#298 Jason Magnavice - SEAL Team 6 Red Squadron Operator

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Oh, okay. Your buddy's with DJ. You watch DJs? Well, I knew DJ when he was a kid. Yeah, I saw that. I did a freaking, I did a platoon with his dad. He was my, his dad was actually my platoon chief. I knew DJ when he was 13 or 14. He was to go hang out with his parents. They'd always, you know, they have a big deer roast. You know, we'd go hunting and eat some venison, tell stories. His dad was the most incredible storytellers. Very animated, huh? Still is, right? You still talk to him? No. No? Are you buddies with DJ? DJ, I shoot him a text every now and then. Like I went to Virginia Beach about a year ago to go through a, like a workout program there, VHB, it's called. Very, it's an awesome program. And then we were going to link up then, but our schedules didn't ever see the. No, right on. To add up. Right on. Well, let me start you off with inter-induction. Ready? I'm ready. All right. Jason Magnavice, JMAGS, retired Navy SEAL with over 26 years in the community, eight years at SEAL team, two 15 years at JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command and DEV group, which led to earning your airline transport pilot certificate and numerous FAA aviation qualifications served as served as a tactical communicator, sniper lead jumper and team leader, completed four deployments to operation and during freedom, completed four deployments to operation Iraqi freedom, closed out your career as the coordinator for recruiting candidates for Naval Special Warfare, senior listed advisor for the only enlisted aviation unit in the Department of Defense, currently an airline pilot flying a Gulfstream for a private family holding a 767 type rating at a major freight carrier raised with a Jehovah Witness mother and a Vietnam vet father. Most importantly, you're the father of one daughter and the grandfather of two boys. No social media, no book, nothing to sell. Nothing to sell. Did I write that? I did, right? I found that out. But, well, since you're new to media, I thought we'd kick it off with something real easy. Thank you. It's super easy to talk about. Everyday carry. Me, I got a 365 Legion, AXG. You got a 365 Legion? Yes. Nice. Nice. What do you carry? What else do you carry? Actually, I just picked up a staccato. Nice. Two days ago. Nice. Yeah. You like it? It's a little Gucci, you know what I mean? But it shoots like a dream. It's heavy. It's an XC. But it was one made, our community actually got, it's got like little bone frog on the side, American flag on it. It got a pretty good deal for a staccato. Nice. Yeah. It's a cool gun. So what would you carry, what would you carry when you were a pilot in the development group? Nothing. Nothing? Oh. No, we flew pretty much in the States. That's pretty much it. Okay. Yeah. We'll find our bosses around, gear, tune from, you know, certain places. That's pretty much it. Yeah, we didn't carry, no firearms. Right on. What would you carry if you were doing some blow pro stuff over a dev group? Look, talk about pistol, what's in your go bag, any cool devices you may have had? We pretty much carried the 226 back then before they transit in the big, the, the HAK was at the mark 21 to 45. Holy shit. You guys were using those. A couple of guys carried them. It just for the suppressed value of some of them. And a Ruger mark three, I've got a mark four, but we carry the one that self suppressed Ruger to 22. Self with a little hush puppy. Yeah, for shooting out street lights and stuff like that. Nice. Nice. Anything else? What kind of medical? Let's block it. That's it. We had PJs that did all that stuff. What kind of long rifle were you using? Um, we, I had a SR 25K. I liked the care 308. It was a shorter SR 25 and 300 win mag was like the laser beam back then and now everybody knows shooting 65, Creed and more, all that other stuff. And what's your favorite round? I like 308 and 300 win that you like 308 300. Do you like 300 blackout? I got a Daniel offense PDW. Actually, that's pretty sweet. Yeah. No shit. But every time you squeeze off a run, it's like, there's five bucks, five bucks, five bucks, five bucks. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I got you a present. Would you give me? You want to see it? Sure. All right. It's a bag of gummy bears. Vigilance League gummy bears. See, I do have shit to sell. Like gummy bears. But that's a bag of vigilance league gummy bears made in the USA legal in all 50 states so you can fly home. I got a pop positive. If I take these with anything, you might pop positive for sugar and red dye. That's about it. And I did get you one other present too. Since we're talking about weapons and oh, yeah, this is a story behind this and everyday carry. Oh, no way. Yeah, man. Have you seen these? This is a that a signal for him. This is no, this is this is this came out after the Rattler. This is better than the fucking Rattler, my opinion. But this is the SIG MCX spear. And so this is they're replacing all of the supposedly they're replacing all the military rifles with the 6.5. Excuse me. Yeah, 6. Shit. Now, there's so many rounds coming out. I can't fucking keep track. Either 6.5 or 6.8. Yeah, you start talking. Start talking guns. But but this one, so they got a 5.56 version, a 300 blackout version and a 6 point whatever version. And they put their new optics on the top of them for you. This is like, you can't even get these yet early. And then are you familiar with silencer shop? Yes, I just I just picked up a couple of Huxbridge cans of 5.56 and a 308. No shit. Yeah. Well, SIG was ecstatic that you were coming on the show. I told Jason, he'll get a buddy over there. Jason, he's runs a marketing over there. And it's a great place. They're a great company. Have you been out there? Yes. We went out there for an event for the foundation. Oh, nice. Like two octobers ago. Yeah, it was it was a good time. A lot of good people out at that place. A lot of good people. Nice. Well, and then silencer shop. There you go. Silencer shop. That word that you were coming on. And you know, I don't know. I guess you'd already have experience with them, but you know, you put in once you get signed up with them, they make it super easy. They do all the paperwork for you. You go to a gun shop that's got silencer shop kiosks in there and it just makes it super simple. And then the other thing they do is they also fight for basically gun rights, you know, especially obviously suppressors. So fucking awesome company, but told them you were coming on too and they wanted to throw a can on there. So that's yours. I'm extremely honored. Have fun. Thank you very much. I will. I will. We got a little, a little place in land passes in Texas that we do some blinking at. Nice. Nice. Try to eradicate the hog population out there because they get out of control. I hear that could be pretty challenging. Yes. But from a helicopter, it's entertaining. Nice. Well, maybe we'll break that in later. We got a range out back. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. You're welcome. And then one more thing to crank out before we get into the, to the real interview. So I have a Patreon account and it's a community that we've built. And so they're the reason that I get to be here with you today and, and do these interviews. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Rex Herman. What was the moment in your career that changed the way you think about leadership the most? The moment when, um, well, I've worked for some incredible people in list of guys. Like when I first got to the command, I was just called this guy crazy horse. He was one of the best leaders I ever worked for. You know, a humble guy that didn't think he knew everything all the time. And if he had any, any quiet, that's like who I wanted to be like, we respected him. He was a hard worker. He led by example, but he wasn't hard headed. He was just, Hey, if he had a quiet, he wasn't afraid to ask a question. He wasn't afraid to delegate other people that he knew were better at certain things that he wasn't. And that's what really made me respect leadership a lot from him. Right on. And a few other people. What date, what year did you get to the command? 2001. Holy shit. And you left in 2019. I think you told me before we started. 2016. 2016. Holy shit. 15 fucking years over there. I went over there for a break too. I saw that in your outline. You wanted to break and then decided to scream for Dev group pre-911. I wanted to break. I was tired of doing six month deployments when I was a little Creek and I did went to work here at platoons too. So it was a long work up. You know, some of the deployments were over six months, six, seven months. And my daughter was born in what year? 97. And I was gone a lot. And we weren't really working that much. A little stuff in Bosnia, Cove Sova, that's pretty much. Yeah, there was a work schedule back then and then I'm like, hey, honey, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to screen for a date because a bunch of my buddies are going over there too. A whole bunch of my buddies from two are going over there. Like I'm going to screen and some of the guys are pretty set in their ways that want to, that are like team two, you know what I mean? They were, some didn't want to go over there. They didn't want to go through the challenge of a selection process again. And I could get it. I could understand it. So some of them were trying to talk me out of it, but I'm like, no, dude, I'm going to be home. You know what I mean? I'll be home for three months at a time. You thought you were going to be home? But this is, I got a, I got out of the selection process screen team in September of 2001. Holy shit. And I remember we were walking across the compound when we were talking about the planes hitting the towers. And the first thought was, man, the ATC must have screwed that up. Then when the second one hit the tower, yeah, we got, they took our whole class into a briefing room. Our skipper came in, gave us the brief and we're like, oh boy, excited. Yeah. Excited because we knew we were going to be busy. But, you know, the families, it took the families were like, our guys are going to be gone for, for quite a bit. And we were, damn, damn. Yep. I know you've had one hell of a career, but let's start prior to the career. All right. Where'd you grow up? Library, Connecticut. What were you into? I was into bikes, baseball and football, pretty much. That's it? Yeah. What about when you were a littler? Any time in the woods? Oh, yeah, with my grandfather. So that's, yeah, getting back to the, yeah, by the way, I got to get for you. We'll get that down the road. But yeah, my grandfather, my mom's dad, he was a Korean war guy. He, from Kentucky, big backwards guy. He taught me, we go hiking all the time where we used to live by a reservoir in Waterbury, Connecticut. Yeah. He'd take me on hikes, point out. It's like poison, addy, poison oak, show me how to make little spears, like with his little folding knife. And then yeah, we climbed this mountain. He called it Jason's Mountain. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty good upbringing. Me and my dad also taught me a lot growing up. He was kind of a stickler for baseball and football. Pretty stern when it came to that stuff too. Oh, really? Serious. Yeah. Right on. What did your dad do? My dad, he worked, well, when he got out of the Navy, he started, he worked for a cargo company as a supervisor for transportation. And then he actually retired from the state of Connecticut working as a transportation supervisor for the state. What about your mom? She pretty much a stay-home mom for most of her life. I got a sister, I'm four years older than the other brother, I'm 10 years older than. Okay, so you're the oldest? Yes. And your mom was a is, is or was? Was. Jehovah's Witness. Yes. We have, we have a prior Jehovah's Witness work and hero. Great people, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome human being. He's editing the show right now. But boy, he's got some fucking stories. Oh yeah. It's rough, it's rough growing up as a kid being a Jehovah's Witness. They stole his kid from him. They did? Yeah. Yeah. I can't say they stole his kid from him, but they, it's a, it's a custody battle in like the whole, they're all going against him. It's wild. The religion did? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure I'll tell you about it after this. Yeah, that's crazy. You had a good experience? No. It's hard to explain. So my mom had me when she was, this was a funny story. My dad got drafted. He was 20. Your dad got drafted? Yeah, he got drafted. He was supposed to go to PBRs, then he volunteered for submarines because it was also sub trainings in Grotton, Connecticut to this, at the sub base there. So it's convenient in before he got, yeah. So my parents are married in May and my mom was a little misgutty, awesome. I love her to death. Little misgutty tissue. I'm like, my, you're, you were born on say a certain date in October and I had birthdays. It was two weeks later. So she turned 18 and I was born two weeks later. Wow. Yeah. They're still married. