Nick Irving - "The Reaper" | SRS #118

[Music] Nick Irving MH welcome to the show man thank you brother we have uh I've been tracking you for a long time years and uh been trying to get your attention and then finally what about 6 months ago wish yeah finally got through to and uh and uh man I'm just honored to have you here and I think you're a great representation of the community that you come from the ranger the ranger Community and um and uh I'm really excited to dive into this so words man thank you thank you my pleas I live up

to it you know you will there's not a doubt in my mind but um starting off with your introduction here so you're a husband and father you've been married for 16 years going on 17 yeah congratulations thank you it's crazy man I've been getting you know there's like a 90 what is there like a 90 something per divorce Rate of special op yeah and about the past five or six guys I've had on I've all had lengthy 10 years plus married that's a good thing then it's a rarity like you don't see it often I

think it's just uh it's a it's it's a good thing yeah I say it's a good thing to be able to stick with someone that long yeah the deadliest sniper named The Reaper with 33 confirmed kills over the course of just four months you New York Times bestselling author of The Reaper In way of the Reaper author of Reaper the board served six years in US Army Special Operations third ranger battalion 75th Ranger regiment you're the first African-American to deploy into the global war on terrorism as a sniper in your Battalion owner of hard shoot

you train Personnel in the art of long range shooting and former mentor on the fox reality show American grit that sums it up pretty good yeah did I miss anything no no no I don't even care Anymore about that stuff man to be honest like there's a few TV shows and movies but no yeah yeah I don't even care man do you like doing the uh TV stuff not anymore I lost that itch um I was doing a show for Discovery Channel and I lost the itch thereafter the show was called Master of Arms it

was like a forged and fire where you make they would uh Forge stuff and I was one of the judges but I would just test the weapons and I just had a bad Experience with that and then thereafter I was supposed to do a TV show with uh Tim Kennedy and a few other snipers and it was my second go around with that stuff and I just kind of lost the itch after it the the I guess the Hollywood lifestyle I've done like the Transformers stuff and you were in Transformers too yeah Transformers uh then

I helped with the show um the movie The Wall terrible movie it was like it's it's like a two star movie on Amazon but It's called the wall and uh it was it was a cool experience because I got a chance to hang with uh one of my good friends is John Cena um we've been hanging out since like 2015 I believe 14 or 15 good guy and it was cool to work with him but other than that and the guy who did uh Jason Bourne the director uh cool experience but it was just it

it it I lost the taste after that all the stuff that is going on in Hollywood that you hear about I've had my taste of Nothing along those lines of just just weird stuff in Hollywood after my last show with Discovery Discovery Channel yeah yeah definitely uh a lot is coming out about the circles in Hollywood oh yeah none of it seems to be good positive no by any means but but moving on so I have a subscription account on patreon that's they have been here since the beginning they're top supporters and so I give

them an opportunity to ask every guest possible a question MH and So here is a question from Stephen Casey what is the best decision that you've ever made and how has that helped you that's the first question yeah that's a that's a tough one wow what's the best decision I've ever made and how has it helped me stop caring so much that's probably been the best decision stop caring so much about the outside and care more about care more so about what's on the inside Meaning what's going on in my life observing that how I'm

feeling emotionally the the the issues that I've had knowledging that taking care of that even if you're not I wasn't taking care of it you know when I first started to acknowledge it it was are you talking about quit paying attention to external influences yes yes man that's crazy I was just on a podcast yesterday and that's I said the exact same thing Really that's crazy hey man I was remote viewing and I heard you say that that's what happened but that's that's like the best thing or best advice that I've taken from myself was

so yeah stop caring so much about the external forces and and things that are out of my control I can't control what other people think what they believe what they you know want to believe about me or anything I can't control that only thing I can control is is is myself so not worrying so much about the outside you know just more so about taking care of me like when we die we're all going to go in that cast basket by ourselves you know and I think that that is my biggest takeaway knowing that at

the end of the day it's just going to be me anyways so I I really shouldn't have to care about the outside forces and and other things that I can't control you know I have to stand before the judge by Myself at at the end so yeah you know that's uh man that's great I'm glad you said that what led you to to start looking internally instead of externally MH and and how did that I mean affect your daily life maybe your business life any anything I would say the birth of my son so long

story I've always wanted a family like a kid I wanted to originally I still want to just the way things are I don't have control over that but I knew before I turned 30 I said before I Turned 30 my 30th birthday I want to have my first child fast forward my 30th birthday on the date my son pops out being there and and witnessing that seeing that and the the the struggle that he had to go through he was born with like a weird heart condition this you know it's healed up thankfully now but

it was uh it was hard to to watch and not have to feel so much power of wanting to D I'm going to already choke up dude but yeah having no control of That circum irance and realizing like I guess what how important life really is you know it all came in that moment and that's when the switch went on of you know like nothing nothing really matters and I wanted to be there for him in the long run so that's when the the switch definitely changed was yeah I wanted to stick around for him

how did it how did it uh affect your life oh man drastically I I I I was too caught up [Music] in outside circumstances outside forces that I had no control over I was too caught up in the outside world and having that Center Point that Center focus being my son and like everything I guess one away if you want to yeah all the the issues that I had not issues but my perspective of what was important in life changed and what was important for me would be able to to raise my son and and

be there for him so It definitely helped out as far as ignoring what everybody else thought I wanted my son to think you know my dad is the you know coolest I can go to my dad at any time no matter what I'm going to be you know I'm always going to be his dad I don't I can't always be with some guy on the Internet or some family member wants me to be I can't be that I can't be all those things at once but what I can be is better for my son so

Yeah man thanks for sharing that I appreciate it but um before we get in man we we already starting to get deep here but uh but before we get into your life story and that's what I want to do we're going to start the childhood go into your military career go into your transition civilian career businesses that you run and uh but before we do that everybody gets a gift what do we got man everybody gets gift we just talked about this that we We did the gummies man we did now those are made in

the USA and uh are legal in all 50 states they are legal yeah fortunately or unfortunately I don't know I can make it work man I can make it work dude my wife used to send me pounds of these overseas pounds I ate in one sitting a full pound of gummy bears and by the time it came out I had one large Gummy Bear in the toilet [Laughter] Oh man but um thank you yeah you're welcome but uh so let's dive in let's start with childhood where did you grow up grew up well born in

alburg Germany uh both of my parents were Counter Intelligence in the Army uh during the Cold War time copying Morse code deciphering Morse code and uh sending it off to the NSA I believe at the time after they left the army or during that transition we moved from alburg to Florida I stayed in Florida for about a Year in Pensacola a year or two my parents my mom retired my dad stayed in for a little bit longer and we moved to Maryland at this place at a at a place called a was on Walker Drive

near Fort me near NSA um not on Fort me the base but near it it was like a government housing and stayed there for from 80 jeez I forget the a 80 I want to say 89 or 90 to 93 stayed in this haunted house that was built on a graveyard and Cemetery and legitimately haunted legitimately haunted all right we got to dive into this legit bro like how hold on how old are you I was at the time let's four or five years old okay four or five years old that was my first experience

when I I'll never forget this experience so I'm laying in bed on this you can look up this old place it's Walker Drive Fort me near Fort me There's no more houses there it's just all built up and and torn down but um lived in this all brick house that was uh connected to another home that if you poke the hole through the through the the wall you could see the Neighbors in the adjacent room few hundred foot home very very very small and my dad would always say if you stood in the front door

you could spit and you'd hit the backyard it was very small Home so as a kid we would always hear like people running upstairs footsteps and my parents would you know ignored it's just the house creaking or whatever and these footsteps would start to come down the stairs you'd hear heavy foot uh footsteps just going around upstairs and they start to go downstairs and they would stop few other times you would hear conversations but like Whispers or like staticky Whispers on a radio station you couldn't tune into all the Way and as a kid you

don't think too much of it you just hear stuff but the scariest most traumatizing if you want to call it that experience that I've had I was laying in bed and now to this day I'm paranoid of sleeping on my back because of it laying in bed on my back and something woke me up and I see a soldier who at the time I had no idea what his uniform looked like it was different than my dad's I didn't find out later that it was like a old uh Civil War style uniform and I see

a soldier walk past my doorway I rub my eyes put the blankets over my head rub them some more and look back down and now it's not just one one there's soldiers a line of them walking and they would turn to go down the stairs uh into the the main living room space maybe 10 soldiers passed by the last Soldier he got in my doorway turn looked and started to walk into my room towards me jumped out of my bed ran through him Into the bathroom curled up on the toilet and started screaming my dad

runs out and I'm screaming at him please don't SP me please don't spank me cuz that's what normally would happen and he came in grabbed me held me and I told him what I saw as best as I could and he says I know son I know I I saw it too that was my first real ghost experience whoa he he did see it too yeah well to pass by uh his room was to the left of my room um and yeah so I guess they were Coming out the wall in the hallway walking past

his door and my door before they went downstairs and he saw it I saw it terrified me and the looks of their clothes uh never forget the uniforms they wor wore the the long gun with the musket or not musket but it had a long not sword but knife bayonet at the tip of it and they were marching with the little cap hats down the stairs I had never seen that uniform a day of my life and I won't forget it and the last guy Walking into my room yeah did you have more experiences yeah

yeah I've had one I guess more recent when within the past 15 years or so I was working at a gun range uh called rifles only it's a big uh precision rifle uh training facility and me and one of the instructors his name is w and we're driving down this dirt road to get to where the facility is it's at night time had just gotten back from the bar I wasn't drinking I was designated Driver but I was sitting passenger seat but regardless we're driving and I hear it sounded like a radio came on the

static and I heard this old lady chuckling laughing and saying something I couldn't understand what she was saying but it sounded like she was in the floorboard it's what it sounded like and I look at him and he looks over at me and it's it it completely went off it stopped he looks over at me and he's like did You hear that and I'm like dude you heard that right and he's like it's not my radio his he had an old pickup truck the wires are all over the place and it's a old beat up

pickup truck radio does not work and we just kind of ignored it after that never talked about it he didn't want to believe it but we both heard what we heard it was an old lady in the floorboard talking some I don't know what she was saying so old lady When if you're out there you know what I'm talking about damn but that's my experience well let's go back to Childhood so you so you grew up in a haunted house in Maryland yep and it was built on a cemetery uh that was like pretty much

and as a kid I remember okay so this is the weird portion my mom her side of the family my grandmother they've been introduced to Like Voodoo or magic and I knew this trick as a kid of how to listen to hell with a sewing needle and a cup and you know to listen to the screams of hell I don't know if it I never heard anything but you hear I think it's just the echo inside the cup but we would leave a devil pie for the devil or whatever we would make it out of

mud and stuff like that me and my nextdoor neighbor Kia and Tasha two girls and we were doing stuff like that As kids like weird stuff like that my sister another scary story for you she we uh hear a knock on the door or she dead and she goes to the back door and there's two women standing there and all white there's no white people where we live at there's two blondhair ladies standing at the door they took her out to the playground and when she came back she learned how to make a uh where

you take a like a gallon of milk cut it out to make a a bird feeder And she came back with that and the ladies taught her how to make it but there were no ladies so yeah that was another incident wow I don't know she knows that one vividly very very strange yeah very strange how many siblings did you have at that time living with us we had three so me my younger sister and my older sister and I have a another sister I just found out about like a year ago um and my

brother I thought was my friend when I first met him in Florida I Thought that this kid was cool but turned out he was my brother too so I have that I know of yeah five holy [ __ ] yeah my dad was getting around man he was getting around right on um well let's let's go back so you grew up around Voodoo I knew about it um like different spells and stuff like that if you want to call it that like how to make a woman fall in love with you how a woman she

makes a guy Fall in love with her how to listen to hell and stuff like that but how would this how would these subjects get broached in your household my grandmother at the time when she she grew up around at more my mom had a spell put on her supposedly and it made her stomach swell up with they don't know what but she was she used to steal oranges and stuff off of people's trees in Georgia and one of the neighbors and where she lived at on this dirt road and Told her to stop doing

it or she was going to put a spell on her and she hung up something in the tree my mom ate it and she got like inflated or something so that's where we got I guess introduced to it and my cousins the older ones they would teach us stuff too like don't eat spaghetti from a chick you just metant or if she offers it to you why because do you you want to know I guess yeah yeah let's hear it well it's Nasty but her menstrual cycle blood making the sauce for the pasta they would

use that and give it to the guy to make a guy fall in love yeah or that attachment and for a guy to do it he would use his underarm sweat and cook it in that noodle water put his underarm sweat in it to make a female do the same thing are you serious is this stuff real I mean what do you think I've never I've never been you didn't pull that on your wife did you no and if I did I wouldn't Tell her no no that was that was destined to be I think

how prevalent was that in the in your household I mean was that my parents did they had like a Ouija board and stuff and back before they had I guess their religious religious Awakening he had a Ouija board and stuff like that but I was never exposed greatly to it it was more so like my dad would show us how to lift people when they sit in the chair and you stack your hands up on top of them Until you all feel the heat rise up and then you lift the person out of the chair

and they float stuff like that but that's like what he taught you how to do that yeah yeah what let's go into that I've never heard anything like uhh I've never I've never yeah I've never I've never wow I don't know anything about this stuff so you sit in a chair right um like a stool or a little chair and you have one person on each so you have one person on this knee this knee This elbow this elbow and one at the back of the face touching or sitting or not touching yet then they're

all standing around you the person in the chair is sitting everybody else is standing around you then they take their hands and they stack their right hand first and then they stack their left hand on top of that so it's a big pattern each one is stacking over and over until all the hands are complete then when the top person the Top Hand Says they feel the heat and everybody's going to be calling out I feel the heat when they feel the whatever is rising up through their hand when it gets to the top person

they all go like this and they touch this side this side this elbow this elbow and the person at the back of the neck does that and you lift the person up and they float you seeing this happen yeah yeah I've done it to my sister me and my cousins are you serious swear to God Yeah I got to look this up yeah what do you call it I don't know I have no idea um like they're legitimately floating legitimately well you're touching them and they're in the air it's like some levitation stuff like that

but they're not you don't let go you keep your fingertips on them and I think that's where the the energy goes back into them and they lower back down yeah wa you should look it up yeah I will look it up definitely wow we'll do It one time it need some more people but it's legit holy [ __ ] yeah my dad used to do um he did it in the army during a what do you call those things where like a talent contest or something like that where they were just just like some people

would go up and like sing or a talent yeah talent show talent show and that's what my dad did with some of his co-workers and they had the biggest guy sit in the chair and he had females do it all women and he Lifted up the biggest guy in their unit out of the chair yeah whoa yeah that's crazy dude totally wasn't expected to go down this road yeah yeah 100% man so what I mean what is it is it a religion well not really necessarily um like Voodoo comes from Africa and it was like

according to who you talk to or what the belief is that was our original religion but it was not Religion it was just the spirituality of the manipulation of the spirit world and that's what they practiced before religion was introduced and they were killed and stuff like that for practicing what they perceived to be it's black magic from black people's magic so they said no more and introduced a different form of spirituality which I'm not against I think that there's a I think all spir religion is a form of magic even prayer Is a form

of of of magic you know it's just the you're the belief that you're putting something into the spirit realm asking a deity or an entity to whatever you want asking you shall receive As Above So Below as within so without all these things so they all coincide with each other I think all roads lead to Rome it's just how we interpret and practice different beliefs very interesting yeah back to Childhood yeah so what what were you other than Voodoo Yeah what were you into as a kid what what grabbed your interest wow uh I love

space I love I used to want to be an astronaut um my dad was a big space geek he was always you know taking me outside to look at the look through the telescope to look at the Moon and look at the stars and show me where Orion's Belt was at and how to find the North Star the Big Dipper little Little Dipper like I teach my son this stuff you know at at his age now and he's seven but you Know how to find north south east and west and different star constellations on how

to read them so I've always wanted to be an astronaut like originally that was my first dream so for fun pretending I was an astronaut making cardboard boxes and wanting to blast off into space that was like my original Dream until my dad showed me uh Chuck Norris Delta Force and Charlie Sheen uh Navy Seals then my Whole perspective of what I wanted to do changed and then school I got into school and I wasn't like too great at it and the astronaut thing was out of the window why weren't you great at school do

you weren't into it or I wasn't really into it um um like first grade was easy anybody can say that but I I just like to play and I like to joke around and I don't know if I had like ADHD or something like that but it was Hard for me to to focus and the way I used to read and I guess I still do read um like for me I would read one sentence and build that story as opposed to reading the whole paragraph and then building it or building it as you go

along I would break each sentence out of that paragraph or chapter into my mind to build that story and I guess it just took too long and you know I wasn't great at math and anything so started to realize I wasn't great at school in like The second or third grade and that's when the I used to get into a lot of trouble at home for not bringing home you know good grades so yeah and after oh after the haunted house I moved to uh little bit near uh in the near the city portion of

of Baltimore Maryland not this city but in Maryland and that's where I stayed from 1993 to 2004 when I graduated and that's where we spent my entire life pretty much what did you enjoy doing as a kid Were you an athlete you like to be out the woods I mean yeah I loved well I love being in the woods with my granddad we would take trips to this small place called hoganville Georgia uh small small spot in Georgia and my granddad had a lot of land um so yeah the whole like slave lineage my great

great great great Granddad was a slave and no a slave owner I'm sorry sorry and ended up raping one of The women and so we come from like that lineage and that land and that plot of land ended up staying with the family because the guy who was a white guy who was a slave owner of course and having a relationship and with one of the the slaves and Mistresses whatever you want to call her and somehow that land because he loved her got inherited to our family and he has a like a bunch of

land out there and uh yeah my mom my grandmother and my Mom picked cotton and clean homes for people um so yeah it it was like that but I would go down there in the summertime and I love being outdoors with him he would take me hunting and showed me how to shoot my first gun which was a 20 gauge shotgun and how to farm so I love to I I like farming not I'm not a farmer but I like to to grow and plan and maintain the crops and stuff um I like doing that

as a kid very cool yeah and then I guess around Middle School is where I got into the whole sniper thing and well the sixth grade uh my mom helped me make my first Gilly suit out of yarn green yarn sewing yarn and a a black jumpsuit that I had and I called that my first ghilly suit laying outside in the field or in the grass and trying to scare people and then I actually learned how to make a ghillie suit in middle school with the burlap on an old uniform and yeah hiding out in

my front yard sneaking home from school or Pretending to be snck uh sick so I could come home from school early so when the kids got off the school bus I could scare them when they got off the school bus and sometimes take pop shot I don't know pop shots with a little BB gun and stuff like that they were all my friends and stuff but that's what we used to do as as kids shoot each other with the one pump yeah uh BB guns and yeah so that was like my thing I guess as

a kid sportswise I was Never great I've tried them all minus tennis and golf no my best friend Andre his Grandad is a Vietnam veteran he had golf clubs and we stole his one day and I ended up uh getting in trouble but it was cool to I guess the concept of golf I think was okay I just never like could hit the ball good so wasn't good at that sucked at soccer football I was okay I just likeed to hit people and I was like never really great though Um by far I had no

future in it basketball Too Short you know not great at it either so SPS no not so much so pretty average kid not not not a tremendous amount of athletic ability not great in school mhm what was the home life like were you close with your parents and and siblings no um so my older sister our second oldest uh she was in and out for the beginning portion of my life my younger years she would be in and out For a year two uh so we never really had like a close relationship she had my

back when I would get into fights I got into a lot of fights and she would help out when she could and but she was always gone too my younger sister she's always been there we have the same mom and dad and we're tight we're close um just like your average brother and sister like we we fight we used to always fight um she's tough But other than that it was I think as far as my family my mom and dad know we were they didn't know how to love in their defense and they've been

open about that they didn't know how to love um they come from a a broken home that you know for for fun my dad would get beat up by his dad and his eight brothers and sisters and my mom's eight sisters and brothers like that's what the dads did in the household they would Get wasted and and beat the kids with whatever objects they could find oh man yeah so they didn't know how to and that lineage has just you know going on and going on so when I popped out and we did it it

was didn't they didn't know how to love or how to show emotion my mom was never told by her dad that he loved her for you know her entire life um my dad's dad died when he was in the sixth grade and Yeah and then it was just a a hard lifestyle for him they were both poor yeah very poor so it was they didn't know how to love so for me how my parents would deal with anything was violence or yeah was by that so it was it was like that yeah do you think

that affects you to this day 100% really 100% me and my sister were having a conversation about it because she she had has issues too she was raped as a as a kid and [ __ ] Yeah by a close friend um yeah it was we it was not the best childhood but as far as an affecting us now 100% um I Tred and I'm you know I don't I don't want to be like that so I stay away from that but because I know what it does to a child you know and I don't

want that for my son but for my sister and I it's uh 100% affects us to this day um not many friends I think we push people away a lot you Know this is going to sound weird but like we weren't allowed to have friends growing up my parents were very yeah controlling in that nature of who we could hang out with who could be our friends and yeah was very why do you think that is I I don't know I've I've questioned that so much and I'm I don't know I I at one point

I thought it was because they did not want the word to get out that yeah I get spanked and beat you know at least three four times a Week you know and that was normal that was extremely normal but whether you didn't do anything or if someone was having a bad day or it didn't matter you just always felt that you weren't good enough so it was my fault that I just was not being a good son so it was in my mind it made sense why I would get spanked and beat um looking back

at it of course I I don't think that that was the reason I know I wasn't a a bad kid you know but then also growing up I had You know my nextdoor neighbor the only friend my friend to this day Andre um we've helped each other a lot I've seen his mom be beaten by her uh boyfriends and I've had to help with his mom and I've seen him and his brother get absolutely destroyed by their 250 lb dad or stepdad at the time um I just grew up around that so it wasn't like

my next door neighbors sold drugs And I've seen them fight and you know with people who owed them money or whatever and it was just normal so I didn't feel like I had it that bad you know how did you I mean how did you and your sister navigate your way through that stayed in our room yeah mainly for her I would stay outside as long as I could but it always felt like if I was having too much fun my dad would cut it short yeah like come inside and do something go clean up

something or yeah Was never really it never really felt like I was allowed to be me or have that much fun without having mom or dad or whatever pick something out and Bash you for it you know damn man yeah what would you say to kids that are growing up in abusive environments today wow if you had a piece of advice for him man it's going to end one day um if you have someone to talk to talk to them but it's just the whole you Have to be careful about it I I get it

that you don't want to get anyone in trouble in the wrong way and you don't want to also get yourself in even more trouble that's a tough one I mean for me the what I did but I don't think it's the healthiest way you just know what going to end one day and I wanted to leave my home at a young age you know young age and couldn't wait to leave home I haven't been back since like that so it's going to end one day staying Strong and yeah that's like it sucks not having I've

never thought about that I don't know that's a that's a really tough one I can just you know go by my experience but also see what that's done to to me and my family it's uh not say did you ever run away yeah yeah how how young were you when that started oh my old enough to where I thought running away was where you take a stick and a bandana and you tie it at the end of it and put your stuff in there and I went Like down the block and stayed for a few

hours and realized I don't have anywhere to sleep um so I went back home and I ran away to my friend's house one time and I knew that if I stayed away too long that when I got back my parents were going to destroy me so I just came back and got the Lesser spanking as opposed to you know getting laate on pretty good wow so you graduated in 2004 yeah and what happened then immediately Thereafter I was I signed the contract while in high school I was um so in the 10th and 11th grade

