#294 Pete Blaber - Part 1: Delta Force Commander on Roberts Ridge: The Battle of Takur Ghar

38:54But you don't have that unless you've got the experience and you, not just the experience of, of, you know, the, the conditions, but the experience of saying, I don't think that, I don't think that's smart. I don't think we should do it. So that's the adaptive risk calculation. The final thing is believing in and trusting your senses. And, you know, that obviously applies to both the same things, but where it really comes in handy is interpersonal relationships. You know, when kids are out, it's the law, the jungle. And, you know, you're going to run into some older kids. You're going to run into some strange kids.

39:33And you learn right away that, you know, you have to understand who you're dealing with and that you can't trust strangers. You've got to get some data on this person first. And, you know, I mentioned the school of hard knocks. You know, mistakes have consequences. You get your face washed out with snow if you say the wrong thing or kicked in the stomach. And, you know, I remember both incidents like that happening to me and my friends. And it was, you know, one time we were just hanging out with these older kids and one of my buddies, we, you know, when you're 10, 11, 12, you say the word fuck as a comma.

40:15It's like, it separates the sentences you use. And when someone says something funny, this is still how I speak. Yeah, me too. We'll probably, to the viewers, they'll probably see us regress to that during this conversation. I'm the same way. My son, when he hears me on the phone with my buddy, he's like, Dad, I've never heard you swear so much. I'm like, but I'm just back in military mode. But you learn to read people. You learn to pay attention to tone of voice, to the nuances of body language. And, you know, that's emotional intelligence. You're looking at a person, you're listening. And, you know, as we know, both those things, you know, kind of signal what a person's about to do.

41:11So, again, the real benefit is when you avoid problems, when you spot, hey, this guy's crazy. Let's get out of here. Let's not hang out here anymore. And same thing. You've now etched a pattern in your brain, and you realize that the only thing you got in the real world is your senses. And that's a biologic fact. You know, Ernst Mach, the guy who came up with the Mach 1, Mach 2, the Mach principle, was a German scientist. And in 1869, he came up with the Mach principle, which is just, there's no other way to prove scientific fact than with your senses. And so still to this day in science, if you have a new hypothesis or new theory, you have to be able to validate that hypothesis or theory with sensory information.

42:06Like you can't say when someone says, well, where is it? And you say, well, it's invisible. You say, well, there's no such thing as invisible. Then the hypothesis or the theory falls apart. So believe in and trust your senses. It's all you got. The ironic thing is that's even more important today than it was pre-digital because there's so much fake out there. There's so many AI-generated video clips. There's so much propaganda. If you haven't learned to take every news report with a grain of salt, every government report with a grain of salt, then you're missing a big lesson of our time. So again, rock foundation is believe in and trust your senses.

42:56Um, and then the, the final thing from that study that I thought was interesting is that pre-digital 70 % of teenage boys had jobs either after school on the weekends or, you know, and including all summer. And the majority of those 70 % were not working to save for college. They were working to buy a car. And, uh, you know, again, I'm reading this thing going, that's me. That's what I did. I bought my first car. It was a 72 Impala for$250. It had 170 ,000 miles on it. It had a hole in the passenger side floor that I had to cover with plywood in the winter because slush would fly up. My mom wouldn't even get in it.

43:42But that thing ran like a champ. And I kept it and used it all through college. Drove down to my college and back. Right on, man. Yeah. So again, to sum up, the point of all that is not to sit around and wax poetic and say, oh, those were the good old days. There's no such thing as good old days. The world's always changing, society, culture, technology. But we can take those foundational aspects of human nature, unstructured problem solving, adaptive risk calculation, and believing in and trusting your senses, and we can understand how important those are to the development of the brain. And we can apply them and make every effort for our own kids and the society around us to allow that back, to have that as part of the way kids grow up today.

44:36You know, big kudos to our parents. Today, you know, they call parents helicopter parents. They're hovering over their kids all the time, ready to swoop down as soon as they run into an obstacle or get hurt or have a problem. Our parents are called Home Depot parents. And Home Depot parents are parents where when you think you need something, you can't find anybody to help you. So you look around for a while, you still can't find anyone. You say, shit, okay, I'm going to figure this out. And so you use deductive logic to figure out what aisle this part is you're searching for. and then you go down, find the part, you know, whether it's a toilet or electricity thing, and you start flipping them over, reading the specs on it, comparing them to the specs you brought, and you end up making a decision.

45:30I'll take this one. And you go buy it. And again, the real benefit of it comes at home when you find out that's the right part. You're like, I did that. I did it on my own. And so, you know, we can also try to be more Home Depot parents than helicopter parents. So that's my - Certainly agree with you on that. Yeah, yeah. So that's my childhood. At high school, I ran cross country, played hockey. I went off to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It's at the southern tip of Illinois, about 350 miles from Chicago. The farther away, the better. And it's an amazing place. It's where the Ohio and Mississippi come together in the bottom of the state.

46:20The glaciers of 10 ,000 years ago did not reach southern Illinois, so it's still full of massive hills, ridges, rock outcroppings, cliffs, lakes, and 275 ,000 acres Shawnee National Forest. And when I went down there and saw that, I was like, I'm going to this is the school I'm going to. Wow. And I didn't even tour the campus. Yeah. I went there for the wilderness, and pretty much every weekend I was in college, I was out hiking in places like Panther's Den and Devil's Kitchen. It was the first time I used my own money to buy a book, which was Be an Expert with a Map and Compass by Bjorn Kjellström.

47:04Yeah, I learned how to navigate what terrain features were. Little did I know I was inching my way toward joining the military. I didn't know that at the time. No kidding. It wasn't even on your radar? No. My first year, I think, was when the Iran hostage rescue mission went awry, Desert One. Okay. And that had an incredible effect on me because, you know, eight guys died in Desert One trying to save the American hostages in Tehran. I think there was like 400 of them. It was a lot. And it had a huge effect on me because it was the first time I ever stopped to think about how good I had it and what an amazing life I had in America.

47:55How old were you at that time? It was just a freshman in college, so, you know, 18, 19, something like that. Wow, you thought that? Yeah. I feel like nobody feels like that anymore. Nobody takes the time, you know, to appreciate it. Yeah, well, you might be pointing out I agree with you, and maybe it's because, look, we— can you imagine anyone kneeling for the national anthem when we were growing up or disparaging, you know, people who served? You know, I grew up, I remember as a kid hearing about the way they treated Vietnam veterans and, you know, being completely disgusted by that. But I think, you know, it was, it was a more patriotic time.

48:41We hadn't had a full portion of the country who, you know, did nothing but criticize our freedom and criticize our forefathers, you know, tearing down statues. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I was a marathon runner and triathlete at the time, and I'd go on long runs in the hills of Southern Illinois. And on one of those runs, I decided, you know, I need to pay something back to the country. And the way I'm going to do it is join the military. And I want to be in the units to do the toughest missions. I want to, you know, make sure that Desert One never happens again, that we don't have a tragedy like that on the world stage.

49:24on an important mission. And, you know, I was super naive at the time. I went to a recruiter and I said, you know, I want to join the military and I'd like to be part of Delta Force. And the first recruiter - You said that right off the bat? Yeah. Because they were at Desert One. And, you know, I didn't know they were a secret or anything. And this is the first recruiter - How did you - so you heard about Delta Force from Tehran? Yeah. Yeah. It was out. That was in the media? Yep. Wow. And he said, look, let me tell you something. The only thing going into special forces is going to do for you is when you get out is either make you a criminal or a hitman.

50:08And I got up from my chair and walked out and found another recruiter in the next town over. And this guy was great. I still remember his name, Terry Story. And he was like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? And I told him, he goes, okay, you can't do that. But here you can get in, become a Ranger, and then become that. I said, okay, how do I do that? And he goes, well, you can join to go in the infantry and then Rangers, or because you have a college degree, you can volunteer for OCS. The only catch is if you don't make it through OCS, you know, you're going to be a PFC and they're going to put you wherever they want to put you.

50:45So I signed up an OCS contract. And again, I freeze that moment in time because it's happened literally millions of times since 1776. It's, you know, our grandfathers did it after Pearl Harbor and, you know, all these great soldiers who joined after 9-1-1, same thing. Pat Tillman joined, you know, the day after 9-1-1, he decided to join the military, to leave the Arizona Cardinals and join the military. So this process has been happening, and it's important for us as veterans to say it out loud and be consciously aware of it because these patriots are our country's greatest natural resource, and we have to treat them that way, and we have to treat their lives that way.

51:43This is a fixed amount of individuals like this. They're not a never-ending flow. So these are a special part of this country. And these young men join with a lot of naivete, but they're joining. They're agreeing to sacrifice their lives and their livelihoods to serve and protect our great nation and the freedoms that our nation involves. And in so doing, they enter a contract with the government, and that contract is sacrosanct. All those patriots ask for is that the government uses common sense on when and where they're going to employ them and provide them with common sense leaders who will make good decisions and solve complex problems so they can succeed when they're employed.

52:33And, you know, I say it's important because when you find out, like, how the Ukraine war started, a bunch of Ivy League, State Department, CIA people concocted that thing, made bad decision, senseless decision after senseless decision after senseless decision. And, you know. Can you elaborate? I mean, we have this entire portion towards the end of the interview, but we can crank it out right now. So the Ukraine war was started by— You say this is the biggest propaganda war of all time, correct? Yes. It should be called the propaganda war. The fighting's real. Everything we've been told about it is basically a lie.

53:21and every piece of history that shows it's a lie has been either tucked kicked under the rug or lied about too so how the war started the war started when the obama administration i don't say u.s because the ukraine war could not have started uh with any other administration because it couldn't have started without the press as part of the group that was going to provide cover for starting it. And they were all in on the start of the Ukraine war. But the U.S., Obama administration, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, John O. Brennan, and Joe Biden. Joe Biden had one job. You can look in his archives as vice president.

54:10His one job was Ukraine. And Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan, his deputy, were the architects of the start of the war. And the way it started was the State Department and CIA non-elected officials, along with their counterparts in the EU, Ukrainian politicians, and George Soros's Open Society Foundation, along with the neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists created the fake Maidan protests. You can still go online. I checked before I came. Videos are still there, 2014, 15. Look at Maidan protests. You'll see brand new GP mediums in the background. You'll see them serving soup. You'll notice that everyone has these same orange hard hats on distributed to them.

55:06The weapons, you'll see weapons, the same common weapons being held by the ultra-nationalist neo-Nazis. And then there are interviews. There's BBC and German TV interviews with Ukrainian protesters. And in one of them, all the guy does is ask, why are you protesting? Every single individual that they question says the same thing. I'm here because they told me to be here and I'm getting paid. And so, Victoria Nuland admitted afterwards that the US spent$5 billion in USAID funds to bribe all these people and to make it happen. And in February of 2014, the culmination of the Maidan protest was the violent overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych government, the duly elected government of Ukraine.

56:04He was elected not just by Eastern Ukrainians, but by Western Ukrainians. And his election was validated by the UN. But for some reason, they decided we got to overthrow him. And the plan, and this is where this senseless decision making comes from. And this is all in cables. It's in State Department CIA cables. And in - For the audience, cables are basically secure emails. Yes, good description. It's all in those. They believed that by overthrowing Yanukovych, installing their Ukrainian puppet politicians, and then starting an ethnic war in eastern Ukraine, which is populated by almost 100 % ethnic Russians.

57:00That by doing that, this would cause so much unrest in Russia that the Russian people would rise up and overthrow Putin. That was the plan. And, you know, when you read that, when you read the cables, when you see that, it's like these, you know, Ivy League never been in a war, never been in anything real in their life. It's like they were like kids playing with matches, completely unaware of the potential unintended consequences of throwing those matches into a pile of leaves or into something soaked in gas. And what happened afterwards is a classic law of unintended consequences. They had no plan for after they overthrew the government.

57:50And in the power vacuum because they had no plan, the neo-Nazis took over the Ukrainian government. They had no contingency plans? No contingencies. And that's why Crimea caught them so by surprise. So also online, you can go on any of your favorite search engines and just look up Victoria Nuland, Gregory Pyatt. He was the ambassador, she was the head of State Department for the overthrow. Their phone call was intercepted by the Russians and then published on YouTube initially. It's on all search engines now. Their phone call is them talking about who, which Ukrainian politicians that was, they controlled would be the next prime minister.

58:38And this is before the violent overthrow. It's like two weeks before. So they're on record talking about who to install in the new government. So there's no... There's like no, this is, there's, it's not a theory. Everything, there's a massive trail of evidence that shows exactly what happened to include open source intelligence, the videotapes that show what's about to happen. So when the, the, the neo-Nazis controlled the five key ministries, the Ukrainian government to include the ministry of defense, John O. Brennan was the head of CIA. then, he flew in the day after they overthrew the Yanukovych government, met with the head of the Ukrainian intelligence and the head of MI6.

59:27And the very next day, they began the ethnic war on Eastern Ukraine, which was really one of the great, one of the most horrific humanitarian violations in modern history. They just began shelling the civilian areas with artillery and mortars. And again, it's all on video. You can see grandmothers crying in the streets with dead, you know, spouses and dead children and saying, why is our own country doing this to us? Why is our own government doing this to us? the eastern Ukrainian oblasts that have since voted for independence and autonomy, then independence and reunification with Russia, so Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, all three of them would have stayed in Ukraine, but they had no choice.

1:00:27Ethnic cleansing began, and between 2014 and 2021, 14 ,000 ethnic Russian civilians were killed in eastern Ukraine, most of them by artillery, mortar, and drone attacks. Wow. All the hospitals. Yeah, horrific. The ethnic Russians petitioned the UN to come in and investigate, begged for the UN to investigate. They wouldn't do it. We should have, as the US, if, you know, Trump always says, if I had been president, this wouldn't have happened. But any objective president, this was grounds for sending forces in. This was worse than Bosnia, worse than Rwanda, any of those places. We should have sent people in to stop it, but no one would do that.

1:01:25And the killing just continued, as well as the cover-up. Most Western Ukrainians still to this day believe what the propaganda said happened, that Maidan protest was an organic protest, that Yanukovych fled because of his corruption. He knew he was going to get busted. He fled the country. And then they say that Putin invaded Ukraine, and he did not. So I told you 14 ,000 dead. Crimea was the first in May of 2014. They knew what was happening they instantly uh voted for independence and in the vote i think 89 percent of people voted and of the population voted and something like 85 percent voted to uh secede from ukraine yeah and and uh russia the the part of crimea that's so important is the savastopol naval base it's Russia's only warm water naval base.

1:02:33They had a contract with Ukraine to keep that till 2045. They just left the base and helped the Crimeans secure Crimea. But Donetsk in Luhansk begged for Russian help. Putin demurred. He was incredibly conscientious about not pissing off NATO, if you can believe that, because NATO is actively working to undermine him. And he's not helping these ethnic Russians because he doesn't want it to look like, you know, he's invading or that he's provoking NATO. So they set their own elections up in the summer of 2014. And the same results, you know, 80 plus percent voted and 80 percent voted for independence.

1:03:25So why is that important? Because today, when you hear people say, why would we give the Dunbas Basin back to Russia? They invaded. Well, you're not giving Dunbas back to Russia. Dun stands for coal, Bas stands for basin. So Dunbas is the coal basin. And within it is Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast, or provinces. And both of those voted for independence. They had no other choice. After all the killing in 2015, the president, the newly installed president of Ukraine, outlawed the Russian language, outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is like the sister to the Russian Orthodox Church. the orthodox church was founded in kiev russia considers kiev a holy the holiest of holy cities it's like jerusalem to them that's why there's they've been so circumspect on the bombing of kiev because it's a holy city but the ukrainians forfeited any right to those to eastern ukraine when they started killing them when they took away all their basic human rights It's life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

1:04:46You can't practice religion. You can't speak your language. He stopped the pensions of all. What the hell are you supposed to speak? Yeah, exactly. Sign language. I mean, if you read the UN Charter on Human Rights, all those things are like the staples. And if you violate those, the UN Charter more or less says the country has a right for self-governance to break away from whoever is doing that to it. So it's, again, clear-cut case. It's not theory. And then on the invasion, you know, I liken what Russia did to, you know, think of it this way. Sure, you can technically call it an invasion. Just like if you're walking down the street and you come up to a vestibule and see your buddy get mugged inside the vestibule.

1:05:39But on the door to the vestibule of the building, it says no trespassing. Well, you fucking kicked that door in, smacked that mugger on the head, tossed him out and saved your buddy. Did you just trespass? Well, I guess technically you did, but no judge, jury or common sense human being is going to say you shouldn't have trespassed. It's the same thing Russia did. 14 ,000 ethnic Russians slaughtered, begging him for help, begging for humanitarian assistance. And finally, he just broke into that vestibule to save his people, ethnic Russians. And so calling him the invader, calling him the instigator or Russia just doesn't hold any water.

1:06:28It doesn't make sense as long as you cut through the propaganda. And that's kind of why I got involved. I've been to Kiev. I've been to Ukraine. I love Ukraine. I love the Ukrainian people. I've never been to Russia, would love to go there. And I have buddies. I have a buddy in the State Department, two buddies in the agency, and a buddy who was over there is a long-term contractor. And they, one night, said, hey, let's call Pete and tell him this stuff and find out what he thinks we should do. And so they didn't call me. They just called and set up a meeting. We met at LAX, outside LAX, and they told me everything.

1:07:09And I was like, holy shit. Now, every one of these guys is still active. And, you know, one reason they came to me was, you know, can you get the word out? And I was like, yeah, I've got a duty to get the word out. You know, right now we're at about 1.25 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. So back to - That many? Yep. 1.25 million? Yep. The Ukrainian Mods database was hacked about four months ago, and the number they had then was 1.2. I'm giving them a benefit of doubt. They've been losing about 1 ,000 men a day every day of 2025. Wow. So it's incredible numbers. You can, you know, I'm on about five or six different Telegram channels that I subscribe to, and there's some great independent reporters.

1:08:06I think you might have had one of them on, Patrick Lancaster. Did you have him on? Okay, maybe he was on Tucker or something. I probably shouldn't have brought that up. All good. Yeah, so— We should look into him. Yeah, he's an independent reporter. He's been over there from the beginning. And the first thing that strikes you when you watch one of his reports is, where the fuck is the press? Why is there no mainstream global media press coverage of the Ukraine war? Why have we not seen a single member? You know, they forced the U.S. military to embed them in Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, and demanded it because not because they wanted to cover it, because that's the quickest formula for getting a Pulitzer Prize and getting, you know, looked on favorably as a journalist.

1:09:00But from the beginning, the question has to be, why is there no coverage of the Ukraine War? And I'll tell you why there's none, because if they cover it, they'll expose the propaganda stories that are happening. And the first way is the entire war has been fought in eastern Ukraine. So every city that gets taken by the Russians in eastern Ukraine, they're the liberators. and the people come out celebrating when the Russians come in and telling them about the hell they've been living through with the Ukrainian army occupying their town. These are ethnic Russians, the whole battlefield, all these flattened towns, all the infrastructure, that's eastern Ukraine.

1:09:45That's where these people live. That's Donetsk, Luhansk. And of course, Crimea has Odessa right next to it uh so it's been hit too but um you know when was this meeting when was what the meeting between that i went to uh was right before 2022 right before the war started so this was a while ago yep and then we've stayed uh they feed me stuff all along i get new stuff uh they'll call me up and go, this is total bullshit. There's been fake massacres that were blamed on Russia. They're so fake, they're a joke. And this is, again, why you see there's no Western press coverage. You know, peoples who were supposedly shot by Russians laying in the mud with their hands tied behind their back, but their hands are tied with pristine white ties.

1:10:44And then when they, when this brave French reporter, who was actually one of the only ones who went and visited the massacre site, he saw the Ukrainian intelligence people pulling cadavers off out of frozen trucks, laying them on the ground, tying their hands together. And he's testified on that numerous Times, same thing. His life's been threatened. He's been censored in France. But there's two of them, actually two French reporters, independent of each other, who reported the same thing. And then the war itself, massive lies about the progress of the war, about the casualties. You know, even President Trump was duped because his initial advisors to Ukraine were, you know, the one guy he had was an ex-general.

1:11:43His daughter ran a NGO in Ukraine. And so when he was in Ukraine, he was paying his daughter's NGO to take him around and provide security for him. how can a guy whose family is making money from the war be taken seriously and trying to stop the war and he was feeding president trump you know propaganda information so initially you know president trump was saying hey russia's lost all these men you know really bad million men well they haven't they've lost probably about a tenth of what ukraine has lost shit yep and russia Remember I talked about their strategic acumen from the beginning. They saw this.

1:12:30This is a war of attrition. And all these ex-generals who are now paid influencers, of course, they can't understand that. And so one of the things you heard year after, you know, 22, 23, 24, you know, look at Russia. They're so weak. They've only moved, you know, 50 kilometers in the last three years. Well, they finish that sentence and then they say, and the reason we got to keep fighting is because they're getting ready to take over all of Europe. So, I mean, they contradict themselves with their propaganda. They're not, you're saying they're not strong enough and formidable enough to even take terrain in Ukraine, yet they're going to take all of Europe, which they're not.

1:13:15There's not a single statement from Putin or anyone else intercepted or not that says they have any designs on Europe. And of course, thank goodness for Tulsi Gabbard. She just released, she did a press conference just about a month ago and released, said, hey, we've already provided this to Congress. There is zero evidence nor zero indications that Russia has any intention to invade Europe or that it would never make sense for Ukraine to invade Europe. so that's been put to rest but the propaganda continues the influencers continue to repeat it on you know the global mainstream media and uh you know people without the truth continue to buy into it man which means everybody's repeating it yeah so all these guys are dying you know and they're just being and people are going keep the war going you can't let it stop and they're taking their time on these peace negotiations.

