SEAL Team 6 Sniper's Haunting Story: How Do You Overcome This? | The Intersection

generally with with the with the Special Operations crowd I do a a do if I have a guest on from that Community it's a life story and there's there's so much truth that comes out of those interviews and and it's almost turned into like a therapy session yeah that's the confession I have somebody coming on who had to maybe didn't even have to I didn't I I want I told him I didn't want to have the entire conversation on the phone and that if he wanted to have it here then we could have it here

he says he does but he killed a child and it's stuck with him for years it's it's it's haunted him how do you how do you make that right how do you make something like that right I would say in a situation like that the devil's in the details right so if I was working with someone like that the first thing I would find out is well what happened mhm because I don't you need to know the details one day I'm in there they spin up and I'm like [ __ ] of course you know

the day I decide to get out you know and I miss the hostpital rescue you know so I'm in there but because of some different circumstances you know there was no clue that there was going to be anything and we had guys doing some different kind of cool training stuff they had to get done lot of the wcky guys and planners for you know when we have that we're typically the guys that plan you know routes and jumps and different things like that right so I had a really um had a platoon chief that you

know like not everybody liked but I had some kind of connection with him I thought he was a really intelligent dude uh I think his intelligence was underrated um and so he I was like Hey I'm going to um I'm going to head out and go for a run around my neighborhood I'm kind of also like depressed because I don't get to go do this thing you know he's like okay so I go running get done running get back to my house look at my phone there's a bunch of texts from him I'm like oh

[ __ ] so I call him hey what's going on he's like hey we got some guys in different places trying to get back but we could really use you know some planning help if you want to help plan this thing I was like yeah and then just kind of joking around you know I'm like hey if I plan it do I get to go just I'm on terminal leave of course I don't get to go you know and but he goes hey uh yeah hold on a second so put the phone down for a

second couple minutes comes back he's like yeah you can go like holy [ __ ] all right uh how long do I have to get there you got all your [ __ ] ready yeah you probably better get here in like 45 minutes you know if you're going to make this bird so I'm like oh [ __ ] so that's how how much time I had to throw all my [ __ ] in the truck and tell my wife hey I'm going to go do this thing are you okay with it she's like holy [

__ ] you we got through all this yeah I'm not going to stop you from doing this one thing but it's kind of that whole like Team America thing like just don't die you know so I'm like okay it won't you know um try my best and love you you know and squeeze the boys and go and so now that's how I ended up on the mission so you know because for example in the story that you laid out I don't know if that was how much of that outcome could be attributed to the situation

well let's let's just say it was a a Justified kill but it yet it still haunts him I think it probably haunts a lot of the team members that were a part of that operation and but whether it was justified or not he's still struggling with it yeah he doesn't feel I I don't want to speak for the man but I it obviously bothers him because got brought brought up right away and and and he wants to he wants to bring that up here and so well what would I investigate then and you can find

this in the news and [ __ ] um there was a hiccup with the staff for Obama informing him that we were in the air ready to jump when we got there and so it got pushed 24 hours because he was asleep in Martha's Vineyard from what I understand um I don't know the details of that I know there's a bunch of [ __ ] that I probably have no [ __ ] clue how works you know and we come down we push to the next night and then we go so I'm up there I

got a tandem medic on me and I'm the point man for the for the op you know and I've got three other guys too usually a team four and up in the point anyways so everything goes well we jump great landing we get on this target um it's four this is the news too uh two professors that were kidnapped from the University of Cabell days before one was Australian one was American Kevin King and Timothy weeks and found out that they're here right probably being moved around different compounds on their way to across the border

in Pakistan and you know the network of dudes that do you know the most deviant [ __ ] with the Taliban it's those guys right suicide bombers you know you know just all the all all the worst [ __ ] you can think of that happened you know chopping off heads and whatever other kind of [ __ ] I think that h L actually was more in Iraq but I don't know um so it's those guys right and so we're expecting some we're expecting a hard fight maybe um and we all know if you have

any experience these guys in Afghanistan with all the suicide bombs the house born iates all the [ __ ] we like go really deliberate with when we go to these compounds we're looking for I mean it's slow CQB we're looking in we're looking at every threshold for wires for different you know there even started using you know motion sensors and you know you know light sensor like um photosensitive bulbs you know in pillows and [ __ ] like that to just blow right and there's so many Ops where that happens right so it's it's high