I went to Annapolis I was an rltc and I was in Navy SE kadak core and I went to this baby seal program um where you have to like to get in you take the the the the the real seal PFT or test where I think it was like a 500 meter swim in 12 minutes 30 seconds or something and two and a half mile run and pull-ups sit-ups and it's to the standard but did that at 16 got scuba qualified my whole route was Navy SEAL and it didn't pan out that way I'm colorblind

and navy didn't want me so in my senior year is when I signed the Army contract and I had to get the parental consent from my parents to sign me off and two weeks after I graduated I was on the bus heading to uh airport to go to Fort Benning yeah real quick so you wanted to be a seal yeah you couldn't get in cuz you were color blind how did Rangers come up How did they get introduced to you so I failed the color vision test the first time and it was called the easy

horror test like this book and they you see the the numbers in that pattern of colors and I didn't see any number except for the number you're not supposed to see and they told me I was colorblind and I I could not be a seal or anything of that nature I had like a very small uh I guess list of jobs that I could do in the Navy none of which I Wanted to do and my ASVAB score was not high enough to get those jobs so I came back and I studied online dialup Internet

the not dialup it was the it ran on a modem but I downloaded all the easy horor tests that I possibly could think of or find on the internet at the time and I studied them and the answers so when I went back hopefully when I retake the the test I could pass it because I studied the test and I know the answers to it I went back a month or Two later not even not even two months maybe like a month later and instead of the isara test they had this weird light test and

it looked like a traffic light but different colors of light and I completely failed that one too so I broke down I'm crying and next door this Army check uh nurse she heard me crying she came in or as I'm walking out she peaked her head into the doorway and she had you know come over to to her room went over there and it was an Army Recruiter there she had she was talking to and she introduced me to him and he start talking about do I know what Army Rangers are and Green Berets I

was like oh I know what a Green Beret is um but I'm not too fond of what a ranger is I saw them in blackhaw down but I didn't like what they were doing it was not what Delta was doing so I thought I didn't really know what a ranger was and he said well they're like Navy Seals but they just They don't swim I was like okay well that's fine I can do that then and the lady who was going to admin administer the color vision test she held out the book and she traced

her fingers on the number so I just called it out I was like oh 12 5 and I couldn't see anything and I still have the document where I had zero out of 14 to 14 out of 14 of my color vision test wow and that's how I got into the army damn no kidding yeah in 9/11 it already happened so we're Already it's is 2004 time for him so we're already at War yeah I mean is that what you wanted to do oh 100% 100% after I saw what happened and like a some of

the seniors during that time were in rltc were going to go off and you know join the military too and um I just didn't want to feel like left out and missed the I already felt like I missed a party but I wanted to at least get in and and contribute some type of way I had no other option I was not I couldn't Do college I graduated uh with the 1.7 GPA from high school and I barely pulled that off so it was the only option for me was the military and yeah I went

there after 9/11 and knew I was going to deploy once I found out the exactly what Rangers do granted as long as I made it if I made it then I knew for a fact I was going to go to combat so that was partially my driving force the other was I grew up telling my you know best friend Andre and you know My family that I'm going to to do this thing I'm going to I can't come back so to fail and not make that would mean I I yeah it was not an option

I couldn't let it happen I had to do it what about the sniper thing always well not always wanted to be a sniper um since Gilly suit days is when I wanted to be a a a sniper like I was a decent shot as a kid growing up and going out to the country I was okay but not like you know anything that Would make me stand out but the sniper thing came after so for us it is you go through at the time it was called Rip this was after basic and after Airborne um

make it through Airborne overcome my fear of heights my shattered tibia fibia pull that off and going on to rep Ranger indoctrination program it was like a month I believe I want to say it was a month long and all it was was just a Beatdown Fest of you Just get smoked we had 98 95 or 98 guys going in and we graduated six from that original class and seven with the rollover so we had a seven-man graduation and um made it through that and got into Battalion so that's less than a 10% success rate

that was a weird class it was a it was a brutal class it was bad we it was a smoke Fest after that is when they uh slowly started to come out with rasp how long is Rip at that time It was like a month long a little over a month I think is it a selection process yeah yeah it's a selection to get to Battalion uh the 75th um now it's called rasp Ranger assessment selection program or some I forget what it's called but now it's rasp and it's essentially the same thing but they've

extended it to where they teach you something now so when you get to the Battalion you're just not like some guy who's just uh beat up weak Private who can't do the basics of a a door breach or breaching a door or clearing a room so now they've Incorporated that um back then it wasn't like that and so yeah we graduated I go into Battalion uh I get there right as my guys were coming back from Afghanistan I did an entire train up with them and I deployed to to crit Iraq hold on hold on

before we get into the deployments of the regiment let's take a quick break And we come back we'll talk about what was like for you showing up at the regiment oh my yeah perfect you know I've seen a lot during my time as a Navy SEAL and a CIA contractor and I've learned even more hosting this show the one thing I can tell you for sure is that it pays to be prepared right now with our national debt surging to unfathomable levels Global tension rising in the corruption in Washington ask yourself are you Prepared financially

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of experience coming home that had to be pretty intimidating Oh yeah dude it was like when you put on that tambouret you feel like a ranger you you look like a ranger but and I felt like I had really accomplished something you know which I did but do you get so do you get the tan Beret after rasp when does that happen yeah as soon as you graduate rasp you get the tan Beret so you you start off with the Black Beret which used to be the Rangers Beret then regular army adopted the Black Beret

Rangers got the Tan and as soon as you graduate rasp like you're doing your ceremony you do your Ranger Creed and you get your tambet and you D your tambouret and from there you I had to walk across the street through this big privacy Brown fence and like 200 yards away and that was Stir ranger battalion so I didn't have to like get on the bus or anything just carried my bags went over to the compound checked in got my room and I had two duffel bags my bed and some Empty drawers in my room

and I lived out those duffel bags like my entire stay at the barar but yeah my first day there no one was uh back in you know Battalion they were all coming back from that deployment so I had it pretty much to myself for like two or three days a weekend or so so I didn't really know what to expect I sat in my room most of the time and sted at the four walls called uh family every once in a while Um what's your family think now that you've made it I mean it sounds

like your parents were really hard on you they that's a good I tell you sounded like they were pretty upset that you your grades weren't phenomenal yeah you weren't a stellar athlete M it's forgive me for saying this I feel the same way about my childhood so it sounds like you felt like you were a very unimpressive human being at the time so what was it like when you got Your tanre oh wow and no how does that feel to tell your family or did you even care there I didn't they didn't it didn't well

they cared to the degree of well at first no one thought that I was going to make it so in basic training I didn't like it you know I didn't like waking up at 4:00 a.m. I wasn't used to that I wasn't used to running rcking and all that so I wanted To quit basic training like early on very early on and I remember calling home on the pay phone on a break we had during basic and I called my dad on the uh pay phone and I'm telling him I don't want to be there

and I want to come home and I was just going through it and he told me you can't come home like no stick with it suck it up I guess um so I never really wanted to be there until like after I don't know the first seven weeks or so Out of the 14 week basic is when I kind of to you know fell in a groove of things and it was not smooth sailing I messed up fractured my tibia fias and and both legs and uh it was kind of smooth sailing they came to

that graduation to your boot camp graduation to my boot camp one and they came to the Airborne graduation where I got honor grad and you got honor grad yeah from the kid who I still struggle with Heights to this day anything above 10 ft It's like I could black out bro I could I could black out so it was uh traumatizing but it was cool to overcome that and I don't know if that's why I got honrad but I got honrad and they came to that graduation and I think that's when the realization of he

might actually go through with this and I became a ranger and it was like they were happy but I guess scared at the same time because they knew what comes after that Was going to be combat or War so I think they at that point wanted to separate themselves from that um my mom she claims to this day or she says that a lot of her uh depression comes from that time in my life was the constant deployment but I just never understood that because I didn't feel that love at home you know so when

it came time and I actually did become what I was going to what I've been saying all those years it was like The realization for everybody kicked in but it was too late so can we backtrack just a second cuz I excuse my ignorance I get sometimes I get a confused between Ranger school and and rasp it sounds like rasp is the biggest kick in the ass out of the two 100% 100% so I'd like to revisit rasp I mean how long is rasp about a month a month long it's a month yeah oh a

rasp now I'm not sure it's over a month when I was going through it was a month a month long no days what Does that entail oh yeah Monday through Monday physical like a Beatdown um it really K so for you guys you have hell week and for us we have cold range we March out I believe it's a 12 or 15 Mile Ruck to cold range and the time limit given which was like I forget 3 hours four hours and I forget the time hack for it but we make it there we March out

there a lot of guys normally don't make the time hack um so you've lost let's say 10 guys out of that portion you get To coold range and there's no like facility you live in it's all outdoors and it's just like hell week I guess minus the water and all the boat carrying like we carry logs and a lot of running a lot of just physical Beatdown uh you do l naav there's no sleep you sleep maybe out of the three days I believe four days maybe we slept once but it was a a short

sleep um I remember during Co range just like Max Mass Exodus of guys just quitting quitting Quitting 10 one day 20 the next day and for me it was like I thought that I was going to be that guy because I looked at everyone else I'm like man they're taller they are built like you know rest of Soul Pat Tilman like many Pat Tilman like football players are are built good and I just wasn't built that way of you know what I expected a ranger to be or spec ops guy I mean Rangers do have

a stereotype of Being skinny yeah wiry and short individuals yeah yeah I've always got seals to be the opposite I think to be a swimmer I always thought you had to be like Michael Phelps height or whatever but yeah you I can tell a ranger out of a crowd there's a very distinct personality and look um but yeah so it was uh just a mass Beatdown and we're talking like a 90% attrition rate yeah it was brutal man it was brutal and it was the biggest shock for me but Everything was kind of like a

blur it all blurred together of no sleep little food and just a continuous just Beatdown man physical schol Beatdown everything's hurting everything hurts you're never on time nothing's ever good enough it was just a massive a smoke Fest a smoke Fest like you might get put in the room and do push-ups for I don't know a few hours until the room sweats that's what we make it rain so we you know bunch of guys in a room sweating it's hot humid They crank the uh air up turn the heat on and you just it's just

uh looks like it rained in there there's so much sweat all over the place and sometimes you'd have cond condensation build up on the on the walls in a small room it was just stuff like that a lot of running it's like every Ranger was a marathon runner and I'm just I was never built to run like that I could do my Five Mile in 40 minutes I'm like a 38 minute Five Mile and that's like my my Max the mile runs Those guys could do you know the fastest I've seen was like a 530

520 something 53 something [ __ ] and fastest I've ever got was like a 6:30 and it was one on one occasion fluke of nature maybe the clock was wrong but that's the fastest I've ever been I'm normally a seven minute seven minute guy but um and Rangers just run and run and run and that's what I didn't like about it was that's all we do for PT and that's all like we focused on was the endurance and Longdistance running and I I hated that hated that and Ruck marches um a lot of that lot

of physical Beatdown and like I said by the end of end of the class it was dwindled down to six guys and we had the rollover come in the last portion is there any team events are there any team events yeah and not it's all individual yeah it's pretty much individual like especially uh L naav and night L naav and yeah I would say it's it's a fair amount of just being by yourself or Doing things to a standard just for you as opposed to a team and if one guy messed up then the whole

class would get you know in trouble for it but at the end of the day it was it came down to just who wanted to quit and who would not quit they had um like one event at Cole range where we're standing in formation we had just got done getting our balls smoked off and we're standing in formation outside of the the big tarp trucks the Deuce and a halfes and the instructors are by this big barrel fire and they're cooking and roasting hot dogs and they had pizza out there and they're like all you

have to do is just come over you know we know you're hurt we know you're sucking it's cold just come over got hot coffee we got pizza and and hot dogs for you guys waiting on the other side but if you come over here you you can't come back and a few guys left to go get the Food and that was it for them they told us to all get on the back of the trucks we're heading back and they drove around for like 30 minutes and you think you lost all concept of time so

you're thinking oh we're finally going to go back and hit the sack for a little bit at least be in a a room on a nice bed and we drove around for a little bit they opened the tarps and we're still at Co range where we started off at and that was a big demoralizer so that more Guys quit um after we arrived back at coold range got smoked some more got back on the trucks and then we finally went back to the barck and was there ever a time where you wanted to check out

you wanted every day every day what you going watching other guys quit watching other guys quit I would um I guess not feed off of it I guess you could say feed off of it where at least I wasn't that guy so if I wasn't that guy I can go a little bit Longer until maybe somebody else quits they can't have us all quit I just have to outlast that guy or the next guy or someone else but every single day I wanted to quit more so in Ranger school but every day I wanted I

wanted to quit I think I was just too stupid to to even do it at the time too much ego too much ego to get up there and and you get respect for quitting they respect you and they don't treat you and call you names they don't treat you bad so it was More so of an ego thing for me of not wanting to quit but yeah I wanted to every day interesting so they make it appealing to quit oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah huh so that was the biggest thing about rip and I

think that's what I think made it hard to is it was different than basic training you're more on your own and you're given a set of instructions to do something and you do it um you're not like in basic training where they hold your hand the Whole way it was different in that aspect too and just how mean they were like these guys were demonic it felt like I was terrified of Rangers going in I saw a guy with the tambouret as a kid I'm you know avert your eyes and I would always say to

myself oh my gosh this guy's probably killed people and that would terrify me because they a ranger to me always looked very neat very you know yeah very neat very well put together and knowing that this guy or Thinking that you know this guy has taken a life was like weird to me it scared me so I was always scared to look these guys on the eye of yeah that so I was scared of all my instructors interesting yeah all right so let's move forward again mhm you're checked in you're at third ranger battalion mhm

what's it like when you meet your team terrifying I heard a mass like a stampede coming through the barracks they're screaming Loud doors being kicked and they're screaming where's the [ __ ] new guy and I'm huddled in my room sitting on my bed terrified like there's no way they're going to find out I'm in here and all of a sudden I I locked my door and I see my door shaking and they're picking the lock then they kick my door open all these guys come in and they flood my room with beers in hand

and like you got to drink all this so I'm looking at him like I'm not even a Drinker like that I've haven't I had like one hinin in in uh airborne and I hated it so now I'm stuck with this room full of Rangers shoving beer down my mouth and throat and I'm well let's take that back that sounds really bad but they're giving me a bunch of beer and stuff like that to drink and I remember getting just absolutely shitfaced and that next morning we had to run like six miles and me throwing up

but it was it wasn't as Bad as I thought it was as terrifying that these guys in my mind all just came back from killing people in war and they yeah yeah um they were in Afghanistan during that time and they did a few recovery operations with the Seal team and most of the stuff in Afghanistan that's when they were getting into more of the direct action type stuff so they were up in their package and their amount of combat that they did see um prior to that it was a lot of working With Delta

and pulling security and stuff like that before you know I guess they got uh their hands full Delta and we started picking up the more direct action and purely just direct action raids and sometimes doing um side by sides where Delta's hitting one building and we're hitting the other building and you know uh working with them in that that nature um yeah it was terrifying but also at the same time I felt Like it was good to be a part of a a group like that I just wasn't sure if I could hang because they

were animals physically fit and I didn't I had no idea if I was going to be able to even keep up with these guys so I thought my time was going to be shortlived because like these guys could be hammered one night and the next morning running six mile run like it's nothing and it was you know I didn't think I was going to be able to to keep up with these guys And then we went on to the training cycle six months training cycle started off with Airfield seizure and that was my first introduction

this was like two weeks a few weeks after I arrived and my first exercise was taking over an Airfield and had no idea how to do it except for how to jump out of a plane and it was my first nighttime jump and full combat gear and equipment and as a new guy you're stacked onto this c17 and the Humvees Are in the middle of the the formation lined up on the the B of the c17 and watching them get sucked out the the back ramp as a new guy never seeing this my mind's blown

of like wow this is pretty neat I'm actually doing like cool gu stuff and it's time to jump my I first jump in Battalion I'm weighted down you jump out into this pitch Blackness and my risers got stuck under my left leg I ended up tumbling tumble through my risers and I get a cigarette Roll so I'm falling and I knew something was wrong because I can still uh still hear the the wind of the whistling of the wind and the black figures bodies like passing me at a higher rate than what I knew was

you know not right and I can hear people as I'm following uh pull your reserve pull your reserve screaming pull my reserve and I watch this thing come out like slow motion and it you know comes out and I'm looking down I don't have much room left maybe 500 ft a Little less than 500 ft or so and I'm coming in on the tarmac of the the runway so I'm trying to slip and pull my risers on my Reserve but those don't steer the way your main parachute will and I'm all tangled up and tied

out my gun a Mark 48 machine gun is flung out somewhere and lost in the field it popped out and yeah bad experience I landed on one leg tore up my pants had no weapon and I show up to the Rally Point in the middle of this Airfield About about to take over the Airfield and I'm mimicking like I have a gun because I didn't want to say hey I lost my gun as a new guy my first jump so I'm mimicking like I have a gun and hoping no one's going to notice and the

first thing they noticed like Irv where the [ __ ] is your gun and I say I don't know Sergeant it's it's somewhere in the field I lost it and he blew his lid so I had to mimic the entire taking over the air Airfield without a weapon just nods A helmet and yeah nothing so got the entire Battalion in trouble we all had to go out there humiliating is a new very and not on on top of that the next morning we had to all get on formation the entire Battalion pretty much and walked

the Airfield while I stood on the back of a truck and watched all the guys look for my equipment to make me stand out so that was my first experience [ __ ] yeah after that it was never happened again I mean that that uh that can Create a lot of hatred oh yeah it was a lot how did you Rectify that didn't [ __ ] up anymore and perform formed to my best or as best as I could not failing anything I wasn't allowed to like that's the whole I guess the big thing about

Rangers is the standard like if you mess up a standard or if you don't perform to standard you get RFS um which was release for standards at any point in time in your career you can be Released so I guess to rectify that was keeping a staying the grey man for as long as possible until my first deployment and keeping my head down and just performing and I figured and which happened was after my first deployment is where I started to get respect and become a part of that that team of doing my job on

deployment I think that's where most of it came from it was on deployment yeah when did you figure out where you were going for your first Deployment oh like the last month a month prior it's always uating one minute you're going to Baghdad maybe Afghanistan jalalabad or you're going to to crit or mosul um it's always a toss up and like that the last moment is where you kind of find out within that last month or so uh we found out we were going to to crit Iraq and they were saying it was a pretty

hot environment at the time which it was and like we ended up doing that Deployment 120 missions and that 90day deployment we were doing 90 days at a time before we went to the 120 to keep up with uh Delta's rotation but the 90day 120 missions was like average for you did 120 missions in 90 days yeah yeah what's going through your head when you figure out you're going to De crit Iraq I was scared I thought it was going to be like Saving Private Ryan where you get off the for me I thought when

we lower the Ramp in the c17 is cuz we get picked up in our backyard so we don't go to like an airport it's not announced when we're leaving it's just a c17 lands in the back Runway behind our compound you get on and we fly to Germany from Germany we go to where we're going I thought when they lower the ramp it was going to be bullets flying I'm going to come out charging and that's how you enter War um but instead it was the exact opposite we uh And I kind of got that

picture as a new guy when I was also high on ambient I took the ambient pill before I was supposed to and I didn't know what ambient was I knew it was a sleeping aid but I took it before I was supposed to so I had to fight staying awake while on this c17 waiting to taxi Off The Runway and as I'm sitting there waiting I started to see faces pop out of the chairs I'm hallucinating like I'm cracked off this ambient and I'm Hallucinating and I'm seeing stuff and my team leader Salazar he's like

did you did you take your ambient before I'm like yes I'm I'm tripping and he's like dude just wait finally get an opportunity to sleep but um yeah we get off the c17 we're running off or I think we're going to run off and I don't have a MAG for my gun with bullets I'm like where do we get bullets did I miss that that meeting where they handed out the bullets before we go on this deployment And I'm saying to myself when we run off the c17 I'm going to pick up the first guy's

ammo that drops like saving privet Ryan but you legitimately thought that's what I thought that's how we come into war and they lowered the ramp and you see people walking around little uh Coffee Bean yeah shops and Burger King joints and stuff like that and food places and it smelt like not bad it smelt like well Iraq but where we first landed at it just smell normal I didn't Smell like bombs and anything like that burning bodies no it was pretty pretty chill when we landed um drove to our compound it's a compound within the

big compound but it's all sectioned off with big 12ft tea barriers and satellite Communications in there and you have to have a badge to get into this compound and stuff like that it was pretty neat and within the first eight hours we were in country is when we got our first mission and I remember going out that Night landing from our we were on a Blackhawk helicopter feet hanging out the off the side doors and we land and get off and I see them raid this home I'm a machine gunner at the time so I'm

pulling security and just hearing the stuff going on and inside and how they got to the was the op uh direct action we were going to go kill our capture a high value Target and they got there the assault teams went in did their thing And looking at it through nods was just like it was like watching the news almost of it didn't feel like I was really there it was like an outer body experience you know of watching these guys do their thing and I had been watching them my entire training cycle but seeing

them in combat do it and I wasn't sure if it was a nine Banger going off or just a regular Banger or if it was gunshots going off inside the this little home we were raing but it Was cool seeing them do that and I got a chance for the first time to see how fast they were and how good they were but it was just surreal like I didn't feel like I was really there like did I really earn my spot to be here as a new guy or I didn't feel like I was

really I was ready yet I didn't feel like I was ready yet 6 months went by really fast yeah you know so I felt like that but got into the groove really quick I had a really good team leader who were there Any engagements on that first stop not the first one no um um just bangers going off that I thought were you know gunshots but it was just the I guess a normal routine op we didn't start getting into firefights until maybe a few Ops after that it was very it happened pretty quick within

the first three or four Ops five Ops we were getting into pretty good contact how how long after you got in the country were you on your first operation eight hours Yeah8 hours8 hours yeah8 hours some times it's fast we've done some where as soon as you land it's you're getting geared up and you're heading out the door within a few hours you know it's really quick wow and there it's I think the way we trade off so there's always a battalion overseas so for us being third range of Battalion we would replace the outgoing

Battalion which would be first or uh first would come in to replace us so We were replacing second and the way we would pass off information and the packages and the Intel that we've GA gathered it's we just pick it up and continue on with the missions that they were going to be doing anyways if they would have stayed for another 3 months or so and we build our Intel and stuff like that from the homes that we raid and build more packages and stuff that way so if I remember correctly on your first deployment

you did 120 operations Within 90 days MH about we were doing multiple a day sometimes too five or six after five or six is when you started getting into full-blown engagements oh yeah let's talk about the first operation where you and your team and or team yeah got into an engagement yeah we were in what was the operation I'm not to it was regarding Zara um around that time we weren't going after Him yet it was around that time going after somebody else um with the group that he the guys that he ran with and

I remember Landing landing on the Blackhawks we get off and walking to the objective we were walking down this long field through like Palm Groves and we get to this compound with like a scattered buildings around it and my back is up against this brick wall partly destroyed brick wall my team Leader leader is next to me and I have we call them ramrod um another machine gunner next to me I'm a machine gunner and we're waiting for the snipers to gain position to OverWatch the objective before the assault team goes in and I started

hearing at first I thought my uh my pel tour my my hearing protection I forgot I thought that I forgot the changed batteries and it was malfunctioning because I heard these weird clicks and snaps in my in my Hearing uh protection and all of a sudden I I can feel like gravel crumbling and hitting my helmet in my back a little bit the next thing I felt was my team leader shoving me to the ground Rams down on the ground and I'm confused like what is going on and he's like dude we're getting shot at

and that's what that noise was I I thought gunshots were like the movies are boom boom you hear that and not the That snap that goes by that's what I was hearing thinking that my hearing protection was like malfunctioning so he pins me on the ground and I started to hear the snipers engaging on the rooftop and I'm hearing the snaps come in more and more we pick up change positions uh set up a support by fire line the assault team goes on the rooftop and I think they smoke like 14 guys or 15 guys

up there um like we have a newspaper article I have a newspaper article from That engagement helicopter goes down a little bird hits a power line it goes down and I see that and I never saw anything like that it just looked like maybe he popped flares or something I was not sure what that happened but then I see the helicopter go down into this big wide open field um then we get to call over comes uh he lows down we have to go rescue this helicopter pilot and get him out so They're still engaging

in the main objective a small team me my team leader two or three other guys we all pick up and we run to the down helicopter like a mile away a little less than a mile away we pick up run there the fastest I've ever ran a mile in full kit we get there and you see the helicopter pilot the little bird pilot like huddled down he had a small MP5 like the the short mp5s um he had one of those and his eyes are as big as you know saucers man and He's scared we

set up a support by fire line overlooking him and that's when ac130 started kicking in and laying down people that were they were all coming in from that uh Village nearby coming to get the pilot and helicopter pieces I don't know and yeah we start that was a a pretty intense operation on that one damn that was the first time that I've been that we I was engaged and had to like witness and and experience that yeah everything after I never pulled the Trigger like that was the first time I would say not out of

fear but more so out of like I didn't know what I was shooting at you know it was to put fire down in this general direction and you Traverse and search if I'm correct where you Traverse and search with your like a heartbeat uh you're doing that with your machine gun and helping the ac130 and all the other things we had going on mortars and stuff but I never like saw line my laser up on someone and pull the Trigger on them that didn't happen till oh shortly after and it was weirdly with an M4

