#252 Matt Bissonnette - SEAL Team 6 Operator’s First-Hand Account of Operation Neptune Spear

28:40I went to college after college, joined the Navy, right, enlisted. I thought they, my parents thought I would have lost focus on the SEAL thing. And no, I was just as amped up. I tried Army ROTC in college, so they sent me to jump school, Army ROTC. So I kind of got a little sidetracked thinking, okay, maybe I'll do this ROTC thing. It was an officer in the Army, and I went to jump school as a cadet. and I'm at the chow hall at jump school and I'm sitting across from these seals. Little did I know they just graduated buds, right? But I think they're hairy-chested frogmen and they're making fun of my stupid army haircut.

29:22And I was devastated. I was like, fuck, these guys are making fun of my hair. Like if I continue with this army thing, I'm going to go have to do the haircuts and boots and like that's a thing. And I had read all these books about the Navy. I was like, no, man, I came back from jump school, my cadet status. I went to my little ROTC boss and I'm like, hey, man, I can't do this. I've always dreamt about the Navy and that's what I'm going to go do. They made fun of my fucking hair. I'm out. I'm out. This is bullshit. Yeah, that was it. Left the ROTC, graduated and then enlisted in the Navy. So you did, you got your degree.

29:59Yep, yep. What's your degree in? Social science. Nice, nice. Waste of time. Waste of time. Waste of time. Waste of time. Never used it. But I had it. I went to the recruiter's office, enlisted. They're like, great, you have a degree. You can join as an E3. So E3, Torpedo Man. It's the shortest A school I could find, right? Nice. All my buddies did Gunner's Mate, and they're like, oh, six months. Don't do that. So Torpedo Man, I think it was six weeks, nine weeks, something like that. And then straight to Bud's, just glass 226. Nice. And then I made it straight through. So that was... And you were the Honor Man, correct?

30:42They say. Why'd you get Honor Man, do you know? I don't know. Somebody else picked me. Oh, right. Come on. You got a good inclination. I like to work hard. That's it. Did you find Bud's challenging at all?

30:58Yeah, of course. Of course, Bud's is challenging. I'm not going to say Bud's is not challenging, but I had read 6 million books and, and set my expectations here. And so I think I had set them so high. Maybe it was a little, little down from where I had set them at. Didn't mean it wasn't hard. Right. One of my best friends, every morning he'd wake up, he's like, fuck this, I'm quitting today. And then he'd never quit. But every morning he'd tell me he was quitting where, where me, I was like, okay, if I, if I allow myself to think that every morning, every morning, he's like, this, I'm out of here.

31:30Fuck this. And he'd never leave. I'm like, listen, you got to fix this, because you're really rubbing me wrong. Lying to me. Every morning, you're fucking with me and you're not quitting. I was afraid if I ever entertained those thoughts, I'd quit. So I was like, no, not quitting. Never entertained them. And went right through. What did your parents think? I don't think they knew what to think. I think that's the part when I started lying to my parents, right? As soon as you graduate, it's like, Like, what they know is what they know, and they don't really need to know anything more for right now.

32:06Right, I graduated, nothing going on. Still pre-911. And then on my very first deployment, I was sitting in Okinawa, Japan. Watched it all transpire on my barracks television. No shit. Yeah. I mean, we were like, holy shit. Like, think about it. Your first deployment, brand new guy. Nobody in your platoon's seen any combat. Like, you know, there's the stories of guys going around that made me the little grenade up, paint them all here and there. But nobody had really done anything. And then now we watched 9-11 unfold on my television. And, right, the rest is history. What did you think when you saw that?

32:45Were you... The first one had hit by the time we had turned on the news, and by the time the second one hit, we watched that live. And there was all sorts of speculation between the first and the second. Hey, what was this accident? whatever, who knew, but by the time you watched the second plane fly in, it was the gut punch that you were like, okay, this is real. Something's happening. If that doesn't give you goosebumps and think you're going to work, something's wrong. So, I mean, I probably would have got out of the team had we not gone to, had 9-11 happened. Right? I would have done my time and got out.

33:19But now I was smack dab new guy. 9-11 just happened. We finished that deployment, came back, did another workup, and then my next deployment, we deployed right to Iraq for the kind of initial invasion up into Baghdad. Man. Dude. Still running like thin-skinned Humvees, like before the IED threat, way, way, way. What an arc of a career. So your first deployment, you're watching 9-11 happen. Your last deployment... Well, we don't count as a deployment. your last your last mission i mean fuck you take the i mean you're taking the guy out that orchestra it's just fucking wild to me that's and you're on the invasion so you what so first deployment you watch 9-11 happen second deployment you're on that invasion and you're at team five correct yep how did it feel going on the invasion um well because i would imagine i don't want to i my team three fellas that were there before us right they had done the the oil platforms and moved up inland by the time five came and swapped out with three we were just now taking baghdad and so we took baghdad and then moved into one of the palaces and spent the next the rest of my deployment running ops out of baghdad which was okay like living the dream right young frog man We got an enemy, we're going to take the fight to them, and you're new, impressionable, and gung-ho." So, away we went.

34:51Was it pretty kinetic? Yeah, for that, for going from zero before. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, my first shootouts, my first everything was that deployment. There was a lot of learning happened to that deployment, but it's still learning, because it's a Team 5 platoon It's pretty new. Yeah. Well, let's talk about what was your first, what was the first shootout? What was your first gunfight like? Was it what you had expected? Reading all the books? It's never as expected, right? You can think what you're going to think and it's never plays out that way. At least that's in my opinion. Shot through the door, shooting through the door.

35:35That was the first, first, first. Oh my gosh, they're shooting back at us right now, right? We'd assaulted a target. just hitting houses, hitting houses. And it was at the front door, and they just started pumping rounds through the front door. And that was the first time I was like, oh, okay. All right. Something's happening here. Right on. That was it. What else were you guys doing that deployment? That was it, right? We lived in the green zone, lived in one of the palaces out by Biop, Baghdad International Airport. Worked for the different intel agencies, kind of giving us targets, and we'd go do our best to roll them up, right?

36:18I thought we were pretty cool at the time. Little, you know, and then every night, you'd see these cool black helicopters flying over, and I'd go to my boss, like, hey, boss, why don't we have those little birds around? There's some... Why are we in thin-skinned Humvees right now? Why aren't we in, like, a... Why aren't we flying to these targets? Those little birds look really cool. They're like, well, you don't get those assets here. So that's when I started learning a little more about the big leagues and the different assets that came with different units. And so I had screened for my previous command before my second deployment.

36:52So I got word on the Iraqi deployment that I'd got picked up to go to training to see if I could make it into Damnic. okay so for those that are listening that don't know what damn neck is that's where seal team six development group is at so i've heard i don't know anything about it yeah you better be careful where these admirals might come after they will so so team six pops on your radar because all the assets that you tell the cool toys that they get you're seeing that and all the guys i knew at five right some of the the bigger studs that i knew would like disappear and And they went off to go see if they could screen.

37:29And so I'm like, all right, well, if I'm here, I need to try this. And so. So you got word. You got word that you got accepted to. Yeah, I'd screened before the second deployment. And then I got word, what, six, nine months later that I'd been picked up. I'd barely passed my PT test. Are you serious? Bro, we were doing an SR in Camp Pendleton. and literally they called us two days prior and they're like hey your screening test is like tomorrow morning i've been eating mres face painted living under a tree for like three days and literally three other dudes got pulled out of the field drove down to san diego and the next morning we had our pt test and and i barely passed my push-ups right right on yeah yeah a little worried about that like all right are they are they even gonna you know they even gonna pick me up because i was a slip knot and barely passed my push-ups they uh i got picked up and and then i made sure my push-ups were good for the you take a screening test day one of of training they show up and give you a hard one so right on i had to make sure i was ready for that so you passed the screen test you get it you get in there let's talk about showing up for training how was that pretty cool different right um right you go to buds you have the i'd read a whole bunch about buds i hadn't read much about this i didn't know much about this i knew buds was more of a hey don't quit check i've got i don't have that word in my vocabulary now it's okay how can can you right it's a selection and training probably more selection than training right so they want to know you have it or you don't and and day one it's shotgun blast to the face and then it's uh i I thought getting into that unit was twice as hard as Bud's.

39:22Really? Bud's was simple enough where it was like, you get the deal, right? You run that way. Don't quit. Okay, check. I got that. The selection was, okay, how good are you at what we've trained you to do? And can you make really good decisions under stress and pressure? And can you do that? It's not just about just quitting anymore. Yeah. You found that to be a lot harder. I loved it. it was much harder, right? Because now the selection process in which they are judging you on has nothing to do with you just didn't quit. Now it's okay. How good are you at the game? Right? Buds was don't quit.

39:59We'll train you some basics. Now you've been a SEAL for a handful of years. Now we want to put you to the test of what you know, and we're going to put high expectations on you. And then if you don't cut it, you're out. So I loved it, but it was very demanding.

40:19Can you say how many people you started with? Do you know? I don't remember the exact number. I would say rough numbers, 50 % washed out. 50 % washed out. And no disrespect? No, hey, you're an asshole. You don't cut it here. It's like, hey, you just don't cut it here. Go back to a team. Depending on what you failed out for, you may have a chance to kind of reapply and screen again, or you just go back and that's it. Gotcha. 50 %-ish. So when you say it's mostly selection, a little bit of training, so you have a baseline when you show up there that they have an expectation from the baseline. So are you not learning in the training pipeline?

41:02You are. And they will teach you something new every single day. Every single day you're getting something new, and it's just amazing. every single day. And if you're the guy who didn't pick it up the day prior, the next day there are, okay, now they stack something new on top and you weren't getting what they got yesterday. Okay. The next day is something more. And if you're next thing, you know, you got three of these things stacked up above you and you're not keeping up, you're not, you're not going to last too long. So what, what, what, what did you find to be the hardest part of green team?

41:33For those who don't know, green team is a training, it's the training regimen to get into development group? I think it's an individual operator's ability to identify a situation, right? It could be an elephant, a big elephant, and be able to be like, okay, I'm going to eat that elephant one bite at a time. I'm going to prioritize those bites smartly, and I'm going to start eating, right? And the hardest part of training was that. They were constantly putting big elephants in front of you, stressing you out, wanting to see how you dealt with that size of that challenge, the complexity of that challenge.

42:11Did you quit because the elephant's too big? Or did you say, okay, check, I'll eat that elephant. What size bite size piece can I take? I'm going to start prioritizing those bites and start eating. Gotcha. The tactics were what they were. They're constantly throwing something new at you. If you're into it and like that type of stuff, it was, it's the best training you'll ever get. Every single day, you're learning something new and getting faster and better and better and and if guys weren't cutting it they were gone do you get honor man of this too they don't give an honor man in green team right on all right so what what is the i've never really talked to anybody we've talked pretty extensively about what green team is what the what the what what what the what the different cycles are of the of the program and all that kind of stuff but What is the graduation like?

43:03There isn't one. There is no graduation. How do you know where you're going to go? It's like the last couple months of training. They'll be like, hey, you guys are going to this color. You're going to that color. You're going to that color. And you just, I mean, I remember guys who, the guys who went to one of the squadrons. I won't mention the color, but the guys in my class that were going to the next squadron that we're deploying, they literally left green team two weeks early, checked into their squadron and deployed. No shit. So they were like, you're graduating and integrated into your second deck squadron, and for them, they deployed.

43:37I waited three months, and I deployed three months after I graduated. Gotcha. So it's, the pace is insane at that facility. And you went to Red Squadron? I went, yes. Where did you want to go? Did you want to go to Red? Doesn't matter. I wanted to graduate and be assigned to one of the squadrons. You didn't care which one. I think when you're going through and you're envisioning up on what the differences are and how you want to make believe that there's something special and different, in reality they're not. And whichever one you land in, you're going to be happy and content and welcomed. Are there different cultures for different teams?

44:14I didn't think so. Maybe little nuances, but not significant enough to speak about. How would you describe the culture of red?

44:28put up or shut up? I don't know. Like, very cut and dry, black or white, right? Like,

44:38yeah, no quarter, right? It was standards were this high, and if you didn't cut the standard, we're not going to give you a break on it, right? Here's the standard. You either meet it or exceed it, or we're going to have problems. I loved it because everything was very black and white, and you were either on one side or the other. And, and yeah, and then, and then of course, right, the op tempo was, was through the roof, right? I had done two deployments at Team 5, which were the longer, slower ones, and then you get to that command and they're more often and quicker. And so then, showed up and then just started, started deploying every six months or less, or whatever it was, it was just constant.

45:22What was it like showing up to Red? Everything that I'd always dreamt it would be, it was. Let's talk about— It's a bold statement. Yeah, let's talk about—let's just describe it, day one. You go up to—well, now it's all different, but we went up to the second deck, right, which is where all the squadrons are stationed. You show up with your case of beer, and you introduce yourself, and the whole squadron's sitting around. All the new guys are standing there like, okay, Bish, you know? stand up, tell us about yourself and, you know, where are you from? You're like, hi, my name's Matt and I do Team 5.

45:57They're like, shut up. Oh, no, no, keep going. You're like, okay, well, I was at Team 5. Shut the fuck up, new guy. You're like, all right, check. All right, here's my beer. Next guy goes and they yell at him. They're like, great, we don't care anything about you. Welcome to the team. You're new. Doesn't care what you used to do in the past. You're now part of the team. Let's go. That was it. And then we went to work, man, and we went to work. What's the team room like? Um, in what way? I don't know. Do they have any artifacts in there from previous missions? Of course. It's like this on steroids, right?

46:30It's, uh, cool artifacts from missions all over the place. Um, a whole bunch of computers around the walls of the room. Right, we got a new command by the time I left, so it was updated. The one I moved into was the old school, the OG building. Um, it's been updated a lot since then. Right on. Any particular artifacts that stick out in your mind? Nothing? They're all artifacts. Nothing that cool. Right on. Well, Matt, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into some of the different operations that you were on before the Bin Laden raid. Cool. Old New Territory. The all-new co-op campaign lets you play solo or with friends, as you infiltrate Avalon, a high-tech stronghold on the brink.

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48:52And the best part? Once you sign up and verify through ID.me, it's automatic. No hoops, no hassles. So if you or someone you love is a hometown hero, visit tractorsupply.com slash hometown heroes to learn more. It's Tractor Supply's way of standing behind those who always stand for us. All right, Matt, we're back from the break. We just kind of talked a little bit about Green Team showing up over at Red Squadron, over at SEAL Team 6, and kind of what that was like. So what I'd like to move into now is basically your career over at Development Group, what the pace was like, where were you guys deploying, stuff like that.

49:36So let's just start with what was your first deployment with Red Squadron? Man, first deployment with my former squadron was we deployed to Afghanistan. I was actually there for about a month of deployment. And during this period of time, right, our Army counterparts were very focused in Iraq. And the Navy team had leadership in Afghanistan. So, you know, most of the Navy guys were deploying to Afghanistan. The Army had control of Iraq. Well, Iraq had been picking up, right, from the Tier 1 perspective. So I did about a month of deployment in Afghanistan. And then I got a call that a handful of guys from our squadron were going to move over to Iraq and integrate with an Army counterpart unit.

50:30You said it, not me. Why would they pick a new guy? My whole team went. Oh, your whole team? My whole team. They pulled the whole team. So my team leader, all the way down to me being the new guy, they pulled the whole team, moved us over to Iraq, and then they farmed each one of us out to a different army team. So I was integrated as a new guy into an army unit as a new guy on one of their assault elements. Other guys on my team were another team, another team, another team. We all lived together, operated together. but we fully integrated with an army unit. With Delta. So did Delta send guys over to 6 to integrate in Afghanistan?

51:09At that point, it was because they were taking some heavy casualties, right? Is this when that IED factory blew up and killed a bunch of those guys? There was a lot of stuff going on. Iraq was getting hotter and hotter, right? I had done my Team 5 deployment there. I screened. I went to Damnik, and now my next deployment was Afghanistan. I was there a month, and then they moved us over to in-bed, and I worked out of Baghdad again with the Delta team. So who took your guys' slot in Afghanistan? They just didn't backfill us with anybody. They went lighter. The squadron that stayed there was light a team.

51:46A team went over and augmented the Army guys. Phenomenal deployment, right? I'm still very, very good friends with the Army guys I worked with there. Phenomenal individuals. um we can we rewind just real quick so were you guys did you guys do anything in afghanistan or did you get farmed out because it was just not there just wasn't a lot going on no we were doing ops i was i was out of jalalabod and we're running missions out of jbad um it just they weren't as kinetic it was it was different right iraq everything was just kicking off afghanistan was still, Afghanistan's been through its phases, right?

52:24I've been there 10 times. But at that time, Afghanistan felt a little slower. They were still hitting ops. They were still running missions. It was just the priority was, okay, let's move some extra assaulters over here. I think the Delta guys had already lost a couple guys before we got there. And then while we were there, they had lost a couple more out of one of their other units. It was pretty, right? I wrote around on a little bird right as much as i dreamt about the little bird thing we were black uh we were baghdad swat right uh cruised around on little birds once twice three times a night whatever it was uh all over baghdad um so hold on hold on this there's a lot to unpack here i'm i'm really curious you know before but let's let's just keep it afghanistan for your one month over there.

53:15So, I mean, what was your impression of the difference between regular SEAL teams? Now you're over at SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan with Red Squadron. Did you see anything right off the bat? We're not talking about, I mean, you're only two deployments into your 13 deployments. So you got 11 left over at 6. What was the first, your first month like in Afghanistan with red? Great question. Um, a lot more toys, a lot more assets. And then the guys I was working with were all older, right? I think our regular teams are all new age groups, younger cause you're newer, right? You get to damn neck. A lot of older guys have been there a long time.

54:00So a, just from a maturity of force, I noticed that B, B from a mission planning perspective, right? Just maturity of force guys who've been around a little bit, the mission planning, what type of targets were, just all of that. The technology was a huge differentiator. We had different toys, different assets, different stuff that we could use to target our guys that we were going after. So that was kind of the biggest eye-opening. Hey, I'm now in this big league unit that has some additional resources and tools. And wow, this is cool. I'm a new guy playing the breacher, new guy just carrying the heavy shit and loving every minute.

54:41But, right, we were only there a month, and it was, you know, you're chasing your phones and your bad guys and doing your normal thing, but Afghanistan terrain is not like Baghdad, right? You know, unless you're in Kabul, right? I operate in the mountains of Afghanistan, so just the rural missions to urban missions. Was it everything you thought it was cracked up to be from the very beginning, or were you a little disappointed? I got to be honest, man. Everything I dreamt about and read about and wanted to get to, I saw and I experienced and I was like, right away. Fuck yeah. Nice. It was pretty legit, right?