tension and we're expecting this [ __ ] and we get down and they're at a they're at a compound right got a long walk in everything goes well and then we get to you know we see some some movement around some guys that seem to have RPGs motorcycles moving around and then what I believe was going on based off of what what happened was that that was just normal [ __ ] going on because we were able to get all the way up to the Target sneaking up and get up on top and and get

ready without anybody knowing anything right but there were a couple of noises you know that we made the way that I go back to thinking about what actually happen on this op have a lot to do with you know Kevin King never spoke much about it after maybe he's super traumatized by it maybe he's living his life whatever but Timothy weeks did speak up on it a bunch in a bunch of different interviews and news outlets and you know I was in my Contracting work after this op and eventually they they were cut a deal

to be turned over and and traded and with the release of an asak Kan which is you know the leader mhm and a couple of other guys and once that happened pretty quickly it went around even in the news like a little write up that he had of like what he thought happened on those different ops cuz there was a couple attempts couple of failed attempts and I pieced it together over time what I thought really happened right and so different Roes for a hostage rescue totally different and every operator really understands like pretty in

depth like what those are you have to right you really talk about it because the mission is the hostages and on a hostage rescue it's so hard to talk about especially with people that don't understand war and those things because one of only a couple things is going to happen they're going to kill the hostages if they know that you're you're there which has happened and that's a really hard thing for for for operators to deal with after and or you're gonna rescue the hostages and kill all the bad guys great you know or the

good guys might accidentally kill the hostage while they're on the doing the operation that's happened before too that's hard so as an operator you go through your decision-making Matrix to go you're like hey my decision- making has to be very precise here right and this is where even more so than any other time or like there's no room for the soul I think and those and that's a sacrifice that Warriors have to make in my opinion to do what they do sometimes and that's where the Detachment from that is so hard afterwards to come back

to because you've just moments of Detachment from that for so long over time you know and in history some have been able to to fear that to stay attached and connected to to that Soul while they're doing it but uh that just wasn't the case for what I where I was at right and what guys around me were at why it's so hard right now guys coming out so we get up I'm the first guy to touch the target I I climb up sneak up to the roof my spot and my job is to to

protect the assaulters right and see what they can't see so we have another team coming around the other side a little delayed because they went a different way um we weren't sure if we had been you know compromised at all yet my opinion is we still weren't um so they climb up they get set they get ready and in the meantime I'm looking over down here and there's five people sleeping in the courtyard we knew that um and on the way trying to figure out who they are what they are making sure none of them

are the hostages right and that there's a lot that go goes into that identification you know hair color skin color you know what do they look like is there any chance that they're they used to dress them up like in Buras you know so that we'd think that they were women right so there wasn't any of that they're all males and through a process of that you know getting to 100% Clarity that like none of them are the hostages but at the same time you know going hey the Roe the the the Intel is saying

that who these guys are and what what what networks they're part of when they know we're here they might blow up the whole [ __ ] thing in themselves they're willing to do that right and all of us and we've experienced that before or they're going to [ __ ] spray something from under you know from their little sleeping nest and in my job yeah we're on a mission the hostages are the most important but if I hesitate in a decision dude I've gone through this so much and I'm going to try my best here

because I've went through a whole process for years of a of of making sure I'm not justifying but justifying and like going back and forth with my ego just just trying to understand this thing but also for for so many years I I was just coping with it with addictions and drinking my face off and just being lost with that new trauma right and figuring out if the decision I made was the right one because the decision we I made was we're going to kill these these these five males right and eliminate any risk to

those assaulters because if one gets hit because I hesitated on that decision then I know their wives I know a bunch of them I know you you know they're all around our community you know and [ __ ] that's my that's my job right so then I started to eventually separate this in to a duty decision and a and a Soul Decision right um so when the breach goes off I I'm eliminating those five so I and I did right thinking back now there were some things that happened outside that I there were some loud

noises some things some some mistakes that I think may have spooked those guys into stomping those hostages down into tunnle system down below because when a couple years later when they got turned over that reading that he the thing that he wrote was like Hey the first time I woke up in the middle of night and to getting kicked down a [ __ ] hidden tunnel and was like knocked out and came back to and then as soon as I came back to there was a loud explosion which is the breach from what I I

think um and so it wasn't like hours or days it was it could have been seconds that we missed those guys right mhm maybe maybe not uh so the breach goes off the assaulters come in they get into a fight with a couple of uh couple of guys eliminate them and we're waiting to hear that got them you know in that room the beds are still warm there's still food from whenever before you know exercise bike whatever and hey they're not here and that's when essentially like okay we're going to clear this whole village now