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. But when my dad was deployed, you know, and then some of the sub trips and stuff like that, Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, they go door to door on Saturdays or throughout the week and they kind of pulled her into it. And cause she was probably pretty easy to influence her to have, you know, like a congregation of people like minded and they do have got their great, their incredible human beings for the most part, you know, everybody's got their, their bad apple. Everyone I've about been super nice. But then, you know, go into church three times a week with the kingdom hall. That's what they call, you know, the church where they go. Having a wear a suit, which I still to this day. I don't like wearing a suit. Get dressed up in a little suit, little tie, go to the Bible study once a week. Like a Tuesday nights, you go to church Wednesday, Sunday for an hour and a half. Yeah, it was, oh, you know, celebrate any holidays. That's what I was going to, you don't celebrate birthday, Christmas, anything. Yeah. But if you dig deep into, hey, I'm not promoting them. I'm not sending anything, but they do. And like when you go to a normal church, you have your pastor, priest up there, right? They just talk off the cuff. They just give you, you know, with a lot of their knowledge, which I think they gain internally as themselves. Listen, spring cleaning is here. And before you convince yourself, your kitchen's fine. Go look at the pan you've been using. If it's warped, burnt or sticking to everything, it's time. That's why I switched to hexclad. These things are just built different. You get the performance of stainless steel, but with the convenience of nonstick. So you can actually get a proper sear without dealing with a nightmare cleanup after most pans make you choose. Either they cook well or they're easy to clean. The hexclad gives you both. You've got great heat control, nothing sticks, and you don't have to baby them. They're metal utensil safe, dishwasher safe, oven safe up to 900 degrees, just solid across the entire board. And there's a reason these have over a million customers and tens of thousands of five star reviews. Even Gordon Ramsay uses them at home. 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So it's just convenience. I think holidays of convenience. Easter, which I've heard. Did you have a conversation with somebody talking about the weird star alignment that's going to be happening in a couple of weeks? Yeah. What do you, oh, you know what, you know, you, how do you know about that? Did you watch that episode? I got crazy family member. No, somebody, my mom, my mother-in-law sent me that, I think. My mother-in-law sent me that. No shit. Because she's into that. Yeah. She's really like off the cuff stuff. I'm like, my, you got to calm down with this stuff. She reads some, sends us some stuff. Here we go. The banks are all going to explode. This is going to happen. You know what I mean? That sounds like here. Yeah. That's why I try to stay away from it. I just try to do my own thing. You know what I mean? I try to stay busy. But yeah, getting back to the holidays. Yeah. Easter, Christmas. This guy, let's, so yeah. What you're talking about, this guy said the second Cummings happened in Easter, 2026. So I'm excited. Yeah. We'll see what happens. You got to be ready for it. About a week away. Any day and getting ready. I'm ready. And getting back to that religion, getting back to the Jehovah's Witnesses, man, that they believe in, you know, Armageddon is going to eventually happen, all outlining revelations, all the shit you see going on the road right now, sorry God, is like, it's what it says. You know what I mean? People just take it for granted. It's ho-hum, you know what I mean? It's starting in Iran. Yeah, that's kind of, there's certain signs. It's fucking wild, man. But you got to have faith. You know what I mean? Be ready for it. That's the big thing. Yeah. What got your mom out of it? When did she leave? When I joined the military. Really? I'll get back. Yeah. So I graduated high school at 17 and they wanted, my parents wanted to sign a waiver for me. My dad wanted me to go in as an officer. So he's like, Jay, give me a year of college and I hated school. Like I told, getting back to the store, I wanted to be a seal since I was 10. Like in 1982 when I saw the first Rambo movie. Nice. But yeah, when I joined the military, she stopped going to the kingdom hall, stopped going to church and she kind of let it, and then my sister had kids and then, oh, they started celebrating Christmas and everything. Is your dad a Christian? He's raised Protestant, but yeah, he believes in God, but really not denominational, I guess. So he grew up celebrating Christmas? Yes. And then you guys did not celebrate anything? Yep. He just went along for the ride to keep my mom happy. Yeah. Do you celebrate Christmas now? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Yes, I do. Man, that's fucking great. That's just weird to me. It's weird and then just, yeah, you know, everybody talking about, yeah, it's a, hey, but they have, like, hey, they stand behind their faith, you know what I mean? They're really, they're really sticklers for it. Go door to door, spread in the word. It's, I've let them in all the time when I was in Virginia Beach. I don't see them too much in hostile. I don't see many going door to door there. But yeah, let them in and talk with them, you know, and give them my viewpoints and like when they don't believe in really serving, you know, a particular government or country, they believe you should just serve God and Jesus, Holy Spirit, all that. You're making this sound really good. Huh? It's no, if there was one true belief, yeah, I think that's one of the truest, because I've been around it all. I've heard it all from Catholicism. So are you any denomination? I guess I consider myself Catholic. Yeah, okay. I consider myself Catholic, but I bounce back and forth between that and non-denominational. And I'll tell you why. I think that the Catholics have the spiritual warfare stuff down better than anybody else. I think they really understand what's going on, you know, in the other realm. And, but I think that the, I think that the Catholics don't do the best job of teaching about the life of Jesus and the Bible and non-denominational churches do a much, much better job of it. And so, you know, I grew up Catholic and then left right around when I joined the SEAL teams, didn't come back to Christianity for, I guess I found faith about two, three years ago. And, and so really dove into the non-denominational stuff to learn about Christ and the Bible and all that stuff. And then actually through the show, interviewing all these exorcists and stuff like that, it kind of got me back into, you know, I'm really interested in spiritual warfare in that realm. Yeah, there's a whole different, yeah, there's definitely a whole different realm, I believe in too, definitely. Yeah. But like when first time going to Italy, like I walked into Vatican, I was like, this place is pretty cool. But it's very materialistic, right? Which a lot of stuff in the Bible is. Sounds a lot like the Pharisees. Yes. Yeah. I'm with you. I totally. And then how do you, in celibacy, I'm like, does it really say anywhere in the Bible to be, I mean, God wouldn't have made a woman out of his own image that he created. He wouldn't have made it. Yeah. He wouldn't have brought it even, right? Yeah. If you're down the road, you got to be, hey, you got to be celibate. You can't procreate. You can't have a woman in your life that takes, and I'm not too sure the real reason behind it. I've heard a bunch of theories about keeping, you know, certain sex of the Catholic church within each other. You know, I'm not too sure how, where that really came from. I don't know either. But it's just weird. Yeah. Once again, like you said, you just got to have faith in whatever you believe in. Yeah. Is there some weird, yeah. There's some weird stuff going on. There's definitely some weird shit going on in the world. But, so you wanted to be a seal since 11 years old. Spent a lot of time out in the woods, carving spears, making weapons. Yeah. Well, my dad is why I bought this for you. It's a movie prop, but I saw the first Rambo at 10. Jehovah's Witness kid. My dad takes me to see, because he heard about this movie at work or something. He takes me to see First Blood. He rated our movie. 1982, 83, came out, the 82. And I was like, holy cow. I'm like, that is, I mean, that image you get in your head at 10 years old or two, like just being in the woods, the freaking blade that he had. Yeah. You know what I mean? This ain't the Jimmy Lyle one. Jimmy Lyle made Dark Assault Knife Smith. He passed away a while ago. But I was intrigued. And my dad's like, yeah, Green Berets. Like this ain't a movie or somebody. Those guys are real badasses. My dad's like, I worked with it, you know, and these guys called, you know, UDTs and SEALs back in the South China Sea in the submarines. He did a couple, a few things with them. And I always loved the water too. And you know that image of coming out of the water with, oh yeah, you know, all kitted up. It's when you're impressionable at that age, it's, it leaves a big mark on your brain. And yeah, when I was in middle school, like, Jay, what do you want to do when you grow up? I was like, I want to join a Navy. I want to, nobody knew in the 80s what the freak of SEAL was to like 1990 when, well, when Marsinko wrote the book, Rogue Warrior, whatever. And then in 1990, when the SEALs movie came out with Charlie Sheen or whatever. And I thought that was pretty cool. Like again, I was impressionable, 17 years old. And, um, yep, when I wanted to be a team guy since, yeah, I was a young kid. Yeah. But I couldn't, I graduated high school. My dad wouldn't sign a waiver for me. Like I said, I was 17. No, why would you go and be an officer? No, it's not, I don't like college. You know, I didn't like school at that time. And I turned 18 and joined. Back then it was on delayed entry program. I was talking to my recruiter the whole time I was in college and he's like the one recruiter that didn't lie to you, right? I like to always say, recruiters bullshit you. He was a quarter master rating on the submarine. And back then they had the dye fair program, which you joined, but as a non rate, you go to boot camp, pass a screening test, go to Bud's. And then if you fail, if you make it through, you get a rating. But if you don't make it through Bud's, it's not like nowadays where you can say, I'm emotionally distraught and they lay out of the Navy. If you didn't go to Bud's, you're like chip and paint and, you know, swab and dex as a non rate in a fleet, which is not good. And my recruiters like Jada, the odds of you making it through Bud's are very small. Because you're going to want to have, if it falls through, you're going to want to have a good rate in the Navy. So I'm a QM. It's a pretty decent rate. And I just, I wanted the shortest A school, you know, the shortest school you go to for the rating. And back then I think it was single men with street weeks, QM was six weeks. So I'm like, yep, sign me up. And yeah, boot camp, A school in Orlando, then straight to Bud's. Right on. What'd you think of Bud's? Hold on, let me back up. What did your parents think when you got in? I didn't think they thought that I would make it through Bud's, but that was a great thing when it came to graduation. They weren't happy. They weren't happy, but they knew I wanted to do it. And when I, yeah, when I 318, I signed the line, yeah. Right on. They got over it though. Yeah. Yeah, they did. Yeah. You get there. Well, hindsight's always 20, 20 when it comes to Bud's, right? I got there in a... You're 18, right? Yep, just get ready to turn 19. And I got there in August, right when a bunch of, we had like 12 officers in our Bud's class, mostly all Academy guys. We had two Air Force Academy guys too. It was a good group of dudes, hard chargers, you know what I mean? But back then you're just young and dumb. You just, Bud's pissed me off while I was there. Like I never thought about quitting. I was just mad all the time, going through Bud's, jogging into the compound. We first got there, yelling, getting stuck. Everybody getting like, dude, shut the... They're going to drop a drop. I told you, stop, we get yelled at by not only our own, our own O's, but by the instructors of Bud's like constantly. But it was, it's a big mind game, like they say. But like when