1:14:18Again, historians will look at this and it'll really shine a positive light on Trump because he's the only guy who has said from the beginning, we have to stop the war. We have to stop the killing. And he used to say that every time he talked, he just, he talks about it so much now he doesn't anymore, but he used to start. And that is the start point. And back to that, as veterans, we understand that. We understand that sacrosanct contract that a veteran, that a patriot makes with this government. And so even though these are Russian and Ukrainian military, I think as veterans, we share a responsibility for each other worldwide.

1:15:03And this is just senseless killing. And the really sad thing is that Ukraine, without knowing it, is being absolutely decimated because these people are telling them to keep fight. You can win. We're going to be behind you. And they're not. And they can't win. And they're in a position now where not just manpower but military-industrial complex. and then their command and control and leadership is so contaminated and so dysfunctional, they just have no chance against the Russians. I wasn't expecting to hear all that. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And again, most of it is still open source available, so anyone can do it.

1:15:54uh if people want i've got a long form article on my sub stack page peteblaber.substack.com it's the chronology of the ukraine war i expose it all uh i provide the facts i i have hyperlinks to videos hyperlinks to pictures um and uh you know it's horrific uh mike benz uh coined this and he was right. He said the overthrow of the Yanukovych government started the censorship industrial complex around the world. So when they figured out they could lie about something that big and they could collude to create a propaganda version of reality, they were emboldened. And part of that is their control over tech because Facebook had a big part in that Maidan protests.

1:16:49Everyone got their directions via Facebook. So, you know, during that period, both during the Obama and the Biden administration, those tech companies were controlled by the government. You know, the FBI was controlling Twitter and content on Twitter at the time. So, you know, they were emboldened by it. And again, Mike Benz, you know, did a great report on this, that's what made them go, hey, in 2017, we can do the same thing in the US. Instead of Maidan protests, they did the BLM protests. Create chaos, burn infrastructure, sow dissent, and let that happen so that it leads to the eventual overthrow of the government.

1:17:41And that's what they were trying to do with those riots and everything else. It's called a color revolution. Damn. It's bad. Yeah, no kidding. Let's take a quick break. Okay. I didn't really think about how much my mattress was affecting me until I switched it. You just get used to whatever you've got and don't realize how off it is until you fix it. And that's what happened when I got a Helix. On the first couple of nights, I could already tell the difference. I wasn't tossing around, wasn't waking up throughout the night. I was just sleeping better and actually getting some real rest. One thing I like is they don't do a one-size-fits-all mattress.

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1:19:45Mando it. Head to ShopMando.com because for a limited time, new customers get 20 % off site-wide with our exclusive code, and that code is SRS. Seriously, if you haven't tried it yet, you really should. Go to ShopMando.com and use the code SRS for 20 % off. S-H-O-P-M-A-N-D-O dot com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Mando's got you covered. You know, as of, since we're on the topic of Ukraine, as of today, Polymarket says there's a 12 % chance Russia-Ukraine, there'll be Russia-Ukraine ceasefire by December 31st, 2026. Where do you think they're coming up with that? Do you think there's any legitimacy?

1:20:37I think, well, what would tell me that it's far more likely than not is just the momentum behind what Trump's doing and then the logic of why it makes sense to ceasefire. And I don't think there'll be a ceasefire, you know, unless it's part of it's over. You know, they've agreed on something, but Russia is not going to agree to just a plain ceasefire. They'll agree to the terms that they put forward, the 5-0 blasts, the size of the Ukrainian army, the D— I mean, how are they even getting anybody to fight? 1.25 million dead? I could pull out my—I show these every Tuesday on the podcast I do on CDM Media.

1:21:35And it's also on my sub stack. We show every week the forced conscription. They're beating, they're tackling people, men in the streets, beating them, forcing them into vehicles. And the fights are unbelievable. And what— That's their recruitment? That's their recruitment. They beat the shit out of their people to fight for their country. Yep. And so I've said this numerous times. never i believe never in the history of warfare has a country won a war where they had to force their soldiers to that's un-fucking-believable yeah that no one wants to join the uh so you know ukraine took a zelinski and ukraine took a lot of criticism from biden jake sullivan and uh Austin, that they did not immediately draft 18 to 23-year-olds.

1:22:29They drafted, they started, I think, at 25. They went down to 23. They still haven't drafted, but they've said, done the selective service thing. But when Zelensky established martial law, he closed the borders. So 18 to 23-year-olds were not allowed to leave the country. He just changed that about six to eight weeks ago. The day after he did it, every border crossing was swamped. All the 18 to 23-year-olds pretty much have either fled. Yeah. And what does that tell you? It tells you that the messaging, one, two, three, what are we fighting for, doesn't make sense to the actual people who are supposed to do the fighting.

1:23:15So when you have these actual citizens of Ukraine fleeing, fighting for their lives. Bystanders join in and help the recruits against these forced conscriptors. You'll see the massive fights, and women too, come over, they start beating on these guys. Let them alone, let them alone. This happens every day all across Ukraine because the logical why doesn't make sense. They see people disappear. They realize the truth is, you know, whispered among the people of Ukraine, what's really going on, who's really trying to win this war, whose war it really is. And it's not Ukraine. It's the EU, it's the globalists.

1:24:02And they're the ones telling Ukraine, keep fighting till the last Ukrainian. But the Ukrainian people, the ones that are, you know, the go-to-war age are having nothing of it. So they basically don't have a country. No, they don't. It's not a real country. And that's nothing against Ukraine. I love Ukraine. I love the Ukrainian people. But if you just take what Zelensky did. So first off on Zelensky, you know, in 2018, he, 2017, he became the lead in a comedy show, Servant of the People, which the producers of which, which like, you know, famous producers in Hollywood were two of the biggest oligarchs in Ukraine, multimillionaire, billionaire oligarchs.

1:24:54the head, the one, the billionaire decided, hey, and probably in cahoots with the Biden State Department and CIA because they needed a candidate. They needed someone for the 19 election and it had to be a stooge. So they decided let's make Zelensky a candidate. So up to that point, Zelensky had never even tweeted any position on any political statement, any political event. He had never spoken about any political proclivities. He had never written anything. He had never spoke. When he announced his presidency, his run for the president and his new party, which was called the same thing as the sitcom, The Servant of the People Party, Uh, he refused to debate the other candidates.

1:25:53He did no campaigning. Does this sound familiar? Uh, he put out no, uh, you know, no campaign promises, no platform. Uh, and I think four months after he announced, uh, even though he was behind in the polls, the election happened, he won 73 % mysteriously of the vote. The first thing he did was outlaw all political parties in Ukraine except his own party, the servant of the people. And by outlawing and making them against the law, this is if you read the definition of a totalitarian regime, that's what they do. There's no they outlaw competition, political competition. So what that did was allow him to take over a super majority of the RADA because all these other people in the RADA, that's their Congress, were not allowed to run.

1:26:49So they just stacked it with new servant of the people. And now the RADA has a super majority for his party. He also outlawed press. All independent press newspapers, television stations were shut down. Only stations that run in Ukraine still to this day are either Ukrainian government or NGO George Soros-sponsored stations. So you outlaw political competition. You end any ability, freedom of information. And then he ended freedom of speech, too. There's no, you can't criticize the government. You can't, no right to protest. Those are all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. That corruption scandal that just broke 100, it was a small one, 100 million off the energy sector where his sidekick was indicted.

1:27:53He fled the country. He's now back working for him. He just not in the same role he was before. So, corrupt to the bone. This is not a government of the people. It's a government installed. Zelensky is out of the country more than he's in country. And again, that's a pattern too that should make everyone question, what leader in contentious times leaves the country even once? None. He's gone, in the last two years, he's been out of Ukraine more than he's been in. Usually he's in Europe, gallivanting around Europe under the guise of collecting funds. But you have to ask, how can he do that? Well, he can do it because there's no competition.

1:28:39He's the stooge, and he's earned his right to maintain that from his EU handlers, from his globalist handlers, and from his, he's got American handlers too. The neocons, the left, the people who put them in power from the Obama and Biden administrations still want them to stay in power. They still keep the propaganda going. But the reality is men are dying by the thousands every day for no reason. Fake war. They don't even know what they're fighting for. They're definitely not fighting for Ukraine right now. and their leadership is also just a canard, something other than what it seems to be. Well, I can see why there's only a 12 % chance of a ceasefire by March 31st.

1:29:30Yeah, he's not having any of it. Trump just said it a few days ago that Zelensky's the main barrier. He said Putin's already said, hey, I want to end the war. And finally, Trump's got good information. He's saying it now. He's talking about the Ukraine over a million casualties. He's talking about they can't win. They have no military industrial complex. So if you can't make bullets and, you know, and, you know, beans along with, you know, ammunition, weapons, how can you fight an ongoing war against a superpower? Well, let me answer that for you, because we send them all of our shit. Yeah, very true.

1:30:13Billions of dollars. I think$300 billion we sent them with no strings attached. Do you have any insight on when they would run out of manpower? I think they're there right now. So Russia brought in 443 ,000 recruits last year, just to give you an idea of the standard. No one knows what Ukraine brought in, but it's believed to be somewhere in the double-digit thousands, so 50 to 99 ,000. So that right there just tells you they can't keep up. And on this battlefield, Ukraine doesn't rotate their forces. If you joined in 2022 and you're still alive, you're still out there. there's no ets state you know which every soldier you know is counting off the days till they get to go home uh you know we talk about you fight for the guy next to you yeah you do but you know your foundation or what you're really fighting for is to go home to your family and you know where you live and uh and they don't even have that so they're dispirited um the command and control, the leadership of Ukraine is dysfunctional as can be.

1:31:39And we, again, the Obama and Biden administrations, who were the architects along with the rest of NATO, the Brits have been hand in hand on everything, the French and Germans to a slightly lesser extent, train this army. And it was the same mistake we've made everywhere, you know, from Vietnam forward. They decided we're going to build an army and it's going to be a NATO compatible army. So everything they built was to make it by the standards of NATO. And you can't, you know, the lesson of Vietnam was don't try to build an American army in another country, a second world country who's got its own tradition of military customs, courtesies, protocols, and just ways of fighting.

1:32:32And it's the same thing in Ukraine. Most of the generals were Soviet-trained. In fact, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine right now speaks Russian, was trained in Russia, Siersky. But they don't care. Zelensky's in on the decision-making for combat. They're letting their guys die in these cities. I did an episode on this when Pak Rolf fell. We had a captain, a Ukrainian captain, talk to my guys on the ground and tell us how the thing unfolded. And he said, you know, he gave this example. He said, you know, when you're laying in a position for a long time, you know that position like the back of your hand and you know everything around you.

1:33:20You've calculated time distance from every, you know, terrain feature, every tree, every rock outcropping. And with Pakros, we knew where the Russians were. And my frontline guys knew if they get to that copse of trees over there, this massive, you know, forest belt that protects the farmland, then we're dead in the water. We cannot, we've got to fall back. And fallback is not retreating. It's just fallback that's called a supplementary position, which you always have in the defense. And so once the Russians made it to that point, to that copse of trees, they called in and said, hey, we've got this all set up.

1:34:09We've got alternate positions. Time to fall back. uh rogers standby we've got to get permission from hire that went all the way back to kiev and uh zelinski and sirsky and the answer was no not one inch stay and fight and uh about three weeks later they were surrounded uh most of them killed many of them captured uh and the same thing happened It just happened in Uye Puyye. It's a city down south of Ukraine. Same thing. The guys knew if they make it to that position, we're surrounded. We're in a cauldron. And then you're dead because the cauldrons in this war, because of the terrain and the technology, the drone technology, whenever you see a position, that means that a 10 by 10 kill zone sits in front of that drone kill zone.

1:35:03So if you move up to here, now that 10K kill zone goes 10K from that point. So that's why when that captain, that Ukrainian captain said, when they make it to there, we got to get out of here, you listen to the guys on the ground. You know, you listen to the guys who are assessing the reality of the situation on the ground. And they did not. And they continue that pattern. And it's because they're trying to keep this propaganda thing going that, hey, we can win. We just need more time, more money. And to me, it seems like the EU decided we got to get them at least through 2026. And I believe the reason for that is that then they could get all the orders with the European military industrial complex, which is what's happened now.

1:35:55When Trump said, I'm not giving you stuff anymore, you can buy it from us. They saw that as an opportunity to reinvigorate the European military industrial complex, which they had shut down. And all those stocks skyrocketed before Trump got into power. And then in those first few months, but now they're all tanking because, you know, most honest, objective people see that, you know, the end is a fait accompli. It's going to happen. I mean, if these guys are forced to fight for their country, some of them, I mean, why do you think they're not, or maybe they are, why are they not surrendering? A lot of them, yeah, a lot of them are.

1:36:40Uh, so, uh, you, I've got tons of videotapes of guys coming out of holes and, you know, you Ukrainians are hard people too. They're all slobs. So the Ukrainians are not pushovers if, you know, armed properly, led properly, uh, and motivated properly. But think about that. They're not armed properly. They don't back to the military industrial complex. They've got huge supply problems, which is totally exacerbated by corruption. They're skimming money off the top. A couple of cities have fallen because the$50 to$100 million tranches to dig these gnats-ass trench systems never happened. The money just was laundered and went into the pockets of the oligarchs.

1:37:30So the corruption has also greatly handcuffed the Ukrainian military. But there's their command and control. You tell guys on the ground, no, don't leave, stay and die. And you do that once, you're in big trouble. You do it twice, they're never going to forgive you. And I believe that the majority of Ukrainian military have lost faith in their higher headquarters and that they don't accept anything that's coming out of them as being credible. And then, you know, the final thing is just motivation on not knowing when you're going to go home, seeing all these dead bodies. They leave, they're ordered to leave dead bodies where they lay.

1:38:17There's dead bodies all over the battlefield. And Russia polices them up. Since those Istanbul talks, there's one of the things they agreed to is body exchanges. to repatriate the dead bodies. That's happened, I think, something like 15 times. And the ratio, we just had one, and Russia turned over 1 ,600 bodies. Ukraine turned over 29. Whoa. It was a ratio of 39 to 1. I don't know what it is now on bodies being exchanged. But part of it is just the number of uh kias but the other part is they're not even allowing these guys to you know pick up their dead colleagues and bring them back to repatriate them for their family uh there's monetary incentives behind that if the body's not recovered ukraine doesn't have to pay the family and they don't even if the guy's off the ledger yeah holy shit it's bad it's bad and And this is all these globalists, you know, they're globalists doing like, again, little kids playing with matches, you know, in a gas station, no clue of the laws of physics, no clues of the laws of unintended consequences.

1:39:39And what they've done is, you know, one of the most horrific humanitarian crimes, I think, against humanity that we've ever seen. a million over a million guys dead just on one side we lost 58 000 in vietnam 15 years i think man wow well that paints a very different picture than than what everybody's told yeah thanks for asking it's uh it's important that people and again do the research all this stuff is available online there's plenty of people that were there early who have come out and they talk about it uh the war it should be called the propaganda war not the ukraine war the fighting's real everything we've been told about it is a lie wow well let's get back to you we were you're going to rangers yeah i think i joined ocs it got a ranger contract yep so i went to korea my first tour dmz in korea it's great tour uh and i did that like i said because you could apply for the regiment it's a one-year tour i applied i got fortunate to get in even more fortunate to go to second ranger battalion fort lewis washington loved it there um it was it would turn out to be i was there four years i ended up as a captain a junior captain when i my last year but it was a foundational experience because of the amazing leadership climate that was in place for all four of those years.

1:41:21And, you know, I was taught then what a leadership climate is. And my battalion commander and my company commander said this to me. It was, you know, think of a leadership climate the same way you think of a real climate. You can feel the effects of a leadership climate. you can see the effects of a leadership climate. And when people find a healthy leadership climate, they put down stakes. They work together as teams, think of neighborhoods, to make their place of duty, their place they're living better. And the positive climate makes everyone who lives under it grow, progress, and succeed. Now, when you think of an unhealthy leadership climate.

1:42:06It stymies growth. People are miserable. And the only thing they think about is how do I get the F out of here and get to a place where the sun shines occasionally and I can grow, I can progress, and I can succeed, which is what everyone joins the military for. Uh, so, you know, the other thing they taught me, which was foundational was that, you know, that a leadership climate is not, is not, does not emerge from just the most senior leader in whatever the organization. Instead, a leadership climate emerges from the sum total of choices made by all the leaders in the climate system. them. So leadership is a collective thing in an organization.

1:42:56It's not just the guy at the top, right? Because he can be cool and you can have tyrants right underneath them. And if they're allowed to operate, then you're living in an unhealthy leadership climate, even though the guy at the top's okay. But what it also emphasizes is the responsibility of leaders. And my battalion commander, again, said this to me, he said, you know, Pete, you can be the smartest, funniest, most handsome, most tactically astute commander a unit's ever had. But if you turn a blind eye to a tyrant who's making their lives miserable, they'll treat you with the same derision they treat that tyrant.

1:43:41That's your job. Your job is to remove these friction barriers that prevent your guys from growing, succeeding in what they do. And when you don't do that, you're not doing your duty as a leader. So from that day forward, I passed that on, but I also lived it. Leadership climate takes constant pruning, constant maintenance. It doesn't mean you're looking for guys doing things, but you always keep an eye open for it because it's hard. How would you take the temperature of the climate throughout your entire career, not just at Ranger Battalion? Yeah, just talking to guys and listening to other people who talk to the guys.

1:44:29Your sergeant major should be a huge part of that. But you take that temperature and remember, a climate just like how would you tell if you're living in a good climate? The sun's shining. Everything's growing. Everyone's happy. Everyone takes pride in their neighborhood and gets along with their neighbors, makes an effort to get along with their neighbors. And I think those are things that are hallmarks of a positive leadership climate. I mean, one in particular is just freedom of speech, the ability to speak up, out, or with anyone in the battalion. And so one of the things about, you know, common sense leaders is they talk the same way to a private as they do to a general.

1:45:21And that's the way we all should be. And when you become consciously aware of it, you know, you might even catch yourself at times, you know, why am I suborning myself to this general? It's not how I talk to a private and then vice versa. Why am I treating this guy? Hey, no, I don't have time for you right now. You wouldn't have done that if the general stuck his head in the door. So freedom of speech to speak up out and with is hugely important in any organization, corporate or military. Your people got to feel like they can come up to you and go, hey, sir, I don't mean to I don't know who else to talk to.

1:45:56So I'm just at wit's end. but we have a real problem in B Company. And I know you're busy, but if you could send someone down to take a look, that I would totally appreciate it. You'll get that when you make yourself approachable, when people know that they can talk to you without repercussions. And so freedom of speech, I think, is one of the hallmarks of a healthy leadership climate. Good to know. So, thank you. So, let's move on. Let's move on in your career. Yeah. So, you know, from the Rangers, I went and commanded a company, a light infantry company, Seventh ID. We participated in the invasion of Panama.

1:46:44Amazing experience. I had an amazing company, 111 guys. We deployed to Panama. I had 28 fluent Spanish speakers. Were you with Bob Porras? No. No. Do you know Bob? Yeah, I know. I think he was in the unit then. I was in the 7th ID. I was about to be in the unit. I don't think he was in the unit. Oh, okay. Actually, I think he jumped in a van with some unit guys. Was he in the 7th ID? I can't remember what he was in. I got to ask him. Yeah, I know him. He's a great guy. He did see some action down there, and then he got picked up, and it wound up in a van, and I believe in the van was a bunch of D-boys.

1:47:22Yeah, I saw him too. So, but, you know, what it taught me was we had better intelligence than the agency or, you know, our division intel, because same thing, always listen to the guy on the ground doesn't just apply to the guy who's fighting on the ground. It applies to civilians and to some extent, you know, people who are against you too. Listen to what they're saying, but you can't listen if you don't understand the language. and, you know, it sounds incredibly elementary, but, you know, for all of us who are in Afghanistan, Iraq, you realize, you know, one of the biggest barriers to, you know, not winning the hearts and minds, not losing the hearts and minds and understanding where the enemy was, was the language barrier.

1:48:16You know, there, of course we had interpreters, but, you know, that was usually one per whatever type unit you were in. So the inability to communicate should be a red flag in any type of expeditionary warfare we're considering. And it's just simple. If you can't communicate, you can't understand what that person's needs are. You can't even understand how to get what you need to get out of that person, intelligence, operational intelligence, or just, you know, like we were talking about with talking to your soldiers, finding out, taking the temperature of, you know, the society at the time. So from there, you know, I was very fortunate because I came right into the 7th ID, took command.

1:49:05Also very fortunate. I had a great battalion commander who understood. I told him I want to go to unit tryouts after this. And he said, yeah, by all means. So I finished command. Two months later, I went to Selection. Again, fortunate, made it through Selection. And, you know, that experience, I saw your episode with Larry, and I can't come close to describing Selection as well as he did, so I won't. But there were some great moments in it, again, that taught me a lot about human nature. And it started with the initial psych interview. And a lot of people don't remember this. You probably do. But, you know, it used to be the biggest barrier to getting into the CIA or the special mission units was the lie detector test, the potential lie detector test.

