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That's right. Start your free trial. It's Shopify.com slash SRS. That's Shopify.com slash SRS. 3:04 Jim Lechner, welcome to the show. 3:08 Thanks. Great to be here. 3:09 It's good to have you. 3:10 So our mutual friend, Mike Durant, recommended you. 3:14 And so I'm excited about this. 3:17 You've got one hell of a career. 3:19 Yeah, thank you. 3:20 Me too, and Mike's a great guy. 3:21 We got a long history together. 3:24 We may talk about it, but he and I worked together 3:27 for three years before Mogadishu, 3:29 and then he was my pilot in Mogadishu, so. 3:32 What a good dude, yeah. 3:33 Do you guys keep in touch? 3:34 A little bit, not as much as we'd like to, 3:37 but I talked to him a couple of times a year. 3:38 And then there's different veterans things. 3:41 That's how we got reconnected on this. 3:42 we were working on a Medal of Honor project that's going on up in Knoxville, and we're both involved 3:49 in it. So, you know, we were on a meeting with that and talked afterwards and I got connected 3:54 to this through that. So, all right, Jim, let me start you out for the introduction here. 4:00 Lieutenant Colonel Jim Lechner, you're a 27-year U.S. Army veteran and former Army Ranger with 4:07 with deployment-spanning Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. 4:12 As a young Ranger officer, you fought with Task Force Ranger in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, 4:18 where you were wounded in combat and later received the Purple Heart. 4:22 You later served as Deputy Brigade Commander during the Battle of Ramadi and served in 4:27 assignments involving SOCOM and the CIA. 4:30 Most recently, you went to Ukraine. 4:32 First is a war correspondent and later training and advising Ukrainian forces, 4:38 including service with the International Legion. Today you work in the drone and 4:43 counter drone defense space and are an adjunct professor at Liberty University 4:48 teaching American and military history. And you are also the author of With My Shield. 4:54 That's right, yeah. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Great to be here. So a couple 4:58 things to knock out here right before we start. Everybody gets 5:02 a gift. Oh, great. I got you a couple gifts. First, man. 5:07 All right. Coach Lance Lee, gummy bears, made in the USA, 5:10 legal in all 50 states. Fantastic. Love gummies. Yeah. 5:14 And second, oh wow. Got a buddy over at CIG, his name's Jason. 5:19 Wow. And they just developed this brand new handgun, which 5:23 isn't even out yet. Wow. All right. Thank you very much. 5:26 coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it. You want to give that to you. Wow, that's beautiful. I love 5:37 SIG. Yeah. Hold it up. What do you think? Yeah. So, that is the new P385. It's kind of a cross 5:46 between the 365 macro and the 320 but it's got a compensator up front to help with, you know, 5:53 recoil. Wow. You can mount any optic you want basically on the back. Pistol optic without 5:59 getting uh one of the plates and you can actually adjust that grip from 15 rounds to 17 rounds 6:05 shorten the grip up if you want. There's just a feel about SIGs I mean they just have their own 6:10 feel that's just amazing I think. I totally agree with you. Fantastic thank you I've got a couple 6:17 things for you as well. All right um so one of the things I do is I'm part of a whiskey company 6:25 and uh we got a castle west of Dublin called Kennedy Castle and then this is our whiskey 6:29 It's distilled by the oldest distilled in Ireland Jack Tealing. It's our 10 year. So anyway, that's 6:35 And then of course the book. What do you mean you have a castle? 6:40 So, uh, my buddy actually owns the owner of the company of our community castle whiskey company owns the castle 6:45 He owns a castle. Yeah. Yeah, I bought that my plantation a couple years ago and was telling about it 6:50 He goes, well, I hate to one up you but I just bought a thousand year old 6:53 Irish castle. Are you serious state over there? It's a hotel and venue. It's 6:58 Fantastic place. There's about a hundred and fifty monks buried in the courtyard and oh wow. It's a fantastic place a castle 7:05 Yeah, thousand years old. Wow 7:07 And it turns out it turns out one of my ancestors actually earned his knighthood fighting in that county 7:14 So are you serious? I didn't know that when we first started so I just found that out 7:18 So uh my Irish friends don't even know that so 7:21 That's badass. Yeah that and then uh and the book again 7:25 And I signed this on September 11th, the 25th anniversary 7:29 in New York City. 7:31 So I want to give you that as well. 7:33 Thank you. 7:34 Thank you. 7:35 Well, we're gonna talk all about that in about two minutes. 7:39 And then one other thing, I have a Patreon account. 7:42 It's a subscription account. 7:43 They've been with me since the beginning 7:45 when I started this thing in my attic. 7:47 Yeah, I love them. 7:48 And perfect. 7:50 So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. 7:52 Okay, so this is from Wesley Sturgill looking back at our involvement in the Middle East 7:59 Specifically your time in Iraq. How did your personal perspective on the effectiveness on the effectiveness of foreign interventions evolve over time? 8:09 Yeah, that's a great question because being a history guy 8:12 I'd studied the British involvement and the British partition of different Arabic tribes and things and I probably went into it 8:18 Like a lot of Americans thinking you know, we should apply standard 8:23 you know, standard approaches and frameworks 8:25 to try to build democratic countries. 8:28 And I still believe, you know, in democracy, 8:30 they deserve democracy and to be free. 8:32 But as time went on and I dealt more with the Iraqis 8:35 and figured out ways to be successful over there, 8:39 their tribal network dealing with the tribes, 8:43 dealing with their culture, their Bedou culture, 8:46 there's some of the greatest hosts in the world. 8:48 You know, leveraging that and trying to fit 8:51 into that framework of their culture over there. 8:54 I think I evolved in my thinking from the time I went in there 8:56 to about 10 years later. 8:58 And I'm really, you know, I'm a fan of Arabs 9:00 and their culture. 9:03 Again, I was very well treated and they're a great host. 9:06 And so that's really how my thinking evolved over there is, 9:09 not just try to put a square peg in a round hole, 9:12 but adapt the good things of democracy and our culture, 9:16 the good parts to their culture 9:18 and then let them run with it. 9:21 Could you allow, I'm just curious, 9:22 could you elaborate a little bit on that? 9:24 I mean, do you feel like we maybe, 9:26 we forced democracy down people's throats? 9:30 I absolutely think that, you know, 9:32 the U.S. government is, 9:34 and I'm not necessarily saying the U.S. military, 9:36 the U.S. government is horrible 9:38 at trying to do foreign interventions and foreign policy. 9:41 And part of that is because the State Department 9:44 and other agencies come in and like I said, 9:46 and try to pound a square peg into a round hole. 9:49 And I think we're gonna talk more about this, 9:51 but just the unrealistic things 9:53 that the State Department wants to achieve in a region, 9:57 they'd always give us a list of like 10 things 10:00 that you gotta do, all these different social issues 10:03 and things to achieve. 10:04 And I'd always be like, 10:05 why don't we just achieve two of those and win? 10:08 Or we'll try to do all 10 and we'll lose 10:10 because it's ridiculous, what you're trying 10:12 to achieve here. 10:12 And I think that's what the US government 10:15 is terrible about is trying to approach a country or a democracy and and establish it using our 10:22 standards and our cultural norms. I think we're kind of saying the same thing here. I mean, 10:28 yeah, we'll get into more later. I know we have a whole segment on this. But let's get it. So I 10:36 want to do a life story on you. And you've seen you've been a lot of different places deployed 10:41 do a lot of different places. The one that I'm most interested in, especially as the anniversary's 10:47 coming up, is your time in Mogadishu on October 3rd. But, let's start with, where did you grow up? 10:57 So, upstate New York, a small town pronounced chile outside of Rochester. I grew up there. 11:03 My family had been there for generations. Went to high school, played football, played hockey, 11:09 all the normal things and enjoyed Boy Scouts. 11:12 We camp year round, unbelievably. 11:15 Even in the winter, even in February, we go camping. 11:18 My Boy Scout master, his Boy Scouts had been Hitler Youth. 11:23 They were German refugees. 11:25 His father was smart enough to get him out of Germany 11:27 in the 30s, but he did about five years in the Hitler Youth. 11:31 Great guy. 11:32 Great guy, but very tough guy, as you'd imagine. 11:35 and so we just, we hiked and camped and canoed year-round, 11:38 essentially, and so great experience doing that. 11:41 And like I said, growing up in Rochester, 11:43 it was a great place to grow up, you know, 45 years ago. 11:47 What were you into as a kid? 11:50 I was into hockey and football and, you know, 11:53 sports like that, a little bit of wrestling, 11:56 but mostly football and hockey, and I was into history. 11:59 My dad and my mother were into history, 12:02 And so we'd take family vacations, historic sites. 12:05 So I'd go see Roger's rangers stuff out in the, in the, um, 12:08 Adirondack mountains and we'd go on to Washington D.C. once a year. 12:12 So that's, I was into history and I was into sports and outdoor things. 12:16 How did you, I mean, you went to the Citadel. 12:20 Did you start off at the Citadel? 12:22 I did. I did. I joined the army. 12:24 I joined the National Guard out of high school when I was 17. 12:27 So I was actually a junior in high school with your parents' permission. 12:30 You could do it at the time. 12:30 So junior in high school, joined the army, 12:33 went to basic training at Fort Benning, came home, 12:36 finished my senior year, 12:38 and then I decided to go to the Citadel 12:40 and applied and got into there. 12:41 So that's where I went to college. 12:43 That was fantastic. 12:45 I mean, I had wanted to go to West Point. 12:47 I thought about that. 12:48 I was looking at Virginia Military Institute. 12:50 I wasn't even aware of the Citadel. 12:52 Became aware of it because there was a plane crash in DC 12:56 and one of the survivors kept helping other survivors 12:59 of the plane crash, it was in the middle of the winter and they were in the river and 13:03 so they're freezing and he was helping other survivors get out, kept passing the rope off 13:07 and I'm like, that's pretty heroic and on TV the announcer said, you know, this guy 13:12 went to the Citadel and that prepared him to be a hero and I thought, I'm gonna check 13:16 that out. 13:17 So I went down to Charleston as soon as I got there, I knew that's where I wanted 13:20 to go. 13:21 Fantastic place. 13:21 I mean, it fit with everything that I wanted perfectly. 13:25 All right, where do we go from there? 13:27 So then I got commissioned in the Army. 13:29 It was the first time that I realized 13:31 there's two parts to the Army. 13:33 There's a field Army, then there's a bureaucracy, 13:35 and I wanted to be infantry. 13:37 Figured that out very quick, huh? 13:38 Yeah, it was my first out the gate. 13:41 I figured that out. 13:42 You know, I'd been in the infantry. 13:43 I wanted to go in the infantry. 13:44 That's all I put down on my wish list. 13:46 It was not great at math, 13:48 and so I didn't even consider artillery, 13:51 and the Army put me in the artillery. 13:53 So I basically fought it, 13:55 but was told, now these are your orders. 13:58 So I marched off and went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. 14:00 I went through the artillery, ended up being 14:02 a great experience, you know, it expanded my mind. 14:04 I'm actually much better at math 14:06 as you'd figure it than I was back then. 14:09 You know, learn fire support, 14:11 learn three dimensional aspect of the battlefield, 14:12 but I'm an infantryman. 14:14 So I went into the fire support area 14:18 and that put me back with the infantry 14:19 even when I was in the artillery. 14:21 I was an artillery liaison officer 14:22 essentially down with infantry companies. 14:24 I did that for a few years until I got selected to go to the Ranger Regiment. 14:27 How did you get selected to go to the Regiment? 14:29 So a recruiting team comes around the Army from the Ranger Regiment. 14:32 I was in Korea. I was at Second Infantry Division in Korea. 14:35 Again, I was a fire support officer, so I was in an infantry battalion, 14:38 doing infantry job, excuse me, artillery job, fire support. 14:42 And then when the recruiting team came around, I went, I interviewed. 14:45 I think I took a PT test. 14:46 And then I kind of forgot about it because not long after that, 14:50 the, you know, Saddam invaded Kuwait and the army, everyone was focused on Desert Storm, 14:56 Desert Shield, Desert Storm. 14:57 So I kind of forgot about applying for the Ranger Regiment. 15:01 I was just focused on getting out of Korea and going to Desert Shield, Desert Storm 15:06 because they weren't letting anybody leave. 