Rob O'Neill - SEAL Team Six/DEVGRU Operator The Man Who Killed Bin Laden | SRS #027

hey everybody welcome back i hope you're having a fantastic week even though it's only uh monday but uh but hey if you're not and it's off to a rough start it's about to get better because i have a phenomenal interview lined up for you guys rob has been a long time coming on this show and we finally got it done and i think you guys are really going to enjoy it we talk about his entire career and we get into some philosophical type stuff that i think you all are going to find extremely interesting as

well and i want to tell you all about the vigilance elite newsletter that we're kicking off all kinds of good stuff coming through that especially the exclusive content that's only for newsletter people and uh all kinds of other stuff when the gummy bears are gonna release new products all that stuff it's all coming out on the newsletter it's our only way to get directly to you without any algorithms in the way so anyways it's free sign up links in the description and on another note i just want to personally thank all of you for being

here i love you all thank you and enjoy the show you guys are here because this is not a drill uh this is real we found a thing and this thing is in a house and this house is in a bowl and this bowl is in a country and you guys are gonna you're gonna go get this thing and you're gonna bring it back to us and show it to us good evening tonight i can report to the american people and to the world that the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin

laden the leader of al-qaeda and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men women and children i said you guys realize this is a one-way mission we're targeting uh al qaeda in places where they've never seen guys like us the reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to osama bin laden good evening the al qaeda leader osama bin laden is dead killed by american special forces who raided his hideout in pakistan in the early hours of the morning and i remember putting my first foot

came out i'm looking at bin laden's house and i remember thinking [ __ ] it i guess we'll start the war from here these remarkable pictures from right inside his compound show us exactly where osama bin laden was finally killed the woman that found bin laden said i don't know what it looks like inside but there will be a stairwell going to the second floor and you will run into khalid bin laden and he's 20 years old that's bin laden's son and that is his last line of defense he will be armed on the stairwell

the blood you can see on the floor evidence of how he was shot in the head through his left eye simply because he went this way i turn this way and standing three feet in front of me is osama bin laden and he's got his hands on a mall his wife's shoulders i turn around and um i kind of froze and i'm okay other navy seals are now coming in the room a lot of guys are in there and one of my guys came up to me and uh he said um are you good and

i said no no what are we supposed to do now so rob o'neal welcome to the show man thanks for having me i'm happy to be here it's great it's been a long time coming it has yeah i think we've been promising to do this for a while yeah never never got around to it i even i haven't lived near here for a couple years and i don't know how i didn't make it here yeah well it's life gets in the way right yeah it does life happens around you but uh well we had a

great conversation about the upcoming alien invasion that's going to happen i'm i'm at a point right now where nothing would surprise me right no and even if aliens showed up i would question are those really aliens or just the government just the final push that's what i'm saying and i don't know what to believe i mean i've seen enough stuff to be i believe a lot of things now and there's other stuff that i i'm not sure if i believe it so it's just a it's a crazy world it's to the point where no matter

what happens i'm not going to be surprised no i mean consider a few years ago that a lockdown was just something you see in a movie there's no way this would really happen and it did and we fell for it yeah hook line and singer all of us even if you're you know the anti-master you still stay in your house it's not like you're you're not going to fly without it yeah you're not traveling without it so yeah well actually i got everybody i get everybody a gift and i was going to get you a

delta sky miles oh thank you but can i open it now yeah go ahead what do we got here these are gummy bears those are gummy bears well thank you go good with uh your beer company that's great that's your beer that's right oh you're awesome i need to get some of that beard yeah i'll definitely i'll definitely get you some not a problem at all brewing company we'll send you out as soon as we get done with this yeah i'll put it right there on the bar very cool you know we'll drink it during

the show yeah we have we have a beer uh for every branch we have jar head um soldier beer cat shot for pilots special hops which i thought was pretty special special hops is an ipa it's really good we just came out with uh neptune's beer uh to sort of commemorate neptune's spear which is commonly mispronounced it's neptune's spear as in king neptune's spear natural state people say neptune spear but that's you know it's the two s's in a row yeah what do you got any what's your favorite flavor ipa ipa that's my favorite special

hops but but the the um when when neptune's beer is available it's gonna be i think 12 so that might be my new favorite nice nice you gonna get into hard stuff at all or stupid uh not just yet but if if the opportunity arises um probably well i'm sure that's gonna come but well hey i just want to start you got a hell of a career let's go through the your entire career you know hit the high points obviously the bin laden raid but i want to start with you know where you grew up

montana what was your childhood like well it was uh kind of living in a bubble that you you know there's nothing on the other side of that mountain butte montana montana is the center of the universe and people from anywhere else are probably going to be better than you kind of a weird situation a fear of success i guess um so i grew up hunting that was a normal thing it was normal to hunt elk it was normal to go uh mule deer whitetail hunting fishing and i played a lot of basketball um that was

that was going to be my plan i was going to get so good at basketball that i would get college paid for and then i was going to stay in butte montana and be a stock broker or something like that you know get an nba maybe from montana tech where i did go for a year nice were you pretty tired with your old man yeah yeah we we kind of did everything together we started hunting basically the same reason i joined the navy because he got dumped he got a second divorce and we just had

to do something so we started hunting we have i think the first time we went hunting it was in a it was in a two-door datsun car my uncle jack's and we didn't know what we were doing we didn't know how to side in a weapon um kind of went out we got we got a doe tag for an antelope and we went out all we knew how to do was get uh the the cooler stocked um yeah you know i mean like sodas and twinkies and sandwiches and stuff yeah yeah we used to call

it the buffet and that was kind of it it was uh there was basketball season there was hunting season there was fishing and then um hanging out in butte montana which i thought was a big city at the time because i didn't you know we didn't really go anywhere do you miss it there uh i do i love to go back i i sometimes get jealous of people that have a normal job in a normal life nine to five you know wake up in the morning kiss your kids go to work have lunch come home

be with your kids i totally understand that yeah just a normal life i mean like yeah it's kind of cool i don't have really [ __ ] to worry about yeah but uh yeah what so what did your old man do he was a stock broker oh he was a stockbroker now he does weird [ __ ] like he bought a a really fast harley and he's 73 and uh i think it scares him but uh he bought it and he's uh actually taking his a road test soon dude the cone thing oh [ __

] he's like brand new on a bike yeah wait he had one before he had a honda shadow i remember growing up but i don't think he ever wrote it i think he just had it yeah but he's good he's still a fly fisherman he's put a a basketball court in um in his backyard oh no he plays in the winter in montana he'll go out and shovel it and shoot free throws he's still really good he's got a good shot so when did you if that was the plan what how the hell did the

seal teams and the navy well this thing the seal teams was an accident um because it was it wasn't necessarily getting dumped by a girl but it was a situation that you know i started once i joined the navy i realized most people are similar you get to an age where i just got to get out of here and that was where i was at i bad relationship basketball wasn't i was playing but it wasn't fun anymore and it's i need to go on an adventure and i had two friends that always wanted to be

marines growing i grew up with them jim mcbride and ben walsheski and they all i'm talking high in tights growing up marine corps stickers on their first trucks they're you know they were marines and then and then i would see them come they were two years older than me i would see them come back to butte montana and like it was like watching someone from full metal jacket walk into i was in the vu villa and ben walked in i'm like holy [ __ ] i mean that's a marine like that guy i still wasn't

going to join i was still playing basketball and i was like that's a [ __ ] marine though i'd like to i'm going to watch this guy kick someone's ass in here can't touch him and then when it was time to leave um like because as a young man you you can go out and see the world for free by joining the military yeah and i i again full metal jacket like everyone else i watched that a thousand times and i was like you know what i'm gonna do that because i guarantee um boot camp

is gonna suck but i wanna meet that drill instructor you know just how funny he is but brutal and i want to be tough like a marine so i went to join the marine corps just went down there and there was a my wife calls me the luckiest unlucky man in the world she i think whatever's saying like go through life i think one of her sayings is you could trip over your dick but you're going to land in a pot of gold so uh i went i went in to join the marine corps and

as luck would have it the marine wasn't there he was literally out to lunch and the navy guy was the navy guy west and i went over to him because my two friends and i'm everyone's heard this joke before but my two friends ben and jim said the marine corps is actually part of the department of the navy it's just the men's department and that's why i went in there because if they're part of the department he'll know where he is and then he'll you know i i said um hey where's the where's the marine

when's it gonna be back and you know so he's sitting there he's a navy chief khakis anchors i didn't know what the [ __ ] that meant but he's a chief so he's clever and he said why why do you want the i said i want to be a sniper and i grew up hunting marines have the best snipers in the world i read carlos hathcock's book like i want to do that and he goes look no further my friend we have snipers in the navy all you have to do is become a navy seal

first no big deal we'll send you right to sniper and i didn't know what that was right i'm from montana and i didn't know how to swim and me being a naive young man i i thought you know um i don't know what a seal is but this guy here is a professional recruiter why would he lie to me and i signed it and i signed the contract to go the only thing i did right um was i learned early in life to get it in writing whatever you're doing fine we can do business on

a handshake but sign this first yeah so i got in writing it was called the dive fairer program the dive the dive fairer program which meant um you get like a 2 500 bonus you are guaranteed a chance to go to buds basically underwater demolition seal training you're guaranteed a chance and i didn't i mean i didn't know that all that meant is you can go and fail and then you're going to the fleet yeah and so i signed that and um yeah that was it and then he started showing me videos of buds i

didn't know what that was i the only thing i knew about um navy seals was um watching charlie sheen's character jump off the bridge in the movie navy seals eddie braun is his name he's he's still is his stunt man which is awesome uh very good guy very good stunt man i guess during that scene too i'm kind of jumping around eddie brown said all right i'm going to do this you get one take and he then the famous uh jumping up there yeah anyway i that's why i thought it wasn't that i knew something

about um sit-ups with two thousand pound logs my buddies that i grew up with that i thought knew a lot about um the military said there's no [ __ ] way in hell you're gonna make it through what did you just do i took my mom to the recruiting station to have her watch videos and she didn't tell me to my face but she's like there's no [ __ ] way you can make it to the stream and uh the only person that says that i think really believed in me was my father um just

because i um because of our attitudes with uh free throws and master the basics um free throws that's if i could describe life it would be how to be successful in life free throws because it's master the basics do your thing shoot here muscle memory you want to be great do it a thousand times you want to be really great do it 10 000 times do everything like you do anything we would do drills my father and me um we would play every single day and um anything from an hour of one-on-one to three hours

of five on five but we were not allowed to leave the gym until one of us made at least 20 free throws in a row so that start with a make and then you keep shooting and um that's something else too about like stances with shooting and all that stuff when you make your first free throw you don't move you're in the position i hate watching basketball players now they make a free throw and then i gotta go give everyone five [ __ ] you it's your job you made a free throw make the second

one and then talk about how awesome you are but we couldn't leave the gym until one of us made 20 in a row and that could take five minutes that could take three hours damn but we uh we got we got so good at i think we made ourselves there's a there's a um a steakhouse in butte montana called the derby and like montana's like i said how we don't know how good it is because we're just there don't realize how great the stakes are at the derby in butte montana um we would start our

season off 20 in a row to leave the gym 20 for a steak now it stays at 20 to leave the gym but now it goes up by 5. 25 for a steak 34 steak 35 for a steak 20 believe the gym 50 for a steak and we get to the point my father made 91 in a row and that was the family record for a week because the next week i made 105 in a row in a row in a row and you know what's funny is like a lot well a lot of things

in life only two of us saw it so you can take my word forward or tell me yeah yeah so um um i he believed in me and um so being lucky instead of good um i had my student id to montana tech they had a pool so that meant i could still get into the pool like at five in the morning and i went up there and i'm like okay the breaststroke is one of the strokes it can't be that hard it's 25 meters down 25 meters back i'll swim a thousand meters and gauge

it yeah from there and like anything with like everything was going fine until i entered the water and that's when the problem started i made it to the deep end i almost didn't make it back and i was like i'm [ __ ] i just signed a contract with the government to be a navy seal and i don't know how to swim holy so i i was trying and i'm busting my ass doing whatever and uh my friend so i i'm in there for and just dying i'm trying to get out my friend mike driscoll

i went to high school with him one of the few people in montana who did swim and i believe he did go on to swim at notre dame and he said rob don't take this the wrong way it's great to see you i've just literally never seen you in the pool before what gives and i said i just i just joined the navy i'm going to be a seal and he goes oh no not like that he goes come here and then he showed me um he showed me the how to do the breaststroke how

to do the side stroke and so with repetition i just um i would go there every day and i still have my um there's a little packet you get when you join the navy that folder and even like there's the buds warning order and all that yeah i still have that with my i would write my times down for the 500 yard swim that you had to do no [ __ ] you still have that i still have it i found it in a one of the kit bags that we all keep because i might

need this sleeping bag something um but and then i was i was up there i was getting pretty decent and then jim mcbride the marine who's actually he was enlisted he actually i think he just retired as a lieutenant colonel which is awesome semper fi that's what he was going to do he was going to be a marine he he went to aircrew school in in the marine corps and they taught him how to really do the combat recovery stroke and he goes just do this a couple times and just like when i saw ben

in the vue villa i was watching jim swim and i'm like okay i this is next level [ __ ] now i gotta get this so i just you know i got proficient i thought yeah and then i did get to boot camp and you know i actually failed the the screening test the first time because i took it like an [ __ ] um after you get those 90 shots and you're just sick as a dog cotton mouth whatever um and i was i remember sitting there how many people try out in in boot

camp at the time there must have been 400 people what year is this 1996 96 and uh looking at this bleachers and i still had that small town mentality i remember looking at the navy seal flag the unofficial navy seal flag i'm watching this arrogant team guy i didn't know what to think of navy so he came out there like did this perfect dive that like greg louganis would have loved for a number of reasons but uh and then he got out and kind of just gave us the stink eye and he and i remember

looking thinking there's no [ __ ] way why look at all these guys trying out and and then uh but then i started talking to other guys that were from brooklyn uh some some dudes that that joined the navy to get out of compton guys from south florida and i started to realize that okay everyone's scared everyone's kind of the same we're all the same and and then and then started saying i mean later on in life i realized that i don't give a [ __ ] if you're the ceo of a major company you're

the guy in bin laden's bedroom we've all had our first day yeah and we've all been scared admitted i mean we'll talk about the one percenters later which exists um that aren't scared it will pass they're they but the rest of us get scared um the rest of us have been nervous but if you can just take it increments at a time and so the next time i got there i i lost the intimidation i gave up the [ __ ] with i just got shots no [ __ ] that do the swim do the

pull-ups do the sit up do the push-up do the damn run and get on with your life and and that was it i mean and you know just being in boot camp and i kind of i'm a big believer in um wherever you are be there so i i got into um the classes we were taking okay i'm going to be a navy seal but i want to learn about naval customs and courtesies traditions i want to learn with the horn like i paid attention i was interested in this the the whatever they i was

interested in how to make a bed how to fold your your shirts i still do it and um i got into it and then i did you know i got the contract in there with the you know now you're with a navy seal chief and you you you know you're gonna get your orders yeah and uh part of the die fair program i didn't realize this was you have to be a corpsman okay i didn't see that in the fine print but i i finagled my weight when you go up to get your rates i

made up some [ __ ] and i i found out what the shortest a school was so i could get to buds right away and it was a aircrew survival equipment or a parachute rigger so i would get that i knew i would finish boot camp go to millington tennessee it was like a two or three week a school and i i was with marines now but i mean i'm talking huge dude i had there's one huge marine one white dude one black dude huge marines i'm still intimidated by marines and then this big black

marine this i'll never forget he's a staff sergeant he taught me how to wind a bobbin and how to sew and at first i thought okay i'm into some [ __ ] but i don't know and then i'm like wait a minute sewing might be an awesome trait i'm going to pay attention this a big tough marine taught me how to sew i learned about cyclic rate of fire for a console machine you know what was [ __ ] and but that in the teams it turns out to be a good thing but before we

had all the high speed kit that they you need to cut this pocket off so here where do you want your stuff and but never tell anyone you're good at it because then your first lpo he'll have you sewing everyone's uniforms yeah you have a year work up to get all 100 of these blouses or whatever yeah i went to millington and um went back to butte montana for uh leave and then drove my truck to coronado and the first place i stopped in uh in coronado was uh it was right by the hotel del

and uh i just wanted to get in the ocean to you know if i was uh talking to 19 year old rob o'neill now i'm like dude you're gonna get ocean time just stay out yeah don't take cold showers you just my thing about the cold showers when i when um i talk to young kids young men that want to be seals and they'll say um what should i be doing to get ready for buds and i'll say well let me answer your question with a question what are you doing to get ready for buds

and they say taking cold showers to get used to it and i'm like you know what stop that right now and i'm going to tell you what i'm going to give you an example if i told you in 30 days i'm going to kick you in the nuts as hard as i can and in order to get ready for it you had your best friend kick you in the nuts every single day guess what it's still going to suck when i do it yeah don't prepare for [ __ ] it's just take it like a

man every single time yeah so i got there and uh it was a thursday night and i was in the i got into the the um the pacific ocean and all of a sudden there were these these boats rolling by and there was chem lights on the side of them and it took me a second to realize oh [ __ ] i'm checking into class 208 that's 207 and this is hell week and i still get goosebumps thinking about it like damn boy you talk about swimming you just jumped in with both feet and it's

about to be on and then um yeah i got a hotel i checked in on a friday which was stupid wait till monday like why do you want quarter deck watch when you can at least go have your last beer in peace yeah and then uh 208 started butts class 208 um uh you know it's typical uh starts off with at the time i think we call the ptrr yep that's what they called it they didn't have quite the pipeline they do now they're doing it better now with actually getting guys ready with prep and

nutrition yeah you know this is back in the day when you had a navy seal as a skydive instructor and you eat [ __ ] he doesn't tell you how to work your canopy laughs at you they have so many guys signing up now apparently this is this is uh from this family that i used to train when i did tactics and stuff he this kid went in they have so many people signing up to be seals now that are go to buds i guess that they have to they can't even take them all really

yeah they're they're showing up and they sent this guy out to the fleet for two years but broke his contract that's how many people are signing well that's what tells you about a contract with the government they can tell you go yourself yeah yeah we've seen plenty of that lately yeah but um so you're not checking in though it goes from watching a special on on a cable news special about some reporter that went to but now you're at buds yeah and and i don't know what the [ __ ] and they brought us into

a classroom and we were still in our whites our dressing whites with like the i didn't i think what you have one little service medal yeah yeah and we check in and this instructor came this instructor came in and he goes hey anybody want to quit and he was [ __ ] around like a team guy joke this dude goes i do right off me i never thought his joke he's like no he he just he got orders to buzz to get off the ship no she said he quit because he would get like three

weeks on should do whatever the hell they want yeah so then he quit and then um uh we had a uh an instructor named eshelman and he's a legend if anyone knows who a legend and he said um this is how i started i started to realize that they're training you how to how to be successful in life he said uh all right i know i mean and he buzz instructors are not historically nice guys but this guy was like he would say stuff look guys i'm not here to intimidate i'm here to motivate he