I had been a Mark 48 Gunner that entire time but also drove Strikers that deployment so I was uh to go to Striker driver school in Seattle or no uh it's in Washington state it's where uh I forget the place now it's in Washington state if I remember I'll bring it up but it's where we all uh Drive Strikers I learn how to drive Strikers it's that 40ton Vehicle uh so I was a driver and as a driver you keep your M4 in the cockpit with you and I was the guy that you know would

pop out the hatch and use my M4 if need be and my first real engagement where I saw a body drop was I take that back I'm going too far ahead the first person I ever saw was the 50 cal guy and that was my first experience with killing someone but he was not shooting at us he had a vehicle full of the uh uh ID of vad but in the Back at the time they had the um what's that chemical uh that you clean pools with oh um chlorine chlorine yeah they had the back

full of chlorine and explosives like a chlorine bomb or whatever that was her thing then um that was the first time I ever had to engage a person on the top of a striker on the 50 cal and when I got the call to engage this guy I was like what the you know why and he's coming Vining straight towards us in our Convoy and he's you Know maneuvering to to come right at us and I wasn't understanding what was going on never trained for that you know and he's like my PL slaps me on

the helmet and he's shoot this mother you know cussing me out and like all right put the sights on the hood of the car this white car and put the butterfly switches on it the butterfly trigger and skipped the rounds nine round burst from the hood all the way into the driver's seat and he went veered off the road we Got out and the assaulters did and you know did their little ssse and investigated what had happen and found the explosives and yeah but when they open the car I remember him like spilling out the

car how did that feel knowing that you had just taken another man's life for the first time did not make sense to me it didn't make sense until I got back and I went to sleep and that's when I had my first weird dream of like I I didn't feel anything I Didn't feel it didn't feel real because it's not what I expected I thought it was going to be like in the movies you know big decisionmaking process yeah yeah this was like I'm not even being shot at this guy's just driving at us at

a high rate of speed and I don't I didn't train for that you know and yeah it was just it was a weird feeling I didn't have a disconnect I didn't feel anything but I went to bed that night and that's when I had the dream of that Guy was the ceiling fan and his arms were the blades and his head was a centerpiece where the light would be and he started spinning and I'm strapped to my bed and it's spinning faster and faster until his body like starts to rip apart in my room and

he just bathes my or soaks my room with blood and I'm like bathing in his blood and his face stayed still and was just screaming but no sound was coming out and that's when I was like oh I guess I don't know what I I just felt I woke up scared but I guess that was the first real moment where I had a chance to say or say to myself man I killed someone you know but after that it was like not a normal thing but it was as a machine gunner back then it was

it was a lot of shooting you know a lot of yeah a lot of laying down fire during ambushes and things of that nature um so it was it was different but it was not what I expected uh the first time I shot Someone with an M4 was I was hanging out the the hatch of the striker and my guys were just uh the assaulters were in this it was almost like a trench warfare scenario where they had this trench thing they were foreign Fighters and they had this trench system that we had to the

assaulters had to fight through my vehicle blocked off the portion of the road so they couldn't uh scr across one guy did and I remember I'm parked Next to another Striker Rico 2 or whatever and I remember him looking at this guy and he puts his laser on the guy and and his flood light when his flood light hits him that's when you see the AK and he's running back looking at our guys and he's running with an AK that guy starts shooting my guy start shooting at him so I'm like well we got to

light this guy up and I'm my first time doing that with an M4 I clicked I hit the safety or not the safety I hit The mag release on the side of my M4 mag falls out Click Boom one bullet comes out hit the guy in the back and he falls down tumbles and um yeah that was like the first experience I had with shooting a person and seeing the laser go on the guy and pulling a trigger and watching him collapse but I wasn't like the sole contributor I didn't like I don't think I

killed him myself it was a joint thing where he was being shot up by lots of lasers yeah yeah yeah it was my first Experience but with that though you know but I don't contribute to no my bullet did it was a few lasers lighting this guy up yeah and it was like that for pretty much that entire deployment was just a lot of direct action but the firefights were never to where we thought that we were being overrun or going to lose a firefight it was pretty one-sided and happened was over pretty quick did

you guys lose anybody on that first Deployment no no we did not we lost somebody in a different platoon um believe second platoon we lost one guy in during an IED blast that blew up his Striker and a a nut that goes onto one of the screws in the striker blew and punctured the back of his back and went through him and he bled out that's the only guy we lost on that deployment that I can that I knew sounds like a very kinetic deployment yeah yeah most of them were except for one and I

was Working with uh SE Team Six and Jill alabad and that's a difference yeah I got my it wasn't fun we'll get there we'll get there so you do a 90-day deployment mhm about 120 raids or Ops what what is it that you you think I mean if I remember in your outline we talk about that you you know your first I mean how did you gain your guys respect what was it about you that I went along with the program I I just fell in line I didn't like I got in Trouble for stupid

new guy drunk stuff that everybody was getting in trouble for at the time you know Barracks fights and stuff like that or one time I mouthed off to a team leader because we just got back from Kentucky we were doing uh some air air uh air assault stuff like Fast rope and somewhere in Kentucky and my a team leader who was not my team leader wanted me to recan some 240s and Mark 48 and everybody else was going to bed and I'm like dude I'm Not going to do that and he chewed me out and

the next day when I went back to work there was a handful of Team Le ERS who were waiting for me and ready to take care of things the way they take care of things in in Battalion behind the back of the shed so got rectified quick fall in line quick yeah so let's wrap up your first point when you come home I mean what very connected deployment sounds like a lot Of killing yeah how are you you processing this at home I really wasn't man I just uh I felt like I felt like Robin

amongst a bunch of Batman you know I was just Robin just to just yeah I was just a sidekick it felt like so I didn't really nothing really processed I think it happened relatively quick and I got wasted you know to be honest with you like that was the first thing we did When we got back was just drank and drank and drank and drank for like two days of B drinking and as soon as you're done that you're back in the training like there was no time to we had two weeks 13 days we're

allotted two weeks per year one month per year so two weeks before deployment two weeks after you're allotted for that so yeah I went home to Maryland stayed with my friend did Some cool stuff I guess got drunk and just hung out with friends I didn't really think about too much of anything like I didn't have bad dreams or anything like that um it just felt weird I felt different as I tell you what I I felt that I was never going to get picked on again like my senior 11th grade and 12th grade was

I wasn't allowed to my last year in high school I was not allowed to get suspended anymore for fighting I had been I had used up All my fight days if you want to call it that before expulsion and I would have to come back and repeat and just go to a different school um like I was bullied a little bit I guess you could say because I didn't fit with the the crowd of guys who just lived a different lifestyle you know I wasn't I I couldn't afford to my parents would not let me

be that guy um so not being able to fall into like the guys With the streets or whatever you would get picked on but so I I had to fight a lot you know and after that deployment coming back I knew I was never going to get picked on ever again because it was yeah I felt like that that and I've kill people you know and I don't it was not a big thing to me like I didn't cry about it it wasn't like the movies or anything it just was it just was what it

was so I carried that back and I you I still to this day carry it Of I don't ever want to kill anyone again but cuz I think it does take a piece of your soul every time you do it I don't know my opinion but if I had to of course I I would I would yeah at what point did your wife come into the picture her 2006 oh so during that deployment during like the the later port por I'm on MySpace I had snuck out to go to the MWR so that was the

only place where Myspace was allowed we were Not allowed to have it on our compound or anything like that I go across the street to an MWR that the legs use the regular army guys and I go in there and I hop on MySpace and this girl Jessica she messages me and her picture didn't pop up at first and she just says hey we went to school elementary school together just wanted to reconnect or see how you were doing and I thought it was a different Jessica that I did not like so I clicked X

and I was like there's Nothing there but it ate me up for the rest of that day and cuz I wanted to see if it was the right Jessica I go back the next day and her page loads up and it's the girl that I went to school with in elementary school in the first grade the girl I used to pick on and threw a frog on and a spider on and stuff like that and dated elementary school style same girl just looked way hotter and I looked at my friend who was next to me

I'm like dude I'm going to marry this Chick and he laughed he chuckled about it printed out her picture messaged her got her phone number came back and I called her from a SAT phone um and we talked she knew I was in Iraq but she didn't know what I was doing she knew I was in the Army and I was overseas in Iraq like it's all I was allowed to say at the time or whatever and I met her that after that deployment I got a flight to Maryland and I got a flight to

San Antonio and I Went to go see her and stayed with her as a friend for a few days um I couldn't afford a hotel I had spent all my money on on some rims 20in rims and and uh I got ripped off they charged me like 10 grand for something that was that didn't even fit on my car so I it was a bad story but spent all my money on that and uh and plane tickets so when I went to go see her I was broke but I was broke balling I made it

you know it was a it was a good time and uh Yeah she liked me but I guess not the way I wanted her to like me she wanted to be friends but I'm a type of guy who's very that's not going to happen and she was just getting out of a relationship so and he was still trying to talk to her and my way of telling her I'm the right guy was I will beat your guy's ass and yeah I just did my little worked my magic no Voodoo and we ended up dating in

2007 got married in 2007 November after my second deployment in Ranger school yeah or third deployment got married so second or third deployment Ranger school and then my second deployment got married okay so you came home yeah you met your wife mhm go on another deployment y when did it start getting serious between you and her well okay so it was always serious to me mhm she I introduced her to my friend Andre the One I grew up with and I introduced her as my girlfriend and she was like no we're just friends and uh

I was way on to her early on more so than she was me all the way to when I proposed to her like her parents they're old-fashioned Mexican and I was a gentleman I approached the mom told her my plans I don't know how she felt about it she seemed like she was cool about it until it was time to talk to the dad and I Kind of understood it that he said no but I didn't understand the why of what he what he believed in so it was when I proposed to her it was

tough because the parents were not for it you know they did not want any of that in her mixing you know so she was disown really quick really quick and as more so after we had our child um she was pregnant before that had a Miscarriage I think during my I had moved her down so it was like 2008 and the backlash she got from that initially was pretty bad and it just went down from Hill from Hill from there as far as like you know they just don't like they don't believe in in a

racial you know at all and they told me things about what they what they believed about what I was as a black guy and what they their stereotypical ideas were and why they Didn't you know necessarily want me dating their daughter or marrying her so it was it was like that still is and now they just don't talk and haven't in oh man never got over that no no no I remember when we had our child and yeah her dad uh held him in like disgust gave him back and never saw him again and never

has not talked to his daughter in almost a decade [ __ ] man I'm sorry to hear that dude it's all good I think people like that are just hey man You know you can't change that mentality one two it's not my first rodeo is as far as being like not likeed because of what I look like so it was nothing like new it was more so new to her but that's what she was you know she grew up hearing that was you're allowed to be friends with them but you're not allowed to be in

a relationship with them so she was already going against that from what she was brought up with but I don't know it's I can't I'm Not mad at it though I think it hurt her more more than anything else though you know we'll dive into that more later what so you you meet your wife MH you haven't won her over yet but you go on a second deployment yeah oh after I proposed to her she says yes and as I'm leaving to go on deployment she said no parents got in the ear so that bummed

me out I'm hurt dude you know going on this deployment I just got that news that she doesn't want to anymore so my whole Focus going over there was winning her back you know so I spent like that first month or so just constantly typing and trying to call and talking to her and trying to win her back over and she finally did during that deployment and we made the decision we were going to get married finally like when I got back and then I got the news during that deployment in 07 we were in

mosul and second deployment yes that was a terrible deployment Of mainly IEDs the threat of IEDs and yeah like my first first day in country the first stop we did we were supposed to be driving around we had a guide who had been there and showing us like different routes we could take around the city of mou we go through this one place called RPG alley nothing happens there's no RPGs and then we go down to where going down this uh neighborhood or segment of of of this route we were taking and the guy the

Guide says yeah there's nothing ever happens here it's you know silent don't have to worry about anything here and the striker in front of me blows up lifts off the ground boom and I'm like that doesn't make any sense so I call IED over the comms we go to our you know procedure as far as how to secure that site and provide cover and that was the first within the first few hours in country like watching my roommate get blown up by a it's like a 50 lb or Something I but they buried it too

low or upside down or something that it didn't split the striker in half but it lifted it off the ground like by a few feet and snap the axle on it and they had to uh you know come get it out with the big ES or big machine Big Crane or something was anybody injured yeah the driver was he was injured nothing too serious though he just covered in oil and like I think he broke his ankle or something like that God something Small minute but yeah that was my first experience being in mosul and

it was like that every every day we ran about the same amount 110 plus missions in those 90 days and that was a brutal deployment as far as the pace that we were trying to keep up and being run to the ground and that was a deployment where I went dry on all my ammo the 50 gal 50 cal Gunners all went dry on all seven Strikers the Kwa helicopters all went dry the pilots are Hanging out the side of their doors on the kai was doing strafing runs with their m4s and on Full Auto

doing strafing runs on a we were going to go take down this um apartment building like a big apartment building um we were introduced to it this leg unit who lived nearby to our compound knew who we were and our Rules of Engagement were different at the time so they came over and they needed help because every time they went Down this road they would get ambushed ped their sop was to just blow through it but they were tired of constantly getting hit um so they asked you know could we help out using our Roe

so we dressed up like them put their patches on to look like them went down the road and drove down that route and no [ __ ] man we get ambushed by this big like apartment building few hundred guys in there and dude we par Park the vehicles all turned 50 Cals that way everybody Dismounted except for the drivers and we start hammering this building and it was like playing whack-a-mole like I'm looking through the ACOG of my M4 and a head would pop up and you'd send off a round or two and you don't

know if you hit the guy but another head would pop up and another head would pop up and we were just we stayed there I think it was like 6 hours we're just laying into this building until everybody went dry drive back and they Dropped two 500 lb bombs on it after we left and leveled the place and yeah damn yeah no idea how many people anybody it was just chaotic chaotic of yeah leveling this place how did you get your head right from being basically turned down for your marriage proposal by your future wife

and walking into an extreme hostile engaging environment full of combat Being shot at yeah yeah that was the only thing that made it you know take my mind off of what was going on back at home the only thing it's up until that point like there was a you know you're just waiting to get I guess shot at or get that that Rush of your only focus is kill the bad guy and make it home once you make it home once I made it home then I would go back into rush to the phone to

call Jess and try to work this thing out but I was Always going into the mission prior to that like I guess you could say depressed you know crushed I wasn't used to that um so yeah just the firefights and it was a constant we were always you know getting in the firefight so it was easy to keep your mind off of it but it didn't have to last long it was like a month into that deployment and she was okay okay with it and we decided to get married and I was back on my

aame after that mentally I guess you could say Mentally and she was the only person to ever be there when I got back from deployment like family never I never had family members your family never did come around no on after my deployments and like my first deployment I was sad you'd watch the guys have girlfriends meet them and family I just got off the bus and went to the room got drunk with the guys and you know you know so having her and she was there for all of them after that you know always

there was Really really good at what point does the sniper come on the radar I always had it on from day one it was just the process of getting there I knew I had to go to Ranger school and I wanted to stay far away from Ranger school as possible because it was a 62 day course if you go all the way through and it's rare that guys do and why do you say that it's rare That guys do from my experience in Battalion it was rare you saw a guy unless he was really on

his aame he could even if you were it was just luck you know you could still be peered or somebody you could have a bad a bad uh I honestly forget what they call it we're a graded portion of the school where you take lead and you're you know in charge of all your guys you plan all Your your and you know uh basically like Mission planning you're your op award what so when did you go to Ranger school was it after your secondment after after that in 2007 so we're pushing almost winter time now

and I'll never forget when I'm watching 24 with Jack Bower 24 and my team leader comes in and he stuck his head through the window and he's like Irv when we get back pack your bags you go to Ranger school And I was like [ __ ] man there's no way I planned on I wanted to get married when I got back and I thought they were doing that to be a dick and just wanted to throw off that wedding thing but in order to be a ranger and stay a ranger you have to go

to Ranger school anyways or else you get kicked out so I knew the time was coming I just wanted it to be after I got married so I'm depressed because of that now kind of have to call off the wedding a little bit push it to Whenever I graduate I said best case 62 days plus maybe 70 days worst case I stay there like another guy in New in Battalion and stayed there for almost a year you know just trapped in the school don't want to quit cuz if you fail you get kicked out of

Battalion and you go to like Korea or somewhere Italy so go to Ranger school um like first day was your PT test your what your 15 or 12mile ruck march 5 Mile Run no five your PT test 5 Mile Run and all that stuff your road March comes after the fact you do your water confidence stuff uh which like I'm I grew up like wanting to be a seal and I could swim but I'm not too comfortable with Heights so like that was my only thing I had to overcome was my height the fear of

heights and that was all on mainly day one until you get into Mountain phase of Ranger school but it sucked not so much physically it was just I was hungry a lot you know I was Always hungry I lost 35 lbs and like I got sick in Ranger school I drank some water that I didn't purify and had the worms and I got really really sick painted some trees behind me one day while walking to an objective and just enough to put my pants down and spray the bushes behind me and the Ranger instructor was

like what the hell is wrong with you man uh go get checked out by the medic get some IVs stay for like a day At the hospital and come back out in the field but I wasn't able to eat solid foods for a while you know before it would just passed straight through um lost 35 lbs couldn't feel my big toes for like a year after my nails stopped growing and yeah got married extremely malnutrition and and yeah skinny and frail got married in the courtroom in the courthouse like 25 bucks 75 bucks or whatever

it was and her dad didn't show up so her mom I believe walked her down The aisle my grandmother showed up to mine uh rest her soul she just recently passed away too I he that all good yeah we're losing lost all my grandparents now so all in like two years this past two years man it's been crazy so yeah she showed up and my aunt did and that was it had a little small wedding after Ranger school and ended up uh deploying right after that again like a couple of weeks after to Baghdad so

when it comes to Ranger school and rft From what I understand Ranger school Ranger school is actually more of a leadership course correct that's exactly yeah exactly and anybody can go like we had chefs and Green Berets and I think like a navvy seal or two Navy Seals in that yeah we had a couple of guys go yeah okay but it was just like a leadership course though what did you find more difficult Ranger school or rasp I would say for me rip it was harder it was rip Was harder like does Ranger school have

a 90% attrition rate as well no it's like 60% 60% um but it's not so physical it's just fighting sleep hunger and still being able to lead people and plan and find your way around the mountains the Jungle the swamps doing water operations and stuff like that um it was tough but your day-to-day job in Battalion was way tougher than anything in Ranger School it was way tougher it was the the structure of reinder school that made it hard you know like my first go around I didn't make it all the way through I had

to recycle Derby the first phase and after that I went all the way through but no it wasn't too too tough it just sucked so you get done with Ranger school you're married mhm and then you're going on your third deployment M where's your third deployment to Baghdad Baghdad so Iraq Iraq Iraq again and that wasn't that deployment it wasn't like as intense it was fun we got to work we got a chance to work with seals on I think they were mark five boats or some like a Swit boo they had machine guns all

over it and it was like a riverine type like a rib almost I guess Mark 5 is like a speed boat no it wasn't that then like a rib okay yeah um that was cool working with them and you know I didn't know anything about those Boats but it was cool riding down the river and stuff like that and what was your experience I mean it sounds like you wanted to be a seal yeah color blindness thing mhm didn't work out mhm you went Rangers now you're working side by side with seals what was your

experience like working with the regular SEAL Teams was not bad they were cool they weren't as it wasn't what I expected and I chalked it up to I just my personal belief I think they're Really good at Water operations like no Ranger could ever do that you know but I think when it came to land work and direct action we were pretty good and we just had a lot more time with it um it wasn't like until I worked with SEAL Team Six that I didn't like I didn't want to be a seal anymore you

know I didn't like yeah it was not a good experience working with them they were dicks man But yeah there were a few times where it was back when mistal was the com or was it mistal who was a seal at one point and he was in charge of like the seals that or jok or whatever at that time and he had to are we talking about your experience with six or yeah with six let's we'll get there let's keep it in chronological order it helps me it helps me that's ad Kick It In so

you go so you're you're back in Iraq and I think I Know what this is like it was they they stood up a new task force uhhuh and uh I can't remember what they call it was like task force 21 I was on that yeah 121 or something like that something I can't remember exactly what it was but it was it was TF red and the that's it and the and the teams yeah yeah and so did you guys get to I mean what were you doing together lot of direct action like got my like

one of my coolest Awards I guess Came with with working with seals and and yeah doing joint stuff with them um they were cool guys it was like working with Rangers but I just knew they were seals You Know M um and you guys had they had cool equipment it was different than ours and your guys' weapons were cooler it was cool in that aspect and how so what was different you guys had the boats with the machine gun guns on them um yeah some of your weapons were different like Your handguns we had barrettas

at the time um your handguns were different uh other than that like we both had Mark 48 so I thought that was cool and it was like working with Rangers but you guys had a little bit like little cooler stuff like the boats and we just had a better budget better budget yeah it was cool in that aspect um seeing the things that you guys had and the missions were pretty routine it wasn't like I got a chance to see you Know seals do anything like spectacular we weren't doing anything what I consider spectacular just

regular you know going to go kill bad guys in this building or capture bad guys if we can it was just pretty much that and we would get there by water sometimes and I thought that was cool um yeah it wasn't like anything that really stood out we never buted heads or anything like that they pulled Their weight we pulled our weight it wasn't until I got the Seal Team Six and was it competitive at all no not well the only competitiveness that I saw was with six um of like when we would be clearing

one objective or side by sides who could you know who was getting their objective cleared the fastest and first um we would win but and I have a crazy story I don't know if I want to embarrass anybody but with working with them but uh Regular Sals are pretty cool they were cool longer hair I was envious of that longer hair seems like you guys' standards were a little bit more relaxed and hands in Pocket first name basis was it was cool you know in that aspect um we were very strict you know so I

liked seeing that I didn't want to cross over it didn't make me want to cross over I felt that we're kind of doing the same stuff and I really didn't want to be cold and wet and Sandy after you know Being Ranger and that I don't like the water like that you know it takes a different different different breed that's just not for me you know I'm glad I was not a seal cuz I think I don't think I would have been a good seal because I don't like water that much at all and I

don't I'm not comfortable with scuba diving like I was scuba certified young but I not I'm not like I'm terrified of it at the same time you know claustrophobic scared of heights And yeah I don't like swimming that much and the ocean freaks me out you know doesn't sound like a spectacular deployment no no it wasn't spectacular no but it was it was it was cool do you think maybe it was also with the fact that you're doing this was your third deployment to Iraq and so it I mean were things becoming very routine yeah

routine and it was kind of dying down at that time too it wasn't as hot as it was like in 06 05 07 no far from it it was It was not we were not running like 120 Missions at that point it was like maybe 70 missions 80 missions 90 low amount not triple in a 90-day deployment are you up to 12 at this point okay so it was not a lot of more free time and it just was not as intense you know but it was you're right 100% routine um the change up didn't

come for me until Afghanistan have had you had you lost anybody that you know up to this point yet at that point no not Personally no I knew guys who were who happen to you know be killed in combat or or blown up or something but I wasn't like I knew of them we you know buted heads a few times walking a cow and I might have seen them in chow or PT or something but I didn't know him like that when did you find out you were going to become a sniper after my wife

told me to go ahead and pursue it and I knew 100% I was skeptical after this is after the third Diplom yeah after that I was skeptical of going because I had built such a bond with my guys I didn't want to lose that you know so when you go I got questions about this because that is correct me if I'm wrong did you go to rrd is that what it's called no okay we get an invite um just like we get invites from Delta or whatever what is rrd uh Ranger reconnaissance Detachment back then

it was RC Ranger reconnaissance company at the time and It's like our only tier one unit um the first I had no idea they existed I just would randomly see guys with long beards long hair never in uniform on our compound and I didn't know who they were I thought they were workers or contractors or something never knew who they were you it's like it's rare you see these guys they're I don't know where they even stay to be honest with you my entire time in Battalion I've may may have seen one or Two of

those guys throughout my entire career you know and I always thought they were contractors or something like that worked with them twice overseas and I have no idea what they were even doing I just know that they yeah they did a a Halo jump into Afghanistan and we went to go pick them up and drop them off somewhere in the in the mountains and I have no idea what they were doing interesting yeah we don't know too much about I we know a little bit but it's Very very secretive yeah so you get home from

third deployment mhm what's the what's the discussion between you and your life wife with going to yeah sniper should I go I didn't want to lose that bond with my guys and the selection process I'm you're not even sure if you're going to make it you know you could fail the board and they could simply not like you for a person and you don't make it so I didn't want to experience that and like I would have Still gone back to my to my guys or whatnot but I just didn't want to experience that that

fail that failure um and I didn't want to leave my guys either so I was kind of and I I was so tired of schools at that point and and deploying I didn't have like free time it felt like with my you know brand new wife at the time so I was skeptical on it I asked her and she's like you know what you should follow your dream I I had Told her since you know when we first got when we were dating I've wanted to be a sniper for a long time and up until

that time she knew I was a ranger but we never talked about deployment stuff she didn't know about any of that stuff until one of my guys she went to come pick me up after a deployment as I'm downloading equipment guys come around and they talk about me smoking some guy with the 50 cal and she's like what the heck is going on she had no idea like I Would always tell her man we go over there we watch stuff nothing really happens I say Marines do most of the work like those are the guys

who were you know first to fight with all your might those are the guys and we don't really do much you know and I was like how much can you possibly do in that little amount of time but you don't have time to do anything so she believed it to that point and she didn't really care or ask any questions about it um until She overheard it about you know we were me and my guys were talking after a deployment and that's where she was kind of like wow you know I didn't think about that

you guys are doing stuff like that or killing people so kept it from her for a while and did it change did your relationship changed when when that came out did were there a lot of questions I think there were a lot of questions questions that she wanted to ask but Didn't know how um she mainly asked like did I know anybody who died or was I scared of coming back or anything but after that mainly it changed for her when she would drop me off the tears man she would ball her eyes out because

