#14 Alan Cooper - Marine Recon/Green Beret/CIA Contractor

On this episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, Alan Cooper a longtime friend of Shawn's who is a Recon Marine, a Green Beret, and a CIA Contractor sits down with Shawn and discusses some of the highlights of his career. Alan Cooper was a Reconnaissance Marine in Operation Desert Storm who was on the mission that helped end the entire war. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shawn-ryan-show/id1492492083 Alan Cooper Links: Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/truegritwooddesigns Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phalanx_concealment_llc https://www.instagram.com/truegritwooddesigns Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 02

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

• 0:50Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:00Speaker 03

  It's time to get away in a new Hyundai vehicle during the Hyundai Getaway Sales Event at Woodhouse Hyundai. The Hyundai lineup of sedans and SUVs has the capability you need and technology and features you want. Like the all-new 2023 Hyundai Palisade and Hyundai Tucson. This holiday season, get into a vehicle that will give you confidence with Hyundai Owner Assurance, America's best 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty. Visit us online at woodhousehyundaiofomaha.com.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  He looks at us and he goes, "What kind of weapons you got?" We're like, "We got AT4s, a 50-cal." He goes, "You got a tripod for that 50-cal?" "No, but we got a 60 and we got a tripod for that." And, you know, M16s and stuff like that, grenades and claymores. He's like, "Well," he goes, "I want you to get that 60. I want you to get it up on the roof, put a guy up there with them. I want you, you got 10 minutes to get on the radio, call back to your rear and tell them you're done. You're not talking to them for the rest of the night because we've been D after and we're gonna get overrun tonight."

• 2:20Shawn Ryan?

  I hope you're enjoying The Sean Ryan Show. Let me take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our Patreon community receives exclusive behind-the-scenes content from The Sean Ryan Show, as well as an extensive library of Vigilance Elite videos not seen anywhere else. I also engage in live video chat with Tier 3 members once a month, where we discuss a variety of topics. Vigilance Elite Patreon is what makes The Sean Ryan Show possible. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. And head over to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and get your subscription today.

• 3:05Speaker 06

  Only soldiers can talk of war and the adrenaline and the fear, and what it's like to know that the enemy is all around you and may be coming at you. In a moment, some Marines are going to tell us about that. Serving as scouts, they got caught up in the battle for the Saudi Arabian town of Kafji.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  Nobody expected that Kafji to happen. Nobody.

• 3:33Speaker 07

  The battle for Kafji was won partly because of what two small US reconnaissance teams did. They were in Kafji as spotters to report on enemy troop movements and to call in air and artillery strikes, but they became trapped behind enemy lines for two days.

• 3:52Speaker 08

  All the time it was going up.

• 3:56Speaker 08

  First time, and this is my first time ever going to Kafji. Being 21, uh, yeah, it was scary.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Well, what's the contingency if we get overrun? He's like, "Well..." And he had a star cluster. He goes, "I'm gonna take this star cluster, I'm gonna walk up in that yard, and I'm gonna pop it up, and everything around here is gonna light up like the 4th of July."

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  So there's six of you guys and a small SF team in this city, and that's it?

• 4:23Speaker 09

  Before dawn Friday, scattered bands of Iraqi snipers still roamed the town. They were all that was left of a force of at least one battalion that had attacked Kafji. The Saudis claim the Iraqis lost hundreds of dead and wounded, while allied forces supposedly took only four dead and eight wounded.

• 4:45Speaker 08

  All kinds of stuff going through your mind, you know. Remember you got a mission. Complete the mission.

• 4:53Speaker 08

  Do your job, basically.

• 5:01Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to SRS. As always, I want to kick things off and say thank you to all the patrons who've given us a tremendous amount of support. Those of you who have been here since the beginning have noticed the production value just continues to get better every episode. I also want to talk about our new YouTube channel, Sean Ryan Clips. Sometimes these episodes are long and they can be kinda hard to digest in one sitting. So what we've done is we've broken up all the previous episodes and we're releasing them on the YouTube channel Sean Ryan Clips. So go check that out. And lastly, if you can't support us on Patreon,

• 5:46Shawn Ryan?

  we would love to get a review from you on iTunes. Click the link below. Please leave us a review on iTunes. All we want is just one word. If that's all you have time for, that's perfect. Thank you. Let's get on with the show. And now for our next guest. 014. He was a reconnaissance Marine, a Green Beret, and a CIA contractor. He also served in Desert Storm, which was a war in the Middle East over 30 years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my very good friend, Mr. Alan Cooper.

• 6:33Shawn Ryan?

  Coop.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  What's up?

• 6:35Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the, uh, the show.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 6:38Shawn Ryan?

  You're the only one that's been up here before we actually interview you.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:44Shawn Ryan?

  The only one.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  Am I?

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's it, yeah, what's it feel like sitting in that chair now that we're not running around?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  It's the hot seat, man. I'm itching, nervous.

• 6:55Shawn Ryan?

  I get nervous every time, too. But, uh, yeah, you know, you built that bar over there? That nice, uh, Live Edge tabletop, which I turned into a photo.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Which is nice. I like that.

• 7:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  I would've went that route too, myself.

• 7:11Shawn Ryan?

  You would have?

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:13Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  I didn't care for them legs, but I do like it hanging on a wall.

• 7:17Shawn Ryan?

  And you did the V. You pretty much built half the damn studio up here.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Well, it looks like you beat up the V a little bit, but, you know.

• 7:24Shawn Ryan?

  I, well, I, I broke it, but I glued it back together when I was putting it up.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  You should've told me. I would've made you knew what.

• 7:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we'll talk about that.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah.

• 7:34Shawn Ryan?

  Offline, but, uh, I got you a little present.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  So, go ahead. It's in the box over there.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Present?

• 7:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Almost everybody gets a present. I didn't get the last couple guys a present because the subject matter was so serious.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Oh, look at that, man. Desert Storm.

• 7:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well, I'm, you are the only person I know that served in Desert Storm. Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Is that a fact?

• 8:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  I got some gummy bears.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  I do like your gummy bears.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  More gummy bears? Wow, man. What do we got here?

• 8:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know what that is.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I know what that is.

• 8:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's just a couple of fat pills.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness, dude. Wow.

• 8:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  This is my favorite. And he knows it. This is my kryptonite.

• 8:32Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  That's a peanut butter bucket.

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  That's a peanut butter bucket. Yeah, you know, there's nothing, usually they got like articles or podcasts or YouTube videos or news or something to research the guests. So there's nothing to research on you. So I had to, uh, get in touch with Lori, your wife.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, my wife. She, she told you my kryptonite, huh?

• 8:55Shawn Ryan?

  She did. She did.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Where'd you get these?

• 8:59Shawn Ryan?

  I think I found them in an antique store.

• 9:03Shawn Ryan?

  I used to be addicted to antiquing and then I wound up with a house full of shit.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  I've actually got stacks of these dude.

• 9:10Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  My dad collected them while I was in the.

• 9:13Shawn Ryan?

  So are do you, are you in one of those?

• 9:15Speaker 04

  I don't believe.

• 9:16Shawn Ryan?

  You don't have a trading card?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 9:18Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't make the cut?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  No, didn't make the cut this time.

• 9:20Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's too bad.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Oh, well.

• 9:21Shawn Ryan?

  You probably should have had.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  That's great, man. Appreciate it. Thanks.

• 9:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, but um, Ben, I've been trying to get you up here for I don't know how long and you kept putting it off and putting it off and you live like 10 miles down the road.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Well.

• 9:39Shawn Ryan?

  So let's just go ahead and address the elephant in the room.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  The elephant in the room. The reason why I was putting it off is, as you can see, I'm missing my front tooth.

• 9:48Shawn Ryan?

  You got it back and then you.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did. I got, I've had two failed implants in that tooth. I've been dealing with this tooth for 42 years. I got it knocked out in a fight with one of the neighbor kids back in the seventies when I was nine, I think I was nine. He knocked it out with an axe.

• 10:08Shawn Ryan?

  With.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  With a little hatchet.

• 10:09Shawn Ryan?

  Serious shit going on.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Well, we played, we played rough back then.

• 10:13Shawn Ryan?

  Apparently.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Was no, you know.

• 10:15Shawn Ryan?

  He's going for the jugular, huh?

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah. So, yeah, I've been dealing with it and uh, just what, two months, three months ago, it failed again. So I had to get it taken out and now I gotta get a whole bridge. Which means I gotta shave all them teeth down like a hockey player and stick it up in there.

• 10:35Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  So we didn't want to wait for any longer. So we decided to do it without tooth.

• 10:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we said to hell with it.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:42Shawn Ryan?

  We'll just uh, address the, the elephant in the room.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Heck with it.

• 10:46Shawn Ryan?

  It was like pulling teeth trying to get you in there.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Little, yeah.

• 10:53Shawn Ryan?

  But uh, now I kinda wanna just talk about, you know, like I said, I don't know anybody or know of anybody that was in Desert Storm. And uh, I think I was eight years old. That kicked off in what, 90?

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:08Shawn Ryan?

  And uh, yeah, so I was eight years old when that kicked off. I remember. Buying all those damn trading cards and yeah, yeah, those are like first grade, I think. But um, so I want to talk a lot about that. I know. You know, you had a major part in that war and uh, and uh, got some decorations from it. And you're also one of the only people I know, maybe the only one that was a. You know, Marine reconnaissance, Marine uh, special operations. Then at some point you moved over to Green Beret. Uh, Army Green Beret, another uh.

• 11:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, branch of special operations. And then we wound up meeting at uh, CIA contracted, so. Uh, and um, yeah, so you got. Three pretty badass titles, CIA, Green Beret, Marine recon. Am I missing anything here or?

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Nope, that's pretty much it.

• 12:15Shawn Ryan?

  Do you can, that's it? You didn't overachieve or anything, are you?

• 12:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 12:20Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Uh, no, just was blessed, fell in place for me.

• 12:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and another reason I wanted to get you on is because. Most of the people that come on the show, as you know, that they have something that they're trying to promote, whether it's a nonprofit or they have. Uh, they just want to get their story out. But like I said, you know. No pun intended, it was like pulling teeth trying to get you in here and uh, and I want to say that. I. I can't speak for the entire community, obviously, but I think that you. Are a good representation of. The majority of the special operations community. You don't like talking about what you did. You don't like letting people know what you did.

• 13:08Shawn Ryan?

  You don't like talking about transition and all the challenges that you faced. And, um, and, uh, is if, as I can imagine, you're extremely uncomfortable in that chair right now.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, my heart's going like this.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  You're absolutely correct on all that. We don't like talking about it.

• 13:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  You just, it's not, doesn't feel normal to talk about it. Especially, you know, if me and you were sitting here one on one, and nobody else was in a room, yeah, we could sit there and rap all day, but I know it's going out on the waves, you know, the airwaves, so.

• 13:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's unusual.

• 13:48Shawn Ryan?

  Be good, though, you know? Your kids will hear it. Your family will hear it, your wife, your parents, siblings. And, uh, you know, we're documenting history here, so it's pretty cool.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  In the history books.

• 14:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Hopefully, they don't rewrite it.

• 14:07Shawn Ryan?

  But you grew up in New York.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I grew up in a town up in upstate New York called Ilian, New York.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  If you own a Remington shotgun or rifle, look at the barrel and it'll have Ilian, New York stamped to it. My dad worked at Remington Arms for thirty-eight years, so that's where I've been raised around guns my entire life. Small town. It was a village. Actually, called a village when I lived there because it was so small, but it's since grown up a little bit, and now it's called a, uh, a town. Um, I went to the school,

• 14:49Speaker 04

  the town next door, which was called Mohawk Ilian. But yeah, that's where I grew. It's in central New York.

• 14:58Shawn Ryan?

  What made you want to join the Marine Corps?

• 15:01Speaker 04

  I knew I was gonna join the military when I was eight. Soon as I figured out what the military was. I would actually, when I was a kid, I would get out. You used to be able to get a magazine, there'd be a recruitment ad in the magazines. And I would pull them out and fill them all out and send them in.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  And it was, you know, an invitation for a recruiter to give you a call. But I was looking for the free headbands and the free wristbands and the signs and stuff like that. And they were calling me up when I was like 10 years old, going, "Hey, we're wanting to talk to Ellen Cooper."

• 15:39Speaker 04

  My mother would answer the phone and she'd go, "Yeah, you're gonna have to wait for about another 10 years before he's old enough to go. He's only 10." But I was looking to get the free stuff. But I knew I was going in the military at a young age. It was absolutely no question.

• 15:58Shawn Ryan?

  What was it? What inspired you? Was it family history?