was our class proctor so that is the one that helps you through and he said i i know you've seen the movies and probably read the books regardless of what you've been told this course is not impossible okay people graduate look at me i am living proof so i will never ask you to do anything impossible but i will make you do something very hard followed by something very hard followed by something very hard day after day after day for eight straight months and that sounds like a lot to get from not eight months from

now but don't think about that because that is not how you achieve a long-term goal you do it like this you wake up in the morning on time then you make your bed the right way then you brush your teeth you just started the day with three victories that's three wins already make it to the 5 a.m pt on time and as i'm beating you do not think about the pain you're going through concentrate on your next goal in life which is breakfast after breakfast make it to lunch after lunch your next goal in life

is dinner and after dinner do everything you need to do to get back into that perfectly made bed and because you took the time in the morning to make your bed the right way regardless of how bad today was and it will be bad tomorrow's a clean slate tomorrow is a fresh start and when you feel like quitting which you will do not quit right now that's emotion i want you to quit tomorrow if you can keep quitting tomorrow you can do anything in life and that's what i i mean i thought i wasn't gonna

make i had to get up 15 minutes early to put on sunscreen like i thought that would be a reason a sunburn would get me out of buds um you know little [ __ ] like that but it started to enforce me [ __ ] that i'm gonna put sunscreen on i'm gonna fail a swim but i'm not gonna quit and and then you start seeing guys quit and and one thing one problem too is uh i called it sympathetic quitting when when someone that you think is tougher than you because he's louder than you

quits well if he can't make it i can't make it and they i'm sure you saw two in buds yeah someone well should they just follow him like it's like [ __ ] him like even in the movies when you see someone go into the bell and the other students are like no no it's like [ __ ] you quit i don't want you yeah join them i'm not quitting yeah and then it just you know it turns into uh hell week um and i you know all of a sudden it's breakout like we're in

the tent i know it's coming and breakout starts which is organized chaos they're you know get a muster get your broke and like [ __ ] they're not going to they got they got instructors like that are retired in there to [ __ ] with you yeah just to realize the chaos and and there was a guy that quit right off the bat in breakout and i'm like dude this is the best part like this is this is done the movies and then um and then again it's just the uh i i did have someone

say you're obviously your next goal is your next meal your long-term goal right now is sunrise of wednesday and if if you can live the sunrise you'll probably be so doped up from lack of sleep that you can they'll just push you through yeah and then all of a sudden it's friday and then uh um we did you know the mud pits the famous [ __ ] at the end like the bacteria infested cesspool whatever and uh i remember we had admiral richards was gonna secure us and a typical admiral he was three hours late

so they have to beat us for an extra three it's like could someone just secure this [ __ ] can i get a gatorade just let us go yeah hey i remember he said he's shaking everyone's hands and like he's like the first animal i've ever met and he's like congratulations o'neill thank you adam because now wipe that [ __ ] off your face and like roger that yeah and then all of a sudden hell week's over and then um and then you're in the walk week where they're actually letting you recover and then i'll

never forget our first swim because now you're done with hell week and obviously hell week i think is the reason that navy seals in combat will walk three miles out of their way to avoid getting their boots wet yeah you get tortured and um our first two mile swim they had us line up and face the ocean the first time getting in the ocean after hell week and they made us line up and we're just staring at it and the same instructor echelman he comes walking up and down he's like first time in the ocean

since hillary clinton's kind of spooky isn't it and then you do that you the hydro recon and then boom you get your uh blue helmet here and die face what did you find did did you make it through all at once yeah you were no original yeah oh that's not very many of those i know and and i it didn't make sense to me because i mean pool comp uh they have you do the test on friday twice and if you fail you have to do it monday and then if you fail that you're done

and a lot of people don't realize a lot of dudes fail pool comp and you can get kicked out for failing pool cup most guys get rolled to make it again but i failed twice on um on friday and then i i remember just practicing uh uh untying nuts practice breath holds how am i gonna get through this and and that started to start to enforce that failure is sometimes a learning lesson you can learn don't be afraid of failure just don't quit and then i i went through and um i i i think i

untied most of the knots and uh you know you come up at the end i feel fine and then this instructor's here and i just hear o'neill pass i'm like [ __ ] yeah and he grabbed me he goes you untied three of my whammy knots [ __ ] and then you get on indian diaphase and now and that's where you learn that the navy can make anything suck because diving scuba diving i don't know if you know this is fun not in the [ __ ] nation no so you know you do a little

bit of open circuit stuff then you do the cool uh 120 feet dive in the pacific which is neat then you get into a dragger and then just learning how to count kicks and then ship attack [ __ ] and you know dive medicine uh die physics and you know the classroom stuff where that now this is where the meatheads who can run five miles they fail yeah because now you gotta learn about boyle's law you gotta learn about the bends learn about uh uh ages artillery gas embolisms [ __ ] like that and all

of a sudden you're done with that and now it's third phase and at this point no one had no one had told me that san clemente island is by far the worst part i i mean i thought hell week was bad i thought pool comp was bad the [ __ ] island for me was the worst 40 straight days of nothing but getting beat and i'm convinced the instructors are you know hitting the sauce a little bit they're reminding us that no one you know we're killing you on one of the nicest beaches in the

world nobody can hear you scream out here and uh yeah i mean you know it's and their thing was um wet and sandy every hour on the hour for 24 hours it doesn't matter what you're doing you need to run to the surf kit and your swim buddy goes with you every hour on the hour and i have pictures of like i mean you can be in your there's no point in even going to bed just sleep on the floor and then they'll they're watching or we think they're watching yeah i mean they might not

be but what if they are you know um uh yeah i had i had a uh my swim buddy kept he just got uh some sort of homesick or some sort of island fever and he kept [ __ ] everything up he like he he forgot to put the buff buffer in his gun in the spring and um and the instructor said did you do a function check on this and he's like yes i did he's like he pulls it back there's no spring so obviously the gun doesn't work he goes all right you two

wet and sandy every hour and so i'm getting punished for this guy for my swim buddy and then i'll never forget i think seal team three was out there so the buds compound is here and then the kick-ass uh seal compound like for navy seals and they're still legends to us um they they [ __ ] up uh a demo shot in the bay there uh they didn't they didn't double double [ __ ] whatever it didn't go off it didn't go off so now you've got all these charges in the water don't go off

and there's like this i'm going to screw up the regulations for the navy but i think it's uh 48 hours no one can even get in eod can't even go in there because it might go and and any everyone knows that an explosion of water is way worse than an explosion on land because water doesn't compress so um my buddy [ __ ] up again and they're like okay god and the instructor goes well i can't get you guys wet every hour on the i can't put you in the surf every hour on there because

i have demo shots and i go i will hit him with the [ __ ] hose every hour on the hour let me do it lay off spray this [ __ ] so yeah but then the island ends you know you take the c-130 back and now they're saying okay um well they they read our orders on the island where we're going so and i i don't know if if they still do this but we used to do a dream sheet you put your top three seal teams in a row to me was like this

is cool where do i want to go and i think an uh a guy that i knew said um don't put i mean obviously put which team you want first but then put the other teams on that coast because you might not get two but you will get eight which is awesome whatever you do do not put sdv anywhere yeah i mean it sounded like a good deal at the time because you get free fall and that's like the only good deal but apparently stv is a [ __ ] yeah so uh i put seal

team two seal team eight seal team four because they're all on the east coast uh and at the time uh the only real work we were getting was bosnia kosovo and seal team two that was their al so i kind of wanted to go to seal team two plus you know one of the first two seal teams yeah to me just seemed like a to me i still love to say seal team too that's awesome and um i'll never forget they were reading our orders and they're like so and so seal team three so and

so steal team one they go o'neil sdv sorry seal team two in that one second i'm like no sdv2 you're ready to quit right there you made it all the way through you're like 12-hour dives in the chesapeake bay in february [ __ ] that no thank you yeah but i got skill team too and then and then all of a sudden you're um you know get go to medical get your [ __ ] done go to dental get checked up and then go to fort benning and it's like holy [ __ ] buds is

over yeah now what i have to be an abc what does that even mean and then you go to benning and and uh i never worked with um the army before and it was just cool again because i you know looked up to the army rangers or [ __ ] studs and i went and there there these are kids that look like me in army uniforms and like they're asking me about buds and i'm asking them about basic and then we're going through um through airborne which is just a clown show yeah just i mean

because the army makes those instructors do to keep your attention that ridiculous dancing around [ __ ] well they hate us too oh they they i would hate us imagine the worst thing that they could have done is send i didn't mean to say clown show airborne obviously rich history just some of the [ __ ] they did was clunch yeah um but um yeah i mean imagine taking someone at 19 or 20 years old just finished the hardest military training in the world and you know your punishment is due to to do ten push-ups

you need to do two pull-ups before you go in the chow hole all right yeah two pull-ups how many times a hundred but no i mean that was cool and then but but then in their defense too and obviously you know inner service we make fun of each other you know that um but then the first jump i i mean it took a while like i'm convinced you can teach someone how to fall and push them on a plane in one day but they take their time and you're in those gravel pits or whatever falling

but the first time i jumped the first time under canopy and i landed in one of the black hats one instructor said i was that and i was like that is the coolest thing i've ever done so that was awesome you'd see and then all of a sudden bam you go to seal team too you didn't have uh skt back then no no we went through sealed tactical training what was that i went through sqt so i don't know what that was well um it's a 13-week course that they ran two times a year so

you get there you're in the training department with the older guys and then you um you um wait until you're classed up so you can volunteer to you're you know picking up brass and [ __ ] okay actually that's where i met don shipley senior chief don shipley the first i think one of the first hills i've ever met he came in uh just if if don shipley to this day it's one of the coolest [ __ ] i've ever met he came in and his cac i'm a new guy like i'm trying to blend

into the nothing he came in in his khakis and goes oh [ __ ] it who wants to come with me the chief's club get a beer i was like i would love to no you're not going i would and a ship would just turn out to be like he was he was so cool and we did uh we would i would volunteer to jump with the platoons um just to get i want to get the gold wings that's your next go i don't haven't tried it yet you have to get through sealed tactical training

which is 13 weeks and then a six month probationary period so i want to get the gold wings at least so i'm i'm a new meat but i'm not that new yeah and i remember jumping once with don shipley and just like i mean so you're just statically in jumps and he turns back he's doing the the jump master win thing and he kind of goes we had dudes in the trees like he's like uh yeah let's go to the bar well yeah we're not steering this canopy just get out of here and then so

sct was um was uh we first part was in um uh puerto rico for uh combat diving and that was different than um than bud's diving because now i mean they're legitimately teaching you how to dive how to do your kitkat how to get your your [ __ ] right you're wearing the the wetsuit you want or don't want what makes you comfortable and then just doing like a turtle backing which you know that's the worst part but then you do the four hour dives and two a day and then up to camp uh or

fort ap hill in northern virginia and then you do all the land warfare that it's basically land warfare uh then demo a lot of demo one of the best uh demo experiences i had best and worst was um so master chief pig wagner was running it he's a vietnam guy and and he's up there running the show because he didn't give a [ __ ] and we had always read that you can light c4 on fire and it won't do anything it'll turn into a vapor we'd read it i ain't doing it right so he

pulled us out the first day and he's like yeah okay you two are going to come up here and you're going to like this and around the class improve and i remember i don't know if i had the letter or bob my buddy had a lighter but one of us did and as soon as it flicked he set off a four pound charge in the woods they did that same [ __ ] to me did you blush they did they did that yeah apparently it's a good go-to but yeah it worked but then then you

light it like you can do this and then you learn about c4 like you can you can do anything to c4 it's not i mean it needs that violent uh blasting cap yeah basically yeah so we did that and then you go back to seal team two and then they have a um uh six months of your in uh they're observing you like and so seal team two they're keeping time how fast do you run the old course how fast was your base tour how fast was your swim they're timing you and they're watching and

they're being pricks and i had a dude check in uh his last name was courier master chief i didn't know he was a master i didn't know he was about to be the command master chief because young looking guy red hair looks nice and um he seemed like a nice yeah he had a damn locker and i didn't i've never seen him before and he's a young looking dude i'm like you know i'm about to be a team guy and so anyway so we went to uh we we're going to the oak course so there's

two old courses at little creek as you know this there's a small one in the big one and the small one is just for time it's like you're running in your you know monkey bars or whatever uh parallel lad or whatever they call it [ __ ] and then you jump over this run you're running it for time you do three of those then do a big loop and do three more and then you go back to the team and you know whoever wins wins and i was chasing art tulkey so i'm a new guy

20 years old and art toki is one of the one percenters who he will he will beat you at everything um so i'm i want to i can run i'm still fast from buzz and so i'm like going through the little thing and then i'm going through the tires and uh i hear that dude courier um yelling at me stop skipping every other tire i'm just trying to haul ass so i'm running around and i'm he goes uh he yells at me from one of the he's yelling across now of course at me he's like

i thought i said you should stop skipping into the tire and i yelled at him and if you were [ __ ] fast enough you see me skipping every other monkey bar so um i'm just yelling a team guy because my trident board is that day now i get my my cami's on i go to the trident board guess who's in the center of it that guy mark courier the command master chief oh [ __ ] yeah and i just told him to [ __ ] himself on the old course so he decided not to

try it and he goes you're the guy skipping every other monkey bar why do you do that you need to cheat and i said i go you had to beat our tokyo you do so that was a long tried import i did get it that day and then and then now you get assigned to a platoon right on and that's just one i mean that's that's like a brief it's a every moment in time of how to get there and then now you then you get your trident and then you get your blood wings i'm

not they're allowed to do that yeah and now your navy seal so looking back through that whole pipeline was was there ever time you wanted to quit every day in buds yeah what got you through um everyone who said i couldn't do it yeah just i don't i'm not going to go home with this seems to be the common denominator i think it is i mean it's not because uh well because it wasn't hard i want to quit every day yeah [ __ ] those ocean swims yeah [ __ ] the the conditioning runs the

mind the mind games on the soft sand runs when you're finally coming back after five miles you go right to the compound right past it what was the hardest part for you um i think the swims just because my times were just there they they put me with a good swimmer because i wasn't a good swimmer and he could guide the key you know as we know the key to ocean swims is guiding getting there straight because if you're doing this number you're just adding to it so i would just stare at monty and uh

and he would swim and i would just kick and we you know yeah that was that so you got into team two right started team two and what were you guys doing what was going on in the world um a little bit of bosnia still um sarajevo okay and i don't think anybody had killed anybody yet so we didn't really know what was happening but that's kind of what it wasn't and i was assigned to um a marg platoon on an amfib ship um the uss austin which is an austin class lpd which means it's

the original so we crossed the ocean on a on a flat bottom lpd which is horrific and as a navy seal on a boat you don't have much to do um i i did i took advantage of it i would go around to different shops and see how um how they worked what the quartermasters doing what they do in the airloft how's the what's steering like and uh boats is made cool [ __ ] um and and that's that's another part where a lot of team guys if you can imagine are cocky to fleet sailors

and i would tell a lot of seals because i did a couple cruises on ships i would say you know there are guys in the ship that work a hell of a lot harder than you do navy lies no joke yeah and i just tried to learn about it um and um i met the marines we had my first time working with amphibious reconnaissance uh cool dudes great dudes and we went over that and all we were gonna do was um training exercises we went i mean we went to road to spain i don't know

how many times italy like 11 times and um we did get so i actually i'm sorry i went through sniper school before that deployment so they turns out chief john judy who was my recruiter did not lie to me they would send me to sniper school and just get through buttons first i'd love to see him again i mean that was awesome he was he was never he was never mean to me he just kind of yeah you're good um and so i did go to sniper school camp atterbury which is awesome and and that

sniper course is based off of uh the marine corps sniper school um so when i got on on the ship when we're not doing anything i would get with the the recon snipers and we would just talk about ballistics and talk about minutes of angle and how you do this how do you set up your hindsight what do you prefer as far as taking shots and picking picking their brains because you know there's no internet and there's you can read your books you can lift yeah what are you gonna do for the next 10 hours

so [ __ ] with them um and then we actually got called in to uh at the time it was a real real world mission to go into albania because there was an exercise going on with some admirals and i think like the president of albania and then there was a terrorist threat so this is 1998 and that was the first time in the navy that i'd heard osama bin laden oh al-qaeda is threatening this exercise al qaeda is run by like one of the briefs osama bin laden like i heard him because of the

thing in in 93 when they bombed yeah okay i know who that is but he wasn't you know yeah osama bin laden yet um and so we i mean i did get briefed on it and you know we're never going to see him but i i got to set up like my first range card i'm overwatching this award ceremony which is kind of cool i mean if al qaeda pops out i'll just i'll shoot one of them and that'll be it that'll be it go get a beer that's it um no that was like the

first thing like we did we did some security on um on the housing complex the embassy and that's actually the first time i saw seal team six guys because i had been told they were doing um psd personal protection on a lot of uh big wigs at the embassy and uh i i've been told that ceo team six had been disbanded it doesn't exist anymore and i saw them one of the older guys the potentials yeah those are those are dev group guys that's still team six i was like those [ __ ] guys are

legends yeah first time i saw them for some urban line and then we go back to virginia beach after eight months at sea and um start another workup and then it's a part of the team guy life where you know they call them the one hump chumps the most cocky guys in the seal team are the guys with one platoon because i know everything now i'm gonna meet anymore yeah you are to somebody i ran into a guy you know your heritage um you're a meat to somebody you're a new guy to somebody i ran

into it so i'm a cocky one-hump chump i'm at the seal reunion in virginia beach and you know i see those old-school badass dudes like the big trident hats yeah and i saw this old dude he's a little too old whatever me being cocky and i go hey uh what what buds class were you oh [ __ ] and he said uh well i went through hell week in um 1944 and i said there was no hell week in 1940 he said there was on omaha beach know your heritage i'm like holy [ __ ]

damn dude yeah old school guy i mean that's again goosebumps holy [ __ ] so that's when i learned to just you don't know don't talk [ __ ] you don't know who knows what yeah never start a fight because you're probably going to lose that's [ __ ] cool yeah that's kind of that's a cool thing it's like i want to [ __ ] with an old guy come on yeah yeah yeah and then another platoon we uh we got spun up quickly to do a strike platoon on um the uss kennedy so we

did a shortened workup and they actually the only reason i got in they made a quick platoon of experience guys i don't know why but i got picked because uh i was a sniper and they needed a sniper one of our guys was a radio guy they picked him and another guy um just a linguist or some [ __ ] and then we got into a a pretty stacked platoon and uh we went overseas and and we did a couple things we um we we were doing the the interdiction operations in the persian gulf where

you like you're taking down dows a date smuggler we uh we i uh we took down the uss or the the russian tanker volgeneft which was a big deal at the time it was a smuggled iraqi oil you know i mean the the closest we got to combat was i think we confiscated their steak knives and then we drove it to oman and then we finished that platoon and then we timed another platinum and um i did a yukon this time so i went to germany were you getting discouraged at all or uh no because

i thought i was getting real work i mean we really went in with loaded weapons we really took down ships and not a lot going on yeah and then uh i knew we'd get to we'd do a pump in kosovo on this one for sure and i'm like okay that's i mean there have been a couple shoot shootouts there i will get to um to try out my hide side skills because i guess a lot of a lot of the seals a lot of that we're doing it we're getting compromised um by farmers and that's