I was doing the coordinator thing out of San Antonio, kids would ask, what's the, I'm like, dude, it's about, it's, if you could pass the PST and just stay healthy, you know, and deal with the mind games and Bud's, you're going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah. As you know, it's a big, yeah, a lot of mind games. Did you have any hang ups? Um, no. Not good. Nothing. When we got to the, what's that stuff? Guys who get TBI, the side of their knee, whatever, not TBI. Oh yeah. That little tendon. I always thought it was bullshit until I got to San Clemente Island and I could barely bend my leg, but yeah, I made it, I ended up cutting it through, but not TBI. No, I forget what it's called. Tender. Yeah, your typical band. Yeah, something like that. That was the one time I really got friggin, pretty much, I guess you'd say hung up. That's it though. Time runs. A couple of times in the old course. Yep. I remember getting hammered once for that, trying to tie him the rope swing and a structure yelling at me. I said a really bad word to him. I'm sure enough he had duty that night in the grinder and like the whole 2008 count bodybuilders. Um, just a mental part too. Just staying healthy was, it was the key being smart, you know what I mean? And not doing anything like this is stupid or, yeah, staying healthy was the biggest, in being cold wet and sandy all the time. You just got to get used to it. You got it. What did you, what did your parents think when you hit graduation? They were proud. Yeah, they, my parents never fly either. Their homebodies, they don't fly anywhere and they flew out to California to San Diego, came out to Coronado. Yeah, they were proud. They still, yeah, I got to find some of those pictures back then before the digital times. How did that feel? Totally against you joining the military. But then I was, I was happy that they were happy that, you know, I actually made it through and I got pretty fortunate with the same class. But then we had to go to jump school right after that, airborne and that was freaking, after a bunch of gung-ho young Navy dudes into a pretty regimented army school in Fort Benning. It was, we got in a lot of trouble there. We got, a couple guys got sent back to the, but back then it was like, all right, we'll send you back in a couple weeks. What'd you get sent back for? Well, we went. I didn't get sent back. A couple of my buddies did for just, yeah, running in formation with each and we're running around the formation. We jump into freaking water before we did a PST, just being cocky. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of, you look back at it now and it's kind of like, yeah, we were pretty dumb. Yeah, we weren't even that fucking bad and they just kept picking on us and you know what I mean? The army cord, I just kept picking on us. So one of our guys, you know, they make you do watch and shit out. You know, the barracks and so a really good friend of mine, he's passed away now. It's Kyle Paulson, the name was Kyle Paulson. He posted all his guys up there like, he's like, you go watch that door. You go watch that door. You watch the front door. You watch the back door. I'll be right back. Went in to the Sergeant Major's desk and took a huge shit. Took a huge shit right on his fucking desk. You know, the watch goes all night. And so the next morning, like we're all out there standing. And you knew you're getting boy, you knew you're going to get boy. I know right. Well, none of us even fucking knew. We're just, he didn't tell, he didn't tell the guys that he had posted up on the doors. He didn't tell any of the other guys that were coming in for buds. You know, we're all the same buds glass. And we're standing out there in formation the next morning. And this guy was just a total, it was just like, dude, we're not even doing anything. You're being a fucking asshole to us for no reason. And he comes out. He's like. These fucking you fucking seals. And we're all like, what the hell? Who's shit on my fucking desk? That's me fucking starts his thing, starts the muster with who's shit on my fucking desk. And it was just, it was, I mean. Did he ever get caught? Or did he, anybody rat him out? No, he told us that night, but none of us really thought it was fucking hilarious. So yeah, just, just the visualization of that dick had to have a scraped shit off of his desk. That's freaking disgusting. Yeah, I know it is. It's also hilarious. So, but yeah, yeah. Anyways. And you knew you were going to get blamed for it anyway, because yeah, they were always freaking Navy guys. Cause I think we had a couple of you guys there too. But yeah, we got blamed for it pretty much. You know, the 32 foot tower? Yeah. Well, well, like the second class is the E-5s were in charge of the little hill. You jump off the 32 foot tower, you hooked up a little D-Rings, you do your four count and get down. We had this big dead blackbird on top of the, and we thought it was going to go up to our black hat. Our black hat, our instructor was a cool dude. He jumped into Panama, freaking, he had his little freaking mustard stain on his airborne wings. So he, he, he was in the 75th Ranger regiment too. So he has, he had a little bit of animosity from the other instructors looking at him, but he was real cool to us into the, the future team guys that just got out of buds. But we thought he was going to be up there and they switched sides, but we took this blackbird, shoved its head. It was, it was somehow it died up on the freaking hill. We shoved the head in the D-ring. So when the runners come down, like they hook the little rope up in the D-ring and they're bringing their run, and this bird, it wasn't small as like flopping like this. He struck her nonchalantly. Crap. He just yells, everybody drop. And it was a different guy. And we got, yeah, they hit, well, tried to hammer up. We were, we just keep doing pushups cause it's all we've been doing our lives well to that point. And yeah, he was, he took everybody off the hill. We had hammered us for a good hour. And the poor other people up on the hill that were just going through airborne where like they had to pay the price for our stupidity. You know what I mean? Oh shit, dude. Yeah, that was a, yeah, the interesting times back then. What long time ago, man? Good times. Yeah. Good times. Good memories. But definitely. So where'd he go from jump school? Team two. Team two. Yep. What was the reputation of team two back then? Oh, my team one and team two, man, the SEAL team shoot, they called it. It was a, yeah, you don't want to be a new guy hanging around in the locker room in the cage area on a Friday. Put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Hazing was pretty, pretty common. Did you get it? Oh yeah. Give me a good hazing story. They don't do this shit anymore. Can't really tell you. No, dude, I was, when I made third class and got my bird, we were at Fort Pickett in Virginia. In my, dude, my first platoon, they all went, we all went to Captain's Mass after an appointment for a hazing incident that was actually an accident, but it went to the wrong people. Yeah, man. I'm talking, if you try to fight back at all, because I was a pretty good scrapper back then. No, it's all, it's all over when somebody's got your balls in their hand and the freak, they're twisting, man. And you're getting, you're getting tied up or zip tied and getting dragged out, freaking shaving your balls, hot sauce in the balls, getting hit with paddles. Yeah. It was, it's stupid, right? It's all fun and games until you're tied naked to a spine board, hanging upside down from an elevator shaft and they're shooting fucking simian-ish and rounds at you. And then tape your head up and put a little pinhole on your mouth and throw you in the fucking showers. Yeah, like, what? Welcome to team two. They're like, what? Waterboarding? Like what? You did that all the time, man. Yeah. Drop a rag on your face while you're hanging upside down. And then as soon as you take an inhale, somebody's blowing cigar smoke in your face. Yeah. They're like, that's not, that's not torture. Or whiskey down your throat. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. It was stupid. I mean, back then it was just like, and then once you actually, you got your initial- Dude, there were like no fucking rules when you were in. Yeah, well, that's why you were, I mean- Like no rules. You were smart. When you got secured on Friday, we would sneak out through the locker room, jump the back fence over by the STV and get to your car and you parked down the road so you wouldn't get freaking- guys would have, yeah, keg in the locker room, you know, a Friday and freaking- where the new guys at? You don't want to be around, man. Did you carry that forward? No, I did not. I, no, can't say that I did. I wasn't big into it. I wasn't really big into it. No, I thought it was stupid when it happened to me, so I'm like, well, why do I want to do that? But when you were a new guy and after you got hazed and they, if somebody else was going to get, they made you, like me and my buddy John, we were the take down guys. I'm like the most dangerous part of hazing somebody that doesn't want to be hazed, right? You got to go in and grab them while everybody else tries to control them, tie them up, do whatever, and then I just, yeah, it wasn't for me, really. Yeah, yeah. Well, how did it feel checking into team two after Butts? A lot of pride, a lot of pride in team two because, you know, they had a rep. I kind of wanted to go to four because I like South America, jungle type stuff, which come to find out the order I got. I really don't like the jungle that much. There's a lot of history there. You know what I mean? When you walk across that quarter deck and then, but you're still, you still got to go through STT and then SEAL tactical training back then before they stopped doing that and made it all go on in Coronado. But STT was, it was fun and challenging. I mean, the summertime in Virginia at AP Hill, very hot. And then that's where you try to start, you know, building your reputation too. Because nobody really cares who you are until you get, you check into your team and then you start training and that's all shooting, moving, communicating with really, really big back then. It still is, it still is, but now, you know, you got a little, a lot more to worry about with drones and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yesterday we brought these. Were you involved in, were drones big when you left? They were just coming in. They were just being teeny quite a bit. And now it's like, it's one of the deadliest things in the battlefield, obviously. Dude, holy shit. I did this, I did this little, we made a piece of content yesterday and we brought these drone operators from Ukraine down. Oh, that's a. Yeah. Those guys know what they're doing. Dude, holy shit. So they kind of briefed us up on everything they're doing. I had never, I've never seen it on the closest thing to drone war for I've seen as a fucking predator overhead. Yep. But none of these like FPV drones or like, so we go, we brought them on, on this properties over a hundred acres. They gave us, you know, hey, this is the, this is the drones. These are the capabilities. These are these type of drones. And they're like, all right, go hide. We'll give you a head start. And then they're sending the drones after you and. You can't. It's. Dude, holy shit. You can't hear where the fuck they're at. You, I mean, like it sounds like they're right above you and they're over there. And. It's impossible to get the fuck away from those. Yeah. I've I took some shots at one just for the hell. I just wanted to see what the site picture was like and there's no way in hell. You I mean, you're basically trying to hit a four inch dot. And then they just came out with a particular ammunition. I read somewhere for drones that you could shoot out of like a five, five, six or whatever to and it still seems like pretty hokey to me. It gets it shoots in a pattern with the one round splits into like four little rounds. Gotcha. Yeah. Even if you try to jam them, you know what I mean? I think they still already pre-programmed for what they're going to do, where they're going to go and the tethered ones are the big problem too. Yeah. Well, I mean, once they once you're identified, you're fucked. Yeah. Because I mean, I like I just had a pistol with it. I was like, you know, just just just for the hell of it. I was like, I just want to see, I just want to put myself in the fucking scenario and actually take it seriously. And, you know, I was like listening to their tactics and shit at the beginning on how they find people and all the different capabilities and what the weaknesses are. So I was trying to utilize some of that stuff. And but once once they're on you, you're you're fucked. Like doesn't doesn't if you if you shoot one