Shawn Ryan - A Memorial Day Message | SRS Special Release

This is a special Memorial Day weekend message from Host Shawn Ryan. God Bless our fallen heroes and God Bless the United States of America. Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Shawn Ryan?

  Since the beginning of this country,

• 0:04Shawn Ryan?

  actually since before we were actually a country, from the Revolutionary War all the way to present time,

• 0:14Shawn Ryan?

  there have been approximately 1.1 million American servicemembers who have died

• 0:25Shawn Ryan?

  for what we call America today. That's our freedoms

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  that a lot of us take for granted.

• 0:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's our well-being,

• 0:40Shawn Ryan?

  for the safety that we have in this country, for people to come here and live the American dream.

• 0:49Shawn Ryan?

  And if you take that 1.1 million, and you turn that into a percentage of just today's population, there are an estimated 366 million American citizens living in the United States today. If you just took the 1.1 million from the conception of this country until now,

• 1:18Shawn Ryan?

  not including all the people that have come and gone and lived in this country, past, just today, it would only be less than 0.3% of the population.

• 1:38Shawn Ryan?

  That should be our most cherished, honored

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  class of people to ever exist in America.

• 1:51Shawn Ryan?

  Think about that.

• 1:53Shawn Ryan?

  1.1 million men and women servicemembers have died for what we have today.

• 2:03Shawn Ryan?

  I'll tell you a story.

• 2:06Shawn Ryan?

  It was late September 2005.

• 2:12Shawn Ryan?

  During my first deployment to Afghanistan, I was with SEAL Team Two. This was just three months after June 28th. For those of you that don't know, June 28th was Operation Red Wings. It was the biggest loss the SEAL teams had ever experienced in that specific moment in time. Usually when you deploy, the team that's in country, there's a big turnover. The team that's in country, they do a turnover to the new team that's going to take their place.

• 2:57Shawn Ryan?

  And you talk about what works in combat, what doesn't work, what kind of missions were they running, what bad guys are we after? All of that stuff. Usually takes at least a week. Except this time, there was no brief. There was no brief because there was no one left alive to do that turnover.

• 3:35Shawn Ryan?

  They were all dead, except one. And so the one brief that we did get was from a junior intelligence officer. What that brief consisted of was one, he read Marcus Luttrell's after-action reports on what happened that day.

• 4:12Shawn Ryan?

  It was a

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  starch reminder

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  of what we might be getting ourselves into.

• 4:24Shawn Ryan?

  In the second part of that brief,

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  he showed us a

• 4:31Shawn Ryan?

  propaganda video that Taliban had created

• 4:38Shawn Ryan?

  as a recruitment video.

• 4:42Shawn Ryan?

  In that video was footage of the actual gunfight that went down on June 28.

• 4:54Shawn Ryan?

  There was footage of

• 4:58Shawn Ryan?

  them shooting our helicopters down. They wanted to save the four operators that were on the ground.

• 5:09Shawn Ryan?

  But what stuck out to me most in that video

• 5:15Shawn Ryan?

  was one of the SEALs that had just been killed in action.

• 5:21Shawn Ryan?

  He was laying upside down on the on the side of a mountain.

• 5:28Shawn Ryan?

  And all around him, he had he had a swarm of Taliban fighters.

• 5:38Shawn Ryan?

  His cami coat top was pulled over his chest. You could see exposed skin.

• 5:46Shawn Ryan?

  And I remember watching these fighters.

• 5:50Shawn Ryan?

  And they were

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  pillaging all of his gear off of his body.

• 5:58Shawn Ryan?

  Taking his watch off his wrist.

• 6:02Shawn Ryan?

  Another one picked his rifle up.

• 6:09Shawn Ryan?

  Trying to figure out how to turn his laser on.

• 6:16Shawn Ryan?

  Another one holding his ID up to the camera. Showing the world who they had just killed.

• 6:27Shawn Ryan?

  And the thing I remember most about this segment

• 6:34Shawn Ryan?

  was I saw a, what appeared to be a fresh tattoo

• 6:40Shawn Ryan?

  on this KIA SEAL's ribs.

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  I looked over at my teammate who was sitting to my right.

• 6:51Shawn Ryan?

  He was crying.

• 6:55Shawn Ryan?

  And before I could say anything to him,

• 7:01Shawn Ryan?

  he looked at me and he just said,

• 7:04Shawn Ryan?

  "I remember the day he got that tattoo."

• 7:15Shawn Ryan?

  Now the SEAL laying lifeless, upside down, surrounded by Taliban fighters, was Danny Dietz.

• 7:27Shawn Ryan?

