#313 Eric Frohardt - DEVGRU Gold Squadron Sniper and Assaulter

34:28Because I was, I was young, like 19.

34:36But I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Like there was, I was singularly focused, right? I was going to be a Navy SEAL. I had so much clarity like about that and so much purpose. So I would, and I had gotten this dumb little like printed PDF from the recruiter. It was called the warning order back then. And it's this old school, like it's like 15 pages of eight and a half by 11 paper that's stapled in the corner that it has the, the running program, the swimming program, and then the calisthenics program, pushups, the pull-ups, the sit-ups and the dips. and to me like i took that home and you know i had finished my junior year of college or i'm sorry my one year of college um and i was like 215 pounds like i had bulked up for for ball but i wasn't getting any faster and i wasn't still gonna play um and i show up back and back at home and i got this, now I got this path.

35:52Right. And I literally like, I'm going to spend the whole summer just working on the farm and working out. So I'll like that whole time, basically June through October, like every morning I would do, um, I would work up, it worked you up to a two mile swim. Right. So it had a, it sequentially got longer. So towards the end of that, like like three to five days a week, I'm doing a two-mile swim in fins in a pool. Like it's in a rec center indoors. And I remember it was like - How many laps is that? 44. Oh my gosh. It was 88 lengths. Damn. It was 88 lengths or 44 laps. And I would like sometimes lose count.

36:38So it was like, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to keep my count. And I would do that every morning, right? like anywhere from three to five days a week and then the running program well i'll go sequentially then there was the push-ups the pull-ups and the sit-ups and they had these pyramids and it was anywhere from three to four days a week right and like they have so much better shit now from like the human performance side like and they have p like they have these programs that the SEAL recruiters give you. This is just an old printed off thing that I got from a Navy recruiter in Basin City, Iowa.

37:22But I'll never forget, like I didn't even have pull-up bars. So I'd like, I'd build a pull-up bar from a rafter in the barn. And then, you know, I had this piece of carpet on the floor in a shop, like a machine shop for push-ups and sit-ups. Just a piece of old, like kind of like this right that was my pt pad nice and then i even like built a dip bar in the shop so it was kind of like rocky four right on man so i'd do my swim in the morning i'd go to the farm all day and i'd do chores and do do the work or whatever whatever i was doing and throughout the day i would take a break and grab a set of pull-ups set of push-ups sit-ups dips whatever the program called for.

38:11And then when sometime late afternoon, you know, maybe when the chores were almost done or even like we had a, we had a farm site that was like three miles away, right. From this one farm site. So if that day called for a six mile run, like I would just put on shorts and run in my boots from this farm to that farm, do chores and then run back. so I'm like farming all day I do like two mile swim every day farming all day and then work up to like five or six mile runs every day and I'm like super in shape right yeah uh and then I'm sure you experience the same thing you get in like you get in this great shape and then you go to boot camp and get out of shape at least navy boot camp yeah but I'd you know a big part of the story that I'm leaving out was my dad's support.

39:07I was going to ask, what did your parents think? So on the one hand, it was like so helpful when someone said I couldn't do it. Like I needed someone to say you couldn't do that. I was going to prove them wrong. And then I came home from college. I think it was around Christmas and New Year's, you know, the break. and I told my folks, like we were at my grandpa's house and getting ready to have Christmas dinner. And I was like, I had been meaning to tell him sooner, but I just didn't have the courage because I thought he was going to like whap me. Really? Right. Like, I mean, just jokingly, like, you dumbass.

39:45He wants you to be a farmer or something? No, but I mean, he wanted us to go to college. He didn't, actually, he didn't want us to be a farmer. He's like, he doesn't want us to take over the farm. It's our experience with farming was like long work, hard hours. We didn't, you know, we didn't make a ton doing it. We didn't have land, you know, he didn't inherit land. We couldn't buy land at the time. Like it was, it was just a lot of work and it wasn't for us. Not anyway, he never like pushed us. He never pushed us to be farmers. I mean, we worked on the farm because that was, uh, that paid for room and board.

40:25Right. But in a moment and he was just, you know, he's so awesome. But I just go, all right, Dad, well, I'm not going back to college next year. I'm going to be a Navy SEAL. I said all that in like one breath. And he just looks at me, you know, looks down on me and he's just like. OK, well, like I forget the words exactly, but something like like I really think you'll be. one of the few that makes it through and you'll be good at that. I'm excited for you, son. Right. And, and, and to have that, like that encouragement, you know, from your dad was just like, you know, so powerful. Yeah. And just a reminder, like, you know, hopefully someday, like I'll be aware enough where someone, if they need that encouragement from me, like I can mimic that.

41:25That makes sense. What did you tell them you were going to be before that? Was it when you went to school? I was taking ag business and criminal science classes. So I was either going to be a farmer or in the FBI. I honestly didn't know. Right on. And part of it was you go to junior college, a lot of it's general ed. and you might change later anyway. You can get your general ed done at junior college, community college, and then go to university. You might change your mind by then. You know what I mean? So I wasn't really sure. What about your mom? My mom. So, yeah, she was a nurse. No, I mean, what did she think?

42:18Well, she was concerned, right? She didn't really, she didn't know what that was, like what a seal was. Right. My dad knew because, you know, he'd read even like Rogue Warrior and like when I grew up, like as a little kid, every Friday, dad would get a tape. We didn't have a blockbuster, but we had a corner store with VCR. Like we would have to rent a VCR and he would bring an action movie home. could be Rambo or Commando or Die Hard or like some 80s action movie oh yeah man and so like Friday night was always like movie night and like that like really shaped you know he was aware of what seals were and one time we did you know I think it was like the certainly in the 90s but he brought home the Charlie Sheen seals movie and like my brother and I watched that and And like the next day at the farm, we had this swing set and we turned it into our obstacle course.

43:23Yeah. So I was one of those, like for a while, I was one of those, like every time I watched a movie, my career path changed. Yeah. Like if it was backdraft, I was going to be a fireman. If it was G.I. Jane, I was going to be a Navy SEAL. So, yeah. anyway my mom was not she's supportive of it but like also like back then like this is 98 like it wasn't like she didn't know what I was signing up for you know what I mean but mom yeah she I would say you know fast forward to 2001 and now I'm on deployment like they're you know they're turning into prayer warriors just because of the way things changed.

44:15So I made it, I don't know, finished my year of college. I had that summer of purpose and trained, and I shipped off and went to boot camp in October. Right on. And then boot camp, you know, it's, I'm sure you experience the same thing. Like you get in really good shape, and then you go there, and you're just folding clothes. and doing dishes and i mean it was awful i mean was yours the same yeah i mean shining shining your boots shining your boots sweeping the floor a lot of cleaning swabbing the deck swabbing the deck yeah no boot camp boot camp for me basically all the extra motivation you need not to quit bugs 100 % that's absolutely right oh this is what I'll be doing if I don't make it this is fucking horrible no thanks bro yeah so I go to boot camp in October of 98 and it's mostly uneventful there's two things that stand out about boot camp Matt Bissonette and I were in sister divisions in boot camp Oh, no shit.

45:37So I meet him in boot camp. We end up going to Bud's one class apart. I go a class before him because he had a longer A school. But then we show up at Team 5 together. We're in the same STT class at SEAL Team 5. And we do, for two rotations at Team 5, we are in sister platoons, right? So we're kind of going through all this together. I would have gone to dev group the same time he did were it not for my kidney thing, which we'll get into. So I've known no one longer in the military than him. Wow. So met Matt in boot camp. And then it was towards the end of boot camp. um the and boot camp again it's so it's pretty easy a i was in really really good shape and be like the work like the work ethic you learn on a farm right which just carried me through it has carried me for through so many things made like boot camp was simple but at the end of boot camp, um, I, I had this like extreme pain in my side.

46:55Right. And like my parents come to be there for graduation and like, you get to go spend, like, I don't think we got to stay in the hotel with them, but like they could pick you up during the day and like take you out to eat or whatever. and so I've been at boot camp and I had missed my folks I missed my siblings and my brothers and sister and they're all younger and I'm like as boot camp approaches you're just so excited to see your family it's been like three months and you're so excited to get out on town and eat real food not this crap from this chow hall they finally get there and boot camp's finally over and I can't do it because I'm in this, like, I just go back to their hotel room and I'm curled up in a ball on the bed.

47:47Right. And I just want to be in a fetal position. And I get like, so I get like, I see the doctors, the bootcamp doctors, and they're just like, well, it's probably IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. And eventually it kind of goes away, right? Or whatever. And this is a pain that would plague me, like, in boot camp, at the end of boot camp, and then once in BUDS during Hell Week, and then once in sniper school, and then once in land warfare for when I was at Team 5. and i would later find out like it's a kidney stone so i had this pain in there that fucking well i would i would they would pass right and they would like they would like somehow the way the doctor explained it to me like it would get stuck in the my the ureter is the tube between your kidney and your bladder.

48:59And mine was like, had like scar tissue in it. So there would be times where my kidney wouldn't drain all the way. And then if it would get backed up, it would form a stone, right? So I find out, never diagnosed, like I'm diagnosed in bootcamp with IBS and constipation and it's a blocked kidney. So, and I'll go through that sequentially, So I finished boot camp and then I go to whatever. Back then, SEAL wasn't a rate. So I went to A school. I went to Sonar Tech A school in Point Loma. So anyway, that was like, I think that's like five weeks, Sonar Tech. And they don't send a five-week A school graduate into the fleet.

49:59They have to go through other training before they're actual sonar techs.

50:08And I was the honor man of my sonar tech A school, and they were going to give me my choice of orders. I'm like, well, I'm going to Bud's. Give somebody else the first choice. Yeah. And you had to, as you probably, I don't know, when did you join? 2001. Okay. July of 2001. Got it. Right before 9-11. Yeah. So like back then you had the, like this was called the SEAL Challenge Program. Same. And you were going to get E4 out of BUDS if you made it, but you had to pass these, you had to pass the test in boot camp and then in A school. Right. And then the first day of BUDS, as long as you pass those PRTs, you're in it.

50:51Right. So, you know the drill. Yeah. That's what I was doing. Right on. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll see if all of the BUDS candidates, when you showed up, look like Demi Moore. Yeah.

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52:27Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. Did I do it? Right?

52:35What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch any of this. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it.

52:52In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're f***ing f***ing. And now we're bringing them back.

53:10It does look pretty f***ing cool. I gotta admit that.

53:17All right, Eric, we're back from the break. Yeah. Getting ready to show up to Bud's. So, yeah. What's your first impression? What's it like walking in there? Well, I was... You know, my time in the military and in the teen, like all of it, is marked by steep learning curves. You know, they, like, take people off the street, turn them into SEALs, or in my case, take them off the farm right and first of all i'm one of the guys dumb enough like naive enough like when they're like who's never been in the ocean before and i'm like right like thinking it's a badge of honor yeah and then you know whatever the proctor whoever the instructor was at the time he's like get over here we gotta go catch up takes me to the ocean like and we're i'm in at the time ptrr or something you know before you're phased phased up and uh he just proceeds to surf torture me until i'm stop shivering right and i'm like i don't you know i had seen the ocean i guess technically because i was in point loma for a school but i never been in it and like i didn't realize how cold it was how cold the pacific ocean like i watched bay watch that's what i thought i watched babe that was my fucking bay watch well everyone's running around in swim trunks and you know bikini suits yeah and i'm like it can't be that bad so long story short i i wasn't expecting the water to be that cold or taste that gross you know that salt yeah uh but my first impression that salt and shit coming up from tijuana my first impression it's i don't know it was kind of interesting you kind of look around and you're all kind of like measuring each other.

55:29Like, is that guy going to be here at the end? Measuring each other up. Yeah. And I've done it recently in college football or whatever. You're kind of looking around and trying to see where you might fit. And for me, I don't know. I'm sure you had the same experience. But I'm not sure how many people we started with. I have seen and heard it was somewhere around 180 or 160 or whatever. And we graduated six months later with 19. Wow. Damn. 21 total, 19 originals. And if you... 21 total, 19. holy you only had two rollbacks three so it's 22 sorry holy and we had

56:37If you took like, just say it's 150 or 190 or whatever it was we started with, I wish I could find this out. And you just took this long, like this big panoramic photo. And I gave you a Sharpie. And I said, now circle, or not you, but if I just gave it to some random person. Circle the 19 people that are going to make it through based on appearances. like you wouldn't have circled me like let's say all of our shirts are off or whatever you wouldn't have circled me and you wouldn't have circled half the people that made it through because you can't really judge someone by their appearance like in that role yeah better example a better example would be excel take all 190 or whatever however many candidates there were and every Every name is on a row.

57:38So it's 190 rows or again, however many it was. And then every column was a measurable runtime, swim time, obstacle course, pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups, like tested. And then I just said, all right, now highlight the 19 people who are going to make it. Well, you wouldn't have, I wasn't in the top. You wouldn't have chosen me. and you wouldn't have chosen half the people that made it or even even looking at pedigree like if you just looked at people's like resume and there was a there was like some really good you know college athletes or olympic alternate decathlete or whomever that were the best runner swimmer push-ups pull-ups fastest o-course times like all of those yeah and those people didn't make it like it's so strange and then you have like the failed junior college football players and the washed out wrestlers and the whatever like it what now for sure there were plenty of there were plenty of guys that looked like they were going to make it through and had the measurables and had the pedigree.

58:59Like there were a few of those, but that was more of the exception than the rule. So it kind of taught me like, you can't judge by appearances. You can't judge by measurables and you can't judge by pedigree, at least in that context, because like, there's no quick way to measure a guy's heart or what they're willing and able to do. Their drive, their determination, their resilience. And that's just revealed over a period of time, which is six months and they call it buds, right? So to me, I think

59:43like what makes someone make it through that i don't know obviously there's some grit there's some determination there's some stubbornness all these things but i think something to prove there's a there is that like oh i have something to prove right or a chip on my shoulder and i'm i'm from a such a small town that like when i was going through hell week there were signs in my town I had friends that were from these big towns in New Jersey and California and everywhere in between, and they're anonymous. I'm not anonymous. Yeah. It's a big deal. Just to get out. I'm from a similar town. Actually, about eight times the size of your town at 8 ,000 people.

1:00:30Still small. Yeah. But just getting out of a small town is a big fucking deal, right? Yeah. You know? And I mean, I love it. I mean, you go back there today, it's like walking back in time. It's like, holy shit, everybody's still here, which is awesome. I know. I have nothing against that. I love my small town. And I literally, you know, the bank signs that have the ticker, like the digital. Yeah. My parents are like, your name's on the ticker because you're going through Hell Week. Holy shit. In this little town. And so for me, there's also this pressure. Yeah. Like, I'm not going to quit. A, I don't want to let my parents down.