1:50:01And, of course, the biggest barrier of the lie detector test was one question. Did you ever do drugs in high school or college? And so, you know, there were tons of people who, you know, came back, said, no, they didn't take me, you know, because I, you know, I told them I tried whatever in high school to include marijuana. And so there was a lot of angst about that. And I went, as I told you, I went to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, I think way, way before I was there in the 70s, Playboy magazine called it the number one party school in the country. It was kind of a party school, but not egregiously, just in a very fun...

1:50:52Now I know it wasn't the wilderness down there. Exactly. So, but I was a marathon runner, triathlete. I had rehearsed all this in my mind. What am I going to do when he starts asking the lie detector test questions? And, you know, just to be honest, I, it was impossible not to have tried marijuana where I went, grew up in high school and college. And again, the only thing that kept me, that allowed me to, you know, stiff arm it was I was a hardcore runner. And I believed if I took a puff off anything, I'd be knocking like two minutes off my time. So, you know, I did not. I stopped everything when I started competing in college.

1:51:36So I walk into the psych interview and Larry's the head psych guy and he's sitting there and he's got a manila folder up and he just motions me to sit down. I sit down, I'm like, what the fuck's he doing? and his first words out of his mouth are southern illinois university huh that's quite the party school isn't it and someone had told me uh you know whatever you do don't give more information than the question so don't answer them and then go into some long litany about how you tried it and it was not that great or you never tried it and you're you know all jittery you can tell you're So just answer the question.

1:52:19I said, yeah, it got some rating in Playboy, but it was really, you know, a great college. And I loved it because it was a great place to run and train for triathlons. I could swim in lakes, you know, run to the lake, run back and do my training there. And he asked me one more question. I can't remember what it was. It was something about, did you ever see cocaine or something? And I just answered him, honestly, no, I never saw cocaine without context. And then he said, OK. And he put the manila folder down. And then at the end of the interview, his phone rang, his phone beeper. And it was like, yeah, I'll be right there, sir.

1:53:05And he goes, hey, I got to leave. We got one more person. You got to fill out some stuff. And so I go, OK, yeah, I'll wait. He guns out. I picked that manila folder up. It's empty. this is Larry Vickers no okay wow that's an interesting choice to give a psych yeah he probably could have pulled that off too uh but you know I it was part of learning about human nature and about you know effects based uh activity that you can if you know a desired outcome then you can plan backwards and use little props to get that effect and I probably did in my 13 years there, you know, there's two selections a year.

1:53:47I probably did 10 boards, sat on 10 boards and probably five or six times, uh, me and my Sergeant Major, when there was a guy with, it was like, Hey, he's got some serious gotten some police trouble. We don't know. It might be nothing, you know? And so we pulled out the Manila folder. The thing about the Manila a folder is, it's not to try to catch the guy. It's just to see how they react. Because if the guy goes, yeah, I, you know, I smoked some weed and, you know, I smoked it for a while, but I stopped, you know, and I haven't smoked in two years, whatever, that's fine. You know, same thing.

1:54:29I got drunk one night. I got in a fight. You know, there are a lot of those and guys would think I'm going to get thrown out. It'd be hard to find one that didn't, I'll bet. Yeah, yeah. But you, so you're not trying to trick them to say something. You just want to see how they react. And I carried that forward into the corporate world. And I probably. What is the reaction you're wanting? You want to see a cool, calm collective. You want usually a smile, like, okay. You know, and then instead of getting all uptight and talking fast and stuttering, they just tell the truth. You know, they're resigned to tell the truth.

1:55:10They're resigned to, hey, I'm going to throw myself at mercy of the court. And they handle it. It's a little bit of pressure. You know, it doesn't seem like much, but. Ownership. Yeah. Yeah. And if you think about that, you know... And it also comes with when you're on an interview board, military or corporate, you know, respect for the person. They're there. They've done everything to get there. This is their dream. You know, this is their life. So, you know, callous decisions going, no, I don't like the guy because, you know, he smoked weed once or he got drunk. That's not what you're looking for.

1:55:49But guys who then turn that into stuttering, long-winded, making up stuff, and you can already see that he was arrested, he got in it, he did battery, all this other stuff, and they're not talking about that. Those guys, you want to scrutinize a little bit closer. It's the same thing in the corporate world. Like I said, I hired about 500 people, or I did about 500 interviews. I don't know how many we hired. You know, what you're trying to figure out is how that person thinks. You're trying to get inside their head for whatever context you're hiring them. And I was hiring people for sales and marketing, you know, senior sales and marketing people.

1:56:36So you want to see how they react under pressure. If you're a salesperson, you've got to be able to take pressure, you know. In the biopharma industry, you're in front of doctors, you're in front of payers, guys who make a million bucks a year who are going to price your drug and whatnot. You've got to be able to stay cool under stress. Part of that is what we talked about before, the unstructured problem solving, your ability to just work through something. And I had read this thing in Harvard Business Review right before I got out, and it was about what companies like Google were moving to, which was just intellectual questions that you ask someone, and you're not necessarily looking for the right answer.

1:57:27You're looking at how they come up with the answer, how they approach problem solving, and how they communicate that approach. So, you know, one question was, how much water does the average family of four use over a 48-hour period in their house? And, you know, you'd be surprised. Some people immediately, well, I don't know. I've never worked for the water company. And, you know, someone else. Dissects it. Yeah. Smiles. Okay, four people. Let's see. Dishwasher. Yeah, I drink a gallon a day. Right. Right. And goes through exactly, that's what you want to hear. They're unstructured problem solving.

1:58:08They're saying it out loud. They're using logic, you know, deductive logic to come to an answer. Another question was, why are all sewer caps round? And, you know, there's no right answer to that, it turns out. But there's a lot of reasons they're round. They can't fall into the sewer. Or, you know, a round square will break the street. The structure of a square to put that into an asphalt street will cause, you know, the physics of the street to fail much quicker than a circle, which is, you know, I guess the strongest self-supporting structure or self-sustaining structure. So there's no real answer, but you want to see how they handle it.

1:58:55If they can think on their feet, they can use logic and common sense. And, you know, you don't, if you ask pointed questions, tell me about a time, you know, the famous question is, tell me about a time you, you know, had a difficult customer. Most of that stuff they've got already prepared. There's a pat answer. You're not going to learn how that person thinks with those type of questions. But ask them something that makes them think, that makes them problem solve, see how they react, see how they communicate. And that tells you a lot about that person. Makes a lot of sense. How is it, do officers go through with the enlisted at OTC?

1:59:39Yeah. They do. Mm-hmm. Anything extracurricular? What do you mean? That you'd go, for example, through the SEAL pipeline, the officers have an extra section. Yeah. There is an extra. Is there? Yeah. How many officers are going through it once? It depends. Sometimes there's none. Sometimes there's a good number of them. I'm not sure on the current. But, you know, there were always, it always seemed like there were four or five at least per class. I heard you had an incident with a bear. Yep, yep. It wasn't a bear. It was a pig. I thought it was a bear. Oh, this is going to be good. I was, you know, navigating on one of the famous legs of the long walk.

2:00:37and uh i was i believe no one knows the actual so very few people know the standard i don't i believe i was way ahead of schedule kicking ass uh and i also believe i was close to the end so uh i had to get up this mountain i took this route that i thought would be the best route and i ended up in a what every class like 10 guys end up in it it's a manzanilla forest Oh. So it's like swimming through a sea of a thousand pitchforks. You're caught in this thing. And there's really, once you're in it, you know, you make the dumb decision initially to keep going. This thing's got to end. And then you're in the middle.

2:01:21And there's really no way out except picking your ruck, throwing it, knocking a couple of the Manzanilla vines down, stepping on those, picking your ruck up again. And so, you know, it could take you 100 throws to get out. So, I tried to get up a little bit higher to see if I could spot which direction I should go to. It would take me quickest to the edge of the Manzanilla Forest. And so, I got up a couple of branches high. Right as I'm reaching for this next one, I'm going, I probably should have taken my rucksack off before I started climbing. And snap, that thing snapped. I fell from the tree, fell down, instantly thought, OK, I'm either paralyzed or I broke my back, something, because I fell right on my back.

2:02:14So it was probably a good thing. Well, it caused me to fall, probably. So I don't know if it was a good thing. But it cushioned the blow. And as soon as I checked all my limbs and I was OK, I was like, all right, man. And then I heard this noise behind me. And because I've been walking for 30-some miles, I tried to croon my neck like, you know, an arthritic old man, you know, when you're rung-sacking, you can't move your neck anymore. And I just turned halfway, and I saw this thing coming at me, small, and I, you know, it was squeaking and screaming. in and I instantly thought, you know, that's a baby bear.

2:03:01And then I heard, you know, so I was like baby bear. And of course, any outdoorsman knows if there's a baby, there's a mom. Then I heard the massive crushing of the manzanilla vines behind it and like the snorting and bears snort. And so, you know, adrenaline rush, I picked up my rucksack, used it as a shield and just started sprinting like a madman and mowing down Manzanilla as best I could. And sure enough, I came to the edge of the forest. The bears, what I thought were bears, were closing in on me. I could hear them getting closer. So my adrenaline was all I had left. And once I broke free, the exaltation of breaking free was quickly dampened by the fact that the only thing in front of me was a cliff.

2:03:49Oh, shit. And so I was, you know, I'm like, I'm not getting eaten by a freaking bear while trying to go through selection. So I got up to the edge of that cliff and I, you know, it wasn't a sheer cliff. It was, you know, like the West Virginia hills, pretty steep. And I just hurled my body off the edge of that thing. Holy shit. Yeah. And hit on my feet. I thought I was going to grab this tree. It was a bad plan. They went right by that tree, cartwheeled down, and I ended up about 300 meters down, and I lost my map. So one of the things is if you lose your map, your weapon, your map and your weapon, you're disqualified.

2:04:34So my map, you know, the end of it was a sheer cliff. My map was gone. It was like that thing's history, but I had my weapon, my rubber weapon. And I'm like, fuck, now what I'm going to do? At least I didn't get eaten by the freaking bear. And then I look up and there up top is, you know, is a boar, a pig, a baby pig and a mama, you know, the, the, it was a massive pig. And of course I'm from Illinois. So I never knew there were wild pigs, you know, in anywhere, much less West Virginia. And I was like, fuck. And I had the momentary feel sorry for myself. And then I'm like, dude, you got to get back in it.

2:05:19And I just brushed myself off, made my way to the top. The pigs were gone. It was just starting to get dark. So I had no map, but I'd been to Panama, J-O-T-C three times. And in Panama, you learn to navigate with your feet, to read terrain with your feet. So if your feet are at this angle, you know you're walking off the ridgeline. When they're flat, you're on the top of the ridgeline. Same thing. You're going left, downward. So you literally are, your brain is totally in touch with your feet because you can't see the terrain features in Panama. They're covered so thickly with jungle canopy. So you navigate with your feet.

2:06:04And that's what I did up there. It got dark. I just said, I know I looked at this route. What's left is about four or five kilometers on the ridgeline. The ridge, you know, meandered too. So I got to stay on this ridge, you know, with no map. And so I stayed on it. I remember, you know, because probably of the adrenaline rush, I was completely depleted. I I was droning my ass off. I remember looking ahead of me and going, why is there a washing machine on the trail up there? And I keep going, keep going. And I thought it was a washing machine because there was a little red light. And I got up to it, to the washing machine.

2:06:48And it was one of the Delta cadre. And he was like, color number. And I gave my color number. and he goes go sit over there and I went and sat over there and uh I was like uh I fucked up I don't have a map nothing and uh about five minutes later Sergeant Major came over and said you know welcome to the unit you made it no shit yeah so so you know it's just uh never give up oh I felt It felt amazing. It was my dream. It was my singular goal in the military. It's why I joined. So I was ecstatic. And you know. They didn't ask for the map? No. I can't remember. Somehow they knew I lost it. Somehow he, because later a guy who became my Sergeant Major was one of the cadre.

2:07:49And he goes, yeah, we laughed pretty hard at you. And he goes, you know, that happens about two or three times every single. And I said, no. And he said, yeah. I said, have anyone ever been chased by a pig before? And he said, not that I know of, but bears, yes. And, you know, I don't know what else is up there, coyotes or something.

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2:09:42Right on. So where do we go from here? Yeah, just, I don't know. What squadron? B. B? I started in A. I commanded in B. Okay. Well, I mean, how is it? Talk to a lot of enlisted guys that have been over there, but never an officer. So, I mean, what is it like for an officer to check into the squadron as a new guy? Yeah, it's, you know, to me, it's as it should be. You're, you know, you got to earn. If you're going to get any respect, you got to earn it. That's not going to come quickly. You got to earn it over time. So, you know, you going in and talking to people and telling them, you know, how great you are and how you think is not going to do it.

2:10:32You know, you've got to like earn their trust. And part of that is, you know, is your competency with tactics, techniques and procedures. and the other parts just your you know ability to use common sense to communicate to talk to people and you know for me like when my first job the first troop i got as a brand new you know i was a major so i'm brand new in the troop that that troop larry was one of the team leaders so larry and I, right from the beginning, you know, kind of connected. He was one of the three best shots in the unit. You know, stories of his, you know, amazing shots had circulated the unit.

2:11:26It had been known to me and a lot of other people. But more than that, he was always a very astute tactician and never minced words, would always tell you like it is. And so we just, you know, he was like a sounding board for me operationally. You know, when I would think of something, hey, what do you think about this? And, you know, one of the things we talked about was dogs. And he was one of the first guys who said to me, yeah, a lot of people have talked about it a long time. There's a lot of people who don't want them, but somebody tell me they got to go down and clear a deeply buried underground bunker and tell me that they don't want a dog with them to go in first.

2:12:13And I was like, I agree. And same thing. How about perimeter security? How about clearing just a building, a house where you got known enemy? so you know Larry was a big source of common sense to me he's also very funny you know he and I used to sit through briefings and you know go back and forth cracking each other up and the most famous one was when for 9-1-1 after 9-1-1 happened we were up at JSOC and the JSOC intel officer was briefing the plan they had come up with which was an empty target raid and it wasn't even the empty target raid they ended up doing it was another empty target raid and me and him were sitting there going okay so he opened the the presentation up said you know we have to do something meaningful and then he said we've been we've got the whole staff we've been working for 96 hours, and this is what we came up with.

2:13:18And Larry and I, in that conversation, created this concept. We called it the operational cul-de-sac. You see the sign that says dead end, but you decide to go down the street anyway just to get turned around in the cul-de-sac and ending up back where you started from in the beginning. And that's what we're going to do here. We'll do an empty target rate and then we'll be like, okay, let's find a target. Why not find a real target? Why not, you know, instead of just looking for targets, why not make the mission, get some guys on the ground and start figuring things out? And, you know, so back to your question, if you don't have someone like that who you can speak freely with, who, you know, you respect their opinion, They tell it like it is.

2:14:10You know, I think it's a lot harder for an officer. But, you know, it should be because it's an incredible position. You have to be, in my opinion, you know, they don't need an officer, but they need someone to be looking over the next terrain feature. Someone's got to be talking on the radio to hire. Someone's got to be able to call, you know, a medevac. someone's got to be marking off buildings if you're clearing, you know, a small town or whatever. So, you know, focus on what, how you can contribute. Make sure you stay in your lane and the guys, you know, see the value of having you around.

2:14:56But if you do nothing but, you know, act as a barrier, negative squasher of ideas, overbearing, you know, and tactical operations and planning, you know, you're going to fall right into the, you know, the famous, I don't like officers. And again, to be fair, when I got there, you know, there were some individuals where I just scratched my head and said, you know, what the heck, how did they ever get in here? Wow. No shit, even with that command. Yep. So I think it's good. It's part of the process. You learn, you know, you've got to adapt. You've got to blend in. You got to figure out your role and you got to respect the amazing combat and intellectual power of a bunch of operators.

2:15:54Well, I do believe Larry did say you are the only officer that he ever liked working with. He wanted to make that clear. Wow. Wow. Well, I think that is a high compliment. I did not pay him for that. Oh, man. So you went to Columbia with him? Yeah, that was my first deployment. That was the first one? Yeah. Holy shit. Getting into the unit, I'll just give you my impressions. It was like nirvana because when I got there, everyone I talked to at some point talked about common sense. And back then, if you had to do an elevator speech on what the unit was, it was just an organization that uses common sense.

2:16:39And there were symptoms of that. I don't remember any SOPs. There were no binders that said, this is how we clear a building. This is how we, you know, the formation we use when we're doing desert mobility or whatever. You know, there were historical records. There were things that showed here, here's the formation we use for this or that. But, you know, back to that adaptive risk assessment, it was kind of this adaptive approach to any mission. Don't take set piece approaches to things. Don't, you know, every mission does not take one troop, one squadron, or one platoon, one company, one, you know, battalion.

2:17:23Think about what you need and then, you know, array allocate and group your forces that way. I really like how I've never heard... None of the guys that have come in here have talked about that and described the unit as a place of common sense. And that really fucking resonates with me. Yeah. Yeah.

2:17:48Because, man, I'm trying to put it into words, but I mean, it's just, other units are not able to operate with common sense because of the fucking red tape and the guardrails that are put all around them. So true. Flying at night. Daytime operations only. All these kind of fucking things. And this is, I mean, those are just the two that pop in my head immediately. but you didn't have those guidelines over there. Why don't you think that more military units use fucking common sense? Because even in the SEAL teams, a lot of common sense fucking completely gone. Yeah. No, that's what I do now. I consult.

2:18:26I teach companies how to use the common sense way to make decisions and solve complex problems. And it's not, again, it's not theoretical. It's biologic. You just got to follow your instincts, what the brain tells you to do, And we'll talk a little bit about that later. But that's the way the unit was described to me. The unit had the closest thing to a charter was three guiding principles. And I used them on every mission I went on. And the first one was understand what's going on around you. The second one was blend in anywhere. And the third one is the only failure is a failure to try. And later, I would minimize those to learn, adapt, and interact in any situation.

2:19:18Learn about the situation going on around you. Adapt to it. Adapt to what you learn. And interact. It's the only way you're going to learn. You've got to get out on the frontier and interact with the Indians in the terrain. You've got to understand that. So, you know, when that was first told to me, I was, you know, I took it like you take any guiding principles. It was like, wow, those are cool. But when I got down to Colombia, so Colombia, just to give you some background, it started 91 when Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison. And the president of Columbia said, no more deal making, no more being nice.

2:20:00He's going to jail and he's going to jail for life. So the manhunt began. And of course, the manhunt in a foreign country or any operation is run by the embassy country team. And you know that a lot of people don't understand that. But the embassy country team, which is an ambassador, usually the key instruments of national power, there's a mill group commander for the military. There's a CIA station chief. There's a DEA station chief everywhere down south. And there's usually an FBI guy, smaller group. They do criminal, international criminal stuff. But the mill group commander, the CIA and the DEA were the key honchos down there.

2:20:47The ambassador, the guy, incredibly astute ambassador, his name was Ambassador Busby. He was very unhappy with his country team because of one of the most common symptoms of all country teams. Instead of working together and collaborating as a team, they work across purposes. And a big reason for that is because they're incentivized to. Whoever gets credit for taking out Pablo is going to get the big budget. They're going to all get rewarded. A lot of people don't do it in DOD, but, you know, in the agency, if you do well on a mission, even back then, you got like a 30K stipend for, you know, not an ARCOM, not a little ribbon with a piece of, you know, that we were like, did you see this ARCOM I got?

2:21:37Wow. And, you know, all proud of it. They got like 30 grand. So they were, you know, the system like incentivized them to work at cross purposes. And then same problem, you know, you've seen it in the agency. The majority of people that end up in those stations are people with no life experience. They're never going to leave the embassy. All the reports, you know, big eye opener down there. I'm like, you're the guy writes the reports never left his office in bogota he's writing about cali writing about medellin wow yeah but they were working at cross purposes and so he said he had been to a demo and he he's called back and i'm not sure who he called to but he said i want some unit guys down here to help me figure this thing out and so uh the unit sent a first team down i wasn't with the first team team.

2:22:35But that team, he told the same thing he told me later, which is, I need you guys to help me bring this team together. They don't work together. I might as well have four country teams because there's no communication, there's no sharing of information. And if you guys get in on this, then maybe you can do that. And one of our missions was we are what you need us to be. So, you know, we took that on as a challenge. And when I got down there, it was the last of Pablo. It was when Pablo got killed in Medellin. And my job was liaison in the embassy in Bogota. So I was part of the country team. And right off the bat, you know, I was like, when I came in and the ambassador told me, gave me my charter, he goes, look, I'm dependent on you.

2:23:33And if we're going to get him and get the other guys, we're going to need you guys to do it. And so I went back to my office and I was like, okay, what in the F do I do now? And then I just thought about it. You know, the three guiding principles, understand what's going on around you, blend in anywhere. The only failure is a failure to try. So understand what's going on around you, immerse yourself in the history of the country, immerse myself specifically, not just in the cartel traffic, but all the way back to the Panama Canal times where basically Panama used to be part of Colombia. And why is that important?

2:24:12Because a lot of Colombians still carry a chip on their shoulder about Panama and the canal. That's one thing, getting up to speed on the Spanish language, making sure you're fluent. I took it in college. I had a good understanding, but I had to up my game on the language. That's understand what's going on. And the other part that was key was understanding the two guerrilla armies that were actually a huge part of the cocaine processing network. And that was the FARC and the ELN. And they're both, I think, back around again because Maduro refinanced them and rebuilt them. The ELNs in the north, Ejercito Liberacion Nacional, and the FARC is down south in the Amazonia.

