Air Force PJ: He Was Told to Stand Down. Cole Condiff Was Never Found. | Aaron Love

Senior Master Sergeant Aaron Love — Air Force Pararescueman, 22 years, five combat deployments — is the first PJ ever on The Vanguard Wall. Fewer than 500 people have earned the maroon beret. The pipeline carries a 91% attrition rate — the longest special operations selection pipeline in the DoD.

In 2002, Aaron quit on a pool deck at Indoc. He'd made it through Hell Night. He said three words to an instructor and walked out. What followed was five years in aerospace physiology, waiting for a cross-training window. At a poker game with PJs, his friend looked him dead in the eye: "What the hell are you doing at this table?" He went home. His wife was feeding their four-week-old daughter. She said: "Put the packet in. But don't come home unless you graduate." He graduated.

In 2019, Aaron was standing four feet from the open door of a C-130 over the Gulf of Mexico when Staff Sergeant Cole Condiff was ripped from the aircraft. He ran dive operations for two days. Side-scan sonar returned two shapes that looked like parachute canopies with a body mass behind them. Divers went down. They were two boulders. Cole Condiff has never been found.

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CHAPTERS:
(0:00) Cold Open: Aaron Love & The Cole Condiff Story
(6:04) Aaron Joins the Show
(8:34) What Is a Pararescueman? (91% Attrition Rate)
(9:51) Growing Up in Barberton, Ohio
(19:01) Ohio State, Factories & Hitting Rock Bottom
(27:57) 9/11: "This Is My Generation's Moment"
(29:05) Discovering Pararescue: The Air Force Recruiter
(35:04) Air Force Basic Training: Lackland AFB
(41:49) PJ Indoc 2002: Day One
(49:22) Hell Night — Extended Training Day
(53:32) "F*** You, I Quit." — The Decision That Cost Five Years
(1:00:43) Reclassified: Aerospace Physiology & HALO Support
(1:06:58) The Poker Game With PJs
(1:09:33) "Pass or Don't Come Home" — His Wife's Ultimatum
(1:13:00) Going Back: The Second Run at Indoc
(1:40:48) Dive School & Earning the Beret
(2:28:42) "The Only Spec Op You Need One Of" — PJ Identity
(3:19:24) Pedro 66: Knowing the Men Who Died
(3:32:45) "I Made the Decision to End My Own Life."
(3:53:30) Konduz: Mike Cathcart & Dignified Transfer
(4:09:00) "We Wrapped Him in the Flag Before His Brothers Walked In"
(4:20:48) Are You Gonna Kill Yourself? I'll Be Awkward.
(5:50:59) The Cole Condiff Stand-Down: Four Feet from the Door
(6:05:30) "Get Me the F*** Out of This Aircraft"
(6:21:42) Two Boulders. Cole Condiff Has Never Been Found.
(6:31:55) Calling the Air Force Out in Front of 200 People
(6:38:12) "I Was Hammered on the Plane Home. I Was Done."
(7:16:00) Sobriety, DMT & Becoming Someone New
(7:56:25) "The Black Pill Is a Lie. Have Hope."

CONNECT WITH AARON LOVE:
Ones Ready Podcast → onesreadypodcast.com

Instagram → @aaronlovesamerica or @onesready

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Transcript

Host 0:00

Hey bro, we made it happen. We did it. We uh you're a busy dude. We've got a lot going on too, but I uh I appreciate you. You know, it's funny right before we hit the record, we were talking about how important time is. Um, and I I really appreciate with everything that you've got going on, especially you know, now your new consulting job on Fox News and just you know, you know, just don't no stolen valor.

Aaron Love 0:21

They asked me on one time, it wasn't a paid gig.

Host 0:23

Hey, just don't forget us when you're secretary of defense, dude. You know what I mean?

Aaron Love 0:26

Like somebody made that comment to my wife. They were like, not I want Aaron to be the Secretary of Defense, not for Aaron, but because his wife Tara would just dress her ass off. Like she would immediately hit, like, people would be like, Who is dressing? The Secretary of War's wife. Like the liberal pages would be like, Oh, look at this outfit. Except it would be like super, they'd be like, Well, we tried to say that it was a 4,000 Louis top, but apparently she got it at Target. There's like a service that she found because she's like that.

Host 0:52

For those of you that don't get the joke, Aaron's been on Fox News a lot lately. Uh, we're gonna cover it later on in the podcast. Um, so before we get started, um we just wanted to give you a couple things. Uh that we're not sponsored by them by them, but uh Johnny Rush Eye from Johnny Slicks was on recently and he sent us a bunch of really cool products. So I thought, hey, dude, let's uh let's hand some out to a former Air Force dude with super good hair, bro. We're gonna just talk about my hair's all falling out and you got like a whole head of hair, you're on testosterone.

Aaron Love 1:20

It's like gunmetal gray, it looks good. Just that Irish lineage, brother.

Host 1:24

We got a beard wash. I know you don't have a beard, but uh, this is also a great um for for hair. Uh I take it from my thinning hair, so you should take it so your hair doesn't thin. Uh but it's also a great face wash and then uh a clay pomade. And then he just came out with a new chapstick and he broke it down on our podcast, but I didn't know this. But I guess most chapstick has like a form of alcohol in it. So when you put it on your lips, it actually keeps your lips dry. So you don't need more chip. Big chapsticks. Some of the bad chicks they got us. So uh we're we're giving you one of his chapsticks, and he uses all natural stuff. So you basically just use it when you need it. When you don't need it, it sits in the drawer, so you don't have to use it all the time. So yeah, man, we'll send these, we send these uh with you. Thanks, uh Johnny. We appreciate it, bro. Oh, yeah, thanks, man. That guy's a great human being, dude.

Aaron Love 2:02

Love it. Yeah, we've known we've uh so we we have talked to him, like we've talked to to Johnny and obviously Nick. We were talking about we had Nick on the podcast a long time ago and known a lot of the stuff he's.

Host 2:11

I don't know Nick, man, but those guys are killing it. They they uh, you know, Johnny's story is kind of a rags riches on the business side, and it's just it's super awesome to see to see him win. So before we uh dive in, man, we uh we give everybody an introduction. So we're uh let's introduce Aaron. There is a question that lives inside every man who wears the maroon beret. Not the question they ask you at selection, not the question on the forms, the one that only comes up when the music stops and somebody's looking at you like you were the last thing standing between them and the worst possible outcome. The question is simple. Did you do everything? In 2019, senior master sergeant Aaron Love was standing four feet from the open door of a C-130 over the Gulf of Mexico when he watched one of his guys get ripped out of the aircraft. The reserve parachute had deployed prematurely at the door, the jumper hit the frame, and then he was in the water. Aaron had his eyes on his chutes the entire time. He had a team of pararescuen behind him, combat veterans, a silver star recipient, 25 combined deployments. He stripped them of their kit, he stole life preservers off the aircrew, he was rigging people mid-flight, calling for airspeed, demanding the left door open, ready to jump, a precision, master directed rescue straight to his guy. He was told no. For two days, he ran dive operations in the Gulf as the only qualified dive supervisor on scene. Side scanned sonar, found what looked like two parachute canopies with a body mass behind them. Divers went down, it was two boulders. A cole conduff has never been found. But to understand how a man arrives at a moment like that, four feet from the door, watching and waiting and being told to stand down, you have to go back to 2002 to a pool deck at pararescue indoctrination, where a 22-year-old kid from Barberton, Ohio got into it with an instructor and he said he was done. He quit. What followed was years in a holding pattern, altitude chambers and high altitude airdrop missions, waking up at 0430 every morning to train for a pipeline. He'd already failed, while the guys he started with went to war without him. Then a poker game, then a wife who looked him dead in his eyes, passers don't come home, then four in doc classes, then the beret. The career that followed gave him everything the mission promised Hellman, conduce, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa. He worked casualties in places most people will never hear about and made decisions that most people will never be asked to make. He held the line on deployment as a team leader where a young element leader needed 24 hours off alert just to breathe. He stood in a bombed-out Russian building in conduce and prepared Sergeant First Class Mike Cathcart, 3rd Special Forces Group, for dignified transfer when the surgeons wanted to leave him as he was. He sat on the accident investigation board for his friend Peter Cranes and formally documented how a man he loved died. When Aaron left the Air Force in January 2024, he held the rank of senior master sergeant. He was an E-8. He had served as a flight chief of the 22nd Special Tactics Squadron at Joint Base Lewis McCord, commanding four nine-man special tactics teams. Before that, he rewrote the entire Pararescue Apprentice course at Kirkland Air Force Base and achieved the highest graduate rate graduation rate in the program's history. Multiple Air Force decorations, Afghanistan and Iraq campaign ribbons, and 22 years of active service across five combat deployments. Today, Aaron is a human performance advisor at and military liaison for Optimal, working alongside the U.S. Air Force Weapons School to build more resilient pilots and air crews. He co-hosts the Ones Ready podcast, approaching well over 500 episodes, and runs the Operator Training Summit, putting the next generation of candidates through their paces in person. He sits on the board of Veteran Bushido Brotherhood, a nonprofit connecting veterans who've lost their team and connecting them with a new tribe through martial arts. He has a purple belt in jujitsu. He's married to Tara, father of four kids. By his own description, blunt, abrasive, a man who makes everything feel like a fight. He doesn't miss the circus. He misses the clowns. Aaron Love, welcome to the show, brother.

Aaron Love 6:05

It's so good. You know, it's it's funny when you hear somebody read that stuff out, like immediately I'm critiquing it. I'm like, ugh. How dare no, no, no, that isn't exactly what I have. Like the amaz the he thanks Tim Kennedy and 50 grenades in a in a bag. Like that's now everybody's reaction. But I think that's that's a good thing. That's a good thing. I mean, I appreciate it.

Host 6:22

You know, we uh again, bro. I mean, you know, we do it to everybody, and you were gracious too, man. I I get everybody's like medical records, the resumes, not medical records, sorry. Not your medical records. I get everybody's DD214. I'm like, Aaron's uh has two broken shoulders, uh a lower back, lumbar displacement. No, Aaron's been dealing with ED for several years. No, man, we asked for everybody's like, you know, their military records because you you because of you know that incident, we want to try to get it right as we can. And you know, that's why we when I write these uh these intros, dude. I mean, there's they're all fact-based, man. And I get to say the things about people that they wouldn't say about themselves, and that's kind of like our thank you to you guys. It's awesome, man. You're our first PJ um on the show, dude. And yeah, it's a big deal. Obviously, it came up in the uh in the news more recently, but you guys really are the quiet, unsung heroes, I think, of the Department of Defense. It's one of my understanding and my research, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's one of the longest training special operations pipelines in the Department of Defense, and that says a lot. It is, yeah. Um, so I it's I think it's even longer than the 18 Delta course.

Aaron Love 7:21

It is, yeah. So there's a little bit of wiggle room. The 18 Delta course has the long course that they go to. Pararescueman actually used to go to the long course with the 18 Deltas, which would make it a little bit longer. The long course is be, I mean, it's named that way because it's the army and they don't come up with slick nicknames. It's because it's longer. They do a whole bunch of you know indigenous medicine and stuff like that. But even then, the brief timeline to get through the pararescue pipeline will say 18 to 24 months. But I mean, they I've seen it time and time again. We would have students that were on a four-year tour and they were re-enlisting just to be in the pipeline so that they could graduate. So it's a choose your own adventure game. If you have a couple courses that don't go your way, you get a couple setbacks. Like you're gonna be there for more than two years if you if you hit it pretty much back to back to back, like we were talking about yesterday. If you were to graduate a course on a Friday and then go into your new course on a Monday with no logistical hiccups, and I'm talking about plane flights and gear and all that other stuff. If you could do that, you could get it done in like 14 months straight. But I'm talking there are no breaks, like it has to be lined up, and that's not the real world.

Host 8:20

Yeah, and I it was wild, man, because I was doing a bunch of research um as we were getting close to the podcast. There just has not even been, there's not even that many pararescuen total that have kind of been through the course.

Aaron Love 8:29

It's the unclass numbers are right now, there's only about 200 active duty PJs, 61% of the pararescue community, pararescue and combat rescue officers. Combat rescue officers are a separate career field, but we work together. So it's not like a SEAL officer, a green beret officer. We wear the same beret, but they're completely different, different jobs with different capabilities. So the combat rescue officers and pararescuen form what we talk when we say the career field, that's who we mean. Even inside of that, there's only 200 active duty, two to 220, I think, are the unclassed numbers for how many active duty, about 61% of our entire community lives in the garden reserve in some right, in some form or fashion. But really, right now, like guys that are wearing the beret, that number always hovers right about 500. And even since we got the beret in 1966 and started putting people through the course, you weren't graduating that many a year. Uh, you know, if the if you told me right now that especially living, there are more than you know, 1500 PJs walking the earth, I would I'd be shocked. Wow. Like, I mean, it's really not that and my numbers are probably somebody's gonna fact check me in the there. There's a couple guys that know like pararescue history way better. There's a couple that engage.

Host 9:37

It's 506, bro. Get it right.

Aaron Love 9:39

Well, and they can do it, and they and like I'd love to argue with them on the internet, but their first message is like 1700 characters long, and it's like all of the background. And I'm like, all right, you're right, but you're still a nerd, I guess.

Host 9:50

Well, before we uh we we totally dive into some of the fun PJ topics, um, I really like to just kind of um tell your personal story as well as uh as that bleeds into being a PJ. So take us back to Barberton, Ohio and and paint us a picture of like kind of the house you grew up in and your family and that kind of stuff.

Aaron Love 10:06

Yeah, the magic, the magic city of Barberton, Ohio. Uh so it's northeast Ohio, it's right outside of Akron, right? So the Goodyear blimp is right down the road. The rubber industry in Ohio drew a whole lot of immigrants to it. My both of my grandparents on b on both sides of my family um were Irish. So, you know, my mom uh came from the Kilroys and the Quigglies. My dad, you know, lost his lineage a little bit before that. Dutch, Welsh, Irish, kind of like in there. But they all came over to Baltimore initially for shipbuilding and then migrated to Ohio when the rubber industry took off. Firestone, Goodyear. That's why the Goodyear blimps in Akron, Ohio, because we make rubber tires. That's that's what it is. So that's why Akron, the rubber city, Barbara in the Magic City, because it's this little suburb that popped up out of nowhere. Man, I am the white privilege kid you have heard so much about. Like I tell this story, Pararescue is great, the special operations community is great because of the diversity of experience of the people in there. You have guys that are living in their car and can't feed themselves for months ahead of time. They see a formation of dudes running by, they're like, I don't know, I'll try it. And then you have guys that go to Dartmouth and get like dual biochemical degrees and decide not to go the officer route because they want to do the job of a PJ, right? Like the swing inside of there is great. Well, brother, I am right out of middle America. My mom and dad, my dad was a fireman. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. I'm the oldest of six kids. We couldn't afford a picket fence because my mom was a stay-at-home mom and my dad was a fireman. But if we could have, we would have had a white picket fence as well. So, you know, grew up in the 80s and the 90s in Ohio, very patriotic family. Both grandfathers were in the Navy. Uh, fun story that I always tell. My grandpa Kilroy was a boiler repair man. When they had ships, it still had boilers. His job was to tool around the Pacific and find ships that needed fix. Well, he ended up fixing a ship that probably had my dad's dad on it. So our grandfathers probably met somewhere. They probably walked past somewhere in a ship, and that was a fun family thing that we figured out way, way later in life. We can't verify it, but it's a fun story to tell. And they're both dead. So what are they gonna do? You know, grew up in that area, played sports as a kid, got into swimming, you know, because it was what I was most naturally talented at, which is, I mean, that's saying something because I'm not naturally talented at anything. But I was the best swimmer, so I started doing that year round uh in like the eighth grade and then swam through high school. And swimming is actually a brutal sport, dude. It's not as easy as everybody thinks. Well, it ended up helping me down the road, you know. You know, those times in the the fun, it's funny those things that'll line up and you just have no idea what God's plan is. But my swim coach was actually a Marine Force recon, dude. And we would have these Saturday, especially during uh, you know, the swimming season was weird in high school, but uh and we also happen to be right next to like we had to compete with a school called Akron Firestone. Akron Firestone has produced like 15 Olympians, 200 all Americans. Like they're just they are the school in Northeast Ohio that is the preeminent winner, it's which means I won nothing. My times were like I would look at my times and I'd be like, I'm not competitive in my events anywhere in Ohio because of these people. But if I just move one state over, I'd be like a state level athlete. But it was just nowhere close. Like the talent pool is too high. So, but it was funny because we would do these alternate practices and he'd be like, Oh, we're gonna do this weird breath holding exercise, or we're gonna do this. You guys have to be able to tread water, and I'm gonna pass you a brick across that. And you know, some teams looked at us like, what are you guys doing? And you never really let on, but it was all water con exercises. And I was like, You learned this at dive school. Oh, and now like it, it was it was a funny moment uh at one point in my life. But man, grew up, it was it was great, decided to try to do the college thing. I went to Ohio State. I I love to say this about you know, Ohio State. They uh politely asked me not to come back after two semesters uh because of my grades. So I I love Ohio State uh, you know, as a football program. That's one of the few sports that I end up watching. So went there, came back home, and uh just was basically tooling around. Man, I was working at bars, I was bouncing, I was doing bar back work. Going back, like you you said there were six kids. Yeah. Where do you land them uh I'm the oldest brother? Oh, really? I'm the oldest. So it goes boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl. We're eight years apart because it's northeast Ohio, Irish Roman Catholic. In the winter, there's nothing to do. So that's what my mom and dad did. And then that's where we got six kids in eight years. So my youngest sister is only eight years younger than I am. But we had we went boy boy girl, boy, boy, girl, and all four boys actually went into the military. So my brother Brian retired shortly after I did. So he did 20 and got out. So I got in first because I was the oldest. My brother Brian, it's boy boy, that's Brian. Uh, he was in, he was an infantry dude, got a couple deployments, Harry deployments, and then ended up being a helicopter pilot, went walking warrant. So then he ended up being a 60 flight lead, and then he's out, he works for the FAA now. My next brother in line, Danny, is probably gonna be one of the youngest CW5s in Ohio. So he, same thing, started infantry, just kind of worked his way out of the enlisted ranks, ended up walking to 60, so he was also a 60 flight lead, and then he transitioned to the Army Fix Wing program, and he's been working that active duty in the guard, so the active guard job. He's actually deployed right now, uh, doing that gig. And then my youngest brother, Kyle, so that's Aaron, Brian, Danny, and Kyle. Kyle is a one of the first signals Intel cyber brothers in the army. So when they stood up those cyber squadrons, they were like, well, we need somebody to run the cyber dudes through this because we recruited them to be cyber guys, not to be army guys. And they don't understand there's a whole army game that they don't care about, like med pros and shooting and being in the army and wearing your uniform, and they need somebody to be able to bridge that gap. Kyle just happened to be in the right spot, uh, and he's there, but he's getting close to retirement too. So Danny and Kyle are both approaching 20 years. I think Kyle's within one or two.

Host 15:48

So man, I bet your your dad's proud, man. That's pretty cool.

Aaron Love 15:51

It's pretty cool, yeah. And it's it's cool too, having, you know, I didn't do the special operations thing right away, right? Like quit at Endoc and had a natural delay where I was waiting to go back. And that's when Brian and Danny were infantry guys, and Kyle was just getting it. He started off in like artillery or something. Kyle is the the use case for you don't have to do the same job in the military. He's like, he's you can just have as many jobs as you want. They'll just let you cross-train. You just put in this packet, you could totally just do something else. Kyle just did that. Like it, it it shocked us. Like we had these long pipelines and these long careers. And Kyle would just every two or three years would be like, nah, artillery kind of sucks. I'll teach you the schoolhouse, but then I'm gonna go do something else. I'll I'll look for an additional duty. So he's had like five jobs. So make the job work for you. Exactly. He's like, they're still paying paying me at the same rate. I might as well do a job that's more interesting.

Host 16:38

Your dad, uh, your dad was a firefighter for 30 years. I mean, what did you learn about service and sacrifice? You know, watching him go to work and work in the city.

Aaron Love 16:46

It was just growing up in the firehouse, man. So it was a full-time position. So uh, you know, it wasn't there are some you know, places in America where it's like volunteer, you know, fire, whatever. Barbon had actually had like a setup fire system, so it was a full-time system. He ended up being a lieutenant, he was a fireman the entire time, a fire medic, as a matter of fact. So he rode the EMS truck. Um, and again, like I never had the desire as a younger dude to kind of like follow in the fire footsteps. But growing up in the in the firehouse, like I got to watch people working out. Like my dad would have to leave, he would get called away from dinner, or he'd get called in, or something would happen. And it's just those little breadcrumbs that are like, oh, wait a second, you know, dad loves us and he's here at dinner with us, but somebody called on the phone and dad was like, hey, sorry, and mom's totally okay with it. Dad just grabs a bag and has to go to work. Sometimes it's benign, somebody calls off, but sometimes he would literally be going to a house fire to go help. But just growing up and seeing that those teams, like I grew up, those guys were our uncles, those guys were our, you know, support system. And it was the first time like proudly now I keep on that tradition. My sons have a bunch of people that they call either the bros or the uncles. And it's kids, you know, these dudes that I wouldn't hesitate if I had to go like walk out of a room, I'd be like, hey, hold this baby, I'm gonna be right back. And I would never think about it twice. Like they that's that's your bro. But I got to see that growing up, and I got to use my dad as the example of he had two jobs, he just crushed himself for the family, so my mom could stay at home and take care of the kids and paid for Catholic private school. And we never wanted for anything, we weren't rich by any means, but growing up in the firehouse, seeing the work that it took, watching what it is for a team to come together to actually do work, those were all lessons that really paid dividends later.

Host 18:29

Yeah, I always see wealth or riches. There's multi-layers to that, man. Just and money is only one part of the puzzle, man.

Aaron Love 18:35

I was a rich kid, man. God, I had a loving family. My brothers and I, we I still talk every single day to my brothers. We got a group chat. There's not a day that goes by that I don't talk to one of my brothers. When I was in San Antonio, I was there for a single day. I was in San Antonio for nine hours. I had dinner with my brother and with Trent in that day. I get to see them and talk to them all the time. My little brother Kyle's coming out to to Vegas here in June. It's fantastic.

Host 19:01

One of the things you mentioned when we were kind of prepping is that, you know, um, your family has a belief that every generation owes a debt to this country. Kind of where did that come from and how old were you when that kind of first landed on you?

Aaron Love 19:12

Well, it's grandpa Kilroy. I I don't think I don't think it would end. You know, I spent a lot of time. My grandma Kilroy, like I was my favorite. There's uh 17 grandkids in our favorite. My uh my grandma Kilroy, I was the favorite kid. So I was a second grandchild, but for whatever reason, my grandma Kilroy and I just clicked. Great home life, by the way. I love it. My mom, amazing Irish woman, best ever, maybe the man that I am. I saw my grandma Kilroy every single day until I was seven years old. Like she would come over and I would just be livid. There's a a story in our family about grandma Kilroy coming over and it's snowing out, and I was just freaking freaking out and like reaching for something, and they couldn't figure out what I was reaching for. Well, I wanted them to take me into the closet so I could get my snowsuit so that I could go with grandma Kilroy back to the house. Um, but you know, my I spent a ton of time with my grandpa Kilroy, proud Navy man. And it it was it was never a lesson. It was never, you know, you think about it like a Hallmark movie where my grandpa sits me down next to a lake and he's telling me about service. No, it was just something that's every day. We would see pictures on the as simple as a news story in between a college football game or something, some world instability, and you go, Well, hey man, here's the deal. You know, things are okay right now, but there's gonna be a time where they're not. And every every generation owes a debt to this great nation for everything that we have now in peacetime. That's gonna have to be returned somewhere. Like there's a ledger, and there's there's probably gonna be red on that ledger, and we have to ask the next generation to go and make the ledger whole again. I don't think I internalized it until 2011 or 2001, you know, when all of when everything started happening. Like that was the literally the first thing inside of my head was like, this is it, this is what the generation is gonna have to stand up. There has to be somebody, and it just happened to be me.

Host 20:51

So you go through high school and you know, you're swimming. What what was what was home life like with you and your brothers? Were you guys all competitive? Uh was it you know, yeah.

Aaron Love 20:59

Standards, I mean, tons of fights. I mean, running fist fights or other the love boys. My dad was the youngest of eight. We actually lived in my dad's dad's house. We lived in my grandpa love's house. So we moved in there when I was eight. Like they moved and they didn't need a huge house with kids anymore. So the Love Boys, which were notorious and barbered for being just rambunctious, stupid Midwest kids, we lived in the same house for something like 50 years. Like my little sister lives in that house now. Like that house is for now three generations deep in the love family. But we were all, I mean, look at everybody we won't went into the military, and it wasn't enough just to be an infantry guy that deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Like both of my brother Brian and Kyle did that. Danny went and did the same sort of rotation. Like that wasn't enough. They needed to be helicopter pilots and the first enlisted people in charge of, you know, whatever, and my own story. We all had that in us. It's just a little bit tough to manage when it's a you know, 11 year old, a 10 year old, because I'm only my my brother. Brian and I are actually Irish twins, so we're like 13 months apart. Like, I mean, so we were a grade apart in school. But when you had when you pack that yeah, testosterone into a small environment, yeah. Uh and your dad was in the military as well, right? So he was. He was in the army back at the end of Vietnam. So he was just young enough to wear Vietnam had passed. He was getting ready to get in. But by the time that he got in, so it was, you know, 75, 76 sort of time frame. He gets in for a couple years, did a stint in Germany, but everything was, I mean, we were, it was the post-Vietnam come down, you know, the things that they were doing in the military. There wasn't a whole lot of funding. And he was over in Germany, so he went through, you know, basic and airborne school and got all of his stuff ready to go, but had a quick three-year stint and then came back and then ended up doing, uh, before he was a fireman, he was doing ambulance services in Ohio, which is actually how he met my mom, who was working at the one McDonald's in Barberton, Ohio, uh, and came back. So he he was in it, but not really. They had military experience, but it was never a thing where that was constantly in your face.

Host 23:08

Yeah.

Aaron Love 23:08

And as a matter of fact, like he didn't even, my my mom and dad, it was never even a conversation in high school. I don't remember a single conversation of, hey, here's what I think I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go to college, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. There was never even a conversation I remember where my dad was like, Oh, what have you thought about the military? Have you thought about going into the military? That's what I'm gonna ask.

Host 23:27

Was that something that was like pressured pushed? Was it talked about?

Aaron Love 23:29

Never, yeah, not not even really talked about. I don't, I don't, like I was saying, I don't, I don't think I even remember, excuse me, like a conversation where he was like, Oh, you should check this thing out. It wasn't until really like September 12th or 13th that I kind of looked at my dad and I because I was broke, broke. I would like I could afford the bus there to get to my mom and dad's to eat dinner and spend the night the night before because I was less where I was living. But as we were driving back, I was just kind of like, hey, I'm gonna go hit the recruiters up. Uh I know how this is gonna go. Like the flag is up, people need to respond. And I'm not gonna sit here while other people go out. I'm not doing anything with my life right now. Well, walk me back.

Host 24:06

So you graduate high school and then you go off to college. Obviously, college doesn't work out. Yeah. Um, you go back to Akron, you're working, you know, at a at a truck tire uh factory and then that was the last one.

Aaron Love 24:17

That was the last job that I had. I worked at B and C, which in Barbara we called Burnouts and Criminals. So they mean it was shift work, it had three shifts, and they were basically they're one of the biggest manufacturers of like truck tires, like the actual rims. And then I was this little inspector dude, which means I took the tire out of the machine, I looked for these little Nicks, I buffed them down to tolerance, and I did that, and then shavings and oils and whatever other it was a factory, bro. Like I was working in a factory, third shift. Were you contemplating or worried about where your life was headed at all? I was contemplating suicide, brother. I mean, I wasn't literally doing that suicide, it's not a joke, but for me it was. Uh, because I mean, I was just absolutely I had no clue of what to do with my life. Everything I skated through high school, I didn't have to try too hard. I got good enough grades for people who would be like, oh, we never have to worry about Aaron, he's a good student, but I wasn't challenged, so I was just totally skating by at the high school that I went to, got good enough grades to get into really the only college I cared about applying to, which was an in-state school, which they would have taken me anyway. Um, and then by the time I got to college, like I didn't have the discipline, the adult learning. I'd you know, I was on my own, so I was like, all right, tight. I don't have to go to class if I don't want to. Okay, cool. Um but I just I was rudderless, dude. Like I had no idea what it is that I wanted to do. I had no clue about what I was supposed to do with my life.

Host 25:35

That's what's really cool about the military, and I I still tell a lot of younger kids now. Uh, I think you know, being a part of something that's bigger than yourself is is I think it's important. Um walk me through where you were September 11th, 2001. You know, where were you and what was the first thing that that went on in your head?

Aaron Love 25:55

A lot of Americans did. You look at the TV and you're like, what is happening? That's a very big building. That's an iconic building. Why is it smoking? Uh and then as the pieces kind of get put together, it was a little bit weird for us because the plane that flew that ended up crashing in Shanksville flew directly over Ohio on its way back. So it was, I mean, it was over northeast Ohio on the way back. So we didn't know where that plane was going. My good friend Chaz had a had a young son that lived in Cleveland. So immediately, like, he's trying to call up to Cleveland to be like, hey, you know, uh, what's going on, you know, where's where's my son? And trying to talk to, you know, his ex at the time, his his, you know, spouse at the time. And it was just weird to try to put together in the second tower hit, and then everybody kind of put two and two together, and we're like, oh no, uh, this is a whole thing. Um, it's a weird event to talk about in retrospect, right? Like with everything that we know now and all of the things attached to 9-11 and all that other stuff. But in the in the moment, for what we knew, which was nothing, we just knew that America had been attacked and that we were going to go to a place that nobody knew before, which is Afghanistan, and we were gonna go look for the people that made this attack happen. Now, again, that's really weird to say 25 years later, or we, you know, with everything that we've learned now, just leave that aside. We'll hit that in the conspiracy theory part of the podcast. But in that moment, in that time, like we didn't know any of these things. You know, I was a 20-year-old, uh 21-year-old kid at this point, complete idiot. And for the first time, I was just like, okay, well, this makes sense. Somebody attacked us, we're gonna need people to go fight. Looks like I'm gonna go fight. Grandpa's been telling me my whole life, each generation owes a debt of gratitude to this great nation. My dad was a patriotic dude that always raised us to be fiercely independent and ready to answer this call. And he would echo those same things. And it was the first time in my life. I was like, okay, well, I don't know what a calling feels like, but this feels like I'm called to go do it. I'm compelled to go and talk to these recruiters and get in because I think I know the way this is going.

Host 27:57

You'll you told your dad you were going in and he gave you one specific piece of advice. What did he say? And what do you think it mattered?

Aaron Love 28:04

Well, he said go to the Air Force. Because I told him straight up, I was like, listen, I don't care how this works out. I was like, but I know the Marines in the Army, those the Marines and the Army infantry dudes are gonna go fight first. Wherever we go, they're gonna hold some terrain somewhere and they're gonna go fight. And I want to go fight, so I'm gonna go talk to the Marines in the Army. And he goes, Aaron, just go talk to the Air Force. He was like, That's fine, you can talk to the Marines and whatever else, but just go to the Air Force. They've probably got a job that you would love that you just don't realize yet, and they will take care of you better. You should go to the Air Force. So I was like, all right, fine, I'll I'll talk to luckily enough, they were all in the same hallway in the very small little strip mall that was in northeast Ohio. So it was easy for me to hit all four of them up.

Host 28:45

Yeah, I think back then, I mean, I know when I joined too, like they were they would all be in the same office in some places. Now they have like their own separate, you know, little I don't even think they're they're in the same place, a lot of them aren't even in the same places anymore. But back then it was like Army, Navy, Air Force, they were all like in the same building.

Aaron Love 28:58

It was literally the same. I mean, the way that this worked is that I went, the Marines weren't there, so they were at lunch or they were out talking to somebody or whatever. I went to the Army office and I start talking to the Army guy. And I'm like, well, I I really only want to do special operations, like infantry got it, it's tight. I was like, but I'm probably gonna do okay on the ASVAB. I'm pretty okay student. So I'd like to go special forces, and he immediately starts his he's like, there was no 18 X-ray program. It was like get in, do another job for three to five years, then go to selection and go to SF. We could possibly get you into Ranger, maybe, but a lot of the 40 X-ray stuff, or the is it 40 X-ray? Option 40. Option 40 contracts. Yeah, yeah. A lot of I don't even think those were around. I like there was no direct route to go do this. They were like, listen, we can get you in an infantry and then choose your own adventure. Like, if you do well, you might get picked up, you might get this shot. Was and it was super crazy. And the army was just like, Yeah, I don't even know if you're gonna make it, whatever. It was so close that the Air Force dude, as I was leaving, the Air Force guy like stuck his head out of the office. He was like, Hey, because I he was like, I heard you're a swimmer. I was like, Yeah, he's like, Athlete? I was like, Yeah, I played ball sports my entire life. He goes, You think how fast can you swim a 500? I was like, I don't know, that was my event. I was like, I haven't trained, I've been drinking my ass off and partying. I was like, but what's the what's the minimum time? And he was like, Oh, it's like a 1230. I was like, Oh, yeah, oh yeah, no, I swam a 500 in low sixes. I was like, so even untrained, I was like, give me a day to get you know, feel the water again. But I was like, I can swim under a 10 minute for sure, like no problem. And he was like, Listen, if you can swim, he was like, I'll give you a PT test. If you can swim under a 500, a 500 under this time, and it's it's anywhere close to like what you say it is. I'll give you the full PT test and we'll talk about this job. Let's talk about pararescue. So did he like did he explain that job up front? Or nope. He was like, he wasn't even starting with me. He was like, if you can swim this 500, he was like, Come, he was like, we won't do the full PT test. He was like, We'll do it. It's called the pass at the time, the physical ability and stamina's test. He was like, I will give you the just the swim portion. He was like, just meet at this logo pool. If you can drop this, he was like, Nobody can ever pass a swim. He was like, So if you can pass the swim portion, so I think it was at the time, it was like two 25 meter underwaters, which I had done with my swim coach, two 25 meter underwaters and a 500. He was like, if you can do that in this time, he was like, We'll we'll give you the full test and then we'll talk about the job. So I was like, All right, I wasn't doing anything, I was broke, just boun like bouncing at bars and stuff. So I had to kill. I think that was like Wednesday the 13th. And I took that swim portion on Friday and I got like a 940 or something. And it really, I mean it, you know, it took me a little bit to get going that was just like, oh, okay, fine. I got out and he was like, okay, let's get you the test. And then I was essentially like the next week, I took the PT test, and then I was at Lackland Air Force Base January 2nd. So I waited about two months. Did he give you like job options, or you already knew the PJ was a thing you wanted to do? That was it. As soon as he explained it to me, we got out of the pool, and there used to be a trifold pamphlet, and it had uh, you know, it well at one point it was like Mike Maltz, which is a uh hero pararescuan that died. He was notorious in the career field for being in the best shape. He'd be like a 45-year-old dude just crushing young kids and would talk crap to him about it. Like, oh, you just got out of the pipeline, let's go to the gym. They would just smoke him. It was awesome. Um, but it was Mike Maltz for a little bit, and then a chief named Ron Thompson, like the cool guy pick. And it was like all the gear was laid out, and it you're a paramedic, and you jump and you dive and you shoot and you do ropes and extrication scenarios and the humanitarian you know response stuff, and you know, some of the stories the recruiter uh, you know, to his credit, he was like, Listen, I don't know a ton about these guys. I've never put anybody in that's ever made it, but this is what the job does, and it's really cool. You should try it. And I was like, okay. So that was it.

Host 32:39

What um and you man, it sounded like you shipped pretty quick.

Aaron Love 32:43

Yeah. That's how I mean seeing it, it's completely different now. Like pararescue, the wait time for pararescue inside of that development program now can be up to like a year. Like dudes are waiting to get in for a year. I got I was two and a half months, man. Like you think 9-11 related or yeah, for sure. I I might have just hit the cycle right too. Cause I I mean, you know, I saw him in September. Just the way that this works, the fiscal year is in October. He takes the, you know, I take that PT test in early October. I'm getting one of those slots that just happened to be there. And because I have a passing test right away and he doesn't have to develop me to get there. It was probably like knowing what I know about recruiting now, he's probably just like, this guy's just above minimums in some of the stuff, but he's good. He's got a passing score, send him. And they were like, heck yeah, go ahead.

Host 33:28

Like it just worked out. Why the PJ program over like TAC P or any any of the other Air Force pipeline? Super simple.

Aaron Love 33:34

He didn't tell me about those jobs. No, I mean, there there was no decision-making process. I love talking about this because you know, we look at people now that take, you know, we engage with so many people on One's Ready that are like, you know, I've really been thinking about it for like five months, and I've talked to two TAC Ps and one controller and one PJ and one SR guy, and I'm really trying to think about what job fits my personality the best. And I was just like, oh yeah, that looks tight. High attrition rate, got it. It was a try fold pamphlet.

Host 33:58

Not only then, back then we didn't have the internet. Well, oh, I don't know. I mean, no idea. I'm not that much older than you. Like, yeah, we didn't have like there was uh there wasn't like a phone book where you could call people and ask them questions.

Aaron Love 34:08

It's you know, I would have to put a disc into a computer and dial up to get to the internet to figure out the answer to this question, which probably didn't exist anyway. I think the recruiters back then too, they would roll on a TV and put you in a room and stuck a VHS tape in there that 100% happen at basic training. Like when you went to basic, they would do they would still recruit from basic training. So even if you went in, you could go in open general, which meant you didn't have a job, and you would just pick at basic training. And part of the very first couple weeks in Air Force basic training was a PJ rolling in a big TV with uh three doors down, kryptonite was in the background. I'll never forget if I go crazy, they will use call me superman, dudes jumping out of the back of stuff, setting up bikes, setting up airfields, doing casualty collection procedures, doing you know, medicine work, all the cool jumping and diving stuff. They would they'd be like, hey, we're running a test this Saturday, who wants to go? And then some number of folks would like raise your hand. Like I had a contract for it, a guaranteed contract to go try. But some folks would just be like, Oh, yeah, I'm in. Let's go do this thing on Saturday and see if it has if I have what it takes. But that was the time.

Host 35:12

So you're you're 22 years old and you get to Air Force Basic Training. You're probably a little bit older.

Aaron Love 35:17

Yeah.

Host 35:17

Um, were you the oldest guy in the class or was it?

Aaron Love 35:18

Well, I was 21 when I got there. I turned 22 in May. So I actually turned 22 in indoc. Um, so I was one of the older dudes there. I had a really weird BMT experience as well because it was half Puerto Rican Air National Guard guys. So our drill instructor was bilingual. A poppy. But he would he would have to, he would like yell at us, but he was only yelling at half of us because the other half of the people didn't speak English real well. So he'd have to yell at us and then translate. That's hilarious. And then it was such a weird thing because he would like yell at you and you were supposed to like immediately start doing stuff, but it became this rhythm where he would yell at you and then you wait because he'd have to translate it to the other guys, and then he'd get done yelling, and then you had to jump back into scenario and be like, okay, now I'm scared. Now we gotta go do this. Because like everybody wasn't getting directions at the same time. Um, so it was it was pretty funny. It was one of the few things that I remember from basic training generally was he'd have to translate his slurs and and hazing.

Host 36:14

What was uh what's this what was basic training like for you? I mean, you're a little bit older, but you know, you've you know you've been partying to college, didn't do that great, working at a job. Uh was it you know, was it challenging for you at all, or were you just like ready for the next phase in your life?

Aaron Love 36:26

I just leaned into it, bro. I'm one of those dudes that you know, when I'm when I'm in the moment, I just try to be in the moment. So I was one of those dorkes that like paid attention. Like they said, they told me, and basic training has changed remarkably. It's going through a huge iteration right now to completely change the way that we train airmen. And I've been lucky enough to be part of that with my my day job with Optimal. Do they now stay at the Hilton Garden Inn during basic training? Or yeah, we we actually changed. So we we went we went from Hilton to Marriott. The point structure is just better for what we do. Um, but they're going through a huge change for basic training for the way that we train airmen. When I was there, I mean, it just didn't make a ton of sense. There wasn't this combat mindset that we have today because it didn't exist. We weren't in combat.

Host 37:11

The training environment, right?

Aaron Love 37:12

We were coming out of 30 years of peacetime, essentially. Like, and even the Air Force engagements, you know, Gulf One, some of these larger air campaigns, they weren't sustained operations. We're talking about, you know, in and out, Panama with just cause, some of these other operations that took place, even you know, Gothic Serpent in '93, like that was a that was a one-off. Like the tiered units were doing stuff a whole lot, but that was the first time that the Air Force writ large, and not the first time, but it was, you know, one of the only times kind of in that period where the larger air forces were doing stuff. You know, the the air, the policing mission where we were looking in England, not in England, but in Europe for you know, war criminals post-Bosnia, Herzegovina, all that you know, instability there, there just wasn't a whole lot of like large-scale Air Force stuff that had happened. So that knowledge wasn't there. So it's kind of like this peacetime basic training thing where I was trying to lean into it and understand the stuff, but it was largely academic, like learning ranks and reporting structures and folding your underwear a certain way and making your bed a certain way. And there were there were skills that they wanted to see, but it wasn't, I wouldn't classify it as hard. I don't even remember a whole lot about it. So because I I was older at one point, my one of my element leaders, like he was my element leader, but he came to me and he was like, bro, can you can I tell the instructor that I want to quit and you want to take my job? You're just better at it. It would you it would just be better if you did it. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I guess I I don't really want to. But uh so that happened, and then literally the the the flight chief, like the lead student, did the same, like the dorm chief came to me and he was like, Hey, um, you you have a better ability to lead and like do this stuff. Can you just be the dorm chief? And like, like I went into the instructor's office for the second time with some guy that's like, Hey, I think he would be a better, he'd be better at this than I would be. And my drill instructor's like, seriously, Aaron. It was like he came completely out of character. He just is like, seriously, Aaron. And I was like, I didn't do it. He asked me to do it, I'll do it. It sucks. Like it's a crappy job, but I'll do it. But that was really like the only couple of things that I even remember from basic training because I was just thinking about N doc.

Host 39:21

So, where were you going? Um, or where did you go after you graduated basic training?

Aaron Love 39:25

Right across the street. So it used to be the Chapman training annex. This all happened on a different side of base, the main side of Lackland. It that's the training infrastructure for the entire Air Force, right? So everything over there is BMT training land. So everything, like you know, it's different buildings and a different campus plane and whatever else, but everything really on main side Lackland is basic and Air Force technical training. So that is that is big blue world. So you can't really be over in big blue world. So all of your advanced uh AIT for Air Force is is all on Lackland? For a lot of the career fields, it is. There are a lot of tech schools that stay on Lackland to train. So basic and then AIT, which is we call tech school, tech training school. That part before you get to your unit, a lot of it is at Lackland and then in Texas in the surrounding area. So Shepard Air Force Base does a huge uh a huge amount of training for a bunch of different AFSCs. There's a bunch of different jobs that train in and around the Lackland area. As a matter of fact, I didn't even leave, like we'll get to it after I leave Endoc the first time. But when I went to tech training to be a FizTech, I didn't leave San Antonio. Like that there was just like, oh, you're just in a southern part of San Antonio. So you were in San Antonio for a while. A long time. Yeah. It was it was a a year, a little bit over a year between indoc and then the new tax.

Host 40:38

So you went straight from Air Force Base of Training to uh PJ Ndoc?

Aaron Love 40:42

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Graduated. I mean, you take it's just a bus ride, put your stuff in a bag, we're gonna drive you across space, you go to Chapman Annex. Um, it's the Chapman Training Annex now, but it used to be called Medina. Medina was the training annex. It used to be an old flight line, but I mean it was like across the street, so it's maybe a seven-minute bus ride from building to building. But that pararescue indock school, the Flores compact complex that we call it now, um, that is now defunct because now we have a huge, beautiful new training area over on Chapman Training Annex. Um, but the old pararescue indock building was just a bus ride away. So you would literally leave Big Blue Training World, and then suddenly you were at Indoc, living in condemned dorms. The only other school over there, oddly enough, the Navy had their cooks that would work over there. So it was like two sets of dorms. It was like everybody that was doing AFSPEC War, which is what we call it now. So combat control, TAC P Sier, EOD. Weather wasn't there at the time, but then the officers would be there as well. So it's like all those knuckleheads, and then some navy cooks. And that was kind of like the vibe. Interesting. Over there, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Host 41:49

Uh take me to End Doc, man. It's 2002. You're I think you're 22 by now, and now you're suddenly in the hardest selection pipeline in the Air Force, at least, arguably, maybe the DOD. What's day one like?

Aaron Love 41:59

It is the D. It's the hardest selection, at least by numbers in the DOW. I'll put it. Our attrition rate is 91%. So it is it is tough. Um, man, all credit to to these guys. And when people say they want to make NDOC great again, because in doc doesn't exist, we look at this model and we compare it to what we're doing. And this is where the old guys actually do have a pretty pretty valid argument. Man, it was an enlisted senior NCO. It was eight or so enlisted instructors. There was maybe one or two contractors at that time that were former operators, and they ran five courses a year with 120 to 150 students through that bad boy at a time. No human performance, no special beds, no extra facilities, no extra logistics, no money to speak of. They couldn't even get themselves, they would have to like beg, borrow, and steal to get their paramedic research redone at this time, right? And they were just there jobbing out with the small staff of all enlisted operators that are running this school. You compare that to now, to the massive training system that we have. And this is where people were like, Man, we used to do this with 10 dudes. And we totally did. Um, so at this time, combat control had split. Combat control and pararescue used to go through the indoc uh portion or selection together. It was the exact same course for a bunch of different reasons. Combat control stepped away from the indoc model, they went to their what they called CCSC, so combat control selection course. So it was a shorter course, and they moved their pipeline around for a bunch of different reasons. Too much to get into controllers being controllers. So when I went, it was only pararescuen and combat rescue officers that showed up. They did a good job. There used to be a prep team, which is like two weeks long because you did need it, it was a completely different language. This was not Big Blue, this was not Air Force training. It was under AETC, but there were a lot of things that they could do with drops and physical punishments and training events and having longer training days and all that stuff's highly regulated by the Air Force, but they obviously had a bunch of different allowances because we were doing. Doing things that were important and needed to be trained. But you needed a little bit to learn to learn that language. So they would have two weeks worth of prep teams. So the first day you show up, it's not just like air horns and people quitting and you know, smoke and brimstone and stuff. It was show up like, hey, here's your gear, mark it appropriately. And there was a slow ramp into really what indoc is, which is like in doc is the world's best resiliency course that I've ever been to. And it's also the best accountability course I've ever went to. Because every single mistake you make, you are going to pay for. Like you cannot hide them. You are going to make a mistake and you're going to you're going to be punished for that. So the ramp that was slowly into it. Hey, here's how we line up on the pad. When we tell you to come over to the pad, this is the pad. And we tell you to line up, here's how you line up. And when we say this word, you say this word. And now all of that goes in one. And we're going to let you practice. And on that first day, they were like, hey, really good job. You guys only messed up two times. That's cool. Well, then you would show you'd show up the second day, they'd be like, line up on the pad. First of all, not fast enough, drop. And you would just get smoked. And they'd be like, okay, well, we told you to line up, line up. And you would be a hair too slow. And they'd be like, nope, drop. So this simple thing that should have taken you two minutes is taking you 40 minutes because every bit of that time for every single mess up that they've already told you once. We told you once, you should get you guys should have been talking about this last night. You should have been practicing. You weren't. So now we're going to smoke you for it. And those training days get very, very long because that was the first event of the day. So that I and I'm not just like it, it was a 40-minute event. They were like, hey, show up at 0, 4:30. You're gonna be, you're gonna go to the chow hall. 0430, be on the pad with your thing. We're gonna go through prep day two. And you're like, okay, I'm not joking. When we showed up to that pad, we did not start training for an hour because we could not figure out how to just put our bags down and do it the right way.

