FORCE RECON, MARSOC, JSOC | Ivan Ingraham | Ep. 342

Ivan F. Ingraham is a speaker, storyteller, and veteran. He served for 24 years in the U. S. Marine Corps as a special operations officer. Grab Ivan's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ivan-F.-Ingraham/author/B0BCL7NGS3?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=e87a20e2-f74a-4c1c-b1de-162d7126e00d Find Ivan here: https://ivanfingraham.substack.com/ for his newsletter/blog https://ivanfingraham.com/ for my professional website where people can find out about me, my books and writing, and contact me about booking for consulting or speaking engagements. https://www.instagram.com/ifi_writer/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: StopBox USA⬇️ Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE The Perfect Jean ⬇️ http://theperfectjean.nyc/HOUSE15 for 15% off!! GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! ___________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:58Speaker 01

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• 1:31Speaker 04

  So we mounted up, did a quick scan. We're like, all right, let's go. Came up with our assault plan. And my support by fire position that was being provided by the infantry, never underestimate the enemy. They pumped two mortar rounds onto that to knock them out as they saw us driving in. So they had to displace. And now I had no support by fire. We had no air support at the time. There was some pulling in the overhead. It was just like this confluence and stuff. So now, we drive down to this compound. And as soon as we get there, we are in the base. Murphy's Law says if your attack is going well during an ambush... Well, my attack went swimmingly because I was at the base of a U-shaped ambush and they were hammering us inside of 100 yards.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck. I don't know... And it blew up behind us.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  My guys dismounted and started doing fire maneuver bounds through these guys in trench lines. And they're throwing grenades. Oh my God. Well, I think it scared the shit out of the enemy because they're like, these guys are crazy.

• 2:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

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• 4:31Speaker 06

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

• 4:47Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. This is episode 342 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest in studio today, Ivan Ingram. Ivan had a career in the Marine Corps, served in recon, Force Recon, Marsoc, and then some JSOC assignments. There's a lot to talk about here. You're also an author, written a series of books, The Patrol, Dream Job, what are some of the others?

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Twenty-two and Athena.

• 5:12Jack Murphy?

  Okay, those are the ones that are out now. He has more in the works. Ivan, thanks for joining us, coming in studio today.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Pleasure.

• 5:20Jack Murphy?

  So, you know, the question I ask everyone about their origin story, if you can tell us a little bit about, you know, how you grew up and how that took you towards the Marine Corps?

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Kind of by accident. I'm from Maryland. My father was a Colonel in the Army, was an Army psychologist, and he wrote a book called The Boys in the Barracks, which is a study of the Army's morale and a lot of the leadership issues that the Army as an organization encountered after Vietnam. And while what he found was a bit frustrating for the Army to read writ large because of the racism, drug problems, lots of insubordination, many, many issues that were plaguing, you know, a unit or a force that had come out

• 6:14Speaker 04

  of protracted combat and just really bad morale, he and his research team looked at Special Forces units, Army Green Berets, to...

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Kind of understand why they didn't face the same issues. They might have had them same, you know, in some areas, but not nearly across the force the way that the army did. And so they were looking at ways to harness that which high functioning units with good morale and good leadership were working so that they could actually try and export that to the larger United States Army. So as I was growing up, that was the world in which I was living and I got to meet a lot of special forces veterans because the people he was interviewing were people who were helping with some of the projects he was working with or working on and the people he was working with. And then the other side of that, my mother was a professor of English, expository writer,

• 7:10Speaker 04

  expository writing teacher at Howard University. So I grew up in a house where writing, that was something that both of my parents did. And I kind of eschewed the military lifestyle, even though I was very into military history. And I loved going to museums and things like that. I had, I grew up in Europe for a time. I got to travel all around and go to different battlefields. And as a young kid, that was just a great way to grow up. So then I, when I went to college, played lacrosse in college. And when I was getting out of, or finished that and decided, okay, I'm going to go into the civilian workforce, I just kind of had this nagging desire to serve or do something more adventurous. And so I really wanted to be a law enforcement agent, a federal law enforcement agent.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  So I looked at the marshals, I looked at diplomatic security, FBI, can proudly say I was turned down by all of them. And I, I kind of, I asked like, why, what's going on? What do I need? And they would just say, this is the 1990s, you need experience and you need a little more seasoning. So their recommendation, some of the law enforcement agents I was talking to, was just join the military and get some experience, get your resume built and then reapply. You're young enough that you can do that. So I did, I joined the Marine Corps.

• 8:29Jack Murphy?

  And what year is this?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  That was in 1997.

• 8:32Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  And my father, being an army officer, after I'd signed the paperwork, I don't know if you think I thought I was going to do it. Cause I came to his house in December of 97. And my father was a recovered alcoholic. He hadn't had a drink of whiskey in years. He's a bourbon guy. In fact, we're drinking bourbon tonight, so that's only fitting. And he had this bottle of Jim Beam that he kept with the cork still in it from his last drink, and he kept that on his desk for like, just a reminder, like, I don't do this. And so, I showed up to his house and I said, Dad, you know, I did it. I joined the Marine Corps. He had this ashen look on his face, like, oh, my gosh, like, you really, okay, again, you said you were gonna do it, you did it. I guess this calls for a drink. And I said, Dad, you don't drink. He goes, it's not for me.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  So, I proudly had a drink from the last sip of the bottle that he had, and I guess he passed on that legacy. But he wasn't lying when he said that, so.

• 9:28Jack Murphy?

  Passed on the torch.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  He did. And he's like, you're gonna need this. And so, yeah, I was lucky to have him as a resource for learning about leadership, about officership, about followership, about just the dynamics of what it is to be inside of a military organization. Of course, you have to do it yourself, and I'm.

• 9:47Jack Murphy?

  And a military psychologist at that.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Well, that had its own, like, had its own challenges. But of course, yeah, I mean, I was, at that point, I was, just as the Marine Corps said, you know, he's working together, gung ho. I was into it. I wanted to be part of this. I thought, this is gonna be great. Do my four years, and inside that four years, I'm gonna try and do as much as I can, or five years.

• 10:09Jack Murphy?

  So you came in as an officer?

• 10:10Speaker 04

  I did. I went to OCS. I was probably recruiter's, like, absolute dream, because I didn't ask a whole lot of questions, and I was just like, all right, when do I get set up? And they, oh, well, we don't get guns too quick. Just hang on.

• 10:25Jack Murphy?

  Straight down there.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Just hang on, buddy. Am I going to jump school soon? They're like, easy guy. So, I had a lot of things I had to learn about the process, but ultimately, I was motivated. Motivation will get you through a lot, as we know. So, I hope that at least gives, you know, the beginning of the context. We can expand on that if you want.

• 10:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. So you come in as an officer, go to OCS. I mean, what, in the Army, they call it a branch. I don't know if they call it the same thing in the Marine Corps. What did you kind of branch into? What was your basic course?

• 10:56Speaker 04

  So, Marine, Marine officers will generally be sourced from either ROTC.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Slash what's called MSEP Marine enlisted commissioning program so that sort of people can come up through ranks.

• 11:09Jack Murphy?

  Green and gold.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  That kind of thing, exactly. But again, that's tied to some sort of established ROTC, Naval ROTC program, you know, with the university. Or OCS. And then, of course, the Naval Academy is its own, its own provider. And everyone, once you're commissioned, regardless of your source. So I just did OCS 10 straight weeks over the winter with some very caring staff. I mean, they were, they were wonderful. They were very attentive, made sure that I understood how to be a Marine right, right off the bat. You never forget your drill instructors. And if, if anyone says they were a Marine and can't name their drill instructors right away, no matter how long ago it was, they weren't. They didn't do it. So Gunny Town, Staff Sergeant Carpenter, and Sergeant Torres, wherever you are.

• 11:53Jack Murphy?

  Left an impression on your young mind.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say we're probably the three of the most interesting men I've ever met in my life. So, but yeah, so you go through OCS, and then after that, you go what's called to the basic school, which in the Army equivalent would be kind of like Bullock, but you're not, you're not getting actual branch training.

• 12:15Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  So in my case, everyone goes to the basic school for six months, whether you're an aviator or you're...

• 12:21Jack Murphy?

  So they're teaching you like Marine Corps mission planning and that kind of thing?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Just the basics of being in a rifle squad and carrying a machine gun and...

• 12:26Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  It's, it's not, it's not easy training. I mean, you're, you're doing all kinds of live fire ranges and they just teach you, they say we're a Marine or rifleman, but they want every officer to be able to lead troops. And you may never touch this again if you go to supply or, you know, comptroller or what have you, and not putting down anybody's MOS, but, so when you talk about your rate, you do, the military occupational specialty is what you get assigned. And when I joined, I sat and took the naval aviation, aviator test and...

• 13:01Speaker 04

  The results were such that they said I could fill one up with gas, but I wasn't gonna fly one.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  So I had to do something else. And they were like, well, there's a lot of loud, hot jobs in the Marine Corps, Ivan, and maybe you'd be an infantryman because you're big and you can carry a lot of-

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• 15:14Speaker 04

  Shit, so maybe that's for you. And I was like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Carry guns and like run through the trees. Then when I was there, I met guys who had been in the MISA program, who had been in force recon. And they started telling me, like, I really didn't know that much about that side of it. They started telling me about force recon and their time in it. All of a sudden, I was like, that's where I want to go. And you had to be an infantry officer at the time, or a ground intelligence officer, scout sniper, platoon commander, to really be considered for those jobs.

• 15:43Jack Murphy?

  That rubbed off on you fast.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. And these guys were also, they were fit, they carried themselves a little bit differently. They, like, there's a lot of bullshit in the military, and they just seemed to be able to transcend it. Like, they just seemed like they had a better, you know, one of my very good friends that I served with, and he just retired, was a little behind me. Of course, he made it to colonel, I didn't quite catch him, but he, you know, he was the first guy that I really met who had done that. And I was, I thought, okay, like, this is, this is a culture, this is a kind of a thing I'd like to be a part of. And I really didn't know that much about it, but he first had to get to the fleet, he first had to be an infantry officer. So, after I finished the basic school, I then went to 10 weeks of infantry officer course, which, I haven't been to Ranger School, but it's very much like Ranger School, in

• 16:29Speaker 04

  that you're just doing lots of mission dynamic planning, and it's all officer-based, you're leading your peers and learning how to do it in the infantry officer course. It produces a very good, like, infantry leader. Now, it's even, I think, even better, because they do a lot more call for fire, they talk about combined arms in ways that were evolved as a result of the GWAT, and just the experiences they had. So it's, as far as the Marine Corps writ large had in combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So they've improved that incrementally, but back then, it was very, still very tough, very dynamic training.

• 17:05Jack Murphy?

  And back in these days, in the 1990s... The Marine Corps wasn't a part of Special Operations Command and they didn't have a presence there. And I mean, I'm gonna like, trigger some people when I say this, but like, force recon and recon really kind of was like, the special ops of the Marine Corps, even if it wasn't technically on paper. And those guys were, I mean, I think they were on par with SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets. I mean, they were highly trained, motivated dudes.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  I, I, I agree. I mean, the, the, the pipeline, once I, I went to, I was assigned to First Marine Division, First Marine Regiment, First Battalion, Fourth Marines, in Camp Pembroke, California. By far, one of the best assignments I've had, even still, of all the pictures and stuff I have on the wall, my, the one of my, my first infantry platoon, just, it, I had a great time across my career and I, and I got to be part of some really trep- stupendous units, but like, you never forget your first, and these guys were like, yeah.

• 18:08Jack Murphy?

  Take it, take us into that, your, your first PL assignment with the infantry.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I was, well, I, you know, my first day, I showed up, we, we didn't have even the fire watch medal, we didn't even have the, the eggs and, I mean, the ketchup and mustard medal back then. Cause there was no war, there was no service. So, I literally, the only thing I had going into, going for me on my uniform was the fact I was a double expert. I could, I had expert rifle and expert pistol, and those were the only two badges hanging on my, my, my service alphas. And that's what you checked into the regiment in. And I went down to 1-4. And as I was coming in, a staff sergeant was coming out and he's like, whoa, whoa, so where are you going? I said, oh, I'm going in to check in. He goes, not like that, you're not. And he reached up and he fixed my tie, which

• 18:56Speaker 04

  I guess had come, you know, askew while I was sitting in the car. So, that, already I've got it, staff NCOs, you know, helping me out. This really green lieutenant. So I walk up the stairs and I go to see the executive officer and he's a major and he's this grim faced, like angry dude and he's sitting there licking like this.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  I don't know whether it's not gonna hatch or whatever, so I, he looks up and he goes, "Who are you?" I said, "Oh, my name's Lieutenant Ingram," and he goes, "Get in here." And he reaches out like this with his hand. So I walk over to shake his hand, "I don't wanna shake your fucking hand, give me your OQR." It was off your qualification record, the jacket. I'm like, "Oh, yes, sir, I guess this is how, you know, welcome to this." I haven't even been in this building for 10 minutes. Already had that fixed, and now he's giving me the business. He goes, "You haven't done shit, you don't know shit, you're going to Charlie Company, get downstairs." And that was it. So I was like, "Where's gunny highway?" Like, this is, this is nuts. And so I walked back downstairs, and as I'm coming down the passageway, this is what we call it, you guys call it a hallway, coming down the passageway, I see the Charlie Company offices, and out comes my first platoon sergeant, Pat Reddick,

• 19:59Speaker 04

  and he's like, "We heard you were coming, thank God you're here." And I said, "Why? This is great, what a welcome, man, I've had a rough, rough morning already." He goes, "Well, we got five Marines right now who are under investigation for a congruent, and here's their defense packages. And by the way, we gotta go see the battalion commander tomorrow afternoon. So, I was taking care of it, but now that you're here, you got it." So that was my first day in the infantry. I had five, you know, guys under charges, and one dude who requested court martial. And I was, I was standing there for the hazing, they had a whole bunch of thing going on, and I was like, "Wait a minute, the basic, well, they didn't talk about any of this stuff." Like, we were talking about two up and one back infantry attacks and all this other stuff. I was in a helicopter company, so I was like, "We're gonna go fast roping, we're gonna do all this stuff, nope."

• 20:41Jack Murphy?

  Sure, platoon had like some Jack Nicholson, "You can't handle the truth."

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, kinda like that, yeah. They just got back from deployment and got a new, new shipment of, of boots from, from MC, from SOI, School of Infantry, and the old, the old guys decided they wanna tell the young guys what's up, and so then there was a problem. So that's how I was introduced to the Fleet Marine Force, and, uh, from that point forward, I was like, "Okay, I'm in a different world."

• 21:07Jack Murphy?

  So how'd your court marshals go?

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Uh, the one guy, I will say not yours, because I wasn't court martial, I was there to observe, the one guy beat it, uh, and actually ended up going to First Force Recon Company. Now that I think about it, the other guys all request, you know, they, they took their NJP and uh

• 21:24Jack Murphy?

  Moved on.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, we went, we went through it and I, I still talk to my battalion commander to this day. John Holden was his name. In fact, he had a great uh command climate and it was, it was a great unit to be a part of. I, I kinda regret that, that he didn't get to take that unit to war cause he, it's just a bad timing of, of, of, of everything.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  But he was a dynamic leader. He really cared for his people and he, he was a good, good mentor. And uh, and he told me years later, it was like, that was a tough way to come into the

• 21:53Jack Murphy?

  For sure.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  You know, to join, to, to join us.

• 21:55Jack Murphy?

  And so otherwise, I mean, how did like from a leadership perspective, how did you push your platoon past that? I mean, you walked in, big bag of shit you get handed.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Well, you have to, I, I, I've always said this regardless of unit because believe me, I got in units like, hey, you know what this guy, he's a shitbag. Or hey, you know, this guy's got problems and I try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. And by nature, I, I am kind of a judgmental person. I am a judgmental person. There's someone right now is like kinda like, I, I can be.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  And so I was like, everybody gets a clean, clean slate and whatever adjudication happened, it was not mine to decide. And it didn't happen while I was here, even though I inherited it. So yes, you're responsible, but on the other side. Now we can grow. We're gonna have to. And some of these guys again, actually found that they were pretty creative. Um, and some of these guys, you know, my, my father being a psychologist, I, I one time asked him like, hey dad, you know, how do I get to know my guys? Like, should I find a way to get some sort of personality test for them? And he's like, well, you don't know how to review any of that shit anyway. Like this is all clinical. He's like, just get a keg of beer and lock the door. About two hours later, you're gonna figure out who everybody is. And he was right. So I went in, I was like, all right, because I had a bunch of, I had hoodlums, I had gang bangers, I had guys who were on work release.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  I mean, they were a tough group of guys. They're from all over the country and uh, I was like, all right.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna turn anybody in, but I need to know who knows how to boost a car. And these guys are all looking at each other like. I said, come on, who, who knows how to, you know, who knows how to hotwire stuff? Who knows how to drive, drive stuff? And it started, these hands going up. I was like, the reason I'm asking is because if we go to a really shitty place, I need the people who can get things. And they're like, oh wow, he's a bank robber. This is gonna be great. Like I haven't, you know. But I mean, that was the mindset you had to have because you didn't know where you're gonna serve or anything and I, and you, you, I had to figure out ways to.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Capital capitalize upon strengths and also build a little bit of trust.

• 23:52Jack Murphy?

  And it was the 1990s Marine Corps. You guys weren't getting funding. You weren't getting new kit.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  And a lot of people, we weren't getting a lot of action either. We had like three guys in the entire battalion who had a combat action room, which is the C I B, you know, combat action badge equivalent.

• 24:04Jack Murphy?

  Like the old sergeant majors and stuff.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  Well, the regimental sergeant major had been in Vietnam. He's one of the last serving Vietnam veterans at that point in time. But we're talking like guys from Bosnia.

• 24:15Jack Murphy?

  Got you.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Our company gunny had been in Somalia. Our company commander, actually, had been in Somalia in the later or the early stages of it before, you know, the Marine Corps was there. Before kind of Black Hawk Down took over. So the initial push, so these guys, there were people who had some experience, but you did not have this this large population, this baseline of people that you could rely upon. In fact, combat veterans, you know, seeing what my platoon was doing with Hazing would just think that was a joke at this point. So you're right, there was nothing else to do.

• 24:44Jack Murphy?

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• 25:23Jack Murphy?

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• 26:06Jack Murphy?

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• 26:53Jack Murphy?

  Did you guys get, you know, not combat deployment probably at that point, but did you guys get deployed, like go out with a fleet and all that?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, we did. We were assigned to what's called a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is about a regiment slash brigade sized organization. I say brigade because it's slightly bigger than a regiment. It's fully supporting aboard amphibious shipping with, I mean, at the time it deployed with tanks, it has its own air support, it has its own artillery. It's an organic fighting organization. And so when a Mew, and I was on 15th Mew, you know, you could go ashore and do all kinds of stuff, anything from humanitarian ops to full-scale combat. And it's all launched from shipping. So I was on the 15th Mew, we did what's called a Westpac, Western Pacific. And back then it was like, they were Liberty Cruises. Honestly, we were pulling into these great ports.

• 27:41Jack Murphy?

  Australia, Japan.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Australia, yes. We went to Hong Kong, we went to Singapore. We did do some time during part of Operation Southern Watch as far as just border security in Kuwait, but you're not doing active combat ops. I did, I did combat operations in East Timor.

• 27:58Jack Murphy?

  No shit?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, that had just started to simmer down, but we went aboard or went ashore there, helping to.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Establish, really get the country back on its feet. Because it had been in a huge civil war at that point.

• 28:13Jack Murphy?

  I mean, I know the Aussies were all over that, but I have to admit, I'm pretty naive about the United States military being over there.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Well, by the time we got there, the Aussies had really already, the Timorians Tigers, as they called them, they'd gone up on the border. In fact, I met Dave Kukul and years later, that's where he was, had been, he got his combat time. Obviously, Dave Kukul and stole my combat because he got there first as an Aussie. But it was still an active combat zone and we were flying missions in there, but we're doing a lot of humanitarian aid, trying to get infrastructure back up and running. Case in point for the infantry. They come to me and they say, hey Ivan, there's this road that hasn't been cleared to this village in this one part, part of the Highlands in East Timor, and we need your guys to go in there and pull security until we can get heavy equipment mechanics in there to fix

• 29:05Speaker 04

  the bulldozer. And they're like, so you go in there and do that? And I was like, well, why would I do that? I've got squad leaders. So I grabbed a squad leader and a staff sergeant and I said, hey man, you're gonna go in there. Now, this, this threw shockwaves through the Mew. They were like, oh my God, Ivan's not leading these guys on the ground. Like, what? I got, this is what we're supposed to do. Like, this is how this-

• 29:24Jack Murphy?

  You have to delegate.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  But this is what it's meant to do. It's not that it's beneath me, or I'm above it. It's that I have very quality staff NCOs and the right people. So remember what I asked about, you know, guys learning how to boot shit? We task organized the squad to go in there for very specific purposes. Rapor, all this stuff. And they fly in and originally they were gonna come, have a CH-53, a giant helicopter come and like pick this bulldozer up that had stopped in clearing this road. And then move it to a spot that the equipment mechanics could work on it. Because it was in this really kind of precipitous area. And meanwhile, the Marines were gonna hold security so that these guys didn't get messed with.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  By perhaps if the Timorese Tigers came back, which they probably weren't gonna do because the Aussies were all up in the Highlands, taking care of them anyway. And so my guys go in and like day one, they're just tinkering with the bulldozer and they get it fired up and then they just clear the road all the way up. Like, you know, the mission's done, you can come get us. And when we showed up, so I flew in to watch this and as we show up, they're playing soccer with the kids and like, I'm like, this is exactly, building rapport, we got the mission done. Yep, it's all, it's like, so you just let the Marines be creative and they'll figure it out. And huge lessons learned, huge leadership lessons learned.

• 30:42Jack Murphy?

  Those jabronis knew how to hotwire a bulldozer. It's awesome.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Puente was a gang banger from San Antonio and he used to carry this picture in his pocket of him in a hairnet and like, he was like literally out of central casting with his flannel shirt and a shotgun under his arm. I'm like, yeah, this, and now, and you know, now he's a Marine Sergeant, Squad Leader at the high end site. So, yeah, I mean, you don't forget guys like that.

• 31:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, and you know.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  And so we did, so we did do that. We did that deployment. It was six months and then we came back after.

• 31:14Jack Murphy?

  And I say, being an officer, it's your job to identify the talent in your platoon and figure out how to use them, right?

• 31:21Speaker 04

  And, and have, have faith. And that's, I think that's a critical part. We'll probably get into a little later. It's just kind of, it's not so much risk aversion because, you know, commanders will risk you to do whatever they need to do, but it's about confidence and whether they, you'll get it done. And it's, in, in, in many ways, as we get deeper into the discussion, it's about branding.

• 31:47Jack Murphy?

  So what comes after fleet? What's the next step for you? You have recon already rattling around in the back of your mind somewhere.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  And my battalion commander, Don Holden, had been a recon guy. And in fact, he had been the Marine detachment OIC at Fort Benning. So any recon person who came through there, who went to jump school.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  We didn't have a lot of exchange with Army Eusefik, the Army SF Command, but with big Army, i.e. the Rangers and the Ranger School, he would just basically help the Marines get to there and through there. So he Ranger qualified, he'd been in recon. And I took the recon selection test before I went on deployment.

• 32:32Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  So I could come back.

• 32:35Jack Murphy?

  Like test, you mean like a written exam or?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  It was a physical.

• 32:38Jack Murphy?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Physical test.

• 32:39Jack Murphy?

  Like an actual selection?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, an actual selection.

• 32:41Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and a board interview. And they were like, yeah, okay, you can come on, but you could get through your deployment. And when I was on deployment, Holden came to me and just said, hey, we're doing the slate for officers and stuff. And you still want to go to recon, right? That's what you want to do? I said, yeah, he goes, okay. And so when I got home, I had orders to do first recon. And so, yeah, I kind of leaned into setting myself up. I wanted, at the time, I was like, I'd rather be in first force because first force had the direct action mission. I deployed on our Mew, was the Mew that that force recon platoon, unfortunately had that tragic accident on the USS Picos with the 47, you may have seen this footage years ago

• 33:24Speaker 04

  of a 46 going over on its back and seven Marines and sailors were killed on that. So that was a very tragic situation, particularly, you know, a small unit like force recon that hits really hard, they had to reconstitute that unit, rebuild it, I learned a lot watching that happen as well. Bob Coats was the leader.

• 33:43Jack Murphy?

  I met him years ago.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  The debt CO.

• 33:45Jack Murphy?

  Debt one.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, debt one CO, John Daly, good friend of mine, work with, I know you've interviewed him. And then Eric Capitulik was the platoon commander, and that was sort of a larger-than-life guy.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  So, you know, in that.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  In that world on the Mew, that's who I was gravitating towards. But Force at the time only had five platoons and they didn't have any room. So I went to recon because I just wanted to get behind the wire.

• 34:14Jack Murphy?

  Your foot in the door, yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Get in there any way you can. So it wasn't like an also ran. I just, it was a different mission, a different unit. When I got home, I had orders.

• 34:22Jack Murphy?

  And recon is I've, people have described it to me, recon is the green side. They do the sort of like long range reconnaissance patrols. And the force and force recon, of course, is the DA mission that you alluded to, right?

