we did a lot of really what I think it to be, you know, good work, a lot of coordinate clearing, a lot of IED stuff.

• 1:36:11Speaker 04

  Schwacked a lot of dudes putting in roadside bombs and, and you know, um, found weapons caches and all the stuff that we all did, but it was also horribly bureaucratic.

• 1:36:22Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  It was, you can't do this, you can't do that, and we gotta ask permission to this. And um, this is, this is where we had a zero injury mentality, you know? We started loading these vehicles up that were never designed for all of this armor.

• 1:36:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  With all this stuff and like, oh, you can't go out, you need, you need full PPE. Like, I can't run with this, by the way, okay? I, you, you put 80 pounds of armor on me. If I get into a firefight, how am I supposed to maneuver? Or grab my friend who was shot and I have to maneuver him? This is stupid. But somewhere along the line, we as a country decided we will not allow casualties. Like, we're not having it. You can't.

• 1:37:09Jack Murphy?

  It was looking pretty bad in the press, yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can't fight a war that way.

• 1:37:13Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  Did anyone not read um, A Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation? Because I did, and you haven't, clearly.

• 1:37:23Jack Murphy?

  I have that manual here somewhere, actually.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  It's a good book.

• 1:37:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  So the, the 2007 deployment was very different for me. I was also not a team leader. I was now a platoon sergeant, so senior enlisted for 24 individuals. And I had a pretty shitty platoon commander.

• 1:37:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, pretty shitty. Uh, he was a last minute substitution. The original one rotated back to the United States because his significant other had cancer. And he's like, I'm out. Okay, thanks. Um, and they substituted somebody else in, and, and this guy was a douche, a total douche. I, I.

• 1:38:06Jack Murphy?

  Did he come out of the recon community or?

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  No, no, he was, he was there, but he had no reconnaissance, and the officers typically don't.

• 1:38:16Speaker 04

  Usually they're ground intelligence or aviation intelligence officers.

• 1:38:21Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I can see that being an issue.

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  This, which for the most part is not a big deal because they understand the significance of the mission and the reconnaissance. And they are mature enough for the most part to be like, this is your area of expertise. I'll just sort of help mold you and point you in the direction. Now, this guy was straight from the infantry.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  And he had some very didactic and rigid ideas about, you know, the way things should be done. I'm like, okay. Okay.

• 1:38:53Jack Murphy?

  So how did that relationship end up working out?

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  Not good. Not good. Not good. Um, I also got into it with our first sergeant at the time a lot, you know.

• 1:39:09Speaker 04

  Like I said, we, it's not that I forgot I was in the Marine Corps. It was just that the reconnaissance community had always been a little to the right of center. You know, you have the Marine Corps rank and file rigid, like this is a Marine. And, and then over here you have recon who I'm not saying shouldn't adhere to the norm. But by virtue of its mission set doesn't.

• 1:39:39Jack Murphy?

  They have to adapt a little bit.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  Little bit. And I had a couple of individuals in the chain of command that were like, nope. This is the way we do business.

• 1:39:49Speaker 04

  That's not how we do it. I'll do it that way because all of you outrank me, but fuck you. This is not how we do it. So yeah, there was some contention. We, we did not get along.

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  We made it through. I made it through the deployment clearly, but it wasn't fun. It wasn't enjoyable. Yeah.

• 1:40:09Jack Murphy?

  Felt hamstrung, it sounds like.

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was. I was hamstrung. Um, I was really just ready for it to be over.

• 1:40:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:40:20Jack Murphy?

  How, how long was that deployment?

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  Um, seven, eight months.

• 1:40:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a long time.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  It is. Yeah, it is. And again, it's, it's Camp Fallujah and everything had just been. Like all of the fun of war was stripped away because, you know, you're living in a pod. And there's a dining facility and.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  There's all these rules about, well, this has to be done.

• 1:40:47Jack Murphy?

  How you can use the shower, what you have to have with you when you go to the chow hall and all this weird stuff.

• 1:40:53Speaker 04

  I'm like, this is not what I remember of oh three. And for me to go from that period and really be away from the Marine Corps in England while all of this other stuff was going on and now reintegrated with it. I have got a platoon commander that I can't stand and I've got some other people in the chain of command that are difficult and prickly to work with. It was just not a good experience.

• 1:41:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I recall that it kind of being difficult because you're like, maybe it's a sense of entitlement, but also it's just culture shock that you're doing these like combat operations. And then you come back to the FOB and there's like a whole one-page printout of the rules of how you're allowed to use the coffee maker. And it's like, this is feels weird, you know?

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  It does. And I think somewhere along the way,

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  we just industrialized the whole process of fighting.

• 1:41:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  The Marine Corps does not do peacekeeping very well. The Army doesn't either. In fact, I'll go so far as to say, America.

• 1:41:52Jack Murphy?

  No, we don't.

• 1:41:52Speaker 04

  We just don't. And that's what we were trying to do. You know, you're fighting this asymmetric warfare. At the same time, we're trying to help the transitional government of Iraq and it was just.