  The same Danny Dietz

• 7:33Shawn Ryan?

  that we were all there to honor

• 7:37Shawn Ryan?

  in Texas over this weekend.

• 7:46Shawn Ryan?

  That is just

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  one scenario

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  of many

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

  that plays out in my head

• 8:00Shawn Ryan?

  this time of year.

• 8:07Shawn Ryan?

  Some of you get it, some of you don't. A lot of you know exactly what it's like to

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  lose somebody in the blink of an eye

• 8:19Shawn Ryan?

  for the benefit of everybody else that lives in this country.

• 8:26Shawn Ryan?

  And as civilians,

• 8:30Shawn Ryan?

  some of you are...

• 8:34Shawn Ryan?

  You want to know how can you honor these guys? These men and women, these servicemembers that have died for everything that we've come to enjoy, our sense of security, our freedoms in this country.

• 8:48Shawn Ryan?

  And I know that can be tough.

• 8:52Shawn Ryan?

  That's get real grumpy around this time of year.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  We've lost a lot of brothers. And to us, that's family.

• 9:08Shawn Ryan?

  You thank us for our service.

• 9:11Shawn Ryan?

  We get upset

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  because it's not about us. But I'm here to tell you one thing.

• 9:22Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't matter what we think.

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  Here's what matters.

• 9:29Shawn Ryan?

  When you go home tonight

• 9:34Shawn Ryan?

  and you look at yourself in the mirror, you're getting ready for bed, you look at yourself in the mirror, and you ask yourself one question.

• 9:51Shawn Ryan?

  Was I an American

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  that was worth dying for today?

• 10:08Shawn Ryan?

  And if the answer is yes,

• 10:13Shawn Ryan?

  you're doing everything those servicemembers that died for us

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  would have ever wanted.

• 10:23Shawn Ryan?

  Carry out our traditions.

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  Carry out our culture.

• 10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Stand up for what you believe in, stand up for what's right.

• 10:39Shawn Ryan?

  That's all you need to do. Just ask yourself,

• 10:44Shawn Ryan?

  was I an American that was worth dying for today?

• 10:54Shawn Ryan?

  And for us service members and veterans,

• 10:58Shawn Ryan?

  today's tough.

• 11:01Shawn Ryan?

  I know what you see. We all see the same things. We see the furniture store with 50 American flags out front with not one mention of one of those 1.1 million people who died

• 11:17Shawn Ryan?

  for them to even have that furniture sale. We see the parties.

• 11:23Shawn Ryan?

  We see the car sales. We see the carpet sales. We see everybody trying to make money.

• 11:31Shawn Ryan?

  But there's a lot of good people in this country too, and we have to remember that.

• 11:37Shawn Ryan?

  And they're just looking for a way to show appreciation.

• 11:43Shawn Ryan?

  And we have to remember something. We carry a lot of resentment. We carry a lot of weight.

• 11:51Shawn Ryan?

  And no matter what we do, that's never gonna go away.

• 11:56Shawn Ryan?

  But if we remember this one thing,

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  our brothers, our sisters, our family,

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  the people that we fought with, that didn't come home,

• 12:18Shawn Ryan?

  they wouldn't want us carrying that weight.

• 12:26Shawn Ryan?

  They wouldn't want us

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  feeling that resentment.

• 12:34Shawn Ryan?

  They just want us living our best lives.

• 12:40Shawn Ryan?

  They want us to be happy.

• 12:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's why they did it.

• 12:53Shawn Ryan?

  And I don't know about you all, but the ones that I know,

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  they wouldn't have gone out any other way. And while that may be a tough pill to swallow, there's a quote

• 13:08Shawn Ryan?

  that gives me some peace. And ironically,

• 13:14Shawn Ryan?

  the first time I read this quote

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  was the same day

• 13:25Shawn Ryan?

  that I walked into Afghanistan for the first time,

• 13:29Shawn Ryan?

  sat in on that brief.

• 13:33Shawn Ryan?

  Those of you SEALs that are watching that deployed over there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It was written on the wall in the hooch

• 13:43Shawn Ryan?

  that we used to sleep in.

• 13:46Shawn Ryan?

  And this is what it says.

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  "For those who fought for it,

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  freedom

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  has a flavor

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  that protected will never know."

• 14:05Shawn Ryan?

  And to me,

• 14:08Shawn Ryan?

  that's a privilege to be able to say that.

• 14:14Shawn Ryan?

  Happy Memorial Day, everyone.

• 14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Remember what this day is about.

• 14:21Shawn Ryan?

  And God bless America. Thank you.