• 34:34Speaker 04

  That's probably the biggest differentiator. Yeah. Force also was able to lean further into deep penetration reconnaissance stuff. So they did a lot more of military free fall. There was, there were guys who had been to free fall school and we were all airborne qualified. Or for the most part, you know, the O three twenty one, the badge.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  You're going to see a trend here that I'm always kind of late to stuff. So.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  But, but back to recon, the, the training pipeline is largely, largely the same. As you go to different places or, or different schools and different, different things.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Throughout the, the pipeline, but it all starts at the basic reconnaissance course, which is 10 weeks long. That is your, your, your entry level school. Officers and enlisted go there together. It's not like airborne school, you're just an alpha or an echo or, or just a number. But you serve in a team as a team. You carry a radio as an officer. You're not, you don't have separate training, that kind of thing.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  So you go to BRC. After that, you become, you, you then go into a school's pipeline, which is jump, dive, sear, ranger if you can get it, but it's about two, two years. If you, if you put it all together. But if you match up all that training and there'll be SEALs who'll just roll their eyes at this. If you went through the entire pipeline, you've gotten all the same training that the SEALs get in BUDs. And that's what BUDs is much more efficient because it just pushes.

• 36:04Jack Murphy?

  Okay, and everything except the underwater demolition side, right?

• 36:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, you don't touch demo till, till later. And that's what I mean is BUDs is very comprehensive in the way that they, they do the training. The SQT is also very comprehensive. And that's the problem in the, in the recon pipeline, at least at the time when I was in there, is that you kind of did this incrementally. Like hopefully you could have everything lined up and you would.

• 36:23Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I got you.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  You would pass it all, but if there was a deployment.

• 36:25Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  If you were going to go, if something happened, you know.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Anything, anything could throw you off.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  So I leave one four, I check into first recon again in my alphas. Now I have a couple more, a little more ribbons just from deployment. They call it the muse stack. It's just, you know, you got out there and you did.

• 36:46Jack Murphy?

  I was on a boat.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was on a boat. Armed Forces, we got the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal because we went to a combat zone. We were not, you know, so I got, at that point I could join the veterans of foreign wars. But, you know, we're not combat Marines. And so then you go in to check into recon and it's like, oh shit. Like memorabilia on the wall, like it's very tight. And, you know, again, what they called you, if you were, before you went there, they called you a roper because you would wear this

• 37:14Speaker 04

  static keremantal rope that you would, could use for repelling, returning, you know, and that was, you wore, you wore that over your shoulder, sort of this mark of shame that you were not.

• 37:25Jack Murphy?

  That like thick nylon green rope?

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Or black.

• 37:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  They didn't quibble. But I wasn't there long enough to become a roper because I got there just after my deployment and I walked in and Mike Polovic, who was the, they called him Iron Mike Polovic. Guy's fit as could be, served, he was in the Royal Marines Exchange. He was just, just a badass. And he too is sitting over the desk like this. And I'm like, here we fucking go again. Knocking the hatches.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Who are you? Mike was not nearly as gruff as, as, as my XO, you know, in, in one four. Who are you? Oh, so Lieutenant Ingram reporting his order. Oh, yeah, yeah, Ingram.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  After this, you're gonna go over and see the XO. Uh, but right now we've got you slated for about a year's worth of schools. And, um, in the event that you should not pass, you don't have to be honor man, but if you shouldn't pass or you quit, your adverse fitness report will be waiting for you and then you'll be in the parking lot. Is there anything about what I've just told you, you don't understand? I'm like crystal clear, so he goes, go to the XO. So go to the XO, check in with him. It's like, your BRC class starts in like nine days. You can go down and join, you know, some of the swim stuff, but I, I hope you're ready. And I was like, basic reconnaissance courses is gonna be, whatever, I'm fine. I'm just came off a boat and lifting all day, I'm in shape.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  I was quickly disavowed of that day one of the entry test, which was just brutal. And then from that point forward, you have just 10 weeks of just thrashing and

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• 40:57Speaker 04

  Hazing and it's five phases. You've got land navigation, you've got

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Patrolling, you have.

• 41:04Jack Murphy?

  Get the Zodiacs.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Get the Zodiacs, you're carrying stuff on your head, you're doing all, all, running the O course, and it's run out of Coronado. And yeah, you're, you're training like literally side by side with, with Bud's students, just port and starboard the stuff you're doing, you're doing surf checks, fins, all kinds of stuff and, you know. So you've got a communications package, you have to learn how to work all the radios and, you know, then after that, you do full mission profiles and it's all green side patrolling, you're doing sketching, you're taking pictures and reporting and you have to move to extract LZs and they were like, literally, if you don't make it to extract by the time you're supposed to, you're gonna walk home and they're not lying, like. The fact that the instructors almost took like this sick, you know, pleasure if somebody jacked it up, like, well, I guess we're walking all night and they would, and we would.

• 41:44Jack Murphy?

  And did the Marine Corps run their own dive school or did you go down to Key West for?

• 41:49Speaker 04

  They, they do run their own dive school, Marine Combat and Diver is run out of Panama City, Florida.

• 41:53Jack Murphy?

  That must have been a lot of fun.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  I went there after BRC.

• 41:58Jack Murphy?

  That was the next step.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  That was my second stop. And I was in phenomenal condition by the time I got done with BRC and then I went through a scout swimmer course and then I went to, to, to PR, or to MCD. And that was another, like, I felt like I got hazed like for the entire first part. By the time I got to airborne school, it was a break. Two, two and a half minutes of fun crammed into three weeks.

• 42:20Jack Murphy?

  So dive school, is that all on the rebreathers?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  You start off in SCUBA, first phase of SCUBA. It's a lot like SefuO and I actually later went to SefuO to participate in diver qualification and dive supervisor course with them, which is a lot more gentlemanly than, you know, being a student. So I've, I've been to Key West as well, in Fleming Key there. But yeah, dive school is, you do, first phase is SCUBA and then after that you go into under, you know, just the rebreather and there's a lot of, a lot of night navigation, a lot of underwater navigation.

• 42:56Jack Murphy?

  And so like to describe for folks out there who maybe aren't familiar, I mean, the, the concept here as you guys being marine recon, marine recon, you're gonna go and be the scouts for the main marine element, you're gonna swim up to the shore and do the hydrographical surveys and all that other kind of stuff.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Yep, you could do that by surface, um, if you, if you wanted to, you know, one of the options could be to do it subsurface clandestine, certainly the rebreather allows you to do that. Honestly, the SEALs have a pretty good with their SDVs and a lot of the profiles that they do, they're they're very capable. They can do harbor recons and things in ways that the Marine Corps can't. But you can't be good everywhere. And the Marine Corps was very good in in in applying the recon forces against or the recon units against their forces and force mission. And so a good example would be if you're doing an assault, then it wasn't going to be an amphibious assault, but you still needed to have depth.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Force recon could jump in well behind and establish observation posts, maybe even be calling in artillery or naval naval gunfire or air on approaching force while simultaneous to them being inserted, you'd have amphibious amphibious reconnaissance going in and setting up clearing the not so much clearing, it makes it sound like you're using engineers or something like that, but just doing the surveys and making sure that, you know, you can actually land and establish a bridgehead. But, you know, that's a that's a very complex mission. It's a war type mission, and we we didn't we didn't do that. And certainly as we moved into the later, you know, the early part of the GWAT, and then as it progressed,

• 44:35Speaker 04

  I think we lost a lot of that reconnaissance capability.

• 44:39Jack Murphy?

  Patrolling.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, that patrolling is, in my opinion, is one of the baselines that, you know, if your unit can patrol well, then you can you can do anything because the the principle applied.

• 44:48Jack Murphy?

  So when you're in your recon platoon, this is now like late 1990s, I'm guessing?

• 44:53Speaker 04

  I got there in August of 2000.

• 44:55Jack Murphy?

  Okay, 2000.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  And I went through the training and we did a deployment. That's why I love my Polovik, because like, we're going to do a battalion deployment to Hawaii, because you can learn and get more out of training in good conditions than you will in bad, because we expect you to be able to do it in bad conditions, which is a complete difference from when I was training with the British SAS, who were like, no, the weather needs worse. Can we get it worse than this? Like that now we'll go do it. FPS is the same way. Oh, it's not it's not snowing in the North Sea? Well, let's just wait for it to get really shitty and then we can get out there. I'm like. Why do you guys do this to yourselves? It's like, because when else, like, this is when it's gonna happen, guy. And they were right. They were like, you know.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  I talked to a Falkland Islands veteran in parachute regiment who had been in the SAS. And he said that his fighting in the Falklands while it was really, it was a light infantry war, was really, really challenging. He's like, we trained so hard that when we got there, it was just sort of like, alright, well, we're just used to this. And there's something to be said for hard training. And so, I say, I'm talking out of two sides of my mouth, because we went to Hawaii, we had a great time, but at the same time.

• 46:04Jack Murphy?

  It was a focus on developing individual skills, right?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Right. It was really more like, hey, let's be good divers now. And then if you're good divers here, we can take you into the shitty weather. Instead of, let's just throw you into really bad conditions and then see what happens. Because there are units who overstep that before, and people get hurt.

• 46:18Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  So he had a good idea for incremental training. And that's, so that's March of 2001, and 9/11 is not even looming. Like, we don't even know what's coming. And my platoon wasn't even earmarked yet to, like, be on another Mew. So I probably wasn't gonna be able to take my platoon out on a deployment had 9/11 not occurred. I was gonna just kind of do my time, my fleet time. And at that point in time, I was just like, well, I'm gonna start looking, revisit the marshals. I'm gonna go back to the FBI. This has been my plan. This is what I'm gonna do.

• 46:57Jack Murphy?

  And so, where were you and the guys at when 9/11 happened?

• 47:06Speaker 04

  I'd come up with this, I'd come up with this plan to take my platoon to Switzerland to participate in Swiss Raid Commando, which is this special operations.

• 47:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Competition around Bern, Switzerland.

• 47:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  And, like I said, there's nothing going on, so we were like, we. We're gonna jump into Lake Bern, water jump into Lake Bern, and then we're gonna do this. We're gonna, you know, and we got invitations, we had country clearances, I had transportation.

• 47:40Jack Murphy?

  That's cool, and it is kinda rare for the Swiss to do that kind of cross-training because of neutrality. You know, it does, it is a sensitive issue.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Well, other Marines had done it, and so we were like, well, I was like, well, when's the last time we sent a team there? Like, oh, it's been a few years, well, let's do it.

• 47:55Jack Murphy?

  Cool.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  So I went, I went and briefed a guy named James Conway, who was the first Marine Division Commander, later became the Commandant.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  And I said, hey, sir, this is what I'm gonna do, and he said, right, okay, you're approved, I hope you represent, and have a great time. That was September the ninth, so we're like literally lining up and getting everything going. And then my wife woke me up and said, you need to come, you need to come see this.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  And getting a little emotional, because I went to World Trade Center today to visit, to visit a friend, or to see a friend of mine, but my, my, my mother-in-law's cousin was killed.

• 48:43Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Well, and there were family members who were working there who got out, so we, you know, John Crowe, his name is there, so I went and saw his name, I went, you know, just, it was a huge, you know, people forget how absolutely terrifying and confusing that time.

• 49:00Jack Murphy?

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  And it's not just a big hole in the ground, right, when you go there, it's not, I mean, one World Trade Center still looks amazing as you walk by it, but

• 49:09Speaker 04

  the cost, today, today going down there was like visiting a battlefield, and it really is hollow ground, right? And so I, I come in and I'm watching this, everything, like we all did, on full on TV, and at that point in time, I was like, yeah, well, you should not go to Switzerland. Like, nobody knew what was gonna happen.

• 49:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  But then the phones were ringing, like, hey, you need to come in, we're in DEFCON D, we're drawing, we're drawing weapons, we don't know what, you know, it was, it was, it was a hairy time.

• 49:36Jack Murphy?

  It's, you know, yeah, I hate to sound like an old man or something like that, but you're absolutely right, that people, young people today, they don't understand what that was like. I was a senior in high school when it happened, and I mean, people were fucking afraid.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:51Jack Murphy?

  There was like a palpable fear in the air.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  And, and this is the, this is the thing. Is that

• 50:03Speaker 04

  everyone looked to our nation's leadership and said, what are we gonna do?

• 50:11Jack Murphy?

  And to our military?

• 50:12Speaker 04

  And that's who the next

• 50:14Jack Murphy?

  They rung down the ladder, yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  What are and and and you know Iraq wasn't actually on the docket at that point in time. It was all Afghanistan. We had Muse that were out and the next thing we know, one of our recompiltoons is on the ground in Afghanistan. There's raids happening like there's all kinds of shit and everybody's like

• 50:33Jack Murphy?

  It is on.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  It is on.

• 50:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  My buddy Nate Fick, who wrote One Bull Little Way, I've known him, you know, twenty some odd years. He he was over there as an infantry guy and just the the stuff that he was involved in. Uh, just as an infantry platoon commander, you know, as these guys started, remember, but I said, we didn't have any combat. He he said in his book, and we made combat, we became combat vets overnight. Now, all of a sudden, we had a lot of combat vets and they just kept growing from there. But yeah, sitting back in in the States, we didn't know what was gonna happen, etc. So.

• 51:03Jack Murphy?

  And I mean, speaking to the the fear that like your units drawing weapons and they're probably putting demo together and everything like the units did that. I, as I understand, a lot of it was on their own volition.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 51:15Jack Murphy?

  They didn't get order. They were like just preparing like they knew something was gonna come.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  The the intel shop all of a sudden had a lot of work. And we're like, if you know, having sipper and like, you you know, that's

• 51:31Speaker 04

  you know, high side stuff, there weren't a lot of that, not like it is now where you would get screened and you did that was just for the way you work. Never mind top secret. So it was sort of like, hey, you you guys need to get to work and start mining thing.

• 51:44Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  What networks do we have? Like we didn't. We didn't have the relationships that we have now between agencies, particularly at the national level. All this stuff was was brand new. We literally were just grabbing maps of Afghanistan and putting them up on the wall and be like, okay.

• 51:56Jack Murphy?

  Putting little tags in them.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, the the bear went over the mountain, you know.

• 52:00Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Dave Graw is his name. Uh, we we had a few guys come in and give P M Es on their time, uh, having, you know, worked in Afghanistan in the eighties. It was the only end. It was the only information we had.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  And so we just didn't know. And so then from there, we just went into this crazy training cycle. We were out in the desert and honing our skills with vehicular patrolling, foot patrolling, how do you get teams in and out, immediate action drills. The training then became very, very real. We're no longer doing this vacation shit.

• 52:31Jack Murphy?

  You're getting ready for a real, real world mission.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 52:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  And so I was there for all of 2001 as we went into 2002. I was looking to try and stay. They don't have what's called stop loss, which would keep you in your unit. And I missed the push to Iraq because I got orders to go to the amphibious reconnaissance school to become the XO, which I did want to stay in recon. I did want to be a part of it. It beat going on recruiting or something like that, but I was really frustrated. So I missed the Generation Kill deployment. I've known many of the guys who were in Generation Kill, Rudy Reyes, Nate Fick was a platoon commander, the guy they called the Iceman, all the, the bride Colbert, all these guys were people I knew and, you know, I remember the platoon commander coming in and took over my platoon. I'm just like, I told you

• 53:19Speaker 04

  I was late, Jack. Late to a lot. So they went and they deployed and I remember we were training in Key West in March of 03. And we were out for a couple of beers and all of a sudden CNN flashed on and we were in the invasion and all of us were like, can we have like 20 beers, please? Because like,

• 53:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  We're a bunch of recon guys and we're not even in the,

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• 55:09Jack Murphy?

  So, yeah, it's 03 and you haven't gotten to Afghanistan or Iraq yet.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  I didn't do anything yet. Nope. And it would be, it would be a while.

• 55:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's frustrating.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  It was amazingly, because I was at ARS, which is the west, the east coast version of BRC on the west coast. Now they've consolidated all out in the west coast at SLY. Which is better. I mean, they've got better access, better throughput. You didn't, two schools at the time was meant to feed like small requirements on each coast, but...

• 55:38Jack Murphy?

  Did you have a fear like that, like a real fear that you were gonna miss the war?

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 55:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I now was no longer looking to become a federal law enforcement officer. Like, I'm gonna stay in.

• 55:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  This is, this is an opportunity. You want to, you want to be able to do this.

• 55:51Jack Murphy?

  Kick some ass.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  But I was in this training command and we're training guys and, you know, the irony is that we've got a cadre of dudes with have operational experience and maybe one or two had done some combat Sierra Leone or Bosnia.

• 56:08Jack Murphy?

  Doing like NEOs.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  NEO type stuff, protective stuff. The guys in Bosnia did some actual reconnaissance missions and, and, you know, had real world kind of hariness that they were doing. I'm not talking direct action, but they were involved in some things. And I, I had, I had taken over from, from a guy named Doug Zembeck.

• 56:30Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  So...

• 56:31Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  So, he, he's his own, he's his own legend. We can talk about that. He's a very good friend of mine, was a very good friend of mine.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  So I'd taken over from him and he was like, hey, man, you're entrusted with training in these Marines. I know that because he was gonna go to, um, he'd got orders to what's called the, um, now the Expedition Warfare School, but it's time amphibious warfare school, which is a captain's level career course for the Marine Corps. And then from there, he was gonna take an infantry company. He was like, look, I know that this is frustrating for you, but you're in charge of something very important and you need to do that job the best that you can, which is a huge leadership. And he was right. But we're a cadre of guys who don't have a lot of experience and then we start getting dudes who were in infantry in Naziriyah. We get guys who are part of like really legitimate ground combat operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq as infantrymen.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  And now they're coming in and we're teaching them how it's gonna be.

• 57:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that doesn't go over.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a lot of credibility. So eventually we started getting some cadre that actually did have combat experience. A couple of guys who'd been shot, like, so they started lending it.

• 57:36Jack Murphy?

  The entire military kind of had that problem around that timeframe, like oh three, oh four. You know, Ranger School, whatever it was that you had instructors who nothing wrong or against them at all, but they're suddenly having like Ranger Battalion privates with like three combat deployments showing up at their school.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  When I, I went to, I went to airborne school in December of two thousand two and there were Ranger privates walking around with mustard stains.

• 58:03Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Cause they jumped into Rhino.

• 58:05Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  With, with, with, with CAG. And so, you know, I haven't even got a jump yet and these guys are, you know, get out of the way.

• 58:12Jack Murphy?

  I, I knew a couple of guys that had two mustard stains.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, from Iraq and Afghanistan. It's wild.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Well, I, I remember asking, when I was joining the military, I went to MEPs and they put you through the, the, you know, the screening. And one of the medical screeners, there was an army medic and he, he had, he had jumped in Panama. Ranger, a combat Ranger squirrel. And then he had, uh, you know, mustard stain on his, and I, I just handedly asked him, well, how many jumps do you have? And he goes, one that matters.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Fair.

• 58:42Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the, you know, that, just being in that environment, because you're in this tough guy club, but you're not really a tough guy, and you're, you're, you, you want that. And it was, it was a little bit of a self-consciousness, a little bit of stigma. And so, yeah, I, I did that from oh three to oh five. And then, um, I very much wanted to, I wanted to lead recon Marines. I could have gone and become a company commander, because that's what I was, an infantry officer. Doug was doing that, and very successful with that. Uh, they don't call him the Lion of Fallujah for no reason. And, uh, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna ask to go to second force and become a platoon commander there. And-

• 59:27Jack Murphy?

  And so that, that would be your third platoon at that point, right? Is that normal or abnormal?

• 59:32Speaker 04

  No, that would be very abnormal. In fact, taking a platoon as a captain was career suicide. And my, my monitor, my, my detailer, he even told me, I had to sign a, he said, I'll cut you orders there if that's what you want to go. I got plenty of people that, that need company command time. So if that's what you want to do, and they, they've got a job for you. I drove down there and interviewed with the commander and got a stamp. And then I came back that day. I was like, all right. So you, you gotta make your own luck, right? You gotta chase it down. But if, if they didn't give it to me, I, I don't know what, like, that's the direction I want to go.

• 1:00:03Jack Murphy?

  That's what you want to do.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that is, that is, them allowing me to do that, and that decision is what set the rest of my career. Because I was told like your career's over. Well, they didn't know what things were gonna look like.

• 1:00:14Jack Murphy?

  So you go to force as a captain, take a platoon, uh-

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  And I've trained guys at ARS who've now been to combat and come back. And now they're like, oh, great asshole, you know, welcome.

• 1:00:25Jack Murphy?

  Now we're into like oh five, oh six. All right. So what's it like landing at force?

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  It is like, the, the best way I could equate it is if you saw a band of brothers, it would be like checking into the hundred and first after they got back from Normandy.

• 1:00:38Jack Murphy?

  Salty D's.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Oh my God. Platoon sergeant, everybody. I couldn't, I-

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Well, I had, you know, you still have to be a leader, you still have to be there, but you, yeah, you got this, it's not even a chip on your shoulder, you just have to try and figure out how to navigate. You have to earn the respect, you have to earn, and so go on all the way back to my, my first infantry unit, I kind of was like, well, I'm gonna start just like that. They all get a fair shake, hopefully they'll give me one too. I already had a reputation within the recon community, for good or for ill. And so I had to kind of, almost, I had to humble myself. My friend, my friend Roger Sparks, who does some really good veterans work, he's out of Alaska, he was a recon guy and then went to PJ's, he's a Silver Star recipient, a really, really great guy.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  When I was at first recon, he's one of my team leaders and he's like, there's a time in everyone's career where you come legit, where everybody's just like, okay, you've, you've got what it takes. And, uh,

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  never forget that, like when you get to these units, you, you've got to figure out.

• 1:01:42Jack Murphy?

  How did, how did you go about that? How did you build rapport with these guys and kind of like get that nod or handshake that like, yeah, okay, this guy will work?

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Well, I had a lot of talented NCOs, obviously their combat, their combat experience was quite significant by that point, because they'd done Afghanistan, some of them had been Afghanistan and Iraq.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  And they were seasoned, and so I just said, all right, I sat down with the platoon sergeant and platoon commander, and, or as, as their platoon commander, and I said, all right, how are we gonna make this unit work? I'm here to lead it, I mean.

• 1:02:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you sought their guidance.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I don't, but I don't have to take my shoes off and, and say I'm in charge, I'm just like, people already know that, but that's not what I'm here to do. And then I also went to other platoon commanders who had been involved in that for a while. And said, hey, man, I'm having, this is a challenge, I'm having, this is hard. What do I, what do I do? You know these people, what do, what do I say? And it's not so much looking for validation, and you're not looking for,

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  they're gonna tell you what to do, it's just sort of like, hey, give me some, I need some guidance here.

• 1:02:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  And that's a hard thing to grab hold of. And it's hard to, um, like I said, to humble yourself, it's hard to, to kind of say, okay, this is what I don't know. And there was a lot of stuff I didn't know, and there was a lot of stuff that I could offer. And I said, all right, we'll go figure out that blend. And so when I took them out on a patrolling exercise, they were like, what is he doing? But I did it for a very specific reason, to watch and see how these guys work and what do they do? And how do they move at night, and what do they?

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  And then we got the keg of beer and we figured out the personalities. My dad's legacy was right on, you know what's going on.

• 1:03:18Jack Murphy?

  But no, that's interesting. I mean, you took them out on a training exercise and it really was for you to observe them and to see how they operate so that you can kind of then mold yourself around that.

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  Knowing they were also watching me.

• 1:03:28Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  And so you can't be first in everything. You wish you could. You wish you were great across all areas. And, you know.

• 1:03:42Jack Murphy?

  But these guys are hard chargers, yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you can't fool. You can't fool the audience. You can't fool the audience. Like, you gotta give them credit, right? In the book and the movie or whatever. And so, yeah. And then after a while, we got to know each other and we were getting ready actually to deploy to Iraq as part of a M U, because that's what it was at the time. And then Donald Rumsfeld came down and said, we're standing at Marsoc and Marine Corps figure it out. And I was in the right place at the right time to be a plane goer in Marsoc when they started.

• 1:04:10Jack Murphy?

  Wow. So tell us about how that came about, because one of the funnest stories about this that I heard, we had an enlisted guy, and I'm sorry, I can't remember his name. He's an enlisted Marine. And he said that they came, he was in recon or force, came back from a training exercise, and like, the supply guy or something met them in the parking lot and was like, yeah, you guys aren't recon anymore. You're something called a man sock, I think it is. That's Pete Perry? And everyone was just like, what?

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  I, so like I said, I was supposed to go on this M U in October, and I had already gone to meet with the M U commander, and I'd also met with the infantry battalion commander. Even though we were force, we knew that we were going to do a lot of reconnaissance, linked up with second recon, which is another, you know, you have the same, you have second force, just like first force, and then you had recon battalion. So we were trying to come up with like, how do we consolidate all the reconnaissance forces, which they've now, they've now done as part of the Marine Corps.

• 1:05:06Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so it's like under a Marine Corps Special Warfare kind of umbrella?