how you start learning okay you're in someone's backyard they they're gonna recognize you yeah and so we learned about that you know i did a couple hide sites in kosovo camp bon steel ate really good food and then we left um back to germany and now we're oh i've been to kosovo i'm this is my third platoon you know i can be the [ __ ] at jb's gallery of girls when i go back home or whatever is that place still there i have no idea that i love that place it was called stopless go

not topless because they had little things on wasn't it right next to the uh what was that bar right next to it it was right next to it the brass the the brass bell the brass i wonder if i don't know if it's still there i haven't been back there but yeah we so we're back in uh at unit two up in germany just finished kosovo and then i was in the um uh operations room uh type we did have email at the time because it was september 2001 and um we saw the tv come

on and they had a picture of the twin towers the north tower was on fire and they said um obviously this is breaking news a small plane has hit the world trade center and we're looking at it and you know we're trying to think through it like that's a that's a nice day man that's clear and that is not a small hole because that's a huge building that's a big [ __ ] hole man and then the second one hit yeah and we're kind of and someone did say that's osama bin laden that's al-qaeda man

everything everything that we know just changed right now so we're deployed and it's like well all right i mean where do you want us to go we're overseas and it didn't happen um they did obviously sent guys right in and then we went back and i i put in that's what i put in my um uh my package for um green team do i want to go to steel team six now so when you saw the when you saw the planes hit the towers did you have any recollection of bin laden's name from before when

you were gone oh yeah yeah cause we talked about al-qaeda just in some some briefs here and there okay yeah and we knew they were a threat but we never knew it was that we when they first hit we're thinking we're going to sudan or something where we fight in africa or whatever and then they obviously figured out where they were and i put in my package and i had to i had enough time between going going to green team um to do another deployment so i got on another another marg deployment and i'm like

this is going to be sweet because we're going to go in with the marines through turkey and we're going to because now it's 2003 i mean that's kind of a jump some time there but we're gonna now we're invading iraq and we talked about this earlier like for whatever iraq was worth i was excited because we're going to invade a country i'm a navy seal and we are going to we're going to kill yeah and i want to because we're all still fired up about i mean that's that's how we got away with invading iraq

because of what happened on 9 11. um and then with me being the i don't know what it is about me but there this turned out to be um a problem in monrovia liberia with the embassy there was a civil war and they wanted to evacuate the embassy so they literally turned us around so the marines are off oh shh and they're going man i mean and they and we did talk to them afterwards and they invaded iraq i mean that's [ __ ] an invasion so um but we went back and and um so

instead of going into a gunfight i did my my first and only real world hydrographic reconnaissance so and the what the the funniest part of that was because you know you always get um um briefed on dangerous marine life but whatever i don't give a [ __ ] that's they're not going to hurt you but this one we paid attention to and said because you're going to be swimming in on the coast of africa and there's every man-eating shark you can imagine is here and um i there shouldn't be any but um if you see

saltwater crocodiles they're 20 feet long they'll eat you and then now there aren't any there aren't any hippos but those are the deadliest animal in africa they kill more people than anything oh and here's your landing point it's called black mamba point the reason it's called black mama points is because it's full of black mamas and they're very aggressive they'll chase you and they'll kill you after that it's like all right so and then even when we flooded the the the well deck of the of the uss lasalle to get off there were hammerheads like

swimming into the ship holy [ __ ] what the [ __ ] is this yeah like can we just go to the [ __ ] inventor can we go to iraq yeah but i know we went into the did a hydro recon it was kind of cool because we did the the no [ __ ] thing and the marines did come i think the marines came in by helicopter it's like you're welcome oh man dude but yeah then we um so we didn't have time to invade iraq and then we went back and then i

was a master at arms at seal team four for um like january to march when green team started so i ran pt and then uh went to selection and so then you go over there and it's like all right here [ __ ] because i mean green team is um you're putting your trident on you're betting your trident right now because you'll either be the guy that made it or the guy that tried and didn't yeah that's a lot of i mean that's a lot to to deal with and you can get kicked out of

selection for anything like i've seen really really good dudes just [ __ ] something up and they're gone yeah have a bad day and everyone has a bad day throw the wrong shot though you're [ __ ] out back when you went through though there probably wasn't as many guys going to green team no i don't think so how many guys we're going in um we went with about 60. we got like 30 through okay that's half i think 60 but i mean they did spin up to the point where they did two they were

doing two green teams a year yeah and that was just a different animal um because you're not gonna get quitters you usually won't get quitters so they're trying to they're trying to find guys who can think through problems who can think who can who can make decisions you know rapidly who's not going to freeze at the door and i've seen dudes do it you know in a in a close quarters combat situation you got a breaching problem i've seen guys freeze at the door like they they forget to look for the hinges they forget which

goes where and it's all right and it's sort of the if you want to be fast slow down if you want to deal with chaos breathe and i tell people that now uh at boardrooms if you're having a shitty meeting stand up and breathe and that's so you know learning the uh the slowest smooth is fast and you'll get through it and i you know i've had days where because cqb is notoriously hardest part of green team when you're because it just they really just hammer you for um i've had days where i can do

no wrong three runs in a row everything's smooth it's [ __ ] easy to the point where the last one of the day they have me carrying a broom because they told me i'm not safe with a gun just getting in your head and what they will do there is uh punish you for things you didn't screw up but hammer you for it like what can you give me an example um over penetration you you're supposed to be six six inches from the wall you're four inches from the wall get outside and they just are

hammering you tire drags sweating dehydrated uh getting in your own head what did i do i know i didn't [ __ ] that they know you didn't [ __ ] it up but they you don't know that they know that you didn't [ __ ] up because and as soon as you're done getting beat they put you right back in the front of the train and you're and this is when you haul ask through that you're not slowing down on this you're running fast because what they're telling you is um we've just punished you for

something you didn't [ __ ] up can you get over it or is it gonna stay in your head okay and some of the best advice again in life is whatever it is get over it learn from it and get the [ __ ] over it uh you know you're not getting that playback learn and move on what how would you compare green team to buds is it is it harder harder different because you're doing the 10 mile run in the morning but then it's not then it's just tactics with skydiving it's just a lot

of [ __ ] uh hey host halos combat jumps all that stuff um and then the cqb is just it's repetition and it's just uh it's just it's the constant scrutiny it's it's so many instructors hammering you at once it and it's just it's a mind game i mean it's it is the best time of your life it's just hard yeah what uh would you say there's like a certain attribute they're looking for in an operator to get over there or you know it's it's hard to say because you it's like buds where you can't

pick who's going to make it and who's not i mean i mean you can he's going to make he's but i don't know about these guys like the gray man he's going to the gray man wins there too um um i think but the green team's more of a if if they like you from the beginning or if like it's kind of a good old boy network too like someone says hey you do want this guy they're going to i mean you know they're going to hammer them they're not going to know that they're kind

of looking out for them but if they don't like you you're [ __ ] like if like they'll if they pass your picture around the the the uh the team rooms and someone knows you from cp shuckers well [ __ ] him that's it that's all it takes could be damn that's how it was i think then uh and i was fortunate i was i was liked by a few a few guys and um you know i [ __ ] things up i mean everyone [ __ ] things up but uh i think i kind

of got it um just slowing it down the realization it's like with a golf swing if you watch yourself swing how fast you bring it up slow the [ __ ] down keep your head still let's uh let's take a quick break and then we'll get into the rest of it hey guys let me tell you about this subscription service that i've been working real hard on called vigilance elite patreon basically on patreon we haven't broken up into three different tiers we got tier one tier two and tier three let's dive in our tier one

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no matter what tier you choose the support is greatly appreciated and it is the only thing that makes this show drive on so thank you for all the support see you on patreon all right so we kind of got through green team yep you're showing up you're done how do you how do they figure out what squadron you're doing once once you do realize that seal team 6 exists and it's not a you know a development squad it is i mean you're developing [ __ ] but then you're shooting people um with it uh um

the squadrons at the time or the two original squadrons were um blue and gold for navy and and actually the reason it's called seal theme six is because mars dick marsenko just a phenomenal ultimate navy seal who was the commanding officer he called it six because he knew russia would say they're seal team one two and six where the hell are three four and five not you know not just a hat rack yeah um but we we there were so when i got there there was there was blue and gold and gold uh they absorbed

into red squadron which is the one i wanted to go to um why did you want to go there um that well because of neil roberts okay uh he was he was obviously roberts ridge and that was red squadron red team at the time that went into tucker gar and he fell out of the helicopter and that that's the first time it really sunk in that um we're fighting some [ __ ] animals this is al-qaeda and they're not going to just kill you did you know neil i did he was one of the first

navy seals i met i met don shipley i met neil roberts neil roberts took me and my friend matt to lunch at arby's i'll never forget that brand new guy steel team too and he was just always so willing to help you with anything from the finance rate you're getting on that car at that stupid used car lot off base to here's where you put your 60 pouches okay look come here this girl's crazy get away from her neil roberts is the guy and you know his name is neil roberts robert o'neill uh and he

was a red hair i mean a complete stud like he was way better than me like i think his old course time is on his headstone still because he had the record for so long which i think is [ __ ] awesome yeah but he was just he was a one percenter um and uh but in in every way salt of the earth um nicest guy in the world he can murder you with a knife like just awesome guy and just because of the the fight at talker gar the the the story of what happened

everything from chapman to to slab what they did on that mount brett morgani the guys how they how they just never leave anyone behind and they went back and they got in one of the worst gunfights you could imagine close close quarters with pkms getting shot at you at night and just to hear and i'm not going to tell their story i wasn't there but just to hear them um debrief us i was like okay i want to go to i mean the bones man blue team awesome gold team doesn't take [ __ ] awesome

but i just wanted red um i mean i'll i'll go to the other ones because just i mean it was even cool to go through green team because the instructors were all at squadrons and as a new guy looking at the trident i felt like that looking at the bones looking at the at the crusader yeah looking at the the the red man and i just wanted red team i just i felt it did they give you a choice or no that you get picked they have um they uh they they actually have drafts and

um every year one team is first and then they should rotate and then every every time you're at your pick one troop or one team gets their first pick so you actually go through uh you actually go through a process i actually picked dj shipley and i'll never forget when it was my turn to pick i was like that guy's still available our team just got better no [ __ ] so how's it how's it work then do they do do you oh the instructor's giving you yeah yeah because you had inside yeah you're you're

playing the good old boy network like your red team instructors are coming up to red team saying i'm not going to say anything you want this guy here's the order that you want to go and we want him in the squadron but like if your team can get him um yeah it's [ __ ] awesome so i just i got red and i don't know why but i remember that they posted the uh uh lists on the on the cork board and it's like okay you see the guys it's like oh sweet man no um

reeves got gold and that's awesome and um uh my coke is going to golden oh look at me and nate red and this and it's just i mean it's interesting you all made it so you're going to know each other we call it the second deck once you get to the second deck is when you're part of a squadron and then going into the second deck for the first day is um [ __ ] i'm a new guy again and the first thing i remember walking into the red red team room was uh obviously it's

the way it's just the the way it's designed the memorabilia [ __ ] neil roberts [ __ ] bent saw is up there in a frame above the desk where he used to sit wow but it's like it's from reading history to being now you're a part of it but now it's like holy [ __ ] i'm scared of these guys um what impressed me the most was how fast they could do cqb like like if you're not in the front you're they're gone they're gonna dust this place but the second thing was how funny

they were the humor and the camaraderie like oh my god i thought i was funny i gotta step up because these dudes are funny and they're just good dudes like uh and i i maintain that uh up until the last day my last day at seal team six i was lucky because every single day i got to go to work with people who were better than me and and we didn't necessarily undermine each other we would we would ask each other questions well you did this why why does that work and what do you think

about that how should i carry this i got to a point where i was telling uh telling my guys you don't need to carry a pistol and they're like why is that i'm like well if you get into a room and you your primary goes down your buddy already killed him and if you go outside with a pistol just [ __ ] bring it bring a cleaning rod or throw rocks at him clean your [ __ ] gun this pistol's not doing [ __ ] it's weight you're carrying wait take that [ __ ] off

your gun it's not a space gun you need you need your eotech and a laser and an extra battery for your nods because it's gonna fail yeah change your batteries every day yeah but uh yeah the first day they're just watching them work and then seeing how how they work together and the humor and the camaraderie and that's what i think makes a great team is morale they always made sure morale was high um little things like uh you guys have anything to do go home be with your kids we're not doing [ __ ]

today leave and uh it was um it was a uh big boy mentality like um our first muster is going to be 10 a.m i'm i'm just assuming you will have gone and worked out by then yeah and we did and it wasn't like organized pt or march to the surf zone it's like do your thing can you can you carry me if i get shot in my body armor are you doing those workouts then we have no problem and then uh and then you do that you know we got there we're doing a work

and it was just like now it's like over there it wasn't new guy it was like newer guy and instead of like [ __ ] you idiots like here let me show you how that come on let me let me show you a quick way to make that seven foot charger c6 watches so it's actually pretty [ __ ] welcoming yeah it is a green team they [ __ ] hammer you yeah but it's they all they all go through it and then once you're through like i i saw um green team instructors that i

thought were the the meanest [ __ ] in the world once you get to the second deck it's forgotten it's a game which is i want you uh it's the same in buds they're [ __ ] hammering you because i will have to go to war with you i might can you can you do it yeah but then you get up there and it's like i mean you get you got friends everywhere you know everybody and um and now we're going to war and i mean other than a couple things um we weren't losing a

lot of fights so we didn't really hit you know my first deployment well that's when it hit because my first deployment was to um jalalabad afghanistan we were running a safe house which is um some guys cooler than me and probably a three-letter agency carried a briefcase full of money and bought a small hotel and then hired locals to be security and plumbers and [ __ ] cooks and then here's your safe house and you're it's a safe house because you're you're stimulating the economy you're paying the guards and they will work for money um

you're shopping in the bazaars you're eating shawarmas out in town and then you know the pet family around you doesn't want to get mortar so they'll make sure that taliban doesn't come in that's my first one and i didn't um i'd never been to war and i'd only seen it on tv so i assumed it was as bad as it was on tv i assumed there's a suicide bomber around every corner everyone's going to be shooting at you it's going to blow up all the time and it took a while to realize that in a

war zone most of the people just want to get on with their lives and raise their families most the people are not combatants they're just [ __ ] over it um but the first few times we were doing some new technology in jalalabad we're doing uh um so it's now we're doing mount in jbed so hold on just for the audience mountains military operations urban terrain so it's it's uh urban urban fighting so it's like everywhere it's a it's a not just a 360 range it's everything ranging you can get shot at from anywhere and

you don't even know why something can blow up everything next can blow up um and i remember thinking that i'm i'm kind of wasting my energy jumping behind [ __ ] and you know there's i think we have four dudes that's four guys from red team two included so three uh seals one eod but at that time eod was going through green team with us so i mean they're shooters and uh i remember jumping around like looking and i looked at my uh my boss who was uh he was involved in operation anaconda where um

robert's ridge happened and he he'd been awarded a silver star for some of the [ __ ] they did and i was watching him and i remember looking over and he's got like body armor short sleeves big old beard like he's got one of those one of those cop radios and just and i remember looking at him thinking i want to be cool like that i want to look cool like that and uh we got we got back and i i told him i'm not kissing your ass but how weren't you afraid and he goes

well how do you know i wasn't afraid i said because you didn't look like it and he goes that's right you don't know if i'm afraid but if i show you that i'm calm you'll be calm calm is contagious and and that's how you learn it's like okay that's [ __ ] cool i just got to look cool and so we did a couple things here and there like one of the one of the funniest things i saw was um we we learned that if you run into a a foreign fighter is uh anyone not

from afghanistan or if you're in iraq anyone not from iraq so you got jordanians or saudi arabians if you run into them they look different they speak arabic they're there for one reason right they're not teaching school they're al-qaeda yeah we ran into uh i was uh i got a very short course on how to be a battlefield interrogator so my job was to and we invented these tactics as we went along uh as soon as we took a house down shots fired or not whoever's surviving we're interrogating them right now you know put the

interpreter behind him i'm interrogating you because you catch them with their pants down they're nervous they don't know how to how to act i ran into a saudi arabian's big fat dude and i instantly started laughing i i said to him through the interpreter i said you don't know what that t-shirt you're wearing says do you and he had no idea his t-shirt said it's not a beer belly it's a fuel tank for a sex machine and so i'm like you just you just saved yourself a beating because that's awesome i wish you had a

picture of that yeah oh i i wish i had that shirt if i'd known him better take it from him made an ft out of it um but yeah i mean so we were doing that kind of stuff and and um it was it was that's what we do i'm getting to know the locals i'm getting to know a little bit of the traditions how you do this getting another local food um you know even driving to assad about up to konar river at the time because we were doing it right and we didn't we

hadn't pissed off everyone yet but there's ieds but um one one night we we would drive dirt bikes around town um locals that we would purchase the the local bikes you know put on the the protect drive to this is when the airfield wasn't built up this is like there was still russian [ __ ] there and like the rangers stayed there the ranger sniper teams were there a couple marines were there and stuff and we they're putting up a few tents here in there and uh they said hey some guys uh from the east

coast just flew in um some helicopters i was like [ __ ] let's go see him and so we drove over there that turned out to be a turbine 33 and we i bullshitted with some of those dudes talked to dan healy about um sam adams uh i went to sniper school with dan healy and he loves sam adams he's a new englander and uh we're like what's the what's the deal and they said um we just inserted four snipers into um the korengal the congo valley they're looking for a mod shaw and then once

they find him with eyes on um we're gonna go hit the house and and we were like [ __ ] yeah can we go and so we were we were trying to work at scheme because our headshed from from six was in bagram and they told us no no one from seal team six is getting on those helicopters we think there's missiles and um we're like yeah cool man [ __ ] have a have a good fight and i had a some of my guys were down from that so we took them back to our

uh our safe house and we had some contingency funds that you're supposed to use to build up the um the um the infrastructure so we had some dude build this stupid cold tub like the size of a hot tub but it's cold and we were just sitting there we could get heineken um over there so we were sitting there having actually the the heineken story is funny because when i first got there they had a place where we could send the interpreter to get booze for us i mean obviously no one drinks overseas but um

we sent them there and the the price was um i want to say 20 bucks for a bottle of stolichnaya vodka and 30 bucks for a case of heineken and so we sent the terps out my trip was larry because we couldn't pronounce his name so he's just larry and we sent him out to get some stuff and uh i'm i'm the newer guy there but i'm now you know i'm i'm over there and uh he came back with nothing he said yeah the the guy running the shop said i know who you're selling this

to these are for the americans and the prices went from 20 and 30 to 50 and 60. i'm like [ __ ] this are you kidding me get your [ __ ] on so we roll over there we go to the guy look i can appreciate inflation uh 20 30 you go 25 35 that's fine you raise it that high you can't sell booze in the islamic republic of afghanistan i'm going to take it all for free and put you in jail and he goes 25 and 35 he's fine my friend i'm like [ __