now she knew that I was on the ground fighting um but she never really brought up she's very quiet at the time reserved you know um very quiet she didn't want to bring that stuff up Because she didn't know how to approach it I guess either and I didn't I didn't really talk about it you know at all um I mean she's seen me cry in the car once but that's about it and she didn't really ask she just asked if I was okay I wanted to talk about anything she's always been open to talking

do I want to talk about anything and no you know at that time so it was more so of that with her um she didn't change any other way like she Still loved me the same and treated me the same just was more asking if I was okay you know or I want wanted to talk about anything did she have any support group or anything when you were gone no I mean you're you don't have a healthy relationship with your parents doesn't sound like her parents had written her and you off yep y for for

racial issues yeah and what about the team the team my guys do you guys have a Support network we had a FRG uh family Readiness group but that was like a lot of drama you know a lot of drama yeah I yeah so she stayed away from that her I feel so bad for you know for looking back at it you know she moves to a place she's never been before ex and experiencing these long durations of just not having me around and she had a job at the mall and the bank for a little

bit and other than that she had no like we had a a Dog and that's about it she didn't but I would call her every day whenever I could but no she was a a lonely person too a lonely person too you know so I guess we kind of fit good in that aspect we matched of we could both deal with loneliness together you know how was it getting into sniper I mean what is the do you put in for it yeah you put in a packet you uh do your chain of command like your

your squad leader to your you know platoon leader platoon Sergeant Platoon leader uh first sergeant platoon leader all the way up to the chain of command and they review it to make sure you're good to go uh you go qualify with the you know a M4 open sites to make sure that you can hold a group uh to make you to get in and then that's where the selection portion starts which is your basic PT test more shooting test and then a board of a panel you go into this or you take A psychological evaluation

first a couple of those written then you talk to a psych then depending on what the psych says and if you've passed everything else the physical portion and the shooting portion the psych portion then you have to go to the board and they sit you down and interview you uh interview you about your basic knowledge of what it is to be a ranger different operations who you are As a person Family Man and just to get to know who you are then they send you out the room and you'll find out later that day or

the next day if you've been selected and out of the I think 14 guys we had seven of us got selected and we joined the sniper section and there was 12 total at that time 12 students snipers uh not full fledged snipers at that time um the seven who were made it through the selection Process plus the guys who were already there most of the guys had gotten out so we had the you know the veteran snipers who had been there for a few Ro ations go in and uh after that you get sent to

sniper school but for us it was we had to do it was when we got like an increase in the budget so we sent guys to um like these civilian courses that for I went to like long range Precision uh Mountain Precision um this place down in Corpus Christie or Kingsville Texas that does all types of crazy type of long range and moving Target stuff and it was a sick course man it the best shooting I've ever done the best I've ever been at shooting was after that course um then I went to sniper school

no [ __ ] so they're sending you to all these civilian courses leading up to sniper School sniper school yeah is the sniper School army sniper School mhm army sniper School um or is it specific to Rangers no it's Army sniper school at that time it was I think it's a 8 week sniper course or I forget I think it's had you done any stalking or was it all shooting courses before you went to sniper School most of it army sniper School most of the civilian courses were shooting we did a stalk here and there

it wasn't like harped on or focused on like the extreme long range shooting course was strictly shooting And the mountainous stuff in California high angle stuff uh not the Marine high angle it's a civilian course that now was all 100% shooting the only physical thing was getting up to the top of the mountain um and then we learned like um like a there other civilians in the course no not it was just you guys okay so it was basically what did you say seven of you and you guys are just fill In these courses these

these civilian yeah that's pretty bad yeah best shooting courses I've been to were the civilian ones and like by the time you get to sniper School the shooting is the easiest part the stalking is where it gets like okay well this is a whole different ball game um all of us should I mean all the guys pass that and then from there we'll start to send out guys to uh marine scout sniper their high Angle course and what did you find the most challenging portion of army sniper school to be Target detection that was the

hardest portion of it stalking was easy I never like I was um I could have gotten hogr but I was being a ranger in a regular army school and [ __ ] off with my other Ranger guys and being sneaky doing stupid stuff so we were I wasn't allowed to get you know honrad from that but stalking was easy my last stock um so It's like a tradition where you wear what whatever you want to wear and you do your final stalk or whatever after you've passed all of them um like one of our guys

um keep his name I'll call him m a legend really really great guy good sniper he did his in like a yellow t-shirt and he stalked and made he passed his stalk in a yellow t-shirt so for me and my spotter we went and t-shirt and jeans and we managed to pass a stalk and T-shirt and jeans and Stalking was the easiest portion but Target detection was like the hardest for me hiding or finding the hidden objects in the in the field and dude that's just I don't know it takes a different and I'm not

the best describe it a little bit Yeah so Target detection would be imagine 10 military items um uh a bullet casing uh Compass protractor dog tags uh boot lace things of that nature and they put it out 50 100 yards in front of you and they hide It in the woods or in an urban environment one example like one of the hardest ones I had to find was a protractor the clear square protractors that you use on maps was taped on the side of a brick wall a white cinder block wall holy [ __ ]

tape to the side of that and the only thing that stood out which you had to look for as you're looking on the edges or the edge of the the building you're looking for that regular it goes from hard Edge hard Edge Smooth and now you have little ticks on that one let me focus in on that oh there's a protractor there but it's clear but I can see the the ticks on the protractor so okay I can outline that or taping a toothbrush to a branch in the in the woods or whatever and I'm

looking for the irregularity from crooked branches nothing in nature goes straight lines I'm looking for the straight line of the toothbrush I see that now I see the bristles on it That is the hardest portion of sniper School finding glint that's always easy it's the objects that don't have glint Blends in and you're only looking for a straight line or something that just does not fit and yeah that was the hardest portion for me that doesn't sound easy no man that was the most stressful I failed finding a clear protractor at 100 yards on a

Wall in an urban yeah yeah that was the do they give you any parameters or is 360° environment or no so there's like a a tap line in front of you and they give you your sectors you know left and right field of sectors and everything in front of you from the tapine to 100 yards or further whatever it's fair play there's 10 military items in there write them down identify them describe them and draw a picture of them of where they're at so You're looking for shape color description dimensions and you're putting all this

down um sometimes they would put a hand grenade right in front of you like right across the line and that will be the only one you don't find because it's right in front of your face but I took that I that mentality with me and I carry it to this day that sometimes things can be so close that you don't even see it or notice it it's like your nose you know if you focus on It you can see oh I have a nose right there but how often do we really see the nose that's

sticking right out in front of our face it's rare so most of the stuff that we're looking for nine times out of 10 the hardest things to find can be the things that are right in front of your face that no one thinks to see cuz they're too busy looking elsewhere so that was like the biggest takeaway I learned from sniper School interesting yeah hope it makes sense like it makes Perfect sense so you get done with sniper school you go to a couple more schools you went to a marine high angle Horse no we

would send guys to Marine high angle I didn't go uh to Marine I I was one too long of a course and I had seniority at the time so I would I sent um one of the newer guys who came in right after me I sent him to Marine scout sniper and then he went to Marine high angle or where the green marays go Um they have their sniper is it sodic sodic there you go yeah we would send a lot of guys to that I wanted to so bad but their course dude I was

married I did not want to do any more long schools so I passed it up looking back at it I wish I really do wish I went to that and Marine scout sniper I really do more so marine scout sniper cuz those guys are dude so badass man working with those guys overseas was like we working with Carlos Hathcock what I think my idol at The time and I to this day think is the greatest sniper is Carlos Hathcock but who was that a marine scout a marine sniper with the 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam

like one of the the deadliest ones uh his spotter had more but his significance the role that he played you know the reason why we have a Barrett 50 cal today it's because of Carlos Hathcock he decided to put a scope on top of a the Mau and single fire the 50 cal using a scope on Mounted on top that he mounted to it dropped the guy with it too but so I think he's the best and his stalking story of stalking this NVA high value Target thousand yards stalk taking out his Target he was

not supposed to come back it was a suicide mission and his whole story about that dude it's like cutting slits in the back of his uniform to shove grass through to makeshift like a little ghilly suit and stalking this Guy and taking him out was just so badass man never got a chance to do anything like that but close working with the Marines the Marines I got a chance to see them work their good magic man and it was phenomenal let's go back just a little bit let's talk about the sniper yeah spotter relationship mhm

how does that happen in regular army there you have have a traditional Spotter and sniper mhm in ranger battalion there is we call Them spotters but they're snipers too there there is no um spotter in rang of Battalion you're kind of both snipers just know how to do the spotter work you only practice spotting in Sniper school just to get qualified and to pass the course but after that there's no more spotter stuff we know how to do it but the work we're doing direct action stuff there's really no need for it you know it's

more typical engagement is closest I shot someone was like 20 feet and the Furthest was like half a mile and but that was a extreme Rarity most of the engagements was which was an extreme RAR the long distance half mile shot what would you say the average shot was 100 yards within 300 within 300 definitely within 300 average about 100 yards yeah well before we get into your sniper work mhm you get done with the sniper School mhm you've been talking about being a sniper since you were a little kid yeah I mean how did

that feel graduating sniper school knowing that you're going to go to combat as a dude regimental sniper a dream man a dream like it did dude everything that I as a kid wanted to do and imagine myself doing laying around in a Ghillie suit to be able to actually do it and have the title now was meant everything you know all the days that I wanted to quit didn't matter anymore it was like I'm glad I stuck With it and stayed with this dream because I could have talked myself out of it so easily it

was you know had it not been for my wife saying no pursue it I would not have pursued it you know but actually doing it it meant it me everything it felt you can't describe it it was it was a legit dream come true man a legit dream legit you know right on man yeah let's take a break when we come back we'll get into your next deployment as a sniper all Good ladies and gentlemen we're getting closer to the edge of collapse we see things falling apart around us and this is just what we're

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and much more plus you can cancel it anytime plus they guarantee you'll say oink oink and I'm just so happy I got moed so keep American farming going by signing up at moink box.com Shan right now and listeners of this show get free bacon for a year that's one year of the best bacon you will ever taste but it's only for a limited time spelled m oi n k Box.com that's moink box.com slan all right Nick we're back from the break you had just gone through all your sniper training you're now a regimental sniper getting

ready to go on deployment where are you going I'm going to Afghanistan for the first time first time what year 08 late or early 08 early 08 so it's uh or mid 08 galal Abad that deployment we hopped around it was like a terrible is this the deployment you go and work with six that's it yeah so I'm In jalalabad alabad and Bam asadabad asadabad one of the it's a weird name aabad is a hot yeah Zone it wasn't as hot when we went though I mean it was hot and the seals just did more

stuff like they treated us dude it was really bad like they would make us carry their equipment that they could not carry they'd pass it on to us uh we almost got Into a big brawl with them and their General that some general had to come in I think it was mccristal I know he signed an award for me and gave me a medal um and I was the only time I shook his hand met him but I think it was him or one of their generals came in and gave a general or an admiral

Admiral Admiral Admiral I'm sorry um Admiral and he came in and gave a speech to the seals and us because we were bumping heads one guy we were on this Mission Doing a hostage rescue with Seal Team 6 up in the mountain somewhere and one of my guys walking up the mountain he fell down and where he didn't break his leg but it folded back in so like uh dislocated his whatever tendon is right here or whatnot he snapped his leg back had to carry him out when we got to the you know debrief room

there was a bottle of vagile seill that the seal guys had place where he Used to sit and we got into an argument about that almost got into a fight Admiral came in he's like set us down had a big speech and basically said there's way more Rangers I don't care how badass you guys are there's like 35 of these guys and a handful of you guys like they're you know probably not going to end up the way you wanted wanted to so they put up this green fence in between our compound the Seal Team

Six compound and the Rangers and we had Different Chow times to eat and I remember we were going into well we were doing a mission with SEAL Team Six and won't say we were going we were going out of Afghanistan um we were going out of Afghanistan to a different place something happened one of their guys drowned and we came back without the body and we were told to we had to go out and get that guy and this happened Yeah around 2008 there's a story about it he drowned and went down the river into

very familiar with it what's that I'm very famili that there for that one that was a weird operation and how retreated thereafter and like we wanted to do the cool stuff with them they just seemed like that they were just way better and we didn't know anything you know and we had been doing da operations with you know tier one units long before we were doing stuff with SEAL Team Six And like we were getting really really good at it we were good at it you know we had one of their CAG commanders or F

sergeants come in and give us Awards we were we took over one of their missions they had to go do something else they were originally supposed to do this hit and we ended up doing it and they were impressed by it you know came in congratulated us and thanked us and went on about their way we were good at what we were doing but it was just working With them they were like it was not fun to work with like you you didn't not get a chance to show what you were capable of doing it

was like they just brushed us off to the side so they could get theor GL or whatever it was and I will say this every hostage rescue that I have been on with them dude I remember hostages getting shot you know I remember carrying out one female and I was a Kid so I kind of made a joke about it but I said man this chick must have done like a cartwheel because she was shot in her arms and legs and that was it we had to carry out in the stretcher they made us carrier

to the uh the Hilo and that was basically what we were used for just like to carry other equipment other weapons that they couldn't carry and stuff like that and once we got to the objective they would take it from us and they would do their thing it was like That so we were pissed you know the whole deployment was like that yeah damn yeah working with you know KAG was or Delta was way better way better when they came into Afghanistan I got a chance to work with their V interdiction team they were doing

a lot of that at the time and that was like the first time I'd ever seen a vehicle interdiction and how are we talking keg or we talking KAG yeah okay and how good they were and professional They treated us like little brothers but with respect taught us a lot of stuff and yeah it was cool working with them because you got a chance to see how fast and good these guys really were like phenomenal phenomenal so you're basically saying Delta took you guys under their wing big time and took what you took your knowledge

and improved upon it when their counterpart six basically just kind of push you off yep yeah exactly that Exactly that most of the guys in KAG like come from regiment I knew a lot of guys who went to KAG I had the opportunity but something about walking 40 miles no I sucked at 15 so 40 no that's Roger the line damn well that's that's uh pretty disheartening to hear yeah yeah put a bad taste in my mouth I can imagine I can imagine well let's skip that deployment unless you have anything else you want To

bring up from that deployment no that was a pretty yeah it was like that saw some weird stuff weird stuff like what I don't know if I can say on this but just their Roe was different their Roe was different the use of bombs were different and I had questions and I've also seen them I've seen them get kicked out of country a couple of times interesting from questionable you Know I don't know yeah yeah I was too young to understand I chalk it up to that you know yeah well let's move forward yeah yeah

how was the next B it was how was the I mean what I actually do have some questions so you come home from that what's your leadership telling you after a deployment like that I mean that could discourage a lot of guys into getting out and and I mean I I could imagine a Very disgruntled team yeah we never wanted to work with them again not necessarily get out it was just never ever wanting to work with them again you do such a big train up most of the guys at that point they've had you

know three four five deployments and to go on a deployment and you're told to you know stand back and stand by it's disheartening but it just is you know you're never going to do it again if you have the opportunity to work with KAG if You can and during Afghanistan like they were not even KAG wasn't really in country like that was mainly seals and yeah you know KAG was still in in Iraq but I remember when they first came over their small element that they took over and I brought over to Afghanistan they attached

to us for a little bit and went out on our missions and helped out and one of the coolest CAD guys that I met uh like E6 or E7 cool guy but he came over and deployed with us did missions With us taught us a lot uh it was one of the first times I had a compliment from somebody of that caliber I looked up to of like dude good job man it wasn't it's rare to you know normally it's just hey you did your job and and that was it they were more like you

know congratulating and hey man that was some good work you did out there you know like that so it felt good hearing that from KAG and working with the FBI HRT guys that were coming over and attached To us and stuff like that was pretty neat so yeah it was it was a cool experience in in that aspect yeah so we're coming to your last deployment correct close yeah so is that to a that's I know that's to Afghanistan back to Afghanistan yeah this is 33 kills in four months mhm let's talk about this deployment

rough man that deployment was at the height of I guess when who was the President it was Obama at the time and he had that big influx of sending the big troop or the wave of troops coming in to Afghanistan was the largest influx since the invasion of the war something like that in 2009 and we were mainly working in Helman and marja marja was like the Wild Wild West and they hadn't cleared it out yet since early on in the war you had you know a few guys here and there but it wasn't like

it was at the time Taliban Safe Haven so I didn't know what at the time but when what year is this do you remember 2009 oh month it was let's see cop died in July so March March April April April May time frame is when we got there and yeah April or May time frame we get there and first few hours routing country and um I'm coming with the mindset of like Afghanistan is lame dude there's not much going on unless you're you know in one of those very few Hot spots up in the mountain

somewhere that Outpost or whatever and I wasn't expecting too much so I told my wife the same I'm like you know after my last deployment to Afghanistan like there's nothing that's going to happen um and it was the exact opposite dude it was the omen of me being on my last deployment and normally guys on the last deployment don't make it back or they get hurt they get you knew this was going to be your last deployment I knew On my contract okay depending on how it went determined if I was going to sign up

again or en list to do another you know 2 3 4 years or whatever but we get there and shortly like a few hours in country we go to marja and that's the Taliban Safe Haven and I remember Landing the Chinooks outside the city of marja or town of mar whatever the outskirts of it and as we landed there I just started seeing tracers go up in the Air my that's pretty pretty neat or weird I didn't think too much of it it and it was their early warning system so as we we literally when

we step foot in the in the city and start walking through the the homes and little huts and whatnot we get ambushed our first mission out and I remember no the first mission is where I had we didn't get ambushed I had I killed three guys in a tree line they were countering to uh cut off our Avenue to our Extraction area and I pluck three guys me and my spotter they had AKs and RP rpks or PKM machine guns and was setting up trying to set up an ambush point and that was my first

kill as a sniper and how did that feel for you what was the distance 300 yards like 300 yard yeah 300 yards a little over 300 but I remember being on top of the rooftop and the sun is coming up so I can see now normally like 98% of our missions are at night this is the first Time I remember seen like Afghanistan or overseas in the daylight like that and I see these figures in the tree line moving and bobbing up and down and I'm like that doesn't seem right so I look through my

scope and that's where I see they are they car carrying the weapons and one guy setting up here one guy's trying to set up and take his little friend further down in the tree line so I'm looking at him I'm like wait this is a make any sense we're not being shot at But they have weapons I called it up to our Ground Force Commander and he's like anybody with weapons that is deemed as a threat engaged and I remember looking at my spotter I'm like dude we're going to smoke these dudes man before they

you know start shooting at us um took the shot my first shot missed but I remember the recoil of the and the smell of the when you first fire that round and You've got a clean Weapon It's oiled up and you get that gas blowback I was shooting an Sr 25 and shot the first guy first shot missed hit him the second time went down to the second guy my spotter picked up the third guy and I remember with his 300 Win Mag and it didn't it felt good but it also didn't feel like it

was real my first time shooting a three-dimensional moving human target I was not expecting I don't know just felt weird Of normally with the machine gun it's more bullets or with the AR our M4 it's way more but just putting one round and watching the body go down was just it was weird it was weird but it felt good to know that I was like doing my job of hey I I don't ever like to say I did something of I saved the team or or prevented something no it was just right place right time

and it felt good to facilitate the extraction for the guys and taking these guys out um that was First day in in Afghanistan got those kills and we were going out every day thereafter the next day we went to marja and that's where I get into the story we're walking in through the we step foot in the perimeter city of marja and we get ambushed and I remember this Tracer to me it looked like a lightsaber it was long and a glowing like lightsaber and it went past my head and it felt like slow motion

like what the heck was that I knew what It was but it took a minute I got down and that's when we start getting ambushed from the rooftop uh I forget how many guys were on the rooftop I'll pick it up in a minute but I was at the back of the formation and me and my spotter or sniper pimberton we I pick him up I'm the sniper team lead so I say let's go to the middle of this formation provide Precision fire so at least our guys can get out of this Kill Zone and

make their way down to the ob Ive so I get in the middle of the formation me and pton there's an m203 Gunner next to me and I remember telling him hey shoot some 203 on the back side of the house that these guys were on in case they try to flee out the back and we went to cut that Avenue off some he launched off a 203 and I remember I didn't have my ear Pro in and that boom the the crack of that 203 going off was like wow it woke me up a

little bit for Those uh in the audience that don't know what a 203 is that is a grenade launcher yeah mounted on the bottom of his M4 and yeah he shoots off two rounds of that it thuds in the back me and him set up I go prone put my bipods down he's kind of behind me and he's uh using his uh flood light to infrared flood laser to illuminate the guys on the rooftop and I can see like their head pop up and just the whites of their eyes would glow when it bounces Off

their eyes or whatnot and I lined up and I tell him hey we're going to you know pick these guys off I'm going to start on that side that's how we would work is I'd you know work on the outside work our way in and we go for the countdown I shoot and I hear a click on his end and I'm like what the heck was that and he Chambers around he goes click click again no nothing no fire and I think what ended up happening not too sure but I think s got in his

bolt Action and prevented the hammer from fully striking the primer I'm not sure but it never happened again it's like the only time I've ever chewed someone out and you know was pissed but I guess the good side I got a chance to kill all the guys myself but as they were popping up I just said hey keep your flood laser on them and walk with me meaning I'm going to engage one guy and go to the next guy and illuminate his head so they were popping up and They're shooting at us and I would

just line up the scope and pull the trigger first shot I remember hit the the lip of the top of the roof where they were peeking over and it struck low not sure if the distance was off or the angle I was shooting at I don't know or Jitters who knows what I was rarely a first shot impact guy mainly because of the range you don't have time to I was doing everything Mil Dot formula so if I know Like I always used if I have your body from top of the head to groin I

knew the constant for that was uh what is it 40 * 25.4 and I think that's like 116 if I'm not mistaken that would be my constant and I would just quickly divide the mill dots into that 1016 but I would just make it a whole number my constant to a th to get me within close range so let's say if I'm I measure you from top of the head to the groin two M dots and know That's 500 meters you know two and a th000 uh so yeah I would play it I guess by

ear like that Med distance was off I'm not saying that they were 500 M away they were relatively close like within 150 M away shot the guy cleaned up my second shot shot him in his head and I remember his head busting and it sounded like a g gallon of milk spoiled milk being poured over the the edge of the the rooftop how how close were you it was within 150 yards you could hear that I could hear the chunks or I could hear splashing [ __ ] I could hear splashing my distance dude honestly

could be off it was not it was no long no more than 150 nighttime I don't know it was within no more than 150 it could have been less than that less than 100 less than um I don't know I don't if I'm not going to say I heard it I could have been making that up in my brain from what I saw but I don't know my I don't know I think the body descriptive yeah like Even the first guy that I remember a sniper shooting overseas my brain registered pack sack of potatoes and

that's what I saw I thought someone dumped over a sack of potatoes off of a ledge and that's what my mind made up you know of I don't know the mind it happens all the time I'm not saying it didn't happen no no dude no no there was also no sack of potatoes obviously but no I know that I don't know if it's the way my brain makes sense of things or Whatnot um I'm not sure but to me it was like a jug of milk being poured off the side of the ledge that's what

my brain told myself whether or not the sound was audible or not did did he fall over no it was like fall behind the ledge no he was not off the ledge but hanging off the off the ledge like from this part portion up so his body was on the roof and he was halfway spilled over the second guy I shot his head he disappeared and at this time we have ISR Above and they're describing what's going on on the rooftop and I thought it was a dog the third guy um but he was crawling

on his hands on his hands and knees so I just saw the long portion of his back or his spine and I thought it was a dog so I shot and he went down I didn't find out it was a guy until we went onto the rooftop and I saw the dead bodies there uh yeah my guys after that they pushed on to the objective we got ambushed Thereafter I think we got ambushed like eight times that night before we got to the objective it was an 8 hour running Ambush but that was the normal

for marja um that was normal of my one of my good friends Paul Martinez was a sniper came in after I did but he was on that deployment with me he was in charge of all the uh interpreters or not the interpreters the the ana the Afghan army guys and I was always around him and he got a chance to see me do a lot Of cool stuff and that's what made him want to be a sniper but it was uh in his book he describes it way better than I ever could of the amount

of rolling ambushes every few 100 meters or so we're getting ambushed ambushed ambushed uh before we even got to the objective and then by the time we got to the objective the sun is coming up so now we have to to run out to the uh pickup location the extraction um that was like routine for that Deployment um that mission I remember so I killed those guys on the rooftop and then I may be tying these two missions together but if I'm not mistaken after that is where I called in the ac130 to drop uh