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. And we can go into the back and forth of who got disbanded when, and then who got reactivated. The Marine Corps is a relearning organization. We learn, and then we learn a lot more, and then we, you know, no one ever accused us over 250 years. It's 250 year anniversary, unimpeded by progress. No one ever accuses us of being particularly bright. But we, damn, we're hard, right?

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  I was actually up at Quantico at the breachers course. I got a slot as an officer, a very rare one, to go to the dynamic entry, you know, explosive breaching course. So I am a qualified breacher or was. Now their breachers are going to fuck this guy. But it's true. I was up there at the course and I got a call and they were like, hey, man, you're not going to be on the Mew. We don't know what's going to happen, but Marsoc's just stood up and we're all now in Marsoc. And so when you get back, just stand by. So we didn't know what it was going to look like. We know that we were now falling under SOCOM, but they brought in auditors to our arms rooms, our supply.

• 1:06:19Speaker 04

  And to your point of like, we didn't have any gear, we didn't have any, this is where we're working on a shoestring budget. SOCOM came in and looked at our weapons and looked at all of our stuff and were like, how have you guys been doing this? You're so poor, you actually don't know how poor you are.

• 1:06:33Jack Murphy?

  They were concerned about interoperability and things like that.

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  The commonality of gear. We didn't have PVS-15s.

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• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Two barrels. We were still running around with singles. Some guys had them as they were starting to come in, but I'm not saying we were using the CAR-15s, but you know, we'd basic M4s, that kind of thing. And it was just like, okay, here's some money. Like, go get, go buy yourself some new boots, man.

• 1:08:52Jack Murphy?

  Go down to Walmart or Cabela's.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, go to 511 and hook yourself up. Like, whatever you want. Your Cry Precision was brand new. Like, get yourself 100 pairs of canvies for all your guys. Like, what? And if you need more, come see us. Like, it's no problem. Like, we got this crazy GWAP money. And then we're like, all right. So we start getting more gear. We start getting better equipment. We start, you know, really, you know, getting ourselves outfitted. And that's what we were able to do in those interim years, but when we weren't deploying, was build our forces up. And the best part about that was the force recomplition that I had inherited and now was part of. We were together now for another two years after that. So we had incredible unit cohesion.

• 1:09:28Jack Murphy?

  A lot of time together.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  A lot of time together.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  My jump masters, like, they, they knew exactly who was who. You know, we all knew what skills we had. We had, we had levels of training that we'd been to that hadn't been done because we had this opportunity. And that's kind of how I looked at it. I was like, well, we don't know what's going to happen, but we can be ready. So let's just, we're going to train and we're going to train really hard.

• 1:09:50Jack Murphy?

  So yeah, talk, talk to us through that a little bit, you know, after you guys went down and bought all of your Oakleys and Velcro and everything that you needed.

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  Well, to be fair, a lot of guys were already leaning into that. They already cleaned out the places in town. That was legal, that was legal.

• 1:10:05Jack Murphy?

  How, how did you begin like standing up? I, I assume, you know, you mentioned auditors and so forth. There must've been people coming down and you had like some benchmarks you had to meet to be quote unquote qualified as a SOF unit.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, that, that all came out of SOCOM. In fact, the army did a lot of evaluation on us, particularly, uh, we were direct action focused at that point in time particularly. So there were people from CIF, there were people from, from CAG. And they were, they were curious, like, what are these, how do these guys train? What do they do? We, we invested in marksmanship training on a, on a huge level. We, in fact, we invested in our tactics. We revitalized how we, we did stuff because Delta had found that five guys attacking the people, the, the paper people army was not really effective and dudes were getting shot and it was, so, so we, we, we had to relearn a bunch of things. Aggression helps in those fights, but you, you also have to be a thinker.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  And like the British, you know, the British say, you know, take your time, but hurry, you know, be careful, but get it done.

• 1:11:02Jack Murphy?

  Be deliberate.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you know, if you're in, you're in, but like, just, we, so we had to change things immensely in the way that we trained and the way that we approached stuff. And, and, uh, that was a lot of learning as well. I mean, you guys had come back from Iraq with Humvees that they had gotten the CBs to weld armor plate on. And they're like, yeah, there's got to be a better way to fight than this. And so they designed the GMV, the ground mobility vehicle that we all started, you know, they, they went to Letter Kenny Arsenal and said, okay, we want to design a vehicle that works. So from the ground up, it was tailored built for SOF use. That's why they had the SOF area, the GMV, the turret and all those things.

• 1:11:44Jack Murphy?

  So we have to not preface this, but at least explain to the viewers to kind of like dovetail this. We had Fred Galvin on the show a few years back. We have his book, right? A Few Bad Men right there.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know Fred, I know Fred very well.

• 1:12:00Jack Murphy?

  You know, you guys can, can and should go back and watch his interview and you can, that first Marsoc deployment sounded pretty hellacious for those guys on what they went through.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  And, and to be fair, I was not there.

• 1:12:11Jack Murphy?

  Right, yes, that's what I'm, I'm leading up to here is that you were-

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Same generation kill, I was not there, so it makes for good TV in some ways, but I can just say who I know and that's-

• 1:12:19Jack Murphy?

  You were the follow-on after Foxtrot, if you'd kind of take us through that a bit.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Yep, uh, so I was, I was the direct action platoon commander, we were paired up with a,

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  an infantry platoon, they call a trailer platoon, which is really not a good name, they were, they were, they were meant to be an augmented security force for us doing a direct action mission, so if we were isolating an objective and we, the assault platoon were attacking, or going into the, um, the assault, the infantry would be in external security, they'd also come in with heavier weapons, uh, machine guns, that kind of thing, and be able to, to, to lay down some exterior higher firepower, and they were also able, it also allowed us to put every assaulter on the objective and not have to have a driver, like they, they could take care of all that for us, but, so another thing we invested in was driver training, we went to BSR, we did day and night, we did off-road, you know-

• 1:13:09Jack Murphy?

  Old mobility, yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  It, it's a lot of fun to drive an old police Caprice Classic, you know, with a big block V8 405 at a hundred miles an hour on night vision goggles down a racetrack.

• 1:13:21Jack Murphy?

  Crown Vic.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, yeah. And just, just roll, like, you got the sus- cop suspension, you're just, yeah, it was, it was great. So, um, so, yeah, but we invested in that kind of stuff because we, one of the biggest casualty producers was vehicle rollovers and accidents, and we're like, well, then shouldn't we learn how to drive? And you gotta drive in your body armor and your gear, and you gotta be able to feel the pedals in your boots, and so we tried to make this training as realistic as possible, um, and then, so the Marsoc company at that time was 120 people, and that had enablers, communicators, it had, our company commander was a major, uh, like Fred was the company commander for Fox Company, I was in Golf Company

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  at that point, uh, and then we were to succeed Fred and his guys, and then they got into, they got into the, uh, the encounter, the, the ambush that they were involved in, and you can read about that, you can go see, see different things, um, and that was a really difficult time, uh, because-

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  People are quick to judge. The facts weren't there.

• 1:14:23Jack Murphy?

  I told Fred at the time, I mean, we were hearing about it. I think I was in the special forces qualification course. And I was hearing weird stories at Fort Bragg about this stuff that, as I now know, are highly exaggerated. You know, that's not how it went down.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  Everybody heard that.

• 1:14:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  And it sent a shockwave across. I mean, the Ring Corps has never liked Marsoc. And at that point in time, it was like a, see?

• 1:14:50Jack Murphy?

  They really didn't like it.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  See? This is what?

• 1:14:52Jack Murphy?

  Told you so.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  This is what you get, which is totally unfair because he had, man, if I had a good freaking group, he had an A-team of dudes in that unit.

• 1:15:02Jack Murphy?

  And...

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  In fact, he was direct action.

• 1:15:04Jack Murphy?

  It sounds like they have been, it took a hell of a long time, but they have been vindicated.

• 1:15:07Speaker 04

  It's been adjudicated, it has, and, but, but, but they...

• 1:15:11Jack Murphy?

  It lingers.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:15:14Jack Murphy?

  Leave some scars.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  It does. And it also went through SOCOM the same way. Because it was like, what's going on here? And so there was even more scrutiny on us as we were ramping up. You talk about certification where they're like, well, let's take a look at, like, we really need to look at these guys carefully. And we're just like, wait a second.

• 1:15:35Jack Murphy?

  What'd I do?

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  We're training as hard as anybody else. We've already demonstrated, we demonstrated our capabilities to do what we needed to do. And so, coming in after them,

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  you know, that was the environment. And we just had to kind of figure it out.

• 1:15:50Jack Murphy?

  Another leadership challenge for you.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  Have we seen a trend here?

• 1:15:53Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  We're only in 2007 right now.

• 1:15:58Jack Murphy?

  Well, how did you overcome this particular leadership challenge that like Marsoc is under the microscope? And in the eyes of many military leaders, like, you guys suck, you know? Not, it's not fair, but there's a perception out there.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  We needed to be the best people we could be. And I said...

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  We know who we are, we know what we can do. And it's up to us. Now, this doesn't mean zero defect, but we don't have a lot of room for mistakes.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  In fact, we don't, because we're playing with house money now. So we cannot have a bad bet. And unfortunately, some people took that to mean really holding back. And Fred, Fred did tell me, he's like, you're gonna enter a world where people approach things from the point of view of like, I don't have to do anything right so long as I don't do anything wrong. And they'll wait, they'll wait out stuff like that. And so.

• 1:16:59Jack Murphy?

  That's a little metaphor for the entire war.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  Fred was right. I'm not giving, I'm giving, Fred and I get along, we always have, I haven't talked to him in a while. So Fred, if you're watching, man, love you, buddy. But he, he, he really, he had to, he, he had to fight his own fight. For his unit's good name, for his men's good name, and he didn't give up, like he, he had his people's back. And that, I think that's what my own guys wanted to know as well. Like, hey, if this goes down, if Ivan.

• 1:17:34Jack Murphy?

  Kind of support your boys.

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Stick with you.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  And, but the answer was yes, but again, we, you have to figure, you had to figure this thing out. And, and so you're,

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  you know, we deployed to Afghanistan in summer of 2007, and, and we were there until the early, early part of 2008. And we saw a protracted amount of combat, a hell of a lot of. When I was an infantry officer, of course,

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  met a guy named Blackjack Matthews, Lieutenant Colonel, Battalion Commander in Way in 1968. And he had given his Marines the order to fix bayonets. Fuck. Fuck is right. And what he said about that is that it, it was the most difficult order that he'd given anyone because he knew someone on the other end of that rifle was gonna die.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  And so, while I never, I of course never gave the order for fixed bandits, I know people who have done it in combat.

• 1:18:33Jack Murphy?

  Really?

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  Oh yeah infantry unit, there's infantry guys who've seen way more combat than we have. I mean seriously, let's call it what it is. And, and so, but I thought to myself, they talked about the combat that he was in and the, and the, you know, just day overnight type of leadership and things that he had to be involved in, I was like, I'm never gonna see something like that. I'll never say never, because, man oh man, I couldn't get deployed to Iraq, I couldn't get, you know, I kept going to these.

• 1:18:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you fought for this.

• 1:19:01Speaker 04

  I was doing everything I could and now I was finally able to go to the game. And I got all caught up.

• 1:19:08Jack Murphy?

  What area were you guys deployed to?

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Uh, we were in the Helmand.

• 1:19:11Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  Cause at that time was really dangerous. I mean, not that any place was great, but.

• 1:19:15Jack Murphy?

  That was, oh shit, this timeframe is like during the surge too, isn't it?

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Uh, no, it's just prior to that.

• 1:19:20Jack Murphy?

  Just prior, okay.

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  So we were kinda the only marine unit in this area kinda alone and unafraid and then we were, we were lashed up with, we were working with special forces units. So I've, I have earned my, my special forces combat patch, um, which, which is pretty cool. I, I actually take a lot of pride in that because I work with some phenomenal guys and to be, you know, be fair, we were, we were new to the, the environment. There are guys who had been in Afghanistan but earlier, there were guys who'd been in Iraq, but this was not Iraq, it was different. Um, you had to learn, relearn things and the enemy gets a huge vote and we were working with SF guys who'd been there a while and they were like, hey, we're gonna show you some stuff, like different ways of packing your gear, different ways of patrolling, you know, or, or navigating and avoiding IDs and all this other stuff.

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  And they, you know, we probably, no, we definitely avoided more casualties than we took, even though we did take casualties, uh, because of, of their tutelage and I would, I would give them, but on the other side, it felt like we were being watched, like, hey, you know.

• 1:20:22Jack Murphy?

  Big brother.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, hey, you know, nobody really trusts these Marsoc guys too much. So let's just put some SF guys with them because, you know, they're so trustworthy.

• 1:20:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  Like, well, it depends on how you look at it, right?

• 1:20:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  And so we just came to find like, after a while, it was like, hey, you guys are like us. Well, yeah, I mean, we're trying to tell you that, like, we're, you know, we get it, you know? But people did ask, like, what's your training course like? Did you get a beret? Do you get in? We didn't even have our badge in the Marsoc.

• 1:20:48Jack Murphy?

  You weren't Raiders yet?

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  Nope. And we were all Force recon. But I tell you what, like, as soon as you told them you were former Force dudes, you said you got this credibility.

• 1:20:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, like, okay.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Talking about, like, okay, these guys are, these guys are all right.

• 1:20:59Jack Murphy?

  Any missions that, like, stand out in your mind? I mean, maybe like, the first time you were in combat, or any that particularly, you know, stand out for you?

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  So, we were tasked, like we said, we're a direct action unit, but we did a lot of infantry-esque fighting, infantry fighting, but we're small. A hundred and twenty guys is still not a lot of dudes, especially out in that bad guy country. And we often did a lot of patrols by platoon, so you've only got five, six vehicles that you're out there by yourself. Whether it's reconnaissance, or you're actually doing active combat ops where you're searching for the enemy, or even a raid, which we did do a few of.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  You...

• 1:21:41Speaker 04

  We did a clearing operation, and that makes it sound like it's an old Vietnam search and destroy, but that's not what it was. We're just kind of moving up this valley to kind of...

• 1:21:50Jack Murphy?

  Movement to contact.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

  Movement to contact. We're really trying to figure out the enemy, because the big, the big push was gonna be on a town, a city called Musacalle, which is further to the north, and we were down south of Kajaki. So none of, the 610 route hadn't been made yet, any of that stuff, you know, those things, those improvement projects hadn't been completed, and they were like, what's the enemy like up in this valley? We gotta go figure it out. So they sent us into this valley, you know, in the Hellman River, to go and do that. And at first, it was presence patrols, you know, you're gonna meet with people, meet with villagers and things like that, and then it just started getting incrementally more hairy the further north we went. And so we did a clearing operation as a company.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  We're in three different sections, and mine was actually, was actually in reserve, so it was...

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Not so much rear security, but you know, we, we, we had to like move in a bubble, you know, cigar, like cigar shaped patrolling formation, just with vehicles, basically. So you've got your flank security, we were, we were in the back and we got into a pretty good contact over on our left flank.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  One of my vehicles was hit. Luke Mylan was killed.

• 1:23:06Speaker 04

  He was a special forces medic. They called SARC, a special amphibious reconnaissance corpsman, which is a Navy eighteen delta.

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Special forces medic, he was.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  Luke was a great guy. I still speak with his family. He factors very heavily into my novel, which will be coming out this year.

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  He held the army, the USASOC special forces medic of the year award and the Marsoc operator of the year award simultaneously.

• 1:23:40Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  So he was an absolute warfighter. And when he was killed, we were like, oh my God, like this is, this is our.

• 1:23:48Jack Murphy?

  One of the best guys.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, like holy shit, like it was, and, and five other guys were wounded and it was really, that was just a huge eye opener. And I think that day was when I really learned how to lead because you had to somehow

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  deal with the flood of emotions and your Marines are all busted up and then you've got guys who want revenge and you've got dudes being evacuated and it was just terrible. So the next day, as we're doing this assault, at that time I had not fired my rifle in combat yet, I'd, you know, we'd heard this whole thing on the radio, I'd seen

• 1:24:23Speaker 04

  this entire thing unfold, but it was, it was distant. I was an observer, but I wasn't in it and I was like.

• 1:24:34Speaker 04

  I've now seen combat, I've been in combat, but I, I don't feel like I've been tested.

• 1:24:41Speaker 04

  And then later that evening, the following day, my company commander came to me and said, we need to establish a foothold on this one part of this, this ridgeline.

• 1:24:52Speaker 04

  So I want you to take your platoon down into this, to this compound and take it over and fortify it and the rest of us will swing up past you. Cause everyone else had been in a lot of contact and we were fresh, fresh, relatively fresh, because we'd been in the back.

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  Mounted up, did a quick scan. We're like, alright, let's go. Came up with our assault plan. And my support by fire position that was being provided by the infantry, never underestimate the enemy. They pumped two mortar rounds onto that to knock them out as they saw us driving in. So they had to displace. And now I had no support by fire. We had no air support at the time. There was some pulling in the overhead. It was just like this confluence of stuff. So now, we drive down at this compound, and as soon as we get there, we are in the base. Murphy's Law says if your attack is going well, you're in an ambush. Well, my attack went swimmingly. Because I was at the base of a U-shaped ambush, and they were

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  hammering us inside of 100 yards. RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck. I don't know. It just, and it blew up behind us. My guys dismounted and started doing fire maneuver bounds through these guys in trench lines. And they're throwing grenades. Oh my god. Well, I think it scared the shit out of the enemy, because they're like, these guys are crazy.

• 1:26:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a reputation Marines had with the Japanese during the war. I mean, this is, this is who you guys are.

• 1:26:29Speaker 04

  So, I realized, after the RPG hit the, hit the hood and bounced off, I was like, okay, this is, I don't want to be in this vehicle. I at least need to get out of it. And I need to control this fight. Because that's the officer's job, is command and control. But, we also teach the fighter leader concept. And, I get out of the vehicle, and the bullets are flying. And I start to run around the back, and my driver yells, his name's Coil, he goes, hey, sir, can you shut the door? I'm like, dumbass. So I run back, and I shut the door. So he has some protection. And he's just sitting there. My 50 caliber, my gunner up top is blasting there, the 50 caliber. I run around the other

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  side of the, of the vehicle. I'm getting on my radio. And, I mean, it is just chaos. And, calling in contact report. And then, I get the word, hey, get out of there, this place. Like, there's no point in trying to fight this out. So.

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  Tell everybody, hey, we're withdrawing. You know, get back to the vehicles. And again, like I've seen these guys now running forward. I don't know if anybody's down in these trench lines now. Like I've lost sight. It's dusk, so you really can't see what there's a lot of dust and firepower. Firepower coming in, going out. And we are in a, is it just a severe firefight? And I, uh,

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  I owe Eden Pearl, Massar and Eden Pearl, who is, who has passed away unfortunately, due to his wounds from years back.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  I owe him everything for teaching me this technique. And he told me, if you run around a piece of cover,

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  you need to re-clear that piece of cover because you don't know what's now on the other side of it. And

• 1:28:21Speaker 04

  I took up the stance, just like we were trained, and I leaned out around the edge of that truck. And there's a, three dudes running with a PK.

• 1:28:30Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:28:31Speaker 04

  And I zapped them all. And that was the first people I'd ever seen in my sights or, or killed. And they all went right down. And, uh, then I started running.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  And Jack, I can, I can feel the bullets going by me. I can hear him smacking the armor plate behind me. My interpreter is laying on his back with his AK over the top of the armor plate, just going like this. Just trying, like, like he's terrified and just trying to contribute.

• 1:29:03Jack Murphy?

  That's a technique.

• 1:29:04Speaker 04

  It is. And I'm ducking underneath. Like, he has no idea that I'm there. So I'm like ducking underneath and I jump back in with coil. And I think, we need to turn around. He goes, rise to that, sir.

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  So, so now, we gotta get everybody back in the vehicles and we're trying to get accountability. I'm like, it's just chaos. And we're trying to turn these vehicles around.

• 1:29:20Jack Murphy?

  But the boys meanwhile executed like old school battle drills, like lobbing frags into those trenches.

• 1:29:26Speaker 04

  It is. They did an immediate, they did it, they, they went into an attack like that and they basically did an Australian people coming back.

• 1:29:31Jack Murphy?

  Fuck, man.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  I mean, we're talking about guys firing, you know, saws in their shoulder, aiming while standing up. So they're just, just laying it down. And I just remember looking at other guys named Rodriguez. We called him Big Rod.

• 1:29:47Speaker 04

  And he's just standing there, just leaning into his saw, just doing controlled eight to 10 round bursts.

• 1:29:54Jack Murphy?

  Doing God's work.

• 1:29:55Speaker 04

  Yep, I was like, awesome, this, I mean, I was just like mesmerized at that point in time. So we start turning around and my, my JTAC had the wherewithal, because he's smart, to go out the other side of the vehicle instead of running, because, like, I told you, remember I couldn't fly a plane, this guy, he could. He jumped into this low cover ditch and was now like calling in air support and he's got eight tens on the run. He's like, hey, we got eight tens coming, we need to get out of here. And he has the wherewithal to have a smoke grenade with him. So he's just, he's doing like everything, he's got all this stuff.

• 1:30:24Jack Murphy?

  By the book.

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's got everything laid out in front of him, he's like, oh yeah, Roger, we're ground call sign, just another little combat. So you've got like Rod over here shooting like, like, you know, he's just having a field day and you've got Fruitbat just like, eight tens, that sounds good, how many bombs you got, okay, we can stack that up. And he's, he's doing all the, you know, stuff in his head. So we, we get back in and as we're getting, we get everybody back in the vehicles, we get everybody rogered up, and this seems like it takes forever, but it, it's quick. And remember, we did all this driver training, we did all this stuff like stuck vehicle training, and sure enough, as we're getting ready to pull out, we hear this, oh my God, we're stuck. And the way we had pulled in, there was like this drop off in one of those GMVs, and they weigh like 10 tons.

• 1:31:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  It has now dropped into the side of this freaking thing and is hanging by a, a wheel. So they've dropped the wheel into this thing. And I'm thinking, this is it, we're dead. They're gonna hit, like, they've got a stationary vehicle, they're gonna get those RPGs, now that we've shocked them, they're gonna recover from that shock, and they're gonna, they're gonna blow that vehicle up and we're gonna have a real problem. You know, so now I'm like, well, maybe we should just fight our way into the compound and, you know, just leave the vehicles and just do what we can. So I'm, I'm trying to make all these decisions and I hear this, and I turn to Coyle, I say, you gotta stop. And he goes, what? Like, we, we got a stuck vehicle, gotta stop. And he's just like, but, but we're driving, like, we gotta get out of here. I'm like, I understand that. So now we're having this philosophical discussion about why we have to stop and. The hand of God, Jack, or something reaches down and pulls this vehicle off of this freaking thing.

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  Like that, because people are jumping out with tow straps trying, like now they're under fire doing this kind of stuff.

• 1:31:56Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  Like we, I don't know how many valor awards came out of this one action alone was what people were doing.

• 1:32:01Jack Murphy?

  They had, so they towed them out of it?

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Well, they hadn't even gotten hooked up yet and somehow.

• 1:32:06Jack Murphy?

  No shit, they backed out of it.

• 1:32:07Speaker 04

  The driver figured out whether he had put it in four-wheel drive and toggling.

• 1:32:11Jack Murphy?

  Brake throttle, modulate.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  He could, but he all of a sudden he's like, whoa, and he jumps out of this freaking thing. They're like, we're free, go, go. It was like, we just start barreling out of there. And then we got back to the covered and sealed, then we all stopped.

• 1:32:24Jack Murphy?

  And watched the A10s come in?

• 1:32:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, we watched the A10s come in and they pulverized them. And then it got dark and then, you know, combat just ends after a while, as you know, and then you're just, it's just really quiet. I was, I was, uh, I was not a smoker. I love cigars, but I was not a cigarette smoker, but a lot of my guys were. And I was like, hey man, does anyone have a cigarette? Like I really, I need, I need this. The adrenaline is still coursing through me. A10s come in and pulverize them. We get now an AC 130 over the head just to consolidate all of us and they, we run fire missions off of that for a while. And I'm sitting in the covered and sealed. We had, we did a few more, there was a few more combat actions after that as well, because we, we had, we still had to fight our way out of this little part of the valley.

• 1:33:11Speaker 04

  I carried an M79, one of those old school break.

• 1:33:13Jack Murphy?

  The blooper?

• 1:33:14Speaker 04

  Yep, I carried one in my vehicle. I grabbed the bandolier of, uh, M79 and just started like just lobbing them out to, to put, put rounds down to, to get, because people were coming back. So probably one of the last Marines to fire an M79 in combat. And, uh, and as I, as I, as I got done, I, um,

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  I had that cigarette and Abdullah, my interpreter, he's listening to the ICOM and hearing all the chatter and he's like, sir, sir. It's very bad for them. We, we really, you know, we really gave them a good going over. I was like, is that right? He says, he goes, yes, he, uh, they said, uh, you are worse than the Russians. And I said, that's probably the best compliment I've ever been paid in my life. So then the adrenaline wears off as I'm smoking the cigarette and I sit down against the Humvee, the GMV's wheel. I put the helmet down. I start falling asleep and I woke up and it had burned down to my fingers. And like, that's what woke me up. I probably would have slept there all night afterward. So, I mean, you know, if anybody's like, yeah, and then at that point, you're patent, like, chin strap swinging. I was exhausted. I was like, oh, my gosh. This is unbelievable. And then we got up and, you know, and that that mission continued for another couple of

• 1:34:17Speaker 04

  days before we finally, you know, we could only go so far. And we're just like.