Host 45:52

Your uh your swim coach in high school was uh Marine Force Recon, as you mentioned earlier. Uh he ran you guys through pool events that sound a lot like early water con, uh staying down together, touching walls underwater. When you hit the water con and end dock, did that early work show up, or does force recon pool training not even come close to what they were about to put you through?

Aaron Love 46:09

Well, I mean, we were high school students and he he just, you know, was in force recon. He had some some cool stuff. He had a pretty hairy injury from a fast rope. Like he peeled off a fast rope. The helicopter didn't know that he was still on. Helicopter started to leave and he was still on, so he just kind of met the ocean at a high rate of speed. So it wasn't exactly like that. Like the stress wasn't there. When we did it, he was just like, here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna drop down on this side of the pool, you're gonna do a push-up. I'm gonna tell you to go. You're gonna jump in, go to the bottom, go touch that wall, come up. And it was a game for us. You know, it was a fun game of how you know how many in a row could you do? So it prepared me at least to be able to pull the curtain back a little bit and go, wait a second, this is just training. This isn't, they're not trying to drown me. They are trying to just do training with me. So, you know, and by the way, I hadn't done that. Yeah, we're talking about high school. I didn't do any of that in between. People asked, like, how did you prepare for end doc? I didn't. I just showed up. I was just like, okay, there's gonna be swimming, and there's gonna be running, it's gonna be super hard. I don't really need to know that much else. Okay, super hard, running, swimming. I'll just show up on days that are, you know, running and swimming. But those first couple pool sessions, they were a huge shock. Uh, mainly because I'm I started off with, you know, in that first in dock class, like 1040 airmen, 140 folks. And the first time that we got in the pool, and they were just like, hey, simple, we're gonna do one 25 meter underwater. I think we had like 20 people that were like, Nope, I'm out. Like, nope, I'm good. Like, we had people that showed up to that first day, that first very slow day, just getting gear. Like, there was a PT test. We lost people on the PT test, like on the very first PT test in, they were like, uh, you're gone. You can't get through that. But people showed up the second day and didn't even want to see what the training was. They just showed up in their uniform, they're like, No, I'm good, I'm I'm gonna quit. I don't know where this is going. Well, and it's hilarious, like in that moment, you know, you have people that showed up ready to quit. We're like, what are you doing? You don't even know what the day's gonna be like, and then they see us get smoked in in Texas for an hour because we can't put a bag down the way the instructors told us. I was like, maybe these guys are onto something, you know?

Host 48:11

Yeah, the psychological games and and the the you know, the human mind and how sometimes, you know, we we quit on ourselves. You know what I mean? Like just hearing the story of like, yeah, we need you here at 4:30. I quit.

Aaron Love 48:24

Like, wait a minute, bro. What did you think you were coming to? Listen, bro, that sounds super early. Uh, is there any way can we make this more like a gentleman's?

Host 48:32

Yeah, it's like an Air Force joke somewhere in there, but um It's everywhere, yeah. Yeah, for sure, dude. It's really hard to make Air Force jokes with PJ's dogs.

Aaron Love 48:39

You guys are like the tough attitudes of DOD, so this don't come off right. Well, that we lean into it. It's hard to make a joke to somebody that's like, yeah, no, I deserve those things. I deserve a room to myself and temperature control. You made it through Hell Knight. Um, what what is that like in PJ and Doc? So that it just used to they called it Extended Training Day because the military can name anything and and be either just like completely unhinged or completely innocuous when it's actually unhinged. So it used to be you know hell night or ETD Extended Training Day, which is what they call it. And it's the same thing that all these other special operations forces selection programs do sometime in the middle of your program. And for us, it was like anywhere from week four to really week seven of the entire 10-week program. You'd get woken up after a day of training, you go home, you'd think you're good. Typically, it's on a Monday or Tuesday. You go home, you're putting your stuff away like normal, and then the instructors show up and pull you out of your room, and it's immediately everybody's just soaking wet, toss your rooms, everything's gone. And that starts what's supposed to be 72 straight hours of training. It always used to end up being almost like a week. Like we we didn't call it hell week like the SEALs because we didn't we called it extended training day, but you would train all day Monday. Typically, you would wake up on like Tuesday night, like there would be a zero one hundred wake up on Tuesday night. So let everybody get to sleep, pull them out of bed on Tuesday. You're working all the way through Tuesday, there's no sleep Tuesday, no sleep Tuesday night. There's like brief amounts of sleep on like Wednesday morning into a full training day on Wednesday, into brief amounts of sleep, and I'm talking like two or three hours, like out in environments where they're like, okay, you got two hours to eat your food, and everybody's just shoving food down and trying to go to sleep and do whatever. But it typically happened the end, like it would happen like that for like the entire week. So they called it extended training day that was really supposed to be 72 hours, but it ended up being like Tuesday through Friday sort of event. And it's just it's it's awful. It's sleep deprivation, no food, no water, doing stuff. I mean, you're going to the pool. That was the war the worst part about the the extended training days that I did complete, uh, which were two out of the four teams that I went on. So made it through hell night. Well, I guess two the first time, and then one the second time, because I was out before the fourth one, or out before the third one. Um the bus would just show up and it would be like eight o'clock at night, and the bus would show up and you'd be like, Where are we going? And the bus driver's like, You're going to the pool, put your stuff in. And you're like, Oh my god. Yeah, I do not want to go to the pool. And it was just, we felt like like looking back on it and now knowing how the instruction goes, because I was in the instruction architecture. This is all highly played and orchestrated. Like they know exactly when you're going. But as a student, you're just like, it is two in the morning. Why are we going for another pool session? Like blacked out, just heinous, like no, it felt like there was no structure to it. I mean, it was just chaos the entire time. And it was at your most tired, your most hungry, your coldest, your absolute lowest of all time. And they're like, Oh, are you guys feeling terrible? Do you need a nap? Okay, we're gonna go to the pool and do more stuff underwater until someone quits. And you're just like, Okay. Do you guys lose a lot of people that week? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't I don't remember the exact numbers. I mean, it was it was a ton. I actually injured, I rolled my ankle just stupidly on my first team at the very end of that week. So they were like, Okay, cool, yeah, we'll roll you back to the next team. There was this rule where they were like, Okay, so technically you made it through. Like, they didn't, I didn't make it to the end. Did I make it on that first team now that I'm thinking of it? It was the second team. So the first team, I get through the ETD and they were like, hey, so you rolled it, but technically it's like Thursday night, it's not Friday. So the next course, you're gonna have to go through it. Because if you graduated and then rolled it to the next team, sometimes they would give you the option, like if you did great and you made it through Hell Knight, you would just pick up with that team after Hell Knight. You wouldn't go through the entire thing. And they were like, Yeah, it's sort of gray area. And I was like, I'll just go back through it. I was like, I don't want to deal with, you know, am I sitting out? Am I not sitting out? Whatever. I was like, just when my ankle heals, I'll go back to the next team. And then went through it on the next team. The next team was how long was you were you a holdover until you started the next month? It was short. You know, I think it took like a month to get back to full speed, three weeks to get back to full speed with the ankle. I didn't spend a whole lot of time on student status waiting in between because five courses a year, like that was already four or five weeks into it. Junior team was just waiting to start because typically it would be get through hell night, probably like week five or week six, and then junior team would start because there's always a senior and a junior team going. So I just flowed right to the junior team.

Host 53:16

It was fine. Was it easier going through the second time? Because you kind of knew what to expect mentally.

Aaron Love 53:20

No, it was the worst because I knew what to expect mentally. You know what I mean? You know, it's like the one class master, you know. Oh, I've I've been here, I've seen things, bro. Yeah. As a student, like, shut up.

Host 53:32

Remember that in the army when you go on basic training, there's like the dudes that have been there like two or three days or four days longer than you that like have the haircut, the uniform, they're like telling you what to do. And I'm like, wait a minute, bro, you've been here like three days longer than me.

Aaron Love 53:42

Yeah, there's nobody more confident than a guy that's been there two days talking to a guy that's been there zero days. It's funny, right?

Host 53:47

Uh, but the funny thing is like sometimes you like take their advice, man. You're like, hey, bro, he's been here three days, man. That's what we should do. Yeah. Uh, after months at in dock, beaten down, injured on your second team, you got into it with an instructor on the pool deck and told him you were done. What do you remember about that moment?

Aaron Love 54:01

I remember a lot. It's a lot of regret. Um, you know, the instructor, he's still a guy that's in there. If I said it, the guys in my in my specific peer group would know who I'm talking about. And man, it wasn't his fault. I was just, I was emotionally drained. I was immature, just stupid. Like I was doing fine. Like I was doing look looking back on it now and trying to be as objective as possible, I wasn't having any problems. Like I would fail events here and there. I was good in the water, it really wasn't a big deal. It wasn't like an event where I was like, okay, well, I can't complete this event and I'm worrying about it, and I'm not gonna pass, and I'm gonna use it. My numbers were fine. They were tracking to graduate. I'd made it through Hell Knight. I had a good team of dudes. It was a big group of guys that I really liked. Uh, I had everything in front of me, and I just made a stupid decision in a moment because I am who or I was who I was at that time. The instructor, I I always when I first started talking about this event, I would frame it in a way that would make it seem unfair to me like he was picking on me. That's nonsense. It has it had his actions had nothing to do with my decisions, and it's taken me a long time to grow into the type of person that I would hope would look at this and go, you don't blame other people for this. He was just being an instructor. He saw a weak, he perceived a weakness in me, and he kind of like picked at it a little bit. And yeah, did he say something that I didn't agree with? Yeah, I got mad at him. And I like, but by that point, like I I kind of just lost my way and just I had an emotional outburst, which I mean that's going to become a theme. I have emotional outbursts because I'm a passionate person, and it took me a long time to control that. But I look back on that moment, if I had just shut up, I would be just fine. Uh, but I was unable to. So it was a good lesson for me. And I give it to Pararescue Chief Brian Winder, is the guy that made that call. So he was the chief, the commandant of the schoolhouse at the time. I don't think he might not have been a chief then. He might have been like a senior or a master sergeant. But he ended up being a chief, and we've talked about it since. But Brian Winder pulled me aside and he was like, Hey man, listen, I don't I don't hate you as a student. Like, I like you, you've got your problems. I like you as a student, I wish you could continue. But here's the deal You said the words, I quit. Because my quote was, fuck you. If you're what a PJ is, I quit. I don't want to be here. He was like, Listen, man, I understand the intent of what you did there. Like, I understand what you meant to say by that, but you said the words, and that's the standard. And I'm gonna hold you to the standard, like you're gone, gone. And he was like, But I wanted to talk to you about it kind of like man to man to let you know. And I was like, Okay, that's that's fair. Like you're right objectively, I should not have done that. You're gonna hold the standard, okay. That's it. I'll I'll go do a different job.

Host 56:43

When you say I quit, does that actually feel like in real person? I mean, is it relief? Is it rage? Is it defeat?

Aaron Love 56:50

It's all that. It's all that people that people that quit would be like, and I've seen a bunch of students quit at this point. Um, people will lie to you. There are some people that are just, I mean, it's the biggest weight off their shoulders. It just isn't right for them. They don't have the capacity, something about them knows it. You know, for the people that spent a ton of time training to get into this thing, it's you know, the immediate weight of all of that time that you've now just wasted um for quitting at this thing. You said to a bunch of people, I'll come home on my shield, bro. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna pass this course, no, nobody's gonna stop me or I'm gonna die. And then you say the words I quit. Like, now you got some real internal work to do. Like you got to figure out who the liar is there because it sort of looks like it's you. Um but all that, all that regret, and then I paid a you know a five-year penalty for those actions. So there's not a day that goes by that I don't look at that and go, objectively, in that moment, that was a terrible decision. Um, however, it it really does give me something to talk about to these kids because I've had that experience, I've had that experience. Like I can look at you and go, oh no, you can totally quit and go back. You can totally have a good career after you quit. You're just gonna have to pay the man for it and you're gonna have to fix those problems because that was all that is was just a manifestation of the problems that I was having in that moment. It's not like I just happened out of nowhere. Looking back on it now, I can go, oh, mentally making the wrong decisions with my life, physically not training what I was supposed to be. I was disconnected from God and not spiritually aware of what I'm supposed to be doing. Like all of these pillars that you're supposed to have to support you. I looked back. Everybody wants to look at the moment, but they never want to like zoom out and look left of the moment and go, okay, well, what led up to it? Looking back now, I can be like, oh yeah, there's a million things I could have done to interrupt that process. And I just didn't because I didn't know how.

Host 58:36

You said something really honest uh that that you were glad you didn't make it through that first time because you weren't really ready to live up to that beret. Um, how long did it take you to get that perspective? You think?

Aaron Love 58:46

It's a good question. I don't know how long it took me to fully realize that perspective. It's definitely something that I came to as I was in the job more, I think around like 10 years kind of after I had been a PJ, like had a couple deployments, had a couple assignments, had good things happen, had bad things happen, both personal life, professional life. You know, there's a moment of reflection where I look back and I try to I try to put myself in the shoes of that 22-year-old Aaron Love. And then once I knew what the job really meant, because again, I didn't I didn't know what the job really meant. Like I didn't fully internalize the best job in the United States military being pararescue. I didn't realize that it was going to be something that made me into the person that I am now. Had no clue. I thought it was just a cool job. I didn't have a good why. I didn't have somebody coaching me, I didn't have my own information. I had to figure this out as I go, and I'm not that smart of a person. So, like 10 years into the job, I was like, oh no. If I would have graduated then and went through the pipeline then, I don't know what kind of experience I would have had. But I'll tell you what, I wasn't set up for it. I wasn't set up to, especially when I start thinking about the realities of it. But like you're telling me that I was gonna go to Florida and go to dive school and then go party with my bros, and I was completely single with nothing weighing me or connecting me to the world to go drink heavily with my friends for two years and then immediately go out, you know, into the operational world in 2004, 2005 as some, you know, leader or operator? I shudder to think about that. I shudder to think about who I would have been as a person, as a leader, as a PJ at that time. Cause just being honest with myself, like I was not ready.

Host 1:00:28

Um, after you quit N Doc, you were reclassified into aerospace physiology, running altitude chambers and supporting high-altitude airdrop mission teams. How did that MOS kind of come about for you? Or or uh how did you end up over there?

Aaron Love 1:00:41

Roll the dice, baby. So I went. When you quit, you go through a reclassification process. So you talk to some careers folks, and it they just have a list and they're like, hey, it's needs of the Air Force. So here's a list of jobs that you could possibly do. Write down two or three, and if we can get them to you, you can. It was almost always a shell game. I mean, uh, so maintenance and security forces in the Air Force are the two biggest career fields. Those are the two biggest enlisted career fields. So you had the best shot of going to one of those because they can always take people and security forces and maintenance. Some of the medical jobs were harder. This was technically a medical job, but it was really an operational job that fell under the medical environment because they didn't know what to do with it. It was like a redheaded stepchild. You did some sort of training that looked like medicine and treatment, but really was. It was exposure to out like altitude to help flyers and first line dudes understand the effects of hypoxia. So it was this weird in between. I read the description and I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. But what they did is they had like, you know, sort of like your opportunities, and they were like, you can go to jump school, you can go to survival school because you have to instruct air crew. So I was like, oh, that actually seems pretty interesting. I was like, does anybody ever pick this one? And she's like, I don't even know what that job is. And I was like, like, it wasn't like a recruiter or a refund, like it was no kidding, just an A1 personnel person that just had to get me to check a box so that they could check their box and then get me into the training pub. She's like, I don't know what that job is. I was like, all right, tight. So I signed up for it and I ended up getting it. Everybody that I reclassed with, because there was at that time, there was like two or three other people. One of them became one of my best friends in the world. We were roommates. He got I told him what job I got. He was like, Oh, they have spots, and he just signed up for it. He had never heard of it either. He ended up being a fit stack for his entire career. Um, my boy Rocky. But I signed up for it and I was just like, nah, it kind of looks cool. The tech school is right over here. There was a little base, it used to be called Brooks Air Force Base, and then they made it a city base, which means you could just like drive onto it. Like there, you would just pass a gate and it wasn't like controlled, and now it's just open in the south of San Antonio. Like you can drive to all the the places that I went to tech school. That's just there's like a big hotel in here now. It's pretty funny. But I was like, it's here in San Antonio. I don't have to move anywhere, I can just go right across here. I don't have to be a cop, I don't have to be a maintainer. It seems like a cool job. I'll go try it out. Tech school was only like nine weeks long, so I only had to spend another like three months in San Antonio before I could get at least qualified enough to go to the first.

Host 1:03:03

So, what was the actual job? What what were you actually doing?

Aaron Love 1:03:05

It was badass, dude. Sounds like it, dude. I my my oldest uh daughter, I met his or her godparents. Like I had such a good relationship. Like he is my daughter's godparents. I have seen those people that I work with for the last 25 years, great friends. Like we've had I've had like a bunch of them on our podcast. But what what what was the what does the actual job entail? Super dope. You're an instructor and you have an altitude chamber. Altitude is simply an absence of pressure at altitude. That's all it is, right? So the the effects that we deal with have to do with pressure. Well, if you remove the pressure from a big box, you can mimic altitude directly and you can show people what it's like to be hypoxic. So you would take them through a one or two-day training period, like the original was one day, and then your rehit, your repet was uh your original is two days, your repet was one day, and you would instruct everything from gas laws to effects of physiology to nighttime, like how your how your body reacts with low oxygen in nighttime. And you know, there's a night vision acuity demo. There was a whole bunch of stuff that you would do, and you would have different programs for jumpers, and you would for helicopter pilots, and you would for fighters, and you would for tankers and and whatever else, because they're exposed to different threats. As an aside, you would be the guy that was on the aircraft that had the oxygen for when guys would jock up over a certain altitude. You need oxygen to support the jumpers, and over a certain altitude, you had to have oxygen. That also means you had to have a phys tech. So that was the cool part of the job is it was in so many different spaces. We did dive chamber for like dive injuries or people that got the bends. We did the altitude chamber to train pilots, we did human performance and training, which is you know really close to what I'm doing now, which is just helping humans optimize their performance through a number of different modalities, and then you did the actual mission support where you're a high high airdrop, high altitude airdrop mission support technician or a HAMS tech is what they used to call it back in the day. There's a different name for it now, just supporting halo jumpers. Yeah. But it was I got to go out, man. I worked with an EOD East Coast unit that I did a good job with them on the first time, and they were like, hey, this guy's pretty chill. We want to have him back again. So you get by name requested by certain teams that you work with. I spent like three months with them one time in Key West because we it was just this constant like, hey, we're gonna jump, then we're gonna come back, and we're gonna jump on this key for another two weeks and come back. So I spent like over the course of six months, I was there for like three months. It was the sweetest gig. Oh, it sounds like it. Like, but it's awesome. It was just the people that I work with were great. The job was really cool. I got to go to jump school as a regular Air Force dude, a bunch of survival schools. I went to Arctic survival as a phys tech. It was great. The opportunities were fire, it was a good time.

Host 1:05:41

At what point, as you're a phys tech, well, one, when you left the PJ Pipeline, did they tell you, hey, did you get an invite? Hey, you can come back and try out again?

Aaron Love 1:05:48

Or yeah. Yeah, there's there's a form that you fill out. There's basically a block on the form where it's like, you did good, you can come back, like didn't meet standards. You did terrible, you can't come back. Um, we don't recommend you. And I got To hey, you can come back and try again when your window opens up. So I was like, okay. Is there a certain amount of time you have to wait to go back? There is, yeah. So it's it's super nerdy in the Air Force, but there are cross-training windows. At my time, they were attached to your contract. I was under a six-year contract. So I think it's like the 39th through the 45th month of said contract, you can apply for cross-training and you have to wait until that window opens. It's a little bit different now. You basically have to be on station for a year. And there's a memo that's out that, like, hey, for any of these Air Force special operations shops, if you're on station for a year, you can you can put your packet in and you can start the process. But for me, I had to wait. So it was like 39 to 45 months, if I'm remembering correctly.

Host 1:06:37

What uh what was your decision point where you're like, hey man, I want to try this again?

Aaron Love 1:06:41

It was that poker game, dude. So I was man, I was at jump school, I was in Georgia, had a really good friend named Rob that was a PJ over the 38th. Uh, Rob says he's like, Hey man, you gonna come over and visit? Was that was he in your original pipeline? He was, yeah, yeah. Rob and I have a very funny story about we both hurt our ankles at the same time, and we were laid up in the dorms. The rest of the team's not training. He hurt his ankle like the same time that I did on Hell Knight, so we were both rolled back. And uh I get up to go to the bathroom and I'm hobbling to go to the bathroom, and I turn out of my room and I turn face to face with an instructor. Now, Rob and I had been, we're on quarter, we're not doing anything illegal, but we're playing GameCube. That's where we are in the world, right? Playing GameCube, and we're supposed to be just like resting. So we both have our he has got his ankle elevated on a chair with an ice pack on it. I'm hobbling to the bathroom. Well, he can see me, but I'm the instructor is behind the door jam. So from his angle, he can see me in a door and then the hallway. So I come to attention, I'm like, whooya, sergeant. And he immediately was like, Oh, whooyah, you're not getting me, dickhead. And the instructor is an inch away from my face, and he's like, And I was like, I'm going to the bathroom, Sergeant. And Rob is just like, Oh, I'm going to the bathroom, Sergeant. I'm going to the bathroom, Sergeant. Oh, he didn't know you're had no clue that that instructor was there. No clue. And he is just giving it to me like I'm doing a bit. And the instructor's just like, go to the bathroom. And I was like, who ya sergeant? And Rob's like, ah, who y'all sergeant? So I go to the bathroom and I took way too long in the bathroom because I didn't want to know what was happening in that room. What's going on? Oh, dude. Well, I got back and Rob just tells the funniest story. He's like, Man, he came in here. He's like, the second that I saw this instructor's face, he was like, I was like, oh no. Classic instructor shit. He's just like poking around his room, just like, hey, uh, what are you doing in here? What do you uh what do you got going on over here? You know, just like raising his heart rate for no reason. Uh, but that was, you know, that was me and Rob at Ndoc. And then, you know, years later, he's like, Hey, we're having people over the house. You should come, you know, playing poker. I was like, Great, I got I I play poker. Well, it was all the team dudes. So, like halfway through the night, he just looks at me in front of all these other PJs. He goes, Hey, does it ever feel like you should be sitting at this table, not as a dork fizz tech? And I just kind of like looked at him and he was like, What the fuck are you doing? He's like, What go back to Endoc? He's like, This is the team, man. We do this all the time. Like, the team is waiting for you, and you're an idiot. And I was like, uh, okay. Um, I had a three-week-old daughter at the time. My daughter was born literally three weeks before I went to jump school. She was born in August. I was in jump school in September. And I went home, and that was a conversation, you know, with my my wife at the time. I walk in, she's got a four-week old. I just graduated airborne as a phystech, and she knew I went to see Rob. And she looked at me when I came in, she goes, like, okay. And I I remember it was like night. I landed in DC, like, or I got back to DC late. So it was, you know, 10 30 or something. She's feeding the kid. So feed my daughter. And she's like, Well, do you want to go back? And I was like, Yeah, I really do, actually. And she was like, Okay, well, put the packet in. She's like, But we're changing the lock. She's like, We're you're not this isn't before young, stupid Aaron. Like, you have a cut, you have a child to worry about. I have to follow you around for this thing. Her dad was a SWAT cop, like a very uh experienced SWAT cop in DC in the crack epidemic in the 80s. Like he used to do undercover narco work, like he like he they know she knows the game, right? Like she she's like, if you want to put us through all this stuff of having a different phone and leaving dinners and disappearing for periods of time and missing all of this stuff, she's like, I already did that and I'm down. But if you leave, you're not coming back with she's like, I'm locking the doors. You either graduate from that course or we need to have a serious conversation about it. And I was like, All right, and that was it.

Host 1:10:29

What was the hard of those hardest part of those years as a phys tech? You know, waiting to go back to in doc once you make the decision um to go back and redo it, knowing what you're going back into, if that makes sense.

Aaron Love 1:10:44

Well, the first thing the first thing that I I mean, and it took me a long time to figure out, but you know, you really have to ask yourself in that scenario, am I going back because I failed something or because I really want to do this job? Because those are two different, those are two different things. Explain that, explain that mindset. Yeah, there's there's a ton of dudes that fail in doc that want to go back because it's the one thing that they haven't done, right? There may or may not be a Navy influencer who's doing it right now because he wasn't able to complete it and he just desperately wants to go back now and he might be there. And all you guys out there, ask Aaron, send him DMs. He really loves to talk about it. I will block you and I will call the police. I swear to God, I hate talking about it. So, but you know, that's a real thing, man. But you really have to figure out, and it took me like even before I left, I was just like, I had had that idea because I had a good mentor that was like, listen, are you doing this because you failed? Or are you doing and you want to you want to write that wrong, or do you want to be a PJ? Because only one of those is gonna work, dude. Like the goal is not to graduate in doc. The goal is to graduate in doc and get through the pipeline and get fully qualified and get to a team and go deploy. That's the goal. Because end doc's just like the first step, right? It's the gate, it's the the you're paying your ticket to ride your ride at N Doc. That is it. You were punching that ticket so you get to go to the rest of the pipeline. And to his credit, FizTech officer dude was like, You got to be really sure that you're going because you want to be a PJ and you want to do the mission, and not just because you have that ego that's screaming at you because you failed a thing one time. I think that was the hardest part to wrap my mind around to get really to a place where I'm like, no, no, no. I actually wanted this calling that I felt from the beginning that I had never felt before. It was to be a PJ. It was to go deploy, it was to go live the motto that others may live and actually do the job. It's not just because I failed this thing and my ego won't let it go.

Host 1:12:33

What did that ultimatum feel like that your then wife, you know, kind of put on you? Was it terrifying or was it exactly the kind of accountability that you think you needed?

Aaron Love 1:12:40

It was exactly the accountability that I think I needed. You know, I have, you know, obviously, so my my ex and I have had split up, like we're no longer together. But she, like, I credit her with first of all, I didn't make it easy. She was there for me, you know, during times where I was just a complete and total idiot. I mean, just stupid decision making and too much drinking and putting her through things that she didn't have to be put through. Like she's a freaking saint that didn't deserve that 20 years of my life that I gave to her. But just like always, it was the perfect thing that I needed to hear at the time. You know, it wasn't just this wishy-washy sort of, oh, I love you and chase your dreams and whatever. Like she knew what she was saying yes to. She watched her dad leave, and then the things that her dad was going to do ended up being on the news later at night. Like, that's no kidding, the world that she grew up in, and she was readily accepting that reality for our family to include our young daughter, our infant daughter. But she had conditions, and it was the first time really that somebody was like, You can do this thing, but listen, you you're saying you're gonna do it, so now you have to do it, and here's the accountability. And was she really gonna change the locks and get divorced if I didn't make it through in doc? No, but that was her way of communicating to be like, Listen, this is serious, like I'll support you, but it comes with a cost, and you have to live up to your end of the deal here, and it was great. Like, to her credit, it was exactly what I needed at the time.

Host 1:14:04

Going back to Endoc at 25 or 26 year old, you're an NCO. Um, you know, you kind of know what to expect. Stakes a little bit different. You got a wife, a kid. Um, what was it like going back, you know, day one the second time around?

Aaron Love 1:14:18

It wasn't harder or easier. That's the question I get the most. Hey, was it easier going back the second time? No, I just knew different stuff. The course is the course, the course hadn't changed. It was still a 91% attrition rate. All of the evaluated events were still the same evaluated events. All the water was still the water, the water was still wet, you still couldn't breathe through it. The ground was still hard and covered in fire ants and little Texas, you know, pokies. So all that stuff was the same. I just had the benefit of I could see behind the curtain a little bit. Like this is now I had the benefit of looking at a training event and going, Oh, because I was an instructor too. So I can go, oh, that's your attention getter. You just you're allowed to curse during your attention getter. That's your overhead question. You're just allowed to point at somebody and tell them to talk, and then you can make them do push-ups if they don't answer your question. Oh, this training event is going to be essentially this long. Here's the structure of the event. I could follow along. Like in my head, I could see, oh, and then this is the lead instructor, and this is the addition. Well, everybody else is like, oh, it's chaos and there's no, there's nothing to it. Like, no, it's highly regulated, and I could see it's almost like seeing the matrix for the code, right? Like, I could see what was going on, and it just turned the volume way down. Then I had a obviously a daughter that I cared about. I had a bunch of different things that I didn't have the first time that came with its own stuff. Like navigating, going through indoc with a toddler is super tough. Like I went to indoc the first team I went through in 2006, at the end of 2006. Um, but it was super short. I hurt my I hurt my back on a deadlift really early in the course, uh, you know, like week three or week four. And then I was trying to get through it, trying to get through it, and I just got to the point where they're like, hey man, you really have to go, like, this is really a like you really did tweak your back, and you're not gonna be able to make it through. And you got to go to these med appointments. But if you miss so many events, they'll actually just be like, all right, you're missing too many events. So I went into like the the med folks one day and I was like, Yeah, still dealing with the back thing. And they were like, Okay, tight. Well, you're gonna need like three more appointments because they wanted to do a they wanted to do STEM and all this other stuff, and they're like, that's cool, but we're gonna need like five more appointments. And I'm like, I can miss one more event. So they were like, All right, well, then we're just gonna recommend that you get washed back. That experience was the hardest. People talk about going through four classes and going through multiple hell nights or finally getting it. They're like, oh man, you know, what was your lowest point? That was the lowest point. That was the lowest point because I had trained, like, we're talking five years of time. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning. My daughter, first of all, my daughter did not sleep through the night. Till she was five, I could count on one hand the amount of times that she went to bed and woke up in the morning. And it was almost always when I wasn't home. My son, by the way, does the same. My son does not sleep through the night. He slept through the night last night. I'm here in freaking Texas. So anyway, um, man, I there were there were times where I'd be holding my daughter, my my wife and I had a had a deal. Like, I took nights with my daughter. Like she needed time for her to sleep because she can't, you can't be a mom 24 hours a day. Like I had to show up as a dad. And I was like, all right, night times are me. Like we put her to bed, you don't get up, like we have bottles. I will give Anna the bottle and get her back to sleep. There were times at like 3 45 where I'm looking at my flip phone and I'm turning my alarm off because I'm like, well, I gotta leave the house in 40 minutes. I'm not gonna go back and take a nap after Anna finally goes to sleep. I'd have to train at 4 30 to go to work at seven. I did that for like six months of getting up. I did not miss gym days, no matter what. I was at that gym at 4 30 in the morning to lead up to hopefully a successful event. And three weeks into it, on a stupid, I just it was just a normal deadlift. I just picked it up and it was the perfect like tweak, and I was like, oh crap. And I'll tell you what, man, like I mean, I I am super open about my emotion. Like when I get passionate about things, I have a tendency to tear up, just man tears. But I mean, I straight cried. Like I was, I was just like, I spent my life, you know, my wife's words in my head, don't come home. Like, you better be dead and you better pass because you are you are affecting a child's life. And man, that call to my wife at the time was probably one of the hardest phone calls I ever had because I had to be like, I fucking failed again. I did it again. Like it's not, it's not it's not okay to hang it on an injury. Like, if I was prepared, I wouldn't have gotten injured. If I was doing the right thing, wouldn't have gotten injured. That lightweight deadlift, it was it was like 185 pounds. It was nothing, it was a warm-up. And I tweaked my back and I was like, okay, that this is it. How long were you out though? Uh I had to wait till the next class. So I think I showed up in the beginning of 2007. So that was the second in doc class. So it was like that was a September class. September class goes until like after October or something like that. And then there wasn't another, like I would have missed that next class. So they put me in the the we used to call it balls. This is how you know your indoc team. It's class zero zero, whatever for the year. So it's zero zero one, zero zero two through five, because there's five indoc classes a year. So they put me onto balls too. We called it balls because zero zero. And then we weren't allowed to call it that for a long time because because everybody got woke. Hopefully, the boys are back to calling it balls too. So I was put back on balls too. So I had to spend like three months at home, and it was, you know, the Christmas exodus and all this other stuff that I that I had to do for it. And I'd like I was at my lowest point, like, worst possible scenario to go, and it was my last shot. Like, I wasn't getting another setback. This was it. I tried to cross-train, I trained for it. I told everybody that I was leaving, you know, I had groups of people, you know, some people were like, This is great. You're really trying for stuff. I had a supportive chain of command, but there were plenty of people that were like, hey man, so you already failed. Like my my commander and the the colonel that was in charge. It was super weird. There was a colonel in charge of a squadron, which is super odd. Um, and it was a small squad, it's like 20 people. She is great, but for a week before she would sign off on my packet, she brought me and my wife in for our mentoring sessions, five days in a row, to go, this is what the job is. And every day had its own talking point. It's like, here's what the job is. Do you do you understand what the job is? Does she understand what the job is? You guys are making this together as a team. And it was annoying. And I look back on it, it was one of the most clear examples of transformational good leadership I've ever seen. She is always in the pantheon for me of good officers because she cared so much about me and my family that she forced me to talk about it and sell her that I was ready to go back before she'd signed my paperwork. When you had to go back from injury leave? Well, no, when I had to go back for the for the entire second event, right? So she even before I went to that in doc class and injured myself on the first one. In the pet like the packet had to be in like a year before that. You had to put it in, you know, and then the Air Force has to do their systems and get you into a class and assign you a course seat, and then like all that stuff still exists.

Host 1:21:13

Oh, so you were waiting for a while before you went back to that second class.

Aaron Love 1:21:15

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a long time to put it in. Not not the second class, the first class. That process took like eight months for me to get that seat. During that eight-month time, she would not sign off on that final paperwork and give me her recommendation until I basically convinced her that this was not an ego thing, that this was me wanting to do the job, that you know, the family knew what was going on and what it was going to entail. And what are the best I can't give her enough credit. Colonel Marie Charles, Haitian immigrant, didn't even know how to speak English until she was like 18. Just a savage. Awesome. Um but you know, that time period in between that that first course and that second one, like I was that is not the recommended way to do it. Like, you want to go in trained and mentally ready and whatever else. And I I was on my last shot. I knew that I wasn't gonna get another shot. I knew that I could just catch some dumb injury that would put me out, and they're not gonna give me a third shot at it. You know, sometimes bad luck is bad luck, and sometimes you just have to eat it. So there was there was gonna be no, couldn't get injured, couldn't quit, had to had to meet the standards of the course, which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do. And I knew that going back kind of in the beginning of January, like that was it. Like that was that was it. I had a lot of a lot of pressure. So when people were like, Oh, it had to be easier the second time, no, bro. Now I'm the NCO I see of this team. Or, you know, there were four NCOs that started the team off, two of us graduated. The one guy that was there with me, an awesome savage of a man that ended up being a crow much later. His name is Dan. Dan and I were at the ex we were both staff sergeants, but he had more time and rank. So they they were like, Well, by the rules, Dan, you're the NCO I see. So I was like the number two. Dan was a guard guy, I was an active duty guy. So it was like I was in charge of a bunch of dudes. There was 140 airmen that were looking to me as an NCO. Like, you're a staff sergeant, you should know these things. Like everything about their they these guys couldn't figure their payout. I would have just a line of people at my door that were like, This is why you're in the PJ and doc horse, too. Oh, yeah. No, I had a I had a strict rule at 7:30. You were not allowed to lock on my door. I was going to sleep at 7:30 because we woke up at 4:30. But until 7:30, I had people like, hey man, I don't think I can make it. And I'm having these family problems and I'm having this really, you know, problematic life event, and I'm not really in it. And I sort of got the job, I don't know what it means. Like, I would have like I'd I it was my job to talk to those people and to mentor them as an as an NCO. I didn't just get, and by the way, I had to worry about my own stuff. I had to get my own gear ready, and it's an individually evaluated event. So if I stay up till 10:30 listening to your sob story about little Susie back home, I just lost three hours of sleep and now I got to train the next day. And if I don't, if I don't meet standard, like there were different challenges. I wouldn't say one was easier or one was harder. There were just different challenges to it. But just like everything else, I had that whole script of my entire life running in the background. No, I have a three-month-old at home. My my wife is living with her parents at this time in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, where I'm still assigned to this unit in DC and I'm essentially TDY at this crazy selection that I'm I have a 9% chance that I'm gonna graduate on my last shot.

Host 1:24:26

What uh what did it finally mean to you personally in graduating that course after everything you've been through?

Aaron Love 1:24:32

I think I was finally in a place where I realized that wasn't the end goal. It's man, it felt great. Like I I never failed. I I used to talk shit about the water events. This is just something that I did in my head. I was pretty good at the water events. Like the pool never really raised my heart rate. Like I had a pro I've never been able to do pull-ups now with shoulder injuries and stuff. Like, I still cannot do if you asked me to do eight like twos to the pararescue standard, which is pulling yourself above the bar and then breaking the horizontal chain of the bar with your chin, like literally getting to a point where you're pulling yourself over the bar. I physically cannot do that. My shoulders don't. I have a full slap tear and a rotator cuff tear in my left shoulder that I just never got fixed. I can't even do a single probable, like maybe I could get away with like one or two. I can do like your normal gym pull-ups, I can rip those off pretty easily, but to the pararescue, like indoctrination standard. I always had a problem with them. Never had a problem with the pool. I was on, I had failed ditching don. There's a specific way that you have gear on, then you go to the bottom of the pool, you take the gear off, and there's a very specific way in which you lay it out. And I'm talking to the inch. Your mask has to be exactly equal with your foot cups, your weight belt has to be not twisted, laid over top, everything has to be maintained on the bottom of the pool perfectly, and then you come up. I used to be able to do that in like 10 seconds. The instructors would get livid at me because they'd be like, Go, you'd be treading water with all your gear on, and then they'd say go. I had that bad boy down to a science. Hit the bottom pool, hit my butt, fins off, mask off, everything's over, nice and tight. Take a second, and then I'm I'm up. And it was cool. It was not a stressful event. That was the event that I failed on my final eval. Like when I got done with the cows in the morning, because you did cows in the morning pools at night, I got done with the cows, and I'm like, I did it. I fucking graduated. Like, that's how confident I was in the water at that point. It's like buddy breathing, you're not getting me on buddy breathing, dog. You're not getting me to pop on an underwater. I don't care. 50, don't care. Got it. Any of this alternate stuff you're gonna make me do, don't care. I did it. I'm there, I'm good. And I failed that event. And I had to come back the next day. And literally, they like I failed that day, and they, you have one refire. Like, this is it. Like the rest of the team had graduated. Like, that was it. They were done. They graduated their event. And then I had to go back in the pool by myself in front of the commandant of the school and a different instructor, uh, RT, who ended up being a chief and a wing chief and an awesome dude, awesome guy for the career field. I went down on that first one, and there was literally a conversation where I was treading. I went down and put my gear down, and the instructor comes up and he kind of looks at me, and he just he like shook his head and he walked, he went over, and there was a very intense conversation between the guy that was running the pool deck, who's my commandant, and the guy in the water. It was so close, like it was that inch tolerance. He was like, I'm gonna give this to you. He was like, Maybe on any other day, I don't give it to you. He was like, I'm erring on the student side right now, not the instructor side. And I was like, Oh fuck. And my the commandant guy had a very distinct way of speaking. He's like, All right, love, all you gotta do, you just go down and you put your gear on, and as long as it's right, we can end all this drama. I'm just like, I'm the only guy in the pool. That's fine. I'm like, oh, for the love of God. So I go down and I put it on. It was correct, I got the pass. And like, because I had done so much work to make sure that this wasn't the Like I said a million times. This is not the goal. This is not the goal. But man, the relief, the pride, like you can't help it. Like I I did it. Like this was I didn't do all that work for nothing. I didn't take time away from my daughter and my family to do a thing that I failed at. There there has to be a moment in your head, like it's okay every once in a while to let that ego pop up a little bit and go, hey man, this is a thing that you should be proud of. And I like I'd be lying if I didn't say, you know, walking out of that building if I didn't, I didn't feel pride. I didn't feel like I didn't feel like I'd right it or wrong. I didn't feel like I was this new person that magically like I came from the depths and I had this chip on my shoulder, like all that stuff. That didn't really exist, right? But graduating and being in that ceremony and getting my certificate, you know, the biggest compliment I got is like, yeah, Aaron, you were the least crappy of the NCOs, I think. Like, you know what? I'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it. I like it felt good.

Host 1:29:08

Man, the pipeline after indocs, it's another two years, man. You guys go to dive school, free fall, paramedic, you got the apprentice course. I mean, how do you keep the edge for that long? I mean, dive school, again, I think that's one of like if we had to separate individual schools. I think dive school is one of the hardest schools in in DOD. It is. And that's not a pipeline course. It's just, you know.

Aaron Love 1:29:28

Yeah, the pipeline was a little bit weird for me. So getting those schools knocked out, like the schools that I had as a phys tech, shortened my pipeline because I didn't have to do you, you don't have to do Army Airborne again. It's just Army Airborne. It's, you know, three weeks of training unimpeded by 50 years of progress. It's the exact same airborne school that your forefathers went through. So, you know, you don't have to repeat those schools, and that was good, but it made my pipeline go in a really weird area. Did you stay with the same uh class? So I didn't, right? So, first of all, I was TDY. So they they did this thing where if you were a cross trainee, I was still assigned to the unit. So I graduated in doc, but I went home to my day job the next week. Like I was just uh an in-doc graduate that was still a phys tech that was waiting on my next school because it was cheaper to keep me where I was and then just send me TDY to schools and then have me come back home until paramedic school. So paramedic school is like, we're gonna PCS you for paramedic school because that was that's like six months. So from basic, they take you from high school graduation, they make you a basic in 30 days. So you you graduate the basic course, and then you go directly into paramedic, and then they turn you in that course, it's only six months long to include clinicals. So we're talking over a seven and a half month period. We take people with high school degrees and no prior prior training, and we turn them into nationally registered paramedics. It's the fastest in the nation. The adult learning part of it is just absolutely insane. Is that what you guys do back then, or that's what they do now? That's what they do now.

Host 1:30:52

Now it's called That makes sense because I imagine paramedics got a high attrition rate. It's it's huge. It's like an 18-month course, isn't it? You guys do it in six months.

Aaron Love 1:30:59

Yeah, it's the fastest. The fastest that you can do it in the civilian sector, I think they've got it down to like 14 months and then clinicals. But you're going to school eight hours a day, every single day, in a college-level course for these accelerated programs, and we do it in seven months.

Host 1:31:14

Generally Christmas.

Aaron Love 1:31:15

Yeah. So it is it is it is no no small feat. So that's when they would PCS you, right? So my pipeline actually went super weird. It's the best to go straight from indoc, which is really a pre-dive course. Like all of the things, all those WallerCon crazy that ditch and on, you do that at dive school with the tanks on. This came because we used to go to Army C DQC. CDQC hated the PJs. What is CDQC? Uh combat dive qualification course. The combat diver qualification course. That down a key west? Yeah, it's the army dive school. We used to go to the army dive school and you would have vetted operators. Again, if you think about the time of when this happened, there was no 18 x-ray program. So Green Berets didn't take people straight off the street. They did another army job, they were current qualified in that job, and then went to special forces selection, and then they would go to a dive team, but they didn't go to dive school first. They would go to a dive team and then they'd go to pre-dive and then they'd go to dive school. The PJs used to piss everybody off because these 18-year-old kids straight off the street that had 10 weeks of pre-dive. Like we just we took the like all of the in doc exercises are dive school exercises that we make you do an in doc every single day for 10 weeks. So that makes you highly successful at dive school, but it also makes you a target because you're in super good shape. It's running, swimming, rocking, cows, all this stuff for in doc. And then they put you right into what used to be CDQ. Well, it's still CDQC, but they would put you in as a PJ as a 19-year-old, fresh off the street. Did you guys have any Air Force reps at the dive school? Or is it all there was like there was like one instructor, maybe one or two instructors that would work there because we owed a bill for the instructor. But it, I mean, it was the army dudes were like, oh, okay, Air Force guys, and they would just they would smash you. And it got to the point where we're like, okay, we're just gonna make our own dive school. So I went through the third class of Air Force's dive school, which was just the army, it was their vetted program that we were running that they would bless off, just like a junk course would be. Like, here's the instructional material. Can you hold this standard? Okay, you can, okay, you can have your own dive school, but we're gonna monitor it the entire time because we own the program. Where's your guys' dive school at? Pensacola, Florida. I mean, it's in the NDSTC building with the Navy and and everybody else down there at Panama City. So, but I didn't get to go to dive school right after Endoc because I had airborne out of the way. The guy that's doing the pipeline manager stuff, he was just like a random Air Force NCO. So he had a date that popped up. He was like, Hey, can you go to free fall school in like two weeks? And I was like, I'd rather go to dive school because dive school is like the next hardest thing. I'm like, I was trying to get to dive school, and he's like, Listen, I don't have a spot for dive school for like four months. He's like, but I can get you to free fall in the meantime. So I was like, okay, yeah, tight. It was awesome. I got to go to Army Free Fall, it was cool, but I wasn't doing any of that in doc water-based dive stuff. I took a 1.5 month break in between that. So I went free fall first and then dive school. Brother, that is not the way to do it.

Host 1:34:13

How was uh how was your free fall school experience? Had you do have I mean, other than you know, Army Airborne School, had you ever like done any any jumping on your own?

