CSM Dawson recounts his journey in the Special Forces. He describes the rigorous Q Course, including phase one's six-week beatdown and phase two's field exercises. Dawson highlights his role as a radio operator. He details his experience with the Green Light team, including the challenges of carrying a 65-pound bomb and the stringent security protocols.
Ben Derrick 0:00
Music.
Welcome to the soldier fund podcast, the platform for untold stories from the National Guard Special Forces community join us as we delve into the lives of these elite warriors and the journey of our non profit dedicated to supporting their courageous mission to free the oppressed worldwide. I'm your host. Ben Derrick, let's dive in well before we get rolling. CSM Dawson, I'm so grateful to have you on the podcast today. I'm eager to get this mixture of story and a career that has spanned as long as yours has, and I can only imagine where this episode is going to go. I want to say thanks for you making the time and putting all the work in to be able to join us today. I know our audience is going to be eager to hear what, what is going to happen next. So usually what we do when we're introducing our guests is talk about, you know, times down range and rank and honestly, all because of the span of your career, all that stuff kind of gets lost. But you're, you're known as CSM around me of the circles, which I know may frustrate you a little bit, but I think it is a testament to your role as a leader, and we're going to get into a lot of that today. So I would love to if we could just start at beginning of career, and what, perhaps, what attracted you to this SF community in the first place, and then we'll see where this goes.
Speaker 1 1:38
Well, first of all, Ben, I'd like to, I'd like to express my appreciation for you having me on this podcast and giving me this opportunity to to have a conversation about thinking that one of the greatest things I've loved in my life, you know, my respect for the battalion and my respect for the men in the battalion and other special forces organizations and the regiment has been a very important thing to me, and even as I got older, it became more important to me. So I do appreciate it. And so without further ado, I will say I really appreciate the fact that I get to step step on the in the tall shoes of the last interviewee you had frank Rossi, which I don't know that I can imagine up to that, but Frank's a special man, and he is anyway. So I joined Special Forces in early 1980 I was what was called a rep 63 that's the same as an that's the same as an x ray, if you will. And I came from a home we didn't have running water, we didn't have we didn't have telephones, and so running water and indoor bathrooms was first time I see it was in basic training. And the interesting thing of it also about that the first airplane I ever rode in, I jumped out of, which is a helpful task. I mean, you know, let's knock out, let's knock out two cases of beer at one time, right? Army as an oh five Bravo, that was before the designation of the Special Forces tab. So what you did pipeline wise at that time was you went through basic training, a it jump school, and then they put you on a bus, and they sent you to Fort Bragg the 82nd guys would get out at the 18th replacement depot, and then they would take what a few of us were going on over to special forces training to what was called smoke bomb Hill. And I remember the bus driver saying, gentlemen, this is where you begin. I thought, oh, man, I'm in the wrong damn place, for sure, but what are you gonna do? It's too late. You can't late. You can't run you signed a contract. So we did our pre phase there for about six weeks, and I went to an experimental Q Course. At the time, they had been losing a lot of guys, and the Department of the Army wanted to do a survey to see why they were losing so many guys. In phase one, there was no selection. Then you had a six week phase one, which entailed, let's see land, nav, patrolling, survival and methods of instruction. And mainly it was just a beat down. It was a six week beat down. I mean, I'm a radio operator. First of all, I know nothing about patrolling. You know, I'm getting two hours sleep a night. How much am I going to learn about it in the classroom? You know, it's just, it was just ridiculous. It was just, it's like, well, we're just going to beat you guys up. We relied on all the guys in the class that were like. Like x 82nd or x Rangers, or stuff like that, to really pull us through. And they did. They really did. You know, we had some good there was some good mentorship. But I will tell you this, the oldest man in my class was 29 years old, and at that time in my life, I thought, man, that guy's old. I don't think he can cut this. And I mean, I really believe that, I thought, man, you can't. You got to be 19 years old to do this stuff. But alas, made it through phase one, went into the basic radio operator course, spent, I think, 12 weeks there. Went to phase two, went out to Pisgah National Forest in February of 1981 and was a five man, five man team. We carried three sleeping bags because we want to cut our weight down, because you're going to be up all night making combo. And it was brutal at that time. If you didn't make communications with Fort Bragg, they didn't give you food. Now, I don't know if that was quite legal, but that worked for them. It happens, it happens. It was a very it was, you know, it instilled and instilled a lot of desire to be successful, and we got through that. And special forces was a funny thing that has changed a lot, because at that time, I remember having a class in phase one, they landed a c1 30 and a helicopter, and they said, This is the cool stuff you can steal off a c1 30 and a helicopter, if you can get your bag, you know, it was lot less honorableness. You know, we were out in western North Carolina when we finished that eight weeks, and they had made us pack a clean set of clothes and a waterproof bag. They took us down to the creek and said, Get cleaned up. Got us cleaned up. Took us into this littleville, bought us all dinner, put us in the back, because it was a dry county, so we could have beer. And these guys did all that for their students. Of course, it was only 18 of us, but you know, they, they, they took care. They really took care of their kids. No, they were hard on them, but they took care of them, and they made fun of them constantly. It was just harassment. Was going to happen all the time, you know? So then we went to phase three, which was the final phase of SF course, which was six weeks long, and went out, did the whole Robin Sage thing was good training, you know, jumped in with my first ruck that weighed like 110 pounds, and survived come out and I come out, And we went back to brag, and we graduated, so that that pipeline lasted. I'm thinking about, well, I've been in the Army a year and two months when I graduated the Q Course, right? So you can figure about eight months of it was, was Q Course, lot shorter, no language school, no selection, no seer, right? And that's, and that's one of the big things I point out to guys nowadays, the competence, the core competency level of your average Special Forces graduate, is so much bigger than when I went through. I mean, these guys are much better trained. I mean, they're way more competent. You know, they're they're semi fluent in their languages, their regional orientation is much better. I think their problem solving skills have been, have been drilled into them, as well as some necessary leadership skills too, which is helpful when you're, like, an x ray or a rep 63 like I was, because, you know, I didn't have any leadership skills. I had nothing. So basically, when I was going to go to a team one day, what was I bringing to the team? I'm a pretty damn good radio operator. Other than that, I can do land. F No, I do know how to take a good ass kicking. I can remember. So I can remember, in phase one, we were out by the street one day. This is before. I don't have you been to camp call.