• 1:42:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. When, when the MPs are handing out speeding tickets on the FOBs.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Jack Murphy?

  It's kind of like, what are we doing here, guys? What are we doing?

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  Oh, and the road guard vests. I don't even want to talk about.

• 1:42:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  Fucking road guard vests.

• 1:42:17Jack Murphy?

  That was like a huge preoccupation. What? So yeah, I mean, that's, I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 1:42:26Jack Murphy?

  And so what, where did you land after that Iraq deployment?

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Back at first recon, I took over as the Headquarters and Service Company gunny.

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  So I was the company gunny for H and S. Um, I did that for a little while and then got another platoon. And this time we were gonna go on ship. So I was a platoon sergeant for a Mew. Which coincidentally would be my last, would be my last.

• 1:42:58Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool. I mean, that's pretty rare to get. Multiple platoons.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is at least multiple deploying platoons. So I've had, I think total five Mews, five Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments, which are all, you know, on ship. And I, during that five, held every position that you could have. So I bookended it very, very nicely. Yeah.

• 1:43:20Jack Murphy?

  Oh, you guys were back in the Pacific?

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, yeah. It was, um. That was a great deployment and I did some things on that deployment that I'd never been able to do before. Didn't even know we could. We went to, um. Went to Malaysia. I spent like a week in the jungle. With their Malaysian recon, just, just living on the land and, um. Eating monkey and squatting over rice and it was, it was fucking cool. Yeah. It was really cool. Um, Kuwait and did a bunch of other stuff. Um, yeah, it was fun. We had a lot of fun.

• 1:43:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Jack Murphy?

  And eventually they sent you to airborne school?

• 1:44:05Speaker 04

  Yes, Fort Benning. So, okay. That decision was made while I was on the way home from ship. On that Mew.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  At that time, Fort Benning was where you sent. The, like, your shipbirds, your, the people.

• 1:44:32Jack Murphy?

  For like four years, man.

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  As a Marine, especially as a recon Marine, like, oh wow. So I called up the monitor. The monitor is the person in the Marine Corps who sends people to their jobs. Like, they have the big chessboard and they're like, this person's up for reassignment. Where do I need this person? And I'm an E7, so I'm not cannon fodder. I'm gonna pick up E8.

• 1:45:00Speaker 04

  So the monitor, I had a good relationship with the individual and I, I see the orders come across the computer. I'm on ship and I'm like, oh no. So the first chance I got, I picked up the phone and I call him. And it was a very short conversation, but I basically said, right off the bat, like, I know that I have ruffled feathers, but I had no idea I was this much of a ship bird. And he said, slow down.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  I am not sending you to Fort Benning because you have done anything wrong, because you have not had a good career, because you are not a fan. I need the opposite. He said, we have been sending the worst of our worst to Fort Benning. We cannot do it anymore.

• 1:45:43Jack Murphy?

  Because it's giving the Corps a bad rap.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  It's giving the Corps a bad name and we have not had good mentorship and leadership at Fort Benning. So if you don't know, the Marine Corps has had a presence on Fort Benning since World War II. It is an agreement we made with the Army way back in World War II, which basically says,

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  we will allow the Marine Corps to go through our parachute school, but in return, we want one or two of your Marines to help teach. So the reconnaissance community is really the only people

• 1:46:15Jack Murphy?

  That are airborne.

• 1:46:16Speaker 04

  That are airborne qualified. So it inevitably stands to reason that the instructors would be from that community.

• 1:46:22Jack Murphy?

  One of my RIs on Benning was a Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps.

• 1:46:26Speaker 04

  And it's not just the airborne school. So we have Infantry Mortar Leaders Course there. We have Pathfinder. We have Jump Master. We have Ranger School. There are Air Assault Schools there. Fort Benning has a lot of schools. Each one of those schools has a Marine on the staff. All of those individuals have to be shepherded by somebody. That's what he was asking me to do. And I'm like, okay, I hate you, but I will go do this. And I did.

• 1:46:57Speaker 04

  Fort Benning was an interesting tour, you know from having worked there. I was part of the Marine detachment. I was the infantry operations chief for the Marine detachment. And it was very small. There was only 12 of us. It grew later. There was a time where the tank school that used to be at Knox was bracked, closed. They put all of that structure at Fort Benning. Fort Benning changes from the infantry center of excellence to the maneuver center of excellence. It doesn't matter. So now Marine Corps tanks are there. And we went from a 12 individual mom and pop detachment to, oh, we have 90 people here now.

• 1:47:42Speaker 04

  And that was interesting.

• 1:47:46Jack Murphy?

  And how was it providing that coaching, teaching, and mentoring to young Marines, young recon Marines coming through airborne school?

• 1:47:54Speaker 04

  So I spent a year as a static line jump master instructor. That was the first thing that I did.