1:01:12And B, I don't want to go back to my hometown with my tail between my legs. Most of all, I had something to prove, you know, I wanted to go do something hard. And I think just having so many factors, but just being very clear on what you want to do and being willing to do it. Like every time, and I've thought about this a lot, but when I failed at something, it's either I wasn't like crystal clear on what, not just what I wanted to do, but what it would take. Like I wasn't 100 % clear on what I'm doing and what it will take to succeed, or I wasn't willing. like and there are there's it's great to know like if there's something like to succeed let's say to succeed as a whatever stockbroker name name the thing uh race car driver two very weird weirdly different roles but like you have to know what it takes and then you have to be willing to do what it takes to succeed.

1:02:23And if you don't, if you're not willing, that's fine. Don't do that. So for me, when I, as I look back and I look at different things since with the benefit of hindsight, like clarity and willingness are like very important. Right. Um, and I think in buds too, I mean, there's so many different character traits, but like just resilience, like the ability to bounce back up. Because no matter how good of an athlete you are, you will fall and you will fail, right? Or you will be brought low. And just the ability to return to baseline, I think, like kind of. I think that's a huge part of making it through.

1:03:14Yeah. Not enough people talk. I mean, when you're bringing up washed up wrestlers and all that kind of shit, these are all people, these are all kids that have learned how to lose, you know what I mean? And have gotten back up and tried it again and again and again and again. You know what I mean? And I think, you know, when you're talking about the best athletes, because it's the big mystery, right? Like, how the fuck do we learn who the hell is going to make it through these programs? It's been like the question since. At least since I came along, which was 20-something years ago. You know, and I think that's a big component is people that did.

1:03:56It's resiliency, right? It's learning how to lose, pick your shit up, and get back after it. How to just get back up. Some people learn that through broken homes. I think that's why there's a lot of people that come from a broken home that make it in there. And you just really, it's a mixed bag of nuts when you get out, you know, you got rich kids, poor kids, abused kids. Like, but they all, I think that's, that seems to be a common denominator. Well, that's why, like I said, like I've heard, you know, the Navy, the Navy spent millions of dollars to try to figure this out because they want a higher attrition rate.

1:04:40So they're trying to get better, more qualified people into it, but they can't, they still can't figure it out. The army has done the same thing with their special programs. And the answer is like, there is no quick test. It's revealed over the selection. Yep. Right. And the recipe is different. Like the recipe that made me get through that, my resilience came from the farm. Right. And the toughness that I learned from my parents and playing some football. And, you know, I didn't have the classic sob story, but I mean, I had days in buds that were easier than days on the farm. Like I had farm days that were harder than seal training.

1:05:28Yeah. And that's where I learned that. Right. So I think you're right. I mean, there is like you just look at a picture of like a buds graduation photo and you know them all so well. and you think about their stories like new jersey california florida my swim buddy from washington state right i mean i was he was my swim buddy the entire time like first second and third phase wow we both made it through together and like you just hear their stories and then they hear about the kid from the middle of the country on a small farm in iowa and like there is yeah there is no one there's no one story but there's common denominators like people who knew how to i guess get back up right from falling and failing what did you find what did you find the most challenging about buds so

1:06:30i was oddly so i was oddly one of the there's two of us in our class that never failed one thing the first time every time. So I never won the time to run, but I was always in the top five. I never won a swim, but I was always towards the beginning. No shit. Somebody that had never been in the ocean before. My swim buddy was really good at guiding and I literally just like followed his... Right on, man. You know? And I was good at swimming. Like I could fin all day, right? Because of my two miles in the pool five days a week, right?

1:07:16So nothing was, I mean, it was all, I should say, it's all hard, right? But nothing stood out. I wasn't the most, I wasn't the strongest on push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups, but I was in the top 10%. Yeah. And I was actually quite good at the O course. just like I have long arms, big hands, and I had grip from the farm. Like so, because so much of the O course was like kind of grip stuff. You know what I mean? And I somehow like passed dive physics and pool comp and weapons practical, all those things like the first time, right? Like I just, whatever. But the hardest part about Bud's was for me was Hell Week.

1:08:04and that same side pain that I had had in boot camp revisited me, right? And it was Wednesday or whatever the Steel Pier night was. So the Steel Pier, which I think is like the hardest part of Hell Week. and that's my recollection of it is the water temperature determines how long you can be in the water and then when you get out of the like they have to take you out of the water so that you don't get past hypothermia or whatever and it's based on the water temp and that's based on average weight so there's a lot of fluctuation and you know we all know we don't all have the same body fat. So they, the BUDS instructors have a timetable where they're allowed to keep you in the water and it's based on the water temp.

1:08:59But on steel pier, they make the whole thing miserable by when you get out of the water, you're laying on a pier about this wide and it's metal. And then they hose you off with a garden hose, right? So it's colder than the water. And like, that's the night I had another like side pain attack. So I'm sitting there just wanting to curl up into a ball and, but I'm laying on that pier and just getting like, you know, kind of jackhammering. And again, like at the time I wasn't diagnosed with anything other than IBS with constipation. They're like, oh, it's IBS with constipation. So now they give me a laxative.

1:09:41Well, now I have diarrhea and essentially and it's hell week right and you don't get to stop and go to the bathroom um i don't know that's not a very glamorous uh story but i i um at the time i'm not so i wasn't what's wrong with them i don't know give them some black scoops like because i'm like holy curled up in the in a ball and i went to and i didn't even get to stop then i went to sick call the next morning and they're like well what's the matter with you i'm like i got this terrible pain in my side i can't stop curling up in a ball and it really really hurts and they're just like probably constipation ibs give them some laxative Oh, shit.

1:10:33And you're just like. Oh, my God. Hell week, bro. So. So you went through hell week with a fucking kidney stone that they were giving you. And I have to stipulate because I know a lot of people will see this. That was not diagnosed. Right. I only know this with 99 % certainty because a few years later and I had this pain revisited me. A few years later, I had the pain again, and I was finally properly diagnosed with a kidney stone. Holy shit. Same exact pain, right? And that happened when I was going through land warfare at Sealed Team 5, which I'll get into later. I'm trying to stay chronological here.

1:11:17So long story long, 99 % sure that not only was, you know, Hell Week hell, like it was full benefit for me. like having this not only having what i'm 99 sure is a kidney stone but also having diarrhea

1:11:39damn yeah wow so that was i mean that's my answer to your question what was the hardest part about buds probably i mean how the fuck are you going through like around the world like all this like the the longest mile with laxatives what's that that's what are you literally just shitting they just give you that they gave me that thursday morning and then i just i it ran its course in about 12 hours and i'm just like but like thankfully you're wet all the time so you're always in the ocean to rinse off it still hurts here's some more laxatives yeah drink water talk about your fuck man all-time misdiagnosis oh man that's fucked up dude wow yeah so so it was shitty time for you for your for your audience the term full benefit yeah that's just that just means like when it sucks extra hard like i had full benefit and then like to make like the funny thing is like so here i i graduated hell week they secure hell week on friday afternoon and then right after that you all go in they see you at the at the medical thing before you walk back to your barracks and i go into medical i'm like well my toes kind of hurt well both my big toenails were ingrown and they yanked out my big toenails oh my god here i have this like kidney oh your toe hurts kidney stone diarrhea and it's finally over and like oh as a parting gift we're just gonna take out your big oh shit damn and you get like you know you get like a week off the next week walking week but there's not much of a break like after that you're back into it and like and you know i still don't have my big toenails like oh shit so wow full benefit that's definitely full benefit holy shit and somehow i'm like and i as i tell people that i'm like and i even like in my mind i'm like how would you not quit like that is too but like i don't know if I didn't know any better or I was just dumb or I wanted it that much I don't you know if that happens to me now I'm quitting that sounds like a major lawsuit nowadays holy shit what the fuck damn holy shit so you made it through hell week made it through hell week I graduated Bud's class 225 um how did that feel how did it feel to tell your parents your siblings your friends back home you get you made it you well as you know like a i made it through training but then they're like oh so you're a seal well then you have that period of time because you can't even like it it's kind of anti-climatic right because you're not a seal yet but like you graduated buds I was beyond, you know, very proud, right, of my accomplishment.

1:15:05I'd done something that I'd set out to do, right? I worked hard and I achieved it and I had gone through a little bit of, you know, had an obstacle, right? So I felt amazing, right? But then, and it's very short-lived because then you check into a, you know, back then we went to jump school in Benin, right? And then you show up at a team and then it's kind of like pretty humbling, right? Because now you're a new guy. And not only are you a new guy, but you're a new guy at a team without a trident, right? Right. And so checked into Team 5 and, yeah, kind of you feel like you start all over. Did you want to go to the West Coast?

1:15:55No. You didn't? It's so funny. And I ended up loving it, right? I mean, I loved kind of pre-9-11, every team had its own kind of like personality, right? and team five was kind of like known as surf team five. And like everyone thought I would, like I didn't, you know, I look like a surfer now. I've never surfed. I don't surf, right? But I chose like literally two, four, and eight when you do the dream sheet. Yeah. Like I wanted to go to the East Coast. Like I wanted to go to the East Coast and I wanted to go to Dev Group. Like that was. You already knew about Dev Group? I got in trouble in third phase because we had buds instructors talking to us about the different teams.

1:16:49And I literally, and so I'm not even graduated yet. And I go, well, what does it take to go to Dev Group? None of them had gone there. Well, then like two of them beat me because like you haven't even made it through this yet, dumbass. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. So it was always on my radar. Um, but I wanted to go to the, I wanted to go to the East coast. Um, so I went to, uh, seal team five and I had, had the best time. So like, it was just, uh, so different than the East coast. And it was so different than just growing up on a farm in Iowa, You know, but I met. I met some, you know, awesome, awesome people, had some awesome teammates there, some awesome experiences.

1:17:44Any good hazing stories? We you know, the hazing was and it didn't happen. These are not my stories. These are things I've witnessed. Like we had guys that would get, um, you know, taped up naked to a spine board, you know, with basically we would call it riggers tape, but for people that don't know, it's basically duct tape, um, or just get covered in spray glue. I think one of the worst ones I heard about was a friend of mine got like taped up to a spine board like head to toe with duct tape to a plastic spine board and they taped a funnel into his mouth and poured vodka down it and then they put him in a closet and they taped an alarm clock to his head and it was just ringing so he couldn't pass out.

1:18:48And then they left him there for like eight hours to chew his way out or whatever. Holy shit. And he had like pissed and shit himself in the tape. Oh man. I've not heard the alarm clock one. We did the happy hat. The happy hat was common. Oh fuck. That's the... The happy hat's where they, for the audience, it's where they tape a handle on the top of your head wrap your whole head and duct tape and then they tape a handle on the top of your head so anybody that wants to walk by can grab the grab the handle and yeah shake your head around and there's not a damn thing you're gonna do about it so these were always like horror stories so when you're a new guy like showing up at a team back then you kind of walked around like just waiting for your number to get called right um and i've heard other kind of you know i've heard i've heard wild ones like this like someone they threw they put them in a cruise box and threw them in the san diego bay with a can of spare yeah a can of spare air i haven't heard that and then they had them on like uh you know he's like 30 50 feet down and they had them on like one inch nylon and pulled them back up i'm like holy shit you're pretty lucky that didn't go badly yeah no kidding so i didn't witness that that's a secondhand one that i've heard but yeah it was pretty epic back then wow wow wow yeah but the alarm clock one is pretty sinister like not only to just get taped to a spine board and then to get your stomach filled with vodka but then to tape an alarm.

1:20:31That's a good one. Like, dude, it's just awful. I kind of want to do that to somebody now. Got any new guys on staff? We do. We do. Wow. So what how was it? I mean, what was your impression of Team 5 when you showed up? So Team 5, it was so, I loved it. Like, and so we're going, I'm I am there for a couple of weeks before I went through STT. Back then it was SEAL tactical training. And that's all the recent BUDS graduates that show up at teams one, three, and five. There was no seven. Okay. So teams, all of us that were out of BUDS and jump school, and we were not yet SEALs and not yet in a platoon, we went through a class called STT.

1:21:33And among that class, like, and that's three months. It's like 90 days. And in that class, there's people that are going to go to one and then three and then five, right? And at the time, like, one was the hardcore, like, no fun one. Yeah. Right? And three was kind of in the middle. And team five was like totally the more relaxed, like surf team five.

1:22:09And then midway, like early on in STT, we had a new commanding officer at SEAL team five, Tom Dietz. and he had come out with a policy. And at the time, this was like groundbreaking. He said, no more mandatory PT. Your adults work out on your own. We'll have one group PT a week on Fridays and we'll chase it. It was kind of a monster mash PT. So for the audience, that's like a run, swim, O course, ruck kind of combo adventure. And like back then, every Friday at SEAL Team 5, you had a long PT and it could be running or swimming or a combo and rucking or obstacle course or combine all of those. But it was always over at noon.

1:23:09You showered and changed and there were two kegs on the grinder. Nice. And it was kegs on the grinder by grinder is like a asphalt, like blacktop area and maybe some hot dogs and some burgers and two kegs. And that was like the kickoff to the weekend. And team five, it was like, it was very interesting because there was also a volleyball net there. So people are like, you guys had a volleyball net. Oh, dude, they're playing volleyball for training or everyone had skateboards. So they're moving around the weapons containers in longboard skateboards. Nice. It definitely was this kind of surf-like team.

1:23:56And we finished STT, showed up at Team 5, and I could just train how I wanted to. And then every Friday we had to do a workout together. It was awesome, right? Versus like having this regimented like run day, swim day, gym day or whatever. They kind of let you do what you wanted, which was pretty cool. Yeah. I think, you know, eventually they all got more like that, right? But my impression of Team 5 was like I didn't want to go there and I ended up being glad I did. Right on. Yeah. Right on. How long was it before you platooned up? So, finished STT, and I was supposed to go into a platoon a few months after that.

1:24:59Sorry, I'll rewind. I finished STT, then I finished my total of six months probation. Oh, okay. Took the trident board, earned my trident. Every team had their own trident board. That one, team five for as lax as it was, as a culture, we had a very hard trident board. So it was like an eight or 10 hour day. And you went from diving to mar ops to land war. And you had to do all these different things and have written tests and then like a performance test. And like it was a long day. All in one day? Yeah. It was like almost 10 hours. Holy shit. And you had like you were in your camis. They made you put on face paint.

1:25:48And you were carrying a ruck between stations, taking apart weapons, writing out a dive chart, right? Putting on a static line rig and getting inspected. fixing a Zodiac, like all these things you had, you had like a 90 minutes or whatever per session. Gotcha. So it was like both a, a practical and written thing. Okay. Earned my trident finally. And now I'm like, now I was like a seal. Uh, and I was supposed to platoon up. I forget the time, but it was going to be in like Echo or Foxtrot platoon. But then Charlie and Delta platoons did a nighttime combat equipment static line, and like three people got hurt.