2:25:09So, and then blend in anywhere. Now you're working on a country team. So besides my khaki jungle stuff, I got to wear a suit every day. I got to comport myself so that, you know, the people in the State Department, CIA aren't calling you a knuckle dragger. You got to be able to communicate. And, you know, only failure is a failure to try. My main thing was we got to get people out of Bogota. They need to be down where the narco trafficking is going on. We have to be interacting with the environment and the people. And that eventually, I mentioned Pablo got killed. The Colombian HRT deserved 100 % credit for that, and they did it.

2:26:00The agrupacion is what they're called down there. But immediately, the day after he died, the ambassador called me in and he goes, okay, I want to go after the Cali cartel now. And I want you to lead the effort to go after the Cali cartel. This is after Pablo was killed the day after can you talk about the day he was killed yeah it's pretty much uh he you know one thing about him was he loved his family and uh they had identified this weakness he had to get on you know a mobile phone and talk to his son and his son at the time his son and his mom were staying in like the the hilton in bogota they were you know house under house arrest or whatever because they tried to flee, I believe, and a number of countries said they would not allow him.

2:26:50So Pablo was in Medellin. I can't remember the relationship of the house. I think his mom was either his mom's house or his mom's friend. He was hiding out there and he got on his cell phone to call his son. His voice, he instantly was voice matched. We had trained up the agrupacion on how to use the direction finding, uh, uh, singing, uh, um, you know, uh, package, which was literally a package. You put it in the back seat and then you had a, um, you know, like the equivalent of an antenna that you would point out. It looked like a bullhorn you'd point out and that thing could triangulate a cell signal.

2:27:37And they literally the, because the, The initial hit on it just put it in, I think, a 400 by 400 meter area. So they went out driving, two guys with the direction finding equipment. And they just did a comprehensive search in the neighborhood, up, down, up, down, and on their third up, down, bing, a hit. And the guy who got the hit looked up. And there in the bathroom window of this house was Fat Old Pablo on the phone. and uh they immediately slammed on the brakes ran up there got in a gunfight and uh and shot him dead wow yep shit and uh yeah in bogota uh medellin you were in medellin no no i was in bogota when it happened yeah but i there were guys down there in medellin when it happened and they were in a safe house but it was a hundred percent you know colombian when you hear people say the u.s did it that we had nothing to do with it and we that was not by accident we knew how sensitive it was and we knew that you know to kill pablo it's got to be by the colombians or capture him um because you know a bunch of gringos grab him it just makes him a martyr a hero you A lot of people liked him down there.

2:29:01They did, especially around Medellin. He sponsored soccer teams, built parks, employed a lot of people. But anyway. How does that feel? First deployment killed probably the number one most wanted guy in the world. Well, I didn't do it, but it felt good to see it happen, to see success, that the efforts, you know, which had been going on, I think, six or nine months were, you know, were successful. And then, you know, I didn't have time to reflect because that next day he said, we're going after the Cali cartel. And, you know, I did the same thing. I was like, what do we need? How are we going to do this?

2:29:46And, you know, to our conversation earlier, the first thing was no embassy employee had stepped foot in Cali up to that point. So you had this place that was supposedly 100 % controlled by the cartel, totally inhospitable to any outsider. And we were like, well, there's only one way to find out. Let's get some guys down there. And there's a military airfield down there. So we flew down there, unloaded our guys. The Colombian, our partners, The HRT was very sensitive about down there. They're like, you guys have to maintain low viz out here, or it can get really bad. But what they found, first off, Cali's beautiful.

2:30:35If they ever turn it into a resort, it'll take off like almost nowhere else in the world. Gorgeous terrain. Yeah, it's beautiful. People all across Columbia are great. They're super nice, super friendly. And so we had the beginning of an op. And I returned. I would go down there, check on them. The guys were living in squalor. I went back to the embassy. And I had instantly an amazing breakthrough. And this is probably three weeks to four weeks in from when he gave us the mission. So I'm back at the embassy. It's Christmas time in Bogota. And I can't remember. I think it was like the 23rd. And I was in my little office next to the ambassador's office.

2:31:32It was 7 o 'clock at night. And I just got off the SATCOM with the guys down there. They were, and what they told me, you know, gave me pause. They were like, Pete, we barely get any food. The Colombian supply system's heart broke. It's not their fault. They're not getting much food either. But the real problem is water. You know, we've been out of bottled water. We're trying to boil it. We're not sure if some of the food the Colombians are feeding us is cooked in, you know, water that was boiled at the right temperature. and sure enough we're all sick as dogs you know shitting our brains out we've lost like 15 pounds uh we're living in squalor and the the safe house what's supposed to be a safe house it's definitely safe but it's not a house it's a shit shack so it's a safe shit shack that we're staying in and i said well shit man do you guys you want to come home i'll send an aircraft down tomorrow I'm bringing home.

2:32:34They're like, no, no, no, no. We're fine. We can hang another couple of weeks. Just don't forget about us, Panther, and get some good intel. And I'm like, Roger that. So I literally put the SATCOM receiver down. I was standing there. And then another SATCOM radio that printed out digital messages beeped a life. And this one was an Intel net and it was sending me a SIGGIN hit from the massive, you've seen them, the massive radar dishes that dot South America. It was a SIGGIN hit. And I tore the thing off and read it and it was like SIGGIN hit. Miguel Rodriguez Oriella, one of the Oriella brothers, head of the Cali cartel, positive ID at this lat long.

2:33:26And I'm like, holy shit. So I go over, we had a wall map, you know, about half the size of this, cut this wall in half, it would cover the half the wall. And I went on and, you know, it took me a couple of minutes to do the lat long. And I remember looking up at it and going, wow, these fucking guys know what they're doing. He was in, he was in a hundred meter square around the most pricey condominium real estates up by the Zona Rosa in Bogota. And then because it was a one over 25 ,000 topographic map, I followed the terrain down from the Sigan hit. And right below him was the 10-acre U.S. ambassador's residence.

2:34:11And my first thought was like, simple genius, what better place to hide than right next door to the guy who's leading the search against you. So my next thing was, we got to take action on this. So I left my office. Like I said, I think it was around seven at night. I left my office, went down to the agency's office, locked tight, no one there, lights off. DEA, locked tight, no one there, lights off. Mill Group, locked tight, no one off. And I was really looking for DEA or CIA and specifically CIA, but nothing. So I got on the phone, the landline, I called their emergency numbers, got voicemail on all of them.

2:35:01So this is another, as I'm doing this, I'm going, this is why the ambassador brought us down here. Probably out drinking. Yeah. Well, it's - Only agency. We're like military guys. When they're on a mission, they're on a mission. There's no time limits you know you're going to pull an all-nighter if the mission uh you know requires it but that's not the same and and for good reason they all had their families there but you could see most embassy company country teams have this corporate mentality you know you just cannot match the work ethic no of no military guys probably especially soft i've not worked in a conventional unit but you cannot you cannot fucking match that work ethic anywhere you go you're right unless you're working here at sean ryan show i've talked to some of your employees they told me they work their fucking asses off that's what they got a heck of a team out there but that is one of the things i noticed immediately when i started contracting for cia these people's work ethic fucking sucks yeah yep all they give a fuck about is getting drunk at the tally bar.

2:36:08Yeah. And it's not good. And then for the wrong reasons, and you're trying to do something, it gets frustrating if you let it. But anyway, you know, so I'm trying to figure out what to do, and there's a knock on the door. And I'm like, come in. And it's the ambassador's secretary. Her name was, I'll call her Maria. And she was like - This could go one or two ways here.

2:36:38Oh, Sean. Maybe both ways. I don't know. I heard you're a Delta. I already had a good relationship with her because as funny as it sounds, she was a career State Department employee and she was just an administrative assistant. But if you needed an answer in that embassy, like if you needed to know, hey, you know, I got this. Who do I talk to? And then what do I do after I talk to him? She'd tell you, OK, don't talk to this guy. Talk to this guy. Don't tell him what you want. Just tell him what you found. She'd give you advice like that. Very highly contextual, very valuable. You know, she helped us.

2:37:22I can't, you know, put adjectives on it. But she stuck her head in the door. She goes, hey, I just wanted to check on you. It's pretty late. You're the only one here. And I'm like, yeah, yep, I got a really, we got something kind of hot right now, Maria. You know, I'm super busy. And she goes, oh, well, I wanted to just tell you we're having dinner at my place tonight. A bunch of people from the country team are coming over. We've got, you know, the steaks in Columbia are like all world steaks. We've got fresh steaks. the chef's going to put them on in like 20 minutes. They should be ready in an hour.

2:37:59And I'm like, you know, Maria, I can't. I'm here. I'll probably be here all night. And you know, this is really hot. I'm sorry. And she goes, okay, well, you know, if you change your mind, here's my address. And I don't bite. And I took the address and she said, I don't bite. and this is part of not working with women, the door shut. And I awkwardly said, well, then how will you swallow your meat? And I was like, fuck, I cannot believe I just said that. It's the fucking stupidest thing I ever said. Oh, shit. And I go back to plot the thing. And all of a sudden, the door opens up again. And she goes, what did you just say?

2:38:41And I go, I asked, how will you chew your food? And she goes, oh, OK. I thought she said something different. But OK, the offer still stands. We're going to be there. You work really hard. So if you finish this up, please just come over. Stakes will be ready. It'll be a good time. And I'm like, yep, no change. So I went back. I called my guys down in Cali. And I bounced it off them. I said, hey, guys, here's what I got. And they're like, Panther, you got to figure something out, man. You got to act on this. This could lead to a lot of intel. And, you know, this could be it. This is the opportunity we can't pass up.

2:39:28And I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll get back to you guys. I'm going to keep trying to call these other country team members. I tried again, no answer. So I went over the map board and, you know, something about this yellow sticky she gave me. I was like, I wonder where this is. So, you know, it was like one, two, two Callaway, something like that. cali you know c-a-l-l-e so i went up the map i go inside the circle like in she's her condo is which makes sense is also above the ambassador's residence the best real estate in town inside this at the time it was a hundred meter circle the sigint circle is her apartment So I'm like, damn.

2:40:18So I called the guys back up and I go, guys, horns of a dilemma here. You know, no one's answering their phone. This SIGINT hit is getting colder by the minute. Right now it's 26 minutes old. So what I found out is the SIGINT hit comes either the same apartment or the apartment next door to one of the embassy employees who asked me to come over for dinner, but I told her I can't. I'm not going over to anyone's house for dinner while you guys are shitting your brains out. They're like, Panther, come to your senses. Get your ass in the car and drive to that party and check it out. It's the only thing we got.

2:41:01And I'm like, okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be gone. I gave him a five-point contingency. I said, it should take me about a half hour to drive there. I'm going to drive. So give me a half hour there, half hour back. I may need to hang out in the party just as part of my cover for action. So give me two hours max. If I'm not back in three hours, call Southcom and tell them what happened and where I went. They're like, Roger that.

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2:42:55If they want to fix their sleep, they've got to try Beam. So remember, go to shopbeam.com slash SRS. Use code SRS. With my code SRS, you can grab Dream for 50 % off. Try it today. So, you know, again, this is my first deployment. I get my car. It's nighttime. There was not a restriction against driving at night in Bogota, but it was highly discouraged by the State Department security. But I knew the route. i'd driven all over bogota and the route to get there took me through parquet national which is pretty hairy part of bogota and i remember all my you know all my uh training had come into place i took my 45 out it had a piece of velcro stuck to the uh the hand grip i also had a piece of hook pile tape, which is what Velcro sticks to on the dashboard.

2:43:55So I stuck my 45 on it because I got to drive, you know, so I stuck my 45 on the dashboard, put up my hat over it. So that if I ran into an ambush in Parquet National, I could just blast away through the front windshield and drive out of the ambush. So I drove, you know, made it there. I got within, you know, about 500 meters, slowed down. It was like, okay, am I doing the right thing here? And I know I don't want to go to the apartment, but I got to check it out to see if I got to check the SIGINT hit out. So I drive up and my cover for action is I'm going to this dinner. So I shift my mindset.

2:44:41Don't act like a guy checking out a SIGINT hit. Act like a guy, a dumbass embassy employee going to an embassy party. So I pull up beautiful glass faced, you know, high rise condominium, 20 stories, maybe beautiful. You know, you can tell these are massive, uh, condos, full glass, uh, vestibule. And I get out of my car. I park it, park in front and the car next to me was a Lexus, a black Lexus with tinted windows. And as soon as I got on my car, I was like there's someone in that car and they're looking at me and uh you know the same thing had happened to me my house had gotten robbed in Washington a couple years earlier and I came home from a bar and the guys who robbed it were in the car next to me and I had the same thing I was like my spider senses set off that someone was looking at me so you know I dismissed it I'm like stick stick with your cover, stick with your cover, keep walking.

2:45:45So I walked up, you know, act like you've been here before. I opened the door, act like you know where you're going. I walked over to the, you know, the doorbell call box thing, saw her name, hit the thing, you know, walked over to the elevator. It was a private elevator and, you know, turned. And as I turned, four guys were getting out of that Lexus. Three of them were gigantic. One was your typical CEO looking guy in the back seat, which fit the whole profile. And I'm like, come on elevator, come on, because they're coming into the lobby. And as soon as their door opened into the lobby, the elevator door opened for me.

2:46:34And I took one glance before I walked in and I saw the lead guy you know thousand dollar suit at the time and i saw a sidearm uh that he was armed you know there's no guns you're not allowed to have guns in colombia unless you're a narco trafficker or pistols uh in bogota so about you know up elevator i'm going up i'm like what the fuck i think that's them and they're in this building so up the elevator goes it comes to her condo bing the doors open the whole condo is like dark there's you know like five people in there drinking champagne soft music there's like candlelit table in the background and all five of them turn at the same time and they're all dressed they somehow changed dressed to the nines and all of them turned pete welcome so glad you're here and you know i looked at them and again you know can't hide my geekiness bam i hit the closed door button and the down button at the same time they're like the last thing i heard was one of the guys say what the fuck all right all right man all right breathe breathe you know i'm going down i'm going down what if they're still in the lobby First thing I did was touch my 45, you know, and then touch my spare mag.

2:48:01I had eight rounds in the 45, seven in the mag. So I had 15 shots. Should be more than enough if I get in a shootout. But I don't want to get in a shootout. What I want to do is walk right by them, get their license plate, and then drive away. And so, bing, the doors open up. There they are again. Same thing. This time, they're standing inside the lobby, just one of them's on the old school brick cell phones. So I take a deep breath. I walk right by them. I walk out. I look at the Lexus. It does have license plates. In a split second, I was able to memorize the license plate number. I got in my vehicle, and I drove away.

2:48:49and uh i you know i drove about a block away and then just watched and sure enough they right after i walked out they loaded their vehicle and i was like i might have spooked them you know i gotta like think worst case scenario so i got back to uh the embassy i immediately got on the satcom to my guys i go guys here's what happened they're like what the fuck did you go back there i'm like no, I can't go back again. I don't want to blow the cover and I don't want them to know that there's embassy people living there or whatever, but we got to process this thing. And so can you guys somehow without letting the Agrupacion Intel guys know what we're doing, just see, I know they run plates all the time.

2:49:38They have a massive data place of Colombian plates. See if you can run it and see what happens and he goes that no problem panther we know the guy who does it we'll do that so they ran the plates and sure enough they were registered to this office in cali uh which you know they called up on a uh satellite photo that they had on their laptop like it's an office it's a one-story office can we go now and i'm like guys it's got to be hrt you know and they're like yep yep roger okay we'll get them ready for an op tomorrow morning and so i stayed in my in slept in the uh my office that night the next morning hrt what's that fbi's hrt no these are the colombian hrt is their equivalent of steel team six and delta force they're the agro basion is what they're called uh they're their ct force uh and so you know uh the next morning, I wake up because I hear voices out and it's the ambassador.

2:50:42He was an early riser and the CIA station chief out there. And the CIA station, I walk out and the CIA station chief's going, ambassador, we got this singing hit last night. We processed it. We know where it's at and we're ready to go. And ambassador goes, okay, make sure you brief Pete and then let me know what you guys decide to do and he turns to me and he goes okay and i go hey man check out this license plate number and tell me what you find out and he goes okay you mean you know what happened i told him yeah i was here last night do you didn't you get my answering machine message he goes oh that was you yeah i never listened to those uh so that next day all this worked together to get approval for the agrupacion guys to hit this small office, one-story office with my guys.

2:51:39So they get to the facility, and this is 92, I think. Yeah, 92. So, I mean, think about even in 1000, most people don't know what a computer hard drive is in 2000. And even in 2000, people were still learning the internet and stuff. So it was full of computers and hard drives and printers. And my guys called me and they're like, Panther, we got to go inside. They don't know anything about computers. They don't know what to grab, you know, what could be sensitive. They don't know how to interrogate the devices. And we had our significant guy down there. He had all this high speed shit you could just plug in.

2:52:24And so I go, OK, I got to talk to Southcom because our ROE is we're not allowed to go step foot on any target that the HRT is in. So I call Southcom and I'm going, this probably isn't the smartest thing to do, but I got to do it. So I call him. Guy gets on the phone. He goes, OK, OK, let me run it by the boss. Calls me back 10 minutes later. Permission denied. You shouldn't even be out there. It's their op. Should be letting them run the op themselves. But permission denied, they're not allowed to go in. So I call them back up. I go, guys, here's the guidance. You're not allowed to go inside. They're like, roger that.

2:53:08So they had the agrupacion open all the windows. They went to each window around the building. They got on top of the roof. There was a massive skylight. They opened the skylight. They started pointing. That's a hard drive. Get that. Get that. The result was all that info turned up. Somewhere in there were two things, eight key congressmen that they were bribing in the Colombian government and also an address of one of their main residences. And that resident was taken by DEA and agency guys, and they ended up going in there with the Colombian HRT and arresting the Oriela brothers. Found one of them.

2:53:58He was in a hidden room in there. So, you know, to me, I reflected long on that, you know. And my lesson was how sensitive decision-making is to context and that you can never pre-decide anything or you can never tell what you would do in a given situation without context. You know, was I going to the party as an excuse to check out the Sigen hit, or was I going to the Sigen hit as an excuse to go to the party? I don't know. Would I have gone if it had been somewhere else? I can't say that. But I know in the context of the moment why I did what I did. And, you know, I was happy with every bit of it.

2:54:54to include, you know, leaving, hitting the down button on that elevator and going down. And, you know, they found out what happened. And all that did was get me invited to about 10 more of those. Nice. Yeah. But, you know, we had very clear lines, demarcation lines of never mixing business and pleasure. So. Right on. So. Wow. Yeah, that was my, and so, you know, you started this asking about going after the cartels in Mexico, and that's what I mean, something similar to that. But the added challenge, it's so difficult to know who to trust in Mexico, and specifically in the government. Yeah. that, you know, it's going to be tricky, but I'm sure there are some, you know, Mexico experts who can come up with a counter solution and then just incrementally work, develop the situation, work the intel, have people in place where you can take advantage of opportunities.

2:55:58And then, you know, the courage of your convictions to act. If it makes sense, do it. Even if it seems like you're bending the rules a little bit, But fucking bend them, man, and ask for permission later or ask for forgiveness later. I've got a question for you. Since we're talking about cartels, and I'll just wrap it up into everything. I mean, if we are taking out a cartel, a terrorist organization, some type of a machine, through everything that you've been through, because you've been through just about every damn conflict that's happened since Panama, would you rather go start with the bottom up or the top down?

2:56:57I think if you got the intel on the top down, go top down. It's just usually, it's the inverse. You got the intel on the subalterns, the lieutenants, and it's much sketchier on the big guy. But if you got good intel, you got to take it while you got it. because finding a guy who doesn't want to be found is even with all the technology today is super difficult um you know the maduro thing is an incredible op and someday i'm sure we'll find out you know where the intel came from but it had to be pretty good i wouldn't have passed that up either so yeah i'd always go top i think you know that's why human hunting you know if we had taken out Hitler, if we had had the balls in 98 to take out bin Laden and he wasn't that hidden.

2:57:56He was in caves. He was living in Kandahar, driving to Khaust every week, which is like 400 miles on elephant-sized potholed rows surrounded by landmines. So it takes like 10 hours to drive there and he was doing that every week uh we could have gotten him in route we could have gotten him in koust could have gotten him in kandahar we stayed in his house we used it as a safe house after the invasion we could have taken that thing out but no audacity no uh you know no listening to the guys on the ground uh you know i i doubt president clinton at the time had someone telling him you know we can do this it's not this complicated thing but at the time uh he had a four-star the head of the military was telling him you know whatever we do we can't it can't involve boots on the ground in afghanistan it's like dude why you know no one even know you could land in afghanistan could have landed any time before 9-1-1 on a on dry lake bed a dirt road anywhere and no one would have known you were there yeah so you know uh those are the components and you know we have those now so it's just a matter of you know the interagency unity of effort again and uh that's critical and i'm hoping that that that's working uh you know i know that the CIA still needs a lot of course correction from the, you know, tidal wave of woke hires they made from, you know, 2020 to 2024.

2:59:45And I'm not being derogatory. I'm just, that's the truth. And I would say that if they were all right-wing fanatics, you can't have political people in the CIA. You just can't. You can't have them in DOD either, but you can't have them in CIA because it's much more prone with the money and everything else to nefarious activities. And as we saw, we now have seen, again, Tulsi Gabbard release that memo where the head of the CIA had already approved that the memo, the famous Hunter Biden laptop memo of 51, it already endorsed sending that thing around. Gina Haspel, right? So you just can't be that way.