down, there's just going to be a swarm of them. Come on. 20 more of them. Yeah. And they're even saying that you can have one on station or more than one on station and have the same pilot control in multiples. So you could, you know, fly 10 damn drones and have nine on station and just up that one went down. Another one switched to the next one. You know what I mean? And they're already hovering on station, just waiting for it. Waiting to bounce. Yeah. I was like, this is that's nuts. You're fucked. A shotgun, even a shotgun. You don't even have that many shells to go through. You know what I mean? Maybe it hit one, but by the time you got one coming behind you too, it's it's a whole different battlefield. Like we always say, like getting back to the STT thing. That's where they really teach you well, the diving and then shoot, move and communicate. And now you got to really stay low move with discretion and definitely have somebody watching your six or somebody that's going to get because the drones are the biggest. I mean, for when I'm hearing now and all this stuff, because I've been out of the game for a while. And then talking to people that know a lot about it. It's yeah, it's a different battlefield, definitely. It's pretty wild. Yep. It's pretty wild. Because as you said, you had back then in the beginning of OEF and OIF, all we had were predators, Draco's up there and now they're kind of outdated. Yeah. I mean, these things, one of them was like that big. Yeah. Said it can go 300 kilometers an hour. Fucking crazy. That's insane. But I actually, I could be off on that. But anyways, back to you. STT. Yep. AP Hill, then the diving and then. Yep. Got my first platoon. How was that? It was actually a pretty good deal because they usually don't give like new guys out of STT back. But like I said, we don't wear fair platoons, right? So we go to Alaska and do telemark skiing. You learn how to live out of a backpack for freaking almost 11 days unsupported. And so I got into a winter war platoon and great, great people in there. My first, the die buddy was Tommy Valentine, who unfortunately passed away quite a time back in a jumping accident in Arizona. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, he was my first swim buddy. He was a freaking stud all in all the time. Awesome. Awesome, dude. I learned a lot. You're pretty much trying to gather and trying to see like we talked about earlier, like, Hey, who do I want to? Who do I want to be like, you know what I mean? And. Yeah, Val was definitely one of those guys. He led by example, hardcore, super incredible combat diver too. And like we take that shit for granted nowadays, right? Like how much water is in the desert? But, uh, yeah, super squared away. Pretty much everything you did. Where was your deployment? We went to a first trip. Well, they moved the command. Well, not the command, the unit from Scotland. Yeah, we moved on over to Italy. Ben Dizzy, the heel of the boot. Cause we were staged there just to go over back and forth to Bosnia, to Syria, or coastal or whatever, just to work with other little units over there. We really weren't doing much as far as combat wise. And a teammate did a couple of ship takedowns in the Adriatic around that time to enforce embargo. Like I said, this is back in the nineties. And then we went to Norway, which was a blast. Well, I've heard those are awesome. We went there for a month. And yeah, the funny thing is I go, I raised my whole life right. Thinking I'm Polish and Lithuanian. My first trip to Norway, I get there. We're talking to the Marine Yagers there, like their version of the great, incredible people. They're like, are you Scandinavia? Are you like Norwegian? Like you got a big head. You kind of like, you look like us. And I'm like, no, dude, I'm not. No, I'm, I'm, I'm like Polish and freaking, I think Lithuanian, you know, but back then, sure enough, I get my freaking, uh, the 23 and whatever, whatever the DNA checked on comes back. Hey, you're 80, it's like 78% from, and like in Norway, that area, like straight over there, kind of a little bit to the UK. And my mom is also the same. Like my dad, I don't, is he my dad? No, he is. But yeah, he don't have any, like I don't have anything that my dad has in him from his DNA. It's weird. Well, like the ethnicity traits or whatever you want to call them. Yeah. But going back to the first trip to Norway and they, are you Norwegian? I'm like, nah, like you look like you could be, you know what I mean? They were like, I said, this was back in 93, 94 and like, no, yep, sure enough. I am, but don't, Norway was a blast, man. A lot of skiing. Those guys are born with freaking skis on their feet. Jump turning with 80 pound rucks on with tele skis on. Holy cow. We're just too busy picking ourselves up off the snow. You know what I mean? Yeah. Damn. Damn. What was going on? I mean, I know what was going on, but what, did you wind up going to Bosnia? Yeah. Yeah. We've gone to Cerebo hang out there. I actually, that's where I started, uh, made a couple of good friends with a couple of CCTs, contact controllers over there from, yeah, we just drive around to various like safe houses there, hang out there, bring them food and stuff and come back. It was a lot of, a lot of driving around, not too much. What was the point? What was the mission? The, back then, right? We, it's funny how America goes to one extreme. We were protecting Muslims from getting killed by Christians, right? The Serbs and all that. And I really wasn't clear what the mission was over there. I've really, it was just, sounds like every fucking war. It go, it going after, uh, I'm not really sure what the fuck we're going after. Pifwix and like the person wanted for war crimes or whatever. Like these generals that were in charge of the mass, freaking graves and stuff and kill them just in like towns of people, you know what I mean? Yeah. But that was very like, genocide going on. Yeah. A lot of genocide. Yep. Yeah. Humanity can be evil at times, man. So what, I'm just curious. I mean, this was, uh, I don't want to relate our experiences, but this sounds similar to when I joined. What, what was your impression of the civil teams? Were you fired up or you're disappointed? I mean, you got, this all came off of Rambo in 1982. Yes, it did. It did. You're not doing Rambo stuff. No. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was just along for the ride, like waiting for something to happen. You know what I mean? And the training was fun, but we made, obviously, you know, we make things that people pay to do for fun suck. Like jumping like, dude, oh, we'll go skydiving. Like, did I care if I ever see a rig again? You know, diving, like, it's not the fun I'm staring at a compass board. Freaking depth gauge and a stopwatch for freaking two hours underwater and freezing your ass off. Right. But you learn a lot and you want to be good at it. Yeah. Right. You don't want to be subpar, especially the biggest thing is not letting your, your teammates down. I think that was, so the brotherhood, you know, you definitely see from the beginning, once you're in, once you get kind of established in your role and you build that trust. But as far as being bored, yeah, it was, as far as like not actually doing what you're training to do, I think that's kind of what. What's going on in the past couple of years too, as well with guys just getting bored in one day and just, you know, but you got to be careful what you ask for too. You got to be careful what you ask for. So you. You spend some time. How long were you a team too before you decided? Eight years. Oh, eight years. Yeah. There's something. Glad you brought that up. Something that's not in that piece of paper right there. So I got out in 98. For eight months, I got out, I was going to be a US Marshal. Couple of my buddies from team four already went, went over and doing it. I went through the whole process, got out, moved to Connecticut and moved back home. Cause I thought I was going to work out a new Haven guy. I went to high school with is a Marshal as a U.S. He was the head Marshal at the time. A guy went to high school with his dad's best friend. So he's like, come up. Yeah, come up here. You move up here. And I'm waiting to hear back from the Marshal service about what I'm going to go to Glencoe, you know, to start up school on here, fleet, see whatever. And then I get a letter back then. So before emails and all that, we're sure to tell you that, you know, I'll consider for it. And I went through to interview. I went through the, like you're going to. I do. The fucking seal teams become a Marshal and then they denied you. But hold, can I rewind for a minute? Why did you want to leave the seal teams have become a Marshal? My daughter was born. I didn't want to deploy anymore for no reason. Just what we were talking about earlier, as far as like, you know, being bored where it really wasn't anything going on. And I thought it would be cool. You know what I mean? And just talking to other buddies too, like, Hey, it's better than being an FBI agent, cause you don't get as much red tape to cut. If you want to do this is back then, you know. Yeah. And I got the, it says, you're no longer being considered for the position. And I called up one of my buddies. He's like, yeah, dude, it's a whole, they're doing a whole scrub. They're, it was at that time, it was kind of like, because I looked away. I am and who I am, who I am. I wasn't going through with that class. I'll just leave it at that. So I'm like, shit, what am I going to do? Like I got a newborn. Well, I'm putting it's like, Hey, the federal prison's hiring. And Danbury, Connecticut. And I'm like, what? Be a, be a freaking CO, right? And so I go, I go interview for that job, 23, 24 years old. And I'm like, yeah, I guess I could do it. And it just went from male prison to female prison. Medium security, federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut. And I'm like, do you sure you want this job? Like, I need something, man. We'll start off as a GS seven or GS eight, whatever. I'm like, I just got out of the Navy. I got in my buddy of mine, who was also in my first platoon, he got out. This is where I'm going with this. He moved to Florida to be an EMT. And we talked back and forth. He's like, he's like, fuck this. I'm going back in the Navy and back then. So this is, I don't know where I'm going with this. But anyway, I worked in the pro, I go to, I go to Glenco for the training down in Florida at Fleetsea, where they train the federal CO's. And there was, that was a fun, only one, one other dude knew what I did prior. Like I just kept it on the down low. He was a Marine and we both worked at the same prison, but we both went to training together and when you're down there, you shoot like a Ruger nine millimeter. Like a Ruger nine millimeter, the old freaking AR 15s and a shotgun, a pump shotgun. And yeah, it was, it was a good time. It was a pretty, the shotgun story. I got to tell it though. It's what, so this, you line up in like a couple of months, when you're shooting everything else, you're online and shotgun, you're getting like a two lines. Cause I think I don't know when to save money for shells or it's just something that it was like a remington eight, 70, I think a pretty basic pump gun. And there was a lady, a DEA agent that was in the structure there, right? And I'm just having a go. I'm like, dude, I'm like, why is this is going to be funny? So cause she's like milk and everybody through it. Like, oh, this is what you do. Like you put one in the chamber this way and then you load it like that. And she's like, all right, be careful. It kicks a little, right? And I get up there and like, I'm like, I'm like, dude, I'm acting like I'm all nervous and shit. And he was trying on the lap, right? And she's like, Hey, just relax. Just relax. And like, dude, I've been, John Shaw taught us how to shoot shotguns. You know what I mean? I grabbed the shell, I go put it in backwards, you know, the brass face. