The First Green Beret in Afghanistan | Justin Sapp (throwback episode)

originally aired 04\22\22 After the 9/11 attacks, small CIA paramilitary teams were secreted into Afghanistan to pave the way for a larger Special Forces deployment. Amongst them was Green Beret Justin Sapp who was the first U. S. Special Forces soldier to infiltrate into Afghanistan. Subscribe to our new newsletter!!!! https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse 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

  Special Operations.

• 1:36Speaker 04

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

• 1:51Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. This is episode 143. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, right over there. Our guests tonight in studio, we're very happy to have Justin Sapp here with us today. Drove in to Brooklyn. I told them we're deep behind enemy lines out here. That's a joke, by the way. But Justin, no stranger to any of that, he is the first special forces soldier who was inserted into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, detailed with a CIA paramilitary team. Those events were detailed in Toby Arden's book, First Casualty. We had him here a few months back and interviewed him about the book. But we're really glad to have the man himself here in studio tonight. Thank you for joining us, Justin.

• 2:36Speaker 06

  My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

• 2:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, man. You know, we'll start off where we always start off. You know, I want to ask you a little bit about how you grew up and your family background and upbringing and sort of the path that took you into military service.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Sure. So I grew up, my dad was a CIA operations officer, a case officer, ever since, well, prior to me being born. So I was born into that, I guess, lifestyle, so to speak. And that lifestyle is very much like being a military brat. You know, you're moving around, except you're moving around the world. And you're living in embassies and stuff like that. And not always embassies, but, but, you know, in an international kind of environment. And so I started out, I think the first trip, I might have been three or four, somewhere in that realm, we went to Lebanon. My dad had a knack for getting all the, the good spots. And at the time Lebanon was like the so-called Paris of the Middle

• 3:34Speaker 06

  East. And then that changed about six months into his tour. And it turned into the Lebanon that everybody knows. The civil war started after the Maronites and the clash with the Palestinians. So, so we evacuated from there, lost pretty much everything. And then went to Greece for a while, back to the States, reset, and then we went to India, Bombay or Mumbai, did two years there. That was pretty, pretty straightforward, you know, South Asian tour, enjoyed it. I was a little kid, swimming, you know, kind of subtropical environment. And then, um, I actually went to an Indian school there. I was the only American kid in the school.

• 4:16Jack Murphy?

  Can I ask you, we've interviewed a whole bunch of CIA officers on the show before who talk about their kids and getting to the point where at a certain point, you have to tell your kids, this is what I do for a living. I was wondering, as a kid, did you have any inkling that like dad disappears late at night with a bag under one arm and then comes back, keeps odd hours? Have any inkling of what your father did?

• 4:38Speaker 06

  I don't think I became really cognizant of that, the sort of strangeness of what he did, these be like compared to other people until I was probably like, I think 12 or something. And it was the people that would come over, you know, and hang out, he would hang out with. That was, you know, not totally unusual because you're, you know, we were in Cairo, for example, but it seemed a bit odd. And then I remember my dad had a firearm. He had like a pistol, he had like a Ruger Speed 6 357, which I thought was really cool. And I'd go, you know, ask him to show it to me and stuff. But he never explained why he had it. And I, I just sort of figured out that your average guy at the embassy is

• 5:21Speaker 06

  not going to be carrying one of those unless he's RSO or something like that. And then he eventually told me, I think I was like 13. He pulled me aside and he said, hey, you know, you probably realize that I'm not your average bear here. I have a different job and this is kind of my mission. He didn't go into tons of detail, but, and you should, you know, be mindful of that, safeguard it. And, you know, I ended up in seventh grade, I ended up moving to Virginia where he was an instructor. And, and so that was obvious because then he was an instructor and I'm with other kids that are dependents of, you know, agency people. So, you know, then it started to come into, into the resolution

• 6:03Speaker 06

  as to, you know, the kind of nature of the job and all that kind of stuff. But honestly, I didn't, I didn't have tons of interest in that because I sort of saw it like. Still, I still saw it as kind of related to being a diplomat or kind of diplomatic international lifestyle, and that's a different kind of community from the military. And I always was, had more affinity, honestly, as a kid, to the Marine detachment, because, you know, we'd be at the embassy and I'd hang out with the gunnys kid, or my friends tended to be the defense attache's kid, not always, but, you know, frequently. And, you know, we moved so much that, that I just kind of gravitated towards that profession. I was more interested in that profession.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  And, uh, and I, probably by the age of six or seven, I had decided, hey, I'm gonna make a career in the military, whatever that means. I didn't quite understand the different jobs in the military. I just knew it was about fighting and the Cold War was, you know, we were still in the midst of the Cold War, so it was, it was a calling, you know, like, like, not to be cliche, but I felt like that's what I want to do. There was no question. And so, all these kids who were searching, you know, like, high school or college, like, I'm gonna decide, I don't know what it would do with my life. That was never, for whatever reason, that was never a problem for me. I always knew, okay, I want to be in the military. Now, I gotta figure out which branch and what I want to do. And it was always either the Army or the Marine Corps and so forth. Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 06

  And so, how did, did you also go to high school in the States, or was that overseas? I did, first two years of high school in New Delhi, India, and then I finished up in Marietta, Georgia. It's kind of a, my dad wanted to get close to his father, who he was estranged from, who lived in Georgia, so that's how we ended up in Georgia. Uh, and I finished up there, and then I went to college at Virginia Military Institute, and, um, my, uh, my family ended up moving up to the DC area like a year later. And then they became Northern Virginia denizens for, well, pretty much the rest of my dad's life. And, uh, and so I was like three hours away from my, so that wasn't, uh, that wasn't too bad. Um, yeah, I mean, and, and it was weird. I mean, I, I left, uh, from India, and I remember showing up the first day in, uh,

• 8:14Speaker 06

  11th grade, came in like a couple of weeks late, and, uh, where'd you say you're from? Indiana? Where, where in Indiana do you come from? I said, no, India. I came from India. And so, I don't know, I was a bit of a weirdo, I guess, and you know, that's bad to move kids in the middle of high school.

• 8:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  I totally realize that now. And so I struggled a bit just assimilating and then, you know, but eventually I got it together.

• 8:39Speaker 07

  When you were going to high school in India, because you had, you had mentioned that when you, and I don't know if that's when you said that you went to like Mumbai, and you went to, you know, an Indian school, is that also in high school?

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, good question. No, I'm sorry to confuse. So I went to like first grade in Bombay. And that was, and there was no American school there. There was like German and French schools, but no American school. In New Delhi, there's the American Embassy School, been there for years.

• 9:06Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 9:07Speaker 06

  We just plugged right into that school and I did ninth and 10th grade there.

• 9:10Speaker 07

  So when you, when you like actually got to high school in the US, because you had been going, you know, to schools all over the world, basically, right? And was it a bit of a culture shock to you? Was it American culture, like?

• 9:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I'd lived two years in the States, 7th and 8th grade in Virginia. That was helpful, but you know, in American high school, it's different. You go to an international school, it's a mixture of people, there's no American football, sports are not, don't define the social hierarchy as much as they do in the States. You know, it's just the way it is. And so I had sort of these eclectic friends who were like a French guy who was my friend and a guy who ended up being Bosnian Muslim was my friend. These were like my close friends and then I, you know, I had American acquaintances. Come back to the States, you know, it's Georgia, so it's all about American football. So I didn't, and it was a good school, don't get me wrong, but I didn't play football, I was a swimmer.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  So I said, okay, I'm gonna do swimming and that'll be my thing. And that was sort of a, that's not the same as, it's a team sport, but it's not. It's a very individual sport. So I was kind of, that was my clique and then I did J-Razi, you know, Navy J-Razi and I had some friends there. But by the time you show up in like the fall of 11th grade, you're already behind, all the cliques have been formed. And so I'm like, I gotta get through this and then go to college and then I'm gonna move on with my life. You know, no, no offense against, you know, North Georgia, great, you know, that northern suburbs of Atlanta, you know, but time to move on.

• 10:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. And then what, what was it that caused, had you already decided on the army by the time you went to BMI? Like where, where did you make that decision to go army and did you make the decision to go special forces at the same time? Cause you'd been exposed to a lot of Marines at the embassies and whatnot.

• 10:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, so I didn't really, I was aware of the term Green Beret and I think I had seen the movie, The Green Berets on projector in, in one of the embassy parties, but I didn't know what that meant. I knew there was the army and that they, they were like infantry and that they did stuff like that and they had tanks and artillery. And then I knew the Marine Corps was the same and I had family members who were both sides. So my grandfather was a career sergeant major in the army, fought in the tail end of the Battle of Bulge. I had an uncle that was, you know, wounded in the Korean War, Marine. So it was a little bit of both. Honestly, the Marine recruiter in Marietta was really

• 11:41Speaker 06

  good and he almost got me into the reserves. Cause he's like, hey, you come do, you know, basic training boot camp at parasail and then you'll go to a reserve unit and, and then you can go to college or whatever you need to do. And I was like, oh, that sounds pretty cool. And I gotta say, I was influenced by those movies. Like I know the Marine Corps says full metal jacket is not representative, but it was great propaganda and it, it drew, I was like, okay, that sounds cool.

• 12:06Speaker 07

  I think it's very representative of action.

• 12:08Speaker 06

  I, I don't know. I, you know, I, I, I wanted, I loved those kinds of movies. I loved Platoon. I loved all of them. And so anyway, I knew I wanted to be infantry, something like that or combat arms. And one day I went to this college fair, I think it was at Oglethorpe University and I, there was a brochure on BMI and sit it out on other places like that. And I was like, oh, this looks, this looks fine. You know, this looks pretty cool. And then I went to some luncheon or dinner that they hosted and there was, actually it was a former Green Beret, I remember now chatting with me and I know what it was. Then one day. I was in the library and I found an old Time Life magazine and it was Roger Donlin on the cover from was it 64, 65?

• 12:53Speaker 06

  And he had the Medal of Honor. And I was like, whoa, what's this? And I remember going in there and there was those photos of him with the Monty Yards and he was smoking the pipes and that whole indigenous unconventional warfare thing. And I said, wow, that looks really cool. But he never, I wasn't that far along. I was just sort of get into the military what I wanted to do. And then I thought, well, if I go to VMI, you know, I should apply for an RTC scholarship. Well, I didn't get a four year because those are very few and far between. I got, I ended up getting a three year. But, so I went to VMI on my own dime the first year and then I got a scholarship and, and went from there. And it was at some point at VMI, I want to say like my 10th, whatever, sophomore year, my third class year, that I was down in the like bowels of the library again.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  And I was studying and there was just some pamphlet, it was a brochure or something. And I don't remember exactly what it was. It might've been the SF, some sort of journal. And it had the Green Berets in there. And I remember flipping through it, leafing through it, and then there was the Battle of the Green Beret, you know, written out. And I remember reading it and I said, wow, I gotta learn more about this. And so I eventually did. And then we had, some people may have crossed paths with him. We had an RTC sergeant major. We had 06 PMS who was, I think, armored at the time. And then we had a Army Sergeant Major SF guy named Billy Goodson from 10th Group, 1st Battalion, 10th Group.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  He had been, he was SCUBA qualified, he had all the, you know, all the stuff. And man, he was a great role model. He could PT, he was like 40 and he could like PT, out PT most of the cadets. And so he would do morning PT like three days a week. So we'd go out with him and, and he was a real role model. I'm like, I want to, I want to be like that guy. And so that was probably the galvanizing moment. But then, you know, you find out, okay, so you can't just excess, you know, go to selection as an officer from, you know, from the base, you know, your, your basic course, right? You have to, you have to go serve three or four years and then you can be selected later. And so I got, ended up getting armor. I wanted infantry, I got armor, alright, but it was good enough. It was like, you know, combat arms and interesting and kinda like Patton,

• 15:05Speaker 06

  I like Patton. So, I did that, I did Korea as my first tour, up near the DMZ, it was about ten clicks from the DMZ, Munson, Camp Pelham. That was, that was a good tour. And that was about as close as you could get to combat, right? I mean, I wanted to be deployed and kinda near the danger zone and that was about as good as it got in 1995.

• 15:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 06

  So, I was there, did a year, and then I was fortunate enough to come back, and this was luck and timing, and I got an assignment to 373 Armor in the 82nd, which was this one-off battalion that's now disbanded sadly, that had airdroppable M551A1 Sheridan's. And I was lucky I got that.

• 15:48Speaker 07

  Cause it's right there at Bragg.

• 15:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's right there at Bragg. And so I was there for a couple of years. They inactivated the unit I turned in, the company's worth of tanks, I was like the XO of Delta Company. And then I went over to the Cav for a while, cause that was the only place to put a 12-alpha armor guy. And I did, I think about just under a year there, and then I went to selection. And then the pipeline went from there. So I spent a lot of time at Bragg, starting about 96 to, 96 to 98. And then I graduated the Q course in, I started selection in 98, and then I had to go to, you know, you have to go to the captain's

• 16:29Speaker 06

  career course now. Came back and I graduated December of 99, and then we went to SER School. And then, so I got to group in early 2000.

• 16:39Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 16:40Jack Murphy?

  So you've probably figured like, maybe there'd be a Bosnia deployment in your future or something of that nature?

• 16:45Speaker 06

  It was all about that. It was all the, you know, the JRTC rotations at the time of the late 90s were, you know, Bosnia, I-4-esque. You know, you had, you know, the bad guys were sort of these quasi insurgents and you were escorting convoys and stuff of that nature. And the heroes were the Somalia vets.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  And in the 82nd, it was all about Panama.

• 17:13Speaker 07

  The Panama Rangers.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  The Panama guys. And in our unit, Sergeant Major Troxel ended up being the Joint Staff Sergeant Major. He was our first sergeant at one point, and he had jumped into Panama. So he was, he was like, he was, we loved him, right? And little did I know, you know, that in several years, we would get our own, kind of, as he called it, baptism by fire. And, yeah, so it was all about that. And when we got to group, the mission at the time was called Desert Spring. It was a legacy of the containment of Saddam, if you all remember. And there were 90-day rotations to Kuwait. So there'd be a brigade, armored mech brigade, and then there would be an SF slice. And we were part of that. So we'd do those rotations, and those kind of sucked.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  I mean, quite frankly, I mean, it was always like, you know, really hot, and you were cooped up on Doha, which was north of Kuwait City. And it was like an old warehouse for shipping, and it was like all asphalt. So like in the middle of the summer, it was just sort of like, you know, like a radiator. But anyway, we went out and we did some training with the Kuwaitis. I was on an ASOT team. I was on ODA 552 at the time. We were doing the three.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  And what's an ASOT team for people?

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Oh, sorry, yeah, the acronym. So Advanced Special Operations Techniques, or now they just call it Advanced Special Operations. But we were technically called an unconventional, urban unconventional warfare team. So the lexicon was a RUC team, which was like your standard SF team. Then you had the specialty teams, HALO, you had dive teams, and then you had the ASO teams. And so I got pulled into an ASO team. I got called by a guy, a warrant named Steve Millar, out of the blue, which I was really flattered. He called me at the Q course. He said, hey, somehow he got, you know, my digits from group because they knew who was coming. He said, hey, do you want to come to our team 522 and wear an ASO team? I said, oh, wow, that's very cool.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  Honestly, what I wanted to do is go to dive school and be a dive team guy. But the fact that some vet from group called me, I was like, I can't turn this down. So I ended up going, I did that. My team sergeant was sergeant major, well, at the time, you know, was Tony Pettingill. He was a master sergeant Pettingill, who came out of, kind of came into SF kind of late, I believe as an E7. He was a drill sergeant and all that kind of stuff. He was really good, very disciplined, great at, you know, physically fit, all that kind of stuff. So he was a really a good role model. And anyway, and so that progressed. Tony moved on, moved and was up at the company for a while before

• 19:52Speaker 06

  he PCSed. And then after he PCSed, I was still on the team. But what happened was, I was coming up to the end of my two years. So this is like, yeah, like the spring of oh one. And I had just done a PDSS pre-deployment site survey to Uzbekistan for a joint training exchange, so-called JSAT. We did the JSAT in Uzbekistan, which was interesting, and I'll come back to it later, why. But we were in the Fergana Valley. So we were around Afghanistan. We were in that neck of the woods. We trained with the Spetsnaz unit, Uzbek Spetsnaz unit, which is essentially a legacy of the Soviet Spetsnaz, right? So that was interesting.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Before I left, I had cobbled the deal with the old battalion commander, where I had told him, hey, I want to go to dive school. He said, okay, fine, we'll send you to dive school. We got a gap when a dive team in Alpha Company, First Battalion. Now, Alpha Company was going to become the CRE, the CIF. It was in the midst of this transformation. So the team, I don't think was a paid team, but it was like, hey, you're going to get another team. So a third year, which is not guaranteed.

• 21:00Jack Murphy?

  Which is a big deal for an SF captain.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, because the HALO, it's like, hey, HALO team, take a number, because you got to, someone's going to nice you in the back to get that team, right? So I, but I really wanted to be a diver, honestly. And he said, okay, it was John Allen, Lieutenant Colonel John Allen at the time, and he's like, hey, Justin, you go, you go to dive school, you make it, I'll put you on an Alpha Company. And still, but he changed command in over the summer while we were deployed. I come back and pre-scuva is looming. So I had about a month to get myself into shape for pre-scuva. And, and I knew what was involved. So I was like worried and, and I was a swimmer, but I was still, you know, I was worried. And Colonel Haas, Chris Haas, was the battalion commander,

• 21:46Speaker 06

  new battalion commander. And he, he pulled me and he said, Hey, look, I need someone really smart to take over as the S4. I understand you had some deal with Colonel Allen, but Colonel Allen's gone. And I got priorities. And you're gonna be S4. And then, and I said, what are you gonna say? You're in the military? Roger that, sir. And then he goes, but I tell you what, I'm, I'm gonna let you go to dive school. And I said, well, thank you. Because this conversation occurred, I think, after I've, I finished pre-scuva, but before I went to

• 22:14Speaker 07

  dive. Oh, so you already did the hard, I mean, not the

• 22:15Speaker 06

  So I already like passed pre-scuva, right? So that's like the gate to get in. And he was like, I'll let you go to dive school. But when you come back, you know, you're, you're on the staff. And I said, okay, fine, sir. That's, that's fair enough. So we went down to dive school. And while I was down to dive school, 9/11 happened. And then everything changed from there.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  Guys, before we continue on.

• 22:35Speaker 08

  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.

• 22:50Speaker 09

  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.

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

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• 24:02Jack Murphy?

  The story, we do want to give you guys a heads up about some of the sponsors for the show. We got Orca Coolers and I got some stuff here to show you. We got some thermoses and we got this. Well, you have that there, Justin.

• 24:17Speaker 07

  Oh, thank you.

• 24:18Jack Murphy?

  Take that a souvenir. We got this huge cooler down here with a big army logo on it. Orca Coolers, orcacoolers.com. You guys go there and use the discount code TEAMHOUSE20, you get 20% off. So orcacoolers.com.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  They've got a lot of nice mugs. I mean.

• 24:38Jack Murphy?

  Got some other thermoses over here.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  We gave Ben a really nice thermos last week. Yeah, yeah. They've got some really nice stuff.