which we did and got other compounds we're looking at to you know to go look at to go do and as I'm doing my job hopping from roof to roof covering my guys I'm going like this Rush of just sort of stress comes over me because now it's Soul Time right what I didn't know what I don't what I think I didn't know I still go through this to go did I know or did I not know in that moment that two out of the five males were kids so in the moment it doesn't affect

me too much it's my job um you know we wrap up that Target we get back it's a failed hostage rescue a team discusses like we always do we go hey anybody have any issues with everything that went down tonight raise your hand no even the guy who I I told you the platoon she was like man I'm well I brought it up because I didn't you know hey I don't know I think I you know I I know I did the right thing Duty wise but something here is [ __ ] [ __ ]

me up right now right and I'm you know I'm good he like you good I'm like I'm good but I don't know what to say what I what I feel is like hey you did the right thing with that you know when you breach in Afghanistan it's a blind assault there's [ __ ] dust like they're that those guys' clearance was like you can't even see your hand in front of you so imagine that you know hey feeling your way into bad guys you know and making sure they're not the hostage so that was that

the last I ever talked about it with anybody the craziest thing was those guys got extended for a month to do more more operations around this Rangers get involved other guys get involved and uh like all right guys I got to go start my job in a [ __ ] week and get back in time for it so I fly back and no [ __ ] like two days later I'm up in DC in this office at ditra with a [ __ ] suit and a tie thinking about these kids and and just trying to

figure the [ __ ] out but not understanding how um and I'm in this [ __ ] office I'm supposed to be getting readons and badges and [ __ ] and I've got this there's this [ __ ] you know guy who's the boss or whatever the program manager and he's like [ __ ] eating twinkies and [ __ ] all over his desk and I'm like Hey sir what am I supposed to be what do I need to do here and he's like [ __ ] what the what are you talking about get your

ass over the [ __ ] brief you're supposed to be in and I'm like okay you know [ __ ] dick you know and I go do my best to figure out what the [ __ ] I'm supposed to be doing in that in that job the first couple of weeks you know just feeling lost like the [ __ ] am I you know and you know over time I got into the swing of it and it was really actually a really good experience doing that work it's just you know as I processed through this

and and and went through this whole phase of just these years of just [ __ ] figuring myself out just getting the [ __ ] shoveling the [ __ ] out as much as I could while still adding more not not being able to figure out why I couldn't get it off and so imagine he's torturing himself and imagine he's doing that in a way that is counterproductive and that's also counterproductive in relationship to his family is that helping or making it worse right I mean so that's something to think about it's this isn't I

mean I'm speaking hypothetically because obviously I don't know this person I don't know what their situation is but almost everyone has other people depending on them you know and if you overburden yourself with guilt and take yourself out you're going to hurt people around you so you have a moral obligation to not do that if you can avoid it so that's one of the things I would investigate to begin with I would find out well exactly what happened what were the situ requirements conscientious people tend to overestimate their culpability in any given situation and downplay

the situational factors and that's called the fundamental attribution error and it's particularly true for conscientious people so I do very careful analysis of the situation and find out well was it likely that anyone would have done that in that situation okay well then then well then you there's another problem that comes along with that which is well what does it mean about life that you can be in a situation where you have to do something terrible to proceed that's a religious question to some degree and and there are ways of addressing that in terms of

atonement likely what I would have him do is I would ask him to begin with at least is like well imagine that you were counseling one of your friends who has this problem and you wanted to help him calculate a pathway forward that would enable him to get on with his life what would you require from him what sacrifice would you require for him you know because people will often burden themselves with an impossible moral task and it's not helpful you're not you're not it's not right to take yourself out of the game right so

I can't be much more specific than that because the devil's always in the details it has to be personalized to go back to that moment and now look at it instead of [ __ ] hiding from it which I was doing for years and every time I wanted to think about it I would just go [ __ ] get drunk you know and I got to this point just a few years ago I'm eight I'm eight years out now and maybe four years ago was Rock Bottom where this thing plus the childhood and all the