15:09 They basically said the rest of the army is going to go fight that, but Second Infantry 15:12 Vision, you're going to stay here in Korea and I wasn't having any of that. 15:15 So I worked really hard at it talking to DC found out I had a replacement coming anyway 15:21 So I said, okay, then I'm clear and I got orders to go to the 82nd 15:25 And I actually had my going away party 15:27 I was 24 hours out from flying to Fort Bragg from Korea when I got a knock at the door 15:33 And it said hey, they got a they got a phone call for you from the Pentagon 15:36 so I went down to the headquarters and and 15:38 Called and it was infantry branch or excuse me as artillery branch and they said hey we got this 15:43 a slot that just came open in the Ranger Regiment, 15:47 do you want it? 15:48 And I said, well, of course, you know, 15:50 because I didn't think there couldn't be a war 15:52 without the Ranger Regiment involved. 15:54 And so I took that. 15:55 So 24 hours out, I changed my orders, 15:57 reported to Fort Benning, 15:59 started going through the process 16:00 and then the ground war kicked off 16:02 in Kuwait and Iraq. 16:05 And then the war was over so fast 16:07 that that third Ranger Battalion 16:08 didn't even get to deploy. 16:09 So that was that that's how those events went real quick, but kind of shocking, but it got me to the ranger battalion 16:17 You know fantastic experience. Which ranger battalion third ranger battalion of Fort Benning 16:22 First is in Savannah second side in Fort Lewis third ranger battalions at Fort Benning, Georgia, Columbus, Georgia 16:27 That's where I went there'd been in a training accident the lieutenant who did my job was injured 16:33 So I got pulled in to replace him. That's why it was the last minute last-minute thing 16:37 and got assigned to Alpha Company Third Ranger Battalion. 16:42 What, I mean, what was your pipeline into there? 16:44 Did you just show up and fill the slot immediately? 16:46 Did they put you through? 16:47 Yeah, that's a great question. 16:48 There's a selection process beyond just being selected. 16:52 So being selected is essentially an invitation to come. 16:54 There's a two week course you go through. 16:57 At the time it was called the Ranger Orientation Program. 17:00 Basically for officers it was a gentleman's course, 17:02 but what was great about it 17:04 in my first introduction to the Ranger Regiment was 17:06 they weren't gonna yell and scream at you, 17:07 but here's the standards you're gonna meet. 17:09 You're gonna do a five mile run in 40 minutes, 17:11 and then it's time now, and you'd go and run, 17:14 and if you had to make that time. 17:15 If you didn't make that time, they said, thanks for coming. 17:17 There was a number of events like that that you had to do, 17:20 so PT test, physical training test, 17:23 five mile road march, excuse me, a five mile run, 17:26 a 12 mile road march in less than three hours. 17:29 So you had to meet these standards, 17:30 and if you met all those standards, 17:32 then you were accepted into the Ranger Regiment 17:34 in about two weeks, and then I passed that, 17:36 and then I was assigned to Alpha Company 17:38 for the third range of time. 17:42 As a father, I think about whether I've done enough 17:45 to prepare my family for the things we can't predict. 17:48 If something happened to me, 17:50 they'd have enough to deal with. 17:52 I don't want money to be one more thing weighing on them. 17:56 Making sure they have some financial security 17:58 is important to me, 17:59 and life insurance can help with that. 18:01 That's why I wanna talk to you about ethos. 18:04 They make getting life insurance fast and easy 18:08 and the whole process is 100% online. 18:12 You can get a quote in seconds, 18:14 apply in minutes and get same day coverage. 18:17 There's no medical exam. 18:19 You just answer a few health questions online. 18:22 You can get up to $3 million in coverage 18:25 with some policies as low as $30 a month. 18:28 It's a way to start figuring out 18:30 what your family would need 18:31 to take a step towards being prepared. 18:34 Take 10 minutes to get covered today 18:36 with life insurance through ethos. 18:39 Get your free quote at ethos.com slash SRS. 18:44 That is ethos.com slash SRS. 18:48 Application times may vary, rates may vary. 18:54 What was it like showing up at the regiment 18:57 and leading those men versus where you came from? 19:00 Yeah, it was a challenge. 19:02 And the reason is I showed up at right a year 19:07 after they jumped into Panama. 19:09 So all of my team, all of my team were combat veterans. 19:13 The guy, not the injured guy that replaced, 19:16 but the guy that took him into Panama, 19:17 won the bronze star. 19:19 My guys were, in my view, my guys were all heroes. 19:22 They'd all jumped into Panama, got combat jumps, 19:24 all done a fantastic job. 19:26 So it was a little bit of a challenge, 19:28 but the good, you know, the good part was 19:30 I'd done a similar job in Korea. 19:33 I had a year of experience doing that. 19:35 And I, you know, I had my background and I was extremely happy to be motivated to be 19:40 there. 19:40 So I just hit the ground running as hard as I could. 19:43 Did you learn a lot from them? 19:45 Absolutely. 19:45 Absolutely. 19:46 The, I say that I did a similar job in Korea, you know, calling in artillery, the basics 19:52 of air support, but the range of regiment obviously does everything a couple of levels 19:56 higher than the conventional army. 19:58 So I had to learn to work with special operations platforms such as the AC 130 helicopter 20:04 copter gunships, all those types of things. 20:07 And that was new. 20:08 And then the other good news about that is, 20:10 they send you off to school. 20:11 So I went to the Marine Corps school for a CAS, 20:14 I went to the Air Force school for CAS, 20:16 I went to the Naval Gunfire school. 20:17 I got all kinds of great schools. 20:19 And that gave me a lot of background as well. 20:21 But my guys that had been working 20:23 with those platforms for years, 20:24 did a great job teaching me 20:26 and showing me what Wright looks like. 20:29 And then I just fell in step and ran with them. 20:31 Did you, were you working under Major Bill Garrison? 20:36 Well, eventually Bill Garrison was our commander 20:39 when he was the JSOC commander, yeah. 20:41 How was it working? 20:42 I mean, he was a founder of Delta Force. 20:45 Absolutely an icon, you know, 20:47 and I think he's a Texas native too, 20:49 but definitely an icon. 20:51 He'd been in the Phoenix program in Vietnam. 20:53 So when I worked for him, he was the JSOC commander 20:56 and the overall general officer in command of us 20:59 in Mogadishu. 21:00 And I really loved his approach because a special operations 21:05 task force like that, as you know, can be rank heavy. 21:09 So lots of senior NCOs, lots of officers. 21:11 And he made a point of just grabbing the lieutenants. 21:14 He'd grab us, take us outside, just talk to us, 21:18 get our opinions on what was going on, 21:20 give us some of his insight, talk about the days back 21:23 in Vietnam. 21:23 So I really appreciated his leadership style. 21:26 And it was very hands off. 21:27 I mean, there was about four levels of incredibly exceptional leaders in that task force and he 21:34 He would handle dealing with the phone calls from DC 21:37 And the pressure from the four stars and things and he would let the commanders deal with with the run in the unit 21:43 And the tactics on the ground 21:46 Where do we go from here? How long was it before? 21:51 Mogadishah fired up so actually three years so I three years 21:54 Yeah, I got into the battalion as Desert Storm and Desert Shield were literally kicking off. 22:01 I was there for the next three years. And so, you know, we trained like we were going to the 22:05 Super Bowl, but but three trying to keep that focus for three years is tough. And I be in there 22:11 three years, I got to go through every cycle of training that the battalion does, you know, 22:16 its special operations focus, airfield seizure focus, back to building basics. I got to 22:20 to do that three times. 22:22 So I got a lot of experience for Lieutenant 22:24 doing that in the range of regimen. 22:26 But again, it's kind of hard to keep your focus. 22:28 And, you know, I was a single guy coming from Korea, 22:31 had come from the Citadel to Korea, 22:32 kind of living like a monk, you know, 22:34 for about four or five years there, 22:36 just doing nothing but my job. 22:38 And I got to go out and experience, you know, 22:40 social life and things in Columbus, 22:42 George a little bit, met my wife. 22:44 We dated for about six months. 22:45 Then we got engaged. 22:47 Then we got married in the summer of 93 and not too long after that she was 22:52 expecting our first child our daughter Carolina and all those things coming 22:57 together and I've been in the battalion for about three years and I'm getting 23:01 ready to get promoted to captain and when you get promoted in the Ranger 23:04 Regiment you got to leave the regiment and go back to the regular army and do 23:07 a job at the new rank and then get selected to come back hopefully. You 23:11 have to get selected to come back? Right it's not automatic. You've already proven 23:13 You have to, you have to get that, you have to prove yourself at the new rank. 23:18 So as a captain, you got to be a company commander or a major as a battalion level staff 23:24 officer and prove that you can do it at that level and then hopefully get selected to come 23:28 back. 23:28 So it really is hard for an officer to leave the regiment because you don't know if you're 23:32 going to come back or not. 23:33 And nobody wants to leave all that. 23:34 And nobody wants to leave, of course, yeah, because it's, it's the best thing 23:37 you've ever done. 23:38 And so I was getting ready to leave the battalion 23:41 because I was getting promoted to captain 23:43 and I had orders to go to the captain's level school 23:46 and all that was gonna happen in the September timeframe 23:49 and I had just gotten married 23:50 and found out we're expecting our first child. 23:53 So now it's August and I got one more exercise to go on. 23:58 The battalion is gonna go on an exercise to Texas 24:00 and there's a ready cycle of the three battalions. 24:05 There's always one that's waiting for the call, 24:08 for the alarm bell to ring. 24:10 It's called Ranger Ready Force One. 24:12 So we were assuming Ranger Ready Force One, 24:14 where we were normally locked down, waiting for the call 24:16 if anything happened around the world, 24:19 like firemen in a firehouse. 24:21 And they decided that they were gonna send the battalion 24:23 out to a training event in Texas. 24:25 And it was a little bit different, 24:26 but we thought that's fine, and we would go, 24:27 we'd all be together and we'd do some training events 24:29 out there. 24:30 So I had one more event to do, I was gonna do that, 24:32 go through this Ranger Ready Force One cycle, 24:35 do this training event in Texas, 24:36 and literally come home from Texas 24:38 and then turn in my keys and my gear 24:40 and go on to the next thing. 24:41 But while we were out there, 24:44 again, I mentioned there's three companies, 24:46 Alpha Bravo and Charlie. 24:47 I was in Alpha Company. 24:49 We did our live fire exercise with the company 24:51 and when we came in from the live fire exercise 24:53 we saw something was going on at the headquarters 24:56 and the company commander and I went to the headquarters 24:58 and they said, yeah, one company's getting selected 25:01 to go form a task force at Fort Bragg 25:05 and deploy on a real mission, 25:07 but it's gonna be B company, not A company. 25:09 And so again, just like Desert Storm just crushed, 25:12 we were crushed and I went back to A company. 25:14 I mean, people were just literally dragging, 25:17 but I didn't have a lot of time to get depressed about it 25:19 because I hadn't walked into the tent five minutes 25:22 when a runner came in and said, 25:24 the Italian commander needs to see you. 25:25 And so I went up to see him and he said, 25:27 hey, you're counterpart in B company. 25:29 The lieutenant that does your job 25:30 has just left on emergency leave like four hours ago. 25:33 So you're gonna fill his role and leave with B company go get your gear and get on the plane 25:38 Holy and and that was like, you know a life-changing event and I I'll refer to this a couple times 25:44 I think but that's beyond coincidence 25:46 The way that I got to battalion 24 hours out from going to the 82nd 25:51 My counterpart leaving just hours before the order came down and getting pulled into B company 25:56 You know there's as Winston Churchill said there's things going on in time and space that are beyond time and space and that 26:02 But absolutely, you know, the Lord had a path for me, a calling for me from the very beginning 26:07 of my career, and that's just pieces falling into place. 26:11 So I joined B Company and we went to Fort Bragg. 26:14 What happened when you got to Fort Bragg? 26:16 Got to Fort Bragg and we started training. 26:18 When we formed the task force, we had our own aviation, who I knew most of those 26:22 guys, Mike Durant, and I had worked together for a while. 26:26 And then we had the special operators from Fort Bragg that were the foundation of 26:31 the task force. So all three elements came together, the aviation, the Delta guys from 26:36 Fort Bragg and then the Ranger company. So we joined them out on the range, a little 26:41 bit of a rocky start. They'd been working on this contingency and it was good to go 26:46 to Somalia and deal with the situation that was deteriorating over there. They'd been 26:50 working on this all summer. The way the culture worked back then was the Rangers 26:55 still support tier one units on missions, but back then we really weren't given 27:00 a lot of information. We're basically told just to kind of fall in and do what you're 27:03 told. And that's essentially what happened. We got to Fort Bragg and we got bused out to 27:07 the range and I went with the company commander to meet with the leadership and they're like, 27:11 well, are you guys ready to live fire this in about 30 minutes? And we're like, 27:15 we don't even know what the mission is. So it was just a little bit of a bump in the 27:20 road, things falling together, but a little bit of culture because they explained to us 27:25 real quick what we were going to do was going to be try to hunt down the leadership 27:28 of the Somali National Alliance 27:30 that was opposing the UN and the US effort in Somalia. 