• 1:48:00Jack Murphy?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. After that, I went into the office and was just, you know, permanently in the office as the

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  operations chief, essentially. So part of the duties and responsibilities would be to talk to the Marines when they showed up for the basic airborne school, or Marines that were showing up for Ranger school, or it didn't matter what. Like, I would be the guy that come by.

• 1:48:23Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  I was a master sergeant. I picked up master sergeant, so E8 halfway through that tour. And I would just be, you know, let's talk a little bit there, young sergeant. So, welcome to the Army. You were going to be called sergeant, whether you're an E5 or an E8.

• 1:48:39Jack Murphy?

  They all get called gunny.

• 1:48:40Speaker 04

  Yep, yeah, yeah. Either gunny or sergeant. I'd make, I'd make one correction a day. That was my quota. As an E8 or an E7 at that time, a lot of the soldiers would refer to me as sergeant. I'm like, I'm not a fucking sergeant. I'm a gunnery sergeant or a master sergeant. But one correction a day. After that, I reached my quota. And I would just like help manage expectations. There were a lot of Marines that would come through the schools and as Marines, for example, we don't wear PT gear in the mess hall. We just don't. It's horribly forbidden. Nobody would ever think to do that. But in the Army, after whatever, you're gonna go eat in PT gear. And so sometimes you'd have an overzealous

• 1:49:22Speaker 04

  staff sergeant, like, everyone's going back to change. And I'd have to be, listen, dude, they can't do that. There's a schedule. They don't have time for that. Just leave the little guys alone. Things like that. Or, you know, there was, I don't even know if I should say this. There was a senior enlisted Marine who failed the physical fitness test for the basic airborne course.

• 1:49:44Jack Murphy?

  Yikes.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was good. He then lied to his parent unit and said that he didn't fail, that there was an administrative error, that he was being recycled to the next class. So I had the unpleasant conversation with his unit to say, yeah, that's, that's not what happened. He didn't come back, oddly enough.

• 1:50:06Jack Murphy?

  I, I always found the Marines going through those schools to be pretty squared away. I think it might have been the SEALs that needed adult supervision.

• 1:50:14Speaker 04

  They did. And, and they stopped going through that.

• 1:50:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 1:50:17Speaker 04

  Back in the day.

• 1:50:20Jack Murphy?

  Do you remember, I don't know if this was still going on, and it sounds so bizarre to say this out loud. People watching this are probably like, what the hell? When we went through airborne school, they would like check to make sure that you weren't wearing underwear under your PTs. Because they're like, we have to monitor how hot or over heat exhaustion or something like that.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Possibly.

• 1:50:43Jack Murphy?

  And so they would do these like random underwear spot checks on guys. And one of the SEALs decided to wear lingerie underneath his PTs one day. So they check and he's wearing like a thong from Victoria's Secret or something.

• 1:51:00Speaker 04

  I went through the basic airborne course as a student, I want to say in 2002. It was one of the first things I did after Afghanistan and then um free fall school the next year. And we went through and there were still seals there and it was like, I look back now and I think to myself, what a frickin joke it must have been for those guys.

• 1:51:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was absolutely.

• 1:51:24Speaker 04

  To finish buzz, you'd be like, really?

• 1:51:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  This and they've proven clearly because their their parachute school is one week now, it doesn't take three weeks.

• 1:51:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  To jump out of a plane.

• 1:51:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that really feels like a relic of like the World War Two.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  It so does.

• 1:51:41Jack Murphy?

  And and there were complaints too, as I remember as we were getting out of the army, they're they're trying to change things because you remember to do a jump, a training jump, that's an all day event.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Jack Murphy?

  To come in and do your sustained airborne training, drop parachutes.

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  J M P I's.

• 1:51:56Jack Murphy?

  J M P I's, go down to the hangar, rig up, yeah, it's like a full day event. It's like, does it really need to be?

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  It's a lot of work and I gotta say, I still think tactically, well strategically, does an airborne unit have worth? Yes, but less and less. I mean, if you think about what the need for the 82nd Airborne is and I say that with all due respect to those individuals, but can you envision a battlefield where we would need to parachute? And hold ground and hold and seize an airfield for follow on forces in 2026 with what we know about taking place in Ukraine and the drone threat that has permeated warfare? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe.

• 1:52:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is sacrilegious, but you also have to ask, like, do we really need all of these guys? Uh, who are free fall and dive qualified?

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Jack Murphy?

  Like, but you know, the amount of people that we qualify on it versus how many combat jumps? We've done during the war, how many combat dives have we done during the war? I mean?

• 1:53:07Speaker 04

  And I spent the bulk of my time in recon on the dive team. You know, so I went to dive school in 97 and I spent the next, God knows how many years diving. With all manner of equipment and like the same thing that you trained me to do. There's now an autonomous system that can do better without any risk. So you're right. I don't know if it's really required anymore. Um, I think the Marine Corps sees it because they're drastically changing what their units are going to look like.

• 1:53:38Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. I in somewhere around this timeframe, when is the the generation kills turned into like a HBO series?