Ben Derrick 9:35
I haven't
Speaker 1 9:38
been when I was there. It was nothing. We lived in tar paper shacks, and there was no windows, and the door was piece of plywood, and you just raised up the louvers on the side for air to come through concrete floor. And you had a, you had a a plywood plank for a monk. And that's how you lived. You ate C rations three times a day, and that was it. That's how you lived. They woke you up every morning with this old rattly, you know, bullhorn thing that played music over it, and was usually the ballot of the 18th Airborne Corps. And that was usually they would start that whenever they felt like it, because sometimes they might come in drunk about 330 in the morning. It's like, what's time to do? PT. So PT would begin. Remember, I had a good friend once, they was always checking for watches, and they had this little game they played. Anybody know what time it is? And this guy yell, it's daytime? Sergeant, well, they smoked his ass thoroughly. Had a guy get caught chewing gum once, chewing gum during flag detail. He ended up terminating his volunteering, withdrawing for chewing gum. You know, it was just, it was madness. They would do stuff like this. So once a week, maybe twice, they bring a hot meal out mer, my cans take us into the big classroom area, and everybody would eat a hot meal, but if somebody had been screwing up a lot, they had what they called the guest of honor. And the guest of honor would get a double pile of rice and beans on his plate, and he would eat up with the instructors, and he'd eat all of it. And then if he felt after so long, they would let him select a buddy to come up and help him eat. Just harassment,
Ben Derrick 11:46
but it created a certain sort of camaraderie, I think. I mean, as I hear the newer guys talk about this, there's a lot of honor given that way for the original guys that were doing these things.
Speaker 1 12:02
I would agree with that. I would agree with that and and it really, what it was, was this whole process, was a process whereby, you know, they were trying to pick out and build the guys that had the capabilities to become Green Berets, correct, you know, they they weren't gonna, they weren't gonna build them in their eighth month poi, but they were gonna make you extremely proficient, extremely proficient at your job. You know, our medics at that time, they would go there. Just their Phase Two alone was over a year in two months. It was tremendous. And the attrition rate was out of this world. I mean, I would say they would have less than a 10% attrition rate. I mean, they would lose 95% of the guys, which seemed like a lot, you know, after they go through phase one, do all that stuff. But they would usually, if a guy was pretty savvy. They'd let him reclass into Levin Bravo or something like that. And I know a lot of guys did that.
Ben Derrick 13:08
So this question not to interrupt you, because the story is moving very well so far, it makes me ask the question, what was it that drove you to get through this? What was your motivation for success?
Speaker 1 13:21
Can I be fair about this and tell the truth? Is this going to be a true where I was scared of hell at going to the 82nd I'd gone out and jumped with those dudes on a Saturday once, and they were scary people. You ever hear a daisy chain? Yes, David Kane is where you hook your shoot to the back of another guy. Shoot to the back of another guy. They do that, you know, they would try to get the helicopter rocking back and forth. Just crazy shit. I'm like, Oh my God. I don't think I could survive that. So that was a lot of it right there that, and I've always kind of had a, I don't know, an inner motivation to do something better. You know, when you're a kid, you dream of all kinds of things. I can tell you, once you complete the Q Course, you quit dreaming because you've made it there. There's nothing to dream about. But, you know, and so I give this example, I I went to, I went home for Christmas after being in 11 months and and my mom said, All I did was run and sleep. That's probably all I did. Go for runs and sleep, of course, from rural Missouri in 1980 when people saw you running down the road, they thought you were going getting shot at, or you were running away, or you were trying to avoid a dangerous animal. So. So much impossible to go for a run. It's like, what are you doing? I'm out running. Why are you doing that?
Ben Derrick 15:06
It's a different time.
Speaker 1 15:08
It is. But, you know, I remember, even after the war on terror, I'd come home and run a lot, and I'd wear spandex running pants. And my brother asked one of my neighbors over here tad he says, What do you make of that Jeff running out there and those spandex running pants and stuff? Tad goes, I don't know, but if he can run that guy damn fast, I think I'll leave him alone.
Ben Derrick 15:31
Well, getting through training, get through the course, and you know, the part I'm most eager to hear is your being a Green Beret. Just that experience for you, what it was like?
Speaker 1 15:43
Well, it was a real kick in the balls. I'll tell you the truth. So what happens when you're one more story before I get over this, please. Now this is the truth. So, so we were sitting in a barracks one afternoon, and good buddy of mine. We're talking and we're talking about, after the Q Course is over, and I'm going to Devin say, he says, I said, So what are you doing? He says, Well, I'm going home. I go, What do you mean you're going home? He said, I'm going back to Mississippi. I'm like, what? How are you doing that? He goes, Well, I'm in the National Guard. I'm not in active duty. I go, you shitting me? You mean they have a National Guard? I could have been going home at the end of this thing. He goes, Yeah, there's a bunch of guys here. You didn't know that? I'm like, hell no, I thought everybody was on active duty. He goes, Oh no, going home, man. What's wrong with you? Well, anyway, so I didn't go home. Ben, a friend of mine, and another guy in March of 2000 no March of 1981 got his Ford pickup. One guy rode in the back, slept in a Joe bear bag, and we rode up to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, rolled in there and got signed in, and then the big kick in the balls comes when you're an 18, when you're oh five, bravo. They send you to signal company. Oh, I forgot one story. Did it before we left, before we left for Fort Devens, Massachusetts, there was a chick named Katie Wilder going through the Q Course. This time there was only, there was 2q courses. There was the officer Q Course and the enlisted two course. Everybody knew the officer Q Course was bullshit, right. Well, anyway, Katie Wilder was a female captain Intel branch, and she was going through course. Well, Swick, not Swick, but JFK. Ima said, We need aggressors, and we want aggressors that are going to chase hard. So they came and got about 20 of us that were all going to Devon's. All of us were going to know in 20 he's like 10 going to Devon's. Our job, they gave us one active duty guy that knew what he was doing, because we didn't, and our job was to chase that team through the woods for four days, and that's what we did. Wow. I mean, it was awesome. It was awesome. I mean, we phone fox that they never slept. We'd attack them like two or three times a day, you know? And I gotta tell you, that was, that was ridiculous. But anyway, that's my Katie Wilder story, okay, I did go to the graduation. I did to go to graduation there that when he was supposed to graduate, she didn't walk across the stage. They sent her back. They sent her back to Fort Huachuca. But I saw when a helicopter landed one time, her rucksack go skidding down the runway. I was like, that's not very heavy, is it? Anyhow, so we get up Fort Devens, get signed in to civil company, because you got to do two major operations before you can go to an ODA, okay, which sucked, you know, but luckily, there was two operations coming up, and I jumped on the first one, going to Flint lock as a radio operator working 12 on, 12 off. And it's actually a really good experience, because at that time, our communication style was very different from anything you use today. We used a lot