[ __ ] I was doing outside of what I what I really wanted to be right which was just good I [ __ ] you know I had this friend in my neighborhood take his own life just in the little Lake across from my front porch and just to go to that spot just cuz it made me feel good I just like take a paddle board over there and I'll just kind of lay there where he took his life and go [ __ ] I like feel something here and then every time I leave this

spot I don't feel anything and because of that you know eventually I started to just took about a year of this seed being planted and growing in my head to we like man I can just [ __ ] I'm a burden on everybody I'm yelling at my kids I'm a horrible husband I'm addicted to everything I can't figure this [ __ ] out with these kids so you know one day I found myself uh just playing slack sight squeeze you know the drill when you're [ __ ] dry firing um but with one in the

tube and then that was the moment I'm like what the I didn't even really realized I was doing it I was just thinking and and then I now think back to go thank God I wasn't drinking a bunch there because I think that in those moments in that in that critical moment which is the the veter the veteran suicide like critical moment that I think about a lot is a lot simpler than what what I think we all think it is because there's very specific thoughts going on in that moment right this guy you know

this couple of guys or my team thinks I'm a [ __ ] or something like I had another friend take his own life and I he was at that out station with me and he got sent home because he was became an a really bad alcoholic then he he was a great operator before and then he turned into this and he started getting bounced around teams but you know they they got it to where he could like survived through it and he got to retire and then right after he retired he took his own life

and for them it was a little different it was like dude that whole [ __ ] of like if if a guy is not performing for whatever the reason is in that moment when you guys start to when we start to jump on it and be like that's a [ __ ] to do the [ __ ] bag and you just betray him after everything all the good he was in those hard moments like that's the [ __ ] guys are thinking about right so there's a much better way to do that [ __ ]

and I even participated in some of it with a different guy we got rid of it's like we're hard [ __ ] but we don't have to play that game when when it gets to that we can get rid of a dude for not performing or put him somewhere where he can get a little bit better right take a break or whatever it is without going H he's and [ __ ] jump on that and be like [ __ ] you know because once that label happens that's a betrayal and fast forward to later that

critical moment those little memories like those are what they're thinking about what we're thinking about in my what I think one of the things that I've done with people who've had post-traumatic stress disord I've familiarized themselves with the literature of horror that's very useful so there's a book called Ordinary man that details how a battalion of German police officers were turned into the murderers of naked pregnant women in Poland one step at a time there's a book called the rape of Nan King which is about what the Japanese did in China at at the runup

to the second world war the woman who wrote that Iris Chang she committed suicide it's a rough book human beings have a very dark side and now and then that what happens to someone who's Trum ized as they run into that dark side well how would that be conceptualized religiously well if you meet Satan at the crossroads there's no necessity that you're going to recover from that like these are realities in fact they're the deepest realities that's why people break apart in a situation like that they come across something that's so dark that they just

can't function well the first thing to become aware of is that's actually how the world is constituted it's constituted as a landscape of Good and Evil we're very bad at teaching people that we we portray it in our movies always in action adventure stories always a landscape of Good and Evil a mythological Quest the Lord of the Rings The Hobbit the Marvel Universe you know those are all Landscapes of Good and Evil what we don't understand is that is the landscape now partly we don't understand it because we're in pumpkin shells right it's like you

know noral middle class existence there's not much good in it in the extreme sense there's not much evil in it in the extreme sense it's all middle of the road but that's not life I appreciate the fact on people who who think like that because so many people just justify their their wrongdoings to in their head they justify why they did it and they they they look for reasons to convince themselves on on why they're why they're sinning why do you think people why is it so hard for people to just admit wrong instead of

justifying well so that that's related to that question you had about Pride we like to be right if I'm right and you're wrong I don't have to change and so that's pretty convenient for me because change there's a desert part of change like if I have to change I have to fall apart and then I have put myself back together it's very annoying to fall apart you know if you're arguing with your wife and it turns out you're wrong then you have to go figure out why you're wrong God only knows why you're wrong like

maybe it's a deep wrong maybe it's a pattern and you have to take maybe 10% of you has to go something like that and that's a kind of death it's really hard and so people will insist that they're right so they don't have to change because change involves sacrifice change involves death when you learn something new the stupid part of you has to go and it has to die and that's actually painful you might have put a lot of work into that stupid part of yourself you know and then you have to let it go

and then it's not like you're like I said it's not like you're better as soon as you let it go it's no you're just lost on that front then you have to figure out what to do instead in in the religious orientation what you try to do is you try to replace insisting that you're right with trying to find out how to be right and that's the opposite of Pride that's humility it's like okay there's some pathway forward here that I could Journey down if I could only specify what it was no matter where you're

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