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  Two thousand and eight. Yeah.

• 1:53:48Jack Murphy?

  So it's around this timeframe. What what did? Did you get kind of hit a second time by the?

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  I did. I did. This time it is not as pejorative as it was in oh, three. Because he wrote those three articles and then it was turned into a book. That book was optioned by HBO. Now HBO is producing it. So I'm in Fallujah in oh, seven. And the series is in production and then comes out in oh, eight. So I come back from that oh, seven deployment almost to the first episode being released almost. Um, I helped a little bit in post-production, did some technical advising on the show. Um, you know, made some trips to Hollywood and Burbank, actually, and did some work. Met David Simon, um, met who at that time was very well, uh, or sorry, was unknown Alexander, right?

• 1:54:37Speaker 04

  Like hung out with him for a while, did some press stuff, but.

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  I didn't really get hit with the negative side.

• 1:54:44Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 1:54:45Speaker 04

  I did get hit with a lot of just the other side, the um. Love the show or love the book or, you know, um. Did this happen? Did that happen? Did he really say this? What did you think of Captain America? And a lot of these guys at that time were still in, they were still around and they were like, I'm not gonna. Slander or bad mouth or say one thing or another. He's over there. You can go ask him. I learned my lesson. You know, there was a bulk of time between oh, three and oh, eight for me to be like, yeah, I'm wiser, I'm older. I'm going to handle this one differently this time. So, I mean, discretion was definitely the better part of valor.

• 1:55:30Jack Murphy?

  Was it a little surreal seeing those experiences on the screen?

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes. I read the scripts early on. The technical advisor on that series was a good friend of mine. Um, he had access to the scripts. Well, the first technical advisor, he bowed out and another friend of mine ended up taking over. But point is, I read the scripts and I saw what they were trying to do. And I thought it was pretty good. Right? But you don't know what it's going to look like.

• 1:56:00Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:56:01Speaker 04

  And so I see it and I, and I thought, oh, okay. Well, I look good. The rest of you guys I don't know about, but they got this one. They nailed me clearly. Um, it was very, very surreal. One of the things those, like even before Generation Kill was even a thought, I don't know how it was for your experiences, but there were times where when you're just bored and sitting around as a platoon or a team or just a couple, you would sort of, what if like, if this was a movie, who would play you? Never in a million years that I actually think that that would come to light. And it did. And so, you know, there I am,

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm actually at Evan Wright's house in California. I'm there. Um, my girlfriend at the time is there and, um, Alexander Skarsgård is there and we're watching it in Evan's living room. We're watching a, a pre, like a pre-release DVD of the first episode, you know, and it's still got the editing code scrolling through. And it was like, yeah, all right, this is not bad. This is not bad. I, I think this will play well. I think it'll do it justice. And I think it did.

• 1:57:17Jack Murphy?

  What did you think has been like the kind of legacy of the series? Because people talk about it to this day. I mean, I think it resonated with a lot of folks.

• 1:57:26Speaker 04

  You know, I think we kind of hit on it earlier. There has not been a chronology or capturing and an oral history or written history about what was it like for the American soldier, and I'm using that term universally, to go to war? We just didn't have anything because we hadn't had a war.

• 1:57:51Speaker 04

  You could argue 91, but if anyone says Jarhead, I'm just gonna punch him in the face. That book sucks. I'm sorry. The book sucks. The movie was horrible.

• 1:58:00Jack Murphy?

  Three Kings was good.

• 1:58:00Speaker 04

  Three Kings was actually pretty good. Three Kings is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that movie. But there wasn't anything. We just, and this was it. Now, there has been numerous things since then, but you know, maybe I'm a little biased. I don't think anything captures just the raw grit. The absolute truth of what is it like for a young man to go to war?

• 1:58:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 04

  In this generation or in that generation? Nothing else captures it. And I think it's still to this day fairly representative of what it is like for that generation.

• 1:58:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and it's important to communicate that to the public.

• 1:58:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:58:42Jack Murphy?

  Who largely don't serve in the military.

• 1:58:45Speaker 04

  That is another interesting demographic, less than point, I want to say point one, point zero one percent of our population wears the uniform at any time, the lowest it's been in the history of the United States. And even less of that is actually in theater exchanging gunfire.

• 1:59:02Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:59:04Speaker 04

  So I do feel like your point is valid. This is transparency. This is empathy. This is understanding. I have never been one of these people to say, you know, the veteran needs a handout. No, but just understand what it's like. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who is 18, 19 years old, 20 years old,

• 1:59:26Speaker 04

  away from home, maybe for the first time, and in a foreign land, and they are picking up arms against an unknown aggressor.

• 1:59:35Speaker 04

  And seen. So I think it's interesting. Yeah.

• 1:59:40Jack Murphy?

  And for you, what came after your glorious stint at Fort Benning, Georgia?

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  I got another call from the monitor, this time.