55:24The caliber of guys you're working with are just next level, right? Yeah, everybody's tightening each other, making yourself bigger and better. and yeah. Nice, nice. And so what was it like jumping over to Delta? I mean, you have a month taste in the training pipeline of development group. And then, I mean, shit, less than a year over from, it sounds like it's less than a year from when you showed up to green team to - Deployed with an army unit. Now you're with Delta. Yeah. Who's the, you know, the army counterpart. Yeah. They were phenomenal. I had a great time. I figured there'd be more, you know, the rivalry shit-talking.

56:10None of that. None of it at the operational level that I experienced. Like I said, I'm still very good friends. Some of my best friends were the Army guys I worked with on that deployment. um pretty cool right we're working out of baghdad with all the all the sexy assets that that right i'd been in baghdad a deployment and a half before dreaming of all these fun assets and toys and what it would be like and now here i'm back now it's a tier one unit it wasn't you know army navy but it was army unit and a whole bunch of navy guys were still there and now we're we're hitting every night um that was that was right yeah that was that was a steep learning curve I'll bet it was.

56:51I mean, what are some things that are different? What are some things that you notice that are different between the two? I mean, let's just start with the assets that you're given. I'm talking the difference between development group and Delta. What are the differences that you noticed between? We swim more. That's it. Like, and if you get honest with the Army guys, like half of them be like, yeah, if I could swim better, I would have went to Bud's. Like, well, thanks for being honest. I appreciate that. Right on. No, great guys, right? I've worked with operators from around the globe, right?

57:30German, Israelis, Brits, Aussies, all very similar like-minded individuals, right? Their camo may be different. Their technology on their gun may be a little different. The funding they got for training is definitely different. But from an individual operator, all very similar. Very similar. And I would say that for the Army guys, our Army counterparts, very similar, same mindset. Sure, they hadn't been through BUDS. They have a different selection of pipeline. But from the operator themselves, the way they're structured, the way they operate, right, the tactics were all pretty similar, nothing that you couldn't assimilate into easy enough.

58:09so you didn't get over there and go oh fuck i'm gonna have to go through another selection i should have stuck with rotc yeah fuck no they never had to do this detour damn it they uh they again they were super cool they opened me up um opened up everything allowed me in and uh and respected my talents on their team i was arguably the outsider and a new guy so what kind of stuff were you doing over there. Baghdad SWAT, right? Little birds to the roof. Panders, ground assault force, squish them in the middle, right? Night after night after night, right? Intel finds bad guy. We show up at the house.

58:53I can remember a good one where we, right? These little bird pilots are shit hot, right? They are what they say they do. They deliver on every single time. and we're hitting, you know, downtown Baghdad, thousands of rooftops, right? How do you find the one rooftop in the masses that you need to land your helo on? And every single night, they were perfect. Every night, always, boom, boom, boom, nailed it, right? Well, one night we come in and we land on the roof, but it turns out our pilot had landed one too far by accident, right landed one too far we get on the roof one house passed our target building ground assault fort hit the ground they start coming up big shootout in the stairs right one of my buddies jeremy shot in the leg um right they're throwing hand grenades down the stairs turns out there was eight guys in the top floor that me and three other dudes would have landed and made entry into that space right because we were little bird team to the roof four-man team we would have gone top down, we would have entered onto eight dudes and that probably wouldn't have worked out too well.

1:00:03Right. I got a lot of big guy upstairs scenarios where, right, you don't understand it in the minute, right? You're like, oh, fuck, we landed one house too small, too far. We should have been there. Well, had we landed on the right roof, the odds are it would have, you know, maybe we wouldn't be here, right? It'd be a whole different story. um so yeah that was that was a an average night in Baghdad that uh that that mission was actually the first night I ever killed anybody no shit no um Brad I'd done two first deployment no no combat second deployment into Iraq we'd done some shooting but nobody that I had ever like engaged and saw type thing um and there was that night there was a whole bunch of dudes trying to climb out the back window and uh we lit them up and then we ended up we ended up a couple army guys ran in on the first floor of this building they were all sandbag bunkered positions on the second floor and uh so we pulled a bradley fighting vehicle into the front front door this right right in front of the house and literally had the 18 year old kid behind the chain gun just start unloading into the house and so like 20 millimeter chain gun in the front yard of this house just blasting away and they all started trying to pile out the back window and uh so shot him a whole bunch of them and then uh how many of them it's probably four or five that tried getting out um the uh we ended up sending an eod guy in on the first floor of the house and they set a big thermobaric charge right ran out of the house all right the army guy's like okay 30 seconds it's gonna go 29 30 no boom all right all right you're the demo guy you just said the demo you just said it should be blown up now it's not blowing up what's up did you dual prime it he's like dual prime it what kind of demo guy doesn't dual prime something so okay now you're sitting there there's a thermobaric charge that has been actuated the clock's ticking i'm finding in the difference between Delta and Dev Group.

1:02:16Always dual prime. So anyway, we waited, we waited, we waited, and we're like, all right, somebody's got to go back in the first floor and hook another initiator to that charge, and you have no idea where that initiator's at, if it's hung up or what's going on, because you're the demo guy who said it should be off. So the same demo guy had to run back in the house, set a second initiator to it, ran out and clacked it, and the whole house fell down. And that was a big, very significant moment for me in two ways. One, yeah, I had to actually engage somebody for the first time. But more importantly, right, I was pissed because we missed our landing spot.

1:02:57Right? And you do enough of these. In hindsight, you're like, well, we're very blessed we missed that landing spot. Right? So, you know, it's not always bad. Right? A little perspective. Look at the situation. And yeah, we got really lucky there. So I probably shouldn't be mad that we missed the target. Yeah, yeah. What did it feel like to take an enemy combatant's life for the first time? Zero emotion, zero anything. Nothing. Nope. It's easy. Didn't bother you one bit. Nope. To me, I've never had any issues with that. I'm on the right side of this, they're on the wrong side, and I had zero issues.

1:03:39Did he feel accomplishment? No, not really. What sense of accomplishment per se, right? There's a whole bunch of people there. Probably three of us shooting at the guys, climbing out the back window. It wasn't I just went and did some crazy jujitsu move on them or something. It was just part of the team and part of the mission and how it goes down. So I've never been like, well, I did that and that was me. That's just never been me. Let's talk about, before we get to the Bin Laden raid, let's just talk about any significant events that happened at Dev Group prior to the Bin Laden raid. You covered it with Pete pretty good in your last couple of episodes.

1:04:27I was on the Captain Phillips rescue with him. You were on there? Yeah. Let's hear your perspective. How'd that go down? I thought Scabell did a great job describing it. I wasn't there. I wasn't one of the shooters. I'll say there's way more than three shots, right? Anybody who saw the movie and believes it was three heat-seeking sniper bullets, I got an island to sell you. I would say, right, the other misconceived notion is right after the guys took the shots, there was one AK-47 round fired inside the life raft. I don't think that's in the movie either. Right? So talk about hero to zero status, right?

1:05:08The shooters thought, okay, well, we just missed and they offed the captain. So I think probably the sexiest move that night was a couple of the snipers that were on the back, fantailed the ship, right? They put their long guns down, they still had their pistols, but they climbed off the back of the ship, right? Ocean waves, little rope that goes out to the life raft and they did the commando crawl like the oak horse, right? down the rope on their stomach all the way to the life raft you know climbed to the back stuck their hands guns in and then everybody was dead um so that's that's that's the piece that that i always shared that's not in the movie um other than that right we uh i wasn't one of the shooters i wasn't intimately involved in it i was there with the almost hundred others that if right if they got their captain to shore we would have had to go hit some of the the training camps or some of their their facilities on shore a lot a lot more booger eaters than the three we were oh shit so that's how that would have went down there was almost a hundred of us that jumped in right we didn't need a hundred to deal with four booger eaters on the on the life raft um but had they got to shore and they were within a hundred yards of shore right but they they realized that that stretch of beach was different tribes they would have made landfall they would have off them taking their captain so So we were able to literally convince them to tie a rope to the life raft and tow him south.

1:06:30The fourth pirate, right, had got wounded in the hand during the initial assault. So they had pulled him off the life raft. And he's literally standing on the back of the Bainbridge with a buddy of mine. There, he's got his hand bandaged, right? They're smoking cigarettes, right? He's lighting a cigarette for them. And they were trying to get the pirates in the life raft to see, right? I'm lighting cigarettes. And he's got his hand bandaged. And then my buddy's like, hey, tells one of the Navy guys, go in and get a soft serve ice cream cone. I guarantee the Somalis never eating soft serve ice cream.

1:07:03So literally, there's the Somali with his hand bandaged with his cigarette and his soft serve ice cream on the back of the ship. And that was us trying to say, hey, look, you know, look at your guy. He's getting treated very fairly. He's got medical attention, smokes and ice cream. You know, give up the captain and you can have some too. that clearly didn't pan out for him yeah man and arguably what other tricks he's the lucky he's the luckiest out of all four of them if you think about it because he's he's in federal penitentiary in new york right now right the others are dead right he never got air conditioning in somalia he certainly didn't get heat i guarantee he's got free college eye care dental care three meals a day he's living the dream in the federal penitentiary compared to where he would have been.

1:07:51I mean, shit up there. They probably have his whole life planned out for him and donations and everything for when he gets out, right? For sure. So, wow. Wow. But what else? What else? That was the only real, right? There's the standby where something happens, you go. That was the only real spin up for a true standby mission, which was a, you know, okay, boom, go fly away, do the jump package in. That was the only one of those I did during my time. Did you lost anybody throughout your career? A lot of times. Anybody close? If I go through the contact list of my phone, 43 names in my contact that are dead.

1:08:34How many operational? Almost all. Almost all of them. Yeah, a couple of suicides, but yeah, almost all. Who was the first person that you lost in combat? Mike Koch. He's in my green team class. then the Badger. There's a list. All guys I went through green team with. Nope, nope. Different squadrons. Red did pretty well, right? The squadron I was in. We dodged a lot of bullets in a lot of different situations, right? A lot of my friends in different squadrons, not so much. Yeah, right? I mean, it's all fun and games, and these deployments are great, but they're not the most safe, right? You guys get zipped.

1:09:21Just about every deployment, every other deployment. Yeah, that was... Talk about faith and my journey. Right? From 9-11, through everything, all of basically the global war on terror. I saw a lot of it grow and change, and I saw a lot of really good people not come home through it.

1:09:49And that, the way I dealt with that, right, without going crazy, was I chalked it up as that was God's plan, right? I knew that if I got shot in the face tomorrow going to work, that was it. That was God's plan. That was what it was. I had done enough of these deployments and seen enough of, you know, guys not coming home for one reason or another. being bad luck or whatever. And so I think the more I dealt with the death, the closer I was with the God connection of like, okay, that justified it for me. In some weird way, that was the piece, the bandaid I put on it in the moment to chalk it up as, okay, well, it is what it is and I got to get back to work.

1:10:37Interesting. So you never really lost faith going, you know, within the SEAL teams. I think a lot. I lost most of my faith when I was challenged when I got out by our own government and when I didn't understand it, and I was confused, and I didn't have a community, and it had been cut off, right? When I was in, dude, like, how do you deal with death? Like, you got the same job I did. You know the deal, right? It's part of the job. And certainly, you're gonna keep deploying and do this for as long as I did if you're not absolutely comfortable with where you're going And if you get shot in the face tomorrow night, maybe you're not going to be as good of an operator as you should be.

1:11:18And so for me, in those moments, I always was much more. I tried to place my confidence in, OK, well, that was. I don't understand it. But that is, since I don't understand it, somebody else must. I'm hoping. I'm betting on it. And hopefully I'll have some understanding of this at some point. Were you married during this time? Yeah. How was your wife handling the operational pace? I'm divorced. It's right. It's tough. Before I got married, I was like, hey, look, just so you know, if work isn't my first priority, I'm probably not going to come home to deal with any of the other priorities you and I may have.

1:12:03And so I was married for nine years, home for less than one. both my kids were born uh three years and a week apart so i was clearly home on the same deployment cycle um divorce rates through the roof in the community right i think everybody does fine with oh your husband's in the day or there could be stuff happened after extortion right a couple months after the bin laden rate everybody's on the high then extortion goes down 22 friends in one night you talk about we call pink squadron that's the wives and girlfriends and you want to talk about some some social pressure of it's time to retire time to get out time for you to move on think of that uh a the amount of loss think then the the pressure from the wives to the other husbands that are in the command you know how many rpgs I've seen come by a ramp on my 47?

1:13:02A lot. Every single one, you're like, oh, man, glad that didn't hit. And then one hits. So that puts it in perspective really quick, certainly for your loved ones. How about your kids? Too young to understand. How are you? How's your relationship with them now? Good, because I got out, right? I got out. They were young enough that, right, they knew dad went on long trips. Those were deployments or short trips were training trips. I've done the math. I never put them to bed for more than like 14 days in a row without another trip. Never home more than about 14 days for 14 years plus. Do you think that, I mean, this is, I've done like 250 of these now at this point ish.

1:13:56at least 50 % of these interviews have been military guys. Talk about the same things every single time. You know, there's, I mean, every story is obviously unique to that individual, but, I mean, the arc is damn near the same every single time. I mean, what are some, would it even be fucking possible, especially at a command like that, you know, to where you can be home for more than 14 days in a row to put your kids down. You can be home for more than 14 days. There were those options. You could raise your hand and say, hey, I need to come off the speeding train. But think about it. There's only a handful of people on this job doing this job.

1:14:37And the numbers are not good, right? The year I left the SEAL teams, the SEAL community had a net gain of one new operator. So that's what I'm, I know that, I know the operator, the individuals are going to be like, hey guys, I need to take a break because I didn't get to put my kids down, you know, last week. But I mean, when you see the, I mean, you just said it, the fucking net one, net plus one that year. That's it. In the middle of the longest fucking war that the US has ever been in, we got a fucking net one. That's a problem. That's one. And so what I'm kind of getting at, you know, somebody that was over there and just, you know, my own career in the regular SEAL teams, which was, you're still fucking gone all the time.

1:15:21And, you know, the retention sucks. People are getting out left and right. I mean, how, I guess you see what I'm getting at. Like, it would have to come down from the top. Do you think there is a way for the sake of retention that guys can get more time with family, with their kids, with their wives? I'll give you an example. I did, right? I'd never asked for anything. The longest break I had in my career was selection and training to get into my former command. That's not a break. That's nine months of just kicked in the nuts. That was my longest break, right? I did 13 straight tours, raised my hand every time, volunteer, volunteer.

1:16:01At the end, right, post Bin Laden mission, hurt my neck. I go to my master chief and I'm like, hey, master chief, I need a break. My family's imploding. Like medically, something's wrong. I can't drink a beer without my arms going numb. Something's off from the crash. I don't know, but something's off. look will you send me to go be a green team instructor or something so I can I can take up a wrap off for 18 months I'm like look I'll even go I'll go get my master's degree I'll pay out of my own dime professional development whatever I just I need to be home I need to do something for me I'm getting divorced like I've got to I got to figure out how to slow down he's like listen I've got to move somebody to this other squadron and I got your name on that billet.

1:16:51I'm like, I know, but that's not a stay-at-home billet. That's a deployable billet. He's like, I know, but I got to put somebody there and we don't have enough people and I've got your name earmarked for that. I'm like, well, Master Chief, look, I've never asked for anything. My family's melting. My neck is broken. I got some shit going on. I need to figure out, can you please find something? He came back a week later and was like, no, it's the only option you got so that's part of the reason i got out fuck man so so can it be fixed i hope so right could it be fixed i think so um the priorities at the time were mission success not sean ryan's mental health matt bison that's personal wealth and any of that how do you think that worked out in the long term you think that worked out you always take care of your people first.

1:17:45They didn't take care of the people. 9-11, I saw a lot of changes, a lot of changes between here and here. I saw the tactics change. I saw the leadership change. I saw by the time I got out, every major officer I knew was writing themselves up for their own awards, and they were going to get promoted off the number of missions they ran, not off the number of bad guys they caught or doing the right thing. It was, okay, number of missions, amount of awards, all this nonsense. And then I saw the rules of engagement slowly starting to change, right? Making things more dangerous for us, right? So you'd have the Admiral McRavens coming in saying, okay, well, you can't use your dogs anymore.

1:18:28You can't go at night. Like, wait a second. We only go at night because it's safer to the force. We bring our dogs because our dogs save our lives nightly. But now the leadership saying, don't bring your dogs because the locals are complaining about dogs being unclean. What? What? Are you fucking kidding me? That was Admiral McRaven? We had so many different officers and congressional delegations, right? We'd have congressional delegations come over. They would ask us, hey, are these new rules of engagement prohibitive, costing you more danger on target? And our officers would be like, nope, nope, all good.

1:19:06Our senior enlisted master chief, I can remember a master chief, I'm not going to name his name, But he stood up in the meeting with the congressional delegation and said, well, with all due respect, I don't believe what the officer over here is telling you. I'm the one going on the ground. And yes, it is making it more dangerous for us. Nobody was communicating those things. I saw that slowly happening over and over and over as we're sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan, right, risking our lives. while the leadership is making it harder and harder for us to do our mission. And all of that was adding up to part of the reason why I was like, I'm no longer signing my name on the dotted line to work for the Idiots of Friendship.

1:19:49Damn, man. I thought the leadership over a dev group was... It has its strengths and weaknesses. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying it's shitty. But I'm saying we've definitely had our less than stellar. Right. When we get into talking about all the book drama. Right. When that all hit. Right. I reached out to my commanding officer that I had just left the squadron. I'd known him for eight years. Right. I'm like, sir. Right. The only thing I've ever been taught. If there's an issue, you communicate with leadership immediately. And that's exactly what I did. You know what that SEAL officer in charge of the SEAL community did?

1:20:30He replied, delete me. that's the only conversation that's the only correspondence i've ever gotten from any leadership in the seal community since i wrote my book or or anything period wow so you know talk about leadership issues i'd say the community has a few yeah i'm not gonna argue that geez all right well let's move in let's let's go to the bin laden raid let's talk about When did that pop up on your guys' radar? We just got home from a deployment. We just got home from Afghanistan. Like eight days prior, they pulled 24 most senior of us in, in the squadron, and briefed us up. Said, hey, look, we think we found him.