of what was called Blind transmission broadcasting, which meant they would send you a 120 group message sent twice at 15 groups a minute on the hour on the half hour, whatever your contact time was, you would copy your message, and in that message there'd be a seven group call up. The first seven groups sent would be sent three times, and in those seven, seven groups was your the group that showed you where in the crypto pads to find the break for the frequency, and it would have your frequency in it. You know, 5555, number groups. So anyway, you would take. That that would be your received message. You have to break it later, and then you'd have 10 minutes to build your antenna, get it on that frequency, tune up, and send your burst. And we were only allowed to burst with with a gray 71 I mean, we didn't send manual code. This was all like that, great 70 ones, vintage, 1950s early 50s. It's all mechanical, eight track tape, magnetically recorded. And you get pretty good at it, and, and, and you're using a 10 watt radio, and you're generally talking around 1000 miles, which is hard to do, but, but those guys in that signal company, they were used to using those break back rigs because that that Drake 71 mechanically, would send it about 300 words per minute. But because it's mechanical, it's on a spring, it might vary between 280 and 300 and weather conditions and everything. So it was pretty darn tricky, right? But we did it, and as I progressed, I got pretty good at it. But what happened was, before I did my second operation, a levee came down. I don't need a levee is but a levee, they needed seven radio operators in Panama. Now, at that time, Panama was supporting El Salvador, right? And they would take seven radio operators, they would send us to DL I and Route teach the Spanish and send us straight to Panama to plus up their teams. Well, hey, how good a deal is that? Right? Go to El Salvador or go play in Europe. That's a, that's a no brainer. I want to go to El Salvador because that's where shits happening, right, right? So, so, so I, I sign up. Well, I gotta see the CSM. It's like, why do you want to go to El Salvador? I go, Well, you're doing shit down there. He goes, You know, they have sand fleas down there. I said, is that like regular fleas they get on a dog? He goes, No, they're sand fleas. Good sand I said, Okay, I'll keep that in mind. Two weeks later, lo and behold, I get a phone call from the CSM, I'm at the BOP or the base operations platoon. He goes, Hey, I need see you. Get up here. I got there. He goes, Hey, how about this? How about I send you to Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 10th group, put you on Oda. How about that? I go, that'd be good. It's just no more talk about the seventh group. Shit though, okay, yeah, no more talk. I won't say shit about nobody. I won't say I held you hostage. But anyway, so they sent me up there. I met a first team sergeant. And you know what the funny thing is, I listen to these guys on these podcasts talk about whether they showed up for their team room and how they were kind of like Sean, not shun but you know, anyway, it was like that. I got there, 20 year old me, I know Jack and shit. And guy goes, Joe Davies, my team sergeant, Joe says, Get in here. I'll talk to you. I said, Okay. He says, You better be a good goddamn radio operator. I go, Oh, I think I am. He says, Well, good. I'm gonna send you down for a code test right now. You better be able to do a 1515. Was that last son of the bitch we had? Couldn't I said, Well, I think I can. I ain't really worried about too much. So I did. It came back. Passed. Said, Man, I'm glad you did, because that would we would lose our green light status. I said, what your green light status is? Yeah, this is weapons team, son, like a weapons team. He says, Yeah, I'll tell you about it some other time. But it's a weapons team. I said, a special but he said, a special weapons team. I'm like, we shoot, like, special machine guns, special hand grenades. He goes, No special special weapons. Hell, I didn't know what special weapons was make any damn does anybody know what? Whatever? Go up the s2 go see Sergeant Major Mickelson, get your Ts processed. So I have to have TS clearance, so I go up there, we do all the paperwork, and Sergeant Major goes, we'll get this expedited, we'll get it out, we'll get it to you. You'll have, you'll have this clearance within 60 days. Within 60 days, that's how fast they would do it, because it needed to be done bad and they weren't. You had to have a particular number of men on a cell to be an effective green team, you know, green light team, okay, and you had to have at least six and then it but the problem with that is, if you didn't have all your guys qualified, then they weren't all qualified. They couldn't even look at. It, they couldn't see it, they couldn't look at it, they couldn't touch it. So we processed my clearance, and within two weeks, I met with a DIA agent and did my polygraph. I sat there four hours with this dude. Now, mind you, I'm 20 years old. I had one one speeding ticket my entire life. I lived at one address my entire life, and we're gonna go over this. You know, I don't know if you've been to one of these things. I've been through a lot of them. The questions like,
Speaker 1 25:42
so, do you have any friends that live with illegal aliens? No, I don't. I'm from Roscoe, Missouri. Dude, there's no legal aliens there, you know? And this goes on and on and on and ends in the questions with girls, like, girls, what? What do you think about girls? What do you think it's like that no time for sergeants movie. You know, when Andy asked Andy Griffith about just any old girls, you know, like, what about young girls? I'm like, well, the young girls are okay. I mean, it's fine with me. I mean, I don't care. No, no, no. Skin off my ass, right? He keeps going on and on, he'll come back to girls. It's like I said, you know, you seem like you've got a problem with girls. I don't. I don't have a problem. Well, have you ever thought about overthrowing the government? I'm like, No, not really. Do I need to? I don't know. It went on. It was an experience for me. I mean, I was like, geez, can this place get any freaking weirder? So I got my clearance. Finally, in the meantime, we've been doing, we've been doing a lot of live fires. I mean, and these guys, you know, several Vietnam vets, these guys had Bucha time in the boons. They had fought, they had shot. And so when they want to do a live fire, what do we say in the army? We walk, crawl, run, right? Not them. They just run, run. Run, because they know what they're doing. I don't know what I'm doing. Give me a break here, dude, I remember the evaluator that was valuing it's the first one we did in Australia. And Peter. Australian peel was pretty complex and and we did it. And Joe says, Well, Dave, how'd we do? He says, Well, hey, see, didn't shoot anybody. So I think we did okay. I was, hey seed. Okay, that's what my team start. My team started. Always call me. Hey seeds. Hey seed. Do this. Hey, see, do that. You know? I mean, it's just ridiculous. I know we went to SOT there might like compound to do close quarter battle and, and I'd said, I said, Joe, can I use the long gun and shoot over people's heads? He goes, never in a million years. Will you ever do that? And if you ever get near my daughters, I'll kill you. I said, okay, but you know, shit like that happening all the time. I mean, it was just, it was just amazing and great time. So after, after I got my clearance, me and another guy who had come before me, older guy, we went and did our went to training on the device, which was, it was not bad, I mean, it was good training. I mean, wasn't very complicated. You know, you had a device that weighed about between there was actually two different models. There was a smaller one and a larger one. The larger ones one we usually, normally did I think it was a be fit now, be something. Anyway, it weighed about, I'm gonna say, 65 pounds, and that would be in the configuration for jumping. I mean, unless you decided to jump it in the barrel, because you come in this little bit smaller than, like, a 40 gallon barrel, and you could jump it in the barrel if you wanted to. But, man, that barrel was big. I mean, it was clunky. They had an extra large Alice rucksack that they issued with this thing so that you could jump it in a rucksack to make it easier, right? Which was not too bad it was that was easy. It was easy, pretty easy. But what, of course, it did is it caused a greater stress on the ODA. For one thing, you had to carry a shape charge, a 30 pound shape charge, in case you had to destroy it. So at the end of the day, you're going to end up carrying an extra 100 pounds on every single mission. So if I'm the primary carrier, that's what I'm carrying. And that means all my 100 pounds radio gear got to go somewhere else. So it makes it harder for everybody you got. You got to have a real, you know, strong team of guys in great shape do this and and you. So that that's what that was all about. And you also had to obey what was called the two man rule. You ever heard of the two man rule,