27:34 We were gonna try to take out their leader, 27:36 Muhammad Adid, and track him down. 27:38 And they basically ran us through that real quick 27:40 and they said, well, let's go live fire, hitting a target. 27:42 And again, we had just gotten off the plane, 27:44 just gotten off the bus. 27:46 So we had to take a little bit of a step back, 27:48 kind of get those two cultures to align 27:50 because while they are extremely proficient 27:54 and extremely flexible, 27:56 the Ranger Regiment is very proficient, 27:57 but we got young guys, we have a very methodical process. 28:01 We do planning, we do rehearsals, 28:03 then we go into live fire 28:05 and then we're ready to do the mission. 28:06 It takes some time for us to get up to that level. 28:09 So there was a little bit of a culture clash on the range 28:12 but we worked through it and we went back 28:14 and got our planning together 28:15 and then quickly organized 28:17 and the way we need to be organized to support them, 28:19 they were gonna hit the target on helicopters 28:22 and fast-stroke in or land on the building 28:24 and we were gonna land a fast rope out of Blackhawks 28:27 into the street all around the building 28:29 and form a security perimeter 28:31 and provide them security 28:32 while they were operating inside the building. 28:34 That's the basic concept of what we were gonna do. 28:38 A lot of flexibility to it 28:39 because we could do vehicle hits as well. 28:42 And over the next few weeks, we rehearsed that. 28:45 So was this, did you have the exact, 28:48 like a replica of the exact target 28:50 that you thought you were gonna hit? 28:51 Or was this more scenario base? 28:53 Do you know what it means? 28:55 Yeah, it's a great question. 28:56 Yeah, it was extremely flexible. 28:58 So what we knew was that he was in a city, about a million people, pretty dense-packed 29:03 city, but we also knew that he was a very smart individual, a deed was. 29:10 He'd been a former Somali general, been trained by the Soviets. 29:13 He knew we were going to use signals intelligence. 29:15 He knew we were coming after him, and so he varied his pattern. 29:19 He never stayed in the same place. 29:20 so we didn't have one target that we could train on. 29:24 We had to develop intelligence 29:26 of where he was gonna be at a given time, 29:28 a window of opportunity with a trigger 29:30 that gave us an opportunity, and then we'd hit him. 29:33 But that could be at his aunt's house, 29:35 that could be at a hotel, 29:37 that could be him moving in the street in a convoy 29:39 or a single vehicle. 29:41 He did all kinds of changes to his pattern 29:44 that were really ingenious 29:46 and he kept him safe for a long time, 29:48 but we had to train on all of that. 29:49 So what we did is we came up with a very standardized template and this worked out very well because as you know normally 29:56 You can you can build a model and you can work through every step of a fixed target 30:01 But we couldn't do that. So we built a standardized template and that template would be that the assault force 30:07 The tier one guys would land right on top of the target if it was a building or if it was a vehicle 30:13 They'd land right on top of that and then the Rangers would come in and go all around them be inserted by fast-rope from helicopters 30:20 all around that target wherever it might be, but 30:23 The key here was that we went to the same position every single time 30:29 So for example, my position was in the southeast corner of the target 30:35 Whatever that might be the intersection of building whatever it would be. I'd go to the southeast corner 30:41 Tom DiNamasu would take his element to the northeast corner, you know, and so on and so 30:45 on. So it was a set piece. And when you hit the ground, as long as you knew where north was, 30:51 I'd say, oh, that's north. So I'm at the southeast. That's the target building. 30:55 Click. Everything falls into place. And so we could take that template to anywhere in the city, 31:00 and we rehearsed it over and over again until it was really second nature to us. 31:05 Nice. Nice. How long did you guys spend rehearsing that? 31:08 About about about two weeks. Yeah, maybe a little over two weeks 31:12 Just rehearsed it on Fort Bragg and rehearsed it in the mouth site rehearsed it on vehicles 31:16 They did a great job of bringing 31:19 You know opposing forces into role play and so they'd have crowds converge on us all kinds of different scenarios 31:25 and we live-fired it and so we really got it down when we felt very flexible and 31:30 Another important part about that is the commander could make a call in the air 31:35 And so we would we would fly in helicopters to the target 31:38 But the commander could make the call and he could say for example if the scenario was it was just a deed in one bodyguard 31:44 We don't need all hundred guys. There'd be 40 assaulters and about 60 Rangers 31:49 We don't need everybody just put a small team in to take him out in his vehicle and keep everybody up in the air 31:54 And so 31:55 It was very flexible or if it was a heavy package we could land everybody 32:00 which is what we normally did. But we also had situations where it was just one guy in a vehicle 32:05 and they'd put a small element in and we would stay up airborne. So a very flexible 32:09 template that we applied. And we did that for about two and a half weeks at Fort Bragg. 32:13 I mean, what do you think from, you spent three years of battalion doing training, 32:19 training, training, training, you'd missed Desert Shield. Right. And now you're on 32:28 probably the most high-profile mission since what, Escobar? 32:34 Was that Escobar happening? 32:35 Escobar, yeah, or Sante, you know, we really, 32:38 or Desert One, we, that's how we felt. 32:40 I mean, I- 32:41 You're gonna take out a deed. 32:43 Yep, we absolutely- 32:45 Like from no combat to- 32:46 Right. 32:47 Hey, we're gonna take out a deed. 32:48 Right, on a moment's notice. 32:50 I mean, it was literally like the standard Ranger, 32:53 hey, here's the mission go. 32:55 and and we got to train up but no we absolutely knew we're cognizant of the 33:01 significance of it I mean for me especially being in that last 30 days in 33:06 battalion I was just ecstatic to be there and every guy really I think that's all 33:13 they wanted was to keep their seat on the mission that's all they I mean 33:16 everyone was just no matter what they told us to do we were gonna do what 33:21 they said to be able to keep our place in the mission and one of the 33:24 The tensions that was involved is they kept cutting the package. 33:28 So we actually brought a platoon from a company that was going to reinforce us. 33:32 There'd be four platoons and that platoon got cut at Fort Bragg. 33:36 And those poor guys had to go home and they kept cutting guys. 33:40 We had one of the AC 130. 33:42 They cut it. 33:43 And these were cuts coming from Washington DC saying, no, the package is too big. 33:47 You got to scale it down. 33:48 So, I mean, that was literally my biggest fear was we were going to get cut. 33:51 And the other thing that was going on was the typical thing that I've experienced in every war I've ever been in is the 34:00 disjointed communications between the strategic level and tactical and so they brought us in after two weeks of training 34:06 They brought us into the the mess hall in Delta and gave us this big dinner and said okay guys 34:10 Unfortunately, it's been canceled 34:13 Just like that and so we got on planes the Rangers got on planes and we went back to Fort Bliss, Texas to this training event 34:19 And we landed for Bliss and a guy ramped the plane and said no, it's back on again 34:25 So I mean it was an incredible roller coaster 34:28 I mean just a roller coaster that just had us on our we just don't want to get cut 34:32 We just want this thing to go and get and not get cut. But thank God 34:37 On that one we turned right around flew right back to Fort Bragg and within 24 hours 34:42 We were we were out loading to to Africa to Somalia 34:48 But, but, but just a hell of a roller coaster. 34:51 No kidding. 34:52 So you get to Somalia. 34:54 Got to Somalia. 34:55 We had to phase in there. 34:57 It took us about a week or so to build up. 34:59 Just trying to figure the area out. 35:01 There was one small element of U.S. there. 35:04 And, you know, the background of that is we went in heavy with Marines 35:08 and U.S. military forces. 35:10 And then President Clinton was elected and he scaled it down. 35:13 And what he chose to do was turn it from a humanitarian mission feeding starving refugees to let's try to fix Somalia and build a country 35:21 But you know while he's doing that changing that mission. They scaled down the US military presence 35:27 So there's a very small element of US military there, but they were backfilled by 35:31 International forces like the Turks and the Greeks like the Indians and the Pakistanis 35:36 They all had military contingents there. I mean, can you imagine that's that's who your alliance is 35:42 I remember one day we drove out into the desert to do some training and the brigade you hold on. So you're you're 35:50 Counterparts are our countries that hate each other. That's exactly right turks. It was a Turkish 35:55 General-in-charge and there was a Greek battalion on the ground 35:59 I mean just crazy and and this is illustrated by when we went out the Indian brigade 36:04 Armor brigade came in and we were rolling out one day and we stopped to talk to them 36:08 You know, they're on our side. 36:10 And they had their tanks pointed in every direction, 36:13 not just out of the city, 36:15 but back into the city where our camp was. 36:17 And we asked them, 36:18 why do you have a tank pointed that way? 36:19 And they said, well, that's where the Pakistani camp is. 36:23 So we got to be ready in case they attack us. 36:25 I mean, that was our task force, the military task force. 36:28 So we were obviously operating independent of them 36:31 as a joint special operations task force, 36:33 but that's the UN, the friendly forces 36:35 that were on the ground, very complex. 36:37 So we got in there and tried to build that, 36:40 our situational awareness, build the intelligence picture 36:43 of what they were seeing, and they didn't have a lot. 36:46 Again, they were kind of getting overwhelmed by Adede 36:49 and his, this effort that had been growing all summer. 36:52 And this whole thing got triggered by Adede, 36:55 started to attack U.S. forces 36:57 and planted an anti-tank mine 36:59 and killed four guys in a Humvee, 37:01 and that triggered our task force being launched. 37:04 So the U.S. guys are very small, 37:05 trying to react to this tide that's growing against them. 37:09 A million people in this city. 37:10 So it was a pretty huge, pretty huge resistance. 37:13 And so as we started getting our feet on the ground, 37:15 we were talking to the US military that were there. 37:18 They had a target list. 37:19 They said, there's this office building 37:20 that we think a deed's guys use. 37:22 And so we had that on the list. 37:24 And while we were getting our feet on the ground, 37:26 we were based at the airfield. 37:28 There was a mortar attack aimed at us, 37:30 aimed at our compound. 37:31 So three mortar rounds impacted, 37:33 a couple guys lightly wounded, 37:34 General Garrison said, hey, we're not just going to take this lying down, so what's the 37:39 top target? 37:40 It's this office building, so we went and hit it that night, just to kind of show the 37:43 flag. 37:44 Well, that's where we kind of learned some lessons on the complexity of a UN operation 37:49 and the complexity of Somalia, because we found a couple guys in there. 37:53 We detained them, did our standard package at night, the assaulters assaulted the building, 37:58 we went in at night, performed the security perimeter, and then we extracted with 38:02 some prisoners. 38:03 got back to the compound and found out they were U.N. employees, that the U.N. used this building as 38:08 an office building. Yes, it was owned by a Deeds guys. It was owned by his number one guy, Osmond 38:14 Otto. He owned the building, but he leased it to the U.N. So the U.N. used it as an office building. 38:19 So that's what we figured out. This is going to be a little more complex than just, 38:23 just going and striking the target. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Man. Where do we go from here? 38:33 So then we continue to refine our intelligence. 38:37 We had kind of a pickup team, and you look back 38:40 on the things, the incredible capability we had 38:42 during the war on terrorism. 38:43 This is all before that. 38:45 And so, again, Washington had been paring our task force down. 38:49 So instead of giving us an AC-130 38:51 and our normal intelligence platforms, 38:53 they gave us a Navy P3 Orion sub-hunter. 38:56 Great guys, some great systems, 38:58 but they'd never worked with special operations before. 39:00 They'd never done man-hunting before. 39:02 And so they were trying to do reconnaissance 39:04 around the city and locate a deed. 39:06 We had other scout elements out. 39:07 We started developing human intelligence, 39:10 you know, falling back on the old standard intelligence systems 39:13 and putting spies out there and trying to find it. 39:15 And we made some progress with that. 39:16 And we started to get some more hits. 39:19 We got identification that a deed was bedding down 39:22 at an old army barracks one night. 