1:21:17We want you guys to plan the ground assault option. Eight days after deployment. Yeah. Right after eight, ten days, something like that. just come home i should have been on leave they pulled uh pulled us in from leave and uh pulled the 24 most senior in the squadron so you have any idea that's what they were going to talk to you about um no no i had no idea and i actually had a medical appointment that i couldn't miss the morning that they were pulling these guys down to this other facility to read them in and i'm like hey guys i've got this medical thing at the doctor i've set up you know is it cool if I miss this or do I need to miss the doctor's appointment to hit this brief?

1:21:55And they're like, no, you're good. Just drive down when you're done. So I finished my appointment and drove down. And then when I showed up at the facility, they'd already given the guys the brief and said, hey, look, we think we found the guy. We want you guys to plan the ground assault option. Boom. So then we got to work. How do you plan that? Just like we'd done any other mission, right? The enlisted guys at the bottom who actually do it Start coming up with the courses of action. We're somewhat limited on the way we could tactically action the target based off where it was. Right. In Afghanistan, we'd grown very comfortable with not flying the helicopter to the compound.

1:22:36Right. Landing 20 kilometers away and patrolling in. So, right. We're going to pick the lock on your door. We'll get you while you're sleeping. Don't wake up anybody in the neighborhood. That was that's much more of what we like to do. But because of where his compound was in the city, the odds of us landing five kilometers away, patrolling through the city, remaining undetected was low. So had we been compromised on that patrol, right, he would have left the building. So based off the building, everything we were seeing, that drove us to say, okay, well, let's go straight to the target. Let's fly the helicopters.

1:23:13And that's where that plan was started. Did you know that you had those, the new latest and greatest Blackhawks? I don't know anything about any crazy Blackhawks. Okay. You can talk about them all you want, but I'm not saying anything. Did you know you were going to get fancy helicopters to fly in for the mission? Not immediately. Walt's not going to come after you anymore after this fucking release. Not immediately. I can't fucking tell you that. Or any of these other guys. But so you had no idea. When did you have an idea those were coming? In the mission planning. During the mission planning, they told us about certain assets that we could use that had certain skills that we needed.

1:24:05And so some discussion whether we truly needed it or not. And ultimately it was yes. How long did you guys have to plan the operation? Two weeks. Two weeks? The longest. I've never rehearsed for any mission. Right? 13 deployments, never rehearsed for a single mission. Every deployment, go do your plan, brief the team, roll out the door and go. The only mission I ever rehearsed for was the bin Laden. No shit. My time I ever had time. So can you talk about the two weeks from when you got briefed to execution? I mean, what was the pace like? Came up with our plan and then just started rehearsing our plan with a mock-up that we trained on.

1:24:57But again, even rehearsing on a mock-up where you don't know the inside of it is kind of irrelevant, right? We knew kind of the outside layout. And so you could go get a false sense of security running a dry run on a compound for time. But if you don't know what's in the house and what's going to happen in the house, you're getting a false sense of security of, oh, we ran this in three minutes. We cleared it in three minutes. You're clearing a structure with paper targets and without any interference, right? So, yeah, we spent a week or two doing that. Went out to another state, did some more rehearsals with the helicopters.

1:25:34and then came back. I can remember... Is this like you wake up, rehearse all the way through the night, rehearse just all hours of the day? Just rehearse, rehearse. Day, night, day, night. And then when we weren't there, we'd give the people like, hey, can you update this on the mock-up? They'd update it. We'd come back the next morning and hit it again or whatever it was and just constant rehearsals.

1:26:01Yeah. What did it feel like to get that brief? Especially not have no idea. You come back from a medical appointment, and it's, look at your buddies, the 24 that are going on, and they're like, hey, we're fucking hitting the number one guy. That doesn't get you excited. Something's wrong. That's what I'm fucking saying. You're like, holy fuck. Let's go. Right? I'd been involved in one other spin for bin Laden years prior. So this one felt much different. Right. The one years prior. Right. It was flowing white robes were were seen on ISR feed. And he's coming back into Afghanistan to make his final, you know, take the fight to the Americans.

1:26:48And so it was this whole. It was a big shit show is what it was. All the officers, everybody want to get involved to be involved. It was the closest spin of any intel they'd ever had on bin Laden. So they just delayed, delayed, delayed. this big force got built they flew in like b1 bombers from the states they bombed the shit out of an empty hillside um right like three days before they're going into the mission right they're going to take out bin laden they send me and another guy over to pakistan to do some stuff there so i'm literally on the pakistan side of the border dressed in pakistani uniforms with a pakistani element and my guys are on the other side of the border they're dropping bombs on a whole bunch of empty mountains.

1:27:28And two weeks later, they're like, okay, bin Laden wasn't there, and they call us a home. So that was the previous spin. This one felt much different. This one was a lot more under the radar. It was quiet. It was like, okay, whoever lived there was significant. It was none of the intel that I saw was 100 % proof positive. It was bin Laden himself, but it was somebody significant. So, okay, whoever lived there was going to have a bad night, but we would figure it out. I remember in one of the Intel manuals, right? I don't even know who put these together, but I'm breezing through it the first couple of days.

1:28:06Like on page one or two, I see a statistic where it says, you have up to a 70 % chance being shot down on the helo ride in or the helo ride out. Wow. And I don't know who came up with that statistic. There was Intel people at all levels thrown out different numbers and statistics, but I'm like, I'm not a numbers guy here, but 70%. That's just the helo ride. That's not dealing with the guys with the guns once you're there. Did you guys think it was a suicide mission? I've never thought any of my missions were a suicide mission. I refuse to think that way. I don't care what, who. I'm not allowing myself.

1:28:46It's like my buddy and buds who every morning was like, fuck this, I'm quitting. I'm like, I can't allow my mind to go there because I'd actually quit. So I'm like, I'm not going to allow my mind to go anywhere other than we're going to move through this target and figure it out. What was, can you run through the plan of what you guys developed for the night that it happened? I love my Mike Tyson quote, right? Somebody interviewed Tyson after a fight. They're like, Mike, didn't you have a plan going into tonight's fight? And he looks at the reporters like, yeah, everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face.

1:29:17I love that quote, right? We had a great plan, super simple. We did in Baghdad, top down, bottom up. We were going to squish them in the main house. That was the plan. Pretty straightforward. We got punched in the face as soon as we got there. These helicopters, helicopter pilots are amazing. I cannot say enough good about them. Rehearsals, everything perfect. Everything to the second. I'm sitting in the left door of the helicopter. I'm going to be the first one out, chalk one on the left side. My buddy's on the other side, right? Ropes hooked to the helo, 40 feet up. We come to a hover. It feels like four hours.

1:29:56It's probably two seconds. And immediately the helicopter goes 90 and starts going in. I'm sitting in this door. Fuck. Helicopters crash very ugly, right? A plane maybe can come skidding in. My little chicken legs are hanging out the side of the helicopter, and we're going in this way to the side. Um, buddy of mine's holding me in. I'm literally falling out of the side of the helicopter as we come in and we hit. Um, nothing goes boom. Clear out your shorts, whatever you need to do to get back in the game. Holy shit. Um, man, the way we hung up on the wall, right? The helicopter propped up against the wall.

1:30:41There's a wheel on the back section of a Blackhawk and that wheel's the only load bearing for the back half of the helicopter. That wheel landed on the wall. Had that wheel been 10 inches this way or 10 inches this way, tail section would have broke. I wouldn't be here, right? The height of the wall was 10 feet. Our helicopter hit. If you watch the Zero Dark Thirty movie, the main rotor hits the ground, comes snapping off. That did not happen. Right? We hit. I jump out this door and run away. Turn around and look. and the main rotors are still turning. They're within about a foot of hitting the ground.

1:31:19You want to talk about the big guy? Right? When your time's up, your time is up, and it was not our time. Inches, inches. Landed perfectly. Helicopter didn't roll. Main rotor blades didn't snap off. Nothing. 40 feet up. You told me how that happened. Why did the helicopter crash? Great question. Okay. So, do you know what was happening in Washington, D.C., the day before the mission that the president would have wanted to be at? I don't remember. A White House Correspondents' Dinner. So, the day we had originally planned to launch our mission was the day before we actually went. It was a weekend, zero a loom, so good time to go.

1:32:11So the president got involved. He was like, hey, can you guys push this one day to the right? Can we push to the right? I want to hit my dinner. Okay, so we moved the op to the right. Not me. It was well above my pay grade. The op was moved to the right. The next day, the temperature was roughly eight degrees warmer than the day prior. You know how temperature affects density altitude, how a bullet flies over a mile. it affects how much lift a helicopter can have. So hypothetically, because I'm not speaking in real terms of weights, right? If our helicopter could carry, say, 1 ,000 pounds, say we were at 800 pounds a load, that's fine.

1:32:55We operate within those margins, normal. The next day, eight degrees warmer, temperature, we didn't have the lift. So what I've been told is we got into the target area, our pilot was at full throttle, and we settled with power, because he didn't have enough ass to keep the helicopter in the air. So, why did we crash? Because President Obama needed to hit the White House Correspondents' Dinner. You've got to be fucking kidding me. Eh, that's a portion of it. Wow. Un-fucking-believable, man.

1:33:37The only political shots I take in No Easy Day, right? I make two political shots because I hate all politicians. Biden, right? He was VP at the time. We meet him after the raid and he's like literally handsy, like trying to rub guys' shoulders and like tell them bad jokes in their ears. Like, we're not teenage girls with ice cream here, dude. Like, come on. He's like, who's the drunk uncle that showed up at Thanksgiving? Like, oh, that's the vice president like okay that makes sense oh shit and then and then obama obama was great right super smooth we we all stood up there i got our photo with him you know uh gave a great speech and then he invites us all to the white house to the residence for a beer okay i'm very apolitical but if a sitting president invites me and my team that just risked our lives for whatever to the White House to have a beer with the sitting president, you go, right?

1:34:33You're going to go. He invites the freaking women's World Cup soccer team, whatever. Everybody goes to the White House. Here's a sitting president inviting us to the White House for a beer right after we probably got him reelected. Do you think he ever followed up with that invite? Probably not. Nope. And so I bet you voted for change, too. That's my only one-liner in the book of like, yeah, I bet if you're still waiting for Obama to invite you to the White House for a beer. I know you just risked your life for him and probably got him reelected. He invited you for a beer, but you think he's ever going to follow up with that?

1:35:05No. Wow. Not surprising though. Not surprising. So yeah, all my buddies are jumping out the other side of the helicopter and going to work. And I'm like, they're going to fucking make fun of me later if they see me over in the corner. So I couldn't run around the front of the helicopter. The main rotor blades are still turning. I literally had to run down along the wall underneath. There's like three or four of us on our side, But we all ran underneath the helicopter, joined with the team, and reached one. Second helicopter, there was no radio call between dash one and dash two that we'd gone in.

1:35:36Were you going to be on the top or on the bottom? We were fast roping 40 feet down into the compound. My team was clearing and securing one of the southern buildings, and then we'd all wrap into the bottom floor and go up. Chalk two was supposed to go to the roof and work down. As Chalk 2 came into a hover, right, you're flying a really expensive helicopter, looking through toilet paper tubes, night vision, right? And that pilot looks and he happens to see we've got a parked helicopter in the compound. He doesn't know if we've been shot down, a mechanical, what's going on. He just knows there's a parked helicopter in the compound.

1:36:12Mm-hmm. So, he makes probably the best decision of the night that nobody will ever talk about, right? He could have pushed a bad position, tried to do the game plan and land on the roof. The odds are he would have crashed. Why do you say that? Well, I'll explain why we crashed. Our hover was at 40 feet. The compound was mostly 50 feet, right? That second helicopter would have had hold a hover with the same weight at 15 feet higher. If we couldn't hold a hover at 40 feet, there was no way Chalk 2 was going to be able to hold a hover at 60 feet and lip land to let his crew off onto the roof. The odds are they would have crashed.

1:36:51So that pilot immediately sees, says, okay, I'm going to do the safe thing. And he hovers his helicopter outside the compound into a field across the street and lands them out there. They thought they were going to the roof. Now they're outside the compound, outside the wall in a field across the street. Shit. So, yeah. Somebody ran to the door and let them in. Right. We track sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try to chase every biohack. But real performance starts deep, at the cellular level. Armora Colostrum is nature's original superfood. Colostrum is packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that help fortify gut health, help strengthen immune health, help fuel performance, and more.

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1:39:56All right, Matt, we're back from the break. We had just left off. The helo crashed. The other one landed outside the compound. I think you guys are getting ready to link up. Yep. My team was tasked with securing this building to the south of the compound. It was one of the other, he had been on that two facilitators that lived in the compound. And one of them lived in this Southern little building inside the compound. So my team was tasked with that while the rest headed to the first floor of the main building.

1:40:32We got to the door, the little Southern building, door was locked. I know we'd made a little noise crash in our helicopters, but we're professionals here, right? We didn't want to make too much noise if we didn't have to. So my buddy that was there with me carried a sledgehammer, right? He starts banging on this metal door, trying to get it open up, and it's not going to open. So, okay, we're not going to spend five minutes banging on this thing, and we got to get in, so I was going to use my explosives. I commented one of the first times I ever got shot at was through a door. Mm-hmm. Right? And I've had that happen multiple times now.

1:41:06we just crashed into their compound we just beat on their front door with a sledgehammer the last thing i'm going to do is stand in front of their door setting my charge there so i literally got on my knee as low as i could setting my charge and as i'm setting my charge just above me ak-47 through the door holy shit are you serious um wow i picked up a little bit of frag in my shoulder nothing crazy but i carry a set of bolt cutters on a pouch on my back right each handle can kind of come up. I can pull it out, cut my little bolt cutter setup. We got back from the mission. I was going through my stuff.

1:41:41There's a bullet stuck in the handle. Are you serious? So we got lucky with the crash. We got lucky with 30 seconds later at the door. Myself and my partner returned fire through the door blindly and everything goes quiet. Wow. All right. I got to go back up. I got to get my charge on the door. I got to clap this thing off. We got to get in here, right? We got to, time's ticking. My buddy spoke Arabic, right? So he starts calling into the house in Arabic. And I swear to God, not five seconds go by and you hear the metal latch on the door inside and they're getting ready to come out. Like, why didn't we try this when we got here?

1:42:21This would have been way simpler, right? Just come on out guys. Door opens up. It's a female holding the baby, two kids behind her, her husband and land dead just inside the door. Perfect Arabic to my buddy. You killed him. He is dead. Talking about her husband. Wow. Pulled her out, right? Women and kids away, cleared the guns, cleared all the area, left them there, left the dead guy there, and then we rolled into the main house. While all that was going on, right? Did you guys know where he was gonna be? Who? Bin Laden. The assessment was assessed that he most likely lived on the third floor of the compound.

1:43:02Assessed. Assessed was Khalid, his son, lived on the second floor, and another facilitator on the first, and another facilitator in this outbuilding. That was the laydown of what they assessed. Right, the guys from Chalk 2, it landed outside the wall. They got let in the compound. Now everybody's hitting the bottom of the main house, right? Are you guys hitting the main house simultaneously, or did you— One door on the house. The way the house was rigged, it had multiple doors to go in, but it had been configured on the inside to secure the stairwell going up, right? And we got in one side of the house, and there's a reinforced metal door at the bottom of the stairs.

1:43:45Sean may be hiding somebody upstairs if you have a reinforced metal door at the bottom of your staircase, right? Maybe a sign that you're hiding somebody upstairs, right? So all of these things you're thinking through, you're like, okay, shots fired at the first building. They want to get jiggy, right? We've got reinforced metal doors at the bottom of their stairs. That's odd, right? A couple of charges and that went away. No power, pitch black, good night vision. It's not like you see in the movies with, you know, Team America here to kick your ass and clear left, clear right, right? We're very calmly and quietly clearing the space.

1:44:27got up to the second floor there had been an adult male and his wife engaged on the first floor in the stairs up to the second floor what I remember seal in front of me it just shot Khalid up the stairs Khalid was Bin Laden's son we'd been told we think Khalid lives on the second floor we're literally standing on the second floor there's a ladder, stairs to go up to a landing and up. A little head pops down looking at us on the ceiling. How did he, did he hear you guys? He had to have, right? I mean, the, anybody inside the house had plenty of time to wake up. They heard helicopters hovering, helicopters crash.

1:45:10They'd heard muffled gunfire, some explosions, right? Outside buildings, first floor of the main building. And then now we're in the house. So they had had more than enough time to go to assume there's somebody here that's... Is it true that somebody yelled to Khalid in Arabic, he came out and then was popped? Didn't yell, whispered. It's the sexiest move I ever saw in the SEAL teams. Whispered Khalid's name. You're on the second floor. You see a head peek down the wall, look down at us, try and see who's down there. I couldn't tell, right? It's pitch black. We're quiet. We're not, hey, it's America.

1:45:51None of that. And that same seal, right? Sat right next to me in the helo crash, right? In front of me on the stairs. And he literally whispers Khalid's name. Khalid, Khalid. Khalid had heard gunfire, all this stuff. Then he hears somebody whispering his name. Not yelling it, nothing aggressive. Peeks around the corner and gets popped in the head. Holy shit. Falls down. Rolls down a couple sets of stairs. AK-47. He was literally right around the corner of the stairwell. With an AK-47, had we made our way up the stairs, he would have popped the point blank as we rounded the corner. Maybe the rest of us.

1:46:39More importantly, he would have slowed our assault down. Right? We'd given ourselves 30 minutes on target with a 10 minute window to spare. And yeah, had he stood at the top of the stairs shooting down, that would have slowed our assault up the stairs. I've had to, I had to assault years ago. There was a guy at the top of the stairs shooting down at us. And literally we threw a whole bunch of hand grenades up the stairs and then ran up right behind him. it's not not the prettiest way to assault a fixed position yeah um so thankfully right from a from a historical move standpoint that was epic was that rehearsed or that just fucking happened like pull it out in the midst of stress and pressure and send it and that is what i love damn that's That's just, come on.

1:47:31I wouldn't have thought of that. Did you say anything? No, I wouldn't have thought of any of that. That was fucking genius. I didn't think of any of that. But you got to think, right? Now you just heard some guy answer to the name Khalid, right? We've heard all the guys downstairs got guns, right? I got shot at at the first floor. So, okay, whoever is in this house is putting up a fight and trying to hide, right? So, okay, significant. At least chalk that up in the back of your mind as you're moving through the target that, okay, maybe the Intel folks are correct for once. There was a ton of different Intel people involved in this.