] couldn't we just done this in the first place so we're um we're in the we're at the safe house and um we were actually technically a ranger major was in charge of us we did have a senior enlisted guys with us but the ranger major was kind of running it between jalalabad airfield and our safe house and he came out we're so weird drinking heineken in this uh tub and he said hey your boys just got [ __ ] up we got to go oh [ __ ] and we're like whoa what do you

what do you mean he goes yeah they shot a hilo down and we we gotta we gotta we gotta go that was your first deployment over there that first one how long were you in the country i was almost done so three and a half months and that was this is june and um we we rolled over i ran into a few guys i knew from from seal team two that put me through training master chiefs that were there and uh you know and uh the other helicopter that got that missed and i don't know

if it was three four or three two uh got missed the pilots landed in the wrong spot on the on the uh the a different base on in jalalabad because they were something happened so other guys were coming in they didn't get shot down and i remember they said yeah it just it just came out of the valley and turned and it it it hit and it went down at 3-3 went down and and one of them missed us damn so we're talking to guys that just got shot at by surface-to-air missiles even though technically

that's not what happened they're telling me face-to-face missiles were coming out of that valley and it was so it was more of a holy [ __ ] the the i mean it's good to see you because the world's still a decent place because you're still alive or whatever the [ __ ] we're saying and they they came out and said look um we need there's a crash site we got to get up there and they're not going to fly us because they're shooting down helicopters now so figure it out and we're running around this makeshift

airfield and i'll there's a there's like a bee hut full of rangers and we're like hey we we here's the situation and we told them and we're like um i need five guys and uh all 20 of them jumped up and said we should you know we should take us 10 minutes to get ready we'll be out in three and then they came out the we decided go get whatever vehicle you can steal [ __ ] commandeer we're driving as far as we can and then we're humping up into the into the valley and um

we you know we we didn't know we didn't know if there were survivors we didn't know what happened but we knew taliban was up there and so we um we drove as far as we could and then we started walking um up up and this is daytime it's i don't know 90 to 100 degrees fahrenheit humidity and we're humping up to i mean to the point where there were dudes like i carry too many mags um because it's so there were dudes passing [ __ ] back to like like who's taking it just drop it

so keep water maybe we can get airlift or something and and then we you know we humped up for um for 10 hours so we're not quite there yet and i remember looking around saying hey did any of you guys call home before we left on this thing and they're like no why it's like well all our families know is a bunch of seals from virginia just got killed and they haven't heard from us and so that's going through your mind too we're we're sticking each other with ivs hanging them in trees and stuff and

i remember looking at a guy saying uh you know this is why training is so hard because if we were going to quit right now where the [ __ ] are we going to go right here so we we kept going up they did fly in um they did fly in a helicopter from bogom more of red squadron they got to the crash site first so they i mean i don't know who wants that job but they got the job and they're going to go to the crash site find find it and um you know

some of the stories that i've heard were like lou langlais was looking at the crash site and he said i'm going to go um um try to get some intel from the village and he looked over and said i just never want to die like that you know and lou was on extortion one seven damn and you just hear safe stories about you know it's life is fragile man and uh um so we started humping back down we're trying to leave this the sun's going down and then we spotted some um some taliban on the

opposite ridge line and you know we're like [ __ ] it let's call in who wants to hit him and the cloud cover was coming in and nobody nobody wanted to to um uh to to get under it [ __ ] you're in the western himalayas man this is a new [ __ ] but the a-10s would and that's the first time i've seen an a-10 get called in and it just it was so low and and um it came over us and the an a10 obviously shoots what is it how many around three thousand

rounds a minute or something so i don't know someone's gonna correct me but that's a lot it's so much it sounds like a growl and when it when it came over us the first thing we heard was the bullets going supersonic then we heard it no so we saw the smoke heard him super sonic heard him hit then we heard shoot so it's and like that's when he there was a marine i know people have heard this seen the meme but i'm pretty sure it was coined that day there was like a marine or a

young private in the army that said it is true what they say but doesn't kill you makes you stronger except an a10 an 18 will [ __ ] kill you oh [ __ ] so well then well then we we walked down and um we're closer to asada bad than we are and we should have been maybe two days and we're closer to asada bed than we are to jalalabad so we're gonna go to abad um and we're gonna rack out there they've got beds um or floor i don't give a [ __ ] we've

been awake for so long and that's when the dude that got the note from marcus um he showed up so he's got this you were there when that guy showed up the guy showed up and because we had an argument with the um you know i'm not trying to ruffle any feathers here but we had an argument with the agency because they don't they never want to burn a source which is fine that's a thing gathering intel but this guy knows where marcus is and you're taking us there right now and and i don't give

a [ __ ] if they kill you what's worth thinking their agency's yelling and they something along the lines of well we're not sure if this is him because he didn't cross the t's in his name latrell and we're like yeah but it's on tack notes and he got his [ __ ] social right it's him we're going so there was a big argument there i'm pretty sure i know a guy got fired for that um one of the rangers got fired i think banned from the country but he made the call we're gonna go

so then we got back in the car we drove around patch river valley um you're going around about up to pesh which now you're in in no man's land and um marcus i guess had gone from the coronal into the shariak valley which are two i mean these are two neighboring valleys and people don't understand in afghanistan there have been families living in these valleys for 10 000 years that i've never met yeah like they don't you don't you're not allowed in and hate each other hate yeah they'll cut your head off and like put

like old school dracula put it on the steak type [ __ ] so we're driving in there and this is a part where i've seen afghanistan's a different world and people don't understand that if they if they when i first got to red team i was asking guys what's afghanistan like they said you just have to see it because you're not going to believe me yeah and so we went up there and it's they don't have water and i remember seeing that there's k i'm a father and i've seen these kids i remember handing a

bottle of water to a little girl she opened it dumped it out so she could play with the plastic so then we're pumping up again um another mountain and it's just steep terrain and then we we knew he was up and over marcus is down in this village and we got up um almost to the top and one of my guys said um one of my guys said um i gotta sit down i can't i can't i can't go anymore we've been awake for three three and a half days i can't go and i said

that's okay we'll just tell mrs latrell marcus his mom that we didn't we were this close but we didn't get him because you got tired and he goes yeah you're right and i said do me i said do me a favor tell that [ __ ] to me in one minute because i don't think i can go any further and so we're just whatever trying to get up to the top and that's you know rangers came in helos they did get marcus out and then um now we're just in the sheriff valley it's like all

right well let's try to live our way out of this one so wait you weren't with the rangers it was just for you guys no no no we we were with rangers and we were there were marines and [ __ ] there too i'll never forget seeing marines because like we got to choose what we would wear i had no body armor a couple mags in a uh shirt they're wearing full like fur sergeant told me i need to wear all this [ __ ] like i said at the beginning marines are [ __ ]

bad [ __ ] they will they will take shitty gear and make it suck even more semper fi baby but yeah the rangers flew in and and that was ballsy too because one of our options was um i mean we well i let me back up when we had that dude uh afghanistan might as well be the 13th century we showed this guy an aerial photo of his village on an ipad i might as well have just showed him an actual picture of allah this dude looking at an ipad like one minute you're [ __

] your animal now you're looking at an ipad so we were gonna fly in he could couldn't really pick it up but we they uh we we thought this could be a mud suck we're just gonna walk brain just [ __ ] being rangers man we'll do it and they did and they got and then we lived our way out and then the you know the remaining two or three weeks is a miserable deployment we lost so many great guys on that on the gila yeah and then so that's deployment number one damn dude yeah

that's uh it was intense i mean because we i mean at first we were just having fun and it wasn't real i mean it was real but like the fighting's over army the green berets and cia took care of that [ __ ] they bought the [ __ ] out and we're just we're going to rebuild or something and then delta's going to find bin laden we're just going to do this the food was great yeah what so what were you guys doing before that we were just testing new technology trying to find um we

found a few minor al-qaeda guys in town we we actually there's a video online where we found we we put these um there was an al-qaeda guy working at a gas station he was laundering money and funding [ __ ] because that's one of the major ways there's only a few roads obviously and um we the rrd rangers the the uh and they're awesome dudes um they went out on an rns and they really watched this damn gas station in it for five days which just sucks like in the heat and then we they know

they had eyes on whatever they and we rolled from the safe house 30 seconds grabbed the student and rolled out with them there's a video that they made of us rolling up we wear this ridiculous hodgie gear i mean i don't blend in i don't know if you know you don't blend it no we go to war with scotland i'm in there but um we you know we roll up we run in we run out we got this dude the van takes away they made a video if you if you can find it online it

says a snatch and grab at the grab and go and it's literally a 30-second mission and that that was uh we just rolled him out through him and flew the ball but we were just we were using technology to track al-qaeda and see what they're doing and mainly i mean we're just rolling them up to get intel we're trying to to build the network to find there's not a lot of al qaeda in afghanistan at this point they all went to pakistan okay so not a lot i mean a couple dudes and up in the

coronal but most of them went over to the federally administrative tribal area the fatah and they're all over there on that side and that's another story that i have uh two deployments later let's go and do it okay well i mean we did go to iraq next we'll go we'll we'll jump to this and then we'll go to iraq okay um so my uh next deployment to afghanistan i would instead of being a member at the jbad safehouse i was in charge of the assad about safe house so i'm the team leader there which means

i have one other guy with me from from red team uh and then we have a few augments that are that are probably going to screen for dev group uh but aren't there yet so they come over to learn what we're doing and then and we're working with the agency running sources back and forth and mainly this is just for drone strikes so we can get intel hit these guys or whatever and we we were getting bored and a very important lesson i learned on this deployment is never die because you got bored do everything

like you do anything and always follow your rules people die because they take shortcuts or they get bored i got bored and uh i came up with a plan with this the chief of of base who was uh he had actually been with the agency fighting um with the mujahideen against the russians so this dude knew the area and so he and i over over cocktails i think the agency calls it fellowship over fellowship we came up with a plan that we know as per rules of engagement uh if we have troops in contact and

positive identification on the border we can pursue i want to say 10 clicks inside of pakistan so we knew there was a about a click in a click and a half and there were two al-qaeda safe houses so we figured if we go up there on the border and sort of show ourselves they'll shoot at us we'll call air support we can hit these houses that's going to be a good mission cross border up this is badass so that's the plan and everything went to [ __ ] because we get up there i got a

couple um a couple army guys and then a few afghans and we had actually we had put on um the brown tiger stripe stuff and i don't even know if that's legal so we don't look like americans so we're trying to if the if the if al qaeda or the taliban sees us they're not worried about air support because this is simply you know a a afghan army yeah we'll kill them we didn't we didn't put that together because that like a truck came up and some dudes got out and it's like it's like i'm

almost a flash checkpoint and they walk up and they're yelling us to come talk to them for tea and i was like yeah you guys go talk to him don't don't tell him there's americans here whatever so they went down there and they kind of came back and they said yeah they wanted t but we're not falling for that so they went to this thing we got the high ground here it's it's 11 30 in the morning we we stayed overnight we're up there 11 30 in the morning and then another truck came up full

of guys and then another truck came up full of guys and then another one now we have a little bit of high ground but there's a lot of dudes down there and this is some serious [ __ ] ambush [ __ ] i'm in charge i'm i'm you know an e637 but i'm the ground force commander of this one it's my call it's like well i mean we can get the [ __ ] out here right now they want me they might not notice so i'm like yeah you know we're going to beat it so

uh we had some guys below us a semi-mortar team that but they you know whatever they weren't us army we didn't know if they could do it so we're running down to them i'm explaining what's happening and we gotta haul ass or maybe we can we can get uh x-fil and that's when one of the afghan guys i was with said the the first words i ever heard him speak in english he pointed up and yelled bad guys and i remember looking up and uh now this is gonna be a real gun fight in the

mountains at high noon and watching dudes run that fast in in the had brown brown [ __ ] like brown uniforms almost on so these are these are it's a it turns out to be a mix of uh al qaeda taliban and pack mill pakistan military no and we're looking up and they're they're surrounding us and they're falling ass and they they just start zipping ring rounds at us and you can you can hear them you know and the scariest ones were the the ricochets so we're like we're like we can't move now we're pinned

then they got us on like three sides um we had separated i had a new guy it wasn't he was a he was a seal team four uh he he had he was my radio guy he'd never ever called in real world close air support and i need him now and he's out he's maybe 100 yards away i had heard up to this point some of our standard operating procedures that originated from vietnam were lines of gear how you wear your gear in lines first line second line third line your first line gear is your

most important it's closest to your body it's on your belt it's it's it's um you know an extra mag in a pocket in copenhagen whatever uh cash second line gives your second most important stuff magazines grenades maybe some more water and your third line gear is your least important stuff and your rucksack so that's your sleeping bag and ground pad extra sucks foot powder the reason so i've been told you keep it that way is because if you need to run you can start ditching your [ __ ] in order to get lighter now that's

the first time i've ever ever heard anyone do it i dropped my ruck i sprint over to tony i gotta get to him because he you know and people just eating dirt i lay next to him and uh um i said okay here's the deal that what up on the thing where they set the flash checkpoint um hit that first and he said i can't we don't have any air support i'm like okay this is bad get you got to get some whatever it takes you know we've been up there for a day and a

half they lost interest in whatever and the other people whatever so we're laying there and i'm just right next to him and and um the rounds are getting so close that they were hitting air bursts above us with rpgs where explosion and they're shooting mortars at us too um that you'd hear an explosion and look back to are my legs still there [ __ ] yeah i mean nothing was hitting i don't know how i don't know how it got so bad um we did we did this for an hour where it's not even there

the worst feeling i've ever had in the world is having someone shoot effective fire at me but realizing i can't shoot back because my rounds probably won't reach him and if i lift my head up i'm done like we were seeing tracers uh right between us and um how many of you guys were there um a total of six five or six americans that's it maybe 15 afghans how about the oppose the oh i don't know i there was a lot there was three or four truckloads full of them [ __ ] and um so

so we're up there this is all happening and they they now they were to the point they were so close that i had a dude shooting at me um he looked like me he had a red beard a white guy shooting a pkm but he's yelling allahu akbar god is great in arabic so now i'm seeing this [ __ ] and again we don't have i don't even have night vision because i don't need it it's daytime it's semi whatever and um that's when you start to think okay not only is that al qaeda that's

a chechen this is where you save at least one bullet for yourself yeah i'm not the those guys will skin you alive and we and and this is all happening and finally tony said all right i got one i got one i said austin hit that [ __ ] checkpoint get it in here now and he said okay i can't th the batteries in my radio just died because we had been out there and it had been on and they just they died and so one of my jokes about this is um um i don't

believe in micromanaging you teach your people how to do it let them do it but right now i figured it was a proper time to micromanage i said change the [ __ ] batteries and he said i can't i'm not carrying the spares remember you are they're in the rucksack so i said something i mean i don't have a choice at this point i said something along the lines of don't tell mom i did this and i ran so i'm running to that thing and i don't know i don't know it's i'm saying 100 yards

and i don't know how i hadn't been hit at this point and naturally i know where they're packed they're probably at the bottom of this [ __ ] thing there's an opening stamp thing i grabbed the two old school batteries now i'm running back [ __ ] the rucksack i have the batteries and i i chucked him to him and now we're calling it air support and uh there was a funny story something uh okay no what what he said was uh bombs away two minutes out and i'm like two minutes what did he [

__ ] drop this from the space shuttle is that the first nothing takes two minutes to fall anywhere well it turns out it was i think it was a it was bones it was a b1 and he was at 60 000 feet and he just dropped three j dams uh three two thousand pounders shh and it's danger close but like whatever and uh uh one of the guys said to me um this is dangerous what do we what do we do if it hits us i said not a problem plug your ears and then they

don't they don't they don't whistle they sizzle it sound like bacon and then we let the whole hillside lit up and like i'm watching dudes on fire running around that we just hit with with that's that's the first time i was like i will never make another joke about the air force that is the thank you that i heard that was america just that's and now now they're running al qaeda and i'm not finally getting some shots off i think i killed the chechen they're running up the hill we're [ __ ] lighting them up

um uh and it turned the tide there and then we called them in again it actually got to the point where we bombed pakistan for four hours one of the guys we called in his call sign was dude one two which i thought was just awesome and he was you know now we're calling him where he's flying upside down and he's he's like wanting us to describe what we see and it's like you know can you see the the peak with the snow yes can you see the the intersection the river yes that's one unit

of measure i want you to take two of those units please at zero nine seven magnetic all this [ __ ] but like the first thing that the conversation i had with him was so awesome he cause you know we had adrenaline going he wants you to calm down so he said just talk to me like i'm a man and i said i see why women find you attracted so yeah so we so we get done with that and we can find and then at this point you know we got more fast movers the coyotes

showed up and they're just bad [ __ ] and then we can call in to um a couple 60s we have some army pilots coming they're going to pick us up we're going to we're going to bounce uh so i they called us in i got on the starboard side the right side of this this this uh this blackhawk and we're now we're leaving and it's it's a it's a maybe a 10-minute flight back to april that's how close we were to this right on the border and that's the first time i saw the um

the battlefield that we just created and it is scorched earth and i'm thinking oh man we just bombed pakistan that is an international incident yeah then i thought i'm in charge i'm probably going to hear about this oh [ __ ] and i was right because we landed at abad and they had already flown a two-star general in there to meet with us and and he said uh and i'm in a good mood at this point i was gonna die for the past six hours now i'm gonna live and i'm in a good mood and

he said hey o'neil you realize we're not at war with pakistan right and i said yeah man but we were today and you should have yes sir and then he and he said yeah there's gonna be an investigation obviously and uh you're either going to get a silver star or you're going to spend the rest of your life in leavenworth [ __ ] and you think waiting an hour for a bomb is a long time try waiting three weeks for that decision to be made we got lucky though and the footage is still on on

on the internet where pakistan was saying it was an unprovoked attack by american forces like they always do because it turns out pakistan [ __ ] lies to us um they had the footage as they're getting the stuff okay well really now look at this here's your guys attacking my guys and they said there were some like a 21 martyrs from the pack we killed like 21 pakistanis that were fighting us wow so that's like a so i did get a superstar that you did yeah yeah that was my first silver star what's actually funny

is i've been i've been lying to my mom my entire career because it's easier to go to war than to send someone that you love to war so but they're worrying is not going to affect how you do so don't make them worry just lie to them no we're not doing [ __ ] don't worry mom iraq's not what you think we're not ever my mother came down to um to virginia beach for my the presentation of the silver star and they actually read the unclassified version of what happened and she's sitting there listening and

i remember saying mom i promise you i'll never get another silver star now fast forwarding to the day after the bin laden raid i said mom i think i lie to you i think i'm getting sick of silver stuff yeah damn dude that's crazy and that was just because um another rule in life you don't need to go looking for it don't go looking for it no if it's meant to find you it'll just find you don't like uh well like thanks to jiu jitsu don't fight anyone in a bar you don't know who's a

black belt very true don't go looking for it if you get in a bar fight and someone starts with a leg kick apologize i'll buy him a drink no my bad i was wrong exhale through the nose damn yeah well let's uh let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk about we'll get into iraq cool so okay all right so we're back from the break let's talk about iraq iraq again was one of those things where um i i hadn't been and i and i knew it was it was it

was more dangerous than afghanistan at the time because foreign fighters had realized it'll be easier to kill americans in iraq because we can get there a lot easier than to go to afghanistan and um and they and they they had learned our tactics they they knew what we were doing they knew that one of our tactics was um if there's an open door we're gonna run into it because a lot of this stupid um not stupid but just arrogant special forces um not special forces all of us were there there's going to be a fight

anyway let's just get it over with that was the mentality the time i'll kind of knew that so leave the door open have machine guns inside and then just drill the first four guys in the room and they they did that um and so we went over there um our our army counterparts took some pretty heavy casualties and and that's when we kind of um started to learn that the one of the worst things you can have nothing on them those guys are complete studs um but one of the worst things you can say when

you're running a team is well this is the way we've always done it it's like wait a minute why are we running into why are we running in there how about we just how about we stop why don't we just clear the room from the door we in we invented combat clearance we why are we sprinting at night through houses with white lights when we can put our nods down and own it and why are we yelling stop yelling when you turn a corner and you point your gun up i don't need to hear you

yell stairwell i'll assume there's a stairwell shut the [ __ ] up quite so we started training on um um silent runs and we learned when we were silent not only were faster and more efficient we were communicating at the highest levels simply by reading off each other you don't you know there's no reason to um to give someone your position and and then we so we just started reinventing tactics not just we at red squadron or seal team six delta was on board with all this stuff and then we're all and what we were

really good about too i mean i mentioned a cross um a rivalry type thing between services that wasn't us or delta we we would cross train with each other and then most importantly the guys who just got back would debrief the guys about to go over and we would take them on um even when we got like when we're leaving our our relief squadron we would take them on a shakeout op like here's what we're doing here's how it works everything from intel uh to workout schedules to here's what you should do and here's the

dangerous part here's what we're looking for we you know we did a lot of that stuff and and um it was everything from uh snipers realizing that they're they're climbing the roof so they um okay i don't i mean i'm not saying i agree with this in iraq but i don't need body armor i need to be light i don't need this many magazines i haven't shot that much um but again too be careful what you wish for we had i had a sniper mind that i was telling him because he's climbing he's climbing every

building and he's you know he's the first one out there leading the patrol and we're doing you know we realized that you don't need to land on the x land over here we'll walk in and when they figure that out we'll take motorbikes and then we'll walk in um i had one sniper that i was saying um we had an argument at six i was a sniper at two but then i i said i you can be an assaulter or a sniper at seal team six and i said i wanna be an assaulter my joke

was and again joking but not seeing the future i said i know snipers are going to kill more people but i think assaulters are going to kill kill more famous people you said that yeah it's a joke it's like the thing with my mom we're not doing anything snipers will kill more people assaulters will kill more famous people damn talk about throwing some [ __ ] out into the universe that's what i'm saying so we had this one sniper and he he got to the point i think where he was carrying one mag of 556.