• 24:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So use the code TEAMHOUSE20 to get 20% off. They also have a Navy one. If you're a Navy guy, they have. So you're not left out. You left out their flapping. And what's the deal with Sap Gear?

• 24:56Speaker 07

  So Sap Gear, honestly, they're, they're pretty badass. You guys should check them out. They have all kinds of apprehension avoidance gear that they have. They have these awesome little things. So what this is a little bracelet you wear, obviously, but so I always keep a window breaker in my car, right? In case, you know, you get trapped in your car. Getting out is not, you can't just bust tempered glass. You can't just bust the car windows. So I normally carry one of those trigger, have one of those like little trigger guns to break the glass. But you might not always be able to reach those. So one of the things they

• 25:37Speaker 07

  sell is this GTFO bracelet. It's like eight bucks. And really, especially if you're driving on icy roads, I like just throw this thing on because what it, what it has, it has one of those, I don't know if it's carbon fiber, what it, they have the, the video on YouTube, but it's got a little, I assume it's like carbon, whatever it is, but.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  It's a little bead that will break tempered glass. So when you have it and then you uh

• 26:06Jack Murphy?

  You do it like a slingshot.

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  Yeah, you pull it back like a slingshot and it'll it'll break out the glass on your window. Hit down in the bottom of the corner and let's the whole window fall. Learn that lesson hard. Uh but check out, check out all their really cool stuff. They've got amazing stuff on there. SAP gear. Uh this is the GTFO strap. They've got a lot of amazing stuff. Uh counter surveillance measures, all kinds of cool stuff. That's SAP, S A P gear dot com. SAP gear dot com. Uh and the code word is just team for 15% off. It's just team and 15% off. Check them out, guys. You'll love them.

• 26:44Jack Murphy?

  All right, Justin, back to our regularly scheduled program. While you're down in dive school, nine 11 happens. What what are you guys thinking and feeling as you're you're watching that unfold on every single television channel on the country that day?

• 26:58Speaker 06

  So what's what's weird is um we were actually underwater when the event happened. So because you do, at least you used to, morning dive and like afternoon dive and night dive. So you had like three evolutions the the day and we were on Dreggers, the L R five. So we're closed circuit. We're like in the fourth week, I think, of the P O I, some three and a half weeks in. It was a five and a half P O I, a five and a half week P O I at the time. And I remember we came off the dive and so they got this little uh area behind the the schoolhouse where you freshwater rinse your stuff. So we're in there cleaning up and there's these instructors walking around and like, hey, you know, and I overheard him talking about a terrorist attack.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  And uh but no one had said anything, no one had pulled aside. And I I remember I asked one of the instructors, I said, hey, sorry, you know, what's the deal with this terrorist attack? He goes, oh, you haven't heard? No, no, we haven't. He goes, well, you'll find out soon enough. And then at some point, one of them came to me and said, my fiance had called the dive school and I didn't give her the number of the dive school. Why would I do that, right? I'd give her my cell number or whatever. I had a, I guess we had a cell phone at the time, uh which I thought was weird. And uh anyway, all of a sudden they're like, everybody get their ass up into the classroom. So we stowed our Dreggers, we went up to the classroom and one of the instructors came in and he popped in a V H S tape and it was a V H S taping of the second plane.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  And it kicked on with the explosion, all the fuel. And to me, my first reaction was it kind of, it didn't look real, it kind of, I don't know. Like a Hollywood movie. Hollywood explosion, right? Big food gas explosion. And then he said, gentlemen, our nation's under attack, or something to that effect. Training will be suspended until further notice, and we're going to guard Fleming Key. So Key West, it's like, you know, there's a very long spit at the end of Key West, if you look at it from, you know, like looking south and north. The very end of it is basically where the dive school is. And so, we had to patrol the area, I think a day or two we did it, and some guys were in Boston Whalers.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  So it was just sort of surreal, you're in UDT shorts, which are not the best shorts in the world, T-shirts with mag lights and Tevas walking around, looking for Scuba Bin Laden. And then meanwhile, the guys are motoring in the Boston Whalers. I was jealous, I want to be out in the Boston Whalers, but we're just walking around, you know, the sand fleas are getting you, and the little fire ants or whatever. And then finally, I think the second day, they said, okay, we're going back to training. But there was no, hey, you're going, your group's going to do this, there was none of that. It was all sort of news blackout. One other thing I remember, this is kind of funny. The next morning, it was like September the 12th, I was the guy who had to run the detail to put the flag up, right?

• 29:46Speaker 06

  So it's like 5:30 in the morning, it's still, it's like, you know, dawn. And we put the flag up, and I said, hey, let's put it up and bring it to half-mast, you know? Sure enough, we did that. And then literally like three minutes later, this, I don't remember his name, but he was a Navy XO, he was a Navy officer. He came up, he looked up, and he said, why is it at half-mast? Or something like that. And I was like, you know, I'm like, he's like, have you received official notification? Put the flag at half-mast? I said, no, I just kind of assumed that was the right thing to do. And then he said, we'll put it back up until we get, you know, the notification. I said, fair enough. So anyway, I just distinctly remember that, and we all kind of had this perplexed look at each other.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  But anyway, we continued and finished the training, and they had to compress it because we had lost a day or two. And then we graduated on the 20th of September. And I think the day before I called group in the three, it was Mark Schwartz at the time, Major Mark Schwartz at the time, he picked up the phone and I said, "Hey, I'm down here, coming back home tomorrow, graduating, what's going on?" And he said something like, you know, "Come, it was, come in Saturday morning." So we get back Friday night, come in Saturday morning, see the battalion commander. So we get back, one of my teammates picked me up at Campbell or at the airport in Nashville. I remember his dad was driving, like, I'd never met his dad. He's like, "Guys, I wish I was young again." I want, you know, he was

• 31:11Speaker 06

  a Vietnam vet. He was, you know, everybody was speculating as to what was gonna happen, but no one knew anything. So, I get back to group, or get back to Campbell, and I was living in Oak Grove at the time, actually, and paying 500 bucks a month for my apartment. I ended up going in to see Colonel Haas in the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Haas, and he said, "Hey bud." First thing he said, and that's how we would speak, like, "Hey bud, first things first, you're not gonna be the S4."

• 31:40Speaker 07

  And just for people who don't know, like, you thought you were gonna take a third year on a team, which is a big deal for an officer, a captain, right?

• 31:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like a great privilege, honor, whatever. It's good, you know, you wanna do that.

• 31:53Speaker 07

  And then, he comes in and tells you that you're gonna be running logistics?

• 31:56Speaker 06

  Basically. Yes.

• 31:59Speaker 07

  Logs.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  So I didn't know whether I'm getting that job because I'm getting relegated, or I'm getting that job because I really am smart and...

• 32:06Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  I don't know. I think my company commander, I think the company's had to cough someone up, and they said, "Well, SAP will be good at the job with numbers." I don't know. I have no idea. So, I ended up, so I get into his office, and he's like, "You're not gonna be the S4." He goes, "I'm gonna lose you for a while." And he said, "So you need to go up and see the group commander later today, but we will high-five each other on top of a T-55 in Kabul," or something like that. He is just kinda, you know, that was his thing. He's like, "Alright bud," and he's kinda like that, and he sorta, I think he hugged me, or he slapped me in the back, or something like that. And, anyway, I left, and then I went up to group, I think later in the morning, and Colonel John Mahon was

• 32:52Speaker 06

  the group commander, and I was waiting on the outside, and they called us in, and all of a sudden, these other guys showed up. So it was me, there was none of the captain... Who I knew from the Q Corps, good guy, and three warrant officers. And we went in, so there's five of us. Mahalun's like, "Sit down." We sit down and he said, "I have to send, I have to pick three of you to go to the interagency, the CIA, to conduct an unconventional warfare assessment, then X will out and brief the ODAs and then they will infiltrate. So you're doing what we would call the pilot team thing, which was the kind of team I was on, but the way they were doing was different. They didn't have a whole SF UW team or ASOT team go in.

• 33:37Speaker 06

  It was, we were gonna augment an agency team.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  Were these other five guys also from ASOT?

• 33:42Speaker 06

  Uh, I think they were, I don't, you know, that's a good question. I know at least one was, and then the other captain, he was, I think he had been on an urban UW team, but I don't, he hadn't been to ASOT, neither had I at that point. I had been to Broken Axle, but I had been to ASOT. And I don't know about the other guys, but the two other warrants were very senior. They were like threes or fours. I thought that was very senior at the time. They were older guys. And there was a younger warrant, and there was two captains. So we're like in our late twenties and maybe they were like in their late thirties. And anyway, so I assumed, well, if I was Cromahalun, I'd pick the seasoned warrant officers

• 34:23Speaker 06

  because they got all the experience and they're trusted guys, trusted agents, so to speak. But anyway, he said, "Okay." And he went around the table and he asked some questions, like cursory questions, like, "Does anybody have any experience with, you know, the interagency?" And I said, "Well, you know, I did, I was an intern when I was in college." And he kind of, I'm not sure that was the right answer. He was like, "Okay." And then, and then, and then everybody else was like, "Oh, you know, I did this, whatever." And then he said, "Okay, come back this afternoon." He goes, "Go back to your battalions. We'll get back to you." And so it was very clear, like, he had to make a decision out of the five, who the three were gonna be.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  So we left and then we were called back. I think it was like 1500 that day. And I just remember, he was Major Bob McDowell at the time. We called him Angry Bob McDowell. Good guy, but he was very, like, he was a strong XO, right? And he was a guard dog, right? So he would guard the Colonel assiduously. And we go up there and he's, "What are you doing here?" And we're like, we're told to come up here, sir. He's like, "All right, just sit over there." So anyway, he calls us in and it was only three of us this time. The other two had not been called back. And then he said, "You guys are going, you're going, uh, I think, so this was like Saturday evening." He goes, "You're going Monday. You're going to DC. You're gonna get briefed up, you're gonna liaise, and then we're gonna go from there."

• 35:50Speaker 06

  And I think we actually went to Sox and all the way. So it was like a two-phase trip. And that was it. So we got our stuff together over the weekend. We flew up to, down to Tampa. We did some meetings in the J3. I remember it was, I think it was Lieutenant Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel Schlump at the time. A really good guy and he kinda, they briefed us up. But, you know, it was, what we knew about Afghanistan was so-

• 36:15Jack Murphy?

  Very little, right?

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Very little, right? So it was sort of like, okay. And then we went up to headquarters and that's when things got interesting. Because, you know, it was, they were also in a state of flux too. Everybody was.

• 36:31Jack Murphy?

  At Langley.

• 36:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, everybody was trying to figure out what we're gonna do. And we're outsiders, so we have to sort of be assimilated and minded. And, you know, we're not, we're not from that organization. So we were there for a couple of days. We got, you know, treated really well and, you know, but what are you gonna do? You're not, you know, you don't have a desk job there, right? You're a Green Beret that's hanging out with a Starbucks coffee cup that's now a spit cup, right? So you had to, you know, I don't, I think we eventually decided that we'd just keep the Copenhagen in the car. So went back to group a couple of days later and went to brief Colonel Mahal.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  And he, we explained to him what we knew. It was very much like, hey, we're gonna come back to DC. And then we're gonna be put in an OML, an order of march, for teams going in. And that was it. But in the interim, we were to wait to be called on. And so the order of march, so to speak, had not been decided yet. And so we were just on call. And I remember the guys in the three shop, there was this guy who worked at the three shop who was detailed or tasked to help us. He was phenomenal. Because we'll say who, but one of the three of us got to Nashville Airport the next trip and had forgot our passport. He went all the way back to Campbell and got it before the flight left. It was amazing.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  I don't know how fast he went, but he could fly 100 miles an hour. But anyway, we were called back within two days. So it was like, hey, wait a week or two, and then a week or two became two days. So what I did was I packed everything I had that was not discernible as military gear. And then everything else would be procured later. And it was weird because I saw all my kit, you know, LLC and all that kind of stuff that I wanted to take. And they said, don't bring that. So I left my issue. And that was a little weird. And in retrospect, I wish I brought it, but at the time it made sense. So we get to headquarters, we get to DC. And they said, okay, you need to be outfitted.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  So we ended up going out to REI one night. And I think I spent like, I don't know, thousands of dollars buying everything imaginable. And I ended up packing it into one, I don't know, like an osprey kind of three day pack or something, or hiking pack, which is, you know, relatively small. And then I had a more of an expedition pack, you know, that was

• 39:09Speaker 06

  that was filled out with different kit. We bought some silly stuff. I remember I bought glacier glasses because I assumed we were going to be in the midst of snow and, you know, high altitude.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  It's all a mystery at this.

• 39:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was totally occurring cognitively. So you're outfitted like you're going to go scale Everest. That's what that in our mind's eye, that was, you know, that was what it was going to be like. And so we bought some weird stuff. But anyway, we packed it all. But at the end of the day, it all fit into two bags. And we got there and it was so

• 39:40Speaker 06

  it was such a state of flux that from one hour to the next, you didn't really know what you were going to be told. And we were not in the decision cycle. We were the help, right, that they brought in to be liaisons and sort of military advisors, for lack of a better word. I remember we got a brief at one point, you know, about Bin Laden and all that kind of stuff. And at the time, we didn't know where he was and they had an idea, but they were trying to keep us busy and they sort of kept gave us some briefs and stuff like that. And then one day, the next day, I think we were there about the third day, that second time. So this is on around the end of September, probably around the early October, they said,

• 40:23Speaker 06

  hey, you're leaving tomorrow. And, and that was it. And so we had to rush out and get some last minute things. And then we, we boarded a vehicle and took off from there. And next you know, we were in, in Germany. And then from Germany, we went to Uzbekistan.

• 40:43Jack Murphy?

  So had you been assigned to a paramilitary team at this point?

• 40:48Speaker 06

  Yes, but I didn't quite, it's interesting. I didn't quite understand, like how they were structured, right? All I knew is that, okay, there's teams. They had one, Gary Shroen's team was already in the Panjshir Valley at the very end of September, sometime, I forget the exact date, maybe 26, somewhere in there, 22nd September, last week's of September, they were already there. So they're like, hey, we got guys in the north. But that had been an area that they had iteratively gone to meet with Masood before he was killed. So that was somewhat of an established relationship. Dostum was like this shadowy figure that they did, you know, was out there and Ismail Khan and all these guys. And I remember seeing

• 41:32Speaker 06

  him on a, on a map, like, here are the Northern Alliance guys, and this is the Sittemp enemy, you know, Northern Alliance, very general, broad conceptual. So we get to, so I remember getting the vehicle, the day, the evening that we were going to fly out. And that's when I met Mike Span. Some of the other guys I had seen around, but there wasn't a lot of time to fraternize, right? So I sort of met him. And I remember I sat next to Mike riding in this van. And that's when I first spoke to him. And he's kind of a quiet guy. And so I had to sort of, you know, work out a little bit. And then we got to know him. He's, oh, you're, you know, well, he knew I was from fifth group. I didn't know anything

• 42:15Speaker 06

  about him. And he told me, hey, I was a Marine, you know, I was an Angkor guy. And we started chatting. And then we get, and so we, we flew together and I got to know him. And so we kind of bonded. I mean, everybody did, but I, for whatever reason, Mike and I talked a lot. And he was roughly my age. I want to say he was like three, maybe four years older than me. So he was like a 92 guy, graduated college. I graduated in 94. So he was two or three years older than me.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  So we get to Uzbekistan and then things got, you know, I mean, it was all, we're putting it together. I met J R Seeger, who ended up being our team leader. And he was already there. And so he had the plan as best we knew. But at the time, I didn't know that we were going to meet with Dostum, that we were, our mission was to link up with Dostum. Until maybe around the second or third day we were there. And maybe it was just, I didn't ask. But I had, I was really the gun guy. So we had these AKMSs.

• 43:16Speaker 06

  That were, you know, mint, new, they were good guns. And we had some pistols and radios and stuff. And so we set about getting that organized. The commo stuff was more work because there's, you know, that was the first time I'd seen satellite capable in-better. The in-better was still kind of new at the time. So I was like, oh, what's that, you know? And, and then we had to put the evasion plan action together. And I, that's when I worked with Mike quite a bit. And I got to know him even better. We were, we were sitting in this, this warehouse. And we didn't have enough maps. We had some jog maps. We had some 100, one over 100, one over 100,000 DMA maps.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  But they were incomplete. So I'm putting them together and I'm like, hey, Mike, this is incomplete. So this is not really good because what we wanted to do is outfit every individual with at least a jog map of the appropriate area. Right, right. But you know, invariably, it's like going to be on the scene, right? So you're going to need two maps or tape them together or something like that.

• 44:18Speaker 06

  So Dave Tyson, who's in the book, of course, he was there. And I told him, oh, man, we don't have maps. So he goes, I got some Russian maps. They're probably pretty good. They're in the back, you know, in my office. So he brought this scroll of these old Soviet maps. And I remember they were like red inky map, red brownish. They were really good. The relief, all the contour intervals, all that kind of stuff was was good. The problem with those maps were they use a different mill system. So I forget what it was, but the 160th guys and I talked about this. It's like, if you call in coordinates off that map, you'll be five miles off, is what they told me.

• 44:55Speaker 07

  It's not UTM, the grids on it.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Absolutely. It's not UTM. So, but for terrain association purposes, it was okay.

• 45:03Speaker 07

  Right.

• 45:03Speaker 06

  And so we pieced that together and had a more complete map set.

• 45:07Speaker 07

  So when you went in and when you were doing like the radios, were you guys on agency fills or military fills? Like, who were you reaching back to?

• 45:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we had our own internal, like, inter-agency sort of hierarchy, right? So I was told, hey, you are under our authority. You are not under Colonel John Mahollen's authority. And then by law, that that was correct, right?

• 45:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 45:31Speaker 06

  That's the way it works. Title 50 versus Title 10. And so, so I'm very much part of the team and be honest, you know, honestly, I was the low ranking guy on the team. So I was just there to really do the needful and help out where they where they needed help. And it became very clear that Mahollen, Colonel Mahollen originally expected like this, this comprehensive unconventional warfare assessment like you were taught to do in training.

• 45:55Speaker 07

  Like a, an area assessment sort of thing?

• 45:58Speaker 06

  Exactly. And in fact, that's what I had. I had the template for an area assessment that I, I don't know, I got from somewhere. I had it on a, I can't remember. I had it. I had it printed out. But that, it became evident that the timeline, the two week timeline and the next fill, that was not going to happen. And that things were much more compressed and accelerated and expedited. And so my task then became more to survey, rapidly survey LZs, HLZs and drop zones. To get the guys in and get, get the, the, both humanitarian assistance and basically what became our, our resupply. Um, and so that's, that was, that was my task.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  So you had reached back to the military with, with like your radios?

• 46:44Speaker 06

  No, okay. No, it was all, you know, all inter-agency, that they, there was their hierarchy, their chain of command. I was, you know, a minion in that, you know, I was basically an outsider attached to that. Meanwhile, fifth group is down in Uzbekistan and they are, you know, setting up shop there.

• 47:03Speaker 07

  Right.