Ben Derrick 30:06
not the one you're talking about? I could do those certain
Speaker 1 30:10
like the TS clearance stuff, you know, in other words, I had, if I was carrying it, I had to have a guy walking with me that could put his hand on my rucksack at all times. Ah, yes, okay. And we're all carrying locked and loaded. We're all carrying guns, and they're always locked and loaded. You know, because we can't, you don't want to get compromised. And you know that was, that was their big fear was, when we put these teams out of these planes or places, if somebody could get wind that they had one or even a practice one practice one would be just as good, because it gives you all the parameters, but they would definitely want to get a hold of it. So it was, it was like that. It wasn't, it wasn't a joke, and you had to employ it a certain way, to be more specific. For example, once we were trained on it and we operated, we became part of was the, what's called the PRP. Have you ever heard of that? No, sir. It's called the personal reliability program, and it's mainly in the Air Force. Okay, the Air Force guys that go down in the control bunkers and turn the key for the nuclear launches are what's called a PRP. They've been evaluated as being personally reliable to pull the trigger if they're ordered to do it, what's
Ben Derrick 31:42
that got to do with you? And so that
Speaker 1 31:46
I have to be a part of that program. I have to be able to pull that trigger, and I have to, I have to my personal reliability has to be insured. Wow. So in other words, when I went through that process, when I went through the whole dia interviews and all that they had to determine from that point on, is this guy capable of doing what he says, what he what will we tell him to do?
Ben Derrick 32:07
Even before you even knew what being told what to do was going to be, yeah.
Speaker 1 32:14
I mean, you can't get the cart for the horse, but you can't put the horse before the cart sometimes. I mean, so it's kind of weird like that, but you had to be part of that. Now, being a part of that was not easy, because, number one, you required to pee in a cup every month, every single month, and dog blood drawn and all that shit, right? And you couldn't go out partying by yourself. You had to go with somebody that was also in the PRP program. Well, guess what? How many 20 year olds are in the PRP program? Not very, damn many. And in group at that time, you only had one team per battalion that had this capability. So it wasn't really common. It was pain in the ass, is what it was. You know, I remember a particular time me and the team went down and we're having to pee in a cup and draw blood. I've always had this when I was younger, not not anymore. I'm over it now. Used to have problems with blood being drawn out of me, and I may have been a little hung over. But anyway, I'm sitting in this school chair, and they're drawing blood. Next thing you know, I'm on the floor doing the funky chicken team Sergeant looks in, goes, Oh my God, they killed Hayseed. I woke up just as he said that. I said, I'm not dead. He said, what'd you do? Did you fall out of the chair? I said, No, I passed out. Why'd you pass out? Well, sometimes my blood does that to me. He goes, Jesus Christ, you chicken shit. Man. It was like I couldn't get a break. I was always fucking up, always fucking up,
Ben Derrick 33:52
and you didn't exactly know where you had landed, what was going on, until much later. I'm the way you're telling the story, like I'm just on the edge of my seat. What is this thing? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1 34:04
it was just mind boggling, you know? So we did a mission once, it was right before Christmas, you know, I thought all the goddamn times I'm getting on Christmas leave. It's December the 14th or 12th, I don't know, and they're calling us out. Well, you can't just say, Well, I'm not going, No, that. No, you cannot do that. Yeah, they will put you in jail for that shit. Because, like that. You know, the new people come down there. It's not, it's not the army, it's these guys in black hats. You know, they're the ones reviewing this shit, you know, from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and all that. So we isolate, we fly to Vincenza, Italy, and we pick up a device. So the first thing you do is on a MC 130 you run all, all of the air crew off the aircraft. Team Sergeant signs for the plane they can't even be on. The plane, even though it's a secret plane, they can't be on the plane when we when we crack this device, because we're gonna crack it, pull it out, do a 100% inspection, buy the book, place it and jump configuration, and that's what we're gonna do. So that's what we did. Fly to Germany, jump in, execute three day movement, set the target, and think we had, like a company of American infantry aggression against us and do the job. The interesting thing about this was, though, is we had this. We had we had the two. We had the two NRC guys. We had our tactical evaluator who was a captain engineer, and we're sitting there, of course, the helicopter wouldn't fly, because helicopters never fly to pick you up. It's always a deuce in half. It's like cold as shit, you know. So we're sitting here on this crossroads, and I only carry enough food. I don't eat the first day and the Last Day, so I'm starved to death, and all sudden, here comes the army. Boom, boom, rolling up there. Surround this. I'm like, I'm sitting there, and evaluator gets up, and Lieutenant goes up this Lieutenant gets up. I'm gonna take all you prisoners. You're obviously who we're looking for. And blah, blah, blah, blah. Evaluator goes, no, the game's over. You're not taking and you're not taking anybody prisoner. Well, we're gonna confiscate everything. Here he goes, You're not gonna confiscate shit. And that's when he dropped that 45 he said, in fact, you're gonna get your goddamn ass back in that truck the hell out of here. Well, ventilate your I will ventilate your ass right here. Like we all locked the load. It's like, okay, here we go. Game on. This Lieutenant looked around, goes, I think these are not the men I was looking for. Anyway, get back. They the NRC guys took the took the device back and for to check it and to do everything. Because what we do, we normally set it, set the timers on it, and you set the timers, do your back, backside, uh, stand back. Stand off. Time, stand off. And then you would listen on the radio for your ops codes every 20 minutes. And they would send out ops codes, ops codes. And there was a four letter code group I was looking for to tell me what I was going to do, because at some point time I needed to shut down and get the hell away as fast as I could, like I get an hour. And so usually it'd be like a four man team that would stay within 500 meters of it. But usually what they would do is they would wait till that one hour right before that, and they pop you and say, recover it. You're, you're, you're, you're pulled off. So then you go down there and you de arm it, but you de arm it by the book. De arm it, put it back in its little bag, scurry away. That's the way it worked. So long, fun,
Ben Derrick 38:02
what? What was it? When you say, de arm it, what was it?