• 1:59:50Speaker 04

  The last call that I would get from him, now, we talked all the time. I mean, I just talked to him a couple of months ago and he's long since retired. He basically said, what do you want to do? Do you want to stay in the Marine Corps or do you want to get out? Now, I had never intended to serve longer than 20 years. That was always my goal. 20 years to the day and I'm done. Nothing against the Marine Corps. I just wanted to do something else.

• 2:00:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:12Speaker 04

  But you gotta do your 20. If, once you're past 14, you're committed. That's sort of that fork in the road. And he says, do you want to stay in? And I said, no. He says, okay. I need you to do one more thing then. Then I would like you to go to Quantico. I want you to work at Raids and Recon and uh, if you're not going to get promoted, that's where you're going to go. I said, okay, I'll do that. And I did. And also very interesting career ender. Never expected to end up there.

• 2:00:52Speaker 04

  Raids and Recon is the

• 2:00:56Speaker 04

  group that is in charge of acquisitions for the reconnaissance community. And in some cases, the Marine Corps as a whole. So if you don't know, the Army has a version, the Navy has a version, the Air Force has a version. There is a group of people and it is a mix of civilian and active duty, whose job it is to buy you things. That uniform that you're wearing, that pack that you're carrying, that rifle you're shooting, all of those things had to go through some kind of a purchase process where there is a need identified. We need a new gun, okay? Tell me about this new gun. What are the capabilities? Describe it. What do you want it to do? Or maybe there's a, uh, there's a training gap. There's, who knows?

• 2:01:42Speaker 04

  Well, you've got to have a group of smart people, you know, engineers, logisticians, subject matter experts who say, oh, well, they need a new gun and it has to fit this criteria. Well, then that means it must be.

• 2:01:54Speaker 04

  You get the idea. So that's what I did. I was a, I was a project officer for Raids and Recon. I had a portfolio I was in charge of, which were boats and engines, breaching equipment and Hearst equipment.

• 2:02:06Jack Murphy?

  Hearst?

• 2:02:07Speaker 04

  Helicopter rope suspension training. So all of the Army's air assault equipment.

• 2:02:10Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 2:02:11Speaker 04

  Right? The Marine Corps, we call it Hearst. So if you're doing fast roping, if you're doing rappelling, if you're doing anything like that. That suite of equipment, we would label as Hearst. I was in charge of it. Breaching. So if you're doing explosive, mechanical, thermal, or ballistic breaching, all of the tools, techniques, tactics, and procedures, I would be in charge of. So for example, um, it's all about battery powered these days. The quickie saw, I'm sure you're familiar with it. It was gas powered. Those are great, but when you're using it in confined spaces like on a ship, that engine,

• 2:02:44Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:02:44Speaker 04

  That'll fill up a space pretty quick. What about an electric saw? Ooh, interesting. How do we recharge it? Um, what is the battery life? Does it have enough horsepower to get through a bulkhead of a ship?

• 2:02:54Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:02:55Speaker 04

  All that stuff. Um, but predominantly it was boats. The Marine Corps uses an inflatable craft called a Zodiac. You guys do too. Everybody uses it. It's kind of old technology. There's new stuff out there, so I worked on trying to bring that to market. Um, and then a lot of parachute testing. Go out to Yuma and, you know, get new data for, um, new glide data, release data for the parachutes, or a lot of underwater propulsion testing. A lot of diving, stuff like that. And then just going out to industry and talking to people and going to trade shows and finding new things and.

• 2:03:32Jack Murphy?

  That must've been actually a pretty good gig to help you transition into the civilian world. I don't know what, what you did in retirement, but.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  I worked, uh, after the Marine Corps. Do you want to jump ahead?

• 2:03:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, unless there's something in between the two that.

• 2:03:47Speaker 04

  Not really. I got out of the Marine Corps on a Friday and on a Saturday I was flying to my new job. Yeah. So I, I spent the last, uh, about 10 years in the intelligence community after the Marine Corps. Um, a good friend of mine was already doing the job and it's kind of one of those jobs where it's word of mouth.

• 2:04:09Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:10Speaker 04

  There's no website you can go to. There's no resume you can send. There's no application process. It's just like, hey, um, you interested in doing some work? Yeah, sure. What's the job? Can't tell you. Okay. Would I like it? Yeah. Well, can you tell me anything about it? No. You want to do it? Okay, let's try it. And it was like that. Um, my name was dropped. Phone call was made. Interview was done. And then, um, assessment and selection, which is no joke. There's been two schools in my life where I thought, I am not going to graduate. Dive School was one of them. I never unpacked my bag from Dive School. I went from Okinawa, Japan in 97

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  to Panama City, Florida, to the Naval Dive and Solving and Trading Unit for Marine Combat and Dive.

• 2:05:01Speaker 04

  I loved that school and I could swim like a fish, but I could not run to save my life. And they had extremely rigid PT standards. And I'm like, I am not going to pass this course. So I never unpacked my bag. And I graduated and I loved it and it was great. But the other thing that I thought there's no effing way I was going to pass was the assessment and selection for my last job.