he loved the 556 with the with the the 14 inch upper and then one mag in a harness and like no water like that's his loadout that's it and i'm like dude i know we're i i know our plan is to only be here during one cycle of darkness but you're gonna eventually you're gonna want more bullets than that and i think our last gun fight on that trip to uh to iraq he was we were in a weird gunfight and this snipes were up top and he was blasting out and he my nickname was

nisro navy seal rob o'neal nisro that's some of my friends at the bar could you what up mine israel uh and he yelled daddy goes nisro i need a mag and i said no dude i told you to carry more bullets and he literally goes come on i can still hear him screaming but um but we were we were learning stuff like that we learned you don't need to rush the first kill that i ever got was in on that iraq deployment is when we just decided um because we were still in between the nods

up or even look under him white light fast we said we're gonna go slow we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna go in quiet we're not gonna blow the door we're gonna pick the lock we figured out ways to break the glass quietly and open it and just go inside wake them up you know catch them when they're sleeping see how many guys you can touch while they're sleeping well we started having competitions how many al-qaeda guys can you check for a suicide bomb and then wake him up by saying and then watching a grown man

[ __ ] his pants that was one of the greatest things ever but one of the nights we were going into this thing we had a we had a lane uh a hallway and like the first time we're trying this quiet and we're walking in this al qaeda dude hops out he's got an ak-47 he could have killed every single one of us but he couldn't see us so we hop back in the room and now we okay there's [ __ ] we had a guy with us andy who is a special boat service guy

in sbs and brits are the [ __ ] best they're they're as funny or if not funnier than we are but i compare them like we're the normal keys they're the sharp keys on the piano like it sounds good but it's a little off um he had a cloud of death over him the other brits said you're going with andy he he gets in fights like he just it follows him you will get like you're going to get in a fight and so andy happened to be with us and then one of our guys goes

through we clear the room and one of our guy his first kill blast this guy splits them wide open and then we're kind of looking over there and andy who's been in fights since the invasion like andy can you go check that guy he walked over with a white light and goes oh he's [ __ ] mates so at this point now that they heard us shoot inside um we got the d-boys hitting another target our snipers are going hot so uh myself and and one of my guys were like let's we got to get

out and get into the ice this is these are our first kills this actually turned out to be the sniper who initiated the fire to rescue captain phillips and smally pirates we got our first kills together we went outside and we did this cross pan that we'd always been working on like if you're on this side you cover this way he comes this way and then you wave and move or whatever so we're out here these two dudes pop up like pepper poppers so we get our first two kills and i'm like [ __ ]

i just killed that guy in he goes yeah i just killed that guy go okay what do we do now and he goes maybe we should try one of those bounding things and then it kind of sinks in and that's that's another you know we finished that off we killed a bunch of dudes we got that was our first major fight in iraq where the tactics were using worked but how did they adjust to us how do we we might need to readjust to this and and that was another thing where um now co team

six was getting and fighting getting kills and it was just sort of okay now and this is before the afghanistan huge fight saying okay now i have my first kill now i'm i'm part of the club and this is it i'm in and then you know we finish iraq and we learn stuff and then we go back and we train and then we keep talking to the other guys that are over there learn new tactics what's working what's not working do you like which barrel which magnifier you're using with your optics um um we had

to tell some army guys like look that that that laser this thing that pistol grip and all this is great in iraq when you get to 10 000 feet in afghan you're not gonna want that because weight is measured in ounces and ounces equal pounds and it's gonna suck what do you need you need you need a neotech and an iron sight you're good that's it um so yeah so that was iraq so we bounced from afghanistan iraq um afghanistan iraq we i was um i was part my fourth deployment was we call it the

deployment that never was because we had um so the commander of seal team six just got us authorized for some reason we were not authorized to fight the taliban in afghanistan we were supposed to go only after al qaeda really yeah it was weird it was you know and it's it's i mean it makes sense sort of you want to just send the tier one guys after the tier one targets but you know we're getting bored and there's a lot of fight in kandahar so that so they authorized team six to start targeting taliban that's

when blue team went in there and just [ __ ] crushed them gotten fights like epic [ __ ] that you can i mean there's books out there mob six by chef that's [ __ ] amazing i mean he's just a [ __ ] stud and um just and so our group went they wanted to all go to afghanistan to include the headshed so the bosses the ceo of the whole team and they're all there and they sent like a troop of us 15 news to iraq and our boss his name is rich davini and

i can say that because he's made himself public stud too he was a guy that taught me nobody ever worked for me they were with me and he agreed to work for delta like a lot of arrogant team guys wouldn't want to work for them he's like you know what if we're going to get work it's going to be for them because like it or not the army runs the show so we started working for delta and it happened to be during the surge of the awakening when when um stan crystal general excuse me mcchrystal

realized if we start killing al qaeda which are sunnis that are hijacking sunnis we can get them to rise up and help us and we can win this war and they did guys like um uh stan mcchrystal bill mcraven they were on the right track and they were you know i would follow those guys to hell but we started hitting those targets on basically kill missions uh every night and we were to a point where with if we only killed 11 dudes it was a waste of our time no [ __ ] yeah it was

insane we're targeting uh al qaeda in places where they've never seen guys like us um like even in terror we learn how to interrogate people like you the cocky all kind of guy it's like i've seen americans before and you say really do they look like me and they kind of look at your tattoos i had a demon hunter patch a beard like i'm not here by accident my friend i'm here for you like just [ __ ] awesome [ __ ] psychological warfare and we called it the deployment that never was because everyone's in

afghanistan from our crew and they're fighting and they don't give a [ __ ] about us so as long as we keep doing this um it's on and that was i mean i think the iraq war was completely [ __ ] up but that was one of the best summers of my life because at the time um we were warriors and that's where we're here to kill you yeah and we [ __ ] them up we we i we didn't have one of our guys hurt we i don't know how many kills we got but

it was guys like rich that were running the team like like we would hit a target and because of the intel on target the battlefield interrogation we would hit a follow on target so it's like and so we would go over rangers and i love working with them because you know you got they're obviously capable of doing all this but they generally would put like a machine gunner and they're kind of blocking as we hit the point target once you hear the rangers going hot and you know rangers know like two things ruck hump and

[ __ ] kill so they're just awesome guys obviously they're better than that i'm just i love rangers um but once you hear them outside they can hear the 240 going hot it's like okay it's it's a fight so we would go from house to house and i'm talking we're getting we're getting kills in every every room um and we're doing a quick um like a quick brief to the boss like okay here we go hit this building right here and i think you know i'm talking too fast i talk fast it is and i

look at rich and said all right you know what sir i'm sorry you're in charge and he looked at me and said oh make no mistake i'm not in charge i'm responsible and that's a great [ __ ] leader right there yeah and so we would do that we had we had missions where um so you were hold on so you were just you go hit a house you would do an interrogation and then immediately from there depending on what we found but we generally found we generally found the guy we're looking for in the

first house or someone that knew who was we there was jesus there was one guy and you've been to iraq how it's [ __ ] up place too we were going after a guy called uh like mullah muhammad one arm because he's a mullah and he's got one arm we grabbed a mullah pulled him back his name was muhammad one arm but he was missing the wrong arm there was another one we'd grab the wrong guy holy [ __ ] um but we would do stuff like uh um the way that it worked for us

is we we started in al assad out west and we were hitting targets up into syria and then we cleared it to you know we got into fallujah got into ramadi got into baghdad north of baghdad and it's not just us but we're working with the army with the air force with the marines and and we're getting [ __ ] done and we're really winning this war and uh like there were times too what i love about special operators is they really know how to solve problems they came to us with um there was a

problem um north of baghdad i think it was called bakuba whatever and it but it was a peninsula and it was a small peninsula and but there it hadn't been touched since the invasion on o3 so this is 2007 this place hasn't been touched because there's a 19 al-qaeda guys there and they're ied makers they're improvised explosive device makers we haven't gotten to them because there's one road in no one wants to drive that road they're going to blow you up we're not going to carpet bomb them because there are so many innocent civilians there

and i mean you do have certain collateral damage but we're not going to kill that many innocent people plus they're getting bullied by al qaeda tortured like we can't fast rope they're going to shoot us down so they came to us and they said can you guys solve this problem and being navy seals were like well yeah it's gonna suck uh but we can swim in and it's not a swim like a buds ocean swim it's like a swampy shitty nasty whatever and you know there's water in iraq and people don't realize that but we

did and we went in with um 17 seals and two dogs two malinois and they're important to the story because we got in there immediately immediate gunfight but we cleared 10 houses we killed all 19 guys didn't hurt one woman or child then we left swam out uh the next day the locals woke up and you know they're the usual terror reigned by these al-qaeda [ __ ] but now there's no one they're dead they're gone and they had a block party so we have assets above and they're watching this because you want to see

who you know i'm not going to give away tactics but you want to see what happens after yeah for follow on and there's this block party going on the block party got so big um a reporter from baghdad when a newspaper reporter from baghdad went up there and interviewed the people in the houses that we had taken down and asked who came last night and the headline on the newspaper said they were ninjas and they came with lions no [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] lions how cool is that that's pretty badass yes so

but that's what we did for that we um we got i mean i mean watching what i was you know just proud of my guys that's when i realized that that right now and this is probably me just being arrogant right now red team is the finding finest fighting force in the world there's no one that does i mean obviously there are guys that do it like that but i'm here i see it now this is my bubble these but i [ __ ] love these guys yeah and i think that was the most combat

that that we'd ever seen and that was that 2007 deployment to iraq damn how long are the deployments over there four months yeah and you guys were just hitting it every night yep son of a [ __ ] we were in places where uh we put up makeshift tents to sleep like not not like but i mean it's not secure like there's a there's concertina wire maybe in some iraqi guards like you're you could be in it every you know but like no internet no tvs uh the chow hall is a mile and a half

away or whatever and uh there's so nothing to do like i remember guys singing i learned the cincinnati bengals fight song because i was sleeping in between two dudes from cincinnati still know it let's go into a little more detail so you swam in yeah which i mean it's not so much even a swim it's just a really shitty swamp where you're grabbing the dogs by the by their um their handles and just inserting to like you get under palm groves and the big grapes with the huge rats running across it yeah and you know

the closer you get to target the dogs are barking they know you're coming and then you get through their snipers start climbing and then uh once the snipers get up there and you just you hear them go hot um it's just on but i mean it was we were we were good at it so we're we're moving quickly through houses um i mean not too but like we were killing dudes in in in houses clearing one man in blast him and then moved down the thing and you're killing other dudes um and at the time

it's cool yeah you know the further you get away from from that it's you know you start wondering what you're doing yeah does that bother you yeah yeah there are certain guys i think about uh there's there's one guy in particular that i think about that i killed uh he was the second guy i killed in this house i entered the house killed the guy in the front i went into a bedroom i did a one-man entry because i'm an idiot and there was a guy that was um in bed with his wife and he

i gave him the courtesy of calm down you know you're waking up just you know obviously a guy with a green face is in your room and it's scary calm down and there's a [ __ ] ak-47 next to him like come on don't do that he went for it i blasted him killed him and uh and then his wife sees it so i just shot this guy next to his wife and um you start to wonder like now the only reason i shot that guy is because i am in his house and we were

born on two separate parts of the planet yeah and i don't know i don't know him and then he's i mean the further you get away from it it's like um what if we had met somewhere else like in in a coffee shop in france would we have shared a joke was he funny didn't matter damn yeah if i i think i found the further you get away from war the more it starts to sink in um that a lot of guys are killing each other because a lot of narcissists that are in charge have

you do it do you think i i often wonder that too what would we have got along or i don't it's crazy i feel like i would have liked half of those people probably more than more than the people that i'm around you probably have a lot more in common yeah it's crazy isn't it yeah it is [ __ ] crazy it's insane to think about it i mean because the the um the humanity of it people don't realize the the humanity that uh um this i mean this is uh people in there's these are

dudes in their house with their families okay he's going for a gun he's got a gun he's aiming at me now is he protecting his family and that's not is he is he a carpenter he needs an ak because he lives in [ __ ] ramadi oh and and again it's be i think it's just because uh one thing i started with the more senior that i got one thing that i disagreed with was uh um patrol to contact and strike to develop it's like look man you're gonna go to a house and and find

someone with a gun and kill him because you went to it you're in his house i i mean i remember um one of the things that where i started to not turn but like say no more um was i went into the wrong house and i'm on i was in a swamp and i i was walking across this white carpet and these only two people in the in the house were a woman and her ten-year-old daughter and i looked down at their white carpet and i remember thinking i understand why they hate us imagine someone

doing that here you know yeah so i mean it's the shitty thing is you get you get a lot the more time you get to think about it the more you think about it and you start to realize like it's it's it's a it's a big planet it's a small world and uh you know it's just a couple people sending us i mean he believed in his cause i believe in my cause that's yeah that's where i was gonna go too is it's you're i mean i don't know what the percentage of people that actually

stand up for what they believe in but i thought it was a lot better a lot bigger until until 2020 came around and then i realized man the majority of these [ __ ] people are just sheep that would just do whatever they're doing whatever they're [ __ ] told and they turn it they they turn it political yeah and more and and and and we're going up against the the whatever percent let's just call it the top one percent that actually stands up for what they believe in and it's just on the other side

of the world and they just believe something different than what we that's what they just and they believe it and uh they just believe in their cause i mean yes they're the bad guys to us but we're also the bad guys to them yeah i mean they attack us because we're the great satan yeah and they and i you know i tell i i like think about the crazy aunt you have at um thanksgiving dinner that is so religious that she knows everything they're just like her they just believe something else yeah i mean the

more the more deep you get it's so frustrating yeah because you start to wonder who's calling the shots but i mean that's that's what we did like i said at the time 27 30 year old 32 year old [ __ ] bring it i'll fight anybody here and then you start to to question i mean i mean i've had guys say do you think you know are we are we going to get past this like are we going to be good like with life so and you know that's you know and the p i think

the ptsd comes it comes with it and that's real yeah it's unfortunate and a lot of guys um and a lot of men and women went through a lot of [ __ ] because some politician told them they had to you're absolutely right that's i think that's a why they recruit them young too that's crazy but even even now thinking about iraq i can just i can sometimes sit there and think so iraq the [ __ ] was that all about i think about that too i think it was all halliburton it was hollywood someone's

getting paid someone's getting paid for the anthrax vaccinations smallpox all the all the the vehicles that we left the [ __ ] we brought over every single round all the body armor someone's getting paid for oh that's a big contract somewhere yeah well i mean halliburton did what they were oh yeah they were everything they were they were the carpenters they were the chefs they were the trash people they were the fuel people they were they were the cleaning crew they were everything every aspect of life in iraq that was on an american base was

held together by halliburton who was tied to cheney yeah you know so but but anyways moving on yeah moving on so so where did you go after iraq so we did afghanistan iraq afghanistan iraq and then i did the rest was afghanistan i'm trying to think of which ones i went to where we sent a small team and so then it reversed um the majority went to iraq because they got the debriefs on what we were doing now the fighting center actually they sent a small group of us up to bagram and i'm talking a

small group um eight guys and we were just um we had the ability to augment other groups um and we would like if we went out on hits which were rare we got it we did find some ied guys we did get some shootout uh shootouts there um winter time afghanistan so not a lot to do we um got to know each other really well we you know held training reaching charges how to get better at stuff working out uh a lot of um mma stuff which is a pain in the ass when you when

you're sparring with guys that are bored that know how to fight yeah because they just want to get after it um you know a couple things here and there we um uh wasn't very exciting but we kind of did that i'm trying to think of the other ones um well let's talk about the alabama okay so that so that was in 2009 and um we were sort of aware of um the memorised alabama getting hit by somali pirates but we didn't know what was going to happen and i was actually so we're state side and

we were we were the national mission force for it for something like that that would happen i happened to be at my daughter's easter tea party at her preschool on my birthday it was good friday april 10 2009 so it was an easter tea party and we were just giving the kids treats i had a pink plate in my hand i'm giving her cookies and cupcakes and um we got the call um captain phillips they gave they sent us a code that we knew what it was and basically what they're saying is okay he got

captured you go and get him right now so your [ __ ] had better be ready you have a certain amount of time to get in there and a certain amount of time to take off and we had been seal team six was designed to do this to rescue american hostages at sea it had never been done not one time it was [ __ ] like this the first one one in eight years it had never been done and we had been selling that we can take i don't want to give away the timeline but