Speaker 1 38:08
The device, the bomb. Okay, so, yeah, you put
Ben Derrick 38:16
it, putting two and two together. This was no small bomb.
Unknown Speaker 38:21
No, it weighed about 65 pounds. It was a, it was a dirty bomb. It was an implosion device.
Unknown Speaker 38:27
You 235, and had, you know, you had, you know, specific things that had to be done on it wasn't simple, right? People, people made but people also made it harder than they needed to.
Speaker 1 38:46
It was probably the actual dealing with it, if it wasn't for all the rules, because the rules were incredible. I'm sure they were. I'll give you an example, when you wired in the timers, you had to use between 11 and 13 turns of 20 gage copper wire between The arming lever and the holder that was about an inch and a quarter, and you had to have exactly between that number of turns. And it doesn't matter that it's 10 below zero out there. It doesn't matter that it's raining. It has to be perfect. And that's why guys like me being a well, you know, when you're young, you're Mr. Tech savvy, you know? Well, I wouldn't say it was tech savvy. I would say that I was more tech savvy than a lot of the guys who's a lot of the people that were on those teams. Their goal was to get off those teams, because we plan for real missions. We plan. We, we, we planned real missions. We had real missions we were going to do, if the balloon went up, this is
Ben Derrick 40:07
the infamous green light teams. Is what you're describing,
Speaker 1 40:10
right, right? You had a real mission. You would go in on D minus two. We were going to use a C plane, and we had no ex, Phil,
Ben Derrick 40:25
repeat, no X, no X, fill,
Unknown Speaker 40:32
we would go straight into err, roll over to UW,
Ben Derrick 40:36
wow. So how long did you stay on, on buddies, teams,
Speaker 1 40:42
a little over two years, long enough I enjoyed it. I mean, well, but I got a lot of good schools out of it. I got NWTC instructor, school, ski school, climbing school, Halo school, you know, all those great things. I mean, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have got those anywhere else, starting
Ben Derrick 41:00
a career this way is kind of hard to imagine. Like this is very early on. You've still got three decades ahead of you. Let's get into middle career. And you know, because, frankly, sir, a career that spans 40 years is a very unique thing. So to cram this into one podcast episode would be impossible, but I'd like to start hitting the high points in mid career.
Speaker 1 41:26
So what I did was I ETS out of the active duty I remember the night I left the company, Sergeant Major caught me and he said, Hey, do not leave until I've had a chance to talk to you. He was an asshole. So I holler, my roommate was looking to win, and said, Hey, man, I'm getting in my car. I'm leaving. If I ain't getting shit there, up there, you can have it. I'm gone. He says, Don't you got to sign out. I go, I ain't signing shit. I'm leaving my contracts up. I don't know what you think you're doing anyway. So I get out and I immediately start to college. I mean, immediately, like, two weeks later, I started college. You know, I had no experience at college. My SATs were terrible. You know, like every SF guy ever was, he goes out and gets drunk the night before because it's an easy test, comes back and you're like, mid range, retarded. Anyway, I go to college, and I stayed in the reserves. At that time, there was a reserve company in Kansas City, so it gave me the ability to stay in the reserves and make that money, which was good. So I went to college, and all through all this, I'd been dating I'd been dating my wife for about eight years now. I was dating her when I was a senior in high school, and I was still dating her, and she was going to college then too, so she was a freshman as well, little bit younger than me, anyhow, so I was dating her Ben in the reserves, which I hated, I gotta tell you, at that point in time, at that point in time, and I don't want to knock the guys in the reserve, in the guard of the 80s and all that. I don't want to, but there's a reason why I there's a reason why the active duty had issues with us, because it it's still in the guard today. It's that guard mentality, you know, there's not that, there's not that dedication to excellence. You today, today, you deal with excellence. These guys, these SF guys today, they are, they are spot on. Their certifications are just like active duty. Their criteria is just like active duty. They go the same school as the active duty, I mean, and they deploy just like the active duty. But in that time, we mainly did war games, okay? And while I had been involved with a few war games, it wasn't the same. This is preaching, yeah, yeah, all through that and you know, but I stayed in the reserves, got out of college, got married, decided to go to law school, went to law school, graduated about 1989 there was a period of time in there I had to go to, I had to get out of Ben radio operator. So I went to, oh, and I got my Intel training. Didn't get the MOS for another two years, because if you're a medic or radio operator, you know they could guard. Only had reserves, only had so many radio operators and and medics. But I went to law school. Got out of law school, thought I was all smart, important. The Missouri journal,
Ben Derrick 44:52
inspired by the stories of these warriors and want to support, I mean, I was fairly successful at the soldier fund.org, All that away. Your contributions. Help us, Special Forces soldiers,
Speaker 1 45:05
go for some big, gentle, big state, buying it, buying it, buying a new car that we drive that car off the lot, and that thing just differentiated 20% right. There it was me, but I, you know, I practiced law, moved back home, bought a farm, and it was pretty good. I liked, I kind of liked practicing law. There was some fun things to it. I mean, I enjoyed it. And I was really close to getting out of the guard about oh, 1995 I think, but I will say this, I didn't, because at that time, the National Guard was more like a therapy for me. You know, it kept me in shape, it kept me focused, it gave me something to do. And at that time, after Somalia, things started getting serious in the Guard, you know, after Desert Storm, after Somalia, things started getting real. You know, we were training for real. We were doing real J sets. I did a six week J set in Kuwait in 1994 I did a five week J set in Jordan the year before, and coming to Mississippi, I did, J sets in El Salvador, Honduras, shoot Peru, Ecuador Bolivia. So these were real missions. We were trained in troops, and we would be doing and by and large, while the traditional guardsmen in Mississippi is doing two weeks in the summer and one weekend a month, we're doing about four weeks sometime, because J sets just don't happen in the summer, and and and you're doing that, and then your medics are doing their certifications every year, same as engineers everybody else. So you're putting in at that time, we're probably putting in. Guys are putting in at least six weeks full time every year to meet their training. And at that at that time, you could see the progression of skill going up. It become more and more more and more significant, if you will. So the standards were getting higher and, oh, by the way, I talked to you about this before they also stopped the program back in the 80s, of the of the paper tab, we talked about that, didn't we? We did, yeah, did you ask anybody else about it? Ben,
Ben Derrick 47:46
not yet, but I don't our audience hasn't heard that part of the conversation. I'd love for him to well.