• 16:01Speaker 04

  No, it wasn't family history. I was actually from my immediate family. I was the first one that ever went in. My dad worked in a factory his whole life, you know? But, you know, I was, I come from a, I don't want to say poor, but we were a low, medium-class family. We, you know, my mom used to shop for my clothes at the Goodwill and stuff like that. And I mean, we were by rich and by no means, I can remember my dad telling me, "Yeah, we used to go down there and buy, uh, french fries at McDonald's for 10 cents, you know, every Thursday." It was french fry night and still today, I still eat McDonald's french fries.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  But there were 10 cents back then and my dad's like, "Well, I made $2.10 an hour back then too," you know? So they were kind of pricey.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  The thing that made me want to come in, I think, was just I liked that war type thing, you know, war they depict, you know, this was Vietnam War was going on. It was a G.I. Joe at that time, you know, where all G.I. Joe's running around and it just the country, you couldn't turn the TV on without seeing a Marine Corps, you know, commercial and stuff like that, or the Army. It was just very appealing to me, very appealing.

• 17:29Shawn Ryan?

  So how, how young were you when you joined?

• 17:33Speaker 04

  I actually joined the delayed entry program, which was, well, I wanted to join when I was 18 or 17, but my mother wouldn't sign the paperwork for me to go in because I was underage. So I actually had to wait until I was 18 before I could sign. Her philosophy behind that was I'm not going to sign you into something and then have you hate it and then come back and blame me for it. So, but I actually, my last year, my senior year in high school, I was actually enlisted, ready to go.

• 18:05Shawn Ryan?

  What year was that?

• 18:06Speaker 04

  That would have been 87 because in 88 I left.

• 18:10Shawn Ryan?

  88 you left?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  1988, August of 88. I actually left two days before my 19th birthday.

• 18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Paris Island.

• 18:21Shawn Ryan?

  What was your job description?

• 18:25Speaker 04

  In the Marine Corps?

• 18:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Well, I started out, I started out as a tow gunner. And the funny thing is, is the way I got there was the Marine Corps had started a new program called MCT, Marine Combat Training. And I was one of the first dudes to go through this entire program. And it was basically set up for, to teach every Marine, regardless of whatever MOS you were to be, to be a rifleman, or no combat operation type stuff.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  And I went through that and it seemed like it was like months, but I'm sure it was only like thirty days or something like that. But there was a road march on that thing. And I got the biggest freaking blisters on my, my heels. I'm talking, they were deep. And when it came to picking out MOSs, they go, what MOS do you want? I go, I want whatever MOS. They were like, driving that Humvee and I don't have to walk. And it was a tow gunner. So I was actually a tow gunner when I enlisted into the Marine Corps.

• 19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  And that's kind of part of the infantry. Infantry's broke up into a machine gunner, mortar men, basic infantrymen, and then a tow gunner. So I chose a tow gunner because I didn't want to walk no more. I was tired of it.

• 19:45Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. How long were you doing that before?

• 19:49Speaker 04

  I was a tow gunner for approximately, I think about eight months. I got stationed in Hawaii.

• 19:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  So I went through tow gunner training, right? And then I got stationed over into Hawaii. I was in Hawaii in a tow gun, tow gunner platoon for, I mean, like three, three, four months, maybe. And they came in and they said, we need you guys to take a swimming test. So they threw us all in the pool, gave us this extensive swim test. And only eight of us come up out of the water, basically passed. And they said, out of you eight right here are no longer in tow gun, tow gunners or tow platoon. You're now in the special training section. And that's how my career started progressing. It was pretty cool.

• 20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Just right off the bat, you didn't even, they didn't even give you a choice? It was going into special operations.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  No, you're going, you're special training section. And what it was, was it was, uh, there was only eight of us. And then one dude was in charge of it. And, uh, they took us and they sent us to Coronado.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  In Coronado, they taught us over the horizon navigation. You ever hear the, there was a course out there called Coxon Course. So I went through that Coxon Course. It was five weeks long in Coronado.

• 21:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, real quick, just for the audience, because I don't know what that is. Over the Horizon is those little Zodiac, those rubber boats. And basically what you're doing is you're navigating

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  that little boat in the middle of the ocean over the horizon, meaning

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:28Shawn Ryan?

  past where the eye can see.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Yep. It was the, uh, the F-470 Zodiac and the Boston Whaler, which had, uh, twin, twin 70s on it. It was a small craft. Um, but yeah, you're exactly right. We did it over the Horizon Navigation. We did, uh, well decked launches out of a ship and, uh, some scout swimming type stuff like that. But the main thing was, uh, over the horizon to do amphibious landings. So they sent us there and we did that. And then they made us all rappel masters. Then we, they made us all high speed cast and recovery masters. And I don't know if they even do that anymore. Do they do that anymore?

• 22:14Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, they did it, but it was more out of tradition when I did that. They weren't, it was kind of, I don't want to say worthless training, but

• 22:22Speaker 04

  It is.

• 22:22Shawn Ryan?

  you know, we're never gonna do it.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  I thought it was worthless back then. I'm like, why don't you just stop the damn boat and let them, let them get in, you know? But basically, for those of you that don't know, it's, you took an F-470 Zodiac or a rubber, rubber craft and you mounted it onto a, a larger craft, a larger boat. And then you would have swimmers out. The whole concept behind it was, is you were basically too far out or you're too, too close to shoreline for a ship to get in to pick you up. So you had your scout swimmers that did the mission, came out, went out, swam out to

• 23:03Speaker 04

  a, a depth where this boat could pick you up and they would hold a lasso out basically and flip you up into the back of the boat. And then go out to the ship. So we learned that. Then we did spy rigging. They made us all spy masters. So, once everybody was qualified in all this, these disciplines, we went ahead and started training the line units on amphibious landings, scout swimming techniques and stuff like that.

• 23:32Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, did you know that this was special operations when you were doing it?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  No, we didn't look at it like that. You gotta remember back in 19, this would have been, what, 1990, 1989, the Marine Corps had no special operations. They didn't recognize anything as being special operations. They didn't even consider reconnaissance, force recon, or battalion recon as being special ops. It was just the Marine Corps, period.

• 24:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  So, you know, you got your little designations and other branches where in the Marine Corps, you're just a Marine, period. You know, it's like, hey, he's SF, or he's a combat controller in the Air Force, or this or that, Navy SEAL. In the Marine Corps, you're just a Marine. Back then. I don't know what it's like now.

• 24:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's probably for the better.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, you know. So, we did that. And then we basically taught amphibious landings and did a lot of operations with, we trained a lot of Brits on it, too, and Malaysians. I remember doing some Malaysians. We did a lot of Malaysians cross-type training.

• 24:44Shawn Ryan?

  Can you give a brief description on what a scout swimmer is?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  Scout swimmer is basically an individual who launches either from a small boat. So, what, what we used to do is, and this is one of the pictures I showed you there, it's with the subs. Back in the 90s, early 90s, they were determining on whether or not to get rid of this different class of submarine. They felt that the use for it was no longer. At least, this was my understanding. So, they used the Marine Corps, they used recon to go ahead and show that there is still an application for this sub. You can still use it. So, what we would do is, we would get on the sub, and we would do dry deck. And wet deck launches off the sub.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  We would take the little zodes, that 470, within 500, about 500 meters from the coastline. And then deploy scout swimmers. So the scout swimmer, what you would do is deploy, you get in the water with your fins on, all your gear, your weapon, and you would fin all the way into, into a certain distance from the coast, from the actual hinterland, you know, the coastline. And you would do a series of events. You know, you would also recount the coast, go up and down the coast.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Prescribed distance, like, we're gonna go 1,000, or not 1,000, 100, 100 yards this way, then we're gonna go 100 yards this way, recounting the coast, seeing if there's anywhere, anybody on the coast itself. And then we would come in a little bit further, a little bit further, come up on the coast, sneaky, you know, sneaky sons of bitches. And get up on the, up on the land, and then do a series of zigzags, looking for a suitable place to hide a boat. Once a suitable place to hide the boat was found, we would go ahead and signal the boat, radio, or whatever type of light we had. Bring the boats in, they have 470s, Zodiacs.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Bring them up in, take the motors off, and we would silently take them all up into the hinterland. The hinterland being where the vegetation starts, on a beach. Hide it, go off, do your mission. Once your mission was complete, come back, recover the boats, and then launch back out. We would take the zodes out, to a certain distance or a location where the sub was loitering. The sub would come in, periscope would go up, and we would stretch a line between our zodes. The periscope would grab us, and then pull us out to a suitable distance where it would then surface, and then we would get back down in the sub.

• 27:47Shawn Ryan?

  Just for the

• 27:48Speaker 04

  That's a lot.

• 27:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, just for the audience, when you hear special operations, first ones in, you know, that's basically, that's one of the ways what they're, what they're saying is a beach insertion like that, hydro reconnaissance, sometimes you're calling in, you're looking for a place where more forces can get in.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:09Shawn Ryan?

  Or you're just gonna do an operation.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:11Shawn Ryan?

  Get in real quick, do your thing.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:13Shawn Ryan?

  And get right back out, but this, this is one of the ways how we as special operators get in to a target before

• 28:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:22Shawn Ryan?

  anybody else, before conventional forces, so.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  And that, yeah, you're right. That's one run reason. Another reason we did it was to do hydra- hydrographic surveys. And we actually did a few hydrographic surveys for LCACs to come in.

• 28:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yep.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  All interesting, very interesting, fun.

• 28:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  We had a good time. I had a good time in the Corps.

• 28:48Shawn Ryan?

  You liked that?

• 28:49Speaker 04

  I loved it.

• 28:50Shawn Ryan?

  Man. I was not a fan of hydro recon.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Loved it, dude.

• 28:55Shawn Ryan?

  But when did you move into, so when did you, was there a graduation?

• 29:01Speaker 04

  For?

• 29:01Shawn Ryan?

  From training?

• 29:04Shawn Ryan?

  When you got your, did you get the designation?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  For STS? There was nothing. This was just something they stood up and that was it, man.

• 29:11Shawn Ryan?

  So you're like the very first

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Very first.

• 29:13Shawn Ryan?

  force recon Marine.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Yep. I even had a, I had a a Boston Whaler, one of the Boston Whalers with my name on it. We all had our names on it. It was cool.

• 29:26Shawn Ryan?

  No shit, so you're a flank owner for force reconnaissance?

• 29:29Speaker 04

  No, this was for STS.

• 29:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Special Training Section.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  How I got the recon. Was through these guys.

• 29:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  So what happened was the Gulf War kicked off. Well, it started in, I want to say August of 90.

• 29:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Sometime like that, around there. And the eight of us, STS guys, were, what they had done is because nobody wanted us anymore as far as paperwork goes, they didn't want to take care of us paper wise. So they kind of just folded us into recon, said, "You guys aren't recon, but paper wise, you fall into recon." Because nobody else wants you. We're like the bastard children, right? So we're sitting in the chow hall, all eight of us sitting there eating, and we're like, "The war just kicked off." And we're like, "The hell are they gonna use us for?" I mean, there's no boats in the desert? You gotta remember, we were only, we were 19 years old, 20 year old dudes, man. We didn't know nothing.

• 30:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  We're sitting there eating. And it was funny because the minute we got done eating and we walked over, they, the recon guy, the, I believe he's the first sergeant, came up to us and said, "Go get your shit together, get your shit packed. You're now recon. We're going to war." We were like, "You gotta be kidding me."

• 31:00Shawn Ryan?

  Were you excited?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Was I excited? Um, to tell you the truth, I don't remember whether I was excited or not. I was more like flabbergasted as to, "What the hell am I gonna do?" Because recon, you know, there's a lot of training involved in becoming a reconnaissance. They didn't even make us do the damn indoctrination.

• 31:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  They were like, "Based off of what you guys do, and you've been doing it, you're basically doing a lot of the Marine Corps recon mission now. So you're just recon now."

• 31:36Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. I would think you would be excited. I mean, eight years old, you're mailing in

• 31:42Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:43Shawn Ryan?

  snippets to the recruiters and having axe fights with your buddies.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  You gotta remember, I'm 52 years old. I can't remember everything.

• 31:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  We were all, uh...

• 31:54Speaker 04

  We're all like in awe, basically, wow, we're gonna, we're going to combat, we're going to a war zone, you know? And the Gulf War was the first substantial, you know, war since Vietnam. I mean, you had a little conflicts like down in Grenada and Panama and stuff like that, but nothing at this level.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  And we had enough time to sit there because we didn't deploy until September to hear all the news and the horror stories. I don't know if you guys have ever heard them, but they were predicting there was going to be like 10,000 US soldiers killed in the first freaking hour, the wave. Because Saddam Hussein had enough time to build up a first offensive belt, which was minefields, and we can talk about that, but minefields all throughout the entire border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

• 32:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get into that, let's take a quick break, and then I just want to give a quick history lesson to the audience because that was so long ago.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 33:03Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Operation Desert Storm, or the Gulf War, happened over 30 years ago. So let's do a quick recap on what happened. On August 2nd, 1990, Saddam Hussein, the prime minister of Iraq, sent his army into Kuwait to basically take it over. Now Kuwait was a major oil supplier to the United States. The eight years prior to this, Iraq was at war with Iran, and the US actually backed Iraq. We actually turned them into the fourth largest military in the world at that time. Now, we have to back Kuwait because they posed a great threat to Saudi Arabia, also

• 33:47Shawn Ryan?

  another major oil producer. So if they would have taken Kuwait, if Iraq would have taken Kuwait, then Iraq would have turned itself into the fifth largest oil-producing country.