Aaron Love 1:34:20

Nope. This is another funny thing about me. Never before and never after did I do any of this stuff. I had never shot a pistol before I got into the Air Force. I had never climbed a mountain, like never touched a rope. Like we were broke, like we had sticks and balls and stuff. That was our childhood entertainment. I had never really, other than a road trip with my grandparents, I had never been outside of Ohio before I got into the pararescue pipeline. So, how was the Halo course for you? Because that can be a tough course, too. It was dope. It was super, I mean, I had to figure stuff out because I was like the lowest. I'd never jumped out of a plane, I had no idea. I was an athletic dude, I'm a coachable athlete, so I could figure out body positions and stuff. But at one point, I had my instructor had a note that he wrote on my helmet and it said, Stop sucking. And he put it upside down on my helmet. And I was like, Why did you put it upside down? He's like, Oh, so I could read it when you're tumbling. I was like, All right. Um, so it had its own challenges, and I figured it out um and ended up getting it was an awesome experience. Like, I love free fall. I mean, I got to jump out of a plane. Like the army does it a little bit differently. The navy, you go out like your first jump, somebody's like hanging on to you. The army, you would be in the wind tunnel for a week, and then you go down to Yuma. So my first jump back of the C-130, he's like, You're gonna poise, so you're gonna jump with your back to the ramp. So you're you're just gonna look at the aircraft, you're gonna get in your position, you're just gonna stare at that aircraft. I still have the most clear memory of leaving that ramp, looking at the C-130. Temporal distortion kicks in. Like, I can see the individual rotations of the actual propellers on the C130. My instructors following us out, and time just like froze. I was I was like, oh shit. Just absolutely crushed that exit, too. Like my first jump just killed it. My instructor was like, This is awesome. You get it right away. It was the next 10 jumps were sporty. Like it was a lot of me figuring it out. I was like, Oh, yeah, this is Can you explain a little about uh Halo and and and what it is? It's just a deployment mechanism with a parachute. So halo is high altitude, low opening. So meaning you're jumping, but you're not deploying your chute for a long time. There's a bunch of different flavors of this. There's hey-ho, high altitude, high opening. Like if you wanted to use a parachute to get a very long distance with your team for tactical reasons, if you needed to just take a small team and jump them from big aircraft to a place that's sometimes 20 clicks away, you jump out, you open your chute, and then you drive your chute all the way in. Hey low would be used if you're over top of something and you want to get there quickly. You jump from an altitude, you scream down through the altitude, you open your chute low, preferably right over target, and then you spiral down. And there's a couple different in-betweens. There's actually a haymo, high altitude, medium opening, and these all have altitudes attached to it, but it's just ways to employ with a steerable parachute. Static line is different. Static line, the chute opens your plane, and you're over top of whatever it is. There's a weird in-between here where we figured out how to deploy one of those square parachutes from a static line system, like a double bag static line system. So you're jumping out, the plane is making your chute open. You're not doing anything, it's pulling it out of the bag, but you have a steerable canopy over top. And a lot of teams will use that for hey-ho now. Like they'll jump out on these double bag systems because it sets everybody up in a nice stack. So it's just a different way to employ a single parachute system. So you uh you go to Halo School, you go back home? I did back home to DC. And how long are you home before you go to the next? It was a couple weeks. So I think I only had to spend like two or three weeks, you know, waiting for the dive school slot and waiting for the orders to drop and all the other systems. That's kind of cool. You got to go home and at least see your kid in between. Yeah, for sure. Between and again, can't talk enough about my my chain of command at the time. Like some chain of commands are they almost take it like a fence, like you would you would cross-train out and then whatever. I got home from graduating in doc and a new colonel had taken over, uh, a guy named David. And David looked at me, Dave Carey. He looked at me and he goes, as far as I'm concerned, you're a PJ now. He's like, You graduated the course. Nobody does that. He was like, If you need to take two hours out of the day to go train, just tell me when you want to go train and you're you're good. He was like, Tell me what your training schedule is. He's like, You need to be getting ready for these schools. I was like, listen, man, I'm I was I was certified as one of the only enlisted dudes that could teach certain blocks, and it took the load off the officers. So there were two officers and they were responsible for like this entire different thing of instruction. During my period there, I had actually gotten qualified to teach those like high demand, low density sort of areas of instruction. So I was like, hey, put me in all of these things. I was like, if I can take something off of somebody's schedule, I was like, I will schedule around all of these things. I was like, I still work here for you and I still have a job. I can't just like totally check out and you'll never see me. But he was he was like, that's awesome. You do whatever it is that you need to do. So I would come in, check in, get things ready to go, and I was totally free to go to the pool, go to the gym. You know, sometimes I would I would look at him straight up and I'd be like, hey, I don't have to teach until one. I need to take a day of like rest and recovery. I was like, I need a day at the house, I need a day to figure this stuff out. He was like, Yeah, it's already a yes. That's pretty cool to have leadership like that.

Host 1:39:23

That's not it was not everybody in the military has stories like that. So it's really cool to hear.

Aaron Love 1:39:27

It was awesome. They were super supportive about it. So yeah, went home a little bit and trained and then went to dive school. Dive school was just harder than it needed to be because I was just out, I was two months away from that grind mindset. And then you showed up in dive school, there was no intro, like we had whatever. The second Air Force dive school had something like 20 setbacks, and it was a dumpster fire. I mean, they absolutely just got crushed. So when I showed up, we had those 20 people that had rolled back on the team plus the people that were in the class, and it was like day one. You know, we showed up even before the course started, and we were together in the parking lot of the hotel, and we were like, Nope, this is how they want you to line up. This is these are the commands. Like, we were like locked in because those guys had the negative transfer of that previous class and everything going wrong. They're like, We we don't want to do this again, man. Like, we don't want to go through that. Did that help you guys at all? Oh, yeah, yeah. Nice. It did. Uh, we we made our own our own terrible choices. The funniest dive school story is we're going through the rebreather portion. So there's a way to dive for, and this has gone back and forth in the Air Force, but everybody's back to the full suite of stuff. You train open circuit, that's where you have bubbles, that's where your bubbles go to the surface, and you have closed circuit where you breathe into a tube. It's a tube that goes from the tank to your mouth to the tank, and there's no bubbles. And this is for infill, like this is the sneakiest way to do dive infills. Like all the tier one teams practice on what's called closed circuit diving. We decided that during one of our last events that it would be hilarious. The teams do what the teams do on the weekends, so I'm not gonna defend or try to explain it. But the guys found a sex shop in the panhandle and they sold inflatable sheep that you could physically have sex with. Okay. We decided that it would be a funny joke that one of the dive teams, and it was inflatable, underneath the water, they would blow this sheep up, hold it underwater, tie it to their buoy, because you're attached to a buoy, so the instructors know where you are under the water. And then they tied it on a string so it was the buoy, and then an inflatable sex doll sheep that was following this one specific dive team. Now, listen, in a moment, that sounds hilarious. The instructors, however, always get a vote and they did not find this funny at all. One of the worst smokings of my life, and there's a weird rule about breathing, the way that you breathe on these systems, it's actually oxygen, it's not like compressed air. So there's a scrubbing system, and that's how it produces oxygen through a chemical process. Because of this, it has different physiological inputs, which means for a period of 12 hours you can't do heavy physical activity. This made the instructors livid because they did not think it was funny. They were like, you guys aren't taking this serious. And granted, we probably shouldn't have done that, but then they couldn't touch us for 12 hours after the last dive team got out of the water. And it just made them livid. Like it that was enough time for word to spread to the other instructors that weren't there. That was enough time for them to be mad about it. And the second that that 12 o'clock, the second that 12 hours hit, it was just it was hell on earth. Like we we paid the man for that. And the my great guy, Steve Goodman, you know, he's sitting there, he's the OIC of the course. I went through in doc with him. He was a vetted special operations unit commander. Like he was a com squadron commander, I believe, but he was in the special operations world, had a command tour already, Iron Man, triathlete. I mean, ridiculously in shape, great, great leader, great guy. And he just kind of looks at me and had this smiley way, he was big, tall, lanky dude. And he's like, you know, Aaron, I don't think we should have done that. Like, you know, that was his officer to NCO talk. And I was like, you know, sir, I think you're right. I don't think we should have done that. Um, so dive school was was interesting, but got you know, got through it. Um how how long is that how long is that school? It was like it's six weeks when you include the closed circuit time. So you can get through it in four if you're just doing kind of like the salvage dive open circuit portion. The closed circuit portion adds another two weeks.

Host 1:43:29

And what it what what is dive school? Obviously, it's scuba diving, I get it, but like what does it until uh or what at least the parts you can talk about?

Aaron Love 1:43:36

Yeah, it's another it's another employment capability. You know, for PJs, we have the salvage rescue as well. Like if a plane goes down and then it sinks, how are you gonna get to it? There's still stuff that we need to take off the plane, or there can be people that are trapped, especially for recoveries. Like PJs do that. We also have the NASA space shuttle mission. Everything that we do is water water focused. Water covers 72% of the earth. You have to be able to work in that environment. So CDQC and the Air Force Dive School turn you into a combat diver. And it's everything from surface swimming to doing the you know the actual work with the systems in the pool, and then there's open water where you're doing navigation, you're learning emergency procedures, the ocean is a cruel mistress, so you need to worry about if there's a storm and winds and waves and currents and tides and all of these other things that you wouldn't think roll into it, like academics that you need to understand about gas laws, possible dive injuries, like us as PJs. If you get bent, if you get you know the bends or if you get an arterial gas embolism or an age, that could kill you. I need to know how to how to treat that, how to get you to where it is that you need to be to the dive chamber or whatever.

Host 1:44:39

So you guys really go through for both sides. One, the actual mission of the dive mission that you guys could do, but also to understand potential injuries that you could treat.

Aaron Love 1:44:46

Right. Because if I'm if I'm sitting alert and there's a SEAL team that's doing an infill, and they have guys that pop up with any weird thing, they're gonna call us. Like everybody, everybody defaults to trauma. I was supporting SEAL team eight. They were doing a training mission in New Mexico years later, and we had PJs that would go out with their specific teams. It was a really cool training event, and they they they wanted to do a fallen angels scenario, like losing a plane inside of one of their scenarios, and we just happened to be right up the road. So they hit the schoolhouse up. We're like, yeah, we can support. We took students, we took instructors, and they had PJs. They flew from Virginia Beach. New Mexico is pretty high in elevation, like even Kirtland Air Force Base is at like 3,000 feet where I lived, it was like five. In Magdalena, where we were training, it was like seven or eight in the mountains. Right away, they came from Virginia Beach at sea level. They had one day of acclimation, and then some of these dudes were out on the mountains. We got a real world call during that event that somebody had acute mountain sickness. Like a student PJ was with them, and he calls back on our radio and he goes, You know, hey, this is me. This guy is for real going down hard, like puking, crapping himself, like going down hard. He's like, I think it's AMS. And we get him back and we look at their doc. We're like, How long have you guys been here? And they're like, Oh, like two days. We're like, bro, all of your dudes are about to have problems. Like you came from sea level and now you're at 8,000 feet trained, like running hard. Like you need time to figure this out. So you think you're gonna get called, you know, to the dive example. You think you're gonna get called because of firefight. Man, we've been called for all types of stuff. You know, people that are going in on a long walk-on, they break their ankle. That's not like a tactical problem, but that person can't continue. And now they got to come off target and they're close to target. So we're gonna have to go get that person. That's not trauma. You have to have your entire repertoire ready to treat whatever it is on target. I mean, I've treated kids, pregnant women, you know, old super old people, super young people, like infants, babies, all the we're definitely gonna dive into that when we start talking deployments.

Host 1:46:48

Yeah, what was after dive school for you?

Aaron Love 1:46:50

What did I do after dive? I think dive was because I had all the other schools, like I had airborne, I had sear, so I didn't have to do that. So it was waiting in this time. My son was born. So my daughter is almost two. We got pregnant. I'm a very fertile person. So my wife was like, hey, two-year gap is about right. We've got this hole in between, you know, in doc really, and you know, free fall school. If we're gonna get pregnant, now's the time. Your boy performs, and we got pregnant with my son. So then, in that time, in that like seven months of me going to free fall school, dive school, and then getting everything ready for the PCS, because that has its own process to it, just PCSing, it got to the point where we're like, okay, well, we're we had to get a waiver to have the baby. Like the doctor had to essentially write a note and be like, hey, this has been, it wasn't a high-risk pregnancy, but it was right on that line for my wife, like pre-eclampsy and some other stuff. So the doctor's like, listen, you guys wanna they wanted to get us there a month before he was born and then have the baby in Kirtland to get me into that paramedic class. And it just ended up not being a thing. So during that time, get done with dive school, get the PCS set up, then the doctor's note essentially becomes a thing. So they're like, all right, well, you're not gonna make this one. So that cost me six months of time because another course didn't start for six months before I could go into the basic course and then into the stayed at your phys tech job? I did, yeah. And then we had my son in DC. So we had him, and then we moved when he was a month old. So we literally took a cross-country trip with a two-year-old, a newborn, a box truck, my wife, and another car, and I had our dog in the box truck. And then we drove from DC to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Oh, that's where you guys go to paramedic school? That's where the entire training architecture is. The paramedic school has always been associated with the schoolhouse. Now MP3 is actually at San Antonio. So you do the bulk of everything for PJs at San Antonio, and then you go to to Kirtland Air Force Base for your finishing school. That's where the finishing school still is.

Host 1:48:53

So, but back then you uh you so you went to New Mexico or you went to New Mexico, New Mexico. Right, yeah. How was uh how was paramedic school, man? Uh I went to an extremely condensed EMT school, which is not comparative, and that was hard. Oh so I can't imagine what a super condensed, high-paced paramedic school is like.

Aaron Love 1:49:11

Well, and there's all these other things in the background, right? Like when you're going to that as a civilian, you only have to focus on that. I had this entire other thing. Instructors would just randomly come in because the touch points, so the that course has always been contracted out. It's contracted out now. We had at the time there was one entity that was running it, but these weren't like military dudes. They were really high speed, really good paramedics that had a high pass rate at the nationally registered test, but they weren't necessarily connected. Everything they learned about pararescue, they learned from working in the building. It's not like they took this job because they're like, Oh, I'm trained in special operators, this is gonna be awesome. Some of them did like later, the word got out and they're like, Hey, this is a really good, good gig. But you know, you'd have very little touch points with the military. You know, you're wearing a military uniform in this class, and but these guys couldn't like drop you, they couldn't like make you do physical exercise. The best thing Could do is go get an instructor and go, hey, these guys are screwing up. And then they would come fix the problem. Every once in a while, you'd have an instructor come over and just smoke you for no good reason. Like, oh, you guys are getting out of shape. So you'd have a PT session, but you had to maintain all of that other stuff. Like you're still in the pipeline. So you had to do all the PJ stuff. But then it was 12 hours a day of no kidding, like class work. Like I had a promotion test that came up in paramedic, and I looked at my wife at the time and I was like, all right, listen, I've got this test. If I fail, they're gonna set me back. And I was like, this test, I got one chance to pass it and one refire. Friday, I have another test that's just as important on new material we're learning in between Monday and Friday. And I'm supposed to take a promotion test for E6 on Wednesday. What do you want to do here? Like, I could I could probably study enough to pass this test and maybe have a shot at promotion, but I'm gonna have to sacrifice that study time for the other two. And she was like, absolutely not. She was like, just guess on the Air Force test. And I was like, great. But that's the amount of learning that you're doing. Like, even cardiology in normal programs, learning cardiology, all the stuff with the algorithm for how you treat it, what drugs you're supposed to give, reading something on a monitor and being able to tell what's going on with the human heart in order to interrupt a deadly process that it's going through. Normal programs, that's like four months. We do it in two weeks. So, like day one is like, what's this rhythm? And you're like, I don't know. And they're like, Oh, well, this is a deadly one, you have to know this one. And then you'll test on that like two days later. They'll just put up a bunch of rhythms like which one's the most dangerous rhythm, and you're like, C, I guess. But I mean, the pace of learning is just absolutely ridiculous.

Host 1:51:37

That's you know, and I'm I I I I always go back and forth this mentally, right? Like, obviously, they want to get you through the pipelines, you're operational, but the other part is like, how much of that do you retain? Well, and that's the question, like, how do how much of that did you retain later? Or did you have to like go back and constantly research?

Aaron Love 1:51:50

Yeah, it it's why medicine is called practice. This is one of the great things about being a PJ is that like our book of things that we can do is huge. Like, just the menu for the we call it the career field education and training plan. It's the menu of everything that you're supposed to be current and qualified on. And there's levels to it, right? Like, as you get better, you go from three level to five level to seven level to nine level. Medicine is just one part of that. Like the dive stuff that we talked about, there are special forces dudes that work their whole life just to go to a dive team and they focus on nothing but dive. We just do that as like a side quest. And medicine is a side quest inside of tactics, shooting, ropes, employment of all types, both free fall, dive, static line, high angle rescue, sear, high angle, confined space is a whole other game. There are entire companies out there that all they do is like confined space. We just do that as a side quest. There's 297 line items that you have to be current and qualified on to call yourself a current and qualified PJ. So it's constantly just this thing. So, how much do you retain? Our entire pipeline is like, let's see how much information we can shove into you so that you have an idea of what this discipline is, whatever the discipline is. You go to free fall school, it's only like three weeks. That doesn't mean you're a good free fall jumper. It means you can just go out and become a better free fall jumper on the teams. Medicine is the exact same way. You're not going to retain all of that. You are not going to come out of there a world, the world's greatest paramount. Now, they do a great job, and the feedback from every one of these programs to include what they call MP3 now. When these trainees go to these trauma centers, everybody at the trauma center says the the same thing. You guys are way smarter than people at your at your normal, your hands, your procedures. I've had people tell me straight up, they're like, you guys are like third-year medical students with your ability to do procedures like IVs, um, other invasive procedures, medical procedures. They're like, you guys are so far ahead. What do you attribute that to the training? Yeah. Well, because we stick an IV, like at the in the paramedic course, like you have a certain amount of time for the national registry. Like, you have to be able to do an IV in this amount of time. Well, in our world, you get a third of that time. You have to have an IV that you cannot lose. Like, I've had instructors literally walk up a patient, they'll be like, Hey, is that IV good? Like, whoo ya, sergeant? Got it, man. Got the flash right away. It's flowing. And then you take my bag up and just throw it. And you'd be like, Well, it wasn't secured. And that's what happens in a helicopter or when somebody runs by this patient because you're in an active firefight. So that IV was not ready to go. And you're like, crap. And you do that a hundred times a day. We actually, there's there's rules inside the pipeline for how many times you got stuck. You had to pay attention to how many times you got stuck during a day. So you look at a pay, you'd look at a an instructor, be like, hey, you're the patient for the next scenario. Like, I'm already stuck on both of my ankles, one up on my calf, a bicep, and a forearm. You can only do this arm. And they'd be like, Oh, okay. And then you get two more IVs that are. But we, I mean, that was every day for six months. No light, tear like they would pile all the furniture in a room and shove your patient underneath. They'd be like, You can't be with the patient. You got to work him in that space. That was just Tuesday. Like, that's what we did. So by the time that you got to touching real patients, it was almost like the speed was, it was almost like they took it off a pro mode and put it back on rookie for you. Because you had like a preceptor and a trauma surgeon and you know, all these other people. And it wasn't a bunch of students pretending to be those people. It was actually people that you could ask for help. And you'd be like, Okay, cool. Here's my trauma algorithm. Here's where I am, here's where the patient is, here's my turnover. And the and the doc would be like, Great, what do you want to do next? And you'd be like, Oh, I hadn't thought that far. I guess next I would do this. And they'd be like, he'd be like, exactly right. You want to do that? And you'd be like, Yeah, I do. So it was it was great. The training, it was one of those times where when you're in it, you're like, This is stupid. I don't know why we're doing it. Why are we lining our bags up the same way? Well, because 10 years later I was out on target and the world was chaos, but I knew that every single person on my team would have their bag in that same way, oriented the same way with the same equipment. So that they said I needed an IV bag. It didn't matter what bag I reached into, it was right there. I knew inherently where it was. And that those moments you look back and you're like, oh, it was for a reason. We were doing this for an actual operational output. And paramedic school was the exact same. Like the first time you treated a patient, you're like, oh wow, this is why the training was so intense. Because this person's gonna die. My very first call when I was in Philly was for a child that had seizures. So it was an 18-month-old kid, had a bunch of seizures. For whatever reason, the doctor in Philly gave this person a seizure medication that typically you only give to people with like decades worth of seizures, and there's no other way to stop it. So he was already on that medication and they had volume to give him when the seizures got really bad. So, first of all, this was a febrile seizure. The kid was having a seizure because he had a temperature. That's super common. Kids do that pretty frequently. Like, if my child had a seizure and a and a fever at the same time, I wouldn't be like, oh no, this is a terrible brain event. This is like, oh, that's what kids do when they have a fever. Their parents didn't have that education. Their parents gave an 18-month-old 10 milligrams of volume, the entire stopper. They were supposed to give them one part of it. So I walk into a near-comatose 18-month-old. I've got two small kids at my house during this time, living in Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. And I walk in and I look at this kid and I look at my preceptor. I'm like, we got to go to the hospital right now. And she started doing the preceptor thing where she was like, Well, okay, we first, and I literally picked the kid up and I was like, I don't give a shit about this information you're about to give me. We need to go to the hospital right now because this kid's gonna die. So I need a driver so that we can go. And she was like, okay. Like she knew, like at that point, she was like, okay, and to her credit, she had enough trust in a student to go, okay, this is serious. Luckily, that kid lived. I'm not saying I saved the child's life, but that was the very first call that I took. Like without that training behind me, and without, you know, my ability to in that moment to go, okay, sick or not sick, this is a sick kid. Sick kids go to the hospital. We don't talk about the sick kid at the house. We take that kid at the hospital.

Host 1:57:50

Before we dive into kind of you going, um, you know, in now you're a full-fledged PG, I just want to talk a little bit about the training pipeline. I know this is a space you live, especially now currently. You have a training program, uh, actually, a company that kind of does some of that training. What are some, you know, either words of advice? I mean, there is no secret red pillar sauce. I think everybody's looking for the easy button. There's no easy button. But what do you like, you know, what is some of the biggest, biggest messaging that you're telling kids that are uh either thinking about this this pipeline, going back or whatever, as far as um a preparation, both mentally and physically?

Aaron Love 1:58:22

You don't have time. That's the first thing I say. You know, that's the biggest lie that young men tell, you know, to themselves. It's why we've talked about it so much, like even before the podcast and stuff, is you don't have the time you think you do. You you don't have the time to make this decision. Like if you think for a second that you can do this job, you should try. And you should, you should figure out a way to do that. Like if you feel that calling, if you can't explain it like I could, like I couldn't, you know, when I first started the process, the answer is probably just to go. You're not gonna have all the information, you're never gonna feel ready. It's like having kids. You're never ready to have a kid, you're never financially stable enough, you're never ready as a person, you're never ready as a couple, you're never ready to take on that challenge. It just happens and you have to respond to it. And going into these pipelines is the same thing. There is no secret sauce. I wish I could just tell you the cheat code. Like we've been trying for five years to say it every way that we could. You just gotta go, first of all, and then you got to be a good dude and put out. And it's it's like a joke. Like we've used it, it's gone the full spectrum now. We start we started saying it and we were we were saying it honestly, and then we said it ironically for a while because it's such like a it's not helpful at all. Just be a good dude and put out. Well, what does that mean? Define good dude, define put out, right? But now we're all the way back, it's on the other side of that one where we're like, nah, man, the secret is just be a good dude and put out. If you just care about your team, if you're a good teammate, if you are doing your own stuff, if your stuff is just locked up tight and you're beaten every timeline, well, then you have time to help your teammates out. And you have time to go help put the team gear away, and you have time to really help somebody out when they're struggling. That's just being a good dude. Put out, do what you're supposed to. Be part of the team, be a good part of the team, and then add value to the team. And just be a good dude. Put out, try hard. Just like you know, basic training is the easiest thing even today for people to slough off because it's Air Force basic training. The jokes are the jokes for a reason. And a lot of guys are just focusing on in doc. When people are going into basic training, I tell them the same thing. I'm like, lean into it, learn the big blue stuff because that's what I want to see you do in the pipeline. Like, imagine me as an instructor looking at you and be like, all right, listen, some courses are important, but other courses aren't, and you can ignore them and you don't need that knowledge. Just focus on this really important one. Well, then you could go, well, then this course isn't important. I get to decide what courses are important. They're all important. They can all teach you different lessons if you actually just give a shit and lean into it and pay attention to it. Um, and then for everybody else's, you know, that's that's trying to get into these things, we tell people, like, you're gonna have to do this your own way. Like the lonely work is hard. Just like me, there are gonna be people that think that I had a guy right before I went to Endoc that second time in 2006. There was a uh another hand's trip that was coming up, and it was in like October. And he was like, Hey, I'm gonna put you on this trip. And I was like, I'm gonna be at indoc. It's like I go to End Doc in September. And he was like, Oh, yeah, tight. No, you'll quit before then, so I'm gonna put you on this trip. And he literally did, he went through all the process, like, there's a process attached to it. It wasn't just a joke. He put my name on the thing, he had me orders, he had my lodging, he had my air flight, he had me locked into this thing because he was positive that I was not going to make it through. Wow. Like, you are gonna have those people in your life. Sometimes those people are your parents, sometimes those people are your spouse, sometimes those people are the girlfriend that you've had that you don't know that you're thinking about popping the question to, and they're gonna be hard set against it. It's like a video game. In a video game, if you're going the right way, you encounter more enemies. There are more things that are standing in your way. That's how the game tells you you're going the right way. This adventure is the exact same. There are gonna be people that pop up, people that you were your ride and die from day ones and being like, hey man, like Rocky's wife in the best or Rocky's wife in the best Rocky movie, which is objectively Rocky 4. She didn't think he could beat Drago either. He had to go to Russia to train to fight on Christmas in a barn with his two bros because not everybody was on his side. His wife was against him. That's gonna happen, man. Like these things, whether it's the admin or the political culture or the culture of America or what we're doing militarily, there are gonna be a million reasons not to do this. But if you can find the one reason to do it, hang on to that reason, your why, and just go.

Host 2:02:38

Um, as a guy who went through the pipeline a couple times, you went back and instructed, you you worked in that job. What do you think are some of the biggest things that you see that that commonly uh people fail for?

Aaron Love 2:02:50

So very few people actually fail, fail. So the people that can't meet the standard, that actually can't perform the tasks, those are a small part of the people that end up leaving the pipeline. I think I grabbed I graduated one of the biggest in doc classes. We were close to the record. I think we graduated 29 people. Out of that 29 people, I want to say only 13 of us actually put a beret on. So the people that graduated in doc even didn't even make it throughout the entire pipeline for whatever reason. You can catch a bad injury or something pops up in your med jacket. Guys have disciplinary problems. Cause again, man, these are testosterone-fueled 22-year-old guys that you're sending to Panama City. And yeah, the dive training sucks, but that's Monday through Friday, and there's a Saturday and there's a Sunday, and guys manage their relationships with alcohol inappropriately. Guys make decisions about, you know, there's random bar fights they should have never gotten into, you know what I mean? But it's part of it is losing focus. It's like, hey, I mean, you get it through in doc, and there's such a high from assessment selection or in doc or whatever selection course. Like they told you that you were gonna fail, and then you didn't. And now suddenly you're getting to do these things that people have been in the military years waiting on these courses, and you're just attending them as a 22-year-old. That is hard to manage, brother. Like, that is hard as a guy without a fully formed brain because your brain doesn't fully form until you're 25. It is hard to navigate those things with life in the background. You still have a family at home, you still have people that are counting on you, and guys have a hard time staying focused for that long because like it. I wish the pipeline was graduate on Friday, show up to your next school on Monday. That ain't it, homie. Sometimes there's two or three months where you're no kidding, just showing up in the morning and some random person, not even an operator, like a random support person that works somewhere, no shot, no shot to the support people. But they're like, okay, we got two details, you got to go help move furniture over at this place. And then later this afternoon, you have to set chairs up for a dog and pony show. And you got to clean both of those spaces before you do anything. So you're like, man, my day is mopping up spaces, moving stuff, moving furniture from one place that I already moved it from yesterday. You're like, I'm moving it back at this point. And then I get like two workouts a day, and my next class is in four months. I got to do this for four months. It is easy to find trouble in that four months. It's easy to get, you know, not focused. And then, like, like anything else, you know, if you're waiting on that paramedic school and you're not studying paramedic before you go into it, if you're not starting to like get into the books and at least understand terms, you get into it and you're like, oh, holy crap, this is way harder than it needs to be. We see a lot of people do that. Very rarely, you know, I worked at kind of like both ends of the pipeline. I find myself in the very beginning part of it now, in the scout, like even before the recruit develop area. Now that's what we do. I I've seen people at all stages, and very rarely is there somebody that can just like not put it together. Like those students stick out in my mind where I'm like, crap, man, you're a good jumper, you're a good diver, you're good at tactics. But when I ask you to do all those things inside of an event and look like a PJ, they just can't put it together. They're good at the pieces parts, but there's a magic in the mixing where you have to constantly be able to, like no other special operations force. This could be a jump mission when I get it. And by the time I jump, it could turn into a jump with a follow-on dive mission at high altitude. We have to be able to go in between those disciplines and in between those lanes and be better than entire teams that that's all they focus on. Just in that scenario, you got to be as good as the free fall team jumping in, you got to be as good as the dive team jumping in, and you got to be as good as the mountain warfare team that's gonna handle that part of the mission, and you're one team and you're six to twelve dudes, and you gotta do it. It's very rare that you can't see people put it together like that, and they stick out in my mind.

Host 2:06:40

So I kind of what I'm hearing you saying, man, is it's a lot of I mean, there's a lot of mental work that goes into it. You are I mean, and what am I hearing you saying? Like people self-select more often than they actually fail.

Aaron Love 2:06:50

Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. That's that's the biggest thing. Like, be a good dude, put out, don't quit. If you can do that, if you can just take the instructional inputs, because I like to break it down to I try to demystify as much of this as possible. Any training event that you step into, an instructor is the leader of that event and he has a checklist. And that checklist has the things that you got to do. And sometimes on that checklist is like, well, we're doing alternate watercom today, whether you screwed up or not. Like we're gonna, we're gonna punish you, and we might have to play a role and find a reason why you screwed up to do this thing, but it's on the list. If you can just lean into that, like what are the instructors trying to teach me? What do they want to see me do? Oh, they want to see me complete this correctly. What do I need to do? They've already told me how to complete it correctly. They showed me in most cases. I just need to show them the instructional output from the input that they're giving me, and that takes the fear away from all these training events every single day. You're like, oh, you're not, you're not really mad at us as a team. You found a minor infraction, and there's a part on your checklist that the minor infraction gets you to do. Oh, okay. Now this is a little bit more gamified. And if I know what the game is, I can win the game. That makes sense. Thanks for breaking that down.

Host 2:08:02

So you finished up the whole pipeline, man. And uh, you know, that's it's kind of like you're going to school, coming home, going to school, coming home, and then you finally you PCS. Um, was paramedic school the final thing for you? Sounds like.

Aaron Love 2:08:14

No, so the apprentice course is the final spot for everyone.

Host 2:08:17

Yeah, I guess that would make sense. Is that where you test everything that you've been doing?

Aaron Love 2:08:20

It is, yeah. So that's where we ask people to put it together. I ended up being the operation superintendent of the uh Air Force Pararescue and Combat Rescue Officer Career Field. It's in Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, it's down in Albuquerque. That's the finishing school. So that has a bunch of different blocks in it. But basically, we're taking all of those skills you learn. Remember how I talked about its building blocks, right? Man, you go through your mountain phase and they're like, okay, you guys kind of know about the mountains, but this is what it looks like to be a PJ on a mountain. Okay, you know medicine. Medicine is a big block inside of there. It's months long. We're like, hey, you know how to be a street paramedic. We're not asking you to be a street paramedic. We're asking you to access a patient and stop that patient from dying in a tactical scenario, sometimes on a rope, sometimes under the water, sometimes on a mountain, sometimes in a burning aircraft. We need you to do all of these things, and then you start looping other things into it. It's kind of the first time as you get to that pararescue school, you're not building at that point, you're buying. At the very first part of the pipeline, I'm just looking at assessment selection. Do you have the attributes? We have nine attributes that we look for. Do you have the attributes that I can build on? Okay, your communication, that's one of the attributes. It might not be great, but do you have the raw materials that I can build into an effective military communicator? And we do that with everything physical fitness, grit, determination, teamwork, emotional intelligence, everything. At the Pararescue Schoolhouse, you're looking for that finished product. Now, granted, it's at a lower level. Like we're looking for the bare minimum of what you need to be defined in the training architecture to be a PJ, to go to the teams. But we are asking you to put it all together. That's the first time where you take all these pieces and parts of schools, there's sear events there. Like we put you through a very cut down under the guidance of Air Force survival evasion, uh survival evasion resistance and escape, folks. That's an entire career field inside of the Air Force, which is a little bit different than the other services. Like you have no-kidding dudes that just stare at this problem all the time. Like they do nothing but survival. We have those dudes that work at the schoolhouse, they build those events into it. So you didn't just go to SEER school, forget it, brain dump it, and you never use it again. They're like, no, no, no, we're gonna we're gonna weave this in. Like these things are valid, they're in play here. Now the entire book of stuff is open. So even at the Pararescue Schoolhouse, at the end of two years of training, people are like, well, it's still technical training. One of our evaluated events is for a brand new team member to jump free fall with his team, tactically move to a crash site, treat a mass casualty, which is the hardest thing that you can do in a tactical environment. Medically speaking, we're talking 10 critically injured patients for a six-man team. We want you to button that up. You're going to take contacts, so tactics are involved here, integrating the air over top of you because that's what we do in the Air Force. We're constantly an air-minded asset that works on the ground. We need you to do all of those things evaluated in their pieces and parts. And if you fail one of them, you fail the entire event. We do that for 14 straight days and eight evaluated events with these kids at the end of it. Wow. It is like it is the crucible for what it is that that is your finishing school.

Host 2:11:26

And how long is the apprentice course? Six months. Oh, wow. Six month courses, right? So it's just a bunch of different uh exercises and and um like culmination events, right?

Aaron Love 2:11:38

So it it's it's a building block approach, right? These blocks always move and there's magic in the mixing, and it has a lot, it has more to do with how many trucks do you have and where is the range than anything else, which is a funny thing to think about. But logistics always drives the operation. Like if you got two classes and both classes need all the trucks, and you've got a finite amount of trucks, and you got to move that block that the other class needs because there's always this a junior class and a senior class. Running three, right? So sometimes you have to like play around with it. But you go through a mountaineering block, weapons and tactics block. So that's shooting both. I mean, everything from your primary and your secondary, so your rifle and your handgun, all the way through, you know, crew serve machine guns, 240, 249. You get a little bit of experience in the long range, but not a lot. It's more like a fam. But you have weapons, you have tactics. The tactics block is no joke. You're just outdoing patrols, like army standard, five paragraph op order, no kidding, patrol to contact sort of stuff. Like you're learning the full suite of tactics. It's not just like super duper PJ stuff. Weapons and tactics, shooting, mountain air operations, where you learn everything from rotary wing, jumping in the water to helicopter operations, fast roping, all of the, you know, working on the hoist, working with the rope ladder, in and out of helicopters, different ways that helicopters can employ to get you to the target to where you need to do. Fixed wing jumping is inside of there, both in the air and the water. You're throwing a boat out of the aircraft and chasing it out into the ocean. Like that's something that we do for it's called, it used to be called Rams rigging alternate method zodiac. So you take a big zodiac, our AFE people, second to none, they can take any piece of equipment and they can throw it out of a plane. They do that with a boat. They take the big zodiac rubber boat, they fold it up into a small box with everything that you would need. The boat goes out, you follow it out. You do that as a student. We used to do that at night. Night Rams jumps are the scariest thing that you can possibly do because you're doing it's a free fall jump at night over water, already super dangerous. Now you're gonna add equipment, you're gonna throw a boat out. That's its own problem. That boat can do wacky things, the shoots can fail, everything can happen. That boat is also your lifeline, so it's the most important thing. If you're out of the open ocean, that boat is the only thing saving you from mother ocean. So now we're gonna throw that boat out. Now we're gonna jump out after it. That's typically three to five thousand feet. You do not have time for an automatic opening device. We used to jump the procedure, the ramps procedure used to be completely agnostic of your altimeter. You would have an altimeter on so that you knew what you were at, but you would jump and you would activate your parachute on a delay. So the boat would go out, and if you're doing free fall, you would follow the package out. The boat leaves, you give it a second. The first person goes, they're not looking at their altitude, they're counting to five in their head. 1,000, 2000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. Then they pull their shoot. The second dude counts to three. One, two, three, shoot. Everybody else clears the hill. It's essentially a one-second delay. Clear the hill, get flat, pull your shoot. That sets the boat, the five-second guy, the three-second guy, and the one, one, one, one, one. It sets it up in a perfect stack. That's without an AAD at night over the water. And if you don't make the boat, you die in the ocean. We do that as students. That's just inside of AirOps. And that's not the final phase. So medical is its own phase. The crows, remember, I said they're different career fields. The combat rescue officers are there with you, but they'll split off to do officer stuff and then come back and meet up with a team. Like the medicine block, crows don't do medicine the same way that PJs do. Some of them end up getting their national certification. The good crows will really understand the medical piece so that when their PJ medical experts are telling them things, they can understand what's going on with the patient. That's great. That's for their knowledge, but the training courses are different. So when the PJs are off over here doing their medical thing, the crows are off over here doing radios and air integration and call for fire and larger the things that an officer needs to do to run those. And then you meet back up. So you go through these seven phases of training. And at the end is what we have. We used to call it the FTX, which in the military is the final training exercise. But we actually changed it when I was there in the new course to call it the final evaluation phase. Because that's really what it is. Over this 14 days of time that are really 24-hour days, you're getting every single, and this is from AARs, from past missions, from guys talking about it. We build missions that look like real missions that have happened and we make the students do them because we have the benefit of being able to look at those missions and go, okay, what went right? What went wrong? What did the team do that was right? And then you can build an entire scenario for a student team to go, okay, well, here's the jump, here's where this team failed. The team needs to do this to be right to go. And then everybody has to individually individually perform for an entire scenario. And that includes mission planning, which they've never seen before. We put mission planning way further down to these cats comparatively to other special operations forces because you're going to be a singleton that has to know everything about the team before you go to that team. So it's kind of a tangent. I love doing the Trump weave on this stuff. As pararescuan, you're going to show up to a team of vetted operators that have gone through selection, went through the pipeline together, know each other, probably deployed together. And then you're just this random Air Force dude that shows up to the team, you're like, hi, I'm super valuable. I cut down on your risk, I'm a force multiplier. Brother, you'd better be in better shape than them. You don't have to be the fittest dude on that team, but you better be top three. You don't have to be the best shooter, you better be top three.

Host 2:17:03

Are you talking about when you guys become an add-on to like a Navy SEAL team or an SF team? Exactly.

Aaron Love 2:17:08

Right. Like those teams are asking us. They requested to get a PJ. You would better be better than them at their primary food groups. And when something falls in your lane, you better be just the lockdown subject matter expert. That's why we force all these skills. Like nobody else, like nobody else gets all this in the pipeline. It's one of the big draws to the Air Force Special Operations community, is that I'm telling you from 18 years old, if you just get in, be a good dude, don't quit, put out, I will give you the world that all these other people had to fight and die for to get to these courses. And you're going to get that before you're 21 years old. It's crazy. But the the output that I expect, though, is that in that room, in that no matter what team room, your top three shooter, top three fitness, top three at all of their stuff. You got you have to know how to their mission planning. They can't come to you and be like, hey, we're working on execution in phase three. Can you help us out here? You can't be like, well, I don't know what execution phase three is. You have to be like, oh, okay, execution phase three, that's infill. Yeah. So for infill or actions on, here's what I would do from infill to get to actions on that gets us to phase four, which is exfil. This is what I would do. And this, like, you have to be able to rip that off as a 22-year-old dude because that's their expectation. And it's a high stress environment.

Host 2:18:18

Can you explain a little bit about like how PJs deploy, um, whether as singletons, as as add-ons, as you're discussing, or um as a team? I don't think that's a concept I even really fully understand.

Aaron Love 2:18:30

So the we'll we'll start at 30,000 foot and then we'll zoom in. So, brother, we are here to fix problems. Pararescue, a Bravo squadron commander from the Army Tier One unit, probably gave the career field one of the best compliments. He just so happened to give it to me. He was like, you know, Aaron, if I have a problem, I want to PJ at whatever problem I'm talking about. Because you guys may not, you guys probably aren't like the subject matter expert. You're probably not like the guy, unless we're talking about personnel recovery. But every single other part of this operation, I can look to you for an answer. And not only will you have one, but it's probably the best answer. From employment to planning to contingency planning to patience to all of this stuff, you guys are able to work in all of those things, right? So from the 30,000-foot view, we are there to mitigate risk, to be a force enabler, and to solve problems. Everything that we do is reactive in nature. If we could get into phase zero, like before the PR event happened, we could just take that person out of it. There's no PR event, right? It's not how this works. Like we saw in Iran with the dude 4-4 and the other two pilots that ended up going down, the other two recoveries that needed to happen there. That was driven from an event that put us into the scenario. Up until then, we were just waiting for something to happen, right? So from the 30,000-foot view, we are a force multiplier, whether we're working in our own teams or associated with another team, and we are there to fix problems. As we kind of drill down, there's two ways to go about this. You can draw a box, and this is what happened in Iran. You can draw a box and you can go, hey, anything that happens, it kind of like falls in your lane, we're going to call you to go do this thing. If somebody's trapped, if somebody is hurt behind enemy lines, if a pilot gets shot down, if there's a piece of equipment that we need recovered, if there's somebody that's evading that we need all the way up to the Department of State, we also do what's called non-combatant evacuation operations. If an embassy falls and they send a team to go take the people from that embassy out, pararescue is involved in that operation. Benghazi one, Benghazi two, the events that we've seen where people have non-combatant evacuation operations, Beirut, people where we need to get American citizens out. PJs are on that, right? So if you draw a box around an area, you say anything that fits in our lane, we're gonna call you guys, and that's cool. And that's your classic like CSAR sitting alert. Come sit and relax. Because you're just waiting. And the best days, and I know I'm gonna make my PJ brothers mad here, the best days are when nothing happens. Okay because nobody's hurt, nobody's dead, nobody's lost, nobody needs us. You gym, you tan, your laundry, you repeat, you eat, you get big. That's what you do, right? That's best case scenario. That doesn't always happen. We've seen it a million times. When the flag goes up, we're gonna go. So that's kind of like way one. And you're working on small teams under what's called the Guardian Angel Weapon System. So this is a whole suite that can support an entire operation. The PJs that are going in are not the only people that are doing it. Can we do it? Of course, I'm gonna say yes, I'm a PJ. I don't need no damn helicopter, I don't need no damn airplane. Put me on the ground, I'll walk in. I don't care what we got to do, right? But there is a whole team from the C-130 guys to your med folks to your helicopter pilots to your aircrew to the people that are doing your med. As silly as it sounds, like there is a function that schedules your flight time and that keeps track of all of your stuff. They tell you when you're current or you're non-current on something, you need to rehack something. If it wasn't for those people, you can't go do your job as a PJ. From finance to supply to the gate guards that are standing at the gate that we like to make fun of. If it wasn't for them, we couldn't go do our job. The Guardian Angel Weapon System has all of those jobs in one. We've got security forces airmen that operate as our Cadams guys, like those guys are your weapon savants. Hey man, this thing's shooting weird. They will take it, they will do magic on that rifle, and it will come back to you out of the box, brand new, modified, ready to shoot. Guys are amazing. Air crew flight equipment, we already talked about. If you need to drop that shit from an airplane, doesn't matter what it is. They can attach parachute to it and they can do it. When you have, and that's when you have that entire thing, it's like the personnel recovery task force, right? It's this whole ecosystem of people that can do it. The other way, so that's on, and it gets a little bit more wonky because most of the PJs work for the air combat command, that's big air force. That's all the fighters, all the planes, all the whatever. And then to a smaller extent, there's AFSOC, which you work in a special tactics squadron. They're exactly the same capability, but it's different mission focus. The easiest way, if you're familiar with the army, there's free fall teams in the army, and there's mountain teams in the army, and there's dive teams in the army, right? This is the exact same. They're still all green berets. They do the same food groups. Shoot, move, communicate. For us, shoot, move, communicate, medicate, tech rescue, like extricate, right? That's our five food groups. That if you need a PJ, shoot, move, communicate. We all do that as special operators. Exquisite employment tactics, techniques, and procedures. We can get to wherever it is that you need to go. And then when we get there, we're gonna medicate, we're gonna extricate, provide technical rescue skills, whatever that is. You're trapped in a well with bad air down there, we got you. You're trapped in a vehicle that's burning and we need to cut you out of said vehicle, we got you. We need to do, you know, there's 15 people that are injured because you took an IED to a chow hall, we got you. We do that, right? Like those are the five food groups. The differences with AFSOC and STS is AFSOC is underneath SOCOM. And typically what you do with that is you push the assets to where they're needed the most. You're not sitting looking at a box waiting for something to happen. You're with the team that is going to assume high risk because we buy down your risk. If there's already a PJ there and nobody from this box team has to fly to you and expose themselves to risk, the guy on the ground can do exactly what he needs to do on the ground to put band-aids on problems until the cavalry can come in and everybody else can do it.

Host 2:24:05

What's the decision point for PJs, right? Because Navy SEALs have, you know, sore medics, Rangers have medics, uh, SF teams have 18 deltas. So you guys are obviously, you know, I don't know if the highest quality care will whatever, and there's not a lot of you. So what's that decision point on, hey, we need a PJ on this versus hey, we have two 18 deltas on this team?