1:48:10The girl from the Zero Dark Thirty movie, she was always 100%. She wasn't a hot redhead, but she was always 100%. There was other Intel people we had there. Some of them be 50%, 70%. She was always 100%. Um, so yeah, you're thinking, okay, all these little pieces, these are all little signs that are adding up in the back of your head, step over Khalid and head up to the third floor. How much interaction did you guys have with the woman? The CIA check? Yeah. Tons. Tons. She was there when she briefed us in. She, I sat next to her on the flight over. Um, the, the movie does a great job portraying how like feisty smart she is.

1:48:53She's wicked smart. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. All right, so you're moving up to the third deck. Third floor, point man in front of me again. Same guy? Same guy. Same guy, whispered Khalid. Head pops out the door at the top. Point man takes a couple shots, and the head disappears into the room. We don't, right, we kind of skipped over my 13 deployments, right? One of the biggest things that we had learned and evolved through was the tactics we were taught CQB. It's hostage rescue clearance when you're in a building. It's all about speed. Well, over time, we were using these old school hostage rescue tactics to assault buildings where there was no hostages in.

1:49:43Right. So why do we need to throw a flash crash in the room and then immediately run in here and do our clear left, clear right, you know, old school CQB stuff when there's no hostage in here? Wouldn't it be much safer to stay at the door of the room and like pie the whole door from the space where you're much safer and less chance of getting shot back? So we had started evolving our tactics, right? It was no longer hostage rescue clearance. It was combat clearance. And combat clearance meant we're slower, much more methodical. There was no reason to just run in the room and clear things. Makes a hell of a lot of sense.

1:50:21Right? Much safer. And trust me, the swamp in the community didn't want to evolve to those tactics, but over time, it was saving lives nightly by not rushing into the room, right? Who do you call the swamp of the teams? I'm just curious. Any of the old school guys that are still there. I mean, is the swamp at dev group as well? There's a swamp everywhere. Yeah. Okay. I think there's a swamp or just the bureaucrats. I mean, that's where all the teams' tactics come from is from development group. But I mean, well, at least when I was in, when we went, when you go to assault, so all of that, it just comes down from you guys.

1:51:08And so, I mean, it's just fucking shame to hear that there are people over there that are delaying. Not everybody, but any organization, there's the old school guys in the organization that don't want to change. Right. And they want to do things the way they've always done it. And what they've always done is fine. And that's fine by them. no judgment. I'm somebody who likes to evolve and adapt. And when there's people dying because of a tactic, I really think we should evolve that tactic. Right. I would share that sentiment. Kind of makes common sense. Yeah. Yeah. Where did that change come? Where did combat clearance come from?

1:51:46Was that guys like me and other operators that were operating and we just continually go to our leadership, right? I did eight years at the command and you're just deploying, deploying, deploying. And so I wasn't a senior guy yet. I had a kind of middle management. I mean, it's just so different than, you know, it's completely different than everything that I've been trained. I've never done combat clearance. I was out before that got to, you know, the vanilla side. But one of the missions we did with my army counterparts, right? And a good SEAL friend of mine was right there when it happened, right?

1:52:21They blew the door. As soon as the breach goes, you run in, right? First four guys, four-man entry i breached for four first three went in they had a sandbag bunkered pkm at the end of the hallway just so everybody ran right into the pkm bullets right my buddy i won't mention his name but he was literally standing there at the door and all three fell right in front of him fuck man right so you tell me how many times you need to be like hey guys it's this tactic of like blowing the door and running in. If there's not a hostage in there that we need to save, why are we taking that risk to force?

1:52:59Simple question. So we had evolved to that, right? So this, the Bin Laden mission, we knew there was no hostages, right? They're not holding somebody on the third floor. So there was no reason to be, to rush, right? To do the old school tactics have run into the room. And so, cleared to the door of the room, looked in, and he's basically twitching at the foot of his bed. There's two women in the room. Bin Laden's just twitching at the foot of his bed. Headshot from the guy coming up the stairs. There's two women standing there in the room, right? So, is he still alive, or is this just nerves? It's pretty twitchy.

1:53:40I'd say he's done. Headshot. cover the headshot, right? We didn't want to shoot him in the face. Nobody wanted to, we wanted the photo, right? The rules of engagement were capture or kill, right? None of this was go in and kill everybody. I've never been on a mission in the SEAL teams where they said go in and kill everybody. Never. It's always capture or kill. And we had 30 different lawyers show up and brief us on this. Why was he engaged while we were coming up the stairs? Because the only thing he exposed was a head. Stuck his head out the door to look at the guy coming up the stairs and was engaged.

1:54:20Within the rules of engagement for that point man, why? Because he could have produced a gun around the corner, right? Khalid down the stairs had had a gun in hand. Guy in the first room I cleared had a gun in hand. So third floor had more time to set up a defense than anybody on the second and the first, and everybody else had got a gun on the first and second. So for the point man to think, okay, bin Laden's armed, well within the rules of engagement. We'd been briefed. Part of the intel packages was, hey, they have the house rig to blow, or they're all wearing S-vests, and when you get in there, they'll martyr themselves and kill you guys too.

1:54:55So again, rules of engagement, point man coming up the stairs, only sees the head well within the rules of engagement to take that shot. Now he's laying the foot of his bed. Two women in the room. Right. Same point man grabs the two chicks and pushes them back against the far wall. Right. Had they had a vest on or something, he would have taken the brunt. Turns out they didn't. Pushing back against the far wall, and that's basically target secure, right? We finished clearing the third floor. And it's okay. Question the women and kids, right? Trying to get a name for the guy. The women gave us an alias.

1:55:40Did you shoot bin Laden? On the ground, yes. You did? Yeah. How many times? A couple. Where at? The body. In the body? how did that feel don't fucking tell me like i'm just doing the job bullshit you just fucking killed you shanko vinlon you never said i killed i'm i'm correcting myself you shot him as he was twitching at the fucking edge of his bed and you didn't know what that counts for but come on you didn't feel anything no sense of accomplishment retribution this guy we had a long way to get home still right we i think everybody was still very focused on okay right we're we've got one helo down all right let's think big picture here where we are in this situation yeah we got knucklehead down but did you know it was him man looking at It looked like him, right?

1:56:44The women gave us an alias. The kids confirmed it. We went back to the women. The women then confirmed it. We all carried photos of him, right? And all the photos we carried, his beard was gray and his little gray hair. I searched his bathroom. On the shelf, just above his sink, just for men hair dye. Get the fuck out of here. Are you serious? He died his beard. That's why his beard's pitch black in all the photos. Oh, shit. so uh yeah right we got a helo down we got a lot of stuff going on we're very far from home right you got an hour and a half helo ride into a country that's that's got surface to air missiles and they're way different than what's going on in afghanistan and so okay we got the clock's ticking 30 minutes on target so uh um i started taking the photos uh a buddy of mine was there.

1:57:36We literally, he had a camelback. He took the hose of his camelback and dripped water on his face. We took the sheets off his bed, washed all the blood off his face. I had bought, I was the supply guy. So I bought everybody in the squadron digital cameras, right? Because we knew, right? If we had the body going out in our helicopter and then we got shot down on the way out, how do you have proof on your helicopter, right? So did multiple digital cameras, taking photos, DNA samples, different helos. And then they're like, all right, you guys bag him up. So we had the body. Drug him down the stairs by his feet.

1:58:17Nice. Right? I can shut my eyes and I can remember the sound of his hollow skull bouncing down the stairs as we drug him down. Drug him over his son's dead body, down to the first floor and shoved him in a body bag. Nice. At that point, right, officers getting on the horn saying, hey, confirmed, we've got him. There are EOD guys. We had one EOD guy on the mission. He starts running around. He gets on, somebody gets on the radio, says, hey, prep it to blow. So our EOD guy starts running around the house, setting thermobaric charges in all these rooms. What are you doing? He's like, well, they said prep it to blow.

1:59:03Like, the house? I'm pretty sure they're talking about the helicopter. He's like, what helicopter? Like, dude, you need to go look in the courtyard. We had crashed so quickly, there was no radio call between Chalk 1 and Chalk 2 that we'd gone in. The whole target gets complete. And then some of the people in Chalk 2 found out that we had crashed in the assault. They did not know. Are you shooting? Everything was happening so quickly that that hadn't been communicated. So our EOD guy grabs his Thermo Bear, charges his ride, runs out to the helo, starts rigging that to blow. We're moving all the women and kids around the compound to safety.

1:59:41We're doing the 30-minute or 30-second shopping spree at Walmart, whatever, running around, grabbing anything we could. Thumb drives, computers, anything you can find. um i remember our master chief getting on the horn be like x fill the building now like no more hey two minutes like everybody out now wrapped everything up i remember running out of the building i'm carrying a whole bunch of stuff and i look over and it's the most uncomfortable weird thing you've ever seen these helicopter pilots that are never on the ground and they've got these big like aviator helmets these big black dark helmets and there's like two pilots and two crew chief and somebody had handed them suitcases of like intel so they're their big helmet they're looking around no guns they've got suitcases i'm like come on guys let's go um pulled them out uh we were down a helicopter right so leadership called one remaining at two backup ch-47s with backup seals and backup fuel one of the ch-47s flew into the compound right um landed picked up The other guys, since we had the body, they sent my team out on the one remaining Blackhawk.

2:00:55So we, uh, Hilo lands, we go booking out through this field, carrying the body bag, get to the Hilo, throw the body in, we jump in, and I may be a little sensitive because I've already been in one helicopter crash that night, and the whole cockpit is flashing red. Oh, shit. The whole thing's flashing red. I'm like, I don't know what that means, but I don't think that's healthy, right? It's our gas gauges. So we'd given ourselves 30 minutes on target with 10 minutes to spare. When I lifted off, we were at 38 minutes. So we were running on fumes. Our helicopter still had to fly eight, 10 minutes to our other refueling helicopter.

2:01:35We landed, we got gas, right? Everybody thinks it was the 24 SEALs that pulled this off. There's some army refueler out there who joined the army to refuel helicopters, right? not be Delta Force or anything crazy to refuel helicopters, probably for college GI Bill. And that night, that Army kid refueled us up, right? None of us would be back if it weren't for the Army kid who refueled us. We got gas for 20 minutes, right? Now we've blown up our helicopter, so now all the radars are coming up, right? Everybody's looking in Pakistan for what's going on. And you know you still have an hour, hour and a half helo ride to the border.

2:02:15Wow, man. So, sat on his body the whole way, cleared, uh, cleared into Afghanistan. Landed. Turned over the body to, to McRaven and the crew, and then we, we all flew up to Bagram. Turned over the body. We were all still in our uniform when President Obama came in and gave his whole spiel on the TV. Like, we're literally watching Obama, the body's laying right there. Let's keep going with the deep. There's a lot that's about to come out that's important and the debrief on items that were kept. I mean, this is all rolling into what you really want to talk about, so I'd just be as descriptive as you can.

2:02:55Yeah. I mean, we did our debrief, and that was it, right? Did our debrief, flew home. On the way home, they're like, guys, really good job tonight. You get two days off. Like, what? We showed up at the—we landed back at the beach, right? Nobody ever meets you when you come home from deployment, but half the command was standing there with pizza and beer. And, of course, the Navy bus. Get on the Navy bus, back to the base. Why was bin Laden's body thrown into the ocean? I don't know who made that decision. It was somebody way above my pay grade. I agree with it. I like it. You agree with it? Yeah.

2:03:36Why? We turned over the body to some Army counterparts, some Army Rangers, and they're the ones who flew it all the way out to the carrier and dumped it. I like it because it's, uh, there's no shrine, no memorial. He's just simply gone. There's no, even Al Qaeda has not said, hey, he's still alive and we've got him. Like, prove, prove you've got him. He's gone. Done. Erased. Deleted. Never to be seen again. Right on. I-I kind of like that, right? If there was some memorial or, you know, shrine or where they buried him, maybe that would be a little different. I don't know. Makes sense. But it also created a lot of conspiracy theories, but, you know.

2:04:19Government's got the photos. They can release them. They can do whatever they want. Was that that photo? There was a photo that was circulating around. That was bullshit. You didn't take that photo? All right. All right. All the, all, yeah. Any of the stuff online is not accurate. That's all.

2:04:36so we were talking about you know the the helo ride back where you had to think about you got to think about putting a bullet in bin laden now i think everybody processed it when we landed in bagram right we landed in bagram we did our debrief and and then we left the hangar right downloaded all our gear like we were flying back a couple hours later so literally download, debrief download. Okay. All that was done. And we had a couple hours and, and we went to some of the, some of the old area that we could hang out at Bagram, um, and hung out there. And there were some TVs that guys were turning on and that's where the story was breaking in the States, right?

2:05:20Like Bin Laden had given, or Obama had given his spiel, right? There's the stuff, university guy, university's going crazy. There was some like ticker tape at like a baseball or something, all these things were breaking. And I would say that was the first time everybody sat in the room and was like,

2:05:42take a breath. I hadn't had a chance to do that until then, right? We're still getting back. We still had something to do. We just got done. Like, now it's out. Only thing you're waiting for is a plane ride home, and you got a couple hours to kill, and we all went into, like, this area and just hung out and watched some TV. And so, like, all right, guys, plane's ready. And then we hopped the flight. They, you know, you typically stop in Germany. We air-to-air refueled on the way home, flew all the way back to the beach, landed, and good job, guys, two days off. I went to work both days, because what do you do when the world has just exploded in such a way, right?

2:06:22And what, you're gonna go hang out at home and feel like you're normal? No way. Everybody showed up at work. I see one of my good friends. I went to the green team with him. I spent eight years. I saw him more than I saw my family. I see him two days after the mission in our cage area at the command. I'm like, hey, Pat, are you? He looks at me and he's like, hey, man, can I ask you a question? Yeah, what do you got, dude? He looks around, makes sure nobody else is there, and he's like, hey, are you sleeping? I'm like, fuck, no, I'm not sleeping. I haven't slept in days. He's like, okay. All right, good.

2:06:59I feel normal. That was the single most emotional conversation I ever had with any teammate in 14 years. No shit. That was it. Are you sleeping? Nobody ever got, nobody talked about it. Nobody talked about mental health or how you were doing. There was none of that. It was, um, so that was, that was two days after the mission. One of my best friends, He's like, hey, man, are you sleeping? Because I'm not. I'm like, fuck, no, I'm not sleeping. He's like, okay, good, good. I feel normal, too. Fuck, man. It was a lot. It was a lot. It was crazy, right? And the media just hypes it up and makes it want to be crazier.

2:07:35And it was us just doing it. Yes, it was a very historical, significant event. I get it. I'm more proud of the Captain Phillips stuff, and I wasn't even one of the shooters, right? We saved somebody, not just killed a whole bunch of knuckleheads. I get that Bin Laden's a significant figure. I'm not knocking it. but it was um yeah it was a lot it was a lot all the stuff seals training gives you right we can go snipers shoot you know homemade bombs all the stuff we've been trained to do not one second and hey what do you do if your friend gets shot in the face what do you do if you do a bin Laden mission and it's fucking you up at home and you can't sleep nothing so yeah that's tough damn man if you're always going to revert to your training in a bad situation there was no training to revert to it was just and the right from from my first deployment to that lots of missions in between and right what are you how are you evolving adapting what was changing in between that I saw it all change, man.

2:08:45I saw from the beginning to the end.

2:08:50Yeah, it was tough. Not any of that, not any section, not any second in there was any leadership ever worrying about the individual operator. brand newer but it was excited to be there right okay eighth deployment ninth deployment tenth deployment nobody was ever checking in like hey sean are you okay yeah another three 12 devotions in the squadron last year your family okay nobody ever asked that nobody once ever said hey your family okay your kids okay are you home enough no way and then if you did mention, hey, I got some stuff going on at home. It's like, oh boy, we're losing this. So it was the expectation and the pressure, certainly at my former command, grew and grew and grew.

2:09:41And with the success of Captain Phillips, and then with the success of Bin Laden, all of this, the expectation was, okay, you're going to be fine. And if I'm the officer in charge, we're gonna do all this great stuff i'm gonna look good and i don't have to worry about the side effect it's having on my crew um but yeah the the and then shortly after the bin lan raid and all the high of that we had extortion and you want to talk about a gut punch right um

2:10:14that was crushing how long after the braid was extortion what august uh it's made august a couple of months. Yeah.

2:10:25Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy.

2:10:30And yeah, I mean, that was kind of one of the final straws for me, right? I knew my enlistment was coming up in December.

2:10:39I had been talking about, I didn't like the decisions being made in Afghanistan, taking away our dogs, saying no night missions, all this nonsense. I had joined and stayed in because of 9-11, and I did all these deployments, and I saw all this change happening throughout this stretch. And as the longer I stayed in, the more I saw our leadership, right, was promoted based off writing their own awards and the number of missions they ran, not how they took care of their guys or evolved what we were doing, right? Name a general or an admiral in Afghanistan who said the way we were doing it was wrong and survived.

2:11:23There aren't any. There's not one. There's no leadership in our military who said, hey, the approach we have in Afghanistan is wrong. We should be doing this. No, you're relieved and we're going to bring in another yes man to deliver my policy of what I want you to do. And so I just kept seeing more and more of that.

2:11:44And yeah, I knew that the leadership, whether Panetta, Admiral McRaven, President Obama, all giving interviews and all their stuff for their own hype. And that's what finally hit me. That disgusted you. Yeah. What was McRaven's position at the time? I don't care about that guy. I could give two shits about McRaven. Was he... I mean, what was he, though? He was commander of JSOC. He was the JSOC commander, okay. Yeah. Yeah. You know...

2:12:25I'll just put it this way. McRaven was at the command years ago, right? Before he was the commanding officer. He was not well-liked at all. Everybody always saw him as a horrible boss, at least from my level, my perspective only. Um, he gave it when he left the squadron. He, he, he like had this big plaque made that hung in the team room for years. Years later, he becomes the position he was in. Nobody liked him. Nobody liked the position he was in. He was very involved in trying to take away the dogs and the night missions and all the stuff that helped keep us safe on these very dangerous missions.

2:13:07So I may or may not have been there when his plaque was removed from the team room wall. We cut it in half, we shipped it overseas to a forward operating base in Afghanistan that we were working out of, and we burnt it in the fire pit.