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• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  Well, this is the enemy frontline, basically. And so pushing up into there, we still did more incursions to keep them on their heels as the Usykala thing was eventually going to unfold later that fall, later winter, or early winter. And it did. We were part of that on the outskirts, but the 82nd, actually, that entire mission with Afghan partners. So, wow, I didn't know I was going to go deep into a war story, but... Yeah, that was notable. It was memorable just because that was the first real action I'd been in. And then after that, we just, we got into more and different stuff. And there were always named commanders that we were trying to go after, HVT types.

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  And I did some analysis one time with one of the SF intelligence sergeants. And if an American unit had taken in as many casualties as we supposedly inflict on the Taliban and their leadership, like, we would be combat ineffective for all the shadow governors and all these other people that we were after and killing. So I think we underestimated just how resilient and their resolve. Like, we did have them on the ropes at one point as, you know, probably more like a 9-10 timeframe, but at that point in time, they were absolutely ferocious.

• 1:37:41Speaker 04

  And beatable, and we could, but we kind of... Afghanistan was a distractor from Iraq. And we really stretched pretty thin. I don't want to get too big into the American political sphere at that point, but, you know.

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

  It was, so yeah, that was 2000, when we finally finished, it came back in 2008.

• 1:38:01Jack Murphy?

  How long were you guys over there?

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  I got there in August, so five months.

• 1:38:08Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so relatively short, but it probably felt like a hell of a long time.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, yeah, I aged. I think we all did at that point in time.

• 1:38:20Jack Murphy?

  So coming back from that deployment, I mean, you kind of got your wish in a sense, I mean, everything you were looking for.

• 1:38:26Speaker 04

  I sure did. And I never looked, I never wanted it again, not like, not like that.

• 1:38:32Jack Murphy?

  You got it out of your system?

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think we all become sort of adrenaline junkies in that, you know, you, you, and, and, and Fick talks about this in his book where you're, you become kind of addicted to it.

• 1:38:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 04

  You want, you want to hit. And then if you're gonna be out deployed, then you're like, well, I hope we get in some action. I want to do something. And then no matter how much action you've had, you're then like, well, that wasn't so bad. Maybe we could do a little bit more.

• 1:38:59Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  I've been in this big ambush thing. I want to, I want to CQB.

• 1:39:02Jack Murphy?

  I want to push it a little.

• 1:39:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to get in a room and actually get in a gunfight with a guy. No, you don't. Like, there's a, there's a reason we changed our tactics on this. Like, it's, you know.

• 1:39:11Jack Murphy?

  So you became a little bit more cautious in that sense, like, kind of like, be careful what you wish for, sort of thing?

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  I think more circumspect.

• 1:39:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  Definitely. More, more, um,

• 1:39:24Speaker 04

  more calculating, or at least evaluative.

• 1:39:28Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  What is really worth.

• 1:39:30Jack Murphy?

  Like weigh it out, you know?

• 1:39:31Speaker 04

  Cause we, you know.

• 1:39:32Jack Murphy?

  If I lose five guys on this mission, is it worth it?

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  Well, and that, that played in later in my career, particularly when you're working at the national level where you, you, you were being called to do a job. Uh, when the phone rings, you know, the, the, the National Command Authority is out of, out of options. And you're gonna go in there and you, you, you get into a world of.

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Risk mitigation, you can never, you're trying to buy down as much, you can't eliminate it, you're trying to buy it down as much as you can. And then, are those risks worth it? Are the conditions right enough that we can go do this? And you want all those decisions made before you get in the helicopter, you go do, you open the ramp to jump someone out there.

• 1:40:09Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  That, that is what it comes down to. And I think that that's where people run into problems, particularly, you know, senior level leaders, is they may not have that kind of exposure, may not have that kind of experience. And this is not to say that the people who are leading are not where they should be for the right reasons. It's just a matter of, I think, we lose sight of that. And whereas we had a big population of combat veterans, that has dwindled, particularly in the last five to eight years. So, we're gonna go back into that peacetime footing a little bit, though I hope the lessons are still maintained.

• 1:40:50Jack Murphy?

  So, coming back from that deployment, 2008-ish, what, did you say in Force Recon? Or, I'm sorry, you were Marsoc at this point. So, how much longer were you in Marsoc for after that?

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  I then became an executive officer in one of the Marsoc battalions.

• 1:41:09Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  And that battalion's mission was primarily, like Jay sets, in FID, in Africa, and, um, yeah, so I got some exposure, you know, working, very different, you know, problem set than just direct combat.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  For the people who aren't familiar, J set, Joint Combined Exercise for Training, it's if you're forward deployed, you're going to countries, you know, I think SF used to say, "Your training tomorrow is adversary today." But we did that in, um, in the Philippines and parts of the Pacific as well. So, I had, I was responsible for a whole bunch of teams and people deployed doing those types of missions. So, it was, also some of them in the, in the Central Asian States as well.

• 1:41:51Jack Murphy?

  Cool.

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  So, I got a lot of exposure with that, and then from there, I went to the Naval War College, I took a, took a year sabbatical, got my master's degree in Rhode Island, and then I came back to Marsoc after that and took on company command, after a stint in regimental training, and regimental operations.

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  In 2011. And I also did an augment in between then with National Mission Force for in 10 and 11.

• 1:42:23Jack Murphy?

  So.

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  Where I was an operations officer for Strike Four.

• 1:42:26Jack Murphy?

  To, before we move on too quickly. So, working some of these like FID missions in Africa, Asia, Central Asia. The last guest we had on the, on the show, Frank Sobchak, wrote this whole book, Training to Win, Training for Victory. And he examined five different partnership relationships that we have around the world. El Salvador, Philippines, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq.

• 1:42:53Speaker 04

  It's pretty diverse.

• 1:42:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And so anyway, I, I would just like to kind of like probe your experience a little bit on that. Like, what was your takeaway from some of the partnership relationships that Marsoc formed in those years?

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

  Well, there, many of them are enduring, because now the Marsoc battalions have regional focus. I mean, we, we very much, like Marsoc training, I think, I think SF can kind of say the same thing, you know, whereas it didn't have a formal selection course, they developed that. Where there's, you know, it used to be sort of SF didn't have an MOS, they, they developed that. So you had, you know, longevity in your career path, languages, all that stuff. So Marsoc has embraced all of that stuff. Marsoc had the valuable opportunity to be able to take all these different things that worked in different special operations units and create one that could, didn't have to learn as quickly.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  And I don't mean that not learning, it, it, it didn't have to develop those things because other units were already doing it.

• 1:43:52Jack Murphy?

  From scratch.

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  And they could say, okay, well, we're going to adopt that. It just took a while to get it moving. So there's longstanding partnerships that have been out there and, and we've got, there's teams that work all over the place in Africa, they work all over the place in the, in the Philippines and, and Central Asian states, like I said.

• 1:44:05Jack Murphy?

  I ran into Marsoc guys in the Philippines.

• 1:44:08Speaker 04

  There are people who run into them all the time and they're like, what are these guys doing here? So I think.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  When you look at the global war on terror at that point in time and how we were trying to literally tamp everything down everywhere, and like I said, we kind of lost sight of what we were doing, I think, as a nation when we kind of spread ourselves all over the place, we're going to defeat this ideology, and every ideology is bad. So then you swiftly find that the things are important in Western Africa are not the same, like Africa is a continent, not a country.

• 1:44:38Jack Murphy?

  The priorities are a little different.

• 1:44:39Speaker 04

  And each place is different.

• 1:44:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Speaker 04

  And so, you know, I think the French get a short shrift, but they do a lot of work in Western Africa, and they take a lot of casualties, you know, or did, for some of these really aggressive mission profiles that they ran. And but you'd be surprised that Boko Haram is not the biggest problem that some of these places are facing, even though it makes good headlines for us.

• 1:45:00Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  And I'm not saying we're being overly exploitative, I'm just saying that, or exploitative, but I'm saying that...

• 1:45:05Jack Murphy?

  They're also dealing with extreme poverty, corruption, all sorts of stuff.

• 1:45:08Speaker 04

  Just running water.

• 1:45:09Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:45:10Speaker 04

  I mean, our level of poor is very different than the rest of the world. And at that point in time, with us trying to remap the Middle East in, you know, a method that we found the most acceptable, without necessarily asking the people who lived there if that was the way that it should go, I mean, we had to keep a pulse on all of the things that were going on around the world, and our special operations were out there doing that. And then there was partnership, of course, with national level organizations, State Department, agency, et cetera, to see if all of that jived. Because you were really leaning into trying to find out what that next flashpoint might be, or if it was going to be there, that, again, it's containment, it's not elimination.

• 1:45:52Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:45:53Speaker 04

  And so those MARSOC teams were not necessarily involved in direct mission assistance and planning with units that were going out and doing them, or if they were, it was much more standoff, you know, we'll help you develop this plan, but...

• 1:46:09Jack Murphy?

  Again, Marawi.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  Yes, and the Philippines is another good example on that, although one of my teams...

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  Um, on their way to a training range with the Philippine Marine Corps got into a big friggin' action. So the next thing I know, I'm getting all kinds of simple reports of this firefight that they've been in and they're, you know, they're being awarded the Vietnamese or the Philippine Cross of Gallantry. Holy shit. Per man. And now I'm going to the Marine Corps saying, hey, these guys were at the combat action. Well, we don't have any combat in the Philippines. Like, well, they were yesterday.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  I'm not making this up, like, you know. So, yeah, I mean, and their medics, you know, were treating wounded and all kinds of stuff. And so you never, and, and, and that was one thing, though, that, that they had talked to their, their Philippine counterparts, you know, you gotta treat these things as a mission. Like, the enemy is everywhere and you never, you never know. Now, they're not going in to take out AFSI F's, um, you know, planning and headquarters cell. They were not involved in the hostage rescue that happened over there as well. But there's a lot of special operations, things that are happening around that to enable those types of missions to happen. Yeah. So they were actively involved in it. And so they, you know, the, the, those units that are on the ground are your best collectors. They're your best pulse on, on what's going

• 1:47:29Speaker 04

  on there. And, and I think, you know, one of the, in a historical area that we didn't learn from is that in Somalia in the nineties, there were special forces, American special forces units, US Army Special Forces units in Somalia already on the ground, who had a pretty good handle on a deed and like what this dynamic was, was really like in that place. And then when, you know, the National Command Authority, and I know, I mean that like Washington got involved, then they were like, uh, we got the answers. Like, I don't know, we're gonna take care of this ourselves. And so then you get into, you know, a, a mission creep that just overextends. And I'm not, I'm not discounting anything that happened in Blackout Down or the bravery of the people involved. And, you know, there

• 1:48:11Speaker 04

  was a lot to be learned as a feat of arms in, in the Battle of Black Sea, for sure.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  But that kind of thing just it just snowballs with if you're ignoring the people on the ground or or at least discounting.

• 1:48:24Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  You know, and that mission when that mission focus changes is sort of a discounting and and I really don't think you can I think there's there's value in having those chase sets out there even if people see them as boring and kind of unimportant because training people to shoot you know do marksmanship and do basic medical training is.

• 1:48:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we were talking about earlier, they're never gonna make a movie out of it.

• 1:48:40Speaker 04

  Unless something goes bad.

• 1:48:41Jack Murphy?

  But some sometimes those like liaison relationships are where you're gonna have the biggest impact on the battle space.

• 1:48:48Speaker 04

  It it is and it also helps for your unit memory like it that's the problem with the Mew, the Marine Corps Marine Expeditionary Program is it rebuilds itself every thirty six months or so for a six month deployment and because they're always reconstituting that's that's what really makes particularly our our national mission forces very effective is that they are standing.

• 1:49:11Jack Murphy?

  They have continuity.

• 1:49:12Speaker 04

  They have continuity and they have a lot of lessons learned that they pay attention to.

• 1:49:17Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  And then when it's time to go into this next place or like who do we know like who's in our network what is our experience there and Marsoc has done a pretty good job of that as well.

• 1:49:26Jack Murphy?

  So after that you go to grad school.

• 1:49:29Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:29Jack Murphy?

  And you come back to the Marine Corps with a bunch of new vocabulary words to annoy your enlisted guys with.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  And annoyed they were. I actually ironically we were talking about Fred Galvin, I took over Fox Company.

• 1:49:45Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:49:46Speaker 04

  And that was my company command um like I said I did a tour with the with a strike force as an operations officer which actually really did help me not only post graduate school or or war college.

• 1:50:00Jack Murphy?

  That was before your company command?

• 1:50:02Speaker 04

  Just before my company command.

• 1:50:03Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit.

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  Uh, okay. I.

• 1:50:09Speaker 04

  I had, there were Marines working in a specific unit and they said, hey, we need some assistance with, um, one of our opsos fell through and we need a guy, and I know it's short notice, but is it possible you could come fill this? And so Marsoc Solid was a great opportunity, um, and commanders knew each other and calls were made and so I jumped on an airplane and went over there. And that was in Eastern Afghanistan, which is another part that I hadn't really served in, so I worked, I worked there for four months. Pretty high-end, uh, high operational tempo, um, environment. But I learned a lot, not only through operational planning, but just watching how these units

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  prepared and did things so that I took all of that information. And when I became a company commander, it was like, I really have a fair thorough understanding about how to utilize ISR, how to, you know, augment and accelerate the intelligence process and apply that in real time and make changes and explain why those changes are necessary and develop a unit that sees it that way. And so you should constantly be learning and evolving and trying new things. But if you don't have support, you're kind of hallucinating, so you can't just like run forward and say, this is what I'm gonna do.

• 1:51:34Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  It's a salesman, it's a sales pitch.

• 1:51:37Jack Murphy?

  So, um, you mentioned that a little bit earlier about the importance of branding.

• 1:51:41Speaker 04

  Uh huh. And that's, uh, going back to that confidence thing. If it's face value, they can say, oh gosh, these guys know what they're doing. We trust that they will be able to, to do the things they say they can. And so, once that trust is established, and that's, that's really what happens in the JSOC world, it's taken at face value.

• 1:52:05Jack Murphy?

  And you noticed that with the special missions units that they're like, yeah, okay, these guys got it.

• 1:52:10Speaker 04

  They don't have to.

• 1:52:11Jack Murphy?

  Prove themselves again.

• 1:52:12Speaker 04

  They don't have to say anything.

• 1:52:13Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:52:14Speaker 04

  They really don't. On the other side, they have to maintain that.

• 1:52:19Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:52:19Speaker 04

  There's very little room for, for.

• 1:52:23Speaker 04

  Fallibility.

• 1:52:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you have an operation where a bunch of birds get shot out of the sky and it changes things.

• 1:52:29Speaker 04

  It does. I mean, just having one go down. And I mean, those units have taken a lot of casualties. I wouldn't, I'm not gonna say unnecessarily, but you know, they lean into the mission and say, this is what we're gonna, we're gonna do. The risks are assessed and then, once they say go, it's, it's time.

• 1:52:49Jack Murphy?

  So you were in like a planning cell at that point?

• 1:52:51Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. I was the, I was the operations officer for this entire organization.

• 1:52:56Jack Murphy?

  For that, for that task force?

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  Yep, for that organization. And so I, I literally was looking across the, the table at the targeteers and the drone operators and the, the air mission planners.

• 1:53:12Speaker 04

  Like, just shout out to the 160th. I mean, the first time I worked with them, we, we, we set up, this in training. We were doing a direct action raid on this, on this combat village. And we set up that we're gonna land in this field and, you know, attack the building. And a warrant officer looks at it and goes, why do you wanna land there? That's like 150 yards away from the, from the building. We're like, yeah, well, I mean, you gotta be able to put the helicopter down. He goes, my rear rotor arc is 30 meters.

• 1:53:49Speaker 04

  Okay, I was hoping for 25, but if that's how close you can get, that's fine.

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  That's how he landed. Ramp went down, he's like, there's the, and the guy on the, the ramp gunner is like, that's the building.

• 1:54:01Jack Murphy?

  There's the door.

• 1:54:02Speaker 04

  There it is. And we're just like, wow, curbside service, you know? So, I mean, it was just a difference in training that we weren't even used to.

• 1:54:10Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  Once you, once you have capabilities that you can reach into and people that you can work with and that you trust on that level, then you can have a discussion about, you know, risk to air force, risk to aircraft, risk, risk to mission, what's worth it at that point in time, you know? If you're gonna do an offset, fine, we'll do an offset, but now we're gonna land in such a way that it protects everything, it's, you know, audibly masked, you know? Hopefully we fly in bad weather because most people aren't gonna be outside, you know? You bind down all this risk and still gonna be able to, to land and do the.

• 1:54:36Jack Murphy?

  It's, i- it's cool to hear you talk about this stuff, at the level you got to see the planning process because there is. A sense with a lot of people out there, sometimes even, I hate to say it with former operators, when you listen to them talk, like, I don't think they totally understand everything that goes in to putting one of these missions together.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  They don't.

• 1:54:56Jack Murphy?

  And running to the door and blowing it down and clearing some rooms is awesome, but there's all of these other pieces that have to come together.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  There is, and that's not to say that the operator, at the operator level, they're not taking the risk.

• 1:55:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:12Speaker 04

  They really, I've worked with very talented people, and there were stuff like creatively talented people, so they just, they'd talk about how they were gonna do something, and I'd be like, oh, I'm writing that one down, like, damn dude, that's good, like, you know, just things you hadn't really thought about. And then you, you get out there with your troop commanders, and you'd start listening to how they run stuff, and how they do command and control, and, and, and actually manage their, you know, the chaos. And I look back on that one firefight, and like, how much better would I have been if had, had an opportunity

• 1:55:42Jack Murphy?

  All of that, yeah.

• 1:55:43Speaker 04

  to, to be able to handle the amount of stuff that he has, never mind the support network. So, it incrementally made me better as I started looking at it. But, you know, because we were going back to Afghanistan with my company, I realized that I could only take so much back from them and say, okay, here's how I'd like to do things, because you're not resourced the same way, you're not equipped the same way, you don't have the same permissions. So, you can't just say, why can't you be this? Just say, this is who we are, this is who we gotta be, and we're gonna work within those parameters, and we're also gonna push them as hard as we can.

• 1:56:13Jack Murphy?

  Well, what were some of those lessons that you were able to apply back in MARSOC, as far as like, how you organize your special teams, or, I mean, how did that kinda come together and coalesce for you guys?

• 1:56:26Speaker 04

  Well, at that point in time, we were now running into what's called VSO, which is Vigilance Stability Operations. So, I was gonna be, the thing that I learned on that Strike Force rotation is they had multiple units out independently working. And at that point in time, I had not done that. Like, I was not experienced with that type of distributed.

• 1:56:45Speaker 04

  Operation, operational area and distributed commanding control. And it's two parts. You're in command, but you've got to control all of this stuff. But now you have to have a tremendous amount of trust in your subordinate. It's not just your officers, but especially your NCOs to get stuff done. Because they're operating in other areas that you may not see them for weeks. And they're entrusted with money and they're entrusted with weapons. And there may be sensitive programs that they had to run that they're not looking for your permission on because you've already said, I trust you. So I had to be very direct about what my expectations were. I had to follow up on that, but I also had to give them the room to work on it. And so as we're getting into the VSO piece, I looked at the way that these strike forces,

• 1:57:27Speaker 04

  you know, were managed from a central point and what they were allowed to do. And I mirrored that and said, as, as these guys are trained, based upon where their operational areas, we need to help them to achieve the best, you know, outcomes.

• 1:57:45Jack Murphy?

  Speaking of the mobility stuff, if I recall right, wasn't this around the time that Marsoc started using like dirt bikes?

• 1:57:52Speaker 04

  Yep. Started using dirt bikes. We used, well, that was one thing. When I was out, the strike force, I mean, they were loading those side by side razors into the back of, I'd never seen that done, in the back of helicopters and landing in the middle of nowhere and then, you know, getting the job done. Motorbikes, the same thing. I was like, riding dirt bikes at night on night vision? I want to do that. Like, that sounds great. So we invested a lot in, you know, mobility training. We sent guys to dirt bike courses. We sent guys to mule packing courses in case you were going to go into the mountains with, with animals. And by the way, mules are not as easy to work with as you think. That kind of stuff. And we, we, we, we, we could be creative, but we also, you know, made it very mission focused. It wasn't just adventure training for adventure training.

• 1:58:37Speaker 04

  But then you kind of put the fast roping to the side because you know you're not going to be doing that much. But you do focus on your jump stuff because you think, you know, there might be an application there. But at the same time, you're really looking at, all right.

• 1:58:49Jack Murphy?

  What are we going into?

• 1:58:50Speaker 04

  Are we good? Can these units fight and thrive and sustain themselves? And can we sustain them? And, you know, because they're in VSO, they have to be able to generate their own intelligence. So do they have the right amount of intel, access to intelligence, to the stuff they're reporting back? How are we packaging that? And, you know, my unit got really good because of the way we were distributed and I had special forces teams working with us as well. Um, and all these VSO sites are developing a really big battlefield picture of not only the Taliban network, but who the movers were. And from there, we would hand off the larger target packages to people who could go and execute, whether it was a special air service or it was, you know, our own people, our own SMUs. And people would show, and people would look at our intelligence packages and again, take it at face value.

• 1:59:34Speaker 04

  This came from this group. It's not gold, like we're not just running in there, but it's pretty credible. Let's, let's follow up. And they would send a two man team and they would come and talk. Or they would say, hey, come up here and let's have a conversation. And so they would put people on, you know, hey, you're going to go on this raid? We want to get this guy, we're going to come with you. Less risk to us, we can still do the job we need to, we have better permissions to roll a guy up and you don't have to worry about the tension problem. Like dude, this is awesome.

• 1:59:58Jack Murphy?

  So what area were you doing VSO in?

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  In the west, western Afghanistan.

• 2:00:03Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:00:04Speaker 04

  Farah, Shindan, Herat. I had the whole, the operating area was about the size of West Virginia. Um, down into Nimruz. So this is kind of this arc around and then you've got, of course, Iran as your main, your main intruder.

• 2:00:19Jack Murphy?

  Was that something you guys had to account for or run up against?

• 2:00:23Speaker 04

  We did. I, I will say this, and all the time that was over there, I never saw some Chechenian fighter. We never.

• 2:00:29Jack Murphy?

  No IRGC guys?

• 2:00:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, the gold standard would have been to roll up a Quds Force guy. Like, no, we never, I mean, I'm sure they were there and collecting. I mean, you know, the phones that they have over there are all Iranian made. You, you had to assume that you were being, uh, collected upon. It wasn't like, you know, but it was also where, um,

• 2:00:51Speaker 04

  We're pretty overt. We're in the open of, you know, you're living in these villages. You're now trying to, you know, expand some of the security into these areas, even if they didn't necessarily want it.

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  So I had to change the mindset of how we approached the mission. We had to, we got Dave Cullin to come in and give a three day,

• 2:01:14Speaker 04

  very academic, but also because he was, he had been a warfighter, you know, with the Australian Army and he had a long, he did the Accidental Gorilla, if nobody knows that book. And so we had him come in and talk about not only the book.

• 2:01:25Jack Murphy?

  I read his book, Blood Year.

• 2:01:28Speaker 04

  Very smart guy.

• 2:01:31Speaker 04

  And we're like, okay, well, if we need to understand, let's get people who have done this and can actually put some stuff against counterinsurgency, because that's what it was. And it's hard to grab, you know, counterinsurgency is something that's baked into the Army Special Forces playbook. Marsoc has now got it, but at that point in time, Coin, another mistake that was made, my opinion, is that we tried to make all of our armed forces, you know, able to do Coin and say, well, it's just this mission. It's just different.

• 2:01:59Jack Murphy?

  Anyone can do it, yeah.

• 2:02:00Speaker 04

  True at all. We know that. You need specialists to do specialist work. You wouldn't have somebody, you know, YouTube how to rebuild a turbo in your car. You would go to a specialist to do that. I hope anyway that that's how people would approach it.

• 2:02:15Speaker 04

  But because of that, you need specialists. We found that we had to become specialists and we had to admit that we didn't know certain things and we had to learn. And so I found the most, the best people with the best expertise as I could. Particularly when you're talking about

• 2:02:33Speaker 04

  counterinsurgency, asymmetric threats, which is something different. But, you know, when you're in these environments where you've got this changing scale where you could be in full combat at any minute. And it did happen in some of these VSO sites. I also use the VSO sites as jumping off points for action if we do it. Cause I had now a forward deployed node that could, that knew the area and could do stuff. And we talked to people that again, like we're talking about rolling someone up. We like, we've already got a force here is ready to go. All you need to do is send a few people down and we can make it happen. So we got really good at having that kind of relationship. And because of the relationships I had on the strike force, they were, these people were still working at Camp Alpha and I could just call them and just say, hey, we got something going on.

• 2:03:13Jack Murphy?

  Was that at all difficult to manage? Like sometimes where it's like, hey, JSOC, you don't actually need to be here. Like we can handle this thing.

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  You wish that you could invite people into your house sometimes.