we can take off in a certain amount of hours and we had the commanding officer of steel team six on my bird and we took off at you know 59 minutes to you know whatever 59 like i could see that okay we did it and certainly now we're taking now we're flying and uh in that amount of time we not just me but we as seal team sex we had thought of everything every imaginable at sea rescue uh a nuclear problem a yacht whatever we had never thought of a a lifeboat a fully enclosed orange

lifeboat being towed by a navy destroyer no one thought of that for some reason so we okay we're like well we have um we have 15 hours to come up with something so everybody i don't the newest goddamn guy on this plane think of something a ram it with one of our birds more boats or heal think of something and we're going to list all of them and then we're going to start crossing them off and we'll take the top five then from there we'll get to the best one and um we we did not

go over there to kill those pirates we we went there to get richard phillips like we're just gonna we if we can we'll just negotiate i mean we didn't you know they're already negotiating they didn't send an entire squadron negotiating we're plus we you know we've been killing people all over the world so we but we didn't we put the snipers down when we got there to um watch them make sure nothing unsafe happens as we're preparing for the rescue and as we were preparing for the rescue something very unsafe and they shot that's that's

how it happened there was there was no three two one execute it was just boom boom so it was all just bam yeah someone shocked me read off each other like the plan that i thought was gonna work that we came up with was uh and i thought this was brilliant this is why i was actually getting coffee in the chief's mess because we're going to do this plan was uh yeah i didn't do [ __ ] on that [ __ ] thing yeah hold on you didn't that was that was off camera so you

were getting coffee i was i was i had just made chief and i was so happy to be in the chief's mess on a navy ship that i mean they're bullshitting with like the bosses made chief but we're talking about uh who are the redskins gonna draft or some [ __ ] or they just whatever and the snipers took the shot the plan that we came up with meaning me and my team leader was these are not terrorists this is brilliant these are not terrorists they're criminals and now they're scared and they're seasick which they

don't like and they're out of cot the drug they take yeah all we got to do is bring them some water and some radios get them some radios to the village elders let them talk and tell them we're going to bring them in they just want to go home now we get them close you know the sun comes down jam the comms pull them a couple clicks up and my team will be on the beach and once they get off we'll handle it we either hey we're friends beat it or we shoot him and then

we take him so that's that's the plan that i thought was gonna work so i'm talking football with bmc and uh we got a message that someone said yeah we got him and i was like got who dude we got him but we got captain phillips like holy [ __ ] good you guys are awesome yeah they got him and and um uh yeah they took the shots um i think one of the coolest stories that doesn't get enough credit is is uh you know the slide for life the obstacle we have at buds yeah

where you climb up and you slide down a rope and like the marines have it army has it i remember seeing that thinking um the [ __ ] is the use of this no one is ever gonna need to know how to do this one guy needed to do it one time and it was after they shot that sniper needed to go down and uh pull phillips out i'll tell you a story now this is not my story it's just a good story so i'm assuming it happened this way the sniper said um and he's

probably full of [ __ ] but he said um when he was going in there he had to go to his pistol and he did carry a pistol thank god and he said but i'm going into the small space and this is the only time in my life that i get to rescue someone so i got to think of something cool to say right do i say we're a seal team and he said he went in there and they've been using this entire boat as a toilet for like four days and it's in the african

heat and now there's three dudes laying in it and their heads are split open and he said that he kind of thinks something cool to say he looks at richard phillips and said i'm definitely gonna need therapy after this [ __ ] that's what i say i need therapy holy [ __ ] but i mean the thing about that though was um from virginia beach 15 hours and 46 minutes later we had a full head count in the indian ocean we rescued richard phillips on easter sunday the thing that people don't think about is i

mentioned we hadn't done that in 28 years so imagine this those snipers were in their own beds in virginia beach four days before that on a long weekend um it's a long weekend we've never done this i'm gonna skip work and i'll sign in my gun on tuesday you know their guns did not need to be sighted in for the most difficult shots of their lives but their guns were sighted in for the most difficult shots in their lives because they were prepared well crazy those snipers are just complete bad asses how many snipers were

there i won i mean we we jumped in with 103 people like this is the only everyone just jumped in with 103 i think yeah i think we had 98 canopies five tandems or some [ __ ] um yeah i mean everybody every swing and dick that was in virginia beach was going on this mission uh and just because everybody wanted to go everybody wanted to be on the op this is a real jump yeah the first one um i want to say i mean you brought 108 people we had dudes i swear to god

for riding desks that were like yep i have a trident i haven't operated 12 years but i'm jumping i can still remember this stuff um we had dudes um their first that was their first jump they were tandem in uh con guys oh wow yeah so i mean there's a there's a sniper team there but i i there was three i want to see the shot [ __ ] i thought it was this i thought it was like five or six of you guys i didn't realize you brought everybody in there was there was dudes

there was dudes in there before us um from uh from a more advanced squadron that i'm not gonna get into they were sort of there but then they you know we we they were already overseas they they brought us in from virginia beach okay and those i mean the snipers that's just i think this is cool yeah so was it three simultaneous you know what i don't think so but that's what the debrief said all right i wasn't there i was i mean i wasn't there yeah but they i know they got them well it's

cool that you're a part of it yeah yeah it's actually pretty [ __ ] funny you're in the chief smash [ __ ] in belfast i think it's awesome because if people say um you know you're telling stories that aren't true it's like no i really wasn't the chiefsman like whatever do you mean holy [ __ ] so but yeah then that was that and um so now that's the pinnacle we've done the hostage rescue um we've been in the gun fights we've done this and then um we're going to go i'm going to go

to afghanistan again and this time so i'd been at an outstation i'd been on the strike teams i'd run the out stations now i'm the senior enlisted um running all of them i'm the senior enlisted for all the outstations and my job simply now is to work with the agency get intel from these different places try to frank um um cross-border operations again um and so at this point osama bin laden is a ghost and i'm not he's not even on my [ __ ] radar oh i i was at the point just being at

seal team six i was i remember thinking i hope i get to meet the guy from delta that kills bin laden that's i this is as close as this is awesome i hope i meet him so like one of the big we did a um we the the biggest thing we did on this one was we found an al-qaeda guy abu iklaus al-masri or some [ __ ] like that who was the tier one target in coringa and we did a snatch and grab on a on a highway and got him um this other strike

team we're doing we're doing stuff one one of the newer guys first deployment with red team actually got six kills at once with a saw which i thought like that's that's pretty cool yeah but we're watching this and then but it's so this is uh this is um uh january of 2011. and that's all we're doing and you know trying to develop [ __ ] but i'm more planning uh training trips before when we get back making sure the guys on my team are running their trips the right way where we're going to go and

we planned uh the first um trip back for my team my troop actually was to go to miami to dive or because our biggest concern is more piracy the pirates have been adjusting to what we're doing they had mother ships can we do open water dives on a ship that's not a shift that is anchored how do we find it what can we do and we're just coming up with [ __ ] but we're done with deployment and we're also in south beach so i want guys to have fun we're going to train but then

we're going to go to happy hour you know hang out on the beach have some drinks and we're going to train tomorrow and um we were down there we're staying at the courtyard marriott near south beach and we're outside well before we went on this trip our boss the the commanding officer red squadron was coming on the trip and we're kind of like that's a drag because we can't have as much fun with the ceo there but he got pulled they're like yeah you've got to go to dc for something so we're good we didn't

know why the ceo and the master chief went to dc but we're down there and then my boss got a call uh my my troop commander and he said hey um we gotta go we gotta go back to virginia beach so pack your ship as soon as you can we're gonna get the first flights out of here look what the hell all right what's going on what the [ __ ] i don't know so we flew back um to virginia beach and they brought 28 of us into a room now we've got guys on different

trips that got pulled in senior guys from like there was a rock climbing trip in nevada but they got the senior guys got got called in and then other guys came in from arizona and we're here and other dudes are junior guys at seal team six are there but they're not into this secret room and they they said uh all right you guys are here because this is not a drill uh this is real we found a thing and this thing is in a house and this house is in a bowl and this bowl is

in a country and you guys are gonna you're gonna go get this thing and you're gonna bring it back to us and show it to us and we're like okay no sweat first we're wondering why i asked but okay well what's the thing well we can't can't tell you okay well uh how are we getting there can't tell you what country is this we can't tell you how are we getting there can't tell you how much air support none like all right that's an answer no air support so let me know and they said also

we we're not we're only bringing shooters only seals are going on this um so we can't bring our kick-ass air force cct the radio guys we can't bring the pjs who are paramedics or [ __ ] medics so if you know any medical [ __ ] you bring some medical [ __ ] if you know how to use radio you're the radio guy and uh keep it light because we only have a certain so we're like what the [ __ ] is going on and so we would walk around we're trying to get our [

__ ] ready we we knew there would be two two birds that's all we knew we assumed it would be ospreys off of a flat top going into libya because the arab spring had just started and they're we're going to go get qaddafi and they want to enter or interrogate them so we're going to get them in it's got to be that but we're walking down we're in the new building where the all the cages are together on the bottom and we're running into guys from other squads and they're like hey man what we heard

something's going on what's going on and we're literally like i have no [ __ ] idea and they they got mad at us because they thought we were lying to them it's like i i and we'd run into them when we'd go out at night like i guys i don't know what we're doing but we're getting our [ __ ] ready this went on until friday and um they said okay everyone go home be with your kids and you're coming back on sunday and we're going to drive you somewhere and we're going to read you

in on what this is and we're like okay what's who's going to be there at the read-in and the tired bosses were like oh probably the vice president the secretary of defense the secretary of the navy and we're like oh my god and then they're going down the list they said something blah blah blah they said ctc pad blah blah blah they're going down the list i'm like see ctc pad that's cia counter terrorism uh pakistan afghanistan if we're going to libya and i didn't say anything but you know we went home hung out with

the kids we came back on sunday and they split us up into vans we had four guys in my van i got my buddy driving my other buddy up front my troop commander my boss is right here and then i'm sitting here and i explained to that on the drive down we're going somewhere in north carolina and i explained to them exactly what i just said here and i said um this isn't gaddafi they found bin laden and my boss looked at me and and there was no chairs he goes that's exactly what i was

thinking so we just start talking about this and uh my buddy drive in the van i'll never forget the way he looked at me in the mirror and he said man o'neil if we kill osama bin laden i will suck yo dick and we had to laugh about it then um you know fast forwarding obviously three weeks to the day we're looking down at bin laden in his house and i said well now's a good time as any i guess he's like oh [ __ ] you and i'm like your bet but but we got

down there and um they uh they they put us all into a room and um the commanding officer of seal team six so each squadron had a commanding officer but six was like a group so that commander that ceo came in and i'll never forget the way he said the reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to osama bin laden and i mean it sinks in but there's you know we're professionals and we're like okay are we going right now we i mean we're ready and they they explained

to us they brought in the agency team which is mostly women and explained to us if they went into such depth of how they found him in these long briefs we're all almost like look it we believe you i don't need to know this [ __ ] just you tell me where he is i'll carry the gun in the sledgehammer and um they you know they were very cool the way they talked to us and and then they had a they told us that the president had uh he had about five options to get him

and they said you know obviously um carpet bombed the [ __ ] out of it hit and i think the air force wanted like 22 jdms to make sure and it's like all right holy [ __ ] you're gonna kill everyone around yeah so that's a i mean we'll never know if we got him there was something of a they called him the pacer they could see him walking outside we can hit him with one bomb but i mean we know how that works you [ __ ] up that one you you'll never find him

again they we actually laughed at this one they said we can do a joint op with the pakistanis and it was like oh yeah tell them about it yeah he's [ __ ] out of there um or you're an option and then you guys can figure out a way and so you know we're thinking everything jumping in no can't do this and whatever and um but and and even the the president didn't know about the i guess that the chief staff of the air force said well there is one more option and he told him

about the helicopters that no one knew about and so then we just started training and that that was an option so we trained there it wasn't to uh it was you know obviously to get to know the the exterior but don't tell me about the interior i'll figure that out when i get there don't don't tell me there's seven men and 10 women and 16 children you tell me how many people you think are there and i'll figure out what they are when i get their type [ __ ] and we're just kind of coming

up with contingency plans we wanted to prove to them the powers that be that we are a good option that we know what we're doing and he even got to the point where uh president obama said i was never 100 convinced bin laden was there but i was convinced you guys could go in and find out and come home and so we trained on that and we tried to think of contingencies trying to brainstorm everything uh you know what if the cars leave what if we get squirters who's doing what coming up this and and

then we would go back to the hotel or whatever we're staying at and somebody at the cia had made a two scale model of bin laden's house i'm talking to the oh [ __ ] and so we're talking about it um just and we're you know we're training 12 hour days and talking about it every night then doing it over helo's fat we faster up so much i i have severe uh tendinitis still from just grabbing that damn rope almost the point like can we just simulate we fast i know how to do it i

can fall yeah but one night um one of the bosses said all right what's the worst thing that could happen and the youngest guy in the room said the helicopter could crash in the front yard and we're like what the [ __ ] why would you bring that karma here yeah and he goes i don't know shouldn't we talk about that for 30 seconds so we did that and then we went out west to a a certain place and i we were even to a point where um uh like i'm i'm known for morale i

want to keep morale high crack jokes have fun but guys were joking uh around the table one night i said you guys realize this is a one-way mission you should take this a little bit more seriously we're not coming back from this one and then yeah they're like yeah yeah [ __ ] and so we get out there though and they brought us into the the you can the movie zero dark 30 kind of plays it right where the the seals walk in they see those helicopters and i remember i started laughing and they're like

what's so what's so funny now and i said well before i thought there was a 90 chance we're gonna die but i didn't know they were sending us uh in on transformers and that was kind of it's like well these i mean and these things someone designed it um the pilots that came out they gave us the four best pilots in the world army pilots they had never flown these things and they we trained on those for four days and then um then we uh went one more time home to see our kids and then

we forward stage to jalalabad because if they if president obama gives us the green light um we want to be right there so and uh you know you still can't and the reason they picked us is because um we had a team already in afghanistan we had the national mission force which is for a contingency but if if that team in afghanistan stopped working and just started training someone might notice if the national admission force leaves someone might notice this squadron is supposed to be leaving no one's going to care that was us so it's

better to be lucky than good so we went over there there was a squadron over there and we came in to do the bin laden raid and they knew it can you ima and they i'll tell you what i cannot say enough good about them i would have been [ __ ] you guys we're seal team six and we're and you guys come to do it they could not have been more welcome welcoming to us you know i mean they were pissed but they they were complete pros wow and um and then we waited there

uh we would play poker with those guys and they said we actually weren't fun to play poker with because like [ __ ] i'm all in too i'm gonna die tomorrow just you know dark humor uh but then we did we did get the green light um and we're gonna launch we have saturday or sunday to launch because that's our um 48 hours of zero percent illumination and if we miss that window though we got to wait 30 days we're going in zero percent and we got lucky because the rumor was that bin laden was

was going to leave on september 11th of that year to a new place that's the rumor it could be false but that's what i heard um so we got the green light we didn't launch on saturday because of the correspondence dinner and um we figured if if um the entire cabinet and the president in a room with the entire press corps and they all get up and leave the press goes like huh what's that all about yeah and i guess even hillary clinton was like wait we're not launching on saturday because of [ __ ]

those guys we launched yeah which i i mean hillary clinton you know i never vote for her but i take her in a foxhole but then yeah we did on so we did on sunday we're gonna go sunday and it's it's uh it's 100 we're going and we went to um we went into a hangar to get the final brief we're going over everything that we're gonna do and and we i mean we're good we know the exterior we know who's supposedly there we talked to the intel analysts we they're with us still in in

jbad and um uh admiral bill mcraven he he's given us the last speech and he said you know guys last night i watched my favorite movie hoosiers and the best part of that movie is when this team from hickory indiana makes it to the state championship and they walk into this gym and it's an arena and they're starstruck and they're just looking around and coach had um one of the guys grab a tape measure and say what's the distance from the back of the rim to the free throw line he said it's 15 feet coach

all right get on his shoulders gets on the shoulder what's the distance from the hoop to the floor and he said 10 feet coach and he goes i'm sure you'll find these are the exact measurements in your gym in hickory this is just a bigger arena and he goes you guys do this every night this is just a bigger arena and then we were leaving i remember we went assuming said hey admiral um you're so [ __ ] busy i i doubt you watched hoosiers last night but you were born to give us that speech

right now yeah and so then we left we took a team picture and then uh we had our gear on and like you know said uh said goodbye to the guys that were there and we we actually um you know we're going with uh the the shooters to the first two birds and it's you know instead of uh instead of like giving them a fist pound it's giving you guys hugs and it's like i see you see on the on the ground and and then you know we left you do your last thing take a

piss or what like one of my concerns was how are we going to pee um on the way i don't want to get out and have to pee like and they actually someone came up with these little i don't know what they have now they're probably common those little diapers you unfold you can pee in them but i i actually i don't even trust these things i'm peeing in a bottle and i'll throw up i actually kept the damn bottle of piss on my pocket the whole mission i forgot about it i mean to the

point where we were um we were um we were given access to everything like didn't even need to be approved for use yet the if if it works uh you can have it and we uh but we're now we're measuring like we're trying to cut guys off for like you're too heavy these two guys don't carry that because certain pounds of fuel to get there because we don't have refusal it wasn't that calculated we were trying to keep it to to that 32 minutes on the ground we had a dude come in this i don't

remember what the hell he was trying to sell us but he said uh here's this box that uh it jams everything like it jams cell but like it can it can jam landlines and jams this [ __ ] and it weighs and it's like the uh um kilometer radius wow and one of the guys goes has it been tested in a helicopter and he goes no and he goes i have a better idea can you invent something that's only 30 pounds uh it's the radius of this room and it jams bad ideas anyway so so

we went out there and we got in the birds um and then we took off and we left and we had um we had a 90-minute flight into into his house we now we actually had we had more birds behind us there was actually uh blue team guys in 47 the chinooks behind us uh 45 minutes and then there was more on the border with rangers and then there was more oh wow because the word i got i wasn't there and this is some south side chicago [ __ ] politics was when they told um

president obama our plan that like yeah they're gonna get here the first if they get contact with the pac miller the pack police we're gonna hardpoint uh we don't want to get in a shootout with them because they're not our enemy and then you can send someone to negotiate with the pakistanis and pull them out and he goes that's interesting and then he looked at the chief of staff of the air force and said what do you need to reign hell on pakistan my guys aren't [ __ ] surrendering to anybody no [ __ ]

that's what i heard and that's pretty cool and that was so this is a mission now where politics is out the window and then you got to figure president obama he's going to lose re-election if we all die and that not that that matters but does to him yeah but he's making the [ __ ] call because this is what we're going to do so um so we're so we have birds behind us like if we need to get um if we need a qr an irf and a qrf we got our guys coming in

and we're [ __ ] we're fighting and we i know we have [ __ ] above us but they didn't really tell us because we got enough on our plate like i'm assuming someone that's invisible has some bombs up there so we're flying in 90 minutes to get into bin laden's house and um um we can get shot down now at any time we don't know if this technology works we don't know if the the most high-speed pakistani new guy is manning the radar system pointing that way and they'll shoot us down and we can't