• 34:00Shawn Ryan?

  In the world, so we had to step in. Now, let's just go over a couple of key facts with the war. Now, George Bush sent over 500,000 US troops to Operation Desert Shield. On January 17th, 1991, Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm, after all diplomacy that we tried to do failed. Desert Storm became the largest air campaign at the time since the war in Southeast Asia, Vietnam. The US and 40 allied nations flew 18,000 combat missions, over 116,000 air sortie missions,

• 34:43Shawn Ryan?

  and dropped 88,500 tons of ordnance in that war. The air attacks during this war lasted for a total of six weeks, while the ground war actually only lasted for 100 hours. Iraq tried to split up the US coalition by launching SCUD missiles at Israel. However, Israel did not respond, thanks to its allied partnership with the United States. Desert Storm was the first time that we saw the MIM-104 Charlie missile system used in combat, which is basically a missile system used to intercept the SCUD missiles that were launched from Iraq.

• 35:27Shawn Ryan?

  It is also the first war where the US Air Force utilized space technology and stealth technology in the war. In total, about 697,000 US troops took part in that war, with 299 losing their lives. Let's get back to the show.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Now, the rest of the story.

• 35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, you're now recon, and you're packing your shit, you're going to war.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  I'm now recon. They said, "You're going to Kuwait," or, "We're going to Saudi Arabia," because Kuwait was overtaken by Iraq. We were like, "Where's Kuwait?"

• 36:15Speaker 04

  I didn't know where Kuwait was, like, like them guys in Vietnam, where's Vietnam? Alright, so where's Kuwait? So, we looked up, we found out where Kuwait was. So, we actually got our gear ready, they started giving us classes on how to do call for fire and stuff like that. Wasn't really much time to do patrolling type stuff and, and you know, first of all, there wasn't even a second or a third platoon. There was only two platoons in recon at the time, and when they integrated us in there, they stood up a third platoon and split us up with a bunch of new guys that were coming in. So, we called us ourselves Third Herd is, you know,

• 37:00Speaker 04

  whenever you're third platoon, you're third herd. So, we got in there, we set up, we got ready, we started packing, checking gear, repacking. I mean, you know, the loadout is just horrendous. Inspection, inspect this, and whatnot. I mean, the rules, and you had the rules, you can't take any porn with you, you can't take any booze with you, or any personal firearms, because we went all, we all went out and actually bought our own pistols.

• 37:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, we all went out and bought our own pistols, thinking we're gonna take, take our own pistols over there, and they're like, no, you're not. So, they squashed that, but, good thing though, because I bought a Taurus and the damn thing broke like the first frigging time I used it.

• 37:47Shawn Ryan?

  That's what you want, bought a Taurus?

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's all I could afford, I was an E3, man. So, yeah, we got it all ready to go. Everything was ready to go, I think we left in September, some, somewhere around September, from where I remember. We flew there, I believe it was a, they don't have them anymore, it was a C-141. I believe we flew over there in a C-141 and landed somewhere in Saudi Arabia.

• 38:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, how long, when they told you, pack your shit, you're going to war, did they give you a time estimate of how long it was gonna be before you were actually?

• 38:26Speaker 04

  They did, but it kept getting kicked back, getting kicked back. We were actually on lockdown, we couldn't go anywhere. And, we had to stay in the barracks and whatnot, but, it was like, okay, we're going, and then we went.

• 38:41Shawn Ryan?

  How, how long was it?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Uh, from the time we got the word until the time we left, about three weeks.

• 38:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  So you did call for fire classes?

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:53Shawn Ryan?

  And?

• 38:54Speaker 04

  And whatever other classes they want. You gotta remember, we didn't have all the technology. We got, I had a Pric 77 dude.

• 39:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  And a 104.

• 39:02Shawn Ryan?

  That's true.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  You know, Pric 77 ain't hard to u- use. I mean, you're just cracking your, you're, you know, your life.

• 39:11Shawn Ryan?

  Nowadays, that's like a...

• 39:12Speaker 04

  We had no GPSs. We had a compass. We got a GPS and, uh, when we got over there though, it wasn't actually a GPS out of a helicopter. And there was only one dude that knew how to use it. It was a T-bleeder. Nobody else knew how to use it. He can use it, you know?

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Uh, night vision goggles were, uh, crappy at best, but, uh,

• 39:37Speaker 04

  no body armor. All we had was a flak jacket and a, you know, LBE at the time. Canteens and a butt pack. Real low key, low, no tech. So there wasn't much to call for fire, man.

• 39:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  And as a reconnaissance element, you're not involved in, you know, direct action and stuff like that. So room clearing, you know, basic room clearing was all we needed to know. And I think that was just more or less common sense. Wasn't an official class or anything like that. We were very, in comparison to what I've done into NSF and in the agency,

• 40:20Speaker 04

  this was like grade school, like elementary school level type training.

• 40:25Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Really, yeah. It was just gut, man. Gut, let's go, let's do it. We're Marines.

• 40:33Shawn Ryan?

  Was it, was it, were you going to an urban environment or?

• 40:36Speaker 04

  We didn't know what environment we were going in.

• 40:38Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't know it was just gonna be desert, urban, nothing?

• 40:42Speaker 04

  Nothing. We didn't know anything about it. We weren't told anything about it. We were just, knew where we were going. Improvise, overcome, and adapt. That's the whole Marine Corps motto, you know? And we lived our lives like that. We didn't care. It was like, let's go.

• 40:58Shawn Ryan?

  So you got there.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  So we got there and it was hot as shit in September. He goes, we got in there, the Gulf, within the Gulf. And I remember they put us in these big warehouses on cots and it was just blistering hot, man. No A C, no nothing. We sat there on cots for a good, probably two weeks drinking warm Coke. I remember we were, they go, hey, you want some Coke? Yeah, sure. We put it, opened it up and it turned into foam as soon as it hit your mouth. It was just all warm shit, you know? But they had, like I said, they brung in them global prepositioning ships. They had all the equipment on it and they started offloading that. And we started getting, getting that equipment.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  You know, as a, as a Lance Corporal or even a Sergeant in the Marine Corps, we were all sitting around. And it was basically the higher ups were doing all the logistics stuff and then bringing that logistics to us. And only a few people were involved in that and that wasn't team guys, so to speak, you know? So we just sat around until they figured out where we were going. Initially, they took us to like a military compound. I couldn't even remember where it was. It was actually rooms with A C, stuck us in there. We stayed there for a little bit, just to acclimatize and adapt to the area. We continued to go over training, you know, like the 50 cal.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Now, we had 50 cal, so we did the timing on headspace and timing for the 50 cal's and stuff like that. We, we went to a few ranges, I believe.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  One thing they had in this will play later on is they had AT4s. But they only had the nine millimeter practice stuff.

• 42:49Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  We never shot an AT4 before. All we shot was in practice nine millimeters. A little tracer round.

• 42:57Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  But anyway, we did a little training on that. We got vehicles at this time, no up armor, nothing, just soft skin, no doors on half of them. Humvees or humvees that were, somehow they got painted desert. Some of them did anyway, desert colors, you know? We stayed there for a while and we did a lot of card playing poker. And then we got the word we were going to a place called Manifa Bay. Which is on the eastern side of Saudi Arabia. In the Gulf area, right up to there. I believe, yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  And then we went to Manifa Bay and that's when we sat down and we started digging holes. They said we were protecting the border and stuff like that, but uh. We're just loitering there, basically.

• 43:50Shawn Ryan?

  Is that, that's what these pictures are?

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, they're kinda in the same area, living in uh. Living in holes for the most part. Then they set up a tent city and we went to a tent city and hung out there. I can remember getting hit by uh multiple rocket launchers. It was funny. Cause you can see them on, on the horizon. They look like Roman candles just. And that was the first time we got hit. Rockets went up over us and they ended up hitting a guard shack for MP shack, but. They had played that chemical weapon warfare stuff so high, so much that everybody was extremely paranoid over that.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  And we all had gas masks and mop level, you know, mop level suits on us. I swear, the first time that thing went off, I had dawn and cleared that entire mop suit in about 30 seconds. Yeah. It was like, cause they had different alarms and the mop level alarm went off and we're like, holy shit, man. Putting that thing on, dawn and clear, and then you just sit there and then you start hyperventilating. Did I, do I got any gas? Did I get gas? What's happening? And then they give the all clear and it's like, wow, man. And that's, you know, that's. That's got an effect on you as a kid, you know?

• 45:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  20 years, 21, a lot of the guys that have gone in during, say. If you went into Afghanistan, joined the military in like 2014. You've already heard about combat for the last, what, 14 years? Here we hear nothing about it, you know? There was, the mindset wasn't there at all. It was.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  You know, it is what it is. But, uh, yeah, the first time we got hit was like, oh shit. Then after that, they kept hitting us and hitting us and pretty soon it's like, okay, the alarm went off and you're sitting there and your rag going, yeah, all right, whatever.

• 45:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  Whatever.

• 45:56Shawn Ryan?

  Did they ever wind up using chemical weapons?

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Well, they claimed they did after the fact and they trying to roll it into the Gulf War Syndrome stuff, but if, I don't think officially they've ever said that they did use chemical war.

• 46:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm sure the government would never lie to us.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Mm-mm.

• 46:18Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Hell no, man.

• 46:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  I think the big scare was with that we had our, uh, our artillery unit actually had tactical nukes. And if they used any of that, they were gonna nuke them a little bit.

• 46:35Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Just, you know, a little bit.

• 46:37Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  But it never came down to that.

• 46:40Shawn Ryan?

  Just a little bit, huh?

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:41Shawn Ryan?

  Just a little nuke?

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Just a little nuke, nuclear water, nuclear chemical. But yeah, that was, that was that. This was pretty much like what I refer as to the admin phase, just us trying to get used to what the surroundings and whatnot. And people trying to figure out, the higher ups trying to figure out how this is all gonna unfold. We just did a lot of standing around, sitting around. Um, and like I told people, I said, combat isn't always boom, boom, boom, boom. You're not always going. There's a lot of downtime. We did have a lot of downtime. Then we started moving up a little bit more north, towards Kafki, towards the border, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  And then we started doing more legit type stuff. You know, like, okay, now we're getting up here, we got a purpose and we're here now to, uh, re- do reconnaissance.

• 47:39Shawn Ryan?

  How many of you guys were there?

• 47:42Speaker 04

  We had, on my particular team, we had six.

• 47:46Shawn Ryan?

  Six? How many of you guys were moving towards Kafji? Just six?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:52Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  We operated just in a six man element.

• 47:55Shawn Ryan?

  So you were conducting reconnaissance and surveillance for conventional units?

• 48:01Speaker 04

  We were doing the reconnaissance mission.

• 48:04Shawn Ryan?

  For the whole front, for the 600,000 deployed?

• 48:08Speaker 04

  It, well, no, because it was all spread out along Iraq, all through there, just for our corridor, which was mainly Marine Corps.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Uh, third Marines, I believe, or first Marine Division. And, uh, just our little slice of the AO.

• 48:27Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Nobody expected that Kafji to happen. Nobody. They didn't think they would, I don't believe they, anybody thought that Saddam would have the nuts that come down through there into another country, Saudi Arabia.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  So. So we started getting missions to go up into Kafji and recon that area. And, uh, actually, they had hidden a oil platform up there. Or, uh, oil facility, you know, refined gas refinery. So that place was smoking and we went up there and investigated that and kinda went through the city. The whole city was abandoned. And the day it abandoned was the day they started the air campaign.

• 49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Why was it abandoned? Did the, did the population just evacuate?

• 49:18Speaker 04

  The population just deed him out. They all got out of there. And it was, it was quite the sight because as soon as that, uh, air campaign started, there was nothing but taillights going south, getting out of there.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 49:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they said they dropped, what, 88,500 tons of ordnance out of the sky?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  They pounded the daylights out of them. They were nuts. They pounded the, the will to fight out of them people. Cause none of them really wanted to fight.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  I got pictures of POWs. We had so many POWs coming south, we, we couldn't take them all. They were just like, hey, keep going, keep walking.

• 49:58Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 50:02Shawn Ryan?

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

• 50:24Speaker 04

  So we got up in the CAFG and we started, you know, finding locations to set up our, our equipment. And remember, back then, we had the 104 and we had to set up an actual antenna, full wave dip pole or V, different types of antennas to tuck back to the rear. So we had to have enough space in order to do this. So we'd find suitable locations to go ahead and do this, usually our rooftops and stuff like that.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  We had been operating up there in CAFG for a couple of weeks before the actual event happened, so...

• 51:06Shawn Ryan?

  What were you looking for? Were you just, were you just reporting any activity that was happening?

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Just any activity that was going on.