2:13:27Now, we can keep going with the McRaven references here because I'm not a fan, right? You know, I wrote No Easy Day. Hold on. Before we get there, I'm just, we'll get there. I know we've got a lot to cover there. Just want to rewind just a little bit. You know, when you, how long was it after the Bin Laden raid where you left the Navy? The raid was in May. I got out in December, end of December, January 1st. On to terminal leave. Seven months. When did you decide you were getting out? How fast did you know this is it? I'd been talking about getting out before my last deployment. I told you we came home from the last deployment and 10 days later we were spinning up on the Bin Laden thing.

2:14:14So I'd been talking to a lot of my guys on that deployment because that deployment had slowed down. All the new rules were kicking in that were making it more dangerous for us. And I, as somebody who'd been there this whole time, I was not an officer. I was an enlisted guy who stayed there and operated the entire time. Right. Our officers bounce in and out and in and out and back and forth. I was there. So I saw I saw a lot of changes. And the more changes I saw, the less and the more senior and the more mature I got and the more older I got and the more dead friends I earned our gain. I was like, man, maybe I'm not putting myself in the healthiest position here, being sent to war by some of these idiots.

2:14:58And so I was very open and honest with my team that, hey, I don't know about this. So when I got back from that deployment, probably after the Bin Laden mission now, but that's when I went and sat down with my master chief. And I was like, hey, I need a break. Right. I was done and operational in the squadron. I was no longer staying there. I'd done very few guys stayed there that long. They're like, okay, you got to move out of the squadron and go do something different now. I'm like, okay, well, I need a break for 18 months. If I'm leaving the squadron, give me a break. And that's when they were like, no, the only other billet we're going to give you is an operational billet at a different squadron.

2:15:32I was like, okay, well, if those are my options, if you're my master chief telling me my only option is this, okay, thank you for that clarity. I already knew what was going on at the senior ranks and in the military and what was going on in Afghanistan. and I saw them making it more dangerous for us doing our jobs, I was like, why am I going to continue to volunteer for these knuckleheads? Well, I mean, what did the other guys think? Were they on the same page as you? Depends on where your enlistment is. You know the deal, right? Are you at 16 years? Are you at 20? How close are you to that retirement?

2:16:06I never joined for retirement. I joined because I wanted to serve. And then I stayed. And then I just stayed and stayed and stayed because there was a war going on and very few of us were doing it. So I stayed. I didn't stay for the paycheck. You know, there's not much paycheck there. Retirement, right? I could do 20 years and retire at the same amount the trombone player in the Navy band does 20 years and retires, right? So it's not about the money. Like I said, I got out with a plaque with my name misspelled. That's all I got. So it's never been about,

2:16:42I don't know what it's been about, but it hasn't been about... It was time for me. The other guys that I worked with, maybe they're sitting at 16 years. I was at 14. Maybe they have two years left on their enlistment that gets them to 18. And then they were trying to get us all with the big enlistment bonuses at 19 years. If you stay to 25, we'll give you some big money tax-free. So they were definitely courting a lot of the guys at that level. And the hook is if you do pass 10, well, why not stay till 20 and get your retirement? I was at 14. Why not stay six more? Well, what are the odds I make it?

2:17:19Six. It's pretty good odds I made it at 14 based off the amount of friends that aren't here, right? What are the odds I make it another six? And in these six years, I'm not going to be operational where I like. You're going to put me in the leadership with all these clowns that I don't trust and respect now? I'm out. Fucking A, man. Damn.

2:18:12Outro Music

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2:20:48Don't wait. Now is the time to make your move. Visit SeanLikesGold.com one more time. That's SeanLikesGold.com. Performance may vary. You should always consult your financial and tax professional. Did you have any aspirations to write the book before you were out? I had talked to, well, we knew the movie was being made within three weeks of the mission. so the movie idea and everything that the movie was happening was everybody knew that you mean what do you mean within three weeks of the mission you mean you mean the movie was a lot and discussed before bin laden dies three weeks within the mission we go to panetta's retirement ceremony and he has at langley virginia full access to langley the screenwriter producer director so we all knew that very very loud and proud that okay they're making a movie out of this but how the fuck does the government sue you for seven million dollars they didn't sue writing a book or whatever the fuck they state whatever you call it prosecuted you they fucking took your money they took your they took seven million dollars that you earned from the book but the director of CIA has given full access to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, to make a fucking movie.

2:22:18They gave the female CIA woman, they gave her permission to talk to the producers to give them the movie. That's the reason the movie's so accurate. So we all knew, plain as day, right? We knew this was happening, we knew this was coming, and honestly, it wasn't much of a surprise. right um did your team know you were going to write the book not everybody but i talked to a crew that that uh that i respected and said hey here's what i'm doing what was their take mixed mixed results um i a key piece to explaining what i was doing was hey look i'm not putting my name on it i'm not getting out in front of it and and i think they were like okay that makes sense if you can do that we get it because everybody else we'd seen was beating their chest taking credit right um and i was like look i'm i don't want any of that um i'm not using my name i don't have any plans on showing my face i want to tell the story i'm a kid who read a book i read a whole bunch of books growing up and it's because of those books that i voluntarily did 13 fucking tours right it was those books i read about right it wasn't uh so yeah i don't think writing books is bad.

2:23:33Um, you know, I think if you're a seal who's done and there's some out there, right. Uh, that have done very little and written about it a lot. Those, those kind of give a bad, uh, but those are also guys saying, Hey, look at me at the same time. So I took a very different approach. I've been there, did it. I don't want the, I don't want the press publicity and I'm going to, I'm going to tell the story and I'm going to do it under the radar. At least that That was the approach. That was the plan, until I got punched in the face. Where do we go from here? A book came out. Well, let me back up. Next question, right?

2:24:12So I get out of the Navy, I'm going to write a book. I've never written a fucking book before. Where do you go? How do you do this? I'm like, okay.

2:24:22I met a... a literary agent who does the book stuff. Talked to her. I'm like, hey, how do I do this? I need an attorney, whatever. She had represented a former Delta Force author by the name of Dalton Fury. That was his pseudonym, right? Delta Force officer wrote a book called Killing Bin Laden. Interesting. Yeah, interesting, but okay. He now died of cancer. So Dalton Fury writes this book. Literary agent had represented him. So she's like, hey, I can help you. I helped him through the whole process. I'll get you in touch with the same lawyer we used to do his book. Amazing. Great. That's exactly what we need.

2:25:10So former SOCOM JAG. now civilian practice represented other military authors like okay great i think i've got the perfect i got a lawyer i got my literary agent we go get a publishing deal and and i'm like okay how do we need to do this lawyer how does this work like okay well i can review the book i've got my clearances i've done this for other people i'll review the book and set that that's how it works. I'm like, okay, check. Did I know anybody who'd write a book could create some waves in the community? Sure. But as long as my lawyer was telling me I was legal and I'm referencing that against the movies and everything else coming out from the administration, I'm like, okay, seems to make sense.

2:25:55This guy's a former SOCOM jag. He's represented a former officer who wrote a book about Bin Laden and did a 60 Minutes episode. I've got the right legal advice. Seems like the perfect fit. So, boom. Knock out the book. Book finishes, right? We get it published. And the book comes out, right? And as the book comes out, that's when the government hears it, reads it, whatever. And they go high and right, right? Now, mind you, my book came out before the presidential election, and it came out before Obama's movie, before the Zero Dark Thirty movie, and I want to say it might have come out before the finish, which was the book that they'd all given interviews for.

2:26:38So my book was a surprise to the White House and everybody else. So the DOJ is sent after me. um man holy shit you you think getting in a gun fight's bad i've never seen anything like i didn't know anything about it i didn't know that this world existed um and then and then my real battle started right uh three years so this really happened because zero dark 30 the president's in Panetta's movie wasn't out. Their book wasn't out. Interesting timing to all of this, right? If I look at somebody who's running for president for a second term, right, who's going to run very much so on his movie that he's promoting, that's promoting his heroic decision-making to take out bin Laden, right?

2:27:32Right? You want to make sure that narrative is out there. Well, if a nobody presents a narrative that could counter yours, whether you've read it or not, what do you do? You crush the competition, right? If you have a Hunter Biden laptop weeks before a presidential election that could upset the election, what do you do? You have 100 former intelligence officers write about the fact that this isn't a real laptop and this is all fake. And they crush the other news. Same difference. I was just a nobody. And so they came after me and legally, right? So legally, so lots of lawyers throwing all sorts of threats.

2:28:10my original attorney, right? The guy had given me all the advice that says, look, I can review it. He's like, look, they're wrong. There's nothing classified in the book. He's like, wait till they read it. They'll leave you alone. There's nothing wrong. I'm like, they seem pretty angry here. It's like, what's the deal? He's like, no, you're good. I don't like that vibe from my attorney when I got a whole bunch of pit bulls over here yelling at me. So I hired a second attorney. First attorney continues to tell my second attorney that we had no obligation to get the book reviewed, that he had the prior authority to review it, to vet it, to make sure there was nothing classified in it, and check the box.

2:28:46New attorney is like, man, I don't know that that's accurate. So remove attorney one, bring in attorney two, and go to the pit bulls at the DOJ and say, look, I'll give up attorney-client privilege. I didn't do any of this maliciously. I'll answer anything you want. Like, please don't be so mad. Look, this is exactly how we got here. I'll go through my emails with my attorney. For the past nine months, this attorney has been guiding me through this process to this moment. So if you have a, if there's a legal problem here, let's all sit down and discuss this, right? That was when all this hit, right?

2:29:23All the drama and the press hit when the book came out. I've been taught, right? Communicate with leadership. If there's a problem, communicate with leadership. I'd done that every time in the teams, right? If there's a problem, go hit up leadership and communicate. It's our single biggest asset is our ability to communicate through the issues. I text messaged my former commanding officer, commanding officer of my squadron who'd moved up to be commanding officer of the whole team. I said, hey, sir, this has gotten out of hand. I would love to talk with you about this and explain what's going on, open up communication.

2:29:55He responds back with two-word text, delete me. that is a perfect example of the leadership inside nsw right delete me no didn't want to talk to me didn't want to ask what happened didn't want to say hey bis you're one of our top performers you've been here for years you just left like what's going on there was none of that it was an immediate we're gonna fucking crush this dude and so i had done some it's like my first got out i did some Video games, I helped with a video game company, shoot some, like, advertisement-type content. Well, I'd hired some buddies that were still in. They went after them.

2:30:35The command did. They went after any one of my friends. They absolutely, one of my friends, they told him not to even come back into work for his last year in the Navy. Are you serious? Officer. One of my officer friends that I had actually emailed a copy of my book to before it had come out. And when they, I gave up attorney-client privilege so they could look through my computer and see the advice I got. They went through my computer and dug up everything they could. And they saw that I'd sent a copy of this book to an officer friend who was enlisted and became an officer in the community. And they went to him and were like, hey, why didn't you report him?

2:31:09He's like, report him for what? Like, well, he was writing a book and you should have reported him. And they fucked him. Right. They, they screwed over probably 12 other of my friends. I mean, what do they say, I don't know, I didn't know this was wrong. I mean, we just had the president, Leon Panetta, the director of CIA, fucking have Hollywood and open the doors to Langley. They didn't care. The hypocrisy is so in your face and sick when you're sitting through it. I'm like, hey, what about the movie? They're like, well, you're not Panetta. You couldn't authorize that. I'm like, okay. What about Admiral McRaven and Obama giving interviews for this book the finish like did anybody approve what they could talk about or not talk well they know what to talk like okay well what's the review authority we're all operating off the same like come on guys right so so for for three years three years they came after me i've never written thankfully the book made a ton of money right the book all the book money went into savings account.

2:32:13I've never written a$50 ,000 check in my life. I was writing$50 ,000 checks a month for my attorney's fees. Because if you're the government and you have unlimited attorneys, what do you do? You outspend them. So immediately they're like, yeah, felony. Felony? For what? Oh, all sorts of threats. Every threat under the sun. I'm like, I gave up attorney client privilege. They called me in for two separate, I'll call them interrogations. They weren't questionings. They were 12-hour sessions in the basement of the NCIS headquarters in San Diego, right? Where they, no SEALs in the room, just some asshole NCIS guys, and literally going through every step in my book, like, well, right here, you talk about you guys launched the mission out of Jalalabad.

2:33:00Did you know there was a mortar attack in Jalalabad a week after your book came out and an American service member was killed, that blood's on your hands. I'm like, I'm sorry, did you just say Jalalabad was mortared? I'm like, have you ever been to J-Bat? No. I'm like, okay, well, I've been there like 12 times. Do you know how many times it's been mortared? Every time. I'm like, I hate to break it to you, but we have Russian contractors cooking our chow, and we have Afghans pumping the shitters. Like, it's nobody's surprise that we have an American base in Jalalabad. Right? Didn't matter. That was them just trying to poke me.

2:33:38They pulled up a picture in my book of the four-tube night vision goggles. Like, right there, highly fucking classified. How could you... You're such an idiot. How could you leak this stuff? Like, do you get internet down here in the basement? Yeah, please, please Google GPNVG night vision goggles and the manufacturer's website will pop up with all the specifications. In fact, you can buy them for 40 grand. They're on sale now. Anybody can have them. The Canadian Tier 1 unit tried to pull that shit with us. That the four tubes were classified? Yeah, that the quads were classified. So we sent them the article.

2:34:13Actually, they said all of the equipment that was used to take the world record sniper shot was classified. So we actually sent them the article in Ballistic Magazine that I believe, was that like two years old, Tim? Two years old? said oh you mean all of this equipment that you guys had ballistic magazine fucking put in the article about you yep oh that's classified okay so we put four dildos over the nod tubes and sent it back to them we said there you go canada yep the they'll just choose the hypocrisy they they kept saying look it's tactics techniques and procedures ttps it's the same bullshit they just went after pete scobell on right yeah who's that who's the guy what's the guy's name that i'll say I won't say his last name, but his first name is Walt.

2:34:59And he had the balls. Walt Allman. He's an admiral, right? I don't know what the rank he is. Is Walt Allman an admiral, Tim? Yeah, Walt Allman. He's the guy. Yeah, he went after Pete Scobell and threatened him and said that he's going to fucking ruin his reputation in the SEAL teams because he came on the Sean Ryan Show and talked about an operation. Look, I love Walt, but I think people change when they get into positions of leadership. And I think that's why I left the community, is because I saw these great officers moving up into a realm where they became politicians. And sorry, I'm not a fan of any politician.

2:35:37Yeah. You know, Walt came, he got in touch with my attorney, you know, who's sitting right over here at 10 Parletory. and is telling him that Pete needs to... that Sean needs to take the episode down or whatever because Pete released classified information about the weight of the boats. He said the wrong fucking weight of the boats. It's just... It's like, well... Here's what I would say to that, right? Leadership has the balls to call Pete, who absolutely bared his soul on that episode and crushed it, right? But NSW has the balls to call a guy like that and harp on him. But, right, recently there was a Netflix documentary, right?

2:36:23A Netflix documentary that came out in the past six months on the Bin Laden raid. So this is a great story. On the Bin Laden raid? Specifically about the Bin Laden raid. Only about the Bin Laden mission, Netflix special, six months ago. The same raid that you were on and wrote a book about. Yeah. And then took$7 million from you. Producer of the show calls, gets a hold of me, says, He says, hey, Matt, we're doing this interview. I've already interviewed Admiral McRaven. We're doing this whole Bin Laden thing. I'm like, listen, A, hasn't this been done already? He dies in the end. Let's get over with the story.

2:36:54They're like, no, but Netflix has never done it, and we're going to do our version. I'm like, okay, great. He's like, listen, we've interviewed all the Intel folks out of D.C. We just sat down with Admiral McRaven at his house for like four hours. And look, we'd love some of the operators on the ground to come in and share their story. And I'm like, really? Admiral McRaven just talked about it? I'm like, what authorities, any clearances, anything that we went through that it's okay to talk about this? And that's when I explained to the producer. I'm like, listen, I explained my situation, how the government came after him.

2:37:25We got to finish it. But how the government came after me and put me in debt and all this stuff. I'm like, look, I got a payment plan for writing a book and talking about this mission. Now it's been 10 years and it's supposed to be okay for me to go sit down next to Admiral McRaven and tell the story. They didn't go through, right? Well, no. I talked to the producer. Walt would never allow. Walt Allman would never allow this to happen. So I'm like, hey, can you get me in touch with the Admiral? Nobody inside the SEALs has ever talked to me about anything. But I'm like, can you put me in touch with the Admiral?

2:37:56And the producer does. I get a call set up with Admiral McRaven. I'm like, fuck yeah, let's do this. Call McRaven. He's in his car. He's driving. I'm like, hey, sir. Hey, Biss, how you doing? What are you up to? I'm like, well, you know, I'm a little conflicted. A little bit of conflicted here, sir. Let me explain my situation. I wrote a book. Hired a lawyer, wrote a book. Government came after me for that book. I now have a payment plan on that book for the next 15 years, and the government is going to fucking kill me if I say anything about this book. But now they're asking me to get on a Netflix documentary next to you.

2:38:32It's like, oh, Matt, Matt, don't feel obligated to be on that. Like, what do they want you to do? We'll take all the credit, man. Don't worry. What do you mean don't feel obligated? I'm like, sir, they want the operators to get on and tell our version of the story. And to be perfectly honest, sir, if you're okay doing it, then I guess it's okay for us to do it. You could literally hear him shitting himself through them. I'll bet you could. Right? Go, Matt, Matt, no, no, you don't need to. Don't feel obligated. I'm like, sir, don't worry. I'm not. I'm not going to be involved in this. I still got a payment plan for talking about it.

2:39:03Like, was there some authority that allowed you and other people to participate in that interview? Well, Matt, I know what to talk about. I'm like, okay, great. I'm sure you do. Oh, he knows. He knows. Yeah. Oh, okay. So, he then switches gears. He's like, well, Matt, maybe I can connect you with somebody who can help with your situation. Yeah. Like, oh, sir, that'd be amazing. It's so thoughtful of you. It's amazing that now, all of a sudden, when... He's been thinking, Admiral. When you don't want me to go on the Netflix documentary, you want to now try and help me. So, he sets me up with a civilian former SEAL.

2:39:38He's now a civilian aide to the sitting admiral. So I'm like, great. I get on the phone with this guy. This guy takes my call. This guy's actually was phenomenal. Former, former team six commander, older guy, now a civilian, long conversation with him. Broke down the whole thing, everything I've been through. He's like, man, can you back this up with documentation? I'm like, absolutely. Stand by. Blasted him all the documentation with everything to back up everything I've been through. And everything goes quiet. Why would Walt Allman allow Admiral McRaven to do a Netflix special? Well, that's my question.