even even be mad at him because we're invading yeah but worrying about that missile isn't going to stop it so if you're worrying about something that it doesn't stop worrying you're wasting your energy if we die we die and so i'm looking around at other guys in this bird how are they handling it and dude you're sleeping and i remember thinking you were asleep on the ride to bin laden's house you have ice in your veins man that's just [ __ ] insane uh and i'm i'm sitting next to cairo the dog and then she's

the he wrote the book no ordinary dog uh they're back there and cairo is just you know being a good boy and uh i was counting to keep i learned in kosovo as a sniper to count when you're when you've got when you're glassing something and just count zero to a thousand thousand to zero and then change your cadence keep your mind working but keep focused and um you know we're about we're like 90 minutes in or 80 minutes into a 90 minute flight we bank to the to the south and i don't know how

i remembered it but i i was counting 556 557. freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended you know you know politics whatever that's what george bush said at 9 11. and i was like [ __ ] i'm going to keep saying that and then it's like wow we're i'm on this mission we're on this mission we're going to [ __ ] kill him so we we did another bank and then uh the air crew guys opened the door and now we're looking out it's not even and that's

something they don't get credit for the air crew guys they put their asses in those seats too if we get shot down they're dying as well and their job was to keep the bird flying and open the [ __ ] door what if we couldn't figure out how to open the door something that simple you know how to do it he opens it up now it's it's a about about pakistan is a resort town and there's electricity this is not a training area this is not afghanistan this is some serious navy seal [ __ ]

we're about to do so the perfect plan was i was in the second bird the first bird is going to go right in between bin laden's house and the and the um guest house they're going to fast everyone out we're going to insert a sniper um some snipers a dog an interpreter a machine gun then my team's going to go to the roof we're going to fast rope down onto the roof and then we're gonna figure out how to get to the balcony and basically that's i'm gonna [ __ ] jump and i'm gonna shoot

it out there's probably a window there bin laden's in the the woman told me third floor bin line is in this house and that's what's gonna happen and then it went to [ __ ] because i guess there was an updraft there was the weather was different or something and the the pilot realized that if he um if an inexperienced pilot would have tried to power it up and that would have flipped it or something he explained that later he said the safest thing now if i can if i can pin it to the ground

and that put the tail on the on the fence we could live so he did that and he saved everyone's lives just making that decision yeah and it was on purpose um and then our so we took off to go to the roof but our pilot now the communications is kind of sketch here um our pilot saw him do that and he realized that [ __ ] if he can't hover i'm not trying up there so he just went back down so all we know is we went up and we came down and the pilot's

basically saying get out and i remember putting my my first foot came out i'm looking at bin laden's house and i remember thinking [ __ ] it i guess we'll start the war from here and i knew damn well there's a um there's a wall just because we train so much there's a door on the wall northeast corner which is off to my left and so the breacher decided to go up and put a seven foot charge of c6 on it so we're so now because we're hitting this side they're somewhere in there i think

we're going to go into the house this way and we can just we can go up with them he blasted the door it opened like a tin can and there's a brick wall behind it so on the wall there's a wall and a and the breacher said all right failed breach this is this is bad he said no this is good that that's a that's a fake door nobody does that he's he's in there so then we know there's another door over here which is the carport which we know opens because the cars go in

and out and we didn't know what hap we we heard them saying dash one going around but what they were saying was dash one going down so we just gave him a courtesy hey we're gonna blast the carport and they said don't blast it we'll open it and the door opened and the thumb came out with a glove that i recognized and that now we're to point in life where it doesn't matter why you're here you just are yeah i tell football teams that all the time it doesn't matter why it's second and fifteen it

just is time's kicking let's move so we walk in um it didn't make sense to me why they're in there i saw the air crew standing there i saw american flags but different um you different gear i remember thinking who the [ __ ] are these guys whatever and so there's already gunfight stuff's going on uh explosions we go into the main house there's guys going down the hallway this first floor of bilan's house and we're backed into this uh into this room and i'm like looking around for bombs like they're gonna blow this house

up if anyone's gonna martyr himself it's been lied i don't see any but i'm seeing guys knowing that they could blow up but they're not it's not affecting them they're doing their jobs and being proud of them like this is just you guys are [ __ ] cool and uh the guy next to me in the room he whispered he said helicopter crashed and i said what helicopter and i thought some of the birds behind us had crashed but he said bro our helicopter crashed in the front yard you walked right past it holy [

__ ] that's like okay that that makes that makes sense let's take a break let's take a break so i'm watching guys do their jobs even though we are in this is a an extremely high high threat situation um and dudes are dealing with problems but what i remember seeing you know they just the guy just told me the helicopter crashed i'm like what helicopter crashed and i thought uh one of the other helos had been shot down and he goes bro our helicopter crashed in the front yard like you walked right past it and

i remember sort of trying to justify my i'm like well i must have been looking this way because that's been lod's house but i'm watching dudes run from different rooms to grab kids that have been separated from their families to bring them back to their family so those kids would would not be as afraid as they are right now and and i remember thinking you know being proud of the guys but then thinking that is what the good guys do yeah al qaeda is not doing that when they come to our house no you're going

to shoot it out they're going to cut people's heads off we do that because we're the good guys and i'm sure you've seen it in combat yeah but now we're in we're on the first floor and then they've reached the second to the second floor the woman that found bin laden said i don't know what it looks like inside but there will be a stairwell going to the second floor and you will run into khalid bin laden and he's 20 years old that's bin laden's son and that is his last line of defense he will

be armed on the stairwell and she was so badass she said here's the way she put it if you can ace him you get a shot at the big guy and that's just that's a cool brief right there for a badass you know um so she was right and it turns out um she was a hundred percent right on every single person in and out of that house oh she nailed it but when we get to the stairwell and it comes up it comes back so the stairs go this way there's a little area and

then it comes this way and khalid was there and he he jumped behind a banister and i'm at this point now because i've like i had the front row seat to the coolest hit mission in modern history i'm just watching cool guys right and they're going up the stairs and he jumps back and i'm a certain amount of guys back and normally in an urban setting if we're fighting up i will pull guys out i only want a certain amount of guys on there just to avoid uncertain i mean unnecessary deaths if he starts dropping

[ __ ] on us like grenades and whatnot or takes a shot down the stairs but i figure we're going to die anyway so i want to see how this goes down and i'm just standing i don't have a shot and now we're back to being quiet and it's dark and um the point man said something like and i'm going to [ __ ] this up it was something like khalid irfa idek khalid delta rasha something like that but it was basically come here come here in two different languages that he knew khalid spoke which

i think is incredible because i would have thought he would have pinned and try to get a shot off and khalid simply got confused and he leaned over the thing and went what no [ __ ] that is the coolest thing i've ever seen in combat how tactically savvy are you to think of doing that like well he doesn't know he doesn't know we might be pakistan he's here to move him he doesn't know i'll just call him out and he did so he and he was armed perfectly within his rules of engagement we step

around him we go up to the the last the second deck the last set of stairs and i moved from this point from like eight the eighth guy to the second guy because everyone else went to the right to the left because they're gonna you want to clear obviously um the area before you move on but now we're down to two and we're pointing at the last set of stairs and above it there was a curtain it looked kind of like a shower curtain but it was like a green olive drab type thing and we

can see they're sort of backlit there's people moving uh and we assumed those are the suicide bombers but bin laden's in there and i the guy in front of me took a shot before we got there and they're moving around and i'm the two man and my job as the two man is to is to hold him and wait his job is to simply look forward don't drop security and i got you and through effective communication when it's your time to go i will squeeze you it's on i'm just telling you through effective communication we

have enough guys but we don't have enough guys we're out of guys it's two of us and um i i'm way i want i want four more i'll take two but he starts saying we gotta go come on we gotta go he doesn't know it's me he knows it's one of his guys and what he's saying is uh is um those are basically suggesting those are the suicide bombers but if we go right now we can beat him and i remember taking a deep breath and uh it wasn't it was no by no means bravery

on my part it was more of a okay we're gonna blow up now and i'm tired of i'm tired of thinking about it let's [ __ ] get over with so i get to squeeze he goes up and he he moves the curtain and there are um there were three people standing there he didn't have even enough time he just jumped on him he how he doesn't have a medal of honor beyond me he jumped on the grenade so the guy behind him can get the shot damn so he and i be and simply because

he went this way i turn this way and standing three feet in front of me is osama bin laden and he's got his hands on a mall his wife's shoulders and i don't know what he's doing he's not surrendering he's he's maneuvering somehow he his hands are on her and i remember thinking he's taller than i thought he's skinnier than i thought so you knew it was him right away turning in a corner yep his he's not surrendering he's he's got to have a suicide belt so i shot him twice when he was standing up

i shot him again on the floor and then i moved a mall out of the way so i can he i can hear bin laden taking his last breath when i shot him he fell to the foot of the bed where'd you shoot him i shot him in the face three times um i moved a mall and uh and his two-year-old son is now standing there and this is the humanity of everything this kid has got nothing to do with this i'm a father and i picked him up and i move him i moved him

to the back of the bed and uh she'd been shot and and uh i turned around and um i kind of froze and i'm okay other navy seals are now coming in the room a lot of guys are in there and one of my guys came up to me and uh he said um are you good and i said no no what are we supposed to do now and he said now we find the computers we we do this every night hundreds of times and i said yeah you're right i'm back holy [ __ ]

and he said to me yeah you just killed osama bin laden your life just changed get to [ __ ] work and so we did um we we uh they started we you know we actually took we do have pictures of bin laden it's actually my gloves in there was putting his head together for the picture dumping water on him and like he was i think the pictures haven't been released because it's it's one of those things where you you really don't need to know how justice looks when it's served it just it just is

so those picks on the internet no they're fake it's split from from he split from here to here okay i mean he got hit three times with a i'm shooting 77 grand hollow point at three feet oh it's a devastator yeah and um so they're dressing him up guys are doing ssc and i i went down to the uh sensitive site exploitation we're finding intel i went down to the second floor i had two other dudes with me and we're going through now we found these huge offices with with i'm talking computers hard drives uh

like the old school towers um we were pulling big kit bags from underneath the bed and were opening them and i thought it was uh uh freeze-dried steaks and it's like wow these guys are in it for the long haul this is and it's like wait a minute no this is raw opium they're trying to make money off this and so we're finding all that [ __ ] and we we were finding so much stuff from from pictures to hard drive like we're cracking those up and pulling the hard drives cds um papers hand written

letters um and we're just shoving it into these it was to the point where we wanted you know we wanted 32 minutes on the floor i think we were there for 47. and now it's like okay come on we now it's let's let's get the [ __ ] out of here uh i went back upstairs i actually carried i helped two three other seals carry we carried bin laden down all the stairs we just came up and i remember yelling at guys guys [ __ ] them we're leaving get out we're figuring this out uh

outside i think the ground force commander coordinated a way for um another bird to um to come in to get us we're going to put him on the on our bird the first team's going out on that they're going to go refuel with another bird on a mountaintop we went out with the body we actually sat down next to uh the lead sniper from the captain phillips raid and said here's your guy and he looked down he goes you got to be [ __ ] me i'm like no we got him he goes let's let's

[ __ ] leave so they took off with them we went around um to the other you know i think it's to the east side of the compound we're calling in uh 47 but we don't like i said we don't have our cct guys so we're calling it and we're rusty yeah and i remember seeing the there's a guy on twitter who was tweeting he was live-tweeting why would they be doing helicopter operations on a sunday or some weird [ __ ] and i remember seeing him thinking if we were in iraq i'd blast this

dude because he's outside of a target with a phone but we're in pack they have no [ __ ] idea that we're here so then we're calling this bird in and i remember we're saying hey so we have to blow up the um the bird inside we don't we're going to leave it we're blowing it up but i asked someone's like what what was the the time fuse on that thing and they're like well i'm like holy [ __ ] abort we had a we had to actually call off the the bird coming in to

get us because we were going to blow it out of the sky so they absorbed it and turned then the [ __ ] thing blew up like we almost blew our own helicopter out of this guy then they came back in we get on that thing and then we take off and uh now we're leaving now on a mission where we're supposed to die but now we're leaving and if we can live for another 90 minutes if we can cross the border to afghanistan we get to see our kids again we get to live another

50 years but they know they gotta know we're here and they can shoot us down probably with an f-16 that we sold them the pakis but worrying about that is not gonna stop it so i'm not gonna worry so we're sitting there in this bird i have the um the the lead sniper from the captain phillips right there was a weird thing with um with jealousy um when when this sniper initiated the fire um because sometimes when people are so close to doing something they get angry and they were giving him a lot of [

__ ] talking about firing and i remember saying to him at work after the phillips raid hey man don't pay attention to that [ __ ] you're a [ __ ] hero don't you ever forget it take a copenhagen for me take mine you're a hero and i would remind him that he was going through a really rough time we're sitting on this bird flying out and i'm trying to absorb what the [ __ ] just happened and i see this copenhagen come in front of my nods and he said take one of mine now

you know what it feels like to be a [ __ ] hero which is just insane a dude next to me from the other squadron blue squadron was there he's from new york and he asked a question that every seal asked when they found out bin laden was dead they he said who got him and i said i think i did and he said on behalf of my family thank you so now it's deep and we gotta you know can't worry about the [ __ ] we're so we'll just start our watches and so we're

counting got to live the 90 minutes but it's been 10 minutes now it's been 20 minutes now it's been 30 minutes and now it's 40 minutes 50 minutes we got to get to 90 minutes but it's been 60 minutes then i start thinking about like uh all the weird sports analogies like watching a a no-hitter at the top of this seventh at fenway park like i'm not going to say anything i don't want to jinx it you know but it's been 70 now it's been 80 minutes then i start thinking about um one of the

greatest games ever played when the team usa hockey team beat the russians in lake placid a team they're not supposed to beat but now they're winning four to three and you can hear the crowd counting down ten nine eight seven six we got to 85 minutes into the flight and the pilot came over the radio and just as cool as ever said all right gentlemen for the first time in your life you're going to be happy to hear this welcome to afghanistan so yeah so i mean and that now it's like holy [ __ ]

we did it we land the now the other bird had to go to a mountaintop and refuel there in the other stealth bird with another 47 they're still coming back and so it's like okay come on guys they land and like no one's hurt and then bin laden's over here the the guy that was in front of me to go up the stairs in the independence room were like hey man you and i need to talk and we go over into the corner and he's like what the [ __ ] happened on that stairwell i'm

like it was just down to us i don't know i mean that and then he looks over to the woman that found bin laden and said uh well there she is you got to go give her something man you own this like yeah you're right and i walked over to and i pulled the magazine out of my gun i jacked the last round out and i said you have room for this in your backpack and she said i think i do and then i said well we have something to show you now in the movie

zero dark 30 they brought the woman over to bin laden's body and it was like a moment of pause and they opened it she looked and she was all thoughtful and she cried and left that's not at all what happened here's what happened i gave her the mag and said we have something to show you now it starts to again moments were sinking in but it's like you know what this is historic like this this will be in the history books you know she found him though she's the reason this happened she gave up her

life for this she doesn't have a husband she doesn't have kids and she's been working on this 20 hours a day for years and then and then i'm like uh you know this is this is like this could go down with iwo jima um but then as being the arrogant navy i'm like put the pressure on myself [ __ ] i gotta think of something cool to say so we're walking over to the body and i thought this would have been good enough i looked down and i said is that your guy and she looked

down for a second one i guess i'm out of a [ __ ] job and left you got to be [ __ ] left at that yeah so then we um we uh mcraven was there he actually uh he there that now they're in the process of we do have some dna tests we got a lot of pictures he was talking to um to the white house and he he had one of our snipers lay down next to him because our sniper was six two our tallest guy was six two and uh he said yeah

i just uh i just had one of our tallest guys laid down and he's shorter than i think it's him and the president says let me get this straight you can blow up one of our 200 million helicopters but you can't afford a 99-cent tape measure so they're doing that we fly them up to uh to and i remember craving just we're standing there he came up to me and he kind of just put he didn't say anything but just put his hand on my shoulder like this and it was like just a [ __

] yeah moment went up to bagram i mean everyone we're still looking around at each other now we got everything laid out the the smart bin lad's body is laying there um uh we're laying out all the stuff in order of which room which floor which building and they're going through it there's a dude doing dna tests and and um we're just kind of standing around the army brought in these those big green tubs full of breakfast sandwiches and we have the news on there's a big tv on and you can hear it kind of

um you can hear it building up like they know what's happening geraldo is out there with people in front of the white house and and our guys are on the phone with with the white house and they're just trying to uh the president wants a full count how many were wounded how many are killed what's the total and we're just standing there bin laden's right here and uh i remember everything quieted down the president is on tv with a red tie walking down uh red carpet came up very presidential to the podium and said tonight

i can report to the american people into the world the united states conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden the leader of al qaeda i hear the president of the united states say osama bin laden i look at osama bin laden and i thought how in the world did i get here from butte montana damn dude and that and that's it and then we um and then here's where it gets cool i mean i mean just camaraderie thing is like well you know well we should shower up because we're flying home and i could

use a drink where the [ __ ] seabees you're going to find everything you're going to find showers you're going to find pizza you're going to find beer and pry some whiskey so we went over there and uh and it was you know that's when it started to get a little awkward because we we they do have the internet over there we're getting and everything ble seal team six seal team six bin laden you know that's and then that's it uh this is gonna be bad but for now it's gonna be good and uh actually

the the ground force command when we went back uh the ground force commander who is probably the smartest guy i've ever met um photographic memory he could operate on an hour sleep a night and be fine uh and he's by the book but he pulled the appointment of me into a room and he poured us a shot and we all took a shot together he's like great job boys we hop on a plane we leave um pop and ambien which you know was awesome and we slept to virginia beach we landed there and then uh

it was almost like a scene where there were people waiting for us other seals were there with a couple buses coolers full of beer and uh cheers and high fives and then we went to the command and uh and that was that was it i was like we're going to be the best friends um in the world forever man that's [ __ ] that's insane wow i need to tell apart that i didn't you can edit in if you don't mind i'm just gonna hit it okay um so we're having this conversation when i asked

what helicopter crashed and he said dude our helicopter crashed in the front yard because i thought it was something else as we're having this conversation one of our snipers was running around the compound with cairo and his job was to circle it twice to make sure no one squirted um you know ran out of the the building and he when we're having this conversation inside he ran into the point where the pilot had the the tail on the fence so he's looking up and sees this tail he didn't know they crashed either and he came

over the radio and said guys inside be on alert they are ready for us they have a training mock-up of our super secret helicopter in the front yard and there was a weird silence and the boss came over the radio and goes no jackass that's ours because we crashed and he said he and he said over the radio yeah that makes a lot more sense in the [ __ ] i was just saying carry on holy [ __ ] damn yeah we got to virginia beasto and then and then it just you know turned into

as opposed to being in the shadows everybody wants to come down and meet us we they want to fly us places to meet us secretary defense came down and it was just it started to suck because there were dudes that had been at red squadron for 16 years that moved on to operations and then they wouldn't let them in the debrief with the secretary of defense and it's just like this is gonna there's some bad blood's gonna start yeah because of this [ __ ] and uh you know and a lot of guys a lot