1:26:43And two of them were going to be out of the platoon. So they grabbed two new guys, and I got to be one of them. So I platooned up early. Oh, right on. So, yeah, I forget the exact time, you know, that's so long ago, but so I ended up getting into a platoon at team five and then they had already done more than half their work up though. so now and they had done like mar ops and some of the suck like um back then like um special reconnaissance some of the sucky blocks of training so now i'm a new guy in a platoon that's already done half the hard stuff well they didn't all really love that you know what i mean um but i had an awesome time in that in that platoon i think we had like

1:27:48right into they had finished mar up so we went right into uh combat swimmer right and that's like whatever three weeks back then and then finished that and pretty soon we were doing CQB and a Shaw's trip so it was great right where are you guys heading to we ended up going to Guam Guam pre 9-11 Guam deployment and so we're there we deployed like mid to late August 01 oh shit so right before huh yeah right before 9-11 and my so my birthday is September 7th and I call my mom on my birthday from Guam and she's like well what do you want for your birthday and I'm like you know I'm some dumb whatever 21 or 22 22 and I'm just like mom I just want a war to fight shit right you know dumb, the stuff that dumb young warriors want.

1:29:11So anyway, we started in Guam and then we got sent to the Middle East. You went to the Middle East from there. Yeah. What was September 11th like for you? well i will you know obviously i like it's so memorable just because so i remember not long before that having a big birthday party out in town you know i mean i'm turning 22 on deployment right i think it was that and then I don't know, like my, so my wife was going to college classes and she would wake up early in the morning at the time, sorry, girlfriend. And I call her and she, she just says, I think I think someone bombed the World Trade Center or and then she's like no maybe a plane hit it and I go what like and I remember this like we didn't have laptops in our rooms and stuff like that there was in this we stayed in a not even a barracks in Guam it was a kind of a a bah kind of like hotel right so there's a hall it's almost like a college dorm there's a hallway everyone gets their own little dorm room um which had our own room and that's where we were staging because we originally went to guam in august and we were supposed to travel to like go and do joint training with like australia and then go to the philippines and maybe thailand and malay whatever all the pay com stuff um but you have these rooms in guam or they did and we didn't even have a tv i didn't have a tv in my room but at the end of the hallway they had one of those old like three foot thick big screens remember those and i just remember her saying something about the world trade center you should get in front of a tv And I like just kind of like, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

1:31:43And I walked to the end of the, into the hallway and there's already people around the TV. And I'm just like, like, I get there in time to watch the second plane hit it, you know? And it's like, oh. And from that moment, like, pagers started to go off. No one knew right away who did it. And but that night, you know, we were getting different intel briefs. And then pretty soon we're getting more and more briefs. And, you know, instead of worrying about like, where are we going to go out tonight? It was, hey, we need to. We brought all these guns with us from Coronado. Not only do we need to make sure they're sighted in, but like, let's get a few more yard lines.

1:32:39or whatever. It got very serious. Like that switch from, you know, pre-9-11 and just kind of... Steel Platoon was a rock band. It was like, hey, we had all this fun. We were ready to do this stuff, but mostly it was like a deploy to party. You know what I mean? But it got real serious. So when did you guys figure when did you guys hear you're going to the Middle East? So we originally. We thought we were going to go to Afghanistan. And obviously we didn't. We ended up and we're constantly getting these briefs, but it probably was. I think it ended up being like three weeks later that we got shipped to the middle, flew to the Middle East.

1:33:38and we ended up replacing a Team 3 platoon that was doing underways or VBSS in Kuwait and they got to go to Afghanistan. Gotcha. But along the way, I want to say we stopped in like Oman or something like to refuel. I forget exactly where, but there was like dev group guys there and Delta guys there getting all ramped up for Afghanistan and we were just like whoa. And we thought that's like oh we're in the right spot we're going to Afghanistan then we land in Kuwait.

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1:35:53Post 9, like, right when 9-11 happens. But in hindsight, I think I got to do, you know, 20 plus real world non-compliant shipboardings. A few of which I was the lead climber on. And it was kind of like, obviously in post 9-11, that doesn't seem like that big a deal, but I'm like, hey, that was better than what they were doing before. And we were ostensibly, A, there was the Iranian oil embargo, the Iraqi oil embargo, but then And there was also this, you know, this idea that Al Qaeda terrorists were going to be like funneling out on these ships. And that's how they, you know, that's how they motivated us to do it.

1:36:50But, you know, the gravity was still real and people were still drowning doing that. So it was as real as it gets. Not a lot of bullets flying, but, you know, still pretty, could be scary. You know, underway shipboarding is like dicey, especially at night, especially in, you know, in these waters and with stuff like that. Do you want to describe the first one? Huh? Do you want to describe the first one? The one that I. Any one that's of significance. So there's two that are very memorable. And I was like, so I was a new guy. I was a jack of all trades. One night I'm a lead climber. One night I'm a breacher.

1:37:26Go figure. And there was one, and it is pitch black. We have nods on, and we have, like, back then, we're still running MP5s, you know. And so the pole man had put the pole up, and then the ladder man was unrolling the ladder, you know, on the bottle. and the original lead climber went to climb and his handgun, the handle on his sig got stuck in the rung and he was climbing against it. And he didn't like realize. And it was partially the fault of the ladder man because it was all unspooled. And he was sitting there and like, just couldn't go, right? And then after like maybe a minute or less, he like lets go and he tapped me because I was the second lead climber.

1:38:22He's like, bro, you're up. Go. And I'm just like, ooh. And now I'm going to be the lead climber up this underway ship that's like steaming into Iranian waters. And it's a 20-plus foot climb on a caving ladder that doesn't have a runner on top. I'm the one that's going to climb it and set the runner. So I shimmy up that thing like, like it's like so quickly and and by the way it's it's like oddly like climbing the uh a small ladder on the side of a grain bin or a grain silo in iowa and so i shimmy up this thing and i get to the top you know and the hook the grappling hook is just it's not on anything bomber it's just on the lip and i just climbed this thing on a hook that's just weighted on a lip you know what i mean yep and i get up there i clear the thing with my pistol i look at that i'm like oh crap i gotta get off this ladder right and there wasn't anything there immediately to like hook it to safer.

1:39:38So I pop up over the, over the thing, over the lifeline. And then the first thing I do is, you know, I'm, everything is clear around me and I'm up there alone. And I take that, I take that grappling hook, I hook it on something more solid. And then I take my safety runner out and I run that around something more solid. So now it's hooked on something solid and it's on a, and the runner is on something solid. And then back then we were using like that little, uh, like the chem light, right. That with the tape on it. And I put the chem light over like, okay, the ladder is now on something more bomber, sorry, more solid.

1:40:24And then there's a runner on it. And then the rest of the team came up. Um, I'm like, that was, you know a lead climb on a non-compliant shipboarding on my first you know my first deployment so pretty cool it was it was memorable and then there were there was another night where we had this shipboarding was like a step over freeboard so that ship had been so laden that you didn't have to climb. The rib could pull up next to it, and you could step over onto it. Oh, wow. It was that full of oil. And it was steaming. It knew we couldn't go into Iranian waters. So as soon as they saw us, they were like steaming into Iranian waters.

1:41:15And that night I was carrying, remember the torch? Yeah. The like oxygen torch or whatever it was. And I have a torch on my back and I step over the, so I step off the rib over, over onto this tanker, straddle over the lifeline. Right. And we're like, we're standing. There's like water ankle deep. It's like that laden. Right. And I'm standing there and they had put heavy steel up going into the superstructure. And some of it had angle iron behind it. And so we have to try to, you know, you have to either take down like whatever, the engine room or the bridge, right, to stop the ship. And they had protected the bridge so well with the extra steel and the angle iron.

1:42:15and I bust out that torch, you know, I had that rod and I start it and I used the entire tank on half of the diamond cut because the steel was so thick and it was reinforced behind it. So I didn't run out of rods. I didn't run out of battery. We ran out of oxygen just trying to get Like, you know, obviously I'm a new guy. I'm probably not as proficient as I should be on this. I tried. But at some point, like it didn't matter. I get halfway, a half diamond cut and we get a call like, hey, you guys are almost in Iranian waters. You get off in the next five minutes or you have to jump. right off a boat that's moving with huge screws and all that right so the ribs are pulling back up to pick us up and and like all of a sudden like we're standing in more water it's almost like the ship we were on like was was either taking on water or whatever but like we started and it was like this deep and now all of a sudden just on the deck right it's like knee-deep water and there's like a big battery on this uh torch that you use to start it and i am sitting there as when i when i grab the lifeline to straddle it and go back onto the rib i'm just starting to get i'm i'm getting some voltage and i'm like and like pretty soon i'm like halfway stuck there i'm like i can't like and my buddy's like i think it's the battery he's trying to unhook me and like I'm standing in water.

1:43:58I got this big battery on. I grabbed the metal lifeline. And it's like, oh, I think I'm just catching a little voltage here. Right? Holy shit. And then, like, that very same night, that very same night, we had to get off this ship that was, like, going into Iranian waters. I had half cut this diamond and I, you know, was getting like not electrocuted. That would be an exaggeration, but I'm feeling something like I grew up on a hog farm and we used to have fights with cattle prods. It felt like that, like where you're getting hit by a cattle prod. and uh like to top it all off a teammate of mine as we ended up so we back then we had ribs and mark fives you probably remember mark fives and we would do longer transits in the mark fives and then when it was time to do the climb get on the rib so the rib picks us up off this boat this ship and then we're going to transit back onto the Mark V.

1:45:12And like, I don't know how, but for like, even with all these climbs and stuff, no one ever fell overboard. Right. Um, one time we had a, a guy fall upside down on the ladder and have to get pulled up from the ladder, which is scary, but no one really fell overboard until one night we're like the night of that when i was getting shocked by this torch we're stepping from the ribs back onto the mark fives and teammate of mine who's the radio man so he's got a big radio and it's pitch black and the boats are they're kind of moving he steps slips and hits the drink in the Northern Arabian Gulf. Turns on his strobe and he's got this big radio on and it's like, man overboard, right?

1:46:06And we had nods. We could see his strobe and everything. But he's, and that's Jack Carr, the guy, the author, right? Who I'm still close with. But he's written those books, and one of them is the Amazon show Terminal List. Right on, man. It's memorable to me for that. I bet. I bet. Wow. So then you guys come home? Yeah, we finished that deployment and come home. And I had met my now wife, Leah, right before, not long before that deployment. And then, so the first year of us dating, I did a six-month deployment. So really only six months dating, right? And back then it's like, you know, now you can FaceTime from deployment.

1:47:08But back then it's like calling cards and, you know, these phone banks and - A little bit tougher. Dial up emails and that sort of thing. So I come home from that deployment and my post-deployment leave, I get like three days off and my post-deployment leave is sniper school, which is not in any way stretch, any way, shape or form that relaxing. right and at the time like there was an east coast and a west coast sniper school it wasn't all centralized under the whatever it is now the center and i so i go through my i show up at sniper school instead of getting a you know a nice long post-deployment vacation um and And I forget all the details, but at the time they said one NSW sniper school, one, which starts with like 30 people, expends more ammunition than the Marine Corps sniper school does in a year.

1:48:18Wow. The amount of, and that's just the, and I'm not saying they're better or whatever. I'm just saying we had that much more money to spend on ammo. So you are spending, and sniper has evolved so much with reticles and ballistic coefficients and all that. But like back then, hours and hours and hours were spent on yard lines, right? So there was a marksmanship portion, which was a couple of weeks at Camp Pendleton. And you had to qualify expert with irons before you could move on. And then we got shipped to, not ship, but we went up to Kalinga, Northern California. And that's where we spent most of the marksmanship part of sniper school was spent in Kalinga.

1:49:14And we would, basically, you're living in a tent there. There wasn't even birthing. It's something like six weeks and something like that. And there's a couple of weeks where you, you know, it's M14 and then you move to your, like your 308 and then your 300. And then at the end you do the 50 cal, right? Like it's a couple of weeks with each one. I think the 50 cal is just one week or whatever it is. Like I forget exactly, but it's, it's five or six weeks and you're in a tent. And then all day long, you're just, you're either prone on yard lines or you're in the behind the berm. We call it the butts, right?

1:50:05Those target butts going up and down and you're marking targets, right? And these are like long, hot days. Well, back to kind of like full benefit. I have another side pain. Oh, shit. in sniper school. And I end up going, I think it's Lenore, you know, where we did, do you remember HAPS, high altitude, where they put you in a chamber before you can go to parachute stuff? So they had a chamber there where we did HAPS. But then I had to go there back because, you know, because I had this side pane. And they're like, well, we don't know what it is, but we can tell you're in a lot of pain. They gave me Vicodin.

1:50:52Right. So I spent, I spent the night in this way better. It's way better. And so I spend the, again, at this, I should be clear. I'm not at this point diagnosed with a kidney stone. I know in my heart it was because I got that same pain later that did get diagnosed and I end up losing a kidney, right? So I know what it's like. So I spend the night in this hospital. I think it's Lenore. I might not be pronouncing that right, but I'm all hopped up on Vicodin because it's painful. They drive me back to my tent where sniper school is the next morning. And the next day, we have our UKD test, unknown distance test.

1:51:45And on a UKD test, you're kind of, you're like here, and then they have like four targets at this yard line and maybe four targets here and four targets here, whatever, right? Like unknown. It's not like an even yard line. It's not like 100 or 200, and they're not on the yard lines, you have to guess how far they are. You have to mill them, the height with your mill dot, and then dial, and then you get one shot per target. And there's either five targets per spot or four. But there's a total of 100 points on the test. and you either you have to like hit the thing it's like a miss or a hit right um and i am still on like high from vicodin and i asked the so i asked the instructor i'm like man i just spent the night in the hospital do you think i could retake this test some other time and like back then like they they treated sniper school as they wanted attrition Like it was a badge of honor if like more than half of our, well, I would say half of my sniper school did not make it.