• 51:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  There was some stuff going on there that we weren't aware of. There was a joint, I believe it was a joint operation element that was just right on the border, just north of where we were operating on CAFG. And what it was, was it was a combination of, there was a few SEALs up there, Army Special Forces, a lot of radio battalion-type guys, you know, nerds on radios. And they're all sitting up there in a little, up in this little house up there. And we came in, we found an SF team in CAFG, just rolled up on them, didn't, nobody talked to nobody.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  We didn't know who the heck anybody was or if there was even anybody up there. We had talked to them. And it was funny, I remember, we had been eating MREs for like a month. And they had like these big pans of nice lasagna and all kinds of stuff, man. We're like, what the freak, man? We're over here eating shit and eating good. We ain't take a bath in like a month, man. And they were all cleanly bathed. So we were like, where are you coming from? And they're like, we got a safe house just north of here that we're operating on. So we thought, you know, there was absolutely no guidance. You can do, go and do whatever the heck you wanted to, you know? Yeah. So we actually went up to that safe house.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  And it was like, there was a commander sitting in there, right? He's sitting on a couch and I remember typical Haji house, you know? It was just concrete with some rugs and stuff on the ground. And he's sitting in this couch and the TV's playing. And this movie that was playing was Tom Cruise and Cocktails and Dreams. And he's sitting there, he looks at us and he goes, what kind of weapons you got? We're like, we got AT4s, a 50 cal. He goes, you got a tripod for that 50 cal? No, but we got a 60 and we got a tripod for that. And, you know, M16s and stuff like that, grenades and claymores.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  He's like, well, he goes, I want you to get that 60. I want you to get it up on the roof, put a guy up there with them. I want you, you got 10 minutes to get on the radio, call back to your rear and tell them you're done. You're not talking to them for the rest of the night because we've been D F'd and we're going to get overrun tonight. And we're like, I was like, I was like, what? So, and it was funny because he was sitting there like chilled out, watching Cocktails and Dreams. Yeah. My team leader was, uh, he was a corporal, E4. But the thing is, is he was a 35 year old E4.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  And Lentz was his name, but Lentz is like, alright. So he told the radio guy to go out there and get contact with these back to the rear and tell them we were going to be off the line for a while. And we got the 60 up on top and Lentz, Lentz was like, Well, what's the contingency if we get overrun? He's like, well, and he had a star cluster. He goes, I'm gonna take this star cluster. I'm gonna walk up in that yard and I'm gonna pop it up and everything around here is gonna light up like the 4th of July. It's like this crap's, you can't make this crap off.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  I guess he had air support.

• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  And it was all stacked up, ready at his bidding. Of course, we didn't know any of that, you know? So that was the longest freaking night in my life. And we sat there and we got one round that came in and hit like in the front yard. And as soon as the sun came up, Lynch is like, get your stuff together, we're out of here. And we got the heck out of there. And we went back down to the city. So that night, we positioned ourself in the city. And I remember we got in one place.

• 55:26Shawn Ryan?

  Were you still with the SF team?

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Nope, we left. We separated ourselves from them.

• 55:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Cause we thought that, you know, they're gonna bring the heat. We don't wanna be, we don't wanna be, we only got six dudes, remember?

• 55:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  We don't need no too much heat. So we went down to do our job again, reestablish comms with the rear and set up in this other place, another house. And I remember sitting there, it was like at night. And I was sitting up there and you know, we pull shifts over watching the city and whatnot. And that was my shift. And I looked over and we had a call sign. If we ever saw multiple rocket launchers going off, and you know what they are, they're the ones with the big box on the back of the truck.

• 56:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  They just

• 56:13Speaker 04

  and we had a call sign or a code word, mail call, meaning this thing's coming down south and it's gonna hit you. And I'm sitting up on the roof, you know, thinking, doing whatever. And I looked off in the horizon, I can see that thing just going, you can't hear it, but it's like And I was looking at them and they were coming up and they were coming right at us. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. So I'm, you know, I watched the first like three of them hit. The biggest frigging fireballs I've ever seen in my life and they were kinda walking in to where we were. And I ran downstairs yelling, you know, mail call, mail call, we got incoming.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  So we all buckered down and everything and that was it. About three or four rockets hit like right there in front of us. The building we were in coming down the, what the, we call the main MSR. The main, there was two MSRs that came down out of Kuwait and they split. One came down on the east side of the city and one on the, towards, or the west side, or the east side by the ocean. And then one came a little bit more inland on the, on the east, western side of the city. And I was like, wow. But anyway, that happened that night. So we called up and told them, you know, this is what happened. We reported all that and then we just moved location.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Cause we didn't know if there was an FO in the city or whatnot, people watching us.

• 57:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 04

  So we just moved the new location. We sat up and that night.

• 57:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is this still the abandoned city?

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 57:50Shawn Ryan?

  So what's it like watching an, I mean, was there, nobody was there?

• 57:56Speaker 04

  Nobody was there.

• 57:57Shawn Ryan?

  You're just watching nothing all night?

• 57:58Speaker 04

  We're going in and out of people's houses.

• 58:00Shawn Ryan?

  Damn dude.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  We had nothing to do.

• 58:02Shawn Ryan?

  That's eerie.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  No really, no rule other than to go up and recon and walk around and survey this city.

• 58:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  We were up there, we went into the bank. They had cleaned the bank out.

• 58:14Shawn Ryan?

  Did they raid it or, I mean, were they?

• 58:16Speaker 04

  No, I think the people took it.

• 58:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  The people took it that left. Um, you could find, we found a little bit of cash laying around, a little bit of this and that. But pretty much they took everything out of their houses and packed it up on their car and left.

• 58:30Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Anything of value.

• 58:31Shawn Ryan?

  What's the population of the city? I mean, uh?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Oh, I have no idea, but it was, I was looking at it on, uh, Google Maps. And, uh, it's a pretty good sized city.

• 58:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a pretty good size. And, uh, there was nobody there.

• 58:48Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's eerie.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  All there was there was cats, cats and dogs.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Yep, and we had full rain. We had a, we had a pair of bolt cutters that we referred to as the keys of the city. So if we wanted to get anywhere that was bolt, we just.

• 59:08Shawn Ryan?

  So there's six of you guys and a small SF team in the city and that's it?

• 59:12Speaker 04

  Pretty much. The SF team was kinda up out of the city.

• 59:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  And I can show you that on the map. We had another recon team in there, but they were kinda separated from us. And this is when it started.

• 59:28Shawn Ryan?

  So no, there's six people. So there's 12. How many SF guys were there?

• 59:32Speaker 04

  They were totally out of the picture.

• 59:34Shawn Ryan?

  So there's 12 people in this entire damn city?

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 59:37Shawn Ryan?

  12 Americans?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  Well, what happened was is we had small arms fire that night. Lot of illumination going up. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Everything was lit up. And this was just north of the city. And we were like, the team leader, our CO in the back could hear it. I mean, they were that close where they could kinda hear this stuff going on. And we're like, well, we got a lot of illumination going off. We got a lot of small arms fire going. It's, we're gonna stay and see what happens. So the team leader said, we're gonna stay. And then we watched that whole group that was just north of us, all in their five tons, and they all

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  evacuated. They actually got in a little bit of a firefight with them and then evacuated and left. Totally out of the city, went all the way down north. Lance said, we're staying.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  So we stayed. The night went through, then the whole night, little bit of small arms fire. And I don't know what they were doing up there. You know how Arabs like to shoot up in the air when they win something or, you know, whatever. They could have very well been doing that.

• 1:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  They get excited.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, and a couple clips or a couple mags. But anyway, so the next morning, once again, I'm on, I'm on watch again. It's 06 in the morning and I hear this noise.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  Grinding. I'm like, what the heck? I'm like, what the heck? So I got the binos up and I'm watching. And I started seeing people walking down the MSR. The main MSR that came down in front of us or right to the side of us. And they had RPG packs on. And then I looked over and I heard more grinding. I looked over to the east and I started seeing them M111s, I believe they are, armor personnel carriers. Oh shit. I was like, dude, they're all packed down here like gypsies. And I ran down, I let, you know, team leader know and they started getting on the radio and started reporting and doing all these reports.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  So how it worked was is Lentz, the team leader and the RTO would stay down at the bottom. We would observe and then give them the reports. And they were just all reports going out. How many people? We had T-55s come down there. That's an old tank from 55, 1955. T-55s come down. I think I counted like six of them. Then we had the T-72s come down and then more and more people came down. So after it was all said and done, it was like, they, they said there was around 750 to a thousand

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  Iraqis in the city, overtook the city. And we were in the middle of it. How many? About a thousand, 750. They think they were the And there's six of you. Well, six of us plus six of us, so about 12 of us total. And there was a

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  They believe it was the Iraqi Republican Guard that was coming down to their, to the fight. These guys ain't caring about nothing, man. They were pretty cool. Chilled, you know, they were just walking down there. Of course, you know, they've been in combat too. They just got done with fighting Iran. Yeah. You know, so kind of emboldens you a little bit. Yeah. So they overtook the city and we're sitting in that building just reporting. And

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  Once we reported back that the city was overtaken, that's when they started ramping up the coalition force to come retake it. They weren't gonna let any Marines come in there. They tried to portray it as a rescue mission for us, but it's not a rescue mission if you choose to be there. We're not, we chose to stay there to report. It wasn't a rescue mission. It was, hey, let's get these guys the hell out of here.

• 1:03:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Okay, they're not supposed to be here. So, as they were working their plan up, they developed, they put this coalition together. It was Qataris and Saudis. Qataris were there because they had tanks and Saudis had armored personnel carriers and stuff like that, like LABs.

• 1:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  You know, with guns on them and everything like that. The reason the Marines weren't allowed in the city, and the Marines basically set up all around the city on the outskirts of it and, you know, provided fire, but they weren't gonna let them in because they didn't want to level the city. They let the Marines, they wanted to, they wanted to keep the collateral damage to a minimum is what they really wanted to do. Because if you let the Marine go in there, Marines clear buildings with grenades.

• 1:04:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  You know, and they would have leveled the whole damn building.

• 1:04:48Shawn Ryan?

  There's not gonna be any city left if you let them, uh...

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  It would have been ex-coff.

• 1:04:51Shawn Ryan?

  Take the gloves off.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  But, uh, they, they, uh, they set up this coalition, coalition force, and it was mainly Qataris and a couple of tanks. And, uh, we had Cobra helicopters flying around. We had a couple Harriers come in. I remember the Harriers came in and dropped the load, and then a Sager missile was fired at them. And as soon as that Sager missile, this is the difference, as soon as that Sager missile was fired at a Harrier, they stopped all air. No more air came in. Then it was just cobras sitting on the outskirts with tow missiles and hell fires.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  And that was pretty much it for as far as support. Well, we had artillery and 12th Marines artillery was supporting that whole endeavor too. Harriers never came back because they shot a Sager missile. I guess they didn't want to lose one. I don't understand that, but that's what it was told to me. So, they got this fiasco of a coalition together. And my buddy, who was in the rear, they actually put a team together to come up to try to get us, you know, to meet us as we were coming out. And it was funny because they got in

• 1:06:19Speaker 04

  this line. It was the Qataris in the tanks, the Saudis in the LAVs or the, yeah, LAVs, and then our guys in the Chaplains Humvee, because that's all they could get. And they're spearheading this freaking attack up the freaking road, the MSR. Qatari tank got hit, boom, blew the freaking top off it. And everybody else went like this. And they were in the momentum and my buddy was spearheading the attack in the Chaplains Humvee with nothing. They actually got up in the city, dude, and then dismounted and started moving.

• 1:06:57Shawn Ryan?

  Starting their fighting.

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were starting moving, shooting and communicating and getting in the city while all the coalition force said, whoa. And it was kind of comical because you hear all this over the radio. And I remember my buddy, somebody come across the radio and the coalition was actually being led by an SF guy, who I still remember his callsign was Coyote. And it was a major, an SF major was orchestrating these coalition folks to get up there and clear the city. His name was Coyote. And somebody got on the radio and said, hey, Coyote, is it okay if I throw this grenade?

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  Coyote come across, you hear this on the radio, and he goes, "I don't give a shit what you do. Do whatever you want."

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  But it was funny, because off in the distance, you could hear that grenade go off. And then all hell broke loose. Oh shit.

• 1:08:04Speaker 04

  It was, it was funny. And then they were like, "Hey, where the hell are you?" You can hear them moving and communicating. And they're like on the radio, and he's like...

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  One of the guys goes, "What's your location, man? We need to know where you are, where your location is." And he's, he's looking around, and you hear him on the radio, and you can just visualize this. And he goes, "I don't know where the hell I am, but it looks like every cat and coft you took a shit in here."

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  And then all hell breaks loose, you know, because somebody throws another grenade. And they're just moving, moving towards us. But they never, they finally got stopped, and they never got to us. But just the comical crap that was happening during this whole, Yeah. This whole endeavor was funny, but...

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  So they finally got the coalition together.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  A couple of things that happened during this whole process. The other team that was more to the western side of the city actually called an artillery strike on top of us. And if you ever heard an artillery round go off over your damn head, it's probably the loudest thing I've ever heard in my life. And it was time-fused. So it, you know, exploded in the air and then threw fashetti rounds or whatever it was all over and, you know, just for personnel, basically. Yeah. Well, that happened that popped all the tires in our vehicles and a couple of holes in the gas tanks and stuff like that. So we were screwed there, kind of, sort of. And, uh...