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, it goes up. I drop it. You did this shit on purpose. I drop it. And then I'm, I load up and she's like, OK, be careful. You know, it kicks a little and like the way they're showing how to shoot, like boom, so give it back to her. She called me a fucking asshole. And the guy behind me was laughing. Like, dude, I just wanted to have fun with it. And one of our one of our instructors, like he started laughing his freaking ass off because it was it was a pretty the way it went down. You had to be there to see it. It was pretty fucking obvious. She was like, be careful. I'm like, no, I'm a little nervous. That's awesome. But yeah, I did that for eight months. I found out my buddy went back in a Navy and I'm like, dude, I can't do this anymore. So I called up. I'll call him Mad Dog. A lot of people are going to know who he is. And he was working another great guy, another great role model growing up, taught me how to ski, actually, well, growing up in the teams. And I'm like, hey, are you taking? And like, can I go back? And he goes, I know you'd be calling back. I know you'd be calling back. Like, are they taking? He's like, yeah, you got to go see your recruiter. I'm like, what? I just can't. He goes, yeah, you got to go see your recruiter. This is before, as so was actually a rate. I was still a quarter master. So I went to the same recruiting office. I went in freaking, dude, 10 years ago when I first started talking to him when I was in high school. And obviously the same recruiters aren't in there. And like, hey, I want to go back to the Navy. I mean, but they called it a nav vet. Like I'm a nav vet. I want to go back to it. And like, what did you do? I was like, I'm a quarter master. They go to second class and he gets up, he calls a detailer. He's like, no, they're not, no, they're not taking you back. I said, by any seas 5326. And to that, I'm wearing, I'm wearing T-buzz, torn shorts and like freaking a beat up T-shirt. And he's like, you're a fucking seal. He goes, oh, yeah, they're taking you guys back. And that was another little journey. So I had to go back to the meps, the military entrance processing station up in Springfield, the same one I went to before. And my recruiter drove me up to what the recruiter I was working with. He drove, I had to do the duck walk, go through the whole physical again to get in there. And then when we were standing there, swear in, I'm like talking to this kid. Hey, when you go to the Navy for, he goes, I think I'm going to go to BUDS, you know, I want to be a seal. I'm like, I heard that's tough as shit, man. Like it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty hard, you know, line of work to choose. And my recruiters like, Jay, leave him alone. Like, don't be it. And I said, Hey, we'll talk about it afterwards. So it was going through the whole recruiting thing again, going through the whole damn freaking. Yep. I came in two weeks later. I was in a platoon with DJ stat. I'm like the tune chief. Yep. How was that? It was good. It was a fun. It was a good time. It was good. It was good. Just getting back in man. It was just good getting, being around, you know, going to work, I'm not saying going to work at FCI for like eight months and then having a broken service and then realizing, you know, how much you do miss, like the biggest thing you miss when you leave are the guys, right? The boys. So getting back in right into another one of where people tune. Yeah. Right on. It was, and then they had two years later, I screened for a. Damn that. For that group. Well, before we dive into that group, let's take a quick break. All right. Perfect. If you've ever hired somebody like I'm in the middle of doing right now, you know, this can be extremely overwhelming. You put a job posting out and the next thing you know, you have 2000 resumes all wanting to be the next producer. Well, if you're hiring, here's the good news. You can now review all these resumes and applicants faster. Thanks to Zip Recruiter. Zip Recruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested quality candidates first. And today you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com. Slash SRS. What I really like is it cuts through the noise. Their matching technology brings the right people to you faster. And with this new feature, the candidates who are actually interested rise to the top, you're not wasting time guessing, you're getting straight to the people who want the job. And you even get a better sense of who they are because candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com. Slash SRS. That's ZipRecruiter.com. Slash SRS. Meet your match on Zip Recruiter. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilant's Elite, the Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrace, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime. Not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Jason, we're back from the break. We left off at. You took a quick, you took a, you took another break from the SEAL teams, became a correctional officer, went back to team two for about another two years. And now you're, sounds like you're getting ready to scream for development group, also known as SEAL Team Six. Yes. I, um, I wanted to go over there to take a break. So. You wanted to go over there to take a break. Yes. Did you tell them that in your screening? No. I'll just kill. And no, I wanted to go over there to stop because my daughter once again, was young and I was never home. I just wanted to stop with a six month appointments and I'm like, go over, over there, I had, once my buddies went over there and they're like, it's great. You know, you hang around for three months. Just carrying a beep around you back then. And then you train, you have some very specialized training, you know, for another three months, you get to go to schools. You wanted to go to like civilian schools, great shooting schools, you know, lockpicking all that stuff and at a very high level. And then you train with your team back then or squadron now for another three months. So you're, you're home quite a bit, except for when you're picking and choosing what training you want to go do. And, uh, this is what you were told. Yeah. This is pre-911. Yeah. Yep. And I, I finished a training program there in September of 2001. And yeah. Well, hold on. Let's talk about the screening. The green team. Yeah. It is definitely more cerebral than like you would say, like, then buds is as far as the shooting, moving, communicating part of it. I mean, when you got in, when you. Guts went through, went through green team. I mean, I'm out of fucking death group guys, so I can talk shit, but I know what I saw when I was in and I got out in 2006 and they went from running one green team a year to running two green team of years. And it seemed like the majority made it through green team. I think it was a completely different scenario when you got it because there was nothing going on. Retention was probably really good. Yeah. Guys weren't dying. So there wasn't really much to fill. So it was really, really fucking hard to get in there. It harder. Probably should shut my mouth because I'm not one of them. No, no, but you think I get your point, even when I went over here to screen. When I said, I was like, I wasn't impressed by the attitudes of some of the guys over there. You know what I mean? They're like more high and mighty than you were. You know what I mean? And we have guys coming over there that were, that have done real world shit boardings, you know what I mean? Real world operations, either Bosnia, Kosovo. And we knew that the guys at the command really weren't doing anything except hanging around and maybe go grab a person who wanted for crime. And that was the big thing or, you know, take down a ship that gets hijacked or whatever. And I wasn't impressed by the attitude because they were like, oh, like this fucking new guy, you wear your blues when you go over to your screen and do your interview and all that stuff. And it was just like they're arrogant dudes pompous and arrogant. And you could then even after green team, you could kind of see why they are. Because you do get some pretty good training, like really good training. And, but as you said, once again, there wasn't much going on. And then 9-11 happened. They weren't taking anybody though, were they? I mean, they were taking like very few people before September 11th. Yeah. It's a good old boy network, you know what I mean? They go around, they ask everybody you work with in, you dump a tunes with. And if you don't, if you don't like somebody, I just give a reason why. Because there are a lot of great guys that don't come over to the command because they just don't want to deal with the bullshit, you know what I mean? Back then. And then when we got busy and started growing, yeah, that's when they were because we were gone, I mean, quite a bit. Yeah. The three color teams were, yeah, four months, four months, four months, you know, then you rotate every four months. How was green team? It was, it was challenging. Safety is a big thing there and doing things at a very high level, you know, being able to shoot well. It's a big thing. Safety violations, I said, is the biggest thing that gets people shaking from there and not being able to think, shoot an unknown instead of, you know, what you're supposed to do in the house. That was the, I think the most challenging part for people going through the training, jumping, they take it, that at a very high level too, can't go one degree off heading when you, when you exit the plane, you got to be able to, yeah, fly tight formation under canopy and everything, the diving, it was pretty, you know, at a high level because you're not just in peers anymore, you're diving as a whole group. So. Oh, no shit. Yeah. With a little pole. Yeah. Right. Right on. So you get through green team. Where do you go from there? Um, we're, we're into a squadron and then, well, the team back then and then we, we punched out to Afghanistan. Which squadron? Red. Red squadron. Is that where you met this? I met him a few years after that when he came there. Yes. Okay. Yep. Red squadron. And you graduated. It was red team. It was red team back then and then they started calling. Squadrons to made up with our army counterparts of CAG. Gotcha. They were squadrons. So they're like, Hey, we're team anymore and. Gotcha. Make it squadrons for the higher ups at JSOC to make it easier for them. And so you graduated green team right before September 11th? Right there. Right there. We were going, we were walking across the compound when the first plane hit. And I remember one of my buddies comes out of the locker room. He was like, dude, you hear what happened? And that's what we had just like phones were that big back then either. We were just watching the news inside the team room or inside our training room. And then another plane hit. Then our skippers like call a meeting for all the cadre in all the class and kind of gave a lowdown on what's going down. And that's when he said there's another plane. They're tracking down right now after one hit the Pentagon. And yeah, it was kind of, it was exciting. It was an exciting time, I think. But then it was, you know, this is, it's about to get real. What's your wife think? She was worried, obviously all the wives were. Yeah. That first appointment wasn't really good for the wife network. Yeah. When we first, when we first punched out over there. So you hold on, hold on. So you get done with green team. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, what, and then you go right to red team, right to Afghanistan. Yes. Well, we had a few weeks in between and we were working on stuff that we might be doing over there as far as insertion techniques, like jumping, how we're going to work, freaking getting our gear set up. Cause it was the first move for, I mean, I mean, going to Afghanistan, right, it just, it just kicked off. And we wanted to be sure. Were you the first squadron to go? No. No. Second. What were you guys doing? What was the mission going to be? Hunting down the Vodin was the big one. Obviously when we first got over there, looking for him all over his network of people, and yeah, just trying to find him. And that was our big mission when we first went over there. Well, let's talk about flying in there. I mean, you just had roughly a 10-year career at SEAL Team 2. Yeah. Yeah. Eight years at SEAL Team 2 with a eight-month break. You joined the SEAL teams because of Rambo in 1982. Yep. And now you're stepping foot in a country that just... Where Terrasel is that just fucking hit the Twin Towers in Pentagon. Yeah. Yeah, we flew over there. That was friggin' entertaining too. The crew that I was with, the team, the boat crew, I'm like a little squad, you call it, pretty much in the teams, we moved around. We called ourselves the orphans. We moved around from... We landed, we got in Kandahar, and then we went to a couple other small towns. We were living out of a backpack, eight-night maries for almost four months. Holy shit. And then you had to stand and buy, trying to develop intelligence to actually track down people in this network. And then they had a big military offensive operation in Akantha. It happened during our first pump over there where we lost Neil Roberts, Fifi, Chappie, the controller, and yeah, that was... You were there for that? I was one... We were on the other bridge. Yeah. Holy shit. Let's go on to that. Well, getting into that was even funny, because my chief, my boat crew leader, which is called Crazy Horse, he's like, Jay, are you still up on your JTAC stuff? And because he comes out of a meeting, right? And we're just messing with our gear. Like I said, we were