105s on a handful of dudes like five or a handful of guys and uh help blow these guys up but I also might be tying these missions together too it was a it was like that but in my mind I think that Was the at the tail end of that mission is dropping the 105 Howard surounds I'll look at the date on the award and I'll send you a copy to I maybe mixing two missions together but my mind that's how it feels it was all one and uh drop those guys and I think that

was the first time where I got a chance to feel like a sniper where you're using air assets precision rifle um and prior to that I was Shooting guys in the tree line we were being ambushed again and in the assault team went up to this tree line and I'll never forget looking through the scope they had to walk across this field me and my spotter sniper were tucked into another wood line and there's a couple hundred meters or so to the next Tree Line some guys had squirted off the objective and had hunkered down

and was setting up an ambush point in the Woodline uh ISR fed that fed us that Information and the assault team started to press him and they have a dog with them the dog's barking he's honing in on something in the Woodline and I see these like flashes I'm like oh [ __ ] that's those are eyeballs you know blinking in the tree line I don't have a clear shot nothing's really happening and then you just see Sparks erupt from the tree line and long goes down Keith goes down our dog starts running weird shooting

through the tree line and Making a circle I'm like what is going on I start shooting then I see long one of the team leaders and he's picking up Keith and we hear man down he's shot in the head and all this stuff right and I'm like what the [ __ ] or what excuse me and I start shooting guys in the tree line but I'm not as I can't really see where the bodies are I can see flashes of light I know I hit one guy after that my spotter he's calling guys out I

don't know what Happened if I'm hitting anybody after that I'm laying down more so like suppressive fire as they're dragging their guys back the dog is just running weird he finally finally come comes back to his dog handler he gets picked up the dog is shot he took around in his side Keith took around through his night vision and long took around through his helmet we called up a Carl gustoff he puts I think it was flette rounds I think into the tree line a what round Flette I've never even heard of that it's like

a bunch of it's the big ordinance but when it explodes it sends out like shrapnel like razor fragmentation yeah something like that I was not a goo off guy but I'm pretty sure it was called flet rounds and it would shoot out these like a like shrapnel in you know into the tree line and he shot that it didn't really do much or anything that we could see I think it hit low and that's when we Called in the ac130 uh at first the rounds were hitting like they were to the right and behind the

guys off quite a distance so I call up and I'm like hey I say uh like left 75 plus 50 or I'm giv calls like that to bracket the the rounds once I saw the rounds hitting where the Ambush was coming from where I knew the guys were at in this sector of the tree line you know fire for effect and and they just Started raining danger close like 105's down then I remember walking close in the distance after the rounds were expended walking across the field and his smoke is rising up it looks like

something out of a movie and I'll never forget this guy I think he was in shock or something but he's walking I don't know where he came from but he's walking through this smoke and I had changed mags by this point and I Lin up with him and he turns To go do his thing I don't know if he was out of it or what but he's about to shoot I perceive or what I don't know what he was going to do but he was just dazed and he's got his um AK with the wrapped

up tape around it and he turns and I remember plucking him but it felt like my gun didn't go off or nothing ejected and I thought I had like a squib round I fired an assault team lights this guy up so I'm stuck looking at empty out I take my mag out Looking at what's going on trying to figure out if I have a squib or whatever my guns jacked up I had no idea that I was shooting subsonic I had pulled the wrong mag so I shot subsonic at him and with the subsonic you

have to rechamber around each time and not enough blowback to chamber the next round I had no idea I was doing that finally figured it out changed out my mag and we carried on from that mission but I remember going into the tree line Seeing body parts and our the first first thing I came across was a hand and it looked like here again my mind does a weird trick where I say Mickey Mouse glove like the swollen Mickey Mouse hand glove it looked like that then I saw the arm legs like butt cheek I

think heads popped off and weird stuff like that so we were told by our commander we have to figure out how many guys for our a or after action report to and called it up how many Ekia so we're putting the bodies together essentially to see how many bodies there were and it got called off pretty quick after you know guys are gagging and it's like dude you guys were picking up limbs yeah and piecing bodies together yeah for an after actions report yeah oh yeah to make to see how many guys that we killed

and we called it off early on like after two or three bodies The Ground Force Commander looks at me he says Sierra my call sign hey How many guys was you know we're in here I'm like five I know for a fact five so we left it at five had no I'm pretty sure it was is that like standard sop have you done that before yeah I mean not to that degree we've done missions where what's wrong with an estimation like I don't know five five bodies I don't know I don't we've done bda's battle

damage assessments where you know you have a big uh Hellfire missile or something would be we had one in Iraq a Hellfire missile gets called in on a hux vehicle blows up we drive out to do a battle damage assessment and examine the bodies take pictures and see how many guys that we you know took out but that was yeah not routine but it happened of damn where yeah if we w't cutting off fingers you know but that was not my job I've seen the assault guys do it but yeah taking off or taking teeth

we had a suicide bomber working with the FBI and suicide bomber blows himself up in the Back of a pickup truck as we're approaching him I remember seeing uh one of the assault team leaders I didn't like him so I'm just going to call him M he lifts up he flies back through the air and like something out of a movie uh we get hit with the blast and luckily none of us got injured or hurt but I remember hearing his body parts falling and his head was sitting in the back of the no on

the ground near the back of the truck in the FBI guy put It up there and we pulled some teeth using our Gerber knife and stuff like that um yeah it was routine for us to do that like cutting off fingerprint or fingers and you know taking it to a compound that was not ours I'm by one of those agency you know places and yeah that was uh that was my first experience in marja and it was like that every every mission in Mara all the way until we were about to do our final mission

Our push in Maria before the Marines came through that Invasion um and our mission was to have two platoon one was going to be on the East one was going to be on the west we were going to close in and kill everybody outside at night deemed a threat uh and luckily that got called off I was sure we were going to have casualties you know luckily it got called off and we ended up doing a mission out in Kandahar um and we got hit by the Afghan police out there and that was a hell

of a ride but Mara was like that and some days I would kill one guy some days I'd kill five six guys you know but it was a it was Mar was all all like that I didn't find out until I got home I was watching the news in my apartment with my wife and I saw the Marines were going into marja and that's when it all made sense of like what we were doing there of like oh you know we were Supposed to we our whole job was to kill as many fighters enemy Fighters

as we c as we possibly could in Maria before the Marines got there and we killed that deployment like over a thousand guys total you guys you guys killed over a thousand enemy combatants yes oh yeah my wife was there during the ceremony when they announced it when when they we got our Awards I got two awards from that deployment one was a a valoris the one where I dropped the bombs was the Valoris award uh going to have some joint accommodation medals um from that deployment but we smoked a lot of people on that

deployment a lot wow yeah a thousand not all bullets though it was a lot of bombs being dropped and we were killing people every night though every night the ground guys we were killing like as a the the entire platoon you could get Man 9 15 20 guys in a night and that was a good you know Good night a good night but most of it was a lot of a lot of 500 lb bombs a lot of ordinance a lot of 105s and 30 mic mics and yeah lot of that let's go back to

that first mission mhm it sounds like two Rangers were killed that night oh no cool story Keith when he got shot through his nods the bullet did not penetrate all the way through and deflected so he ended up not getting hit that's the second Ranger I knew who got shot in the Head woman CAU well the guy other guy who got shot in his nods he was climbing up on a rooftop on a ladder a sniper he got shot through his nods but I think the bullet went into his brain it didn't kill him he

fell off the ladder and I remember him chunking a grenade up there to kill the guy that shot him in the head and he killed that guy and Keith is the other guy that I knew who got shot through his nod and the bullet didn't kill him but when we got back I remember Keith from when he first came in I'm like dude what did that look like he's like bro I thought it was a a beach ball coming at me I'm like you could see the bullet did you see Trace as a sniper I'm

like when you're sniping you could see the trace of the bullet I wanted to know if he could see the back end of the trace and he didn't know I what I was talking about but he said he thought it was a beach ball someone threw a beach ball at him and it got big and he was Knocked down after that uh long got shot in his helmet and he was fine too the dog survived we had to carry him out and I remember the Ambush and walking through the water of this River Ravine and

the dog handler patched him up and he's carrying his dog Chico on his shoulder and us getting am ambushed and that was the closest one where I shot someone 20 feet away it's a older gentleman who was uh I guess he felt that Allah or whoever Was on his side and he wanted to just run through us for whatever reason and we got the call to drop him uh he didn't want to stop we gave him commands I remember shouting at him and and Posh to and putting my red laser on him and circling his

chest with it putting around at his feet putting around next to him and he is just focused on coming at us and I was like damn he was wearing all white never forget it and I looked through my scope and I put the scope on It looked like a button on his shirt or a pattern and I pulled the trigger and it was just all white I didn't see body parts or anything it was just the all white what he was wearing the Garment and shot and I looked and then he was down I was

like wow that was I never shot someone that close before with a 308 you know that was weird and took the dog out got ambushed the entire way out and got picked up and did it again the next day yeah of course minus a dog and Keith and long yeah they got back in the fight pretty quick though wow yeah I got pictures from that when I have to send you or I'm sure they get posted up yeah we'll put them up yeah we'll put them over uh while we're speaking here what we're speaking about

but you know it's what was your as a sniper and you guys are getting after it every night you just we just mentioned a th000 Plus killed mhm in what 4 months four months yeah it but it's a combination of like different platoon our platoon was we had the lucky spot of going to Maria but we were right next St to I want to say second platoon or third platoon so us combined you know 50 60 guys yeah killed about a thousand holy [ __ ] yeah that is a lot of work work yeah what

is is is a sniper that's getting that much action what do you prefer to carry oh semi-automatic a sniper rifle I wanted To take the Bold action but it didn't carry enough rounds and it wasn't fast enough to like Traverse targets um my spotter he carried a 300 Win Mag and I saw that not the struggle that he had it was just slow but when he hit someone it was definite you know um yeah it was I would definitely I would pick the sr25 any day of the week before that I had the mark 13

the 5.56 not the was it A mark 13 my nen clat is off but it was a 5.56 DDM rifle yeah was that the Mark 11 Mark 11 one of those yeah um so I've always been like a semi-automatic guy not as accurate you know past I was going to be cocky and say like 800 met bro but in all actuality semi-automatic I think I'm I'm really good up to 700 bold action pass that to if it's a 308 like I wouldn't I could pull off a th000 yards with it But not first shot maybe

not second shot it would take a minute maybe and that's just because you know the like density altitude I knew PL played a lot with the uh ballistics and how far I could reach out accurately or before I hit transonic or the Bullet started to Tumble at a at a certain distance and it just wasn't as accurate as it would be let's say it's if I'm shooting a Target at 600 700 but reaching out to 1,300 Win Mag Bol action is what I would go to and the luckiest I've ever been was at 1,000 yards

a little under 1,000 yards with the sr25 and that was my longest furthest shot and I think a lot of it had to do with luck but and I didn't yeah like I said not first round impact I remember when the guy looked at the the splash on the ground and when he looked up the second round was already in flight and I remember when it hit him and Martinez he looked over at me and he was like dude badass and I just looked at him was like Holy [ __ ] I didn't want anybody

to know that dude I didn't think I could hit this guy that far away but they were shooting at us from as we were extracting we were getting ambushed from the side there was this big wall and we had kywa or Cobra helicopters flying in and I remember hearing like grass being like mowed or something like that like llama were going off and that was the machine gun from the helicopter shooting over us into a courtyard that Was ambushing us trying to shoot through the wall and we're leaning up against this wall and had no

IE we had an idea I just didn't make sense of it that we were getting ambushed on that side and they were trying to shoot through the wall to shoot us and then we were getting ambushed um across this like a a dam almost like a small dam or R Ravine concrete Ravine and up on this hill uh being ambushed from machine gun fire and the first group of guys at that distance I missed he had fled behind a house or the the backside of his wherever he was shooting from a house Hut whatever you

want to call it um then the second group of guys is where I redeemed myself and was like no I'm going to get this sucker um I had made a bad judgment call and in distance I was way off like two Ms low and I was half a m to the left of him and off on distance so I compensated for the second group of guys I was going after first shot missed I was still low But I was within enough of a where I could make a second shot correction just copied and paste the

splash of you know splashes here let's say half mil low mil low and just pulled it up and held a little bit right quarter mil right to compensate for whatever win that was out there that day and the second round I'm pretty sure hit him Square in his chest just based on the way that he fell like in his own footprint the way he fell but that's my cleanest shot and working with The Marines and saving I hate using that word man I didn't save anybody I just shot a guy that had an RPG he

popped around a corner and I was overwatching this Marine I had I was attach with them on his 5day operation with wcky guys and uh like the third or fourth day they were every morning they would get ambushed by the surrounding town they had overtaken this school me and the Marine scout snipers we stalked out broke into some abandoned home cleared it set up a sniper position waited all night and waited for the Ambush to come Ambush didn't come I don't know if they knew we were out there I'm not sure I don't think they

knew but for some OD reason they did not engage that day the Marines decided they were going to they called it movement to contact I believe where they just got in their vehicles and went out to the city And waited to get shot at to or get engaged and I remember that being weird I had never done anything like that I'm overwatching them and I see the the Humvees come out and I can see the Marines in it and no [ __ ] there's a guy where they started getting shot at and I couldn't tell

where it was coming from or couldn't pinpoint it we had some mortars land beside or not beside it was pretty far off but mortars landing near our position and you could hear snaps of Bullets and the Marine Convoy as it was rolling through this guy popped out with the uh RPG and he lined up pointed at the hve the lead hve and it was a snapshot like I had been out there all night so I had pretty good distance of where different buildings were and you know landmarks that we had determined and I shot that

guy and that was a I guess luck I don't know it was a really good shot really good shot and I hit him and I remember they brought me Back his uh sandal um couldn't take it and their Marine Commander or whatever uh shook my hand PT's hand and wanted to give us an award and a write up but our commander was against it and we were out that night to do the worst mission of my life man yeah but I met up with one of the Marines at a book signing and he shook my

hand and you know he says I saved his life or whatever and I always just feel weird About that like Keith he email me years later dude years later and he was like you know people call you the reaper or the angel of death but he was like dude you're my guardian angel and I'm like I don't know it feels weird I guess because I don't it's a weird I don't know it's just weird to to think I guess that you save someone I don't know I just don't I don't think I like it too

much you know Why is that I feel weird about it I it's just I feel weird about it I don't know I feel like I don't like I'm not that good to to have that like I don't know responsibility or honor to do that yeah to save someone's life is like an honor so yeah I don't think I'm I I feel weird about it you know feel weird about it if I did if you feel that way then cool but I don't know keep it I don't know I Feel bad saying keep it to yourself

but I just don't want that you know let me just I was just I was just there right place I guess yeah but I don't feel that way yeah well if you wouldn't have been there yeah yeah I don't know I I don't think of it like that I don't I don't I I don't know if I go too far down that rabbit hole it's like well what if you know the guys that did not make it back did I not do my job you know Yeah yeah do you want to go into the worst

mission of your life are you all right yeah one secondo it's all right man yeah you don't get this a lot do you all the time man yeah whenever you're ready bro it's all good man on your timeline yeah I don't call these tears I don't Know what they are sweat bro it's hot in here yeah yeah we don't have to do this no I'm good bro open book man open Buck open book yeah but yeah after that mission uh yeah so in the beginning of that mission like was a 5 day op I was

approached by the reconnaissance guys and they had caught wind of the good Work I was doing and I had racked up a pretty good amount of kills at that point so they came over to my sniper team and they're like hey man have uh what do you think about this they gave me a scenario if a car was a thousand yards away coming down an Alleyway and you had a clear line of sight to shoot the driver could you pull that shot off honestly no but I told them yes because I really wanted to work

with these guys And they're like cool get your team together uh we're going to go after we've been tracking this high value Target we're going to go after him and yeah we want you guys to Tagle long 5day op at first we were going to like infill like a 20s something mile walk and I'm like geez I picked the wrong time to do this you know I didn't I'm not a big Rucker and we were carrying everything we were going to need to survive with batteries ammo food Everything for five days and it was a

uh five six-man team me pton radio medic team lead so like six guys and yeah six-man team and I remember calling my wife telling her because I was used to calling her every day so I'm like I won't be able to talk to you for like a week and can't say much but I'll call you when I get back don't worry about anything if I don't call for you know a week or whatever so And to do that I had to use the FBI sat phone because our phone calls were always monitored at the where

we had our little phone area um so I used the FBI as my roommate or live next door to me I used to sat phone called her told her that and I was on my way I remember being on the back of a shanuk with six guys and the the crew chiefs were like who are you guys and we couldn't tell him who we were or whatever he's like this is it there six of you and we're Like yeah and we SLE I slept for a little bit like an hour not even an hour flight

30 40 minute flight to get to where we were going and we had Maps that's all I knew we were going to this location and I'm tagging along with the wrecky guys and they're going to do all their communication satellite stuff however they track phone I don't know how they do that cool guy stuff but I was just there to you know Provide support by Fire with precision rifle um didn't sleep for like the first 3 days maybe got catnaps here and there we teamed up with some Marines from 25 the two5 Marines and being

attached with them for a little bit helping out with their snipers and learning some cool stuff from them and how they operate and things of that nature we finally tracked the guy we had him pinned down to this Location and after I had that engagement with the RPG guy and the Marines we were on a flight soon there after that night to do uh conduct this mission to capture the high value Target so we called in the platoon to facilitate that and like we had the guy pinpointed the assault team was going to go in

and get this guy and the mission from the get-go just felt weird man it felt rushed it felt pushed like this particular platoon had not had A chance to do its thing that whole deployment and I think a commander wanted a ribbon you know so we had a lot of that and we don't work in daylight operation like we don't really do that so we start off the mission and I remember dude getting there was was a was like hell riding on the back of these Marine trucks I don't know what they were called like

deuce and a halfes like a a big trucks very uncomfortable We drive out there we get dropped off and I remember it looking like a scene out of Aladdin the the sand dunes and all the stars in the sky looked like that I was pretty peaceful and I remember falling asleep nodding off and I was like begging for a firefight I was like dude I'm I'm sucking right now tired day five going on day five now and the walk there took forever started off at night by the time we got There it was like the

sun was coming up so I already had a bad feeling about that to begin with but they kept pressing on with this Mission and I remember when we so my plan for my team was to set up like a blocking position a good distance away from the actual where the target building was at and to you know block this Avenue of approach that was going into the uh the town where the house was at we set up in This open field but I remember walking through the open field and there's these craters like holes in

the ground I'm like what is this stuff so I looked back at my Spotter and something told me I was like dude if something goes goes wrong we're coming back to these holes no [ __ ] man make it past this whole maybe 50 m or so we lay down I'm pulling security along this long road and the town starts to wake up and I'm just Getting these bad vibes took my night vision off try to blend in with the terrain as much as possible and I see this uh the the mopeds what do you

call those little like a moped and there's two guys on a moped and he rolls up and I put my laser on him I'm like dude he's going you know to the objective put my laser on him my laser light and he sees it and I waving around in his chest he he can't see me in the grass yet but he looks down in his chest he stops the Bike and he looks down in his chest and he looks up in that direction of where I was at I'll never forget the look in his eyes

of hate just hate bro and he backs up does a yui and goes away and I was like this isn't good this is not good and then in front of us a huddle forms like a football huddle these guys get into a huddle and me and my spotter are looking at him I call back to the wcky team lead I'm like hey uh can we smoke these guys He's like do they have weapons and I'm like no but I just got a bad feeling man like the way they're everything about them they they were planning

and looking around looking at where they thought we were and it just felt weird they were all in this huddle and then no [ __ ] Bro they're like ready break they scatter a minute or two later bro like the grass was like waist high that we were in and I remember like dude the grass Being mowed around us it just started getting chopped down in all directions all 360 it lit up and I remember looking back at my spotter the wcky guys are already breaking contact we go back and four of us jumped into

the hole I'm second guy in the hole we had the wcky team Le go in PT's on top of me I'm sorry the other guy he's right on the outside of the hole and he's in a star for like sprawled out and we had the medic behind him also sprawled out And dude we we were getting lit up bro I cannot describe how intense the fire was around us and then it like stopped and we just heard pow just one crack at a time but the intervals were very consistent and very accurate and I'm like

oh [ __ ] we're getting engaged by a sniper and then it clicked what the Marines told me before coming into that area they were like dude one we cannot go with anything less than a brigade and we're out there with less than 35 guys Two there's a chin sniper that's working that area and he's been out there for a while he has a you know supposed to be a big kill record he's been fighting for way longer than your average fighter supposedly like the Soviet days or whatnot and has been like a mercenary in

that area and from a chin sniper um so I deduced it down to this is him he's good really good so I call it up we're being engaged by a a sniper so I'm trying to do a snap bang where I Hear the crack and I wait for the report of the rifle like lightning and thunder and I'm getting like a general idea of how far away the sniper is so I pinpoint him to this tall building it's the only it's where I would be if I were a sniper zoom in I'm looking and I'm

I'm not too sure so I go to pick up my head and crack bullet goes by look at pton he goes to roll over crack bullet snaps and pops up D dust next to him then it started getting way More accurate me and the I call him Jay the the the team lead from Rey me and him pop up and we're almost helmet to helmet bro and a bullet between us he pushes off of me I push off of him and the next thing I heard was the medic screaming who's hit who's hit team lead

thinks my head is gone I think his head is gone he's like I'm good I'm good are you good check yourself I'm checking my face like dude I'm I'm hit Something's Happened nothing and that went on for 3 hours of playing volleyball with this sniper in this small hole and the fire just got more accurate every movement that you would make he'd take a snap at it he was going off of movement and I would put rounds to where I think he's at but I know I'm not going to hit him because I think he's

shooting from back inside of the room outside the window or this little slit or uh a hole in the Side of the wall or yeah the building but he's backed away from it so I know I'm not going to hit this guy so I'm just putting rounds into it then we started to hear the enemy closing on us and you can hear him Allah abbar and all that and at one point they got close where you could hear the footsteps my spotter starts engaging guys who are close bro close to us with the 300 Win