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  We had one guy, and I don't know why, he never said anything, but there was one dude that was sitting in the building next to us. And he was actually shooting at us. But he never told anybody else. It was weird.

• 1:09:59Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean? You mean, one of your guys saw an Iraqi shooting at you?

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  We saw him in the building next to us, and he was just like peeking, and he would shoot, and that would be it. And then a little later, he would shoot, and then he would go down. We don't come figure that one out.

• 1:10:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, did you, did you shoot him?

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  No. We didn't, we didn't do it, we didn't respond to him because we didn't want anybody to know us. We had a BTR-50.

• 1:10:29Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, you didn't know if he actually saw you or not? You thought he was...

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Well, he was shooting at us, so...

• 1:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  The thing, the weird part is, is why didn't he call in reinforcements and give our position away? He never did. But we had a, and here's a AT-4 comes in play. We had a BTR-50 roll right in front of our paws, right in front of our position. And they're all sitting up out of the turrets and everything, and they were close enough, we could see their faces and everything. And me and my buddy were sitting up in this small little room with that AT-4 locked and cocked, safety pin out, getting ready to put this round through if they had saw us. And they drove right by, never once looked up in there.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  And today, I even think about it, I'm glad we didn't shoot that thing, because it would have blew our frigging eardrums out of our, our heads. Because after, later in life, I've gotten the chance to shoot an AT-4. And you don't want to shoot an AT-4 off with no ear and protection, sitting in a little concrete room.

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  It would have, we would have come out of there bleeding, put it that way, you know? But, uh, for some reason, this guy never shot. So as it progressed, we've been, we were in there for forty hours, roughly, about forty hours behind, totally surrounded by the Iraqis. And, uh, finally, the coalition had made a corridor in which we were able to drive out. And I got pictures of that vehicle, but

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  all our tires were blown out, no doors, all soft skinned vehicles. And we drove out right around all these Iraqis and they never shot at us, never saw us, and we went right out, popped right out, and that was that.

• 1:12:27Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. And that was, that was forty hours of that shit?

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  Forty hours.

• 1:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  What about the other team?

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  The other team had a little bit more closer call. They actually, one of the guys, Brown, is his name, got hit friendly fire. Got some shrapnel in his leg. He actually got a purple heart out of it.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  I don't know if you knew Sterling, Sterling was over there and, uh, he was the RTO. But they had people, Iraqis, actually in the building, same building as they were in. And they could hear them coming up. They actually burnt all their crypto.

• 1:13:07Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Back then, we had CAC sheets and everything crypto wise.

• 1:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  And, uh, they burned it all, destroyed it all, and, uh, they were ready to go. You know, fisticuffs.

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  But they never happened. You know, this guy over here, when we, when we pulled out, we shot a saw and about, uh, two, two oh three grenades up into that building to cover our, our, uh, exfil there. And, uh, nothing ever happened. We don't know whether you, we got, we got him or what, it just went away.

• 1:13:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, that happens a lot.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  You know.

• 1:13:48Shawn Ryan?

  You get an engagement and you don't go.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  You don't go looking.

• 1:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  Don't always go back to check and see how many bodies are laying there.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  But, you know.

• 1:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  Or if any at all.

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

  It was quite the event, about forty hours worth and our contingency was if we didn't get out that night, we were gonna walk out. Because we were relying on Saudis. You know. So the contingency was, hey, listen, if we don't, if they don't make a corridor for us to get out of here tonight, we're just gonna go ahead and drop this stuff and we're gonna walk out through the wadi. And sneak out. Cause you know, we owned the night. We had, the MVGs we had was crap. But yeah, it was better than what they had. They didn't do nothing. You know.

• 1:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Crap compared to, you know, what we have now, but.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  What was it? Was it like the two to ones?

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  It was a, a box. And I think they finally gave us, we started out with the box ones with two, two

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  lenses and then they, they finally got us the one lens. But it was the first generation.

• 1:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  And that first generation, you couldn't see nothing, man.

• 1:15:04Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  There was nothing.

• 1:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  You've never looked through them?

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't have that wall.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  But

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  the, you know, we've been up there working and like I said, the reason I got on CNN after we got back to the rear, had some lunch, was the weeks prior that we were up in there, we actually had a wireman on our team. And he wired a bunch of phones up in this abandoned city and we all made, collect calls home. So my mom knew I was in that city. And then the next thing she sees is the city's overrun. You know, and back then it was snail mail. You had to write a letter and she might have got it in two months.

• 1:15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  You know, so the quickest way I could get the word back that I was all right. And she was going nuts, by the way. Both my parents were going nuts.

• 1:16:00Shawn Ryan?

  So you called your parents and your, your radio man wired the phone so that you could make a collect call back to New York? To tell them, hey, we're in Kafji.

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  We're in Kafji.

• 1:16:11Shawn Ryan?

  And they flipped the news on and Kafji is being overrun by the Iraqi army? Which is the fourth largest army in the world at that time? Holy shit.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the quickest way to get the news to her that I was all right was to get on this TV guy? Which happened to be CNN.

• 1:16:30Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  And let them all know that I was still alive.

• 1:16:51Speaker 10

  We focus first on the battle for the Saudi border town of Kafji. It was captured by the Iraqis on Tuesday and retaken by a combination of Arab and American units early today. Some fighting continues on the outskirts of the town located near the Saudi Arabian border with Kuwait. We get a pool report filed today by Brad Willis.

• 1:17:18Speaker 11

  It is shortly after eight o'clock, Friday morning, February the first. Although the Saudis claimed overnight that they have reclaimed the city? We are seeing a number of armored personnel carriers and Saudi tanks rolling into the city. We have heard some loud explosions and sporadic small weapons fire. Clearly, there is still some resistance, some sniper fire and some heavy Iraqi weapons still doing battle in Kafji.

• 1:17:49Speaker 11

  During the height of the battle, these Marines were trapped for 48 hours inside Kachin on a reconnaissance mission. Today, they feel lucky to be alive.

• 1:17:59Speaker 08

  Tell me what it was like for you being pinned down for two days during the Battle for Kachin? Uh, pretty scary. Didn't know whether to make it or not. Uh, all kinds of stuff going through your mind, you know, what to do. You have to keep your head, keep a level head, you know. Remember you got a mission, to do your mission. Do your job, basically. What kind of fire did you come under?

• 1:18:30Speaker 08

  Uh, heavy machine gun. Lot of Tom missiles going by. Uh, that's heavy, small arms. Sniper fire? Yeah, we took, uh, sniper fire yesterday. Or not, this one. Was there a time you thought that you were going to lose your life? What?

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Panemonium.

• 1:18:54Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Well, let's take a quick break.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:19:02Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:19:23Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break.

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  We had one more op. I call it the last op.

• 1:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  But you, this op helped end the war?

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  Pretty much. I think, in my opinion, it did. Um, so there was this big stink during the entire war about these defensive belts, right? Where were they? There were minefields that were laid out, and Saddam Hussein was trying to prevent anybody from rolling up in there. So, what they did was, is they sent up B-52s and they did arc-like daisy cutters. It's a big, huge bomb that they roll out the back end of it, and it kind of creates a crater, so to speak, a lane. So they wanted to know where these lanes were. They didn't know exactly where they were, so they sent us. This was our, pretty much, I guess, our last...

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  Our last mission in the whole war. And it was like a 15 click movement. Patrol on foot, we went up on foot. We carried rucksacks that probably weighed about 100 pounds. Burlap, we were gonna go up on the first defensive belt, recon it, find the hole that this daisy cutter made, and then go ahead and mark it and then bring the troops up there so they can all go through it.

• 1:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  Same six guys?

• 1:20:43Speaker 04

  Same six guys. We got up there, there was actually two teams again, except this was another team. Besides the one that was in Kafki. So we got up there. We, it was a patrol from hell, man, because I was the point man. We had them crappy nods. We had found earlier a cachet of toe poppers. You know, toe popper is a small mine like this is for, for a guy to step on and blow his foot off.

• 1:21:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  They spread them things all over the place, too. So we had found a cachet of that earlier, and so we were real leery about this toe popper. So as we're walking up, patrolling, I'm the point man looking for these things, plus scanning the horizon and everything. And we had to do a lot of stopping. And the reason being is, they like to crush your Coke cans. And then leave them out in the desert, and they're about that big.

• 1:21:40Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 1:21:41Speaker 04

  And they look like toe poppers. So it's like, we got something up here. And I just kept on going and going. So we finally got up there just before the sun was coming up. And the whole plan was to take this burlap that we just carried for 15 plus, whatever clicks. Dig holes, hide sites, put the burlap over and hide, and just sit there and observe and recon the horizon. And once it got dark, we were gonna go up there and recon for this break into the defensive belt.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Well, we got up there and started digging holes and guess what? When you turn sand over that's been hot and cold, hot and cold, it starts to turn colors. So it wasn't the same damn color as when we dug it up and we were all stuck like, stuck out like sore thumbs.

• 1:22:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  So we just happened to find a bomb crater and I got a picture of that for you over there. A bomb crater, probably about 15 feet deep, dude. And we all got down in this bomb crater with our burlap over us and we hugged the sides of this, this bomb crater and just put one dude up and pink, pinked over at the top, you know? And did the, uh, pulled security, I guess. And, uh, later that night, we went out, we found the first defensive belt, we found the mine fields and we found the, the cut in the, in the belt. And annotated that and everything was going pretty smooth, everything, no problem. We were to the point where we were like relaxing now.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  So we're all in this bomb crater, sleeping, you know? Hanging out, eating MREs or whatnot, you know, just hanging out. Well, a fast mover came in and for some reason dropped a 500 pound bomb, bomb on us right over next to us. And the shrapnel went all along the edge of that freaking bomb crater, dude. I had it landing like right here next to my head.

• 1:23:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  And it was so wonderful, nobody got killed. I mean, it was like, what in the world? Well, the rear heard that and freaked out. So they freaked out, they came up, they pulled us out of there, we got back. Team showed them on the map where the cut was. They said, all right, they passed that to the rear. Everybody got on trucks and went through that, that cut in the defensive belt. Next thing we know, we were in Kuwait International.

• 1:24:15Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  And that was it.

• 1:24:18Shawn Ryan?

  I'd like to highlight what Coop just told us because it's a significant event and his humility didn't do this event any justice. So basically Kuwait in Saudi Arabia, the border was one huge minefield with only a few routes in and out, which nobody knew the routes. Basically what happened is the mission that Coop was on with his unit, they found one of the only routes into Kuwait from the Saudi border, which in turn, as soon as they found that route, US troops were able to take that route and get into Kuwait, which basically led to the end of the war.

• 1:24:58Shawn Ryan?

  So what I'm telling you is the mission success that his unit and him found led to the end of the war. That's pretty significant. Now let's get back to the show.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  Yep, that was it for us. Everything, they were all pushed out. Iraq or Kuwait International was completely a ghost town. No Iraqis, no nothing dude.

• 1:25:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  It was, that was that quick. We went through the oil fields, you know where all the burning is? Burning oil fields were going on. The Iraqis were actually lighting them on fire as they were retreating. And we went through all that stuff. We got up to Kuwait International and it was it.

• 1:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  We stayed there like for two days, two or three days. And got on trucks and went back south and staged and got ready to leave. It went that quick. I think the reason the war went that quick is because it was well planned and well organized. Really, Schwarzkopf had it, had his shit together. As far as I'm concerned. You can get there with all your critics and whatnot, but the damn thing was over in a hundred hours. We bombed the living daylights out of them so bad that they didn't want to fight, man. They bombed the fight out of them. They wanted to go home. They didn't want anything to do with this.

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  And them POWs were coming down like fifty, hundred, hundred fifty at, you know, little sections with their white flags.

• 1:26:30Shawn Ryan?

  Who was considered a POW? Was that the Iraqis?

• 1:26:33Speaker 04

  Iraqi Army.

• 1:26:35Shawn Ryan?

  They were just, I quit.

• 1:26:36Speaker 04

  They were quit, threw their guns down, had white flags, and they were going south. There were so many of them, we couldn't even, we couldn't take any of them. We just told them to keep walking south, man.

• 1:26:46Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  No room for them. So, it was, it was good. It was over.

• 1:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  I guess it makes sense. I mean, it's, you know, they said, when I was researching the war, it said, you know,

• 1:26:59Shawn Ryan?

  eighty-eight thousand five hundred tons of ordnance got dropped and

• 1:27:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  eighteen thousand air missions.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  We sat there in tents for like a month, I think, before we even went out.

• 1:27:12Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:27:13Speaker 04

  And you can hear them bomb the living daylights out of them, arc lights, all over the horizon at night. All you saw was boom, boom, boom, boom. This went out for what, a month, maybe more?

• 1:27:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Speaker 04

  Before we were even actually moved out to go do anything.

• 1:27:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, do you know what, were they bombing?

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  All their sites, their tanks and all that.

• 1:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  It was along the border?

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  They had a big trench line up there on the border too, yeah.