• 47:04Speaker 06

  And so the fact that we ended up co-locating and we ended up working together. So a lot of that, that distinction was, was mollified because we were there and everybody was part of one team and it worked really well. But yeah, if it came down to it, if, if someone said, hey SAP, you need to do this for, you know, I don't know, Max Bowers or Mitchell or Major Mitchell, something like that. I could say, well, no, actually it don't work for you, but they'd never, that never came about. That was, you know, theoretical.

• 47:33Speaker 07

  Did, did you notice a difference at this point in time? Because now you're, you're, you know, in this, you know, agency team and you're also co-located with, with, you know, fifth group, which is still, even though they're, the special operations are still part of the army and the army is not a fast-moving organization. Did you notice a difference between the flexibility and mobility of the two different outfits?

• 47:56Speaker 06

  Yes. So I think it's true and a lot of people on the agency side of the house will tell you, hey, we're much, we're much more nimble. I, I, I agree with that wholeheartedly, but you know, part of that is you're smaller, you're more flexible. You have a, a, let's just say the way they develop people is very much like more individually focused. So that makes sense and, and they can move on a dime, but it's like a lightweight fighter versus a heavyweight. So you have a lot of movement and you can do this and that, but if you, you know, you want to pound somebody, that's, that's who you call in the heavyweight. So group pretty, you know, relative to the, the conventional force, pretty, pretty nimble. Um, and maybe not as nimble as some units, but it's pretty nimble.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  So, um, Yeah, it was definitely, I saw that, but the reality was, at the end of the day, when we ended up going in, we went on 160th aircraft. So, that's when I realized that, all that's great, but there are certain capabilities that only the military has. Right. And it's amazing capability that came out of the ashes of Desert One. Mm-hmm. And we're the only country in the world that can do that stuff. Yeah. And that was really amazing, because at first, just quickly anecdote, when I first got there to DC, they were speculating on infill rat line mechanisms. One was, hey, we'll take you out to the carrier, and then you'll be brought in by helo into

• 49:24Speaker 06

  southern Afghanistan, and then you'll wear burkas. That was at one point, that was kind of spitballed. At one point, we were gonna go in a truck that was modified with hiding, a hidden compartment. Then we were gonna go on other aircraft, and then finally, General Franks, you know, the long story short, coughed up the aircraft to do it, and they were 160th aircraft. They're direct action penetrators, 160, MH60s.

• 49:51Jack Murphy?

  Could you tell us a little bit about the team you were assigned to? You know, how many guys were there? What were these guys like? I mean, who were they? And you're experiencing sort of all of this for the first time, as an army dude, as a greensuiter, hanging out in a black world, I guess you could say. And that sort of run-up to insertion.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  So, they were all, the first thing, they were all prior service guys. They were all military guys. I mean, every last one of them. So, you know, JR had been an entry officer. You know, Dave had been in the military, Alex had this storied career as a sergeant major, you know, Andy, they were all like, they were all prior service. So, that... You know, that was a prereq, right? So, we had all those guys and then Jer was kind of an outsider they brought in from another area, but they brought him in because he was known to be a guy who worked well with the military. And he had in fact been a guy, I think he had briefed Schwartzhoff in Desert Storm.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  So, he was well-known and I think Hank Crumpton picked him, handpicked him to do that job because he was like a GS-15 at the time. So, yeah, it was amazing that as quickly as they put the team together and as quickly as they shuffled the order of march, because we were not originally going to be the first, one of the first teams in. Of course, Gary Shroen's team was in, but it was sort of up in the air and then we were moved from the back of the formation, so to speak, to the front. And to this day, I think Alex knows the reason, I don't know why. But that's when things changed and all of a sudden the next day we're, it's like, hey, tomorrow we're going to the, we're going to the airport. And so, um, so yeah, but, but they were all good guys, really good, sharp guys and I,

• 51:39Speaker 06

  it took a while to get to know them, but I realized it right off the bat that, you know, that this was, however the team was put together, they'd done something right. And they always said, you know, Jer would say, well, it's good to be the first, one of the first teams in because, you know, there's certain advantages to that and it's everything is new and nothing's established.

• 52:00Jack Murphy?

  You have ability to shape things.

• 52:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. Indeed, and, and so, that was cool. Yeah, so, and Scott had been in Mogadishu and I learned later that he had gone to VMI like me, but he was like four or five years older than me, so I, he had graduated before I got there. So, that was a little bit of, there was some affinity there. But anyway, yeah, so they were good, they trusted me to do my piece and they had their piece to do and Jer knew more about Afghanistan than anybody I had met and then Dave, of course, knew tons about Afghanistan, particularly northern Afghanistan, and he had the language skills that were phenomenal. So, that was indispensable. So, we had those two guys, we had Alex who was a sergeant major, who was like, you know,

• 52:47Speaker 06

  looking after the team, and then you had these younger guys who were all, you know, champing at the bit to do something, and they had me who was the gun guy and the HLZ Pathfinder, really a Pathfinder kind of guy. And that was it. And we were there with Fifth Group. Which had a very kind of expeditionary presence of those GP mediums and so-called piss holes and all that kind of stuff had just been established, a little rough. And we isolated for, I think, three days. So there was a delay. And then on the, you know, I think it was, you know, it's in the book, of course, the night of the, I think of the

• 53:26Speaker 06

  15th over 16th, period of darkness, was when we went in in October. So, and we went on 160th birds. And there's a whole story in the book about how the DAPs were picked and the 47s didn't go. At the time, I didn't really think about it. But later on, I met the guys and I realized, yeah, that is somewhat, you know, weird, right? Weird, yeah. It was good. It was uneventful, uneventful flight down to the Uzbek border. We left right after dusk. I think it was like 9 o'clock, we went wheels up. And I remember talking to Colonel Mahal, and he was standing on the tarmac. And this is, you know, you know, like, right, you know, right at dusk. And, you know, I'd been pounding water because

• 54:09Speaker 06

  I get hydrated, and once we get shot down, I want to be ready, and all this kind of stuff that you're going through your mind, all the various contingencies that can occur. And then all of a sudden, I had to go to the bathroom, like, horribly. And I ran over there, went to the bathroom, came back, and he's just staring at me. And, you know, he's a pretty tall. And he's just staring at me. And it was really, it made me a little uncomfortable. And then I kind of took a step closer to him. And he goes, "Don't get killed." (laughing) Like, "Don't get killed," just like that. And he's got these big hands, like, "Don't get killed." And I said, "Try not to let you down." And, um, and then he left. And then we got on the aircraft. We rehearsed, you know, on one load, offload, all that kind of stuff. And they were, you know, right after dark, we're up. And I want to say it

• 54:52Speaker 06

  was two and a half hours, maybe, ish, three hours. I can't remember. But I found out later that was the first combat aerial refueling in of a In theater. Of an MH60 in theater or ever combat. Oh, wow. Because I guess it qualified as combat at that point, right? So, and I was sitting in the back and I had PBS7s. I mean, we went pretty light. I mean, we had AKMSs, Glocks, two backpacks, you know, med bag and med kit, you know, the thigh thing with the morphine and all that kind of the Oshamans and, and that was it, you know, and not a lot of food because we were going to be relying on the Afghans, which actually worked out fine.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  And I'm looking through the PBS7s and I see this 47 chasing us in the back, which I didn't know was there. I'm like, I just kind of wondered, why is he following us? Because the 160th, they didn't explain anything. They were like, hey, we got the infill. You guys just sit back and ride. And JR had the headset on, I didn't, so I don't know what was being said. So we're just sitting there and I'm enjoying the ride and it was smooth. And all of a sudden I look out in the distance and the lights of what was Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan just end and then it's just black beyond that, south of that. It was just dark. And I'm like, I remember thinking, that has to be Afghanistan. And then there was a little shimmer off the Amadaria River because there was a little bit of loom. And I said, that must be the river.

• 56:20Speaker 06

  And then, you know, like a minute later, the crew chief was like, passed back, hey, we're in Afghanistan. And we looked down and that part of Afghanistan, north of Mazar, near the Uzbek border, they have a lot of sand dunes. And so I remember seeing that. And then we hit the mountains, went in another maybe 30, 45 minutes, and then we infilled. And it was unique in the sense that normally, as we all know, you know, you kind of flare in like that and you land, right? It's more efficient. But all of a sudden, it was like we stopped and then we just elevated straight down. And I'd never done that from that kind of altitude. And I remember looking to either side of the aircraft and it was sheer like rock face. It was a gorge. I don't know what the clearance was, the rotor disc space between the rock and the rotor disc space, but it wasn't much.

• 57:05Speaker 06

  And we went straight down and we landed and then we got out and we all had our little duties and set up a perimeter. And then we talked to the crew chief and thumbs up. And there was two birds offset like that. And then they left. They were like, bye, we unloaded our stuff and that was it and they were gone. And then as soon as, you know, that, you know, as soon as you go in.

• 57:28Speaker 08

  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.

• 57:43Speaker 09

  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.

• 57:54Speaker 08

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

• 57:59Speaker 10

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

• 58:05Speaker 08

  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.

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• 58:55Speaker 06

  I don't know, aerosol, there's, you know, the tumult of the engines and all that, and the prop rotor wash, and then they're gone and silent. Yeah, dead silent. It's just silent. And then you're sort of like, okay, this is when I'm supposed to do cells. And then I remember looking through my nods and there's these Afghans, there's like a wall of them, and there's some horses that are sort of neighing and all that kind of stuff. And there's this one big guy, because Dostum's a little bigger than everybody else, he's at least six foot, I think. And he comes out, and then he goes towards JR, and JR meets up with him, and they shake hands, and they start chatting a little bit, and I guess Dari. And, um, and from there, we picked up everything, and we were ushered quickly into a meeting, and that was a big meeting.

• 59:37Speaker 06

  And then, um, I remember JR and Dave and I, and everybody was sort of arguing over whether we should take our weapons in. Because, you know, it's a little bit awkward, but hey, we're in Afghanistan, we don't know these guys. Right. Oh, by the way, Dostum's reputation wasn't the best, so, you know, it's like, I don't know, man. And so, basically, we decided to take our weapons in. And I remember sitting down, and you're doing the Indian, you know, the sort of cross-legged thing, and, uh, and they were chatting, and it was all done in Dari. And, uh, so JR was really good about explaining and justing what was going on. But I remember I was sitting next to Mike, and we were told to take notes, and so I was

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  trying to take notes, and I had to listen to what JR was relaying to us, and then... And that went on for about an hour, uh, and then it was like, okay, let's get you settled in. There was a little claw down the, you know, a little ways down, and, uh, we'll get a couple hours of sleep, and we'll get up in the morning and get, get busy. And it was like, you're gonna go do the HLZ, you're gonna identify an HLZ survey, it's sent it up, got it. So, next morning, we woke up, and, um, they, uh, they brought a vehicle, and so, I think that there's a picture in the book, maybe there isn't, but it was a, you know, jingly truck, whatever you want to call it. They're packed with RPG rounds, they were in these like burlap sacks, or some sort of sack that you put grain in, or something like that.

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

  Maybe it isn't, isn't it? Is this it? Uh, it's that, it's that, probably that truck, but it's a different photo, but that, probably one of those trucks, something like that. And, um...

• 1:01:14Speaker 06

  And that was the truck we rode to what, towards the front line. Which is, the crow flies probably wasn't more than ten, fifteen clicks, maybe, maybe, maybe fif- ten, fifteen miles. No more than that, but on the roads there, the road was riverbed, riverbed was a road that took forever. But I distinctly remember Dave, um, his Uzbek, because the guy was Uzbek, if I remember, was so good, he was just rapping with the guy, talking to him, and then he would joke, and the guys, they were laughing, and they're telling jokes and all that. And I'm trundling along there with my AK, and then we get to this, this, uh, Dayhe was the town. Got out, we met with, you know, the, the local sub commander, who was one of Dostum's lieutenants.

• 1:01:59Speaker 06

  We had a discussion about force array, and how many troops he had, and all this kind of stuff, and then I went out with Dave and, you know, I surveyed the H L Z based on the, the, it was the SWIC GTA that they gave you, that fold out, that tri-fold thing. And I just used that, and then we sent it up, uh, later on the, in the day, and that was the H L Z survey. And then they came back and said, just mark the hazards with an iron stroke, and we got the rest. And then we went up, the, I think the next day was when we first got on horses. So they had a couple of vehicles, but not many, to move, you know, precious cargo for like, I don't know where, you know, RPGs and rounds and whatever. Uh, but everybody else was either foot bound, or, they had like a couple of Hiluxes, but

• 1:02:44Speaker 06

  mainly it was horses. And so they showed up, and they said, we're going to the front line, and, uh, you're gonna meet Dostum, and, again, and we're gonna talk through some stuff. So we went up to the front line, it seemed like about a three-hour horse movement. Um, I was excited, you know, it was cool riding a horse, I wasn't a great equestrian person, I had been on horses before, but not much, and J R. knew a lot about horses. So, we went up there, and dumb thing I did, I wore my, uh, three-day assault pack, uh, with my AK. So, riding on a horse, the one thing I remember, wearing a backpack's suboptimal, because you're just gonna stress a lot of muscles, you don't normally stress.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  And then, the AK thing, any rifle, the magazine beats against you when you move, and so there's a way we- Configured it so it would rest under our thigh. And it was somewhat, you know, accessible, but it didn't beat your leg. Because if you had allowed it to beat your leg, your leg would be bruised and raw. So, so we got up to the, this, this kind of a, a giant, I guess it was a mountain, maybe, maybe like 6,000 feet, somewhere in that altitude, wasn't too high. But there was this giant gorge, the, the Dari Sue Valley that separated. It's like something out of a cowboy movie, like a cliff or Indiana Jones where they go off the end of the cliff. It was that kind of precipice. And on the other side were the Taliban.

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  And you could see them, they were little, you know, ant sized figures, but you could see them through binos. And I remember Dostum had lazy W Soviet style defensive positions dug in, like trench line with latrines and everything coming off. And then he had a command bunker with a stove and everything. And we went in there and we met with him. And Jer and, and Dostum spoke at length about the strategy and what they were going to do. And, and he had this map that someone had drawn by hand. It was like a special, like they'd taken a map and then they had made their own special that was like the size of a, maybe this beige padding there. And that was the special for the area.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  And then we, you know, after that, we went back and then the ODA came in, I think, the next night. So it was an interval of like, we're on the ground about three days, I think. And then ODA 595 came in. They came in on 47s. And that was around one or two in the morning, somewhere in there. And it was straight up, you know, I or bust or strobe, whatever I had, I think I had a strobe. And they came in, they landed and got off and I, there was Andy Marshall, I, I kind of knew from group. Was on the team and he's funny and he's just a funny guy and he came off and I I said something like welcome to Afghanistan, you know, it's kind of a little bit like the

• 1:05:34Speaker 06

  Stone Age here, right? You know, it's just not, you know, you're it's gonna be a little rough. And he had been in Somalia and he said, oh, no, don't worry. I've seen worse before. I was in I was in Somalia for, you know, ninety, whatever it was, five or three or what? I think it was three. So I was like, okay. So, you know, anyway, so we set him into the claw, which became known as the Alamo. I didn't call it that, but someone named it that. And it was just a couple of standard Afghan claw with the, I guess you call it a artesian well in the center that kind of it was a cistern type of thing where we procured water from. That was the other thing. The water situation, that was that was a huge limb factor. So he showed up, I had the reverse osmosis REI pump that was not not like nowadays

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  were like this big. And I'm like furiously like pumping the thing in the morning. And then finally, Mark, the medic, was like, okay, that's just not gonna work. He goes, what we're gonna do is the volume, yeah, yeah, thank you. The volume of water we need, we're just gonna bleach it. And so we did. And then everybody, the brooms smelled like an indoor pool because everybody's off gassing. But the water was pure or purified. And but yeah, so that's where we stayed. We put the ODA in there. And the next that was late at night, the next morning dosed him, showed up. He said he'd be there at eight. He showed

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  up like seven fifteen or seven thirty. I think he did that on purpose to to off, you know, to sort of keep let us know he was the boss, right? And the ODA wasn't ready. And so they were scrambling to put their stuff together. I mean, their LCEs, I don't know, weighed sixty, seventy pounds, had PDMs, you know, M sixty seven grenades, you name it, they had it. Pursuit determinations. And ammo, water. And so we were scrambling to help them. And then the Afghans had brought mules that we had requested, or donkeys, actually, and horses. And then they took the heavy stuff, the rucks, you know, the medics' rucks, stuff like that, and they put it, you know, on either side. And they did that, lashed them down. However, they did that, I remember

• 1:07:38Speaker 06

  watching them do it. And then everybody pretty much rode with their LCE on a horse that had been provided by the Afghans. But Dostum was so frustrated initially that day. I just remember that morning, that Dave was a little bit excited, too. He's like, hey, Dostum's getting pissed, man. We need to, we need to move out. And I said, okay. He goes, go talk to the team, man. I said, Dave, they, they can only move so fast, right? Look at the rucks. They're like 100 pounds, you know? He goes, okay, man, but he's getting pissed. And so sure enough, Dostum barked out something in Uzbek, and then he just rode off with his little entourage, right? And they left. And he's like, I told you, man, he's pissed. I said, well, he's not going anywhere until we bring in the close air support. So he can

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  just be pissed, right? That's good, you know, sorry, Dostum. So, so we eventually got up to the front line and everything worked out. But I think there were some hiccups early on, and I'm sure Mark, who you could talk about, but they, they were trying to call in, if I recall, they were trying to talk the guys on the target. So they got air pretty quick. I mean, the thing I remember about that era from like 9/11 through probably December, it was like riding a tsunami of anger. And you were like this big wave surf guy on the edge of it. And all you, you didn't want to wipe out because you just knew that there was 1,000 other people that would take your job in a second. And I know that

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  carriers, the plane started going back still with bombs on it. That was the wrong answer. And so there was a lot, a little bit of tension early on about that. But that was, we were just, the team was just getting, getting their groove on, they're getting warmed up. And they eventually, they augmented them with an STS guy. And, and then things, things really started going well. But the, the first time I remember, because we were sitting up there, and Dostum had this carpet, like a little Afghan carpet. And on top of it, he had his radio operator, I called him, I forget his name. And he had stuff like, something you'd buy at Radio Shack, like a scanner and all that kind of stuff, and powered by car batteries.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  And they were scanning the freaks. Dave talked. Dave was listening and he could understand and he would, you know, the Tobs would talk in the clear and they pick up their freak. And then Dostum was sitting there listening. He was like picking his teeth listening. He's like, "Give me that handset." And he was like, "Hey!" And then you start cursing them out. And they're like, "Who the hell is this?" And then they go back and forth in this sort of sophomoric banter, back and forth. Yeah, it's funny. They talk shit to each other on the radio. But then they were respectful to each other. Like, he said, "Get your commander on," or something like that, I remember Dave saying. And he was actually at one point speaking to the Tobe commander. And they were very polite, like, "Hey, sir, how are you? You know, this unfortunate situation," and, you know. And but Dostum was a little

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  more aggressive because he had the upper hand and he was talking shit. But the other guy was very, like, deferential, you know. It's kind of weird, kind of Afghan way of war, you know. Right, right. But anyway, that went on for a while, but I was quickly task organized with Mike and Mark, the medic, to go to Ba'amiyan. And then another team, under Scott, an element, went over to link up with Mohammed Attah to bring in another inter-agency team and an SF team, which became 534. So things were quickly evolving. And so Jer, Jer was like, "Okay, we're gonna break up into three teams. Alex and I will stay here with Dostum, you

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  know, the principal. And then Scott, you're going here. And, you know, Mike Span, you're gonna be in charge of this team and you're going to Ba'amiyan and link up with Mr. Kareem Khalili, who was, you know, the leader of the Hazara people." And I didn't know much about Hazara and people, and I didn't know, certainly didn't know anything about Kareem Khalili. So we linked up and then his, Mr. Sultani was his sort of emissary slash driver slash interlocutor, who I didn't know all the time. Years later, I helped get him back to the States, but that's another story. But he helped, he moved us from the Dariy Su Valley all the way to Yakalang Valley, which is west of Ba'amiyan. So the Tobs had

• 1:11:59Speaker 06

  Ba'amiyan at the time. So we crossed from the Dariya Suf Valley all the way up into this, more or less the geographic center of Afghanistan. And then we passed by Bandi Amir, that famous lake that people back in the seventies hippies would go to and stuff like that. And then we ended up linking up with Mr. Kareem Khalili in Yakalang. And then that was Mike's kind of first trip alone away from the main team. So it was a big deal to him, right? And so I was there to support him. Mark was there for medical coverage. And we were there alone for a while. And that was weird because I remember, I probably never do this again in Afghanistan, but we were doing like eight hour shifts, right?