3:00:38And it's so foreign to most of us. Like if anyone had ever said to me during the Obama administration, hey, we got some guys, there's guys on the inside and they're working to overthrow Obama. I've fucking rat him out, man. He's the president of the United States. And, you know, they wouldn't have said that because it's so far out of the, you know, out of the, just any concept of righteousness or logic. But, you know, that was the case. They were doing everything they could to, you know, get rid of Trump. And who knows how many opportunities were missed, you know, with real criminals, real narco-terrorists, real terrorists.

3:01:25During that time, they were all focused on Trump. Yeah. Yeah. So where do we go from here? Somalia? Yeah. We go there next. What was your involvement there? I was backup, so I'm in, so C did the mission. So before the mission happened, it actually coursed through all three squadrons. So B had, if you were on alert, you had the mission and you rehearsed it, the Somalia mission, how to get a deed. You know, it was more or less a single snatch type thing we were working on. and uh so b had it first then a which was me and larry and then c uh we passed it like the day of that they deployed was the turnover and the commander decided to give it to them which you know it's fine they and they did amazing there uh but you know the rehearsals were I think, uh, you know, have some key learning points in them too, because the rehearsals, this was, this was the, the like onset of the MH-60 dominating every mission, uh, that special ops went on.

3:02:50Uh, they were, they were new. The fleet was just updated. um all the 160 blackhawks were new they were big you know they were they held the most people and they want every mission was you know a default to an air assault raid and so we were out there rehearsing there's no competition between squadrons and like all missions you're not really believing this one's going to happen because you know we've been through a thousand dry holes or a thousand nope don't need to plan anymore you know knock it off so it was just you know the way i described larry before like just common sense looking at shit what works what not and so after the first night uh we were like these blackhawks are not assault platforms It takes 45 seconds for a Blackhawk to break, flare, hover, and get his rope down.

3:03:48Then it takes another 45 seconds just to get one aircraft load of unit operators all the way to the ground. You're talking a minute and a half. A little bird with four guys on it can pull up to a balcony, the top of the building, the side of the building. if it's a balcony you can do one skid turn around do the other skid but basically a little bird it's brake flare hovered dislodge 15 seconds so a little bird was 15 seconds in and out and a blackhawk was a minute and a half and we were like they're gonna blow that fucking blackhawks out of the sky common sense common sense and larry larry can tell it was me and larry it was unfortunately in the AR was led by, uh, all Blackhawk pilots and stuff.

3:04:42And they were great guys who I know, and I would be honored to fly with, but they took it like, you know, personally or like we were making an emotional thing. And it's like, guys, I like your Blackhawk too, but I just don't want to ride that thing into combat. We have enough little birds. Why don't we put the whole squadron on little birds? So we needed 12 little birds to do that. The whole assault force, I should say. And, uh, and, you know, that went all the way up to the commanding general. Well, the commanding general was a helicopter pilot, a Blackhawk pilot. And so the answer came back very swiftly, keep the Blackhawks.

3:05:21um and so the next thing we were doing is you know you're rehearsing the shit out and we're like can we at least try some other techniques and you know one idea someone in the someone in the troop came up with was uh you know they have these shit sucking trucks that is the only way they they don't have sewer sewer lines they just have shit sucking trucks that suck the shit out of their little vats below the houses and they drive all over. Why not get a shit-sucking truck, hollow that thing out, clean it out, and we ride inside the shit-sucking truck right to the target, jump out, grab them. We can even wait inside of it until the target presents itself.

3:06:11and that idea got kind of quashed too and not by you know any not by other squadrons or anything by the higher headquarter so it just you know it was just formidable to me because uh you know i already it was already apparent that everyone expected the u.s to come in helicopters You know, and we knew how easy it was to knock a helicopter out of the sky just with an AK-47, much less an RPG. So, you know, it just did not seem to make sense. And from then on, you know, I was, you know, I was dogmatic about no helicopters allowed. And the main reason is, you know, not even the tactical operational that I was just talking about.

3:07:04It's because when you default to the helicopter solution, you immediately divorce yourself from the real deep thinking that's required for any successful op. You know, what time does the guard shift change? What time do they eat dinner at? What's the pattern these guards do each night? You know, at the specific time we're looking at H hour. Uh, you know, can we, can we use something like the shit sucking truck to get in there? All these things that if you don't have a helicopter, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna think about. So I guess going back again to, uh, unstructured problem solving, you know, you're, you're not, it's not unstructured problem solving.

3:07:52If someone says, I need you to do a raid on these Blackhawks, there's all the only option is to either fast rope or land where a Blackhawk can land. So already you're fencing your options in. And then that means you've completely lost surprise. And so squirters, unless you're surrounding the target, you're going to have squirters and squirters almost always get away. So defaulting to the helo mindset, it's nothing else. We still need helos. We need to have them, but I think even most Blackhawk guys would agree. It's not an assault platform. It was never built to be an assault platform that flies to a target with known enemy and somehow lands or disgorges its guys.

3:08:42The little bird is. It's like a flying dirt bike. It can get anywhere it wants to go. It's got that small bubble signature. It even crashes well. It bounces when it crashes, very survivable. And they're in and out, you know, like that. 15 seconds versus a minute and a half. So, you know, I just became a big advocate of don't use Helos unless you have to. And if you do have to, always try to use Little Bird first. Who shot that down? Well, multiple were shot down. It was just the Somalis with the RPGs. No, no, no, no, no. Who shot the ideas down? Oh, JSOC. JSOC shot it down. Yep. Yeah, at the time, you know, probably take some hits for this, but you had like the helicopter mafia was in place.

3:09:45And by God, we've got these multimillion dollar machines and we got to use them. We got to show results for spending all that money on these helos. it's human nature but so so it was a was it it was a tf-160 mafia it's jsoc yeah no i wouldn't even call them they were old tf guys but you know i think maybe that is a mistake maybe what i mean that that in itself is a mistake isn't it yeah i think so i'm again i don't want to sound controversial, but in those first years, I was commanded by my JSOC commander for the Battle of Shia-E-Cote, was an Air Force one-star general who flew transport planes.

3:10:36And he flew C-141s his whole career. And he was a nice guy, but my uncle's a nice guy too, but I'd never put him in charge of a bunch of commandos in a war zone. And show me where in the military guys like you and me are taking command of F-16 wings or F-15 fighter squadrons. It's not. They don't put ground guys in charge of air. So why are you putting air guys in charge of ground? Zero fucking sense. Yeah, but there's been a bunch of them, and nothing against those guys. They're just taking what they can get, but I just agree with your premise. It doesn't make any sense. All you can contribute at that level is wisdom and knowledge, and hopefully learn through experience, but you've got to be able to relate the nuances.

3:11:33You only get that from a well-rounded team. Yep, yep. what was the sentiment at the unit after that happened after moment issue uh it was you know great uh like concern i mean first empathy for the guys you know and see and the families um i you know i i can't speak for everybody but for us it was my circle of guys it was just You know, we need to learn like hard lessons and be very honest. And the unit was always very good at that. You know, you pull off what you think is the most successful op in the world and you get your ass ripped apart in the AAR afterwards. And usually good stuff brought up.

3:12:25You know, they were productive. They weren't character assassination events. But we never really were able to hot wash it. You know, a number of key commanders got hurt. General Harrell, he became a general. He was injured by that mortar round. So Dino was in a little bit of turmoil. I don't think we ever, you know, did justice to all the lessons. And quite frankly, you know, more than that, I wanted to hear like each of these team leaders who were in C, I wanted to hear their stories, you know, what happened to them because they were all in slightly different battles, you know, all throughout Mogadishu.

3:13:10And one guy pretty much became a personal hero of mine, Paul Howe, because he was taking it to the enemy. You know, the Rangers and a bunch of other people had to, you know, ordered, hey, stay static, stay in position. We got to get, figure out where everyone is. Well, Paul Howe was like, I'm not staying static, let them surround me. And he just started moving and clearing buildings and clearing up a huge portion of the sector to ensure it wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't get surrounded on the, you know, one or two square block area where everyone was located. So, you know, I wanted to hear more of that.

3:13:57But other than that, I mean, it was no, there was no negativity. It was just empathy and, you know, compassion for the families and, uh, the guys who got injured, some of them, you know, very seriously. So it took a, you know, it took a big toll. And, uh, you know, same thing I said to you earlier, no one was walking around cursing Bill Clinton. No one was walking around that didn't exist. You know, we didn't take it out politically, we take out on ourselves, what could we have done better? You know, should we have agreed to this? You know, I know one of the things C brought up was this template mentality they were forced to follow.

3:14:41It was the same because you had this helicopter package, the same package was used. The Little Birds went in immediately around the whatever the target building was or on top of the blackhawks went to the four corners drop fast ropes ranger isolation force security forces and so that package you know we even it was even called a template at the time became you know the default and uh you know i definitely a lot of us learned uh formidable lessons from it and i know i did because it affected every op i was on from there on out man yeah i've interviewed um tom about that i've never heard anything like it yeah and he was in the real shit he's an amazing guy too i would love to have heard his you know classified ar every bit of it because so much of the stuff those guys did you know changed course corrected the unit on things like cqb our tactics techniques and procedures as tom probably told you you know we all went to mogadishu with skateboard helmets on uh and we only wore helmets to hold our nods and uh you know our peltors uh to our ear uh but after that the unit's the one that invented what's now i think called the mole you know the partial helmet the unit invented that you know started cutting just like they always do started you know turning operators loose uh with saws and helmets and cutting them into the right shape and then turning back to vendors and going can you do this can you make one like this and change the padding and they changed it and they built the current helmet that you know of the version that produced the current helmet that everybody wears in the military.

3:16:39So that's just one thing, but tons of tactics, techniques, and procedures changed after that. Moving along walls, stuff like that, because the walls were getting hit by RPGs and bullets, and you don't really have to aim if someone's running along a wall. If you just hit the wall in front of them, with an RPG, it's going to splash all over them with a 7.62 round. If it's a good wall, it's just going to ricochet and go through however many guys are in a line along that wall. So that's another one I remember. But I'm sure Tom and the rest of those guys have a ton more that would be fascinating to hear.

3:17:22Well, Pete, let's take a quick break. Yeah, sounds good. For this show, the biggest thing is preparation. When you're sitting down for a long-form conversation, you can't just show up with surface level notes. You need real depth, structure, and the right questions. That's where I've been using Claude. It's helped me with research, building outlines, and shaping better questions before I sit down with a guest. I'll take a topic or a guest, run it through Claude, and it helps organize everything and tighten up the structure. It's a tool I use every day, and it has become a huge part of my workflow.

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3:18:35And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode, claude.ai.srs. All right, Pete, we're back from the break. I think we're moving to Bosnia and the Balkans next. Yeah, so Bosnia. I did seven rotations in Bosnia. What were we doing over there? It was... I came in on the tail end of this. Yeah, it was to capture war criminals. S4 was the security force for Bosnia. So the International Criminal Tribunal, IKATI, I can't remember what the last part is, indicted these Serbian war criminals for good reason. There were massacres, massive massacres, hundreds of people.

3:19:36And once they were indicted, NATO and the UN charged the US and the multinational force over there with capturing them and then we i well jsoc was selected to uh you know run the op which was continuous i think started in i want to say 95 went to 99 and uh you know i think the war ended in 95 so you know you saw the end of the war you saw what happened uh and it's crazy i mean uh like the ethnic hatred you know on all sides was pretty pretty heavy and uh you know you remember what i said about understand what's going on around you the first thing you do before you go to bosnia is again understand the history and you understand you know bosnia bosnia's muslims and they were the object of most of the ethnic killings.

3:20:45But the history of that area goes back to 1389 when the Turks came in and slaughtered Serbs and Croatians and they kind of never forgave them for that and you know the turks brought islam to the balkans so you know you'd hear serbian guys and croatian guys talk about that and it's like wow 1389 that's a long time ago but you know you understood and uh and to me you know i sum up bosnia as it was it was a living laboratory it was like this you know um you can do whatever you want to figure out how to capture these guys and uh and we did you know uh back to that unstructured problem solving you know first thing blend in anywhere uh you know usually when you're over there you wore what most males wear in bosnia and that's like blue jeans a white t-shirt and a leather jacket um some cigarettes Some cigarettes, yeah, a lot of cigarettes.

3:22:03The, you know, I always remember one of the girls came down on the first day of her tour, and for some reason, the most common color of hair in Bosnia at the time was a color that knows no equal in nature. We just called it red not found in nature. and she somehow went out bought a box of this red not found in nature and dyed her hair and i was like whoa but it was all about blending in and you know the ability to go into a town do a close target recce walk down the street see if you could spot the the war criminal uh a lot of cool innovations at the time like uh you know to track someone you need the i forget what the triangulation sighing thing is the cops have uh is it low jack i don't know yeah i think it's called low jack but it's the three antennas when you're when you're tracking a beacon you know you optimal is to have three antennas so you have three little antennas on top of your car but it's like how do you keep that from sticking out well same thing you understand what's going on around you and and people in bosnia use their cars for everything you know a yugo is a five cars in one it's a pickup truck it's a dump truck it's a bus you know uh and so you'd see constantly see cars with you know everything strapped to them and we just decided hey let's put a box on top of the car to cover the antennas and we'd switch the box out every few days you know make it look like a washing machine or something and strap it on and drive around like that uh you know there was no it was the 90s so there was no google maps or anything so you had to have also a satcom antenna to downlink you know your digital satcom your maps uh because you might want one you know that you don't have a satellite photo or something so a lot of little innovations uh just again in the in this you know art of human hunting, tracking, surveillance, and then the setup, setting these guys up.

3:24:21There were some incredible ops that were pulled off over there, really, really valuable long-term. One device that was invented was, we called it the Kevlar tennis net. and uh it's a good example of how stuff you know how the unit you know does research and development it's just hey guys we got to find out another way to stop vehicles we already had the spikes which are good but you know we wanted to stop a vehicle and then with the intention of pulling people out and capturing them so one of the guys did some research and he found this german scientist who had sewed together a kevlar tennis net and he did it to stop to put on the side of the autobahn for cars that lose their brakes to be able to drive through you know and he's so he came to me one day and uh he said hey have you seen this thing and i'm like no and he's like this guy in germany i'm pretty sure he was german has it and it's uh made a kevlar and it'll stop a car up to 60 miles an hour.

3:25:33That's incredible, man. You got to check that out. And sure enough, he flew over, checked it out. We bought it and we employed it. And one of the biggest war criminals, he was a Serb general. I won't name him, was captured that way. And it was cool. So we spray painted it gray so it would blend into the asphalt on the road. First, you got to find the right terrain. So anytime you're doing ambush, you want it around a curve so you can get the vehicle as slow as possible when you do the hit. So we found a good curve in the road. And then as luck would have it, there was a bridge abutment. so we were able to anchor the net on both sides to you know and i'm not talking to uh i'm not talking a bridge over the road i'm talking to it was a bridge the creek went under the road gotcha and it had like the guard rails and stuff but the cement abutments and we anchored the net that way then uh the guys dressed up as road workers road worker vests shovels about six of them were out there and then two people followed the target.

3:26:52He got in his car and then passed it off to an aircraft that was tracking the vehicle. The aircraft tracked it, downloaded it to the assault force. The assault force was waiting in the woods off to the side. It was the capture. The guys were going to do it the workers were had were all armed they were going to be the initial but you know we had like 25 guys out there and uh sure enough here he comes down the road 50 miles an hour uh you know you just you sometimes you can't believe shit why it's happening and you know they pulled that net and it stopped that vehicle and you know everyone was pretty serious but it was like little kids in a, you know, some kind of, I don't know, Christmas store.

3:27:39It was like, yeah, you know, running out there. And this thing snagged this vehicle, uh, and captured him without, you know, hurting him. He had an amputated leg. So his leg, his, uh, fake leg came off, but, uh, you know, captured him without hurting him, uh, you know, which is what the intention was and in the process invented this new you know vehicle stopping device uh that i think is still relevant today damn if you need to do it so that's what i mean by living laboratory a lot of things were invented a lot of things were perfected um and you know they set us up really well for uh Afghanistan because you know the last tours I think were 99 in Bosnia so only about a year and a half till 9-1-1 happened anything else notable how many how many war criminals do you think you guys took?

3:28:42I think captured seven or eight. There were a couple of things. So Bosnia was the first time VTCs ever showed up, video teleconferences. So the Bosnian command and control cell was called S4, Security Forces Bosnia, I guess. And it was the most bureaucratic structure you've ever seen. A four-star general, American four-star at the top, like a two-star Brit below him, a one-star German below him. They all needed to approve everything. On your guys'? On our guys'. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it was crazy. I remember one op, and this actually op, when it actually came to fruition, we passed it. You know, the SEALs eventually came over.

3:29:41We were rotating, doing, I can't remember if they did autonomous, but they were definitely over there, and they did a couple of the capture ops. And on this one, it was a guy we had been following for a long time. He's an old man, you know, just living quietly. We knew where he lived, lived in an apartment every day. you know got up walked to the fruit market bought some fruit walked back so you know the seals plan was we're just going to pull a van up there when he walks by we're going to open the van doors grab him throw him in and drive off i'm like fucking hey great plan and uh and so but it had to be approved by s4 and like i yeah no shit how else are you gonna do it yeah and i can't remember why I had to go to to brief it with them but you know I was up there in the yet all these generals and they listen to plan they go once he gets inside the apartment how many steps to his apartment see oh guys like 20 23 it's okay we need to know exactly how many steps it's like all right What else?

3:30:54What kind of anti-intrusion devices do you think he's got in the apartment? I was like, I don't know. Probably not many. He seems pretty cash. You know, he's just walking up and down the street. I don't see him taking a lot of measures. And this is an exact comment. He's like, you know, I read somewhere that one of the best devices to tell if someone's breaking into your house is to just put a soup can on the door with some change in it. Do you think maybe he's got a soup can on his door? Oh, man. What the fuck, man? And we were just like, holy shit. That's when you know it's not even. Yeah. And that's when we started.

3:31:38This is, it's going to come into play later, but you realize this hierarchical decision-making, these disconnected chains of command. And this is, even though they're, you know, on the other side of the city, they're completely disconnected. They're running the construction and all this admin shit. And they want to play, you know, infantry commando, you know, when the missions come up. I hate these fucking people. Yeah, it really tries you. And it tried everyone's patience. There were guys pulling their hair out. And this is the shit why I only have six years of the military yeah because i just looked as a 24 year old i was able to go you're a fucking idiot i'm out yeah well i think uh common sense again winning the day makes the fucking hair on the back of my head stand up it makes me so angry yeah it should so fucking angry it should because you care about soldiers you care about doing the right thing and and that's what it messes up so that guy i mean if he ruined my fucking dreams I'm not fucking around all I wanted to be was a seal and then I got there and that's what I witnessed and I was like this is not what the fuck it was cracked up to be yeah and a lot of a lot of guys had a great experience you know but and I had some really good experiences but I just ran into that too many times and I was like this is not the fucking place for me man yeah but no I'm with you um and you know just to give you like the the final story i was again 99 i believe so it was in the middle of that we nato bombed uh belgrade uh for like 78 days i don't know if you remember that the capital of serrable oh or capital excuse me of serbia bombed him for 78 days.

3:33:37It's NATO doing offensive operations in order to bring the country to its knees, another stupid ass decision. But during that, the Kosovo thing was also going on. So what happened was the Serbs finally decided to pull back out of Kosovo. And this was all being run from now EUCOM headquarters because Kosovo wasn't part of the Bosnia thing. It was up to UConn. So one day, I get this intel tipper and it said, hey, the Serbs are pulling out of the Pristina airfield. Pristina airfield is the only airfield in Kosovo that can land transport aircraft. It is absolutely critical to US interests that we secure that airfield.

3:34:27So I was like, I know exactly where it is. I had 20 guys. We were doing some either prepping for something, or we were going to do some training thing. So I had 20 guys and I'm like, we have vehicles. I can get in my car right now. We'll drive there with the 20 guys and we'll hold the gate and hold us by force a perimeter by covering it, you know, with weapons. But we can easily secure that base because no one's going to fight us for it. It's just whoever arrives there first owns it. So I briefed this right to the S-4 commander and the S-4 commander was like, okay, well, we don't have approval authority.

3:35:08It's got to come from UCOM. So he gets on the phone to the four-star in UCOM. The four-star in UCOM goes, negative, negative, negative. We need to put this into the planning cell, figure out how to do this. So UCOM goes into this 96-hour planning cycle. That same day, a lot of people don't know this, the Russians were part of the multinational security force in Bosnia. And the day before that Intel Tipperan Pristina came in, And we had driven out and bumped into these guys. They had like 10 BTRs parked on the side of a road near where their base was. And it was their sector and everything. We stopped.

3:35:57It was kind of cool. You know, we was like, this has got to be the only time U.S. and Russian military guys have sat down, talked to each other. And we shot the shit, gave memories. They gave us our food. We talked for a while. uh you know they were they were like normal guys well russia obviously wanted that airfield too uh you know uh serbia was a huge ally of russia and they were red hot pissed off we were bombing it anyway so they were looking for ways to you know get their moxie back and do something poke you know, the eagle instead of always having the bear poked. And so 18 of those BTRs loaded up with guys followed by 20 civilian vehicles.

3:36:47They drove 400 miles to Pristina, got in the gate, shut the gate behind them. And still to this day, Russia controls that airfield in Pristina. And the Russian general just put this out. He's a civilian now. He put it out a couple of years ago, someone interviewed him and he said, well, the first thing is we knew that NATO was a paper tiger. They wouldn't do anything if we went there. So we were convinced to go there. And then we knew all we got to do is start out because the multinational bureaucracy that they have in Bosnia can never make a decision. They'll still be talking to each other between Germany, the US, Britain, and the other commands.