Aaron Love 2:24:22

So I I typically don't like the comparison between those guys because I have so much respect for them. I was on a podcast where I was like, listen, 18 deltas are better medics. Like, if you want me to tell you like the best medics, I will tell like Ranger medics are ridiculously good at trauma medicine. They went through a long time out of first bat where they said they didn't lose a single viable casualty in GWAD. I'm resistant to that just because I understand, like, I there's a little bit of magic in that, in that claim, right? Like, was this guy survivable? Was he not? Did we treat him? Did he live? All these other put all that to the side. Those guys are world class of trauma medicine. 18 Deltas, they go through that long course that we talked about earlier. They're doing stuff with indigenous medicine and populations and veterinary medicine and dental and all these things that they have to do because of their job. It's almost we're playing in the same sport, but it's different leagues of playing, right? The decision matrix for between an 18 delta is that P and for a long time the PJ community was resistant to even calling us medics. Like we're not medics. We have this amazing capability and we are super good. Like, if you take an 18 Delta and you give me a PJ that's fresh out of the schoolhouse, like literally no deployments, nothing, and you give me the same mass casualty scenario, I'm betting on the PJ kid because that's what we do. Aircraft that have a whole bunch of crew members go down, and for 50, 60 years now, we've been training to respond to that event. We know how to do that, right? So the comparison, it's not like you're getting a better medic. It's not like they're, oh, we're gonna take, you know, I don't know. My intention was not to compare one versus the other. But it takes it's there's nuance to talk about it because for clips, like as a clip guy, I'm supposed to be like, oh, PJs are the best medics. We're ATP, we're nationally registered, some of these guys aren't. There's nobody that you want better than a PJ. Listen, man, in context, sure, that may be true. For a specific example, when I compare these medics out, you're not you're not asking for a PJ because you need a medic. You're asking for a PJ because you have a 3K walk on and you're at 8,000 feet and there's this one part of terrain, then unless you're roped in, it's called high consequence terrain, you're gonna lose somebody, they're gonna die, and now you have a PR event on the side of a mountain. I can get you to that target. If a mass casualty pops off, I can get there. If we're on trucks and we're going in and a truck takes an IED and there's no other way to access this patient, the PJ can show up to that problem and be like, no, no, no, I have specific tools and training to get this guy out of this problem. We mitigate risk. Just like combat controllers who are joint tactical air controller certified, the JTAC dudes that can call in bombs and run air, dropping by everybody can drop a bomb. I can get on a I can get on a radio and go, I'm not a JTAC. I need help. Here's where I am, here's where they are, make them disappear. And that pilot will go, okay, type, got you. That's not what they bring to the fight. Combat controllers can do a million things to make your risk go down. Because the commanders look at the full suite of capabilities and go, oh no, no, no. Now there's this whole other problem that you guys didn't have an answer for. These two dudes, a combat controller and a PJ, they've got an answer to. There was actually a rule in GWAT. If you're a high-risk team, if you're gonna go out and do high risk stuff, you actually weren't allowed to leave base without a combat controller and a parascue team that was on call. That was a vetted rule in in the world in GWAT in Afghanistan. That is the that is the capability that we bring to the team. So when you start looking at your mission, and this is a narcissistic thing that I will say is that PJs and combat controllers are always asked to go support these other teams because of the suite of capabilities that they bring. Medicine is just a small part of it. We're not replacing your medic. We're not re- some of these teams have JTACs. We're not replacing your JTAC. We're giving you a combat controller because not only can he call in fires and bombs, if you wanted to, you can point to a spot on the earth and you can set up an aircraft landing plan and an airport where one didn't exist and control aircraft above. That's crazy. PJs do the same thing. If you can get us on target, we can fix 90% of your problems right away. We already have those answers. And then the other 10% we can work together and figure out how to fix. So it's not like you're like, oh, well, this medic or that medic. You're looking at the full suite. When you start talking about technical rescue capability and the mission change, we got to jump. Well, you don't need to tell the PJ to go home because he can jump. Oh, well, hey, man, it turns out this is a dive operation, or we're doing like a water infill. Okay, your PJs and combat control, they're still good. You can still do it. To be narcissistic, I will say, and this is a point that I bring up about the Air Force, this is not true in the inverse. People want to compare these things off. I there are people like good friends of mine. I have friends in all four services. Every once in a while, somebody from another service will hit me up and be like, Oh, you said this about the army. You guys suck at this, and you're the Air Force, whatever else. I ask them one question. In your career, friend of mine, special operator, has a PJ team ever called you one time to go, I just need one of you, because my commander said that this would buy down risk. If I put one of you on my team, this mission gets approved. If I don't, the mission doesn't go. Has that ever happened in the inverse? It has never happened in the inverse. Not one time have I gone out on a mission and be like, you know what I need? One seal. Give me one seal, and this mission is a go. Now, that's a dickhead thing to say, and it's adversarial, but it's also true. But if we want a book, we definitely know who to call.

Host 2:29:36

We only need one of them. 100%.

Aaron Love 2:29:38

And the jokes are there because they're jokes, right? But like this is a true fact. Like, you know, the request for forces of the parasites. We had a standing request for forces for the Ranger Regiment who had great medics. They still wanted us because of all those other capabilities. They wanted a combat controller, too. And it's the same with the army, it's the same with the tier one units. You know, to this day, like there is a PJ that's in that room that he's there for worst-case scenario, but it's because he can shoot, move, communicate, he's fitter, he's good at all of those things. He's great in his own lane, and he's a force multiplier. Is there a different process to get to AFSOC on the PJ side? There's not. And that's there's this was a big thing too. Uh legend pararescue chief Lee Schaefer retired when I was early in my career. I think I was still in England at the time. Uh, I got to go to his retirement thing. I mean, he's a legend, like, and also he's a super short dude, so he's really well known in the community for being a really small, really, I mean, leader, just awesome dude. A PJ is a PJ, is a PJ. Just because we're in AfSOC focusing on a different mission set, like it's just a different set of missions, right? Like in the most clean hypothetical, when you're looking at a box, you know the answers that are probably going to come out of the test. Pilot gets shot down, convoy gets blown up, maybe there's some wacky thing that happens. We've had guys respond to like avalanche in Afghanistan. So like it's like a truly civilian thing, like 200 civilians trapped. That guy, Dan that I was talking about, Dan was a mission magnet. He actually responded to an avalanche in Afghanistan, like doing avalanche recovery in a tactical environment in Jiwan. Crazy, right? But you know what's gonna happen in that box. So you train for the box. Well, on the AfSdock side of the house, it's the box is a little bit different, right? The things that you're training for is like, oh, well, these guys are gonna patrol to contact, they're literally gonna go get in a gunfight. So I'm gonna have to be better on my trauma medicine, I'm gonna have to be better in my employment, I'm gonna have to understand how these systems work, and you just focus on different things, but the capabilities are the exact same. That's why there's no selection to go back. I actually went to an STS right out of the schoolhouse. So my first assignment was at the 321st to go to England to be on an STS, which was a little bit non-standard for the time, but I was a little bit older, like I knew the Air Force game, so the overseas assignment wasn't that big of a deal. It was just another move that I've I'd done a couple times. But there's no selection between AFSOC and you know, I bounced, I did two assignments in AFSOC and one assignment in ACC, and then I had my instructor assignment. So I actually worked in three separate commands, playing three separate games, right? But the baseline dude, the para-rescue guy, it's still that 297 line items of capability. On AFSOC, they're just using this menu, ACC, they're using this menu, but it's the same dude, and you flow in between the units.

Host 2:32:18

Super cool, man. Thanks for breaking that down. That uh definitely helps me understand it uh better. Um, so talk to me, man. You're you're out of the pipeline. You your first assignment uh is in middle Milden Hall. Milden Hall.

Aaron Love 2:32:30

Milden Hall. Everything's a hall or a row over there.

Host 2:32:33

I mean, after all those years of waiting, dude, you know, you're your first go through, then your weight, and then you you go through, you get injured, you go all the way through, you've made it all through the pipeline. Like, what's it like to like you're you're there, man? And you're a little bit older, so you're a you know, you can probably relish the moment a little bit. When you're younger, you probably just don't think you should keep going.

Aaron Love 2:32:50

Right, right. Yeah. A lot of those dudes show up to England and they're like, oh, tight. Now I get to wreck this locality, you know. Yeah, so a little bit different for me. I had, you know, two small kids, like international move, two small kids living in England, you know, had never done it before. Man, there was definitely a couple of those times that I remember when I first got to England. Everything is just complete, it's a completely frozen memory for me, right? Because the weather was different, like all of these new things, like you're constantly learning you're driving on the other side of the road and there's roundabouts everywhere, there's no traffic lights, and people talk funny. So, like everything, like you tend to remember more when you take in that new information. But I distinctly remember walking into a you know the very small BX on this very small base, and I had my beret on, and I caught a reflection of myself in a beret in a uniform, and I was like, oh shit. Oh no, I'm the adult now. You know, I had spent so much time in student life and you know, trying to manage my ego about, you know, I'm not Chuck Norris, I'm not Jason Bourne, I'm just doing a job here. But every once in a while it's okay to kind of to look at it and you're like, I had that distinct thing of like, oh no, it's real now. Like I'm in a very long Long road to get there, too, man. Right. Yeah. And and you want to feel good about it. And it's funny being an instructor at the schoolhouse, you let the teams have their fun, especially graduation. Their families come in, PJs, it's a center of gravity for PJs. So you get old retired dudes that just want to come to graduation. And the only reason they want to be there is they want to see their bros that are coming and they want to see the new the new crop of lions that are going to go out and do the job. It's awesome, right? Something that I always told the teams is you are back at the bottom of the totem pole now. Like you are at the top right now. You just got your beret, your family's here. You said the code and blouse your boots in front of your friends and family. It feels like you won. Live it for now, but the second that you sign into your unit, you're the guy that takes the trash out and shuts up. Like that beret means nothing. They've all done it. Congratulations, you made it through the pipeline. Thousands of other people have done it. Now what are you gonna do? Because that's the job. So I had good mentors that would get me in that. And I was I was resistant to it. I had my own problems with trying to figure it out. Again, I was a cross-trainee, I was an NCO, I'd been in the Air Force for a little bit. And unfortunately, you know, for dudes like me, like that led me to talk a lot more when I should have shut the fuck up. Um, you know, oh hey, listen, man, I've been in the air, I think I'd been in the Air Force for, you know, if I got there in late 2008. So I graduated in 2008, PCS was immediately afterwards. So I got there in early 2009. Like I'd been in for seven years, you know, I was fully qualified, my other job. Like I'd reached the training limit to what I can do inside of that job. I was promoting very quickly in that job. And I showed up to England and I I wish I would have heard my own words later. I'd just been like, you're the guy that takes the trash out and just tries hard and shuts up. That'd be great. But there were definitely moments when I walked around, or you know, the first time that I was in a real world brief, you know, something as silly as you know, Tuesdays are Intel brief days. Like I don't know why we always pick Tuesdays, but like every organization I've been at, Intel will sit you down for an hour and break down everything that was going on, who was doing what. And you know, in England, I worked with combat controllers that were over there that were Winchestering three AC-130s in a single firefight. Winchester means they shot they shot them out of ammo. The plane couldn't carry any more ammo and they still had a problem. There was a controller at that unit when I first got there that Winchestered won AC 130. That guy went home to reload. He was replaced by his wingman. So the second AC-130 came out, he Winchestered that guy, and the guy that reloaded back to base showed up to finish it off, and he ended up Winchestering a third AC-130. Like, that is the pace of operations that I showed up at the STS. When I sat in that first Intel brief, I was like, oh no, this is very real. Like those guys aren't just call signs on a board. I know that dude, he lives two blocks from me, and you're telling me he just engaged in a 13-hour firefight and killed 200 people. And this guy showed up afterwards and he saved 10 of our partner force people by himself. The realness was, you know, immediate. Because you go from that high of putting that beret on and having that time, be like, I made it. I did it. Did you though?

Host 2:37:04

What was your uh what was your first pump out the door in England? Um, like your first like real world call out.

Aaron Love 2:37:10

Yeah, I actually got so it was a completely benign, and this is why I love Pararescue, because I mean it's not just all gunfights and inside combat rescue, man. We were training doing a rope scenario, uh a rope training. There was a company that came out that just did ran by a former PJ, awesome dude, Ish Antonio. He did just confined space technical rescue training. So he would come out to your unit and you would just go through an intensive, like two-week block of crazy stuff. So we were down in Bristol in England, and we were actually on a ship. Getting somebody from like the below decks of a ship up to where you can get a helicopter to fly in and get them is insanely hard. Like, if you've never been on a ship, you have no idea, nothing lines up and everything is purpose built. So that means like where people walk is like a secondary concern to well, the boiler room has to go here, and this is the propulsion system, and this is the lower deck, and this is how this is set up. Like it's all for the boat, and then they just put like walkways and shit into it. So not there's no like simple thing. So doing confined space in there is super technical, it's super hard. Like you have to make a system. Sometimes you're making five separate systems. You're like, I have to get them up to this level, and then we have to have a rope that brings them all the way across here because our next up, our next stairwell is over here, and then we're gonna have to change the way the patient is oriented. Like you could get them up here, but now we're gonna have to change them so they're head up and button them up in a litter and take them up this really narrow hole where you can't even get a rescuer in, so you're gonna have to pass them from rescuer to rescuer. And by the way, that person's dying while you're doing this. You still have to treat them medically while they're going. It's really hard. And just in the course of that, it went from you know, somebody gets a phone call, classic military thing, right? Like the leader that's there, the the senior enlisted guy, I think he's like a tech sergeant or something, gets a phone call, walks away, comes back and looks at everybody's like, Hey, we're done. We're gonna, we're gonna pack up and go home. And everybody just goes, Oh, okay. And then you just you throw your stuff in a bag and you come home. And we came. There was a uh, I believe it was a Filipino flagged tanker. It was a Filipino dude that we went to get. I can't remember if the ship was a Filipino flag tanker. But essentially 400 miles out in the North Sea, so northwest of Ireland, the super tanker was out. They were on the northern shipping routes, and the guy had what they thought was appendicitis. So they have doctors and folks like med folks on board that can help out with stuff, but that was beyond their capability. They couldn't turn the ship back. Where they were going didn't have any, I mean, they were just stuck in the middle in climbing. You call it getting assholed. You can't go up and you can't go down. You're just stuck on the wall, and you're gonna have to like just jump off because you suck. They were just assholed in the middle of the ocean and they couldn't do anything about it. And they had this sick dude. They were like, Well, if his appendix burst, he's gonna die. We can't do anything about it. So they started planning this huge mission right up the street from Milden Hall. So remember different commands. We were with AFSOC, but right up the street, there was RAF Milden Hall or RAF Lakinheath, which is a huge fighter base. They have a bunch of fighter pilots. There's a rescue unit that works there, they have helicopters, and there were AC-130s there. Or C-130s, excuse me, not ACs. ACs are the gunships. So basically it came out there. We're like, all right, here's the deal. There's gonna be a C-130 team with the boat that we talked about earlier, the Rams boat. We're gonna jump the boat in, the team's gonna jump in, they're gonna get in the boat, they're gonna go to the larger vessel, they're gonna take us up on a larger vessel, which is super dangerous to recover to a large vessel like that. By the way, in the middle of the clear blue ocean, North Sea, freezing water, they're gonna take the boat up on there, and then we are gonna take off all of our jump stuff and dry suits and all this other stuff we had to jump in, and then we are gonna provide medical care to this dude until we can get the helicopters to follow in and get him, and then you know, we're gonna stabilize them and then we'll get him to where he needs to go.

Host 2:40:40

Wow.

Aaron Love 2:40:41

What was funny because that was the thing, and they put all of like the higher experienced dudes and the jump team, and then like the B team was the Hilo team, and I got put on the Hilo team, and everybody like during planning, the entire and planning didn't take very long. I mean, we were we got the call in the afternoon and we were launching, I think early that morning. So, I mean, very short, deliberate planning and uh to get everything together. And it was funny because everybody on the jump team was just positive they were jumping, they just knew they were like, This is the jump mission, this is the out in the ocean, this is gonna be it. So you guys probably don't do a ton of those, right? Real world, especially not from an AFSOC unit, yeah, right? Because that doesn't they they literally just called us because they're like, We our PJs are deployed, we don't have enough people to make a team to go do it. So there were PJs and controllers that were on that jump mission. Controllers were jumping with PJs to be part of the team to go into it because they just didn't have the the ability to support. So the entire planning, they're like, This is it, dog, the big mission jumping into the North Sea, saving a sick dude. This is gonna be great. I show up to the helicopters because those dudes go off and they get packed up. And I show up to the helicopters, and the one there was a master sergeant from that Lake and Heath rescue unit, and he looked at me and he goes, Oh, dude, we're going in. He was like, You're on, I was on trail. There's lead and trail. He was on trail, which is weird because he was the team's the overall team sergeant. And I was like, Why aren't you on lead? I was like, Why are you over here with me? Because I was the youngest PJ. Like, I mean, this is my first, I was out of the pipeline for six months. And I was like, Why are you over here? He's like, Oh, bro, we're going. He was like, the way this weather works, he's like, they're not gonna have the ceiling to jump. He was like, the helicopters are gonna, we're gonna have to get refueled. He was like, but cap's gonna be like a hundred feet. We're gonna have to like go in underneath this and then go, you're gonna hoist down on the ship. And I was like, come on, bro. No, we're not. And he was like, Yeah, get your get your fucking mind right. So I was just like, okay, so sure enough, uh, you know, we have a couple refuelings. Uh, we stop for fuel in Ireland one more time. Had an issue, had an issue with the probe. This is my first mission. And they're like, the helicopter pilots after we take off from refueling, they were like, Hey, uh, the probe isn't all the way out. The probe on our helicopters can refuel, so they have a long probe. The probe has like a little detente end to it, and that's supposed to fully seat, and that stops the tube from taking in or losing fuel while we're flying and there's fuel splashing on the windscreen. And they were like, That's not good. I was like, Yeah, gas on the helicopter is probably a bad thing. So we landed, if I remember it correctly, in a random field, like in a random Irish field, and the special mission aviator at the time they were called flight engineers. There was flight engineers and gunners, and they combined those two things into a career field called special mission aviator. They're the backenders. Dude gets out of his seat, walks around to the probe, and just kicks the dog shit. It's like, and there was this big clunk where the thing resealed, and the pilots are like, Oh, yep, that fixed it. Go ahead and get in. And then we take off. And I literally look at my team, I'm like, Are we serious right now? He's like, Yeah, sometimes it happens. And then we took off over the North Sea and we refueled like three more times. Like, oh wow, that's like a that was a hump. Oh, yeah, we refueled three times three or four times on the way out, and three or four times on the way back because I think we had seven total. Like we were just it happened a whole bunch. Maybe, maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe some air crew guy will come back with there's only two on the way out. It was more than one on the way out, and more than one on the way back. I can tell you that because I was terrified each and every time. Um, so yeah, it worked out exactly how the team leader said it. Like the the 130 dudes couldn't get the the okay to jump, and it was just it ended up being the helicopter hovered. The boat actually couldn't take a helicopter either. Like our helicopters were entirely too heavy, so they're like, you can't land the boat. So I no kidding, got out of the hoist, like a 50-foot, 100-foot hoist over the super tanker that was still in motion because they can't stop. So the helicopter's flying, the boat's flying, and then they hoist me down. I get the patient, I do my initial assessment, I package them up, I'm ready to go. Then the helicopter again goes into a hover, drops the hoist. Me and the patient go up, I get the patient in, and then I treat that patient for the resultant ride back to Shannon uh in Ireland to the Shannon Airport to pass them off to waiting doctors. He did need a whole I wish I could tell you, like I did like surgery and like removed his appendix and stuff. I didn't need to, he needed supported care. So IV monitoring, pain management, did everything that I could, took as many vitals as I could to make sure I had a good turnover. But that was it. Mission, mission complete. Uh, you know, hoisted onto the ship, buttoned him up, flew him back, and then turned him over in Ireland. And that was by the way, I lived in England for three years. Only my family is Irish. Like I'm like two generations out from Ireland, still have family that lives there. That was the only time I was ever in Ireland. I was on that flight line for about 40 minutes. I turned them over to the dock, talked to the paramedics. They kind of talked about the mission. We got like some waters. Somebody brought us out some waters. We got the helicopters ready to go. We flew home and we were done that day. It was the only time I ever went there. Sounds like a long day, man. It was pretty long. And uh, and I mean, you know, you try to tie this into the pipeline and like what are we, you know, does this make sense? We kind of talked about extended training day. And inside of that moment, if you can't zoom out, you're like, Well, what's the point? They're just waking us up. We already had a training day, and now they're asking us to do another training day and they want it to be better. That doesn't make any sense, brother. I was physically training when I got this call. I didn't know I was gonna get that mission at six months out of the pipeline that day. I had no clue. Like, it was a phone call. They were like, Hey, we need you to show up to this thing. I didn't have enough sleep. We planned through the night. I was getting gear ready. It was an early show. I didn't like nothing was good because that's what we're there to do. Pararescue from the 30,000-foot view, we fixed problems. Six sailor at sea, no way to get them other than a hoist down from a moving helicopter to a moving boat to save his life. Okay. That's Tuesday. You're telling me nobody's shooting at me?

Host 2:46:29

All right. Well, do you guys do a lot of preparational planning and logistics in your pipeline course? Because, you know, as I hear you talk about these complex operations, you know it and I know it. But man, that that there's so many different moving pieces. You're talking air crew, packaging, chutes, oxygen, you know, what whatever it is, plus, you know, and and or the medical problem when you get there, right? So you have to make sure you bring the right gear for for that because you guys are are trained in so many different things. So is that whole preparation and planning a part of your pipeline, I guess if you will?

Aaron Love 2:46:58

Oh, yeah. It's there's the the magic in the mixing that I talked about is almost entirely due to the professionalism of the instructors that we have working in these places, man. Like when I went through, I didn't have the benefit of even in 2006, to uh 2007, 2008. If you look at just the way that the Air Force puts people at instructional schools, those guys have been there since 2003. Because it's a four-year instructor gig. By the time I showed up and I went through the apprentice course, you know, 2004 is when they got there. They might not have had one of those combat deployments in 2002, 2003. They got their orders and the PCS timeline, like six months beforehand. You're not going on a deployment six months before you have to PCS. Like nobody's gonna put you on that on that go. They know that like they might not have had the mission, their unit might not have gone, they might not have seen anything. That's the instruction, uh, instructor core that I had there, and that's no shot to them. But when you fast forward to what we're doing now, there are like five silver stars in the room when you have an instructor meeting. There's you know, we've had people that have like high-level distinguished flying crosses and crazy, like the craziest missions that you've heard about, those dudes are now instructing and they get to give that experience to those kids. To link those two instructional cohorts together, the instructors that I had, the instructors that we have now, everybody in both of those groups still understands that amateurs plan for execution, professionals plan for logistics. You have to know contingency planning and logistical planning is something that I truly feel our career field does better than everybody else. So much so that it's almost a joke. When we take people through deliberate planning and we're like, hey, PJs, you're gonna do a deliberate planning course or whatever. There is at least one guy in the room that goes, This is all gonna change by the time we get to Target. We're just gonna figure it out. Why even plan? Now I get I'm resistant to that. I think you need to be a good deliberate planner. I think it gets you more, you're it makes you a more well-rounded operator. But that joke has a little bit of truth in it. I don't know how many times I've taken off and somebody's like, hey man, pretty benign. It's just a simple patient pickup. It's like one dude that got kind of hurt, but he's not really hurt, and the situation on the ground isn't that bad. And you show up to a raging firefight with five for real hurt people and none of the things that you need to do it. Like that is standard. So, you know, the that input that those instructors are giving, there's always that extra little sauce that the instructor is, you know, if the and I know that the instructors are doing the right thing, even when I went through, they would pull us aside and they'd be like, hey bros, you did good on this mission. This mission was a smaller part of an entire four-day operation that that entire team did back to back to back to back to back. Like we gave you the easy mode, the easiest thing that they did inside of a three-day mission. And all of these other things play into it. And you have to not only understand, but you have to understand those to a level that you can apply them at the right time, even though you've never seen it before. We have people that go off on their very first, just like me, six months into it. Now, luckily, I had a whole team of vetted operators that could guide me and could tell me this stuff. But there were people from my unit, there were PJs that didn't go on that mission because they were attached. We used to do an attachment to it, it was the Commanders in Extremist Force, which is there's Green Beret teams. There's a special mission unit that just does a very specific mission. Right underneath that. So, like that's one one alpha. There used to be a force called the Commanders in Extremist Force. I think they're bringing it back if they haven't. Well, they change it into CRIF. So it was the SIF, then the CRIF, and then it went away. And now they're talking about bringing it back, right? Super specific mission, usually kill, capture, direct action sort of missions. Not a whole lot of they're like a tier one subordinate that reports to the COCOM commander. So like they used to call it go into the mate to the miners, uh, is what they used to call it. Like go into the go into their tier one unit, that's the majors. But go into the SIF was kind of like the miners. You're doing sort of that same mission, just outside the umbrella of JSOC, right? But we had guys that would show up and they would it would hit the cycle just right. They would graduate, they'd have a couple months to get current and qualified, and then they were with that team on alert. There was a very real possibility that that dude that was just like me, six months in, ready, current, and qualified to go deploy on your own. Now you're representing the para-rescue career field of one of the highest value teams in the nation. Like some guys had that experience. I got lucky and got a civilian rescue to kind of like get my feet wet. Some of these dudes are no kidding, like, oh, what was your first mission? Oh, it was a 5k walk-on in Mosul, Iraq with the SIF team to go get into a two-day run and gun battle. Okay. But those, you know, to speak to our training, like I have to be ready to do both of those things.

Host 2:51:38

Yeah. Was there did you have to do like, you know, you hear a lot in special operations. Was there a big hazing community once you got out of the pipeline into your first unit?

Aaron Love 2:51:45

There, there always is, but I needed it. I probably needed more hazing. You know what I mean? Yeah. But the those people, they call it hazing because they don't know what else to call it. That's culture.

Host 2:51:55

Well, I mean, there's a difference, right? So we've had a lot of rangers on, and we've had a couple rangers that were pre-GWAT and then went post-GWAT. And I know like the pre-GWAT hazing was especially in the Ranger Regiment, dude. It was like it was everything that you would think that would be hazing and it was.

Aaron Love 2:52:09

They weren't doing anything else. They had plenty of time to come up with hazing regiments.

Host 2:52:12

But then you hear, you know, GWAT kicks off, the war becomes real, and hazing kind of, you know, isn't necessarily for everybody because there's more important things. So, I mean, uh, was there like a ton of hazing or just like just the the normal ribbing that you would expect as the new guy?

Aaron Love 2:52:24

You're the new guy. And we were a super small team, and at the time it was a kind of a wacky thing inside of Air Force Special Operations, but the teams weren't always integrated. Like there was a very long time where it was like there was the controller room and there was the PJ room, and there was a door that connected those two. And the two tribes, you didn't just like willy-nilly walk into the room. Like when I got to the 321st, there was blue team and silver team. We were silver team, the controller team was blue team. And I'm talking, these guys have the crazy amount of experience that they do. The PJs that were working there, crazy amount of experience. There was only, I think, 10 PJs and like 40 controllers or something when we showed up there. So we're the smaller team. There was a standing rule. It was like vampires. Like if you walked in that door and somebody hadn't invited you in, they would close the door behind you and they would just be like, Okay, you get to pick, and you would fight a dude in that team room. Like, you didn't come in. Like the guys that knew about it would like open the door and be like, Hey man, uh, are you guys planning for this thing? You'd be like, Goldie, you can come in. And he'd be like, Look at you, and you'd be like, No, seriously, come in. You're safe.

Host 2:53:25

That's funny.

Aaron Love 2:53:26

Um, so I mean, that could be viewed as hey, uh, always the new guy. Like, you're you're gonna wear a red helmet for your first jump, like you're gonna have your cherry jump at the unit, like you're gonna take the trash out, you're gonna do those things. But the the G Watt sort of era turned all that down because you didn't have time for the shenanigans, like the peacetime shenanigans were over, like we we didn't have time for the silly stuff. But the good parts of the culture lived on. And the guys that went through it would never describe it as hazing, like they almost describe it fondly. You know, they look back and they go, Oh, I remember when I was a new guy, you know, I had at the 2-2, we used to do what's called banging the gates. Or was it the 2-2 or the 2-3? It might have been the 2-3. One of the units had two very distinctive gates on the flight line, and the controller team, the rule was is you had to dress up in full kit. This is a punishment, hazing, it's not hazing. Dress up in your full kit, radios, everything, everything's good to go. And you take one of the small mini-bikes, like the 50s that they would have, and you would have to go bang the gates because you could hear the metal bang on the gate, like you'd have to take a wrench or something. You would bang that gate, and then you'd have to walk, you weren't allowed to turn it on, you'd have to walk in your full combat gear to the other gate, and it was a long way. And we could hear when you bang the gates, and then your infraction would say how many gates you had to bang, like six gates, and you'd be like that is three laps. And then you'd walk your happy self with your equipment, and then you would bang the other gate, and your penance was paid at six gates. Uh, the two three, they had a climbing tower, super awesome. Well, a climbing tower has like 15 stairwells that go up. So somebody would be like 30 towers, and you'd go because the tower is up and it is down. Peaches tells a funny story about how he there was a big, like one of the big like yellow and red like thermoses, like the classic just has water in it, like water coolers. There was a full one at the bottom and an empty one at the top, and he got a Dixie cup because he's small, and he had to fill the top one up.

Host 2:55:30

Oh Lord.

Aaron Love 2:55:31

Have have fun. But that sort of thing, like you know, the the true hazing, what people would think about hazing. I mean, I'll just it just didn't happen. Like, maybe it happened in other units, maybe it happened to other people. Everything that we had to do, like as the new guy, like, hey, new guy, you're briefing this thing, or you know, even the little funny one at the 2 2. We had this hilarious thing where a new guy would show up, you do hail and farewells. So his, you know, from whatever section, he would stand up and he'd go, Hey, I'm with red team. This is our new guy. Guy fresh out of the pipeline, just got here. He lived in Pensacola, Florida. He graduated the pipeline, whatever. And everybody was like, hey, welcome. Cool. And the commander would go, Oh, that's great. Tell us a little bit of something about yourself. And no matter what they said, the second that they start talking, everybody in the room, shut over. And he would just get screened. And then everybody would laugh and clap. And the first and when they did that to me, I was like, Well, that's kind of unprofessional. But then the next time that a new guy showed up, I was like, Oh no, we're gonna get to tell him to shut the fuck up. This is great. This is great. And people like remember that it's a way to bring them into the team. I think that's what people, when they talk about hazing, they forget. Like they want to bring you into their culture. That's the gate. That's the gate to come into the tribe. It's like gangs still do it, they still beat you in to come in, right? Like you go through that to be part of you go through something that your teammates went through.

Host 2:56:48

2009, man. You uh you had to Iraq, man. This is your first combat tour. This is kind of like the I don't want to say the pinnacle, but man, this is kind of what you've trained for, man. This is the the you know the Super Bowl, if you will. Um, what was that first deployment light? What was the mission? What were you guys doing?

Aaron Love 2:57:05

Yeah, so super awesome. It's gone through a bunch of iterations, but basically the tier one unit is still responsible for providing like PR to the larger force. You can imagine in three theaters Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Yemen, the you know, the un Somalia, these unnamed places that were still working where the tier one assets are. You can imagine the demand for that capability far outstripped the capabilities and resources to do it. So, what they used to do is the tier one unit would essentially have a train out, which is really a tryout, a train up, which is really a tryout. And they would take people from the AFSOC ST units and you would go support that thing. So the the tier one unit, the AFSOC geographically separated unit out in North Carolina, still owed like CSAR teams to these specific areas. But there was maybe only like one or two dudes that were on that team that were actually there, and then everybody else was a supporting entity from the AFSOC units. So it was called the torch rotation at the time. So you would go to North Carolina, you would do spin-up. If you performed well, you get put on a team, and then you would go out and you would do in support of the task force, right? And that's inside of that STS mission set where we're not just looking at a box, rescue teams were doing that in the same areas. We would focus on teams. Like, here are the five teams, these are all high risk. We need to be in this position to respond the best that we possibly can. Here's when these teams are going. Like it was a lot of like lining it up, and could we be available for the entire folks that needed us? So that was that mission. Train up was great. Um, it was a huge learning experience. I performed exceptionally poorly at like four or five different skills, right? Listen, I had never touched a rope before. We did a one-man rope. It's I've done it a million times at this point. Like, I can't believe I messed the one man test up, but there's a one-man test where you basically do a whole bunch of rope stuff on a wall, rappel down to a patient, get the patient ready to go, ascend back up the rope, make a system, take the patient up, make sure the system's safe, and then you're done, right? You have to do like a not bypass in between where you have to like change the rope that you're on. And it's highly technical. And I just sucked. Like, not only did I blow through the time, but I never actually completed the event because I would do something, and an instructor would literally go, Hey man, why are you doing that? And I'm like, Okay, because this is the one thing I know, the one way that I know how to tie the thing that you're asking me to do to do the next step. And he's like, Nobody's ever showed you this. And he would just show me some rope magic shit. And I'd be like, How did you do that? And he was like, Yeah, man, this is kind of like the standard. Like, in order to do the thing that you're doing, this is pretty much what everybody does. I just didn't have the training and I didn't have the life experience because I'd never touched a rope. Like, I touched a rope during that one phase in mountain in PJ. It goes back to like, you know, you're learning at such a in a high pressure environment that you can't keep everything. Right. And even I even had like, you know, that rescue mission was interrupting a ropes course. So, like, that was the most ropes knowledge that I've ever gotten in my life. So, like, for that specific event, I just absolutely bottomed out. So, like, there was during that train up, I was like, listen, probably not gonna get put on a team, probably gonna just come up here for the because what happens is if you went up there, they would send too many people on purpose. And if you didn't do great, you didn't get because it was a draft. The team dudes from that unit, they would literally have a big board and they would have all your scores from everything that you're doing. Because it's a tier, it's a special mission unit. Like, who's running the training? Air Force, Air Force, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, the Air Force is running the spin-up. The army, the security teams, we used to have rangers that would provide security teams, they would go through the spin-up with you. So you got to work with the dudes that you wanted to play. I mean, just world class, everything, everything from shooting to the scenarios. I my mind is still blown about the level of realism that you could do there. Most realistic training I've ever seen. Like, kudos to those guys. They're they're vetted tier one dudes because they're that good. Um, but just you know, really bottomed out, didn't think I was gonna get drafted. And I was like, hey, you'll just go back home. Like, no big deal, you'll use it as a training event, and you know, it sucks not to get picked up. I got put on basically what ended up to be the Irat team. There, I think it were two or three different, you know, Afghanistan teams that were going out. And I got put on for whatever reason, it was lightning in a bottle where I didn't perform really well. But the PJ that I was with was super good in that area, and the areas that he was a little bit weak in, I was super good at. He was a rescue PJ. I was able to bridge the gap of his like XTS experiential knowledge because I've been a 321st for a little bit. The controller that we had brought a different flavor in, and when we all got together, man, it was just we could not be stopped. Like our team, when we got because it was set up really well, it was kind of like part task training and then a little like crawl, walk, run a little bit faster. And then we went into full mission profiles, which were mind-blowing. We did five or six of them for whatever reason. We got in that FMP, and that team was perfectly constructed, just and through no benefit of my own. Like, I was dragging people down, like I could work out, I was strong, I could carry stuff. Like that was my my band. I was I was good at medicine, like I was always good at just being a medic. It was something that I was okay with. Like it works well in my brain. We just cracked, we we started calling ourselves the Yankees uh back in the 1970s. The Yankees were so good that MLB was gonna make them break their team up because they were too dominant. We started calling ourselves the Yankees for that reason because there was a conversation that happened in another room after two or three FMPs that were like, hey, we might need to think about breaking the teams up because like you guys are like doing really well and some other teams are lagging. Like maybe we like the wrong personnel. Like, can we take this controller and put them over here? And what about this PG? And my team leader was like, Absolutely not. Like, I picked this team, I did it on personality. Like, I mean, it was like the 1980 miracle scenario, right? Like, not a single so you guys deployed with the task force, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we did we do in support of the task force, right? So I was under their umbrella for that, but I was still a 321st STS PJ. I was just on that routine.

Host 3:02:58

So did you deploy with a group of PJs, or was it you a combat controller?

Aaron Love 3:03:01

Mixed team, right? So a combat rescue officer was our team leader, which was kind of like non-standard. Usually that's an enlisted guy, but again, they were spread so thin. My team leader that was a prior Alaska lieutenant combat rescue officer ended up being my team leader. Usually that's an enlisted position. So we were already kind of like weird, but it was you know, a combat rescue officer, a couple PJs, and a combat controller, and then our support security team was a ranger regiment, and then all of the other supporting folks were from the task force.

Host 3:03:32

So when you guys deployed on that rotation, were you guys specifically a CSR element for the task force? Yes, awesome. Yeah, that makes sense.

Aaron Love 3:03:38

Yeah, so not the box, the teams inside of that box, like that's who we focused on. Like, hey, this team is doing a call out in this named area, this team is doing a call out in this named area, this team is going actions on in this area, and we would just be constantly staring at those teams. Like if anything happened, like we were the guys that we were gonna go in and support. Would you guys do a lot of interface as part of their pre-mission? All of it. I mean, you know, showing up to, you know, got to work with the 160th a lot, got to work with the rescue helicopters because we were still flying Air Force, you know, regular rescue helicopters to these events. Like we had helicopters that were assigned to us. So that air crew, the 160th getting together and the big air mission briefs, it would happen every single night. It was at like five o'clock at night. Everybody would get over and go over the packet, and everybody, uh, it was a good chance to see the larger architecture, like just being in the room and watching everybody else plan, like the army teams that would plan. Or, you know, I have a really clear memory of kind of the first time my team leader was like, Hey, I want you to brief a PR plan tonight. And it was kind of like around the room, and it was a bunch of the army dudes, and it was like sergeant major, sergeant major, sergeant major, sergeant major, e8, sergeant major, whatever.

Host 3:04:42

Like the unit has like 18 or 20 of the of the army. I was gonna drop it.

Aaron Love 3:04:46

I think it's like 21% of the sergeant major, and they're all just working on those troops, bro. Like they're all like best possible scenario. But you know, stepping into that event, man, I'm an E5 on my first deployment. Like, you got to make them believe that if something happens, we are going to come and it's gonna be a good thing. Like, we are going to fix that problem. It was the first time that I was just like, did you cross-train with any of the assault troops when you guys were in your train up before deployment? No, we didn't get to touch the assault troops again, because like again, we're the supporting function for them, right? Like they're off doing their own thing. And you know, they have at the tiered units, they have their own PJs that work with them. Like we knew for a fact, like, if we're showing up to, you know, an army or a navy op and it's at that level that they called us in, I'm getting turnover from the PJ that works and eats and lives and breathes with them, right? Because that's that's that force enabler model, the tier one. That's where the larger forces got it, right? Because the army and the navy tier one units a long time ago are like, wait, you guys are highly capable. What if we just had you guys assigned to our teams and our troops? That makes sense.

Host 3:05:43

How would you describe like PJ culture compared to other teams that you operated alongside, like Rangers, SEALs, SF, controllers? Like, what makes a PJ team room feel different from all of those?

Aaron Love 3:05:54

It's mostly the willingness to engage in homosexuality, I think is what I'm supposed to. I mean, like, so you know, I'm making a clip out of just that, bro. That's what I'm supposed to get. Happy sack, tree hugging, medicine, you know what I mean? Like very touchy-feely. But, you know, those jokes come from a real place, you know, a little bit older, a little bit more cerebral. There's a very, very high value on being an adult learner. In order to step into any room and be a subject matter enthusiast, hopefully a subject matter expert on what it is you're talking about. You have to be a voracious reader. You constantly got to be in that student mindset. You know that you're always a lot of times, you know, it's easy to take the supporting dude. Like, you got a whole team. Imagine you have a whole team of operators that went through a pipeline together, blood, sweat, and tears, multiple deployments, and then you got this one random dude that shows up on your deployment. Like, hey, he's on your team now. It's super easy to shove that guy in a corner. It's super easy to take the PJ and be like, hey, take your little med bag, and you're gonna go sit on the truck. And if I need you, I'm gonna call you. And if you don't find a way to, you know, that but that butt sniffing happens a lot. But we breed people that are professional, they're good at their given tasks, they're fit, they're ready to show that capability and really bring value to the team that they are. And we just put them much younger than any other special operations force, you know, younger in their career. You could very well have an E4. This happened in Hellman in 2000, you know, 2014, 2015. There was a huge IED event that killed like eight rangers and a couple CIA chicks. That event was fixed by a 24-year-old pararescuan on his first deployment from the 23rd STS. Like that problem was fixed by one dude. You're talking about the coast bombing? Uh, I don't think it was, it wasn't coast. It was there was it the most famously, the ranger that got injured from that event stood up and saluted the president when he came in, and everybody freaked out about it because they were like, wow, like that dude's a hard ass. But that was that event. That that it was a houseborn IED. They clacked off the entire house. I don't it wasn't the coast. Because I think coast happened at 13, didn't it? Anyway, whatever. We somebody fact check it. Fact check it people behind the scenes.

Host 3:08:03

They always ask we've had dudes from the we had a dude from the coast bombing here, so I just I was just curious. Yeah, and then there was yeah, we've had a couple of the rangers talk about some of those incidents where some females, a bunch of rangers got killed on a houseborn ID. So I'm not sure.

Aaron Love 3:08:14

It happened famously in Coast, and then this one, I think the two were from the CIA, and then the larger assault force was Rangers. And I mean that I watched that happen from the talk in southern Afghanistan, but that those are the situations we're putting people into. So when you back it all the way up for who are we looking for, like you need somebody that can communicate appropriately, you need somebody that can be confident right on that line of cocky. He's gonna have to be a little bit older and a little bit more mature and able to deal with those things. Whether sometimes you walk into a team room and the team doesn't like you, like that's just a it's just a thing. You don't vibe with them. We need people that can break down those barriers and be like, listen, you don't like me, you don't understand why I'm here. It wasn't your choice. I got it. But here's the things that I can do for your team that can help you out. Just let me show you. We need those people that can navigate that. So the entire culture, it really like we're looking for people that are willing to accept the fact that it's gonna be reactive in nature, you're not gonna pick your time, you don't get to say when the mission happens. It could be at the end of a long training day, you still gotta go. It could be a suicide mission. The question is, is are you gonna go? Are you the type of person that's gonna be like, I don't know how this is gonna work out, but I'm going. The culture, whether it's because we have the widest dispersion. I mean, I'm talking, you know, tree hugging hippie right on that line of like non-confrontational dudes, all the way to meet eating sharp two savages that are just on that continuum of violence, they just want to kill everything, right? Yeah, for whatever reason, everybody meets in the middle because when it's about that patient, man, like you don't care. Those tree hugging hippies will turn into absolute savages.

Host 3:09:49

Well, plus, man, I'm I mean, once once that team sees what you guys are capable and your work on a target, then everything changes.

Aaron Love 3:09:57

Then you're like, okay, wait, you're a and then that's when the real questions start. When they start asking you stuff that's outside your lane, that's when you know you're starting to really do it. When somebody pulls you aside and be like, hey man, we're talking about this really weird thing, and I don't think it's really a PJ thing, but could you help us talk about like how we could use aircraft or how we could stage certain equipment to make it a little be like? I certainly could.

Host 3:10:16

Oh, that's awesome. Um what did the first few missions teach you about the gap between training and combat?

Aaron Love 3:10:23

That gap is way shorter, that gap is way smaller than I thought it was gonna be. I'll I'll tell you that much. And you know, this is just a credit to every instructor, every single one of my mentors, from you know, CA to these other folks that that really, you know, NN. Like I use operate, so a thing in our community is we use operator initials. That that's your name. Like NN is a real person, but our community is so small that you can literally just use the first letter of your last name and the and the last letter of your last name, unless somebody else has it, and that's you. Like when people hear LX on a radio, they know that that's me. That's Aaron Love. Like C A is a real person, NN is a real person. I just don't use their whole names. Um, you know, those people we train, there would be training events. I'm like, this couldn't happen in the real world. And then you would deploy and you would see a mission that happened just like you trained it, but to a lesser degree, and you'd be like, Oh wow, I could have fixed a more complex problem than that. That is like hearing these things that you don't understand as a student. You know, an instructor will tell you something while you're doing a training event, you're like, that doesn't make any sense. And you hear his words in your head 10 years later, and you're like, oh this is why he wanted me to learn that lesson. I just wasn't ready for it yet. And that gap between the mission, the best feedback that I ever got, fast forward, you know, seven, six years later in Afghanistan, we got a mission right off the rip. I mean, right, the guys were barely into a sleep cycle, and we got a mission to go get it was a very hairy like go into the into a valley where there were people above the helicopter. Like, you don't need to know tactics to understand that if somebody can just throw a rock at you and kill you, that's not a good thing. Go into there to get a kid that was shot in the head in a firefight, put two helicopters over a zone with people above you. When we got back from that mission, my youngest team member that we trained up with at Vegas looks at me and goes, bro, that was that was like not one of the harder training events that we did before we got here. He was like, I got on the helicopter after we did everything on the ground, and I was like, Oh shit, that was exactly like the training that we did. That's probably the best compliment that I've ever got. Yeah, it's but I was I was the beneficiary of that because on those first couple alerts and stuff, it wasn't I wasn't just along for the ride. I was like, oh no, that alert means we're going, and that's uh now I gotta go do this, and then I gotta be ready for this next thing. Like, it was awesome. Like, it can't talk about the training enough.

Host 3:12:41

How many of those early missions were the quiet kind where nothing happened? And how many were the kind that kind of changed you?

Aaron Love 3:12:47

Yeah on that deployment, on the Iraq deployment, not a ton because we're it was this really weird thing. We had to get approval through the Iraqi government and the Iraqi police before we could go on an op because that's the that was the weirdness of Iraq at that time. So it turned into this thing where like you'd get this three-day approval through the Iraqi government, and then all the teams started showing up to dry holes. Oddly enough, the people that we had to talk to their countrymen about taking weren't there. They'd been there for months, and then we show up and they're not there. So it got to this weird thing, and then there was a little incident on the ground where it was straight propaganda, but like we landed. The people that were there that didn't want us there started shooting at us. We killed the people that were shooting at us, and then the Iraqis spun it as like, oh, they were just simple farmers, and they didn't know it was American helicopters, they just thought it was maybe Taliban helicopters that were flying over and they shot at them, and then you killed us for it's this huge, like political thing, right? That shut us down for like a month, right? So, you know, those first couple missions, pretty benign, pretty, you know, a lot of prepo, a lot of sitting and waiting, and then we had that month break. Um, we took a shit ton of incoming at that place. We actually had the the craziest, like were you guys in uh Ballad? We were, yeah. But the craziest non-mission event, there was a 160th Little Bird pilot that was spinning his aircraft up, and we're they did this is a funny hazing thing, but they did controlled detonations every Wednesday on Ballad where they would just blow up huge cachets and stuff, like the EOD folks would just blow stuff up in center side. So it's funny for the new teams, like on the first Wednesday, the new teams would react to the huge explosion because it was close enough to feel, you'd be like, Oh crap. The new team would like start throwing their stuff on and be like, Oh no, it's happening. And then the new guys would be freaking out, and then the the the old guys would be like, ah kidding, they just do it every Wednesday, and we just wanted to play the old team. Did it to us, we thought it was funny. Um, but it was a Tuesday, there was this huge explosion, and we all kind of look at each other, we're like, it's not Wednesday. We poke our head out, and there's a big black plume of smoke, like right because we were right over the walls from where the 160th parked their aircraft. So we were like, oh shit, like the deployment before a one uh C46 or 47 basically was taking off or did something. There was a rollover, and it it injured, it killed a couple people and it injured like 25 more. So those dudes, like that stuff would happen on base. So we look out, big plume of smoke. I was like immediately yelled at the Rangers, I was like, Hey, you guys are in the truck with the mass casualty bag, and myself and the other PJ just sprinted out. We're like, it's right there, meet us there. So they got the mass casualty bag, they're getting out in the truck. They get over there, and my my I was getting them ready to go. So my PJ brother beat me to the aircraft that was still spinning. And I show up and I'm I like look, and the pilot has his head down, and I kind of like gave the WTF face to my like, what are we doing here? And he just kind of like shook his head. I was like, in spin-up, this guy clacked off one of his rockets out of his rocket pod. It punched through the Hesco but didn't detonate because those the system that he was using armed at a certain speed, like it judged G forces. So when it hurt hit a certain amount of Gs, that's when the warhead would activate. Well, the rocket punched through the Hesko, was still firing, ended up going fast enough to detonate. That's the cloud of smoke that we saw because it like bounced a couple times and then finally armed, hit the ground, exploded. That was the big explosion that we heard. It was right in the middle of the airfield. That dude just accidentally hit the wrong button and clacked that bad boy off. And we like we heard a rumor that that dude was at home in Fort Campbell and had his stuff like pulled like 72 hours later. You hear that song.