• 2:03:23Jack Murphy?

  But it doesn't always work like that.

• 2:03:25Speaker 04

  More interested in like, hey, maybe you guys could just take the night off. We got this. And so you kind of, kind of cross your arms and go, ooh, you get upset. But it, it generally was complimentary. I didn't have anybody just out of the blue, just fly into something. If they were going to do something, they were very circumspect about, you know, there was, there was a good liaison there. And then they would also be like, hey, look, if something happens, we need, we're going to need, we might need help. So if you can, if you can put some guys on.

• 2:03:50Jack Murphy?

  Have a QRF.

• 2:03:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you guys can put some guys on standby, that would be, that would be great. What kind of, what kind of medical facilities do you have if we have to come here? You know, oh, you have special forces medics? Awesome. You've got people, you've got a surgery, you know, based upon this army MASH unit that's co-located with you? Fantastic. So those are the kinds of things. They don't know everything and everybody, they would, they need to kind of build.

• 2:04:09Speaker 07

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

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

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• 2:04:35Speaker 07

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• 2:05:07Speaker 02

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• 2:05:29Speaker 03

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• 2:05:36Speaker 04

  ...their own network as well as for our support capability. And they're... If you can do the job and you offer something of value, they're gonna take it. They're not gonna just say, "Oh, we'll do it ourselves."

• 2:05:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 04

  They're better than that.

• 2:05:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, team building.

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I, um... I think that the...

• 2:05:55Speaker 04

  The strength of VSO was that we really were trying.

• 2:06:00Speaker 04

  The difficulty was that...

• 2:06:03Speaker 04

  We're trying to be good everywhere and to... We just were running out of kind of patience. Even as it was like heading into 2011, 2012. Even though Afghanistan lasted another almost 10 years. We were throwing things, just like trying to make this stuff work. And it...

• 2:06:22Speaker 04

  We all served...

• 2:06:26Speaker 04

  We all served to make the best of that situation. But it was not the direct action kind of combat that I'd been involved in five years earlier. So, I think a lot of guys were kind of disappointed that we weren't doing that as frequently. Even though we did get into some action out there, for sure.

• 2:06:44Jack Murphy?

  What was sort of your takeaway from the VSO experience? Because we've interviewed certainly SF guys, uh, at least one SEAL. Probably we have had some Marsoc guys on. But it sounds like, uh, or Scott Nann we've had on the show who developed it.

• 2:07:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, he's...

• 2:07:02Jack Murphy?

  I mean, it sounds like...

• 2:07:03Speaker 04

  And he's a heck of a lot more versed on this than me.

• 2:07:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, and I'd love to hear your take on it. But I mean, it sounds like just as we were kind of like getting it up and running and it was starting to pay dividends, that they shut it down.

• 2:07:14Speaker 04

  Well, that's kind of what I was kind of alluding to. But that's that's a great way to sum it up. And so Akil Cullen said, you know, counterinsurgency and the warfare that you're you're involved in. Yes, it is involved. You don't want to create more insurgents. You want to try and develop more friendly networks than than bad ones. But honestly, you still, if you're not shooting people in the face, you you're doing it wrong. Like, you have to keep being aggressive.

• 2:07:40Jack Murphy?

  Keep the pressure on the bad guys while you're building up this sort of civilian infrastructure.

• 2:07:44Speaker 04

  So in 2009 and 10, under Obama, we had not only increased the drone warfare permissions, like, he really opened that up big time. He also opened up special operations, like, being involved all over the place. And we, you know, I don't want to say it was war on the cheap, but it was really like, let's just get, you know, we're just gonna let the the dogs loose and and and try and put an end to this thing. Unfortunately, national level pressure pulled us back. Like, we had the Taliban on the ropes. And we were pulling out of Afgh- or out of Iraq.

• 2:08:18Jack Murphy?

  At that point, like, 2010, 11?

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, 9, 10, 11. We really had the Taliban on the ropes, and they were ready to come to negotiating table. We kind of get it let up. And then we were just like, okay, let's do VSO. And this is not saying that that was a bad idea, because the US Marine Corps had done that very effectively in Vietnam with the Hamlet program.

• 2:08:35Jack Murphy?

  Cat, cap, or cap?

• 2:08:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Combined Action, you know, program.

• 2:08:40Jack Murphy?

  Thank you.

• 2:08:40Speaker 04

  And and, you know, the Hamlets, so you're going in the Hamlets. And it was very successful, you know, in his thing. But this requires maintenance, and it requires a long term investment. And the population in America in America was war weary because of Iraq. People were kind of, well, still, what's going on in Afghanistan?

• 2:08:58Jack Murphy?

  Why are we there?

• 2:08:59Speaker 04

  What are we doing?

• 2:08:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:00Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, in order for that to be effective, it was going to take a lot of time, and it was going to take, you know, probably more investment. And we were just sort of looking at like, okay, well. When are the Afghans gonna get hold of this thing and do it themselves? And quite frankly, they weren't gonna do it.

• 2:09:14Jack Murphy?

  And I mean, the reality is like a VSO project. That's like a decades-long project. That's not, that's not an election cycle project.

• 2:09:22Speaker 04

  And we, because Americans want it quick, fast, and in a hurry, and cheap,

• 2:09:29Speaker 04

  they, you know, you pick two, right?

• 2:09:33Jack Murphy?

  Can't we just use robots to do this?

• 2:09:34Speaker 04

  I'd love it.

• 2:09:35Jack Murphy?

  You know, blazers?

• 2:09:36Speaker 04

  It just, well, I mean, it was very, you know, with the drone program, program, it was sort of like, well, we'll just do standoff and we'll just shoot these guys. Well, that, that's, that's not balanced with, with, with on the ground, you know, work. And the other problem or challenge in, in VSO is that you're kind of like with the JSET, you're turning over your teams every six to eight months and you're having to rebuild these rapport. And there were guys who had gone back, you're like, hey, we're now back in the Zarqo Valley. We're now back in Shindan, but we haven't been here for 18 months.

• 2:10:07Jack Murphy?

  Things have changed.

• 2:10:08Speaker 04

  Things have changed. The, the way we are fighting this war have changed. You know, I was on a SIF and I was doing, I was banging targets every night in Iraq. Well, dude, we don't do that here now.

• 2:10:19Speaker 04

  Well, you got a bad guy outside your gate, probably go get him. Well, let's hang on, we don't want to be too violent. Well, that's, that's what I mean is you gotta be able to, you know, have that throttle. And I tried pretty hard to lean into being able to, you know, get into the, the pacification while also, you know, building up the rapport.

• 2:10:35Jack Murphy?

  Another leadership challenge and grabbing them by the collar like, oh, hold on a second.

• 2:10:39Speaker 04

  Well, that's when they started saying like, we can't want this more than the Afghans do. And I don't know if I met an Afghan who wanted it more than us.

• 2:10:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:48Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 2:10:48Jack Murphy?

  Fuck, man.

• 2:10:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Speaker 04

  And, and so, you know,

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  we, we finished that deployment in March of 2012, nine months. Quite a number of guys wounded, nobody killed, thank God.

• 2:11:08Speaker 04

  And I came back from that and, you know.

• 2:11:15Speaker 04

  You know, one day you're in charge and you're leading and you're you're out there and then next thing you know, you're sitting in a parking lot and

• 2:11:23Jack Murphy?

  Twenty-nine palms?

• 2:11:24Speaker 04

  Wondering why the band broke up, you know? Luckily, I didn't get sent to Twenty-nine Palms. I actually actually ended up going to it's called Special Operations Training Group in Marine Corps.

• 2:11:35Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:11:36Speaker 04

  Train, which is Training MUSE. And I spent a couple of years doing Training MUSE, taking the stuff I'd learned in Marsoc and helping MUSE get better, both with their the way they train and they approach different things. And, you know, I also was involved quite a bit with what they're called Stability Operations and also inter-agency operations. Because my time with with Marsoc, I'd spent plenty of time working with people from different NGOs, different parts of the United States government, all the, most of the agencies within it, especially those who were, you know, in in Afghanistan, and those who were supporting those J-sets because they're, you know, working all over the place, working

• 2:12:20Speaker 04

  on country clearances, trying to, you know, if you do that as a regular thing, you assume everyone knows how to do that. And then when the larger Marine Corps is like, hey, we need to get some people into this place, they don't even know where to start with doing a country.

• 2:12:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, who do we call?

• 2:12:32Speaker 04

  Who does you request? Do you all even have passports? Oh, that's a good one. Maybe we should get those. Like, you know, what else have you got for us?

• 2:12:41Jack Murphy?

  Kind of important.

• 2:12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, ah, maybe we'll just pump the brakes for a minute on this invasion thing you guys were.

• 2:12:50Jack Murphy?

  So was that like a rewarding experience to kind of take all these experiences you've had and now you're in a training position and sort of pass some of that along?

• 2:13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. I actually, that was a part of my career I really enjoyed. I like, I like training. I like teaching or trying to impart.

• 2:13:12Speaker 04

  And ultimately, it's not just to help the unit get better. Especially if you're getting into tactics and I'm not, I was not a ta- I did enjoy tactics. I did enjoy, you know, shooting and that kind of thing. I don't mind being out of the range and helping people with marksmanship or even talk about the ambushman yet or some others that the things I've been a part of to help them understand, you know, combat decision making and leadership. But on the other side, it's, you know, there's, there's a lot more that you can, you can bring and offer to people. And so I like, I really do like that. I think it's a very, it's a payoff. And that's not to say like, I just love being on the podium and lecturing. You know, you want, you want people to get something out of it.

• 2:13:57Speaker 04

  But when you bring someone like Andrea Dew, who's a professor at the Naval War College who wrote Terrorists, Insurgents and Militias, which is a great academic study of, you know, why people are kind of the way they are. So before you ever go into some of these situations, you kind of look at Lashkari Taiba and these terrorist organizations, then you look at people who are not necessarily terrorists. And we've, we've, we've broad, we've broad brushed every organization that's bad out there as, as being terrorists and in many ways they may have things that are traits that kind of align to terrorism. But if they're an insurgent or if they're just a militia in a lawless land, they're just trying to get something done. Narcos smugglers. Absolutely. Well, I mean, I made deals with the Taliban, or at least the guys I know who are associated

• 2:14:42Speaker 04

  with the Taliban to stop IDing roads so we could get something done. And their only agreement was like, hey, just keep people out of our valley. That was it? Pretty much. I'm like, was that the problem? Cause that's easy. And oh, by the way, what do you grow over here? Um, stuff. So who do you sell to? Oh, don't worry about it. Good guys, dudes you would like. No questions there. Exactly. Do you want the IDs to stop or not? Like whether we've lost, you're losing the plot here. I've been like, where are we at? So I was just like, all right, well, you know, you're going to make a deal and that's just it. And so, you know, if you're really, if you're really looking at in a, in a straight, moral, ethical, like I can't cross these boundaries line.

• 2:15:28Speaker 04

  You have to be able to...

• 2:15:31Speaker 04

  You're not subjugating your personal code. You're looking at it from the perspective of like-

• 2:15:35Jack Murphy?

  A pragmatic perspective.

• 2:15:36Speaker 04

  Exactly. How do I get this done? And ultimately, that's the result.

• 2:15:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you weren't hashing out a peace deal, you were just hashing out a little-

• 2:15:45Speaker 04

  I just want a peace here.

• 2:15:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:46Speaker 04

  Or at least, reduction.

• 2:15:50Speaker 04

  So, I mean, Afghanistan was fine when I left, I don't know what happened now.

• 2:15:54Jack Murphy?

  If somebody else is-

• 2:15:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, no, I mean, and that is not to castigate anybody who served there or anything that, you know, has happened. Anyway, it's just, because of the rotations that you would have, you would just, you know, you'd come back and see another guy and be like-

• 2:16:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:05Speaker 04

  "Hey man, didn't I see you in 2010?" You're like, "What have you been up to since then?" "Oh, you know, Jay said to this, that, and the other thing," and, you know...

• 2:16:12Speaker 04

  We're back. Shouldn't we be done? Like, shouldn't this be... shouldn't we have progressed? So, we...

• 2:16:19Speaker 04

  It's kinda like writing a book where you don't have the end in mind.

• 2:16:23Jack Murphy?

  Well, I know you've heard it before, you know, people say, "We weren't in Afghanistan for 20 years, we were in Afghanistan for one year 20 times," right?

• 2:16:31Speaker 04

  But not the same year 20 times. That was the other problem, is we were like, "Well..." And I have my Iraq veterans used to say the same thing, "Well, we've been in combat, it's a, you know, it's no big deal." Like, at the sharp end of battle, it is... they are indeed correct. Shooting, shooting tactics, how you employ that, you know, how you fight is definitely...

• 2:16:53Speaker 04

  You know, something you can overlay, I don't want to use the word "template." But then after that, the environment, you have to understand the operating environment you're in, and the way that your enemy fights, and the way that they approach things. And then people say, "Turn the map around," it's not just terrain, it's mindset, it's how they look at stuff. And so, on the VSO thing, we really wanted to get a little more deeper into the psychology, into the psyche of what we're doing. Not only are we having an effect at the VSO level, but, you know, who are we fighting against, and what is important to them? And then, you know, my opinion in Afghanistan...

• 2:17:29Speaker 04

  We probably should like let them be a kingdom.

• 2:17:33Speaker 04

  And have a king and fiefdoms and just rule it medievally. Cause that's what they understand.

• 2:17:38Jack Murphy?

  Kind of what they wanted.

• 2:17:38Speaker 04

  Well, it's but and we said, well, no, you need Jeffersonian democracy.

• 2:17:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you need a federal system and.

• 2:17:44Speaker 04

  Crank out loud, well, a lot of people got rich off of that and it wasn't the people that, you know what I mean?

• 2:17:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  I remember talking with the provincial governor in Hurat. Very real educated guy.

• 2:17:57Speaker 04

  Impeccable English. And his bailout plan was go to Arkansas where he'd already bought a house.

• 2:18:03Speaker 04

  Like he wasn't going to stick around and I mean, he wanted to help his country. He really did. But he, he already knew what the.

• 2:18:09Jack Murphy?

  What was coming.

• 2:18:09Speaker 04

  What was coming. And then, you know, I was talking to provincial governor in Shindan. He's like, you all are lucky in America that you don't have people on two sides of you, countries, two sides of you, i.e. The Pakistanis and Iranians meddling in your affairs at all times.

• 2:18:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:18:21Speaker 04

  Never mind the international interest in our country like, like we got.

• 2:18:24Jack Murphy?

  Russia and.

• 2:18:25Speaker 04

  You. You, US.

• 2:18:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:27Speaker 04

  The Chinese, all these other, you know, we.

• 2:18:31Speaker 04

  We, we're, we're dealing with a heck of a lot more on a geopolitical scale than people are understanding. And for me, I was sitting there like, okay, this is way more complex.

• 2:18:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. They're in a dangerous part of the world.

• 2:18:45Speaker 04

  And we were living in it.

• 2:18:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So two years training the Mew and then what was the next stop for you?

• 2:18:52Speaker 04

  Back to Marsoc. Where I went to the component level as the current operations officer. So I was managing.

• 2:19:03Speaker 04

  With the ops team. All of the Marsoc operations.

• 2:19:06Jack Murphy?

  Wow, okay.

• 2:19:07Speaker 04

  So I went from the, you know, the regiment. I went from battalion to a regiment and then up to, to that. So I, I did that for.

• 2:19:17Speaker 04

  About.

• 2:19:20Speaker 04

  Only about five months because then I got earmarked to be what's called a special operations liaison element, team leader, uh, on the 22nd Mew, which is a special operations cell that was attached to the Mew to help them with SOF.

• 2:19:39Jack Murphy?

  Like the Marsoc integration?

• 2:19:41Speaker 04

  Well, more like Mew, big Marine Corps integration with SOF.

• 2:19:45Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 2:19:46Speaker 04

  Not just Marsoc, but, you know, say National Mission Force needs to come in and land on the aircraft, I would, or the carrier, I would go in and help manage, you know, the LNO stuff between those two. Or if we're gonna go ashore somewhere and do some training and there was a special operations unit there, I would get the Marines and the SOF unit together and talk about what that training could look like. In our case, we got really lucky. I had a great, uh, Mew commander named Todd Simmons and he, um, he really gave me free rein. He made me a member of his, of his, of his staff. And I took him all around the SOF world, Tampa, uh, Bragg, um, we went overseas to

• 2:20:26Speaker 04

  SOC U, SOC AF, um, uh, talked, SOC CENT, got him tied in with all of his 06 and above level, uh, people so that he could have those direct conversations. And I made sure that I shared every piece of information and intelligence that I had with him, you know, on an equal standing. And, and so he and I would have fairly regular, uh, meetings and when we got deployed, we were given the mission to support the, uh, liberation of CERT Libya, which is, uh, Operation Odyssey Lightning, which, which, which I managed and ran with the Mew for, uh, uh, fi- four months.

• 2:21:04Jack Murphy?

  So CERT, we didn't have a, the embassy, of course, is in Tripoli. What were you guys evacuating out of CERT?

• 2:21:10Speaker 04

  No, the, uh, ISIS had taken it over.

• 2:21:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:14Speaker 04

  And the GNA, the, uh, the, the militia group that we were backing in Tripoli is the officially recognized government.

• 2:21:21Jack Murphy?

  Haftar's guys?

• 2:21:22Speaker 04

  Haftar's guy, no, no, Haftar was on the other side of Benghazi. This was like...

• 2:21:28Speaker 04

  Half tar, we actually had to make a plea to him to like stay out of the fight. Even though he was, he was well ready to get into it. Um, this was the, the other.

• 2:21:37Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:21:38Speaker 04

  The, the, the recognized government, but they had a group of militia guys that they wanted to get into Sirt and take, take it back from ISIS. But they needed new air support and they needed a lot of different kinds of support. And so I helped, got the opportunity to help manage an entire war plan by way of that. So.

• 2:21:59Jack Murphy?

  What was that like? Yeah. I mean, cause now you're, you know, creating a war plan or air campaign to support a indigenous ground force that you don't really have any control over.

• 2:22:10Speaker 04

  And they are being managed by soft elements from different countries. And yeah, so I, it was challenging. Different, very challenging. And you're dealing with militias who do all of their operational planning on Twitter. And so.

• 2:22:25Jack Murphy?

  That's one, that's a technique.

• 2:22:26Speaker 04

  Hey, man, wanna get it on? Sure. What time? Firefight hashtag, let's go. You know, like wholly, I could, you couldn't make this stuff up, you know?

• 2:22:35Jack Murphy?

  But it's not bullshit either. Like they, that kind of stuff really happened.

• 2:22:38Speaker 04

  No, really, it really did. And, and, and I will say that the Libyans themselves were very aggressive. Um, it took a while, but they, they fought ISIS like literally to the last man. And the Mew, the Mew support to them is what, what made it happen.

• 2:22:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I mean, Serta is a, or Sirt is like a traditional hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism in Libya.

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and, and it's right up on the Med, uh, in the Bay of, uh, you know, Bay of Benghazi there.

• 2:23:08Jack Murphy?

  Little area that Marines have some experience.

• 2:23:10Speaker 04

  Little bit, little bit. Um, shores of Tripoli, all that good stuff, you know? I guess I guess going back to my roots, right? You know? President Joe Bannon probably running the first Marine special operation by crossing the desert to, to attack Libya with six, six other jarheads. So yeah, I mean, you know, like it just now you're working at the operational strategic level and taking all the stuff that I had done to that point, not only working with Muse and understanding of the interagency and now I was applying that, you know, with a conventional marine force that actually had really creative people on it and Simmons was just like, go, get it done.

• 2:23:53Jack Murphy?

  And so the, I mean, I, your impressions of the air campaign, because I'd had, I've had people tell me there's some very interesting kind of takeaways, at least from the drone war, if they were to look at like Raca, Masool, Surt, they're all a little bit different.

• 2:24:15Speaker 04

  Kind of like they found in Bosnia, air campaigns cannot win a war.

• 2:24:23Jack Murphy?

  On their own.

• 2:24:24Speaker 04

  Well, the air force will absolutely tell you that I'm wrong on that, but it's, I mean, well, that's why they exist, is to drop bombs and help the US Army. They absolutely can turn the tide, absolutely augment, augment, they will augment and if, if employed correctly, help the momentum and keep the tempo going on a, on a ground offensive. And that was the one thing that the Mew could do is just the deck cycle was just all day, every day, 10 hours straight, day, night, fixed wing, rotary wing, you name it. And the only thing we didn't put was boots on the ground. So although God knows they were ready.

• 2:25:09Jack Murphy?

  Out of Tunisia or Malta or where, where were they most?

• 2:25:12Speaker 04

  We were based on a, on a boat.

• 2:25:14Jack Murphy?

  Oh, no shit. Okay.

• 2:25:15Speaker 04

  We were on the USS Wall. We dropped more ordnance than has been dropped in like ages. I got a picture somewhere of all the bombs that are painted on the superstructure of the boat. We used up everything in the magazine and then we had to ask for more from UCOM and they were not prepared. For as much as they were like, how many did you drop like? We don't even have that many like we're just like send what you got fin kits, whatever. So then we were getting them from other theaters and I was, you know, we're talking to our soft network. To load stuff on the aircraft to fly at the different places for us to send V22s to then fly on to the.

• 2:25:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, the different combatant commands.

• 2:25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're we're moving, we're moving, we're working across different combatant commands to enable this this fight.

• 2:25:54Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 2:25:55Speaker 04

  And the other thing is, you know, it is precision bombing, but you know, 500 bomb is not necessarily precise. So if you look at the.

• 2:26:02Jack Murphy?

  And you don't have your JTACs on the ground either.

• 2:26:04Speaker 04

  Well, there are JTACs controlling.

• 2:26:07Jack Murphy?

  From other countries.

• 2:26:07Speaker 04

  From other countries. And so.

• 2:26:11Speaker 04

  You'll find that the British enthusiasm is a little bit different from ours. They they're actually pretty aggressive and you know, they they they they they were just like, well, just bring what you got. We'll figure it out, you know, and. Can you make it a two? That sounds great like.

• 2:26:26Speaker 04

  But but bombing is obviously destructive and people are like, no shit watching. But to to your point of. Of RAKA, of HAMs, of parts of like Fallujah, like. Your clearing operation and once you get done like CERT was leveled. Like this used to be the the the gem on the Med in in where people would go to vacation in CERT. And I've I've been, you know, I've I've been boots on the ground in Libya and I've looked out over this stuff and like, if these people can get their shit together, you have a great surf spot some days. Come on, guys. And so. What did you really gain by? I mean, yes, we beat ISIS. Hooray. But there's there's nothing left.

• 2:27:11Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:27:11Speaker 04

  And there's a tremendous amount of casualties. I mean, the Libyans took a lot of casualties. Just because they were really untrained. We're not talking about professional soldiers here.

• 2:27:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:23Speaker 04

  So never confuse enthusiasm with capability. And they they got after it. But you want to talk about a CQB technique, they're using fricking T62 tanks, main guns, just to clear buildings.

• 2:27:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Speaker 04

  It's a method.

• 2:27:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:39Speaker 04

  Not a lot of HR possibility with that, but you know, but ultimately, they, you know, they're like, we're getting this thing done. And so you you just you look at what air support can can offer. And you look at how it's employed. And then you, again, you make those the risk calculations. And we knew exactly, we had the permissions to drop the bombs. We were, we knew what the pieces would be. And it was just sort of like a collateral damage, i.e. civilians were making sure they're not there. That was that was huge in the ROE. There was, you know, we had to ensure that we were able to employ things the right way. But we, you know, I

• 2:28:16Jack Murphy?

  Proportionality.

• 2:28:17Speaker 04

  Proportionality. And I was a JTAC as well. Like back, I was trained it by the army. As a matter of fact, at SOAC years ago. And I have live controls in combat with with aircraft. And just the geometries and stuff that goes into calling in a bomb. You know, there's very tragic stories of people who've

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• 2:30:05Speaker 04

  Had bombs dropped on them. I mean, Don Parnell talks about that, you know?

• 2:30:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:09Speaker 04

  That was a... You talk about things, you know, go through the command like, holy shit, this just happened. And, uh, you know, if it can happen, we gotta figure out ways to mitigate that. So...

• 2:30:26Speaker 04

  The way those things are employed and how you do it has to be measured. It has to be well-planned and like, there's something called a type 3 engagement, where literally everything forward of a line is a free fire zone and we were able to do that in combat. But you've gotta have a hell of a lot of trust in your people.

• 2:30:45Speaker 04

  Because now you're saying, anything in here is engageable and you can do it. And so when Cobra pilots hear that, they're like, oh my God, this is great.

• 2:30:52Speaker 04

  This is why I joined the Marine Corps. They're like, I wanted to fly.

• 2:30:55Jack Murphy?

  Those are like words you don't tell a Cobra pilot. Like, no.

• 2:30:58Speaker 04

  But we did, and they did.

• 2:31:00Jack Murphy?

  Like, anything in this box?

• 2:31:02Speaker 04

  Yep. Anything in this building is go ahead.

• 2:31:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:05Speaker 04

  Four line of troops is right here and they're like, okay.