Speaker 1 47:52
So when I talked about that 1980s SF, and I'm not dinging anybody, I've got friends wear paper tabs who are great guys all that. But do you know, when you don't hold the standards the same, you're not always going to get the right guy. So in this case, paper tab, you would go to Fort Bragg for two weeks. That would be your phase one, not six weeks, two weeks. And then the next year, your summer camp, you would go for two weeks. You'd have to do correspondence courses throughout the year, and then the next summer, you would go for your two weeks, right, and get your MOS and then you could go to a two week Robin Sage the next year. Or you could do two field missions with your own ODA, and then they would award you your flash, you know, pre, pre tab, days, or your tab, whatever it was, and that was called a paper flash, wasn't eight months, like six weeks, right? People like you must be kidding me. I'm like, No, I'm not kidding you that I actually didn't know that till I was in the Reserves for quite a while. I'm like, What do you mean a paper tab like, oh yeah, this guy's paper tab like, oh yeah. What's paper tab? Actually,
Ben Derrick 49:09
you know, this is has a close connection with Frank's episode, or my conversation with Frank. He was, you know, very particular, very big on standards being the same, and not to jump too far ahead, but the reduction of standards causing a dilution of the force. And this is a big problem for guys that have been around for a long time. When you start adjusting the standards, then the throughput, the output, is not the same. The Green Beret at the end of that standard, different standard is not the same.
Speaker 1 49:40
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I couldn't agree more. I will say, though, compare and contrast from my active duty days years ago to what we're doing today. Like I said before, they do a lot better job of training them. I think, I think that, and they used to be, it's kind of like, hey. Hey, we're going to get you through this. You're going to be competent, but it's going to be up to your Oda to train you. What that meant, though, was so while I was on active duty, at least of the X rays that came to my team, I was the only one who made it. They kicked the other ones off the team because they were just goof, either goofy or stupid. It
Ben Derrick 50:24
does explain a lot, the way that you're talking about it now, actually explains a lot. You're filling in some gaps, for me, that there is a pretty high level of competition among teams, like, who's the top team in this company, who's shit hot here? I mean, that's still a huge part of the culture in that there's a lot of pride at the team level, at the way that they can accomplish, achieve their capabilities. It seems like that may be a little bit of a root of that, that the training was happening at the ODA level. I think that survived inside the culture well past when it began.
Speaker 1 50:57
I completely agree with you, and I think this all culminates in my mind, at least with, with the global war on terrorism. At that time, I was a team Sergeant in Charlie Company up in Grenada. I had, I had a full ODA, very competent guys, I mean, very competent, and we were extremely competitive. Extremely competitive. We were activated in just before 2002 went out to Colorado. And, I mean, every day it's this is how you can tell it a really good ODA, a really good ODA, we're gonna go out here and run, right? But it's never a run, and it's never in formation and everybody wants to win. It's always race. Everything's a damn race. That's right, you can't do anything if I'm taking my gun apart. It's a goddamn race. You know, you know, if I'm eating Chow, it's a damn race. It's always a race. We're always racing. We're race horses, we're Taipei personalities. We want to get it on, you know? And that is true, you know, that's the Frank Rossi's. That's all those odas, you know. And I think teams in companies, they know who the guys are that are really good, and sometimes they also, you know, they know from their qualifications, but the politics is knowing where to put yourself and knowing when to take on the man and fight the good fight, when to shut your mouth. That runs all the way back to when I was in e3 on an ODA, I knew when to shut my mouth, you know. And I think when my team Sergeant Joe said to me, Hey, seed, shut your fucking mouth. Don't say a word. Okay. He meant it. If I got out of line, one of these sevens would smack me, you know. Not so much anymore, but you had to learn those hard lessons. And it it was just tough. But when g watt kicked off, I saw some things in my career I thought I would never see. Because, okay, right? We all train. We all trained what we train towards, lethality. We train towards, we train towards the capability to fight, to be forced multiplier, you know, to to to to get in with the indigenous people, make them our friend, bond with them somewhat, you know, and that's our jobs, but, and that's what makes Special Forces special, okay, I'm not very philosophical about things. I'm more like, you know, man with hammer hits rock, you know. But that's, that's what it comes down to. But as time went on, we deployed over there as a company. I actually didn't deploy with Charlie Company. I deployed with Alpha Company on that mission, and that was oh three. And I will say by August of that year, a third a quarter of that company was gone. Wow. They had been pulled Wow. Because they, they, I always used to use this word, they, they saw the devil and realized they didn't want no part of it. You know, I'm saying, I do. I mean they, they didn't want to. There's two guys that react to this stuff, man, I saw him both at the same time. I had a guy on another. Oda was just like, he's like, I catch him. He's sitting on a truck bed down in Gardez one day. And I'm like, Hey, man, what's going on? He's an e7 on one of the other teams. He goes, not much. I said, What are you wearing? He goes, I. Oh, this is my three colors. And they're, like, completely Tan. Tan. I go, when was the last time you washed that uniform? He goes, I don't think I've ever washed it. I said, Have you ever had a bath? He goes, Oh, I've had one. Some pile back. I go, Well, you really need to clean up. You know, this guy's like, he hung with it, though. He just didn't give a damn anymore, right? Had another guy, another guy that every time he pull up the KV pass, he starts shooting the 50 Cal. I go. What are you doing? Just letting them know I'm coming. I'm like, Dude, I don't like that attitude. I might not know I'm coming. You know, we're down here in gardens. This is not nice area. I mean, I had we're meeting. I had team Sergeant tell me, says, Well, gentlemen, me another team, couple, third group teams, and this team sergeant, my company, is like, I think we should all hold hands and pray. I'm like, Look, I'm good about being religious, but I don't like the idea. I mean, I guess you pray before football game or something, I don't know, but it's kind of like saying, Well, Lord, I'm coming to meet you. Like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm trying to be positive about this. I don't like people that scare me and that scares me. That same mission, that same mission, me and Sean Charles, team leader. He's the first car him and Gary Brown, first car. Every damn night they'll be driving along the road. Next thing you know, they're heading out somewhere in hell. I don't know where they're going. I'm in the back of the patrol. They just take off going the other direction, I guess. Where are you guys going? Well, we lost the road like the road's not hard to find. Jesus Christ. Man later on found out. Gary says, Well, you know, I wear contacts and I didn't have men. Well, okay, well, you kept doing that shit because I'm getting tired of getting lost every damn night, you know. So we started using these Bearcat scanners. Now this is a good one here, using these Bearcat scanners, because all the dudes down there, the Taliban have these Push to Talk radios. That's how they communicate. So I got my interpreter back there, and he's got his bear CAT scanner. And I don't know he wasn't, may not be in my truck. I don't think he was. He was up to Sean anyway, Sean calls me back say, Hey, we're getting some chatter up here. They're setting up. They're setting up an ambush up here on Route Bronco. Pretty sure it's route Bronco. I said, Okay. He says, Yeah, they're calling for people to come out with whatever they got. RPGs, RPKs, AKs, whatever they got come out and they're saying tonight, we're gonna see who lives and who dies. I'm like, oh shit, that's what I wanted to hear, damn it. I mean, I think maybe it might be time to get off the road. Oh well, no, we'll just party right on up there. Luckily for us, of course, we had the Gary Brown maneuver, which is to immediately make a right hand turn and go the other action. So that was still almost impossible to ambush us, because we didn't even know where we were
Ben Derrick 58:17
going. When you say, when you say, Sean? Which Sean,
Unknown Speaker 58:21
Sean Satterfield,
Ben Derrick 58:22
okay, okay, Sean Satterfield, my team leader, yes, okay. I thought that's what you meant. Anyway.