39:24 So we hit that. 39:25 But again, just the nature of how our template worked. 39:28 It was a great template, but it had some pros and cons. 39:31 and one of the cons was the assault force would go in first, 39:34 but that would let everybody know on the ground, 39:37 know that we were coming before this perimeter 39:39 could get sealed off. 39:40 And so a deed was able to squirt out 39:42 and get off that objective before we got him. 39:44 And so we had a little bit of frustration with that, 39:46 trying to track him down. 39:47 Again, he was very canny. 39:49 He was hiding in a very good way, 39:51 never used the radio, 39:52 never provided any signal intelligence, 39:54 only used his family, his messengers to coordinate, 39:57 so very difficult to track him. 39:59 But our human intelligence started to gain some leverage 40:02 as we went through things. 40:04 Now, the other thing that didn't happen was, 40:06 General Garrison said, and we knew this all along, 40:09 you're not gonna end this problem by taking out one guy. 40:12 This is a very united clan, the Habergeter against the UN. 40:17 They're very united now because we've been fighting them. 40:19 And so you're gonna have to take out the network. 40:22 It's gonna have to expand that. 40:23 So Washington finally agreed to do that. 40:25 And that's when we were allowed to start targeting 40:27 some of the other key players in Adeed's network. 40:31 And the movie Black Hawk Down opens 40:33 with us taking out Osmonado. 40:35 And he was the chief financer. 40:37 He was the number two in the Habergatter clan 40:39 and in Adeed's group. 40:41 And so we finally were able to start targeting him 40:43 and watching him. 40:44 And he had not known that he was on the target list 40:48 that we'd expanded. 40:50 So he was kind of moving around openly. 40:51 And we saw him, our intelligence saw him 40:54 at a mechanic, a garage complex that he owned. 40:59 And so we launched in the daytime, hit the target. 41:03 Unfortunately, when we got there, 41:04 the only guy we found was one of the Somali, 41:07 one of their enemy militia tribe guys 41:09 that were chained to a tree by the neck. 41:11 And he was the only Somali happy to see us that day. 41:14 And when we released him from being captured 41:16 by Adid's forces, but we missed Otto. 41:20 And interestingly, I found out years later, 41:22 because as you know, we got efforts going on Somalia now. 41:25 Some of my friends at Aseel actually made friends with Otto decades later 41:30 and Otto took him back and showed him the hole that he squirted out. 41:33 So he had a hole right underneath his desk and a tunnel 41:36 and he had jumped in that tunnel and squirted out. 41:38 So he was there. 41:39 We just missed him before we could detain him. 41:41 Holy shit. 41:43 But then about three days later on September 30, late in September, 41:49 Otto was riding around town with one bodyguard in a vehicle and we picked him up. 41:54 And our helicopter, our scout aircraft, picked him up and we locked on him. 41:58 So we launched the assault force to take him. 42:00 And this was really an interesting mission because, as I'd mentioned, it was very flexible 42:04 and the commanders knew we don't need all hundred guys on the ground to take out just two. 42:09 So we just put in one assault team, they stopped the vehicle. 42:12 And this is what's shown in the movie, Black Hawk Down. 42:15 It's the opening sequence. 42:16 It's not really realistic to what we actually did, 42:19 but the gunships were able to stop his vehicle 42:22 in the intersection. 42:24 The assault force landed. 42:26 The bodyguard tried to delay them 42:27 in the kindler, gentler military of the time. 42:30 They shot him in the leg rather than kill him. 42:32 And then Otto himself ran into a building. 42:35 They began clearing the building. 42:38 The Tier 1 assault guys cleared the building, 42:40 finally found him, Somali, 42:42 hiding in the hallway and they said, 42:44 are you Osmondo? 42:45 And he said, yes, I am. 42:46 So then they took him up to the roof. 42:48 One of the Blackhawks came into the roof, 42:49 they extracted him. 42:51 And so it was a very successful mission. 42:52 That all took about 50 minutes to do that, 42:54 to stop the vehicle, search the building, find him, 42:57 get him out. 42:58 Well, this is one of the most interesting parts 43:00 of our plan is as I mentioned, 43:03 the rest of the assault force is in the air 43:05 because we normally did our missions 43:07 coming in from the air. 43:09 So this is a daytime mission. 43:10 We were up in the aircraft, 43:12 Mike Durant and Ray Frank were my pilots. 43:14 I'm in the same aircraft every time 43:16 we're flying in our formation, circling the target 43:19 in case we were needed. 43:20 But again, I mentioned we just put a small assault force in. 43:23 So the Rangers and the rest of the task force 43:26 are circling in our helicopters over the target. 43:30 And we're observing this. 43:31 So it gave me a ringside seat. 43:33 So we're candid left as we're circling, 43:35 and I'm on the left side of the aircraft. 43:36 So I could watch the whole mission go down on the ground. 43:39 I could see it progress. 43:40 But as that mission is going down in the intersection in the building, we could see all around the neighborhood 43:46 tens of thousands of people converging and the Somalis were not stupid 43:52 They didn't have technology but they would when they had an action going on they would burn tires in the street 43:58 Where that action was and then you saw the smoke and you'd get your gun and you would converge on the smoke 44:03 If I was a Somali militiamen and then they'd get organized and then they'd move in 44:06 but it took them some time to do that. 44:08 But we could see burning tires all around the neighborhoods 44:11 and we could see people assembling 44:13 and tens of thousands of people getting stirred up 44:17 and starting to move towards that intersection. 44:19 And as the clock started ticking past 50 minutes 44:21 as we're extracting Otto off that roof 44:24 and extracting the rest of the assault team off that roof, 44:29 you know, 20 to 30 guys, 44:30 now the Somalis are starting to close on that site. 44:33 And so our guys on the ground 44:34 are now having to engage Somali gunmen and our snipers who are riding the helicopters 44:40 overhead are starting to have to engage Somali gunmen coming into the area. So that was really our 44:45 first relatively big contact fighting the Somalis. We had a couple potshots here and there before 44:52 but this was the first time Somali gunmen had made it to the target and our guys on the 44:56 ground were fighting but fortunately we were able to it was going smooth enough that at 45:01 But about an hour now, we got everybody off. 45:04 So Otto goes out at about 50 minutes, 45:06 about 10 minutes of fighting as the teams 45:08 withdrawing to the top of the building. 45:10 And at about an hour, we lifted the last guys off 45:12 and the task force all returned back to base. 45:14 But I got a ringside seat of that. 45:17 And then the other thing that was going on is 45:19 as we're orbiting the target, 45:21 and we're not 1,000 feet, 45:23 we're down at rooftop level orbiting 45:25 because our door gunners were trying to support 45:27 and we had snipers on board some of the Blackhawks. 45:29 The Somalis are shooting at us, 45:31 shooting a lot of small arms at our helicopters. 45:33 And they're also shooting rocket-propelled grenades. 45:36 And we could actually, you know, hear them 45:38 whooshing underneath us or whooshing behind the aircraft. 45:41 But when we got back to base 45:42 and we did our after-action review 45:44 and hot wash of all that, 45:46 a couple of things we took from that, good and bad. 45:49 Good we took, as long as we were able to stick 45:51 to our plan and as long as we could execute 45:53 within 60 minutes, which was our goal, 45:56 we could stay a couple of steps ahead of the Somalis. 45:59 And we could deal with whatever they could had time to react. 46:02 They couldn't get those tens of thousands onto the objective within an hour. 46:05 It takes more than that. 46:07 So if things went smoothly and we could do that within an hour, we'd be okay. 46:11 We had enough combat power, enough in our plan that we could do that. 46:15 The other thing that we thought was they can't shoot us down. 46:19 You know, our helicopters are moving too fast. 46:21 Our pilots are too good. 46:22 We can deal with them and they can't shoot us down. 46:25 The right and the wrong with those lessons learned. 46:27 But that's what we took from that mission just days prior to October 3rd 46:33 What was your relationship with those guys while you were there and the movie it looks 46:39 almost 46:41 Like you guys don't get along at all 46:43 Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that 46:46 Certainly there there was as I mentioned earlier on when we first made it to Fort Bragg. There was there was some cultural friction 46:52 and I think that was mainly at the leader level and it and 46:57 It wasn't a crisis, it wasn't unhealthy. 46:59 It was just different ways of doing business 47:02 and trying to work through all that. 47:04 There were some personality issues at the leadership level. 47:09 Very relaxed, very special forces way of doing business 47:12 versus very regimented range of regiment 47:14 way of doing business. 47:16 And Mike Steele, our company commander, 47:19 former Georgia football player, 47:22 he's a great commander, great soldier, 47:26 but a very one-way monolithic way of doing things 47:29 in a very aggressive way, 47:30 and not necessarily a flexible way 47:34 where a lot of the leadership on the Delta side did business. 47:38 It's just different ways of doing business. 47:40 So there was a little bit of friction there, 47:43 a little bit of some of the operators viewing 47:46 some of the things that we did 47:47 in the Ranger Regiment culturally 47:48 as unnecessary or dumb. 47:52 and I'll give you an example. 47:54 You know, we stayed in our regular uniform, 47:56 no matter what, there was, 47:59 we were, it was August and September on the Equator. 48:03 So it was incredibly hot, but we never came off that. 48:06 I mean, they might, they might make an exception 48:08 let us get into our physical training uniform 48:10 or shorts and T-shirt for certain things, 48:12 but usually you're in your full camouflage gear 48:15 moving around. 48:17 Other units didn't do that. 48:18 They were senior leaders. 48:20 They dressed the way they wanted to dress and so big cultural things. Gotcha. Now 48:27 I will also say that Mike Steele didn't make all those calls and a lot of people don't know that and I've told Mike this, you know 48:35 You shouldn't get blamed for somebody else's 48:38 Decisions, but Mike approached it as if these are the orders from our commanders and from from other people 48:43 I'm gonna follow them and I'm gonna adopt them as my own 48:46 So a lot of the things that people thought were dumb going on like staying in uniform all the time or 48:52 Whatever it may be. They weren't Mike Steele's calls. I know that because I was with him 48:56 I was his fire support officer 48:57 So I'd be with him in these meetings and he was told you will do this and he would go out and own it 49:03 So all the guys thought these were Mike Steele's calls 49:06 But they weren't and all the Delta operators thought these were Mike Steele's calls now 49:09 Like I said, he didn't always help himself on on being just very straightforward and and you know 49:14 his personality, which is very similar to mine. 49:16 So I'm not really throwing stones at him, 49:18 but you know, a lot of misconceptions. 49:21 So all that to say, there was some friction at that level, 49:25 some cultural friction. 49:26 But I will also say that, and again, I was a lieutenant. 49:31 So a lot of the younger soldiers, 49:33 the operators did a great job 49:35 because they were all senior non-commissioned officers. 49:37 Did a great job of trying to bring them in 49:40 and develop them. 49:41 You know, we had senior NCOs as well, 49:43 But we had a lot of junior guys 18 19 20 year olds and they did a great job at mentoring them 49:48 They did they would they would do extra training with them. They would they would talk to them 49:53 We had guys from beat company that were now operators in C squadron Dan Bush 49:59 And he would come back and and provide really good liaison. So so I don't think across the board 50:04 It was two different groups doing this at all 50:06 There was some friction at cultural friction at the leadership level that fed into that. Okay 50:11 that. Well, before we get into the third, let's take a quick break. 50:17 You've heard me talk about Caldera Lab before and lately the product I've been reaching 50:22 for the most is the good. Between being a dad, hosting the show, traveling, training, 50:28 and trying to keep up with everything else, I don't have time for some complicated 50:33 skincare routine. I don't want 10 steps. I don't want a cabinet full of products 50:37 and I don't want something that takes a bunch of time every morning and every 50:42 night. I just want one simple product that actually does something. 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It's on your bank account. It's on your kid's school forms. The pizza place. 