3:37:31And I mean, he called it like laughingly. It's fucking embarrassing. It is. But, you know, again, it's only, you know, experience only matters. They probably got awards for it. What's that? I said those fucking generals probably got awarded for it. Yeah. Yeah. But again, experience only matters if you learn from it. And the lesson was if you want to be nimble, you got to be quick and you got to be audacious. and you can't go through this hierarchical decision-making process in the real world. It doesn't work. And remember, there was no real world. Bosnia is kind of a, you know, it's not a war, definitely.

3:38:07And, you know, Colombia wasn't a war. So we were not at war. We weren't, these generals were the same way. They don't have a concept of operations of how things unfold. for me and my guys, we could see instantly just drive there, you know, 400 miles. We'll be there in, uh, six hours or eight hours, seven hours. Uh, and it's a simple thing. No one's going to do anything. We'll take it. But you know, this demurring and this, you know, get the jag in here. We want to see if this is legal. Uh, it's never going to work. And, uh, again, I, I add that in because we're about to go to Afghanistan and see all of these negative, destructive C2 protocols just impede any potential for success on some of the biggest ops in Afghanistan.

3:39:11Man, that shit just enrages me. Yeah, it's going to get worse when we talk Afghanistan. And that's what Ukraine is, just to keep going back to Ukraine, because we only talked 2021. So the New York Times just did an expose, and it's a funny thing. It was meant to be a propaganda piece to prop up the DOD and CIA guys who've been fighting the war. Well, it turns out the Ukraine war was commanded and controlled by U.S. generals from UCOM in Wiesbaden along with Brit generals. And I'm talking four-star, three-star generals. They're micromanaging. They're coming up with these attacks. They're coming up with these counterattacks, applying this, the number one negative lesson of all the way back to Bosnia, but for sure of GWAT, which is what I'm describing and I'll describe again.

3:40:15And that's that decision-making and problem-solving by disconnected chains of command never has and never will be capable of making sense of the reality of the situation on the ground, nor will it be capable of making sensible choices for what the guys on the ground should do next. And the reason for that is not theoretical, It's biologic. The very nature of a disconnected hierarchy means its senses are disconnected from the environment. And as I mentioned earlier with, you know, mock, the only way to prove scientific facts is with your senses. The only way to make sense of any situation is with your senses.

3:40:58A video, anything else does not work. It has to be sensory information. That's how the brain works. sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. So these disconnected hierarchies that are on steroids now, they're$10 million every one of these jock talks is a massive space age conglomeration. And where did this stem from? When did this start to happen? I think it was part of technology. They figured out they could do it. And I think what entices these generals is when you're running, when you're telling people what to do off of BTC, it's like being a captain again, like being, they can be a company commander again and tell tactical shit, but they never understand that they're looking at a one dimensional view of reality that they can't smell.

3:41:54They can't feel the cold. Uh, they can't feel the fear that a guy has because he heard some guys coming up behind him. None of that is relevant to guys who were sitting in TOCs, tactical operations centers, with a wall of big screen TVs, air-conditioned, heated in the winter, eating their three, four meals a day, working out. And so I think it just became intoxicating to these generals to— Did it stem from entitlement? Do they think they don't need to be on the battlefield anymore because they have a fucking star? I mean, where did this shit stem from? No one ever self-corrected it. And, you know, that's...

3:42:40It's fucking crazy. I mean, there's this... Oh, man.

3:42:48Jamie Sands. Have you ever heard of this guy? Mm-mm.

3:42:54Who is he? Oh, he was... He was... What the hell? I can't... I'm having a brain. he was in charge of all of the seal teams and that's like same battlefield experience he was he was my co at two oh yeah just all just got canned finally but it's it's i mean just i just don't get it yeah i don't know i would love to know when this started happening Was it World War II? Well, I think the VTC, I think the SATCOM and VTC, yeah, have allowed these. I mean, I think it's always been, you know, you see in the old movies of World War II, the generals in a chalet moving, you know, little icons across a board.

3:43:47So it was probably to some extent then, but the chaos of World War II and the inability to send messages quickly precluded a lot of that micromanagement. But now you've got a predator, so you're seeing eye in the sky stuff. You think you've got better SA than the guy on the ground. You don't have any idea what he can see. You've got SATCOM radio, so you're hearing sound bites of people talking and sit reps of what's going on on the ground. And I think they just get caught up that they feel like they've got this tactical omnipotence. They can understand everything. And then, you know, the very nature of the fact, you know, they're generals makes them realize, well, no one can come up, you know, with a better decision than me.

3:44:39I'm going to use my wise general officer wisdom to inflect this operation. And they just can't resist it. And I've seen it. I remember coming in from Shahi Khot back to Bagram and sitting in one of the talks. And an op was going on. They were all watching the Predator. And they called in fast movers. the fast mover dropped a bomb and it nailed these people and you know i was not even convinced they were enemy definitely some of them were civilians and the whole place started cheering yeah and me and my agency buddy were standing in the back and you know we we didn't even we never even gave a peep we didn't cheer we didn't say anything because we were still looking going, how the fuck do they know who that is that just got hit?

3:45:38And it's just this enticement that, hey, I can't resist injecting myself into this battle and potentially hitting the mother load and capturing Bin Laden or whatever. And I remember a general at that same BTC said, Pete, come over, sit down next to me and put a headset on. And the guy started asking questions. And I knew the answer to the question. And then somebody asked me something like, well, what should we do? And because of Shahiq Coat, I knew what the response is to that. The response is, what's your recommendation? And get that guy talking. Get him unloading the tacit knowledge that he's accumulated on the target because most of it is tacit.

3:46:34In other words, he hasn't made it physical yet. It's just inside their head, but no one has given him a chance. No one said, hey, blank slab, tell me what you'd do if you were in charge. What do I need to know right now? And they just start talking. And within that conversation, these pearls of wisdom, these nuggets come out and you're like, of course, that's what we need to do. And it's, you know, back to that principle, always listen to the guy on the ground. But, you know, the best question any commander can ever make when he's trying to figure something out to a subordinate is to ask, what's your recommendation?

3:47:13And get them talking, you know, so you have some kind of accuracy. to pivot off of. And again, I think that comes with experience. Most of these generals, they don't care. We've been doing it now 25 years. So if we take the end of Bosnia till today, I guess it's 26, because Wiesbaden, it's one reason that I believe Ukraine's been so unsuccessful. Not only we build an army that was supposed to match NATO, which doesn't match Ukrainians, and ukrainian military training we commanded and controlled it with the same disconnected hierarchies that cannot make sense and they in their zest to keep self-correcting they just micromanage more what a shame yeah we're never gonna learn well shows like this so you got to get the word out you get the the truth out and educate people and I think at least we can chip away um and you know the right guy is in the right place at the right time and who's heard you know the lessons and that's that's the other part you know uh I said it earlier experience only matters if you learn from it and I don't give a shit about proving I was right or someone else was right or someone was wrong that doesn't matter and that's why I try not to say names you know people are like why don't you name the guy i'm like because then you'll be thinking about that guy instead of thinking about it's one of the perils of human nature and that that guy's out but there's 10 of him back in right now so it could happen to you again but it might surprise you because you only think that guy does that shit and so don't personalize it just talk about the foundational lessons and we have a responsibility to do that so they don't happen again and you know that's an example of one right there prevent these tragedies from happening again when did you show up in afghanistan uh we were the you know november of uh 2001 holy shit so we you know did The initial raid on Mullah Omar's house was kind of the opening combat boots on the ground.

3:49:41I was flying. I was the LNO in the AC-130 during that, so I flew above it. And then from there, again, a piece of history. Our command wanted to go home after that empty target raid, said there's no more missions for us. And, uh, I had had this, uh, PowerPoint presentation that we built in 1998 when we were told by the Clinton administration, come up with, you know, a way to get Bin Laden. And I described to you, he drove from Kanawha to Khaust, 400 miles. So I showed them this template, which was get guys in, move to a safe house, sequester them in the safe house, and then wait for the right moment, move out, set up an ambush, grab them and get out.

3:50:32But what we found out while we were doing that was that southern Afghanistan is full of these dry lake beds that are like pool tables. So you can land C-130s on them. You can land the C-130. authority, disgorge vehicles, disgorge little birds. And that became our plan. Let's fly into these dry lake beds, unload vehicles, unload little birds, let the little birds go hunting. AH-6s have a couple MHs, but mostly AHs. And the vehicles go out. We can take key roads, block those roads, interdict the roads. And we're going to still blow it off, but it turned out Franks, General Franks, was so pissed off.

3:51:19He's like, why do we pay you guys all this money? You don't do anything. You raid two empty targets. You didn't capture anybody. I need you to do something. So they sent that plan up to Franks. He's like, approved. And the next day, we started the process, haloing guys into the dry lake beds, doing penetrometer checks to check the soil and the you know the surf for sardines and c-130s were landing like a night later unloading gowers and uh little birds and that's when the hunting began that's when the you know almost all the enemy fled kandahar after that and uh ended up you know in eastern afghanistan in the shahikot valley where they hid oh shit yeah you were in an anaconda yeah yep i was the afo commander

3:52:20a lot of history there yeah it was uh i mean it was the biggest battle at the time and it ended up being the biggest ongoing battle of the war. But it started the same way we described earlier. General Franks, I was on the ground. The Taliban had fled. It was early January now. We had 45 AFO guys under me and they were mostly unit guys. I had some SEALs, uh, some SEAL Team 6 guys, uh, Air Force CCT and, uh, some special mission SIGINT guys along with us. And then the agency had, you know, a small group of ground branch on the ground, but that was it. And, uh, you know, I had given the mission guys, we're going to move out the frontier and start developing the situation.

3:53:19And Frank's heard, he had read one of our sit reps and he's like, now this is what we should be doing so he flew into bagram and he said tell blaber to come see me so i you know went to bagram and it was a it was a shithole at the time there wasn't even a fence around it and i met him in uh in a room but off of a hangar and he said look it's real simple i want you to get afo go find the enemy and then kill or capture him and i was like roger that's This is the best mission statement I think I've ever gotten in my life. And it was. It was a blank canvas. And, you know, immediately got together with the guys.

3:54:03I, you know, shared, guys, here's our mission. Okay, you know, how do we accomplish this? Afghanistan is massive, 645 ,000 acres. And so you'd think, you know, 45 AFO guys wouldn't be able to do anything. But, you know, that's where like logic and the process of elimination comes in. You know, Bin Laden's only allies in Afghanistan were Pashtuns. So there's almost no way everyone else hated him, all the other tribes. So he's not going to be hiding amongst tribes that hate him. He's going to be hiding among tribes that like him, the tribe, which is Pashtuns. And that's really just the southern part of the country and then up the east side of the country.

3:54:55So you've now necked the country down by about a third. And then if you start looking at, you know, what you have in that third, there's vast tracts of desert, flat as can be, same places we landed on. He ain't going to be out there, too vulnerable. There's, you know, all throughout massive mountains, 20 ,000 footers. He ain't going to be up at altitude. He's, you know, old. The rumor at the time was that he had diabetes or kidney failure. But, you know, we just kind of necked it down. And then we, you know, one of the big breaks that happened for us is I had been there for the initial invasions and then uh like i told you the our higher headquarters swapped us out they wanted to start rotating people we'd only been there like three or four weeks and so everyone was like why why do it now but you know we did it so roger that so we all went home the seals came over and then the afo concept i you know was selected to lead afo so i flew back uh and i came back a different route this time under alias and everything A lot of people hesitate when they're told they might need to start taking something for their cholesterol that they're not comfortable with taking long term.

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3:57:29So, you know, then that initial portion, why I was home, this Intel guy I had worked with for many years had called me up and he's like, hey, Pete, there's a guy who used to be one of Bin Laden's trained but non-security detail, worked on his detail. and he's in prison right now in the U.S. And he's written a, like a, you know, his own personal, like little pamphlet on how to find Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So it was like 20 pages long legal paper. He goes, you got any interest in reading that? And I go, hell yeah, man. Can you get that to me right away? And he goes, I should tell you one thing.

3:58:16And I go, what? And he goes, he's been in prison since 1998. And I said, well, you know, if Warren Buffett wanted to give you a stock tip two years after he retired, would you take his stock tip? Yeah, you'd fucking take his stock tip. So why would I turn down the guy who trained Bin Laden in security detail, you know, two and a half years earlier? He still knows how they're trained, their habits. There's got to be something in there. So he sent it to me and this thing read like, you know, a bestselling novel, every bullet. I was, I highlighted the entire document, ended up being highlighted, tabbed.

3:58:59It was just full of solid, logical, operational information. And the part that stood out most was his recommendations for once we go over there. So before I tell you what those are, I called the guy back and I go, hey man, can I talk to this guy? He goes, yeah, sure. He's in the, you know, he's in a prison up in a large city on the East Coast. It's a prison that sits right in the middle of a large city. And I'm not going to say what that city is. And I'm like, okay, what do I need to do? He goes, you just need to, I'll take care of it on the Army side, but you need to call this number at the Bureau of Prisons and get permission.

3:59:44And I always point this out. This period right after 9-1-1 happened was a unique period in American history because it's for a brief, short period, this is how you saw how the government should work. uh bureaucracy was not the watch work we're all americans we're all pulling together and i saw it right off the bat i called a guy in bureau prison say i'm pete blaver i explained what who i was what i'm doing uh you got any problem me seeing that he goes ready to see you tomorrow just give me a time we'll be ready same thing dod was like yeah tell him to go i we don't think he's going to produce anything but let him go so you know we had this we broke down these bureaucratic barriers and you could actually get things done.

4:00:34So that next day I showed up at the Bureau of Prisons, at the prison itself, showed my ID. They took me up into a room, all the tables and chairs are connected to the floor, can't be used as weapons, sat down and a couple of minutes later, door slid to the side and in chains in an orange jumpsuit came this terrorist ali muhammad and he was in prison for uh the kenyan and tanzanian embassy bombings but he had also trained bin laden's uh security details so i had his thing and i told him hey i just want to talk to you and when i asked him point blank hey how do we find al-qaeda in afghanistan he said ask the shepherds because they have to have lamb meat to to survive ask the shopkeepers, because Arabs eat different spices than the Afghans, and the shopkeeper will be able to tell you who bought them.

4:01:34Ask the money exchangers, because all the Arabs, Al-Qaeda, who come into country come through Pakistan, so they have Pakistani rupees instead of the currency of Afghan choice, which was the American dollar. And ask the taxi drivers, because the Arabs don't have driver's licenses. They don't know how to drive. And so we took that. We were like, wow, this is really good. And, you know, I finished my meeting with him, uh, like a couple of days later, flew back to Afghanistan. And, uh, and then we just started, we necked everything down. Uh, we had a warlord tell us, we asked the warlord, Hey, uh, do you know where Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan?

4:02:17And he told us, um, somewhere in the mountains around Gardez. So we occupied a safe house outside Gardez and we started, you know, a methodical searching. And, you know, one day we were out, it was a long day, about eight hours driving around. And the, I think the drivers, the guy who saw him, you know, just all of a sudden looked over to the right. And I was looking at the same time and he yelled, a fucking shepherd, you know, cause we've been talking about these shepherds everyone knew the ask the shepherd after shopkeeper everyone was saying it but it wasn't real yet you know we hadn't had a shopkeeper a shepherd or a taxi driver or a money exchanger so we see the shepherd and like yeah i think there were five of us in the vehicle like little kids you know we got out laughing our asses off motherfucking shepherd i can't wait to talk to this guy you know it's like that picture you had up there at the sniper hide site you know what guys do during the downtime they laugh most of the time you're laughing so we got up to him through our interpreter we asked him respectfully if we could talk to him he said of course and we just said to him you know do you know where al-qaeda is hiding uh in afghanistan and he just beckoned us with his fingers, turned around, headed for this probably about 1 ,500-foot hill, and then just power strode up that thing like an Olympic gold medalist speed skater.

4:03:58And behind him was us, the warrior athletes. We don't know Pierre. And I always remember I got to the top and I'm like, hands on the knees, next guy's up. We're all sucking air. And I look up and there he is at the edge of the of the ridge and you know i follow his arm down to his gnarly finger and he's at the end of it was these daunting palisades and he just said you know two words shahikot and you know they never used maps they always pointed to stuff or drew you a little sketch in the ground and so we could see the mountain range we still didn't know where the Shia Code Valley was, but we saw this mountain range.

4:04:41And to give you an analogy, it was kind of like looking at the Grand Tetons from Jackson Hole, still a big ass thing, but at least we had it necked down. And we use the same process, same way our brain makes sense is process of elimination. It just starts chopping shit down to get to the relevant part that has a chance for whatever success you're trying to achieve. And so we looked at these mountains and you could see, you know, he's not up at alpine level in the snow. That would be too difficult. We already knew that the Afghans weren't creatures of habit. So they needed an urban umbilical cord.

4:05:24They needed quick access to a small town or somewhere where there was water, wells, and food to buy, you know, feed them. So they weren't like the Vietcong who could survive on grubs and stuff. They needed that urban umbilical cord. So by the time we necked the whole mountain range down, it was not a big chunk. It was pretty much the area they ended up being in and probably a small area off to the right of it. And we decided, okay, we need to do environmental recons, which is just go out walk through the hills check the route up to the area we think we want to go like is there a route um and then you know understand the environment is there any source of water up there um you know what's the terrain like can you can you hide up there are these barren you know mountains are they too exposed is there any sign of life civilian activity enemy activity up in these mountains uh then all the operational stuff how does the cold and altitude affect our our batteries our nickel cadmium batteries how about our weapons you know we learned we needed the uh desert um you know uh silicon spray for our weapons to keep them from uh clogging up and getting frozen up So a lot of little things, the environmental recons proved, but mostly they proved we can do it, we can get in there.

4:07:04Then we came back and started planning to go in with three teams. I first had to request those three teams, which was incredibly contentious. I got on a VTC with the higher level commander. I was proud of what we'd done. I thought this is a no-brainer, so I went in like a naive kid. And when I finished my briefing, all the intel we found, it was very clear that this was not going to go that way. The general said, what makes you think that your theory that there's Al-Qaeda hiding in a pocket is correct? When we've combed that area with satellite imagery and there is nothing in there. And I'm like, well, we've talked to people.

4:07:51We've had a warlord tell us they're there. We've had a shepherd. There's activity. We talked to a couple of Afghan who lived in the villages, and they confirmed they had seen these guys, Arabs, going in and out. So we had a lot of circumstantial evidence, enough certainly where this was not like us just guessing. They're in that mountain over there. So finally, again, same thing. pressure from Franks. He approved two teams. So two teams, I got two teams from the unit. I needed three. And at the time, my acting sergeant major, we didn't call him that, but he was like my sidekick, was a guy named Homer, a SEAL team guy.

4:08:41He was my sergeant major. And he goes, you know, the SEALs are all sitting back at Bagram, cooped up, dying to get the fuck out of there and i know for a fact that if you request a couple teams from the commander he's almost assuredly going to give them to you i go well can you can we work it from both ends and he goes i already started they're already waiting for your request so i went back requested two teams they gave me one and that team was a team led by a guy named mike goodenbow fantastic guy uh you know sniper recce mentality to the nth degree funny common sense guy warrior i knew him yeah great guy he was killed in action uh as a as a contractor after he retired but uh worked with him over there did you fucking amazing guy yeah really uh and you know just to bring him up it takes up you got to personalize it now go to back to what that thing on ukraine you know 1.25 million of those guys dead and you know goody's dead and uh you know there's a number other guys so when you know we had the debacle of the pull out from afghanistan you know it like to me it dishonored all those guys who made all those sacrifices um but anyway good he was out there so we were set uh we moved in one team used atvs uh two teams we did vehicle drop-off they walked in uh and within a couple days they were set in position um and the battle uh began and i'm going to try to give you a short version of it so the battle began uh two days after the teams had surrounded it and it it opened with a thud because the 10th mountains plan was to land on the valley floor we told him you can't land on the valley floor and you shouldn't fly those helicopters because there's dishkas and if if you look at my book uh there's a picture of that Goody took with a cool pics camera of an enemy standing right next to a dish gun.

4:11:01He's standing right where the brigade commanders of the 101st, who was participating in this with 10th Mountain, was going to land. And right on the OP, we picked. So another lesson is when you pick out something because it's good terrain, don't be surprised to find that the enemy made the same choice. Expect every OP that you're going to to be occupied because it's good terrain. And it was. And so that fight started off. It was going well for us. The guys remained uncompromised. First time in modern history, I think, I've ever, that's happened, the three OPs. They were just calling fire in nonstop.

4:11:52um you know liquidating targets five here five there ten here ten there it was shooting fish in a barrel um but again things were not going well for the 10th mountain they were pinned down they knew they couldn't get the second chalk in with the second wave of Chinooks because the first ones had taken so much fire uh so uh the brigade commander uh who's didn't have a radio his sat gun broke came up to goodies position he was like can i use your radio to call back so it was our afo sat net and he called back and he said hey to the 10th mountain commander great guy general Hagenbach said, hey, sir, I recommend we call off the op, bring everyone back.

4:12:44We reset and come back in another day. And General Hagenbach said, roger that. He listened to the guy on the ground. Now, it was our net. So I couldn't hold back from adding some context. So I got on the radio and I I said, look, before you make a decision, I want you to know what we're seeing because it's a totally different battle than what your guys are seeing. We've prosecuted at the time, I can't remember, 37 targets or something. We've bombed damage assessment between 50 and 100 guys killed so far. We've cut off all the ingress, egress routes by fire. Our guys have enough supplies to stay in position for another 48 hours before they need resupply.