Mag and he's laying some hate down and get it it gets picked back up we're Calling in for air strikes I'm damn near crying bro I'm C I've never cussed out a colonel in my life but cuss this colonel out like we we need bombs we need help bad we're about to be on CNN getting our freaking heads chopped off you know yeah so yeah they could not drop any bombs why Obama's rule of Engagement bro we could not have anything uh with 0.1 collateral perc collateral damage Meaning if we Dropped a Bomb and their

home got hit with shapel that would be a bad deal for we were it was all about winning the hearts and Minds so getting a bomb dropped at that time was impossible and we couldn't drop it to where I had pinpointed where I figured this guy was at the sniper found his location on the map we called it in for an air strike the best that that they said they could do was do a fly over show a force the first first thing that Came over was a i it it was a F-16 or F-15

one of those Jets he came over didn't do anything next I looked up and I thought I saw a UFO I'm tired borderline hallucinating so I'm like yeah that's a UFO and it's just this thin black look like a disc and as it it's low bro low and as soon as it gets closer I'm like that's a that's a B2 stealth bomber I've never seen one of these things before in my life except for like on TV and it was Way bigger than what I expected and thinner than I expected and I remember he had

his bay doors open and he dropped flares and that didn't do anything so then we called in for bombs to be dropped on our location so I'm calling up like drop drop them on us because we're getting you know overrun and I'm I'm playing volleyball with a sniper I can barely see and I picked some machine Gunners off on a Rooftop who was shooting at us picked some more guys off in the field and then uh yeah when we thought it was over I look at J U look at the the the wcky team lead

and I'm like dude do you have a grenade and he already knew I was going with it if they get in close we're going to pull this grenade hug it and we're going to kill them with us right so he pulls out his grenade man one second Bro yeah that's where I fist bump Mike pton yeah we said our goodbyes you know one second it's okay man like I said this is the worst one so I'm good after this one but and I haven't talked about in a while so I think that is different but

yeah uh say our goodbyes I fist pound Mike pton and I'm like dude tell my wife I was not a [ __ ] and he's like dude I'm not telling Her anything she's Mexican she'll cut me I'm like yeah she will and uh yeah he did our little goodbyes whatever waited to these guys to you know overrun us and look over my shoulder and here's my dumb brain again my kid brain I thought it was the Road Runner the like when someone's running real fast and you can see the dust kicking up from the back

of their feet it was a machine gun team Cop Eric inis those guys uh they heard the call man dude yeah they heard the call of uh you know we were pinned down pretty good and uh they came in and extract extracted us and we popped smoke Murphy's Law we popped smoke and the wind blew at the opposite direction so we had no cover like screen cover or anything like that to to bound out we Were going to bound out bound out in twos and uh me and uh Mike Pimon were going to be the

last guys to bound out covering them as best as we could is you know they made it back to the machine gun team on this on the road that we were originally overlooking and uh snipers trying to pick us off as a running so I tell Mike I'm like dude zigzag and I learned this from just you know right grew up I'm like dude you're getting shot at Zigzag uh I I didn't zigzag I just vline it and it's the fastest I felt like I was running on clouds man I could not feel the ground

beneath my feet vined it to the machine gun team Mike's right behind me and you can hear the cracks of the rifle and you see the ground pop up and made it back to the machine gun team I look at cop I'm like dude I am sucking I need water bad haven't had water in you know like felt Like a day or whatever and really thirsty and mouth was sticking together and couldn't form any spit he gives me water out his back uh his backpack I drink half the bottle gave the rest to Mike and

it's up to me you know hey where we going I'm like well let's bound make our way back to the main element where you guys came from and we'll join up with them and finish out this Mission and as we pick up to move out I See some guy pop out from the backside of this little house and I put my rifle over Pimon shoulder we're both look facing that direction I used his shoulder as a brace cuz we're standing and I you know shot this guy in his as he poked out from behind the

house and like a walking fir fight um and I made the dumbest call of my life man of skirting the tree line yeah yeah should have went in it and skirted Tree Line probably tired Wanted to get to the element as quickly as we could because they were also in a huge firefight throwing grenades and back and forth uh borderline hand inand combat in this little like Ravine it was intense bro making it back to them skirted the tree line and I [ __ ] you not I saw the ground open up like a the

guy come out the ground he lifted up the grass and he came out of the ground and it's a team of guys and they started Engaging us from dude me to that that wall it's danger close [ __ ] and we get ambushed and I remember diving head first I didn't care how deep this ditch was or what was in it dove in hit water like chest deep water we all jump into it and I look over and I can see cop the guy who had just rescued us he's got his leg up on the

embankment yeah laying down a cover fire and I'm I can see the uh Like the dude's heads and in the ground and I start shooting and what I could hit I know I hit one one and uh got back down and as I get into like cover from the embankment portion I'm like this high in water chest high neck high at this point and uh I hear this loud sound like an M4 an M4 was right by my ear and uh I'm like I go to look over like dude back away a little bit and

there's no one right there but then I see the Embankment behind me me the mud like blowing up and I'm like holy [ __ ] that's a that's gunfire so I move off to the side a little bit and that's when I'm going back up to engage and I hear this weird slap and I heard cops scream I look and I see like a water hose dumb brain again pumping red water like squirting into the field like what is that then I see him fall and he's Screaming bro screaming cussing and screaming his femoral artery

was hit snapped up into his body and uh he took two rounds to to it and I remember the Ravine the water we were in like turning different color dark brown and it tasted like pennies and uh look at the a commander the lead who's with us and by this point he's next to me so I grabb him I pull him in close to I could Talk so I could talk to him in his ear screaming we need to get there's like 300 M down this Ravine or down here to this uh opening that's where

we take our dog leg and go across this field in the the safe haven the safe house was going to be there but we have to go now we're screwed in this little Ravine and this yeah screwed and as I'm talking to him I feel a splash of warm water slap my face and then he just got weightless and I Thought I don't know what I thought I just thought he just sat down really fast and he goes down I wipe the water off my face and it wasn't water it was his blood and I

see this right above his uh body armor this gaping hamburger meat hanging out of his chest I go back up against the embankment pton comes over he just puts his hand inside the wound and I remember him like screaming yeah and I went black bro I Went it's the only time in combat where I like blacked out for a second I'm staring in his eyes and watching his chest open up and PT's hand in it and him screaming and cop had stopped screaming at this point and our medic is working on him badass medic Melvin

his kit bag is floating in the water and he's doing like surgery bro you know [ __ ] put on two tourniquets bleeding wouldn't stop he's packing it trying to you know get it to Stop Watkins got hit in his foot or his ankle so we're down three and uh one of the wrecky guys came over and slapped me on my helmet he slapped me on my helmet and he's like dude get back in it you know I'm like oh [ __ ] yeah and uh he's like come over here the the sniper he's not

engaging him and he's like come over here to me behind this weird little fallen tree and as Soon as I get up next to him to get eyes on anything we get shot at and he pushes me he's like dude he's targeting you you know everywhere I went down this Ravine crack crack and uh The Plea the cries and you know everybody's jacked up and cops going in and out of Consciousness and we finally made the decision to let's just move we can't get pinned down here so he passed his body up on the Stretcher

and uh I remember him passing by and just White and uh like when we would take cover we'd shout like you do hold your breath you know we'd have to go under water to get him to safety and uh yeah he you know was out of it lost a lot of blood and uh we get to the end of the river ravine and um I remember popping out the other side and going into the safe house and dude it felt like World War II open up and I Go down Pimon looks back at me he's

like thought I was hit he comes and grabs me and starts pulling me I'm looking up at him like dude what the what are you doing and he's like I said we're getting shot at he's like no those are our guys we had support by fire machine guns up on top and I was just so you know out of it a little bit and uh we get into the safe haven the little house we had taken over and the first sergeant was in there and he's Like hey you guys get up on top and uh

we were the first ones to get up on top to provide cover as you know cop and everybody else was coming out and uh we were just told to engage everything that was a threat and uh I remember looking out and dudes were getting dropped off in like Vans with the sliding doors taken off and mopeds and bikes with like four guys three guys on them and RPGs and ammo and machine guns piling out into the City pretty far away and couldn't engage him too far away and tried some shots too far away and just

picked off everything else that I could pick off and yeah and uh we called for reinforcements the Marines to come in and they couldn't do it they had to have more people like I said a brigade and we were told that the best they could do was Park their vehicles like a mile away and we had to run to Them that was like not really an option at the moment we were going to stay in fight so we had the guys who from my platoon put speed balls together ready to go ammo and stuff like

that they were going to fly the helicopters in low drop off the Speed balls and we were going to get it out and fight all night watched the medac come in and provided cover for them it's a old school like Medevac uh with the big cross on the side And watching the guys carry out the wounded and covering them and uh stayed the fight had 210 bullets and had six when it was over left um did a lot of shooting [Music] and yeah uh we had to uh that was the initial call was to was

to remain overnight luckily that wasn't the case and as we were running low on ammo I'll Never forget the call my first sergeant was like if you got a band that if you have a knife get get ready we're going hand in hand if you know these guys are going to overrun this compound so in my mind I'm like you know what I'm going to smoke a guy get his AK and fight with that and if we go hand in hand hey Haj is pretty small we're good so luckily that did not happen uh we

did make the decision to run out everybody was like timid not timid It was a rough day um like hour 8 n at this point we have to run out the wide open field a mile to get to the Marines that finally made it and I volunteered it was like you know I I wanted to kill myself so much that day it was like after yeah after like I saw the the third guy was head debated standing up to get my head taken off you know just tired of it yeah So I was like you

know I I'll volunteer and D I'm not like crying too much am I you're all good man I'm I've never heard anything like this I'm sucking bro but so yeah we uh I volunteered to lead us out I had like Six Bullets left and I told Pimon I was like you take up the rear for the assault team make sure we're good and I'll get the front we're just going to book it I Don't have time to shoot you know so we just start running when they open up the big blue doors the gates I

have a picture of it of uh yeah before we ran out I just booked it man see the Marines on top of the hill and they didn't have enough vehicles for us or whatever so yeah we had to fit like 30 guys and four Humes and on Humvees and piled in and I had a big 500 lb Marine 50 cal Gunner laying on my chest and I'm laying across Pimon Lap and another assaulter lap he's being stood on it's cran packed in there some guys are piled on and we drive out I asked for a

cigarette and Marine was like gave me one and I go to flick it out the hatch and it landed back in my I always say that was like the worst part of that whole mission was having that cigarette burn my back and or this other guy an assaulter pouring his canteen out on me dousing me I'm Like dude it's just a cigarette but we get back and we got the target we were going after captured him and I remember doing the quick a when we got back and I'm sitting next to a prisoner before we

fly him out to where we have to fly him out to and I'm sitting next to a prisoner and I'm leaning up against my Ru sack and D I'm dozing off and I do off and I heard a clear as day man uh bullets snap past my Head so I wake up I'm looking around I'm wondering you know why is no one else freaking out you know everyone's just pretty calm and chill waiting for the helicopters to come in I'm like damn that was not even a gunshot I'm I'm still hearing bullet snap you know

and I knew I was like hurt after that and then few days uh few days later yeah cop died the first hospital he went to power Went out so they had to take him to another hospital yeah so that's the guy who saved my life I've never heard anything like that before my bad bro oh man haven't talked about it like that well either but yeah think about it every day every day every day man you want to take a break let's take a break how many guys out there are Worried about brain health you

know all we hear about is Fitness everybody's getting ready for bikini season cuz Spring's right around the corner I'm personally more concerned about my brain you look around you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control I'm going to take everything I can to improve the health of my brain and I'm going to tell you about my five favorite supplements from lard superfoods that help with brain health all right the First thing I do every morning is I have led superfood creamer it's got adaptogens and functional mushroom which are great for brain

health I put this in my tea tastes amazing who likes vegetables cool me neither that's why I take L's Daily Greens just pour it a cup shoot it real quick you got your daily vegetable intake plus guess what yep that's right functional mushroom extract there's six different kinds in here once again great For brain health after greens we got daily Reds this one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it but I can't stand beets I think they taste like [ __ ] and so I take one scoop of this put it in my water

and I don't have to eat beets anymore all right we're winding down the day now this is the next supplement I take every single night lared sleep and Recovery helps me sleep helps me recover from my daily workout and guess what yep you're right It has mushroom extract guess what it's good for your brain and I saved the best for last most of you know this my favorite supplement at LS is performance mushrooms has a ton of mushroom extract super super good for your brain take it every single day sometimes multiple times a day these

are my five favorite supplements from lared superfoods you can go over to lared superfoods.com use the promo code SRS save 20% ladies and gents I would not have partnered with This company if I didn't believe in them they take the cleanest ingredients they try to Source everything in America unless they find a better ingredient that's more quality somewhere else I think we can all appreciate that once again lared superfoods.com use the promo code SRS that'll save you 20% over the past several years vigilance lead patreon has fueled what you now see today the Sha Ryan

Show because of our patrons and their support Has enabled us to produce the best quality Productions that you see weekly including our small team that continues to grow I've done a complete restructure of vigilance lead patreon in 2024 by adding new and improved tiers and giving them a unique name tier one is now known as the Seeker tier two is known as the protector and tier three is now known as The Defender and our newest tier tier four is known as the Patriots one of our top benefits by joining tier one is Getting early access

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have positive impacts on would have never happened and for that I would like to personally thank you you can join me today for as little as $5 a month by visiting vigilance Elite patreon all right Nick yeah that was a heavy segment man dude that Chef is finally gone man he was cutting up all those onions I'm surprised you didn't You know I'm glad you kicked them out that dude was rough man man that uh you know I just uh I've not heard of anything that intense really I don't think ever and that's what caused

me to get out man that was it that was it I final yeah I was on my way out the door but that like sealed the deal of learning of cops death and just that whole mission man and I watched guys get bronze stars for just saying go do this you know and Never step foot on the field of you know never had to do anything like that but they walk away with the bronze star and you know I'm never about medals anyways I was supposed to get a bronze star with v but they pulled

it and reduced it to uh a arom joint accommodation metal or Army accommodation metal with v reduced it to that um only because they told me I was just doing my job so there was no point Of and I don't care you know but I watched the guy who sitting the at behind the desk at a braon star I I remember when we came back from uh deployment in Iraq mhm and we did some really good sniper stuff for conventional guys mhm and um which opened up a lot of routes you know a lot of

uh logistical routes we came home and uh I remember watching a guy I get a bronze star who stayed back in Little Creek Virginia for stocking the candy Machines because the candy machines were stocked every day what yeah we're sitting there at uh you know the morning the morning muster and that's we're watching this guy get a [ __ ] bronze star for stock and candy machines at at Seal Team 2 I couldn't believe it wow then then and that is about the moment I knew that I was making the right decision to get the

[ __ ] out M MH but um but uh you know we had a we had we just had a good conversation off camera and I Kind of cut it because I think it's important to have it on here about about the ego you know that runs within the soft community and and the comp the competitiveness the characters that come out afterwards we had talked about a couple of individuals that we both know that will remain but you know it kind of conversation kind of started with you know how do you how do some of

these guys live with Themselves you know people that you knew in service people that I knew in service and then you see them on social media you see them on YouTube see him on the news you see them everywhere and you know that's not that guy that's not you yeah and now they're trapped MH into into being that that character likely for the rest of their life oh yeah yeah and there are some very Controversial individuals from the vet Community from the especially from the soft community that our living a lie and um and that

brought us up to you know the comp killing mhm mhm and how that I mean I'll let you pick up the conversation you know yeah from The Killing portion um when it comes to Ego oh the while you're overseas deployed yeah you know the the competitiveness on Killing and it becomes you know I think it starts as you're killing for the country you're killing for your team and then it gets competitive I think it you go in with the mindset of that like I would say my first deployment I felt like I was doing it

for the country you know after payback for 9911 I'm finally here and I get a chance to deal out my payback but then I want to say maybe my third deployment is when I started to see and Notice that more so when I was a sniper um like killing the guy bad guys or whatever you want to call them killing people getting back and the guys who did not get a chance to go on the operation would show jealousy or you know Envy towards that and it became a competition really quick as who could get

and I never thought it was a competition you know I was right place right time um and I didn't have to look for it I enjoyed being a sniper and I Enjoyed looking over my guys so that they could do what they had to do on the ground I enjoyed and I liked working by myself and having that leadership role but the killing was never something I I expected like especially as a ranger sniper it's rare that you even get a chance to pull the trigger so I never went into it with that mentality or

mindset I thought I was going to do more I wanted to do the stalking you know setting up hide sights that's what I Wanted to do the most I thought that part was the coolest thing about being a sniper the shooting portion it's cool and all but it's so rare so I didn't expect it all the snipers that I knew some had zero kills my replacement sniper so after Pimon fell down this 75 plus foot well had to get medevaced out um I was replaced with another sniper who had I think he was in the

section for like two or three years and never had a kill um until he started Working with me and that was just because we were getting ambushed like literally every day and he had to shoot people but prior to that he never killed anyone so I was used to that the are the the snipers that had been in the in the section for so long they never talked about killing because it was rare you might have guys with two or three kills some guys with zero um but it wasn't a big thing that we harped

on you know until I started to see that Competition when that's all it became about was just killing and killing and killing and well I have more than you and I have more than you and I'm catching up to you and I'm like dude I don't one I don't care you know I don't really care and no one knew what I felt like after the fact so after everybody I've ever taken out or anything I've always felt bad about I've always felt that I guess coming from a religious background I felt that it rips out

a Piece of your soul I think that spiritually we're all connected in some way shape or form we all share one thing in common and that's the soul and we're all connected by it so eliminating or cutting that tether of somebody else's life it's like you feel I felt the same way that a tether was connected also cuz you know deep down I don't know some people in our community maybe they they are telling The truth when they say oh I don't feel anything and I I don't I don't buy it I don't buy it

and did you feel anything at the time when you were killing after the fact or was it was it years later no during the killing so it would I ride like this weird roller coaster of emotion of a big rush adrenaline dump I'm about to kill this guy I can see he has a weapon or he's shooting and I get like a rush before a hunter with shoot a deer after that though it was like this Crazy like you reach the peak of a of a roller coaster and right when you come down it was

like that freef fall of it didn't feel it's a weird you don't it feels weird it feels like remorseful the remorse part came when I got back to my room and I had privacy away from the guys and I didn't cry I just felt weird I felt sad I did feel remorseful like man I and my mind would play tricks of like did he have a family or you know who was he before That when he woke up that morning it was always weird to me that like when a person wakes up they have no

idea that they're going to die you know and if they did would they change their life leading up to that point if there was no getting around the fact that you're going to die and two 2 hours from now what would you have changed differently and that part is what I played with in my mind like did They carry on about their day did they have a good day did they I don't know you know so it was weird in that aspect of like wondering their life prior to that of the kill um and I

felt like I was a a young guy killing grown men which was weird to me too you know it was just weird to kill someone that was like my dad's age you know and it was weird it was weird but I always felt remorse thereafter I Never I didn't show it to the guys I didn't show anything until I got back my last deployment and that's where my wife saw me crying in the car uh after cop died and I had called my dad this the only time I've called my dad on that deployment I

masked My Cry with the sounds of the Jets taking off on the runway and this big generator behind our Barracks overseas called on the satellite phone and I didn't say anything I just waited For the the afterburners on the jet to kick in before he took off and I used that um to cry so the guys wouldn't hear me and that's like the only time he just he was pretty much like it's okay son and you know I guess he understood I'm not sure but that's all he said and it yeah that's the only time

I cried like that and like let it all out pretty much yeah and then of course when I got back but I didn't really care about the competition of of of killing or who had The most my career leading up to that all the guys in my platoon like the assaulters were and I was not an assaulter I was a machine gunner machine gun team leader designated Marksman and sniper I served a brief role when I first got the Battalion as an assaulter and then I lost my gun um on my first jump in and

like no I just was never that guy to always kick in the door and go kill bad guys you know that wasn't my thing those guys were doing all the Killing to me like they were really doing it a lot but I didn't look at them and envy them because they killed more people it was just cool to be amongst them of hey these guys are really good at what they do and it's like a dream come true being in a special operations community and doing these cool jobs at the time at that age and

but I never looked at someone and said man I want to have as you know much kills as you do um it just turned out That way and I don't have like as a sniper I have you know quite a few but like my entire career there's guys I'm sure out there who have way more you know way more but I don't look at them any better than what I you know did we all did our job and it is what it is we're here today and hopefully we make it we're making today count and

yeah you know you you mentioned off camera that every kill that you had you felt took a piece of Your soul mhm what do you mean by that like literally a piece of your soul um like gets disconnected I think we're all connected bro like that's my belief now and from what I've seen from my experience in spirituality I believe that we're more connected than we think we are it's just that this realm that we're in this place this Earth that we're in and I read the Bible and the the ruler of this world is

is Satan you read the Bible every day Every day I thought okay mhm we're going to we're going to go down some rabbit holes here yeah so we had talked about let's talk about your your we'll call it your journey to God mhm how did that I mean what sent you down that rabbit hole after what were you searching for I mean you you've had some of the most kinetic deployments that I've ever heard of mhm some of the most descriptive combat accounts I've ever Heard mhm and so I guess I should make any assumptions

but I would assume that your transition was rough rough yes um well like so ranger battalion it's crazy you say that like to me it doesn't seem like a lot because we know and anybody can look it up it's the only unit with the most kills and captures and continuously deployed since gwatt began is ranger battalion it's the most killed captain combined than more than the Marine Corps Air Force green maray as you name it combined we've killed and captured more enemy high value targets than any unit combined and that's Google whatever you want to

use to look it up so it was not it's not weird to me that it was like that like the the rain the most deployments that I've seen a ranger have was like 14 14 deployments and thought he was badass but um I think he's badass um but I think that for my transition Was like anybody else's I think who's been through that um a lot of self-medication in the wrong way I struggled a lot with alcoholism it runs deep in my family depression and thoughts that I wish I didn't have you know not wanting

to be here anymore you know still got the scars to prove it yeah so um I I've struggled I Struggled with that for a long time what do you mean you still have the the scars to prove it internal or external external what it happened what's that is this a suicide attempt not that one per se just hurt I just wanted to see blood just wanted to see blood what happened just decided to take a razor blade bro and start carving yeah front of yeah in front of my wife she saw it she Saw that

yeah holy [ __ ] yeah did that and had a bottle of Jack one day and decided to dude my life was crumbling down when I got out uh had no idea what I was going to do did Contracting got out wasn't for me I was tired of being away from home you know so I bought a home and I just felt empty I felt just useless empty I couldn't apply all the stuff that I learned and was you know good at like I I was terrible at school Wasn't a good kid try to be

a good husband but I just felt like empty so decided with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Glock pistol to go outside in the backyard and stare at the stars and have a conversation with my inner self and yeah scary times scary times man scary times what did that conversation entail with myself yeah why am I Here basically why am I here and is there any importance is the why I'm here why am I here and why are my guys not and the message I got out of that was if I do this everything

that they did would have been in vain you know by not living life and that's what kind of I guess pulled me out of that at that moment but I teetered a lot with depression anger resentment a lot of that and it's nowhere to fit in you know nowhere to Nowhere to fit in so I would self-medicate daily until I couldn't remember and I I felt like I didn't exist anymore I would just drink until I was in I called it my dark space where nothing exists anymore no feeling no emotion just darkness and I

liked being there for a while you know a while you liked being there yeah you liked being there or you didn't know how to be anywhere else oo that's deeper I didn't know how to be anywhere Else yeah I didn't know how to be anywhere else and I didn't know how to process the outside world as far as struggle like overseas when you get mad and you you're faced with the situation it was easy and being overseas everything was cut and dry you just stay alive that's it you don't have to worry about your light

bill you don't have to worry about the water bill I had no job after I got out of Contracting everything seemed like it was you know Falling apart just got a new house in Texas and I had nothing you know I was empty bro empty I had I was losing everything everything and decided one day to lock myself in a room and I just started to write my whole deployment and I called it team Reaper at the first because the reaper just did not and originally I don't know if I've ever really told the story

cuz I don't care But the original the reaper term came from that deployment and I called after an assaulter WR cuz I don't like this guy anymore um well whatever no judgment that's his path but he gave me that title the angel of death and I was like our ptin was like oh like the reaper Blue Oyster Cult I had no idea who Blue Oyster Cult was or anything and he's an older guy Pimon so so he introduced me to it the Baby Don't Fear the Reaper and that stuck I always called us team Reaper

I don't like we're a team you know me and him were a team he was just as good as I was I was just on a semi-automatic I guess and I was the sniper team leader but my original when we got back we had a deployment video and on that deployment video team Reaper blue oyster Colts playing in the background and that was our thing the first book I ever wrote was team Reaper I didn't want to Be the reaper that came up along the lines when I got into the big book publishing company and

they did not want it to be a team it wanted to be about me regardless if it was Nick was The Reaper in Battalion or not I wanted my guy to be a part of it that's why I Incorporated pton and everything and I still keep in contact with pemerton and he's always been my guy loyal my guy you know so the first book I ever wrote was terrible I wrote it completely wasted sitting in my computer room trapped myself in there and just wrote team Reaper unedited that was the first original book so it's

always team Reaper from the beginning I just didn't want to be singled out as the reaper regardless of what some other title someone gave me and it went along with that but the first book I ever wrote was was not even about me I just wanted to talk about the Things that me and my team did and that's why I got out of the whole after the first book I was I say I didn't like it it was cool but the individual uh uh the solo that it was just me out there I know my

Spotter and the guys on the ground were just as good if not better than I was I was just right place right time you know and that's why I got out the big book publishing world and Stopped doing the autobiography stuff and made up my own character that he can do whatever he want like I grew up reading like Tom Clancy and those guys and that's what I wanted to do I wanted to build a character that is not real not me but is what I would Envision a spec op guy to be and what

he would be like when he out the life that he's trying to live so I started going along that's why I write what I write now it's to take me out of it now let me just Show you like I've been writing since I was a little kid my mom has one of my original books that I wrote in elementary school based on the haunted house bro yeah it was a a Goosebumps style book but I called it Goose lumps and me and my friend Andre made it uh short book scary book supposed to be

but I've always loved telling stories and writing so that's been something I've guessed before the sniper thing was what I've liked doing and I continued to do And I I'm not the best at it but I've gotten really good at it and Accord like the feedback that I get from it I like the feedback and I like not being the main focus character I don't I I think it's uh it can be not good for your health it can be dangerous and you can start to believe whatever thing that you're building up the character that

you've made on yourself and the praise that you get for Being this one guy it can kind of not be good and I don't want to be singled out like dude I was telling you I don't want to on my Tombstone I don't want to be the reaper you know I don't want to be that I just I'm a writer I love to write I love to tell stories I'm not Tom Clancy or Stephen King I'm not those guys I don't want to be those guys I just want to tell my stories that I spend