• 2:05:25Jack Murphy?

  How calm.

• 2:05:26Speaker 04

  The shooting standards are incredible. I mean, there were guys from pick a unit, doesn't matter, all the letters that you could think of. They had guys there from all of those. You have a 78% attrition rate.

• 2:05:40Speaker 04

  It's hard. And I'm not a shooter, not like, I can shoot the long gun. But my pistol skills are just average and they couldn't be average. And so I was really worried about it and I had about three months to prepare. And I spent a lot of time doing a lot of shooting and a lot of things wrong. And the, um, organization sent me to a school in, um, it doesn't matter.

• 2:06:09Jack Murphy?

  Like a mid-south or something like that?

• 2:06:11Speaker 04

  You said it, not me.

• 2:06:14Speaker 04

  That changed my entire pistol approach.

• 2:06:17Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 2:06:18Speaker 04

  If not for mid-south, probably wouldn't have passed because I learned a way of shooting that

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• 2:07:27Speaker 04

  I wasn't aware of, and it completely changed.

• 2:07:30Jack Murphy?

  What was that thing that changed?

• 2:07:34Speaker 04

  I have a tendency to muzzle. I always have, because I learned how to shoot with very, very large caliber guns. It was...I never really had a proper pistol education. The long guns are different. So I learned how to shoot on some guns that were just like... Nobody learns how to shoot with a .454 Casul. I'm quoting a movie that was Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, but big guns. And so I have a tendency to muzzle a little bit.

• 2:08:03Speaker 04

  They taught me a way to press that support hand palm into the grip swell, and it helped. So much so that I suddenly started bringing my groups in nice. And I just, um, I naturally offset a little bit. I know I shoot low and left, so I offset a little bit right.

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

  And I was consistently making A boxes. It's all Ipsic target for scoring. So suddenly I'm getting As, where before I was getting Bs. And yeah, it worked out. It was. Yeah, it was great. And then the speeds. Like you draw from the holster, and you're talking about

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  two rounds in less than two seconds from the draw. They have to be in the A box. I mean, that's fast. And I just didn't do anything like that before. It wasn't that I couldn't, and obviously I did because I passed. But there was a learning curve there. Needless to say, it was incredibly, it was incredibly hard. And I watched a lot of people wash out. Dudes that come from communities that we would, we always would emulate. Like, wow, you're, you know, you're from that group. I thought for sure you...nope.

• 2:09:16Jack Murphy?

  Was there any like additional training you had to go through after that?

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  There wasn't anything that I had to go through, but I was afforded the opportunity to and some of the best training. I mean, amazing. And the people that you work with are really fantastic individuals. And you talked about transition and while Quantico, that last bookended tour in the Marine Corps was fantastic for helping me transition into the private sector. I promise you what really did it is I found myself in an organization of all prior military and in a semi military environment. So no, there wasn't a rank structure, but it's like, oh, you served here and you served there and I remember that part and you remember this. You know, all of the services from all, I mean, pick an SF unit and that's who you're all now with.

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  But you're wearing plain clothes and there's no rank and you're all doing the same job and it's fun. So there's a little bit of measuring still, but not much. And that's what really made the transition so seamless.

• 2:10:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And you said you did that for 10 years. Like what was, how did you like the job?

• 2:10:21Speaker 04

  Oh, it was fantastic. Um, not only were the travel opportunities incredible, but you're working with some people who are absolutely at the tip of the spear. And you're helping accomplish a mission that is really important to national security. You're helping support real world operations. And so there's relevancy. A lot of the things that we do in the Marine Corps or the Navy or the Air Force, it doesn't matter. You're not going to see the effects of for years to come. Like I have no idea in my heart of hearts if Iraq is a better country today because of 2003. I'd like to think that it is, but I can't prove it. It's hard to prove a negative.

• 2:11:04Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:11:05Speaker 04

  But I can emphatically say that I have helped, helped in a part of, I'm not taking ownership of it, but I have helped support operations that I know had immediate impact to national security and that's very, very gratifying.

• 2:11:22Jack Murphy?

  Was it, uh, speaking of transitions, was it difficult for you to transition from being a recon Marine to, I'm guessing in this case, more of like a clandestine low visibility sort of, um, Uh, framework.

• 2:11:38Speaker 04

  It was very easy because it was a lot of the stuff that I did wearing a uniform or sometimes plain clothes, but in the military under Title X and now it's a different title, but it's a lot of the same MO.

• 2:11:50Speaker 04

  More so in many respects, you, one of the things that I think it really solidified for me is just how much more vulnerable or less safe you are, the more that you try to make yourself safe.

• 2:12:04Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. The more armor you're sticking on the side of the vehicles.

• 2:12:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, all of it. The convoy operations, the, you know, the SOPs.

• 2:12:11Jack Murphy?

  Raising your profile.