• 1:12:44Speaker 06

  Eight, three times eight, twenty-four. But then we said, ah, we got a little lazy, quite frankly. So well, we just, you know, shut down from whatever hour, whatever hour, sleep. Everybody slept. I look back on that and that was, that was, you're trained not to do that and you did it. And fortunately, nothing happened. We end up bringing in an OGA team and then we brought in an ODA. And then our mission there was over. And we had some comms issues that we fixed, but man, like for Mike, that was huge because if we couldn't make comms, we were dead in the water, you know, for him at least. And so we fixed that fortunately.

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  How were, how was it like interfacing with the Hazar? Because one of the main issues in Afghanistan is all the different ethnicities. And I know that traditionally, like the Hazar have been, they've been really kicked around by, in Afghanistan itself, right? So did they, did they look at it as a freeing Afghanistan or were they just trying to protect their own area?

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  You know, I'll say my first impression of the Hazar were they're very quiet, like as a, you know, as a subculture or a culture, very quiet people. Someone referred to them as like laid back, like the Southern Californians of Afghanistan. But they were very. I don't know meek is the right word, but they were very kind of chill people. And so it was hard to get to know them. They were kind of quiet and they weren't. The Pashtuns, you can tell they're just a more aggressive culture because they're the dominant culture, right? For them, it was like, hey, we've been downtrodden and beaten for hundreds of years, literally. You know, really starting badly in the late 1800s.

• 1:14:33Speaker 06

  And so they just wanted to protect their sort of ancestral seat there as best they could. Of course regain Bamiyan and then regain some of the villages that went up the Dari Asuf. So what I did know at the time, I learned later that Dostum's area was not the Dari Asuf Valley. He was the whatever, the most effective combat leader, but the area we were in when we infilled initially in Dehi, that was basically a Hazara area. And then further up, and I glossed over this, but we, we had a excursion to Taliban, the first Taliban prisoners we had, I think anyone had seen on the American side.

• 1:15:14Speaker 06

  And it was through a village called Bazar Shukte, which was a Hazara village that had been raised. And I remember it was burnt, I mean, like something you see in Ukraine now, it was just burnt, destroyed, and the Hazara people were like, hey, you know, the Talibs came through, they came all the way up as far as they could, they burned everything and then they left. And they did other unspeakable things. But so the Zara were like, I don't know, just they knew that they, they had, they were at a disadvantage and that all, it was all they could do to ally with someone strong, make an alliance with the Uzbek's and, and the, you know, Tajiks. And that was their key to survival. And Kareem Khalili was a very quiet guy, very kind of studious guy.

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  He looked studious, he had glasses and kind of like, like professor, professor type, kind of very thoughtful guy, very quiet.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  You know, he's very clear. We're like, we're here to help you. How can we help you? We propose to bring in these teams and they can bring in air power. And that will help you and then we'll attack Bamiyan and we'll defeat the Taliban and you can take Bamiyan. What I wasn't sure of was their capability on the ground. Because I didn't get a sense like, I didn't see a lot of fighters like I did with Dostum. You know, so I was kind of wondering where are those guys? I think they were up closer to Bamiyan. See, we didn't go to Bamiyan. So we brought the teams in and the OGA and the ODA. And they were sort of linked up together and then we left. And then we went all the way back. And by the time we got back to link up with the ODA 595 and JR.

• 1:16:48Speaker 06

  They were already pushing through the final pass at the head of the valley. Which is in the movie 12 Strong is sort of, you know, the rockets flying and all that kind of stuff. I missed all that. And so, when I got there, it was the aftermath of, you know, there's some bodies here and there and some destroyed kit. And then, of course, there were the tanks that were, I guess, hit with proximity fuses from air. And I remember the Afghans were perplexed about how we could strike so accurately. Because they would say, well, the Russians would just come in and bomb it with dumb bombs. And they would hit everybody and kids and everything, obviously. And you guys don't do that, it's pretty impressive. And I say, yeah, well, you know, it's been a lot of money preparing, developing this capability.

• 1:17:32Speaker 06

  But yeah, so there were tanks that the Talibs had that were knocked out. And it was just sort of wreckage as we tried to catch up to ODA 595 and JR and Alex, actually. And so, we linked up with them, South Amazar Sharif at the Kali Jangi Fortress. Which had just been evacuated by the Taliban. And I remember, because I called, like, we had an iridium, we had an iridium. So I called Alex, the Team XO. And I said, hey, where are you all at? He's like, we're at this fort. It looks like somehow a foreign legion. You can't miss it. And sure enough, you couldn't because it's on the south side, the south kind of west side of Mazar. And there was, you know, big parapets and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  So we went there and then Dostum had us there with his guys for a while. I can't remember how long, but I think it was twofold. You know, he wanted to keep an eye on us too. He wasn't like milling around. And I always noticed that they had minders, like, you know, Dostum wanted to know what we were up to, which is fine, I get it. And so we were there for a while. And what was interesting about that place, which became the focus of the prisoner uprising, was it was a bifurcated compound, massive. And on the southern side, where all the stables were and the granaries, there was also conixes. So I was with, I remember Sergeant Major Mario V. Hill and I. He was the third battalion, fifth group. So everybody closed on this place.

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  It was our team, Team Alpha, OD 595. It was, it was third battalion, fifth special forces group, Mark Mitchell's staff and Sergeant Major V. Hill. And Sergeant Major V. Hill and I kind of knew each other. He said, let's go, let's go look around, you know? So we were snooping around the fort and it was just packed with mines, anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines. And then they had these six or seven conixes in the south courtyard, southern courtyard. And they were just packed with, you name it, PPSH-41s, M1 Garands. I mean, everything you could ever imagine some arms dealer would send were their ammunition,

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  out the Yin Yang Dishkas and 107 rockets. And then they had like a single shot, I don't know if you've seen them, but the tripod, a single shot 107 that I guess they developed for Spetsnaz. But, but anyway, they had all that stuff. And I remember going around and I was cherry picking some stuff. They had bayonets. They were World War I bayonets, so we grabbed those as war trophies. And then I never forget, we went in one room. And to this day, I regret not bringing this back. It was a like paper mural, for lack of a better word, but some Taliban had taken colored pencils. And he had colored a Taliban flag, but he was a good artist and it was, you know, tacked to the wall.

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  And I remember Mario and I looked at each other and I'm like, Sir Major, do you want that? He goes, well, you want it? And I know you want it. And then I, I was like, ah, I'm gonna take it. So I took it and I rolled it up and I kept that. And I ended up sticking it in an old Stinger missile tube that we found later. And, uh, and then I never got it back because you're not going to bring a Stinger missile.

• 1:20:45Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:20:46Speaker 06

  Back to the States, right? So at least not on commercial air. So, uh, so I.

• 1:20:50Jack Murphy?

  Like TSA would know what that is.

• 1:20:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're right. Maybe they wouldn't. There was no grip stock. It was just. But, uh, but yeah, so we, uh, we found all this crap and, and there was mines galore. Well, that became the ammunition that was used for the prison reprising, a lot of it.

• 1:21:07Jack Murphy?

  So everyone kind of like ended up coalescing around this, uh, this fortress? And it ended up, at what point did it started getting to, um, used as a prison?

• 1:21:19Speaker 06

  So, um, yeah, I'll just, uh, lead up to the day. So we moved from the Khyi Jungi Fort to, uh, another place on the, on the east side of town. And we started to separate ourselves from Dostum. And Dostum was doing his own thing and, you know, whatever. The, the politics with him and Atal were getting kind of fraught. Um, Mike and I ended up getting told to go to, um, the southern part of Condu's. There's a town called Poli, uh, Poli Comri. And, uh, Poli Comri, there was a sub commander there that we were supposed to link up with and convince him

• 1:22:02Speaker 06

  to essentially attack or at least block the southern, uh, exodus from Condu's. So the idea was Dostum, ODA 595, JR, all those guys, the sort of task force, would push from west to east on Condu's, call in close air support, and then they would isolate Condu's as a urban center.

• 1:22:25Speaker 06

  So we went down there, uh, this is a day, day or two before, uh, the prison uprising. And we met with this guy and I remember we sat down, we had tea and whatever, you know, uh, pistachios and he was having none of it. He was not interested in moving because from his point of view, they had that town and they had no interest in moving anywhere. They were going to sit on that town. So everybody was starting to carve up the pie, right? So Mike got really frustrated, I remember. He, he was upset with this guy. I was frustrated, but I wasn't really upset. He was upset with the guy and he'd pull out and he's like kinda in my ear like cursing guy, like I can't believe this guy, you know? I said, well, we're done. Like you can't force him to do anything. So Mike's like,

• 1:23:06Speaker 06

  yeah, you're right. And then we ended up linking up with Alex in a bourgeois neighborhood. It was really weird. I guess the Soviets had built. And they're over there talking. I'm roaming around this place and it was like a time capsule. They had these family photos in this house from like the late seventies, like before the, the war and the revolution. People in bell bottoms, no burkas. It was really surreal. We're walking around and I'm waiting on them to talk. They ended up conferring and it was decided that the next morning, Mike and I would go back to Mazar-e-Sharif. I wasn't part of that conversation. That was between Alex and Mike. And, um, I don't know at that time whether Alex had heard

• 1:23:48Speaker 06

  or Mike had also heard that there were prisoners, but we found that out on the way back. And it was weird, you know, the Afghans are always like, at a checkpoint, you'd arrive at the checkpoint, chit chat with the guy. Uh, we had, um, I was driving, but we had an Afghan with us. And they said, oh, there's 300, it was always Chechens for some reason. There are 300 Chechens up ahead and they're really bad news people and you gotta watch out, this kind of thing. And so, uh, we're like, okay. So we went forward and, um, it was funny because we asked these guys like, hey, if you know where bin Laden is, you know, let us know, we'll, we'll, we'll take care of you, kind of thing. And they were just like, yeah, we don't know where he is. But anyway, well, we went up and, um, we

• 1:24:28Speaker 06

  ended up running into the vanguard of Dostum's group. And, uh, that was the evening before the uprising started. And it was, you know, late afternoon. We were hoping to get up there. I personally thought maybe we could get in a position, we could call for CAS on these so-called bad guy Chechens and, and be done with them. And, uh, I mean, you know, Consistent with the law of our conflict, but you know, basically that was that that made sense to me, right? We'll get in a position we'll call Castle. But we got there and they were gone and then Jaren pulled Mike aside and I was near him, but not within earshot. So I couldn't really hear what was being said. And that was when we, you know, they were discussing the prisoners, that the prisoners

• 1:25:13Speaker 06

  that come out of conduits, that Dozen had made a decision to take them to the Kali Gendhi Fortress and that y'all should go, someone needs to go and interview these guys because there's treasure trove of information. These are the guys, like Dave said, these are the guys we've been looking for. Because up to that point, all the prisoners we ran into, all the detainees or whatever you want to call them, they had all been Afghans. Uh huh. And they weren't like necessarily Pashtuns. They were, they were, they were like Turkmen guys who have been pressed into service. So they were sort of, quite honestly, like pathetic. I felt, kind of felt sorry for some of them because they're like, hey, I got gunpoint, I was told to go fight you guys. And but they always said the Al Qaeda guys, the Allon Brigade guys, the Zero Five Five Brigade guys, they're just one terrain feature ahead. You just gotta, you gotta catch them. You're gonna catch them, but they're, they're over

• 1:25:58Speaker 06

  there. And we never saw them. And so when we heard that, it was like, oh, this is, this is why we came here. These are the droids we're looking for, right? So we, we went back to Mazar and then it was right at dusk, we got to the fort. And I remember the guards, and it's in the book, of course, the guards were really cagey acting and Dave was talking to them and they were, he said, oh, man, they're, they're all amped or something to that effect. We go into the fort, right to the point where the prisoner uprising would start. And I parked, we had a Toyota Surf vehicle with all these Japination stickers on it from Hokkaido, I remember, like a used car or something.

• 1:26:40Speaker 06

  I don't know how we got it. But, but anyway, we go into the, the fort and there's, I remember seeing a guy dead under a tarp with a wispy beard and his beard was like kind of blowing in the wind. And I was looking at him and I'm like, what happened here? And Dave was talking to the guy, so I couldn't figure it out. And then Dave came back, he was, hey, we need to leave and come back tomorrow. This is not good now. It's dark and the guards are sort of unhappy and someone was killed, etc. And so on the way back, I learned from Dave that there had been a guy who had killed himself with a grenade.

• 1:27:15Speaker 06

  And, uh, and then he took some of, uh, the Northern Alliance guys, unfortunately had died as well. And that was when I realized, okay, these guys, they're armed, or, you know, there, there's a problem here. But I didn't, I didn't go, sadly, I didn't think about it, you know, and, you know, I didn't go second, third. There wasn't so much you could really do about it at that moment either. It just seemed like that's Afghanistan. Right. And, you know, and I was like, okay, that's sad. Okay, we'll get back. So we got back, but you're busy. We get back. Okay, we're going in tomorrow, but there's only three or four of us there at the, at the MSS we were staying at. And so we had a, a radio,

• 1:27:57Speaker 06

  so someone had to watch the radio. So we'd split up, you know, like DA six kind of thing. We'd split up our duties, right? Two hours on and the next guy's on. And, um, the next morning, uh, about 7:30, I remember the MR SAT rang and Mike was up and he got it and I was up. And he's chatting and it's Alex and Alex said, hey, we have this, uh, Waz truck or, uh, whatever Waz Jeep, Russian Jeep that had been delivered. And it was kind of a piece of junk. You, you need to deliver that to Poli Khomri because I have no wheels and I'm relying on the Afghans. I need my wheels. It's like, fair enough. So we were gonna go in at eight. That was the plan. And then Mike turned to me, I recall, and he said, hey, change the plans. You're gonna go with another guy, Greg, and you're

• 1:28:42Speaker 06

  gonna go deliver this vehicle to the, to Alex. So it's a three hour trip. And I said, okay, what about the, the, the bad guys? What about the Talibs? Or we just called them Talibs. They were, you know, Al-Ansa, B K guys. He said, well, we'll link up, you deliver the vehicle, you come back, we'll link up in the afternoon and there'll be plenty of them to, to, because, you know, I was, I'll be honest with you, I was curious to see who the hell these guys were. Right. Because when I got there the night before, they were all packed in the pink, uh, house, in the basement. So I didn't see any. Um, anyway, we got down the road. I'll never forget this, so, m- m- my backup. Mike and Dave got in the Toyota Surf.

• 1:29:22Speaker 06

  And the thing had a problem when start, so he had to clutch start it. So Dave was like, how do I clutch start it? And so I said, I gotta push it. So we pushed it, he clutch started, it got going. I said, see you guys later. And that's the last I saw of that. Sadly, that's the last time I saw Mike alive. And, and, and, you know, I would see Dave later, but. So we left, and I drove that was about thirty, forty-five minutes outside of Mazar Shereev, and it broke down, something with the distributor cap. So fortunately, I had a guy from fifth group who's also this, this awesome mechanic. He was like a motorcycle guy, designed his own Harleys. And he got up there and, you know, those engines aren't that complex. He was like, it's a distributor cap, and we're gonna have to get a new one. And so we towed that vehicle back to Mazar.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  And this is where I really feel bad is, I came back to the MSS, and I'm like, trying to problem solve. So I'm like, where's Dave and Mike? And said, oh, we haven't heard from them yet, they're, they're still busy, you know, they're, they're working, there's a lot of guys to go through. I said, okay. I said, well, I need to get this vehicle fixed. So they linked me up with this Afghan, who was like an Afghan grease monkey, and we went to the Mazar to get the distributor cap. Cause any task like that fell on me, which is fine, I was, you know, suthesponting, right? So I, I was like, okay, fine. It was when I came back that I knew something was up. And at one point, and this is where I didn't, you know, you get those cues, but you don't, in retrospect, they make sense, but at the time, they didn't make sense.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  So Paul Cyberson, who was there, and I knew at VMI, he was a year ahead of me, and he sadly passed away, he was killed in Iraq in two thousand and four. He came up to me, from, you know, his Serb Italian, and he, he said, hey, have you heard from the guys down at Kly Jongi? Have you heard anything from them? It's like, I heard some rumors, it was like some shenanigans going on, or something like that, but it was couched in a way that, I mean, I don't know, in retrospect, I don't know, I can't remember what he said, but it was, I wish I had.

• 1:31:20Speaker 07

  It seemed more casual than what it was.

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess. I mean, in retrospect, what he was talking about was uprising, but, but it wasn't relayed to them, it was relayed to them through Afghans, in kind of a convoluted manner.

• 1:31:34Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:31:34Speaker 06

  I said, I'm sorry, I haven't heard anything. And I went in, I remember talking to the guys, my team, and they were like, no, we haven't heard anything. And then I was like, okay. And so Paul was like, okay, fine. And then he went back, presumably to talk to. Major Mitchell, or Kurt Sontag, or one of those guys, I don't know. And then I went to get that stuff. And when I came back later in the afternoon, the comment was, I'm glad you're back. I wish you'd been here. Greg said that, I think. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, there's something going on at the fort. I had to send Glenn, the medic, the other medic, there was two, actually a PA, they're both PAs, to the fort to investigate. And he went with the Brits.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  And I kind of glossed over some things. But the night before, the SBS detachment had arrived. I didn't even know we were there. And there was some shooting outside. We went to kind of battle stations, 100% security. And all of a sudden, I heard British accents. Chatted this guy out, figured out he was a medic, you know, British, British.

• 1:32:34Speaker 08

  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.

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  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.

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

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

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  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.