• 1:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  They were just hitting all their key spots and hitting their tanks. There were some tank battles up, up on the eastern side, I believe. The army was actually engaged in tanks and stuff like that.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  They had an entire fleet out in the ocean, out in the Gulf. And my buddy was on there. He was in the Marine Corps. He was a tow gunner. But he sat on that ship the entire time. At the end of the war, Schwarzkopf said, "I never planned on using them. They were nothing more than a diversion."

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  You know, how'd you like that? Sit out there forever and just be a diversion?

• 1:28:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that would suck.

• 1:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  I hope you're enjoying The Sean Ryan Show. Let me take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patron community receives exclusive behind the scenes content from The Sean Ryan Show, as well as an extensive library of Vigilance Elite videos not seen anywhere else. I also engage in live video chat with Tier 3 members once a month, where we discuss a variety of topics. Vigilance Elite Patreon is what makes The Sean Ryan Show possible. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. And head over to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and get your subscription today.

• 1:29:03Shawn Ryan?

  You came back from Operation Desert Storm, and you left the Marine Corps?

• 1:29:09Speaker 04

  Yep, I did about three more years in the Marine Corps. I did a six, total of six years in the Marine Corps.

• 1:29:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  Continued on in recon. Did some great stuff, you know, I went to the island of Tonga. It's actually the country of Tonga. We helped them set up their military. They used to be the Tonga National Guard, but they changed it to the Tonga Marine Corps. We helped them set up their little operation out there. I went to dive school, jump school, mountain leaders chorus, you know, went to a bunch of schools, had a good time and whatnot.

• 1:29:42Shawn Ryan?

  Why'd you leave?

• 1:29:44Speaker 04

  Oh, you know, I got disgruntled. My, I think the problem, my problem for leaving out of the Marine Corps, I would've stayed in if I had left Hawaii. I did the whole five and a half years, basically, in Hawaii.

• 1:29:57Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think if I left, I probably would've stayed in. But I got a little disgruntled. It happens, and I said, "Okay, I'm out."

• 1:30:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I get it. I mean, um, so you left. I actually talked to your dad a little bit, did some research. You started working for Remington Arms for like six months. Couldn't handle it. You couldn't handle that transition. You said, "I gotta get the hell out of here." And then you joined the Army. Did you know you wanted to be a Green Beret when you joined the Army, or?

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  Well, yep. This is the thing. When I was out of the Marine Corps about a month, I knew I made a mistake. I was like, "Damn it, man."

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  You know, it's been in me since I was a kid. So, once I got out, I was like, this is a big mistake. So, I actually lived in Montana for a while because a ex-wife of mine, I lived out there with her. But anyway, I called up the Navy. I said, "Hey, I want to go Navy SEAL." And they said, "We're not taking any prior military."

• 1:31:07Shawn Ryan?

  What year was this?

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  That would have been 90, 94. There's, they weren't taking any prior military. So, I said, "All right, damn it." They go, "Well, we can put you on a list." But I said, "How long is the list going to be?" They said, "About two years." Said, "I can't wait two years." So, I called up the Air Force. I said, "Hey, I want to go PJ. I want to be a pararescue guy." They said, "We're not taking any prior military at all, period." And I was like, "Well, I know the Army will take anybody." Now, keep in mind, I was, I'm still got the Marine mindset. And Marines hated the Army. Back then. So, I was like, "All right, the Army will take anybody."

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  But I had a lot of buddies that transitioned from the Marine Corps and went straight SF because they had a program called the SF Baby Program. I forgot what the designation was, but they were going that route. So, I said, "I'll do that." I called them up and I said, "Hey, I want to go join the Army." He said, "Come on down." Signed the paperwork. I said, "I want to go SF." He said, "You can't." I said, "Well, my buddies did." He said, "Well, they did away with that program." I said, "Okay, so what are you going to give me?" They go, "We're going to give you the infantry, eleven Bravo." I said, "All right, what's that? Infantry, okay." Then he goes, "You can choose where you want to go. You can go to Korea, Italy, or Fort Bragg, North Carolina." I said, "Where's SF at?"

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  They said, "Fort Bragg." I said, "I'm going there. I'll go there."

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  I've never been in a line unit, dude. I heard horror stories about them. I'm like, you gotta be kidding. So I was dreading this shit. So I got down there, they got a thing called replacement. So you go there, you get placed to what unit. And I showed up, dude, I had long hair, no uniforms, no nothing. Guy looked at me and I gave him my folder of my stuff and he looked at it and he goes, "You wanna go to LRS, which is a long-range surveillance, basically recon." Cause I had trained some LRS guys from Hawaii on scout swimming techniques and stuff. And I was like, "Yeah, I wanna go to LRS."

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  And he took me over there, introduced me to the commander. Commander goes, "You wanna go to Ranger School?" And I said, "Nope." He looked at me, he goes, "Well, you ain't coming here if you don't wanna go to Ranger School." I said, "Well, I guess I'm going to Ranger School." He goes, "Go get a haircut and get some uniforms and report back." So that got me out of that line unit crap. So LRS, long-range surveillance, is considered a stepping stone for SF.

• 1:33:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  I had to do a couple of years in regular army before they would allow me to go SF. So what better place to go to LRS? LRS worked out great. I went to Ranger School, I went to Halo School, and some other stupid schools. And once I gave them the time back for Halo School, I said, "I'm going SF," and I went to selection in 1999. SF selection.

• 1:34:26Shawn Ryan?

  How did SF selection compare to, in the training compared to what you were doing?

• 1:34:34Speaker 04

  SF selection, believe it or not, was the hardest thing I ever did.

• 1:34:37Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  Yep. I went totally unprepared, out of shape. I said, "This is what I'm doing. This is why I came in the army." So I'm gonna do it and I went and did it and it was and it was the old selection process. I don't know what the new one, they had a new one after I few years after I was in and they keep changing it up. But it was definitely an ass kicker, man. When they said the song, you know, 100 men will train today and only three will win the Green Beret. It's true. I watched dudes boof, boof, boof, fall to the wayside.

• 1:35:16Shawn Ryan?

  How did it, how did it kick off?

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  Well, the first thing, it's 21 days. The first, the first few days is admin days. They give you classes and whatnot. What they're doing is, in my opinion, was they're trying to wear you out because you only got a couple hours of sleep, you know?

• 1:35:35Shawn Ryan?

  Let me, uh, I just want to explain something to the audience. SF training is not 21 days. You go through selection to be picked to go to SF training. That's what's 21 days.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  21 days.

• 1:35:51Shawn Ryan?

  So it's a three week course, ass kicker course, in hopes that you get selected to then go to the next to training to become a Green Beret.

• 1:36:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  So what they do is they give you a bunch of classes. They give you classes on land navigation. Land navigation back when I went through, I don't know if it is, yeah, I can't speak for the guys now, but was real heavy. So you gotta figure, the way they run it is, is you got a 65 pound rock sack on your back the entire time. That's minus water and food. You go everywhere with it. Every event is done with it. Everything. And you do this land navigation course, which is called the STAR course. Basic land, land nav. And I believe if you coma, if you added all the distance up you did, you do night and day, it's probably about 12 miles a day in distances. And you do that.

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  I think for like five days, five, six days, we were doing that. And then, uh, you know, they break it up with obstacle courses and other stuff like that during out the process. And then you have what you call team week, which is pretty much the last, during the last week. And that's basically problem solving, you working as a team. They do different events. Every day is a new event. And once again, you got that 65 pound rucksack on you. And you're doing like, they'll give you a Jeep with tires missing on it. You have to move it 12 clicks.

• 1:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 1:37:32Speaker 04

  So they give you a Jeep with missing tires and a couple of poles and some lashings. You guys figure it out and you're pretty much picking the damn thing up and walking 12 clicks with it. That's one event. Another event was like sand babies. So they had this, I believe it was like an old rifle range, but they had berms all the way down through it. So it was like this.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  And, uh,

• 1:37:58Speaker 04

  you had to get so many sandbags down there, like they had a hundred sandbags. You gotta fill the sandbags, put them on your 65 pound rucksack, carrying 300 yards or 300 meters over, drop them off, come back, get more. And it's an event you gotta do. I don't know whether, I don't remember if it was timed or not.

• 1:38:16Speaker 04

  But holy cow, you want to talk about your back doing this, dude? I wonder if I can't walk. I got back problems, you know? So that was one event. And they had a bunch of different events, like the sandman, they had a sea bag full of sand. And they gave you steel pipes that were solid. They're, they're almost solid steel pipes that were like 12 foot long, that probably weighed 150 pounds with them themselves. So you figure a 500 pound sea bag with all these, there was like four. And plus you got your 65 pound rucksack. You got it sitting on the back and you're walking 12 clicks with this thing.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  You got that and pails of pain, pails of pain. They give you pails with holes in them. They got two versions of it, ones with sand, ones with water. We got the joy of having one with water.

• 1:39:12Speaker 04

  So, you know, pails with holes in them don't hold water for long.

• 1:39:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  So you have to carry this, fill these pails up at the bottom of this hill with string and a stream. And then walk up this freaking, you know, seventy-five yard straight up freaking hill. And then dump them in this bucket. You gotta fill this freaking fifty gallon drum up with holes. And you gotta do it all fast. The thing, I remember that, that sucked for me bad. Cause I don't have a little big gate, long gate. And they put the, they grabbed the tallest dude, he was like six something. And put him up front and you gotta stay with him and he's, they could tell him to set the pace. And they're up there whispering in this here the whole time going, you better, you better go faster.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  We're gonna drop you if you don't start moving out. And he's moving out. Now, and it's smart individual and say, I'm going as fast as I can. And that buddy fuck up behind him, but this dude didn't dude, about, about kill me. But anyway, there was a bunch of events and the last event of the whole process is a twenty-six mile road march. For time, of course, they don't tell you what the time is on it. You just go do it. And it's with that sixty-five pound rucksack. Plus you gotta put all your water and your food to last you however long it does. So I did this twenty-six miles. I seen, I seen dudes do that with broken feet.

• 1:40:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Trying to get through this. All it is is a gut check. They just wanna see how you're gonna do, if you're gonna fail, if you're gonna whine or whatever. I think I did it in like seven hours. But this dude had broken feet. They just pulled him out. He made it. Cause they just wanted to check. They got a little bit of compassion over there, you know, but he made it. So I finished that. It was twenty-six miles. Um, then they sit out there and start playing more mind games with you. And they put you in this group and they call your names off and tell you all to go over here. Everybody I call your name, you go over here and you know, typical mind games. And then they made this crew go all the way over here so we couldn't hear them.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  And they're making it seem like we're the failures, but we were actually the guys that made it. So out of a, literally, I'm telling you.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  Hundreds of dudes there, maybe 60 something made it. And unbelievable, it was hard training, hard, hard gut check for me.

• 1:41:46Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about what you're doing when you got to your team and what those Asian deployments were like.

• 1:41:59Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:42:20Shawn Ryan?

  So we just wrapped up selection. After selection, you show up to your team, right?

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:42:27Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 1:42:28Speaker 04

  No. After selection, you now start your MOS training.

• 1:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:34Speaker 04

  So I was an 18 Bravo Weapons Sergeant.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  So that's, that training was a few months. Let's see. Started in April and ended in November.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  So whatever that is.

• 1:42:50Shawn Ryan?

  Did you know what team you were going to?

• 1:42:52Speaker 04

  I knew a group I was gonna go to. I know I was going to first group. You find that out after, after you graduate. I graduated on the November 20th, 2000 is when I graduated the course, the Bravo course. After the Bravo course, you now go into a language school. In language school, depending on your language, is between four and six months. My language was Indonesian.

• 1:43:24Speaker 04

  So you do the four months of that. That was a four-month training of everyday language school. After that, you go to SERE school and get your ass kicked. So that was three weeks long. I believe it's three weeks, yeah, three, two or, yeah, three weeks long. Three weeks of SERE school, which is an excellent school.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  It sucks all the way up and it's not excellent until the last day. The last day is when you figure out SERE School. And everything that happens. Uh, how everything works.

• 1:44:01Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I never, I never went to SERE School.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:44:04Shawn Ryan?

  So let's, let's go into that real quick.

• 1:44:06Speaker 04

  So SERE School starts, starts out with the first week is class work on how to survive. Um, you go over, uh, history on individuals like Nick Rowe. Nick Rowe was a Green Beret in Vietnam that was in, uh, a POW for like five years. You go over his stuff. You go over different techniques of, uh, how to tell a story and how to manipulate and try to get them off of what you're actually doing. So you got that for the first week. The second week is like survival stuff, like, uh, how to kill a rabbit. How to skin it, uh, stuff like that. Third week, you go on a mission.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  So your mission is blah, blah, blah, whatever. You're going to go out and do it. They break you up into like a 12 band team. You go out and do it, you end up becoming into a survival situation. So they don't feed you or nothing during this entire week. You're basically living off the land, whatever you can find. Like we found a deer head and ate it. And then we found snakes and rabbits and ate them. We robbed somebody's garden with green tomatoes and we fried them up and had fried, fried green tomatoes. We ate those, you know, some guys got lucky and got, came across a pig farm and pulled a pig out of there and ate that. So the, like, I forget how many days was surviving off the land.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  And then they put you on an E and E corridor. So you're E and E in now.