1:53:13And they didn't like, they didn't feel like it was their job to make more snipers. They felt it was their job to protect like how hard sniper school was. Right. And so he tells me, he says, take the test or go home. You can always come back next year. I mean, I'm a SEAL. I've just done a deployment. I am here on post-deployment. This is my post-deployment leave. You should want to make more snipers, right? The teams need them, right? So I'm like, what do I have to lose? I'm going to take the test. And the only problem is, so I'm sitting there. I'm high. I'm confused by my reticle or I'm sorry by my my elevation turret so they did let my spotter help me dial I had to squeeze the trigger but I was so relaxed that I got the top score now he was dialing my scope he was so I'm sitting there Sean like oh you know what I mean like wake up 30 minutes later and i would just dude i was like man my trigger squeeze is so smooth like because i was still on this like i mean again someone might get in trouble if you're like taking a sniper test on vicodin nowadays but uh so again uh past that i finished finished sniper school and not not i finished the uh marksmanship part of it and then we had to go do the stalking that's where more people fail out is stalking and um i made it through stalking but i got like all of a sudden i started losing a lot of weight and like i got down to like below 170 and i'm like and there was a couple of us that were like getting really really sick well unbeknownst to us like a few of us got valley fever which is mike ritland got it he was not in my sniper school but he got he got medically retired from it oh shit he lost a lung from this or portion of a lung and i forgot about that So that is the reason that the SEAL teams no longer go to Kalinga.

1:55:54Apparently, there is like a fungus in the dust that's like prehistoric or whatever. And if you're like in that dust all day and the wind's blowing and you breathe it, the spores can like form in your lungs. Holy shit. it and i was one of like i was fortunate enough to be one of the people who got it but i never i got it and beat it and never lost any lung function right so i actually have like they say you have it forever but you've beat it or whatever like you you have the antibody or whatever it is someone would is probably watching this now and correcting me on that but i got valley fever not to the point where I lost lung function, but I got really, really sick, lost a ton of weight.

1:56:50My face started to, like, just my eyes sunk in. But one person from my sniper school, like, he got medically retired from it. Shit. And then Mike, you know, ended up getting it really bad. He lost part of a lung. So, like, kind of back to the full benefit theme. Like, finished my... Shit. Finished sniper school with a kidney stone and valley fever. It's been a rough go for you. Been a rough go. Yeah. But no, it was good. I actually finished sniper school. And at that point, my second platoon had already started. I joined them. How did you meet your wife in Guam? I met her before deployment. Are you guys still together?

1:57:38We are still together. Wow. That's an anomaly. we we met in san diego um before my first deployment okay um her being from omaha and me being from iowa like we we connected like closely right away just because of the kind of shared midwestern background and and like she's i mean my wife's the greatest she we dated through the first deployment we got married right before the second and then all the other ones that you know at dev group that she went through and the stuff she's gone through and we are you know 24 years married 14 14 16 18 and 20 year old kid damn congratulations man um how many years married 24 yeah wow yeah i mean people say i don't look old enough to be married that long and have a 20 year old kid but i'm like my mri looks old right and all the all the well actually my med record's pretty thick yeah right yeah so long story short um like i can't you know anyone who tries to give me credit i always like Don't give me much credit.

1:59:02I had so much fun, but whatever Leah put up with is much harder. So how did you guys meet? So we meet at a bar in downtown San Diego, and we had just finished. So I'm in my first platoon, and we had just finished a month, the month of January in Kodiak, Alaska, which is as cold as it sounds. Good times. doing over the beach with dry suits and land nav in the snow, right? Now, I should say, like, remember how I said the farm made things a little easier? Like, that Christmas break, I went to Iowa for Christmas and I was there for like a week around Christmas and New Year's and it got to like 60, maybe 65 below with the wind chill.

2:00:10At one point, I remember it getting to 20 below and it was like, man, I didn't even need gloves now, right? Because it had been so cold. And I'm spending my entire Christmas leave helping my dad keep the hogs alive outside. So you're outside for a little bit. You're melting the waters. They have these outdoor waters. You're feeding them or you're running straw and hay to their sheds, right, just to try to keep these poor pigs alive. And, like, when it gets to, like, 50 below, like, the amount of time you can spend outside is limited. So you'd go out for a little bit and come in and warm up. I'm doing this for, like, a week.

2:00:51And then we go to, I get back to San Diego. I'm like, oh, it's so nice. And now we fly to Anchorage, sorry, we fly to Kodiak. And we're going to spend the entire month of January on Kodiak Island. And we get up there and it's like 20 degrees. I'm like, it's warm after Iowa, right? It was warm. So back to Leah. I spend a month training on Kodiak Island. We get back and I had just spent a month with these guys. Like if we weren't out in the field, we were at a little bar in Kodiak, right? Or we were in the barracks and we're all going out that night to Maloney's downtown. I'm like, I don't want to go out.

2:01:44I just spent a month with you guys. I want to stay in my apartment and relax. And I'm a new guy, so it's mandatory. It wasn't like I could say no. I just didn't want to. I'm like, shoot. So I go out and that's the night I meet my wife. And she was supposed to go watch her dad play in the pebble beach pro-am up in uh whatever by pebble beach at pebble beach and she didn't want to do that so she wasn't supposed to be there either and we meet at a bar in downtown san diego and she walks up to me and she's like do you have a girlfriend like i'm like sitting there at i'm like i'm sitting at a bar i have like a chorus light and a jaeger like because back then it was like you always get like a light beer and a jaeger shot and i'm getting ready to take my shot of jaeger and you know chase it with the coors light and she's like this girl just elbows me and is like do you have a girlfriend i'm like no like and so we talked for a while and uh oddly uh you know matt is there he was there the night i I met her.

2:03:05We talked for a while and she finds out I'm in the Navy. She didn't even know what a seal was, which I thought was a bonus. And so she kind of like, well, I don't really like, I don't want to marry someone who's in the military. Bye. Like she goes away. Well, she comes back later and we sit there talking for another half hour. And then she looks at me and she's like, I'm going to marry you. And I'm just like, dang. Like, that's a little forward, right? Well, like, we ended up, we date for whatever. We date for like less than a year and a half. And then we get married before my second deployment.

2:03:50And she, and that was at Team 5. And then she went through all the stuff at Dove Group. And then, yeah. So she's been, she's been through the ringer. been my rock man so what's the secret to a successful marriage man i mean it definitely takes two um You know, I think we've been very fortunate. I think there's obviously you have to love each other and there's selflessness that goes into it.

2:04:33And honestly, our faith has helped us a lot. You know, we didn't start like when we were early married and in San Diego, certainly we didn't go to church all the time. But we got like we got into church big time in Virginia Beach, especially as, you know, things started to get scarier. And then we've always gone to church together since. That's a big part of it. And I would also say, like, I think people think of marriage as a, it's a 50-50, like, if there's this much to do, I'm going to, you know, it's a 50-50 split. Like, we're going to, you know, I'm going to clean half the kitchen, you're going to clean half the kitchen, right?

2:05:29Like a zero-sum game. but I've heard it said this way and I wish I could remember who said it so I could attribute it properly but that's the problem it's not 50-50, it's 100-100 like you both give all of yourself right? and I think that's good advice it's a great way to put it so, and it you know, doesn't hurt to pick the right wife the first time So, I mean, obviously there's, you know, there's some luck, there's some whatever, right? I just feel very blessed. That's cool, man. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we beat the odds for sure. I'll say. We look at, I look at photos now from, we used to have parties in Virginia Beach.

2:06:25like we would have like a Thanksgiving party or just a summer pool party with like teammates and like we could have a Thanksgiving party there because a lot of people didn't have family there right so you'd have a friends giving kind of thing and I look at my wife was good about let's get a photo let's get a photo and like we would take a there might be like four to six couples in a photo and like now i mean i look back on them and there's some of those photos where either all the husbands are dead or they're divorced you know what i mean yeah so anyway i feel very blessed very fortunate and we got let's see we got engaged we got engaged in october of

2:07:242002 and we thought we thought that, uh, we thought we'd get married next summer. Like, so summer of 03. But then I found out about the, uh, that we were going to deploy early because of the Iraq invasion and we were going to be deploying in like January. So we're engaged in October. I'm going to be deploying in January. and I just, we just decided to get married before I deployed. So we had like a six week engagement and we didn't have, so some people thought she was pregnant because it was like, that seems a little rushed. But I was like, babe, don't you want to be able to shop at the, you know, the PX?

2:08:17Or don't you want that insurance? Right. And it just made sense. So we just, we got married in Vail on Pearl Harbor Day. I was in my Navy uniform. It's pretty awesome. Beautiful. So, and to I guess take a quick rewind and get a sip of water a second. Right before that, I lost my kidney. Right before. Oh, shit. Okay. Right after sniper school. It was right after sniper school and during

2:08:56excuse me um land warfare we went to fort chaffee and we had you know at team five the first platoon we went to nyland for land warfare like everyone does for some reason we went to Fort Chaffee for land warfare in my second platoon. And we were just starting our week of IADS. And that's for your audience, like these moving and shooting drills. and like the first night like i got the pain it came and it it had a tendency of just going away within one or two days but this time it was like i had this pain for four days straight like it wasn't that whatever stone was in there was not passing and And I was like doing like I ads during the day and sometimes at night and I'm just curled up in a ball and getting super dehydrated.

2:10:08And, you know, I'm like, I'm just kind of sucking it up because I'm usually like these episodes would go away within a day, maybe day and a half. But this time it's like three days, then four days. It's not it's not stopping. and I'm telling my OIC and the corpsman and finally like my OIC guy named Clint Bruce, he's like, man, you can't keep doing this. And his dad is a, sorry, I guess it would be his stepfather was a urologist in town. And he takes me to see a urologist in town, his stepfather. I get an x-ray with contrast that's different right like the first time I had gotten this contrast and he happens to be a urologist he's like you're there's scar tissue in your ureter and you have a giant kidney stone stuck in your ureter that's the two again the tube between the kidney and the bladder and so they give me this like i guess it's a sound wave surgery you know and they blast it yeah they put you under they blast you with these sound waves and they also put a stint in there which is like a tube between the and i was out i was out during that but like I woke up and I had I was kind of black and blue here like it does feel like you're getting like punched a bit like just from the sound waves and I had you know gotten rid of the pieces of the stone and I had a tube between my bladder and here and they're like well maybe you shouldn't finish land warfare let's go back to Balboa so I flew back to Balboa and under the premise that they were going to like fix my ureter like get rid of the scar tissue and then they went in to go do that um like a week or whatever later and then when they got in there they just looked at my my kidney at that point was just a water balloon like it was not working so like it was like an eight hour surgery because it was so full they didn't want it to break because it's you know it would go septic sepsis um and normally you can take a kidney out like if someone donates or what was like a small whatever and i have a scar from like almost from like 12 o 'clock to nine o 'clock wow because it was this and the doctor's like yeah We almost had to take a rib out because it was just this distended water balloon.

2:13:08So I wake up eight hours later. My poor fiance at the time had just spent eight hours in Balboa thinking I was going to have a 90-minute surgery. Damn. And she's like engaged to me. And I just remember like all of a sudden I wake up and they explained to me what happened. Like, well, you lost a kidney. And I'm like, well, what does that mean? Basically, it means you're out of the military. Like everything's wavable, but like in the soft, like that's kind of one they don't like to wave. Right. And the corpsman, one of the corpsman from like the med department at team five, like did some research, shows up at the hospital and gives me a waiver.

2:14:11They find a waiver I can sign to stay in the military. and I am like high on morphine, but I don't even read this thing. He's like, if you sign this, you can stay in the military. If you don't, you're going to get like medically discharged. And I had done one deployment and I had done all this work and finished, basically finished my second workup and I wanted to deploy again. I didn't want to get out, right? I didn't care that I would get a medical retirement. I wanted to deploy, right? So I signed my waiver and never had one of those attacks again, right? Because that kidney was gone, that ureter was gone.

2:14:56And I was engaged when the surgery happened. I healed. We had our wedding in December. And then I think I deployed it like a couple of weeks later, either in the middle of January or the end of January. Shit. For nine and a half months. Shit. Where did you deploy to? So for that one, we went to Okinawa, which I was so upset. Like I wanted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. um we ended up going like we ended up going to okie and we were gonna so we were gonna split like we were gonna start there and then swap someone out in iraq because of the op tempo and then something to do with you know airfare and not airfare but like airflow getting people in and out and like, nah, just stay.

2:15:58But on that deployment, I had a lot of, I mean, we had a, it was a great group of guys and, um, we had a lot of fun. Um, got to finally, you know, I went to, I would, I would get my share of Iraq and Afghanistan later. So it was nice to, I went to, like, we went to Thailand, the Philippines and Australia and got to do, you know, some of that stuff were you were you honest questioner were you actually able to enjoy that knowing what was going on in afghanistan and iraq not as much as i otherwise would have yeah because i had that fomo right and i i didn't know that i would get my fill of that later right i was just like this i'm not here for that i'm here for that um so no no answer your question no yeah but i mean in hindsight, you know, Australia was awesome.

2:16:57I, I, I don't need to go back to Thailand, but I would go to Australia. Right. Um, it w it was, it was, it was great. And I had good time with the guys. Um, and I stayed late on that deployment. The reason I got home late was the platoon that was relieving us was down a sniper and one of us needed to stay and I volunteered to stay. So I ended up doing about a month extra with I think it was Hotel Platoon and I became close with Bill Mulder and Scotty Work and JMO and some other guys. Right on.

2:17:53Anyway, wasn't quite as cool as I was hoping, but, you know, I don't know what happened for a reason. And so what happened? Did you come back and screen for development group? So I had missed screening for what would have been 04. I would have had time to go to 04, but that screening was during my surgery. Gotcha. It was like a week after my surgery. And I was cut from here to here. I couldn't do anything, let alone the sit-ups. My abs are still growing back together. So, yes, I ended up coming home from my second platoon. I did the screening. There wasn't going to be enough time to do another full workup and deployment.

2:18:55So I went to TRADET. Gotcha. And... And Traded is the training cell for Naval Special Warfare, for those listening. And it was awesome. Like, it really was cool. Like, I had, so I actually did not yet have my orders, but I, they gave me a, they let me go to Traded Assaults, which was great. like I'm getting to help teach CQB and you know getting to go on trips where we are meeting with the the east coast trade at and some dev group guys to deconflict the how CQB is being taught and then um

2:19:44I got like in a year and a half I went to Shaw's like seven times so that didn't hurt for when i did go to all but you know all the selection so um i

2:20:01would have i mean i would have loved to have gone sooner but like i had a great time i had a great time going to going to trade it and doing like the shaw's trips and then a mount trip to fort Knox. And then we were doing back then even go-plats, gas and oil platforms, you know, oil rigs, taking those down. We were teaching, we would teach the West Coast platoons how to take down an oil rig. And I had spent weeks living in the Gulf of Thailand, like taking down oil rigs on my previous deployment. And then we were teaching VBSS still, right? Or like underway ship boarding and like i was one of the two people in the whole trade it that had ever climbed a ship on a real ship boarding right on so it was cool right i enjoyed it um no no regrets about that it was fun and the travel you know and like my wife and i like it was kind of good for me to go to like get like some technically some shore duty before going to dev group and getting on all, you know, getting on that up tempo.