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• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  So they had gone in with Mark Mitchell, Glenn had, but you know Greg had to stay because we had to guard the the equipment and and then I was out getting you know a distributor cap for the vehicle. So we were trying to take stock of what was going on and then shortly thereafter Dave showed up and it was right at like gloaming right at dusk and Dave was uh you know he was not in his he was usually a pretty jovial carefree kind of you know happy-go-lucky guy and he was not and he had dirt all over him and he had this AK and I knew he didn't have an AK he didn't carry an AK he just carried a pistol he had a Browning

• 1:34:44Speaker 06

  High Power. So I'm like that must be Mike's AK I remember thinking and it was covered in dirt I mean he clearly something had happened and I was like Dave what happened and he went on and started telling me the story but it was sort of in bits and pieces and it was all about the the the Daghestani guy that bat or something like that you know it was bits and pieces I'm trying to put it together and of course I'm going okay there's a fight going on you know where's Mike and um and then he said Mike got out the so-and-so the Uzbek my friend told me he got out I talked to him he got out I said okay so I was hopeful as we all were and then you know I don't know how much time

• 1:35:25Speaker 06

  elapsed and then the Brits came back with Mitchell but we were in a different floor so the Brits came back I didn't see Major Mitchell or any of those guys and uh they came up and they said hey are you Dave and he's like yeah I said you know and they said okay good oh all right mate we got you Dave where's Mike and said we don't know and he said oh wow and then they sat down and we're just sort of relaxing it kind of collapsed down there leaning up against the wall and then there was a Steph Bass was there and he's American and I started chatting with him and uh Steph was uh like hey man it was bad in there like he was telling me about it and I was sort of and he was very he's

• 1:36:08Speaker 06

  kind of a nonplussed kind of guy but he was he was like man it was bad in there you know and he's told me the whole thing and then Glenn of course was more animated and he was like He was going off on this guy and that guy, because the Afghans, because at one point they'd been introduced to the fort right in the line of fire. And he was livid about that, which I totally understand, and he was, he was just going off about that. But anyway, heard about all the JDAMs had been dropped, uh, but I, I wasn't there, you know, and I was like, God damn it, you know? So, um, they decided to pull back after that initial push in. They dropped the JDAMs, which turned out to be decisive, as I understand it, in terms

• 1:36:49Speaker 06

  of shattering the potential of the enemy to take the whole compound. Hmm. And the next morning, I saw that, because there were just, you know, corpses everywhere, and the trees were decimated, and our vehicle was like a cheese grater, and, and there was just, it was ma- it was a real fight. Um, so that night, um, I remember, I said, I'll, I'll watch the radio, you know? And, uh, we're going first thing in the morning, but right now, we're gonna regroup. And so, the MR sat rings. And, uh, I pick it up, it's like three in the morning, someone in the States, and they're like, hey, how's it going? My name's Phil. I said, hey, how you doing, Phil? And he goes, how's it going, buddy?

• 1:37:33Speaker 06

  And I said, uh, it's, uh, it's, you know, I don't know what I said. And, um, but he was trying to get information out of me to figure out what the status was for Mike and Dave. And I said, well, Dave's been returned, but we haven't found Mike yet. And, uh, but he kept kinda pushing me, like, to extrapolate. And I said, I don't know. And then finally, I kinda, I was starting to get a little frustrated, and I said something like, well, this is what Dave told me. And it was, it was very kinda cynical, like, you know, you could infer from that, that, you know, that, you know, whatever. So, uh, and then he hung up, and then that was it. He said, hey, talk to you later, hang in there. I said, we're going in the morning. He said, okay, I'll relay that.

• 1:38:18Speaker 06

  Well, what I realize now, I didn't know at the time, that information went to Guy X, who ended up briefing, eventually getting the director, eventually briefing the president. So, but they didn't tell me that. I probably would've comported myself differently. Right, right. If someone had asked me that, I would, but I was pretty frank. And, um, the next morning, we went in. There's a little bit of a F up, breaking contact between us and 3rd Battalion Headquarters. And as a result, they got in there before us and we came in right behind them, but then I didn't know where they were. And so, we ended up in a different part of the fort vis a vis the command element, which was led by Major Mitchell.

• 1:39:02Speaker 06

  And there was a T-55 tank, you've probably seen in some of the photos, that was firing into the southern courtyard, but it was up on a, there was a ramp, so it was up on the parapet firing into the southern courtyard, a distance of maybe 300, 400 meters, maybe. And so, we're trying to figure out and get our bearings, and it's Greg and I. And Greg said, "Well, you know, this is smart." He said, "Hey, first things we're set up the radio, get comms, make sure they know we're here, and then we'll go from there." And, you know, there's like bodies, that was the first time I'd gotten up close to guys that looked like they were friendly that were killed, and there were some Hizar guys that were dead. And I was like, "Okay."

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  And anyway, so I got comms with the base, and I said, "Hey, we're here, and this is what's going on." And then we keyed the mic, like, you know, you could hear all the gunfire, there was this cacophony of gunfire, and you didn't know where it was coming from, and it's a very, sort of asymmetric kind of structure, you know, so every turn there was something, you know, you didn't know. So, you didn't know where the gunfire was coming from. And we hadn't been there that long, and I established comms, and then all of a sudden, I told Greg, I remember saying to Greg, I said, "I think 3rd Battalion guys are over there, so we probably need to link up with them." And right about then, I think we were getting up, we were just about to fold up the antenna

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  and put it in this backpack, and...

• 1:40:32Speaker 06

  And all of a sudden, I saw this shadow. It was a nice day, you know, maybe like below sixties. Shadow cast itself across the wall of the fort in front of me, like just like that, a flicker. And then other peripheral, uh, my right side peripheral vision, I saw what looked like a giant black lawn dart, just for a split second. And I remember thinking, what the hell was that? And then all of a sudden, this horrendous explosion that you see in the, you can see the video, it was taken from the outside of the fort. And we were, people don't believe this, but we were 170 meters away. And there were guys a lot closer, uh, some who were wounded pretty, pretty badly and some who, Afghans who were killed. Anyway, so we, you know, got in the prone position and then there was all sorts of

• 1:41:16Speaker 06

  like second, you know, secondary missiles. And I, the one thing I didn't know about that, cause I remember training like, you know, Ernie Tabata, I don't know if he was still there at the Yeah. Q course, but he would always talk about what's the biggest danger, secondary missiles. I remember thinking about him, secondary missiles. And I, I like got down and all these things are landing on me and they're hot. They were just like burning into my back and, and I thought for half a second I'd been hit, but I wasn't. It was just like earth, there's so much energy in that bomb, you know, and it just rained on us. So we brushed that off, kinda like the Blues Brothers. And then, um, I'd seen also, this is the part that really kinda, I felt like it was intimidating. I saw a big chunk of something hit the wall in front of me. It was like gray, black smoke.

• 1:42:01Speaker 06

  Pam, that must've been a giant chunk of shrapnel from that bomb. And I thought, God, thank God, it will, you know, it's just blind luck where you are in the structure, whether you're gonna get hit or not, the way that thing fragments. But the good news was that it hit at the base of this, this wall. So to an extent that served as a sump in my, my view, that just kind of absorbed a lot of the, the blast. But still, it was a huge, you know, net explosive weight. So, um, the tank was flipped, as you probably know, the turret on those tanks that we've seen in Ukraine, it comes off and, you know, the whole tanker was killed. And, um, everything was rubble, then a bunch of equipment was lost and, uh, there were several wounded who had to be evac.

• 1:42:44Speaker 06

  So then the next, you know, several hours were spent evacing people.

• 1:42:50Speaker 06

  And um, yeah, we were left actually accidentally, we were left behind in the fort, Greg and I. So Greg, Greg was pretty upset about that, which is understandable. He's like, "They left us, man. Your guys left us." And I said, "Well, they didn't do it on purpose." But we were gone and literally we were on the radio and uh, the dust cloud had just settled. And then the, one of the Brits came to me and he was running and he was covered in dust. He looked like a cartoon character, just his eyes were, he had blood in his ears. And he, he ran up to me and he was yelling, "Get on that radio and call that bastard off. He just dropped a bomb on us." Mm-hmm. Because the, the initial impression I had is that it had been a 107 or something that had hit some of the mines in one of the rooms. Cause a lot of those rooms were

• 1:43:34Speaker 06

  packed with stuff and that had had secondary and that blew up. And he said, "No, no, it was a bomb." And so I had to call back to the Siege of Sotif and relay to the guy who answered to go to the joint fires element, get a hold of Kmart. Cause I wasn't talking to the AWACS. Right. Tell that pilot to cease fire, to stop drop, you know, that, that you had, we had friendly, well, he said first, "We have," I think he said, "We have casualties." So I relayed that to them. And so, you know, later on, I got the rest of the story on the other end. But they relayed the message, the pilot stopped what he was doing and, and

• 1:44:13Speaker 06

  then we uh, started to, I guess, uh, triage the guys at least um, as best they could over there. But you gotta remember, I didn't know where they were. Right. So I didn't know that how many guys were killed or how many guys were hurt. All I saw was a giant plume of dust. And it was big enough structured, you couldn't see that far. And that's how we got left. Cause I remember, I looked over my shoulders on the radio and they were there. And then all of a sudden Greg's like, "They left us." And I looked back and they were gone. And uh, so we had to get to our vehicle. I remember we go to the vehicle, we had this uh, at that point, we got a new vehicle. It was a little Toyota minivan that was parked on the very end of the gate. And it was all bubbled up from the overpressure, but the windows strangely were not blown out. It

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  was weird. And all of a sudden, out of the, the dust comes this giant Brit named Jono and uh,

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  He must have been from like, I don't know, Newcastle or something like he had this really thick accent. And he was like, your bloody door on the sliding door of the Toyota van wouldn't work. And I was just like, manhandle it. And he just ripped it off. It just came off, like the whole door and he just tossed it. He was like, looked at it and he just tossed it to the side and I say, oh, we got air conditioning now. And then we got in the thing and we had a couple of soldiers from 10th Mountain, there was a QRF element that had been called in and a couple of them had been left. So it was a bit of a goat rope getting out of there. We got out, we assembled outside and then our Major Mitchell was there, kind of got

• 1:45:47Speaker 06

  everybody together and then decided that we had to take the casualties somewhere else, that it was unsafe to land a Medagrand bird near the fort. And so that was reset. Like, and then, and then, you know, the battalion, I believe group surgeon was there fortunately and he was able to help our casualties.

• 1:46:07Speaker 07

  Oh, wow.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, and he did a great job. Anyway, they were evac'd, the casualties were evac'd, I believe that night, if I'm not mistaken, but things were happening, you know, in parallel simultaneously, right? So then that night, they got ECAS in the form of AC-130. So it's in the book. They must have worked that place for about three hours. So the next morning, I mean, it was like showers of sparks and Alex and Jare were a little closer and Alex said at one point, the, one of the bad guys was adjusting fire with the 82 millimeter mortar and then I guess the 40 millimeter Bofors got him eventually. But it was sort of like, Alex relayed the story, you know, it's, hey, they're adjusting fire on us, adjusting deflection.

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  Bracketing.

• 1:46:51Speaker 06

  He's bracketing. Well, he maybe they're bracketing, but then he said they were walking it, whatever. Then all of a sudden, nothing. It's like, oh, you got them. The next morning, it was like a medieval battlefield, because you look in the southern courtyard and there's pictures of it in the book. It was just like, you know, bodies every couple, maybe five, six feet. And they were just pretty evenly scattered about and just clumps of like rags, they look like and. I remember at that point, we were up on the corner, which would have been like the south eastern corner. And there was this little room, almost like a, like a rook tower or something like that with a little loophole. And there was a guy shooting through there.

• 1:47:34Speaker 06

  And it was the radio operator guy from Dostum's guy. It was the same guy and I remember talking to him and, and there were a couple of dead, I'll unsurrogate guys, just lying there. And, you know, so it was like, okay. And then, I don't know who killed them, but they, they were, you know, one, one of many. And I remember sitting next to, kneeling next to, I think it was Major Mitchell and these poor horses had been tied up, I never forget this, to these stanchions or whatever, right next to their, their trough, right? And they had weathered the whole AC on 30 strike. Really? Tied up. Holy shit. And they were like limping, one was limping on three legs.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, animalized people get, I mean, it's, it was terrible. They were just like limping around and a couple of them were just absolutely eviscerated. Like, I mean, like this carcass, you know? And then others were wounded and there were cat dead. Anything that had a heat signature. Yeah. That was above ground was fair game that night. Yeah. And I just remember someone saying, oh, someone should put that horse out of its misery. I'm sure someone did, but it was tied, it was still tied up and it was like limping around on three legs. Like, oh, man. And anyway, then the Afghans, if I recall, and like I said, this is kind of stream of consciousness, but they did an assault and the idea was they were going to clear, I believe from east or west to east across the southern courtyard.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  And that's when a couple of the bad guys came out because they were still alive. Yeah. That was the part that struck me is that fort, because it's, you know, made out of adobe essentially, Afghan version of adobe, it's kind of a pretty resilient thing, like sandbags. So if you were hunkered down in those, those granaries or in those stables. You you probably, I mean, you probably concussed, but you if you didn't, if you hunkered down, you didn't get, didn't catch any of the frag, you're still gonna be alive, right?

• 1:49:31Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:49:31Speaker 06

  And they were, and they were pretty feisty. I mean, they were still fighting because there was gunfire, and then the Afghans would run away, and they'd come back, and it was, it was, you know, it was very indecisive kind of fighting. And finally, after this went on for a while, I think Dostum had arrived in town, and he brought, someone brought a T-62. And one of the guys, I talked to him the other day, he's in New Jersey now, he was like, yeah, I was the guy who brought the tank. So they came in, and they started working that main gun on each, each one of those, those granery kind of stable things, and figuring out where, there was always Chechens, right? There were Chechens in there,

• 1:50:14Speaker 06

  okay, fine. Whoever they are, they're bad guys. So they were firing one into the other, and the guy, I remember he's throwing the brass out of the cupola, you know, onto the ground. And finally, it was like crickets. There was nobody, nobody left that we could tell. And except, three came out later that day, and I remember there was this pretty heavy explosion, like a boom, like that, what the hell was that? Was that the main gun? It didn't sound like the main gun. And then they brought these guys out on a tarp, who were sadly, they were killed, Northern Alliance guys, and it was a feigned surrender. I don't know what they detonated, whether it was a grenade, it was bigger than a grenade, I don't know if it was, suicide belts weren't that common then, so I don't know what it was, but the guy clacked off.

• 1:50:59Speaker 07

  Well, they had all the ordnance, they had all those mines.

• 1:51:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it could have been anything, yeah.

• 1:51:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:51:03Speaker 06

  And he killed three, three Northern Alliance guys, he killed them. And then that was it. And then later, we found out. That there were eighty six guys in the bunker that were still alive, including John Walker Lind. But no one was really fixated on the bunker. And I knew there was a basement to that, that building. But I just saw these corpses and I assumed, you know, that the Al Qaeda guys, al-unserved gay guys had kind of fought to the death.

• 1:51:32Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:51:33Speaker 06

  And that was the end of it. And, um, and then, you know, then we, uh, we found, uh, Mike, uh, actually, um, one of our alliance guys that, you know, was able to identify him. And then Mario, Sir Major V. Hill and I found him and, and then we repatriated him. And, and then that was the end of our piece of that. Now, they still went on because as I understand, um, the Afghans and some ICRC guys, I think, uh, went into the, the bunker basement. Toby's got it all in there. He's got, he, you know, he's got it in detail. But, uh, and were shot.

• 1:52:16Speaker 06

  And so then the Afghans were like, okay, we gotta deal with these guys. And so they tried to burn them out with diesel and frags or something like that and didn't work. And then they brought in a water truck and then they flooded it. And that's when they, they eventually, I think, got hyped, piped out or in surrender. Uh, and, and that was it. And there was eighty six of them. And then that's when John Walker Lind, the next day or later that evening, of course, was discovered. And then that created a whole nother avalanche. Yeah, of a chain of, of events.

• 1:52:49Jack Murphy?

  And John Walker Lind is now out of prison and writing op-eds about the war crimes, horrible war crimes that we committed.

• 1:52:56Speaker 07

  Yeah. And Afghanistan during the battle. Actually, didn't he praise ISIS and, and, yeah. But he, he writes under the name of like Yahya Lind now. I mean, he served sixteen years and got out for good behavior. Um, yeah. Yeah, uh, if you guys have not read it, uh, definitely check out Toby's book, uh, First Casually. It, it really goes into detail because he, he, you know, interviewed everybody. I mean, he had incredible access, uh, to the, to the team involved. Um, he talked a lot today about the events of that day because, you know,

• 1:53:30Speaker 07

  When Justin's talking about this prisoner uprising, it's not like a prison riot in the US. These people were taken en masse.

• 1:53:43Jack Murphy?

  And weren't really disarmed appropriately.

• 1:53:45Speaker 07

  They weren't searched, they weren't disarmed, they were just like sequestered. So, a lot of them still had all of their, you know, their weapons and it was, it was a planned uprising. And that's part of the thing about John Walker Lind is, he was very aware of this, if not a party to it, and I guess it's, I guess it's only worth 16 years.

• 1:54:08Jack Murphy?

  What was the, what was the next step for you after that? You said that was kind of your piece of it was done and you guys left at that point after you repatriated Mike Span's remains.

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, he was taken back to the States, Alex went back with it. And then there was the funeral in Arlington. In fact, I visited his tomb, his grave at Arlington last week with my son. Then there was a funeral. I actually went back for that. But what happened was the team was sort of dissolved, right? And, and everybody went off to do whatever their new mission was. And then I was still, I still had time on my clock, so to speak. So, I ended up going on another trip and joining another team down in Cantahar. And, and then I ended up in Orsgon Province. And that was during the Anaconda phase of things, so.

• 1:55:02Speaker 06

  But it was a little slower there, although there was some action. It was mainly out east in Anacondas, you know. And, and that, that whole thing. So, so I was there during Anaconda, but not in the east, you know. And then I redeployed and went back to group. And then I became HHC 5th Group Commander that summer. And then we got ready for Iraq, probably about August, so we've gone back by June or whatever, May-June, I can't remember. And then next, you know, by August, someone said, hey, that, you know, Rumsfield's signed some DEP order or something, and we're gonna go, probably gonna go after Saddam.

• 1:55:43Speaker 06

  And then that started a whole chain of events for the invasion. So very quickly became Afghanistan was a mirror of your mirror. And we're going to Iraq in the span of, you know, months.

• 1:55:53Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:55:54Speaker 06

  And then we were on the ground. I mean, fifth group infiltrated D minus two. So.

• 1:55:59Jack Murphy?

  Can you walk us through that? Where were you at during that time?

• 1:56:02Speaker 06

  Um, I was a, I was a battle captain, actually. So what happened was the, the headquarters absorbed. We grew from an HAC into a C-2-2. And so, um, we absorbed a bunch of reservist, uh, uh, augmentees who were staff guys. So they were officers mainly, but not exclusively. And we built out the headquarters. So they had a JMD, you know, and we just started filling the slots. And then we did all the manifesting and. Uh, my first sergeant, Rob Glass, um, he, he and I kind of, that was stressful, man. I mean, by the time we got on the plane and like, I think it was January 03. I remember we watched the Super Bowl.