Speaker 1 58:27
Anyway. So, so they he thinks he's got it narrowed down to this collot up here, about 400 yards off of it. And anyway, I'm looking and I can't see shit. I don't see anything over there. And we're kind of creeping up on it. You're creeping up on it, creeping up on it. I said, Sean, are you sure that's the right clot? He goes, Yeah, that's the right clot. And then, of course, we all have headphones on and peltorres and radios. And about that time his gunner buzz comes home, yeah. He says, there. It's right there. And he turns this 2 million candle power spotlight on it. I go, well, thank you very much for announcing your position. I'll be making a right hand turn here. God damn anything to scare me right and then the next night we're out. Next night we're out and buzz. That's our gunner. He says, I see something down the back Creek. There's a man down there. He's got a light. We gotta go down there and sneak up on him. Of course, he couldn't go because he was on the gun. So me and JJ and a couple of the guys, we Gary, we sneak down there and sneak down. Buzz goes, be careful. Now he may, he may be armed. I'm like, oh my god, shut up bus. Get down there. Go white light. I got my turf with me too. Go white light on this dude. Like eight feet away. He didn't hear us. It was pretty cool. It's cool. And he wets his pants, and he's working on his dike. He's watering his crops. Oh, he's watering his crops. My trip goes, I could have told you he's watering his crops. I'm like, Well, why didn't you tell me that? So then he goes, and then the guy said, jabbers. The Terp and Turpin. He says there might be some bad guys over there. So immediately I was Gary or Jay head off that West. Whoa. No, no, we're gonna have Mr. Knight like walk in front,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:14
right, walking in front. He's walking in front. And again, just another, another false positive. You know, it was just, it was a comedy of errors. You know,
Ben Derrick 1:00:27
when you speak about it, though you speak very fondly, like this was, you were alive. You were fully alive during these years of doing this stuff with these guys.
Speaker 1 1:00:37
Oh yeah, absolutely. And the adrenaline was always just awesome. It was just like kicking. You know,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:45
I will relate some things to that, though. After I came back from that tour, I know there was one time I never took my body armor off for three days.
Speaker 1 1:01:00
I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure I didn't but I know when I came back, I weighed probably 235 40 pounds at the time, I lost 40 pounds in like nine months. Whoa, and I don't know why, I think it's because of the long distance. Mean, we did a lot of travel, and a lot of driving on those roads, hit IED stuff like that, and, you know, all those things, all that, all that excitement, you know, you know, raises those cortisol levels and they're hard to get back where they should be. And it's just, it's just really, it's just really interesting. You know, the
Ben Derrick 1:01:58
service does have an impact.
Speaker 1 1:02:02
Oh, absolutely it does. And people don't realize that. They really don't. And in the case of that tour in Afghanistan, it was like, I remember we were, we were what was called Moses in the desert, right? In other words, we would go out and we are, our job is to get shot at so that we could bring out the Taliban and then smoke them, which just that's what we did, every day, every day, every night, every day, every night, until about August, when they decided we could work with the ANA. Now I saw this is a good deal, because you had 100 100 of these dudes, and some of them were pretty damn good. They're pretty dedicated. That's not bad deal, you know. And I told Sean, I said, we got to stay employed with these dudes. So we're going to run them, we're going to run traffic stops. We're going to do this. We're going to do that, because they are super good. 10 days into it, I get it. We get a message. Hey, can you bring your ANA to Kandahar and take them to spin bull lock? I'm like, what? It's August. We've been here. What five months? We're going home in a month. Why am I going to go to spin bull lock? Well, I don't care how many c1 30s you need? I said, I want any c1 30 now I want to go to Kandahar, and I want to go to spin Bullock. And I said, five. All right, five. I'll take five. Five. So Sean launches with one of the engineers, and they go to Kandahar to set up places for the ANA to stay, and I conop with these other bozos back up to cobble. So I'm on c1 30s, there at the airport, not at Bagram at Cobble. You know, I won't even go. Why I didn't go to Bagram, but I, me and the CSM at that time up there, we were person in on grata. I mean, he, he tore my ass out of the frame more than once. Okay, I don't know if you knew that. I didn't. Yeah, pretty bad. Yeah. Well, I'm still looking for that son of a bitch too. Anyhow, anyway, flew him down there. Gun trucks come in. Ana gets off. First thing to do, Ana gets all over the trucks. We take them down to their circumstance, some major cost Optus on the road. There goes, we got like 35 people riding on this hunting I'm like, Yeah. He says, Well, they're Afghans. I go, Well, it's Afghanistan. He goes, Well, you shouldn't have 35 of them riding on there. There's not 35 seat belts. I'm like, well, won't you tell them that? Because I ain't got a car. I ain't got, I ain't got no savvy here, so I'm just gonna go on. These guys were a wreck of Kandahar. We only did, I don't know, we didn't. May have not done any, no, we didn't do the mission, but we did a mission planning. I think Sean had the flu or something. He was sick, and I went down to the set with the 10th mountain and talking. About this mission and all that, and they're talking about the cord on and they're going to put the ANA in here and all that. And, okay, I said, yeah, they talked about the rules of engagement. I said, What's they go what rules engagement to your ANA use, I use Afghan rules of engagement. Like, what's that said they shoot Taliban. Well, how do they know if they're Taliban, I go, they just know they're Afghans. Trust me, stay out of town. They'll take care of it. Don't worry
Ben Derrick 1:05:27
about it. And they did, and they did.