2:21:14And it was hard. Like our first year of marriage, like I was deployed nine and a half months. I set up. That's crazy. I set a pretty low bar. That's the secret. That's the secret. Set a low bar the first year. Right on. On that note, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll pick up a development group. I need you to stop what you're doing for a second and really listen. If someone relies on your income and you don't have life insurance yet, this needs to move to the top of your list. I've had to think about that myself, making sure my family isn't left dealing with everything if something happens to me.

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2:24:06All right, Eric, we're back from the break. We're going to get into Development Group now. How many deployments do you have with them? um

2:24:19lost count no it wasn't like that many I'm just trying to make sure I'm counting them correctly four right on um yep and I had so two at team five one of which was like nine and a half months um and I went through my training um I finished, you know, after Trade Et, went to the East Coast, went to Dev Group, went to Gold Squadron. They had just renamed it from Gold Team to Squadron. Oh, that was an official thing? Yeah. I didn't realize that. It used to be teams, then they became official Navy commands, and they renamed them Squadrons. right on um and that's when that happened when i got there and which is the funny so now i have a i am by no means a plank owner but i have a big big huge um certificate and plaque framed plaque with the coins as a gold squadron plank owner oh right Because I was there when they went from teams to squadrons.

2:25:45That's cool. That's cool. Obviously, it was around well before me and will be around long after. But, yeah. And I, let's see, moved out there technically. What were some of the first things you noticed that were different between DevGroup and SEAL Team 5? You know, there was a...

2:26:20Well, for starters, I mean, you're starting all over again, right? You show up at a team, like you show up at SEAL Team 5. I showed up at SEAL Team 5, you're a brand new guy. And now I've done two platoons. You know, I'm a department head, right? And now I'm going to leave all that to go start all over. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of similarities, but there was definitely something very different about it. I mean, fuck, man. I've been there. I'm just walking in the damn compound. It's like, holy shit. Well, as much get your own fucking shooting range, you got a gym that takes you up to altitude.

2:27:04It's like everything you could possibly fucking imagine. Whereas everybody else is traveling all over the country. And I know you guys are too, but it's appeared to me, it's like, well, I don't know why the fuck these guys are traveling all the damn time. It's all literally everything is right here. They have a climbing wall, they have altitude simulator, they have all, you know, it was very interesting. Like once, you know, once you're there and you're kind of through training and whatever, I could just keep my guns in my cage. Like I didn't have to go sign, like get the ordinance rep to sign them out of the armory to go train with them and turn them right away in.

2:27:49I could keep my guns in my cage. I could take them. I could go to the range anytime I wanted. I could shoot. I'd clean my own guns.

2:28:01Once a month or whatever, when they did, they had to do an official weapons inventory. Then it had to go back in the cage. They would get eyes on. Then you could take it back and just go, like, keep all your gear in your cage and go train with it. Nice. It was interesting, though. Like, when I first got there. It probably doesn't mean shit to anybody else, but it's a big deal. But it is a fucking big deal. It's a big deal. Like, when I was at SEAL Team 5, it was so hard to go train. Like, if you got to go to a range, it was on a trip. Yeah. You weren't doing it there, right?

2:28:40so for starters the like the first thing that stood out to me and this was like when I got there I moved there in 04 and started to hang out and I was going to go through training in 05 and

2:28:59like guys are a little older because they've done at least two rotations um obviously there was the grooming standards you know back then like back then it was a significant difference like long hair beards everything uh and you couldn't have that at you know team five or other teams um and just yeah the the command itself like was this kind of death star type area, like with all these buildings and all these training facilities and like these, like just the, uh, the meeting rooms, just everything was, you just had more. Right. And you had, um, like way more gear, the amount of gear that you get it, even as a, even, even when you get your gear for like green team it's just like whoa this is way nicer than the stuff i had at team five and this is what they're giving me for training you know and then you just kept getting more you kept getting more it's just insane right the amount of just the gear and the other thing i and i didn't i don't know i haven't really rehearsed what to say about this But you got to be there at Dev Group.

2:30:31You're going to have to be there five plus years. Probably more than that. And have done multiple five plus deployments. Probably more. Before you're in charge of a six-man team. No shit. That's generally how it works. I've never heard anybody say that. So you, like, it is so, like, and when you go through your selection, most people are E5s or E6s. And then all of a sudden you're on a six-man assault team of one E6 with a bunch of E7s. Like, it's just more senior, right? And just more mature. Just been around longer. So, yeah, it's just, and there's just this different kind of attitude. you know you can just i don't know more certainly in some ways more mature you know because obviously they're just older right um i would say a couple of things that really stood out to me so when i was new at a team seal team five like i knew that well i felt like if I wanted to be the best teammate I could be.

2:31:46And so part of that meant being as good at my craft as possible. Like how good can, just being a good shooter, you know, being able to shoot, move, communicate, doing all the component skills of being an operator, right? But then also being a good teammate, right? and helping people out and, you know, helping other departments out. Like I've always believed it's not good enough to be good at your job. Like do you make other people better? And I learned that in football. It got emphasized at Team 5, right, and it's something I watched other people do at Dev Group, right? So as good as you can be at your craft, that is how you make the team better.

2:32:45But it's also not good enough just to be really good. You have to help other people. And that's being a teammate, being selfless, being humble. And then being a better leader. And that starts by being a really good follower. because you can't expect other people to follow you someday if you weren't willing to follow what your boss told you to do. And I found that the skills were all very similar. You just had to do them sharper, maybe a little faster, a little better. You had to do everything a little bit better as it came to shooting or parachuting or whatever. Higher expectation. And I would also say that at the command, at dev group, like you don't buy a spot there, you rent it.

2:33:48And that rent is due daily, if that makes sense. Makes sense. So it's kind of like we've all heard I will earn my Trident every day. Like true to an extent, but they're specifically like they are having they're having a new group come up every year with a draft, essentially. And there's people that want your spot. And. People that make it there, they get kicked out every year. Just, you know, shooting a hostage in training or whatever, like not. I don't know. like there's a like safety violations or kill house violations or whatever people that make it there are regularly booted for performance or usually it's safety if that makes sense so and i found that honestly like the like the really the best of the best were both like they're obviously competent at their at their job but they're humble

2:35:07and obsessed so humble enough to not rely on my on the fact that i just shot this six plate drill faster than anyone else like humble enough to realize like i need to still get better right or humble enough to know that no matter how good i am at this like like even though the bad guy doesn't train as hard as me he could still get lucky one rpg hits a helicopter when you're saying the best of the best i mean you are the best of the best when you get over there are you saying the best of the best at that particular command yeah like you like i would look around and like you know you would just see like the people that i looked up the most to as operators like they were humble and obsessed at the same time like we had a strong belief that you don't rise to the occasion you fall to your level of preparation.

2:36:07And I feel like humility precedes that level of preparation. Like you have to be humble to realize you still need to keep training. The person who's not humble thinks they've made it. They don't need to train. Or another way to think about it,

2:36:29the humble operator is more inclined not only to not think like oh i'm not any better so i need to train but also i'm not any better than my teammate so i'm going to go like it's time to like whatever clean the high bay or take out the trash like that level of selflessness like humility the humility enough to help each other out. Gotcha. And then obsessed with the craft, I guess you'd say. Did you notice these things immediately?

2:37:02I don't think I was mature enough to notice them immediately. How old were you when you got over there? Damn. You got in at, what, 21? 19. 22nd employment. 22nd birthday on your first deployment. So I would have been 25? 25. I mean, not, I think it was 26. So still pretty young. Is that right? 25.

2:37:36So still pretty young.

2:37:42But like, you know, I didn't have the charity now that I have now, you know. And I would just look back and I can look back with the benefit of hindsight, like at the good operators were humble and obsessed. Right. Always prepared. Always helping other people. Right. And having like seasoned operators help you out as a new guy there or whatever the case may be. um so i mean it's the same job it's just doing it to a different level maybe um to a level of humility and obsession with just being really really good at it you know what i mean which is that obsession i did uh and it you know it gets you have to you have to really obsession is a double-edged sword like if you obsess over everything then pretty soon you'll run out of bandwidth right if you are as obsessed with you know how you make your morning coffee with as how you would i don't know clean your gun or sharpen your blade or whatever like pretty soon you're going to run out of energy.

2:39:05So you had to be super careful. It's like, beware of how much of the things you obsess over because you only have so much bandwidth, right? And it was very hard. So we had a kid in...

2:39:30our first first kid we had while i was going through training there and um my son and then had him in september then i'd finished training and deployed right away holy shit um and my wife i swear like i think i was gone on average 300 days a year there something like 280 to 300 and we a lot of time we may my my poor wife was pregnant or nursing the whole time we were there we had three kids right while i was there um from essentially we had moved there in the end of 04 and left there at the end of 09 beginning of 2010. Uh, we had three kids and it was, my kids were young enough to where they don't remember me being gone for birthdays, like on deployments or work trips.

2:40:39So, and I've, you know, since had a lot of friends who've, you know, had kids at the same time that ended up staying there longer and like their kids would for sure have memories of them being gone over christmas and stuff like that so uh it got it definitely i i saw it getting harder and harder to be a you know to be a good husband and father and a seal at the same time now i i think you can and i think i did a pretty good job of balancing that at that time um like when i was when i was home from being on a trip like work hard get my work done but like i wasn't going out on weeknights in virginia beach i was coming home um and then when we'd go on the road i would go out with guys right but i would not let that in any way like affect how hard i worked at at work or how hard I trained like I trained as hard as I trained as hard as anyone like we a friend of mine and I like we would we would do these like Friday morning workouts like where we had this rule like you had to be like completely fasted and this was before people were really fasting for like longevity and stuff like that.

2:42:10But we would do like a really long ruck on the soft sand followed by like some sort of body armor, like push-up, pull-up, sit-up thing followed by like an operator standards handgun and rifle test. Nice. Followed literally by like chess, just to like, you're so depleted after all that. The only thing you were allowed was like electrolytes. Right. And so we would like do stuff like that. Maybe some grappling, you know, stuff like that. So brought on. But I can also say like my wife and I have now been married 24 years. and I also got medically retired from that command that, you know, a lot of people do get divorced from.

2:43:07So, you know, maybe that was God's plan, like, that I would get, you know, that I would get hurt in combat and the kidney thing would come back to bite me and I would get kicked out of the Navy. So, like, that's kind of the way I kind of think about it. Interesting. Yeah. Let's get into some deployment stuff. Yeah. Where was your first deployment to? Iraq. There, when I was there. I would say mostly went to Iraq. I did go to Afghanistan.

2:43:43Two good war stories for you. One takes place on Super Bowl Sunday, 2008. and eight. So I'd been there for a little while. And this is in Iraq. We didn't think we'd have a mission that night because it was Super Bowl Sunday. And our pilots, TF-160, said the helicopters were down for maintenance. They also wanted to watch the Super Bowl. But then we found out there's an HVT in our AOR, sorry, High Value Target, Area of Responsibility. And we had to go out and do a capture kill mission. So we go out on this mission and we're going to, this guy is, he's in one of three buildings. So we split the, the troop into three, you know, small assault teams to go assault three different buildings simultaneously.

2:44:50So we keep the element of surprise, right? Because they're all like 100 yards apart. And as

2:45:02Eddie and Dom's unit is getting close to their building, so I'm already in front of the building that I will soon be leading a team through the door. And I got my gun on that door. It's pitch black. We're going to be taking this building. Eddie and Dom's team goes past us. And they're going to go set up on this building. And I think they barely get there. They're almost there. And somehow they get made. And it was a little moon out that night. But somehow someone saw them. and people started like running out of that building trying to get close to them and blow themselves up. They had suicide vests.

2:45:50Now, Intel had told us there'd be suicide vests on this whole Target set. But I mean, there ends up being like 15 people wearing suicide vests. Holy shit, they were legitimately running at, were they detonating themselves? Yeah, so they were running at the other element the other assault team, because they knew the gig was up. So they were just trying to get as close as possible to them. And they were all running. Like back then, the initiators were on the shoulders. So if they went like this, they could still blow themselves up, right? They knew that because they knew that we would have, the interpreter would tell them to come out and put their hands up and put them like that.

2:46:36And then they could reach like almost like a rip cord right there. Does that make sense? So they would run out of this building at Eddie and Dom's group. And something like three or four of them just blew up. Right. And so I'm, I'm sitting there holding this door. I'm holding this door and I just hear. Gunfire. Boom. More gunfire. Boom. more gunfire like it's three or four times right and it's shaking the ground like these are like big s vests and um across you know the that team leader comes across the radio and he's like shots fired shots fired suicide vests be careful and like i remember like i literally before that moment, I literally had thought like we had got into position early.

2:47:35Most of the time, the mission goes as planned. Like you go in, you capture, you kill the guy, whatever it is, you get home. I'm like, we're going to be back for halftime. And obviously we weren't. So they didn't, they end up eventually taking that target down. And now, you know, I'm holding on a door, like maybe from here to the, you know, that engine block. And then a guy comes out of that door and he's, he's got a suicide vest and he's got an AK. He can't see me, but I'm like this far away. Like, obviously I have to engage him. He's already too close. And there's another teammate of mine right there.

2:48:23Like that's even closer. Like if he blows himself, like we, we could just die right now, especially if he had shrapnel on it. Even worse would be to let him go back in there because we have to go in there and find, you know, the, the leader would, and that could be him. But like, as you know, like a suicide vest inside is much worse than a suicide vest outside. just because of the reverberation or the concussion factor. How could you tell he was wearing a suicide vest? Well, he had a big vest on, and four people had just blown themselves up. So I assumed. I assumed it was an S-vest. And we were told, we were briefed.

2:49:12Like we knew that the target line that we were chasing was like mostly foreigners, like not obviously not Iraqis at all. They're from all over. Like, but they had come together under the Al Qaeda banner to fight and fight Americans there in Iraq. And this group in particular was known like they were not going to surrender and they were not going to get taken alive. So they wore suicide vests and they all had AKs, right? And so he had what, to me, and we found out after I shot him, it was a suicide vest. But I'm like, well, it is a vest and they just blew themselves up. It could be. I was just trying to get you to describe what it looks like for the audience.

2:50:03Oh, yeah. So he had - I'm not questioning your judging. Yeah, yeah. No, he had like his man jammies on and then it didn't look like an assault vest. You know what I mean? It had like that. And it's not like you can see the wires on the thing from your, but it looks different than, it's not like a, I'll date myself here, like in a Blackhawk assault vest. Remember those? Oh, yeah. Right. Which we bought with our own money. No. So I end up and we were, you know, at that time it was like, hey, if suicide vests are even on the menu, it's all headshots because you don't want it to. you know blow up just by so i got him and then at this point you know they've heard us in that building they've heard me shoot this guy there's still another target to prosecute we still have to take my building down and we're like hey like as you know we need speed surprise violence of action.