• 1:56:43Speaker 06

  And then it wasn't long there, long after that we were wheels up. And I remember getting on the plane. It was like really cold that, that, that day. And, uh, it was just like a relief to get on the plane. And then we staged out of, out of, uh, out of Jordan, uh, the C-2-2 was in Jordan. And then we had a, two battalions in Kuwait. And then of course, all the conventional forces were in Kuwait, you know? Um, and then, um, D minus two, there was infiltrations, D minus one, there were infiltrations. The air interdiction started, uh, right around the same time as our infiltrations. It was mainly into Al Umar and into south center Iraq. So my duty was to battle track the south, southern and central, central part of Iraq.

• 1:57:25Speaker 06

  So second and third battalion, fifth group, first battalion was in Al Umar doing counter theater ballistic missile suppression, scud hunting. Uh, and that, that went on until, um. Man, I don't remember, maybe like April or something like that, or May, I think it was April. But yeah, it was pretty heady times and then, but that was a conventional fight. We were the supporting effort, you know, so it was very different. Al-Anbar was ours, along with the Brits and the Aussies, but center and south, that was, you know, 5th Corps and 1MIF. And then we had, 2nd Battalion had infiltrations into central Iraq.

• 1:58:05Speaker 06

  So they were doing strategic reconnaissance. And I remember Iran, you know, I mean, it was just, you know, I was an operator then, now I'm a staff guy and I'm briefing, you know, Colonel Mahalan every day, twice a day. My boss was Mark Schwartz, who was the S3 of group. And that was more of a staff grind, you know. I do, I do remember this, that like the day we infilled, the group infilled was D, I guess it was D minus 2. The word came down from SOX and it was, you know, execute, execute, execute, kind of like emphatically.

• 1:58:44Speaker 06

  And we're like, sir, we received the execute order. Like Mark Schwartz, if I remember, he talked to Colonel Mahalan and Colonel Mahalan wanted to pick up the satcom and talk to all three of his battalion commanders at once and, you know, say execute, execute, execute. And I remember the S6 had everything right, you know, comms, everything was right and good to go. And then like 10 minutes later it failed. And I remember he keyed the mic and I could hear the, of the satcom not working. And, and he, he just, he was like, he just like let the thing down and he looked at the 6, he was just like, all I want to do

• 1:59:26Speaker 06

  is talk to my commanders. Is that too much to ask? Or something like that. And then he turned to me, he said, call them on the MRSAT or whatever the bat phone was. And I called them and, you know, that was it. And then we battle tracked the group, you know, from, from the headquarters. And then eventually they moved the command element into what became the, I believe it was a Radwaniyah Palace complex. So the hill where, near where Saddam's sons, he had the, the lions and stuff and the zoo and stuff like that. And they set up there. And then I redeployed back to the States in the summer. And then I PCS'd a SWIC. So, you know, all the assignments things, the assignment

• 2:00:08Speaker 06

  cycle didn't change. Whether you were in combat or not, it actually got me in trouble a little bit with Branch because I wanted to stay longer and I didn't know how the game was played and I, you know, I sort of tried to pull some strings and that was the wrong answer. So, anyway, they got me back.

• 2:00:27Jack Murphy?

  Well, before moving on, I would like to ask a few of your, I guess, impressions of the difference between the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. And what was some of your takeaways were and how those two conflicts were prosecuted? I mean, very different countries, very different geographies and approaches. As you said, Iraq was largely conventional.

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• 2:02:19Speaker 06

  It starts with the difference of the countries and as most people who've served over there, Afghanistan is much more rural than than Iraq. I mean, there's plenty of rural areas in Iraq, but the preponderance of the population is urban or kind of semi-urban based in Iraq. In Afghanistan, it's not. And so the centrality, it's not customary in Afghanistan for the periphery to adhere to the center of Kabul. That they don't like that, which is the problem, right? That they don't want to obey Kabul. In Iraq, they've been under Saddam since what, late 60s or whatever? And it's a much more wealthier

• 2:03:01Speaker 06

  country with much more infrastructure and an urban, large urban middle class. And so that's socially, the society there was different. And I think that made the war different. The other thing is, we went in in the very beginning, and it's in the book, the whole, you know, option between Cofer Black's light-touch approach, or General Frank's is, let's drop the 18th Airborne Corps into into Afghanistan, which he probably thought was a light approach. That had just unfolded well, and a lot of it was put together on the fly and it worked. Iraq was a much more deliberate plan, because I remember going to 5th Corps Headquarters

• 2:03:46Speaker 06

  in October, it was right around September, October, late September, and for a planning conference. And man, that was, you know, this was like, hey, this is how it's going to be done. Op orders. Decisive maneuver, phasing, all this kind of stuff you're taught, and it was all done the American way of war, man. Decisive maneuver. And actually, it's kind of impressive. You're like, this is what the machine can do. And the machine did it. And you see it unfold, because I saw it hour by hour unfold, you know? And, yeah, it was amazing. But it was a conventional fight, and we were in Iraq, very much a subordinate or supporting effort. And that kind of, I think pissed some of the guys off. Chapped your ass a little bit.

• 2:04:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I remember A-15, a lot of them to death. They got mad, because they were supposed to hit this target in southern Iraq. It was a radio tower or something like that and they were all amped up to do it, you know. And the Brits overran it like it just wasn't a thing.

• 2:04:45Jack Murphy?

  Oh, because it happened so that so quickly.

• 2:04:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they were and they were stood down. And and they were champion of the bit because they had done some good stuff in in Afghanistan. So anyway, they ended up getting plenty of plenty of work.

• 2:04:59Jack Murphy?

  Down the line, yeah.

• 2:05:00Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, but but at the time they were they were, you know, they were pretty miffed. But anyway, you know, the whole thing unfolded and then there was that big tick up up near Carbala. So the whole focus was sort of like in ninety one to destroy the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard. They're the center of gravity. I mean, it was cog analysis, all that kind of classic, you know, schwerpunkt, you know, decisive maneuver kind of stuff that you're taught in Commander General Staff College and all that. And it culminated there and there was that operational pause and then the the Sam, you know, Fedeen and those guys had sort of sort of gotten together and they attacked us.

• 2:05:42Speaker 06

  You know, it didn't attack me, I was in the headquarters, but they attacked, you know, the vanguard there, third ID. And there was a bit of a fight there, as you remember, and then they eventually ended up overrunning Biap. There's a bit of a fight there. There was some fight, you know, there's obviously some fighting up in Baghdad. I remember that and our first casualty I remember was was Sergeant Livesay. I remember that because we had to try to coordinate evacuation and it was it was like on a line between the Marines and the Army and that created some confusion. It was it was bad. And anyway, so other than that, though, it was, you know, we quickly overran Baghdad. The original plan had been to create these tactical assemblies around Baghdad.

• 2:06:27Speaker 06

  But events overtook itself. General Blount did the famous thunder run and, you know, Colonel Perkins at the time, who had become my big boss years later, he was brigade commander, armor guy. So they took Baghdad was taken and and then it wasn't probably until.

• 2:06:48Speaker 06

  Later that summer, the first kind of ID started occurring, like very, you know, unsophisticated.

• 2:06:54Jack Murphy?

  How did, um, I'm, I'm interested, how, how did the ODAs perform during the invasion? Because I feel like most of the accounts we have of this are actually from the invasion during Desert Storm. We've heard about some of those ODAs and what they were up to. I feel like, not so much, maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a book I missed, but I feel like there hasn't been a whole lot out there about the special forces role during the 2003 invasion.

• 2:07:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I, I don't know why, that's a great question, actually. I think it might've been kind of subsumed or shattered.

• 2:07:25Jack Murphy?

  By how big the military effort was.

• 2:07:27Speaker 06

  Well, I think if the insurgency hadn't become what it became in 04 or really 05, you might've heard more about it. But there were so many other things going on and it continued to go on and transitioned from, you know, decisive maneuver to the counter insurgency campaign. Yeah, you heard about like, was it 525 in Desert Storm that was compromised and they had the big tick with.

• 2:07:54Jack Murphy?

  Huge firefight.

• 2:07:55Speaker 06

  Huge firefight and were able to, fortunately were able to exfil. A lot of it was similar, I mean, they had SR, the difference was they were infilled with vehicles, they were not infilled by foot. So they had mobility and they were moving around and the biggest risk you had, quite frankly, was friendly fire. I, I think that was more of a risk. There was a couple of close calls that fortunately worked out, but, uh, but you know, when you have a giant force moving forward and you've got KIA warriors screening forward and they're looking for targets, you know, and you're in a non-tactical vehicle, even if it's marked with, properly with VS-17 panels, you look like Saddam Hussein, you know? So, uh, so anyway, there's some close calls, I recall about that, but, but it's basically

• 2:08:40Speaker 06

  strategic reconnaissance, looking over key, um, uh, crossing points in the river, where bridges were, stuff of that nature. Karbala Gap was a big one. And then Al-Anbar, and then 3rd Battalion came into Baghdad during the whole reduction of Baghdad, if I recall. I didn't follow that as closely. And then boom, we were set up, hey, you guys are at Rabuniya Palace complex, you know, that this whole. The structure that became Iraq that we all knew was, was, was coalescing, right? And then it was quickly like new rotations came in because there were leaving, third ID was coming, or was it third, no, it was a third ECR, but at the time it was Colonel

• 2:09:24Speaker 06

  McMaster was going into Al-Qa'im and all this stuff was moving on and there was a whole new OIF rotation coming in. And I left and I went back in the summer of oh three, I went to SWIC and then.

• 2:09:35Jack Murphy?

  And so you were the, you were the gig pit guy, as you told me earlier.

• 2:09:38Speaker 06

  I became, I became the commander of the eighteen X-ray program and I didn't know I was going to be that because originally the plan was, um, I was going to be a eighteen Alpha instructor, or at least that what the assignments guy told me. But anyway, I showed up late because I, I pulled some strings, I stayed longer in, uh, with the group.

• 2:10:00Speaker 07

  So you were in the doghouse?

• 2:10:01Speaker 06

  I was, but I didn't even realize until I got there, but like, ah, you know, whatever deal was struck and whatever assignment you had, and then you get, um, my buddy Pete was leaving the X-ray program and it had been around before as a National Guard program. And then in oh two, I believe, after nine eleven, when they had to ramp up the production of SF guys, I think it was seven fifty was the aim at the time, the, they, they expanded the program. So I inherited that in the summer of oh three. And, uh, actually it was, it was, it was a good prep, I thought, for selection. I mean, like, I wish I'd gone to that.

• 2:10:45Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm. Physically, you did a really great job preparing, you know, these young guys for selection.

• 2:10:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, there were some, um, risks there because it's brag and, and we like, we wouldn't run selection, uh, we wouldn't run the training, uh, POI in August because it's so hot.

• 2:11:02Speaker 07

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 06

  And we had to watch that, heat casualties, you know, obviously that was my biggest fear. And it was always, uh, it was never the hottest day when you have a heat casualty and it was never, not necessarily the least fit guy. I remember this one soldier we had, X-ray candidate, he, uh, he was a super fit, fast runner and, uh, he went down on the five mile run and I was really worried about him. He, he ended up being fine, but that was, that was a nightmare. And then land navigation, a lot of guys don't realize that whether you do it. Benning or that's a lot of work and that's a lot of managing people and it's kind of a thankless job, but we had a huge training area. They had taken over an area that had

• 2:11:46Speaker 06

  been leased. It was leased to the government by the Rockefeller family. I can't remember. Some rich family owned the train. It was a big piece of real estate. They called the northern training area. Great for training land ab and we would run a nine hour land ab examination, mini star, we called it. And that was great. That was great training. But the problem was you always had a couple guys who'd come up, you know, missing the index. So then I'd have to call a helicopter in sometimes to find them. And then finally I got frustrated that and I just told people, I said, if cadre catches you sleeping, you're dropped from the course because you're a safety hazard.

• 2:12:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:12:25Speaker 06

  Because guys would come out of the wood line without a bead of sweat on them at like nine fifteen, index was zero nine. Where you been? Oh, I was trying my best to get here, Sergeant. Yeah, it's like July in North Carolina with a ruck on. You don't have a bead of sweat on. You've been sleeping.

• 2:12:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Speaker 06

  And so anyway, I don't know. I'm, that was the part that was tough was coming up with rules and then you had to stick by them because I was, that was a very big thing to me is that if I'm going to put out a rule, it has to apply evenly to everybody.

• 2:12:59Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 2:13:00Speaker 06

  And where it became interesting was, and so I was pretty, pretty ruthless. I remember, not ruthless, it was, it was hard and fast. I remember there was this guy, he was a really good student, but he was caught sleeping.

• 2:13:12Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  And the rules were the rules. And I remember the cadre on the, on the mic were like, we caught roster number so and so, cold busted sleeping. And, and he didn't know I was listening. And, uh, I'm sleeping, huh? And then they came back and I said, he's gone. Like, well, you know, he's really good. I said, I'm sorry, rule, you know, if I'm going to apply it to all.

• 2:13:34Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:13:34Speaker 06

  Hundred and fifty guys.

• 2:13:35Speaker 07

  It's sort of get preferential.

• 2:13:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can't, you like the guy? I got it, but he broke the rules. He'll come back and he'll do fine.

• 2:13:42Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:13:43Speaker 06

  Um, but yeah, that was tough. And then I'd say the, the other thing was, um, Yeah, letting guys go that really wanted to be there, but it broke in the rules, just had a bad hair, got hurt. That was, that was, that was tough. Cause you could see it, you know, there, you know, it was heart wrenching for them and to an extent for me. Um, yeah.

• 2:14:04Speaker 07

  Did you guys ever like think that, I mean, was there, with, when people go missing and it becomes like a safety hazard, was there a reason that you didn't put like BFTs on them or something like that?

• 2:14:15Jack Murphy?

  I don't think you had them at that time.

• 2:14:16Speaker 06

  We didn't have them, so that's a good point. That was coming about, I forget the nomenclature on the thing, but we actually had a guy from Sunto, a Finnish guy come out and meet with us and they were pushing whatever their, their technology was. But we had, we eventually had a device, but that came about like as I was transitioning.

• 2:14:36Speaker 07

  I see, okay.

• 2:14:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it was very much, uh, emerging, right? Uh, but you know, maybe like oh, oh six, maybe, oh five? I can't remember. But yeah, that was a huge problem. And then we had ATVs and we had to run the roads. You had to quickly mark all the points in a period of, you know, between the end index and the new start. And guys got hurt on ATVs, that was a whole nother issue. So there was a lot. I mean, there was a lot of movement.

• 2:15:04Jack Murphy?

  I can't let you go either without telling us about the gig pit.

• 2:15:07Speaker 06

  Okay, so the gig pit was a, uh, venue that was, that was set up before I got there. And it was simply, uh, like a kiddie pool, um, about, you know, two feet deep, if I remember, with sandbags and, you know, with water, right? And it was muddy, because it was, you know, whatever. It was a mud pit and, um.

• 2:15:38Jack Murphy?

  And this is where students were physically corrected?

• 2:15:41Speaker 06

  There were times when, yes. And I gotta be honest with you, I don't know, maybe, you know, I'd, I'd get, uh, thrown in prison today for doing that. But at the time, we had issues with, uh, these were young guys. They were out of basic training. And honestly, there was kind of uneven.

• 2:16:00Jack Murphy?

  Some discipline issues.

• 2:16:01Speaker 06

  Right? And so some philosophy, the old SF guys would say, well, you know, it's all, we need to treat them like.

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  Big boys, and if they fail, then you kick them out. The problem was, I couldn't just kick them out.

• 2:16:16Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:16:17Speaker 06

  So, and it was a collective thing, so.

• 2:16:20Speaker 07

  You couldn't kick them out because like there was a mandate to get more people into SF?

• 2:16:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I couldn't just arbitrarily, or even on cause, relieve a guy unless it was on our violation.

• 2:16:30Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 2:16:30Speaker 06

  Because that was not my purpose. My purpose was to prepare them for selection. And then selection did that. So it was not selection. That was very clear. The group commanders were clear about that. This is not mini-selection. This is not filtration. This is preparation. And so, fair enough, right? But the problem was, you have all these young guys. At one point, we'd have three hundred something students because you have a waiting training guys, med hold. I mean, it was a management issue. And, um, and you go in, and they were living in the barracks that had been kind of refurbished, World War II barracks. And there was, you know, I mean, you know, young guys, I mean, they're just gonna be doing stupid stuff and, and the place would be a mess. And, and you'd take them out and do

• 2:17:13Speaker 06

  some pushups and wouldn't, wouldn't correct. So it was sort of an escalation of discipline kind of thing. And the gig pit was the ultimate, um, octagon and whatever. The ultimate corrective action that, that was at our disposal, short of kicking a guy out. But I, you know, like I said, there was, there were certain hard and fast rules that, that applied.

• 2:17:36Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:17:37Speaker 06

  Um, you know, I kicked guys out for honor violation. So guys who were cheating, because you could cheat on LAN nav, but we'd catch you and you'd be gone. Um, peers were good. I, it, the peers helped me identify some people who were problematic in terms of their integrity and stuff of that nature that you never would have caught otherwise. And then, um, yeah, and then sometimes with the cadre, uh, you had to watch that a little bit because guys, you know, guys would be guys that'd get a little carried away with PT and stuff like that. And the other thing too is, um,

• 2:18:16Speaker 06

  It's not all about PT. The problem is that when you have young guys and you have them for what's really just over three weeks and you know optimally they it's a 21, 22 day POI, I think it was 23 day POI, and then you got a little downtime and they go to selection. So you had to do a lot in a short amount of time. And so most of it, what can you imbue? You know, fitness, land navigation, some discipline, but you're not going to imbue experience. So the x-rays, from what I understand, got a reputation for being very fit, but clique-ish within their own little group because they had many of them come through the pipeline together.

• 2:18:55Speaker 07

  It's because of the gig pit. It was the man maker. They had this bonding experience.

• 2:19:00Speaker 06

  Maybe that was, maybe that was the galvan, that galvanized them. I don't know. But, but in, in the criticism I got was, it's not fair to the in-service guys because these guys have a month to prepare that the in-service guys don't. They have to do it on their own. They come back from a deployment, they, you know, they're out of shape, whatever. They got to whip themselves into shape and go, and that's not fair.

• 2:19:24Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:19:24Speaker 06

  And that's one way of looking at it. The other one was how you capture your statistics, right? So if you look at the statistics, they were very successful. But it's where you start the, the measurement, right? If you started it from basic and then were culmating and graduating in a qualification course, a little different, but the way they captured it, it was a little narrower. It's from arrival at x-ray, at the x-ray program to graduation. Or from, from, or completion of selection, being selected. So that was, that was, you know.

• 2:20:01Speaker 07

  We talked, was it, was it Ryan? Who were you talking to who said it? Because he was in that, whoever we were speaking with said they were an x-ray. And when they went through the x-ray program, they felt like selection was no problem after they had done the x-ray program. Like, like they were ready for it. They were fit.

• 2:20:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, there was, there was a high, the guys I sent to selection had a high success rate. But, you know, I had them for roughly a month, in some cases longer if they were like awaiting training or something. And what are you going to do? I had guys who were in great shape, PT, land nav, PT, land nav is PT, you know, and these guys were just fit, aerobically fit, they were strong. And they, hopefully by then, you know, they had a mental kind of toughness.