4:13:40And quite frankly, this is the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime. And if you guys leave, I totally understand, but we're staying. And then Hagenbach did something that I think is a model for all future generals. He changed his mind. He consulted with his two one-stars who were there. One of them was General Harrell, ex-unit commander, great guy. And they said, yeah, I don't think he should pull out. And he got back on the radio and he said, okay, we're not pulling out. We're staying. and we'll get the next chalk in tomorrow. Here's what I want you to do. And, you know, he did the right thing for the mission.

4:14:26He did the right thing for the men and he did the right thing for himself by changing his mind. And so, you know, I point that out because, you know, the future battle commanders never feel, don't allow ego to stop you from changing your mind. Changing your mind is what you do when you got more information. And the only reason you change your mind is because you have relevant information that makes you change it. Never hesitate to do that. Whatever you do, don't talk yourself out of it because you might embarrass yourself by saying, you know, I was wrong or I shouldn't have said that when I did.

4:15:09So, you know, we stayed in. We kept the fight going. um and that night uh you know the battle was like on everyone's computer everyone was being briefed on it the the predator feeds were on in the white house situation room centcom was monitoring our satcom 24 7 uh having meetings about you know what was happening uh and that night the phone rang And so all that adulation was coming to JSOC. So CENTCOM was calling JSOC a great job. It's unbelievable what you guys have done. Who knows if the president called, but they knew that they were getting a lot of positive attention for this. And so that night, the guy who was the JSOC commander at the time, a one-star Air Force general, calls me up on the red phone and he said, hey Pete uh great job on everything you guys have really uh you know really done super but look uh you know we can't have you do this anymore it's too much uh I need to get you out looking for the next battlefield I need to get you out looking for where the other places the enemy are and what I want to do is pass this mission off to the SEALs.

4:16:37And, you know, sometimes when someone says something so outlandish, you have no response. And that's the way I was. I was, I guess it's called dumbstruck. And I had like three firefights going on at the time. So I'm like, sir, can I get back to you? You know? And he's like, yeah, okay. And I hung up. And my intel guy was like, I fucking cannot believe this. Because essentially what he's doing is trying to change the command and control in the middle of a battle and it's an incredibly nuanced battle uh the terrain the enemy what we'd done to prepare ourselves just being acclimated uh we were telling everyone you need four days here minimum to acclimate gardez is 7 800 feet the battlefield was between 8 ,500 and 11 ,000.

4:17:28So serious altitude. So I got back on that night and I go, sir, this makes no sense. We're fine. The teams are fine. They got another 48 hours. I'm fine. I'm not redlining it. We can keep commanding and controlling this thing and and trying to trying to pass it off to people who have not been immersed in all the things we've done and all the coordination is a formula for disaster and he ended the conversation with pete uh i'm sending the seals down uh tonight put them in by tomorrow night and that's an order holy fucking shit yeah and so he sent that you know i went went to get a couple of hours of sleep me and my intel guy were trading off when i woke up uh you know the sun was just coming up and i noticed you know a couple cars new cars in our uh our parking area um and so i went to talk and there were you know there were the seals and uh um i said you know what are you doing man and why didn't you tell us you were coming because they're really lucky they didn't get shot by the afghan guards they shot someone two days earlier a civilian who just drove up without stopping at the sign he said oh because general tribun told us to come down and uh you know he said you were you were all good with that and i'm like oh man so one of the guys with them was a guy named brit Slabinski and I knew him from Bosnia.

4:19:15He, he had done a tour same time I did. Um, I had ridden in a car with him for like 20 hours. So, you know, and I had a lot of respect for him and we had a good collegial relationship. I said, Slab, can I talk to you outside? And he's like, yeah, sure. I said, Slab, you're a sniper recce guy. You know, this makes no sense. Putting you in tonight, you haven't even acclimated yet you guys haven't talked to the afghans you haven't talked to the guys who already went in and did the environmental recons you haven't reconfigured your kit uh you know we've got all this these spray paint cans so you can get the model look of the mountains the lava rock and everything else um you know your weapons you guys need to test fire your weapons your nods, everything, frequencies.

4:20:02And he's like, I hear you, I hear you, Pete, but I already fought this back at Bagram and they wouldn't listen to me there. And they're not listening to me now. I've been told it's an order and we have to obey orders. And then he said, I know you guys don't have to, but we do. And that's a joke. He doesn't, we do have to obey orders. But like you said earlier, in a unit based on common sense, one of the hallmarks is freedom of speech. In the unit, you tell a guy to do something outlandish and he's going to go, tell me the logic of why. Why does that make sense? You're going to debate it. The irony of having that culture is leaders end up saving themselves more often than not from doing really stupid shit because they're saying it out loud.

4:20:59They're brainstorming, you know, with other human instead of just in their head, bouncing off the walls of their head. So, you know, and I understood that. Like, you know, the culture at the time was, you know, you obey your officers and you don't ask questions. and um you know slab had to do it so and i was given an order so we let them plan they came up with a concept to go up to taker gar and the original lz was called lz1 it was to the east of taker gar on the flatland it was down on the mountain and we chose it because one of our other teams, Juliet team could see that HLZ. So at least we'd be able to cover it by visual overwatch and by fire if needed.

4:21:58So the mission was on for that night in helicopters. And I also told the general that we had a no helicopter policy. But the only way that they were going to get in was by helicopters because to get them in tonight, that's the only away. You can't drive them and have them walk and expect that they're going to make it tonight. So, you know, now we had an air assault to bring them in. And that night, we, me, my agency counterpart, my special forces counterpart, all moved forward with the convoy, the Afghans. We were going to reinsert the Afghans that night. The halos to pick up MAKO 3-0 slabs team flew in and uh landed at gardez and immediately uh you know called back and said we have engine problems so it was darkness so probably eight o 'clock at night local uh engine problems going to be an hour they're at nine now if things go right and the problem was uh slabs backwards calculation of the time it would take to get up that mountain in nightfall was about 30 to 45 minutes away from being passed.

4:23:21So 45 minutes, they still couldn't get the aircraft right. But during that time, the SEAL troop commander, who was a major, went up to the pilot and he said, hey, what do you think about landing on top of the mountain and the pilot was like i don't know if it's possible and he said it is i've seen imagery i have the imagery so i think he went in got the imagery showed the pilot i think the pilot was al mack i think you've had him on um and uh and it was yeah and so al's like you know he can land a freaking chinook on a gnat's ass if he wanted to so he's like yeah we can make it up there thinking you know this is all good well slab had already recommended we roll 24 hours because it's now at like an hour and a half and he's past his minimum amount of time to make it up to the top in darkness and uh and so slab said no my recommendation is roll 24 well the troop commander walked away from slab got on the blue sat called back to his headquarters said hey here's the deal uh we got engine problems slab wants to roll what do you want me to do and they were like Charlie Mike, you need to get on that mountain.

4:24:49And so he went back, he was completely, you know, and this is what I meant by a troop commander. You don't know anything yet, but you're full of vim and vigor. You know, I want to get in combat. I want to be in the greatest firefight. And I think a lot of that was operating with this guy. And he went back to LMAX, said the mission's ago let's do it and you know slab same thing he told slab you're going up on the mountain and so now things are just getting worse uh the delays keep coming um i'm forward but i'm full suite of comms so i had satcom i had uhf vhf uh i had a predator downlink but they never called me They never, whether it was headquarters or anyone else, never called me and said, hey.

4:25:41And the troop commander should have called me. The last thing I said to him, anything happens, call me and we'll talk it out. And he should have told me because I would have immediately shit canned it and said, we don't need to go up there. There's no, we control the valley, not them. There's movement on that hilltop, but they're not shooting any weapons. So when we have time, we'll go up there. and the 10th mountain was halfway up the mountain anyway. So I kind of figured they'd end up doing the top of the mountain clearing. But so slab, you know, finally the helicopter goes, they hop in, they fly up to Takargar.

4:26:19Before they reach there, someone told an AC-130 to check it out. The AC-130 came back and said negative activity on the mountain. And it turns out it was spider webbed with paths. There was a donkey tied to a tree, a fire up there. Somehow they didn't see any of that. And slab goes flying in. And the way this mountain is, is the only place to land, the peaks up here, the only place to land is right here. It's 50 feet or five stories below. so the place where the where the donkey was there was also a bunker uh you know a hardened bunker so the here comes the chinook break flare flaring its whole belly exposed rpk machine gun fire rpgs they knocked the out of that somehow lmack incredible you know example of of airmanship steadies the thing.

4:27:23But while that was happening, uh, Neil Roberts fell out the back of the helicopter, tumbled down onto the, onto, uh, Tucker Garb and, uh, aircraft went over the side, did a controlled crash landing on the valley floor. And, uh, you know, slab got out of that thing. He immediately called me online, a site radio, gave me a sit rep and said, you know i said same thing to him what's your recommendation he said i got to go back up there i got to go up and either rescue him or recover his body and i was like roger that um and so we began planning to reinsert those guys up on top of the mountain

4:28:18man yeah and we're not even to takergar yet and that's the that's what's coming next and that's the real tragedy

4:28:30but you know it's the same thing it's these you'll hear this disconnected chain of command trying to make decisions and solve problems and then injecting uh those decisions and those solutions into the battlefield and guys who can see everything hear everything know what the right thing to do are you know nothing more than like gnomes who have to obey these mindless orders from the starship and uh that's why i say it's the main lesson of of uh g watt and you know i just saw something that they're looking to spend a couple billion dollars on this new c2 thing that has AI and all the screens. I want to tell Hegseth, do not do that.

4:29:26Do not invest the money. You need to go back to the old way. You need to go back to the whole goal of the military should be reorganized so that command and control is always at the lowest level possible. Uh, we don't, you know, you can still have talks and jocks because they're good for things like helicopter and fixed wing aircraft deconfliction. They're good for beans and bullets stuff, logistics, but we should call talks the support talk. You know, the talks job is to support the guys on the ground, whatever they need, not tell them what to do and only talk to them, you know, when they're not watching a BTC with another general officer in it.

4:30:15Yeah. Man. Let's take a break. I've got to tell you, this is one of those things I didn't realize how much I needed until I actually started using it. Every device I got needs a different cord. Phone, headphones, watch it's a mess especially when you're traveling but Ridge they fixed it their five-in-one travel power bank has everything built in so you're not carrying a bunch of cables around anymore you've got magsafe wireless charging Apple watch charger lightning USB-C all in one device I've been using it and it just simplifies everything I'm not digging through a bag or fighting for outlets anymore.

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4:31:48All right, Pete. We're back from the break and it's about to get heavier. Yeah. So, you know, we picked up, uh, Neil Roberts fell out of the helo. Al Mack crash helped, uh, crash landed, controlled crash landed the helo right in the middle of the Shahi Code Valley. Slab gets out, immediately calls me, gives me a sit rep, what happened? Uh, and in that sit rep, it's, I'm going back up. So, you know, right off the bat, he never, no one was telling him to go up. No one had to cajole or convince him he was going back up. Well, that helo is not airworthy, so another helo comes to pick them up. And remember, what's happening here, back to context, you know, slabs, I'll go now to go back and pick him up, right?

4:32:41So the context of the moment matters. So the helo picks him up, takes him right to Gardez. It's only a minute and a half, two-minute flight. The Gardez safe house is exactly seven kilometers from the center of the valley. So, touches down at Gardez to wait for another helo, an airworthy helo, to take them back up. So, I'm at the base of Takargar, so to speak, the base and about a half mile away. So I can see Takargar from where I'm standing. I have line of sight. I'm talking, you know, I can talk to the top of the mountain with line of sight. No one's up there right now. But the AC-130 is narrating what he sees.

4:33:30And unfortunately, you know, when we look at the tapes, there were a lot of missed opportunities there. The enemy's just, you know, nonchalantly walking around in the open. At one point, about 30 guys surrounded Neil's body, and we know why. They were taking his equipment. One of the guys who later gets killed, a guy named Redbeard, we called Redbeard, is wearing Neil's Gore-Tex pants, laying there dead with his pants on. So they're tapping into this bonanza of material. But there's no high-resolution feedback. And I, you know, I don't need, I don't have a predator video. I'm walking around, um, you know, in the Shahi Code Valley.

4:34:22So Slab gets back to guard as the other aircraft picks him up. Now, all these talks, Bagram, which is 50 miles away, Masira, which is a thousand miles away in a time zone, are going beehive. You know, this is, we got a crash, you know, we've got a man missing. We're going to launch a rescue operation. And you can hear they're trying to inject themselves. And remember, all the accolades had come the night before, you know, and everyone's watching. So I think, you know, and this was described to me by a staff officer. They were conscious that this thing they just got complimented for and then took over immediately went to shit.

4:35:09Now, little did I know they were taking it over because that was about to start. My deputy, whose name was Jimmy, another unit operator, I had put him in the 10th Mountain Talk right in the beginning so that we'd have an LNO there, all our radios, they could hear our radios, they knew everything we were reporting. And Jimmy did an amazing job at that. Now, Now, in totality, he's probably got the best SA of anybody because there's a Predator downlink. He's got that. He's got the AC, both AC-130s on radio. They're orbiting around. He's got AFO sat. He's got Purple sat. He knows where the 10th Mountain guys are.

4:35:53So Jimmy gets on a radio and he goes, Roger, sit rep follows. was the enemy is surrounding Roberts right now, bunching up. If we hit him right now with the AC, we should be able to either disperse him or kill some of them. He was making a recommendation. The Air Force One star I told you about gets on the radio, goes, stop getting all emotional on the radio. Why don't you just get off the radio? Kicks him off the net. Are you fucking kidding me? Nope. And little did we know at the time, this was, you know, this was like, you know, injecting cancer. What's that? Do you know that fucker's name? Yeah.

4:36:45General Chabon. It's out. What a fucking piece of shit. Yeah, I mean, it's going to even get worse. How the fuck do these guys live with themselves? I don't know. Yeah, so Jimmy's off. And unbeknownst to me, right after he did that, he gets on what's called the purple sat, JSOC sat. So I'm AFO sat. The blue sat is the SEAL sat. Everyone's got their own SEAL. Their own SEAL. Their own SATCOM freak for command purposes. But for this mission, it's AFO sat. AFO is running this battlefield. But they get on the radio and unbeknownst to me, they say, switch all stations to purple sat without telling us.

4:37:36So now it's quiet. And I'm like, wow, well, at least they exercise in some radio discipline. And we're not hearing anything. what's going on, what we now know, because we've got the tapes, the tapes from the radio. So they switched the sat frequency and this, they put, so he's the commander. And this is another point. The guy they put on is a major. He's a field artillery major. He's never commanded controlled anything before, much less a complex multi-unit infantry battle, because that's what this is now. He called special ops, but we're battling like infantrymen on a mountain and down in the valley and using fire support to reach out and touch the enemy.

4:38:29Puts this guy on and this guy is confused. He doesn't even know. He begins injecting himself in the battle. He doesn't even know that Roberts fell off on top of Takargar. He thinks he fell off in the middle of the valley where the Al Mack put the helo down. About 50 meters from that helo is a mortar platoon. So he immediately begins obsessing, telling the AC-130s, grid, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, I want you, you're cleared hot. I want you to waste them. And the AC, luckily, the lead AC pilot, heroically, he knows. He knows Roberts fell on the ridge. He knows that grid he's talking about is in the valley.

4:39:15It's not where Roberts is on top of Tucker Gar. And they're like five kilometers away from each other. They're not right next to each other. So he continues talking these guys in, trying to get them to open up. This is a 101st mortar platoon. And luckily he gives the approval of fire in the AC-130. You hear the pilots say, negative, negative. We're not, you know, we're not going to do that. Do not fire on them. Then he straightens them out. At the same time, the guy is telling everybody, everything flying, okay, we're going to assault this mountain. We're preparing for an assault. How many shooters you got on board?

4:39:58First thing he calls is an HH-60, which is a medevac helo. How many shooters you got on board? It's a female pilot. She's a good pilot, squirt away. None, really. How many guys got guns? We all got guns. Okay, you're all shooters now. Holy shit. A medevac helo. Are you fucking kidding me? No, and he's saying assault, and he ended up saying it. I counted 15 times on the three tapes. And major, major point here. In infantry and special ops, words matter, especially words that describe offensive tasks. Assault is what you do when you have enough people, enough firepower against a position you can overwhelm.

4:40:47This is a bunker, five stories above them through the snow. They've got nobody. The Slab's team is not assaulters. They're sniper reconnaissance guys. They got SR-25s. I believe he had plastic helmets on there too. They have no Kevlar on. They're kitted light like snipers. Like they should be. Yeah. Fucking sniper. But he's telling them assault and he's telling everybody assault. Slab's aircraft lifts off. So their aircraft has purple sat. Chapman, who is a CCT, you know, I don't know exactly, and I've asked Slab if he knew what he was doing, and he said, no, I don't. But I believe he was plugged in to the intercom on the aircraft.

4:41:40And if you're on the intercom, you can hear the comms, especially the purple sat. So Chapman, who's a new guy and he's in Air Force CCT, is hearing this assault, assault, assault, which is, you know, beyond belief. It's the last thing. The plan that we made, this slab ran by me, was they fly us up. We're not going to land on the same spot. There's a defilade position up there. We're going to move to the defilade, contact the AC-130, and then do recon by fire and begin picking off targets from our defilade. It was a beautiful spot surrounded by rocks. And that was the plan. But now I'm no longer talking.

4:42:22There's no one to talk to because I can't talk to Slabby's in the aircraft. I could have talked to the 47s, but they'd switch freaks. So I'm thinking, wow, why is nobody talking anymore? You know, there must be something going on. Must be internal comms and they must be stuck at Gardez. So I should mention before they left, I got a radio check from Gardez. It was MAKO30 Charlie, which is John Chapman. Charlie is the suffix for RTO. He's a CCT, but he was their RTO and CCT. And so he told me, we're loading up Gardez, take off ETA, 10 minutes or something. I was, roger that. So off they go. So instead of even going right from Gardez, we're now like an hour from when Slab initially said that.

4:43:19Instead of going back to the mountain and landing offset, the guy they put in charge, that major who's a thousand miles away, realizes he made this mistake and he was telling the AC to waste a friendly mortar platoon. He's a, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to get things straight. tell Razor 04, I think it was, to go into an air loiter. So instead of going and landing and getting on the mountain, they go only one nautical mile away, which is nothing. The thump, thump of rotor wings of a 47 are like they're in your backyard from a nautical mile in the mountain. So the guys on top of the mountain, the enemies, they're over there, they're doing something over there.

4:44:06They sit in that air loiter for, I think, I think it was 40 minutes. And then he gives them the go ahead. Okay, send them in and does one final assault. So if you look at the video, the video that's on the internet and, and the more videos will be coming out, the actual videos unedited that show the full sequence of events. And when you see them, everything becomes clear about what happened. On the video, you watch the 47 lands in the exact same place it tried to land the first time. So all this gibberish on the radio he's doing, he never tells them. And oh yeah, remember, do not land on the same spot, but they do.

4:44:56They land on the same spot. But luckily, the enemy decided to just wait and shoot once the aircraft took back off to try to knock it down again. So it disgorges Slab's team, Mako 3-0. And you can watch on the video, and it's on the internet right now, you'll watch four guys run as planned to the defilade position, and one guy alone beelines it for the bunker. When I first saw that, I didn't know what happened. So after everything happened, I'm jumping forward a little. The two days after it happened, I flew back to Bagram to watch. I wanted to see the tapes. That's when I first watched the AC-130 and the Predator videos.

4:45:45When I see this guy get out of the helo and go right to the bunker, I'm like, I thought it was slab. and if it wasn't slab i thought you know i didn't know even know that you know i didn't even wasn't even thinking he's got a cct with him or anything i'm like fuck what are you doing because one guy is going right for the bunker well what i believe is that you know chapman is a junior guy he heard over and over i told you 15 times we're gonna assault this is an assault so he gets off that Halo, he's new. Remember, this is 2002. There hasn't been a war. So everybody is a new guy in actuality. We've been out there at least a little while.

4:46:32We've been sneaking around. So we're a little more, you know, attuned to things, but everybody else is new. So all the little things that became second nature, like getting off a Hilo and making sure you never stray from the guy in front of you. And, you know, as an RTO, you just follow your leader. And if that's a team leader, you follow that team leader. That radio is your weapon and it's the most effective weapon up there. But I believe he was confused. It's cold. It's cold. It's dark. Snow's blowing. You've gotten off many helos and you know how easy it is to be just temporarily disoriented.

4:47:15But if you've also been listening to this cacophonic, you know, gibberish and this assault, assault, assault, he's fucking thinking the plan changed. We're assaulting the bunker and off he goes. And, you know, I point this out and I mean it. He's a new guy, but this is kind of a heroic thing. He's charging a machine gun nest. You know, he believes his mission now has changed, and he's charging a machine gun nest. Well, Slab obviously takes a head count, knows he's missing, sees they can see him up ahead. He's heading for the bunker. He yelled to Chappie, Chappie, what are you doing? And I can't remember exactly what Chappie said.

4:48:00It was something like, I don't know, or I'm not sure. and right when he said it, the bunker opened up on all of them, firing blindly. They don't have night vision. They don't have sights. So the one thing these guys had going for them was they had night vision and the Uzbeks who were up there did not. So Chappie heads up, slab goes right after him and you watch on the tape and it's, you know, the guy on the tape says, the team leader never catches up with them. Well, duh, because he's going up five stories through a foot and a half of snow. You're not going to catch a guy who's ahead of you going up five stories in a foot and a half of snow and everyone's on adrenaline.