Host 3:16:28

Cause you had a bad camera, don't last absolutely.

Aaron Love 3:16:34

Ridiculous. So, as far as like anybody get injured? No.

Host 3:16:37

Oh, good.

Aaron Love 3:16:38

I mean, just his career. Yeah, the only thing we lost was that guy's wings. You know what I mean? That organization is not gonna take you just accidentally the little bird? Yeah. Oh wow, it's not gonna take you accidentally ending a rocket, bro. Like you were you're dunskis. But as far as like tactical missions and that stuff done, it was learn, it was dipping my toe into that JSOC world, being in those rooms and hearing those conversations. We trained just like absolute madmen. Uh, you know, we had a very that I did more training on that deployment than probably in my entire pipeline. I mean, every single day, like we had I went Airbnb A and B, like I went to the mission brief. Then I took the rangers and we went to the range and we shot flat range for two hours and we shot CQC for two hours, and that got us to about midnight. The team leadership would show up after the other follow-on meetings that they would have to do. They would roll into the range in the shooting, we would have lunch, then we would go off and we would go to every single unit on base and we like you have an ISR platform, does it have people in it? What's the important stuff? If you guys go down, how many people? How do I cut this piece of equipment out? How do I damage it so the enemy can't use it? How do I cut this apart to bring it home? How are you guys gonna call us if you guys need us? Like, every I mean, we would do that every single day, whatever, while we were sitting alert. Like, you would take stuff out, put it on the birds, get ready to do the missions for the night, know which teams are going out, have an idea like how many souls. Are on the ground. What could I possibly do? Is this one high risk? Is it not? Then you would sit alert. Then everybody would get home in the morning. And then in the morning, we would have like a physical challenge event before breakfast, which was our like team family dinner. But we would do training where it was like, okay, well, here's a gator, like your classic side-by-side military little drive-around golf cart looking thing. We would park it at the bottom of a has. A Haz is a hardened aircraft shelter. It's got like a 35 degree up, it's a big concrete structure that we took over from the Iraqis in Ballad to protect aircraft. But it was like, I don't know, 100 meters to the top of it. So you would run them, like you would run the has if you need to like work outside. You do sprints up and down the has because it was just steep enough where you could walk, you didn't have to scramble. But we would do we would set up training events where like there's a patient at the top and a uh uh vehicle at the bottom of it. You had a tire rope system, tie that bad boy, get it all the way to the top. You couldn't like use the gas on the thing, you had to pull it in neutral up to the top. So make a rope system to haul this heavy thing up, load your simulated patient, make sure it's all good, and then release it back down, and then you were done when that got down. We would do that like three days a week. Like there was always a train. It was sometimes it was as easy as here's a patient, get him into a litter, ready to go. You have one person and it can't be more than two minutes. Like you got to get it done. We would do that every single day.

Host 3:19:23

That's crazy, man. Yeah. Um, during your spin-up for that deployment, Pedro 66, uh, an HH60 G Pave hawk out of the 66th rescue squadron went down in Helmand province on a combat rescue mission. Five airmen killed. These were your people doing, you know, your mission that you've talked so passionately about. And that happened before you even deployed. What does it do to a team to take casualties before you even start to like go on deployment and go to work, man?

Aaron Love 3:19:50

It makes it very real, man. Like it's easy to LARP and to kind of be because I was I mean, granted, best training I ever got, that spin-up was absolutely unreal with the amount of resources they threw at it. But there's a certain amount of gamification, right? At any time during that event, I could kind of just poke my head up and be like, hey, instructor assist, I did this thing. Do you want me to do this to this? You know, do you want me to actually cut a hole in this mannequin? Especially when you're talking medical training. Exactly, right? Like I can't perform surgery on every single patient, right? So, you know, there was always that LARPing sort of, you know, gamification. When we got the word about Pedro 66, we were like halfway through that spin-up. And I wasn't going to Afghanistan. I was going to Iraq, like we knew it at that point. But like these were, it wasn't just the PJs on board. It wasn't just Ben White, Joel Gence, and Flo, you know, Mike Flores. It was that entire air crew. I did my entire element leader spin-up with that air crew. There were a Vegas aircrew that were flying that mission in Hellman. I knew I did my spin-up with every single person on that point on that plane. Like Wiz, uh, you know, Aguilar, David Smith, like those are the air crew dudes. I knew those dudes because I flew like 60 hours with those guys. Like I knew those men. Um, you know, and I'm blanking on the fourth one and it's killing me. Got a very distinct, I'll think of it here in a second. But Wiz, David Smith, Aguilar survived, David Smith was killed, Wiz was killed. Um, the other pilot. Oh man, it's almost like a it's really bothering me. It starts with an S, and I can't believe I can't pull this up. I'll I'll figure it out here on a break. Um I I knew those men. Like when they went down, I went through the pipeline with Ben. Ben White was on my in-dock team. He came over to my house. We played, we had Friday night pokers. I lived on base when I was at Kirtland. We were a terrible team. We got locked down. So we just had Friday night poker nights and our house on base because the dudes couldn't leave base. But I had this sweet base house that was pretty big, and you could fit a couple beer pong tables in the in the garage and you could have a big 10-seat poker game. And that's what we did like every Friday. And Ben would come over and he would hang out. And I knew Ben the entire pipeline, man. Um, highly religious dude. My favorite Ben White story is you know, we're at one of these the five-mile run at Endoc used to be a huge watershed because you got a break, you had to run every mile at seven minutes a mile until after the five. So the five mile at seven minutes was the longest, fastest run that you'd have to do. So there would be people that would literally game it. They'd be like right on the edge of the four-mile run, and they'd be like, All right, listen, I'm gonna fail the five-mile run. I know I'm not gonna pass it, but I get to retest on the sixth. You don't have to redo the fifth, you can you get a couple shots, whatever. You need two shots on the on the five mile. Like if I fail the first one, it's okay. I can pass the re-fire to get to the six mile, because the six mile run was in 4230. So it was just over a seven-minute pace to graduate, right? But that five mile run was one of those big gates that everybody was like, oh man. Like if you're a if you were a borderline runner, that five mile was tough to do. We're walking out, and some kid is on his re failed the four-mile run, so he couldn't fail the five-mile run. So you can't you can't fail two times in a row, right? So Ben White walks out of this, it's four o'clock in the morning. We're all in our stupid PT gear, smelling like student, going over. He had got to go eat at the chow hall before this eval day. It's on a Monday. Everybody's pretty tired. It's dark out in Texas. And Ben White comes down, and this kid's name was Zydell. And I'll remember it forever because Ben White had a southern accent. He's from Tennessee. And he bends down and he goes, Oh, what's that? Zydell's legs. You wish he were Ben White's legs. I bet you do. That dude failed out. Zydell did not make that run, like that was his last day. But he hugged Ben, he laughed, and he's like, brother, that's exactly what I needed before this event. That's who Ben White was. Like Ben White was just a good dude. And he was killed in that crash. It was the first time we lost a combat rescue officer in combat rescue and combat operations. It was first lieutenant Joel Gents, uh, out of Vegas, so out of the 58th. And then Ben was out of Moody at the time, and Mike Flores was out of, I believe, DM. Like those were and and I knew the entire air crew.

Host 3:23:55

Like, this is what happened on that op, do you know?

Aaron Love 3:23:57

Yeah, man. So Pedro 6'5 and 6'6 went into the zone to get a Marine. It was in a firefight.

Host 3:24:04

Just for you guys all out there, though those were the call signs for the helicopter crews.

Aaron Love 3:24:07

Yeah. So Pedro in the Air Force rescue community, Pedro actually used to be, it was a really weird-looking two-rotor helicopter, but it was super strong. So it could lift a ton of weight. It had two road, two main rotors, not like back to back, but like side. They were almost like angled. And that call sign was Pedro, and that was one of the first like air crew recovery service, like ARRS, the air rescue and recovery service, is the preemptor to pararescue, the pararescue community. But those call signs were Pedro. So then the H-860 took on that moniker. So a lot of times people associate the Pedro call sign with pararescue operations. So they were flying under the pararescue Pedro lineage call sign on H-860s. They picked the Marine up in Hellman, they were going back to deposit them. Um, and one 762 round hit the tail rotor of that aircraft. Uh the pilot was Newski, and the other pilot that I'm blanking on, it's really annoying me. They were able to limp that bad boy. They would have, if they would have just crashed and taken what they got, they were simple helicopter physics. There's two spinny choppy things. You need both of them to fly. No matter what aircraft you're in, if those two spinny choppy things aren't working, you're gonna crash. They knew that they were gonna crash and they were able to get away from like a smaller base. They were taken off from like a smaller fob. They immediately took fire. They knew that they were unrecoverable. If they would have just bought the bad deal that they had, they would have crashed and killed more Americans. They limped it out to an open field and put it down and it killed everybody on board except for two, except for Aguilar and Simone is the other pilot that survived. And he was, I mean, Aguilar was physically on fire, was calling people in from that SMA position, from that gun. Uh, I believe he was a gunner. So from that side of the aircraft, he was physically calling the second ship, which are good friends of mine, and we talked about on our podcast that entire event. But their their brothers had to respond to that event. They were the second ship, and he was physically on fire, like 90% burns. He ended up losing a leg. Simone had serious uh mental, uh both mental, like the moral injury of the event and very serious structural damages to his brain, to his head from the event. But those are the only two that that survived from there. It was one 762 round to the tail rudder.

Host 3:26:21

Catastrophic, dude. So you had to deal with that before you kind of before you ever deployed in that Iraq rotation. So I know I was out the door like two weeks a week after that. Did you you didn't go to the, I'm sure you guys you didn't have time to go to the services, right?

Aaron Love 3:26:34

I was deployed. Yeah. And and that's the crappy thing, too, is you know, when extortion went down, extortion was the biggest loss of life in our career field before that. We lost, you know, those guys that I went through in doc on that first one. You know, when I look back at that team, John Brown and Dan Zerby were the two PJs that were on that quick reaction force extortion 1-7, along with the Navy Gold Squadron dudes that got shot down. So the 31 Heroes event, you know, there were three Air Force dudes on that. There was uh one of the Harvell brothers, legends in the combat control community, unfortunately, both passed away at this point. One of them on this event, and then the other one uh just to a tragic. I don't know. I I hesitate to say that it's been called a suicide, but he had been having problems with mental health, both tier one combat control, silver star recipient, dude. I mean, just savages and legends in the career field brothers, uh, Andy and Sean. I believe it was Andy on extortion, and then Sean later both passed away now. Um, but you know, I got that call in England, that was 2010. I got that call in England, you know, earlier it was August. Um that extortion had gone down as well. And um it's the same sort of thing, like, dude, that sucks, and the whole community is just hurting. But the nature of this job is like we still have alert, man. Like I know you just got a bad phone call, but the next phone call could be to go get that Filipino dude out in the ocean. So there's not a lot of time to process it. And this was this was like the most hyperbolic event, right? Like you lose people that you like. I knew Ben's family. Like it wasn't just some I knew I knew what Thai food Wisnewski and Aguilar like to go eat in Vegas. Like I know I knew I knew weird, intimate things about David Smith, one of the backenders that was killed in that event because for so long we would sit on helicopters and you'd have two hours worth of a flight to get to an event. What are you gonna do? Sit in silence? No, you're gonna talk to your bros. Like I knew those men. So to hear that they had died, like that that realism, that like, oh, this isn't this isn't pretending. Like you're gonna you're gonna go do this thing and you could die doing it.

Host 3:28:38

Yeah, we're gonna talk about that later too. I mean, you know, we we we lightly greased over all the training that you do in the PJ pipeline, but that's just enough to get you into the career field. You guys are forever training, and the training that you do is in extremely austere and rough conditions because that's the type of you know missions you're gonna get. So you have to train for them. And you know, we're gonna talk about some training losses later on.

Aaron Love 3:28:58

And it's uh well and and just to I mean, just think about it in the civilian sense. There are people that dedicate their lives to thing like free fall, like being a really good jumper. That sport kills them. There are divers out there that dedicate their lives to diving and no diving, and there are people that it kills them in that sport. Mountain climbing, there are people that dedicate their entire lives to just one discipline and they die. We do that in a week of training for spin-up. Like we do these dangerous things and call it training 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We were doing high-risk training like that. We were talking about jumping onto Blod. If the weather had worked out, I would have gotten a free fall jump in Blade in Iraq. That would have been just training. We just had a random idea. Hey, if we're down for a month, we can jump, right? Like you guys could figure out how to turn the C RAMs off so they don't shoot us. And we could jump, we could free fall, and we'd be safe and we'd be good. We actually got that all the way approved. The winds were too high. We'd have to jump way too far. The release point was like in Iraq. You know what I mean? So, like, if something happens, like we're we're like, well, what would well you definitely need a gun with you? So now it turned into an equipment jump, and now you're like, well, wait a second. How are we? This is a full locker jump. Wait, yeah, hold on. Who's coming to get us? Well, you just call the rescue team. Hold on, boys. We can't call ourselves. We're already here. Guys, we're uh yeah, pull over. I I can't pull over anymore, dude. I can't pull over any further. Yeah, but I mean that's but that's you know, it's part the nature of the job is that you're always gonna train, but these things are dangerous. You can't it's the soft truth. You can't make an organization, you can't just magic the skills up when the flag goes up. Like you have to train those skills beforehand. They're all dangerous. Yeah, we're gonna cover that here in just a minute.

Host 3:30:33

So you finished up that deployment. Um, that was 2010, and then you um you go back to England. How long did you stay in England before you PCSed?

Aaron Love 3:30:40

So I stayed, I was there until 2011. I got back from that deployment and I fully intended on going and assessing for the tier one unit. Like out of that deployment, uh, I was I was lucky enough to have mentors and people that really cared about me. And a couple of them, like a couple of the dudes that were at that unit, pulled me aside and they were like, hey, listen, you should put your packet in. Like, you got a lot of work, like some of your skills aren't there. But I will tell you, like, you know, just from the remember the buy versus build model, like they're looking to buy a product. For me, they were like, with a little bit of building, like you could definitely do this thing, like assessment selection at that unit, like just like the other tier one units, it's no joke, man. Just so we're clear, like Air Force has a tier one unit. That's what we're talking about. They do, yeah. And it's in North Carolina, the AFSOC geographically separated unit is what you're allowed to call it. So the GSU. Um, there's in history, there's been numbers associated with it and whatever else. We don't say those numbers, we don't associate that unit. They've got an unclassed, completely benign mission statement. I'm gonna stay with it. I was never at that unit. Uh, spoiler alert. I had my packet in to go assess. Um, and then I had my injury event, which you know, for a long time I would call my injury event, but it was it was a suicide attempt, and I paid for it with a very serious injury. So I broke my my pelvis. 13 vertebrae, compressed two vertebrae, broke five ribs, separated my left shoulder, had a moderate TBI, and actually crushed so much of my tissue that I was in danger of going into liver and kidney failure. What happened, dude? You know, um, so worst time of my life, right? Like just doing all of the dumbest things that I possibly could. Like special operations is a mistress in every sense of the word. Like when you're home, you're not really home because you're thinking about being gone. When you're gone, you do this weird thing, you're like, oh, I wish I was home. And then you're home for two weeks and you're like, uh, when's the next trip? When's the next training trip? Can I get back on the road? When's the next appointment? What do I need to be getting ready for? And I was just in that life, man. Like I was stupid, I still wasn't emotionally mature uh enough. I was going through a terrible period. And uh, you know, I just I I made the decision uh that I wanted to end my own life. Um, and I just wasn't very good at it. So yeah, good thing I even I can't kill me at this point, is like how I'd like to phrase it. But I mean, I kept that secret from you know, the woman that I was married to and my kids for a decade after that. Like there was nobody that knew, you know, this story. We were in a place getting ready to do a different thing, and it was on again, off again, on again, off again. Um, and I don't actually remember a whole lot of the event um due to the injuries and some other stuff that was happening. Like I was I was an alcoholic for 25 years. Um, so we weren't on alert. I made a terrible decision, and in that moment, I I fortunately don't remember a whole lot of it. Uh, I remember waking up and being in immense pain at this lodging location with people that didn't speak English. And I was just like, hey, I think I need I think I need to call my friend uh that's here with me. There's two of two of my friends that are here with me. Um and I think they probably need to come check me out. They were PJs, so I was like, hey, whatever. They took one look at me and they were like, what the fuck? And I eventually got aeromedically evac out to launch stool, where I spent about a week where they, I mean, the liver and the kidney things were you get so your your body is good unless you crush it and then it puts off a bunch of toxins, essentially. That's what rhabdo is, right? Like rhabdo, you have a bunch of things that your body can't process because it's not meant to process bodily fluids, it's meant to process stuff that you take in. Your liver values are supposed to be in the hundreds. Mine were in the you know, like ten thousands for like a couple days. Like it was a it was a really serious, really serious event. Um, and you know, the the comeback from that, obviously I wasn't assessing and selecting it anywhere. Uh, it was gonna be, it was still in the moment. When the doctors first saw me, they're like, Well, you're probably not gonna walk again. Um, that was the the extent of my injuries at the first place that I went when I got to launch stool. I I took that as a challenge and I got up when the doctor told me that I went and walked and went and peed, um, which isn't a good thing to do. That's dumb. I shouldn't have done that. But I did it because I was like, fuck you, I'm gonna get back. Did you throw yourself off a building or something? Or what happened? I did. I did. So basically, what happened? The place that we were staying in, there was a first floor and it had a walkway. I thought that walkway overlooked like a little courtyard. It didn't, it overlooked a loading dock. So I think what happened here is either, and again, I don't remember the event. Uh, I think looking back, we looked back through my text messages and the conversations that I was having and stuff, and obviously like putting two and two together, even though I don't remember that event or the lead up to it, because I we'd went out, we'd had dinner, uh, you know, I went back and went to sleep. And then, you know, some two hours later into my sleep event is when this happened. So the it in the head injury doesn't help around this event either. Um, but it looks like I either went up to just like take a seat on that wall and went over backwards. Um, or when you put the text message conversations, the kind of like the head space that you can very clearly see that I was in, uh, it looks like I just kind of like sat, was like, okay, that's it. I'm just one over the side, but I funny as dark humor goes, you know, the funny part of that is I actually landed on a manhole cover. And in the initial pictures in the hospital, you could actually read the wording on the manhole cover. Like that's how hard I hit it. But I I, through the grace of God, I landed flat on my back. Um, didn't land on my head or somewhere else. So I had no other structural injuries other than that, got away with no surgery. But I basically had to go through all the way through the Air Force and the Department of Defense at the time, Department of War now. I had to go through an entire waiver process because they thought that if I got back into a parachute harness, I would, I would sever my spine and I would be paralyzed. They're like, you won't survive opening shock. And I was like, Well, we're gonna have to find out. Only way to do it is put me in a harness. So I basically had the the equivalent of a hold harmless waiver through the Air Force like medical thing. Like I had to be able to pass a T a PT test first. So I had to teach myself how to squat again. Couldn't squat.

Host 3:36:39

How long was your recovery process?

Aaron Love 3:36:40

It was eight months before I took a PT test and passed it. Oh, I had to pass that Air Force PT test. Like that, they were like, this is all a non-starter if you can't pass the PT test and get back in. Like, that's the standard. You got to meet the standard. Were you in England the whole time? Yeah, yeah. Um, so I did. I passed that PT test, and then the the first real event was like we went down to Hunter Army Airfield and we jumped with the 160th. So static line, the first jump back, I jumped a static line and I landed on a runway. So at that point, like I landed on concrete and a static line shoot. So I was like, okay, well, I guess we're good here because I can't get any more rough than that, and then jumped a free fall jump and and that was okay. And then I was fully back up on team, and then that's when I started getting ready for that PCS. So that entire period of 2011 really was rehab, like learn to like literally learn to walk again, literally learn to move my body with the way that my body articulated. I have a anterior shift in my pelvis. If you ever watch me how I stand, it looks like I'm an Instagram girl that sticks my butt out. I have a lower dotted curve. It's because the way my body healed, my pelvis is actually rotated anteriorly. So it's just the way scar tissue and stuff. Yeah. Uh scar tissue, the way the muscles feel. And then actually the way that my bone, like my SI joint from like S5 all the way down, like the bottom half of my spine, is just trash. It's just like that's where the brunt of the impact did through the pelvis through the lower part of the spine, and then the rest of the transverse process is broken all the way up and then compressed in between my shoulder blades and then.

Host 3:38:04

Did you talk to people after that event about what had been going on in your life or was it all this?

Aaron Love 3:38:08

I kept it a secret, man.

Host 3:38:09

Yeah, I was about to say, man.

Aaron Love 3:38:11

I didn't tell anybody. It was just, you know, from the outside looking in, it was just some fucking idiot fell off a thing at night and hurt himself. It was a dude, it was a big deal. Like I don't wanna I don't wanna downplay um the impact that that had really across a level that I didn't intend to do. Because when that goes like when something like that happens, or like a special operator was injured attached to a thing that could possibly go off, I mean that goes directly to SOCOM. So like my boss, my commander at the time, he was dealing with calls of like what the fuck is going on, and that was not his fault. Like, you know, I was I was mad at that guy, I don't have a whole lot of good things to say about that guy, I think, for some valid reasons. But you know, being a little bit older, you know, the fact that I even put him in that position is disgusting to me. It literally is. Um, and if you can think about two years of training and a successful deployment and whatever good things that I was doing in my career, like that also has to be mentioned that that was a huge, huge failure for a number of different reasons. Like me not getting the help that I am, me engaging in activities, you know, mainly drinking, that were just absolutely antithetical to what I was trying to do or who I was trying to become. It was just also fake.

Host 3:39:27

Now that you're older, you you're wiser retired, um, you've had a chance to minster people, mentor people, like if if you go back and look at that incident that you went through, like what were the signs and signs and or symptoms that you couldn't recognize then, but you can see now with a clear head of kind of your spiral.

Aaron Love 3:39:45

It was it was the I mean it was so classic. Like looking back on it now, like thank God we have all this, you know, the these mental health people that aren't afraid to have this. Like, I was still living in that world, like 2010, 2011. We didn't have the grace that we Extend to people when they talk about having these mental issues now. Like just looking at the way that I went through that event personally, like that informed me as a senior NCO. That was one of my hot button things. Like, guys would come to me and they'll be like, Hey man, mentally, I'm like not really having a good thing. Like, that was an all that wasn't one of those things, you know. When I was growing up, it was like, Okay, well, you better lock in, you better figure that out. Like, we need you to be on touch. Yeah, yeah. That I didn't ever approach it like that because although I didn't tell anybody that, like, I didn't ever be our career field is small, so people would hear about it, they'll be like, What the fuck happened? And it was never a thing was like, Oh, yeah, well, you know, I was at my lowest point, and you know, I the only time that I ever felt good about who I was was being on target doing the job, and the rest of my life played second fiddle, and I'm not a good dad, and I'm not a good partner, and I'm not a good man, and I'm not doing the things that live up to this beret every day. My good friend Ben died wearing this beret and did it everything right. And then when you look at me compared to my friends that had died, people that I actually knew. If you just wrote down on paper what they did and wrote down on paper what I did, you'd be like, that guy's a piece of shit. And that is that is fair. Like that is an oak. I the only thing that I've learned of being older or whatever, whoever the better person it is that I've been trying to become over the last 20 years, it is fair to say that that is an accurate representation of me at that time. It just is, and I just have to live with it.

Host 3:41:24

Sure. So, I mean, you obviously rehab back from your injuries, um, and you end up going to Afghanistan. Uh, take me to Hellman Province in the winter of 2012. What was the operational temple like for your team on that deployment? Yeah. So we for those of you that don't know, and you guys have heard you know our podcast for the last year. You guys know that Afghanistan in 2012 and 2011 was just the wild west, man. It was it was dope.

Aaron Love 3:41:52

And I'm trying, I'm desperately trying to think. I I know this is right because your show prep is freaking intense. So getting a bash, and I had just gotten to Vegas. So we took over. That commander, that crow that was my team leader, actually took command of the 58th. There was a reorganization, like, new commanders come in, and there's, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, that commander took control of it. So the guy that I deployed with, that I had a great time, that I respected as a man, like he's doing his commander gig out of that tier one unit now at the 58th. And he had this crazy idea where at the beginning, a lot of times pararescue in the rescue units would kind of like treat deployments like pickup games, and it was super weird because you'd be like, Well, there's a deployment in June coming up. It's like October, we're gonna start planning for it. Who wants to go? And some guys would go, and some guys from different teams would be like, Yeah, I'm in for this, and some guys weren't. Some guys would go and they'd only do that, they'd be like, I can go, but I can only do two months, or I can go, but I can go, I can go for the last half because I'm having a baby or whatever else. And they would kind of just like piecemeal a team together, and then you'd go through a truncated spin-up, and that's who you deploy with. My commander that came from that tier one world was like, No, no, no, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna hard crew teams. We're gonna have, we're gonna organize into what we call troops, because that's what we call them up here. So we're gonna call them troops, not flights. That pissed a lot of people off because the Air Force is the Air Force. But he's like, I'm gonna have three troops and we are gonna take the other commanders at the other two rescue units. Like they refer to rescue units in the Air Force as the big three until very recently, because the Vegas unit actually just got decommissioned. So they took all those pieces of equipment and men and they shoved them between there was 38th, 48th, and the 58th rescue squadrons. The 38th is out at Moody, the 48th is at DM, and the 58th was at Vegas. So those other commanders from the Big Three were lamenting the pace of mission and how many people they were going. They were like, we need to take a knee. We need to figure out a better way to schedule this stuff. And my commander, people loved him and people hated him for this. But on a VTC, he was like, You guys need to take a knee? We'll take every single deployment you guys got. The 58th will take every single one. We're doing this new thing where we're gonna put dudes on together with team. They live, eat, breathe, deploy with these dudes every single time. You're not gonna need big spin-ups, you're not gonna have a lot like, yes, people are gonna have babies, yes, people are gonna get injured, they're not gonna be able to do a deployment, but we're gonna have a bench of people that already trained with that team so that there's no you don't have to worry about what SOP are you using, what SOP are you using? Is your team different? Is my team? Whatever. All that stuff's gonna be figured out in the wash, and we're gonna take every deployment. And the two commanders are like, you are gonna break your unit, you're gonna break the dudes. There's no way that you can do that. It just worked. We took, I hit three deployments, I would have had four every single Christmas, four years in a row. I would have deployed. So I missed the third one because I got orders to the next assignment kind of like unexpectedly. But I was I was set up, I did three three deployments back to back to back, and it was the same period we were the Christmas troop. So one troop, um, the commander also decided that I was ready to be a troop chief. I wasn't even fully qualified as a team leader yet, but he had worked with me and he was like, listen, there's three troops, there's only one person that I want to take one troop, and the other two I've already got figured out for enlisted guys, but we want to make you the troop chief. And that was a whole other thing. Like the guys that trained me to be a team leader at that unit because I had just come off getting injured. I had upgrade training that I still had to do to be fully qualified. Those two dudes, their their names are both Matt. Matt and Matt trained me and certified me as a team leader, and then I became their boss to take them on that first deployment. Vetted dudes that had rescue deployments. I came off my injury, which was a suicide attempt that I didn't tell anybody. I was still trying to figure my life out, still an absolute dumpster fire. And that commander who I trusted invested in me to be like, no, you're gonna be the troop chief now, and I'm gonna promote you over the other people that live and breathe in this building, and you just PCS tier. And that was the setup to that deployment. Like, I wasn't even a fully qualified team leader. Like, if they just put me on that deployment, I wouldn't even have been the top-ranking enlisted dude on the deployment. And suddenly I was the senior enlisted leader that was in charge of it, with help from our chief who deployed with us as well to help like literally to teach me on the job this is how you do it. Uh, what did that responsibility feel like? It was crushing. I mean, again, I can't overstate this enough. My life was a dumpster fire. It wasn't just imposter syndrome, like that imposter syndrome was vetted now. Like that was actual input that I got and be like, you made this decision. It was the wrong decision. And I could, it wasn't just one event, it was an entire string of events where I could be like, you are not the person that these people think you are. And then I had like all of those other things rolled in, like supervising people that trained me to be there. And you know, Matt and Matt, one of them was way more aggressive, and I had a very tense conversation where I made a deployment decision that affected Matt and his team. And he looked at me, he was like, What the where the fuck do you get off telling my team what you're gonna do? I'm the guy that trained you to be here now. Now you think you're gonna tell me what to do. Aggressive, not wrong. He had every right to say that. It took me a long time to take my ego out of it and be like, no, he was fucking dead right. Um, so all of that played in. And all you know, there's a lot of the personal stuff too is you am I gonna come back from this? Am I gonna change because of this event? Am I going to do better things? There's that constant script that runs in back of your head, and all those things played in going right back to you know, where we lost Ben two years prior, you know, three, you know, two and a half years prior to the exact same place, like living and working in the buildings where that happened in Hellman.

Host 3:47:30

Rescue work puts you in bad places on purpose. Cliffs, open water, free fall, helicopters, going in hot. How do you personally think about acceptable risk? Is there a framework or is it always a judgment call in the moment?

Aaron Love 3:47:43

For us, the risk assessment's gonna go out the window. Uh that's just what it is. We we respond to the worst possible scenarios. That is where we live, right? Nobody, again, there is no pararescue mission if the mission is going great.

Host 3:47:57

That's true.

Aaron Love 3:47:58

We're we're there for the worst case scenario. So, and and again, to speak to the culture, we just attract people that they will look at a suicide mission and just go, okay, you know, Chief Master Sergeant Ivan Ruiz, who's a great dude, he lives in Vegas. He and I mean, he's just an absolute savage in every regard. He got the Air Force Cross for a firefight that happened in a compound over the course of hours, like eight to 12 hours. At one point, they were throwing World War II Bangalore-style grenades out of windows at him and his shooting buddy, who I believe was on the SEAL teams. And they did it so many times that it became a joke of who can throw their buddy on the ground and protect them from the incoming grenade while they're fighting across a courtyard to go save kids. Get the fuck out of what do you what are we talking about? Where do we find guys that are just like, well, yeah, man, then they started hucking grenades at us, and the first one was weird. So I threw him on the ground and I protected him. And then he saw the guy that was going to throw another one, and he threw me on the ground, and we laughed about it as they exploded and we were both fine. Like, I can't stress enough like how ingrained Pararescue is into the biggest operations in history that have ever Blackhawk Down, the rescue of Jessica Lynch, the rescue of Captain Phillips, the Iran Easter rescue, Scott O'Grady, all of these Marcus Latrell, all of these Scott Scott O'Grady was picked up by Marines, PJs were involved. Um, all of these events have PJs that were the the one dude that turned the course of this battle and combat control and tack P as well. One dude on a radio turned this battle for a larger force of Americans on the ground. So where it is that we find people like that, I have no clue, but that is who I'm comparing myself to as I step into Vegas. Like these legends in the Mike Maltz, the guy that I said, Mike Maltz worked at the 58th before he was killed early in the Afghanistan war. His name and his picture still rang out in that hallway. And here I am, injured, one deployment. Now I'm a troop chief of a squadron that had the most audacious claim as a squadron in the rescue community. It literally, like the entire community was like, You guys in Vegas, I don't know what you're doing. You guys are training in vehicles and on the ground, and you're using helicopters when you need them and not as a go-to, like all these other things. Like, what are you guys even doing out there? And it was just one of those things. Again, it was the right mix of personalities in the thing, like in the in the mix that just lightning in a bottle happened and it it just worked. We just the things that we did, that hard teaming and that progression through the team and always working. Like you'd get a new guy, but you'd be like, Hey, new guy, everybody's been doing it this way. You just do what they do, and those guys were able to do the more advanced stuff quicker. We just found that it worked. But you know, going out the door, you know, I had Pedro 66 in in my background. That guy, Dan, the mission magnet that I've talked about like three times now. I'm gonna text him after this too, and tell him I talked about him the entire time. Dan responded to the Bastion base attack when they breached Bastion. So there were there were insurgents that breached the base of Bastion, which was huge, but they had on they had on American equipment, they had on uh medical scrubs underneath army uniforms that they got off the market so that they could take off that uniform and get into the hospital to go kill people that were in the hospital. They were the re the the Alaska dudes that responded to that, um, Komatsu, Dan Warren, a couple of a couple of other team members, those guys went and fixed that problem in a base attack. It was less than a year before we got there. Like shit happened, like it's super real. And I'm dealing with all of this other personal stuff, stepping into that, like having to look at somebody's family and go, okay, like I know we're getting ready to deploy, but I got them. Like the training plan that we used to get here, it was mine. The logistical support that we got here, I had a hand in it. We did everything that we could to protect your what, your husband, your father, all these things. We're gonna bring them home. All the while I've got this constant self-talk in the back of my head, like, yeah, but do you? Because you're kind of a piece of shit right now.

Host 3:51:59

On that deployment, you had an element leader, you called him Dave, who was sent out on a mission and faced an impossible medical decision without getting too graphic. Can you kind of walk us through what happened and what's like watching a young PJ having to face that? Because this is this is the part of the job that you know we haven't really talked about as much during this podcast so far, but this is you know really the the human toll that takes up a toll after you see this time and time again.

Aaron Love 3:52:26

Yeah, the nature of job of the job is just seeing the worst of humanity and being able to deal with it. You know, you're on you know, 12 on, 12 off rotations. I think those dudes were on I think I was on the seven, so I think it puts them on the tens. So you split a day, like some team shows up at 10 a.m., some team shows up at 10 p.m. It's really on the team for how they divide that day. We were doing it for like periods of darkness because when it got dark out, obviously like everybody worked at night, right? So that night shift team, you would split it, so they got like half some teams would do like 12s or ones, so they would show up at like 1 a.m. and that's when turnover happened. So each team got like half the night, right? Stuff was happening 24 hours a day, but those are your two teams. We'll continue to call him Dave. Uh I'll I'll just have to do it. It's a fake name, so I have to make sure that I don't default call him the real name. Just call dude. We could call him Mike. Uh so anyway, so you know, uh Daylight Up, essentially a convoy hit an IED, and it was such a big IED that it took the up armored truck that they were in. I don't think, I don't think we had Matt Vs at that time, but it was a very, very large armored vehicle, troop carrier type, and it actually twisted it on its asset on its axis and it killed the people in the front seat. Um, so we it was a vehicle extrication scenario. So we were called to help with the extrication problem. They show up, one deceased American hero removed, no big deal. But the truck was actually deformed in such a way that even with our exquisite tools and training, there was no way to get this guy out of the seat. Like he was stuck in the seat. We are trained with advanced surgical procedures that include field amputations, and it's for situations like this. This is a tactical scenario. Every medical scenario is a tactical scenario until it isn't. So they show up and it's a tactical scenario. We've already taken losses on target. The enemy knows that there are losses that we've taken on target. We can't spend our entire life, we can't get a wrecker out and just tow this back to base and figure out what's going on. That's not an option. So we are trained to do things like field amputation with some of our tools. And at this point, this young man on probably his second deployment, um, he was put to the decision of cutting apart an American to remove him because he was so hopelessly trapped that we could not get him out whole. And he had to make the decision in front of this guy's unit, guys that he's worked with and the guys that know his family, he had to go to that commander and go, Here's here's the move. We're gonna have to cut him apart. And we're gonna have to put him in a body bag. It's the only way we're gonna get him out. And he had to make that decision on his own. I mean, if his I can't remember if this was his first deployment or his second, but he, I mean, the youngest, one of the younger dudes on the team, good experience and a good dude, but he had to make that decision on the ground in real time. It's the only time in my career that I've ever taken anybody off alert. Like when he got back and when he told me the story, and you know, you know, I fuck, I was crying by the end of it. Like I can't imagine being put in that scenario that he was put in that day. It was the only time that I've ever told somebody that he wasn't gonna go on alert for his next one. I told him, I was like, I'll fly in your position as a team member because I was splitting the shifts, right? Like they were coming in at 10 or one or whenever they were, and I would come in at seven and leave at seven. So I saw both teams. And then my officer did the opposite sevens. So they had leadership from both, and then if something happened, we'd get woken up. But I told him, I was like, I don't care what I have to do. I was like, I will I will work through today and I'll have my gear ready and I'll fly in your position, or we'll find a way to fly three and two or whatever. But you need to take one day off. That's the only time in my career that's ever happened. How'd he take it? Not well. I mean, you know, he wanted to go back out. These guys, these guys want to do this, what they signed up for, man. But at that time, you know, at least for me, I had to make that call as a leader to just be like, listen, man, I know you're gonna hate me and you're gonna talk shit about me, and you're gonna say that you were fine. I'll good. I'll eat it. I I hope that's always the way. As a matter of fact, I hope you never get to a point where you're like, oh wow, I actually needed to come off of that. And Aaron did the right thing for me there. It just took me a while to figure it out. I hope you never get there. I hope you're always mad at me and you always say that you were ready to go out on that next one. I'll take it. Because that's the type of dude that we attract. But I just felt like at that time, like I had to give him a break. It's the worst thing that you could have possibly imagine.

Host 3:56:50

You've talked about this idea that every person has a finite cup, that you can only absorb so many of these earth-shattering moments before that cup overflows. When did you first start thinking about that concept? I guess.

Aaron Love 3:57:03

I was aware of the concept for a while, but it wasn't until my Bogram rotation uh and losing and losing Mike Cathcart that you talked about earlier. I mean, I said it directly to our flight doc that we deployed with. I was kind of writing my after action report in that moment years later. And I just kind of looked at her and I was uh you, she's an awesome sauce tea legend. Uh, Regan. Regan is awesome. She deployed with us as a trauma certified flight doc, which were you didn't have a lot of those. So having her there was a huge, huge benefit. And a couple of missions in that thing, like she just absolutely performed. Um, but I looked at her and she was just like, hey, are you are you kind of like okay? Like you're not going through your normal process for a mission. And I I know like there was one brief that I would normally have, like, I'd have like one debriefing where we'd kind of like talk about it once we got home. And I actually pushed that brief. It was my standard habit. The second we got home, like we still had work to do. We're gonna go through this debriefing event. We're gonna talk about lessons learned, we're gonna figure out what we can do. And I actually pushed it off until the next day after a full like alert cycle and a period of sleep. And she's like, Hey, that's not like you at all. She's like, What happened? And I was like, to be honest with you, Doc, I'm not, I'm not ready. I can't sit in front of that meeting in front of these guys and talk about this event. I was like, I don't know how many more of these I have left in me.

Host 3:58:16

So let's, I mean, you know, you've already teased about it, so let's talk about it. You're in conduce, it's uh the winter of 2014 going into 2015. It's a joint airfield seizure uh with around 500 Afghans. Uh, your team was on alert, and then the call comes in. Uh, can you just talk to us about that day and and and what happened that day?

Aaron Love 3:58:34

Yeah, so it was a long, deliberate planning thing, this audacious idea. Khandu's is an airfield in the northeast of Afghanistan and it sits right across the border. And because of the way the fighting seasons work, like people go home for the winter and then they come back when it warms up, and that's when you get the fighting season in Afghanistan when it's warm up because nobody fights in the winter. Well, we had this idea. What if we retook? We had condu's airfield for a long time. And then as the battlefield changes and stuff changes, you give up pieces of terrain to go to other ones. So conduce was an American airfield at one point or another, and we had given it over to partner forces, which means we don't own it, which means we need to retake the airfield in order to go have it. So we're trying to get ahead of the fighting season that was coming in. So this is in the winter. So this audacious joint operation, uh, Afghan-led American supported, so the main force of ground operations to include some MI-17 and air assets that we'd been training through foreign internal defense processes for them to solve their own problems. We get this audacious sort of plan. Hey guys, we're gonna go take Kandu's airfield to have a stopgap for those people that are flowing across the border. Like, we want to have an area of operation, but like, oh no, you're not flowing across the border this next flight fighting season. We're gonna secure this sort of area. So we had to go back and take it. So huge event. Uh, every special operations element was there, you know, deployed to the airfield as a deliberate event. So we had plenty of time to plan. Like, we knew moving stuff and setting stuff up, and that has its own challenges, just to make, you know, you're just looking at the world, and this is the one time that the good idea fairy is actually a good thing. Like, you need one guy in the room that's like, hey, what happens if this crazy scenario happens? How are you gonna fix it? You're like, that wouldn't. Oh shit, that actually might happen. Okay, great. Yeah, that that was actually good. And then you have to plan for that and figure out what logistics you need. And you're far away from big bases, and oh, by the way, it's in Afghanistan, so you can't, you just don't have freedom of movement. You can't just call a truck from one base to drive it because that truck could hit an ID. Yeah. So, you know, those those planning contingencies were happening, but lead PR planner for that and talk through like how we're gonna how we're gonna do these things. And there was a small village that was associated with conduos, Mike Kathgart, uh, out of North Carolina. Crazy story, guy that I ended up working with later at the 2-2 that'll play a large role in a later story was his combat controller, good friend of mine named named Chaz Mann. Um, but Chaz was his combat controller. Uh so basically they're they're going in to clear this village. You know, basically you get the airfield and then you start expanding those rings where you're safe, right? So if there's a village inside of like ring one, you get the airfield, get everything set. Okay, well, there's a village that's pretty close, and there's a lot of dudes in there that could really screw this airfield up. So we need to go take that village. And then you start expanding the rings to where you're like, okay, now this is an area of safety. So Mike Cathcart was attached to, I believe, is third. That was third.

Host 4:01:16

That was third.

Aaron Love 4:01:17

Third. Okay, good. So third special forces, they're going in, they're doing a clearing operation. We're sitting alert for these teams. Now, this is where, like I said, a PJ is a PJ is a PJ, and usually STS guys are assigned to teams. The ACC dudes could do this as well. So this was a rescue deployment. I was with the 58th rescue, not inside of ASOC. That's underneath the big Air Force, like we talked about. But we're doing this mission because we have the capability to do it. And when we told them, we're like, listen, we can pre po, we can be a minute flight away from you if that's what you need us to do. And they were like, We want that. So we deployed with two H H sixties and then with our 160th brothers, we had 47s and all the aircraft that we could possibly need. So we deployed and we were sitting alert on the airfield, ready to go. We were plugged in with the Sauce team. So, special operation surgical team, SOST is what they're called. Um, these guys are absolutely fantastic. They can turn a room like this into a trauma bay where you can take casualties and do no kidding surgery, open people's chests, pass blood, save their life. And they can do this within a kilometer of the forward edge of battle. Like they are awesome. Like, if you have somebody that's really hurt, you ask for one of these teams. The army has teams that birthed the Air Force teams. Like the Air Force is modeled off of an army team that already existed. The Air Force has this asset and they're fantastic. I've worked with them a ton of times. Um, just absolute savages.

Host 4:02:35

I got to train with the army guys, the GML dudes. They're just uh very, very unique.