of guys do want to be the 30-year navy seal who retires and then lives in coronado undercover forever and uh they kind of got that violated one i mean one of the one of the funny stories though is is uh like i was mentioning earlier when when peop the first question people asked was who got him and uh they would say nizro got him and i guess the most common answer was oh [ __ ] we're never gonna hear the end of this damn dude that's um man that's an awesome crazy [ __ ] i

don't even know what to say yeah i mean it's but it's like it's like it was written that way or scripted it's just the way it worked great team the pilots that got us in and out i mean that takes balls to fly chinook that far into pakistan to pick up guys that are already in gunfights with al qaeda and i think we killed um like three of the top four that night no if we hadn't we'd we did within the next few days and there was like 11 other ops that jason did that night

in afghanistan like it was a i mean it was it was part of being part of something great and it couldn't be more proud that's insane yeah that's insane let's take a quick break that was heavy all right so we just covered the whole raid everything that happened there's a lot of conspiracies out there a whole lot of conspiracies out there on whether whether it was a double yep but why why did they dump the body into the ocean we they had told us that's what's gonna happen even before we left and i remember we

were asking why is that you're going to dump them in in the ocean and they said well because we don't want a shrine to him where people can worship and i remember explaining to them you don't understand sunni islam um you don't uh there's one god you worship allah that you not false prophets they would not do that to bin laden you don't worship him because they don't believe in that [ __ ] um you can do something else with him but they were convinced they wanted to do that um there are pictures of them

that i've heard are in cabinets at langley i don't know but uh yeah all i know is we we handed him over to some senior guys from the army and they flew him to the uss vincennes i believe i said that right it could be wrong but it's that ship and that they have the coordinates of where they dropped him and i didn't see it um i believe it i mean i know he's dead i know we have pictures i wish they would release him but i didn't see it so you know as far as

i know he could be freeze-dried somewhere too huh i mean i don't know i just they they told you that before you even went on the raid they're like okay we're going to dump them in the ocean yes why would they even i don't know i mean why not i had a lot of different options for them but that was it they that was that's going to happen just bring them out and i mean they they labeled it they did the test they have the test but they someone took the body away and then we

never saw it again interesting yeah it is have they ever done that with anybody else i'm not as far as i know but yeah i've never heard anything yeah they were they were saying they brought him to that ship they gave him a proper burial and then they threw him over and no one was allowed to watch i guess a proper burial huh well probably let's see as far as getting thrown over the side of the ship kicking off the [ __ ] fan tail that's about it but yeah they broke down the coordinates and

they they apparently marked the uh the pad eye on the ship which means whatever but yeah and there are guys that said they were on the ship that they know what happened but i don't i mean i've never seen footage of it so i mean i can understand to the conspiracies around it like why you know i mean it's definitely odd there's no doubt about that yeah yeah because like like i said there's not going to be worshipers for him and and even now with that it kind of is the mystique of did they really

get them type [ __ ] yeah so when did you when did you decide you were going to come out and say you're the you were the shooter i didn't uh i didn't do it at first but um my name did go around really quickly in virginia beach and coronado and in dc and new york because people just know people around there and i was getting calls that no the next night from people saying hey man tell us what happened all this you know [ __ ] like that um you know and there was a

people kind of knew and and and um they would single me out in in different briefs and i really didn't care for that because i've always said it's a team effort i i didn't it's not me guys it's the look at the pilots thank them because they're the smart guys thank the intel officers that found him uh and then it just started to get uh it started to get awkward and i decided you know it's um i'm gonna i might move on and then uh we we went from the the best time in our career

to the worst time because soon after on extortion one uh august 6th the extortion one seven was shot down we lost 31 americans and we went from planning missions to planning funerals and it's like you know what it's time to leave i need to um i want to see my kids get married but because we lost so many guys at gold we need to backfill so i'm going to do one more deployment so i actually left red squadron and went to silver squadron to go immediately to afghanistan because my entire point was uh i'm uh

i came in through the front door and i'm going to leave through the front door i'm going to do one more deployment to prove you got you know i'm not in this for the fame i'm not trying i'm not writing a book there was rumors that i'm writing a book like someone actually pulled me aside and said one of one of my officers said i heard you just got a 17 million advance to write a book and i said well i don't think you know how books work because you don't get a 17 million advance

unless you're a president uh but yeah but there was just you know rumors flying around and all this [ __ ] i did go to afghanistan and uh you know extended and i got out in uh august of of 2012. um and then um you know i started work i didn't know what to do i didn't know what the hell i was qualified for no degree i started working in in washington dc um on capitol hill with different people and i met i met a congresswoman carolyn maloney from new york and she said you know

you you should probably um donate something to the 911 memorial um and i did because it's if you haven't been to the memorial you got to go it's it's insane it's a chronological order of what happened on 9 11 and at the end i anonymously donated my shirt uh with an american flag just so people could see this shirt was in the room with bin laden the cia analyst donated a coin that she had and it's kind of there but when i donated it i went into a room where there were 30 some people i

didn't realize i was going to be speaking right then they had all lost someone in the towers and uh and i'm up on stage this is the first time in public i told the story and to see their responses to um crying in their hands um you know wanting to give me a hug and they were saying that uh there's never going to be closure but this helps with the healing we can put a face with what happened because like we just said we buried him and see you don't really know but i'm telling you

what happened because i was there and i said i actually had a film crew there to document um me donating it for his historical reasons but i was like if i can if i can help 30 people with the healing i can help thousands if i tell the story and then uh it was a tough decision but i i got my story approved the only one approved through the pentagon and uh and i when i came out with a story just you know i've assumed risk before and i'll do it again it's it's worth it

yeah what so you went to silver after that i did what were you guys doing over there um another another winter deployment to afghanistan okay i actually um uh bin laden wasn't the last guy i killed with that gun no she just kept it with me yeah well actually we we did a we did uh my i think my last mission was my very first l ambush which i think is cool because yeah well when we were trying to sell it because you're selling it to staff officers basically that i don't know how they don't

know we we saw this this truck would leave this place go around a mountain and drive through the snow and wait to ambush americans and they did it like on tuesday and antel saw them and then they did it on wednesday and then they did it again on thursday but they're not finding anybody and uh my troop chief and i were like hey if they do this on friday the day of prayer they're definitely doing on a saturday so we came up with a plan like well we'll just insert where they drive get behind these

rocks put snipers up and we're selling it to them and then and we sold it to this army officer like then we're gonna set up an l ambush and the officer said what's an l ambush and um i said sir an ella ambush is the second thing they teach you in the army right after that this is an l ambush and he goes well who invented it i said i think sun tzu invented the art of war um and he goes well which i said well we're going to set up an l i'm going to

form a line of death i'll be in the middle here and when he's coming at me i'm going to stop him and he goes what if he doesn't stop i said i'm going to shoot him this what planet are you wow yeah so so we did we set it up and naturally like the isrs watched them they can't get their car started and you know because it's that murphy's law and so we're literally smoking cigars the sun's up and we're waiting for this dude to drive around uh no one's gonna be there and you know

and we kept it simple like isr is gonna tell us um green light yellow light red light that's when you jump out you stop them and it's in the wide open area and uh sure enough they're coming they finally got the car started you know green light yellow light red we hop out and then i'm looking at this guy and he's driving this uh a car not even a truck and i think this is the first words he ever spoke in english where he put in reverse and just goes [ __ ] [ __ ]

[ __ ] [ __ ] and the the car's peeling out and i'm looking at this dude and there's a you know two days in front three dudes in the back and i'm like hey man get out of the car get out of the car you need to get out of the car because we got snipers and uh one dude hopped out to go to the trunk this guy's head blasted off and then it turned into just a shootout we killed all of them and and it's like well that's an l ambush that was my

last mission and then i you know i got out and then um you know transition out and learn you got to learn that there's a lot of life after the military you know military is unique because you can get in at 18 and retire at 38. and 38 you got a lot of life i hope left in you yeah and then that that's when the the real work starts what do we do now what was it like you know getting out i mean you killed the most wanted man in the [ __ ] history of

the world everybody wants to meet you everybody wants something from you everybody wants to hear the story i mean there couldn't have been any time for just you and no there's there's there's not now too and you know i'll get [ __ ] on the internet they're like why uh hi i'm rob o'neil i haven't talked about bin laden for five minutes it's like yeah you know stop asking and i'll stop yeah i'm saying it you got to figure every person i ever meet wants to hear that story they want to know what happened and

that's fine that's great i mean if if i helped this country and our cause whatever that was um then i mean obviously what that was um i'll i'll do it and it it's always in person it's a good thing i mean the only issue i have in person is we'll be at a an airport bar and someone will recognize me and want to do a shot like yeah cool and it's but someone else will see me and they want a shot and then you know all of a sudden it's like okay you 10 guys had

a shot i had 10 shots this is bad damn but no i mean it's it's uh it's it's it was uncharted territory because you know even i was talking to different agents about speaking and um he said i'm trying to figure out if you know trying to price the guy that killed hitler and i'm like well hitler killed himself and he goes exactly and so it's just you know it's everything's been new and i don't know at first what's gonna happen i don't know now what's gonna happen um but you know i mean it's been

it's people have been been good yeah i mean it it created a lot of animosity you know obviously throughout the community and uh you know we kind of talked a little about that a little bit off camera but how how are you because there's a there's a lot of hate in this community oh there's a lot of hate you know no it's it's tough at first because um you want you want to be liked and your reputation means everything but then you got to realize that what you know what someone thinks about you is none

of your business stop wasting the negative energy on what they're thinking of you and if they're pissed there's nothing i can do about it if they ever want to work with me i'll work with them that's fine if you want help ask i'll help um but if you're if you're just hating then you know take it somewhere else you i mean there's a point where you just got to stop caring i don't care yeah um but you know and it's like there's even been points where they're like well you know you know we hear you

didn't kill milan and unlike some days i wish i didn't i'm just telling you what happened yeah how long did it take you to get to that point uh a couple years yeah i bet because all you know all you know in the seal teams is the seal teams and you're in that bubble i mean even when you you know um you know other seals and you know the bartenders and everyone around you is doing the same [ __ ] i mean as far as work and and you know i found myself in a spot

where i'm just in a spot where anyone could have done it i just happened to turn the corner and it's just um i mean it sucks you know you want to be like but there comes a point where what you worry about isn't going to stop it so yeah get on with it well i think a lot the reason i'm asking is i think a lot of guys need to hear that because you know i don't i don't [ __ ] care i'll just say whatever something no that's probably the nicest thing i've ever done

it's it's it's in this community you know it seems like like i said we talked about this earlier but i want other guys that are coming out to hear this [ __ ] is you know in this community everybody likes each other until you're feeling better than they are yeah and then you're the [ __ ] hate target you're the target and and you know there's i mean it's 2022 now guys are getting out with full careers you know first time ever where guys have been in combat their entire career they're gonna get out they're

gonna write books they're gonna start companies and they're gonna get a lot of hate from the guys that are in and and uh it seems like as soon as you come out public with anything it's like um use your resume there's nothing wrong with that and my i remember my one of my first days at red squad and the ceo of red squadron said you know when we got out we could all be millionaires we could take over the world but we're never gonna because he recognized it as well just the just the uh the

animosity for some reason like everyone's successful but then they hate success yeah so i mean i don't get it i mean it bothered me for a while but i'm not losing sleep over now well that's good yeah that's good but um well yeah let's talk about what you're doing now yeah so i transitioned out of the um the military and what i realized is that i didn't know what to do i had no idea am i gonna sell sunglasses or t-shirts am i going to do whatever but i learned that a lot of people want

the traits that we have as navy seals as special operators effective communication problem solving the ability to have the difficult decisions with people to run a team to uh promote who needs to be in fire who needs to be so i started a foundation it was f at first called your grateful nation but now it's called special operators transition foundation and it's help special operators find out where they want to live what industry they want to be in because i've had employers now with some of the products coming out of universities they don't want that

[ __ ] they said give me one of these guys men or women and i'll teach them how to do this job i want that attitude in the boardroom uh so i've done that transition um foundation and then i just i got myself into public speaking i've been on tv analyzing different stuff i worked for fox news for quite a while um i started an apparel company rjo apparel stuff like front toward enemy which to me kind of summarizes everything front towards your problem yeah and on the guess what's in the back the back like

even the hoodies we have says front row enemy and the back says back it is a it's not a hoodie it's it's an instruction manual on how to wear a hoodie um so you know we did that um uh i'm involved with a beer company now called arm forces brewing company which is veteran owned me and a couple of seals mcteams and raycast care um we we uh have different beer for different branches army we actually for army navy game we had beat army and beat navy cans we sold out at the army navy game

uh we're getting distribution in 50 states uh just because it's a it's it's cool and it's a beer and it's for veterans not just for veterans but for americans veteran owned for american and americans americans like beer and they like veterans so uh anything like that just entrepreneurial stuff um like i said you know the more special operators more navy seals i can work with the better because we're going to do better yeah and it's just um it is what you're making i mean you can sit at home and feel sorry for yourself or you

can go do it yeah that's that's that's for damn sure so what about the new book the way forward the way forward i wrote with dakota meyer who is a medal of honor recipient uh marine uh gangal valley one of the worst fights i've ever heard his his story is incredible i'm not even gonna tell it read the book it's amazing he is similar to me shooting that guy in the room he got a fight where he's rescuing uh his entire team died he's pulling him out and he got hit in the back a butt

stroke from a taliban guy and he actually got into a fist fight to the death with a dude um to the point where he was getting choked out and i don't know if he faked being choked out but he ended up turning around he shot him with a 40 mike mike that was so you know he didn't it didn't arm but it hit him and then he ended up killing this guy with a rock oh [ __ ] and it's the point and again i don't want to tell his story but it's like he says

there's a point in a man's life where you're looking him in the eyes and you both know it's coming and then the book's called the way forward because it's now what you know we did all this fight and we did all this killing uh you start to question why we're killing these people and what's the way forward everything from anxiety to abusing the bottle to suicides what do we do next and i think you know everyone everyone has what do we do now we talked about the ceos that have their first day uh what next

and uh that's what it's about dakota is awesome uh but but again with the animosity like he's got stories where he's got i mean i thought the marines were the tightest group that's what i think are they not he no he he's gotten the medal of honor physically ripped off of his neck at a marine corps ball you got to be shitty and so it kind of addresses the what the [ __ ] guys so i mean it's a great book the stories are um incredible because i talk about everything from it's the transition from

the military to the the adventures that i get into um the story about my wedding that kid rock is in how we lost the wedding rings and i had to get my buddy shorty to find him and how he i had brand new security at i'm at a church in in um in massachusetts at cape cod and i hired local cops to be securities i have some celebrities there like i said kid rock was there and i'm i don't know who's gonna show up because it's a public wedding this guy found the rings and what

i told these cops was what you got to look for is their hands and especially if a vehicle screams up my buddy was screaming up to the thing after he found the rings hops out reaches for the rings out of his pocket he's getting drawn down on by these cops and sprints and hands me the rings and then it goes on to other kentucky derby stuff but the one story i have in the way forward is i'm not going to ruin it at all but it's a hunting story with me some guys i grew up

with my father my nephew my brother and some boston police officers and i have been called out more on that story being [ __ ] than the bin laden raid oh [ __ ] the story's hilarious but you don't let's let's hear it well um the way it started i don't want to ruin the book but um i brought my brother with me my brother's a dj a morning show dj he's not a hunter at all never been a hunter but i brought him out to the powder river in eastern montana which has some of

the best hunting in the world and we're going to split up i sent my brother tom with my buddy smooth and they're gonna go this way what i didn't realize at the time is smooth as a former army guy he loves to hunt like he's he's hiking tommy's not he doesn't like to do that [ __ ] so he's humping up this hill um we're on the other side i got some of the boston police guys there and another truck went up there looking for elk and uh i guess my brother was lagging a little

bit far back my buddy smooth said you know what you stay here i'll keep you in an eye shot i'm gonna keep walking up and all of a sudden my brother tommy started roasting a bowl uh wait and he comes back my buddy smooth comes back because what the [ __ ] are you doing and he goes what do you want some he goes what about the deer and he goes [ __ ] the deer i didn't bring enough for the deer so they're they're doing this i'm on one end and we're trying to set

up another ambush we have radios which is totally illegal um now my my buddy um swift and ed are in a truck driving up on the way out here they they had stopped at a gas station and ed decided to buy um a reuben at a gas station that had probably been under the heat lamp for a solid three days not a good idea so we got these radios he immediately got some really bad diarrhea and i hear over the radio oh my god ed just shot himself and i said what he he shot himself

and he goes no ed just [ __ ] himself and i'm like well how bad is it he goes pretty bad he filled his socks suck they're driving down my buddy's [ __ ] his pants my brother's getting high i'm over here i'm like look we're going to call this a day get out of the mountains so we go back to the cabin break out the whiskey and i said the next day um we're going to hunt the white tails because we're in the mountains looking for mule deer and elk now we're going to go

to the whitetails they're down by the river that's you know a couple hundred meters this way me and smooth are going to walk through here we're going to push these whitetails out they're going to see the bend in the river some will cross but some will come to you so i send my my father down to one end with my nephew and i said to my dad dad here's the deal all you got to do is nothing just sit here nothing so we go out there we put the cops out here we're pushing them we're

now we're doing a sort of an ambush again the deer come out they run to the cops they they blast a few um we get in here a buck comes past me I shoot him and then uh my buddy uh smooth who just couldn't get a break on this trip i i see this monster whitetail buck and i can see smooth pointing at it and he just kind of puts the gun down and yells god damn it and i said what why didn't you shoot me because the only two things i saw in the scope

was that huge buck and your [ __ ] dad my dad got up and was just walking through there like a geriatric or whatever and uh he felt so bad he my dad just goes next time just shoot so so it's like alright cool whatever um no before we do this sorry tommy was worn out my brother tom from the hump the day before so when i was knocking on the door i was like come over hunting he's like no we aren't doing anything i'm sleeping so i go to my um the deer that i

killed we're gutting a man smooth and then swift comes out on a four-wheeler obviously with coors lights because it is seven in the morning and uh he said hey congratulations oh tommy got his buck too and i said no that's that's not possible tommy's asleep and he goes no tom shot a buck and what turned out to happen is uh swift was on the as we started this ambush swift saw these bucks running towards the thing and he'd already filled this tag and so he he's knocking on tommy's door he's like tommy get get out

here and so tommy came out and probably a joint in his hand and uh he said well [ __ ] someone handed him a gun and and he shot this buck that was coming whatever and well tommy how'd you shoot that buck and he goes he was coming right for us because i was in my best porch camouflage holy and he goes so what do i do now and they go now you put on orange and we go get the damn thing damn dude so yeah but people said there's no way that happened but that's

that's one of the stories well i'll link uh i'll link all the everything below you know for people to go buy it and um hey man i don't you know we've been going for quite a while so might as well end it but awesome man thanks for having me yeah thank you for coming and sharing it for all those first-hand accounts and my pleasure best of luck to you appreciate it you