6 months planning and about the same amount of time writing telling Those stories of things that you know Tom Clancy would write about or one of those guys but just from my perspective and how I would do things like I'm into conspiracy theories and if anybody like reads my books especially like my latest ones or whatever they can see I'm more than just a sniper like I'm a nerd bro I love conspiracy theories I love I'm big into space aliens things of that nature you know everything is not about war to me Anymore I'm trying

to leave that away from me as much as possible because I know where that leads to so to stay away from it is by writing fictional stories that I would read as a kid or how many books have you written close to 20 20 books yeah close to 20 I have five major published no yeah five major published and I've written this is going to be embarrassing if people look this crap up man but cuz It's it goes back going to I wrote It's like a picture book about survival I called it uh basic and

intermediate combat survival lame bro I wrote team Reaper and team Reaper 1 and team Reaper 2 I've written three other people's books I have a pseudonym that I go by um I've written books yeah other people's Auto autobiographies and I've written on my Own fictional books like five more additional books on that end so in total close to 20 maybe I haven't reached 20 yet but close to 20 books books so did writing I mean did how did you pull yourself out of the downward spiral was it writing writing writing was found that therapeutic very

therapeutic I don't I didn't never I never used to talk about this stuff ever ever I never I didn't I didn't really care you know I wanted to I was yeah I just didn't Really care I didn't think I was that big of a deal you know I just wanted to tell my side of the story other people people found out or found it to be a big deal or a cool story and I didn't advertise it that way like I didn't go the traditional route and pitch my script I wrote it on my own

self-published it and sold like five copies and I didn't care you know but I got in touch with the Navy SEAL and he liked the story he thought it was Really neat and he got me in contact with uh St Martin's press and it was on from there but I left that major publishing book company or book roll because I felt that it's too controlling you don't have much say so in the way things are done and I want to tell the story the way I want to tell the story you know no filler nothing

from my perspective the way I want to do it and that's why I left it alone and started doing my own Self-publishing and started myself self-publishing book company and like I said I've written for other people who've had number one really good bestseller books number one on Amazon should have had a New York time bestseller but because the way that book World works it's not in physical stores like big books would be so they don't count it on the neelon book scan even though I wrote a book for someone and they sold I'm not going

to see how many But they were number one on Amazon and outdid Oprah or Michelle Obama's book at the time damn yeah that's incredible yeah so it's been a lot of my writing the way I want to write and a lot of if someone else has an autobiography they want to write I've helped them and I've set with them and wrote the entire thing in their voice and stepped away from it I don't really care for it I like to write I like to tell stories you know but that Was the beginning of the therapeutic

you know healing session was by writing and then the birth of my son was when of course it really took a big turn as far as you know wanting to stick around and just be a dad and not be my son does not care who I was he sees me on YouTube and you know he asked about the interviews and he was excited about this interviews I can't wait to watch it and he likes stuff like that And he doesn't really care what Dad used to do and we don't talk about it in the household

you know he doesn't he might see a few things here and there and ask questions like oh were you in the Army did you go to war and what is war um I explain it the best I can two people have a disagreement two countries have a disagreement and they fight over it sometimes they kill each other over it and he's just like okay you know he's more into F1 driving and he wants to be A race car driver so I'm all about that if he can be an F1 driver dude go be it just

make sure you take me along to all the cool places you go I'll be front and center you know that's what I want to stick around to see you know not following my footsteps like he he's told me uh recently bro and it hurt so not hurt but brought me back down all the way he said uh he's like Dad I want to be like you when I grew up I no you don't no you don't don't do That you can walk beside my footsteps use mine as guide but don't walk in them never don't

walk in my footsteps you can observe them and see all the way as I went Ry messed up at R I stumbled Ry Fallen could barely get back up r i slugged along but don't walk in them walk beside them observe them but do your own path don't do Dad's path you no don't do that so to stick around and help him to be that gu is like yeah and he's yeah d dude I I want to see him Explore life the way I didn't get a chance to you know he's writing a little children's

book or he's writing one I'm helping him but I think that's the coolest thing ever you know to not put it out for sale just like dude here's your own book you wrote that that's your book keep it you know as a memory or of of a I don't know not even a trophy just a piece of something that you can be proud of and know that you accomplish that at Whatever stage he is in life right now of like hey man you took your brain you had an imagination and you helped you wrote that

like be proud of that man that's an Avenue you can go on and explore you don't have to have the guns and pack on a parachute and rug sack and do what Dad did you also don't have to write books I'm a decent driver but I'm no F1 driver so dude do that do whatever you want to be whatever you want to be that's awesome man let's go want to dive Into a whole bunch of different here but you know let's back to the Bible mhm yeah what what along your journey mhm took you to

dive into all these different things you said we we at the very beginning of this podcast we had talked about Voodoo MH and it sounds like I believe you said you had explored that again in a cult mhm uh freemasonic lodges yeah what's what what where did you start and what Got you there what were you looking for started as a Christian growing up it's what I believed in my parents believed in later on and they became really big Christian you know followers and that's what I grew up on it wasn't until that last deployment

when I lost faith and didn't really believe anymore I like I you know I just didn't believe I saw a lot of stuff and I lost one too many friends to you know make me question stuff I was just sad being rebellious You know against the most high God that was my way of I guess showing that of by well fine if you don't want to be here for me then in my time of hurt then I'm not going to worry about this anymore I'm going to go and explore other things um so about a

year or two I didn't believe in I didn't practice or really give too much thought to anything anymore it would cross my mind from time to time but I would brush it off like Yeah right you know and then I got into I wanted to get into something or find a higher power you know I felt and I always felt that there's a higher power I don't believe that anything is a coincidence why a coincidence as to why we're here why we here at the time we're here the experience that we have I don't think

it's all for absolutely nothing there's something um there has to be a Creator you know nothing can nothing or creation has Never came from a nothing there has to be a something for something to be created whatever that something is so I believe that so I found myself dabbling in witchcraft what led I mean was it I know you dabbled with psychedelics oh as well that that was after the fact with this was after yeah I got into uh witchcraft my older sister half sister she was a she does stuff like that and that's why

I kind of got the I guess Idea to want to give it a shot and try to see what it was about so I tried witchcraft for about a year bought all the books you could buy read the knowledge practiced it did my seances all that weird stuff that what is it I don't know anything about witchcraft it swers light and dark magic I was not involved with the dark stuff mine was more light focused of not what you see in the movies witchcraft your Stereotypical bad witchy stuff I didn't know mine was more so

of using different powers that are outside of this world to help me become what I thought was going to be a better person and influence certain things in my life um certain guides I would call upon to help facilitate with certain things to help me become better like what the spirit world world like is this like manifestation what is this Conjuring Spirit world like Conjuring so if I chanting chance if I wanted to uh what one I was going to say that one no let's say Define peace there's a chant Define peace there's candles and

chance and certain for me what I would do I would open up a pentagram um spiritual pentagram by tracing a pentagram with my it would look like a wand but it's not a wand it looks like a witches wand and opening up Pentagrams chance to open up and facilitate this new Enlightenment in my life to call in spirits From Another World to help guide and help facilitate certain things that I want to accomplished I want it done in my life but I think I got out of it because I got scared of it they don't

work it felt weird I don't know if it necessarily worked but in the back of my mind I had Christianity it's what I grew up so I'm Thinking what if something I open up because I don't I I haven't practiced this stuff long enough I've read aliser Crowley Crowley and I've read Manley P hall and I've read Albert Pike and all these guys with the occult the Freemasons I've was in a freemasonic lodge for a short stint very short stint and how was that interesting it was mainly my dad was a Freemason so I was

introduced to it early on I would just see him dress Up from time to time and go to a lodge he wouldn't talk about it I didn't find out till much later what he was and what it entailed and he didn't stay long either but as far as I know he made it to like I don't know I don't know what degree Mason he became he was nowhere near like the 33rd at the degree Freemasons or anything like that was got out pretty early I made it as far as you can go as a new

guy if you want to call it that The third degree when you get that initially when you first go into the lodge and you it's a bunch of old rituals are reenactments of different things that happened like storytelling through certain certain rituals like what kind of rituals I don't know if I really want to say if there's a story of Haram HTH in there and the building of the temple [Music] And you mimic like being a lost traveler and you mimic getting I don't know if I really want to give away so many of those

secrets I'm not a Freemason you know I don't claim to be I've dabbled in it and I just know that they hold what they have secret and I don't want to I'm not going to push you then yeah yeah but do you have why why are you reluctant to bring that up do you have fear about it not fear just respect okay like what I Believe is to respect everyone's Altar and that comes from the 42 laws of Maat and that's one of the 42 laws so whatever your rules whatever you do at your altar

I should respect that and if your thing is to not give away Secret and what happens in a lodge or some of the things that they talk about are what they know I should respect it and just not you know share that you know if people want to find out I mean sure there's like there's pretty Good books out there and or just go to a lodge ask questions I just don't want to it's just like I'm going to call it rituals it's like imagine a play right imagine a play and you just reenact stuff

that happen and has been happening and that tradition has been passed down for hundreds and hundreds of years and they maintain the respect of keeping those Traditions alive and in summary being a Freemason is about the building of man The how to become a better person I've heard other theories and I don't know if they're true about what you find out when you reach the highest level or any anything like that from my experience it's just about becoming a a better building Solomon's Temple You're Building You're Building yourself through different things and understanding of things

and in every Masonic Lodge at its centerpiece there's a Bible and you don't have to be a Christian believe in the Bible you just have to believe in a higher power but they use the Bible for I guess a means of of of guiding them and they use what the Bible is the code within the Bible they have Masonic Bibles correct they do yeah yeah yeah do you know how those differ did you get that deep in I know in the they have some ancient like Egyptian stuff in there you know mod raw Isis stuff

like I don't know I don't Really know too much about it I know it's a Bible and it's basically the same exact Bible but just with the freemasonic you know interesting the energy let's talk about the occult is that how you say it yeah yeah what is that if you wanted to I guess sum it up it's like I think a lot of people think of like you know Alice sowley is or crley the the big some people say he's crazy but he was in the ult or dabbled not dabbled But he wrote plenty of

books on and he's messed with Freemasonry he's messed with all types of the Scottish right and all these things theold as well and I picked up one of his books and found it interesting and there's a book that's called um not the secret teachings of man can I forget the title of this book The Alisa Crowley book I'm thinking of 777 The uh I had to send a picture of it but it's a that's where I started off that with Alisa Crowley and found it interesting and did a lot of reading into what he believed

and practiced read a few other books about what they believe and you know practice about the occult and the higher secret societies of of knowledge and learning I found it intriguing and do I believe it to be real from what I experience yes I think That they know how to tap into our used ancient knowledge that we all possess to um what kind of ancient knowledge I would say to uh reach a higher state of Enlightenment are you talking about are we talking about Consciousness very much so very much so and the meaning of what

this body is and what it holds and possesses and the powers that it has within it and how we can change reality um very much so very much so but at a Higher level of understanding that your average person wouldn't consider think about or simply would not believe because it doesn't it is kind of crazy I think when you I don't know if you're just diving into it it doesn't seem real can you give me an example what what what is what is it what's that a cult like or Alis he would practice like what

what what is something that I wouldn't believe like if I wanted to get into this I mean what would you things that You would not believe let's say if I told you like what is our body capable of that our body is nothing more than been a vehicle for a soul nothing more nothing more and our body is not who we are it's not who we are all we are is a projection from a higher being in a three-dimensional world and this is the projection that we get and we're not really here we operate on

a higher plane the only reason why we're here in this physical body is to experience Limitations things of that nature because of what we are really capable of doing nothing is impossible so we come down to this place to experience limitations and what it feels like to not be a God or a part of God but we're all lowercase G Gods which is also stated in the bible where jesus Yeshua says have you not forgotten or did it is written to your law that ye too are also gods and Yeah it's a lot of that

we're all lowercase G Gods we just haven't realized it and that's one of our main purposes in this realm and in this thing called life I think it's a dream whether it's our higher Consciousness that's dreaming in a different realm or it's the most high the God's Consciousness dreaming I mean what point of the Bible did God wake up when he fell asleep on his day of rest in the Bible he didn't wake up yet still dreaming this is all the dream roll roll roll your boat gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily life is

but a dream the boat the stream of life you can also look at Jesus walking on water the significance of water with that is the calming of the storm be able to walk on top of the the waves and the tribulations and all the things in life To be able to walk on it is what I think that entails or what that means just like rowing your boat down the stream this vessel going through life the stream of Life the steady flow of life that's continuously forever running on to row it gently not to get

so caught up into things attached to things to row it gently down your stream because life is nothing more than just a dream and we're living this is a dream world that we're in there's a higher Consciousness That's dreaming and that's what we all share as humans to remind us that every living being dreams and that's our so do you think see I don't think that's so hard to believe I mean I I I think a lot of people believe that the body is just a vessel mhm and we're living in a dream or dream

world I don't think that people think that I mean I don't know you know I don't I don't I don't know yeah yeah I mean I Have you know a lot of thought on a lot of different things and I'm in my own you know spiritual journey as well but um but yeah I do I think that the I think that our body is just a vessel and I think that we are all I mean you talk about being connected everything is connected we're all part of God I think mhm I think God I think

that it Consciousness is God there you go Yeah yeah yeah and we're all connected through Consciousness uhhuh and I think as time goes on we are all becoming disconnected mhm through what we consider technology mhm and the Antichrist bro yeah that's what I think yeah in in very short simple terms okay so yeah we're along the same lines I believe that and I believe that there's different aspects of Consciousness like there's a feminine And a masculine and is represented sometimes and like the ancient KT the ancient Egyptians used to believe that you know how it

was represented you have you know it's not a male or a female it's it's both entities combined into one and it's representative it can be in the Sun and the Moon the feminine and the masculine and it's represented throughout all nature God is and what it is and it uses these signs and symbols to remind us That in the heavens yeah I believe that and I don't believe I believe that the prince of this world and who controls this world is the evil one Satan devil Lucifer the Fallen I believe that and that's why things

are the way they are here um like reading the Bible when the Fallen a third of the Angels were sent down to earth they didn't go to hell they were sent down here the same place for all Sent this is all one big testing ground to see if we can as Gods maneuver through something that was designed or set up from what we see by something that is not of this world um some will consider the devil or Lucifer the the Morning Star you know the the lightbearer that one I think has used politics everything

that we're involved in that makes life that takes away from Life the Meaning of life everything that is designed here to do that was on purpose and designed by one of the Fallen or the fallen and we're here to be tested like Job in the Bible Well when you say I would love to get into that too but when you say we are when when you say our Consciousness is Center to this vessel to experience limitations why do you think we need to be Center to experience limitations for A blip yeah in time time doesn't

exist mhm mhm but it does in this reality MH because we would not in order for a God to be a god it would have to experience all aspects of experience so to only have the experience of I can do everything and all things and not the experience of having limitations would not have a complete being one that has Full Experience like to have only one good experience then there would also be No purpose in life either life would make zero sense if everything was just perfect then there'd be no point of coming here so

we have to have challenges and we have to have limitations in order to have a full experience of all that is called reality reality cannot be experienced in just one form we're already doing that or it's already doing that at its higher state so to be a full God and a all powerful God we have to have limitations As well as the good the bad everything that's good there has to be a bad well to get the full experience just of this world you would have to live a life of every human being on the

planet is it not isn't that what it's doing though if we're all from that everything everybody we're all have we all have our own experience and we're all a direct descendant connection imagine the Sun and those rays of light each Ray is a soul being Shine Down onto the Earth and each one each ray goes along its own path it does its own thing has its own experience so it's living through all of us in our experience to have one full experience all the good all the bad to complete itself you get what I'm okay

you know so it's yeah it has to experience all things and that's by living all lives all different paths no one's life is exactly the same so are we individual souls or are we one Collective Soul that's the thing it's almost like saying it's the Holy Trinity separate or is it all one is the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit all separate or is it all together according to Biblical scripture it's all one they can't be separate the Trinity is all one Yeshua when he walked this Earth he was no different than what he

were his father or his father just in a human Form it left us with the Holy Spirit and it had the holy spirit all existing all at one time so the way that the way that the Holy Trinity has been described to me mhm maybe you've heard this this made a lot of sense to me water vapor ice mhm mhm it's all one thing but it's all different things thank you yeah exactly so I look at it that way too we're all different but the same thing that's how we're all Connected that's we're all from

the same Source we're just different down here but all experiencing things differently but we're all from the same being we all share the same Soul your soul is no different than mine this outer limit this outer boundary may be our life paths may be your experiences will be different than mine but the thing that we have the same the same thing that you're made of on the inside I'm made up of and just like someone else down the Street we all come from that same Source there's no there's only one entity that provides Soul and

Spirit only one entity we get that from one being and it's just nothing more than a light Ray being shined down into a body to occupy that flesh vessel that we are in but once you take away all that we're all from the same thing we're all the same thing just in a physical Limitation body limited body that's what reality is I think is just one big testing round of to see if we have what it takes to move on to the next level you know and what is the next level what do you think

the next level is that I'm not too sure of I would hope it would be what we call this Heaven rejoining rejoining The Source going back home or to the father or to the son I I I would believe the next level Is that to see if we're actually worthy of being the gods that we are of navigating all these tests here if we're able to navigate that then we move on to the next one if not I don't know if you there is a place you go to hell or you just have to come

back and do it again do you think there's a possibility this is hell I thought about that too I believe that the like I said That Lucifer rules this place or he's the prince of this place um he's allowed to roam and do what he wants here so according like to by definition that would make this place hell you know maybe we are being punished for something that we all have which is ego and ego is the only thing that that's what got the devil or Lucifer kicked out of heaven was by having an ego

and that's the same thing that we all possess here and it's One of the the greatest things we have to overcome on this Earth is overcoming our own ego our ego is going to kill us if you let ego take over yeah ego was is a bad thing I think that's why psychedelics when you have ego death and you feel that you know yeah so this place could be like hell are the same place that the devil was sent to I don't know I was just going to ask you that it was I was just

going to get to psychedelics when you brought the ego Have you had we talked a little bit of breakfast about this have you had a full-blown ego death yes terrified terrifying having cried so much in my life and felt so scared I felt like I was dying I guess that I had a bad not a bad experience an experience with mushrooms after watching Mike Tyson take a handful I'm like it can't be you know that crazy so I took my handful looked it up on Google what is 2.5 g look like and a picture popped

Up and it said 2.5 g so I looked at my pile and was like well that must be about it and it turned out to be way more than that like five grams or whatever and ate it and I remember when reality shimmered and went away and it felt like I was in the presence of God my wife was sitting next to me and I told her bow your head bow your head so we're I'm bowing my head she's Bowing her head and I'm like I got a message that came through a light in my

house and it was on a scroll and the message said the law like what is the law follow the law like what is that didn't know what the the law turned out to be like the ten Comm Commandments essentially and follow the law and I tripped for a few hours and that or not even a few hours I don't know how time was weird during that whole time it Felt like an eternity at one moment it felt like I would go away and be amongst the presence of God just couldn't see him and messages and

information that I had no idea about like just being Force Fett it and having the emotion of me I felt like I was going to die and being really scared and at that time me and my parents were not talking had a huge resentment towards them um and something said call Them call your mom and dad because I'm dying I needed to talk to Mom you know my wife is calming me down I'm like well get ready to call 911 but then I thought if I call 911 they were going it was all one big

play like when I was tripping reality went away and there was a crowd like of every person I had ever interacted with in life and how I treated them were like standing up clap clapping and then I beca I was judged by them and how I treated everyone on this Earth is how I'm going to be treated and judged in the afterlife and it said tread lightly and it was all one big play and everybody was a part of the play whether they knew it or not some were test to see if I would lose

my cool and temper and act aggressively and some were you know family members they were you know everybody you can think of that you've come across past passed by bumped into got pissed off in traffic cussed out wish some bad you know something bad Upon them like they were all there and they were all a part of this big play and this was my life and it was all for me because I don't know and I died after that but before I did I called my parents they're freaking out they had never heard about psychedelics

or or psilocybin mushrooms and like where'd you get this stuff from you bought it online I'm like no I can't tell you where I got it from um But it felt like I was dying and sinking into this void hole of Blackness where no love existed and I didn't exist my family didn't exist and I was just alone and like naked in front of judgment and void of all love and what I perceived as God was hell of in complete darkness and void of nothing and being stripped of everything that I thought I was and

made myself to be and I felt like a vulnerable I couldn't do anything like infant but just void and Disconnected from Love and it said well it told me that was hell and you know uh the disconnect from love fighting so much to stay away from that pushing people out of my life and like I'm building my own hell and this is what it's going to be like and I felt myself like I was dying called my parents and I forgave them because I got the message that if I hold on to this it's going

to C me to go into this bad negative place when we die We never know where we're going to die or when we're going to die so would be it would be best or behoove me to rid myself of all the negativity that I had because I'm building my own hell and I want to be full of light love and as much as possible throughout life walking into Christ Consciousness and because you never know when your time is going to go and then when that time comes all that Grudge that I had towards my family

and my Parents God the most high told me who am I to judge and I shut up after that like I don't who am I to judge I'm not perfect they're not perfect but I'm I'm a non-perfect person judging also a non-perfect person because I don't think they're perfect but it's coming from tainted non-perfect eyes to begin with the only one who's who can judge should have perfect vision or be perfect and none of us are so who are we to judge And we're going to be judged accordingly in the afterlife so yeah it's best

not to judge because we're going to be treated the exact same way do unto others as you would have them do unto you and that is as above so below you know how we should carry ourselves that way here because it's going to happen there if you believe in the afterlife or not and sometimes the judgment may come from our own self sometimes we can be the biggest Hardest hardest judgmental people on the planet is our own self we we'll judge ourselves more than anybody else will and being hard on ourselves so I think it

it yeah judgment was a big message so I forgave my parents forgave them told them who am I to judge I don't I can't do that you know that's your path it is what it is but to hold on to that Grudge is only doing me bad you know a lot of darkness and a lot of resentment I didn't need to carry that you know I Didn't need to carry that I've always looked at the pictures on the hieroglyphs that little bag they're carrying if you look at those I've always looked at it as that's

the bag of memories that we're going to take in the afterlife there's not many so make them count make them enjoyable cuz that's all we're going to take with us it's a small bag of memory so either you want that bag full of good good memor memories or you can have it full of terrible Memories but there won't be many so Make It Count you know hope that makes sense this is a great segment I hope man on that note uh let's take a break when we come back I want to talk about do you

believe in what we were doing over there H it's a good one good question so I save the answer [Music] I never thought that 23 years after 911 I would have to come here to the Sean Ryan Show to tell the world that the Taliban is a terrorist [Music] group you with me [Applause] John I don't [Applause] know I come from a bombed Village and P H son I came here this country a very generous country accepted me gave me a home gave me trust gave me an education allowed me to serve gave me security

clearance gave me everything now it's I Am the one reminding them look your founding fathers or your Patriots the guy whose statue you want to go and Destroy and burn George Washington Patrick Henry Thomas Jefferson D you Your Heroes you call them racist slave owners you have forgotten who you are they have forgotten what this country stands for how this country how this Vision started 37 NOS reported that they provided a total of 10.1 million in Taxes and fees to the Taliban and if you don't know who you are there's no way you could know

who your enemy is of alqaeda and the Taliban leaders are dangerous and once again I want to reiterate that the our struggle shall continue until so the Soviets leave Afghanistan and until a government that the Afghans accept comes to power we can not accept uh the preferences of others as Far as our government is concerned so I joined the US Army at the age of 17 and uh because I was born in Afghanistan I was in a very unique position every General out there wanted an afghan with him let's talk about how the US is

funding Taliban oh that's a hard statement to say right yes it is yes or no have you seen any evidence of the Taliban demanding payoffs to permit the Implementation of Aid projects are are we hoping that Afghanistan is a Bull workk against Iran what what what's the national strategic security interest where that it cost us billions of dollars to to be there I'm trying to figure it out cuz what I feel like is is that we got the fight with a bully we lost the fight we got punched in the face he took our lunch

money and now we just keep on paying the lunch money and hopes that he doesn't beat us up Again are you familiar with al-qaeda's Goal list isis's goal list what is it you are an unbeliever according to them where you are this is a camp of the unbelievers they want to purify this you are the end goal I am the end goal this is the end goal and ala's goal taliban's goal they're the same it never stops [Music] [Applause] This is a flag that the Taliban burned in 2022 we recovered it from Afghanistan oh man

this is when the Taliban were celebrating their first year anniversary in Cabo this is what they were doing enchanting death to America uh we we no longer have a presence on the ground in Afghanistan um our involvement in that War uh on the ground is is Over then that first world trade bombing and then the big 9/11 so it keeps increasing so that next one whatever it is whenever it comes it's going to make that 911 attack look like a dress rehearsal lots and lots of incidents like what we just saw in Russia all scattered

throughout the United States be careful when you say us who do you mean that's one when us back the Taliban mhm it's not you you are us I am American I us I I did not do this you Did not do this there are certain individuals that did this you are essentially a spy I wouldn't call it a spy you a spy I would [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we're back from the break this this might be the long we might go for The record here on the longest podcast ever I think my

longest one is with Cody Alfred and I want to get into eventually we were going to get into was it worth it over there were we there for the right reasons or Americans not Americans is America the bad guy cuz I often yeah wonder you know what there's just so many things that people don't know about that were going on MH behind the scenes over there that uh they need To come to light I think a lot of people do know but they don't understand the significance or they just don't excuse me believe what sometimes

the truth is hard to believe yep but um I wanted to we're on this kind of biblical topic and and I want to talk to you about you know maybe not spiritual warfare but there's all these signs that are I mean look at what the world is right now it's a disaster and it's it's it's not you Know Americans think oh it's just this country you know with the with everything man I mean the the the fentanyl crisis the the woke agenda that's gone way out of bounds the the crime is on the rise The

Border's completely wide open everything what's up is down what's black is white I mean it's nothing makes sense anymore and that's that's what brought me to Faith finally is I just I I everything that I stand for is being Ruined and but when you look at it from a from a 30,000 foot view or whatever you want to call it Bird's eyee view this is the whole world now mhm this isn't just this country this is everywhere yeah and I think a lot of it seems biblical to me MH and so I just want to

get your take on that yeah I think this we're in the last leg man I think that revelation if you want to call it that we're in that last leg Of before something biblical happens and it does talk about in Revelations like you're going to see the plenty of signs in the Heavens to let you know that the time is Drawing Near and like I'm into conspiracy theories and I think I'm into yeah I am in a conspiracy theory you'd be surprised that what I dabbled in as far I go down the rabbit hole like