2:51:08So we needed some momentum. Let's, so I'm, I was standing over like behind a wall. I jumped that wall and I'm like, Hey, we're assaulting this target, run into that. And I, I kind of, and he's in the doorway, so I have to straddle him. Right. And he's wearing unexploded suicide vest and I'm straddling him and like pieing the, it was a corner fed room. So I'm pying that room and I don't see anyone in there. And I'm from the corner. I'm like, I'm good. I'm going to get, I'm going to get through this room. All the other bad guys are like probably like in the main room. Right. And I had, I could clear most of that.

2:51:54I mean, you can clear most of this room from that door. Right. Corner bed room. And I clear it, but I couldn't see all the way down this wall. you know and and i didn't realize so there was someone in there and he was barricaded oh shit so

2:52:19i sneak i'm and i'm still like they know we're around but i wasn't gonna just take it dynamically at this point we're not doing a hostage rescue so i kind of sneak through the doorway and my first step in that doorway all hell breaks loose and I am, you know, three yards away from, four yards away from a guy who's behind a barricade and he's spraying me. And I'm like, I'm in the doorway, right? Shit. And it felt like, you know, it felt like minutes. Obviously it wasn't. But I do remember having this feeling like, how did I, like, how did I get here? Like, I'm going to die in Iraq on Superbowl Sunday.

2:53:11Like I should be, I literally had this like thought, like I should be at home watching Superbowl with cold, hot pizza and cold beer. You know what I mean? And now I'm here in Iraq doing this. but then I also had this like moment where I heard the first three or four shots but then I didn't hear anything like it's like my hearing shut off and all I saw was the muzzle flash and like I've later read about when people get put in those circumstances like they will lose one or two of their senses to like focus all their energy on another sense, like maybe their sense of touch, right? And I felt like I lost my sense of hearing and my adrenaline was like, like all of that was focused into my fine motor skill, like of running down my wall and shooting back.

2:54:15And like, that's all I did. Ran down my wall and shot back. And he missed me and I got him, right?

2:54:24and I got, you know, I've said it before, we don't rise to the occasion. We fall to our level of training. And before, you know, we had, before that point had been in gunfights, but nothing like that close and personal and that consequential where it's, you know, it's almost me to you. And he's got the first three or four shots with an AK, right? Shit. And we found out later that before that happened, he tried blowing his suicide vest up, but it failed. Holy shit. His cap failed. So not only does his cap fail and that vest not blow up when I walk through the door, he misses me. I'm running, and I'm, I mean, I'm telling you, I'm running pretty fast down my wall, and I got him.

2:55:21So I ran down my wall. I shot him while moving, you know, in this region, not here to not blow up his vest. And, you know, it's better to be lucky than good. And, you know, that's a very hard shot to make. But that that's like table stakes when you're at dev group. you know what I mean being able to move down a wall and quickly shoot someone in the head while with nods right so that's what I did and um I come out of that like I come out of that room and uh I come out of that room and I just remember like you know you're always kind of patting yourself for a bullet hole because you might not feel it in the moment so I come out of that room and i'm like this i'm crushing my legs and i literally go like and my buddy sees me do this on knots i totally forget doing it but i'm like this safe and my my buddy's on not because you know we have such a sick sense of humor right and he's just like dying he's like bro i can't believe you did that and i didn't even it didn't even dawn on me right like So that was like, I mean, I was elated.

2:56:48Obviously, I was happy to still be alive, but like, oh, I got that guy. He didn't get me. Like, you get that kind of adrenaline. And then probably, I don't know, less than five minutes later, Mike and Nate get shot. Well, four other guys get shot. Two of them die. Mike Koch gets, like, shot through the ear hole. Nate under the armpit right through the heart and they were in a similar room with a sandbag shooter but there were two of them or more and you know two guys got shot in the courtyard Mike and Nate got shot going through the door and now now we have

2:57:38whatever four guys shot um sorry i heard buzz we have four guys shot and um you know two are we don't know they're dead right away but i spent um you know i like that night i like i shot all my all the bullets i had remaining just trying to help you know we were recovering bodies and mike and nates and i remember putting like putting mike into the bag and zipping it up putting them on the helicopter. And then, you know, we came back. We went back to our base, and they were obviously dead, and we were going to have a little Irish wake that morning. And that next night,

2:58:36I think Eddie may have mentioned this like three nights later when the building blew up. Well, between when Mike and Nate died and when Louis Saffront died, there was a point where Louis came up to me. And Louis, he kind of knew, he knew I was a Christian. He knew I was a believer and, you know, I would say things like blessing and things like that. And I would, I would say that I went to church and things like that, but I wasn't like truly living out my faith, you know, like walking the walk as I should. And, and he was just asking me, he was kind of like beating around the bush, just asking me what I believed and why.

2:59:29and and it was more discussions I always think those are the best discussions and I like I was not at that moment it wasn't like I wasn't ashamed but I was I was afraid and I was afraid because like the Bible says to always be able to you know give a reason for the hope that you have right and what you believe and why but I was like so worried about sharing my faith because I didn't have all the answers. Right. I wanted to be an, like I was overthinking it. I wanted to be an expert. Well, what about this? And what about that? And what, like know the Bible before I would share it. You know what I mean?

3:00:11Like overthinking it. Um, and I didn't, I kind of just changed the subject because I didn't have all the answers. And I've, you know, I've had a pastor since tell me like in those instances, we don't need to be lawyers, we need to be witnesses, which is a really good way of thinking about it. We don't need to be experts. We are experts on our own lives. And if we have a relationship with Jesus and how things have changed because of that, we are experts on how that has helped us or whatever. And I didn't want to share it because I didn't think I had the words. You know what I mean? I was thinking I needed to be an expert, not just a witness.

3:00:59And I didn't have the, like the courage to just talk about my faith like I do now. And here he is kind of searching, like being around the bush and really was going to ask me is like, well, why do good people like Mike and Nate die? And like the bad people not, which I still don't have the answer for. right? But I'm sitting there and, you know, of all the regrets I have, like today, now every morning I spend time praying, reading the Bible, and journaling. And I've been doing that for whatever, 10 years. It makes every day better. It doesn't make every day easier. There's still plenty of hard things.

3:01:47It just makes me handle hard things better. It makes me sharper at work, no matter what I'm doing. It helps my workouts. It helps every aspect of my life. I spend an hour a day in the morning, first thing, giving God the first hour of my day. Time in prayer, time in the word, and time journaling, and stillness and solitude and silence, like from five to six or six to whatever it is and i've literally found it helps every aspect of my life in fact if anyone is like well what would you do like like do that for a month and get back to me and you don't have to do a full hour right if i swear if i would have done that in the teams and i've talked to my teammates about some teammates about this like man if we would have done that like i swear i would have been a better seal right i would have been like just because i feel like things are just more clear to me.

3:02:45I have more energy from it. You feel like you're losing an hour of sleep, but that period of time where you're just waiting on the Lord each morning gives you this strength. Long story short, at that age of my life, I wasn't afraid to run into a room full of Al-Qaeda for the flag that I wore on my shoulder, but I was afraid to share my faith for that cross I wore underneath my body armor. That's interesting. You know, I mean, I get it. I know what you mean. But a couple of things. First being, I mean, now that you're deeper in your faith, isn't it weird that that's how we, you know, when the, when the discussion happens and I still think about it and I still, I still, you know, my mind switches and goes back to this too, but because we don't know anything else, but you know, this world, but I mean, if you're a true believer, I mean, that's the ultimate goal, right.

3:03:52To cross over. And we always, we always talk about it as if it's, if it's a tragedy, if it's a tragedy because because that's what we see we see fucking tragedy we see fatherless kids yeah you know gold star wives and it's a mess but you know the reality of it is it's that that's the reward that's the ultimate goal that's where we go that's home yeah you know and and it's I mean, just looking around at people, you know, and everybody's got their shit. Everybody's suffering. I think there's very few people that are genuinely happy.

3:04:45Which is fucking, it's interesting, you know, how we perceive it. And, you know, it's funny, I was just talking to our mutual friend who protects my family, and I think we were talking about it this morning. And I don't even know why it came up, but I was just like, man, I just, I was like, it's so weird now, man. Like, I never gave a shit about dying. It never really, I mean, I didn't want to die. It's not like I had a death wish, but it just didn't really bother me that much. But I didn't have kids. I didn't have a wife. And even when I did get married, I mean, it wasn't until I had kids that now I'm scared.

3:05:36I'm fucking scared to death to die and leave them here in this fucked up world. Sure. You know what I mean? With no guidance. You're not afraid of death for your own sake. You're just afraid of leaving them behind. That's it, man. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's the only... I get that. That's my only tie. Yeah. What about you? I mean... You know... But you had kids. And... I didn't have kids. I did. When I was doing this. I had kids. So the day that happened, I had two kids.

3:06:10I had kids my whole time at Dev Group. Man, dude, that is fucking crazy. I had... I called my wife. I mean, this was a few years before that. I was in Afghanistan. I called my wife on a sat phone. She was just going to get an ultrasound with a friend because I wasn't there to find out the sex of a baby that we were having. I get her on the sat phone. She's like, we're having a girl. We agree on the name over the sat phone right there. It's a girl. We're going to name her Daisy. She just graduated high school. Anyway, that night I go on a mission, and I am between three different Taliban compounds compounds and I had like, I had to help lead a group into this area.

3:07:05And we get pinned down from three buildings and we're in the middle of this in like the Helmand province. It's like a bowling alley. It's flat. And I cannot, I can't figure out I'm towards the front. I'm like, well, which one of these buildings is shooting at us? And I'm, you know, there's three of them. And And we found out later it's all of them. But I'm trying to help coordinate an airstrike because they're shooting here and here and there. So I get up on my knee to get a better view. And a bullet whizzes by my head and cuts off a chunk of hair. I had longer hair than this. Get the fuck out of here.

3:07:54Are you serious? I had longer hair than this. it's sticking out of my helmet um i lose a chunk of hair from like an ak round right and i had just like not five hours before that i'd been on a sat phone with my wife and i were having a girl like i almost didn't meet her right and i was like that night on that helicopter ride home i was a little bit like almost nauseous like dry heaving a little bit like because i almost i mean that was close You weren't like, all right, motherfucker, not the hair. Don't mess the hair. But I almost like, you know, I'm inches away from that or whatever. And there was other close calls.

3:08:43I had like, there was also a time like I would sit there. I would sit there on a helicopter flight. and I would always say, if we had a 60-minute flight, I'd say a 40-minute prayer. And then I would rehearse the op in my head, kind of like Michael Jordan rehearsing a game in his head. Like, I did that on every helicopter flight. And I would say, like, I did say, God, like, if there's any, I know there's non-believers on my team, and if there are, like, I would happily die instead of them. I would just want them to live longer to find their faith. But I still wasn't always sharing my faith with them.

3:09:28I mean, I had a... There were two nights in Iraq where I volunteered to go into a... Instead of sending a full team in, I went in with just an EOD guy to clear a building that we thought was rigged to explode. I had two kids. But I was comfortable with it because I knew where I was going, if something would happen. And I didn't know if other people did. Now, that's very selfish. Like, I don't... Babe, if you're watching this, I'm sorry. So that I did. I think I did that twice in Iraq. But that was after the building blew up when Louis died. Shit. So it was possible. but I didn't I don't know I don't know to answer your question now I'm kind of rambling I do fear leaving them behind I just hope you know now they're old enough that you know I've like either taught them or showed them enough you know what I mean but there will never be enough time you know what I mean I do I think, I know what struck up the conversation this morning.

3:10:54My uncle just died a couple days ago. Oh, I'm sorry. At my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. I'm sorry for that, man. Thank you. But he died on a fishing trip with his son. and my brother. And, yeah. And he was like on my brother's ass to get that fishing charter going. We hadn't seen each other in a long time. The whole family was there except me, unfortunately. Oh, man. And he got in the water to cool off and died right there in the water. Peaceful death with his son who had been struggling for a long time. Finally got it together. They're getting along and sad. But at the same time, I fucking hope I go like that.

3:12:06Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.

3:12:12We just don't know how long we get. You don't. But I think, you know, I just hope I can see my kids flourishing and not worry and just know they're going to be all right. And if that happens, I'm good. Yeah. Those are lofty goals, basic ones, simple ones. Died having a good time with his son on a fishing trip.

3:12:48You know, I say, like, I thank God every morning. I thank God for everything I have. but I start by thanking him for the fact that I woke up. Like, God, I don't deserve a day you give me. Thank you for this one. Show me what to do and show me how to do it. And or strengthen me for whatever BS is coming my way because I can't do it alone. And I think that, I mean, I believe that's so true. So, we just, you know, we don't know. Yeah.

3:13:34You know, I'll tell you another thing that kind of, it always catches my gold team. Like, I don't know, like, what the culture of each team is within development group. Yeah. But just something that I've picked up from the outside is, man, like, the gold team has... a lot of righteous warriors for Christ coming out of there. A lot more than any of the other teams that I've noticed. And what's really fucking odd is it's a cross. A crusader, yeah. You know, he has the crus... And I've talked about this, I've talked about it, I think, with Eddie, Dom, I don't know who all I've talked about it with, but every time I bring it up, they're like, I never thought of that.

3:14:24And I'm like, how the fuck did you not think of that, man? Like, some strong faith coming out of that squadron. And I think there's, you know, I have friends from all of them, and I have met friends in all of them that have as strong a faith. And all of us, though, from my vintage, we would all agree, like, we just wish we were all in that time a little more open about it. even to the point of having like Bible studies and stuff together versus like, and now we're, you know, now we're definitely more, now we're all, you know, more open about it. But, um, it's my only regret that, and, you know, I, back to Louis, I was like, I didn't share my faith with him or just having like what I believed in why, and like why I have hope for the future, just because like no matter how bad all of this goes, like even if I get a hundred years, right, get eternity in heaven, like, and it's going to be better than I can imagine.

3:15:32Even if I would say something like that, right, because I believe in Jesus. I didn't, and he like died two nights later. And two nights later, I was standing, like I had just led our team up to a window sorry up to a building and I was again the lead got the point man so I was going to lead us through that door and I stopped because there was a window here and I had to pan through that window and there were guys in there waiting for us so i engaged him through the window the rest of the team goes past or they were already passed and they're setting up on the door and i'm like you know 10 feet from the door at this point and then i just remember like and eddie wasn't even supposed to be there he's supposed to be back over there getting ready to support with eod but then at the last minute he kind of bumped up and not eddie i'm sorry louis um and then all of a sudden the whole when the building blew up i literally thought i literally thought our our breacher threw like some top secret grenade in there because the whole building blew up and i was like what kind of grenade was that because the last thing i remember before passing out because i was by the window which saved me I the overpressure of being next to the window blew me you know whatever 30 feet away from the building or however far but it blew me enough to where I bounced off the next building like or the wall right so it blew me away from that window I bounced off this compound wall over here And then when I came to, all of that assault team, my assault team had been, you know, crushed.