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  You're just raising your profile and while it wasn't a foreign concept to me, I don't think I saw it illustrated as much when I left the Marine Corps and worked in the government sector and went, oh, wow, the State Department's rolling around in five Level Sevens, all in a convoy with toe straps hanging out. Yeah, you guys are fucking targets. Um, that kind of highlighted it for me. And so

• 2:12:38Speaker 04

  there were a lot of takeaways, a lot of things that I think the reconnaissance training and all of those years in uniform helped me along the way in that next walk of life. Yeah. And honestly, it was really, really easy to go from being a Master Sergeant in E8 in the Marine Corps with all of the courtesies and customs and now I'm just, I'm a private again. Like, no problem. You, I, I'll clean that for you. Yep. I will absolutely get you another cup of coffee. Dry cleaning need picked up? I'm on it. It was like, it was kind of cool. Again, to have nothing to worry about and just individual efforts. Yeah.

• 2:13:20Jack Murphy?

  And you did that for 10 years. What, what kind of convinced you to move on to the next thing?

• 2:13:25Speaker 04

  Nothing convinced me. Somebody took that away from me. So I, I, I had been working on the training side of the house and I loved it and it was incredible.

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  Probably the best job I have ever had. I like, and I, that is not hyperbole. I worked in a very small group with some amazing dudes. And, um, we had some great freedoms and we designed some fantastic training. I just happened to have the misfortune of.

• 2:13:59Speaker 04

  Telling the emperor he had no clothes.

• 2:14:03Speaker 04

  There was an individual at my last job. Let's see, I want to protect the name. So we will call this person Skylar. Skylar is a piece of shit.

• 2:14:15Speaker 04

  There was, yeah, so I had a personality conflict and I was, it wasn't egregious. But when the individual transitioned from the position in which I met him to a position of authority. He decided like your services are no longer required. I said, okay, no problem. I get it. And in hindsight, it's probably good because it afforded me the opportunity to do this. To do the Carry On Podcast, to have conversations with individuals such as yourself. About my story, about what comes next, and then all of the projects and things that Carry On allow for, because I couldn't do it in my last job.

• 2:14:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, right. They didn't want you being like public.

• 2:14:57Speaker 04

  No, no, you, you would have had to have asked permission for each and every, you know, podcast ahead of time for each and every, all of it.

• 2:15:06Jack Murphy?

  But that's actually interesting because I, I also gotta see how to phrase this. There's a guy that once worked for me and wrote for me, and I think he did the same job you did. But the client did not give a shit as long as he wasn't writing about the client.

• 2:15:23Speaker 04

  Fair, yeah.

• 2:15:24Jack Murphy?

  If you're writing about the Marine Corps, they're cool. No problem. Yeah.

• 2:15:28Speaker 04

  I think it's part and parcel due to my systems access. There's rules for individuals that have access to the system and those that don't. So if you have a TSSCI and you have the ability to log into these classified systems, you're under much greater restrictions than if you don't. And I think that's

• 2:15:50Jack Murphy?

  That could make sense.

• 2:15:51Speaker 04

  That's why. Yeah. And just by virtue of doing the job, you are still restricted, but not to the degree that somebody who is doing the job, oh, and you can log into the system. Yeah, they want to make sure that you're, you know, not talking about things that you shouldn't, sharing locations that you shouldn't. I get it. I get it, man. There's a lot of people that currently hold TSSCI's that shouldn't. I think

• 2:16:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Speaker 04

  1.2 million.

• 2:16:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:16:17Speaker 04

  And as we've seen through the news.

• 2:16:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  Some of you guys don't need it.

• 2:16:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, the military especially hands them out like candy.

• 2:16:25Speaker 04

  They do. And it's funny because when I left the Marine Corps, I had a, um, I had a TS. And then I went to the new job and they're like, have you ever held a TS for? I said, yes. Like, who have you had it with? I said, uh, you know, the Marine Corps. They're like, oh, that's so cute. Yeah, we don't fucking care. That, we don't recognize that. Like, they don't care at all.

• 2:16:46Speaker 04

  Like, we're starting from scratch. And then I guess I kind of realized, like, oh, there's different degrees of like, wow, okay, I get it now.

• 2:16:56Jack Murphy?

  Well, yeah, they don't put military guys through a lifestyle poly is one of the big differences.

• 2:17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, huge. So, yeah, when you go through that, it, you're definitely like, put through the wringer. Yeah.

• 2:17:06Jack Murphy?

  I don't know how most military guys can even pass that.

• 2:17:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, I, yeah, absolutely. I don't, I don't, I, I passed mine. So it can be done. But yeah, interesting.

• 2:17:20Jack Murphy?

  Um, so since you've, you know, left that position behind or, or helped out of that position, what, what's been consuming your time since then?

• 2:17:29Speaker 04

  Well, I have some side businesses. I have a distillery.

• 2:17:32Jack Murphy?

  Cool.

• 2:17:33Speaker 04

  Yep, yep. A single malt and a bourbon. I do have a small gun business, manufacturing. And, um, I can do modifications and then from whole metal AR-15s, AKs. So I do that. And I always have had those.