moving everywhere. And he wanted to know if I was still... Because I was a communicator too, as well, in my platoons I've done. And I'm like, yeah, he goes, dude, you know how to use, like, one-seventy-fox ride? Yeah. He's like, why? We had no idea what was going on. He goes, I'm trying to get us some work. We were an assault team. We weren't a recce team, but they wanted to put up... They're like, well, we got snipers in here. We get with ten-inch barrels too. It was stupid. But it was two hours. You got two hours. Go do your radio checks. Meet up with Al, who was our freaking, our calm support guy, not a team guy, but a very smart, incredible guy. And get a DMC 120, satellite antenna, the donkey dick, UHF. I'm like, two hours. And then we got to pack out rucks, I think we're going to be out there seven to ten days. And guys weren't really sure how to pack out a winter ruck, because it was freaking cold and we were at 10,000 feet, between nine and 10,000 feet. So yeah, I'm doing radio checks as we're getting on a freaking 40-seventy-go in. Holy shit. So wait a second. They're sending a fucking assault team in to do sniper work with two hours of prep time? Yes. It was just, it was one of those things, hey, it's better. Let's go do something instead of not doing anything, right? And yeah, we inserted up on this point. It was, uh, jumped off the rapid ads, set up our freaking OP site. As TF Mountain, it was the 82nd, 101st year of war. As they were moving to clear out this valley. And we just called in CAS for a week. And then one night that March 4th anniversary just passed, that was, uh, yeah, when Neil and his team were slavvy, a couple other guys, that's when they inserted and got lit up, and where Fifi fell off and ended up dying. I just interviewed Pete Blaver about this. Oh, I think he wrote, he was, yeah, he was out there as part of, didn't he write a book? He did. He did. Yep. Who's at the Delta unit that was there before? How do you feel about that now? I thought it was, we helped out a lot. We did, I mean, we supported, you know, the big movement with TF Mountain and whatever, the hundred, yeah, those guys. And it was, I didn't feel good when, you know, we found out that, that Fifi passed away. You know, all of our CAS went to them and then we kind of, yeah, we took it out on the telebanner the next day, put it that way, just with more CAS and, yeah. Were you the one calling the CAS? Yes. How did that feel? It was, I mean, you're on your first operation that's gone kinetic, I'm assuming. Yes. Well, big time kinetic, yeah. Yeah. It was a fucking huge operation of cut your teeth on it. Yeah, in a condo, we were calling the CAS, we had, shoot B-52s, B-1s, 18s, 15s. Yeah. Do you remember the first CAS you called where you killed somebody? Yeah, it was right there with B-52s on a, on a discus site, actually. You need to scar it. We had short, we had shorty rifles too, which was, yeah, our post-OVD brief on that was, all right, we do this again, we got to do it a lot better, but. Can you describe your first CAS? It was pretty, it was actually, I mean, it pretty dramatic. I mean, as far as what would a B-52 could drop, you know what I mean? And pretty accurate too. I mean, the, Describe everything. What were you hitting? It was a discus position in the town that, that was a good, maybe two or $3,000 meters from us. And what we'd see these guys come up, start lighting up the 101st, 82nd, we had them all graded out already. And we were doing this with a GPS and a rangefinder back and forth. There's a lot, yeah, there was a lot better ways to do it nowadays, but super accurate as soon as you give, you know, the modified nine line to the pilot or the controller up there in the B-52, they, they programmed where the JDM is going to go and yeah, took it out and then freaking four hours later, another guy would come out of the, there was a big cave system. It called the whale. And yeah, the guys would just come, come out of that and just like, refill the roll and just keep doing it. They were like little ants, you know what I mean? How did it feel to, for your first CAS? I felt successful. It felt good. It would just work. You know what I mean? It's just pretty much what it's about. That's it. How many bombs do you think you dropped? Oh my goodness. That was a long time ago. A lot. That's all I know. A lot. Yeah, I got to read, I got to read the post-op. We did. It was, yeah, a pretty good amount of munitions. About that. Yep. What was the sentiment like after Neil died? Oh, revenge, I think. You know what I mean? And yeah, that whole thing, yeah, it was, I mean, it was tough too. Because the guys that I was with, the other four dudes, that knew him really well, I knew him from two, then he came over to the command before I did. And the two guys that I were with were really good buddies of him. And when his call sign came back, that's when we fell off the helicopter, they were like, shit. And at this time, yeah, getting back to the wives being home, at this time, we didn't even talk. Yeah, we didn't even talk to anybody for like almost a month from home. So they were kind of worried. And then that hit the news and our command did not know how to deal with that. They were hearing about Neil before the command told anybody. And when we got out of the field and they were, forget Al, like I said, our com guy, we get out and we're going to the Gardez, mud pit and he's throwing his two radium phones. He's like, call home. Like I call home now, the wife network is losing their freaking mind. So that was a big lesson learned to for the command after, yeah, after P.P. passed. What came after that deployment? Well, during that deployment, we did another good little Wolverine, which was a good little operation and ended up working out perfectly. We were going after Zawa Harry and his bodyguards and that was perfect L shape. Once again, the orphans had a run around with a perfect good L shape ambush set up with 247s. And Zawa Harry wasn't there, but yeah, we got the mission accomplished as far as dealing with the detail. What was that mission about? Going after their bodyguards. Ben Lottin's, we thought he was going to be with them too and the intel wasn't that great. Where was that at? Right outside of Gardez. Do you want to describe it? What was your role in that? I was a salter. Yeah. It was, we rolled up on in the 47s and like a L shaped ambush, they said they had squirters. Oh, this is a funny story. Well, not funny. They said they had squirters up on another ridgeline and like somebody that they thought was fleeing from power that motorcade that we ambushed. And we... Wait, you ambushed the motorcade? Yeah. How'd you do that? We ambushed the motorcade with 247s. We caught them right when they were doing the little traverse up. The timing in the TF 160th guys are freaking awesome. The way it was set up too in the LZs, the landing zones they put them on, it just happened to be perfect. And the guys that we were going after didn't even, I don't even think they knew what, they started shooting and bailing out of the vehicle, but a vehicle, there was three of them, but after that it was over. Then we went after squirters and it was just a farmer in the field. I was the first one off the ramp on the, I never forget, I got my two buddies standing next to me in the skies. We get back into 47 takeoff, the gold land we're right next to where the crew chief's yelling at us where this guy's at. I get off and look at him and he's got his hands in, so I'm thinking, okay, maybe he's got a suicide vest on it, that's a vest. And he keeps walking towards us and my buddy next to me, he's like, dude, I'm like, dude, don't... Once again, this is where you got to be a thinker, right? You just don't want to like blast somebody to freaking do it. I let three rounds rip by his feet and he falls over on his back like a freaking upside down turtle. Hands in the air, we go zip time and my buddy was just getting ready to drill him. He was just a farmer out there, a goat herder, you know what I mean? And we took him down, dropped him off after we found out who he was, but that made me feel really good. You know what I mean? Because it could have gone another way, which would have been, hey, that's the Fogga War, but yeah, that was something I remember really good. I mean, specifically about that, that I was comfortable with at that time. Brat odd. When I was first growing the business, I was literally boxing up gummy bear orders myself, packing bags, printing labels, trying to keep up with fulfillment on top of everything else. And at a certain point, that just didn't work anymore. And that's when I found ShipStation. 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Go to ShipStation.com and use code SRS for 60 days for free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's ShipStation.com. Use code SRS. ShipStation.com. Code SRS. ShipStation.com. You guys are busy. Yeah, but there was a lot of sitting around waiting, you know what I mean? Like waiting to do something, getting approval to do something. And then, yeah, when we went through three times, wasn't really that busy. I was going to go to the training cell until one of my chiefs said, dude, you want to go to Iraq? And I'm like, yes, I want to go to Iraq because I've just heard the stories from Green. Everything a team guy wants to do, get up at night, eat dinner for breakfast, and then walk out to the birds. Go to your work, come back and do it again. Maybe all night. But yeah, Iraq was, I think what every team guy at that time, the type of operations they wanted to do. Just going out and getting busy. No shit. What year was this? 2003 and 2004. Same squadron? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we sent a couple other guys, we would do the crossbreeding. Like we sent a couple guys from our, I think he even visited it from the newer guys actually to go work with CAG, with Delta Force guys. And then we do it back and forth. And we took a lot of lessons learned to and brought that into our into our training in our SOPs, the way we operated coming from each side. Like you ever remember doing a hot hallway in training? Oh yeah. Right, that's one of the stupidest things you could do, right? Just run on the way down there instead of, you know, maybe crashing or throwing a grenade. And we learned that lesson the hard way from a couple squadron guys in the army. No shit. Did you augment over there? No. No? No. You went over there with the, with Devgram? Yes. Yep. How was it? Was it what it was? It was cracked up to be. Yeah, it was, it was an, um, yeah, we were busy, you know, but it was everything, like I said earlier that you kind of want. Yeah, man, you just load up, come up with a game plan. It got to the point, like the first couple of times when you're playing and to go, you know, go to work, it's, you overthink things a little bit too much until you get like a little bit nervous. And, but then when you, once you keep doing it more and more and more, it's, it just becomes second nature. Like you could go, all right, we got to go take this down and free. Our officers wouldn't even come in there to the team leaders, figure out, okay, yeah, I got the white side again, got the green side, blue side, whatever, boom, just go to work. But it was great. And then walk out to the little birds or 60s and 47s and the targets would change all the time depending on the intel and what we had, what we had going on over there. Just going after, just going after bad guys. Just going after, yeah, just bad dudes. Shit that were coming over from different places, two different, you know, different countries and not only just in Iraq itself. How many targets are you guys hitting tonight? It would depend on the follow ons, some nights one, some nights five. It just depended on what we got off one target. If we even landed on the right building and or if they move somewhere else, that's where the ISRS, that's where great to helping us out. And getting back to where we're talking about the drone war now that with drone warfare, it probably be so much easier to actually pinpoint and that mistakenly hit targets. You know what I mean? Yeah. What did you, so now you're doing close quarters combat. Lots of action. You got a wife, a kid at home. What's going through your head during all this? You don't even think about them. Yeah, if you can't let that distraction get in your way, you know, that's where people make mistakes. Like when you leave home, it's yeah, it's all right. As soon as that gate closes, you walk in there, like, yeah, if you think about that, you're going to let your boys down, you know what I mean? Compartmentalize it. Yep, you compartmentalize it. You're just like you do losing a teammate. You got to compartmentalize it and put it in the cupboard and try not to let it peek itself out. Keep the cupboard closed. What about the cadence? Cadence of ops. Are you keeping