• 1:45:40Shawn Ryan?

  E and E is, uh, escape and evasion.

• 1:45:42Speaker 04

  Escape and evasion. So the enemy is on your ass. So you're going to get caught. So we got caught. They put hoods over our heads, threw us on the freaking, uh, truck, took us to a compound. Uh, stripped us down naked. Everything goes there. They do not give, you think, oh, they ain't going to do that shit. They're going to do it. They smack the living daylights out of me. You standing there naked and they got a girl down there? They don't give two craps, man. You're sitting there with your schlong hanging out and she's right there looking at it. You been making fun of you.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. They don't care. You think they're gonna pull punches, they ain't. Racism, they don't care. They'll call you any name. If you're that, you're that. You know, and they call you that. Whatever. They just constantly trying to manipulate you and get you all to fight amongst each other. This is what they're doing. And that's about three days. So you don't eat, you don't sleep. You're POW in a jail cell. They let you out to do yard work and chores and stuff like that. During this whole process of while you're doing that, they'll pull individuals out and put them in a cell to interrogate.

• 1:47:06Speaker 04

  So during the interrogation, this is where you're trying to do the things that you learned in the first week. How to, you know, you deny everything. You know, you make counter accusations, you admit to nothing. You come up with a story that kind of goes along and you fight it. And they are allowed to hit you. I've never been smacked by a woman so hard in my life. For laughing, I smiled and she just kicked the living crap. Cause one of the guys was in a cell and one of the instructors, you know, they talking to like a, hey you, you, there, you, Mr. Green Beret, you go over there and get me captain.

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  We had one captain, they know who you are. They go, he goes, I want pilot captain. Cause there are some aviation guys in there. And I went over there and I knew who the captain was and I go, hey, he wants a captain. They're all looking at me smiling, cause there was a few captains over there, but there was only one pilot. And I go, he wants a pilot. And the dude's face dropped. And I started laughing, dude. She saw me laughing, she come the hell out of there and just smack the living daylights out of me. But anyway, they will smack the shit out of you. They will give you a black eye. And it ain't no joke.

• 1:48:31Speaker 04

  So that's like three days of ass beatings. They got light cells and hard cells and you have to pass these. A light cell is a guy going, "Welcome, welcome. Sit down. Relax. Take it easy. Would you like some cookies? You ain't eating in, you know, four or five days. Would you like some food?" A lot of guys will say, "I ain't eating that," because they think their buddies are starving, so they're all a team, so he's gonna starve. Well, they don't teach it. If they offer you food, eat it. It's better than you than it is being wasted. So that's a soft cell. And then the hard cell is they get you in there, they tie you up, and they smack you around a little bit. They punch you in the

• 1:49:14Speaker 04

  gut a little bit and stuff like that, and they try to get you to answer the question. The hardest cell to defeat, the hardest interrogator, is a soft cell guy. There was a guy in World War II, a German, I believe he was a German interrogator. He could get anything out of every, anybody, and he never once hit him or mistreated him. No shit. Because once you establish rapport with that individual and you're nice, they loosen up, and they're willing to talk. Now, it may take time, but if you're continually nice to that individual, they'll tell you anything and everything you want to know.

• 1:49:56Speaker 04

  So the soft cell is the one you want to, and you don't learn this until after the course. So the soft cell is the hardest one. That's why you go into interrogation. I've been to an interrogation school that the cops go to, and you gotta be nice, and you gotta get all up and nice, and sympathize with the individual and become part of their world, you know, and just don't worry. I understand why you murdered and raped them three women, you know? They were definitely in the wrong. And you just start talking to them like that, and the next thing you know, this dude's opening up to you, you know? So they teach you all this stuff. And you have to pass. They're in there actually

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  grading you, and if you don't pass, you keep going in, you keep going in. And I was a little bit thick-headed on the soft, on the hard cell, and he goes, "Listen, dude," and he stopped for a minute, and he goes, "Listen, dude."

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  You need to put more fake in it, or something like that. So I was like, ooh, and I started acting like I was being beat and stuff. And they took me out, they got a pond out there, they call it the people's pond. And he drug me out there and started dunking me under the water and this and that. And, you know, it was. And we got through that. It was, but the thing is, is the school is very informative. It teaches you how to do that, to avoid answering questions, how to come up. Like, my, my deal was I had a Marine Corps tattoo. So I was automatically a private, a truck driver from the Marine Corps, and I knew absolutely nothing. And they bought it. And they went with it, because that's the

• 1:51:36Speaker 04

  only, pretty much the only tattoos I had at the time. And they, they ran with it. And they, they actually, see, they don't know everything about you, but they do know mostly about you. And he actually thought I was in the Marine Corps at the time. And I was just there going through training, and on his mind. But I was actually an SF guy, and whatnot. Some guys break down. I've seen guys break down, and they went lopey. And the guy had to pull out, stop the training, pull out his card and say, I'm Staff Sergeant so and so, you're in the United States Army, and you're here. Do you know who I am?

• 1:52:10Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. It'll get to some dudes. One guy gave up everything. He says, yep, he's an SF dude. He's, he's an E, E six, he's an eighteen Bravo, and he speaks this language. Needless to say, that dude didn't, wasn't very well liked after he did that.

• 1:52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but you passed.

• 1:52:30Speaker 04

  Even when the instructors, they were pissed off at him.

• 1:52:33Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  For breaking that fast. But after the whole thing's done with, that's when you sit back and you look at it, and you, and you learn from it. It was just phenomenal. And those things you see. The unfortunate thing is,

• 1:52:48Speaker 04

  These terrorists aren't gonna give a shit.

• 1:52:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51Speaker 04

  You know, you're, you're going down there with your head locked off.

• 1:52:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:55Speaker 04

  Conventional forces like the Iraq fighting Saddam Hussein, you got a chance. And we did have prisoners of war during that. If you remember Bravo two zero?

• 1:53:05Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:05Speaker 04

  They got out. They finally got out. They evaded. They all died of cancer, I think, from drinking some chemical water. But they all made it through there. Um, there was a female girl that became a terror or became POW that we actually think we saw them put her in a armored personnel carrier and take her north. It was the one female. If you research that, you'll see. It happened sometime during the Battle of Kafki. And we believe we did witness that, taking her up there.

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  That stuff will work. She came back, you know, you go up there. Of course, they weren't SIR trained, but you have a chance to survive in when you're dealing with that type of

• 1:53:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:46Speaker 04

  These animals now, these savages, nah, they ain't gonna care, man. So, is it obsolete?

• 1:53:53Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe not.

• 1:53:54Shawn Ryan?

  They're looking to make an example out of us now.

• 1:53:56Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:56Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they want the press. They want, they want it as graphic as possible.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:54:02Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 1:54:04Speaker 04

  But yeah, so once SIR school's over with, then you pop over to your group, whatever group it is you go to. And you get assigned a team.

• 1:54:11Shawn Ryan?

  So you went to first group?

• 1:54:13Speaker 04

  First group.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  And then you started deploying?

• 1:54:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:54:18Shawn Ryan?

  You deployed primarily to Asia, Southeast Asia?

• 1:54:23Speaker 04

  Yep. My first team, I was on what was considered an ASOT team, an Advanced Special Operation Technique Team. It's basically secret scroll stuff like we did in the agency or the case officers do. Kind of sort of like that. You set up SDRs, drops, stuff like that. They teach you all of that. And my first trip was to Nepal.

• 1:54:47Speaker 04

  Kathmandu.

• 1:54:52Speaker 04

  And we were there training military decision-making process. Because at that time, Kathmandu or Nepal was having issues with a terrorist organization called the Maoists.

• 1:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  The Maoists?

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  Yep, the Maoist. And this was during, after nine eleven, so every country that had issues with somebody else, labeled them as a terrorist. They got US funding to fight those terrorists. And with that US funding comes United States Special Forces. And we go in there and we train them. So we went, my first trip was in Nepal. We went ahead and trained the Nepalese Army on military decision-making process, on how to locate the Maoists and plan attacks and stuff like that. That was about five weeks.

• 1:55:57Speaker 04

  Every trip we did was about five weeks long.

• 1:56:00Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, no kidding? So you would deploy for?

• 1:56:02Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we were there for a month.

• 1:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  And then you were back home?

• 1:56:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  What's the deployment cycle then?

• 1:56:07Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's different than than normal, isn't it? I mean, in the SEAL teams, it's six months, nine months.

• 1:56:16Speaker 04

  No, we did like JSATs or referred to as JSATs, Joint Operation Training with joint countries or friendly countries. I forget what the actual acronym stands for. But basically JSATs, we went on and they were roughly between three and five weeks.

• 1:56:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  And you go out there, it took a signature from the, Rumsfeld was at the time when I was going. So the Secretary of Defense, he signs off on it and then we punch out and do it. It's all real world stuff. It's just not combat.

• 1:56:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Where else did you head to?

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

  So, I've been there, I've been to Thailand. Thailand, we go to Thailand, we were doing a lot of training with the FBI, DEA, Border Patrol type people. And what we were doing is they had a

• 1:57:17Speaker 04

  trouble with narcotics coming across the border out of Burma. So...

• 1:57:23Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of narcotics?

• 1:57:28Shawn Ryan?

  Opium?

• 1:57:28Speaker 04

  Opium. It was opium, coming up out of Burma in the Golden Triangle up there. And everybody knows that narcotics is one of the money makers for terrorist organizations. So, we were up there, we trained them, I would train them tactics and shooting skills and stuff like that, and medical. They always wanted medical and tactics. Working, we worked a little alongside with the American DEA, because the American DEA is over there also, to assist them and trying to stop the flow of narcotics coming into Thailand. Them countries over there aren't like here as far as tolerance for narcotics. Malaysia and Thailand, you get caught with narcotics, you're dead.

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  Malaysia was publicly hanging you.

• 1:58:16Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 1:58:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:17Shawn Ryan?

  Is it still like that to this day?

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  Probably. They don't mess around over there.

• 1:58:22Shawn Ryan?

  What year was that?

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  Uh, 94? Been 93, 94, or 2003, 2004 timeframe.

• 1:58:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wrong decade.

• 1:58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  Somewhere around there, 2004, 2005. I've been up there 2006. Thailand, I've been to Thailand probably about five times. We actually did one mission there that lasted three months.

• 1:58:48Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:58:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that was working with the Border Patrol cats.

• 1:58:53Shawn Ryan?

  And you went to the PI too?

• 1:58:55Speaker 04

  We've been to the PI, I've been to Mindanao. Mindanao is a prominently Muslim island in the Philippines. And we were working with the DEA, their equivalent DEA and FBI on, once again, terrorist, counter terrorist operations because we have, Philippines got JI coming up out of Indonesia and the MILF, which is more of a anti-government type organization, or they were. And I'm talking back then. I don't know what current events is right now on that. But at that time, that's what we were doing. We were training them to handle them. And we've had teams even go further down into the PI at Holo, which is an island even

• 1:59:40Speaker 04

  further closer to Indonesia, where they were actively, the Philippines were actually actively engaged with these terrorists. So they would fight them at night and they had some pretty good firefights from what I heard.

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  Philippines is actually a third area of the global war on terror. So you had Iraq, Afghanistan, and a lot of people don't know that we had the Philippines.

• 2:00:06Shawn Ryan?

  That's the number three.

• 2:00:08Speaker 04

  Number three. It's not as bad as Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is still. Matter of fact, a lot of these terrorists out of Afghanistan, they found in Thailand.

• 2:00:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:21Speaker 04

  So we were there basically to help them. We actually had a guy killed in Mindanao. We had a, there was a small cafe outside the little base that we stayed on that motorcycle, dude on a motorcycle had it packed full of explosives, parked outside of that little cafe, touched it off and killed one of our guys and wounded the captain.

• 2:00:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there was, there was a little activity down there. And it's a joint, joint effort down there too. The Marine Corps is down there and the Navy is down there too.

• 2:00:56Speaker 04

  I don't know what group, SEAL group it was, but yeah, they're down there too. Everybody's operating.

• 2:01:01Shawn Ryan?

  I know the West Coast guys.

• 2:01:04Shawn Ryan?

  Worked that area. I don't remember which team, but I know it's the west coast.

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  It was over there. Although that's all changed now. Everybody.

• 2:01:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Shawn Ryan?

  Once the war kicked off, they kind of uh restructured everything and all the specific areas of different teams went to kind of just it all went away.

• 2:01:27Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 2:01:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Philippines hot. We actually have been to Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a big island, huge island, matter of fact, right off of the coast of India. And their issue, they were having problems with an organization called the Tamil Tigers. Tamil Tigers have since been demolished, killed. But we were there doing a med cap, teaching them how to keep their people alive till they could get to the hospital. Because it was a jungle warfare, they'd have a wounded guy, they couldn't get the guy back to the hospital for like three or four days. So the whole, the whole idea was for us to go there and teach them, you know.