3:17:35And that's when Louis died. Like, and he got basically where he was, there was a thick concrete roof, like a carport, like they have over there. That whole thing fell on him. Shit. and then other people, like our dog handler, he had like double compound femur fracture, two thigh bones sticking out. We had another guy who had like a full pelvic fracture and then a couple of broken arms and a broken leg. Like they were all, and like, I'm the only one who didn't get hurt, but I mean, I got a concussion. I got blown away from the building because of the, and i was the first guy i like i would be the first guy in but i stopped and i was engaging other bad guys through a window and then i got blown away from the the window and that's that's like two nights three nights after you know the super bowl sunday um Um, and I'll just never like, so I get medevaced cause I, I was so, my bell was rung so hard that I couldn't stand up.

3:18:52Okay. Like I had that much of a concussion and I had played high school football and one year of college football. So I knew, I know concussions, right. But I was like, man, and I was nauseous. So I get medevaced. I have to get a CAT scan. they say I'm fine and I'm fine. I feel fine. But like now my entire assault team gets sent home, like from one house born IED and then Eddie dies. Sorry, not Eddie. I keep saying that Louie. Forgive me, Eddie. I did not mean your name, but Louie dies. And

3:19:39And it was just nights after, you know, Mike and Nate. So. How are you handling that? At the time, you know, I didn't.

3:19:52At the time, I just, you know, like. Compartmentalized it. Yeah. Predator. I don't got time to bleed type deal. and then um honestly like i that whole deployment was so busy like it was like a couple nights later we're operating again they'd flown in guys to replace the rest of my team and we're out back back in the ground you know chasing bad guys didn't have time to deal with it really um and it wasn't until later when i just realized like the thing that i and i i will say i don't have this i mean we all have whatever ptsd or whatever they call it now i I hear about people that struggle to fall asleep and, you know, have brain fog and all the operator syndrome stuff.

3:20:55And I have none of it. Like, I don't even have nightmares about what I saw or what I did. And I attribute that to my faith. Like, I have none of that. I only have regrets of, like, not being willing to share my faith. Right? And certainly I know there are, you know, I have my share of medical issues, right? And I probably have, you know, brain issues from not just that one. I mean, I was IED'd three times. That was the one big one. But then there's all the grenades and just, you know, shooting a little gun inside of a kill house. All of those things add up. I found out later that even you can get like brain issues from too many parachute jumps, just that opening shock.

3:21:46Right. Oh, shit. Especially like the parachutes we had, which were like for higher altitude. So they have less porosity. So they can open quicker at altitude. That means if you prep, when you train lower, they open harder. If that makes any sense. Um, so just all those things can lead the different brain, whatever lesions or whatever they get now. Um, but I don't like, I saw really bad things. Um, I was put in situations where I had to, you know, it was me or them. Um, and I, I don't know, I sleep fine. I fall asleep. Like the only time I don't sleep fine is when I have like stuff going on at work and I wake up at two in the morning, take a leak and then my brain starts to roll.

3:22:42Right. Like I'm sure we all get that. But I am, you know, when I got out of the military, I tried, you know, I never did a lot. I never did drugs or anything, but I, you know, I lost myself in work. I lost myself in hobbies or working out or the outdoors. Even, you know, I drank quite a bit. But never like, you know, I could never drink more than two nights in a row. Gives me a headache. but nothing ever like fills the like fills the God-sized hole or the God-shaped hole that you have other than like it like that time spent in prayer and in reading the Bible and journaling and I attribute that to my relatively well you know adapt being adapted from all the things I got to see and do.

3:23:43So, I don't know. And maybe that's not the case, but that's what I believe. So. And then I had a... Do you ever think about why you were spared those two times in a row? And I'm sure there's a lot of others. I think you're doing the thing that you need to be doing. I think about that all the time. Yeah, me too. I wonder... I kind of wonder, like, was I spared to have the next kid? Or was I spared to go, like, am I fulfilling my calling and purpose? That's always the question. You know what I mean? And that's something I ask God every day. So I don't know the answer to that. That's a good question to ask.

3:24:36Yeah. I think it's a good question to ask all the time and keeps you kind of at least having something to aim at. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I had a great—the Navy, as hard as the Navy is, and certainly as hard as it is to be at that team, that team has been described as like a burning Ferris wheel. like you get on it you know it's on fire and it's you're gonna get burnt and you're gonna get ground out and spit out the other end but you like you still want on on it you know what i mean uh but as hard as the navy was and like all the things that happened to me in the navy like it gave me more than it took you know like so i don't have any like i don't regret doing that um Why did you wind up leaving?

3:25:38So I got medically retired because of my kidney. And so I had lost, if we can rewind back to 02, when I lost my kidney and I'm on a hospital bed and I signed a waiver to stay in the military. I didn't know that that was a non-deployable waiver. Are you fucking serious? I immediately deployed right after it. Wow. And then I did four more at Dev Group.

3:26:16And it wasn't until I got hurt in combat that the Bureau of Navy Medicine found out. because they had to sign off on my Purple Heart, and they showed up at the command. The Bureau of Navy Medicine shows up at Dev Group at the command and says, where is this Frohart and my boss? It's like, well, what do you mean? Why? Like, it says here that he got injured in Iraq, and he is being awarded a Purple Heart. how is that possible he's like well what do you mean he was over there and he got house he got blown up in an ied and the bureau of navy medicine how's this possible you're a fucking dev group dipshit yeah how do you think it's possible bureau of navy medicine goes well he signed a waiver to stay in the military back in 02 and he hasn't he was not supposed to deploy since that and it that's how wires get crossed and bureaucracies have no idea like can you imagine wow so that i signed a waiver just to stay in under the caveat that i couldn't deploy and then i just i didn't know that i was also high on morphine when i signed this waiver and no one like i never read it i like never and i just kept going wow wow they finally caught up with me right five deployments later they tell you yeah no more huh uh-huh wow wow were you pissed so i was upset like i was like i actually fought it for a little bit and then i had to go get a med board and the med board came back and said yeah you like you can't keep going they said you could have shore duty you could and they actually even offered to let me stay at the command like i could work you know in a training role with the like the sniper guys or whatever um i would have taken that offer if i had 15 in and i only needed like five more but at this point i am almost like to 12 years and i didn't want to do 10 years teaching people and not going.

3:28:46Like if I can't go and go at the highest level then I want out. And I got out I had 6 months they gave me 6 months because that was my EAOS. 6 months? EAOS was 6 months. So I got out like I got catapulted not only out of the Navy but like I was up to that point, like by the time my med board finished, I was training with the squadron getting ready to deploy. I found out. Holy shit. I found out weeks before a deployment, I was not going to be allowed to go.

3:29:28And then I had, and I had planned on, you know how it works. I was going to go on that deployment and reenlist. because then I get my re-enlistment bonus tax-free. And instead of re-enlisting in December of 2009, like that was my EOS and it just, it expired. So I found out in July of 2006 that, like I found out before that about that they weren't going to let me, but that's when my med board finalized. and then by December, not July of 06, but sorry, 09. And then by December of 09, I was out of the Navy. So I had a no shore duty, no transition time. You know how you sometimes get a shore duty job or like you can go network and find your next thing.

3:30:26So now I'm just, but I knew I needed to, like if I'm getting out, I needed to leave Virginia Beach. So we left Virginia Beach. Wow, you left that fast. And it was as hard as it was to join the Navy and become a SEAL. It was like harder to leave. No idea what you're going to do. So it was the hardest period of my life. And I've had kidney stones in Hell Week. And I've been in hospitals from getting blown up. And I've lost teammates and all those things. But that period of time, those first couple of years post Navy where like you get out and like, I didn't know, like I didn't know my purpose anymore.

3:31:20I didn't have a way to make a living. Like I couldn't find a job. So I had to like just start one. Like, I didn't have my team around me, the camaraderie with my teammates. And then most of all, like, I, like, incorrectly, my identity was wrapped up in that trident. Like, all of ours. Like, my, I was singularly focused on one thing, and that was being a Navy SEAL. And that was taken from me. and that is how I define myself. Like I was a seal first, then a husband, a father and a Christian and all these other monikers, right? But like I was, my self-worth came from my profession, you know what I mean?

3:32:13And then, and I used to be able to say like, oh, what do you do for a living? I'm a Navy SEAL. And that meant something. And then all of a sudden I'm just, you know another dad at target buying diapers so i lost i lost all those things and and it was super super hard um but then i just kind of found like you know i got a my purpose now is to be a good husband and father how long did that take you to find took a couple years how did you find it most people never do back to my uh I met some guys in Denver and they, like, it was this faith-based business networking group, very similar to like YPO or YEO.

3:33:08And this group, we all, we had these forums of like six or whatever guys. and there was this phrase called abiding, which is like remaining close. And we were always like talking about like, well, how much time did you spend abiding today? And for us, that was like made tactical as in reading the Bible, praying, and like writing down some thoughts, right? And that was the way for me. So it was within,

3:33:48And I want to say in like 11 or probably 2012, I had gotten out at the beginning of 2010, right? And starting in 2012, I started to like read the Bible and well, pray and read the Bible and just write a few thoughts in my journal and like get shit out of my head and onto paper. and then just trying it for a month. I did it for a month. A month became two. Two months became a year. And I've been doing it ever since. Wow. And as I was telling the other guy earlier on, I want to say it was 2012 was the first year I read the Bible cover to cover, and now I've done it probably every year since, just reading the Bible all the way through.

3:34:43Now there was a year, one year where I just did the Old Testament and one year where I just did the New Testament and went a little like deeper on it. But for the most part, that's what has helped me the most, that time that I spend in the Word and spend praying and journaling. And then when I finish that, then I do my morning workout, part of which is a walk, and I pray half of that walk. How do you pray? Yeah. What's that? How do you pray? I have like a - Like you're talking? Yeah. Just in my - Conversation. Quietly in my head. I'm like, I have a prayer that I do early about faith and hope and love and trusting God and thanking him for things and then asking for forgiveness and then embracing my weakness, my brokenness, and my neediness.

3:35:42I do all that. And then when I go on a walking prayer, I call it, I just start by thanking him for all the things. So it starts, I'm like, God, thank you for my relationship with you. Please help make me a better Christian. Help me grow closer with you. then I go you know in order Leah the kids uh my parents and siblings my in-laws my extended family my friends my co-workers uh teammates past and present um I thank God for you know our country and I ask you know and I'm thanking and asking for help right and start with start by thanking and then I ask for help so that I will be better in all these ways.

3:36:30And then I even, you know, I thank him for the church and then ask me to, like, help me to be, you know, better brother of my brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank him for my country. You know, I pray that more people would know and love you and have a relationship with you and then be with our leaders, give them wisdom and discernment. I have this whole, it would take a while. And then I thank him for my health and then for work. And then I ask him, like, show me what you would have me do. Thank him for every dollar he's given me for our house. Just help me to be a better steward of that money and a better steward of our house.

3:37:14And then even like hobbies and fitness. And I just kind of go like while I'm walking or rucking or whatever. And I just like, I don't know, I, I leave those things and I'm like, I go to work and I have so much energy until like two or 3 PM. I stop and I have a snack. And then I like, I, I have energy all day until about, you know, seven o 'clock have dinner. And then I finally wind down, but it gives, I would say like to anyone watching this, Like it sounds like a lot, but it is, uh, if it takes an hour to do that, it's worth seven hours of energy, right? It, the, whatever you think the sacrifice is, if I only can give them, let's say it's 10 minutes.

3:38:00I, I believe that the payoff is more than three times what I put towards it. If that makes sense. So. Yeah. Makes sense. I've never thought of it like that. It feels like a sacrifice at the time. But it is the energy you put forth pales in comparison to the energy and the strength you get from it. That's interesting. I'm going to have to try that. Yeah. Please do. I will. Give it a month. Tell me how it goes. I will. Let's take a quick break.

3:38:53Thank you.

3:39:18Music

3:39:24Music Music Music Music

3:39:33Music Music Music Music What do you think Sean? We're high Music Music

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3:40:42It's a true workhorse. Right now, get 0 % APR financing on a Silverado 1500 pickup. It doesn't get any lower than zero. See your Chicago land at Northwest Indiana Chevy dealers for details. Chevy drives Chicago. So we're transitioning into your civilian life. Yep. Coming from Dev Group. But one thing that we forgot to cover is lead climber. Yeah. And how you got into that. so i mentioned like in the middle like on a seal team as you know and for your audience's sake everyone does a little bit of everything we all cross train we can shoot um you know we all know how to navigate we all know medicine we all know how to use a radio like and then there's specialties we all can breach a door but there are breachers right um And a couple of different things, like there was a time I was a point man, which is like a lead navigator slash, you know, you had to be able to navigate the team to a thing, to a target.

3:41:52And then a sniper, which everyone knows what that is. And then a lead climber. And a lead climber would just be someone who would, you know, as I mentioned on the boat, like on those shipboardings, I would be the first guy up a ladder. I could set the ladder better and then get everyone else up it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it might be a compound wall or something like that. Usually it's not that, you know, it's not quite that epic. But I showed up at, when I got in to finish my training and I was at, you know, gold team squadron. squadron and me and the other new guy in my little assault team, like my team leader looked at us and the other guy was bigger and he said, you're going to be a breacher.

3:42:42And then he looked at me and he said, how many pull-ups can you do? And I was like, I don't know, like 30 or whatever it was. He's like, well, then you're going to be a climber. And I had never climbed in my, like, besides the lead climbing I had done at SEAL Team 5 on the side of the ship. And so long story short, I get voluntold into being a lead climber. And we do a climbing trip to Red Rocks, which is outside of Las Vegas. So I get four days of climbing on real rock at Red Rocks. followed by four days of climbing real rock somewhere else. So now I have, imagine this, I have eight days of rock climbing under my experience on, like in a harness on real rock, like not counting like a trip to a rock climbing wall, right?

3:43:41But like real rock.

3:43:45And like the group of lead climbers, the one guy decides we're going to go climb El Cap. Right. Which is a. Two, 2 ,500 foot wall. Holy shit. And. And I'm like. Like what? And so long story short, I end up. I find myself in. Yosemite National Park. And we're going to climb El Cap. So the ninth time in my life that I've ever even worn a sit harness is a training day on El Cap. Holy shit. The 10th time in my life that I wear it on Real Rock is day one on El Cap. Day one. Wow. And we climb it in three days, spending two nights on portal edges on the side of it. The last night on the top.