52:15 The dating app. The guy who sold you your truck. One number in every part of your life is wired to it. 52:22 That's not a phone. That's a map to your front door. And it's for sale. 52:28 Glacier gives you burner numbers. Any US area code you want. Hand it out. Use it. 52:34 In the second it starts filling up with spam calls or somebody you'd rather not hear from again, 52:39 you delete it. It's gone. Make another one. 52:43 That's the loud half. Here's the quiet half. 52:46 Right now, sitting in your pocket, your phone is talking. 52:50 Apps you're not even using are calling out to servers you've never heard of, 52:55 telling them where you are, what you look at, what you buy. 52:59 You never approved it. It just happens all day 53:04 every day 53:05 Glacier secure DNS cuts those calls before they connect not after before two days after we launched. I checked my own phone 53:16 837 trackers blocked 53:19 Before lunch, this is intelligence grade protection 53:22 the kind of thing that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars of phone and 53:28 and only went to people with clearances. 53:30 Now it's an app, and it could be yours. 53:33 And I wanna be straight with you. 53:34 I'm not reading somebody else's ad. 53:37 I'm a co-founder of this company. 53:39 I put my name, my money, 53:41 into year of my life and to building this. 53:44 Alongside the people who did the work for real. 53:46 I use it every single day. 53:49 Install the app, hit connect, and you're protected. 53:53 That's it. 53:54 It's that simple. 53:55 theglacierapp.com or find Glacier in the App Store. 54:01 Remember, privacy is in paranoia, it's protection. 54:12 All right, Jim, back from the break. 54:14 Wanted to cover, you wanted to cover a little bit more on the friction stuff. 54:20 Yeah, as we were saying before, again, I was a lieutenant, 54:23 so I wasn't dealing with everybody face to face, 54:27 But there are a few guys I got to know and you know in a big battle like that with all kinds of personalities really really strong 54:35 Individuals and personalities. There's gonna be people talking about what happened and why it happened and I think a couple of things were 54:41 We were all young guys. We you know the Rangers we had 18 19 20 year olds 54:46 But everybody was in their 20s and and really young and and obviously you mature from that and one of the things 54:51 I found over the years I have gotten to be close now with some of the guys 54:56 including Delta operators, you know, over the years, 54:59 over the decades, because it's a very small group. 55:03 We're talking, even if you include the air crew, 55:05 it's less than 150 people. 55:07 So it's a very small group that was on the ground 55:09 that that, you know, that day, 55:10 even though I've met like 3,000 people 55:12 that said they were on the ground that day. 55:14 I'll bet you have. 55:16 You know what I mean. 55:18 But there's some of the Delta operas 55:19 I got very close with. 55:20 And so one of the guys that I admire the most 55:23 out of that whole group is Norm Hooten. 55:26 and, you know, we'll talk more about Norm later on, 55:28 but, you know, I never personally had 55:31 a negative encounter with him, never, 55:33 but I observed his interactions, 55:35 and there's a thing in the movie about him 55:37 getting called out for having his finger 55:38 on the trigger by Mike Steele, 55:40 and I was there when that happened, that did happen. 55:42 I mean, it wasn't- 55:43 Oh, that's a real thing. 55:44 That's a real thing, that actually, 55:45 I was standing there when it happened, 55:47 Mike said, hey, you know, your weapon's on fire, 55:49 and Norm's not on safe, and Norm said, 55:52 this is my safety. But never had a negative interaction with him. Just thought the world 55:58 of him, you know, even then, he was an iconic guy. But I've gotten to be good friends with 56:02 him. And I really know, and he's like I said, he's one of the guys that I admire the most 56:06 out of the task force now. And what he said to me about a year ago was, you know, it 56:11 was really cool being in the unit I was in, it was cool being in B company and 56:16 cool being a helicopter pilot. But what the main thing is that we were all together 56:20 there as Task Force Ranger. 56:22 I mean, that's the important thing. 56:23 And I think most people, 56:26 even though you got some strong personalities, 56:28 expressing viewpoints, 56:29 I think most people now that we've matured in age 56:31 and look back on that, 56:32 I think most people feel that way, 56:34 that being in that Task Force was the main thing. 56:38 The rivalry's gone. 56:40 At least at the personal level, right? 56:43 You know, between veterans of that fight, so. 56:45 Yeah, that's good to hear. 56:47 Yeah. 56:48 So let's talk about the day of, yeah. 56:51 So October 3rd, we'd gotten a little bit of a break because again, this is kind of how 56:56 life went. 56:58 As you know, trying to develop these intelligence driven targets with triggers, we would start 57:03 to get good intelligence on something going on. 57:06 And as that would develop, then we had to be standing by to react to it. 57:10 So in the 72 hours prior to October 3rd, 57:15 three different times, we started to stand the task force up 57:19 even to the point of get your gear on, 57:21 get in the helicopters, engines turning, scratch. 57:24 You know, that kind of thing 57:25 because the situation wouldn't warn us hitting it. 57:29 But constantly chasing intelligence like that. 57:32 And so that happened three times 57:34 within a 48 to 72 hour period. 57:36 So they said, hey, Sunday afternoon, 57:38 you still got to be ready 57:39 but let you go to the beach, get in your PT gear 57:43 and mess around a little bit. 57:44 So we went over to the beach, did some things with that, 57:48 kind of taking it easy. 57:49 I came back and I wanted to go get in one of the air conditioned 57:56 huts that they had. 57:57 Now, we didn't have air conditioning. 57:59 We were living in the big hanger altogether. 58:03 But some of the guys, the pilots, were living in these air conditioned huts. 58:07 and I was all about that because, you know, 58:09 our lives were in their hands, 58:10 so I wanted them to have a good night's sleep. 58:12 I was all about that. 58:13 They felt guilty about it, but I'm like, no, 58:15 don't feel guilty, we want you sharp. 58:17 But I want to go over there and get in one of those huts, 58:19 get to Macy for a few minutes. 58:21 So I kind of snuck away a little bit. 58:23 As I came back from that, 58:24 I saw everything spinning at the operation center. 58:28 I knew I was already late, so I ran in there, 58:30 yep, developing a target. 58:33 They had one of our human intelligence guys 58:35 had come forward and responding to the bounty that we'd put out on a deed. You know, responding 58:41 to that saying, I'll give you information. But it's not a deed, but it's all of his leadership 58:48 was meeting. Everybody except him. And they were meeting at this building right in the middle 58:54 of their territory, right in the middle of the Bacara market. Half million people living 58:58 in this ghetto, right smack in the center of that smack in the area where they had a lot 59:03 of their militia presence. 59:05 In fact, as we started to surveil the target, 59:08 get eyes on it from the air, 59:09 we could see they had a lot of security in place. 59:12 They were pretty smart. 59:13 They did advanced party stuff. 59:15 They would have, you know, lookouts, 59:17 a pretty good security. 59:18 And so we saw all those things developing. 59:20 And so we knew that there was a lot of security 59:22 in place for this big meeting. 59:23 And so that was the target. 59:26 And as we started to spin that up, Task Force, 59:30 it's about three o'clock in the afternoon 59:32 that this is happening and the meeting is going to take place around then. 59:36 So we got to the point where we load the aircraft and the engines are starting to turn. 59:41 And then they said, hey, everybody off the aircraft, but as we're walking back to the 59:46 hangar, you know, no surprise, been through it, they said, ah, key leaders come to the 59:50 talk. 59:50 So we went to the talk and what had happened was the human intelligence source, they had 59:57 told him to go park a vehicle in front of the building to 60:00 market for us. Well, he was too scared to go down there. So he 60:04 was a block up. And we figured that out. They started to 60:09 scratch the mission. But as they're scratching it, they were 60:12 talking to the guy and they're like, go down and park in front 60:15 of the building. So we did. And he went down and parked, put 60:18 his hood up, had a big X on the top of his of his truck 60:21 for our our aircraft to be able to identify him. And the 60:24 conditions were set when he did that. 60:27 So back to the aircraft, little bit different that day. 60:30 That was actually like the seventh mission that we'd done 60:33 and a little bit different that day. 60:34 General Garrison, I'll never forget that. 60:37 General Garrison came out and was like shaking guys' hands 60:39 as we're getting on the aircraft. 60:40 He'd never done that before. 60:42 But again, we knew there was extra security on the site 60:44 and so it wasn't gonna be just one or two guys 60:47 we're dealing with. 60:48 It was, they were estimating 30 to 50 security 60:50 already on the site already, plus their militia forces, 60:55 a significant portion of them really close, 60:57 like within four blocks. 60:59 So we knew, you know, it was a, it was a... 61:03 Was there an estimate on their security forces 61:05 that are staged four blocks away? 61:08 Thousands, thousands and thousands, 61:11 because the Somalis had standing militia. 61:14 They had guys, that's all they did. 61:16 But then pretty much because of the state of Somalia 61:19 it was in constant civil war, everybody had a rifle. 61:23 You know, the government fell much prior to that, like in 1990. 61:28 And all their army that had been supplied by the Soviets, 61:31 all that equipment and weapons and ammunition, 61:34 the population just took it. 61:36 So there was everybody had machine guns and AKs 61:39 and ammunition, everybody. 61:40 And so what they would do is they're fighting their civil war. 61:43 The militiamen are rolling around fighting, 61:44 but then everybody would, you know, like minute men, 61:46 they would grab their guns and come and get in the fight. 61:49 And so we knew right in the middle of that territory, 61:51 population of half a million, 61:53 you know, people don't believe me when I say 61:54 tens of thousands of people involved in this fight. 61:58 But it was a neighborhood of 500,000 people 62:00 and everybody, all the males are armed, 62:02 like from 12 and above. 62:04 So it really was thousands and thousands of people. 62:07 And right in that area, that's the hornet's nest, 62:09 we were gonna go and stir up. 62:10 And we knew that. 62:12 In fact, there's a part of that where this kinder, 62:18 gentler, our gunships, our helicopter gunships, 62:21 as you know, carry Gatling guns 62:22 and they carry 2.75 inch rockets. 62:25 And they would not let us, 62:27 they would not let the helicopters load the rockets 62:30 for most of our missions. 62:32 They say that's too, too much firepower for inside 62:35 the city, kindler, gentler, early nineties. 62:38 And I would always ask, I'm like, 62:39 Look, can we just have them loaded in case we need them always get turned down as we're going out the door the commander 62:46 General Boykin said 62:48 He called me over and he goes hey, they're gonna have rockets on today 62:51 And I thought and I'm thinking I smile I said that's good and I thought yeah, that means it's serious 62:57 so 62:58 Little things like that were going on, you know, we knew the picture 63:01 But like I said general Garrison came out with us shook our hand as we're getting on the aircraft 63:04 And then I'll never forget, you know when we finally got the it's famous from the movie 63:08 We got the brevity code, the code to launch, which is Irene. 63:13 When that came across the radio, I mean, guys were cheering. 63:17 You could hear them cheering over the noise of the helicopters. 63:19 Because we knew we were going to brawl. 63:22 Wow. 63:24 So when you got over the target to fast rope end, 63:28 you had to make a decision. 63:30 Night vision, ammo, grenades, water. 63:34 What did you pick? 63:35 Yeah, absolutely. 63:36 So that's one of the things that people don't understand, you know fast roping is a great technique as you know 63:42 But it's not designed to do with a hundred pounds of gear on because it's your strength of your arms 63:48 keeping you on that rope and 63:50 It's okay from 10 feet, but from 90 feet. That's pretty serious and we were loaded down 63:56 As as much as you can carry 63:58 So what you got to do is say I can only carry so much and 64:03 And what am I going to carry? 64:04 Am I going to carry water? 64:06 Am I going to carry night vision? 64:08 Or am I going to carry more ammunition? 64:10 And if I'm going in at 3.30 in the afternoon, 64:13 and I'm only going to be on the ground for an hour, 64:15 I hope, 64:16 then I'm not bringing night vision. 64:18 I'm bringing a grenade, 64:19 or I'm bringing more ammunition. 64:21 And those were literally the decisions that we'd have to make. 64:24 Now, people can say we made a mistake. 