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  We did live tissue and stuff like that to teach them how to keep an individual alive for at least three to four days so they could get them to a hospital. Get them the proper treatment. That was actually a pretty good trip. Have you ever done live tissue training?

• 2:02:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, several times.

• 2:02:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's excellent training. I think I've done it like three or four times. But it's very beneficial, especially if you're working in that type of job. I mean, you can beat it. It's awesome.

• 2:02:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 04

  Well, I really enjoyed it.

• 2:02:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I know. I mean, it's, you know, it's as real as it gets without actually doing the real thing.

• 2:02:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you learn a lot. I mean, a lot. We had a guy there. He was a Sri Lankan. And we were giving a class about for the chest tube, right? We're like simulating. We have a, you know, a guy, Bertendi was shot and he lays on the ground and he's going, oh. The guy next to him was sitting next to me and he goes, that ain't what happens. You don't do that. I go, yeah? And he goes, yeah. And he pulled up his shirt. He had been stitched up the side with an AK-47. And they had three holes in him and he goes, I didn't do that.

• 2:03:33Speaker 04

  It's like, alright dude, I guess you're the authority on that one, because I've never been shot.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, it was, it was awesome. I mean, I learned so much, hanging out with different folks. I really enjoyed being with these indige throughout the world. Malaysia, I went down to Malaysia, we actually did a joint operation that consisted of Malaysia, Australia, and Guam, Saipan. And what it was is a culmination of different organizations, both American and foreign, and we were looking for a dirty bomb. They actually, actually brought in Dietra. Have you ever heard of Dietra?

• 2:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  No, I haven't.

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  They're a US organization that has nuclear sniffers. They can, they got things set up. You never, you go down the highway and you see them things, where the trucks pass under and this. Some of those are actually, I believe, looking for nuclear weapons. Nuclear material, possibly, coming through. They got them in airports, they got them everywhere. They fly around in a helicopter in New York City with them. Especially after 9/11.

• 2:04:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 04

  But these folks, they actually had sniffers, and they allowed us to use them. And they had a small piece of nuclear material that an individual was carrying around. And I think we actually got them in Saipan. Is where we actually, but we went through Malaysia, you know, all around Australia. It was a good time.

• 2:05:11Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  That was like an eight-month deployment. Eight months. Philippines, all over.

• 2:05:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, so you just bounced around from this spot?

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, we bounced all around looking for this dirty bomb. It was a whole scenario.

• 2:05:26Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. And you guys got them?

• 2:05:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, we got them in Saipan. I think it was Saipan or Guam. But we had both the ASOP team, which was the Advanced Special Operation Techniques, the secret dudes.

• 2:05:40Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:05:41Speaker 04

  And that's the team I was on, it was all plain clothes. I'll tell you, the equipment we had back there was junk. I mean, you had a radio. You know what a Prick 68 was?

• 2:05:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 04

  A big freaking thing like this. Split up and it had a connector and we had that on us. We were down there walking through the Australian Zoo with all this junk. Earpieces in, you know, it's just what we had.

• 2:06:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:09Speaker 04

  You know? And, uh, walking all around, looking for this dirty bomb and doing little meets with people, individuals. Of course, it was scenario driven, you know, it was like, but it was good training, good time.

• 2:06:25Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't realize that, uh, ASOP program was that, was developed.

• 2:06:31Speaker 04

  I know the Navy SEALs tried to get into it.

• 2:06:33Shawn Ryan?

  They did.

• 2:06:34Speaker 04

  Did they get into it?

• 2:06:35Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:35Speaker 04

  I heard they were trying to get into it.

• 2:06:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:37Speaker 04

  But yeah, it's a pretty good program. I went through the broken axle part of it, which was preliminary to see if you were, you know, had what it took to go.

• 2:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 04

  And I was like, I went through it, I passed everything and they said, we're going to recommend you to go to the level three, which is three months long, dude.

• 2:06:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Speaker 04

  And I just got the group and I was like, I don't want to go. And they said, they were ticked up. They were just like, alright. Two months later, I was on a Halo team. So I spent my time on a Halo team, my remaining 10 years on a Halo team.

• 2:07:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, right on. Yeah, no, I was, they started that, man, when, I don't know what year they started it, but I heard about it, maybe 04 timeframe.

• 2:07:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's about right.

• 2:07:30Shawn Ryan?

  This one, uh, we started, when I started hearing about it in the teams and then, and then I was going to go, we did, uh, we did a course with the British MI, with some former MI6 guys, which was actually a really, it was one of my favorite courses, uh, that I've ever done. Never fired a shot, never blew anything up, but it was all about, you know, blending in and, uh, and it was some of the coolest shit I've ever done, winding up on the.

• 2:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, 18th, 20th story, Bank of America building, nobody knows who the hell you are. It's just, what can you infiltrate yourself into and without, you know, being detected, what happens when you get questioned? How do you handle all that? And I really fucking liked that course. And then, um, and, uh, whatever, I'm getting long-winded, but then, I was supposed to go to the, I was supposed to go, they picked me to go to some course at, uh, MI6.

• 2:08:36Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:08:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and then, and then I got yanked and, uh, went to, went to war, went to Afghanistan, so.

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  That's too bad. Now that I think about it, I, we actually had SEALs in my, my Broken Axle class.

• 2:08:51Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:08:51Speaker 04

  Yep, we did.

• 2:08:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:54Speaker 04

  Good guys.

• 2:08:56Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, looking back, you know, if I would have, uh, I mean, cause I would have given up a lot of combat experience had I

• 2:09:04Shawn Ryan?

  wound up going to that course and then eventually getting into the ASOT thing. Uh, so I don't necessarily, uh, regret it or anything like that.

• 2:09:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:09:13Shawn Ryan?

  But it was really, it was just so different than blowing shit up and shooting and shoot move communicate, going in the kill house, doing close quarters combat battle. You know what I mean? Taking houses down and, and then you're doing something that's really permissive and blending in. And it was like, that was the James Bond shit of the, you know what I mean? It was pretty fucking cool.

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  Guys used that a lot and I go, there was a, a guy I went through the Q course with that actually went Delta Force and they used that a lot over there and he actually dressed up like Hodge.

• 2:09:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Speaker 04

  Got on a bike. And drove through Fallujah on a bike. And he was dark complexion with a beard and everything. And mapped out all the positions they had already set up in Fallujah. And went back and reported and then went in there and cat attacked them all. I mean, that stuff is viable. Even when we worked with the agency, you're still got the SDR portion and stuff like that. And, you know, you're always watching your back and you learn how to do that. All that kind of work.

• 2:10:20Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yep. It all came, uh, it all came like when we started, when I started working there, you know, before I met you at all. I like that stuff, man. I really like that under the radar. You're out there on your own and, uh, and, uh, it's, it's just, it's another, it's just a whole nother, whatever you want to call it, tradecraft.

• 2:10:43Speaker 04

  I loved it. I love tradecraft. I love figuring it out, things I even probably, I still do it today when I drive around. You know, it's just, it's something with me. And, uh, I just do it just to do it, you know? I'm always watching, always looking, always trying to, what's he gonna do? Always trying to keep a step, you know? It's funny, cause it's just, it's ingrained in you, I guess, having to do it for so long, you know? I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working for the agency. It was a good time. Working for them, with them, something like that.

• 2:11:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, whatever, uh, yeah. But, uh, let's take a quick break and, and then, uh, we'll come back and, and, uh, wrap this up.

• 2:11:31Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:11:51Shawn Ryan?

  Alright man, we're back from the break. Kind of covered everything. We're gonna talk about transition. I think I'm gonna spare you the pain of talking about transition, so let's just talk a little bit about what you're doing now. Now, I know you just launched a new business, but when you left the agency, you started

• 2:12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Fallon's Concealment, and we've been using your products here at Vigilance Elite for, what?

• 2:12:21Speaker 04

  Five years.

• 2:12:22Shawn Ryan?

  Five years now. Called them out on, I don't know, a couple of different videos and and, but now you're kind of venturing off into into something new.

• 2:12:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  So, what are you doing now?

• 2:12:37Speaker 04

  So, I decided to go ahead and try my hand at woodworking. I enjoy doing woodworking. I have for a while.

• 2:12:46Speaker 04

  The new company's called True Grit Wood Designs.

• 2:12:52Speaker 04

  I've got an Etsy account and I believe it'll probably be up and running within the next week.

• 2:13:01Speaker 04

  We're focusing right now on cutting, cutting boards, butcher block board type. I have a thing for the women called a spa board.

• 2:13:12Speaker 04

  I've been dabbling in epoxy type art, so wood epoxy type art, charcuterie boards, serving trays.

• 2:13:26Speaker 04

  Sky's the limit with this.

• 2:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Your stuff's amazing, man. I mean, you made that raw edge

• 2:13:34Shawn Ryan?

  bar over there. Is that what they call it? Live edge bar? You made that?

• 2:13:40Speaker 04

  I made that. The, it's actually a rubber table and it's made out of the actual stones out of your river. Out of your stream and it's got a tread in it.

• 2:13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, tabletops, stuff like that. The hardest part right now for me is trying to decide what type of legs to put on a table. So that's the big challenge. So other than that, I got all, everything set up. It's operational. I'm actually building inventory right now for when I go live in about a week on Etsy.

• 2:14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we'll make sure you're live before we release this episode. So the link to both Phalanx Concealment, if you want to buy holster, they're all handmade, custom. That's below. What you're really focusing on nowadays and what you're transitioning into is the woodworking. And your work is absolutely fucking incredible.

• 2:14:41Speaker 04

  I appreciate it.

• 2:14:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So that's linked below. And yeah, man, I just, I want to thank you for coming out. I know, like I said, I know it's, it's nerve wracking sitting in that damn chair.

• 2:14:54Speaker 04

  Well, I loosened up a little bit. I feel a little, a lot better now. You know, initially you don't know what's gonna happen.

• 2:15:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:01Speaker 04

  But I thoroughly enjoyed it. And for your viewers, I appreciate your support in Phalanx Concealment. We had our five year anniversary last month and not we, me.

• 2:15:19Speaker 04

  Lot of people out there and I appreciate your, your viewers for supporting me throughout the years. Excellent. I mean, tremendous, tremendous support. And I really do appreciate you pitching it for me. For those of the, those of you out there, he really didn't know me that well and pitched it for me out of the kindness of his heart. Just vets, supporting vets. And I think that's extremely important. I buy all, most of my material from, to make the holsters from vets. So you're supporting vets and it's keep, keeps giving, you know, it keeps giving. And I think that's an important thing.

• 2:15:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I just saw you, man. You know, I mean, we did one deployment at the agency together. And I left a couple of years before you did and, and I can't even remember how we got in touch. But to be honest, do you?

• 2:16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, my sales were like going bonkers, man. I was like, what in the world's going on?

• 2:16:20Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember how I found out you were making holsters.

• 2:16:24Speaker 04

  Somebody told me that you were promoting my stuff.

• 2:16:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:29Speaker 04

  So I called you up. And that's how it started.

• 2:16:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I found out and uh.

• 2:16:35Speaker 04

  Or you called me.

• 2:16:36Shawn Ryan?

  I just know how fucking hard it is to uh transition out of.

• 2:16:41Speaker 04

  Oh yeah.

• 2:16:43Shawn Ryan?

  A life of special operations and agency work and go into uh the business world, having to deal with.

• 2:16:52Speaker 04

  What I gotta say about that is endeavor to persevere. Just keep going.

• 2:16:57Shawn Ryan?

  But before we do wrap this up, I do have one phone call I need to make.

• 2:17:06Shawn Ryan?

  And uh when I was talking to your dad, he said he had something he wanted to tell you.

• 2:17:12Speaker 04

  Is that why he's been waiting for me? He was calling, he was calling me up today.

• 2:17:17Speaker 12

  Hello?

• 2:17:18Shawn Ryan?

  Alan.

• 2:17:20Speaker 12

  Hello Sean?

• 2:17:22Shawn Ryan?

  How are you? I got, I had a great talk with you yesterday, talking about your son and uh he's sitting right in front of me. And uh we kinda talked about you had something that you wanted to say to him, so he's sitting right here. Can you hear him?

• 2:17:41Speaker 12

  I'd like to, I'd like to thank you first for having me on your uh podcast and uh. You have my son sitting there?

• 2:17:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's there.

• 2:17:53Speaker 12

  I'd like to just tell him, as his father, I am so proud of what he has accomplished when he was in the military. And I've never told him that. Uh Sean, for shame.

• 2:18:09Speaker 04

  Sean, Sean.

• 2:18:10Speaker 12

  And uh.

• 2:18:13Speaker 12

  It's uh, it's been a long haul for him in the military and he stood at the test and he uh came out a winner on that uh with his military career.

• 2:18:28Speaker 04

  Well, I thank you dad.

• 2:18:29Speaker 12

  So, uh proud of him and uh I'm proud to be his dad, really. And uh I want him to know one thing in life, is that I love him dearly. We usually don't say that to each other, it's uh.

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  I love you too dad.

• 2:19:07Speaker 02

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