Aaron Love 4:02:39

And the Air Force has the same capabilities they modeled it after those teams. So your trauma surgeon, your anesthetist, your nurse assistants, your radio dudes, they get a little tactical training enough to protect themselves because they're way far forward. So they get a bunch of that stuff. They're I can't speak highly of them enough generally. And then specifically in this event, they were they were fantastic as well. Um, so the operation happens. Mike Cathcart at one point is clearing to move across an area of space. There's somebody off to, I believe, his right side that he never saw. So as he is physically behind his rifle moving, somebody shot him from a 90-degree angle and entered under his armpit and exited the other armpit. So it transected his chest. Um, you know, to Tarantino it a little bit, like this one is hard. This one is hard for me for a lot of reasons. And it's taken a lot of time for me to get okay with even describing the event in a way that is not self-punitive, right? Because you go through when you lose a patient, like Mike died. It's hard to not look at that event and go, okay, what could I have done? What should I have had it? Should I have pushed to get one of my PJs on target with him? Would that have helped? Should I have pushed to use a different airframe? So there was a problem when we got the call. Mike gets shot. We got the call, like, hey, we've got a serious casualty. We need you guys to come get them. The Air Force birds were out, we're ready to go, but there was like a hundred, a hundred feet of ground fog because of temperature inversion. When it gets cold at night, there's a fog that is produced and it's thick, but it's not, it's just a band of fog. Well, the Air Force helicopters couldn't see through the fog to get the PJ team on there. So as we're spinning up, the 160th dudes are spinning up as well on the 46, and they've got a dock, and I believe one of their flight medics that's on board that. So we're ready, like, hey, tell us who can take off. We hear about the cloud deck, they're like, hey, send the one the 46 right now, the 47, the MH47 from the 160s is badass because they have lasers that can look at the ground and they can auto-hover through whatever. They don't have to see the ground to get through it. The Air Force Burbs can't do that. So they get the call to go actually do the pickup. So at that point, we're like livid. We want to be the guys that go get it. But I'm like, listen, at this point, don't give a shit. Get that guy back to the surgical table so that we can help him out. PJs also do a ton of training with the Sauce team. So we're not like in America, there's something called like being a surgical assist, and there are there's entire training programs, and you can help a surgeon out. We obviously don't have that level of training, but we do have enough training with working intimately with these folks where if they need us to be hands, they're like, this patient isn't that critical. We need you guys to take this patient. We're gonna focus on this one, and we need one of you guys to help us out with this. We can do that. So, in my mind, as it was going, I'm like, just get him back to the table. We'll be able to, we'll be able to figure out what it is. Fine. I don't care that I don't get to ride in on this because it was just logistics. We were on board ready to go with rotors turning. So was the 46. The second that call came out, there was no time for us to grab gear and run over the other helicopter. We were like, F it, just go get him. So they get Mike back and we get him on the table, and it is just an unsurvivable wound. Um he didn't look good. His patients look like they're sick and not sick, like that little baby that I told the story of. As a medic, you can look at somebody and look, you're like sick or not sick. Mike was sick. Mike was hurt. They start doing invasive surgery, they end up cracking his chest. When they open Mike's chest, it is just a pool of blood. All the blood that they have given him was just sitting inside of his chest cavity. It transacted, it was the golden BB dude. Like, unfortunately, it was it was Mike's time to go. Um huge shout out to the special operations surgical team. They took this one really, really hard, just like us. You know, they made a solemn promise. Like, if if we told you that we're gonna be here and we're gonna fix anything that happens up to and include surgery, we're gonna do that. They absolutely crushed themselves over a period of hours to try to save Mike, to try to stop the processes that were killing him. Um, but unfortunately, that wasn't it, and they had to call it. Uh, it got to this is one of the things in the intro that I just want to make super clear. The sauce team was super prepared to do all of this stuff. We deal with these sort of traumas so much and we lose so many patients that we have thought through this entire event to include like how is it that you trans, how is it that you show a patient to their teams that has unfortunately not survived? Uh, there is actually extensive studies into this. It's why in in American emergency rooms, they actually will not clean the room up by practice if a family member is going to come in the room because they've noticed from lawsuits that when they walk into a completely clean, sterile room that they've cleaned up, like when they clean the body up, they're like, Oh, you guys didn't do anything, you just let them die. Well, when a pay when a parent walks into that room and they see blood on the floor and things that are still open and a patient that is still just, you know, they don't touch the patient once they call it, like that is a medical thing that they do in America. That shows that patient that they've they've done something, right? Um, it's just a weird part of medicine. We, thanks to going to clinicals and seeing this in the real world and in combat, uh, because combat is not the real world, it's its own beast. We knew that there was going to be a team of people that Mike left when he was alive and he is no longer alive. That is going to be the biggest traumatic event to that small unit that they're going to have to take. We knew immediately that we had to do something to make sure that these people walked in and they saw the best possible presentation of their friend, their warrior, this guy, Mike, that literally died trying to do what they were trying to do. So we had a hero kit inside of the helicopter where we were like, okay, these people we knew that we heard them on the radio, we knew the op was cleaning up, and and we knew through and there was a traumatic, you know, 30 minutes of time here where I mean there were literal tears, a lot of anger, you know, a lot of, you know, what could we have done better? Like people trying to figure out in the moment, like, dude, what what didn't we do? What should we have done? You know, um, everything from pharmacology to physical practice to how quick could we have gotten there? You know, if the PJs were on this right away, would that have made a difference, right? You're you're having those conversations in real time. And then the helicopter lands, and we knew that that team was gonna rush into that room, hopefully, to see us working on Mike. Like they would take somebody on a ventilator and us telling them, like, listen, it's touch and go. That's all they're hoping for. And we knew that. Um, so we went out to the helicopter, we got it's called a hero kit, uh, body bag, flag, um, ready to go. And we kind of looked at the docks. And the one input that we gave them is we were like, listen, this isn't like I understand like leaving everything out and leaving Mike in the condition that he's in right now. We can't do that. Like, I'm telling you, as a team guy, we're gonna clean him up, we're gonna put him in a body bag, we're gonna zip the body bag about halfway up, we're gonna put an American flag over Mike. Because that's that's what I want them to see. I want them to see Mike not as this broken, completely disformed shell of himself. It's important for me for those teams to walk in and see the Mike that they knew. And it just looks like Mike was in a little bit of a fight. So my element leader, Kyle and I, we got him ready for a dignified transfer. And that moment of we talk about having a cup of trauma. You know, I think my cup hit its limit of having to describe having to pull their team leadership aside as the PJ as they came in the door and just being like, listen, man, the medics are gonna tell you exactly what happened, but but Mike didn't make it, man. Like that's what I'm that's what I'm supposed to do, bro. Like, I made you a fucking promise as a special operator that's gone through your entire other your own story of assessment selection and a pipeline and sacrificing your kids' family and life and all this other stuff. And I promised you that if somebody got hurt, I would save them. And having a look at those people and just being like, listen, man, we fucking they don't want to hear about unsurvivable wounds, they don't want to hear about there's nothing we could do. That's not that answer, it's not gonna fucking play, man. So it was really important for Kyle and I to get him ready for a dignified transfer so that when those guys spent their time with Mike, it was it was underneath the flag that Mike loved. It wasn't Mike looking like he just got off target full of blood, it looked like he took the worst of it. But it was important for me to give them as silly and as you know, touchy feel as it sounds. I wanted that experience when they walked into the room to see the guy that they fought and bled with and not some broken patient and not some you know 10 units of blood on the floor that we couldn't do anything about in this bullshit rundown building in northeast Afghanistan in December. Like I just couldn't I couldn't take that for them. Um so that that was tough, man. But again, like we didn't get the night off. Like we were still on alert. Like if one of his friends, if something else happened, if they if they decided to attack the base, like I didn't have time to process that. And then when we got back to base, like I was still deployed. Like I couldn't, what was I gonna do? Get on the phone and tell that story to my wife at home in in Las Vegas and make that trauma her problem for her to worry about with all this other stuff. Like, what what am I just gonna cry and say that I can't FaceTime the kids that night? And that's just that's just life. That's not alert, that's not what we were there to do. Um, you know, that one was the first real chink in my armor. I think it's probably because I was just emotionally immature. I couldn't access those parts of my feelings, and again, as touchy feely or as you know, woo-woo as that sounds. You know, I had lost patience before where I was just like, yeah, man, unsurvivable wound, it sucks. Um you know, I don't know what to say, other than you know, that's the way that that it goes. But that one really, really affected me.

Host 4:12:39

Like that one really broke. I remember you told me, man, you could see it in their faces. We asked you to fix this, and you didn't, even if they didn't say that, you felt it. How long do you think that lived inside you?

Aaron Love 4:12:50

It still does. I still can't a lot of these events, like I can't betrayal is the wrong word because they didn't, it wasn't malicious. They knew what I did wasn't malicious. They knew they didn't see me work on the guy be like, You were a shitty medic. I saw what you did. He would have lived and he didn't. So betrayal isn't like the wrong word. But I, you know, the look on their face is like it's the only way that I could describe it. Like, I believed, like, put yourself in that scenario. You have some random one-off Air Force dude that's like, no, man, we fix problems anywhere in the world, man. Dive, jump, high angle, medicine. We got you, dude. Like, no problem. You put your trust in that guy, and then to see what it like that. I was a team sergeant. I know what it's like to lose friends, to lose somebody that you were, you know. I've never had anybody on my team die, but I can put myself in that that troop chief's position and go, oh my fucking god, you got to go home and talk to his wife. And in that moment, you know, for that guy to look at me and get he like it was betrayal. It was you you promised, bro.

Host 4:13:53

And he's dead now. Years later, you're working at your unit and you find out that the combat controller who was on the ground with Mike that day works in the same building. You guys connected that story over some beers. What was that conversation like?

Aaron Love 4:14:06

It was we were actually TDY, so we went on a just a random, it was like down a Herbie for something, and it was something that he wasn't supposed to go on, but he ended up like going, it was a training event or something. And we were having a beer, and it was literally like, you know, he was like, Oh, yeah, that deployment with whatever. And I looked at him and I was like, You were at condu's, and he was like, Oh my fucking god, you were at conduce. And it was like immediately we were like, holy shit, like we put two and two together, you know, just through drinking. And then obviously, like we rehashed the event and he talked about it, you know, from his end and you know what the team was feeling. And because those dudes went back, those dudes went back out too, man. They didn't just get to go home. They weren't just like, all right, guys, pack it up. They had like six months more of a deployment. Did you get a little bit of closure out of that? I did, but it was in, it was, it took a little time, you know, to hear, you know, to hear Chaz talk about it, to hear his stories about what he felt about the injury right away. I'm not sure if he's the guy that called it in, but I know for sure on the ground he was one of the guys that was like, hey, this isn't like a stay and and play, whatever. You need to call who whatever, whoever's coming for this. Like he was one of the big proponents of like this has to happen right now. It's one of the only reasons I think that Mike got to the surgical table even alive. Like, I think the only reason that he was even hanging on is because of Chaz's actions on the ground. I I really do think that he he did that. So it was good to know, you know, it was good to hear it from his side because it helped me flesh the event out. Because it's super easy just to look at what I did, and then you can pick that apart from whatever. And it's easy to make an ironclad case for like, no, you could have definitely done something. You know, to hear Chaz look at me and go, dude, the second that I laid eyes on it, I knew that he we had to go right this second. Like I've grown enough, or at least I've been honest enough with myself at this point. If if he would have taken that injury on an ER table in the best ER trauma center in America, like at the Baltimore shock trauma, he probably would have died. Um, I I think that's it's not okay to say that, but I think that that's fair to say that. So there were parts of hearing Chaz's story and getting to connect with him that sort of took away parts of my case. And that gave me the ability to really be like, okay, wait a second.

Host 4:16:17

Yeah, what is it about sharing loss with someone who was actually on the other side or in the other end of that call that's different from sharing about it or talking about it with somebody else?

Aaron Love 4:16:28

It's cathartic because you know that they were in the same event. You have that shared adversity. Talk in, and you know, I was better later in my career about engaging with mental health. I started seeing a therapist on my own through Military OneSource. Quick plug. If you need to go talk to somebody in the military and you don't want it to hit your medical records, you can talk to somebody for 12 sessions for free through Military OneSource, and you can shop and find the right person that works for you. Claire was a person that I found, you know, in 2000, you know, 2015 down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I, it's one of the few posts on my I have like a normal Aaron Instagram page where I don't do like inflammatory shit. It's like I send memes with my kids. Um one of the only posts that I have pins there is a is a is a picture of Claire and I. And I say in the caption, like Claire, save my life. Like, but still talking to her, and I think that's why she was so good is she's like, you know, it's not the same talking to me about this because you are just rehashing your trauma. And I'm not, it's not cathartic in the way that you would think. She was always super open about therapy. She focused on equine therapy as well, where she would have like, you know, breakthroughs with people with PTSD through horse and equine therapy. I didn't do that because I'm afraid of horses. I just don't like them. However, you know, she was very open and honest. She's like, when you talk to somebody that you went through the same trauma with, you get to share it from different angles. And that's the best thing to do. She's like, My job as a therapist is to get you to zoom out and talk about this from other perspectives so that you can see that you're not the only person living. She was like, I'll never get to that point with you because there's the barrier of I wasn't there. You can always just look at me and go, you don't understand. But Chaz was there. Chaz is in that same building. Like we didn't have time for pleasantries. But if it was a less dramatic event, like that team walks in and Chaz walks over and goes, Oh, what's up, Air Force Dude? And I go, Oh, what's up, controller guy? What are you doing? He's like, Oh, I'm just working with these dudes. I'm where you live, like we're immediately friends, right? We didn't have time for that. But the fact that I knew that I had a guy that would have done that, that was on that same event and could tell me from the beginning, not it took away this very well-formed idea that I had about the event. It took away some of those, some of the teeth from some of that, you know, probably unhealthy negative self-talk about me being on the plane that went in, me being on the helicopter that went in as opposed to the guy that received the patient. There's just something different about somebody that's been there because he he felt the loss too. And for us, it was cathartic to talk about.

Host 4:18:56

At that point in your career, did losing Mike make you a better leader or did it just make it harder, do you think?

Aaron Love 4:19:02

I think I made it harder. I think I again like we have that tendency. My my story is I always I always cage it as like this is like the opposite of what you should go through assassin selection once. Okay. For you don't need four separate teams. You don't need a suicide attempt and an injury to engage in mental health practices that are beneficial. I'm not gonna tell you what to do with your life, but you shouldn't fucking drink. I'm not gonna tell you what to do with your life, but maybe deploying as a sharp-toothed, violent savage for six months a year, and then putting yourself back into family man mode, but never really leaving that savage alpha male whatever expression behind and man like living in two worlds at the same time, that is not a healthy thing to do. So I think, you know, I'm always my number one problem, just like everybody else. But I think it at least informed me to be like, okay, there are we are not superhumans in special operations. There is not some special makeup or special training that we get. We're just dads. We're just fathers, we're just men. And for me to realize like getting to an area, like that moment really shook who I was as a PJ. Because I was like, wait a second, I should be able to take on this event. Like I just lost one patient, right? Like this shouldn't affect me. Like, I shouldn't have nightmares about this. I shouldn't think that I'm a bad person because Mike died. I shouldn't have imposter syndrome when I talk to other PJs and they're like, hey man, I heard you did good work on this deployment or whatever. And in the back of my head, I'm like, no, you fucking didn't you failed. At least for me to realize that that was something that could be happening in somebody else's head, yeah, that was a that was the good that I got out of that is just being honest enough to be like, you know, it's it's probably a thing that other people feel like this as well.

Host 4:20:46

Well, that kind of leads into the next question. You know, if a young PJ came to you today carrying, you know, what you were carrying after that deployment, what do you actually tell them?

Aaron Love 4:20:55

You know, first of all, I'm so sorry. You know, people don't want to hear this, but the first thing I start, I mean, I I am so intrusive with mental health at this point. Like, I somebody will come to me and they'll tell me a sad story, and I will literally do the book answer and I'll be like, hey man, are you thinking about hurting yourself or anybody else? Like, no, dude, no, I'm not like no suicidal ideations. You're not thinking about anything like that. You never thought it'd be easier if you were just dead. And it's super awkward, but that's always how I start because that's how seriously I fucking take it. You never know when somebody is in crisis because I lied and kept it a secret that I was in crisis for decades from the people closest to me. I did the same, brother. Like that has to exist in somebody else. Like, where there's two use cases right here. So when they come to me and they're like, I'm dealing with this thing, like, first of all, man, this isn't sympathy. I'm not at the top of the hole, or it's not empathy. I'm not at the top of the hole looking at you in the hole, but like, oh, that sucks. I'm in the hole with you, dude. You are on the same path that I'm on. I'm just further down on it. I'm happy to circle back here and really get aggressive with this and be like, what are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? What support agencies do I need to get? Do you want to talk to a chaplain? You want to talk to the first sergeant? Do you want to talk? I I can tell you how to get around the medical system where you can go get medical health care, mental health care, and not have it hit your you're like nobody in here has to know about it. You don't have to, and I'll give you time off from work. You can only do it at two o'clock on Tuesdays. Standing appointment, put it on the calendar. Two o'clock on Tuesdays, nobody's gonna ask you where you're going. I don't give a shit. Go handle your business. Like, I am super aggressive with it now with all my friends because I've lost more friends to suicide than I have helicopter cries. That's crazy, man.

Host 4:22:31

And I can't do that that's just sweeping our community. And I can't do it, and it's gonna get worse. I just read about one yesterday, man. I was just like, dude, it just seems like, you know, I can't get these podcasts out, these stories out quick enough because you're just like, hey, man, yeah. It's like you just want to tell these dudes that are listening to this or watching this if they're struggling with, dude, you're not alone. Like we put ourselves in a situation where we think we're alone and it's only me and nobody understands. It's like, dude, there's so many of us that have been where you've been. Not all of us made it out, but man, find somebody who made it out, whether it's me or Aaron or whoever, you know, there's suicide hotlines, like there is a lot of people that care, but I used to think suicide was this like cheap way out. They were people were pansies and they were scared, and you know, it was such a selfish decision until I found myself in that position. And you realize, dude, it's just like pain, and they just can't see through the pain. Yeah, and they just need, you know, and you just never know to your point. Like that taking that extra five to ten seconds to just look that dude in the eye, like, hey bro, are you are you gonna kill yourself? Do you feel you know, is this not something you can handle, right? Because that that cuts through that's where they have to like respond to you.

Aaron Love 4:23:30

Yeah, and I I refuse, man. I swear I will be the most awkward intrusive, it will be the most awkward conversation of your life. I don't give a shit. I'll do that conversation so I don't go to your funeral.

Host 4:23:40

Yeah, amen. Amen to that. Um, that was pretty heavy, man. Let's take a break just for a sec. Yeah, kind of coming back, man. I know that was uh a heavy chapter, and I I I really appreciate both your candor and your honesty. Um, you know, that is one of the things on this podcast. We just want it to be authentic. Um, and you know, sometimes we have to talk about those topics that people don't want to talk about, and not everybody's. Willing to do that, and so it's it's cool. Um, and we've had a couple others too to just you know have people really sit down and talk about real life and what they went through and um and and what they're going through. And I know that takes a lot out of you. Um, and so I I appreciate you you being honest. I did want to talk about there was another incident um because you did three, there's no way we can cover all three deployments and everything that goes on, but I just wanted to kind of hit some key moments because I think they're pretty crucial and they really you know display what what your career field's all about. But there was an incident in Bogram. I think you were there 2014, 2015. Yep. Um uh on a deployment. Can you just kind of tell us a little bit about what happened?

Aaron Love 4:24:35

So that deployment was super wacky because we actually did more work on base than we did off base, and it was like the full suite of you know, what do you have a PJ team here for? Like, what do we do? We fix problems. A bunch of the problems just happened to be on base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were, for whatever reason at that time, there was a really crude system where the insurgent dudes in the area would basically take a rock, they'd take a cigarette, and the rock had a rocket on it, and the cigarette would burn down and it would hit the thing and then would fire off. So they had to be nowhere near a McGyver movie or something. I swear to God, like when they told us that was a TTP they were using, I was like, you guys are lying to us. They were like, no, seriously, this is how they're doing it. But it would they would just fire rockets on the base. So they could set it up, leave. There was no, there was no finding them. They would just set it unless the ISR was right over their head when they did it. And I mean, boggrim, like there was a ton of like something they could easily hide, but they would just lob missiles at base and uh you take incoming a bunch, and we had it dialed down. Like you could tell the C RAM, which is the the thing that looks like R2D2 that has a Gatling gun that takes incoming down. There was there was the far one, the middle one, and the close one, and the far one would go off, and you're like, not a problem. The middle one would go off, and if it was like far middle, that was the way that the thing was tracking, right? So you're like, uh. And then if the close one went off, you were like, Oh no, were you guys close to that one? Yeah, and there were there were helicopters because you guys live near the airfield, I'm sure, right? Right next to it. So I mean, they would just fire them at the airfield proper, trying to hit anything. Aircraft are parked out there. There's tents with all the stuff in it. So they're just trying to, it's a a crapshoot, literally, like, okay, let's try to hit something. And sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn't, whatever. Um, one event. So I'm literally walking out our gym was like a short, like there were a bunch of pallets that we made a walkway to stay out of the mud. So it was this super short, like walkway out the back of the building to the tent, like the Alaska tent that our gym was. So just as I opened the door, I hear the close C RAM short alert and immediately and I was like, oh no, that's not good because it was the close one, like you didn't hear it come in, and you were like, Oh no. Well, the thing goes off, and then I heard whoop boop and it just blew up. And I mean, it was close as shit. Like I felt the shock wave of the and I was like, oh shit. So I like literally shut the door, and everybody kind of looked at me. I was like, mass casualty bags. Like I just couldn't get it out of my face. Two tents down. There was like a soft skin. Well, that was a hard building because that was where we were living. Like our team rooms, we were sleeping somewhere else, but the team rooms were in the basement, and then the jock was upstairs, like all the work was upstairs and like the command center. And uh shut the door, it was like, Oh shit, get the get the bags. So we go down, and three contractors. It had hit one of the contractors like the army ISR asset tents, and it had blown up like right inside the door, like in people's workspaces. So we had three casualties off that that we had to drag inside of like hardened shelters, like uh, you know, the jersey barriers for like they had two jersey barriers and then a concrete top, and it was where you're supposed to go for incoming because it was like a heart, like a little makeshift hardened shelter. But we ended up dragging three patients into there. One of the patients had this really weird triangular wound. If you were wearing body armor, it'd be just south of where your body armor would cover, kind of on your flank region. And he had this one wound in that awesome, that awesome trauma-certified Doc Reagan that ended up being she's like the head of sauce now. So she like runs all their programs. She's an absolute savage full board colonel now. But I looked at her and I was like, I don't know what it is about this, but this wound right here worries me. I was like, if that shrapnel, it's high enough to hit his lung, it's right in his kidney area. I was like, this one is a freaking problem. Like everybody else kind of got peppered and they got away with it. I was like, but this one I think is gonna be a serious issue. Great treatment from my medic. Like he passes it over to me. I look at it, I was like, I think this is gonna be a problem. Sure enough, like that was a serious freaking problem. Like he ended up having to go to surgery, he got aeromedically evaced out, like it was an issue. It did hit a bunch of structures, like it was just the magical BB. Like, we didn't do a ton to save that guy other than highlight it, be like, hey, this is it. Um, during that time at Bagram, like this is the one of the few like off-base missions, like cool missions. The same dude, remember the guy that I was like, Hey, the training for this event turned out to be the exact same for whatever. Oh, yeah. There was a time where we would do like the Medevac mission turned off right at the beginning of that. So we would only fill in for the army if the army couldn't fly, if their birds were down, if weather was bad for whatever. Like it was no more like formalized, okay, you guys are up today, which was awesome. Now the dudes didn't get to go out and fly as much, and there's like benefits to that Medevac Kazakvac mission that we would help out with. But we were happy to be off alert. We could go to the range more, whatever. We were up on one of these calls, and the same team member, it's like what we think is just this bullshit call from the green zone down in Kabul. Like next to where everybody worked in Kabul, there was a big soccer stadium, and they were like, hey, we need you guys to land in the middle of the city to pick this person up as a female. She said she bumped her head. We've been working on her. She says she's not getting better, she's got this headache, and it's it's not a big deal. It's like a bull, essentially, it was a bullshit transfer. So we were like, all right, tight. So I'm on there and I'm the team leader, which means I have my youngest medic, this dude on his first deployment. And I'm like, hey, man, I know that everybody's saying this is bullshit. I was like, this is good training. I want you to run her through everything and don't miss a thing. I was like, look at all of her meds. I was like, you got a 20-minute flight back to a big medical center. This is a perfect time with me over your shoulder, and we're gonna do good medicine, like medical detective work here, right? It's not combat, it's not whatever. He gets like five minutes into this assessment. He goes, Aaron, this chick has a brain bleed. And I was like, Man, nothing that we looked at in her background. She likes she said she like kind of bumped her head like she fell out of bed or something, but it was a really wishy-washy story. And he's like, Aaron, I think she's got a brain bleed, dude. And he just he was sure of it. So I was like, listen, man, we're about to step into a room with trauma surgeons that know what they're talking about. Some of them are neuroscientists. I was like, You're telling me that you, as a as an E4 pararescuman 25-year-old Jordan, you're gonna tell this person that you think she has an undiagnosed brain bleed. A whole shitload of training, though. Right. I was like, I was like, hey man, I was like, I fully support you. I was like, you can be wrong in this one. I was like, if that's your call, that's your call. Two days later, we found out she 100% had a subdural head bleed that would have killed her if they would have just been like, oh, this is bullshit, just put her in the room and just whatever. She needed a surgery, she had to get aeromedically evaced. Like our flight, that same flight doc stood up in one of our briefings, like, hey, who thought that patient transfer from two days ago was bullshit? And everybody in the room raised their hand. She's like, She's in surgery right now in Launchstool. She had an undiagnosed head bleed. We caught it. The youngest guy on the team. Because I just sat there and I was like, listen, man, you want to make a crazy call, make a crazy call. And he was dead, right? Hey, shout out to the new guy, man. Shout out to the new guy. I'm telling you, these guys, these young lions, they're better. But the probably the but do you think?

Host 4:31:18

I mean, obviously, you you you have the the PJ who has his his own intuition and he's smart, right? You've screened for those, but do you credit that to the training? It sounds like your training is is is very unique, man. Well, absolutely, because as I said, because I have a little bit of yeah, medical training. I stayed at a Holiday and Express one time, so you know, I it's it it's just it seems like you guys have a really cool program.

Aaron Love 4:31:39

Well, as an instructor, like, like I said, you never know who you're gonna show up to. We build that into training. I mean, I've had tactical scenarios that you know, a guy's out in the field and he ejected out of a helicopter and he's unresponsive and you can't figure out why. And teams will be like, listen, I did everything in trauma. And I'm like, How about anaphylaxis? Did you realize on this guy's dog tags he had an allergy to bee stings? Were there not bees in the area? Do you think you got stung by a bee and you didn't treat his anaphylaxis? Like that feels like a total training trick, I got you sort of thing. But what that does as a student is go, okay, hold on here. Rewires your thought process. Just like Jordan, he's like, Okay, you're telling me that this is bullshit. You're telling me that nothing's wrong here, but something's wrong because I can look on the monitor and I can tell you she ain't doing good. So what is it? And that led him to go, listen, I I know the bumping your head thing. He was like, But if you got a subdural bleed, if she bumped her head just right and you have a slow bleed that's slowly like making her feel worse and worse, that'll kill her, and that might be it. That training, like that our willingness to you know put it in there. I've had I've shown up to training events. Um, one of the guys that was on the jump mission at the 321st, he set up a training event for me later in my career where it was supposed to be a tree rescue because we do that and we're like, how do you get a guy out of a tree? Like if a jumper goes into a tree, we have to train for it. But we literally we did like the week before we did tree letdown procedures. Well, I show up to this event and he had literally hung a live person in a parachute in a harness over a 300-foot cliff and stuck his parachute onto the side of it. Now there was safety, and he was tied in so he couldn't fall. But as I showed up, I DOD, bro, I didn't know that. And I looked and I was like, I looked at him and I was just like, because he was training, I was like, what the fuck am I supposed to do here? And he's like, it's a tree letdown, right? It's just the tree, you're above the tree. And I was like, Oh, and then I just used that those tactics, techniques, and procedures to access this patient, clip him in and bring him up. And it was a tree letdown procedure. It was something that you think is totally benign, but he just put it in a different context and it blew my mind. I was like, holy shit, I would have never thought to just use the exact same. He's like, Yeah, you can do that with everything.

Host 4:33:47

Oh, that's a that's a great point. Um, so you finish up your third deployment, man, and that's that's a lot, dude. You've been through a lot, you've uh had a lot going on. Um do you guys have to well, you became an instructor. Was that by choice or was it just your time?

Aaron Love 4:34:02

It was it was not so my so three deployments at Vegas. It was at the end, I was looking for my fourth, and I was finally feeling good again physically, and I still kind of had that like that little voice in the back of my head, like, hey, the tier one unit is kind of calling. At this point, it wanted I I wanted, you know, the selection is hard. Plenty of people go to that selection, just like the train up and don't make it. But the training that you get is just absolutely insane. They give you a great readout of everybody's input. So even if you fail, they're like, here's why we didn't pick you up. Like, we felt like this was weak. We feel like you could be better here, and that's good for your career. Like, even the people that go there and don't get picked up. I was always a huge advocate of like, I'm not the gatekeeper, I don't work at that unit. I can't tell you if you're gonna make it, but I can tell you the selection is valuable. You should go try. Like, if you make I had dudes from Vegas that went and tried that didn't get picked up, and I didn't understand it. I thought they were just amazing PJs, I thought they would be great value, but they're looking for a specific product, right? They're buying that product of who you are, they're not building it. So they just didn't have what they wanted to buy, so they got passed on, but you learned a ton from it, and I wanted that. Like I wanted to go test myself against that against that crucible because maybe I could make it, but maybe maybe I couldn't. But if I didn't, I would understand where I was lacking, and I felt like that was important for me. I was in, so this is 2015. I was an older guy at this point, I was 35, so you know, 35, a lot of injuries behind me, but I still wanted to do it. I went to my commander that was my team leader, right? Like he had this crazy idea. We took all the deployments, I was his troop chief. We went, ended up going down to two troops, not three. And I had one troop, and then my my friend Ryan had the the other troop, our sister troop, two troop. One troop is always better than one than two troops, too. No big deal. We won every team fight. Um but I was like, hey, I you know, I think I want to try to go to your old unit. And he's like, Aaron, do me a favor. Can you get me through another year of time at this unit? He's like, I fully support it. I know what you're trying to do. I'm here for it. Can you help me stabilize what we got going here? He's like, You're a personality that I need to stay. Like, I need you to be the one troop chief, and I need you to kind of like guide us into the next phase. It was a personal request from a mentor, and I was like, hell yeah, I got the packet ready. Because usually what happens is you put the packet in. When they approve that packet, you're immediately like coded that you can't get an assignment, you can't do anything else. Like, you're gonna go do that thing and pass or fail, they'll figure out the other stuff on the back end, right? Like, if you fail, okay, you're live, you'll probably get orders and go somewhere if you're ready for orders or whatever else. But what that does is like you can't deploy, you can't do anything, like everything is focused on getting ready for the assessment selection. So I was like, okay, hey man, I won't drop the packet. I will stay here and we'll do we'll do the Lord's work at the 58th. Well, during that time, there's a whole other Air Force process for like there's spreadsheets, and some of those spreadsheets have red boxes, and you have to fill those red boxes with names because it makes the chiefs really mad if the red boxes stay red, right? Well, one of those boxes was for instructor duty. I initially had orders to be a free fall instructor. They wanted me to go down to the Army free fall school and be a free fall instructor, furthest away from what I wanted to do. Like, I wanted to get into the Air Force to go take teams and go deploy. I never wanted to be an instructor. And I certainly didn't want to be an instructor at like one of the pieces and parts schools. I did not want to be a dive school instructor for the same reason. It's not that I don't love diving, it's great, it's intense, it's important. I just didn't want to do dive stuff as my primary focus the entire time. Like, if I weapons and tactics and medicine were my home. I love weapons and tactics. I am an I'm a medical geek. Like I can still tell you algorithms that I don't use anymore. Tactics is the same way. Like very intense tactical scenarios where you really have to know tactics really well, even for like larger movements. That stuff just interests me and I love it, right? Telling me that I was gonna go work at the free fall school, I was like, I don't give a shit about jumping. I just don't. Every jump has been the scariest jump of my life after the the thousands of employments that I have and becoming a jump master and doing some of these other like really intense things. I just I don't care about, I don't have a single civilian jump afterwards either. Like I didn't do it before, I'm not doing it now. It's just not a thing that I can. Some guys love it. Like sure, good my the best man at my wedding and my uh the guy that married me, both PJs, intense best friends I've ever had. Those guys are both tandem masters. They jump 500-pound barrels and people and equipment and vehicles attach them. It's wild. Never wanted to do it. You know how many times I turned down tandem master as a qualification? More than five. They're like, hey, we got a tandem course, you want to go? I'm like, no, you're I already don't like jumping. It uh it's already a thing that I'm just constantly anxious about for any number of reasons. So when I got those orders, I was just like, bro, this is not it. Well, the Air Force smiled on me. There's a rule. If you were working for the big Air Force and that rescue thing, we took what's called precision jump master, which in my view is harder than the formal course because you have to do all of this stuff in a rescue mindset. Like, you know, the jump master stuff, when you get into like military freefall jump master, it is everything as a checklist from your checks to your drops to your calculations, computers help with calculations and wins and opening altitudes and drift and all this other stuff. Like it's it's plug and play. Like, if you know how to use the system, it's really not that intense to do. Rescue jump masters do that on the back of an airplane in extremis, like literally writing grease pencil win calls on and doing beer math and be like, this is the average here, this is the average here, this is the average here, this is my throw off. I'm gonna fly and I'm gonna physically count in my head when I pass this point in space. I'm gonna count to 10, and then that's when my first jumper should leave, and that'll put us on target. You're doing that in your head on the go while the aircraft is spinning up. It's pretty hard. The army doesn't recognize it as a formal jump master course. One of the prereqs to be an instructor at the formal school is that you have to go through an army formal jump master course, which I never did because when I was deploying, number one, I didn't have time, but number two, there I wasn't working in SOCOM. That's a SOCOM requirement that you go through the formal schools. I didn't have it, which made me ineligible for that assignment. Well, the other there was another guy, a good friend of mine named Ryan, that was supposed to go to the schoolhouse, the pararescue schoolhouse, but he was qualified to go to the army school, and we both worked at the same unit. So it was a super awkward conversation where it was like Albuquerque or Yuma. Sorry, Ryan, I don't qualify for Yuma, but you do, so have fun. So he ended up getting that spot, but I was given orders to the pararescue schoolhouse. Um, and because like there is a little backside here, like all of the chiefs that were doing these, because at that point, like they're they're trying to like move me for my career at this point. It wasn't just like where it's like, where is where is get your high performing tech sergeant for whatever that means, about to make master. Like I had tested for and made master at the 58th. Oh no, I tested for and made master at the the next unit. So they were like, hey, like you're probably gonna rank up here pretty soon, and then you're gonna rank out of a job here, and the schoolhouse needs somebody, and you know, it's just the way that it works. So I was like, okay, so I avoided the free fall assignment and then went to the schoolhouse. And then I never the assessment thing just it never happened because the chiefs knew where they wanted to put me. They also knew my intent to go to the to the tier one unit. And once you go there, like that's you basically lose those dudes for it's a little bit better now that those guys actually come out and go back to the force and spread the love around a little bit. But for a long, especially in GWAT, like if you went there, like it was we would joke about it being the North Carolina Air National Guard because you just went there and you worked there forever. You never got off the teams. That's why you know it's rank heavy there for us as well, just like the army unit having 21% of the E9s. All of those dudes are like E7, E8, and they're assaulters on the team, like they're team members, like your troop chief is an E9 and and whatever else. So they the the big Air Force chiefs knew that I was gonna go to that unit, knew that they were gonna ascend, they were like, Well, no, we have an instructor spot that needs filled right now, so you're getting orders whether you want I was non-volunteer and it's called non-vold to the to the schoolhouse. Voluntold exactly 100%. Hey, do you want to go to this place? You don't? Oh, well, you're still going, so get right with it.

Host 4:42:13

Cool story, bro. We just wanted to give you that opportunity to cool anyway. You get there in March. So you moved to Kirkland to be an instructor, and they hand you the keys to rewrite the entire pararescue apprentice course. The first or for I think it was the first rewrite in over a decade. What did you change and why? If this is the big things, I'm sure there's yeah, yeah, for sure.

Aaron Love 4:42:31

So I I got there and I immediately went into the flight chief job. Um, you know, I did you're supposed to do a couple classes like as an instructor. I only got one. Um, the class was great. My friend Dan, that I'd known my entire enlisted career, went through the pipeline. He was going back as an as an officer. And because they're different career fields, they're different jobs, you have to go back through the school for that job. Like there used to be this thing where you were a PJ and you'd go to be an officer to be a crow, because crow is a super new career field. Like it wasn't a thing until 2001. We were an all enlisted career field until 2001. So we didn't even have officers, like there were no PJ officers. We just depended on ha ha got them. We depended on the fighter pilots and the helicopter pilots basically to run our career field. Um, and then we got officers or whatever. But Dan came back through, like we our entire enlisted careers were kind of like in parallel. And then I was his instructor when he became an officer. So it was a it was a cool moment. But you know, as a flight chief, I did that very briefly, and then I moved into the director of training. The biggest input that we got from all the instructors. Now, keep in mind, like, this is not, you know, no combat, or maybe they got a couple missions, you know, instructor group. This is every instructor there has like five deployments in GWAT. Like they're not guessing at these training scenarios, like they're like, no, I did this, and this is how we fixed it, and this would be a good thing. The course just didn't match the operational requirements for what we were putting people out to. And through no fault of the instructors, like when it is true that I rewrote the echo course, like the next iteration, we were in the Delta course, and we rewrote the Echo course to lean it down and make it and make it whatever. That's not to say that I had some like crazy idea. I just listened to the dudes. Yeah, like the third time an instructor came to me that's like, Why the fuck are we teaching this? We don't do this anymore. This isn't how you work, this isn't how you train, how you equip. And I looked at one, I've told this story before, but my my boy Lucas was running air operations. So when we do all the aircraft stuff, and he looked at me and was like, Aaron, I could do this in 11 days if we just changed the way that we did this, and I would get guys way better training. And I was like, Lucas, burn it to the ground. And he was like, but it's AETC, you can't do that. I was like, you let me worry about the training command and the statements of instruction and the the periodized book and the logistical flow and all this other stuff. I was like, make the course what you need to make it. And I just went to everyone, I was like, is your course what we need for what we're doing right now? And they'd be like, Nope. Okay, rewrite it. Rewrite every block of instruction you have. Tell me what you want, tell me how to do it the right way, and we're gonna do that. And that's what I did as the director of training for about a year. Like, we just and it was con, I mean, I spent six months of that year in with the training folks, like contracted training just nerds in a room in San Antonio. Cause it started to be this thing where we'd be like, here's the paper, here's what we want. And then these people, there was a delay, and then the people would go, Okay, well, we don't really understand what this means or how to align times to it, or whatever else. And it became this like email back and forth. And finally, my boss looks at me and goes, You know, San Antonio is a two-hour direct flight. Anytime you need to go to San Antonio, just go. Like, if you have a big thing that's important that you're giving to them, just go so that you're in the room. So when they have those questions, you can be like, Nope, do this, nope, do this, nope, do this. That's what I did for like six straight months of just living in San Antonio in random Hilton hotels, no big deal. Got my silver status out of it. Good. Staying at some random double tree and just trying to make the course reflect the operational requirements uh that these young men are gonna get into.

Host 4:45:56

Yeah. You achieve the highest graduation rate in history of the course. What do you think you did differently? Was it just listening to the cadre and training, or did you guys train the or did you did you change like the whole training cadre mindset? Like I'm curious.

Aaron Love 4:46:10

I would always resist saying that I had a big part of it. I just got out of the way. I was willing to be in that position, I was willing to be because I ended up being the operation superintendent. So that's the second ranking enlisted dude. There's the chief and then the op soup. That's where I went after director of training, but I did the same thing that I did in director of training. If the guys care about it, you have to care about it. When they come to you for the fourth time, you're like, these trucks suck and we can't get them to work and the vehicle shop can't even get them running. Well, then I stop that conversation and I get my happy ass up and I walk the vehicles. I'm like, why can't we get the trucks running? Oh, the trucks are too old. We're gonna buy new trucks. We don't have money in the budget. We're gonna find it. That's my job. My job is you told me this is important. Is it important? It is important. My guys got so good that they would walk in and they would literally go, You have you ever seen like the four square of important, urgent, not important, not urgent? They'd be like, important, urgent, and I'd go, What's up? And I would stop what I was doing and they would tell me, and I would usually get up right out of that office and I'd go fix something. Or sometimes they'd walk in and go, important but not urgent. And I'd be like, Okay, sit down. What are we talking about? But the only thing that I did was get out of their way and just support them. Like if there's anything that I learned through the four deployments leading up to it, or my own thing is the guy, just like those young team members, that if you just let them do their thing, they will amaze you. So just get the fuck out of the way. Like let them tell you.

Host 4:47:34

Oh, that's awesome. That's a great leadership. Some great leadership philosophy advice. Um, the students when you were at the schoolhouse who looked most like the version of you that quit, how did you handle them differently than instructors who had you?

Aaron Love 4:47:49

A lot more grace. A lot more a lot more grace. You know, you evolve as an instructor. Nobody knows how to be an instructor. You have to find because it is a role. You were playing a role. You have constraints and restraints, and there are things that you can say and things that you can't say, and you have to find how to message around those things and be a good instructor, and that's a whole other beast. You evolve as an instructor when you're there. And when the best instructors, when you can see some part of yourself in every student, not just the ones that kind of like have your same story, the second that you can kind of like identify with them and go, okay, I may not understand your story, like whether it's trauma, whether it's 180 out, whether it's you know, they they passed everything in their entire career and they're just absolute studs. I don't stop giving input to those students. I look at them and go, Yeah, but you kind of do this one thing when you take feedback, and I used to do that too, and it's not good. You you shouldn't do that, right? When you can see the good and the bad in the students, those instructors, and I can't possibly highlight the work that they do enough. These guys show up two and a half hours before a training event. They set every single part of the training event up, then they're done, then they debrief, then they try to make it better from their own standpoint, all with a focus on the student. The students, I tell them all the time, like, bro, you just have to show up wearing the right clothes with a water carrier, and you're gonna do training that is a bucket list item that people pay millions of dollars to do. Like, you're gonna fly in a helicopter today, jump into Lake Mead, and when you fly home, you're gonna fly through the valley of fire and you're gonna take one quick trip over the strip on the way home because it's nighttime and that shit's cool as hell.

Host 4:49:24

And you're gonna have to some people get it and some people don't, right? Some people like you can tell the dudes that get it because they're face, they're just not always happy to be at work. And the other dude's like, Oh, you know, I'm like, bro, you you get to do what most people dream of.

Aaron Love 4:49:34

People show up to a day where you're gonna rip off four free fall jumps with your best friends that you've ever had, land outside of your unit and have a barbecue, and they're like, Yeah, but I mean, we didn't have to take the free fall jumps, you know what I mean? Like, we could get six if the barbecue didn't start at two.

Host 4:49:47

Like, what are we complaining about, brother? Come on, bro. Yeah. Um, was there a student that you went to the map for, fought hard to keep in the pipeline, who later deployed and did exactly what you built them for?

Aaron Love 4:49:59

Nice. That's a great question. The one that I can think of that I really fought for, I was a director of training, and there's a lot of professional subjectivity baked into what we do because you can't, those nerds that work in San Antonio, sometimes I can't explain to them that you just know when a guy isn't going to be a good operator. And that professional subjectivity is important. We want to be as objective as possible in evaluation, and and we want to build a system that we can evaluate anybody and we have standards that don't move, and we can tell you yes, you pass or no, you don't. But there has to be that room for that professional subjectivity to go. You may not have failed, but in this specific thing, you didn't do the right thing, and that can cause serious problems. So I'm gonna fail you for this event and I'm gonna do the correct process. I'm gonna stand by it. But there is a other side to that. There's a like there are students that I absolutely hated. Like there are students right now that I can think of in my mind that when they were students, I'm like, you know what? You are a terrible dude to have in the team room. You there's nothing I can't fail you because we have standards, and I refuse to go below the standard to fail you. But man, you are gonna have a rough go of it when you get out there. Like when you get to the real world, because this ain't the real world, when you get to the real world and teams, you are gonna have a rough go of it, bud.

Host 4:51:06

I I gotta ask, man, because you you it's something that most people don't talk about, but like the special operations community is is a very unique community, and like you know, the instructor, and then you talk about you know the field. So, like, is that is there is there conversations that that guys, you know, like PJs would call you out in the field because you're at the schoolhouse and be like, hey, bro, we know we're getting this dude or or whatever. Oh yeah.

Aaron Love 4:51:28

Well, and in in in both of those cases, but like, hey man, these four names popped up. How are they doing? What are their problems? Where are they doing good? You know, whatever. And then you'd have it the other way where you'd get a call and you'd be like, Bro, what the fuck did you send me? This guy can't do basic shit. And I'm like, listen, man, he didn't fail it. You know what the schoolhouse is, it's a 70% standard. Passing is a 70 versus after they pass and go to the field. Yeah, I mean, we got those calls too, and they'll be like, bro, what the fuck? This guy can't tie his shoes without help. And be like, listen, man, you know what the schoolhouse is, you know what the AETC rules are. He didn't technically fail anything. I was sort of notorious because I found because I I engage in the the only way to it to like the matrix, the only way to fix a system is to get inside of the system and break it apart. I did that with AETC. They were like, Well, there's a very formalized way, because attrition is a huge deal. Anytime somebody leaves the course, like that immediately goes up on every commander screen that you don't want to, you have to explain that. Like, especially at the Pararescue Schoolhouse, like that's the end of the pipeline. If you lose somebody for performance, they're like, Hold on, we need to talk about this because everybody focuses on it. I found a way that there's a way to use the system that they didn't fail an event, but you can do a progress check, and then you can have them do this one specific event that you know that they're bad at, and you can be like, Well, you didn't pass the project check and progress check, and technically, because that's into the larger one, you're supposed to maintain that standard, therefore, you're not meeting the standards of the course. I got to ask you to leave. I did that with like five or six students, and AETC initially was even my commander was like, You can't do that. And I'm like, Nope, here's the reg, here's the thing, here's the process I use, it's in the it's whatever. And we actually had to take it to like the commander of AETC, and they were like, our team looked at it, it's completely legal. You can you are completely within the bounds of the system to do this. You can't do that with everybody, good or bad, right? Just because I didn't like somebody, you can't apply that process. And maybe I do get a call that they're like, This guy sucks. Like, yeah, we know that guy sucks, but he he completed the program. We have a standard. Like, do we have a standard or do we not? And they'd be like, Okay. One time you guys aren't allowed to peer out like they do in other courses. No, no, yeah. They're that so we've gone back and forth on peer stuff for a long time. So that's a double-edged sword. Well, exactly, because you're basing somebody's life and career that they've dedicated their lives to, training and then here in the pipeline and gotten into the military and signed contracts. You're basing that off of their friends' peer groups' opinion of that person. Yeah, that's a super slippery slope. Done correctly, it's great. Like I think there's a I think there's a a context where peer reviews are important, but we stay away from that in the no kidding, you're either in the pipeline or out of the pipeline sort of thing for that reason.

Host 4:54:07

Yeah, I don't know if the SEALs have, but I know Army Rang, the Army Ranger course as well as SFAS, both it's for sure. It's a big part of the selection.

Aaron Love 4:54:13

Yeah. But one of those stories, man, like we had, you know, one student that was going through, and the instructor that just so happened to be an officer, so this is two officers in this case. Like, I was the final approval for this guy failed. Let me look at his paperwork as the director of training. I'm like, yep, this is valid, he's out, or no, it's not valid. He needs a reeval, or here's how the re-eval is going to go. Or, you know, a lot of times if somebody failed, you always get a different instructor to re-eval. And if it was really on the line, like if this person had failed a bunch of times before and we thought that it was going to cause drama, like down the road with the guy's paperwork that he's already got behind him. A lot of times it would be me personally evaluating him and being like, Okay, I didn't instruct this guy, I've never seen him before. You know, I've done the best that I can to be objective. And I just want to look and see if he passes this event. And the instructors that failed him usually weren't even allowed to observe the event. Like, I would walk into the team and they'd be like, How do you do? You know what I mean? Like, did this guy suck? I thought he sucked. Like, yeah, he sucked. He failed. Um, but one of these events happened, I got I got this kind of crazy call of one of the training areas, and they're like, Hey, I need you to come out and we need to talk about this right away. So I come out, and you know, the officer and the enlisted guy running the event come over and they're like, All right, here's the situation. Here are my notes from the event. The officer's like, he's failed, he's out. I want him gone. I was like, okay. I talked to the enlisted guy, I was like, What did you see? And he's like, I didn't see that part of it, and you know, whatever. I talked to the student, I look over the paperwork and I'm like, hey man, here's the deal. I get why you don't like this guy. I get that he did this thing in this context. I will not sign my name to fail this guy. Like he is going to stay in the course. And that officer was livid with me. Like he was fucking pissed.

Host 4:55:53

You think he had become personally attached to the incident, or he was it more of a thing like he was upset that you didn't back him?