64:26 I would love to have had night vision 64:27 in the fight that was coming, 64:29 But that's the decision that I had to make and we all made that decision so more ammunition. I didn't even have water on me 64:37 I had ammunition grenades 64:40 In my case in most of the guys cases. They had some sort of configuration like this 64:44 We had body armor, which was much heavier than it is today 64:48 It was the original version with porcelain plates in the front in the back 64:52 We had just gotten it issued for this mission. So a very heavy body armor 64:56 we had ammunition. In my case I had a man-pack radio that I had to carry on my 65:03 back about the size of a cinder block roughly and I had two other smaller 65:07 radios about the size of a brick. I had batteries for that and I had medical 65:13 gear and so that's that's what I took and my and my weapon. That's what I 65:18 took. But again that's about as much as I could slide down that rope with. 65:22 I would love to have had night vision. Like I said, I should have had water, but 65:27 Those are decisions that we made and that's why we made them. So that's what that's what we did when we fast-rope down 65:33 On this mission. Where do we go from there? 65:39 Well, one of the interesting things is and I these are some of the things I remember clearly 65:43 we took off from the airfield and the the target building was like to our northeast back up in the city and 65:50 But we flew out along the coast out to the west away from the target. 65:54 I couldn't exactly understand why until we turned and the sun was right behind us. 65:59 So like people have been doing, soldiers have been doing for thousands of years, we came 66:02 out of the sun. 66:03 So we came out of the sun. 66:05 And then one of the things that's really crazy that I've determined about this or 66:09 learned about this over the years is in my memory, I clearly remember flying over 66:15 the target from the west. 66:16 I'm thinking about it right now and to me we're flying from the west over the target when you watch the video 66:21 We took a right turn and came in from the north and I just don't remember that turn 66:24 And so it's weird how your memory may not even be right even even when you're looking at it 66:30 But we did we flew out of the west out of the sun took a right turn came in from north to south 66:36 The assault force hit the target. They were able to land mostly in the street and get right off and an assault right into the building 66:42 It was a multi-story 66:43 apartment type building, they went over the wall throwing flashbangs. In spite of everything 66:51 they were able to achieve surprise and shock and penetrate right in that building and start 66:55 clearing it, detained all the guys that they were after. The security forces did not fight 67:01 right on the objective, they kind of pulled back into the neighborhoods, but then they 67:05 started taking immediate pot shots, especially from the north side. About two minutes 67:11 After the assault force landed basically on the building the four Blackhawks carrying the four elements of Rangers came in and again 67:19 I went to the southeast corner the helicopters hover over each corner fast-rope guys down and we established that security perimeter 67:27 There was some issues as we went in not only that we were high 67:31 We were extremely high and had nothing to do with the pilots just 67:34 Based on the multi-story building. We're still at about 90 feet having a fast-rope down 67:40 But there was a lot of dust kicking up and anybody any pilot knows that you have to have a visual reference point on the horizon 67:46 especially to be able to maintain a hover and a helicopter and 67:50 Not possible in a dust cloud 67:52 So the fact that any of those pilots could hover is a miracle 67:57 but one of the helicopters wasn't able to keep a real good hover and 68:01 As that helicopters move and as he's trying to keep that hover the fast-rope that gets kicked out 68:07 you know, you know this but 68:10 you've got to jump out onto the rope. 68:12 It's not on you as you're going down. 68:15 You got to jump from the helicopter, catch the rope 68:17 and slide down in essence. 68:18 At least commit your weight to it. 68:20 And so as that helicopter is moving, the rope is moving. 68:25 And so very difficult to catch that rope 68:27 while it's moving 90 feet in the air. 68:28 And one of the guys, PFC Todd Blackburn, 68:30 missed the rope and fell. 68:32 But so we got a casualty now, fell 90 feet, 68:35 got knocked out. 68:37 So we got a casualty now, 68:38 But we've got the entire security force in on the ground the assaulters are doing what they need to do 68:44 Another thing that happened from the dust was one of the assault helicopters the initial ones 68:50 Couldn't land because of the dust so he had to peel off and land about two blocks away 68:54 And then those guys are now recovering into the perimeter 68:57 They knew where the target building was they made their way to it 69:00 But we're trying to sort things out and now we're getting for the first time some resistance 69:04 mainly on the north side, right away. 69:07 The security forces are starting to shoot back. 69:10 But we're in position. 69:11 It's not anything that we couldn't handle. 69:14 How long is it before, how long is it from 69:17 Delta starting to take the building down 69:19 to you guys faster up and in? 69:21 Less than two minutes. 69:22 Less than two minutes. 69:23 I'd say a minute, maybe a minute and a half 69:26 at the most, and that's just helicopters 69:28 coming in flaring and getting set for those ropes. 69:32 But, you know, they're on the ground. 69:36 We've got helicopters orbiting with snipers in place. 69:39 So that's all set. 69:41 And again, the dust is settling. 69:43 But, you know, again, in a period of three or four minutes, 69:46 we've got the whole force on the ground. 69:48 We've got it locked down. 69:49 Again, getting some resistance, 69:51 sorting some things out, but nothing we couldn't handle. 69:53 And they were able to do what they needed to do, 69:55 and they detained the entire force of targets. 69:58 I think it was about 12 targets, 69:59 12 members of the Deeds Group. 70:01 They've got them detained starting to sort things out 70:04 But again meanwhile the rangers outside and the security perimeter 70:08 We are starting to get some resistance 70:10 So we're dealing with potshots and it's starting to increase 70:13 You know the clock is the biggest thing in this and as that clocks running and times going on the level of resistance is 70:20 Increasing because the Somalis are moving toward the the action and there's more and more and so initially 70:26 It's guys stumbling into us Somalis and getting taken out pretty much immediately 70:30 but then they start to figure things out 70:32 and starting to build bigger groups 70:34 and come in and fight more deliberately. 70:37 The other thing that was really difficult 70:39 and really crazy for us, 70:41 and I still to this day find it insane, 70:43 is there's a number of civilians who just got caught in it. 70:46 I remember one old guy was coming from the grocery store 70:49 and he was just sitting in our position 70:51 about as far away from me as you are, 70:52 and he just got his grocery bags. 70:54 And when we'd shoot, he'd just cover his ears 70:56 and he was just hanging out, just waiting for it to end. 71:00 But then we had women start to walk through our position. 71:05 And Rangers, we'd actually be shooting down the street 71:08 in a gunfight with Somalis, 71:11 and these women would walk through, 71:13 and the Rangers would guns up and wait 71:16 for them to pass and clear, 71:17 but we started seeing them doing this. 71:19 And they were coming in, 71:21 locating us for the gunmen. 71:23 So, the Somali civilians were coming into our position 71:27 and pointing us out for the gunman. 71:30 And it's just amazing to me that, you know, 71:33 somebody would risk themself that way in the middle 71:36 of a firefight walking through- 71:38 No longer a civilian at that point. 71:39 I'm sorry? 71:40 No longer a civilian at that point. 71:41 Absolutely, absolutely, they were combatants. 71:43 But again, rules of engagement, kindler, gentler, 71:48 we weren't killing people like that initially. 71:50 Um, but, and again, you're watching these things. 71:53 These 18-year-old kids are watching these things. 71:56 I was watching these things, and just hard... 71:57 I cannot believe that we're in this gunfight 72:00 and this woman's just gonna walk right in front of our guns, 72:02 walk right amongst us, and then we start to see her pointing. 72:06 That's crazy. 72:06 Yeah, and that... 72:07 But not too long after that, Flip has switched 72:10 and anybody in the street was getting killed. 72:12 But initially, it's just amazing the discipline 72:14 and restraint that our guys showed with that going on. 72:18 And to experience that, 72:19 that people would be so brazen to do that. 72:22 But again, we're at about 45 minutes now. 72:26 I mean, I was just, you know, you've gone from no combat at all 72:31 to in the middle of the Hornets' Mist, 72:35 killing everybody in the streets. 72:37 Yeah, at this point, we weren't doing that yet. 72:39 There was a lot of contact, but we weren't hammering everything. 72:42 We were being relatively selective. 72:45 It's increasing, but yeah. 72:47 Even that. 72:48 Yeah. 72:48 That would, how are you handling it? 72:52 Yeah, it was, you know, for me, and I don't want this to sound like bravado, but it was 72:59 the apex of the lifetime of preparation. 73:02 I mean, I had all my life, I just wanted to be on a real mission, and I wanted to experience, 73:09 I didn't necessarily want to kill people because I'm a Christian, you know, I wasn't 73:12 in from that perspective, but I wanted to be on a real mission. 73:15 I wanted it to be actually on a combat mission, 73:18 not just check the block and say I was deployed. 73:21 And so we knew it was incredibly exciting. 73:24 I mean, it was a little, you know, 73:25 there was the tension there, 73:26 but it was just, for me, 73:28 it was like the culmination of a lifetime 73:30 to be actually on a mission, 73:32 especially with the Ranger Battalion, 73:34 especially in the JSOC task force. 73:36 And so, but I won't actually say 73:39 there was a lot of thought to that. 73:40 I mean, it was just do your job, you know, 73:42 do your job, don't fail these guys. 73:45 We had a pretty good responsibility 73:46 because my job was to talk to the sniper aircraft 73:49 and we had a threat to vector them in 73:52 and facilitate my guys at each position doing that. 73:55 So I was really focused on that. 73:57 I was focused on the three-dimensional aspect 73:59 of the fight and I was focused on making sure 74:01 that those snipers and we had the support 74:04 that we needed to support the guys on the ground. 74:06 So all these things kind of rushing together 74:09 but really focused on my job. 74:10 And I, I, I go back to time and again, that was the training of the Ranger Battalion is, 74:16 you know, we weren't that uncomfortable doing it. Even, even when bullets coming back our way, 74:21 we were very comfortable live firing. We live fired so much. And even when there's somebody 74:26 shooting back at us, we just were comfortable in that environment because we'd done it so 74:30 much. And that's all we focused on. So, uh, it wasn't, it wasn't that big a stretch for us. 74:35 The stretch was like civilians walking in amongst us. 74:39 Yeah. 74:40 That's very surreal. 74:41 We're like, we don't know how to deal with this and what do you do? 74:44 So that was the part that was a little surreal. 74:47 But I think everybody there wanted to do their job. 74:51 They wanted to live up to the guy to their left and right and not fail them. 74:55 And that's what we were focused on and things were moving fast too. 74:58 So you didn't have a lot of time to absorb what was going on. 75:05 There's so much conflicting advice about what to feed your dog. It's hard to 75:10 know who to trust. 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That's 50% off your first order at 76:26 sundaysfordogs.com slash SRS 50. 76:31 Sundaysfordogs.com slash SRS 50, 76:34 or use code SRS 50 at checkout. 76:39 What was, I mean, how did you know 76:41 when the Delta guys had secured the site? 76:49 Yeah, so they came out of the building 76:50 and we were right there. 76:51 I mean, the wall of the building was 10 feet away, 76:54 it was right, I could almost touch it right there. 76:56 So they just walked out, 76:57 started talking to us. We got a status, and I was on the radio too, so we were all linked together, 77:02 and I could hear what was going on. And so we knew 45 minutes in, they're ready to come out. 77:08 There was another piece of the task force that I hadn't mentioned yet, and we had a convoy. 77:13 So we had five-ton trucks and Humvees, and whenever we would launch in helicopters, 77:18 they would launch this convoy out. There's a platoon of rangers and about 10-12 vehicles, 77:24 And they would drive out and link up with us now the good news about that too is they had 50 cows and mark 19 grenade launchers 77:30 Mounted on the vehicle, so that was heavy weapons coming in for us. The bad news is again 77:35 This is before the war on terrorism unarmored vehicles 77:39 We put sandbags in them, but you're talking soft skin trucks and humvees like my f-150 77:45 So that was the bad news on that but but they arrived 77:49 So we got some reinforcements. We know we got an option to get out 77:53 the Delta guys start coming out, loading up prisoners. 77:56 They load up on the vehicles. 77:57 We load some of our guys on the vehicles, 77:59 but all this is happening 78:01 while we're dealing with more and more resistance. 78:03 It's still not anything we couldn't deal with, 78:05 but increasing, and we know the clock's ticking, 78:07 but we see things are starting to wrap up. 78:10 45 minutes, we're still good, we're under an hour. 78:13 So at that point, I was dealing with a gunman 78:16 that was shooting down the road at me 78:18 from about three or four blocks, 78:19 shooting into our position. 78:21 And again, my job, talked to the Blackhawks 78:24 that were orbiting overhead with snipers on board, 78:27 among them Gary Gordon and Randy Shuger. 