• 2:31:07Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 2:31:08Speaker 04

  So they're running tow and hellfire missiles, or I mean, not tow, because the wire guided, but they've got hellfire missiles off of the pods.

• 2:31:15Jack Murphy?

  And the machine guns.

• 2:31:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're just putting them into windows.

• 2:31:17Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 2:31:19Speaker 04

  That night.

• 2:31:21Speaker 04

  Being lazed by somebody else.

• 2:31:25Speaker 04

  That you're not talking to.

• 2:31:26Jack Murphy?

  It's a brave new world, man.

• 2:31:27Speaker 04

  Woo! Yeah, it gets sporty, right? So...

• 2:31:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, foreign liaisons, soft international relationships.

• 2:31:34Speaker 04

  Yep, and you have to be able to maintain all of it.

• 2:31:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:36Speaker 04

  And if it goes bad, where's Ivan? So, I mean, yeah, it's just very... On one level, you have a lot of permissions and responsibility, but there's a lot of responsibility that comes with that.

• 2:31:47Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:48Speaker 04

  And, but it was all on Simmons. Like, he owned the entire thing.

• 2:31:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was like, get it done.

• 2:31:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:31:56Jack Murphy?

  And when did that job kind of end or wind down for you?

• 2:32:02Speaker 04

  All of 2016 and then I came back in 2017.

• 2:32:07Speaker 04

  And then I was back at headquarters doing my ops job for another part of that year. And then I screened to go to JSOC in 2017.

• 2:32:19Jack Murphy?

  Before we go there, because you were at sort of this like high level, component level at this point, with your eyes on a lot of things, as a plank owner of Marsoc, you know, the regiment, the component, like that stuff didn't just come out of nowhere. You must have seen all of it get built.

• 2:32:36Speaker 04

  I did, but remember that I was kind of toggling back and forth. So these things were happening concurrently.

• 2:32:41Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:32:41Speaker 04

  There was a lot of stuff I wasn't, I was in the room for everything.

• 2:32:44Jack Murphy?

  No, no, I understand. But I mean, my question really is like, how did Marsoc evolve over the years? Like from where it began to where you were at that point? What were like the big changes and big evolutionary steps you saw the organization make?

• 2:33:00Speaker 04

  Well, getting their own compound and building was huge. So having a headquarters that was dedicated was, you know, and at the same time, they were

• 2:33:12Speaker 04

  really developing the selection and training process and the operator course, what they call ITC.

• 2:33:22Speaker 04

  So it was great to be a Force guy and being able to come into Marsoc right out of the gate. But we didn't, we got grandfathered in, that's what they call it.

• 2:33:28Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:33:28Speaker 04

  And we all actually asked like, hey, shouldn't we go to selection? Like, like everybody in Delta goes to selection. Like, we're like, shouldn't we all do this? And they were like, we get it, but you're proven as Force guys and you're in. So we were like, well, there's probably some dudes that shouldn't be here. And I probably could say that about myself, right? Like, you're just like, that process needed to be developed and they did a good, they've done a great job with that. And John Daly is involved with that quite significantly. He's, you know, there's a lot of people who do that. But he definitely got the chops, not only from his time in the debt, but also, you know, in Marsoc proper. And John Daly taught me how to do command.

• 2:34:10Jack Murphy?

  I think he still works there.

• 2:34:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, he does, he does. And that's one of the reasons it works is because he's a continuity piece.

• 2:34:15Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:15Speaker 04

  He's a long, longstanding member, right? So that was a big one.

• 2:34:23Speaker 04

  Becoming regionally focused was a big one. So I mean, we weren't just all in on Afghanistan. I still think we should have pursued our direct action side of stuff. I believe that we should have made a

• 2:34:38Jack Murphy?

  Marsoc got very involved in Somalia too, didn't they?

• 2:34:40Speaker 04

  We did.

• 2:34:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:41Speaker 04

  They did. I think we should have pushed a little harder to get into JSOC with an operational arm that may be coming at some point, but it's been talked about and shelved many times.

• 2:34:55Jack Murphy?

  What do you think that would be? Would that be like a HR capability or what do you see?

• 2:34:59Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you've already got two SMUs that run that and it would just be more in the quiver. You know, it'd be another, I mean.

• 2:35:07Jack Murphy?

  A third force.

• 2:35:08Speaker 04

  You need, if you're going to have rating forces, then you need to have flexibility to be in different places at the same time. And I mean, not getting too deep into the TTPs, but there's a lot of horsepower that goes into spinning up

• 2:35:22Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 2:35:23Speaker 04

  that stuff. And it's taxing on the headquarters, it's taxing on the unit that goes and does it. And then you've got to have reserves to be able to, you know, continually maintain. And so, I mean, we all came from second force or force recon for the most part. We were all direct action guys. It's what we were trained to do. And then they were like, okay, we'll be FID guys. And it's sort of like, that's a hard pivot.

• 2:35:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:46Speaker 04

  So Marsoc got really good about doing that and diversifying the training and diversifying the way they did that. They also developed a specific kind of 18 Alpha Officer Team Leader Training Program. I think they should probably expand that a little bit more into the staffing area because I think that's what makes like USASOC, WarCom for that matter, JSOC definitely is people as they complete commands, then they go into staffs.

• 2:36:12Jack Murphy?

  Professional development.

• 2:36:14Speaker 04

  Exactly. And they can take kind of the thing that I was doing ad hoc as I went through my career. They should be looking at building officers who are doing that. And that's not to say there aren't earmarked people that they're, but we have yet to have in Marsoc, even though it's been around for 20 years, a homegrown guy who went through selection and has now led the unit. That's going to take a while.

• 2:36:34Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:36:35Speaker 04

  So in SF or the Ranger Regiment, that would be unheard of. Now.

• 2:36:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:41Speaker 04

  You you you just wouldn't have someone commanding the Ranger Ranger. It was not.

• 2:36:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45Speaker 04

  Starting as a Ranger.

• 2:36:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's no way.

• 2:36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's that the same way.

• 2:36:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:49Speaker 04

  So we we've got some growing still to do, but the diversification was was big. And then Marsoc has really leaned to equipment. It really leaned into training, is very adaptive. The the training. Uh, they have a a no kidding G seven, which is exercise and play and exercise and training, not not just selection and training over here at the schoolhouse, but also like no kidding, how they train units to deploy and it's it is iterative and it's also something they evaluate and make changes to to make better. So they've done a really tremendous job with that as well. Um, and the intelligence section of of Marsoc is is really quite good. And they've got special activities and they've got all kinds of imagery specialists.

• 2:37:36Speaker 04

  I I would like to see that be less sort of, hey, you served here, now you go somewhere else. I'd like them to keep them there, but the Marine Corps is really more like, no, you can do some time here and there.

• 2:37:45Jack Murphy?

  Like they should have their own recce or AFO element.

• 2:37:48Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:37:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Speaker 04

  Standing and it just does its own.

• 2:37:52Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:37:52Speaker 04

  It does its own thing. And it's and it's so there's but but Marsoc is has has really developed in in that capacity. And the other thing I got really good at was they invested in psychology and having psychologists on hand for people coming back from war and and, you know, you you talked about it with with Nate from Valhalla, you know, the the stigma of of mental.

• 2:38:20Speaker 04

  The burdens that you carry around, you know, we we talked about it at dinner, there's only so much stuff you could put in the rucksack till you finally fall over. You can carry it for a while, most of them are pretty tough, but after a while, it's just gonna get too much. And so they did a great, really good job of having that as an available thing. And there was no no stigma, you just wander down and have a couch trip.

• 2:38:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's that that, you know, the the word that gets used all the time is like resiliency. Thing is, like, these guys are resilient. They did like 12 deployments, like they're super resilient people, like.

• 2:38:52Jack Murphy?

  They they need a different type of help. It's not just resiliency.

• 2:38:55Speaker 04

  Right. And they they the the the person carrying that.

• 2:39:04Speaker 04

  To bring someone home for deployment and be like, okay, we're sending you to the schoolhouse for a break. Being in selection and training is not a break, right?

• 2:39:14Jack Murphy?

  That's true.

• 2:39:14Speaker 04

  You're busy and so now you're not at home all the time and you're doing, you're running selection courses and your operator training course is nine months long. I mean, you're, you're, a cadre's gotta run that.

• 2:39:25Jack Murphy?

  A lot of the SF guys will tell you that they're away from their families more often when they're running those selection and training courses than when they're on a NODA.

• 2:39:33Speaker 04

  That was how my, that was how it was for my family when I was at ARS as the, as AOC. We were, you know, we were, I was not in the fleet.

• 2:39:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, but you were busy.

• 2:39:42Speaker 04

  But I was training for reconnaissance courses a year and they're 10 weeks long. And in between that, you gotta plan everything for each course to make sure that you got your air support and all your training areas and ammo and everything else. So, I mean, it's, it was a big lift working on Sundays and you're supposed to be away from the fleet. You know, you're not, you're not operational.

• 2:40:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's not a break.

• 2:40:02Speaker 04

  Right. So, so I hope that helped answer that. But, I mean, you know, I, I think that the processes and, you know, we maybe put a little too much marine stuff into it, but it, it works. Yeah.

• 2:40:16Jack Murphy?

  So then tell us about this position that you screened for.

• 2:40:21Speaker 04

  I was, uh, I was the Deputy Director of Operations for Naval Special Warfare Development Group and, uh, they, Marsoc, the Marine Corps and Navy Special Warfare writ large wanting to have more inter, inter-service.

• 2:40:47Jack Murphy?

  Cooperation.

• 2:40:48Speaker 04

  Cooperation and work. And so they're looking for an N3, Assistant OpsO, um, to, to work with the unit and, um, they wanted a Marine and me and some guys went up there and screened and they picked me.

• 2:41:05Speaker 04

  So, I'm not sure.

• 2:41:08Jack Murphy?

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so.

• 2:41:09Jack Murphy?

  Pretty cool opportunity to have.

• 2:41:11Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. And I was there for almost five years.

• 2:41:14Jack Murphy?

  Wow. That's a long run, too.

• 2:41:17Speaker 04

  It is. It was my last assignment in the Corps.

• 2:41:20Jack Murphy?

  So.

• 2:41:21Speaker 04

  I did not get battalion command, so I pivoted as a lieutenant colonel to.

• 2:41:27Jack Murphy?

  So, at this point, you're pretty intimately involved in mission planning for the National Mission Force?

• 2:41:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you're on standby and you're there for, you know, not just working there, but also doing other projects within, you know, once you're behind the wire, you're kind of free help also to JSOC. If they need somebody, they can call you and say, okay, we need this mission and someone to come help out with that. Or need somebody to go to this country and have a conversation.

• 2:41:59Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:41:59Speaker 04

  So, I had a lot of flexibility to, and I worked, I worked, one of my portfolios was working with a lot of foreign SOF equivalents, British, Canadians, French, Australians. So, that was also interesting. Germans.

• 2:42:15Jack Murphy?

  Was that to coordinate, like, training or operational stuff?

• 2:42:19Speaker 04

  Both, yeah. Yep, depending on what we were doing.

• 2:42:24Speaker 04

  Because some of those countries have different permissions and different relationships with countries that we might want to go work in, but we don't necessarily possess the same, you know.

• 2:42:36Jack Murphy?

  Exactly.

• 2:42:36Speaker 04

  Relationship.

• 2:42:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they have different access and sometimes radically different ROEs.

• 2:42:42Speaker 04

  Impressively so.

• 2:42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:48Jack Murphy?

  So, from, I mean, you were there for quite a while. I guess first off, like, any, anything that's like jumps out at you, any memorable experiences?

• 2:43:02Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the whole, I equate it to working as an offensive coordinator for an NFL team. And so, you're always practicing, you're always doing stuff.

• 2:43:14Speaker 04

  I can't get too deep into the actual details of operations for obvious reasons. Sure. Never mind the people who were there. But I will say the resourcing, the equipment, the access permissions, second to none.

• 2:43:35Speaker 04

  Their ability to

• 2:43:39Speaker 04

  to adapt and change, not only their tactics, but the way they approach things is truly impressive.

• 2:43:47Speaker 04

  Just based upon who they are.

• 2:43:51Speaker 04

  I mean, Vice President Pence came and visited, so we got to see him. And there was always DVs and people that we were, you know, doing, they call them dog and ponies, but capabilities, demonstrations, things like that. So that, you know, that was kind of interesting. Operationally, yes, there were people deployed all over the place. I mean, certainly the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

• 2:44:13Speaker 04

  Everyone was integrally involved in that. By that time, I was actually starting my, my glide slope out of the

• 2:44:22Speaker 04

  out of the Marine Corps, although I was still, still there, I was still plugged in. But like Scott Mann's book, Pineapple Express, like I was, I was involved in some periphery as part of that, as well as what I was doing with, you know, while I was still on active duty. So I had to straddle this line of kind of, you know, being able to see all of that unfold, you know, in real time was not only fascinating, but also tragic. It's not like we could see Abbey Gate was gonna happen, but you're just, you're just watching this chaos and just trying to we're all sifting through tons of information, trying to figure out like what's this, what's this thing gonna look like? And how we're, it just, it took, I, I, it took everyone by surprise, I'm not gonna lie. I mean, we, it should be no surprise that kind of Afghanistan was gonna fall the way that it did.

• 2:45:04Speaker 04

  But the fact that we, we were just so on our heels, particularly from Washington down, that was, that was a difficult thing to, to work through.

• 2:45:13Jack Murphy?

  One of the things that I

• 2:45:15Speaker 04

  And I was there under two presidential administrations, so I got to work with very different sides of the National Security Council as well.

• 2:45:24Jack Murphy?

  One of the things that I heard, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, was that, you know, the US military, including like the JSOC elements, at least for a time, weren't really allowed to go outside the wire on these rescue missions, and it was really like the Germans and the Brits and others that were able to

• 2:45:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a little bit of hamstring

• 2:45:42Jack Murphy?

  Get after it.

• 2:45:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a little bit of hamstringing in that. I think everyone was frustrated with that. It makes me very frustrated right now to hear that Chris Donahue is the last man out of Afghanistan. He was, you know, storied career. That he would even be smeared that somehow he didn't do enough or the right thing.

• 2:46:03Jack Murphy?

  You think he went above and beyond to get it done?

• 2:46:05Speaker 04

  Every experience I had with Chris Donahue, working with him, especially when he was the DSO or the DO, the Director of Special Operations in the Pentagon, and the work that I did, you know, with some of these missions that we had to run, and the experiences I've had with him, you know, prior to that, and watching what he was doing on the ground, absolutely. He is the kind of leader, like, there's a reason they gave him the 82nd Airborne. Like, people would jump out of airplanes for Chris Donahue.

• 2:46:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the military has to take its lumps sometimes, but in this case, they really did get handed like a big bag of shit.

• 2:46:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it was more like, it was a bag of shit with the bottom being a colander. So it was just like, just everywhere.

• 2:46:44Jack Murphy?

  And the State Department was in charge of the whole damn thing, notionally if nothing else.

• 2:46:48Speaker 04

  That has never gone well.

• 2:46:49Jack Murphy?

  It never was a Neo.

• 2:46:51Speaker 04

  Wade Yamamoto said the same thing when he was talking about Eagle Claw.

• 2:46:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:54Speaker 04

  Right? So it has never gone well. And I went to the high-risk course at Foggy Bottom, where the State Department sends their diplomats in case they're going into really difficult spots, and just their mindset is completely different. Are we not having the state dinner tonight? No, a fucking bomb just went off in the front yard. But I have so much wine, like...

• 2:47:19Jack Murphy?

  Different world, man.

• 2:47:20Speaker 04

  Right, but the mindset is completely different. And we deliberately brought military people into that corps so that they could get a flavor of like neo-planning and all that other stuff. Yeah. And there were just moments like after, you know, at night, I'd go out with the rest of the, you know, JSOC guys and other dudes and we'd sit down and we're like, where are we?

• 2:47:39Speaker 04

  Is this, this is how they do this?

• 2:47:41Jack Murphy?

  Well, as we were saying earlier, the priorities are drastically different.

• 2:47:45Speaker 04

  Yes. A fantastic book to read is The Ugly American.

• 2:47:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Speaker 04

  And if, you know, that, that is true, it's a fictional account of basically the French

• 2:47:59Speaker 04

  and US relationship and involvement in Vietnam in the 50s. And all the tenants in there are absolutely true. Just as the guy writes, and I'll just leave it at that, but you just read that and you're like, okay, I want to understand how we got here. Like what's, this is it. And it's, and it's been in the mindset forever. I mean, even their diplomatic security officers, who I would go and do work with and we would train with different, uh, different things in case we had to do an embassy reinforcement, not only as Marines with the MUE, but also, uh, bringing in small teams is just part of whatever, whatever the mission happened to be. They'd be like, yeah, well, we kind of got to deal with the ambassador. We kind of got to, you know.

• 2:48:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, dude, the stuff those DSS guys deal with is off the wall sometimes.

• 2:48:44Speaker 04

  And some of them have been in some incredibly dangerous situations and performed wonderfully. Like I'm, I'm not discounting anybody.

• 2:48:52Jack Murphy?

  They've like been in armed standoffs with the host nation in some cases and that shit never makes the news.

• 2:48:58Speaker 04

  Of course, and they've been in gunfights. I mean, they're the only law enforcement officer who has jurisdiction all over the world.

• 2:49:04Jack Murphy?

  At any embassy, yeah.

• 2:49:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, and in embassy, yeah, for sure. And it's, it's the stuff, I mean, I was looking at DSS pretty heavy to get into. It's like a pretty cool job. I, I.

• 2:49:14Jack Murphy?

  They have like investigative authorities over the embassy and the personnel there.

• 2:49:19Speaker 04

  They do a lot of passport, uh, fraud control.

• 2:49:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:49:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's a pretty diverse, pretty diverse portfolio.

• 2:49:25Jack Murphy?

  Those guys get worked though. They get worked. Like you mentioned Pompeo. The DSS guys had to backfill his whole security detail after he was the VP. Or no, I'm not thinking of, not Pence, Pompeo.

• 2:49:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, but, but I, I, I can only imagine. I can only imagine being on Hillary Clinton's detail when she's like, I'm gonna get out here to Hear Square and go out for a walk. And I'm like, what?

• 2:49:47Jack Murphy?

  No!

• 2:49:48Speaker 04

  What do you, ma'am, what did you say? And you gotta let it happen.

• 2:49:53Jack Murphy?

  But maybe she's just gonna get flowers on her sniper fire. That might happen too, you know? Hey, come on.

• 2:49:59Speaker 04

  We could deep dive. A little more bourbon and we can really deep dive this, but, you know.

• 2:50:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, but so.

• 2:50:06Jack Murphy?

  But I digress.

• 2:50:06Speaker 04

  Well, but, you know. The other thing is that you're really tied into all these, these, these high level decisions and you're, and, and you, you kinda do get to understand behind the scenes. And, and I did work with, you know, Scott Miller, pretty, pretty closely on, on, on a mission. And, uh,

• 2:50:26Speaker 04

  you, you get to meet these, these people. They say, no, don't meet your heroes, but I got to meet a lot of my heroes. And, and, and, and got to, to, to go visit, you know, the chow hall at Bragg, which is pretty good. And, and, you know, and, and experience, get that kind of experience and talk to people. And, and you just, they put me through a completely different jump course, which I had a fantastic time doing. I mean, I, I got out of the military with, with more jumps than I ever thought I would have. I enjoyed that. I really had.

• 2:50:51Jack Murphy?

  What was the jump course?

• 2:50:53Speaker 04

  Uh, well, they, they have their own, uh, they have, they have their own course that, that run outside of Yuma or, or Coolidge, Arizona. They have their own course. Um, and.

• 2:51:05Jack Murphy?

  You mean the advanced tactical infiltration course?

• 2:51:07Speaker 04

  That's ATAC and that's, that's, that is actually run by the army.

• 2:51:10Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:10Speaker 04

  They, that, that is a part, that is a part of the profile of training. But for me, because as a support guy, they were like, hey, if you're gonna jump in with us, not that you're going on the X, but if you're gonna jump in as part of a support, you have to be able to jump our gear. You have to jump our, our profile. So, so they, they basically sent me back to jump school for a week. And I was like, this is awesome. Like, you get to do, you know, stuff like that.

• 2:51:32Speaker 04

  So I, I enjoyed just the tempo. I enjoyed the amount of training I got to do and got, you know, and I enjoyed the missions that, that, that I was exposed to. I mean, I got to be, I wanted to be involved in hostage rescue and I got to do hostage rescue stuff. And that, that's something you don't get to, get to see or do very often.

• 2:51:49Jack Murphy?

  Uh, are you allowed to talk about that at all?

• 2:51:55Speaker 04

  You asked a question and we'll see.

• 2:51:58Jack Murphy?

  What was the mission?

• 2:52:01Speaker 04

  That, so there's, there's the problem, yeah.

• 2:52:04Jack Murphy?

  Like, we're not gonna mention, I'm not gonna mention a country, I'm not gonna mention a name, but like, overall mission profile, what, what had to get done here?

• 2:52:15Speaker 04

  So going back to State Department getting country clearances for us, so if you go into a country with military force that has not been permitted, permission, you're giving, given permissions called an invasion.

• 2:52:25Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:52:25Speaker 04

  Marine Corps is really good at that kinda shit.

• 2:52:29Speaker 04

  Army too, for that matter, I mean, they got, they got Iraq twice, so why not? So...

• 2:52:35Speaker 04

  Or parts of Iraq, it came back to Kuwait, but, um... So you gotta coordinate with the State Department to get a country clearance to be able to, to...

• 2:52:43Jack Murphy?

  Diplom clearance.

• 2:52:44Speaker 04

  Yep, diplomatic clearance. And permission to do what you wanna do inside of that country. It's not like, "Hey, we're showing up and can you give us some local talent?" We're like, "Everyone needs to be out of the way, we need to do this thing, we need, we need certain amounts of support, but ultimately, what we, what we require most is to not be impeded." So...

• 2:53:05Speaker 04

  Whether it's helicopters, or you're doing a jump profile, or you're, you're doing something that is going to give you the best chance of success, you, it's not, there's, this Jason Bourne shit doesn't, well, for some people it exists, but not, not at this level, right? Like, it's, it's very, you know, um, you're not telling your entire operation plan, but you're just saying, "Look, this is what we gotta do."

• 2:53:28Jack Murphy?

  Include the area.

• 2:53:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you, you're, the, the country's aware of what you're going in there to do. So in case of hostage rescue, let's say, you know, the, the person is being held in a specific area and you've got the intelligence to go and get it, go and get them, you have a very short window to do that, and things have to happen very fast, and you have to get those permissions and, and, and so that you can move, because time is everything.

• 2:53:49Jack Murphy?

  But sometimes you're moving so fast that all the pieces aren't lining up here.

• 2:53:53Speaker 04

  Or you, you get moving with what you have in line and you, you hope the rest of it will catch up. And in our case, under one mission...

• 2:54:09Speaker 04

  The ramp was open.

• 2:54:12Speaker 04

  And they were ready to go, the jumpers. And they had not gotten the permission by way of the State Department.

• 2:54:19Jack Murphy?

  So, yeah, for like, people listening, when they say the ramp is open, like, these guys are like, minutes if not seconds away from jumping.

• 2:54:26Speaker 04

  Jocked up, full oxygen, all their gear, ready to go.

• 2:54:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:30Speaker 04

  One leaves, everyone's leaving. There's no like, "Oh, well, wait, oh, oh, oh, hold up." So, "We didn't get..." "Oh, shit." So they're literally like... Green, green light is on. So that jumper go is just, we are, we are just waiting.

• 2:54:45Jack Murphy?

  Holy fuck.

• 2:54:47Speaker 04

  And so I'm on the phone with a lot of different people, as are other people.

• 2:54:53Speaker 04

  And it finally came from the front office, i.e. Uh, the White House.

• 2:54:59Jack Murphy?

  So were they like, running racetracks up there?

• 2:55:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, in their holding pattern.

• 2:55:03Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 2:55:05Speaker 04

  So, yeah, tension's really high.

• 2:55:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:07Speaker 04

  You know, you've got, you've got Overwatch on the objective. You've got Overwatch on the people because you gotta track, you gotta track the jumpers.

• 2:55:14Jack Murphy?

  And they're already over sovereign airspace at this point.

• 2:55:17Speaker 04

  In another, in another country from which they've launched.

• 2:55:19Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:55:20Speaker 04

  So, now they're in the air. We're all waiting.

• 2:55:28Speaker 04

  Got a bunch of stuff lined up. Never mind your QRF and everybody else who are on standby and you're just waiting for go. And then the White House finally gets involved. And I mean, the White House. And then it's all of a sudden like, "Everything's set." Go.

• 2:55:41Jack Murphy?

  Did, did it take the president picking up the phone?

• 2:55:43Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:55:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:44Speaker 04

  Not to me.

• 2:55:47Jack Murphy?

  But to the host station.

• 2:55:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it literally was like, "Hey, what are you doing on Saturday? Why don't you come golf with me and we'll..."

• 2:55:51Jack Murphy?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:55:52Speaker 04

  "I'll make this worth your while."

• 2:55:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. Let's talk.

• 2:55:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, but so that's really what it came down to. And then, then, "Oh, the sky's clear" and we, you know, so...