2:40:13But he wouldn't let Pete Scobell come on and talk about... I'll get a call after this interview. Pete Scobell got a call after his, and they're trying to smack us on the wrist. But who's calling Admiral McRaven and telling him to shut the fuck up? I'll bet Walt isn't calling him. I'll bet Walt's not calling him. I wonder why. It's further up the food chain, all right? Yeah, yeah. So, unfortunately, right, I'll give you another example. In the height of my issues, I contacted a former SEAL. I won't name names, but he has an eyepatch. And he's a congressman out of a state council. You mean Dan Crenshaw?

2:40:48I'm not naming names. Another one of my favorite people. Sir, here's my situation. You know, Dan, Dan actually sent me a message. I should fucking read this to you. But basically, he tells me, I brought something up about him, and I never even met, I gave him the courtesy of not even mentioning his fucking name. It was about his birthday party, where he hired Steve Aoki to DJ his birthday. I mean, that can't be fucking cheap, right? Especially on a congressman's salary. And I brought that up, and Dan sends me a message that says his boys over at six are really upset with me that I brought that up.

2:41:28They're gonna, they might come beat me up. Boys at six. Boys over at six. Well, to infer he's got boys that are under him at six. I don't know why a congressman would be threatening me with SEAL Team Six, but I'm still fucking waiting. This is actually a couple years ago. I still have not had my ass kicked by a couple of guys over at six. But Dan Crunch, he fits with all these fucking people you're talking about. So I called him, right? He's a sitting congressman. He's a former officer. And, drumroll please, he was getting ready to release his book. So I call him up. I get a conversation with him.

2:42:02I said, sir, here's my situation. I hired an attorney. The attorney gave me bad advice. Book was published. I've given up attorney-client privilege, cooperated everything I can to fix this. They've still come after me. We can get into all the other stuff that I'm dealing with. I said, sir, can you help me out with this? He's like, well, you know, I'm about ready to publish my book and I'm not getting it reviewed. I'm like, well, sir. same same letter of the law that they came after me for failure to seek pre-publication review i didn't get pre-publication review because my lawyer told me i didn't have to and he could do it like in your case you know you have to get it reviewed i'm here telling you confirming you have to get reviewed or the government's going to come after you he's like yeah no but i'm not going to write anything classified in my book i'm like there's nothing classified in my book they they said there was they went through it they said nope there's nothing classified in it you just failed to seek review like so if i only thing i failed to do was seek review you're willingly going around that obligation and you don't give a shit he's like yeah but i'm not going to write about anything classified in my book that was the answer never talked to him again so he published his book no review nothing's happened he's kept his money he's a sitting congressman i got a payment plan.

2:43:19So, so to say I've been a little, I guess, I guess, uh, you're not one of Dan's boys over at six. Definitely not Dan's boys at six. That's a pretty ridiculous statement if I've ever heard one.

2:43:33Yeah. You have been targeted, man. So, so the first two years, right. It came after me. Um, I signed an agreement called a proffer agreement and the lawyers can explain what that is, but it's basically like, Hey, listen, I'm going to, I'll give you full disclosure. or I'm not lying about anything. And unless you find some sort of smoking gun, like we're good. So they're like, okay, cool. So I've fooled everything. Talked, anything they wanted to answer, anything they want to hear about, whatever. Went through it all. Lie detector tests, two interrogations in the basement where they're accusing me of all this nonsense.

2:44:05And they finally come back after about two and a half, three years. They're like, okay, we'll leave you alone. But you, and there's nothing classified in the book. You just failed to seek pre-pub review, and we want 100 % of the money back. I'm straight suicidal at this point, right? I've had a gun in my mouth over this. I am fucking—I've lost my community. You've legitimately had a gun in your mouth, or this is a figure of speech? No, legitimately in my mouth. Got that bad. Yeah, I got out of the teams, my whole community, my world. Everything was ripped from me, right? Every single one of my friends.

2:44:41I didn't have friends outside the SEAL teams. Gone. Boom. And if you talk to me, I was getting comms from guys on their wife's phone or some prepaid 7-Eleven phone saying, yo, dude, when I get out, I'll come up for air. But if anybody's hot even talking to you from the command, they'll kick us out of the command. So it was this big, this big, hey, anybody connected to BIS got fucked. And what the, you know, I mean, this is just... An hour ago, we were just talking about retention and recruitment and how development group had a, what, plus one... Was that development group or the entire... NSW-wide.

2:45:20NSW, the entire fucking SEAL team. We had a plus one SEAL for the entire fucking year. And now they're just... And now they've allowed a movie, they've allowed books, they've allowed everything they target you they target you for what because your fucking book went out before the president's movie and and they are going to they are going to fucking lynch people and the seal teams just for associating with you so over over over what they say is classified but there was nothing they can't even fucking run the classified operations because they don't have the manpower because their fucking egos are so, it's just fucking, and they're going to burn dudes for even associating with you when the exact same material went out and all these other avenues.

2:46:15Yep. And they're going to destroy the Navy's tier one unit over making a fucking example out of somebody that's a double standard. Yeah. So to say - Well, I think you made the right fucking call getting out at 14 fucking years. What a joke. What a fucking joke. You saw what I saw, right? I saw that. Shit makes me so fucking angry. Do you know, oh, man, nobody fucking said shit. Nobody fucking, nobody challenged it. This is like this, oh, man, dude, what the fuck? Do you know who this J. Cal guy is that I've interviewed? He's an SAS guy. He's being charged with murder. Oh, yes, I have. You know, I thought it would be a good idea to cover it.

2:47:02Maybe we'll fucking get this. He's really good buddies with DJ Shipley. He works at GBRS, and now he's fucked, and he can't do it. So I thought it'd be great to expose it all. Do you know how many SAS guys have come out and, like, spoken up for this fucking guy? Yeah, zero. You know what their fucking... This is the best part. Do you know what their motto is at SAS? he who dares wins how fucking hilarious is that they can't even stand up for their own fucking guys they can't even stand up for their own fucking guys it's it's the same in their fucking motto is he who dares wins what a fucking joke like what a joke i'm not smiling because i get i smiling because i've been i was in a very dark place right i got out i had everything ripped from me, zero.

2:47:54I got divorced. Everything gone, right? Any community I ever had gone. Like if you talk to me, no, I can't talk to you, Bess. They're going to get me. I can't, nothing gone. And that's when I was absolutely, I'm like, fuck this. I'm out. I'm like, right. Okay. So they're like, okay, we want all the book money back. Like, okay, great here. Here's all I got left. I had spent close to just under a million and a half dollars in my legal defense in about three years. I don't have that money, right? I got a plaque with my name misspelled, no retirement, no pension, nothing. So the only way I could defend myself was with the millions of dollars the book had made that was sitting in my savings account.

2:48:36So I'm writing checks to my, wrote them a check. They're like, whoa, you're missing some. I'm like, yeah, here's my receipts. You've never charged me with anything. Never charged me with a crime, never anything. Like we want it all back. Like, okay. Like we want it in three years. Like, okay. I don't know how I'm going to go make a million and a half or two million and pay taxes on it to then give you assholes the rest. So I was like, hey, I'm going to go sue my attorney. He gave me the advice. I gave up attorney-client privilege. go through my emails and look at the advice I got from counsel.

2:49:13This was not me maliciously going around my legal obligations. Like, we don't care. So I wrote him a check, every bit of money I had, and they gave me three years to pay the rest back. I sued my attorney. Okay. I figured this out when you sue somebody. The first casualty of a lawsuit is the truth. And that's fucked up, right? The first casualty of a lawsuit is the truth. The truth is irrelevant. It becomes about statuta limitations and where did you file in? And so for two and a half years, we fought all this nonsense until we get to a court date. Two and a half years in, we get a court date. And the day we get a court date where we're going to go to court and I'm going to actually get a chance to sue my attorney, he settles.

2:49:56Says, okay, you won. I gave you bad advice. We'll settle. Okay. So problem is the lawyers make all the money in that space, right? He writes me a check. Okay. I got to pay my attorney. And then I got to pay taxes on it. So I don't have the million and a half that the government needs. I go back to the government with my half a million dollars and my winning malpractice case. And I say, hey, look, I got a winning malpractice case. I know you assholes. Right. And through the malpractice case, we did a discovery. Right. And in this discovery process, we were able to question my attorney. Did you know that the DOJ, right?

2:50:37They came after me, two 12-hour interrogation sessions, three years long. They had one phone call with my original attorney. One phone call, 15 minutes. The DOJ called him once for 15 minutes, and my attorney was like, no, I told him he had to get a book review. Lied to him. Never looked in the emails, hundreds of emails with all of his advice. None of it. So the government took that, didn't care. the uh

2:51:07one the malpractice case went back to the government said hey will you relook at this right this proves i've got a winning malpractice case that proves i relied on counsel to publish this book without a government review and if this is the only thing they got me on is i failed to seek pre-public review then he told me i'd like look here it is he's culpable in that decision-making. Government was like, we're not opening it up again. So wouldn't touch it. So then I went back to them and I said, okay, I can't pay you a million and a half dollars in three years. Will you give me a payment plan? So they disappeared.

2:51:43They wanted all my tax returns. I sent in a whole bunch of junk. They came back a couple months later and said, okay, this is just this last January. I said, okay, give us all the money that you made from your malpractice. and then we'll put you on a payment plan. So$3 ,800 a month for the next 15 years. I only served for 14. There's no way I made over a million and a half dollars in my service, so I'll pay back more money for longer than I ever served. They went through my computers. They deleted every photo from my career. Gave me back a computer with no photos on it. Basically zero-ized my whole career.

2:52:25um that is when right and and i've been very been in some dark spots through this right um that's why i said my my faith my journey of faith has been much more locked in when i was in the fight with friends and people and whatever and it was like i understood hey seal shit's gonna be hard and it's gonna i never expected the civilian world to be this hard and to hit me this way and I got freaking jumped and I was not ready for it. I didn't have a community around me to help me. Um, I was alone and in a dark spot, right? I went to the VA, right? Bad neck and back issues all through this time. I'm going to the VA for my medical care, right?

2:53:10The DOJ is fucking me, trying to kill me. Um, and I go to the VA. I'm like, Hey man, I can't drink a beer without my arms going numb. Pain meds. Pain meds. Pain meds. Never even got an MRI in a year and a half. Holy shit, dude. Right? My final trip to the VA, I came back with a bag of pain meds, no MRI. My parents were in town visiting. I remember showing my parents the pain meds and my mom just broke down. She's like, what the heck? So I wasn't, here I am, right? Getting no help from the VA. And I don't know if it's because they said, hey, don't help this guy. Fuck him. I have no idea. I just know I was getting no help, but my only medical help that was there, I'd pay for my own insurance.

2:53:56I serve, so I get my VA, and the VA's doing nothing for me. So yeah, I met a neck and back surgeon in California, former Air Force guy, Dr. Robert Bray, Disc Surgery Center, former Air Force trained surgeon that started his own practice. I met him and he's like, Bess, come on out. He gave me x-rays and MRI and I met him in an hour and a half. He's like, listen, man, you need to clear your schedule. Your neck's basically broken. Like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, your C4 and 5 are like eight millimeters offset. And if you hit a speed bump the wrong way, you're never walking again.

2:54:34Ooh. He's like, clear your schedule. A week later, he operated on me. Fusion, he's done five surgeries, hasn't charged me a penny. I'd still be going to the VA for help. That's a hell of a dude. Yeah. He's operated on probably, he operated on the guy who held me in on the helicopter on the crash, right? He's probably eight other of my friends now he's operated on. No shit. Yeah. What's his name? Dr. Robert Bray. What a fucking badass. That's awesome, man. Yep. If finding what you need were a superpower, you'd be unstoppable. Parking spots, holiday gifts, clothes that fit like they were made for you.

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2:57:13That's hillsdale.edu slash SRS to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash SRS. All right, Matt, we're back from the break. So it sounds like there's, it's not just one investigation. There's a second investigation coming. So how does this happen? Right. The first one went three years. That was over. No easy day. That was getting that money back. OK, that finished. I started suing my attorney. And while I'm suing my attorney, one of the days I'm we're doing our stuff with him. I get a call from my ex-wife and she's like, hey, some FBI agents just showed up at the front doors. The kids are leaving for school.

2:57:54Real good. Real nice. Mike, what are you talking about? She's like, well, they confiscated your old computer you had that we had when you were in. And I'm like, OK, what? They'd say what? They're like, yeah, something about your consulting gear consulting work you did when you were in. I'm like, oh, my gosh. So, OK. Up starts another investigation. Gear consulting? Gear and equipment. OK, so this new investigation is out of the Department of Justice Norfolk field office, not the Department of Justice San Diego field office that we'd been dealing with for three years. right this was all new oh surprise surprise now they're pissed at gear consulting i did when i was when i was in right i was always a gear guy i mentioned that earlier i love my gear development stuff and i was very involved in that my uh actually my former commander that ultimately said delete me um first name wyman um last name rhymes with coward um wyman coward uh came by one day and he's like, hey, you're really good at this gear stuff.

2:58:55You know, you ought to go talk to the Jags, get some approval so you can do it the right way. But, you know, a lot of your designs have some good crawls. You know, maybe you design this flashlight, the Marines can buy it, whatever. So, okay, I went to our Jag at the command, got approvals to do consulting for companies on the outside, shoes, hats, guns, whatever, just any of the stuff I was into outside of work, the very little time I had at home that was outside of work, and it was approved by the command. so here we are i hadn't done any gear consulting for years i've been out of the navy and now all of a sudden i find out they're coming after me for gear consulting so okay so i'll spin up again now instead of the 12-hour interrogations in san diego 12-hour orientation 12-hour interrogation in norfolk new set of assholes run me through the rig oh you you did all these things you broke the whatever you need a plea to a misdemeanor i'm like a misdemeanor for what like prove any of this you're throwing at me prove that i made money off any of my designs through i had the i'm not the purchasing agent i can't affect anything that i design i can't buy we have contracting departments so there's no conflict of interest there but they're like oh no you made money off this stuff we're coming after you so for another year they came after me they kept trying to throw anything at me to get me to, they were like, if you don't plead to a misdemeanor, we're going to try and push a felony.

3:00:20I'm like, where, what, how? So about a week before they're trying to pressure me, I go to the SHOT show in Vegas and the press hits and all across the press said Matt Bessonet retained photos of bin Laden. I had photos of bin Laden. I told him about it in all of my interrogation stuff. Nobody knew that but the government. So then the government leaks that the same week that they're trying to pressure me into taking a misdemeanor because they wanted so bad to get me on something. And I just kept saying, fuck you, prove it. Now, granted, I have to pay legal bills to get that to work. So that's when I'd written my second book.

3:01:06I'm out of money from the first one, right? Given all that back, I'd written no hero. I'm using that money to continue to pay my legal defense. This goes on for a year. After a year, they're finally like, okay, you didn't do anything criminal. Just give us all the money back you ever made. So it became a financial shakedown. So I wrote them a big check and they went away. That was the last I heard from them. And then I've just been dealing with the trying to get to the financial closure of paying them back for No Easy Day. That is why I wrote No Easy Way. Now, what's crazy about that, right? I submitted that book for review.

3:01:52That book has been into the government for six months. So what is that book about? Everything we're talking about right now. So you have to get, I just, this doesn't do. This all takes place since me getting, I'm a civilian writing this whole book. But I have to get it reviewed based off the agreements that I've signed. Now, the guy with the eyepatch doesn't, and he just blows it off. But I have to because they came after me for the first one. So I'm going to submit this one for review. But now they've sat on it for six months, and they don't want it to get out. Right? They don't want my version, this story that we're telling.

3:02:27Right? They don't want this out in written form because it makes them look bad. And so six months, they've been sitting on it.

3:02:36But there's nothing classified in the book, right? Unless they don't want me talking about something that they don't want me talking about. So what if you were to write a book on, I don't know, fixing up your... Have to submit it. 1950s truck. Have to submit it. Based off how they've come after me, I wouldn't dare not get it submitted. Think of all the drama I've been through because my book did not get submitted. So I'm not about to submit another book to publisher without getting it reviewed. Well, but now they're sitting on this. Why would they sit on this? It's not because it's leaking tactics, techniques, and procedures.

3:03:15It's because it's exposing their hypocrisy. And they don't want it. Right? They don't want the story of McCraven getting out. So how would they come after you if there's no... They just won't review the book. They'll just sit on it, let it die. And they know I owe payments every month. And if I miss one payment, they've told me to my face. They'll come back and charge me back interest and fuck me. What would they, what could they get you on if you bypassed it? I have no idea. Could they get you on anything? I mean, I know they can fucking get you. If they could get me on something, they would have.

3:03:45Yeah. If they could have got me on something, they tried for four years straight to get me on anything. And the only thing they could do was break me financially. And so I've got to this point and now I'm like, okay, I'm telling the story. Nobody's going to believe it. I've shut up. I've fought my battles with the government. I fought the legal battles. I thought the Justice Department was going to be just. It's not. I've waited 12 years now for some sort of adult supervision to step in and be like, hey, this is fucked up. We need to fix this. Now, I will say, I will say we may have some potential good momentum.

3:04:25Literally last week, my attorney got a call and there's some there's some potential that this administration is getting involved. and hopefully, I don't want to speak, I don't want to think too optimistic because I've been shot in the face every time an opportunity comes up, but there is an option, opportunity that the current administration is getting involved and going to help fix this. So we'll see. Well. But I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah, that would be great. Let's bring on our attorney and see if we need to clean anything up here. Great idea. Cool. Tim, Tim Parlatori. How are you, sir?

3:05:06It's always good to see you. You too. Man, so are you representing Matt? So I have represented Matt for a number of years. And I want to be clear, I'm here to talk about his case. I don't represent him on his current dealings with the department. Uh, and that's the decision that we made because as he goes, you know, to try and negotiate a better deal with the department, it made sense for me to take a step away from it because since I also, you know, have represented the secretary, um, we want the decision to be made based on the merits as opposed to having anybody sit there and say, oh, well, they just made a decision based on how his lawyer is also the secretary's lawyer.