78:29 And so I called the helicopter, the lead, 78:33 Cliff Walcott, pilot. 78:35 And that's who I would talk to. 78:36 And I said, hey, Cliff, I got a threat down here. 78:39 I'd like you to bring the snipers in. 78:40 And of course I'm using our military code to talk that. 78:43 But that's essentially what I said. 78:45 So he said, no problem. 78:46 And again, of course, the pilots are the 160th, as you know. 78:49 I mean, they're just as much warriors and just as aggressive as anybody on the ground and fantastic guys 78:55 I can't say enough good about him. So Cliff comes rolling in and 78:59 As he comes in they're looking for this gunman shooting and the gun it stops for a couple minutes 79:03 The direct we're not taking direct AK rounds anymore. So I told him okay end of mission go back up to a safe altitude 79:11 And I'll I'll call you if we need you 79:13 And Chris said I'm gonna come in for one more one more look and he's coming in from my right 79:17 the target building's behind me and he's coming in from my right coming you know 79:22 west west to east south of me and I look back and as he's coming around he's 79:28 gonna give the trees gonna try to come in low and slow to give the snipers a 79:31 good look at the road down in front of me and I look back at Mike Steele the 79:36 company commander and to check and see where we're at and we're loading we're 79:40 starting to load trucks getting ready to get out of there and when I turn 79:43 back around again, the helicopter's spinning. You know, it's spinning like an amusement 79:50 park ride or something, definitely unnatural. And there was some gunfire and things going 79:54 on, so I didn't hear the RPG hit it, but it got hit by a rocket propeller grenade. 79:59 And what has come out now is that Al Qaeda, at that time, as you know, Assam bin Laden 80:04 was just north up in Sudan, and he came down, sent his guys down to help Adid, 80:09 And they gave him some of the training they'd learned in the Russian Afghan War and taught 80:14 them how to modify rocket propel grenades to be able to shoot up in the air. 80:19 And that was just a recent development. 80:21 They'd shot down a UN helicopter the week before doing that, but we weren't tracking 80:26 all that completely. 80:27 At least I wasn't at the lieutenant level. 80:30 So one of these al-Qaeda gunmen was out there with a modified rocket propel grenade 80:33 and when Cliff came in low and slow, put a rocket propel grenade into him. 80:38 And he spun off and we watched him and then he disappeared behind the buildings 80:42 And then we heard the impact and saw the dust cloud rise. So we knew we'd lost a bird 80:48 So I immediately 80:50 Port that the captain steel is right next to me call goes out 80:53 We're still starting to move toward collapsing the perimeter and load the aircraft 80:57 But then probably within 30 seconds or a minute we get the we get the order from the command and control helicopter the commander 81:06 Okay change 81:08 uh guys that are on the convoy continue what you're doing the rest of the assault force the delta 81:13 guys from the building and the rangers on the ground pick up now and move over toward that crash 81:18 site and initially they took one of the ranger blocking positions tom did a muscles group about 81:24 1012 guys and they immediately ran over there and do the crash site because the crash site's 81:30 about four blocks away now as you know that's a very short distance but when you're in an 81:35 urban area and you don't really know where you're at because all I knew was the target 81:40 building. 81:41 I didn't know the surrounding area, a little bit difficult proposition. 81:46 You can't just run down the street and take a left. 81:49 You don't know. 81:50 So we start, you know, trying to figure out, get oriented to where we're going, where 81:53 the crash is and where we're going as we're policing everybody up. 81:57 And so that's what happened. 81:58 The guys started loading the convoy, the guys that were already on a few rangers 82:04 and some of the Delta guys loaded onto that convoy but the rest of us, you know, probably about 70 82:09 or 80 of us moving on foot down the street and people asked me why'd you do that? Well, 82:15 Mogadishu, I mean just a devastated city with no government or anything and so those streets 82:21 were just filled with rubble and burnout vehicles and very narrow alleys and you couldn't 82:27 get vehicles down, couldn't even get a Humvee down. So the convoy had to go on big multi-lane 82:33 roads and drive around, but we could walk through alleys. 82:38 And so we did that. 82:40 So we moved off on foot while the convoy started trying to drive down some larger roads. 82:45 But that creates a huge command and control problem. 82:48 Huge command and control. 82:49 Because again, we didn't exactly know where we were going. 82:52 We knew where it crashed, but we're kind of searching for it. 82:56 And as we're doing all that, there's all kinds of things going on the objective, 83:00 on the crash site. 83:01 and one of them is our search and rescue team 83:03 that we had waiting got put onto the site. 83:07 So they fast drove right onto the site. 83:09 They got Air Force PJs, they got some Rangers. 83:12 They pulled guys out of the wreckage miraculously. 83:17 You know, Cliff Walcott and Donovan Briley, 83:19 the pilots were able to keep that aircraft 83:20 just stable enough that it pancaked in 83:23 and all the guys in the back survived. 83:25 The nose went in and they were crushed 83:27 and they were killed, but everybody in the back survived. 83:28 So they literally pull guys out of the wreckage 83:31 and then they start fighting snipers. 83:34 Dan Bush was one of the guys I mentioned. 83:36 So he gets out of the wreckage, he gets up on a corner. 83:40 One of the other problems that we had is, of course, 83:43 the Somalis now are converging 83:45 on the original target building. 83:47 So when the helicopter crashed four blocks out, 83:50 they're in the middle of all that. 83:51 So it's to the Somalis strength. 83:53 Now, they're already assembled out there. 83:55 And so now we're dealing with this hornet's nest 83:58 around the crash site. 83:59 Immediately guys on the crash site are having a fight 84:02 and beat back attacks, get wounded guys out, 84:05 try to get the dead guys out. 84:08 Dan Bush goes up on a street corner, starts fighting, 84:12 takes a round under his plate and his stomach. 84:15 He's shot now. 84:16 One of the other guys has a huge gash in his face. 84:19 He's one of the snipers. 84:20 They pull out from the crash. 84:22 One of our little bird helicopters 84:23 makes an unbelievable landing 84:25 in the middle of all that wreckage. 84:27 You know, weaves his little helicopter in, lands 84:30 in the middle of the fighting, 84:32 his co-pilot shooting out the side 84:33 of the helicopter at Somalis. 84:35 The pilot helps get some woody guys 84:37 onto the skids of the helicopter 84:40 and then they take off with Dan Bush. 84:42 Wow. 84:43 The guy with a gash face says, 84:46 no, I'm not going, stays to fight 84:47 with his half his face cut open. 84:50 So that's just kind of the nature 84:52 of the guys in the task force, you know? 84:54 But that's one of the evacuations 84:56 they were able to do right off the crash site. 84:58 So that's what's going on as we're sorting that out. 85:01 We're trying to find it. 85:02 They're trying to secure that crash site 85:04 and deal with the wounded guys there. 85:06 A lot of chaos. 85:07 But again, what really strikes me in retrospect, 85:10 we'd rehearsed these kind of things. 85:12 We were so disciplined that we're dealing with chaos, 85:16 but you didn't see panic. 85:18 You didn't see chaos affecting the unit. 85:21 You know, we're just dealing with things 85:22 as they're coming. 85:23 And I really give credit to the guys 85:25 and the leadership of that unit for allowing that, 85:28 you know, for setting those conditions 85:30 to be able to take such a change. 85:32 Here you're going from a set piece, 85:35 JSOC raid to now you're dealing with a crash 85:38 and combat that's just going off the scale. 85:40 And so it's really a tribute to those guys. 85:43 Yeah, I'm no kidding. 85:46 What are you thinking when you saw the, 85:48 I mean, when you saw the helicopter crash? 85:52 Yeah. 85:53 Again, you know, as I mentioned, 85:55 and you're, you are just reacting. 85:59 You know, you're sinking to the level you're training. 86:01 There's a lot of shit going on. 86:02 It's a lot. 86:03 It's a lot. 86:04 Yeah, my stomach without a doubt was got tight right away 86:07 because I knew you're gonna have fatalities 86:10 in a crash like that. 86:11 And I knew every guy on board. 86:12 You know, I dealt with Cliff every single day in Donovan. 86:15 And then I heard the search and rescue team going in. 86:18 And one of my guys from A company, Ron Galliette, 86:22 came with me from A company, 86:23 one of my four observers and he got a sign 86:25 of the search and rescue team. 86:26 So now I know Galiette's on the ground, 86:29 you know, in this, in this chaotic fight. 86:32 And just a couple guys out there. 86:34 So now we got to get up there for all of them, right? 86:36 But, but I got this three year connection with Galiette. 86:39 So he's like my Ranger buddy. 86:41 So my stomach is just tight, 86:43 but you're still, you're just moving on training. 86:46 And so I'm trying to keep communications 86:48 with the aircraft, Cliff's aircraft was one of my birds. 86:52 So that's down now the other bird is rolled off and I doesn't I don't know where it's at because they're clearing the gunships to come in 86:59 But I'm the guy to talk to the gunships. They can they can clear them into the area, but not to fire 87:04 So I'm trying to work that I'm trying to get comms with the gunships 87:08 Trying to sort out what's going on 87:10 Yeah, Captain steel next to me 87:12 He's trying to get the all the Ranger elements to link up with the Delta elements now 87:16 We've never done this before we'd never like move through the city together in a fight 87:20 I mean, nobody'd done that. 87:22 So we're trying to sort all that out, 87:24 and do some command and control. 87:25 And I'll say, again, I have no problem bringing out warts, 87:30 but one of the mistakes in my view that we made, 87:34 and we didn't learn this from Vietnam veterans 87:37 who told us this was a mistake is, 87:40 you know, this is from centuries. 87:42 On the ground, when you have more than one element, 87:45 there's gotta be one commander. 87:47 You can't just say, well, the Rangers are professional, 87:50 and they're professionals, so they'll work it out. 87:52 It doesn't work that way in combat for anybody. 87:55 And so we made the mistake of having 87:57 a command and control aircraft. 87:59 And from a very precise target mission, I understand that. 88:05 But when the fight started to happen, 88:08 we didn't have one commander. 88:09 And so you got Ranger commanders, 88:11 you got Delta commanders, you got other elements, 88:14 and nobody's really, I am the guy in charge 88:17 and given orders. 88:18 You know what I mean? 88:18 Too many leaders. 88:19 Who do you think should have been in charge of that in my opinion the 88:24 Commander of the operation was the squadron commander from Delta, and I think he should have been on the ground 88:30 command in that or 88:33 We had some other senior ranger officers that were in there in the convoy 88:37 So there were options. They could have put more senior guys instead of just letting some captains try to work it out 88:44 And I'm not trying to be too critical 88:46 I understand why those decisions were made, 88:49 but the Vietnam guys told us. 88:51 They said, when you get in a real battle on the ground, 88:53 helicopters are a great tool, 88:55 but when you get in real battle, 88:56 it comes down to the same disciplines 88:59 and the same factors that the Spartans had 89:01 in the shield wall. 89:02 You got to have one commander commanding everybody 89:05 and everybody reacts to him. 89:07 There can't be any collegiate stuff going on. 89:09 So I think that's an issue that we had. 89:13 And I want to emphasize when I make these criticisms, 89:15 The beauty of it is, JSOC learned from that. 89:18 They took all the good and bad, and they learned from that, 89:21 and they retooled JSOC. 89:23 And so when the war on terrorism started, 89:25 they addressed all those things. 89:26 But I'm just gonna be honest, we made some mistakes, 89:29 and that's one of them we made. 89:31 I think I read in the outline too that you, 89:34 I mean, because of the rage you guys did 89:37 prior to this, it kind of gave up some TTPs. 89:41 It was some familiar, familiar, 89:43 they were familiar with how you guys are operating. 89:47 Yeah, absolutely. 89:48 And refer back to the Osmanado mission 89:51 is we did the same template every time. 89:53 We tried a few things. 89:54 We did some vehicle born one or two 89:57 where we'd ride in on vehicles 89:59 and trying to change the danger. 90:00 But really the task force would launch in our heavy, 90:05 with small helicopters and Blackhawks 90:07 and we'd launch and we would do that. 90:09 And we took that risk on this mission daylight. 