• 2:20:43Speaker 07

  For the guys who were the leadership challenges, you had the gig pit?

• 2:20:46Speaker 06

  The gig pit, which, um, and we, for a while, we had the gong show, but it was eventually done away with, which was, we felt that we didn't want people to quit without thinking it through. So it was kind of an analog to ringing the bell in the sense that if you're gonna quit, you need to do it, it needs to be a deliberate decision, and you need to explain to your peers why you're doing it.

• 2:21:11Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 2:21:12Speaker 06

  Rather than just disappearing like at Ranger School. Cause when I was at Ranger School, everyone was like, "Close your eyes." "All right, no shame. Anybody who wants to quit can quit now." And I looked through the fingers and there'd be a couple.

• 2:21:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, right.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that kind of thing. We wanted them to, we didn't want them to quit, right? So we wanted to make sure that they had thought about it. And that was the, the gong show. They, they would go up and they would explain to their peers why they were quitting and they would hit the thing and they would leave. Um, after I left, I, I don't know. All that stuff started before me. I continued it. Um, I was inherent. And then after I left, I don't, I don't know. I think, um, one thing that got better, for sure, was the understanding of kind of training modalities and, and sports medicine. Cause they brought some guys in later.

• 2:21:59Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:00Speaker 06

  That had studied that, right?

• 2:22:01Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:22:01Speaker 06

  I was, I, I was kind of brought up from the old school way is just, you know, you're gonna go PT and,

• 2:22:06Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  you know, if you're, you're sore or whatever, suck it up, right?

• 2:22:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:22:11Speaker 06

  You know, and, and there's, there's obviously a little more science to it than that.

• 2:22:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 06

  And I think it got better over time. But I don't know, I, you know.

• 2:22:18Speaker 07

  Well, I, I think, I think a lot, I don't know about the military in general, but I think a lot of the special operations units are, are seeing that.

• 2:22:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:22:26Speaker 07

  Where there are, you know, the sports physicians, there are, you know, the, the physiologists, people like that.

• 2:22:33Jack Murphy?

  Let's, uh, hit up some, uh, questions.

• 2:22:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:22:36Jack Murphy?

  From the viewers. Uh, Cypher, thank you. Rummy, two questions. Why does the CIA make up artificial political factions such as the Northern Alliance and sell it to the public like it's organic? Um, let's just start with that one.

• 2:22:51Speaker 06

  So the Northern Alliance was the name that was ascribed to what was left of the resistance to the Taliban is really what it was. And so from, you know, you know, the Afghan history, at the end of the Soviet war of aggression, for lack of a better word, Afghanistan descended into the sort of warlord chaos. And then Muammar Muharram al-Omar came on the scene. He galvanized what became the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, and he pretty much took over three quarters, four fifths of the country. What was left was the Tajiks under Ahmad Shamasud, the Uzbek's under Abduar Shidostum, Ishmael Khan,

• 2:23:35Speaker 06

  who had Tajik folks in Parke, and Mr. Mohammed Atta, who was also a Tajik, and some Hazara folks like Mr. Khalili and Mr. Mokak. That was it. And so they were collectively loosely affiliated. They were called the Northern Alliance. And they kind of cooperated, but like in a very diluted and loose way. So you had to call them something. They were not the Taliban. They were opposed to the Taliban. They became the Northern Alliance.

• 2:24:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, all political factions are ultimately are official, cobbled together by elites, right? I mean, in Syria, we put together the Syrian Democratic Forces or Syrian Defense Forces, whatever it was. I mean, you got to do what you got to do, right?

• 2:24:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it may not be coherent, but you got to give them a name to kind of define them and distinguish them from, you know.

• 2:24:27Speaker 07

  And even though they're all warlords, and they're all sort of grasping for their own power, you still want to create some sense of unity amongst them, like there's a common cause. You know, we want them to operate at least jointly for a while. You know, who knows what's going to happen? Well, we know what's going to happen.

• 2:24:48Jack Murphy?

  The second part of the question, should we have killed Bin Laden and left?

• 2:24:54Speaker 06

  I mean, yes, I mean, ideally, if we could have found him, but, you know, we know how that went. I mean, it wasn't that easy. Um, I now hindsight being 2020, we know where he was and we sort of have reconstructed his exodus into Pakistan, but at the time, we didn't know that. I mean, we, I remember asking Afghans where he, where he was in northern Afghanistan. He wasn't anywhere near northern Afghanistan, as it turned out, but we didn't know any better. Um, and then we got close to him in Tora Bora and that kind of phase in December of oh, one, but he slipped into Pakistan and then he ended up in, you know, eventually ended up in Abbottabad, as we all know. So, um, it's not, not easy, you know, it just isn't easy. That's all there is to it.

• 2:25:39Speaker 07

  And there's even the discussion, regardless of bin Laden, like our, our mission there really, I don't think had much to do with the Taliban was about AQ in the beginning. It's like, yeah, once we wiped out AQ, did we have any more business in Afghanistan?

• 2:25:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:55Speaker 07

  You know, like our invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they were different, you know, you have the, the light touch and then you have the full conventional military invasion. Both the invasions were very successful. It was just sort of

• 2:26:11Speaker 06

  Everything after.

• 2:26:12Speaker 07

  It was like, okay, well, now what do we do? And our decisions from that point forward.

• 2:26:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, it's a good point. I think it's all boils down to that old adage that was really designed for corporate America, but culture eats strategy for breakfast. I mean, you inherit, you're a victor, right? You're a conqueror, for lack of a better word. You're military success, you're militarily successful. Now you've essentially deposed whoever the alpha was, that system. Now you're the alpha. Now you got to control it.

• 2:26:46Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:26:47Speaker 06

  And I'm not, you know, Saddam was a horrible guy, for example, in Iraq, but he understood Iraq better than we did.

• 2:26:53Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:26:54Speaker 06

  Right. And so he knew, you know, through brute force, and he was an evil man, um, how to keep the lid on things. And then we went in there and I'll, I'll never forget this, because the first time I, I heard the Arab point of view, it's always weird. I went to CGSC in Kuwait, weirdly, and the Kuwaitis, who are our allies, they pulled, pulled me aside and said, you know, we despise Saddam, he invaded our country, but, um,

• 2:27:21Speaker 06

  You know, when you remove him, then you make Iran strong.

• 2:27:25Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:27:26Speaker 06

  And it's sort of that, that whole logic that I had never really thought because at the time, we were so confident, we're gonna knock him off, he's evil. The whole WMD thing, from my point of view, was how we sold the war to the UN and to the world. But, you know, I heard Tony Blair say it the other day in an interview a couple of days ago, that we genuinely believed that Saddam was evil and he needed to be deposed because he was an evil person and he committed all these atrocities and that was righteous, right?

• 2:27:54Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:27:55Speaker 06

  When we talked about the invasion of Iraq in 03, it wasn't, you need to find, I mean, the WMD was part of the thing, but it was, this is an evil guy and we're gonna take him out.

• 2:28:05Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:28:06Speaker 06

  And it's just and we're gonna do it. And that's how we viewed it.

• 2:28:11Speaker 06

  The WMD thing was, was part of it, but it was, you know, it was how we, unfortunately, we didn't get the Security Council resolution that we wanted. And that was kind of how we presented it as, as a means of justifying what we already thought was justified, at least from the military point of view. Anybody I had any dealings with, it was like, he's evil, commits atrocities, he needs to go.

• 2:28:34Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:28:36Speaker 06

  And it was long overdue.

• 2:28:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I mean, the, the, and it's, it's challenging because he is evil and Tito is evil and we see what happened to Yugoslavia, you know.

• 2:28:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 2:28:46Speaker 07

  Right? Like, we see sort of these artificial countries and Afghanistan is the same way, where it's deeply divided within and it's a, you know, a dictator or, or somebody, you know, some strong force, it's like holding this group of people that want nothing to do with each other together. And then you remove that person and then what happens?

• 2:29:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, from, from the Gulf Air point of view, many of my peers told me that he's simply a ballast, as evil as he is, he's a ballast against Iran.

• 2:29:16Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29:16Speaker 06

  And at the end of the day, as bad as he is, he's not as bad as Iran.

• 2:29:21Speaker 07

  Right. And even we thought that for a while, because we supported Iraq against Iran for quite a while.

• 2:29:25Speaker 06

  True, true, true. You're right, you're right. I think at the time, I'm just looking back and thinking of the zeitgeist, you know, it was like... It was like Psalm is evil and this is righteous. But I do remember at one point in, in oh three, leading up to the invasion. I remember talking to my first sergeant, I didn't think it was gonna happen.

• 2:29:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:44Speaker 06

  Because like the Brits were sort of wavering.

• 2:29:46Jack Murphy?

  Waffling, yeah.

• 2:29:47Speaker 06

  And even the SAS guys were like, hey, we're not sure we're gonna be here. And I remember I told, I turned to Rob, I said, you think we're gonna be? He said, I don't think it's gonna happen. I'm like, well, I don't wanna sit out in the desert for three months waiting on, you know, the UN Security Council, whatever it was.

• 2:30:03Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:30:03Speaker 06

  I can't remember, I said. And then sure enough, about a week later, it was executed, executed, executed, so.

• 2:30:09Jack Murphy?

  Uh, KT has a question. I, I don't know if this is some sort of a euphemism or something. Uh, when did you see the first music tent? In Afghanistan? I think that was for Dostum. He, he had music tents?

• 2:30:22Speaker 06

  Uh, I didn't see any music tents. You mean like, uh, I, I, so I, I didn't see any music, period. Or hear any music rather, period, uh, until I got to, uh, after Mazar fell. Uh, in fact, the first women without burkas on I saw was the women's right movement, underground movement that Dostum, that came to meet with Dostum in Shehregan. Yeah, that was really weird because I hadn't seen any women over the age of like, oh, 12, without a burka on, for like months. And then all of a sudden, we're in, in, uh, Shehregan, and these women come in. And this is a culture, this is interesting, like they come in and Jer's like, watch this, man.

• 2:31:07Speaker 06

  So they come in, there's probably like 20, 30 of them came in. They, they, they have the burkas on. They're in the room and Dostum gives a speech, like, you're free and, you know, the Taliban oppressed you, but I promise you that you will be allowed to go to, you receive an education, no barriers to advancement, all this kinda stuff, jobs, work, you know, all this kinda stuff. And they made said some things and then it was, there was like an older lady was kind of the, the alpha there and she was like.

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• 2:33:02Speaker 06

  Like, okay, and then they walked out and they left and we were like an oddity because it's like dosed them and these two like American dudes with AKs were just standing there quietly watching and they leave and then he goes, watch this. And I looked out and they come out of the building, they got the Burkes back on. Wow. And the Taliban along on. Yeah. And he goes, you know why they do that? He goes, it's like wearing a fedora in 1948. That's just what you do here. It's not, it, yeah, the Taliban enforced it. But half of them would do it.

• 2:33:32Jack Murphy?

  It's a, it's a cultural norm now.

• 2:33:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's normative. Yeah, exactly. That was, yeah.

• 2:33:36Speaker 07

  It's, you know, you're talking about Dulston and, and women and then you were earlier when you were talking how they talk, even when you're saying how they talk shit on, on the radio to each other because they're all in the clear. It reminded me of that sto- uh, story in Toby's book about when there was, when Dulston heard that there was a female pilot that was bombing them.

• 2:33:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:59Speaker 07

  And like, like starts rubbing that into their face that it's a woman that's bombing you guys.

• 2:34:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was, that was cool. I actually met, I, I, I think it was her. I met her at the Horse Soldier, uh, event a couple of years ago. Anyway, uh, yes, the angel of death or something. Um, so apparently she was the navigator, the, I think she was navigator of the Foco in the AC-130. And she was on the net and so Dulston could hear her and he said, oh, man, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta like use some, you know, whatever psy ops here. So he, he grabbed the, according to JR, I think it was JR or Scott told me this. He grabbed the, the, the Motorola and he put it up next to the embitter and he just keyed it and he goes,

• 2:34:45Speaker 06

  "Hey Mola," whatever his name was, "hey Mola," uh, maybe it was Mola Fazal, I don't know. He's like, "hey, just want to let you know, you curious to know who's killing you? Listen here." And he was just like, and, um, and supposedly this went on for a while and then he's like, you know, I don't, I'm not sure you're gonna get into heaven. You get killed, you know, by the angel of death.

• 2:35:07Speaker 06

  Something like that. I don't know. And, you know, and then they're Muslim, Afghan sensibilities. It, it, it really sunk home.

• 2:35:15Jack Murphy?

  Peter says, "Awesome guest. Really look forward to the interview. Thanks for the quality time every week. Team House. Thanks, man." Uh, let's see, what else do we got in here? How embitters worked in Afghanistan back then? They worked pretty well, didn't they?

• 2:35:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, they were new.

• 2:35:34Speaker 06

  They worked SAT, FM. Yeah, they were fine. I'm not a comma guy, but the problem was, I didn't realize this because I wasn't, we were trained at the Q course at the time. Mostly as, most of the comms training I received was OGT at the Robin Sage. We had an officer phase, but you know, quite honestly, it wasn't that great. And it was all about HF comms at the time. The 137, stuff of that nature. The SACOM was like, kind of this niche thing, but we weren't, I don't remember using it much. 104 we used, and then we get to Afghanistan and 01, it's the thing, and it's all about SACOM.

• 2:36:19Speaker 06

  So I fear, and this is, I'm sure a lot of comm, comma guys would argue the same, that you know, the, as SACOM kind of just sort of overshadowed HF.

• 2:36:32Speaker 06

  Like, you know, the skills needed to build antennas, that kind of stuff, wave propagation, all that, that stuff you were taught is just eventually kind of, kind of atropies, but

• 2:36:42Speaker 07

  It's sort of like Morse code, right? I mean, it's such a rare skill now.

• 2:36:46Speaker 06

  I remember when I heard they got rid of it, I was like, what? They got rid of Morse code and one guy's like, it's first sign of the apocalypse, man.

• 2:36:55Speaker 06

  I don't know, I mean, technology, you know, it's just, you know, it is what it is.

• 2:36:59Jack Murphy?

  Justin, I got a couple more questions here. Could I ask you to stay a little bit after for the bonus segment to talk about? I want to hear about asymmetrical warfare group.

• 2:37:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:37:07Jack Murphy?

  Connor asks, could Justin talk about any partnership collaboration with third-party nations like Iran, Pakistan during the 2001 Afghan invasion? Or was that all dealt with at a higher level?

• 2:37:19Speaker 06

  So I don't know about higher level. I'm sure there were some, I don't know, diplomacy, international diplomacy, whatever you want to call it.

• 2:37:29Speaker 06

  There was Quds Force guys on the ground in northern Afghanistan, period. And they were, he had like, Dosham had an LNO, who was from the RGC Quds Force, period. And that guy kept his distance from us, but it makes sense, like, if you're Iran, you're gonna have your guys, you know, with the Northern Alliance, right? Because you're not friends with the Taliban.

• 2:37:52Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:37:53Speaker 06

  Right? Remember in 98, they almost went to blows, when eight diplomats were killed in, I think it was Mazar Shereef. So, yeah, but they're still our enemy, right? So, they're just gonna keep their distance. Yeah, I remember seeing the guy, they were there, but the whole, the shenanigans with Iran didn't emerge until later. And I wasn't, you know, that was out of my purview.

• 2:38:18Speaker 07

  Well, that was very much like, you know, Iran fighting ISIS, and, you know, certain people trying to say, "Oh, look, they're on our side." It's like, no, they're on their side. Like, ISIS and them have very different, you know, ideals.

• 2:38:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, they're, they're, they're gonna ebb and flow, maybe they're, they're a common enemy, they're gonna collaborate for that purpose, but at the end of the day, they're diametrically opposed in terms of their theological kinda positions, right?

• 2:38:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:38:51Jack Murphy?

  Uh, last question here. Do you believe there is enough emphasis on language and cultural skills, or are guys who speak Dari, Persian, Uzbek, Pashto, etc. at a premium? I don't know if he's talking about in regards to the CIA or special forces.

• 2:39:04Speaker 06

  Oh, that's actually a great point. So, the, you know, I glossed over that, or I just admitted that. So, in the beginning, I said, "Hey, JR spoke Dari, because he had been trained in Dari, to be an Afghan guy, back in the late 80s, mid to late 80s." Dave was a, essentially, a PhD guy in Central Asian Studies, but the bulk of the military didn't train in those target languages, nor did, as I understand, the inter-agency. So, when 9/11 happened, we were, we were flat-footed, right? It wasn't a priority. Afghanistan had been relegated to the dustbin, you know, that was, it was, it was yesterday's news, and we were focused on other things.

• 2:39:48Speaker 06

  So, those language skills were critical. The problem I have with SF, just say, Army SF, I don't know about the, you know, special warfare, but... If you're going to train someone in a cat four language, you need to spend more time doing it. We try to do, we got a pipeline, we got to get guys through, you do six months of modern standard Arabic, or six months of Russian, and then you're out to group. Now, I don't know about now, I'm sure they've, I knew they changed things over the years, but at the end of the day, six months is like the bare minimum. So I did modern standard

• 2:40:24Speaker 06

  Arabic in 2009, and I did Dari years later, and I did the short expedited course, which was like four and a half months in Roz in Virginia. And I actually got to use my Dari a little bit in Afghanistan, and so that was helpful. But that stuff atrophies pretty quickly unless you immerse. And so, all the guys I've seen that are really good are guys that are able to kind of immerse. But the problem is that they train you to do the DLPT, which is sort of the King's English version of things, read newspaper articles,

• 2:41:06Speaker 06

  you're dealing with, you know, the upper-middle-class kind of Arabs, right? Right. But the guys in Iraq on the ODAs, what they, the way they approached it was, they would focus on vocab and less on grammar, and they would crash on vocab. So when they're on the range, at minimum, they have the vocabulary. Because I always thought that was the hardest part of Arabic, was the vocabulary versus the grammar, just remembering the words. Because there's very few analogs, right? You know, and so you got to remember the vocabulary or you're out of schlitz. So, I just don't think we spend enough time, I don't know if we could spend more time, but you look at Defense Attaches and all that, they spend 18 months going to Arabic school. Maybe if we focused on a couple guys, these guys

• 2:41:51Speaker 06

  have the skills and the, because not everybody, you know, it varies. Guys with the really high aptitude, you kind of earmark them and send them to modern standard Arabic, or these harder languages, and they come and they embed on the teams. And they almost invariably need to be warrants or NCOs because officers aren't on teams long enough. Right. I mean, and it's challenging because, I mean, there are like, what, like 6,000, 7,000 languages in the world. There are almost 200 countries.

• 2:42:20Jack Murphy?

  It takes a long time to build those.

• 2:42:21Speaker 06

  You know, and, and, you know, the, and, and what, you know, you train somebody in some language that, you know, you, we can't, you know, predict the wars of the future. And so, you know, you train somebody in language and they just sit around and do nothing in the military to, you know, have no benefit having this obscure language that suddenly, you know, becomes

• 2:42:43Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:42:44Speaker 06

  critical.

• 2:42:44Jack Murphy?

  Relevant.

• 2:42:45Speaker 06

  You know, yeah. And, you know, you know, and that's where like a lot of the civilians come in and also a lot of the English speaking indigenous people.