• 2:56:03Speaker 04

  Jumpers go, um, they're able to land offset. And then

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• 2:57:37Speaker 04

  They patrolled and basically did a movement to contact and did a hasty assault and rescued the guy. And then we've, we've pre-planned like contingencies for Bedivac, for QRF and X-Act.

• 2:57:54Speaker 04

  And nobody recognizes when shit goes right.

• 2:57:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:57Speaker 04

  And it went right.

• 2:57:58Jack Murphy?

  I remember when this happened. Again, not mentioning any names, but I remember when it happened.

• 2:58:03Speaker 04

  If, if, if it happened.

• 2:58:05Jack Murphy?

  It, it was very, yeah, it, it was sort of like a blip on the radar, right? It was just sort of like, yeah, this thing happened and it was acknowledged in some like wire, you know, reports on like Associated Press or whatever.

• 2:58:16Speaker 04

  It got on Fox News for, for thirty seconds or something. Like you said, a blip.

• 2:58:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:22Speaker 04

  It's like, oh, that's interesting.

• 2:58:23Jack Murphy?

  Because it went down right.

• 2:58:24Speaker 04

  Well, what do you want your margarita? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I did, and...

• 2:58:30Jack Murphy?

  They smoke checked a bunch of bad guys and got the hostage out of there.

• 2:58:33Speaker 04

  And that was, that was very, that was probably one of the most intense things I've been involved in, not because I was on the ground with them, because I, I had been on another one. I'd been on another HR that did not go well. And people were wounded and we, we, eventually, eventually these guys were recovered, but at that point in time, it got, you know, you want to talk about

• 2:58:57Speaker 04

  if, second guessing things that happened on the ground in tactics? If you'd done this, why didn't they push harder? I mean, as, as Winston Churchill says, you know, he said after Gallipoli. Am I comparing this to Gallipoli? Because, you know, now the terrible ifs will accumulate.

• 2:59:10Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:11Speaker 04

  And so that's what it comes down to, like, well, how did this happen? And did he make the right decision to, to pull back? And in some cases, yeah, I think that it is...

• 2:59:20Jack Murphy?

  I think I know the one you're talking about.

• 2:59:21Speaker 04

  Right, and so, so, so then you're like, well, is it mission failure? Or did we succeed enough?

• 2:59:29Speaker 04

  And if it ended eventually, and it did, with the guys being recovered, again, through a different means, but we still, we never, we never lost hope, right? That it was gonna happen.

• 2:59:45Speaker 04

  You're like, well, will we get another swing at this?

• 2:59:49Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:59:50Speaker 04

  Or did we, did we let this guy down and their families? Because you're putting a lot of effort against one to two people. But anybody who's like, oh, they don't value American lives, listen. When I was there, there's a scene in that movie Proof of Life where they've got all the names and everything all lined up on the board of like who, who's involved in K and R and they're trying to figure out, because this is a private firm, you know, in the movie, it's obviously a movie.

• 3:00:13Speaker 04

  But we actively tracked everybody who was, you know, kidnapped or, or, you know, sometimes it could be just a KFR kidnapped or ransom thing involved with an oil company, but other times it could be a political thing, but we track every, they, they track everything. If some, if something happens and, and someone goes missing and, and we, there's constant evaluation like, okay, can, do we have proof of life? Can we go get this person? Can we, you know, we'll go talk to their families. The FBI will go and talk to them as well to, we're trying to understand everything we can. And time is of the essence. It's all about time and doing it quickly and doing it care, and also being careful.

• 3:00:48Jack Murphy?

  The, it reminds me, we had a SAS guy that we interviewed on here one time and he pointed out, he was not a part of it, but he pointed out this sort of like a lesson learned and AAR kind of comment. During the Gulf War, there's an SAS patrol that deployed, they were infilled into the desert for reconnaissance mission.

• 3:01:08Speaker 04

  Bravo two zero.

• 3:01:09Jack Murphy?

  Uh, before that.

• 3:01:10Speaker 04

  Before that, okay.

• 3:01:11Jack Murphy?

  Right before that, they got out there and it was just flat desert out in every direction and the patrol leader was like, the terrain's totally different than what we anticipated, not what we saw on the map. It does not support the mission that we have planned and he aborted and had the birds come in and take him out. And people, there's tremendous pressure to do operations early on in the Gulf War.

• 3:01:33Speaker 04

  But, but that happens everywhere. So you're, you're right.

• 3:01:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And then the next patrol that went in, you know, people were cursing this guy out. The next patrol that went in was Bravo two zero and, you know, we saw.

• 3:01:42Speaker 04

  And I, and I've spent a lot of time with, with, with the special air service and I have, I have friends who are still on active duty there. I, I work with, uh, former members who, who are now out, but they, they were there at that time. They, they knew those guys. Um, and they're also very good about the lessons learned that come after that. And so, yeah, there, there will always be that second guessing. And so, you know, did the commander make the right decision to abort the mission? Did, did, should they have continued pushing the fight to, you know, get the hostage who we later found was literally within like 50 yards, 50 meters of them if they.

• 3:02:19Jack Murphy?

  Oh, that's tough.

• 3:02:20Speaker 04

  If they'd pushed the fight. But now you've got two guys down, one who is literally. Shot pelvically like he wa- like um the ranger in in in Black Hawk Down Jamie um you know who who ended up dying obviously but I'm sorry I can't remember that's terrible um ultimately you know but what comes of that we get quick clot we get ways that we can now do battlefield survive your battlefield survivability goes up so then after that we start evaluating okay well how did he get hit well the guy fired through the doorway and he was getting ready to make entry and this is what happens when you're gonna do you know this is a very dynamic

• 3:02:57Speaker 04

  and dangerous business and when I so that guy went to the hospital and he ended up making a recovery not full recovery

• 3:03:09Jack Murphy?

  but he lived

• 3:03:10Speaker 04

  he lived and he was um we're talking about many bordering on years of recovery

• 3:03:18Jack Murphy?

  yeah for people who are like listening to this like when you get shot in the pelvis not that I know what the hell I'm talking about but there's a bunch of obviously bones and arteries that run through that area so you get shot there like it's a that's a very dangerous and quickly fatal wound

• 3:03:34Speaker 04

  absolutely so the medics did a fantastic so remember there's this huge firefight going on you're going in to rescue a hostage you've got a guy down on the doorway so you've got to pull him back he's now a priority the mission has not ended and you gotta get him evacuated so now I'm juggling all this stuff back back on the rear like making all this happen so I'm on an airplane I hadn't seen this guy in ages and I I'm on an airplane and I see him come on and he's walking on a cane and I said holy shit dude how are you how are things he says oh man hanging in there you know I said listen I'm gonna buy you a drink I've owed you a drink in fact I probably owe you a brewery right but

• 3:04:19Speaker 04

  I have carried around a long time

• 3:04:23Speaker 04

  that you got shot. And the reason why is I'm the guy that got the mission approved to put you in there.

• 3:04:31Speaker 04

  And he goes, I'd do it all over again.

• 3:04:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, of course he would.

• 3:04:33Speaker 04

  What are you gonna do, right? So I was like, how about 50 beers?

• 3:04:36Jack Murphy?

  You would have done the same shit if.

• 3:04:38Speaker 04

  Without a doubt.

• 3:04:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:40Speaker 04

  And so

• 3:04:42Speaker 04

  the juxtaposition of those two missions is one is like really successful and we were like jumping up and down and really excited.

• 3:04:47Jack Murphy?

  That's a really tough pill to swallow for the operators.

• 3:04:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Well, so you know, I they did come back and there was some dejection and there was a lot of like finger pointing is not the right word because they don't do that. The professionals and they don't get into like, well, he did this and he, you know, nobody, we didn't.

• 3:05:04Jack Murphy?

  A bunch of like A-type personalities, mission failure does not go over well.

• 3:05:08Speaker 04

  And but it is part, I hate to say it, it is part of the risk assessment.

• 3:05:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:13Speaker 04

  And it is, you know, the evaluation of you're going to commit those resources. And you're going to risk life, limb, eyesight, machine, and all these other things that are going to go in there. We're making that decision before we ever say go. And then when we go, we go. And you go as hard as you can.

• 3:05:30Jack Murphy?

  So I gotta ask, how was that hostage ultimately pulled out of there?

• 3:05:35Speaker 04

  They negotiated it.

• 3:05:36Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha. Yeah.

• 3:05:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, they negotiated it. Adroitly, I'd say. That was actually, and it was and it was likely because of the effort that was put against him.

• 3:05:48Jack Murphy?

  That they knew it was coming.

• 3:05:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were like, shit, man, we don't want to deal with this anymore.

• 3:05:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:52Speaker 04

  You've outlived your value to us.

• 3:05:57Speaker 04

  Well, they had, they whacked, they whacked these guys on the freaking, you know, objective, but there were just more dudes there and they were just like, okay, we can't

• 3:06:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:04Speaker 04

  fighting this out. So.

• 3:06:08Jack Murphy?

  They made the right decision. Even if it was tough.

• 3:06:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And when that, when that is unfolding in real time, in front of you, you're just like. You know, you have to react and no one you you gotta be calm and you gotta even though you're in the Ops Center and you and you have to maintain the ability of of managing chaos and still keeping everything in line. You still have to continue. And and so I think that's that's one of the things that you know, the the flexibility that is given there is is tremendous. And so, yeah, I I I was involved in three of them. I did three uh causes rescues. All of them are all of them successful recoveries eventually. So, yeah, I guess I could say, you know, I'm pretty.

• 3:06:50Jack Murphy?

  What what was number three?

• 3:06:54Speaker 04

  Separate separate guy in in another.

• 3:06:58Jack Murphy?

  Place.

• 3:06:58Speaker 04

  Another place. Yeah.

• 3:07:01Jack Murphy?

  And how did that one turn out?

• 3:07:02Speaker 04

  That one was actually less dynamic. Uh, he actually, I wouldn't say like walked in.

• 3:07:10Jack Murphy?

  It's like go pick this guy up?

• 3:07:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're kind of like, hey, you know, we we we found it. You still have to, you know, you put put the infrastructure together to go make it happen. But that's actually, you know, while it's exciting on one level as you're getting, you know, full Hollywood type shit, you know, for these other missions and the dynamics of of being in combat, how much easier is it to just be able to like get them? And and that, you know, you the result's still the same. You just have what was really good about that one is, you know, there was a leveraging of of local infrastructure to really kind of do that in a much more clandestine, I would call a cerebral way. And they'd been looking for that guy for a really long time. Or he'd

• 3:07:53Speaker 04

  been he'd been he'd been in captivity for a really long time. And when they got him, I was like, I imagine.

• 3:08:04Speaker 04

  How do you reintegrate your family, right? How do you reintegrate with the world? You know, it's a very difficult. And I wasn't on the receiving end of that. I was never, I didn't do the post recovery interviews. Our psychologist did that, the FBI, you have all kinds of people.

• 3:08:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's a place down in Texas where they do that, don't they?

• 3:08:22Speaker 04

  They do them.

• 3:08:23Jack Murphy?

  Like hostage reintegration?

• 3:08:24Speaker 04

  Well, they do it all, they do it all over the place. But it starts as soon as they grab them. As soon as they got them out, like, you know, they're giving them something to drink or whatever and talking to them.

• 3:08:33Jack Murphy?

  Okay, bro.

• 3:08:34Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, actually, yeah.

• 3:08:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:38Speaker 04

  I mean, in the case where they, where they walked in and stitched up the bad guys in a pretty, pretty good fight.

• 3:08:48Speaker 04

  The, the lead guy dove on the hostage.

• 3:08:52Jack Murphy?

  Because there was an.

• 3:08:53Speaker 04

  Because, I mean, there's a, there's a crazy ass firefight going all around him.

• 3:08:58Speaker 04

  And when all the gunfire stopped, I was, he apparently, like, was like, you know, mouth to ear with him, was like, hey, man, we're Americans, you okay? And the guy was like, I don't know. And he was like, could you, could you get off me? Because we're talking to a dude about my size.

• 3:09:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:15Speaker 04

  Full body armor and everything. And his adrenaline has spiked because he just jumped out of an airplane and walked across the desert, you know, for, for two hours.

• 3:09:23Jack Murphy?

  I can't imagine what that, what that feels like, you know, like the, the accounts of like the Curt News rescue in Panama. Where like you're being held in a fucking jail cell in a foreign country and all of a sudden these commandos show up and they're like, we're American soldiers, we're here to bring you home.

• 3:09:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 3:09:38Jack Murphy?

  Like, holy shit.

• 3:09:40Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there's a Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit that did a, I think it was an oil tanker recapture.

• 3:09:50Speaker 04

  And the crew had barricaded themselves down inside of the ship's secondary steering. Which is, you know, so if something happens in.

• 3:10:02Jack Murphy?

  Was this before the GWAT or after?

• 3:10:04Speaker 04

  This is during the GWAT, this was only a few years ago.

• 3:10:06Jack Murphy?

  Oh, really?

• 3:10:07Speaker 04

  Okay, we could look it up. I'm embarrassed that I don't have the full details, but they, the ship had been, had been hijacked.

• 3:10:18Speaker 04

  The force platoon assaulted the ship. And then they.

• 3:10:26Speaker 04

  They cleared it. And as they got down into the lower, lower part of the.

• 3:10:32Speaker 04

  Sorry, to the aft steering. They were banging on the door. They're like, hey, come out. They're like, we, we're not coming out. Like, you, you, you, who are you? And the guy pulled his American flag off of his, uh, gear and he slid it under the door.

• 3:10:46Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 3:10:46Speaker 04

  And the guy was like, and he opened it up. He's like, thank God you guys are here, you know, so. You don't think, you don't think that thing has any currency? Yeah, that, that's pretty, pretty impressive.

• 3:10:56Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome.

• 3:10:58Jack Murphy?

  So, uh. I mean, I, I, I just realized I've been talking your ear off for like three hours here.

• 3:11:06Speaker 04

  I've been talking your ear off, like.

• 3:11:07Jack Murphy?

  No, I, I, I love it though, and I'll, I'll keep you going all night, but no, I'm not going to, um.

• 3:11:12Speaker 04

  I got nothing else to do. Like, this is great.

• 3:11:14Jack Murphy?

  So, uh, you know, and so like, you, you mentioned that you're sort of like winding down in your Marine Corps career. Before we move on, like, big takeaways from this JSOC experience, five years, mission planning?

• 3:11:29Speaker 04

  Well, I, I think it was the culmination of my, obviously, it's not just the culmination because it was my last assignment, but, you know.

• 3:11:35Jack Murphy?

  You had to use all of your skills and experience and put it all together.

• 3:11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's really what it comes down to is I, I, I.

• 3:11:44Speaker 04

  Got the opportunity to put it all into practice. It's almost like. Studying a martial art for a really long time and then you're, I'm not saying you went out on the street to get in a fight or whatever, but somehow you just finally felt like you had pulled it, like you, you had learned it. And you, not that you couldn't keep learning and, and even the best martial artists will tell you that you're always learning and you should be, whether you're writing or what have you. But for me, I was like, you know, this is going to be the end of my, my career, probably.

• 3:12:10Speaker 04

  And. Just being able to be able to, being able to look at.

• 3:12:19Speaker 04

  My career to that point and say this is where I want to go and having achieved that was was huge.

• 3:12:26Jack Murphy?

  You went further than Marines were quote unquote supposed to go.

• 3:12:30Speaker 04

  I probably.

• 3:12:32Speaker 04

  There are a lot of Marines who are going to see this and be like, yes, yes, he did.

• 3:12:37Jack Murphy?

  What I mean by that was that you guys were literally like not allowed to be a part of the special operations community for so long. That's how it was when you first started. And for you to stand up Marsoc or be a part of that and then go up and have this JSOC position is like you went further than people would have expected any Marine to go.

• 3:12:56Speaker 04

  It was it was not ever in the plan either.

• 3:12:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:58Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 3:12:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it was, uh, it was, it was tremendous. And people ask like, yeah, if I joined the Marine Corps, you know, like if you if you could map your career like I did, I'd tell you right now, go ahead.

• 3:13:10Jack Murphy?

  Do it, yeah.

• 3:13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there's no guarantees, right?

• 3:13:13Jack Murphy?

  No. Um, so before we move on, I guess like I'm kind of curious about like what it's like to sit in those Ops SENS, watching the ISR feed, the thermal coming in, and you mentioned some like pretty tense moments. But then like the other like imagery that comes into my mind is from, uh, what was it Patriot Games where the guy's sitting there watching, sipping on a coffee like that is a kill.

• 3:13:38Speaker 04

  That is some straight Hollywood shit.

• 3:13:41Speaker 04

  I'll tell you, it, um, I mean, you got to get sleep, especially if it starts to to become a little more protracted. And when you deploy, you don't know how long you're going to be gone for. Even if you stand up in the Ops Center, you you you I would sleep in the office, sleep in the couch, because you never know somebody had to wake you up. You didn't, you couldn't drive, even though I lived close by, you'd lose time driving. So you just sleep there and people bring you food and. Um, you know, sometimes it'd be quite boring. Um.

• 3:14:14Speaker 04

  But then it would ramp up and I can tell you that, you know, when the tension is there, everyone is really legitimately focused. And then when it's, when it's happening and you're watching the whole thing unfold. Aside from just people having short conversations with, that is all mission oriented or picking up a phone. It is quiet. It is very quiet and everyone gets professional, i- i- is really professional. Um, and I do remember like when, when that guy got rescued.

• 3:14:45Speaker 04

  And they were like, hey, positive recovery.

• 3:14:48Speaker 04

  Nine tangos down, everything, you know, we're, we're, we're doing SSE. We, we erupted in cheers. Like it was, it was awesome.

• 3:14:58Jack Murphy?

  Because you guys have been like on pins and needles for so long.

• 3:15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that was like, that was like a three day, like day on, stay on, you know, and I was getting a couple hours here and there where I could. And, uh, you know, everybody wants to be that guy. I'm not going to bed. I gotta, you know, you just can't, you, you, the tension is.

• 3:15:13Jack Murphy?

  You have to figure out how to moderate it. Yeah.

• 3:15:15Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you did that in combat too, right? You mean, you can't, you can't go forever and, and unless I.

• 3:15:23Speaker 04

  For all the stuff and things I was exposed to and got to do, I was never in a Fallujah, you know? I, I wasn't in a, in a Marja, you know, protracted week, two week campaigns where you're just living out of your gear. You know, a lot of it was commuter warfare. You're flying in, you're going out, you're having breakfast by, you know, before the sun comes up. I mean.

• 3:15:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. The zero three hundred call up.

• 3:15:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's like.

• 3:15:52Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna say it's easy, but.

• 3:15:54Jack Murphy?

  It's different.

• 3:15:54Speaker 04

  You, you, you get, you, you get used to a certain way of, of, of, of serving and.

• 3:16:02Speaker 04

  My hat's off to the infantry, my hat's off to those guys who who who who gone and done that stuff. And like I said, I had done my first infantry, I would have loved to have had that opportunity with them. So, I mean, yeah, it was a heck of a, it was a heck of a run.

• 3:16:16Jack Murphy?

  Just talk to us about retirement.

• 3:16:19Speaker 04

  In retirement, I'm a writer. I also do a little bit of consulting on the side. Uh, I work with a company based out of Holland called AFG, Advanced Forces Group, which I do a lot of advisement work with mostly retired guys. Uh, some of them are SOC guys, some of them are Special Air Service. Um, some of them are Dutch, Special Forces, and we train NATO SOF. Uh, I call it boardroom mercenary. You you you do a lot of stuff, especially with planning, working, uh, helping, helping their planning process get better and understanding special operations, employment and things like that. And we also do stuff with combat mindset and how you train your your teams, or train people as a team in organizational development.

• 3:17:05Speaker 04

  So I do that, uh, and then I'm primarily a writer. I do all kinds of different writing. I do expository stuff. I do, uh, evaluate or, uh, commentary pieces. Uh, I have a Substack. Uh, certainly I've got my four books, which you can find on Amazon. And we should, we we can go into those as well.

• 3:17:23Jack Murphy?

  What's, uh, what's the Substack? Where can people find that?

• 3:17:25Speaker 04

  Uh, it's Ivan F Ingram. It looks like I-N-G-R-A-H-A-M dot Substack dot com.

• 3:17:31Jack Murphy?

  And what do you write about on there?

• 3:17:33Speaker 04

  That is actually, I I I actually look at it, uh, writing as a craft that's much like playing an instrument, you have to practice. And my Substack is is honestly a way to declutter my mind, whether it's current events or reflection pieces or just something that's coming up in my in my brain. It helps keep everything level so that I can actually focus on on my other writing. Uh, so it's it's a weekly, I I do some stuff for my paid subscribers exclusively for them. Uh, but it's a weekly delivery of just stuff I talk about. So I've been doing it since, uh, January and I do about two articles a week.

• 3:18:14Jack Murphy?

  Damn, okay, you're moving.

• 3:18:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I don't get lost up here. I mean, I got a lot of stuff bouncing around, but I I I like it because it helps me to to to honestly off gas and it also helps me. Write, self-edit,

• 3:18:30Speaker 04

  and develop the way that I can deliver.

• 3:18:35Jack Murphy?

  Present the information.

• 3:18:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, prose or what have you. And so I dabble in poetry sometimes, or I just, sometimes I do some fiction stuff. Um, it just really depends on kind of what, what my mood is. And then sometimes there's stuff that pops up, it's current events, and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna comment on that. And, uh, yeah. So it's, it's, that's a really good thing. And then I've been, I've got four books that I've self-published, and I just signed with the Sager Group for, um, my feature-length novel, which is called Troops in Contact, and that will be out this year.

• 3:19:07Jack Murphy?

  Awesome.

• 3:19:07Speaker 04

  Uh, just got the copy edit back, which means I got a lot more editing to do between, you know, but it's, it's part of the process.

• 3:19:12Jack Murphy?

  So let, let's start off with these ones.

• 3:19:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:19:15Jack Murphy?

  Uh, The Patrol, Athena, Twenty-Two, and Dream Job. I mean, wha- what were these books? And these are all like, kind of leading up to the novel you've been working on.

• 3:19:25Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. So I started writing while I was on deployment, uh, in 2016 as a way to just

• 3:19:36Speaker 04

  capture what I had done, because I wanted my family to be able to just have a record. Like, you know, what, what is, what has he been doing?

• 3:19:44Jack Murphy?

  Which I highly recommend guys do, because I get like Vietnam, that families of Vietnam veterans reach out to me all the time. Like, how can I find out what my dad did? And it's like, man. I'll hook you up.

• 3:19:58Speaker 04

  Yep. Um, yeah, so I started that, and I don't know if I thought of it as a memoir, or as just a way of capturing things. And then I just started writing, and I kept writing, and I kept, and I would, I would just fill in time, it was always a way to kill time on deployments, it was a way to, as I talked about, to unpack a lot of stuff. And then I just said, You know what, maybe I could turn this into a book. And I thought about publishing a memoir once I got out, which I guess a lot of people do. And I talked to my friends.

• 3:20:29Jack Murphy?

  Who does that?

• 3:20:30Speaker 04

  Well, any of us at this point, and the present company included. I, um, but then I talked to my friend Scott Hughes, who has also helped me with the negotiations for the, uh, the, the, the novel. And he, he read part of the manuscript and said, you know, if you approach this from the fiction side, you might really be able to expand on this. And I, he wrote Echo in Ramadi, which is a very successful best seller book about his experience as an infantry company commander in Ramadi, which is a good, great book if people haven't read it. But he said, if, if you took this as, as a, and made it into a fictional story, you can do a lot more with it as far as the characters. Whoops.

• 3:21:12Jack Murphy?

  It's okay.

• 3:21:13Speaker 04

  As far as characters, luckily it's not lit. Um, and also I was very worried about authenticity and not being able to capture the things that I knew was true to me. And he said, you can use all of that. You just weave it into the story. And I hadn't ever considered it. So I then started turning it into a novel that was really jam packed with all kinds of stuff. And he was like, okay, but this isn't the structure. You need some structure to this. And I, at that point, I, I didn't even know about outlining. I didn't know any of that stuff. If, if there are two types of writers, I'm a pantser for sure. I'm like right by the seat of my pants. And I, uh, I started trimming things away. I don't throw anything out. I just put it somewhere else. And so those books all became excerpts or things in that, the novel that didn't really fit.

• 3:21:58Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 3:21:59Speaker 04

  And then I said, okay, well, maybe I'll just start developing stories off of that. Cause you need to develop as a storyteller. And so each of those books, um, you know, the patrol was the first one I wrote, made a lot of mistakes with it. They're probably still in there. Uh, but it's about a patrol that I did, uh, in Afghanistan in, in 2012, uh, as part of one of the VSOs. And it's a, it's a pretty, I think, interesting account of leadership and kind of things that you face, you know, in dynamic, in environments that, that change very quickly, you know, become very dynamic.

• 3:22:35Jack Murphy?

  What's the kind of like main thrust of the novel? Is it like an auto, like fictionalized autobiography or where are you going with it?

• 3:22:43Speaker 04

  Well.

• 3:22:48Speaker 04

  It is a, it's heavily influenced, obviously, by my career and my experiences.