90:12 We know we never want to operate in daylight we never never wanted to but based on the triggers of the target 90:18 And then we launched the same the same package in and I think that you know in retrospect that obviously allowed 90:24 Al Qaeda to look at our template and know that they've had a potential opportunity to bring down a black Hawk and that day 90:32 They actually brought down five black Hawks 90:34 And that's another thing that most people don't know that the five black Hawks were brought down that day 90:39 Thank thank the Lord three of them were able to crash in friendly territory 90:43 Inside the wire, but we lost two in the city that we didn't get back 90:48 But three crashed, but the enemy brought down five aircraft that they were all brought down by enemy 90:53 They were all brought down by the enemy. Absolutely 90:56 Shit. Yeah, that that search and rescue team that I mentioned they went right in on the site 91:00 Their aircraft got hit so hard and it got hit 91:04 catastrophically that while Rangers and guys were on the ropes going down, the pilot knew his bird 91:10 was doomed essentially, uh, Dan Gelata. But such a fantastic pilot and disciplined, he kept that 91:18 bird in a hover to let all the guys clear the ropes and then crashed back at the airfield. 91:24 Yeah. So, and another thing I, you know, I can't say enough about the pilots. I mean, 91:31 they are watching this from the air, watching birds go down and they never once 91:36 Left us never once faltered. I mean, you know 91:41 Aircraft will go and I've I've not had that in the rest of my career to be honest. I've had 50-50 air support 91:49 But they never once even went to a safe altitude 91:52 They were they were all fighting to get down on the deck so their door guns could get in the fight 91:57 And they're watching their guys go down 92:00 So it's just a tribute 92:02 Where do we go from here? 92:04 So we finally get to the crash site. 92:08 We had to go down a couple blocks to the east and then take a left and go up a couple blocks. 92:14 That's where the crash site was. 92:15 We thought. 92:17 And as we moved up there, as I mentioned, now you're over an hour. 92:21 How are you guys navigating to that? 92:22 Did you see the smoke in the air? 92:24 Do you see it? 92:24 Could not. 92:25 We were getting a general vector from the air. 92:27 A rollout recon? 92:29 Yeah. 92:29 Some of the aerial assets are trying to direct us, 92:32 but that's sometimes as much a hindrance as a help, 92:38 because they're telling you, 92:39 take left to the next intersection. 92:40 By the time it gets to you, 92:41 you're already past that intersection. 92:43 So that really was a problem for the convoy. 92:46 But for us, fortunately, 92:49 we only had a couple of blocks to go. 92:50 So we went down a couple of blocks. 92:51 We missed a turn, circled back, up a couple of blocks. 92:55 But the problem we were having 92:56 is that every second that was going by resistance is increasing. 93:01 So we went from a couple of potshots here and there, 93:04 and a couple of different gunfights too. 93:06 Now it's just a wall of fighting going on, 93:09 wall of fire coming in, 93:10 and we could see them coming down the alleyways. 93:14 I mean, just hundreds right around us and thousands behind them, 93:18 and we're trying to move and getting... 93:20 So the back of our group, the 90 or so guys were rangers, 93:25 and they had the machine guns and we could hear the back machine guns now 93:29 it is roaring there's no restraint we talked about rules of engagement there's 93:33 none of that anymore you know we're just fighting for survival and the 93:36 machine guns are going the range of platoon sergeants are controlling those 93:40 so it's not undisciplined but it's it's firepower going out trying to 93:44 trying to keep that convoy moving and alive that group and we start moving 93:48 our way up there and and now Rangers and operators are starting to throw 93:52 grenades, clear walls, there's guys popping up over walls. 93:57 And again, you talk about, you know, 93:58 what do you think and what are you feeling? 94:01 You're really in automated mode, I was. 94:04 I was just like moving like an automaton. 94:06 And I'd say this because I'd see things 94:08 and I'd react to them. 94:10 I saw a guy about a hundred meters down 94:12 in front of me, a Somali. 94:14 And it was crazy because he was jumping up 94:18 and running and jumping down. 94:19 and I couldn't figure out, why is he acting so stupid? 94:23 He was doing individual movement technique. 94:25 He was maneuvering on us. 94:26 But I had already started firing at him 94:28 before I, as I was thinking it, 94:30 I had already automatically fired at him. 94:32 I knew, but in my head, I was like, 94:33 why is he moving around so crazy? 94:36 You know, but so that's the cognitive in me 94:39 not catching up with my training. 94:41 I had already started shooting at him. 94:43 So a lot of that was going on. 94:45 And like I said, now you're getting to the point of 94:48 guys are having to secure your corner. 94:50 You go to a street corner and now you got to secure it 94:52 and you're fighting down the corner, 94:53 you're throwing grenades over the wall next to you 94:56 to clear that and trying to set up positions 95:00 as we moved and we started to close in on the crash site. 95:02 So I never made it to the crash site. 95:06 We were about two blocks. 95:07 How close did you get? 95:08 I got within two blocks, but I never saw it. 95:10 I never saw the crash site. 95:12 I was about a block and a half, two blocks short 95:14 because as our column started to move down 95:17 and started to close with it the front of our column got there and we integrated in with the search 95:21 and rescue team and the guys that were there took up defensive positions and then all the way back 95:26 we just started fortifying street corners and walls and buildings. Now the problem that I had 95:33 as a forward observer was I had to be able to see and what I was trying to do was I was trying 95:41 to get the helicopter gunships on the radio and bring them into the fight and I couldn't 95:45 I couldn't get them to respond. I couldn't get them on the radio. And I'm dealing with that. 95:50 Well, let me go back to Fort Bragg for a minute. When we were at Fort Bragg and formed the task 95:55 force, Rangers operate off FM radios. And the helicopters that we work with have FM radios to 96:03 work with us. But we were told at Fort Bragg, no, you're going to operate off UHF radios 96:08 because that's what the Air Force uses. And there was Air Force guys attached to the task 96:13 force and that's their radio okay but we said that's not a good idea let's stick 96:18 with our FM radios that we have trained with for years and we can rely on no you 96:24 this is an order you will take the Air Force UHF radio okay so we get up 96:30 there under the crash site and now I can't I can't raise the helicopters 96:33 well later on we find out that as you know when any aircraft crashes there's 96:40 an emergency transponder beacon on that 96:42 that goes off to broadcast the location. 96:44 It broadcasts on UHF and it Zed out 96:48 and overrode and jammed our UHF radios and blocked us. 96:52 But what me and my guys said, and this is standard policy, 96:56 it's not that I'm exceptionally smart. 96:58 We said, now we're bringing extra radios 97:00 because we don't trust this. 97:02 You know, you always have your backup. 97:03 So we had FM radio. 97:04 So as I'm getting close to crash, 97:06 I'm like, I cannot figure this out. 97:08 and my radio was working before, 97:10 reached down my headset, grabbed my extra FM radio, 97:14 there's my guys, there's my helicopters. 97:18 And so I started talking to my guys 97:19 on the FM backup radio. 97:21 They've got specific targets they want me to shoot. 97:24 I get the helicopter gunships on the line. 97:27 I relay that information for them. 97:28 I put the word out to everybody around me, 97:30 let's put out visual signal panels 97:33 and mark ourselves so that we're gonna be safe 97:35 from the helicopters and bring them in. 97:36 But I told the helicopters, the gunships, 97:39 I said, there are rangers on both sides of your target, 97:44 which is kind of unheard of. 97:47 And also, I'm asking you for to shoot, 97:49 like, within 50 meters of our guys. 97:52 Normally, it's 3, 4, 500 meters. 97:55 But I'm telling you that we need you to shoot 50 meters away. 97:58 And there's friendlies on the other side. 98:01 But they not even bat an eyelash. 98:03 They said, Roger got it. 98:05 They're coming in. 98:05 So I told everybody they're coming in and as we're waiting we can hear them coming the little bird helicopters coming at rooftop level 98:12 And I'll never forget because they flew by and they didn't shoot but as they come by 98:18 Every AK-47 it seemed like in the neighborhood pointed up at them and and going off like a popcorn popper or stones on a roof 98:25 I mean it was unbelievable the firepower 98:28 They're shooting at these helicopters and they didn't shoot and all four of them came by to do that 98:32 I didn't know they were gonna do it 98:34 but they came by dry on their first run 98:37 to make sure they could see us. 98:39 They weren't gonna risk shooting around. 98:42 So they, I mean, if you think about how recklessly 98:44 they exposed themselves to make sure they could see us. 98:48 And then I asked, I said, what's going on? 98:50 They said it was dry run, we're coming in hot. 98:52 Well, for me, the second those Gatling guns 98:56 started going, the battle changed. 98:59 And so we had been fighting to secure that perimeter and establish our, but the enemies now, I mean, we're not talking 100 meters, we're talking, they're right next to us, they're on the other side of the wall. 99:10 And that's the fight that we're doing. But when those helicopter gunships started shooting, they started taking out not just the guys around us, but the guys coming. 99:19 And that gave us breathing space. And so we were able to take out all the guys that were in around us, while the helicopter gunships are just mowing down everybody around us. 99:29 And I always say, you know, you just can't imagine the amount of firepower 99:33 that those little birds bring to a fight like that. 99:36 And I tell this one story to kind of illustrate it. 99:39 As the fight went on and the helicopters are shooting just all night 99:43 for the next 12 hours or so or 18 hours, 99:47 there's continual firing and engaging the enemy. 99:50 One of the helicopters went back to the base to get more gas and ammo. 99:54 And the pilot told the ground crew, he said, 99:56 Hey, I can't see out the windshield. There's something going on and they went to clean the windshield off and it was human remains 100:03 They've been blowing Somalis up so bad and flying through it that there was blood and and Somalis all over their windscreen 100:09 And so that just shows the violence 100:12 That those helicopters bring to the fight and we were just we were very thankful to God for it. Holy shit 100:19 It's unbelievable 100:21 When did you get shot? 100:24 so 100:24 So probably a minute after I had talked to the helicopters and they did their initial 100:29 run and I had to let them know, hey, you're on target. 100:32 Keep it coming. 100:33 And that, that's what they did for the rest of the, that's not just kept engaging. 100:36 But I said, you're good. 100:37 Checked with everybody. 100:39 I broadcast that and then it seems to me like seconds after that I could feel the 100:45 energy of three round there of AK 47 rounds that going over me. 100:49 And I was laying in the street. 100:51 And again, this is the problem is I had to be able to see. 100:53 So I'm in the street. I couldn't get inside guys. It's a you guys got to get inside, but I couldn't I had to be able to watch these 100:59 Impacts so I'm in the middle of the street, and I'm watching down the street, and I can feel these rounds punching over my shoulder 101:06 And there was a corrugated steel 101:09 Building next to me a little shed and I could I saw the bullets 101:13 You know the holes punching into the corrugated steel one two and then the third round hit me in the leg and 101:19 And so a guy had been behind the wall, just to my left, 101:23 and he popped up over the wall and fired down on me 101:25 from like 10 feet away and hit me with the third round. 101:30 And so that's when I got hit. 101:32 And again, it's probably a minute after the helicopters 101:36 had come in on their initial run. 101:38 And we're probably talking at about 10 minutes to four. 101:42 Now, we've been on the ground about an hour 101:44 and 20 minutes, somewhere in that range, 101:47 around four o'clock is when I got hit. 101:50 So the company commander and his RTO, 101:54 when the gunshot started, you know, 101:56 they moved into the building. 101:58 Were you the first one to be hit? 102:01 A lot of it was simultaneous. 102:04 So I know there was other guys that were wounded. 102:08 But in our area, our little one block area, 102:12 yeah, I was probably the first guy to really take a bullet. 102:14 No, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. 102:17 before I'd gotten to that point, we'd had guys going down. 102:21 So before I'd gotten to that point, 102:22 this is another event that really sticks with me. 102:25 As we're moving down the street, 102:27 before I'd even called the helicopters in, 102:29 we're trying to move up towards the crash site 102:32 and there was a ranger laying there in the street. 102:35 But this will show you the characteristic 102:38 of what we were trying to do. 102:39 We were so mission focused. 102:41 Normally your reaction is stop and give this guy first aid. 102:44 I could see he was bleeding in the hip, but I knew there was a medic behind me 102:48 I said let the medic. I'm in my head. Let the medic take care of him 102:52 We're moving to the objective. Nothing's gonna stop us. Let the medic take care of him 102:56 I stepped over him look down. It was one of my guys 103:01 And I had to keep going 103:03 Mike Goodell he'd taken a round in the hip and and I remember looking at him and he was pissed because he knew 103:09 He was out of the fight 103:11 He was pissed because you know he's swearing that they got me and I can't be in this fight
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