Aaron Love 4:55:58

I wish that I knew his heart. I think it's probably both, you know, because I mean, and again, I value that professional subjectivity. I've him looking like I don't know what makes a good officer. I know what makes a good officer to me is an enlisted guy, but in this case, he was a subject matter expert. He's an officer, he's done the job, he had deployments, he was a vetted dude, like he did what he was supposed to do. Like he had every right to be pissed off at me and be like, not only did you not back me up, but I'm giving you the answer here, and you're telling me I gave you the wrong answer. So I, you know, I respect that, but I held my ground at that point. Um, and by the way, that officer is great. He is crushing it in the career field now. Now, that doesn't mean that initial instructor was wrong, and it doesn't mean that I was right. It just meant that I was willing at that point to be like, hold on, this is the standard right here. We are on just barely this side of below the standard for what you're claiming and then the output. Like, you're gonna end this guy's Air Force career, he's gonna go do a different job and serve his contract out over this event. We gotta talk about that. Like we have to have an uncomfortable conversation about that.

Host 4:57:02

Good for you, man. Good for you for sticking up. And sometimes, you know, we make the wrong call, sometimes we make the right, but yeah, I think it's good you coming in, and and I hope they do this everywhere where applicable. Uh just having that disinterested, because dude, we're humans, man. That's right, yeah. I don't care if you're an instructor or whatever, man. I mean, emotions sometimes emotions can get the the better of people to come in, to have somebody come from the outside, like fresh, not necessarily directly involved. It's easier. I think it's it's better to, I think better decisions are made. I don't know.

Aaron Love 4:57:31

I'm over and as you know, to button that one up, like I want that passion. I want somebody to feel it. I don't want a robot that's just like, oh, he passed or he failed, he made that checklist. I want a guy that comes to me and is willing to die on the hill of being like, this isn't the right guy. I want that fight because it makes me better, it made me go to the regs and be like, is this legal? Is this rote locked down 100% defendable? Because I'm gonna have to talk to a foreboard colonel about this that works two levels up for me, and I'm signing my name to this as the guy that's kicking them out of the course. I better be able to not only die on that hill, I better be able to kill on that hill. Yeah.

Host 4:58:07

Um, you said that you get more out of ones ready than you than you give. Um, was that feeling already starting during those instructor years?

Aaron Love 4:58:17

Or um it's where it started. One's ready happened at the same time. You know, the job satisfaction and the real man going into a firefight and saving a patient, getting hoisted down onto a ship and having that guy live, that's awesome. That is super great. I got to influence a tenth of the career field almost every class. Like we would graduate in a in a single year, you know, we'd graduate anywhere between 70 and 100 PJs a year. Brother, that is 20, 25 of the career field. If I'm teaching the right lessons and I'm engaging with that culture and we're doing the things that we're supposed to be, like this is that I wasn't graduating team members, I wasn't graduating junior PJs. I was looking for the next chief master sergeant of the career field. I was looking for the next team leader at that Air Force geographically separated unit. I was looking for the next operator that's going to win a silver star or a medal of honor. Like I was looking for that dude to be the best version of PJ. And we had them for six months where we could sit them down and good, bad, or indifferent, I could sit them down and tell them, although I didn't because I wasn't ready to talk about it, I could tell them about losing patience and losing Mike Cathcart and not being not feeling like I'm good enough and feeling like what I was doing was a lie, and dealing with mental health issues and personal issues, and how does that work into the job? And you know, telling people the very uncomfortable truth of you may think you're a family man. When you're in this job, 51% of your attention at any given time is on the job. Period. That's as low as it ever goes. It's never equal 50-50 with your family because you have a phone, and if that phone rings and you're at your daughter's birthday, you're gonna leave that birthday and you're gonna go get on a helicopter and you're gonna go fly and save somebody's life. And your daughter's gonna cry and you're gonna miss the first day of school. Those stories I think are valuable. And that's what led to ones ready is that you can be a silent professional or you can be a quiet professional. A silent professional is the guy that never talks about anything and doesn't pour that experience into people. These GWAT vetted operators that have done crazy things, like the guy that is credited with more than 10,000 saves during the H. Kaya evacuation of getting 10,000 people out of that. And by the way, left base and was out in the wilderness doing hostage recovery, essentially, missions of people that were trapped, getting into Mexican standoffs with Taliban outside of the base in H. Kaya during that event. That guy's an instructor at one of our medical school houses now. Just sitting down and talking to him for half an hour on Friday, imagine the input that he could give to these young people. And we just wanted a bigger platform to talk to more people about it. Good, bad, indifferent. America, right now, there's only 23% of Americans in the age striation that actually qualify for military service. Period. We are all fighting for that 23%. There are people out there that have no clue what a PJ does. Good, bad, indifferent, you know, traumatic, dramatic, completely mundane. They have no clue. What does a PJ do? I don't know. I want to talk to that 23%, and I'm gonna be like, you don't know it. But just like my dad, hey, go to the Air Force. There might be a job there that really is the world's most righteous mission, and it's just waiting for you. You just got to do it. That feeling of being able to interact with and guide, coach, mentor, pour that experience, good, bad, or otherwise, into those students led to the creation of One's Ready because we just wanted we wanted to talk to more people.

Host 5:01:43

Yeah, that's awesome. For those of you guys that are listening and you don't know what One's Ready is, uh Aaron has a podcast um with two other guys. Trent Segmiller's been on here as well, and Peaches um, it's called Ones Ready. It's it's been around for a while. It's really cool. They're they've done over 500 episodes, had some very unique guests. It's uh um kind of catered to the Air Force special operations community. So if you have, I mean, if you are remotely thinking about Air Force special operations in any way, shape, or form, or you're curious and want to know, uh, there's there's not a better vault that I'm aware of uh currently that you can find all that stuff.

Aaron Love 5:02:15

Yeah, and we've had everybody on. I mean, these people like we just talked, you know, from my first deployment, probably one of the best. She's was, I think she was the first vetted Air Force jump master that ever existed. She worked at that tier one unit, and she was my like she was the belly button for all support. She was what they call the stock, the special tactics operation center chief. If I needed anything, I would go to KP and I'd be like, KP, I need it's cold out. You know those big football jackets that the linebackers wear that fit over all your kit? I need one of those. It would be on my bed like the next morning. Like we just recorded with her, like she was part of that team. Um, we've brought all sorts of folks on that talk about everything from the base attack at Man to Bay, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. We've had the SIAC on, two SIACs, as a matter of fact, the senior enlisted advisor to the Joint Chiefs, so the highest enlisted position in the military. We talk about all stuff. Like, obviously, we focus pretty heavily on the special, you know, the Air Force special operations. But so many people feed into that pipeline. Like, you could be just a regular A1 admin troop, and you could find yourself driving a boat for the special operators when they need to get picked up out of the water. Like, we want to attract those people too.

Host 5:03:22

Yeah, that's awesome, dude. And we we got a section we're gonna talk a little bit more about ones ready, but um, you know, you finished up your your time, you're coming to the end of your instructor role. Um, what what was next on you or what what was what was the dream or the plan? Yeah, how did that work out?

Aaron Love 5:03:38

So, not a lot of planning. You know, I didn't I was kind of getting towards the end of the career. So 2019, I knew I was gonna be up for for orders. And at this point, they're kind of they're kind of playing the the rank game with me. So once you get to excuse me, E7, the spreadsheets with the little red numbers on it, they kind of change. And then there's people that like operate, quote, on your behalf. So there's a Chiefs group, and when you have like that E7, E8, E9, they really start looking at where can you go and where where can we fit you in, and where can you, you know, do the best. And they they try to align personalities with the job. So I was playing that game a little bit. Well, it just so happened at the same time. Remember how I said that the teams weren't always integrated? This was still the case in like 2017, 2018. There were a couple units that didn't even have PJs at them. So the 2-2 STS and the 2-1 STS, which is in North Carolina. The 2-2 is at Joint Base Lewis McCord. It's right outside of Tacoma, Washington, uh, down the street from Seattle. And then the other one was in North Carolina. It was a STS unit, one of the they call it the two series, because it's 2-1, 2-3, 2-2, 2-6. Um, so those didn't even have PJs, right? So they were looking at like flight chief level dudes to get in there. So now I'm an op soup. I'm supposed to be, you know, for my career, the right move is like go to staff or go to one of these other, you know, standaval, like standards and evaluation sort of job. They're like, it's better for your career. I had done well enough at the schoolhouse where my packet looked really good. So they were like, hey man, like you're an E7, but like this looks pretty good for E8, you know, pretty much immediately. So we need to think about like where you're going, what do you want to do? And it started an awkward conversation as I never cared about rank at all. Like, I just wanted to do the job. I wouldn't even have been in the Air Force if it wasn't for being a PJ. Like I loved being a PJ so much that I was able to just delete the other 99% of nonsense, the political game, you know, the game of thrones that they're working with. Oh, this guy's gonna go here because it leads to this assignment, and he's a chief, and then we can get him to to be a wing chief and not just be an ST. Not only did I resist that, mainly because like I'm not I'm not good in those rooms, bro. Uh, you know, the staff job, there's a language to being on a staff, and there's ways that you interact, and there's a highly political chess game that goes on. I had zero desire to do that, bro. I just wanted to deploy, I wanted to be with the teams at the squadron. So the opportunity, they were like, hey, we're looking for people to come up and do this 2-2 job. It's a flight chief job, which is like a step down from where it's two steps down from where I was at the schoolhouse. And I look at my chief who was from the afs.gsu, a mentor of mine, and an awesome dude. The amount I literally can't tell you some of the missions he's been on because that's not open source information. But the biggest missions you can come up with in your life, like in the recent 20-year military history, this guy's been on like 80% of them. Ridiculous. Um, I looked at him, he was the chief of the schoolhouse, and I was like, hey man, here's the deal. Get me to a squadron. Don't make me play this game. Like, get me to a squadron to go do the job, you know. Like if it's some like, if I'm working in ops, but I'm still with the teams, I'll take it, but I don't want to work outside the squadron. He was like, Your only option here is to take a demotion and go to the 2-2. They don't have a PJ program set up. They don't, there was one PJ that was there that was on like a humanitarian. Like they gave him a spot at the unit just because it was closer to his family to get through a life event. But there is there had never been PJs, there was no PJ program. Like they worked there for a while, then they didn't, then it was controller only, controller attack P and like SR to a smaller extent. Weather before it was SR. But I was like, dude, I'll take it. I was like, let me go interview. I had to interview for the troop chief position. Luckily, there was a tactical question in there, which I they were like, okay. So there was a whiteboard, and they were like, here's the tactical scenario, what would you do? And I was like, yeah. Because they were trying, PJs technically typically aren't really good at tactics. Like, we're just like, hey, we'll figure it out. Yeah, tactics, cool, like, great. But I, because I dug into it so much, they were like, Well, how would you solve this tactical scenario? And I apparently did an okay job. They one of the things was like, Oh, you know, can you tell me the troop leading procedures? That was a block of instruction that I wrote into the course down. Like, I wrote that into our act. I'm like, they need to know this. This is how the army plans from this level. TLP, MDMP. Like, our older guys need MDMP, younger guys need TLP. So you should be able to instruct this. So I actually. Knew him pretty well. It was funny because one of the guys in the room he asked me the question and I ripped through the eight steps. And I was like, Yeah, I received the mission, issue the warno. You're gonna make a tentative plan, initiate necessary movement, make a concept, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he just looked at me and goes, Can you be on my Christmas card list? I was like, He's like, I've never actually heard anybody rip them off like that. That's pretty good. I was like, Oh, good, nice. Um, but anyway, so I got that job and then took the took the demotion to go to the 2-2 STS and stand up. So they they changed the way that the the troops were organized up there. There were five separate troops, they all had like a different flavor to the troops. Like one was the air operations, one was strike. So obviously I had global access and recovery. So that was my troop at the 2-2. But that's what I took, that assignment I took in 2019. Were you guys geographically assigned, or how do how does it work?

Host 5:08:47

Like, did you guys cover a certain area? I still don't understand how the Air Force works at that time.

Aaron Love 5:08:50

There's a move towards that, especially on the ST side, is uh is they haven't it's not fully fleshed out yet, but there was a bunch of stuff of like, hey, you're just gonna look at this one theater. Like for us, like everything was Indo PayCom, um, you know, water-based operations. Like, we were the guys that like constantly kept up on the dive stuff to have people that were ready to do all that stuff. So it's getting better and closer to geographically aligned. A lot of times by default, you would do that because you know, like in England, like we were supporting the SIF team. That was the main people that we supported. We knew what areas that they worked in, and then we just sort of like did that as a thing. We had other things that we were focused on too. Like Arctic was a big I spent a lot of time in Norway, um, you know, doing the Allied officers course and doing a lot of those cold response sort of things for the Russians and Arctic environments and stuff like that. So, sort of yes and sort of no, it's getting more formalized to where they're like, hey, this is your area. Like, obviously, the two three is the closest to Southcom, so they're constantly staring about what's going on in South America. It's just kind of like naturally how you want to.

Host 5:09:46

Yeah, but that's not like a formal thing. So, what what will your well, and I I guess I'm just trying to understand because the career field for PJs is so small, I'm still there's there's you can never escape the onesies and twosies deployments because there's so many people, I'm sure, right?

Aaron Love 5:09:59

Right. So it's a and it's a little bit more formalized in SOCOM because SOCOM, their deliberate planning goes out years. So I could look at that schedule and I could be like, I know I'm going to this location. Then you back up your training plan, and then you decide what capabilities you're gonna focus on and what kind of like wacky things you'll need to do, like based on whatever that mission set is. Exactly. Yeah, and then like where you're going. We went to Manda Bay. I I have a real habit of like going to places that just experience a base attack. So the Manda Bay attack was a huge deal. Where was that at? It was in CSL Manda Bay, Kenya. So basically, there's a small combined support location called CSL Manda Bay, it's about 1.5 miles away from the Lopset port. It's heavy Chinese influence in all of Kenya. Um, but it's also just south of Somalia. So the main job in Kenya for STS is training the Kenyans how to stop terrorists from coming down from Somalia through the Bonai Forest, the Bony B-O-N-I forest, and coming down and conducting operations in Kenya, right? So that's that's what we were there to do in a follow-on deployment. Um, but you knew that, you know, 18 months out. So you could look at it. So, you know, you aligned to that place. Like that place could change. Like we had a sister troop that went to Bagram and were actually in control of Bagram during because that was at the same time as the deployment that I ended up going on to see us on Manda Bay. To loop it all the way back, we know we were going to Manda Bay a year before that. People had the Kenyan military had this larger base, and then the American base was inside of the Kenyan base, and it was way more protected, but it was super easy to get on that. You could literally like drive up on a boat and walk up onto the Kenyan base proper. Well, the enemy is not stupid, and they figured this out and they attacked the airfield, killed a couple people. I think they killed three, and like uh grenaded a bunch of aircraft. It was a serious base attack events, like lost uh two, I think two or three American army guardsmen, like one contractor and an aircraft got killed as one of them as well. But I mean, it was a huge deal. The STS guys and the Marsot guys that were on that base were they're the ones that went and literally cleared the airfield. Like those were my brothers from the 2-3 STS. So less than a year later, we know that we're going to that place. Like that event happens in our spin-up. Like we saw the outputs of this entire thing.

Host 5:12:14

So we just wrote that into training.

Aaron Love 5:12:16

We did, yeah. Like standoff weapons, precision engagement rifles, a little bit more drone training, a little bit more standoff. Like, how do we protect sort of this thing? And you can you you had enough lead time in AFSOC that you knew where you were going. So the regional alignment happened during that very formalized spin-up.

Host 5:12:32

What was it like uh coming out of that train environment and now you're um, you know, now you're you're you're a flight chief on an actual operational STS unit.

Aaron Love 5:12:42

Yeah, it was it was beneficial to the, you know, when you instruct something, that was one of the read-ins that I would give the instructors. Like, it is extremely difficult to actually instruct a true student. Like in your career, when you're doing training stuff, you have a team of people. You may be in a leadership role, but your team is like vetted PJ operators. So you could look at that PJ and be like, five patients on litters with the stuff ready for X Fil, five minutes. And that guy goes, five minutes, and he just goes, and magic happens and you're set up. You say that same thing to a student, and five minutes later, not only have they lost two people, but one guy doesn't have a shoe on and you can't find a rifle. That's you're just like, what the fuck happened? I asked you to move five things this place, and nothing is done, and you guys took 30 minutes to do it. That steps your game up, both as an instructor and as an operator. But the drawback is that you're not outdoing the thing. You're in a gray shirt with your sunglasses on, drinking your coffee, like directing people through it. You're not getting those reps. So there's a little bit of rust. You know, the AFSOC world, like every unit you go to kind of has a different language. You have to know like who are the decision makers in this unit? Who's one level up? Like, who, if I screw this up, like who am I gonna have to talk to that is bigger than my boss? What are his priorities? Like you have to figure that stuff out, and you're naturally rusty. Like I went from the era education and training command, which is our train, it's like trade doc in the army. It's a training environment, it's tightly controlled. Like everything is to the letter, to the second, to the dollar sign. And then you're in AFSOC, where you know, the language is completely different, but so is the game. Like all those restrictions, constraints, restraints. You're dealing with the army, you're dealing with, you know, the Air Force actually has to follow SOCOM regulations for the stuff that you're doing under SOCOM. That's not true in the Air Force. The Air Force makes their own regs and they're like, this is the risk that we're willing to accept. Here's how you do it. And it can be something as stupid as like, how high do you fast rope from a helicopter? Like, where do you mark? If we're gonna do night operations with a fast rope, where do you mark the fast rope? That answer is different in AFSOC than it is in the Air Force. So the employments are different, right? So there, there's that natural like, am I fit enough? Am I ready? Because you're you're you're not instructing, you're not evaluating. Like I was the troop chief, like I was the guy on the ground that was gonna run the mission. And there was no instructor staff that was gonna help me out. Like I had to immediately reorient to get back into the real world of like this is not a training. I'm I'm constantly training my troop, right? Like, we're constantly doing training, but I am not the instructor, like I am, I am the leader, the guy that's supposed to have done this before.

Host 5:15:14

Yeah, 2019 happens. First Peter Cranes, a climbing accident in Boise. You were in the same fantasy football league, annual draft in Vegas. Guys flying in, even if they they weren't if they weren't deployed. Yeah, you were part of the investigation after he died. Can you kind of tell us what happened with Peter Cranes and that whole situation?

Aaron Love 5:15:34

Yeah, so shout out to to Peter Sally Cranes, man. We uh the guy was awesome. It was one of the I got asked to be in a fantasy football league. It's a bunch of operators, like 10 operators, right? Classic fantasy football stuff. My boy Shane hits me up. He's like, hey man, this league is great. Peter was already in the league. They'd worked with him at Moody, they were all super close friends. Just one of those things, like, I didn't know that guy, but I know that guy, and I love that guy. You know what I mean? So immediately just, you know, fast friends. He's an awesome dude. I didn't know him nearly as well as these other guys. They got deployments and stuff with him and knew his family. Um, Emily, uh amazing, and their daughter, uh their children, Hunter and uh Hazel. Um so, you know, I had known him through that. The funny story about me getting out of those formal jump master courses because I worked in rescue. So I show up in 2019, and the first thing that ATSOC does is like, hey, you haven't been to the formal courses. And I go, Well, yeah, but I'm also not gonna be. I was like, I don't have to JM here. I can just be a jumper and you guys are fine. And I'm not gonna be the jump master anyway, like on a real mission. If it's a jump mission, I'm not JMing. I'm gonna get one of the young guys to stay on board, and all he's gonna do is JM. He's gonna do all the JM stuff, and then we're gonna jump to do the mission so that I don't have to do that. So, you know, tactically it doesn't make any sense, but AFSOC is way more army than the Air Force is. They're like, Well, we have this spreadsheet and it says the senior PJ is supposed to go. And I sound like officers, bro. It was the DO. You nailed it, it was the officer. So he was like, Well, the spreadsheet says senior PJ. And I was like, Right, but you and I agree, it doesn't mean the senior PJ at the squadron, which I was, it means the next guy in the shoot that's ready to go for his upgrade training. And he was intransigent. He was like, No, you're gonna go to the formal courses. So I was like, Okay, so I'm going back through army jump master school as an E7. Static or Halo? Static line because you have to do stat this doesn't make any sense either. The fact that you have to be an army static line jump master to go to military freefall jump master is the dumbest rule in the face of they're completely different. The systems are different, the employment is different, the actions are different. There is nothing that I learned from static line jump master school that I used in the military freefall jump master formal.

Host 5:17:46

We need to have Tim Kennedy tell Pete Heggseth, bro, we'll get that fixed in no time.

Aaron Love 5:17:50

Like if you're going to a freefall team and you don't have a static line jump capability, maybe you need one or two JMs that are JMs for that specific thing that you're never gonna use. Maybe just focus on the thing you use. Whatever, it's the military. So not only that, but I had to there the just like our dive school got vetted to have the program and the army just overlooked it. We did the same thing with jump school. So the combat control school in North Carolina actually ran, we have our own formal course. So you could go there and you got to, I mean, it was all Air Force dudes and it was Air Force instructors, and it was the exact same course, none of the instruction was different, the timelines are all the same, but it was just lower threat, right? Like the Army school, the Army jump master school is like a gate for them, and they treat it like a gate. Like they are trying to fail people out. It's ridiculous. So I was like, Well, okay, cool. Well, I get the orders and it doesn't say North Carolina, and it does say Fort Benning, Georgia. And I was like, hey, bro, I kind of look at the front office and I was like, can't help but notice on these orders, this says I'm going to the Army's Fort Benning JM. And they were like, it's the only class we had. We had to get you there. So I showed up in 2019 to Fort Benning, Georgia, and I went through the Army static line jump master course and I almost failed it. I had no idea, like the pre-jump brief. Everybody there had it like memorized and just knocked it out on this one eval. I showed up and I look at the thing and they're like, Yeah, you ready for your pre-jump brief? And I was like, Oh, yeah, no, this is just emergency procedures. I got this. The dude stopped me one paragraph in because he goes, Hey man, so you're doing what we call like broing it up. He was like, You need to read, you can't change the meaning of a word. Like, if you say waste, you can say like W-A-I-S-T, but it can't be W-A-S-T-E, and you can't change the meaning of what that word intends, but it has to be like word for word. And I was like, Oh, okay. And he's like, Do you want to continue with this? I was like, Yeah, continue with the e-val, and then we'll just talk about it in the back end. So I finished my normal pre-jam brief, and I was I was like, What's my score? And he goes, You actually scored a negative 150. And I was like, How did I get a negative? He's like, It's not past fail, it's on a point system. He's like, You messed so many things up. He's like, honestly, I it's higher than that. I stopped counting. I was like, he's like, did nobody tell you that you were supposed to do this? My grandfather had just died. I was on a week of leave drinking hard with my Irish family in Ohio and then drove straight to this course. I had been so far away from like the because that you do that as like an E4 in the Air Force. I was 15 years past that. Like I was not aware of like, you know, in team rooms, there's some like E4s that are just like, oh, this pre-jump brief, I got to get it down. I got to memorize it. Like they had that institutional knowledge. I did not. So I showed up and it was a new shoot that I had never jumped before and a formalized jump brief that I had to read word for word. I memorized that thing in 24 hours and the next morning scored like a 97%. And literally I got done, and the guy goes, Okay, you missed this one thing up. You didn't say wins and wires for the second emergency thing. You just went into the paragraph. He's like, But that's good. That's my only input. Can I ask you a question? I was like, Yeah, how the fuck did you do that? I was like, bro, I literally stayed out for 24 straight hours and just took in caffeine and just memorized it. And he was like, I don't believe you. Fine, get out of here. And then, but like, so I was in jump master school. We were getting ready to go on our it's like your your PWAC event, it's your actions inside of the aircraft where you're actually doing the thing. So we're jocked up. I'm ready to go do a static line jump, like ready to get evaluated. And my phones just start blowing up. Like the fantasy football group chat is like, hey, Peter, I need you to check in. Like, and he we he and I had been taught. I saw the text message in my phone, but he and I had been talking about a trade like two days prior. So, like, we were see, like, we were trying to make this trade happen, and it's just, of course, like he's giving me some bullshit trade, and I'm giving him just more bullshit. Oh, for like fantasy football? Yeah, yeah. I'm like, he's like, Hey, he you have the number one receiver in the league. Would you take these three backup running backs for it and maybe a draft pick? And I'm like, no, but I will take your number one quarterback, you know, like just stupid shit. But it was like, hey, man, you know, you got to check in. So what had happened was my good friend Steve, the owner of Shields and Stripes, um, PJ, I went through that first train up with Steve. Steve was at the AFSOCSU. There was a climbing trip in Boise, Idaho. Peter was like, Hey, I'm coming off this other TDY. I want to come on this this climbing trip. I'd like to get out and do some climbing. And he was Steve was teaching some of the younger controllers like climbing stuff. So they had had like two or three days of climbing. Peter was like, Hey, I'm just gonna fly in for this. He's like, I wasn't involved in like the planning, but I just want to kind of like strap hang and come in and do some climbing and do whatever. So through the investigation, what we found out is that Peter shows up, they get off on the rock, high consequence terrain. So sheer rock face, they're doing climbing, they're setting up for a rappel. And there were some hard-pointed, like unclimbing stuff, like a lot of these civilian climbing areas will have like no-keying stuff drilled into the rock and chains and all this other stuff that will help you like climb and give you an anchor, like a bomb-proof anchor that you can use for safety. So they were using one of these lanes. This the chain that they use though was too far for repelling. So, what it made these low, like the controllers didn't have a ton of experience in ropes, and it's kind of like in the weeds. But long story short, you want to be close to the thing you're repelling off of because you want to take all the slack out of your system. Well, because the chain was hanging like two feet down off this rock wall, you'd have to like slime yourself, like you'd have to get really close to the rock, and then you'd have to like take slack up as you're going over the edge to take slack up to the system to where it's finally tight, and then you could place your feet. And Peter saw it and he was like, Well, it's a little bit dangerous because we're having people like if they don't keep their brake hand or if they don't have an automatic brake, they could go over the edge and something could happen in the transition and they could fall. So, what he did is he put pieces of artificial protection. There's a bunch of pieces of protection that are made by climbing companies that you can jam into rock spaces and you can make your own anchor. And then there's a way to make your own anchor, and you could that anchor can be set up wherever you can do it. So, unfortunately, Peter chose an incorrect application of these artificial pieces of protection and put them in rocks that eventually gave way. They gave way when Peter himself climbed out over, they were getting literally done for the day. And Peter was like, Okay, we're gonna repel off this rock. I'm gonna set up a different anchor to make it a little bit safer for everybody. Because if the anchor is further away from the edge, then you can take out all that slack and then you're repelling from flat ground. And as the slack comes out, you can break yourself and then you can get yourself into position and then actually do the repel off the wall. So that was the safer call. The application of what he did unfortunately led to Peter's death. Uh, as he my friend Steve was actually on the wall, so he was about halfway down the wall, and um, you know, Peter put weight on the system, started his repel, and as he did, those pieces of protection failed. So his anchor that was not uh, and this is uh this isn't this is not my personal opinion, this is what was found in the investigation, the protection that he put in there was not correct. He used two pieces instead of the recommended three, and one of those pieces failed and it it killed the whole system. So Peter, unfortunately, from some height more than 50 feet, uh basically free-falled uh down. There was another person that was lower on the rope that also experienced a minor fall like 10 feet. Um he was okay, but it it killed the entire system. Uh so as he was down and getting off, uh there was that event. Steve was right there, um, was able to get to to Peter right away. Uh, but it was an unsurvival, uh unsurvivable event. So Peter unfortunately died um in Boise, Idaho on October 19th. Is it October no October 8th of 2019? Um and that sucked, man. Like this is again the last, you know, we we try to do an in-person draft every year. It's evolved. Now we just pick like we just throw we have an in-person draft every year that everybody was able to get to for this Vegas draft that that Peter was at. But we decided every year what we're gonna do is we have a constitution and a crazy scoring system. There's a crazy rule, like people will score like 250 points in this league because we have crazy scoring. Like if a quarterback gets a tackle, that's a hundred points. So if a quarterback throws an interception and then makes a tackle on the guy, that's a hundred points right off the rip. We have just stupid rules. So at the draft, we ratify the constitution and the scoring, and then we pick next year's draft. So we started doing, we went for our first one that wasn't Vegas, we went to Cleveland and drafted in the stadium, and it was amazing. And uh, like Cleveland, we decided we were gonna do Scottsdale, so we did Scottsdale last year, and then we decided this year is Nashville. So we're just picking American cities, like, where are we gonna go and have fun? Um, but literally the last time I saw Peter, it was just a dumpster fire in the suite in in Las Vegas. I mean, just the ridiculous stories that are coming out of it. Peter had to fly out early, and he was just this smiley dude. He had like this bald head, he was just smiley and he was jacked, he was like the world's nicest human. Everybody is just absolutely hung over just to the gills. I mean, people were just wrecked, like biblical levels of bad decisions went on the night before. But Peter is leaving and he just he was hugged me and he was like, Hey man, you know, we'll see you next time. And you know, this is great. And you know, unfortunately, then fast forward, I get the word that you know, Peter, a good friend of mine, was the guy that we lost. That stuff hissed the group chats pretty quickly. Um, and then we found out that it was Peter. And then I had to go through the the final you know four or five days of that course. And when I got back to the 2-2, like I was a senior PJ, they wanted people involved in this accident investigation, and I happened to be the senior PJ, and they were like, Hey, can you go engage as you know the mountain warfare technical rescue guy from the 2-2 to go to this working group because this started kind of a waterfall along with the next event that we'll talk about? ASOC completely shut operations down because we had two training event deaths within a month of each other. Like Peter happened a month later in November, on November 5th. We lost Cole Condiff.

Host 5:28:05

Yeah, well, we're gonna have a whole section for that.

Aaron Love 5:28:08

But that whole thing started a complete relook at how ASOC completes training and do they adhere to this regulation or not, and where the Air Force regulations and the SOCOM regulations conflict, like who do we follow? Because they they looked at this, and and the army from their mountain warfare school is like, no, he did like 10 things wrong. And the Air Force is like, yeah, kind of, but not really, because in the real world, this is how you do it, and he's trained and he's been to this. He's Peter had been to multiple advanced world-class mountain rescue courses. It's not like he just thought something was gonna work and then did it. He made an informed decision of what he thought was going to be safe enough for that event, and that led to a follow-on conversation in the accident investigation of like, okay, well, what rules are we really following here? What are you guys doing? How do you do it differently? How did you get approval? And the Air Force found out during this accident investigation, we were doing things that the army had a process that we were completely blind to. Like, there's a progression as a mountain warfare leader, a mountain warfare observer, like they had like no kidding positions and like what you had to do to get there. Well, Pararescue's like, dude, we do all of those things, these high-risk events that you're talking about. We do these in the schoolhouse. Like these guys graduate as your top level dude, and then they get follow-on training. Like Peter already had multiple follow-on training events from a tier one unit to do the things that the army has like tight control over, and we had no clue. And those questions were super uncomfortable for the commanders and the chiefs to be like, okay, like we all accept that there's it's fair to say it hurts, but it's fair to say that Peter unfortunately set the scenario up in which he he lost his life. And that hurts because that that dude is my friend, man. Like that guy was a good man, and he's got kids and he's got a wife, and you know, the training things that we do are dangerous. But unfortunately, like Peter made one decision that cost him his life. And it it forever changed the trajectory of his his now widow and and his family. You know, but that was that was a tough thing to deal with.

Host 5:30:11

Yeah, what was it like to go sit on the board to like be part of the review for you know your friend, man?

Aaron Love 5:30:19

You know, you try to compartmentalize it as much as possible, and you try to be like these people didn't know that I was going through that. I didn't make a super big point of it to be like, no, this is my friend. I thought that it was a way of me being involved. Like at least I could be his advocate in spaces. At least I could speak. I wouldn't, I would never speak for him, and I don't think I'm the type of person to speak for somebody that's died, but at least me in that room, there could be that connected tissue, even if I own even if I was the only one that knew that that connected tissue existed. Sure.

Host 5:30:50

I would want to I'm sure there's got to be a part of you that like that you guys just wanted to figure out what happened so it doesn't happen again, right? Right. That's the whole point of the AARs, even when they're uncomfortable.

Aaron Love 5:30:59

Right. But you know, being in that and hearing, like hearing the very uncomfortable things, like there are guys in there that didn't know that I, you know, I I love Peter. You know, for the short amount of time that I knew him, you know, just watching the way that like you can't have a best friend in the world that speaks so highly of another dude and like hugs him, and his kids call him Uncle Peter, like you can't possibly have that connection, then not just immediately love that guy as well. And that's who Peter was. So there were some conversations in there where people didn't know him and that they were doing their best and trying to get to the bottom of it too. You know, but sometimes you know, people nobody said this, and I don't attribute it to anybody, but like you know, when the conversation is a hundred percent like, oh no, Peter did this, he made the wrong call, he died for it. Like, that's hard to hear, bro. Like, that's my friend. Like, we ate we ate in and out burgers hammered poolside in Vegas and laughed so hard we almost puked, man. Like, don't talk about him that way. But that's what it was.

Host 5:31:55

Yeah, brother. Less than 30 days later, the ASOC Special Tactics Rodeo, Destin, Florida, new T11 parachutes, a competition that nobody had really prepared for. Can you walk us and our audience through uh what happened to Cole Condiff? And you know, you you told it pretty eloquently, you and I, you and I podcast prepped, man. Um, and so just thought the that's a whole story in and of itself. Yeah, I don't think have you talked about this publicly before?

Aaron Love 5:32:21

I have not. I have not. So I do want to put a disclaimer out there. What I'm about to say is my personal recollection of the event, my involvement in the accident investigation. I'm not gonna air anybody out, like I'm not doing it for clout or clicks or likes, but it's an important sword to me. So I'm gonna try to tell it. I may get some some details wrong. I don't do so maliciously. Uh again, this is my This is your story, bro. It is my personal, you know, and again, I'll stay away. Like, I have some very strong feelings about this and some certain personalities that engage in certain ways, and I'm gonna do my best to stay away from those because I don't think that's fair to them because they're not here. I try to stay away from that. Um, we have what's called rodeos inside of the AFSOC community. The Pararescue rodeo, it happens every two years. They couple it with the reunion. What it is, is it's a skills competition. There's a bunch of events. Every team, every unit sends a team. It's a competition between all the pararescuen, and you come up with the rodeo events. There's climbing events, there's jumping events, there's shooting events, there's ropes events, there's all kinds of crazy events, and it's the world's smartest PJs come up with really hard events and they don't tell the teams. And you come in and you just show up and you compete, and there's a winner, and it's great, and the entire community shows up. So the rodeo, AFSOC decides that they're gonna do it. So it's a team-based event, exactly like the PJ rodeo. Starts off with a fitness event. You know, you're gonna take the AFSOC, you know, our standard O, it's called the OFT, the operator fitness test. That's our fitness test that everybody takes. They were gonna do it, but a little bit of a different flavor. It's not just like pass or fail. It's like, you know, the deadlift, I think it's like 315 for three reps of a hex bar deadlift, get you like max points or something. Maybe it's 350 or something. So that's how you get max points on the normal one. But they're like, listen, you can do as much weight as you want and you get extra credit for it. Like if you do a 500-pound deadlift, I deadlift at 515, no big deal. If you do like a 515 deadlift, then that goes into your score, and we're gonna score everybody on every event, and that's the way it's gonna be for shooting, jumping, whatever. So we show up down, it's at Hurlberg Field, you know, we fly from the West Coast, it's kind of a late night. We have we're sleeping in tents, like all the teams are in tents out on this one, like random, segregated part of the field. We don't know what events we're gonna do, but it's awesome, man. Like the entire community is doing it. The PJs that know what a rodeo is are like, bro, this is so much fun. Like, you know, the shooting event that they had was lined up, crazy sponsors and shooting John Witt guns and like moving and shooting, and like there were some long distance events, and there was a like a combined medical event. Like, it was gonna be awesome. Like it really was. But we didn't know a whole lot about it. We know we were going there to compete. There was really no way to train up for it. Uh, that they do that on purpose. Like, you don't want people that know the game, you want to show up blind and see who's really good at all these skills, right? So the the first day went pretty good. We had a good steak dinner, like they brought steaks over for us.

Host 5:34:58

So you went there was a competitor.

Aaron Love 5:34:59

Oh, yeah. No, I was the team, I was so I was the team leader. I was uh I what the I again, the the rules and regulations part of this just make me laugh. So I was a vetted rescue jump master with five deployments, thousands of deployments. Like my schoolhouse, like you would you would kick out on our jump days, I would kick out like seven sticks of jumpers in a single day for static line. Like that's not a normal like jump master event. Like you normally jump master a bunch of dudes, and then those dudes go jump and you're good. I would JMPI, rig everybody up, throw a stick out, throw another stick out, throw another stick out, reland, do that again. We do that like four times in a day. So I was getting like 15 jump master static line employments a day for the course of that time. And we would do that four times a year. I was there for four years, right? So you're getting a lot of work. Well, because I had I wasn't vetted, I couldn't be the jump master for the jump event. And that's gonna play a role here in a second. So had a great time. I was there as a competitor, I was the the enlisted, I was the team leader. There were no officers, so I was the dude from the 2-2, and I had my team uh Chase, Chaz the controller for earlier. Now we're back together working at the same unit. So Chaz was on my team, a controller named Josh, uh, and PJ's Adam and Chase. So we go through the first day, thought we did really good. I thought we won the uh the physical event, just off our numbers and seeing how the other teams did. I was like, I think we might be in the lead here. So we're going into day two, and we don't know what we're gonna do, but they told us, hey, you're gonna wake up at 4 p.m. or 4 a.m. for a brief, and we step into the brief and we find out that we're jumping. It's a jump day, and we're gonna do static line employment and it's a static line precision jump master event. So, meaning the jump, it's gonna be jump master directed, which means the green light comes on, but it's on it that comes on at like a minute out from wherever it is that you want to release everybody. There's a point on the ground that the entire team has to jump out, get under canopy land, and get to that point, and your time stops when your last team member touches like a physical disc that they had on the ground. That's how they scored the event. You were gonna jump from one side of the aircraft first and the other side of the aircraft second. So you get a right side look and a left side look, you're gonna do two jumps. We didn't know this, and I stepped into this brief, and I I'm typically the contrarian in the room. Usually I'm the A-dog in the group. Like somebody will tell me something, and I'm like, A dog, did you think about this? Because here's the immediate 10 problems that I'm thinking of right now. And you that's annoying. Like, I'll just straight up, there's all there's always that one dude. I'm typically that one guy that's like, hey, hold the fuck on. So I look around at everybody. Everybody had just put out on a physical event. They we flew from the West Coast to the panhandle, got like four hours of sleep, then went through a heavy physical day. I mean, that the fitness test is a hard fitness test, and we are going max effort. You're rucking as fast as you can. It's a three-mile ruck, it's a mile swim, it's pull-ups, push-up, it's pull-ups, a run, a deadlift, a broad jump, a shuttle event that is like 300-meter shuttle, but you have to run in 25 meter increments, and then you do that twice and you take the average of your score. You do like a sprint with 100 pounds in your hand. Like it is a nine battery test. It is no joke. It's almost impossible to max out. It's really it's hard to fail because they set it pretty low, the bar for passing. It's almost impossible to max out the Indiana drill that you're running, it's the 510, five cone drill. You're going from center cone to left cone to right cone back to center, and your time stops when you get back to center. You have to do it in boots and a combat uniform. Like, no kidding what you would wear to work. Those are the standards for the event. To pass that event, you have to be better than about 80% of NFL combine times. Like to max that event out, you have to run something like a 5.1 in one direction. And then one direction, I think it's left is always the faster direction for all humans. For whatever reason, they found this out. Left is faster, you have to run that like 4.9, and to the right, when you start going to the right, that's like a 5.1. NFL athletes don't do that, right? So it's hard. So I kind of look at everybody and I was like, hey, hold on. So huge physical event, time changes, people not getting enough sleep. We're up at four, and you're telling me we're doing two jump employments today? I looked around the room, I was like, Did anybody else know this? And none of the other competitors like said anything. And I was and like, and the the room was just silent. Like, I look at the people, like they had a whole staff of people that set this event up, and one of those dudes was my friend. And I looked at him and I was like, So, are we just gonna speed past it? We're just jumping twice today. Okay, well, we do dangerous shit. Let's go. So we look at the run-in, and the run-in, it was on the panhandle of Florida, everything's on the water down there. The run-in was south to north because of the airfield restriction. You could only go north to south, south to north, and the winds worked out the safest from south to north. Well, that meant that you were doing your final pattern. The aircraft was going out over the Gulf of Mexico. One minute out is when the doors are open and that green light is on. That's over water. There's a regulation that says you're supposed to have support boats in case somebody falls out of an aircraft. It's gonna be important later. So I kind of look at all this stuff and I'm like, okay, well, I also couldn't be the lead jump master. My friend Adam, that went to the formalized jump master course just previous to this, but had enough time to get certified at the unit, like blessed off, okay, you're good. You're a jump master now. He was technically the only guy that could be the jump master, which is a weird thing because now I'm just a team member jumping, but I'm also walking Adam through jump like rescue jump master procedures to be like, dude, this is how you spot. When you watch these other teams go, you can tell who leaves early and who doesn't. You can see them outside of the window of the plane. When you get our first employment here, you're gonna be able to. I was like, we're flying, and I'm literally gamifying because it's a competition, right? So I've got Adam next to me, and we and the team is jumping out the right door, we're jumping out the left to start. But there's like three teams ahead of us because they go, they ordered it in the two series. So the two one went first, then the two two, then the two three, then the two four uh two six. And then you reversed it. So on the second run, then it was like two six goes first, not two, one, and so on and so forth. So we are gaming it on the first jump. I'm like, look where they go, look where they land. You can hear the radio calls from the ground because we're jocked up. So you can hear them talking on the freak, you know how close they get. So that will tell you where your spot is, what the winds are doing, and we're working through this. First jump goes good. He did a great job as a JM. Uh, let me back up. We're getting ready for this jump. And the team of people that set the evaluation up had jump masters so that we didn't have to do our own JMPIs, so that they could just help us out, get us in the rigs, and do JMPIs. One of these people did a JMPI and I was standing next to Adam. We're the two most recent graduate. I literally graduated less than a month from the army school for this parachute and passed the jump master course. I watched this guy do a JMPI and I turn around and I kind of like look at Adam. He did this thing and I kind of like looked, and Adam goes, That's not it. That's not the that's not the process. And I was like, You're right, just keep watching. So he went through and he did like three things that would get you failed at you would fail on a run at the jump master school if you did what this guy did. Now it's a different context. We're working in the Air Force. The the the best you're ever gonna be at JMPIs is when you're at the school. Like that's a truism because you're in it all the time. And then you get your own process. And as long as you're doing the majors, the things that you're supposed to do, that's still a good JMPI. So I'm not saying that this guy did anything unsafe or dangerous, but the process was far enough away from the I saw the gold standard process for what a JMPI was. I had to do it before I would graduate. What I saw from him was not what I thought would be the gold standard school at the school.

Host 5:42:34

And for everybody listening, a JMPI is a jump master personnel inspection. Yeah. So before you jump, right, um, there's normally somebody checks you, makes sure all your equipment's squared away, all the things are hooked, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's that's the jump master's job.

Aaron Love 5:42:47

Other countries do it differently. The jump master in an American military aircraft does the check of your chute, your equipment to make sure that the chute is like these things get packed and repacked. Like riggers can make mistakes. They can, they can unlike unwittingly put a dangerous condition into your chute. You have to be able to check that shoot to make sure every individual jumper is completely safe, ready to go with the right equipment before a jump. That's what a JMPI jump master personnel inspection is. That's how you get certified, qualified to be a jump master. So I look at Adam and I was like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get JMPIs on our team, and then you and I are gonna J MPI our team. Like, we are gonna go back and we're going to do it the army way, and we're gonna look through everybody's shoes. Some other teams saw us do this, and a couple other teams kind of came over and like, hey, bro, can you check us out? And very sneakily, Adam and I would kind of like walk over and we would be doing the process, but we wouldn't make it look like we were doing a JMPI because we didn't want to piss off those dudes. That again, we I don't think that they did anything wrong or dangerous. I just think that we had the bet we were the guys that you would want JMPI in you because we just got out of school, right? Me with a little bit more experience, Adam with not a lot of experience, but certified through that formalized training program. So we we kind of we did that. But that was another kind of thing in my head that I was just like, God, this doesn't feel great. Walking into this event, didn't know we were gonna be jumping twice, didn't know we were gonna be jumping static line, the run-in is over water. I didn't hear anybody talk about boats. There's a rule where if your if your point of impact, your PI, is within a certain distance of water, you have to wear flotation devices. This became a big thing as we we kind of looked around and we're like, are we wearing LPUs? Like somebody else asked the question. LPU is a uh life preserver unit. They have a bunch of different kinds, but it's basically a flotation device that you can inflate for your shoot so you don't lose the shoot or yourself. It'll help keep you afloat in the water. That conversation got brought up, and my perception of the team is they hadn't thought of that. Because they were like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, LPUs, yeah, yeah, we'll get them. And you're like, hold on. It's in the red. Like you should we should be jocking up with LPUs, like the kit of stuff that you gave me. Main parachute, reserve parachute, bag, LPUs, because that's what you're needed to jump. I didn't feel like that call was made before the event. I feel like they made that call when it got brought up. So it was another thing, and to demonstrate the insanity of us adhering to these rules, there is a small, like five foot deep pond that just so happens to be in some woods that's within that circle of the PI at Tacoma Air Force. But we literally jumped, you can walk, you can jump to the PI where you're jumping in Tacoma, and you can walk into the gym. It's so close. I mean, it's literally, it's when you heard you were doing jumps out back, that meant you were doing it on like you could literally, I could fly into my office if I wanted to. I could literally fly into the hangar where we worked. It was great because you could just rip off jumps because it was super close. But I will tell you that that pond fell within that circle. So when we were jumping at home, we would wear LPUs to jump onto the flight line at Tacoma because that's a rule. Like that's what it is, right? So the stuff starts kind of like, you know, making my spidey sense tingle a little bit. I didn't say anything, you know, specifically in the time, but it was one of these that was like, all right, cool. We do dangerous stuff, we rid we mitigate risk. We're gonna do that as much as we possibly can. So I'll give you you'll we'll talk about LPUs and we'll give you extra JMPIs if you want it. We'll try to buy this risk down. So we do the first jump, works good. Second jump, reverse order. Cole is with the two three. We were with the two, two. The two six jumped, no problem. Adam and I are still game planning. We know that we've got like three sticks of jumpers, so they're gonna have to jump, be under canopy, land, get their score, and then the aircraft is gonna reset and do their pattern, and then the next team is gonna go. So we know we've got two, six, two, three, and then two, two. So even as the two three is doing their stuff, we don't need to do anything.

Host 5:46:40

So, and what was Cole Condiff?