up? Yeah. You feel good about it? Yeah, it was back in that time, it was what we wanted to do, like what we were trained to do, but the cadence was there, definitely. Yeah. Do you remember your first kill? Um, yeah, it was on a rooftop. I mean, I don't want to talk about that, but yeah, it was, yeah. It was because we were a recce team. We climbed up buildings and, uh, yeah, I don't know if that was my first one. Once again, you compartmentalize that too. But yeah, a guy would go on a roof sneaking over the side as our assault team was coming up. Yeah, we'd like to climb buildings there, the recce guys. Did the killing bother you? No. No. I mean, of course it's going to bother you. If you sit back and like think about it, right? But no, I mean, it was just, that's worked and you're doing it to save. If you put it in their mindset and like, hey, I'm protecting my guys right now. And that's pretty much what we did a lot of as a recce team. Yeah, I'm covering my guys, protecting them. And that's, you don't, you just don't think about, yeah, the actual action that you just did. Anything else you want to talk about on that deployment? Um, the shit, they all kind of blend together. Oh, get into, yeah, I want to talk about one good buddy of mine, like I say his name, he'll know. One of the best operators I've ever worked with. And we were on the roof. This is actually a pretty funny story. I told you, it's carrying the SR-25K. And this was supposed to be like a can and like a little, it was going to be almost like a dog and pony op. Because we were doing a turnover with another color team coming in. This was like our last stop before he went back to the States. And it's going to be super easy, right? Walk in once again, climb a building. There's no covering building. It's a flat mud roof. Stupid idea, right? Stupid idea to climb this building. We've got Rangers coming down the other side of this canal covered in elephant grass that we're going to take out. We'll take out a tent close by, not take it out. Just go in there and see who the heck was in there. So we climbed up the building. We're laying there. Then we start getting lit up by a building that couldn't find out was 300 yards away. We start getting lit up from a PKM on top of a freaking car. It looked like it was like a black Mercedes. Then a guy comes out of a house behind us and starts lighting this up. And we're like, what the f- this was supposed to be easier in this. And we're on a roof like sucking mud. My buddy's standing up looking through his nods. I'm like, dude, what are you doing, man? Fearless. And he worked with CAG for a little bit too. They loved him over there. I'm like, get the f- down, man. And he's like, dude, is that a- what is that? Meanwhile, I'm fishing for my inline for my scope, my night vision for the scope I was carrying. He's still standing up. He's looking. And I put the inline. He thought I had my 556, my REC-M4 when I had the 308. And I couldn't see behind- I couldn't really pick out what was going on because there's a big light behind the car where the guy was shooting with PKN. And I'm like, well, I wonder how far that is. And I carry the rifle doped into 300, so I know my hold's for 100 and 500. It's a short build, 308. Take the shot, the light goes poof. And I'm like, oh, this happened in seconds. Like, dude, they're at 300 yards, right as I'm transitioning down to the guy shooting at PKN. Who I hit in the shoulder, by the way. I'm not too proud about it because all this always flip-flops that come to find out. They all duck behind the car. And they- and I'm like, oh. I carry a mag of AP rounds right here, too, and they're ducking behind the car. So I fishtail, it's got a big-ass piece of brigger tape on it. I put it in my first round, hits like 20 yards in front of the car. But then I worked it up to the car, and then, yeah, we took care of business. Come to find out the next day, after our turnover, the next night, the people we were turning over with blew. They went in and said, yeah, they're like, how do you guys see that well at nighttime shooting and all that? And yeah, we did a pretty good job. Yeah. But that mission was supposed to be like freaking just go in, gather some intel and leave. And that's not the way it worked out. Damn. Damn. How many times did you go over there? Four. Four times. And I left, yeah, and then we started working out a Remadi. We started doing, yeah, transitioning a lot more around instead of being an LSI. Yeah, we moved all over the place. Then we went to- when it really started getting entertaining when we brought our forces up just north of Baghdad to Bakuba. And the bad guys weren't used to having people coming at night and do operations up there. And that's right when I got the call to get back to the beach to start flight training for the aviation unit that we have. No shit. So what is the aviation unit? And how did that pop on your radar? A bunch of my buddies went over to fly over there. And well, I got a funny story about that. So my first time back from my first pump in OEF, back home, you know, basket lead for two weeks. And my chief, my bokeh leader, he's like, Jay, you got to escort the weapons out the shaw's, gun box. I'm like, all right, how do I do that? I'm still a new guy. We just got back from our first trip, our first deployment when we talked about earlier. And he's like, go over to the airport to North of International on the other side of the airport. This is back in 2002, 2003, right? And you're going to see a gate go up to that gate, ring the buzzer, whatever. So I drive there, a gov'y pickup truck, whoop, happens in the back. And I see this big dude wearing a polo shirt, khaki pants, he's waving me up. Back up, throw the guns in the caravan, C208, little turbo prop for a four hour flight to Memphis. So we take off and this dude's asking me all kinds of questions about the deployment. Like, hey, about Robert Ridge, what's going on? I think he's just like some normal dude, right? And total oblivious. I'm like, dude, are you a fucking team guy? He's like, fuck yeah, I am. And he ended up, down the road, he was a master chief, I'm freaking Neptune Spear, and I've been laughting up. Because I'm trying to get back to freaking big guy. I'm trying to get back to blue, you know what I mean? And I can't right now. And I'm like, dude, wait, you're freaking flying an airplane? Like you're a team guy pilot right now, flying me to freaking Memphis. So that's what it, like, well, this is pretty freaking cool, kind of scary, but pretty cool, you know? And yeah, come to find out that program was developed back in the beginning, just to learn how to steal airplanes. If you had to do it, if you're stuck somewhere. Man, I remember hearing about that shit. I didn't know it was still going on. I had no clue at the time either. Apparently. Yeah, no clue. Yeah, I didn't know anything about it. And then come find out, yeah, it's kind of where they sent people that they really didn't want to, it wasn't a good thing to go to, but it was a great trade, a great skill to have, right? They send you to civilian flight school, you get all your pilot licenses, even CFI flight instructor licenses, and then you just pass it on. Why do you say it's not a good place to go? Well, back then it wasn't because we were at war and you don't want to be a team guy flying around the United States while your buddies are off, you know, doing work overseas. So is that what you do? Well, I was burnt. That was the first time. Oh, you're talking about flying around in the States. Yeah, that's, yep, you just, you don't deploy at that time. Oh, shit. Yeah. You see, well, they just spend a bunch of money for you to go to school and they do utilize you to a certain extent pretty well. How do they utilize you? Flying gear, flying equipment around, just like it makes the process of moving like weapons from one place to another place. Okay. And there's one little special program we have for our bigger bird, our bigger plane that we have there, the 1900, which is used for a lot of special stuff, but in the United States, nothing crazy. Interesting. Is it, I mean, is it still like that? I think so. Nothing back there in a little bit. It's been a couple years. How many people are involved in that? Eight. That's it? Eight to ten. Yeah, it's a good, it's a close knit unit too. I mean, I don't know much, what talking about it, but what, um, I mean, we talked about you wanted a break to be with your daughter. How old is your daughter at this point? It's 2000. 13, 13 years old. Was that the big reason you wanted to do it? Yeah, and just get a break from, yeah, just kind of getting, you know, the same routine that was in normal every four months, every eight months. You know, yeah. And also building that skill. Because when I went over there, they're like, Hey, you're never going to, you're not going to make master chief. If you don't, you know, take a certain leadership position as a troop chief. And I'm like, no, I'd rather get my pilot trade, you know, than have to worry about making any nine. So, and it turned out to be a smart move and also being home a little bit more, but you do go to flight school for like almost eight months in Florida. So it's a lot of back and forth. How did it feel being home after all that? It felt good. It felt good. We got divorced, of course. They get divorced. Oh yeah. Yep. Yeah, we'll be separated for like three or four years and then try it again and then no, it just didn't work out. Sorry. Yeah. Typical story about teen guys. Yeah. Yeah. 90% success rate at getting divorced. Are you close with your daughter? Yes. I try to be close to her. We had her little problems when she was like a younger in her teens, you know what I mean? And when me and her mom were separated, it was kind of, she could pick and choose who she wanted to see. Me and her mom really didn't have a ugly divorce law. They said, hey, what do you want? Well, no, but when she was going through that age, yeah, she was a typical teenage girl. And plus, I was flying a lot. I was just learning to fly. And yeah, but I'm pretty close to her. Yeah. She lives in Virginia Beach right now. So you got divorced after the break. Yes. What led to that, do you think? Me being gone, I think. And then also just, yeah, just my wife, she said that when I got back from my first trip to Afghanistan, like something changed. Yeah, I'll bet it did. And blame, and like, I'm still me, you know what I mean? Cause we compartmentalized. And there's something different. I'm like, no, I'm good, you know what I mean? You know how we are, our community. Like we just ignore it and just keep rolling. And some people close to you actually see the changes that you choose to ignore happening, I think, and I think that's what led to it. Pretty much, yeah, she was just, yeah. Is there anything you would change? Anything I would change? Yeah. No. Nothing. Nothing. I wouldn't change anything. How long after you took the break did you wind up getting divorced? Or not took a break? Well, we were separated for three years anyway. And then, so it was probably five, six years. We got the worst. Yeah, like in 2015, yeah. Did you feel different when you were coming home from Iraq? No, I just worn out. Did you notice any changes? I didn't notice. She might've noticed, yeah. Looking back, do you notice any changes? Yeah. Well, hindsight's always 2020, right? So I think, yeah, there probably, yeah, maybe I was a little more cold when I got home, you know what I mean? More, I guess I'm like a psychiatrist now, but I wouldn't say, not as caring, but not as emotional, I guess. So that's, I guess that's a side of me. She saw that would change pretty much. When you run a business, you track every dollar, and your bank shouldn't make that harder or hold you back. Chime is changing the way people banked by offering the most rewarding fee-free banking. It's built for you, not like these old banks, no overdraft fees, no monthly fees, and access to thousands of fee-free ATMs. With Chime, you can get up to $1,150 in annuals fee-free. 