3:05:56So for that reason, I've stepped away from that piece of it. However, look, I maintain long relationships with all of my clients. So I consider about a friend than a client and anything he needs, I would help him

3:06:17with i mean tim we met under similar circumstances yeah so we met through the dallas alexander the canadian sniper when they came at me saying that oh there's all this classified material in there what you know and then we found out what it really was is they're fucking humiliated because they fired one of their legendary snipers over a covid vaccine and not wearing a mask right and uh they didn't want that out there so we gave them we gave them you know very politely gave them the finger and said fuck you the episode's going back up you were very polite about it though but uh but uh but uh you know the the shit just keeps happening you know matt's uh matt was actually the i think the first person that i've heard about this shit happening to now it's happening again obviously with a new book but you know look i mean it was we've just seen so much corruption from the government you know what i mean in in i mean i was going to bring up eddie gallagher and the in the um and the blackwater guys and brad geary but i think those fall under you know different different circumstances all just as you know even probably even more fucked up than this But, you know, it's the shit.

3:07:37It's Dallas Alexander. I mean, a couple weeks ago, we had a couple of Delta guys reach out, wanting their episode pulled because Delta made a statement basically scaring the shit out of all their guys. Oh, you can't go on here. We're going to fucking come after you legally. And I had to tell them, I'm fucking tired of playing this game. I am fucking tired of this shit, of playing this game. And they're freaking these guys out. They're not allowed to talk about it. They think they're not allowed to talk about their own fucking life, you know, and I'm not pulling it. I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not playing these stupid fucking games.

3:08:14And so it's, you know, it was Chris Fettis. We had to get involved with Chris Fettis because we had people telling us that they're going to sue Chris and they're going to do this and they're going to come after him and they're going to ruin his reputation. and it just got to the point where I mean on that one nobody even knows this but that one I called you and I said I'm I want to fund Chris's legal battle and I want him to fuck whoever is making this shit up about him and coming after him and trying to ruin his fucking life we are going to sue them and then we're gonna sue him again and then we're gonna sue him again and then we're gonna sue him again so they don't have anywhere to fucking live so their kids can't go to school So I'm so fucking tired of people fucking with these guys for coming on here, telling their story.

3:09:03And because they tell their story, it jet launches their business and they're able to get out of the fucking Navy SEAL operator mindset and move on with their fucking lives. This is a problem that we keep seeing, and a lot of it is viewpoint or content-based, because we are treating people differently based on what they have to say, whether people like it or not, and also, quite frankly, what their rank is. And I do want to clear up one point, if you don't mind. Walt Allman has only been an admiral for a few months. And he was the commandant shipment at the Naval Academy before. He recently put on one star, and then he became the acting Warcom commander when Jamie Sands got fired.

3:09:53So a lot of the things that you were talking about with Matt that involved where you were talking about, Walt, the reality is that was before he transferred to that position. So it is the Warcom commander that you were referring to. But a lot of that was Sands, Keith Davids, Wyman Howard. Matt's a good friend who said, delete me. And some of it even going back to Colin Green and before. But what you have here is you have these people that once you get above a certain rank, it does become political. And they are doing things, not all of them, but a lot of them are doing things to just try and get another star and to try and move up the ladder.

3:10:41And so anybody who puts out information that may make them look bad or may upset somebody, They want to try and crush that. It's not right. And what they've done, I think Matt's case is one of the most extreme of this, where because his factual, unclassified book embarrassed President Obama, that created this situation where they had to crush him. And you have these people making decisions, saying, I want to hurt this guy, I want to crush because he embarrassed me. These people have never been to any form of combat like Matt's been in. That's what I'm saying. Is that... They have, but they don't care.

3:11:29And this is the common thread that I see, you know, that I am gonna pull back, you know, to Eddie Gallagher and Brad Geary and J. Cowell and all of those things, where they pursue these vindictive prosecutions because they are angry at the individual as opposed to thinking about what is fair. And so because they're angry and because they have power, they will have NCIS go after people and do these type of things, or Air Force OSI or CID or FBI, whoever, or whatever the British equivalent is for J-Cal. And ultimately, you're unleashing complete incompetence from these investigative agencies to try to pursue what is a political persecution.

3:12:24NCIS was so bad. Years ago, it used to be called NIS, Naval Investigative Service. They had to do a whole rebrand and restructure because NIS had become such a politically driven an organization to go out there and anybody that the admirals didn't like, they would trump up these investigations, usually trying to accuse somebody of homosexuality, because that's the easiest way to get rid of somebody you don't like. It used to be called the admirals of Gestapo. They went through a reorganization, a rebranding, and yet in a lot of ways, they're still doing the same thing. They did the same thing to Matt.

3:13:04And I sit here and I look at it and I say, they take a guy who has given his entire life to this. He's given his youth, his health, everything, put it out on the line to try and keep us safe, to try to go out there and continuously deploy. And when he gets to the end, they try and throw him away. It's something Eddie Gallagher and I talk about all the time where you sign up knowing that you're expendable, but they treat you as if you're disposable. And so what Matt went through of being excommunicated from the community, and you know this better as well as anybody else, when you go through that train, you become a SEAL.

3:13:53That is, for a lot of people, that's your identity. That's your tribe. That's what you are connected to. And when you're then removed from that and excommunicated from it, it has so many more negative effects. PTSD is something that is exacerbated through a feeling of abandonment. And yet the command, the military as a whole, the leadership is taking not just a feeling of abandonment, they're creating actual abandonment. And so many other clients that I've represented that you've never heard of, that because the command is angry with them, they will not only kick them out, but they'll take their trident on the way out.

3:14:39And they'll say, you were never a SEAL. Guys who've done plenty of deployments, and I have clients like this, where you look at their DD-214 and they've done 15 deployments, Purple Heart, Silver Star, no Trident, not a member of the community. And so when they then go to try and go to a veterans event or something, they want to go to Navy SEAL Foundation for help because they're having difficulty. Navy SEAL Foundation says, nope, you're not a SEAL. You're not a part of us. You can't even attend reunions. And, you know, Matt is lucky that he got out and then they got angry at him after he already had his DD-214 because had his timeline been a little bit different, I have no doubt that NSW would have wanted to take his trident away from him.

3:15:40So he'd be out there as one of the guys that put bullets into bin Laden's body, but they could say, oh, he's not a SEAL.

3:15:51They tried to do it to Eddie Gallagher. They tried to take his trident away.

3:15:58It is bad for our people. It goes right back to what Matt was saying about leaders should be taking care of our people and not focusing on writing up their own awards and chasing their next promotion. And what they do is they see these people as an impediment to their next promotion. So if somebody makes them angry or embarrasses them in any way, well, we have to destroy them because they hurt my ability to get another star. So that's kind of thematically. How did Matt hurt somebody's ability to get another star? Because his superiors now have to answer to Obama of why did you let your guy put out his book before my version of events?

3:16:53It's that petty. Yeah. And when it comes down from the top of I want you to take care of this.

3:17:04Okay. So, if that's true, how were all these other people, Leon Panetta, Obama, I mean, I get it. I know what it is. I know what it is. It's the content. It's the content. It's the rank. It's the rank. It's the only fucking thing that matters. It's the rank and it's the content. We like what their rank is and we like what they have to say. Therefore, we're going to let them get away with it. John Bolton, perfect example. Former National Security Advisor. He goes out and writes a book. He doesn't get the pre-publication review. They start to go through putting him through the exact same process that they did to Matt.

3:17:50Investigations and everything. But the election happens. And so all of a sudden, the White House turns over to Biden. Well, Biden liked what Bolton had to say because he wrote that Trump was bad. So therefore, all of a sudden, the Biden DOJ puts the brakes on and says, oh, we're going to let Bolton go. Let his book that has classified material in it go right ahead. Let him keep all of the revenue from his book that has classified material in it. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we still crush Matt, whose book doesn't have classified material in it, but has content that we don't like.

3:18:38You know, when his attorney, you know, Kevin Podlowski was the attorney that had given them this bad advice. When he settled that lawsuit, one of the biggest impediments that Matt had during this process was that the attorney had lied to DOJ. He lied and he said, I told him he had to get it reviewed. And that was their linchpin. Because his whole defense is, my attorney told me this is okay. And they could say, well, we talked to him and he said that's not true. So now they have a witness against him. they get him to take this settlement, and I didn't represent him at the time, by the way. He then gets this malpractice settlement.

3:19:28And in the malpractice settlement, yeah, I got to give him a lot of credit. I didn't handle it, but whoever handled it got him a great settlement where Podlowski actually admitted in the settlement that he given him this advice. Usually settlements have one of those, you know, neither side admit that they did anything wrong, but he actually admitted what he did. And that was something that, you know, I then came into this and I was able to take that back to DOJ and say, see, you brought this whole thing based on a false premise. You had a witness who lied to you, which is a crime, by the way. You have a witness who lied to you, and now you have proof that everything Matt did was on the advice of counsel.

3:20:13And one thing to understand is that the consent decree that he entered into on this, the cause of action was breach of contract. He breached the contract that says before you submit something, or before you publish something, you have to submit it for pre-publication review. If he was relying upon the advice of counsel, that's a defense that he would have had had it been litigated at the time. Because we finally had this information, I went to the court and I tried to file a motion to vacate the consent decree and to change the result to match the actual facts. DOJ opposed me. They said, too much time has passed.

3:20:58This should have been done within whatever it is, six months of the consent decree being entered. Even though the statute does say, yes, there's a timeline, but it says, and it can go after that for good cause shown. The good cause shown, from my perspective, is this is something that he didn't have at the time. As soon as we had it available, we brought it to the court. But the problem is that the courts don't really like to change things. They like finality in the judgments. And so ultimately, DOJ opposed us, not factually, just on, well, they should have done this earlier. And the judge agreed and said, well, too much time has passed, so we're going to leave this judgment in place.

3:21:45At that point, that left me with no real options other than to try and negotiate down for him. And the only way that we could really negotiate down at that point was based on an ability to pay. Now, there's a key aspect of this financial settlement that you need to understand, which is taxes. Because when he got the money from the book originally, he paid taxes on it. The portion went to his attorney. Now, you have$1.5 million. As he said, he's got a little bit under$4 ,000 he's got to pay back a month, but he's not allowed to claim that as a deduction or an expense on his tax return. So in order to make the$4 ,000 payments, he's got to earn$6 ,000 a month pre-tax just to pay that.

3:22:45So that$1.5 million figure, he really has to earn more like$2.5 to$3 million just to be able to pay it. And that's not something the IRS is not going to give him any break on that. He's essentially paying tax on this thing twice. He paid the tax on it when he first got the revenue, and he's paying tax on it a second time to try and pay it back. and all of it goes into the U.S. Treasury. So between the taxes and the forfeiture, the Treasury is making a ton of money off of this guy. Damn.

3:23:31Why are they holding his book up?

3:23:36Pre-publication review is a messed up process. I've done it with other clients. And he's right. Anybody who has signed one of these agreements has to have their book submitted. Now, if it's a cookbook, nobody's going to really throw a fit over it. Some guys do actually are that careful with it. And for him, I would definitely be that careful with it. If he's going to write a cookbook, he should submit it. But what happens is it goes to the main office at DOW, Department of War, that does a pre-publication review. They do a first read of the book. They then decide, okay, how many different agencies have a stake in this?

3:24:25And then they'll send the portions off to those agencies. And so a big portion of this obviously goes to Naval Special Warfare Command. Some of it may go to the CIA. Some of it, for his portion of it, will definitely go to NCIS because of the content of this third book. There's nothing classified in there. There's nothing that NCIS has to be concerned about. The government is not allowed to edit your book in any way. The only two things that they're allowed to object to is classified material and a misstatement of government policy. Those are the only two things that they're supposed to remove.

3:25:16But the way that they do this, where they farm it out to all the different agencies, and yeah, I don't want to defend them on this and say that they're not holding it up because I think that they probably are. But the reality is when you send it over to Naval Special Warfare Command, there's just so many SEALs writing books that they have a backlog there. I mean, it's just a fact. That actually doesn't surprise me. You can publish a Green Beret book a lot faster than a SEAL book. Does anybody read those, though? Well, they're not as interesting. I'm just kidding. I know there's at least one person out there.

3:25:53I'm just fucking around. You can publish a surface warp for a book really fast.

3:26:02So there is that. Yeah, I do think that there's probably some element of dragging their feet. And once you get it back, they'll have a whole bunch of stuff blacked out. And some of it's silly. Like some of it you know. It's like if any time for a book like his, any time you see a number somewhere between five and seven, That'll be a little black box.

3:26:28Green team is something that'll be blacked out. Things that are certainly public domain that they'll still black out. Eddie's book. When Eddie Gallagher submitted his book, they tried to redact out portions of it because they were embarrassed about the name of the Iraqi unit that his unit had been assigned to. And they tried to say that was classified. And I went back to them. I said, how is that possibly classified? Well, that's what they said. So yeah, here's the transcript where the prosecutor said the name of that unit seven times in his opening statement in front of a courtroom full of media.

3:27:10So if that's classified, you need to prosecute the prosecutor. Oh, okay. You can put that in the book. So there is still a negotiation process at that stage. But yeah, it does take a long time. And it takes even longer when somebody doesn't want this book to come out. And that really goes back to the original problem that Matt had, is his publisher wanted his book out before the election. that's why the publisher gave him a lawyer who said i can help you do this so it gets out before the election because if he had done it the right way if he had been advised by a different lawyer who said this is what you legally have to do the book would have been published after the election it would have been published after the movie it would have been published after the the other you the Mark Bowden book, he wouldn't have had any problems.

3:28:12He would have been able to keep 100 % of the revenue, but it would have been timed the way that the administration had wanted it to be timed.

3:28:26Makes sense, unfortunately.

3:28:32Do you think Matt has anything to worry about with the new book? No. No, not at all. And with the second book, with the third book, he's got nothing to worry about there because he's following the process. He's not doing what the original lawyer said. And so as long as you follow the process, you have nothing to worry about. Is there any time limit or can this just drag on for years and years? At a certain point, if it is clear that the government is dragging its feet, you can file a lawsuit at that point. How can you know? What amount of time will go through, will go with Matt's book before his attorney advises him to fucking file a lawsuit?

3:29:22It's no specific timeline. There's no specific deadline, but if it's sitting there for 12 months and it hasn't been acted on and he decides to file a lawsuit, here's what's going to happen. He'll file a lawsuit. DOJ will get it. DOJ is the agency that defends every other government entity. They will all of a sudden spit out the fully reviewed book before their deadline to respond to the lawsuit comes. How did I know you were going to say that? And then they're going to put in a response saying, we don't know what he's talking about, judge. You know, we've complied with our obligations, and so therefore we move to dismiss the lawsuit.

3:30:13So why couldn't he just file one right now? It's still a little bit early. Could you just file the lawsuit with the review? By the way, if this isn't done next week, I'm going to sue your ex. It's difficult because, again, the timelines for SEAL books are so much longer just based on the volume. Now, it would be worthwhile potentially, because I don't think that they publish these numbers, it would be worthwhile potentially to file a FOIA to find out what is the average length of reviews. and then once you can, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, get what the timeline statistics are on, you know, books in general, SEAL books, Green Beret books, compare those, and then once you have that timeline, you can see, okay, if it takes an average of, you know, two months for a Green Beret book, six months for a SEAL book, and eight months for a Matt Bissonnette book, now you know that they're delaying you.

3:31:19Gotcha. Gotcha. But ultimately, the people that are administering this are career GS civilians. This process is not something that any of the political appointees really have that much visibility on, because it's something that's kind of, it's administratively handled at that lower level, which is, of course, where all of the deep state lives. and so um it's the kind of thing that once you kind of bring light to it then maybe people up above say okay maybe we need to fix this process and i'm just so so fucking tired of people fucking with these guys just for telling their story yeah i'd have to go back and look i think it took eddie about seven or eight months to get his book reviewed, and everything in his book was stuff that had happened in an open courtroom.

3:32:23Now, we thought, you know, this book will take two weeks to review. All you have to do is read through real quick and see that he's not talking about any operations. Everything happened in an open courtroom, so, yeah. But, no, still took a very long time.

3:32:47man this shit is pissing me off you know i mean matt just said it i mean i we me and you have talked especially with the chris fetta stuff yeah like that really pissed me off yeah and you know and we had had discussions that i said this is a this is a reason why these guys are fucking killing themselves right because they're not allowed to share their story and if they do they get ostracized by either the leaders of the command or the operators of that command And when that happened to Chris, I just want to clarify because I was pissed and I don't think I said it properly. But first, the first thing was, oh, the CIA is pissed because they don't want that getting out.

3:33:26Then it was some of the operators over at Dev Group. Then we knew exactly who it was. And, you know, it's always these fucking people who are lurking in the shadows who never want to be revealed. Right. We found out who that was, and it was, if there is any defamation, any fucking non-truths, and whatever is going to come out about Chris, I am going to fucking sue your ass for defamation. Right. You know, and then magically, we never heard another fucking word about it. Correct. Correct. I'm just sick of this shit. And then we get fucking Walt Allman coming on about Pete Scobell talking about some shit that happened 15 fucking years ago about equipment that they don't even use anymore.

3:34:14It's another thing that I've seen where people that leave before they retire, you know, when I left the first time, you know, I left as an 03. And I see a lot of veterans that leave and they kind of mentally freeze at that rank. And so what happened with Pete is very consistent with what I've seen with other people, where they'll have a high-ranking officer reach out to a veteran of a certain rank and treat them the same as if they were still a lieutenant or a junior enlisted guy. and use that positional authority over them. And some veterans, they still fall into that. I mean, that's one of my beliefs when it comes to our friend, the one-eyed congressman, is that when - Dan Crenshaw.

3:35:13Right, because when WACOM wants him to do something like stay out of the Eddie Gallagher case, they'll send a flag officer to talk to him and tell him, hey, Lieutenant Commander, this is what it is. And he just nods and salutes and says, oh, yes, sir. A video of him committing murder. Yes, sir. I won't support him, sir. I mean, that's my belief is that just seeing how he blindly parrots whatever the senior leaders want him to, yeah, I think that they take advantage of that. I think there was an element of that, of, hey, if we call up, you know, Lieutenant Scobell, and just, you know, tell him, hey, you need to do this.

3:36:01Harass him? You mean fucking harass him? Yeah. There are certain things... I wanna get somebody to... I know. There are certain things... Just like they're trying to make an example out of these guys, I wanna find one of these fuckers and make an example out of him.

3:36:20There are things that we don't want people to say. You know, there are obviously classification issues. We don't want people going out and revealing, you know, secret missions and things like that. I get that. But you know what? We're talking about... People aren't even clearing fucking rooms anymore. They have drones for this shit now. We're talking to fucking dinosaurs in here. This is no different than me talking to Don Gronk. graves about Iwo Jima right like good job you cleared a fucking house we don't do that shit anymore we have robots that do this for us but let's still attack them you know for shit that we don't even let's let's let's still attack them for fucking giving up tactics that we don't even fucking do we don't even have humans on the fucking battlefield barely anymore give me a break and like fuck off and part of the problem is that the people that are trying to hurt these guys are ones that they don't really fully understand the rules themselves.