• 2:42:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:54Speaker 06

  Where, you know, you try to recruit those people as much as you can.

• 2:42:58Jack Murphy?

  We'll, uh, we'll talk about ASW in a minute, but, um, you had a, you had a stint there after SWIC and then you, uh, was telling, we were, we were talking about a little bit earlier that you had a sort of like oversight position, um, on the intel, Army Intelligence Community.

• 2:43:12Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. So I, I would, I was at the Pentagon. So it was the Office of Secretary of Defense and I was in an intel oversight job where essentially I oversaw, uh, I did some intel oversight for SOCOM. And most of that was focused on briefing the, uh, intel, the staff committees at the, on the Hill. So mainly the, the congressional staff committees, but, uh, also the Senate, Senate, you know, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. So, um, I did that, but it was a policy job. So I went, you know, that was after I was the squadron commander and I went to, uh, War College and then I, I did that job. So that was interesting. It was, um, but you're, the Pentagon, the thing that people don't

• 2:43:57Speaker 06

  realize until you work there for a while, if you're an OSD. There's fewer green suitors than there are civilians. So as a green suitor, you're sort of, in OSD at least, I felt like you're kind of summer help, you're coming in for a year or two and then you're gone. So regardless of whether these guys are former military or not, they're sort of like the, they're institutionalized and you're just coming in for a year or two and then you're gone. Whereas on the joint staff, it's different because that's predominantly military guys. You're coming in, a boss is in for a year or two and then they're gone. And then, so it kind of creates a different dynamic. I don't think it's pretty, a lot of, I can't talk about it because it was, you know, sort of.

• 2:44:39Jack Murphy?

  Spooky.

• 2:44:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, but, but yeah, it was, but it's policy, right? So you're, you're editing memos, getting your boss to endorse memos, you're coordinating with other offices and arguing and fighting them over semantics and who's going to be in charge of what. The thing about the Pentagon that's interesting is the study in internecine competition between offices, right? So they're each vying for a bigger piece of the pie. And he who, in my view, this is my opinion, this is my personal opinion, I'm here in my personal capacity, it's he who can sort of subsume more wins, right?

• 2:45:24Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:45:25Jack Murphy?

  The Borg cube.

• 2:45:26Speaker 07

  Yeah. Now, the flip side of that also, because especially since the officer, as you move up, the officer corps is very competitive, it's not just the most wins, but it's the least amount of losses, right? So how, I mean, do people, not necessarily when there is an ongoing project, when a project, like when a project looks like it might be iffy and people want to keep a distance from it, then if it's successful and people want to take the credit, like do you have to fight off like the flocks when, when something actually works that people didn't think, you know, they didn't want their name on it?

• 2:46:01Speaker 06

  Oh, I see what you're saying, like a defeat has, is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers.

• 2:46:07Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 2:46:10Speaker 06

  You mean at the like policy level?

• 2:46:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:13Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, I guess so, but for me it was, uh,

• 2:46:18Speaker 06

  yeah, probably, uh, but for me it was more, you're, you're a military guy, doing oversight, essentially checking the homework

• 2:46:30Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 2:46:30Speaker 06

  of people that you used to work with.

• 2:46:34Speaker 07

  Uh huh.

• 2:46:35Speaker 06

  So you're like the high school hall monitor.

• 2:46:36Speaker 07

  I was gonna ask you if you felt like a vice principal.

• 2:46:39Speaker 06

  A bit of like a nerd.

• 2:46:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:46:40Speaker 06

  And, and I mean, quite frankly, I mean, it's, it's, uh, you got it, there's a good reason we have oversight. It came out of a lot of bad things that happened in Congress. You know, Congress does a lot of good stuff, a lot of people, uh, politicians, but, you know, the, there's various policies and, and well, statutory law that's in place now for good reason, because bad things happen. So that's where oversight is. But, um, that was always difficult for me because they're your people, right?

• 2:47:09Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:47:10Speaker 06

  And maybe that's why, you know, I, you know, it was tough that, that you're checking their homework and, and digging into them and making them jump through hoops. And, you know, there's, there's gonna naturally be some national

• 2:47:23Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 2:47:24Speaker 06

  You remember you, where'd you come from, man? You know, this kind of thing.

• 2:47:28Speaker 07

  It's funny because I was gonna ask you if it felt like being the vice principal, but you saying hall monitor makes a lot more sense because they're your peers. They're people who

• 2:47:36Speaker 06

  I'm speaking of myself, like, like, and you gotta remember too, you know, I'm not, um, I was brought in that job like kind of sight unseen, I was, I was kind of a, you know, outlier. And, uh, all of a sudden I'm like, you know, telling these people that, that are very accomplished people like, hey, you know, this is not, you need to do differently and, and you need to do this different or you need to correct this thing and, and do that. And then they, they kind of, you know, very understandably get upset with it. But there, it's all there for good reasons. It's part of, it's kind of part of that whole check and balances system.

• 2:48:11Speaker 07

  How do you, how do you maintain your objectivity as a warfighter yourself? As somebody who had been in conflict? You know, when?

• 2:48:20Speaker 07

  If like you get why they're doing something, even if it's like out in the grave, but it's like it does like it doesn't meet the standards, it doesn't meet the laws. Like, how do you maintain, how do you maintain, did you just kind of have to like, set yourself to go, these are the laws, this is, these are the policies?

• 2:48:38Speaker 06

  No, it's, it's more, you know, in my view, it's just more interpersonal relationships, you know, like tweaking things.

• 2:48:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:48:46Speaker 06

  Hey, you know, you know, it was more a, a function of being able to get along with people without, about being overly officious, like you, sometimes you had to be, you know, laying down the law, I guess, I mean,

• 2:49:02Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:49:03Speaker 06

  be strident about things, but at the end of the day, it was sort of like, hey, I'm gonna red ink your paper. And then next week, when you return, submit the paper, it needs to have those corrections reflected.

• 2:49:16Speaker 06

  Got it, got it.

• 2:49:17Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:49:18Speaker 06

  But if you didn't red ink it, they would have sent up the freaking grammatically correct version and got away with it.

• 2:49:24Jack Murphy?

  And it's just, it's just like that. And in a sense, you're helping them out, really.

• 2:49:27Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:49:28Speaker 06

  But sometimes, I mean, some people,

• 2:49:29Jack Murphy?

  But they don't see it that way.

• 2:49:30Speaker 06

  Well, do you, some people.

• 2:49:31Speaker 07

  Right. Right.

• 2:49:32Speaker 06

  And you're not, you know, it was like I was, I did a murder, I did a 15 6 in parallel with the Bellinby murder. And I had to come back to Camp Brown as the guy had been there for a year, and then like a week later, I'm back as the, I, the deputy investigating officer. Checking, you know, now I'm that guy. And then, especially in Sawoff, it's like, everybody was cool with me, the, you know, the little dining facility, and then they said, what are you back here for? Sir, you were here for a year. Why are you back here? I'm, I'm the IO for this. And I'm like, oop.

• 2:50:08Speaker 07

  What was this murder?

• 2:50:10Speaker 06

  Do you remember in 2012, an American sergeant shot 16 Afghans and,

• 2:50:16Speaker 07

  Oh, Jesus, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I got, I got, Well, I got picked to be the deputy IO for that. The General Waddell, Breder Waddell at the time, who later became Deputy National Security Advisor. He was, uh...

• 2:50:31Jack Murphy?

  I knew that guy's PL, actually.

• 2:50:32Speaker 06

  Oh, you did?

• 2:50:33Jack Murphy?

  Well, I've spoken with him, yeah.

• 2:50:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's a, he's a nice guy. Anyway, he was a Rhodes Scholar, all this kind of stuff. He, uh, he was the IO and I was the SF guy that was, because it was, it was an infantry guy from Fort Lewis who was attached to SF. And, anyway, it's a long story, but I got back to the States after 12 months in Afghanistan and then within a week, I got asked to come back, asked to come back to do the thing and I agreed. And then, boom, I went back, went down to Canhar and I did that investigation. And, uh, that was the thing where the diners were like, "Oh, you were just here. What are you back for, sir?" Oh, the IO thing, they're like, "Hmm?" You know, I'm sitting by myself at the table, right?

• 2:51:16Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:51:16Speaker 06

  I mean, it's understandable, I guess. But, um, but yeah, that one was pretty bad. I mean, that was, that was a tough thing and, you know, we had to depose all these people. And I had a lot of respect for the, not just the lawyers, but the, um, the legal assistants, because they had to go in and transcribe every audio interview and transcribe it into writing.

• 2:51:39Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 2:51:40Speaker 06

  And that's just tedious work. And there was like 70 something people we interviewed, I remember that. Anyway, so I did that and that was, that was, you know, that was tough. Uh, but kind of similar in the sense that you're, um, you're this guy, you know, questioning, questioning authority, questioning people. And, but the way it's set up is you aren't, you don't answer to them, right? So they, I remember one time I went down to Tampa and, man, I got a ration from like old guys, like General Kearney.

• 2:52:09Speaker 08

  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.

• 2:52:24Speaker 09

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

• 2:52:35Speaker 08

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

• 2:52:40Speaker 10

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

• 2:52:46Speaker 08

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

• 2:53:06Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Chris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games and they're running a deal for all new players. A $30 coin package for just 10 bucks. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 2:53:30Speaker 03

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

• 2:53:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it went awful me. I mean, well, it wasn't going awful me. It was just going awful like for us. They were just frustrated. Right, right. Like that we were, in our view, doing our job. But in their view, we were just nerds that were just being, you know, officious or whatever.

• 2:53:51Jack Murphy?

  Eventually you did get out of purgatory, made Colonel. Can you talk, I mean, as far as you're able to talk to us about, you know, where you are now, what your job entails?

• 2:54:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I'm really a military advisor to the US Ambassador to the UN, which is very analogous to being a defense attache and a Kona space assignment. So I'm in New York City at Midtown Manhattan. So I work with the various member states and they're every, not all member states, but a lot of them have military advisors. They're colonels or generals. And they'll might have a small staff and they represent their country's equities at the UN. So a lot of countries, not the US, but a lot of countries are big contributors like Bangladesh and Nepal and Ethiopia, or formerly Ethiopia, the countries like that. And so, you know, that's what they do.

• 2:54:48Speaker 06

  Other than eternal to the country, they do peacekeeping and so they're out deployed in, you know, Mali or Democratic Republic of Congo, just in DRC, Eastern DRC, a couple of months ago. And so you go out, I go out and I inspect some of these things and then we try to correct problems and advise the ambassador on peacekeeping. But the UN is sort of, understandably, the Security Council is the tier one and then peacekeeping sort of is like DOS running in the background. It's just standard, kind of like, we got eighty plus thousand people deployed, they're in all these tough countries doing, you know, what they're doing. Thankless jobs. And it's kind of a thankless job.

• 2:55:30Speaker 06

  But honestly, in my view, for some of these countries that are less, let's just say, have less resources than we do, for them, it's also a way of funding their military.

• 2:55:45Jack Murphy?

  It gets their soldiers paid.

• 2:55:47Speaker 06

  Their soldiers, they get reimbursed for stuff. So from their point of view, it's a, it's a, it's a transaction, right? So they go and they do this and they're able to fund their military and it, it works for them and it works for the UN. And, um, and the Western countries, to varying degrees, do peacekeeping. Um, as you probably know, uh, the US, we do a little bit, but mostly we support, we do capacity building, which is very important. Um, and, uh, and, and so that's our role. But, you know, we're out doing a lot of other things around the world, so we let other countries do that and it, it seems to work out. It's far from perfect, but, um, you know, it, it's, um, it's what I do and, and, um, you know, and it's, it's, it's an interesting job.

• 2:56:31Speaker 06

  It's, uh, definitely different than anything I've ever done before.

• 2:56:34Jack Murphy?

  Are, uh, are things a little bit tense over there at the UN with everything going on in the world right now?

• 2:56:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, the the Ukraine thing is, you know, front and center, as you all know, and I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon, and nor should it. I mean, it's it's um, it is what it is. I'll say, you know, it's interesting, there's a lot of countries, particularly in Africa, complain, they'll be like, well, you know, it's horrible what's going on in Ukraine, but you know, there's equivalent

• 2:57:00Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:57:00Speaker 06

  things going on all the time where we are, and you guys don't seem to care.

• 2:57:05Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:57:05Speaker 06

  That's like, one of the the constant refrains you hear.

• 2:57:08Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 2:57:09Speaker 06

  And I've been out to DRC, and man, Eastern DRC is rough. I mean, it's beautiful, like, the train and the the environment, the weather is actually very nice, because it's high altitude, but tropical. Um, but man, there's some bad stuff going on there.

• 2:57:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:23Speaker 06

  Um, and so, I found, I find that piece fascinating. I like going out to those kind of places. I've always liked the developing world. I just find it interesting to go out and see that kind of stuff, and fly around in MI-17s, and you know, into the jungle, and all that kind of stuff, you know. Um, but, you know, I'm an old guy now, and um, my days of being a team leader are long, long gone, right? So this is the closest thing I can get, you know.

• 2:57:50Jack Murphy?

  You've had a uh, you've had an amazing career, and now you're you're less than a year away from retirement. Uh, do you have any, any inkling, any plans of what the future holds for you?

• 2:58:03Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, I mean, for me, I'm I'm pretty anchored to the area here. Uh, my family's from the area. Um, I, but, you know, the gravitational pull for guys like us that with military backgrounds is sort of the Beltway, right? Um, but I don't want to do that. So I'll probably end up in, you know, one of the financial institutions here. There's a bit of a

• 2:58:24Jack Murphy?

  You come, come down here, onto the team house, and work with us every so often.

• 2:58:28Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:58:29Jack Murphy?

  We'll have you.

• 2:58:29Speaker 07

  Come on, you you think that JP Morgan gives you a Lefroy?

• 2:58:34Speaker 06

  Well, I don't, I'm scared, man, because I don't know anything about that stuff, but there's a network of vets in New York.

• 2:58:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:39Speaker 06

  It's not big, but it's it's strong, and so, uh, it's it's something I'm gonna leverage.

• 2:58:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, those those organizations, a lot of those organizations have, like, very strong, uh, veteran hiring programs.

• 2:58:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, Bank America.

• 2:58:52Speaker 07

  Particularly for officers. Right, Jack?

• 2:58:54Jack Murphy?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:58:56Speaker 06

  I mean, I don't know yet. I'm looking at a couple of options. I'm a member of the American Legion over at the New York Athletic Club, which is great. So there's

• 2:59:04Jack Murphy?

  Oh, at NIAC? I didn't know there was an American Legion chapter there.

• 2:59:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, NIAC's sort of, yeah, the American Legion is under the NIAC and there's, there's

• 2:59:12Jack Murphy?

  I'm a member of the one in Hoboken.

• 2:59:15Speaker 06

  Oh, really? Okay, okay. Haven't been to that one. Is that?

• 2:59:18Jack Murphy?

  It's very nice. They just redid it. Really nice place. The top four of it is like housing for homeless veterans. Yeah, they do a lot of good stuff.

• 2:59:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think we were pretty relatively, well, COVID really was tough, right?

• 2:59:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:34Speaker 06

  So the core group of people that come out, but it's great and they're pretty tight. Actually, my old group commander from AWG has brought me in.

• 2:59:44Jack Murphy?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:59:44Speaker 06

  So that's how I got pulled in and he's from Staten Island, so it's good.

• 2:59:47Speaker 07

  Let's, we're gonna cover this in the bonus segment, so for our Patreon subscribers, you'll see this.

• 2:59:53Jack Murphy?

  Link is down in the description.

• 2:59:54Speaker 07

  And if you're not, hey, join us, you know, support our booze habit, pay our rent, you know, help us out, help a brother out. You know, you can get in cheap, ground floor. But tell us a little bit about Asymmetric Warfare Group, because we'll talk about this more in the bonus segment.

• 3:00:10Speaker 06

  So Asymmetric Warfare Group was inactivated in the past year, unfortunately. It was a great experiment in kind of a, like a unicorn sort of unit. I came in in 2013. I was not a former unit member. I was brought in as to be the three. So Colonel Pat Mahaney, the American Legion, he was a group commander. He was looking for some fresh blood, so to speak. So he brought me in from outside. I became the three and then I went over to

• 3:00:47Speaker 06

  one of squadron battalions. It was an exigent initially of the Iraq and Afghan wars, mainly Iraq and then Afghanistan. When I showed up, It was, had a strong presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We had hubs in Baghdad. Well, that one was actually reduced when I got there. I'm sorry.

• 3:01:11Jack Murphy?

  We'll, we'll, we'll hit this up in the bonus.

• 3:01:13Speaker 07

  But it's, but just an overview. It was started pretty early, right?

• 3:01:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, like oh, four, oh, five. The first time I heard about it was in oh, late oh, four. They started recruiting people. I didn't go. I, I thought about it, but I didn't go. Um, and a couple of guys I knew went and, and, um, but they were, you know, the two man teams would go out and they would, they were operational advisory teams and they would advise units on how to overcome asymmetric threats and stuff like that. It was a product of the whole evolution of IED.

• 3:01:45Speaker 07

  There was a lot of guys from like tier one. It was, uh, from tier one units. It was, it was a very interesting experiment and.

• 3:01:52Jack Murphy?

  We'll, we'll get into that in, in two seconds on the bonus segment. Here, give me your glass. I'll fill you up there. Next week, next Friday, we're going to have a, uh, former CIA paramilitary operations officer on, uh, Kim Kipling is his, uh, pen name, talking about another legendary paramilitary officer, Dutch. Um, so we'll have him on the show next week.

• 3:02:17Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 3:02:17Jack Murphy?

  And, um, that's it. Until next time, we'll see you guys then.

• 3:02:22Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:02:36Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:02:47Speaker 08

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

• 3:02:52Speaker 10

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

• 3:02:58Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:03:18Speaker 13

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• 3:03:42Speaker 03

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• 3:03:48Speaker 07

  Thank you for joining us tonight. Thanks everybody, we appreciate it. Thank you for having me. And hey, check out Toby's book. Yeah, definitely.

• 3:03:57Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:04:12Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:04:23Speaker 08

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

• 3:04:28Speaker 10

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

• 3:04:34Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:04:54Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris mornings, pumpkin spice latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spinquest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players. A $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today.

• 3:05:18Speaker 03

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• 3:05:24Jack Murphy?

  The full, Justin's full story is in there. And I mean, Toby obviously interviewed all the other OGA guys who are out there. So it's a really.

• 3:05:32Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:05:47Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:05:58Speaker 08

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

• 3:06:03Speaker 10

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

• 3:06:09Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:06:29Speaker 11

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• 3:06:51Speaker 03

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• 3:06:59Jack Murphy?

  Well done, Buck. So we'll see you guys next time. Take care.

• 3:07:05Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:07:20Speaker 09

  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.

• 3:07:31Speaker 08

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

• 3:07:36Speaker 10

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

• 3:07:42Speaker 08

  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.

• 3:08:02Speaker 11

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• 3:08:26Speaker 03

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• 3:08:32Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 3:08:45Speaker 01

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• 3:09:30Speaker 01

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• 3:09:32Speaker 11

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• 3:09:57Speaker 03

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• 3:10:02Speaker 14

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