4:48:50Chappie makes it all the way up there to the top. In the video, they call it bunker two. It's not a bunker. It's a stove. It's just a cut out into the ground surrounded by rocks. In the video, they say he first clears bunker two. It's not a bunker. There's no one in it. You can see the heat signatures of everybody up there. You can see the donkey still alive up there. So Slab follows up. Chappie goes down right when Slab gets there and they're under withering fire. Slab brings the rest of his team around because they followed up too and starts trying to position them they're on a rock the big boulder a couple guys they're spread out like they should be four guys two two and uh another guy gets hit another one of slab's guys gets hit he's on top of the boulder rolls down hitting the leg so now slab's got one dead one non-ambulatory injured and he said and they're under crossfire from three directions, behind them, the side of them, and in front of them, the machine gun nest.

4:50:02So Slab makes the decision, okay, we got to go over, let's go over the side. We need to get out of this kill zone. Right decision again, second guessed by a lot of people. He gets over, as they're going over the side, one more guy gets hit. So now he's got two guys injured, One guy dead. He's actually got two guys dead because Roberts is dead too. And he's got him and one other guy who are ambulatory. They go over the side. This is 24 minutes after they landed. So from the minute they landed, the AC-130, I had briefed the AC-130. I'm talking to him line of sight now. So he doesn't know I'm not on the purple sat.

4:50:50The ACs don't know that, but I'm talking on the line of sight fires net. And so I told the AC, okay, here's what you need to do. You need to cover these guys' movement when they get out of the helicopter. Any enemy you see up in the bunker area, you're cleared hot to fire on them. Any movement you see, you're cleared hot to fire on them. He said, Roger that. So when they got out of the aircraft, within one minute, the AC-130 is calling, Mako 3-0, Mako 3-0, this is Grim 3-3, Grim 3-2, over, no answer, no answer. So I get on. They call back to me, you know, Ultra 0-1, this is Grim, no answer from Mako.

4:51:33Are we cleared hot to fire? And I go, I can't clear you hot now. Only slab can clear you hot. I can't see the top of the mountain. So I can't do that. I don't know where anyone was. Good thing because, you know, So if Chappie was even, he was non-ambulatory, he might have still been alive, but those slabs team hadn't made it all the way down. And the AC is usually very inaccurate on its first rounds. So I tried, I did what you're supposed to do. You don't want to clog the net by nonstop. MAKO 3-0, Ultra-0-1, over. So I go to every 45 seconds to a minute. MAKO 3-0, Ultra-0-1, over. It turned out, remember I told you they demanded they get put in that night?

4:52:19So Slab's team had less than 24 hours to prep, probably 18 hours for one of the most complex, deadly missions you could ever send guys on. My guys had two weeks and 10 days of immersion. And during that immersion, you do stuff like, okay, what freaks are we all on? You're all on your internal comms, which they were on. But unless you've been in combat, everybody doesn't have the fires freak loaded or unless a fires guy comes around and loads it, right? That's just even assaulters. The fire guy comes around before he goes, hey, you got the fire support freak? No, load me up. So none of them had that.

4:53:01Slab had it, but he's on his internal comms. He's not, even though the Empire can monitor both, he's doing what he should do, talking to his team, trying to keep them alive. But for 24 minutes, I called every 45 seconds to a minute, no answer. Finally, at 24, when Slab makes it over the side, he switches freak. He knows I got to get the AC. And boom, now we're talking. To, you know, my initial assessment, the reason I never thought that Chappie lived was because of that right there. Not only did I watch the videos and never see a body move, but I called for 24 minutes and no one answered. He's the CCT.

4:53:49I know his radio worked because he called me from Gardez. That's his lifeline. Even if he was injured, he'd be on that radio fucking calling in hell on earth on top of himself. And from everything I know, he was that kind of guy. He would have done that. But he didn't have it. He wasn't on that freak either. So I don't know. I don't, you know, I believe he was killed right off the bat. Slab begins, I, you know, I tell Slab, Slab, you got to control the AC. Just go ahead and have at it. You know where everyone's at. I don't, I can't see it. So they open up the AC. Like I said, it's 105 fire. It's incredibly inaccurate.

4:54:29They bomb the shit out of it. When you watch the full tape, you'll see this is hell on earth, they probably fired their basic load, which has got to be 25 to 50 rounds of 105 on top of that mountain. Why they're doing it, you look up at this tiny rock outcropping up on this finger that leads down to the bunkers, and there's two guys just fucking huddled up, sitting there, showing you what kind of warriors that are up there. These are mountain fighters, man. And, you know, we have pictures of them because from the sensitive site exploitation, these are fucking hardcore mountain fighters. And sure enough, they hang out.

4:55:17The AC-130 ceases fire. It's, you know, they're about out of ammo, but then they fly off station. And this enemy somehow knew that. And you watch. I told you, I asked when I saw the edited tape, where's the enemy? Where's that enemy that comes IMT and individual movement technique across the snowplane? And that's when he's like, forget it. You don't want to watch it. And he shut it down. So it's not on there. But that's what kept me skeptical and wanting to find out more information. Sure enough, this is Red Beard. The first guy of the two comes down, up, down, up, down, up, down. Well-trained fighter.

4:56:08They're confused. I believe he thinks Slab's team has taken over the bunker. But here he comes. He's coming back to get the bunker again. So again, telling you what kind of guy this is, he's IMTing back to assault that bunker. But the first place he goes to, and the whole way he knows this mountain, he's got Robert's pants on, his Gore-Tex pants on. He knows this mountain because when you track where he went, he went into a perfect defilade position where the bunker could not shoot. You know, it's below that five-story thing. You can't de-elevate your weapon to shoot at that angle. The first thing he does is go up to that stove where Chappie was hit.

4:56:55IMT's right up to it, sits there for 30, 45 seconds, probably checked, saw that John was dead. IMT's right back down. His position is out of defilade. Goes down all the way around, flanks the bunker, gets up. You watch his AK. You watch the report on the Predator video. He begins firing at the bunker, then the fire comes out of the bunker. Both RPK, machine gun, and RPG, Redbeard goes down. And how do we know all that about Redbeard? Because where he goes down in that videotape is exactly where my guys found him when they came across him on the sensitive sight exploitation. We took pictures, we marked the body, marked the position, never moved from that position.

4:57:48Now, the other enemy who was hiding up there starts IMT and down. He too comes down all the way to where Chappie ended up, but he doesn't leave. He stays there. And what's going on in the background, again, unbeknownst to me, I'm down there. It's starting to get a little bit light. Not light enough where you can see anything, but you can see the horizon. And behind Takargar, Takargar is 11 ,000. Behind it is another mountain to the east that's like 12, 12, 5. So sunrise and BMNT are even later for the top of Takargar. You'd think mountaintop, it's going to get sun first, but it's not. It's occluded by this other mountain range to the east of it.

4:58:37And so the sun's rising also in the AC says, hey, we've been ordered off station. I said, negative. You cannot go off station. He says, yes, we're going off station. And so I got another radio to have Jimmy check it out, see if he could find out what the order was. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the general who took over the battle in Bagram launched the Ranger QRF. The Ranger QRF, that's your job, QRF. So you wait around and then during firefights, you get ready. They ran into them. They said, we need to get the QRF forward right now. The QRF commander or captain goes, what's the mission? Where are we going?

4:59:21There's no time. Just get in the helicopter. We'll tell you when you get to Gardez. Well, the helicopter they get in has no SATCOM. So these Rangers from 1st Battalion get in this helicopter to come on a mission they know nothing about. They don't even know Roberts fell out of the helicopter. So they're flying forward to Gardez. They pause in Gardez. and then I hear this radio transmission on the line of sight say, tell the AC they need to stay until the QRF gets here. And I get on the radio and I go, QRF? What's going on with the QRF? The QRF is inbound. They're like five minutes out. Now I hear the WAPAWPA rotors.

5:00:13Here they come. um they they so they're going in on short final the ac is pulling off saying i've been ordered off i tell the ac 130 and this is a quote i say if you you are i am ultra zero one i'm the ground force commander i'm ordering you to stay on station if you leave station right now they're going to blow that helicopter out of the sky when we watch the tapes later that aircraft was already on its way back. When that tape's playing, they're already on their way back, so they're gone. Now here comes the QRF. This is And either 51 or an hour plus after Slab had landed, Slab was told in the beginning, remember I told you when he said I'm going up?

5:01:05He was told on the radio in the helicopter, the QRF will be right behind you. So Slab's getting out of that helicopter. When he got out and Chapman headed up, Slab's thinking, well, we got QRF right behind us. They're not. They're an hour out still, which again, he never would have executed this mission. Slab would have called the thing off with the helicopter before it ever landed. But he didn't know that either. No one's talking to him either. So here comes the QRF. and you know i wish i had my pictures here i'd show you the qrf lands in the exact same place so now we're on our third helicopter landing in the exact same place five stories up from where it's going to land is an rpk machine gun it's already sighted in on two other helicopters this This one comes in, nails it with RPG, nails it with RPK, shreds the helicopter.

5:02:09I believe three guys are killed before they ever get off that helicopter. No one on the QRF helicopter still knows. Roberts fell out of a helicopter. There's SEALs up there. There's enemy. And they, of course, they don't know, don't land on the same spot. The second QRF helicopter somehow got word. It lands over on the other side of the mountain. down a bit. These guys go into Superman mode, power up that mountain. It took them about an hour, but it was an incredible feat by those Rangers. But they tore up the rest of the Rangers and the guys continued to get hit. They were pinned down again, three directions.

5:03:00slabs now, you know, calling, trying to figure out what's going on. I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to figure out who's up on top of that mountain. Something else that happened, that same troop commander who overrode slab for sliding it 24 hours and told him to go, hopped on the second QRF aircraft at Bagram, didn't tell anybody, didn't tell me he's leaving Gardez. He was, you know, like the acting OIC of Gardez. Gets off the Ranger helicopter, goes, you guys do your thing. I'm going off. Goes off on his own to find Mako and finds him. and he doesn't have radios, but he's got a cell phone.

5:03:47So he makes cell phone connectivity back to Damnik. Damnik is talking to the blue talk. I still don't even know this guy's on the mountain. So now things are compounding even worse. We can't figure out the head count. We've got dead guys. We've got live guys, but there's extra guys up there and no one knows. It doesn't make sense. in these in these in this period after the rangers arrived up the second half of the qrf jason coming down was his heroic um uh jcu he's a he's a air force medic um he's treating the pilots both pilots have been shot got i.b bags going a guy from behind them sneaks up shoots him, gut shots him.

5:04:38So now we're on golden hour. We got a gut shot guy. We got to get him off in one hour. So I got to get this count correct so they can allow this medevac helicopter to fly in. I'm telling them, bring it in. Finally get the count correct because someone comes up, someone says, hey, the troop commander's up there, the blue troop commander. I'm like, fuck. So we added him. The count now works. And I'm talking to JSOC and I'm saying, I need that medevac now. We're 20 minutes into the golden hour. He's got 40 minutes to live. I need him now. Yeah, Pete, we've talked it over. We can't send another helicopter up there.

5:05:23We've already lost too. And, uh, it's the risk is not worth it. And I'm like, fuck. I told him again, I need that helicopter. You need to send it. I'm you, I'm giving you my word, the top of the mountain secure. They got some other report that a mortar had been fired or whatnot. And there was still enemy, but it was worth bringing a Blackhawk in, you know, with the amount of guys we had up there, to provide fire support. We could have built a wall of fire. I still would have brought him in. It was worth saving a guy's life at this point. But the request was denied, and Jason bled out up on the mountain.

5:06:09So we weren't allowed to medevac him. Everything went quiet. The bunker, I should add, was still firing away. There were at least one, maybe two guys in there. on that RPK. They had plenty of ammo. They held the Rangers. The Rangers could not assault and take it. They were pinned down there. And there's no superpowers when it comes to frontal assault on a machine gun. That's nothing you can do. So they brought F-15s in. The F-15s were missing. And I'm like, one of my OPs said, hey, Panther, do they know the Predator has a hellfire on it? And I'm like, I thought they did, but great, you know, great point.

5:06:53And I called the CCT up there and I said, hey, use the Predator Hellfire. It's one shot, one kill. And sure enough, he used the Predator Hellfire, one Hellfire, blew up the bunker, killed the guy. The mount was secure. And that was midday, I think 12 or 1 o 'clock. And they wouldn't allow a helo in there. The rest of the day, we had to wait for night. Finally, Helos were sent forward and evacuated all the guys off the mountain. So they all left. JSOC went back to not commanding, controlling. We stayed, finished the battle up, I think, four more days. And then we headed out for the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan.

5:07:42But, you know, again, everything from the injection, the forced injection of a team that doesn't even want to go in, not giving them sufficient time because you don't understand how critical time is that we don't pull shit out of our asses in combat. We prep ourselves to address every possible contingency, especially on top of an 11 ,000 foot mountain because all you got is what you got. Uh, so it's in, you know, PhD combat packing list, uh, but they didn't have time to change their freaks. Um, then changing the radio net, taking command over without telling the ground force commander or even consulting, you know, telling me, Hey, we got this.

5:08:29Nothing like that. Um, then putting the aircraft, telling the AC-130 is the wrong target, putting the aircraft in an air loiter, delaying it beyond comprehension, sending it in, not telling it to land offset or in a different spot from where the other helicopters landed. This is the prima facie. This is 2002. And I'll just say the lesson that would go on to haunt our military throughout GWAT and still haunts it today and has now been exported to Ukraine. And that is decision-making problem solving by disconnected chains of command never has and never will make sense. Because the only way to make sense is with your senses.

5:09:17And a disconnected chain of command by very definition cannot make sense because their senses are disconnected from the environment. so you know never again we've got to shit can this whole concept that a battle can be commanded remotely from a multi-million dollar talk it does not work it's a fucking ego problem it is an ego problem how the fuck do they live with themselves i don't know and uh there's a documentary about to come out about this i've heard yeah there is well there's a movie too uh ron howard i believe is making a movie about the version that, you know, from the edited video that Slab left the guy.

5:10:00And, you know, I've said to people, Slab's my friend, not like we hang out. I haven't talked to him in a year or something. And, you know, a friend like anyone you go to combat in is your friend. And Slab is my friend. I knew him in Bosnia. I rode around in a car on him. he's if you know slab you know he would never leave someone on a mountain who he had any doubt was not dead uh and to character assassinate him like they did to get this other narrative forward just doesn't make any sense i don't know anything about that yeah well you'll find it out that's That's what the whole documentary is.

5:10:48The documentary is proof that John Chapman was killed by that first volley, which even the autopsy backed up. It was terminal injuries from the first rounds. But in order to get the, you know, he got up and cleaned out the bunkers himself. you had to include that slab left him up there and that became the narrative and you know i'll say this a slab wouldn't mind but he he went through you know it caused physical harm to him uh to say that there it's a hard enough balance in your the whole ptsd thing when you get out especially with all the shit he went through but when you being you know falsely accused to some and makes it even worse.

5:11:40So yeah, there's a movie and then the documentary, which is being made, which is, in my opinion, a very productive piece of history because they go into great detail. They interviewed all the Rangers. They interviewed all the helicopter pilots. They interviewed AFO. They interviewed General Hagenbach, the 10th Mountain Commander. They interviewed SEALs. They interviewed other Air Force CCT. It's really a comprehensive piece. I haven't seen any of it. I know what they're doing. But a lot of that info is what needs to be put out. They've reached out before. Have they? They've reached out before to come on here.

5:12:27Yeah. They'd probably be a good guest and bring some of the clips. He went back to Takargar, got permission from the Taliban, and some unbelievable footage. They went back and filmed the battlefield geography again and the geometry, what I was talking about, the five stories, the areas that are in defilade and those that aren't. So my thing, Sean, I'm not getting involved in the bickering. and a lot of it's inner service because it started in 2015 when the secretaries of all the services put out a memo and it said, all services are directed to re-review all silver stars and above to see if any of them qualify for Medal of Honor.

5:13:18So all the services did that. The Air Force had not had a Medal of Honor yet in Afghanistan. and they, this is 2015. And so they put, you know, that's where the, that's where the John got put in for the medal of honor, the Navy countered it and put slab in for a medal of honor. And then it began this inner service bickering. I know nothing about that. I, no one called me. I remember hearing about it. I'm like, they're changing their war. I wrote slabs initial reward. I think there's a reg that says you can't change it unless you consult with you know the prior commander but you know the seals the seals have a history of this shit yeah the seals have a history of this shit well the it both sides did it neither side you know called so i would have just told them i don't have a parochial bone in my body lies come out of the SEAL teams.

5:14:25Yeah, well, in this case, you know, I think they were pretty accurate and they ended up being accurate. But, you know, the battle, so the battle still today, online and everything is these narratives. And someone asked me to address, you know, the Air Force guys, criticism that I was supporting this other narrative. And I'm like, I'm not supporting anybody. I'm the ground force commander. John Chapman and Britt Slabinski were my guys. I still consider them my guys. And my only responsibility once that battle ended was to make sure that the lessons that were learned from that battle are shared and passed on to current and future warriors.

5:15:13So the same thing never happens to them. And that's all I give a shit about. I give a shit about accuracy. I don't care about either side's parochialism. I don't have a dog in a fight. I don't have a favorite. And I'm not going to get involved in a debate with any of them about what they think. They got involved in this in 2015 off an edited video. I've been involved in it since 2002 off real world experience. And I'm the only guy who's seen every video from start to finish. So, uh, you know, to me, it's about learning and the fact it's turned into this narrative battle about, you know, what happened after John got shot is also letting off these people.

5:16:01You very elegantly directed some, you know, emotional intelligence toward, you know, they're the ones, the lesson is the disconnected chain of command caused this entire thing. This op was going, you know, as smooth as a massive battle op could ever go, especially when you're talking about three sniper recce teams infilling over 11 ,000 foot peaks amongst a thousand enemy and never being compromised. But what happened on Takagar happened and we got to learn from it, good, bad, and indifferent. All the little things, maybe some guy in the future will go, hey, do I got my fires freak on my radio?

5:16:47Another guy in RTO will go, okay, when I get up this helicopter, follow the team leader, follow the team leader, follow the team leader. Don't ever, even if you're by yourself, just take a knee and hold what you got. You're not an assaulter. You don't go assaulting something unless you're with the assaulters and preferably behind them. But the biggest lesson of all is that this C2 system is broke hard. And this was the first major incident. If we talk about Pat Tillman, it's the same thing happened to Pat Tillman and his platoon. I'll explain that one, but it's the exact same thing. Their deaths was the responsibility of this disconnected chain of command, micromanaging and ignoring when they needed it, ignoring the guys on the ground.

5:17:40And again, same thing. We need to learn that. And if we don't change it, that's why I'm so big on Hegseth understanding this. We're going to get our asses kicked the next time we get into a real battle, something, a real war like the Ukraine war, we're going to get our asses kicked. It's also tragic because the real strength of the American military is bottom-up command and control. It's letting guys adapt and improvise on the battlefield, communicate themselves. They know what to do. But when you take all that away from them, you've messed with nature, and you've messed with human nature and the results continue to be to this day either catastrophic or massively unsuccessful.

5:18:33Have there been any consequences? No. They're probably still fucking in. The one star got promoted to two. Of course he did. The two star got promoted to three. Of course he did. You know, no consequences at all. They covered it up. They - Slap some awards. Yep. Make everybody a fucking hero. Yep. Yeah, good job. Yep. That's what the fuck they did. I know. That's where those awards came from. And to me, the crime is you're denying those current warriors and future warriors their freedom to learn the lessons that could keep them alive in combat. And these are foundational lessons, but they're also, it's the beginning of, you know, a cancer that is now metastasized in our military.

5:19:26We've got to end this senseless C2 method and go back to dispersed C2, guy on the ground C2, flexible C2. But everybody works for the guys on the ground. You're in support when guys are on the ground. And that's like a philosophical shift that has to be taught and repeated over and over. Repetition breeds recognition. We need everyone to know that a TOC's job is to support the guys on the ground. And that's all they're there for. If there's a request, they answer it. If it's intel that they need to update, they can send the intel. But they don't tell the guys on the ground what to do. And they certainly don't tell them, you know, key life and death decisions like they feel free to do right now.

5:20:26I just want to clarify something. I am not commenting on whether they, whether those awards should have been given or not. I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. But I will fucking comment on this. The United States Navy has a fucking history of turning people into heroes to cover up fucking shit that never should have happened. Yeah. And you know what the fuck I'm talking about. Yeah. No doubt. Fucking bunch. The Navy has a fucking integrity problem. Yeah. Probably every other fucking branch does too. They do. But that's just what I'm aware of because that was the fucking community that I was involved in.

5:21:06And I am fucking ashamed of it. I think it's higher ranking people. The first recourse when an operation goes south, and it's very clear why it went south, because the fucking orders that were delivered via micro messenger, whether it's over the radio or in person, are what caused it. So the first recourse to cover up a tragedy is what you said, drowned the participants in a tidal wave of awards. then the awards uh eclipse the fuck-ups it a positive right and no one stops asking well yeah but what do we learn from it and the generals get promoted the admirals get promoted because it's looked at his job for fucking killing people you fucking pieces of shit

5:21:56sorry man yeah let's take a break

5:22:08Thank you.

5:22:57The End

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