3:37:19Yeah, because they've never been on the fucking battlefield. Well, there's that too. They don't understand, you know, they may not fully understand what the law is on these things, what the regulations actually say that people can and can't say. You know, when, you know, for example, while you have to get review to talk about operational stuff, any military member can go out there and talk about their personal experience. And so the morning after the verdict in the Eddie Gallagher trial, Eddie went on Fox & Friends and did his first ever media interview. I was with him, and it was Pete Hegseth that did the interview.

3:38:02And he talked about his personal experiences of going through this trial, all of which happened in a room that was full of media. And wouldn't you know it, within an hour, I get a call from the WACOM JAG saying we're thinking about charging him for having done this interview. And I say, really? Okay, what do you think he did wrong? Well, he didn't get approval. He's talked about, no, no, no. Okay. Why don't you pull out the WACOM public affairs instruction? We'll read it together. What paragraph are you looking at? Well, no, no, no. You pull up the instruction. I'll wait. well, it's not really in it.

3:38:43Yeah, exactly. It's not in there. So you're threatening him for violating a instruction that you didn't even read before calling me up and threatening that you're going to charge him with. I read it first. I know what he was allowed to say, and I set up the interview so he could talk about the things that he was allowed to talk about, and so he wouldn't talk about the things he wasn't. So take your threat and go fuck yourself. That happened. And that's what happens frequently. But people maybe aren't able to push back at the introductory stage like I was. And so they'll call Pete Scobell and threaten him.

3:39:33though, you know, somebody may be dumb enough to try and, you know, threaten Matt here. They'll send threats to Chris Fettis. Tom Satterly, you know, you called me up about him, that somebody, you know, was telling him he should try and take down the interview from three years ago, talking about what he did in Mogadishu back in the 90s. It's classified, Tom. No, it's people that are just trying to control, and they don't even know what the rules are themselves.

3:40:10You know, I just... I don't think there's more to cover. Is there? With me and you right now? Is there anything else we need to cover? Then what I want to ask you is... I mean, because it's my fucking podcast that, you know, that is getting everybody in trouble. So it's my fucking podcast. So, you know, what, what, and all these guys watch my podcast. And so, you know, what I want to ask is, you know, for the, for anybody who's wanting to tell their story or share their experience or document history or get their business off the ground or whatever, whatever their motivation is for coming out and sharing their story when these fucking assholes come after them, whether that's their, you know, uh, former colleagues or, you know, the head shade of the command.

3:41:01I mean, what, what steps should they take for the next guy that comes on my show and gets harassed by some other fucking app, admiral or general or whoever? I mean, what steps do they need to take?

3:41:18I wish I had a better answer than this, but the reality is that the best answer is to get a lawyer who knows the system and push back. Yeah.

3:41:35And, you know, now you're giving me an idea that you and I should sit down. This could have been a better advertisement for yourself, Tim. I'm not here to promote my business. I'm not here to promote my business. I'm here to help out a friend and a client. But you know what? You're giving me an idea. Why don't you and I sit down later and pull all the public affairs instructions and all the rules from the various services, and we can put together a little bit of a guide? It's something that I had actually suggested to Walt Allman as an idea of,

3:42:14people need guidance. If they don't know the law or the rules, they need to be trained on it. But you know what? Just simply what they did in the wake of Matt's first book where they just started going out with the whole, oh, we are supposed to be quiet professionals. I do not advertise the nature of our work. That's bullshit. It doesn't help anybody. You need to give specific actionable guidance. This is what the law is. The law says you're allowed to talk about these things. The law says don't talk about this. Okay, so maybe you and I should sit down and I'll create a little guide on this because if the commands are not going to properly train their people on it, and the reality is so many of these guys are out.

3:43:02You know, they've been out for 10, 15 years. And so, you know, they're not going to, you know, WACOM is not going to be sending a training PowerPoint to Pete Scobell at this point. But, you know, maybe it's something that we should do. And, you know, to educate people, because the reality is these stories are important. They're important not only for everybody who, who watches this and listens to this, but they're important for the people telling the stories because it's therapeutic for them. And then it's also therapeutic to other veterans who listen to this and watch this, and they see their own story reflected there.

3:43:45And it's probably the biggest recruiting tool in the fucking country. True. To come on this show and talk about all the badass shit you did. True.

3:43:57So the answer is I need to do some homework for you, Sean. And I'll write something up. Well, I appreciate you, Tim. It's always good to see you. You too. You too. Do I get gummy bears here? I'll definitely. We will load you up. I was going to say. Don't look like you're eating any of the gummy bears lately, though, Tim. No, no, it's for my wife. My wife gets mad at me if I don't come back to gummy bears. We will load you up. We got some other stuff, too. So, but thanks for coming on, man. Thank you.

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3:46:05All right, Matt, we're back from the break. Just got done chatting with Tim. But I got to interject here. He said, you know, what the SEAL community does very maliciously is they try and go after your SEAL trident after you've served and you're now out. They did that to me too. They did. Of course. I'd been out five years and they came back and were like, hey, as part of this, we want to take your trident. My lawyer represented me at the time. He's like, I don't even think they can do that. You're out of the Navy. How do they retroactively go back and take away a warfare insignia that you earned and you got out of the Navy with?

3:46:38He's like, that's not even legal. You still have it, right? Yeah. You still have it? Yeah. I don't care. but the uh in in the navy paperwork do i have my seal try to yes did they try and take it away retroactively to be spiteful and little bitches absolutely so they they just literally just spew out whatever bullshit they feel like whether they have any legal recourse or not to try to fucking scare you piss you off ruin your day i mean whatever they just they'll just spew it all out there it's the seal mindset when when it all costs right and if it doesn't you know crush the other guy. Fucking amen.

3:47:17So yeah, it's been my life's biggest struggle for sure, right? Getting into buds, making it in the seals is one thing. I thought that was hard. Getting out kicked my ass. Not the getting out part because I was ready to get out. I was cooked. I was done. But what came after getting out was single-handedly my biggest challenge. And again, and I would talk about faith. I was in my lowest when I got out, didn't have community, didn't understand why I was being put through everything I was being put through. And that's where I was furthest from my faith. As I've got through this experience, it's really reminded me that, hey, there is a reason behind this.

3:48:04I may not understand it. I may not know it right now. It may take me years to understand why. And so it's really been more like, hey, I'm going to trust that this is all part of God's plan, right? I dealt with a decent amount of survivor's guilt having done what I did and getting out. And then I dealt with a ton of questioning why I went through everything I went through. And again, the only way I sit here and smile and think about it now is thinking that, okay, maybe this was God just challenging me yet again. Maybe he wanted to see if I was going to turn into a little bitch. Maybe he was going to see how I acted, how I let my actions.

3:48:45And so I'm big on my actions over my words, right? So, yeah. Has this entire experience changed your opinion of the teams? Yeah, for sure. How so? Man, I would have given anything for that team, for the teams, the community, right? I was that guy that they had hook, line, and sinker. I would have done anything. Died for him. No questions asked. Easy. Check. Had Friday. Done. Then I get out, and I'm like, well, wait a second. This isn't the—where's this brotherhood? It seems more like a school of sharks, and if there's blood in the water, they're coming after you. Like, this isn't the brotherhood I remember or was sold, right?

3:49:30Now, that community is the SEAL community, whatever it is. It is whatever it is. I care very little about it now, right? My community that I've gotten reacquainted with are all a lot of my favorite operators that I worked with. They've now gotten out, right? And I think we all collectively have a perspective that we respect each other for what we did. But it's not about the SEAL community or about this world. I guess the Delta guys I worked with, they're saying the same thing. They're like, fuck the leadership. I'm over it. We're over it, right? We were sent into harm's way by leadership. For what?

3:50:07Right? We got sent a lot, right? A few of us didn't come back. And that same leadership that arguably left millions of dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan, they've got promoted in retirement and everything. And somehow I have a payment plan. it's hard it's hard to process it's hard to justify in my mind the only way is knowing that hey there's a plan he's got a plan i may not understand it right now keep the faith it's a good way to be man it's a good way to be so what else is in the new book the new book is me telling this story the new book is me venting about this because i haven't I've kept my mouth very shut and quiet.

3:50:52I've been very private about it. I tried to fight this battle as best I could through the legal system, and when that ran its course, I was like, I've got to tell this story. But then through this story, I don't want it to be a Debbie Downer and woe is me, and this is over there just bitching and moaning. I can't have it, right? I try to be very optimistic in shitty situations. And so I... We talked about the four F's earlier, right? I learned that from my dad, family, friends, fun and faith. I sprinkle some of that into the book because I don't want it to come across like it's just some former SEAL bitching and moaning, right?

3:51:26It's some former SEAL who's been through some shit and is going to share a little bit of what helped him out when he was in his darkest times. What is in there about the AAR? The AAR of the Bin Laden made? Only thing I put in there is is that there's an audio recording of it.

3:51:47And I mention that because that's where my flow of the mission comes from. Gotcha. What I saw, what I experienced, and then what I sat through in a debrief and what I remember hearing on that debrief and what was audio recorded. And I've confirmed with other people what they heard on that recording. So that's the only thing I get into, just that there was existence of it and that that's where my version comes from and the name of the book is no easy way no easy way it's a playoff no easy day because turns out today is not long enough right you're gonna get kicked in the nuts life's journey is a little longer than that it takes more today well we'll we will we will we will help you promote it and when i'm not i'm not using a publisher on this one right i used the publisher on the last two guess who kept all their money in the process Go figure.

3:52:38Publishers, literary agent. Go figure. Everybody kept their profits except me. So this book, I'm not using a publisher. I'm going as most direct that I can. If people want to help me, they can go to my website, mattbissonette.com, and order a book. And that cuts out all the middlemen. That cuts out all the fluff. That cuts out all the nonsense. And then when the book finally gets reviewed, it goes straight to you. Good for you, man. Good for you. What are you doing with the YouTube channel? YouTube channel, that's an interesting one, right? I kind of parachuted into Hollywood for the SEAL Team show on CBS, right?

3:53:19I had an opportunity to sit down with the president of CBS. He says, hey, Biss, what does Hollywood do wrong with military content? Pretty easy. You don't hire enough veterans to make sure the veteran content actually gets across, right? I said, look, I did 13 deployments and it's not about the Rambo shit. I did plenty of that. I was married. I tried to have kids. Like all of these things and it's a balance. It's not just the shoot them up stuff, right? There's way more to being a SEAL than what's in combat. And he's like, okay, would you help me put this together? Sure. So started hiring a handful of vets.

3:54:01Then Hollywood stepped in. They're like, no, no, no, no, you've got three involved. I'm like, three? We need like 300. So I went back to the president of CBS. I'm like, sir, this isn't the deal we got. You have to put a lot of them in here, right? There's only three of us so far. and uh and of course right what he wants and the lieutenants below him they always change what he wants probably like the military um so i i kept butting heads but every time i'd go back and talk with the president he'd say okay bis okay and he'd i'd win and by season seven right what seven seasons seven seasons of this seven seasons 200 vets employed on the show oh congratulations Congratulations, man.

3:54:44Directors, editors. We had two former SEALs and a former MARSOC guy in the writer's room writing the episodes with the crazy Hollywood types to write the episodes. Otherwise, we'd be throwing nuclear hand grenades episode two. It doesn't work. They clearly pulled a whole bunch of stuff from my books and put it in the show. We talk a lot about mental health. Mental health was never brought up at all ever during my time. ever. It was dirty word, right? So to have the ability to have an effect on a show that can tell a real story, that was it. So SEAL Team 7 Seasons learned a lot. It's super expensive.

3:55:29It's slow, and it's a dying breed, right? So I've got a farm in North Carolina, which is where I am moving to in my next phase of life. I'm going to be a farmer, raising some Wagyu beef. Nice. Send some of that up here. I'll trade you gummy bears for Wagyu beef any fucking day. Deal. So, yeah, through that process, right, it's an old cattle farm that my wife and I bought 10 years ago. We've been cleaning up, and we're like, you know what? We should share a little bit of the story of, hey, where our food comes from, right? I'm a little bit of a prepper, so we'll be getting off the grid with some solar and whatnot.

3:56:10And so we're like, let's put a little show around this. And then I bring buddies out and bring them through the show. No shit. Yeah, you'll have to come. That's cool, man. We set up a thing called the Farm Olympics with my son. When you come, we'll have you do it. But it's shooting out of an ice bath, sporting clays, paddleboarding, side-by-siding, with axe throwing, with Winkler. We got a whole bunch of stupid fun stuff to do around the farm. Dude, that's awesome. Yeah. Sounds like a total man cap. That's fucking amazing. It is. Well, congratulations, man. I'm really happy for you. And so a couple more questions.

3:56:50Send it. One, what is the one thing that stuck with you the most out of your career in the SEAL teams? A positive thing. A positive. A positive from my time in the SEAL team. For all the bullshit happened.

3:57:14Man, and you've lived it. So I'm speaking to the choir here. There's something about working with a group of people. I'm not talking about the officers and all the people around. I'm talking about the operators that you worked with, right? and the fact that each one of them, right, would give of himself for the team, right? And I loved that, right? I loved the fact that I worked in an environment where the team was all rowing in the same direction, and it was great. I absolutely loved that. I loved the black and white nature of it, right? There's very little gray area. You're either all in or you're not.

3:57:55And that was all in. So I loved all of that. problem is you get out and you miss it. I have a Delta Force buddy who's on the SEAL team show, Delta guy playing a SEAL. That's weird. But Tyler Gray. And he's like, look, Biss, we don't have PTSD. We have LTSD. Have you heard this one before? No. Because I'm like, Tyler, what's LTSD? He's like, we have lack of traumatic stress disorder. Okay, explain it to me. And it's the best way I've ever heard it explained. Okay, Biss. He's like, for a decade straight, our day job, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, on average, was to creep into the house, pick the lock on the door, and come deal with you and 10 of your friends with me and 10 of my friends.

3:58:35All right, we're going to be very calm in that chaos because that's what we do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and for a decade. All right, it's kind of our normal night. That's our norm. That's our baseline. I don't get adrenaline rush in a shootout. I slow down and make smart decisions. Adrenaline will get you killed. So if that becomes our norm, I turn to my ID card, I left the base. I never got shot at again. I haven't been skydiving. I've had lack of traumatic stress in my life. And Tyler's like, he explained that to me. I'm like, holy shit. It's the best way ever. I don't have PTSD. I have LTST, right?

3:59:13I did it long enough that that was my happy place and my norm. It gave me purpose. It gave me all the things I needed in life. And then one day I turned to my ID card. I left, and now I have lack of traumatic stress disorder. Now, why do vets step into drug and alcohol issues? Maybe they're trying to recreate the chaos. Single-handedly, the best way I've ever heard it explained to me. Eh, maybe. Maybe. I don't know. A lot of other symptoms going on while in service. Like you saying you're not fucking sleeping while in service. I didn't sleep for more than four or five hours a night for almost a decade.

3:59:53It's like there's a lot of combined stressors that add up and add up. And you think about it again. I was at the command for eight straight years, and that pressure never got relieved for anybody. I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the command in general. That pressure just got more and more pressurized, more and more pressurized, more and more pressurized. Oh, big success of Bin Laden, Rishon. And, okay, boom, we got gut punched with all of our friends dying. Yeah. Right? Like... Yeah, man.

4:00:26I got one other crazy story for you. What do you got? So when my kids were little, I would go volunteer at their school. Right? They used their mom's maiden name, so nobody would know. They're just trying to stay under the radar. Certainly nobody at the kids' school knows my background. on, but there's a program called Watch Dogs, dads of good students. Dads can go to the school, volunteer for the day and whatever. So I'm going to be a watchdog. I show up at the school like, yeah, you know, I'm Ava, dad, you know, I'm here for my volunteer. Like, okay, well, you know, here's your t-shirt. Would you go work the crossing guard as the buses show up?

4:01:04Here's a reflective vest and a stop sign. I'm like, I'm probably overqualified for this, but it's going to be a really safe intersection. I got my Navy SEAL hand and arm signals, right? I'm working the intersection. Reflective vest stop sign. In the middle of this, I see this guy walking up with a couple kids, and he's got a SEAL Team 6 hat on. The type we don't sell. Oh, shit. Right? We have squadron hats. We don't have Team 6 hats. So he walks across the intersection. I give him a look. You know, he gives me the tough guy nod and walks into school. Holy shit. I got to talk to this guy. Maybe he was in the command so i uh i let him come out i get out of the street i let the traffic go and i'm looking i'm like hey man let's do the hats were you in the teams i was i'm like oh no shit i'm team six those are the guys that got bin laden you know you weren't a part of that were you this guy looks around i don't like to talk about it but i was oh shit

4:02:04I can't believe what he just said I just keep staring at him I'm in my reflective vest I got my stop sign I'm like no shit so was I and that's all I said I just keep staring at him and he's looking at me I'm looking at him the two crossing guards are out there beating the shit out of each other I'm like I'm gonna kill him with my sign my wife's texting me she's like you know the kids are at school don't kill him with the stop sign yeah a few choice words I'm like, who is the master chief on Chalk One? What Bud's class were you in? All right, this guy had nothing. Like, listen, I got a lot of dead friends who'd be really upset that you're coming in here acting like you are once you beat it.

4:02:42How about that? What are the odds of that? Man. 24 dudes in the world, and he's lying to the wrong crossing guard at the wrong time. Wow. Wow. Wow. People never cease to amaze me. Well, Matt, we're wrapping up the interview. Last question. Send it. If you had three people to recommend for the show, who would they be? Ooh, three guys to come on this show. Great question. They probably wouldn't want me dropping their names on this right now. I could think of a couple operators that I worked with who would be phenomenal to help round out a whole bunch of stuff for you. Whether they will come here and be on the show, I don't know.

4:03:26Like I said, I wasn't going to do any of this until I talked to you. Knowing you, knowing what you've built and the type of person you are, that's why I was willing to come sit here. So I appreciate that. And I think there will be some others that will follow suit. well and so i won't drop names but uh they will be phenomenal interviews if i can encourage them to come out thank you thank you well matt it was an honor you can uh i wish the best for you i hope that book gets gets the blessing soon so appreciate it god bless brother cheers

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