3:44:50finish the climb off the backside. You kind of walk, then repel walk. There's like a down climb with a couple, a couple of hundred foot repels and like El Cap, the way we did it, because we're not like able to climb it all in one day. So we have like hall bags with portal ledges, which are cots that you sleep on. Two gallons of water a day, all your ropes, all your food, your mountain house meals and like you're carrying each each of us had 100 pounds of gear to start so you and you're not climbing with all that that's on a anchor but you would climb and then you build an anchor and you pulley that stuff up and so you climb a few pitches each each day you make it as far as you can then you you get as far as you safely can get with the light still, you know, with the sun still out.

3:45:48And then you bust out this portal ledge, which is a cot that you put together and strap it to the side of the rock. And the first night on El Cap, I think it was like 800 feet off the ground or something like that. But it was also six, it was steeper than vertical. So I was six foot away from the wall. So it was at a spot where there's an overhang and my the rope hangs down and my cot is like so I'm like 800 feet off the ground and six feet away from the wall and it's just spinning in the wind and I'm sleeping on this thing and we finished that climb and come around the backside and sure like and I didn't know who this guy was at the time, but in the meadow, I think it's called Tuolumne Meadows or whatever, there's a young Alex Honhold looking up at El Cap.

3:46:53And some of the guys were like climbing dorks. Some of the guys at Gold were into climbing. I was not a climbing dork. I didn't have the rock climbing magazines and all that junk. And they're like, that's Alex Honnold. He's the next big deal, right? Like we would have never known he was going to climb El Cap without a rope, you know, a few years later. Well, many years later, but anyway, I went from no rock climbing to a couple of rock climbing trips. This was like, so I, like I found out I was going to be a rock climber in 2006 and we climbed El Cap in, 07. So anyway, it was a pretty steep. Holy shit, dude.

3:47:44That's a steep learning curve. But we finished that and, you know, one of the lead climbers, a guy named Heath, Heath Robinson, who died in extortion. And I obviously knew all those guys really well.

3:48:01Heath mentioned, like, he was the driving force behind El Cap. And we finished that climb and he's like, I'm not going to do, you know, we're not doing any more walls. We're going to go do mountains. So then we went and did Denali, which no one said we would ever get it done. But he sold the trip and made it happen. So we did Denali. And then like the next one, he handed it over to Rob, Rob Reeves, who also died in extortion. And he led the trip for Aconcagua. So Denali being the highest peak in North America, Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America. And that just kind of brings it full circle to, you know, now climbing Kilimanjaro for a different reason, but one of the seven summits.

3:48:56Damn, that is cool, man. Yeah. It was voluntold into being a lead climber. Right on. Damn. That is cool. Yeah. I can't imagine sleeping on a cot that's fucking spinning around in the wind at whatever thousands of feet you are at. Yeah. Well, I mean, just it's so not like to me, like climbing El Cap a wall like that, like that's scarier than jumping out of an airplane for me. Like, I don't know why. Like it just, you have the one rope in your world is that one rope and everything you do is that like bubble. Like it's so consequential. You know what I mean? I'll happily go do another like mountain climbing thing like mountaineering I don't see myself climbing another 2 ,000 foot rock wall holy shit not after all the close calls damn how are you back to kind of your transition how are you integrating in with the family after that pace well it's so i had gotten good at

3:50:22changing quickly from you know warrior to husband and father really right i could i could reintegrate very quickly and it was because like you had to like at at the command i would go there were no decompression stops back then. You would come home. In 06, I did a mission on the last night of a deployment, finished that mission. We had gotten in a gunfight on that mission. Finished that mission, came back to the base. I didn't even have time to wash my camis. Threw everything in a bag. Didn't have time to clean my gun or anything. Threw my clothes in a bag, my gun in a box we flew out of that base you know without being too specific refueled in rammstein and i was in virginia beach at a panera holding my kid 36 hours later wow after holy shit literally after a gunfight and it was just kind of like it was kind of a trip right i was like.

3:51:28But the hardest part was when I never got to go back, like when I never got to turn on warrior mode again. And then it was like, as far as reintegrating into the family, I just, you know, had to, you know, have my quiet time in the morning, you know, my time in prayer, my time in the work, a little bit of journaling. And... You started that immediately. Probably, you know, one and a half to two years after I got out. Okay. And then, but the other thing is when I immediately got out, like, I also went 18 months without having a paycheck. So I just didn't have time to think. Like, it was like this consulting or this doing that or like teaching this class or I briefly did like adjunct instruction.

3:52:25with Mid-South or security consulting or whatever. Eventually we, you know, bought a gun range, but, like, I just didn't have time to wallow. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. And now I, like, sometimes we have time to think and overthink and, like, just kind of, I guess, wallow is the word, you know? brewed on something and not just like go out there and do it and i didn't have that luxury like i like i got out no college degree didn't have a job lined up and you know had three kids and groceries to buy and then you know then we had a fourth kid because we're smart but then you became an entrepreneur yep yep what was your first venture So I first did just some security consulting and that led us to doing some present corporate presentations.

3:53:30And that kind of segued into, you know, we were teaching this guy how to shoot and we took him to a gun range in Denver and they wouldn't let us rapid fire and they wouldn't let us draw from a holster. and as you and I know like if you're gonna if you're gonna shoot a gun for self-defense you need to know how to draw from a holster and you might need to shoot more than one shot every five seconds so we're like this is no way to train and he was just like he's very wealthy guy and awesome business mentor of ours from from Denver ended up being one of our investors he just said well why don't you guys raise money and buy a gun range like if this if you can't train correctly here and at the time denver had like two maybe three gun ranges they all sucked um he's like why don't you just either build one or make one so you know the there was a there was a problem to solve and he helped us find an answer so we actually found some people we raised money bought a gun range and owned and ran a gun range.

3:54:39And it was, you know, firearms training and then, um, a gun store and then lanes for rent, kind of a, a three-legged stool. Right. Um, and I did that, we did that for a while together. Um, me and my business partner and, um, Um, after a few years, um, stepped down from the day to day. And then I went and ran a, uh, a fitness organization called strong first, um, most notably known for their like kettlebell training. Uh, and this was a Pavel's company.

3:55:28and he's the guy who introduced the kettlebell to the West. He's the reason there's a kettlebell in every gym now. Right on. So I had met him at Dev Group because when you're at Dev Group, you bring in the experts for everything, and we brought him in to teach us how to kettlebell once. And I stayed in touch with him.

3:55:52and I had used the kettlebell to help get me ready for deployments and for Denali and Aconcagua and everything. I combine kettlebell with a little bit of body weight and cardio. I still do it to this day. So I'm a believer of it. And then he was asking me to help him find his next CEO And I was in that, at that point, I was in that like habit of, you know, reading the Bible, praying, and then taking a, then I had added a lunchtime walk with a little quick prayer. So I'm on my lunchtime walk with a prayer. And like, I just heard God say, well, you should apply for the job working for Pavel. And then I went and did that for about three years.

3:56:41And I got to, that was a great job. and I was, you know, really blessing to work with and for Pavel. And I had, you know, the gun range I had, we had anywhere from 40 to 50 employees at the peak. But I was also like my business partner and I, like we, you know, we just, like it needed one captain. That ship needed one captain. And then also I just felt like I'm always trapped to this facility. Like if I go on vacation, I can't work from vacation. You know what I mean? And then I started working for Strong First, and I was working remotely back in 2014 before that was a thing because our team, our U.S.

3:57:31team, was everywhere from Pittsburgh to Venice Beach and everywhere in between. And then our global team, we had instructors in 30-some countries. We were doing events in – we had 4 ,000 instructors in 30-some countries, doing events on almost every continent, not Antarctica. And basically, I worked at the – I led the headquarters group and like a senior group of instructors. and we were having licensing the material to be taught in other countries and continents and stuff like that. So, and I was, there was no Zoom back then. It was called GoToMeeting and there was, you know, obviously cell phones, but like very early, like, you know, very good experience for me kind of leading a geographically distributed team.

3:58:28did that for three years. And then I went, I went to work for, I had helped the NRA rewrite some of its concealed carry curriculum just as a, one of my side gigs. And in so doing, I was talking to one of the leaders there and he basically hired me to run NRA's education and training so i left the fitness organization and then went to work for nra headquarters and i was living in denver but like i had to commute to you know to fairfax via dulles oh shit yeah so i was going i did that for three years um it was going okay i mean it wasn't without its drama, right? Just the politics of it all. And I was working on the ops side, like it's training.

3:59:29It should be free from... Bureaucracy? Not free from bureauc... but free from politics. Yeah. But like there is a lot of politics there just because it attracts politicians. You know what I mean? Also, I was like never gonna... I was never gonna play the game the way it needed. I was only gonna do the job, not play the game. so I was kind of doomed

3:59:57and if I was going to do the job the way it needed to be done at some point I needed to move there and we were living in Denver and I wasn't going to move my family to Virginia I didn't want to go back and I loved Denver up until COVID but I loved what I you know I loved that job I enjoyed it but you know it was time to move on so I did that until 2020 and then in 2020 I just started to do consulting and that kind of bounced me around a little bit again like when you get out you just find a way or you make one and we're good at you know hustling and learning and problem solving and communicating and all those, all those skills.

4:00:53Um, and I have since, you know, I worked at a beverage company for a while. I saw that. Um, we had a, a CBD gummy. We had a CBD drink. We had a bottle of water. We had an energy drink. Um, then I was a consultant. I worked at an energy company, that does like natural gas fired plants and like solar and even battery plants. Just helping with like culture and ops. And then I was even helping some of the developers there just as a, like not a lead developer, but I would help lead developers. It's quite the resume. It's just, well, it's just like, you know, find a way or make one. Right. which is, you know, eventually I, I had also always been doing a lot of speaking.

4:01:48It's always been a passion of mine. And I started doing that in 2012 and there have been years where I've done like 10 or 12 events and there's years when I've done like two or three, but I just enjoy just sharing my story. And then like I have the 12 years in, but then now it's like 14 or more. Well now 15 out. Yeah. And I kind of merge the, Hey, this worked in the teams. Doesn't work out here. I've seen, I have seen how different they are and not everything is the same. Right. And I found ways to like kind of tie in things that work in the teams, in the sealed teams and work on the outside. and mostly that's what I talk about when I speak.

4:02:42And it's typically like elite teams, aspects of an elite team or how a small team or an outnumbered team can get big results or it's basic leadership or teamwork and that's on the corporate side. And then once in a while I get an opportunity to go just speak with a sports team or a couple of weeks ago, like a big men's ministry group. So that's kind of the side gig now. Right on. It's men's ministry group. That's the side gig? No, speaking. Speaking is the side gig. Day job. I have a great job working for, it's called Goldenrod Companies, and they're a real estate, I would say real estate development and investment organization company in Omaha.

4:03:37They have offices. Let's see, we have offices in Atlanta and Dallas and Omaha and then I think some in Tulsa and opening new spots. But he basically, it's a founder-led organization. He has a family office, which we would call it a headquarters group in our vernacular. So under his headquarters group, There are, let's say, six portfolio companies, separate companies all doing different things, but they all fit within the real estate world. And I don't know much about real estate investment or development or legal or finance or insurance or even has construction companies. All those things are happening.

4:04:27I'm just helping standardize operations and culture. So I don't do any of the things they do, right? I just help standardize the culture and the ops, you know, think of that as a horizontal going across those verticals. Right on. Which is a good fit when you have a side gig of also doing speaking gigs because you're talking mostly about culture and teamwork and building those things. Yeah. So it fits pretty nicely. What, I mean. As you know, a lot of guys struggle with finding the next purpose, the next thing. What kind of advice do you have for the next generation who's separating right now, getting out, looking for the next thing, thinking that nothing's going to measure up to what they did before?

4:05:20Yeah, man.

4:05:24the first thing i would say is i think it's oh if you have the and i didn't have this i didn't have this luxury but if you have like it is if you can take a beat take a minute and just get that could be a month It could be two months. Just have a little bit of time to unwrap. I didn't get that. But then the next thing I would say is your first job getting out of the military might not be your ultimate thing. Just take a base hit. You can't get the base hit. And, you know, Jordan Peterson had this thing about having an aim, right? Where you have an aim. You have something you're aiming at. And it might be on top of this hill.

4:06:23And you're walking towards that. But as you get higher towards it, like, your aperture opens and, like, you see more. Or you realize, like, oh, that's not my goal anymore. But because you took a step forward, like you're moving towards it. If you hadn't moved towards it, you would have been down here still planning about it. Yeah. Right. And I think like too many people are stuck down here planning about like what to do next. Like find that like base hit. It does not have to be like the end all be all. No. But you're on your way towards it. Like, A, you'll either get there and realize that's not what I want to do.

4:07:09Or B, like something else, some opportunity will open en route. Right? Like my job now, I went and met with the founder of this company and the CFO. And I was just going there to think I was interviewing to do another speaking gig. Are you serious? And then he just asked, well, would you come help us with our culture and our operations? You just don't know, right? And I enjoy doing that sort of thing. It fits well for me with doing the speaking that I do about teamwork and leadership and elite performance and all that. So, you know, you just don't know. I would say to keep it simple, take a break.

4:08:03That's fine. Don't make it too long and then get a base hit. Good advice. Yeah. Good advice. You know, at the beginning of the interview, you had mentioned something about...

4:08:20I don't know a better way to say it, but you had mentioned something about that the service... Your time in the SEAL teams, your time in development group was for selfish reasons. Yeah. Yep. And that you wanted to circle back on that. I was curious where you were going with that. I think I know, but I'm curious. Yeah, it all changed. Like, so I joined, you know, chip on my shoulder. I'm going to prove people wrong. I can do it. You know, we all, and we all kind of had that. I'm assuming, like, I want to go prove, you know, this is like, that's one of the reasons I did it. It's supposed to be the hardest training in the military.

4:08:58right um and then um you know 9-11 happened and i found myself you know in a position to you know do something about it right uh or just to be in a position to like serve my country so it changed from that selfish pursuit to that more like pursuit of service and sacrifice um which i think happens a lot yeah yeah well eric we're wrapping up the interview cool you want to end this thing with a prayer yeah let's do it let's do it let's do it want to lead it sure all right God, I just thank you for this opportunity today. I pray that you would continue to watch over and bless Sean and his family and his team and all of the Sean Ryan show.

4:10:05Continue to help them make the impact they are, not just for their guests, but for all of the people that get to watch this show, Lord. and I pray that I pray that the things said here in this building that you have blessed would be pleasing to you and would make an impact for your kingdom in Jesus name we pray, amen Amen

4:10:34Good? It was an honor, man Yeah, no, thank you, bro Thank you Hopefully I wasn't rambling too long No, it was awesome It was awesome Let's go blow some shit up Yeah Yeah.

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