• 2:17:47Jack Murphy?

  Like fabrication?

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  Yep, yep.

• 2:17:49Jack Murphy?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:17:49Speaker 04

  Yep. And then, um, I'm back in school for my master's degree and that's taking up a lot of my time. I do have children. They take up a lot of my time. And then the podcast and the, the story and the conversation. I, I'm very motivated and passionate to shepherd that and grow and continue to.

• 2:18:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, see where it goes. Have conversations with folks.

• 2:18:18Jack Murphy?

  Tell us where people can go to find the distillery and the gun business.

• 2:18:22Speaker 04

  They both have websites. The distillery is called Raider Distilling. It is an homage to the Marine Raiders of World War II. I was not creating that title because of Marsoc, but I certainly don't mean any disrespect to the Marsoc folks. This, the bottle, the website, the, the, um, the history of the distillery, if you will, it's all goes back to World War II and those Marine Raiders. So that's why I named it what I named it. Um, the gun business, very innocuous. It's, it's Bravo 21 Tactical. And it's named so because of my platoon in Iraq in 03.

• 2:19:01Speaker 04

  It was, you know, Bravo Company, Second Platoon, Team One. So Bravo 21 Tactical is the website. So folks can go if they want. Um, yeah.

• 2:19:14Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, we spoke about it a little bit early on in the podcast, but the Carry On Podcast.

• 2:19:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:19:21Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and tell people again where they can go to find that.

• 2:19:25Speaker 04

  They can go to bradcolbert.us.

• 2:19:28Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:19:29Speaker 04

  Really easy to remember. Bradcolbert.us is the splash page for the website. And then from there, it talks about all of the different styles of interviews or videos that we do. And there's a variety of things that people may identify with. But our bread and butter is our weekly sit rep, we call it. So we talk about some current events, about an hour, hour and a half of discussion with news and stories that are relevant to the day.

• 2:19:55Jack Murphy?

  You got anything coming up that you're particularly excited about that you tease a little bit?

• 2:20:00Speaker 04

  Well, we, we're working our way through the Generation Kill Platoon. We've had several individuals come on. We are going to have Rudy Reyes next month. People seem to be very excited about Rudy. Uh, he is an individual that was portrayed in the book. He actually portrays himself in the show.

• 2:20:21Speaker 04

  He is on television now. He does one of those special forces shows.

• 2:20:27Jack Murphy?

  Cool.

• 2:20:27Speaker 04

  So he seems to be very popular. We're going to have him on next month in July. So I think people will probably be excited about that. And we're just going to continue to work. Nate Fick is going to come on the show. He was the platoon commander for that time. And we have a few others, all of which are forthcoming. And we also have authors too regularly have authors. We've had a couple. And they're coming up soon. Jody Fletcher has a book out. Andy Pretty has a book out, all of which are available. In future episodes coming up.

• 2:20:59Jack Murphy?

  Super cool.

• 2:21:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Jack Murphy?

  And we'll have links down the description for people who are watching this on YouTube or podcast or whatever. We'll have links to all these places. Before we get going today, Brad, is there anything that you know, you wish I had asked, anything I failed to cover here that you'd like to put out there?

• 2:21:18Speaker 04

  I liked the opportunity to come on the show and talk about some of the, you know, the history that I have been witness to and some of the stories that have brought me where I am. But honestly, the one thing that I feel I've always tried to let people know is I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I love the fact that people identify with the Generation Kill story. They may have been inspired by myself or others that are depicted in that story. But I still look back to the men from, you know, Vietnam or World War II, and there's not that many left, less and less every day.

• 2:21:56Speaker 04

  And the things that they did, I've been to Normandy. I've seen the sand. I've touched those pillboxes that the American Rangers had to cliff assault to get to.

• 2:22:10Speaker 04

  I didn't do anything.

• 2:22:12Jack Murphy?

  Through the shores of Tripoli, Marine Corps has been around for a while.

• 2:22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I've been to what was the Beirut barracks in Lebanon. I have, it's now an airport, but like I've seen that soil. I've been to the beaches at Tripoli. I have touched that sand. All of these places. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I am so humbled to have been a part of the Marine Corps' story, but also just the story of all of us who have sacrificed. Um, my, my hats off to them.

• 2:22:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. That's great. Well, best of luck with, uh, podcasts, the businesses. It sounds like you're doing good stuff.

• 2:22:51Speaker 04

  I appreciate it, my friend. Thank you for having me on your show.

• 2:22:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Thanks for making the trip out here to New York.

• 2:22:55Speaker 04

  It's my pleasure. Yeah, really.

• 2:22:57Jack Murphy?

  So thank you, everyone who, uh, joined us today and, uh, we'll see you guys next time.

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• 2:24:04Jack Murphy?

  I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, uh, the things that are on the Team House, on our geopolitics podcast, Eyes On, uh, things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out, we send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can

• 2:24:48Jack Murphy?

  find our newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.

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