• 3:22:58Speaker 04

  But the tenor of the novel is not so much a war book, although it obviously is military based. It is, it's meant to be sort of a retrospective for reconciliation of a person's past. And the central character is named Steve Keller. He also runs in each of my books here. And he is haunted by the decisions he made on the battlefield. And he is visited by the ghost of his commanding officer, who was killed in combat. And through a discussion

• 3:23:38Speaker 04

  with that ghost, he goes into his past to make sense of what he went through and learn something on the other side.

• 3:23:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:49Speaker 04

  So, yeah, it's meant to be a journey, not so much an odyssey, but take the reader down into something and come back out. And, yeah, it's, I think it's pretty good.

• 3:24:02Jack Murphy?

  I'm working.

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• 3:24:18Speaker 03

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• 3:25:00Speaker 02

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• 3:25:29Jack Murphy?

  I'm looking forward to reading it. So, but I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask. And I mean, this is a part of all of these stories that,

• 3:25:41Jack Murphy?

  you know, we don't like do entire interviews about this particular subject, but it's like a part of everyone's individual journey. Like getting out of the military, dealing with the post-traumatic stress. Like what was sort of like your personal journey like with that?

• 3:25:55Speaker 04

  Well, I think a lot of that is captured in not only the book 22, which refers to obviously the 22 veterans a day, perhaps more, that take their lives statistically. There are things in there that are definitely vignettes from my own past, but I interviewed five people who had attempted or really seriously considered taking their own lives. And I wrote it in hopes that someone would read it and

• 3:26:20Jack Murphy?

  Be like, holy shit.

• 3:26:21Speaker 04

  And be like, I don't need to do this.

• 3:26:22Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 3:26:22Speaker 04

  So, but that was one way of coping.

• 3:26:27Speaker 04

  The other one, as I was transitioning, particularly as an officer, there was a lot of pressure, I felt, to fit a certain role. Like, hey, you're getting out, you're an officer. This is the skills you have. You can go work for this company and you'll know you'll make all this money and you'll be well-served.

• 3:26:41Jack Murphy?

  Go work for this defense contractor, go get your MBA.

• 3:26:44Speaker 04

  Bank, whatever it happened to be. And I felt like this is not where I want to be. This isn't, this doesn't feel right to me. And retiring and being able to get out the way that I did.

• 3:26:59Speaker 04

  Allows me a great deal of flexibility and I captured a lot of my transition challenges in the book Dream Job. And that is about a guy who's literally a job interview and trying to figure out what he wants to do. And it is very much based upon an interview that I had when I was getting out and that was the one that sort of said, okay, you know what, I don't, I don't have to go and do this. I can be.

• 3:27:19Jack Murphy?

  Oh, so it kind of like taught you what you didn't want to do?

• 3:27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. I got a lot of exploration on it. In fact, when I, my transition program was the Honor Foundation and they're very, very good.

• 3:27:30Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah, they're awesome.

• 3:27:31Speaker 04

  I had a great transition coach, uh, but even he said, I don't know what to do with you. Because, well, he'd have been a corporate guy. He'd been an army artillery officer and he'd had a full career and then he'd say, hey, you know, you can work for Barclays Bank, you can do all this great stuff. And we were working on my resume and I was sending out the cover letters and we were doing mock interviews and I was like, I just don't, this is not me. This is not where I want to be. And he's like, well, what do you really want to do? I was like, I really think I want to be a writer. I want to be a creative.

• 3:27:57Jack Murphy?

  And he was like, oh, my God.

• 3:27:58Speaker 04

  And he said, he actually knew somebody, not a military person. He's like, I actually have a writer friend and I'll put you in touch with her.

• 3:28:03Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 3:28:04Speaker 04

  So he did the best that he could.

• 3:28:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:28:06Speaker 04

  And, and then from there I started having more conversations and then I got in with writing groups and different people and I had, you know, stuff like that. And then I got into, I started writing, uh, tried writing screenplays and doing some consulting work for Hollywood stuff, some of it military, some of it not. And I just, I was like, this is great. This is exactly the kind of stuff that I'd like to do.

• 3:28:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I like try to like impart that too on when I meet especially like younger military veterans. They often have that, that same mentality or idea that like, you know, they have to fit inside this box, whatever it is, whatever people think you should be in. But just because you were in your mind, a big dumb ranger, doesn't mean you can't go to college and get a PhD, if that's what you want to do.

• 3:28:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 3:28:50Jack Murphy?

  And, you know, I, I think we should really encourage veterans to go out there and, and go as far as they possibly can.

• 3:28:56Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's a big disconnect in, with, between society and vets. I really do. And not just special ops guys, because I mean, we're, we're interesting, right? We're, we're, you know, people, people love the books, et cetera. But I talked about the. Like Scott's book about Ramadi, I mean, his experience, when I was reading it, like, I knew that he had been there, but I was like, holy.

• 3:29:16Jack Murphy?

  You didn't know that, yeah.

• 3:29:17Speaker 04

  I haven't been involved in that kind of stuff. Like, he, he really had some, some serious challenges. And he even talks about his own PTS. I like to call it P, you know, post-traumatic stress, vice, disorder. Cause you don't have a disorder. You, you, something happened to you.

• 3:29:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a pretty normal thing.

• 3:29:31Speaker 04

  And you have to unpack this. And you, and there was a whole bunch, there's a whole, a group of female Marines or veterans who have been overlooked in all of this. And this is one of the, why I wrote my book Athena, which is, you know, really focusing on a, a, a group of CST, you know, uh, cultural support team women that, that worked with me. And I didn't base it on them particularly, but I've interviewed, uh, five women who were involved in FET teams and had been, you know, whether they were in special ops or otherwise. And I tried to get a handle on like what it was like for them to be.

• 3:30:01Speaker 04

  You know, I was like, you know, at least, the least I could do is try and come up with something and that, that is at least a

• 3:30:11Speaker 04

  a recognition to, to sacrifice.

• 3:30:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:15Speaker 04

  And so the, the vet population is, I mean, I was growing up, Vietnam books were everywhere and you always knew a Vietnam vet and they always talked about it. And in our capacity with, you know, things like, things ended in August 2021 in, in Afghanistan and it was just over. And when the State Department is just like, meh, and Joe Biden's like, I reject the, the study of Abbey Gate and what happened there. And then you've got Blinken saying, what do I care about? A bunch of vets, just some vets being pissed off about the anniversary. Like, what does that say to, like, we carried this, man. We carried this for 20 years alone. And we felt alone and we felt alone in our own world and we were, like, remember nine 11? What's gonna, what are we gonna do? The military's gonna take care of this.

• 3:30:59Jack Murphy?

  Now, all of those guys are really alone. I mean, when they were in theater, they fought together as a team, but now they're out there by themselves, like, really having to think about this stuff and consider like, what, what does it mean?

• 3:31:11Speaker 04

  It's.

• 3:31:13Speaker 04

  It's very, it's, it's difficult. And people have a difficult time expressing that and they want, you know, when I was talking with about guys at 22, I did the interview with Chris Meyer on his Profiles in Havoc podcast. And he's like, why, he asked me, why, why do you think people are, why do they kill themselves? And I think it's shame. They're, they're, they've, they have nothing to be ashamed of, but they feel so lost and they feel so unacknowledged.

• 3:31:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:44Speaker 04

  They feel like they've become invisible.

• 3:31:46Jack Murphy?

  It's not their shame to carry, but they do, unfortunately.

• 3:31:49Speaker 04

  Well, right, but, but it becomes really hard for someone to understand that. And, and when I, you know, in Dream Job, as part of that interview, you know, the questions that people asked me, it was funny, like, are, are you serious? And then I realized, like, they have absolutely no

• 3:32:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:04Speaker 04

  clue. And I, and so then I just said, well, okay, it's up to me, or at least I'm going to take this on, and I'm going to try to bridge this gap a little bit. And I don't, I, I, I, I love, I, I don't mind doing corporate, I'm not, I'm not going to go work in corporate environment, but I don't mind talking to corporations and people about how to be, be better leaders and be better in touch and how to better understand and, and, and work with veterans. That's really important. So. And writing is a great, is, is my vehicle, you know, it's, it's the thing that, that I, they like doing.

• 3:32:42Jack Murphy?

  Where can people go to find the books?

• 3:32:44Speaker 04

  Amazon.com. You can also go to my website, which is ivanfingraham.com, not very original, but it's got all my stuff there, all my contact information.

• 3:32:51Jack Murphy?

  And we'll, we'll have some links down in the description for folks who are listening to this podcast on YouTube or wherever they listen to podcasts.

• 3:32:58Speaker 04

  If they've made it this far.

• 3:32:59Jack Murphy?

  If they made it this far. No, it'll be down there regardless, actually. Anything else you want to tell folks about that you're working on right now?

• 3:33:08Speaker 04

  Well, I've got a, I've got a companion screenplay to Troops in Contact, which I've been in negotiate, been in negotiations with a couple of different. Entities to see about getting produced. I don't have any bites, but I would really like to push that at some point. And then I've been working on this rather interesting project for the last couple of years called Torchlight. And it is about the Japanese American experience in World War II. And not just to focus on the 442nd and 100th Infantry Regiment, or 100th, 442nd Infantry Regiment Regimental Combat Team. But also the Japanese American experience of incarceration.

• 3:33:51Speaker 04

  As was laid out by our United States government as a war policy. And then it goes from there into, we're trying to plan it as an eight store or eight episode arc. That really examines not only things that happened in World War II. But post-war as they were eventually, there was a lot of repatriations. And you know, this is one of the most highly decorated combat units ever. I think they've got 18 Medals of Honor. Many of which were post-war awarded. The last of which were given by President Obama. So we're talking about a huge legacy story in the United States that has been overlooked.

• 3:34:34Speaker 04

  There's a lot of stuff in there that is germane to things that are happening in this country. You know, today, and it seems like we should be better than that. But I've been working on that for a while. I've got a great pitch deck. The pilot is really tight.

• 3:34:49Jack Murphy?

  It's awesome.

• 3:34:50Speaker 04

  We're looking for producers, directors and you know, actors. It's a diverse cast, not just for Japanese Americans, but also you know, actors in general. But we're really looking for backing. We're looking for people to get involved in it because it's a heck of a story. And it's one of the, it's one of the things I'm. I wouldn't keep writing on something that I don't enjoy. And I want to see this thing get made and want to see, I'm working with a great team of people with this thing. And it's just really.

• 3:35:18Jack Murphy?

  It's an important chapter of history.

• 3:35:19Speaker 04

  It's great. And it needs, it just needs to be told. So I'm really, really happy on that. So yeah, I write a lot and I try and keep, keep everything.

• 3:35:31Speaker 04

  I try and keep everything aligned, but every once in a while, I'm like, you know, that'd be a neat project. I wrote a thriller as well that I'm in the process of trying to get cleaned up to move for publishing as well. But that's, that's another, another thing.

• 3:35:44Jack Murphy?

  Come to Thriller Fest in June, here in Manhattan, or not, we're in Brooklyn, but it's in Manhattan.

• 3:35:50Speaker 04

  Really?

• 3:35:50Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 3:35:52Speaker 04

  Fantastic.

• 3:35:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I'm gonna be there.

• 3:35:55Speaker 04

  Well, I, yeah, this would be great. Yeah, so it's, I would not, I would not do anything else. I really wouldn't. I mean, you know, the hours are long and at least the pay sucks, so. But I, but I did that, you know, when people was like, you're in the military, you, you can do this, you'll just get paid more. I was like, you know what, I work long hours for myself and have a lot more fun with that.

• 3:36:17Jack Murphy?

  Dude, I've, I've worked in journalism, I've written novels, written articles, been a podcaster, bro, done all these different things, but yeah, it doesn't pay worth a shit, but I would be bored as fuck working in corporate America. Like, there's no way I could do that.

• 3:36:35Speaker 04

  I, I couldn't do it either. And that was, like I said, they were just like, well, this is an easy transition for you because you'll, you, you've already worked the long hours, you should just get rewarded for it appropriately. And I know guys who did that and they got out, they gained 50 pounds, they're losing their hair. Not that I'm a spring chicken, but I mean, just sitting there, you know, trying to look at, looking at what they do, it just, that isn't for me.

• 3:36:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I get it.

• 3:36:58Speaker 04

  And, and I, I just, I love the flexibility and I, you know, I had to ask my boss for a day off today.

• 3:37:07Speaker 04

  And he, and he said, go ahead, i.e. me. So I, and that's, that's great, that's great too. But the flexibility is, is unmatched and it's, it's really a wonderful way to, to, to, to spend retirement. And I've got, I've got a lot of, I'm having a lot of fun with it, a lot of fun.

• 3:37:24Jack Murphy?

  Anything else you want to tell folks about before we get going? And do we have any questions, Steve?

• 3:37:29Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 3:37:31Speaker 06

  A question.

• 3:37:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:37:33Speaker 06

  Uh, from Corbin, how do you see the core retooling, uh, the soft toolkit in the near future, if they do at all?

• 3:37:45Speaker 04

  I guess it really depends on what we mean by soft toolkit. Because if we're talking about equipment, the Marsoc is pretty adaptive. They're innovative and go out and look for for stuff. I think probably though, in a larger scale. The one thing that Marsoc has, or the Marine Corps has done well that the other services have not with their special operations, is kept Marsoc close. And there's disadvantages to that for sure. But I believe that the Marine Corps has come around to the idea that Marsoc is valuable.

• 3:38:26Speaker 04

  And it's better to be interactive and interoperable than it is to have these two separate camps that don't really talk to each other. And that that is something that that needs to happen. In fact, I was down at the 26 Mew in their command, command group last or two weeks ago, talking to them about this very thing. Because the commander was actually the operations officer on the obviously Lightning mission back in 2016. And now he's, you know, he's running a Mew himself. And he he has already seen the value and he was like, okay, we need, my my people need to know this. And because they didn't get the exposure and the ability to run a mission like that. And he sees what's what's happening next.

• 3:39:06Speaker 04

  So I think that's a big, a big way that the Marine Corps and Marsoc can can can meet together. And that that doesn't always happen. But like you get into the Army and use the sockets its own entity and you don't really see a lot of interoperability. Rangers just wouldn't go out and work with another organization. I mean, they barely work outside of JSOC period. I mean, and that's by design. I mean, that's what it's for there.

• 3:39:32Speaker 06

  Cool, we got one more from Tom's. Great stuff, Ivan. What are some of the some other stories you want to get told about the Marines or the military in general?

• 3:39:42Speaker 04

  Wow, there's a lot of, I mean, never run out of material, right? I mean, you, as we've done the research, talking about Torchlight.

• 3:39:56Speaker 04

  We first started out looking at just the 442nd because that had been seen before. You know, that had been seen before and it was in certain people's.

• 3:40:07Speaker 04

  It was in their, it was in their, at least their wheelhouse as far as knowledge. Because people had heard about the Japanese American Combat Unit. Daniel O'Noy was the senator, he was Medal of Honor recipient.

• 3:40:20Speaker 04

  In the popular culture, in the karate hit, Mr. Miyagi is, they make full reference to him being in the 442nd. There's a scene where he's drunk, you know, talking about his wife having passed away. And he's, he's in his uniform and, you know, he's, he's got all of the letters laid out and his wife and he, who, in the letter, they talk about him, her dying in the Manzanar camp. And then he passes out and that's when Daniel, you know, finds the Medal of Honor. And he's like, oh my gosh, I didn't really know about this. And so what's powerful about that scene is that nothing is really said. It's just like, they've discovered this hero.

• 3:41:04Jack Murphy?

  Which is, which is how it goes down a lot of times.

• 3:41:07Speaker 04

  Well, right. And so, but as we were doing the research, we found that there were Japanese Americans who had served with Merrill's Marauders and there were guys in the OSS. And there were, there were women who had roles and there was just so much more to the story. So unpacking and uncovering that kind of stuff led, you know, as we were writing it and have been coming up with the arc. It's just been like, well, we gotta include this one or maybe we gotta add another episode on that because, so when, you know, the larger picture of the military stories, I mean, you, you could open it up, you know, in, in any, in any direction.

• 3:41:42Jack Murphy?

  It blows my mind.

• 3:41:44Speaker 04

  A movie hasn't been made about Eagle Claw, a movie hasn't been made about Sante. Like, those were both gripping stories.

• 3:41:50Jack Murphy?

  We still have not gotten like a Mac vs. Sog movie. I mean, there's a trepidation, I think, to this day.

• 3:41:57Speaker 04

  Just a Stryker Meyer movie would be enough. Dick Meadows biopic.

• 3:42:01Jack Murphy?

  John's awesome.

• 3:42:03Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? Like, just that kind of stuff.

• 3:42:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I, I think there is a hesitation to this day about making a Vietnam War film that isn't explicitly anti-war. Like, we don't really know how to.

• 3:42:17Speaker 04

  Well, and that's what I think happens in your app. I'm sorry, I couldn't show up.

• 3:42:19Jack Murphy?

  No, go ahead.

• 3:42:20Speaker 04

  I think that's what that is one of the challenges. Like first, as we have found in the re, you know, as we've been pitching this and talking to people, you get people who are interested in the story. They like the overall tone. They're like, okay. And then they're like, but historical stuff is hard to make and it becomes a niche thing. And I'm just like, well, they didn't stop it from making Masters of the Air or Greyhound or any of these other movies.

• 3:42:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, not really, man. I mean, like, World War II movies have a pretty prominent place in, uh...

• 3:42:49Speaker 07

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

• 3:43:04Speaker 03

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

• 3:43:15Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 3:43:47Speaker 06

  Oh, I have had no luck lately. Wait, lady luck?

• 3:43:51Speaker 07

  Brett, see, I got you. I've had so much luck on spinquest.com. They have all of my favorite games, slot games, live blackjack, craps, and bubble craps. You can even get a $30 coin pack for just 10 bucks.

• 3:44:04Speaker 06

  10 bucks for 30? I'm headed over to spinquest.com right now.

• 3:44:08Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 3:44:16Speaker 04

  See a movie about 18 Medal of Honor, like, unit that had 18 medals of honor and liberated Dachau? Like, this unit did all kinds of crazy stuff in actually a very short period of time.

• 3:44:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:25Speaker 04

  But, I mean, you could do stuff on the Jedbergs, you could do stuff on, um, Peter Ortiz, the Marine, he's a Marine, he served, you know, two Navy Crosses, he served in the OSS.

• 3:44:38Jack Murphy?

  It blows my mind that here we are in 2025 and there is still new information about World War II, like, coming to light. Like, I never would have thought, I'd think, like, the case is closed. We had a guy, Jassik, here, a few months back, who, like, found an OSS memoir in, like, an archive somewhere that had, like, never been published. Like, like, all this crazy stuff.

• 3:45:03Speaker 04

  I think a lot of this stuff gets overshadowed, though, by things like Lioness. And I'm not cutting on, you know, the success of another writer, but there's sensationalism there that people want to see.

• 3:45:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:14Speaker 04

  And so, you know, the challenge we had, particularly with Torchlight, is that the history alone was interesting enough.

• 3:45:23Jack Murphy?

  You don't need to hype it up.

• 3:45:24Speaker 04

  Well, and then that's where people are like, well, do we have a central antagonist here? We're like, well, we actually, no, we

• 3:45:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we do.

• 3:45:30Speaker 04

  We do, it's the US government, but, but, there's Nazi Germany, there's the Japanese, there's all kinds of stuff, and they wouldn't, but what they wanted was some of this Darth Vader character, like, something that, you know, just is, is hanging over them, and I'm like, that's not how this works, and we're, and we want to be true to the people and the families, I mean, because these, you know, we were basing this on really, on real people, unlike where the troops in contact, yeah, parallels my book, um, but I, I was able to take full liberties in areas with that, with people who, you know, in locations that, I don't have to make those real.

• 3:46:04Jack Murphy?

  What did you think of, uh, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima?

• 3:46:08Speaker 04

  I, I actually thought they were excellent, excellent films.

• 3:46:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:13Speaker 04

  I mean, Letters from Iwo Jima is a really, really

• 3:46:16Jack Murphy?

  Incredible.

• 3:46:17Speaker 04

  Incredible film. What, I mean, you're gonna have very few, uh, directors

• 3:46:25Speaker 04

  Who have the horsepower like Eastwood.

• 3:46:27Jack Murphy?

  The balls.

• 3:46:28Speaker 04

  Well.

• 3:46:28Jack Murphy?

  To do it.

• 3:46:29Speaker 04

  And some guys get away with it and some guys don't. And so like Kevin Costner tried with Horizon. He's, you know, he put his own money against it. He's got a fantastic production company. But he was like, hey, I'm going to do this because I want to do this as a, as a, as a, as a picture. Because it's something that's interesting to me as far as the West because he does like making Westerns. Whereas Eastwood has got such a diverse thing and just to be able to be like, you know, I'm going to take on a Japanese perspective of World War II in Iwo Jima. When they're thinking, when everyone thinks of Iwo Jima, they're thinking John Wayne.

• 3:47:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:47:02Speaker 04

  Or, you know, Basileone in the Pacific, you know, the, the, the series, the Pacific.

• 3:47:09Speaker 04

  So, yeah, there's risk in everything. And there's, there was risk in, in our, in our military careers. There's risk in being a writer. And someone told me once, like, don't read the comments. Um, someone's like, you know, would you, Rick Rubin is a very famous producer. He produced, run DMC and the Avett Brothers. You want to talk about two different, you know, very different musical, you know, he's just like, I hear stuff that I know is going to sell and I, and I, and I want to help you develop that. But he takes huge risk on that and he wrote a great book.

• 3:47:40Speaker 04

  Which just popped out of my mind, but you know, he, he's like, once you release the, the, the book, the record, the movie, it's out there. It's a piece of art that you've created and how people receive it is not up to you.

• 3:47:54Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 3:47:54Speaker 04

  And you, you wish that they would all love it.

• 3:47:58Speaker 04

  But there are dudes who passed on the Beatles. There's dudes who passed on the Rolling Stones. There are people who don't like, you know, any number of, of paintings. There's people who don't like Georgia O'Keeffe. Who doesn't like Georgia O'Keeffe? But there are people who are just, you know, they're not into that kind of thing. They don't understand Salvador Dali. They don't like, you know, Hemingway. Which I think is an antithetical statement, but I mean, tho- those types of, of, uh,

• 3:48:25Speaker 04

  Those types of risks need to be taken and those stories need to be told and

• 3:48:29Jack Murphy?

  Stop focus grouping the shit out of everything. Take some risks.

• 3:48:32Speaker 04

  Well, it's what I told, go back to Second Force.

• 3:48:37Speaker 04

  I pulled all the guys together one time with my platoon sergeant. And I said, guys, I recognize that you've got a ton of experience and I'm here to learn. I'm also here to lead.

• 3:48:52Speaker 04

  And I'm asking you to take a chance.

• 3:48:56Speaker 04

  Take a chance on me. And if you do that, I'll make it worth your while. So anybody who wants to take a chance on my projects. And I hope they're out there.

• 3:49:09Speaker 04

  I'll absolutely make it worth your while. So, yeah.

• 3:49:16Jack Murphy?

  Anything else before we roll out?

• 3:49:19Speaker 04

  What do they say at the end of the AAR? Covered.

• 3:49:24Jack Murphy?

  Thank you, everyone who joined us. We'll see you guys next time. Thank you, Ivan, for joining us in studio. Real appreciate it. Please go check out his books on Amazon. Check out his Substack. Like I said, we'll have some links down in the description for those. It's been a fun episode.

• 3:49:39Speaker 04

  It has been my, it's absolute pleasure. This has been great. Thank you so much.

• 3:49:43Jack Murphy?

  I hope we can do it again sometime.

• 3:49:46Speaker 04

  Maybe June.

• 3:49:47Jack Murphy?

  We'll see all of you guys again next time.

• 3:49:50Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it. But you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad free. And you support the channel and the show and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business survive. Especially during our

• 3:50:34Jack Murphy?

  Early years and you are what continues to help this thing going even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page and there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers and we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And additionally, they

• 3:51:12Jack Murphy?

  got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate.

• 3:51:23Speaker 07

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

• 3:51:38Speaker 06

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

• 3:51:49Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 3:52:21Speaker 02

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drinking one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over 1,000 games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 3:52:44Speaker 03

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• 3:52:50Jack Murphy?

  Get it, guys. Thank you.

• 3:52:56Speaker 07

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

• 3:53:11Speaker 03

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

• 3:53:22Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:53:53Speaker 06

  I have had no luck lately. Wait, lady luck?

• 3:53:58Speaker 07

  Brett, I got you. I've had so much luck on spinquest.com. They have all of my favorite games, slot games, live blackjack, craps, and bubble craps. You can even get a $30 coin pack for just 10 bucks.

• 3:54:11Speaker 06

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• 3:54:15Speaker 03

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• 3:54:30Speaker 07

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

• 3:54:45Speaker 03

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

• 3:54:56Speaker 07

  While there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:55:28Speaker 02

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drink in one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over a thousand games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 3:55:51Speaker 03

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• 3:56:03Speaker 07

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

• 3:56:17Speaker 06

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

• 3:56:28Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:57:00Speaker 02

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

• 3:57:50Speaker 03

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

• 3:58:01Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:58:33Speaker 02

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drinking one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over 1,000 games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 3:58:55Speaker 03

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