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You're steering the bottom of a freaking vodka bottle or something, you know what I mean? How do you deal with it now? Just departmentalize it. Stay busy. Stay busy. Departmentalize. I like shooting. You know what I mean? I'm in a car, motor... That's what I do. When I would come back from my deployments, shoot, I rebuilt a 93 Mustang in my garage. That was the way I dealt with it. Like, I got back from my first pump in Afghanistan, go out in the garage, work in the car, and motorcycles. I like motorcycles a lot. That's how I deal with it. Keep busy because if you... A stagnant mind is not something that's good. Yeah. What kind of motorcycle do you have? Ducati. No shit. Not a Harley? Mm-mm. It's a V4, actually. Right on, man. Alcane. No Harley. No. Italiano. Italiano. It's Italian. Right on. So what did you think of the aviation unit? It was good. It was monotonous, you know what I mean? But it was... It learned a lot. A lot of times you're on call. I'm like, I'm married at night. Adam Brown. I was flying. When Adam Brown was killed, and we were on standby then, and my wife knew his wife from doing... She would do her hair, actually. And then I got a phone call from our commander, like, yeah, 11 o'clock. Hey, you got a flight to Arkansas. Hot springs. And my wife heard it on the phone. And she's, what? I'm like, yeah, no. I don't know. She goes, that's where so-and-so lives. And at times like that, that's hard, too. Flying a K-Co team out to tell the family, and this was like, shoot right before the year before extortion. So... Sure. But other than that, yeah, the aviation unit was... It was a learning experience to put it that way. And it sets you up for the future, too, if you want to stay with the flying part. It did. Yeah, until I went to... When I did my last three years at the recruiting district, I wasn't flying much at all there. But when I got out, I had an opportunity to freaking jump right back into it again. How was the recruiting duty? Oh, man. Dealing with recruiters? I don't know. How the fuck you did that? When I first went in there, I told them I had very little respect for that. Anybody that could sit behind a desk in the military for a career and have a rating of a Navy counselor. And then I think it should be a civilian position, personally, because they want... Like our job there is to give them quality. All they care about is quantity, right? And you're screwing with young kids like futures and lives. And I was glad I went there with the rank that I had as a senior chief because I don't see how a second class of E-5 could go and do that job because they would just get stepped on as far as, hey, keep giving us bodies. You know what I mean? We're not going to just sign somebody off. That's how that job got created in our community when they made SO, an actual job, SEAL, EOD, Diver, Rescue Swimmer, and SWIC. They... Recruiters would just pencil whip their PST scores and then they set them up to boot camp where they already spent money on getting this guy up there going through boot camp and they bombed the PST. Like, why are you sending these guys to us? And that's where they put in the shit screen at the recruiting level. So they would have more qualified candidates go up there. And it was cool going out the way it came in, you know, talking to kids, answering their silly little questions about buds and training, all the book writers' books that I may have read one or two. Do you know about this guy? But it was a rewarding job. It was rewarding. Even though I think like maybe five kids, I said they made it through buds, but in three years. Right on. So why did you... What led from the aviation unit to the recruiting? I wanted to move to Texas. Why did you want to move to Texas? I used to like it when we trained on there in the 90s. We trained at Fort Hood and go visit Austin back when it was a nice sleepy college town. It's not anymore. But I just liked the weather there. It does get hot, the people, the culture when I was there. And it worked out. I didn't even know that job was a job. I called up my detailer and he told me that there's a recruiting job in San Antonio that like working there. And I'm like, I don't want to be a recruiter. He goes, no, no, it's a coordinator. I never even heard about it before. Once again. And you work with a civilian counterpart that works for Academy. It's like a contractor. So there's two of you. And I had no zero short duty. As far as every command I was at, I was always on like C duty, whatever I want. He's like, dude, I'll hook you up with this job. And that's what made me go to Texas. So I'm like, anywhere in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and it recovers a humongous district in Texas. San Antonio all the way up to the Northwest all the way down to the Southeast. It's huge, a lot of driving. But like I said, it was rewarding. It was rewarding. I mean, what was it like for you to just totally punch out of that command out of steel team systems? Oh, that was kind of relieving. No shit. It was kind of relieving. Yeah. It was good just to move on and think about the next chapter. You were done. Yeah. It was, yeah. And things started to slow down too a little bit. But in Louisiana, like when Extortion 17 got shot down now, I was sitting, I actually flew up to Boston to pick guys up that were training up there. And I'm sitting behind a home plate at Fenway Park because I was only the one of the top Red Sox and Patriot fans that everybody knew that was up there. They had tickets. So I'm sitting behind home plate and my phone, it was actually BIS, my phone vibrates and he's a two troop. And I'm like, who would like two troops? Like what? It's not sinking in. And that was when that was August 6th when freaking Extortion 17 got shot down with quite a few of our friends on there. But then, yeah, and that was right around the time I was like, I just wanted to move on and do a more cushier job. You were ready. And the divorce just wanted to get away from the area, half the road area and start out, and I had a new girlfriend too, who's not my wife. Well, congratulations. Yeah. How'd you meet her? That is another interesting story. So before all the book writers, right, at our command, we'd have people come down, we knew people in the aviation, this is when I was flying. We knew people in the aviation community, like higher ups, like some of the guys that founded NetJets, just through doing our recurrent training in LaGuardia Airport. So we'd bring them down for visits. They visit the command. I'll never forget one time I was walking around the command, get a tour of a room, kind of like the team room, and then going downstairs showing this monument we're getting built. And one of the head guys of United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, he's like, well, when's it going to be done? And we're like, well, we don't know. We need like $25,000 whenever operations guys is telling him this. And he turns around to his assistant and he whipped up one of those big notebook checkbooks and writes it in the here. It's covered. So through that, he was good buddies with my current wife's best friends dad. So we met up through that meeting right there, and then it just kind of a long story short, I don't know what wife's going to be pissed, but her best friend died. And then we, I called her just to say, Hey, I'm sorry about it. And then we linked up that way. Gotcha. But through that meeting that happened at the command, of course, it was, they got to shoot like freaking 50 Kells, the Maudus, they got to shoot grenade launchers. They had a blast. And now they don't do that anymore. I can't even get on the command anymore because of the notoriety. But they were very happy. And yeah, it was a pretty cool the way that went down with, you know, taking care of the memorial that they were building for the command. Just one guy right to check. It was pretty, it impressed me too. And they were happy with their experience there. Right on. What was it like for you separating out of the Navy? You're right. I mean, it sounds like you're 100% ready. Yeah. Yep. Well, I was offered a job to actually fly by a great company out of California, Salaris Aviation. And I thought they were rolling the dice with me too, as well, because it's flying a jet. And all I have been flying is turbo props, twin turbo props. It's like a jet with a prop on it. Anyway, so the CEO there gave me the opportunity to, is like, dude, I'll give you a job right now and Van Nys or Teter bro. I'm like, no, I'm not leaving Texas. Something pops up in Texas. Let me know. Like two weeks before I retired, a golf stream job popped up. And I got the frigging go to initial training for it. And it was a little bit easier in flying a prop. Things just move a little bit quicker. And then I rolled right into that. You like flying a golf stream? Yeah, it's a gorgeous airplane. It's a gorgeous plane. All the golf streams are, we fly a 550, though, it's a beautiful airplane. Right on, man. And then it started, yep, did that. And then flew for another guy at Austin, a single turbo prop, the PC 12, which is a gorgeous plane. They're incredible. And the guy was one of the best guys I've ever flew for in my life. Then I got hired by Big Freight Company and did that for a little bit and kind of taking a break and just working with my buddy out of North Carolina. Right on, man. How do you, I mean, how long, so you got out in 2019? Yes, retired. Do you miss it? I miss the boys. I miss the fellas. You know what I mean? I do. But when I think back, do I really miss it that much? Not really. I mean, I miss some of the cool things we did, you know, but I was ready at that time. I'm gonna be, I have replaced shoulder, my knee, my back's jacked up, freaking, yeah, it's, it took a toll, you know what I mean? And mentally, it takes a toll on you. Yeah. It takes a toll. Yeah. Especially with the FAA, it takes a toll. What do you mean by that? We went to Isle of Man. I got back and I'm trying to help other people out with this. Right. I got back from Isle of Man going through the mail. Went there for the TT races, the motorcycle races there. It's freaking incredible experience in itself. But I'm going through the mail and I go, oh, I never get a letter from the FAA. Open it up. Like, hey, we see your disabled vet. And like, yeah. And you got to tell us everything that's on your VA letter. And I'm like, well, when I take my physical every six months, I check off like the stuff that bothers, I didn't even know about half the stuff that was on my VA letter. And I read it like, oh, oh, oh, because it's kind of like a blanket when we had time. Yeah, long story. So I go through everything that's on there. Like, well, you got TBI, PTSD, sleep apnea, all this other stuff. And I got to go get it taken care of. So I see a great doctor in Savannah, Georgia. He has me go through everything. I go through all the testing, smoke it. I mean, my brain is like fried going through the neuropsych testing. And then I end up answering questions to a bunch of other guys that are disabled vets that are pilots that are going through the same thing. But a lot of these guys, they keep trying to push for more disability, right? But they don't report it to the FAA. We check everything off every six months when we get our flight physicals through our docs. And there's a box in there. Are you disabled? Boom. You check it and you get fill out. You put in it. Everything you have and you're good to go. Some guys are lying. They got in trouble. They got caught. And what's weird is they're worried about some of the veterans, right? That are around there. And you can walk around the flight operations area and see like a five foot four, 350 pound man pilot walking around. Like, I'd be worried about that guy more than be worried about, you know, having a vet flying an airplane. Yeah. What do you think they're worried about? That's flying airplanes. I don't know. Well, disabled vets. Yeah. Interesting. Well, some, I mean, there are some crazy people out there. Not even vets, you know what I mean? That do stupid shit. So, mm-hmm. So you're a grandpa now? Yep. How's that? I don't see them that often, but when I do, it's cool. The one, the littlest one, Braxton, he's a terror. And, uh, yeah, Toefer's, they're both good kids. They're good kids. They're crazy. They're good. Right on. Yeah. It was weird. That wasn't planned either. So, yeah. Right on. Yeah, they're good kids. I spoil them when I see them. You know what I mean? That's pretty much what you could. I'm looking forward to getting them out in Texas. Do some shooting. I already bought them like a little 22, a little time cap, whatever. Nice. The little can on it. Yeah. Nice. I'm looking forward to that. Maybe you can get them behind that 300 black out there. Yeah. In a couple more years, I don't want to give it to Braxton. He might turn around and shoot me with it. Oh, man. You want to go break that thing in? Mm-hmm. Well, before we do, what do you got coming up next? Anything? Anything exciting? No, this was a big step for me. I'll tell you that coming in here, talking to you. Thanks for the opportunity. My pleasure. Jason. I got recurrent training next week. So that's my next big step. Right on, man. Well, I wish you the best of luck. Thank you. Thank you, man. Cheers. Thanks. Most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review. Ooh. Kitty. A great story like Monsters Inc. stays with you forever. And Disney Plus is where you'll find your next great story. From the return of the award-winning hit series, Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body. Gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 Plus, subscription required. T's and C's apply.