Speaker 1 1:05:32
They did. So I had to go to the a talk to get the manifest for the helicopters, who had, like, six helicopters go down there talking to this chick, e5 she's like, I need a manifest. I go, I had the manifest from the c1 30s. I got this. Throw it down there. She looks at just, I can't read this. I go, my kid either, but you wanted a manifest. There's manifest. And then she goes, Well, where's your social security numbers at I said, well, guess what? They're Afghans. They don't recognize the Social Security system. They don't pay into it. Good Lord, girl, go get a life. Would you we flew down there, right? We had to put these trucks on these c1 30s at Bagram, which we began to call fort. Bragg, Fort Bragg, East. Well, they looked at our trucks. The trucks were dirty. Hell. There was loose frowns all over the place, hand grenades rolling around on the floor. You can't have that. Why not? It's everywhere at war. This is what happens. Shit falls out and on the floor, and we just leave it there because we don't give a damn. No, you have to have all them taped up and foam around them in a box, okay? And you got to pick up all these rounds. You can't have loose rounds on the floor. Why is there loose rounds? Anyway? I said, because the damn gun jams, or we just jack around out, Jack around in, and don't really care about it, which don't think about it. It was a nightmare, you know, that whole trip, when then we went out to collate and put in a new governor. And it was just psychotic. The shit that went on. It was just crazy, you know? Well, you were there for one finally, yeah. And the worst part was, so we had to do, we were doing one last mission, of course, I didn't know it was the last mission, but it became the last mission we're gonna roll out. And I tell you what my guys were at the end of their, end of the end of their, you know, you know, into their whatever, right? And I had to get in their face and say, Look, you will load your shit in this truck, and you will get in that truck, and you will go down this road, and that's the way it's going to be. And so that's what they did. The interesting thing about that was it really pissed me off. Is the AOB that sent us that we were working for the time, which, of course, we'd never met because we were Moses in the desert. We I call up, and I go, Sean calls up. He goes, this is Mustang six, three check point one. They go, Mustang. Who? Mustang 63 checkpoint one. What are you doing? Well, we're on a con op. Where are you from? I said, We're based out of that castle and collate, dude. He says, Man, what's going on here? Well, the A will be that sent us, had left and been replaced. Bother telling that we were we were going out. I said, Sean, that's it. I'm not driving through that pass tonight. I just had a flat tire. I'm stopping here. I'm sleeping. I'm frustrated, and that's bullshit. People get front and I learned this, people get frustrated, people get tired. They start cutting corners, and it gets dangerous. There it is. There it is. It gets dangerous. You got to be on your game. So anyway, we came home. We got to back up to me and the team, me and Sean, the last guys out. We stayed at the a talk there at Bon we didn't go to the main camp because, like I said, I was not, wasn't well received there, and slept on the concrete floor. It was still fun. Sent the rest of the team up to get squared away, and we took back the last pallet the next day and went back. We had to set in k2 for two weeks. I asked the XO, I said, Is it possible to get, you know, MWR pass and take the guys up summer con. They go, Oh no, we ruined that months ago.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:27
You're stuck here like Jesus Christ, really, this is bullshit. And then you'd walk around there and some e9 catches me and goes, where's your Boonie
Speaker 1 1:09:39
hat? I go, I don't own a Boonie hat. He says, you're supposed to have on a Boonie hat and you're supposed to have the string tied underneath your neck. I go, Well, I ain't thinking that's ever gonna fucking happen. And you may see some other guys just the same. And I'm sure they said, Really, don't give a shit about, shit about about your rules. So we did get one trip to Saint. Con. And naturally, what does all SF guys do? Well, we had chat, was good, and then we went to a bazaar which had Russian vodka, and guys got it. We get on the bus to go back, and they're intoxicated to some large extent. And they had two MPs guard this we named any guns MPs had little pistols with them. These. MP says, Hey, Sarge, do you think can get control these people? I go, they're drunk. No, I can't get control of them. Why can't you? I said, Because I, Frank frankly, don't care. I said, you know, I said, Do you know where we've been the last eight months? They go, no, what do you think I'd be working on, working on cars somewhere down the ballroom or, you know, handed out basketballs. Jesus Christ. Damn. There forced fools, whatever. Finally get home. Great trip. Then, you know, months later, I become Sergeant Major. Run the training company for a few years, do another deployment over to Afghanistan as a s3 type. You know, my my team times over, I was, I was a team sergeant from 1994 to 2024 I 10 years as a team sergeant, maybe a little more, I don't know him, and a little more, but 10 years and then become a sergeant major. And I was a sergeant major, I guess, for what? 15 years, 15 years, multiple deployments, Afghanistan, of course, Central America. Sean and I ran, sent him operations down there for OES, CCA, AFCON, sock af all great deployments. Man, all great deployments. I I did see that my last one with sock AF was really kind of eye opening, because the military was starting to go through some really serious changes that made me question in my span of service, what the goal was. I remember in oh three. Do you remember when that doctor down? It was at Fort Hood, shot those South Carolina guardsmen shot him. I met that unit coming out of Afghanistan, and they were going in and just conventional guys. They were pretty tore up about it. I remember at that time, I think he was Chief of Staff, Dempsey, said he certainly hoped that this didn't hurt diversity in the military, you know,
Unknown Speaker 1:12:45
Where's, where's the concern about the dead soldiers. What diversity is ahead of human life? I guess it is. If you talk about the principles of lethality,
Speaker 1 1:12:59
what is lethality? Competence? Core competence, capabilities, when you put diversity ahead of that, because equality is not equal, it's just inclusive. No, those are political opinions I have, which I'm free to have
Ben Derrick 1:13:17
you certainly had on my whole life, right? Yeah, well, unfortunately, we're running short on time for this episode. What I'd love to do is to be able to come back and grab more of just the philosophy. The stories have been incredible, and I hate that we're having to cut it short, but I've got this pressing question. I'd like to just wrap this portion of the episode with, if you don't mind, in speaking with you, leading up to this interview, I can tell that you are passionate about special forces. You're passionate about National Guard Special Forces. It means a lot to you, and I would love to if you could to put that into words in an effort to help the civilians that are tuning into this podcast understand just how special and elite this community of people is.
Speaker 1 1:14:07
I just have one last thing I want to say on here, Ben before, and I don't want to forget to mention it while I appreciate every, every, every man and woman in our units and the work they do, people need to not forget the most important factor for that soldier's mental health, these guys that are still deploying every time, every day everywhere, how important Their families are and what their families go through. And that's probably one of the most important things to me, given in my career. And I'll just end with that and say, you know, I don't think I would be where I'm at today. If it wasn't for my wife, I wouldn't be do. It means that much. It's hard to put in the work when you're gone month after month after month, but you have to do it right. And I had to encourage my soldiers to do it. I had to tell soldiers, you need to call your wife. I don't want to call her. No, you still got a relationship. You got to call her. Here's a sat phone. Go call her. You.