I don't believe the Earth is flat some compelling arguments but I Don't think it's flat but um I think what's happening now is just a sign of what's to come you know the end times before whatever you believe in happens either the savior is going to come back and help us out or we're going to have to go through some tribulation for some time like pedophilia is running rampid dude it's not even called that anymore now it's the attracted to minor people Maps minor attracted persons please bro I mean it's it's everywhere man it's people

are it's it's just it's crazy the evil one is running out of time so he's pulling all the tricks out its hat and putting him here to get as many Souls as it can before the end and I believe the signs that you could look at it this way the signs are the times the signs of the times that we're in biblically let's say for the solar eclipse coming up during that time you have also Jerusalem the rabbis that are going to Sacrifice the red heer what is the red heer the red cow it's significant

in the Bible um it's only happened I want to say seven or nine times this maybe the 10th where they've had this red cow per perfect without blemishes without never been set on or set or whatever some weird has to be perfect like not a only so many black hairs can be on it has to be perfectly clean never exposed to certain things never tied to a post weird tradition that the not Weird I just don't understand it but it's in the Bible about the sacrifice of the red heer what that signified and the destroying

of the temple before it gets rebuilt the Third Temple and the sacrifice of of the red haer before I believe they burn its ashes and bathe in it this Rabbi a pure Rabbi who's pure I'm not sure how deep down they go into what makes them pure but a rabbi that's pure is going to bathe Himself in it and that's going to signify the the destruction of the Third Temple which they're also talking about doing destroying that the the temple on the mound are I forget what it's that golden cap temple in Israel that the

Jews or not the Jews the uh the Israelis Israelis and the um Muslims believe that they they go to worship and pray the the temple it says in the Bible when that Third Temple is Going to be destroyed and rebuilt that's going to be like a really good indication of no this that we're in the end times then you have the total solar eclipse where it seems like America's going just weird you know and it's like happening for three days over the course of three days is it this the next one coming up on April

8th April 8th yeah that's a three-day three-day event not three days of darkness but it's a three-day solar eclipse event and during Its peak of the solar eclipse is where you're going to be the devil's comet is also should be visible to the naked eye had no idea about that until like recently that there's a devil's comment that's going to be occurring the same time that the solar eclipse happens the total solar eclipse the red heer is being sacrificed and it just according to Revelation and the Bible all these signs have already been talked about

written down and that Said that was going to Mark or signify the times that we're in the end of days or the end times before the Messiah comes back to Rescue his people but before that that's why I think we have all this weird stuff happening where nothing makes sense everything is the opposite I know that or I believe that the the mockery of the most high is to be opposite of it and that's why we're seeing so much opposite what you believe is up is now down you know things that We know as humans

are not right like a male cannot have a baby or a menstrual cycle but we're taught to believe or they're saying to believe no no that can happen all the things that we know are not right an Abomination to the most high we're doing here on Earth so I think that the evil one is pulling all the tricks out its hat as one final last ditch effort before the Creator destroys it and locks it away forever and we can go back to living in harmony our peace However many years is you believe it's going to

rain or he he's going to rain on Earth and Heaven's going to be on Earth and Heaven on on Earth can be interpreted as we can make heaven on Earth by what we practice what we believe and what happens in here because where we're at is not as far from heaven or what anybody would classify as heaven but I think it's just the last ditch effort as it's being backed into a corner trying to Gather as many Souls as it can to join the darkness and reap its benefits by eating that Soul those who don't

fall for it the Temptation are the lies the great deceptions the deceit The Chosen and be called to stand up against the evil forces in one final battle Armageddon and help destroy that force of evil I think were in those times and I Think every great civilization has had these times from Sodom and gamorra to the great flood to flood out the Nephilim the Giants that walked the earth I think it history just repeats itself what are the Giants I've heard a lot of I've heard this subject brought up in several different occasions I don't

know much about it well according to the Bible when the third of the Angels were casted out of heaven and sent here they loved women and they wanted to have babies with women so they had babies those babies came out to be big giants and they roam the Earth and that's why they were destroyed it was not supposed to be that way so they were destroyed in the great flood according to the Bible some religions or Indian Rel or beliefs is that these Giants or things That came down were not Angels they're aliens or star

people made it with the female and had star children these special children that obtain certain knowledge and when these things came down they gave knowledge to mankind um the Bible preaches that too just as the Indians without the Bible believed and other religions believe that some beings came down from the heavens and advanced our civilization taught us Technology taught us makeup taught us all these things that separated us from the true innate light and where we really come from to separate us from that and there's multiple stories from different religions that talk about star people

aliens Angels fallen angels that come down made it with women and produce this Offspring whether they're Giants or whatever but that's like throughout multiple religions and I believe something happened why we went from Being not as intelligent to all of a sudden having this huge leap in technology you know in the look at the past 50 years it's hard to tell from you know what's real or what's not with AI and just video games you know things look so real nowadays compared to Atari that I was playing as a kid and Nintendo that advancement in

technology and that period alone I think is pretty significant but to have gotten to that point you know supposedly we don't know How we made the pyramids we just lost that knowledge or was civilization destroyed in some apocalyptic event and we're forced to restart over again go back to square one and we keep making the same mistakes of getting ahead of ourselves whether we're getting ahead of ourselves technologically or I look at it like the story in the Bible where they were building the Tower of Babel and the gods looked down and said because they

know every what they know Everything because they're they speak the same language so he destroyed that Tower and Scattered the people and gave them all languages and that's why so he couldn't communicate and be able to accomplish anything so he scattered us gave us all different languages and that's that story biblically but I think it was not necessarily speaking the same language it was the we were all together all one we had the same belief system and we got ahead of ourselves and Before and the tower was being built to reach God but not necessarily

I don't believe it was a physical Tower I think this Tower was a metaphor for we're almost as a species getting close to God or Godlike on Earth and to prevent that it scattered everyone amongst the winds and made them speak new things or speak new just not being able to relate with one another and it separated us that way we no longer spoke the same language and I think at that Time the language was love and it separated us so we could not be all together and I think that that's what happens in civilizations

where you reach this peak in everything's accomplishable you can do anything and it for some odd reason gets recycled and restarted or things just get really bad and the morals are not it's not what drives mankind the morals have changed we don't have any anymore we've become too caught up in The flesh too caught up in materialistic things and the things that we can't take when we leave with us which is our spirit our the only thing we can take with us is our spirit and we neglect that the most and we feed the external

forces to satisfy physical pleasure as opposed to spiritual pleasure and that separation I think is what is driving the forces the way they're being driven today is that we've maybe got caught too much In selfishness materialism all that and forgot the thing that mattered the most and it's like erasing the drawing board and and starting back over again um if you were a god what would you do if you look down and you saw your creation going to absolute [ __ ] you'd probably want to destroy I would want to destroy it too like what's

the point I you know he wanted the according to the Bible destroy it after Adam and Eve when she ate from or when they ate the fruit And obtained knowledge that was the thing that you know got them kicked out of the Garden of Eden or if you believe it to be that you know it was too much knowledge too fast and they were forced out of that garden and also in you know Free Will and all that but he wanted to destroy it after that and we've done nothing but a civilization continuously mess up

and go against the natural laws of nature and yeah morals and being kind to One another we've become dark and Abomination to what I believe is God I'm definitely with you mhm it's it's getting very hard to tell what's real thank you with AI I I don't think we're smarter I think we are there we go yeah I think we are take all the technology and all that [ __ ] away I I think we're Dumber yeah I mean what do they say we use 10% of our brain That's that's what they say I don't

I don't know what that really in you know I mean if you think about I had this conversation with another guest uh Joe MCM monal which we were talking about earlier at breakfast but he and I can't remember if I had this conversation with him on or off camera but we were talking about our brain and and he had brought up language and he was basically saying he was saying this this stemmed from Remote viewing mhm and he said I believe that I don't want to quote him but if I remember correctly the conversation was

that we all have the capability to do remote viewing MH and we all had a lot more Instinct and we were able to communicate a lot more efficiently in that language when language was developed it actually hindered communication and if you think about that it does make sense because we do Still read each other's body language which is technically maybe all you need MH MH is to read body language and at the beginning you know it was probably grunting and noises and it was just immediate communication yeah not so in depth like what we're having

now but it was immediate effective communication and then language was developed and that basically slowed communication down and it's kind of been A downward Trend since then where we've lost a lot of instinct we've lost supposed capabilities like I would just call it tapping into intuition I think that Humanity has lost a lot of intuition and the barrier which which calls that is what not only language but would you say technology yeah and then it's just that's what it's all spiraled into right technology now I mean I I heard a podcast the other day That

said that in 10 years scientists are predicting that because of how addict how much screen time you're getting on your phone that they're predicting that we're going to start losing peripheral vision you're kidding I mean who knows right wow it's a prediction it's you know what I mean but it people think I'm crazy they'll go oh what did the science say about you know flu season yeah yeah and uh yeah I get it you know what I mean But I mean I don't of people are going to push back on whatever you say you know

and but part of me is like man I could totally see that happening you know and I could totally see Humanity what I mean there's a saying you don't use it you lose it yeah yeah and I get a lot of screen time on my phone not near as much as what I see kids and other people doing because I make it a point to put it away MH I'm Not going to say I'm not addicted to it cuz I am I'd be lying you know if if I if I at least you're open about

it man there's a lot of people who say I only do two minutes I'm not in denial about it yeah and uh I mean I talk all the time with my wife about getting up going back to the flip phone unfortunately you have Banking and everything is done on the phone but maybe if you know I leave my phone a lot of times when I'm when we're doing a family Event if we leave the house and I want to be in the moment that phone stays home but um but uh I I long story short

I mean I I think we're we're dubbed down and dumbed down and and I don't know I just I got I I I feel like this is some master plan I mean even with the pharmaceutical in going way back the energy you know how we could have gone with Nicola Tesla's model or we could have gone with um you know fossil fuel model MH we took that Route because now everybody's stuck on utilities it's a money grab you know the the Pharmaceuticals I mean I had do you know who Chris Beck is by chance brilliant

guy brilliant mind and had an offline conversation with him about the pharmaceutical industry and how the was it the Rockefeller family that pumped $800 million back in the early 1900s think about what $800 million is today yeah billions with Inflation and you know uh over a hundred years yeah of of inflation mhm now take $800 million back in the 1900s mhm billions what is that even what is that even equivalent to now you could do whatever you want exactly I mean it's I would say it's probably beyond the trillionaire level yeah yeah you know and

they pumped that much money into Pharmaceuticals to get away from natural Eastern medicine mhm that works psychedelics perfect example it works Yeah you know and and and you look at all the drugs that that were on look at all the side effects mhm it's the sep cause may cause Suicidal Thoughts may cause Suicidal Thoughts may cause and and it's it's it's the food everything you know what I mean is is I I think we're definitely not what we were supposed to be that's what I mean it's not we've gotten smarter technology has become the the

block between us and our Natural State or the State we were supposed to be in or evolve into naturally I think technology has interfered with that and put us on a where we thought we were going to go is the exact opposite of we were where we were thinking we were going to go like the internet for example was supposed to bring everyone together all interconnected but it's I don't know I think it's done the exact opposite at some points you can I guess I can say that being able to talk to I that's how

I met my wife was on Myspace but social media today and these dating site things and more people are on that new VR headset thing that you can live in like the metaverse you know cool technology but we are separating ourselves more and more each day by being on the phone and and not interacting the way we used to and like my neighborhood it's rare I tell my kid to go outside if you know go outside and play go make friends or whatever but the Amount of kids that come outside is so much different from

when I was growing up it's you don't really see that anymore at at least where I live and I think we've had technology has been like an interference I think keeping us more apart more separate from each other and what I believe to be God whether that's nature or whatever but I think it's definite like U definitely an interference that it's that it's put on humanity and maybe That's the thing too maybe we've got gotten to a point where technology has become too much and maybe that's the reason why civilizations fall you get to an

advanced technological level but you've lost all connection of who you are and what you are that it gets destroyed like you don't use it you lose it and if you're not using who you are as a human being then I'm why wouldn't you lose that too you're right to be a human well you know the the the lies That we've been fed mhm and the so many things that were labeled conspiracy that turned out not to be conspiracy I mean it's it's it's now to the point where I I already question everything is I think

we've all been manipulated a lot more than than any of us can even fathom oh big time Big Time and I like Part of Me Part of Me looks forward to death so that so that it's all Revealed does that make any any sense I don't trust anything anymore I don't I think we are already at the point where you cannot believe anything that you see unless it's right in front of you and you can touch it yeah you know I think he how would you feel if it was all revealed while you were alive

though do you think you could process it all process it all and understand that no me neither and I think that's I Think there's so much deceit in this world that I I don't think that any human could process how much of it is false I mean yeah I think in I lifetime we're going to see it though a lot of it be revealed I think the veil is already lifting and that's why I think we are thinking and talking the way that we are talking now and I think a lot of people are starting

to see stuff is not right I don't know what which degree but I would hope so that people are starting to see that we've been fed a bunch of BS and lies that just on this show you know i' I had a do you know who Jim cavel is yeah I had a really very interesting discussion with Jim cavel on some of the stuff that's going on in Hollywood and that episode just disappeared really woke up one day and it was gone you two removed it or yeah they removed it let's fast forward about six

months MH yes last night before this interview P did he yeah his house in Miami and his house in Los Angeles got raided for a big sex trafficking sex trafficking operation yeah that was labeled a conspiracy 6 months ago yep truth you and it's just keep and more and more and more of these people are getting they're getting the light shined on that's it where's the light come from yep and who's the source of the light the source of all light that's what I Think is happening we could go on about flu season we could

go I mean there's so many things that are just coming out that that and and that's I don't think we're even scratching the surface no I think there's going to be things in space I think there's going to be things here on Earth I think there's going to be history that's revealed yeah I think a lot of more than we could even fathom is going To be revealed that is I think just about everything we think we know on this planet is a lie dude that's scary it scares the [ __ ] out of me

if yeah if that's true which a part I I believe it but then I I think to save my sanity I try not to entertain the idea that what if everything that we've been told is a lie then what does that what does that put us like where do where do where do we go from there let's go into the wars yeah Yeah you and I both fought in gwat in the gwat in the global war on terrorism do you think that was a lie 100% so do I 100% I think the entire thing was

a lie I mean let's look and for those that going to go oh you're crazy okay let's go let's look at dick Genie mhm mhm how CEO of halberton we start a war in Iraq mhm halberton is a is a massive logistics company yeah and you were in Iraq and I was in Iraq and Everything there was KBR which is a subsidiary of Halbert the mail was delivered by KBR the Chow was cooked by KBR the people that built the chow hall y was built by KBR Alberton fuel halberton every everything everything there the entire

infrastructure was set up by halberg and one guy in charge of that who happened to be the vice president at the time mhm makes you wonder and if anyone questions that I mean I don't believe in Coincidences makes you wonder yeah I mean it's right [ __ ] in front of you you know I mean some people won't even bat an eye at it they won't they won't bat an eye I could dive deeper into the conspiracy thing but I don't know how deep I'll just say building seven is weird you know yeah and I

I'm I would hate to believe that we're so money hungry that we would do something to that nature to Just get us into a conflict and waste innocent life look at Ukraine money yeah I mean woodro Wilson was it woodro Wilson the president uh he warned us right after World War II about the military-industrial complex and how it will likely spin out of control yeah correct you know what I'm talking about now look at then we just talked about the gwad and that was just Iraq then now we're talking about look at Ukraine MH we

you know it's not we're sending them Military supplies so that the military industrial complex companies make more can make more and they pay off the politicians to vote on this [ __ ] so that they can make more and it's it's all I I hate saying it it's by Design CU it's so cliche but it is all a it's all a money thing man it's a money thing to the politicians it's a money thing to the to the military-industrial complex company it's a money thing to the president money thing to the vice President it's all

a greed machine a club and we're not in it man yep we are not in it being at that level at this level no and I think that to get to that level like you sell your soul out a long time ago to even if the truth came out and it was that let's say it it is all about money which I believe it's all about money then that means that the powers that be are willing to sacrifice 18 19 21 year old or anybody for that matter for the Benefit of the pocket which is

just the sacrifice the offering that you do to gain more money who are we controlled by then that means that we're evil bro our poit every they're all corrupt and evil and if that is true then why do we continue to participate in their game if it's a corrupt system if it's e that's why I don't I don't believe in voting I don't believe in it because I think that if it's as corrupt as we as I think it is And back at the last election there's a belief that I'm I I you know something

was going on with that election then at what point does your vote really matter and are you the one really voting or is it nothing more than a way to keep track of you and a documentation you know I don't know but I know that if our vote truly mattered then there would not be lobbyists and people behind the scenes and big corporations and big big banks that pay Off these politicians to make votes in the Deb of night that we don't get a chance to see until the next morning and it's already a done

deal at what point do we really the average person who votes where do we fit in and where do we matter if they're able to manipulate an election not just here in any country so we we do that it's no secret but at what point do we really matter you know we don't matter we don't look at the look at the FDA mhm we can be Paid off you know what the you know what the life expectancy is in this country now 76 Bingo yeah 76 years old yeah look at all the [ __ ]

that gets approved with our drugs our food our clothes our shampoo our deodorant our toothpaste mhm and I mean psychedelics alone mhm psychedelic I mean what I did my psychedelic journey to over two years Ago we talked about this haven't had a drop of booze since there you go not one drop huh and it's it's not it wasn't I didn't even go down to do that I didn't make it a point to do it you know and it's getting it's curing addiction it's curing anxiety it's Cur it's now they're working on it with Alzheimer's it's

curing TBI huh I had a guy one of my best friends go down there was shot in the head mhm with a in a road rage accident and survived probably the worst Car bomb incident I've ever seen somebody actually walk out on guy couldn't couldn't walk without a cane couldn't go outside without sunglasses on even on a cloudy day cuz his vertigo was so bad wow spent 3 to 4 days a week bedridden I've been trying to talk him into going down there he finally goes he does an Iain treatment leaves his [ __ ]

cane there doesn't need a sunglass anymore so sick wow has no more vertigo it's I I Mean but it's too e getting people off benzos it's getting people off uh opiates it's getting people off alcohol I mean so there goes the entire benzo you know obio valume Xanax yeah yeah larzipan I mean there's a whole family of them that that knocks I mean everybody's on that [ __ ] mhm I yeah I lost a friend too yeah you know what I mean yeah oxycoton hydrocodine all of that all That stuff cures it man cures it

how is this [ __ ] not legal we have an opiate crisis and a benzo crisis that's the reason in the country today and this [ __ ] is illegal like when the [ __ ] are these people going to wake up so is science real they still [ __ ] think that the government I'm spitting down no dude but you know what I mean when is when are PE they're not going to [ __ ] wake up no no and they still think that the [ __ ] government has Our best interest and we're

going over war that was started for [ __ ] that we both fought in now we're talking about the [ __ ] FDA we're talking about pharmaceuticals we're talking about everything everywhere you look is deception mhm and it's all powered and ruled by one thing money man greed and money greed and money they don't are we don't matter bro and I think that's that the part that I get pissed off is that not enough people are waking up And when we do wake up what now what now well people don't know how to get organized

that's the thing yeah we don't we we were talking about that earlier so this is where we need a fairity box yeah yeah y but um I don't want to encourage anyone to read the de no never mind but yeah we're not organized we're not I think to get organized one we have to be able to process as a whole to process and understand what's going on what's Happened and there has to be I guess the leaders the only way you get organized is when everybody comes to one commonality and in common core values and

beliefs and that will that that's where the division happens you know that's why race let's divide them on Race let's divide them on gender let's divide them on politics let's divide them on let's every every you can't even pick a subject now where they're where people are not divided so it's it's you Know to in order to get organized it's it's damn near impossible yep we forgot they we're all human Hue the Hue of man you know we're all Spirit man Spirit beings that's sad than black white yeah all that I 100% agree but I

think that maybe we're at a point of no return you know I think that too and I hope in my lifetime I get a chance to see change but the road we're heading man I don't know if I will I pray my son does though I pray he does you know I really do cuz I couldn't imagine what's going to happen in 20 more years from now of heading down this road where do we end up I mean you know it's I don't know man yeah you know I think Step One is people are putting

way too much faith in in humans you know it's it's putting all their faith into Joe Biden or putting all their faith into Donald Trump or Elon Musk is going to fix the the the the freedom of speech Thing it's like dude and I'm not talking [ __ ] about any particular one of them yeah there's ones that I hate and there's ones that I don't but that's because I just look my beliefs are in my own core values it's my values my beliefs what I stand for and I think where America's gone wrong in

the world is theyve put they they don't even know what they believe in anymore they don't know what their own Values are and they're putting they they're it's well what's Nick say I'm going to believe whatever Nick says MH and I could be wrong yeah you know or you could wake up one day because you somebody pissed you off and flip the switch and go the complete opposite direction you know and the people to they are going to follow you in whatever Direction you decide it's your beliefs and your values that you need to be

standing up for not anybody else's you Know that's the different perspectives are fine but huh now people are just being let around by the [ __ ] nose they don't even everybody's an influencer everybody's a social media I cannot stand that word dude influencer I don't what am I influencing or what are you influencing no nothing I mean there's few out there but you're average just because are Instagram models like what is what are you contributing to society I don't yeah that's where we're at man that's where we're at we've become yeah we've lost our

own morals man and own beliefs yeah no matter what it is you believe in we follow whatever's trending yeah we're trending people we follow what's trending you know I I do want to say I want to I want to wrap this up yeah yeah but um you know I heard I watched a clip of you and I I it was somebody that asked you was it worth it over there mhm do You think we made a difference no I don't for every one number one guy that was killed there's another number one guy today no

matter how many of them we killed there's always and I think we've done dude I don't care we we we've I think we destroyed generations and all we did was just piss people off more like if I killed your dad that son's going to grow up with Just as much hate if not more hate towards me than his dad did and we're going to keep that cycle going for what you know I don't and I've questioned who we were who who we were really killing overseas like I don't know if these guys were just Farmers

protecting their land I don't know no yeah we never went to Saudi Arabia after 911 you know we didn't go there they control too much oil regardless if most of the hijackers were from Saudi we Didn't touch them we flew the bin Laden family out in the beginning after 9911 happened we put them on planes and flew them to safety we flew Saudis out to safety but we went to Afghanistan and Iraq I don't and from my experience and in Afghanistan I just don't some dudes and caves did all that they were not that great

when I fought them they were good but not pulling off one of the greatest Heights Heist of all times of our Terrorist attacks of flying I don't know I think those people enemy or not yeah Friend or Foe I think some of those people are the most resilient they resilient it's not where I was going but they stand by what they believe in and they are willing to die for what they believe in and um I think that something that westerners could big time could could learn from I do want to leave you with this

though cuz I do I think we should have been over there no do I Think there's a lot of I don't think I know there's a lot of [ __ ] corruption yeah but I do think that we made an impact and it may not be the impact that we hope to make but you know I will say especially in Afghanistan you know the Taliban is very controlling oppressing outfit and since we were over there yes there was a lot of death and destruction I do think we killed a lot Of innocent farmers and people

that were just protecting what they have yeah but women were able to go to universities a lot of freedoms they got a a taste yeah a small taste of what Freedom tastes like and uh I think that brought a lot of them hope and um and and they want that and there's a resistance over there and they're still fighting to do that one of the resistance Fighters is actually coming on this Thursday nice yeah he's Flying in and keep that guy safe man what's that I hope keep that guy safe his face won't be on

camera but um but he's going to talk about what's happening over there and and and and I've talked to him several times and he is very happy that we went over there he's obviously not happy how we pulled out but you know we in a weird roundabout way you know we showed those people what life could look like you know if they aren't so Oppressed I never thought of that by outfits like the talent B and uh so we did some good well I'll take that piece with me man yeah definitely yeah yeah wow yeah

now we have to worry about our own government overstepping boundaries and taking away some of our freedoms and Liberties and our Pursuit of Happiness as well now we're at that Crossroad yeah maybe we've been fighting the wrong I don't know forgot to look here yep I hope not I know what you're Getting at but well nick man that was a hell of an interview brother loved it man loved it and uh it's one of my favorite ones it's I really appreciate it man for real great life story I'm glad to see how well you're doing

now and and uh I truly being this man it was an honor to have you here and uh I hope to see you again oh anytime man hey dude before I go it's great to see you where you're at today and the the light that you shine On others who may have not had that opportunity dude keep doing your thing bro it's great to see great to see yeah W definitely much love brother you too thank you much love [Music] [Applause] no matter where you're watching Shan Ryan Show from if you get anything out of

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