Aaron Love 5:46:42

Like, what was he, what was his role? Staff Sergeant Combat Controller. He was a member on the team. He wasn't the jump master, or he was the jump master for the two three. So he was the guy that was sending everybody out. So he's the guy that's gonna present himself in the door, look for his spot, and then tell his team when to go. So he had already had a successful jump master employment on round one. So he was the jump master for this. Oh, because there were two teams on the same plane. There were four teams on the same plane. Okay, right. So everybody loaded up together two, one, two, two, two, three, two, six. Those are the four units, the four ST AFSOC units. Five guy, uh, four or five guys per team. I think it was like four guys per team for this event. So you would basically split it because one of our guys didn't jump. Josh, our combat controller, is like, listen, I'm not great with jumping. You guys got it. So we're like, all right, cool. Um, so I think oh, that brings it to five. So Adam, Chase, Chaz, myself, four. There we go. So, but all the teams were on board and you watch everybody jump. So we were gaming it because the jump master would be like, okay, you know, there's a quick check and he's looking and he's kind of telling this team, like, hey, 10 seconds, we're gonna go. And then when that jump master leaves, that's he's got his spot and he's leaving, and then the team follows him out.

Host 5:47:48

Did you guys find anything on your J MPIs when you and Adam were doing?

Aaron Love 5:47:51

Was there anything like that were off on any of the there were not? We didn't find anything that we had to fix. I mean, little stuff that I have preferences for that are inside, like, hey, I like it better like this, or I like it better like that. No majors, they didn't miss anything, and but it was that safety blanket of being like, we did get the input. Like, I gave a guy a JMPI from one of those other teams. Like, I did one of those sneaky J MPIs where it's just stood together, you know, just talking off to the side, got him J MPI. And he looked at me, he goes, bro, that felt a little bit different than the first one I got. And I was like, Okay, well, I I just got out of school and I was like, I've done this, yeah, I've I've got other experience. I was like, so that's probably it, you know, whatever. But in my head, I was like, fuck. He should not feel like that. It should be the same thing. That's the point of it. The jump master personal inspection is its own checklist and it goes point by point boy point boy point. They literally will tell you, you'll fail in jump master school if you go to like look at something and you move your hand away from something else and then put it back. Like if you do that, they're like, nope, you lost a piece of equipment, which means you didn't trace that piece of equipment, which means you missed the inspection of this specific piece of webbing. Like that is the level that they are expecting you to do. So to hear a jumper look at me and go, oh yeah, that felt way different. That is not a good thing, right? It doesn't mean somebody did something wrong. It just means, okay, you should you should roll that into your calculus. You should understand what that means. So we take off the two six jumps just fine. The two three uh is getting ready to go. We do our pattern, and I am again walking around with Adam. You can't walk past a certain flight station in the C-130. I think it's like station 230 or station 240 or something. But it's basically just a just before where the hinge of the C-130 is. Like there's the wheel well that's just forward of the wheels. So as we talk about fore and aft on an aircraft, the front of the aircraft is always the nose, the tail is always the tail. As you're getting towards the back of the aircraft, you get to troop seats, and then there's the door and the jump platform, and you can fold the seats up, and that's where the team stands. And then there's the ramp that goes down that opens up the back. Like if you're gonna jump free fall, you can jump static line off of a ramp, but the the ramp goes down. So we were just ahead of basically that wheel well, you know, safe location. Because as the door is open, you're not allowed to go past a certain thing. That's a rule. So Adam and I are intently focused on the two, three. Where is coal spotting? When are they gonna let it go? Like, what buildings are here? We're jumping out of the other side of the aircraft now. So we're looking and being like, hey, this was your spot from the other side. This is where we landed, these are what the winds are doing. Like, I'm trying to coach Adam through this. The call comes in that they're ready to open the door. The process works. They open the door, the air crew checks the door to make sure it's okay. The jump master does their door check, and at which point they're going to present themselves outside the door by grabbing the fore and aft stanchions on the door. Sometimes there's handles, sometimes there's not. And you're physically going to look out and do your outside air checks. So you look out towards the nose of the aircraft, up around, you're checking the door first, and then your outside air check is where you're physically outside the skin of the aircraft and you're looking down the front of the plane, and you're looking to make sure that everything in front of you is good, everything behind you is good, and you're making sure that you don't see anything that could interrupt jump operations. It's part of the process. I was in the center of the aircraft, like we were walking away from a window. I was at the center of the aircraft and maintaining my distance away from that station that I wasn't allowed to go on, it put me super close to that door because I was closer on that side of the aircraft. Cole presented himself to the wind for his outside air check. I had looked at Cole like as he was doing his outside air check. I was like, perfect, when's he doing this outside air check? I kind of like look so I can look out this other door, which is on the other side of the aircraft behind me, because I'm in the center of the aircraft. I look out, and as soon as I turn my head back, I see Cole violently pulled from the aircraft after impacting the aft wall of the aircraft where he had his hand. In this configuration, you're jumping static line, your main parachute is on your back, and the T11 reserve is in front. It's got what's called a soft center pull. The soft center pull is a red sewn handle. That's how you activate the chute. There's been many iterations. Uh, I was in where I was jumping. Like T10s, they had like this silver ring that used to pull up, but the soft center pole you can get to with both hands, and it basically it's spring loaded, it goes out, and that's how your reserve parachute goes up. Through the accident investigation, we have found through other investigations that have happened inside of SOCOM in the army that that soft center pole will catch air. So it's a woven nylon handle that will catch air. It happened just perfectly that it caught enough air that it activated coal chute. Coal chute was now outside of the aircraft in the airstream, immediately opened and caught enough air and violently impacted at 145 knots coal into the aft part of the aircraft. The emergency procedure for this event is that the jump master in charge, so Cole was the jump master, but there were other folks from that team that were stay aboard jump masters. There were two of them that were actually the ones that were like, okay, no, I'm the jump master for the aircraft. And then all these other dudes, like, you're going to JM your stick, but like I'm gonna handle, I'm gonna be the single point that's like running the operation in the back. I don't know why this person didn't engage the emergency procedure, which is you check to see if you have a hung jumper. So Cole left the aircraft when he wasn't supposed to. The first thing the jump master is supposed to do is look and see if he's hung. He got pulled out of the aircraft. Did his chute deploy? What happened to that jumper? Because there is a real possibility that Cole could still be in his harness, attached to the aircraft, flying behind it, stuck to it by a string because his chute didn't open. You have to figure out what to do because if that's true, then it's a different recovery procedure. Then the aircraft has to do different things, the jumpers have to do different things, the aircrew has to do different things. There were from my perception, there was never an outside check of coal. You can see very clearly that his static line was pointed down to the bottom of the door as soon as he left it, which is not normal. Normally, what happens is there's a slight down, the jumper jumps, and then it drags that static line out the door into the trailing wind of the aircraft. And that static line is at the top of the door. So the first picture that I had from this was watching Cole impact and then seeing his static line at an unnatural angle out of that door. And then there was nobody that stuck their head out the door to look. From my perception, the jump master on that aircraft put his hands up at me and looked like this, and then the call was made to shut the door. The emergency procedure for that event is if you lose somebody from the aircraft, the jump master immediately assesses the event to figure out if we have a hung jumper or if we don't. And then his EP should be to send the team. Because that jumper is now alone. You don't know how I know for a fat hole was injured because I watched it happen. He is injured, he is underneath what we believe to be a good canopy. What we find out is actually two canopies. The aircraft immediately enters a right-hand turn, even with a closed door, you could look out, and there were two distinct canopies, which means his reserve had fired and maintained intact, and then the aircraft pulled his chute like it was supposed to. Cole is now in this time underneath two canopies, and we have a closed door. My initial response here, which is probably not the best, is I walked up to the Jotmaster and I was like, what the fuck are you doing? Because you send the team. Now we were jocked up for land, we had boots, heavy uniforms, chest rigs, radios, support items, like we were heavy, helmets, and we lost somebody over that was rigged for land over the Gulf of Mexico. And they shut the door and the EPs weren't followed. And immediately I was I was like, okay, this whole situation has changed. That wasn't the EP. Somebody has lost outside of this. And I looked at my team and I was like, rig for water, we're gonna do rescue jump master procedures. In the Air Force, and this is why I made it a point to like talk about the difference between Air Force Rescue Jump Master, Precision Jump Master, and the Army program is that Rescue Jump Master trains you for this exact event. Getting on board in an aircraft for like a four-hour flight, you're not gonna jock up right away. You're gonna jock up on the aircraft, sometimes at night, sometimes under NVGs. The winds have changed. You don't have a chance, there's nobody on the ground calling you in, unknown, unnamed drop zone in the middle of the night, sometimes in the ocean. That's what Rescue Jump Master gets you ready to do. There are whole processes for jumping to an unknown target using all kinds of stuff if you have them at your disposal. You can drop streamers, and that's how you see the wind. You literally throw streamers over your target, and then you're like, oh, wait. Then you fly from the target to your streamers and you literally count in your head and you go, okay, this is where I'm jumping. This is where the streamers landed. It took the aircraft 10 seconds to get from there. So the aircraft is going to tell me when we get to this point, but they're going to give me a countdown that's 10 seconds back. I literally counted in my head and then told the aircraft, turn the green light on at 10 seconds, because that puts me over target. That's what rescue precision jump master teaches you how to do. So I knew that the situation had changed right away. And I was like, okay, I'm the jump master now. I want 140 knots airspeed. I want you to put me at 800 feet, and we're going to go out the left door because I assumed that the right door was fouled. They jumped out the right door. There was something going on. I couldn't trust that side. But I was like, open up this left door. I'm the jump master. I told the team, get ready. We're jumping into the water. Chaz, the controller, did probably one of the most humble and professional things that I've ever seen. He looked at me and he was like, Aaron, you and Chase and Adam are all PJs and you do this. I would be a liability. I don't provide you anything into this thing. I'm going to take all of your gear. He literally got an A3 bag. And in this moment where he was on my team, I was taking him. And he looked at me and he was like, dude, nope. That guy killed himself to help us get derigged, take off. I told the guys to take everything off. Take your boots off, take your chest rig off, take your anything heavy, get down to a T shirt. If you got a t-shirt on, we're jumping in t-shirts. I even told it's a regulation, you don't technically have to jump with a helmet to jump into this event. My Adam, I was like, you take everything off up to and including your uh up to and including your um helmet. I was like, we're jumping so low, we're not gonna jump reserves. Reserves are not going to help us at five to eight hundred feet. You don't have enough time to get it out. Like we are doing this like a combat jump. I want as low as possible, as low as the aircraft will get me. We have one chance to make this happen under one shoot. The reserve isn't gonna save your life anyway if you do have a problem. We're just gonna have to eat it. So when you talk about risk and what risk we're willing to assume in that moment, that was the risk that I was willing to assume. And to every single person, I was like, reserves are coming off. The dudes were like, yep, fuck it, no reserves. The one thing that Adam had the courage, and I'm glad that he did, he was like, Listen, I would rather jump with a helmet on. We don't know what's gonna happen. I want to keep my helmet on. I was like, good input, we're keeping helmets on. That's it. And that was awesome. So Chaz helps us get ready to go. Um, we start kind of like trying to figure out where exactly did the air, the aircraft, I think through the investigation showed that they did not get an accurate GPS hack of exactly where we lost Cole, which led to some real issues with the resultant search operations. Um, but it's the fog of war. Things were happening. I mean, you were going from a standard jump, they just ripped off five of these, you know, four of these. Well, five total because the two six jump before before Cole's team did. So they weren't, nobody was on the GPS button, and I wouldn't expect them to be. You don't think you're gonna lose a jumper like that? So we start getting ready for this event. I'm derigging the guys, I'm getting ready to go, and I'm telling them straight up, I'm like, listen, this is rescue jump master. We're gonna do one pass. I'm gonna get my count. The weather couldn't have been better. There was no wind to speak of. The gulf was flat and glassy. I could jump right over top of this bad boy. You can't steer those shoots, but you can get them to go a little bit where you want them. So I know I had a little bit of wiggle room from a jump master perspective. Like, this is something that we do. I've been trained for it. I'm I'm ready to go here. I've got a good team, three PJs on the team, kind of at this point. Another PJ from the two, three. So the the other two, three jumpers didn't jump. One of my students that I had taught at the schoolhouse had been on two deployments and gotten a silver star out of one of them already by the time that he had graduated. He came over to me and he's like, Hey man, I want to jump on this. And I looked at him, I was like, Pete, you're in. Like his name was uh Peter. And I was like, Pete, you're in. I was like, Jock up for a water jump. I was like, helmets only. He's like, got it. So now I had four PJs. You know, I had four deployments at this point. Chase had at least four, Adam had at least four, like three, four. Pete obviously had three or four plus a combat award for the stuff that he done. I felt pretty good about the team that I had there. And I felt like I was behind the scenario, but I was responding to it appropriately. For whatever reason, I was not able to communicate in the moment how badly I wanted to get out of that fucking aircraft. Uh, there was a there are sometimes in the military or even in rescue, you know, on missions where it doesn't need to be a discussion. Like I had the plan. Here's my airspeed, here's my altitude, here's how many people are even the aircraft, here's my intent, here's what I need when I hit the ground. We're gonna get there and we're gonna do our best to keep Cole alive. You need to flood everybody to this area.

Host 6:01:31

Were were you plugged into comms with the the pilots?

Aaron Love 6:01:34

Not when I was doing the jump masters that were staying on board were so I was relaying information through either one of them or the air crew member that was in the back that was on comms that had the comms. But I was like, I had to re-jock it. We had to take their shoots off, which means they needed another JMPI. So I had to do another JMPI on them to get them ready to go. Adam was helping out with his stuff as well. But you know, he's my team, so I'm throwing a JMPI on him, he's J MPIing me. We're getting Chase ready to go, and now we're getting Peter into a shoot and getting him ready to go. So my communications in that time, I felt like I did it like 10 times, but I probably only did it once or twice. I just kept repeating like, this is what you're going to do. Left door, put me over top of the two shoots. Give me this airspeed, give me this altitude. We're gonna do one pattern and we're in. Give me one pattern off the top. I'm gonna have my spot, I'm gonna have my shit ready to go. Don't take your eyes off those shoots. We're going. I felt like I said that 10 times and it was a discussion every time. It was like, well, you know, we can't do that altitude. I was like, I know the fucking altitude is in the operational min's. I know it. Operational min for that parachute is like 400 feet. You just have to fly a little faster. I know for a fact we can jump at what I told you to jump. I know you know what door I want. Why is this a discussion? Meanwhile, I'm doing other things and trying to brief the team. But like, dude, you're whoever gets to them first is gonna be hands-on. Get them out of the water, use whatever LPUs we hand to to float them up, and then we're gonna start. We don't have any, we had like the most bullshit medical equipment. Like, if this was an actual mission we planned for, we'd have waterproof bags with waterproof litters. We would have another litter that they could throw down to us as they flew over top. Like, we would have this locked up. We just didn't have it. Again, we were planning for a day static line jump in an event, in a competition training event. Yeah. Um, so we, I mean, we took, you know, there are survival pieces of equipment on the plane that we there's a butt boat, essentially. It's exactly what it sounds like. It goes underneath your boat, it folds up flat, it's in a square that's about this big, and it pops out with you inflate it with a CO2 cartridge and it has a ring and that floats, and then you have a little dome, and that's this piece of survival equipment. I was like, I want that. We're gonna put it on one of the guys, that's where we're gonna put the patient once we get to coal. Like, once we get in the water, we're gonna figure out a way to get him into this piece of equipment to get him up so that we can treat him and keep him stable and do that. We come to find out much later that piece of equipment that we pulled wasn't even operational. They had it flying on the plane and it wouldn't have worked if we needed it. So we were stealing LPUs from air crew people were like, give me your LPUs. I need these flotation devices on here. Like, we are taking your LPUs. And who is telling you that you guys can't jump? So this gets wacky, right? So the aircraft commander is technically in charge of all risk inside the aircraft. So he gets to say whether you jump or not. At any time the pilot flying, even in training operations, if he doesn't feel good, he's allowed to be like, Nope, nobody's jumping the aircraft because it's his aircraft and technically it's his risk to assume if somebody leads it. So whatever conversation was happening, and I talked to the I talked to the pilot way later in this event. Like I was laser focused on get the team ready, give them the brief, make sure they have what they need. Are they jocked up correctly? Are we as safe as we possibly can be in this event? And are we going to employ? Like, I was focused on that. I was focused on getting the people out of the door. As I go back and I look at this event, which is extremely emotional for me to even get through, those are the times where I'm like, okay, should I have taken a second and walked up to that cockpit and grabbed somebody by their face and been like, you're getting me the fuck out of this aircraft? I don't give a shit about your risk. Because that was the answer that they gave me afterwards. They're like, well, it was too much risk. Like, bitch, it's my risk. I'm the one jumping. I'm the one going to this event. I'm the one assuming the risk. You aren't assuming anything. I don't care about your career. I don't care about your little counseling statement that you're going to get if something goes bad here. I don't give a shit about any of that. Get me out of the aircraft with a current qualified team that you know can fix this problem right now. Um, so those things, like as I I mean, I've broken this event down to its individual seconds and individual interactions. And it's kind of it's probably a thing that I'll never be okay with. But I think about that event, I go, is there is there some set of words? Could I have put letters in a different order to get people to understand that I've got this? Like I do this, let me go do it. Yeah, just say fucking yes. Open the fucking door, put the aircraft at 145 knots, put me at 500 feet, put me over top, and let me go. Did they start scrambling assets once this went up on the radio? Everybody. Everybody did. Little fog of war here. We had some boats. We were over top of the area. There was an Air Force Times article came out that quoted one of these backenders, and it's one of the few things that I will call out directly is that one of these people that was on board this aircraft, when I was on board the aircraft with the doors closed, and I was the one in the only door that people were looking at because we were doing left-hand patterns because they they did listen to me about putting him out the left door and keeping him in the left door. So they're doing left-hand patterns because that I was constantly checking. Somehow, somewhere, somebody got on this interview and they were like, Well, we saw Cole splashing in the water. First of all, no, you fucking didn't. Second of all, those words mean something to Cole's family. I can't believe that that got put out in print and that became part of the narrative. Because that's bullshit. I saw him impact that door. I saw him hit the water. I had eyes on those shoots the entire first part of this event. From the time that that door got shut to where I got them to do left-hand patterns over top, I could visualize the isolated person in the water the entire time. To say that you saw them, because what this did is they were kind of talking about, oh, where there was a delay, and then we had a team that was the fact that there was a team that was ready to jump to go get them never really hit the open source stuff. Like even in the community, and this is just a random thing years later, there was a combat controller that did not like me when I worked at the 2-2. And later, I'm talking five years after this event, six, six years after this event, he pulled me aside at a random retirement that we were at. And he he was a little bit drunk, but he was like, Listen, man, you and I have always had our issues. I literally just heard from somebody about the actions that you took on that aircraft. Nobody knew that, dude. Thank you, man. I'm so sorry. That isn't to aggrandize or say that I did it. It's the fact that the information that was put out after this thing and in the result and accident investigation, some of it was just straight up fucking bullshit misinformation. And that piece was part of it. Oh well, we saw him, and that's why we knew that we could fly off to the room. Are they saying when he splashed, like he he gave an okay signal or something? He was splashing around, he was showing signs of life. I again, I wish I knew the intent of what this person said, but it was used as a piece of information that was like because what happened was is no matter what I did, I couldn't get out of that plane. So we flew over top for a little bit. There were some fishing vessels in the area and boat traffic. There was rumors of like a Coast Guard ship that was in the area that was gonna steam towards this event or try to like pick coal up. At one point, when we got cleared out of our block, because we were flying super low, we were at 400 or 500 feet because that's where I wanted to jump from. At one point, we were like, they were like, hey, we're gonna take you out of this low orbit. There's people that are on the way. There's a fishing boat that's going right to where we lost coal. We think that they saw them. We're gonna get them. That was not true. That fishing boat had no clue that there was an issue. Those people had no clue. They were just fishing, they were just going out that way. So all of this led to an informational picture. The pilots were saying it was too risky. The back-ender was saying at some point, I don't know if it came out on that radio or not, but they definitely said it after the event to the fucking press. Okay, well, we see him in the water. So if you if you just zoom out for a second and you take it away from my emotionally involved on the scene sort of thing, and you zoom out, the commander that was in charge of this is a good friend and a good man. He is the he's a two-star general now. His name's Matt Allen. Matt Allen is one of the I worked with him at the three the 321st. He's gonna make four stars, and I hope he does because he's the right man. He is a good man. The information that he was presented with was there are boats in the area that are moving towards this event. I don't know if he got the piece of information that Cole may be affecting his own rescue, that he may have been sucked out of the aircraft but was alive and was making like actual life movements. And it's too risky to throw this other team out of it. Given that piece of information, there is not a call that I would have made that's different than what Matt Allen made. Or whoever made that call, if it's not Matt. I understand why they made the call to pull the 130 and us away from that event. I really do. I just feel differently because I was at a different optic, I had a different experience. Cole. Cole did not survive that initial impact. That is my personal opinion from watching it happen. He may have he may have survived for a brief period underneath the canopy or to the water. Uh I made an amends with the fact that that was not jumping to save Cole. Cole didn't have to dial on. And just to have his have his bros with him at that moment was enough for me to accept all that risk. I did not think that Cole was alive. There, I did not think it was a rescue, I think it was a recovery. And I still wanted to go. And I still wanted to go right then. And in that moment, it felt like the one thing that I was there to do. This was different than Mike Cathcart. Sometimes it's just you can't do anything about it. But this was the first time in my career after going through the accident investigation with Peter and having to deal with all those good, those bad things, and hearing uncomfortable information and seeing that accident investigation go off. It was the first time that I ever felt like it was bullshit. Like I'm a I'm a PJ. I'm supposed to get it. I know it's a suicide mission. I know it's high risk. I know we just we didn't realize that this was going to happen. But you, ASOC, have told me that you made me into this person to go do this very fucking thing. And the air crew resisted it. And my brother jump masters that were supposed to do the EPs as I saw them, they didn't do it. And the planning wasn't right, and there were no boats in the water. And there were some other crazy things that happened with people doing sort of a non-standard J MPI. And then I had a commander that wouldn't let me jump out of his plane because it was too risky for him as a pilot. And then I had people back in some office somewhere that was like, Well, with the information, we can't send them, we're gonna pull them off, we're gonna button this up. It felt like everything that I thought was true in one event, and it was before I landed because we maintained airborne for a while trying to figure out what was going on until they finally called us back to base because they were like, Well, it turns out the fishing boats weren't right, and we don't have these assets, and now we don't, we don't know where he is, and we're gonna need to get the entire I mean, everybody that could fly at Herbie was off the off the ground. Every airflame frame that could fly, any training event that happened was immediately stopped. And there was every asset that we could out over the Gulf of Mexico looking for coal in an area that we couldn't pinpoint because the helicopter, the HC-130 pilot or the C MC-130 pilot didn't hit the right button right away. So we had a general area and not an exact location. So for the 20 or 30 minutes, I just remember sitting on that floor of the aircraft, still jocked up in my parachute. They had the ramp open at this point because we're just helping with search at this point. You know, the air crew members are on the ramp looking for search. And I sat there and I was quiet for a long time by myself, looking out that door and just trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, man. Like for whoever I am, good, bad, or indifferent, it's narcissistic, and I I I literally choke on the words. That's the only place that I'm really good. That is the only that's why I never wanted to go to a squadron. It's why I never wanted to do the political games. It's why I didn't care about rank. I was good at one thing and it was on target in chaos. That was one thing that I was good at. I was so terrible at so many other things. But in that moment, I was your guy. I had the team, I was ready to go. I had trained for it. Like this was it. Send me all of that bullshit that we say. Oh, on your darkest day, you're gonna call and a PJ is gonna show up out of the air like an angel and pick you up. Well, not if some captain in an aircraft decides that he doesn't want me to go.

Host 6:14:14

You guys, uh at some point that transition to a a recovery operation. Um, what what happened for the next couple days? And and what goes into something like a recovery process like that?

Aaron Love 6:14:25

It's just chaos, man. It's chaos. Um it's chaos when it happens downrange. It's just the same amount of chaos that happens, you know, when you're doing it stateside. Everybody wants to help. Sometimes that's your biggest, your biggest drawback is you have all of these people that are flooding to the area and you don't even know who's who in the zoo to use a dumb thing. Be like, Navy guys showed up. They're like, listen, we got side sand sonar. We can put it off the side, it's like 70 to 90 feet deep. We can give you sonar pictures of huge parts of this. You know, it's the Gulf of Mexico is like super flat on the ground, it's not like super craggy or super rocky, super easy to get down there. It's really not that deep. We didn't even know how to best utilize them. They kind of just like showed up. They heard about this thing and they were like, no, we got this thing, this sonar thing that we can drag behind the boat and we can get you pictures and we can like start doing searches and all this other stuff. But you know, that's just one example. Probably hundreds of people from state agencies to everywhere that starts looking at this recovery thing. The problem is you don't have good truth data to start. We don't know the exact GPS location of where Cole left. Because if you know that, you can know the drift, even with two shoots, you can figure it out. It's about here that gets you a search area. And then you can start playing with drift and currents inside. And okay, for this column of water and with this amount of drift, where is it likely that he drifted? And would the chutes catch water and make it go further? And should we expand the search area? The Gulf of Mexico is huge. Water recoveries are impossible. Surface water recoveries in the ocean are ridiculously hard to do. Like to find a single person just in the ocean with all of the signaling that they want is impossible. It is so freaking hard to do. And now you're talking about doing that subsurface with winds and currents and waves and tides and incorrect clear, you know, incorrect pictures of where we lost them, and you don't even know where to start. Like you're not looking for a needle in a haystack, you're looking for a needle in a stack of needles. You're looking for a specific needle. So as we start working through that, the question started coming up about we're gonna have to start doing dive operations. So we're gonna have to get ready to go. And again, like whether it's luck or, you know, just bad luck, good luck, divination. I just so happened to be one of the only dudes that was a current and qualified dive supervisor that was on scene, right? Like that had a dive. Because again, the two two focused on dive stuff more. We had a great dive supervisor guy that ran our program. He was a contractor that ran it. He was amazing. He like diving quickly becomes one of those things you like shove off your plate, like we don't have time. He wouldn't let you. He'd be like, Nope, we're gonna do the EPs, and you're actually gonna do the EPs. They may be in a pool, but we're gonna do it for real. I know this lake, like American Lake out at the at Tacoma, is like this little camping spot. It's a big lake that they have out there. He's like, I know it sucks to dive here, but it's great for navigation. So we're gonna go do these dives. So, to his credit, I was maybe, I think I was maybe the only one, or like maybe there was like one other dude walking around that was like current qualified, but he wasn't there. So it began this huge thing of like, how do we get somebody? You know, is there a way that a quick process where we can get our dive supervisors to go to the pool, shut the pool down, dive, get them like rehacked on their dive supervisor so that they're ready to go, so that we can have more people to go run this operation. But in the short term, they were like, Who's a dive soup and who's current qualified? And I was like, I am. When we got back, so we everybody collapsed back to the two, three to kind of like get everybody together, the the 23rd STS. Everybody kind of collapses back. There's teams that are gonna go out and fly. Some of my guys want to go out and fly. We didn't even have enough equipment. My guys were begging and borrowing because we just brought the equipment for the event. Like we weren't ready to go for helicopter born search operations in the Gulf. So they're literally going into other people's cages. At one point, it was just like, if your cage is open, your gear got stolen. Like, that's people were literally just oh, this one's locked. This one's like, hey, this cage is open, and they'd be like, Oh, here's his water gear. And they would just take gear to go fly these events. That's how they got dudes out the door because it was just chaos, absolute chaos. So the formalized dive operations were gonna kick off, and that led to two days. Um, the first, the first day, you know, we went out and we were just using like we were looking at the sonar and trying to like figure out like, is there anything that looks like a body that we can dive on? Is there absolutely anything? That operation itself started super early. Like, I was a current qualified dive supervisor, but I hadn't run like a for real dive operation. Like, this was real world, like the hardest thing. Like being a side a dive supervisor is its own discipline. Again, there are entire teams that have dive supervisors, that's all they do. This is an additional duty for me. And I went through dive supervisor in like 2012, and then ran operator, like ran training events and stuff. But you're talking about 10 or 12 training events that led up to this thing where I was no kidding a dive supervisor. So inexperienced dive supervisor. I wish I would have taken that dive school job at this point now, right? Because this would be great. Um, we go out the first day, it's crappy, it's overcast. The we don't have all the protection gear, like we don't have wetsuits, we don't have you know warmy gear. Like we're we came from Tacoma at the end of the fall to the fall in the panhandle. It's 80 degrees out. I don't have like Gore-Tex and all this other stuff. We are going or leaving to go start the search. We're not even out of like the little waterways to get out to the bigger gulf. And the wind and rain was so much that it was just it soaked everybody right away. My team member Adam, that was the jump master, that's now on this dive, this first dive operation with me. We get soaked right away. And I look at him and I notice he's shivering. We're not like 10 minutes into this mission. And I look at him like, hey man, how are you doing like cold-wise? And he goes, Listen, man, I'm not good, but I don't want to make this your problem right now. He's like, So I'll just try to work through it. We were soaked, we were freezing right away, and that was the start of like a 12-hour time out on the Gulf. So this leads into a, you know, the first one, just absolutely no joy, can't even find anything. We we can't even, we can't even get to an area where we're confident that that's the area where we lost coal. Because people are trying to, during this, you know, time leading up to the event, they're getting with the air crew and they're trying to figure out, like, okay, well, here's where the call was. We should have hit the button then, but there was a natural delay when the call came from the back to the front. And that may not seem like a lot, but they're flying at 145 knots, man. They're flying at 100 miles an hour each second, is further and further and further in time. And then when you start talking, and that changes where he drifted, and then that changes where he hits the water, and then you have to deal with well, what were the currents in that area doing at that time? So we're trying to figure that out. The first day was just, you know, I don't even remember. I think we dove on the first day. I think there was some like artifact from that sonar that we were using that we could get down and go dive, but it was essentially just like nothing. We had limited amounts of air and oxygen and to do the search. So that leads into just 24-hour operations of these Navy guys. The timeline is a little bit blurry for me, but either the either the next day or the day following, we showed up to what was going to be that day's dive briefs, and we had a very clear picture from one of the side scan sonars, and they opened with it, and it was two very clear pieces, two very clear things that were separated by about five feet, and then there was a larger thing further down, like a larger mass, so it formed a V. So two big masses up here, and then a larger thing down here. And it looked exactly like it would look like if two parachutes and a hung jumper inside of the thing were on the bottom of it. Couldn't have been clearer. At this point, they had figured out how to get more of their dive masters current, their dive supervisors current, so they had more time to figure this out so they had more dive. And they tagged me to be the dive supervisor. Now, looking back on it, I think that Matt Allen and some of those other commanders and some of those other folks, and this is completely just my read of it. But I'll tell you what I would do if I was the guy that was in charge. I would look at my team and I would go, who needs who needs to make the recovery? And if I was a guy in that seat, I'd go give it to the guy that lost them. So I don't know why I was the dive supervisor on that day. But we had really good, we thought we had it. Like leaving that, I was like, this is fucking it. Like I was double checking every, and this is not like I am a very fire and forget team leader. Like when I tell you to do something, I just assume that you're gonna crush it for me. I mean, I was going through people's individual kit, like I was going through team gear, I was like, Do you have this thing? They're like, dude, you asked me if I had it. I've got it. But that's how I was just I was like, this is it. It has to go perfectly. So we get out on the boat ride and we get out to this location that they had found, and we send divers down, and it was the longest, probably. I mean, it was a 20-minute dive, right? Didn't take long to get to depth. It was the longest 20 minutes of my life. The guys had cameras with them, so they would take pictures, uh, like real-time pictures. So they come up and uh, you know, the guy looks at me and he kind of takes off his regulator and he kind of looks at me and he just swims. He didn't say anything, he just swam up, swam over to the boat, and he pulls up his camera and he gets to where the digital picture is and he shows it to me. And man, so there were two perfect rocks, like in this flat seabed, there were these two boulders that just so happened to be exactly the size of a fucking parachute, and they were right next to each other. And because of the way sonar works, those two rocks, as the sonar was over here, those two rocks made a picture, and the shadows of those two things converged and made it look like there was another clump that was down, and it was just a very dark piece of the picture. It was actually artifact from the two things. So Cole was not there. Um, and that like to have the entire air sucked out of you, I can't even describe the feeling like my heart dropping or my stomach dropped or whatever. That doesn't that has no way to describe the feeling of just defeat that I felt when those divers broke surface. When they were like, hey man, it's not him. Because your own your own expectations break your own heart, right? Like leaving for this, I'm like, that's fucking, I was convinced, man. I was so sure that it was him. Like it looked perfect on the I was just like, this is it. And to have that feeling, and then that really that day there was nothing, there was nothing else. We had nothing else to go on. Like we were back to square one. We went back to look into the navy and be like, hey, can you just do this forever, I guess, in the entire Gulf of Mexico? Because we can't even tell you where is a good spot to look. Can you just look for anything for from now until you find him? So we got home that day, um, and that was kind of it. Like, unfortunately, the military is the military. I didn't work at the 2-3. I was assigned, I had a whole job to do. We were getting ready to go deploy. Like, I was already in pre-deployment spin-up the very early part of it for deployment in 2021. So the commander made the call, my commander back home was like, Hey, we gotta bring you back home. And I fought a little bit. You know, I was just like, hey, I want to be here. Like, I think, you know, I want to be here when they find Cole. And he's like, Listen, man, uh, and I hated this commander. Uh, this commander and I did not get along. And this conversation, it was just he needed to do it. And by the way, like, my feelings about that commander are completely just not even useful to this. He and I just didn't get along. We just had those personality types that every conversation was a knife fight. Um, and that and and I I I had a lot of personal feelings towards that guy for a long time for no good reason. But he made the call, he's like, listen, I gotta bring you home. And it and it it was the it was the it was the right call. Um But man, I like people talk about you know, when's it right to retire? When do you know? Like when when when is when is it right to step away? Like with the benefit of a little bit of time and distance, like that was that was my moment. Losing Mike, losing Peter a month beforehand, and this event and all the other things that I had about it, like I was I was done right there, but unfortunately I had a whole lot of contract left.

Host 6:26:58

Uh the official report says Cole had his tuck tab in. You were four feet from that door, you've been pretty direct that the report is is wrong, and that's a public contradiction from the Air Force's official account of how you know one of your guys, you know, passed away. What what what do you what do you think if you had to get you know make a make a call, I guess.

Aaron Love 6:27:21

So I yeah, I would I would hate to tell the Air Force that they're wrong. I I think you know there were there were in the accident investigation, there were pictures that were like, well, this is a picture, and you can kind of see right here, like here's this tuck tab, it was definitely in the that's why they made that call, right? I will tell you from that J MPI process, I will tell you from knowing what these shoots are and how you're supposed to have tuck tabs and all this other stuff. I do not believe that. Uh, I just I simply I don't. I don't believe that they were in. I could be totally wrong. They could have dead rights pictures of other stuff, just like I do not believe that personal anecdote of we saw coal splashing in the water. I simply have a different perspective. I do not remember them being in. I don't remember like tuck tabs were a huge thing at Airborne School. They would talk about it because there's a known the reason you have tuck tabs is they're literally just a little piece that have a yellow tail on them. And what you do is you stick them in. There is a a part that's sewn into the parachute that has a pocket. That pocket is where the actual pins of the device are. So it goes the there's a the handle that we were talking about that we catch air, that while that woven nylon handle that's attached to like a larger square that you can pull off, and that whole thing comes off in one piece. And underneath that, there is a simple little cutout, a simple little woven thing of the parachute container material. That's where the tuck tab goes. Well, you put it in there to prevent exactly what happened to Cole. The reason you use a tuck tab is that over time the wind pulls on that thing naturally and it it warps that material. It makes it more pliable. And it doesn't do that anywhere else on the chute. So it makes that gap in there bigger. So the army in their infinite wisdom wasn't like, oh, make a better system that doesn't have this known fault. Like they've killed people with this chute before. Don't fix the system, just re-like engineer a fix for it. So they literally made what they call tuck tabs, which are you stick that in the part that is now like bigger than it needs to be because it's been stretched out. You stick it in there to prevent what happened to Cole. So my only question would be: if this tuck tab was in fact in his system and it's meant to prevent this the thing exactly which happened to Cole, which is the air catching that handle and deploying the chute. If that tuck tab is in there, then why did Cole shoot fire prematurely? And here's the problem for the Air Force that I'd love to have an argument with somebody about. They're like, no, 100% tuck tabs were in it, and it happened, but we know for a fact that tuck tags were in it. Okay, you didn't stop us from jumping in that shoot for a fucking second. The rest of the army uses this shoot. Why was there no stand down to the T11R to look? You you said that he had the fix that presented that prevented the scenario, right? Okay, there wasn't a the army didn't shut that parachute program down. The army didn't discontinue that shoot. They're still jumping it right now with the tuck tabs in it. So how do they know the tuck tab was in what what picture was were they taking pictures on the there were there were PA? It was a big PA event. I mean, this thing, it was a competition, it was the first one in a long time. So there were there were people that were taking pictures all the time.

Host 6:30:26

Okay.

Aaron Love 6:30:26

On the ground as we were jocking up, you know, people that wanted to take pictures, dudes were posting, you know, on social media, um, you know, whatever. And there was one of him post-jock up, I believe either on the plane or getting ready to go on the plane that they attached to be like, nope, this is the proof. Like, we can see that the tuck tabs were in there. Well, that just opens up a really uncomfortable conversation for all these people. So you're telling me that you guys highlighted in the program of record, like everybody uses this chute because the army said you had to use it. That's why we were jumping it. You're telling me that there was an issue, they fixed it, but then the fix failed, and they never stopped using the chute. Not a single jump operation was stopped using the T11 reserve parachute. And the Air Force will still look you dead in the face and be like, no, it was 100% in. Well, then that opens a whole other question that you never answered, and you'll straight up deny, you'll straight up ignore it. Be like, well, no, the the tough tab was in, it was just a terrible event. No, that's a problem with military equipment that killed somebody. So shouldn't there be a larger conversation? And for that reason, that's why I disagree with their contention that it was in there. Because you look at the event, what would happen if it wasn't in there? The parachute would fire when he presented himself to win on his outside air check and it would fire the shoot off and it would drag him out of the airplane. That's what happened. And you're telling me he still had it, he did everything right, had to tuck tab in, and it still happened, but we didn't stop jumping the shoot. Okay, something doesn't make sense here.

Host 6:31:49

You stood up at the hot wash in front of commanders and chiefs and called it out directly in the room in front of everyone. What made you do that instead of going through all the channels? I shouldn't have done that.

Aaron Love 6:32:03

You know, the person that I called out there was a guy that I respected the most in the world, was Matt Allen. Like we had a, I mean, it was they they literally would get together after these days and they would kind of get everybody together. And I mean, it was 200 people in this room. It was everybody that cared, and there's a lot of people that care about this stuff. I mean, it was contractors, it was not like the team room, man. Like, I I would just say straight up to a guy that probably didn't deserve it in the moment to get called out. Um but I felt like just like when I was at the schoolhouse and we redid that stuff, like I didn't do that because I didn't do that because I thought that it needed change and I did it on my own. I just listened to the guys. I went through two days of people pulling me aside and being like, I can't believe you had to go through that, bro. You gotta tell that, you gotta tell somebody they were wrong. You gotta say that the aircraft, like I mean, initially it was like the pilots. They were like, you gotta burn those pilots to the fucking ground. I can't believe we listened to the radio traffic. We know that you were trying to jump. You gotta burn them to the ground. Like, you gotta say it in front of people because all the air crew was in the room, support people were in the room, those Navy dudes that were helping us out. Like, this is what we would do like daily like town hall meetings, but they were really hot washes of the day. And what are we gonna do and what's next?

Host 6:33:15

I'm sure you're also probably not getting much sleep.

Aaron Love 6:33:17

None. No. Um, and I was who I was. Like I wasn't what did you say to the aircrew? So I said it in front of everybody. Um, but I basically, you know, I just told them I was like, you had a team that could fix this, you had a team that wouldn't have let Cole die alone. And for all of this, all this talk about you're gonna send us when the world is the worst and nobody else can go, and we trust these people with our lives, and we trust the people on the plane. Like that was the general gist of it of me standing up and being like, You've told me my entire career. Like, I I knew that commander since he was a captain. We worked together at the 321st, and he was a rock star then, and I know that he cares about the men. And again, I can't talk highly enough about what a good man and a good operator and a good leader he is. And me in that emotional state, what I kept going back to was like, no man, this is not some unknown dude that you don't know in the back of some weird aircraft. It was me telling you, I can do this, let me go, and you wouldn't let me. And you wouldn't let us. And I was like, that was fucking bullshit. How did you take it? He man, with more grace than I would have if I was him. Him and the chief, him and the wing chief, were like you they took it on like on the chin in front of people, and they were like, Hey, um you're right. Can you keep the team back afterwards? We want to talk to you. And I was like, Yep, 100% we can. Um I don't know if I needed to do that in that moment. And I I like I think about that a lot because those I respected those. I still do. The chief, his name was Jeff. He's an amazing guy, great legend combat controller. This wasn't him being malicious, like they were doing the best that they could in the moment. And I just I I happen to differ with the the end of the decision-making process.

Host 6:35:01

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, man. Some people, I mean, you know what you've led. Um, sometimes, dude. You have to make calls as a leader, and it doesn't always, you know, feel right to the guys on the ground. And I'm not defending them or or or or you know, I wasn't there, man. But it's just uh I can imagine the weight that I'm sure he's carried as well. Um we talk about it every year. Yeah.

Aaron Love 6:35:20

We text each other every year on that anniversary, and I've talked to him a bunch of times afterwards, and we talk about it every single time. And I love that dude. And I don't talk to him infrequently, but every single time we talk about it. We talk about you know that event.

Host 6:35:32

When you replay that whole incident in your head now, what do you see that you didn't see then? That's a really good question.

Aaron Love 6:35:42

I see mostly my failures because that's what I focused on, right? Like, I really do think like, was I too emotional to get the aircrew to be on my side? Like a lot of this, I mean, it it was a discussion, it wasn't direction. I should have probably been able to figure that out and then alter the way that I was communicating to get them on my team to get me to leave the aircraft, right? You know, in the way that we train for this event, you I can't help but go back and be like, you know, there were there were times where my spidey sense was tingling. Looking back on it, should I have been more aggressive? Should I have really raised the flag and been like, hold on, dudes? You know, should I have called somebody out about a process? Should I have raised my voice more? Was there a better way that I could do it? You know, I think that sometimes you just have these chains of events and you can go back and dissect them for pieces and parts. And that's useful in some cases, but really zooming out and looking at this entire event, you know, the only unanswered question for me right now is like, I I could have been the one guy that changed this event. Like I was in the position to be it, to be that guy. You know, the question that I struggle with now is that constant spiral of like, could you have done anything? Should you have done anything? And are the things that you did, were they the best possible decision in that moment? Literally everything. You know, should I should I have had the reserves on, even though that even though I know that we couldn't activate the reserve from the the altitude that I wanted to jump anyway? I don't know. Was that the right you know? I knew that we were getting in the water. I don't want guys screwing around with their reserve trying to take it off in the water. Because they're gonna have to swim for their lives as well, you know.

Host 6:37:19

Well, again, man, another really tough situation to to relive. I I mean I I know that affected you, it still affected you. Um, but but thanks for kind of just giving our audience and really the listeners out there. Did you know call Cole before that incident?

Aaron Love 6:37:34

I had never met him. Like we had a really brief conversation, like in retrospect, you know, we talked, we were joking about something, kind of like at the fitness competition and at the you know, because he was. I think I made like some random joke to him because he was jumping first. I was like, I'm totally stealing your spot. You better you better nail it. I was like, because I'm stealing your spot. Um, but I I had never met him beforehand, you know, guys talked extremely highly of him. I had a great name in the community, just a great the example of what you wanted a combat controller to be at the 2-3 STS. Just fit, family man, just the literally the best from everybody that I had talked to. But I I did not know him before the event.

Host 6:38:12

When did you first say out loud to yourself or to someone else that this might be the end of your career?

Aaron Love 6:38:17

To myself, it was on that plane ride on the way home. I mean, I was again, uh, if I could just go back in time and shake my little face, you know, I was just hammered on that plane as we took off, away from like the biggest failure of my career, going back to you know, a new unit. Um, I don't know if you know this, but the timing of COVID wasn't really super good either. Uh, because COVID kicked off literally, like I landed in November, and the first cases were in Seattle in December. Like that's they in November, December of that time. And then full-on COVID madness took over right in the spring of 2020. And I was at the epicenter for the nonsense being the middle of Washington State near Tacoma and Seattle. Like it's, I mean, you know, we were I came home from a random TDY a little bit later, and like I was literally driving out of Seattle the night that they started the Chaz Chop Autonomous Zone Riot thing. Like, I landed now, the city was super weird, a super weird energy. Like, that was the time period that I wallowed in for the next five years. Like, those two events happened to me within a month, and then we went right into COVID. So, like the the feelings and the like everything attached to that area and that time frame now is just absolutely insane.

Host 6:39:38

The PJ motto is that others may live. When you realize you can no longer do that job without it breaking you, what happened to your identity?

Aaron Love 6:39:47

Man, it was it was everything. So it wasn't just my personal identity and my ego and my it. I always tried to separate the job from who I am as a person. It's an awesome job. It made me who I am. It literally made me the man that I am, good, bad, or indifferent. Everything wonderful and also traumatic in my life really came out of me being a PJ, right? But I never tried to make that a part of who I am. Like when you talk, you could say pararescue sucks, and there's a whole group of people that they hear that and they don't hear pararescue sucks. They hear me, the person sucks, and now I'm gonna defend myself in the vein of pararescue. I always tried to keep that line very, very well identified in my mind. However, this was from two sides. All of those preconceived notions were completely just shattered in one event. So it was not only the side of me, like, was I good enough? Did I do the things that I was supposed to? Could I have done anything in this event? What should I have done? Was I a good enough leader? Was I a good enough mentor? You know, Adam and Chase, like I can't know their heart, but in their mind where they're like, Aaron wants to do this wacky jump and I'm gonna go, but I'm I'm kind of scared because Aaron's not that guy. You know what I mean? Like everything about me in that moment broke, but it also broke everything that I thought that ASOC and Pararescue was. Because that part of not being able to go and having essentially like commanders that wouldn't let me to go, or aircraft commanders that didn't accept the risk to let me go jump. You told me that for my entire career that you were not only going to allow me to go in those things, but you were gonna send me into that environment. So I had kind of like the dual thing of like, I'm not, I'm I am a PJ, but a PJ isn't me. Like, I do not own part of that. That's not woven into my ego and id. It's an awesome job, and I loved it, and I I have love in my heart for it, but that's not part of who I am. It's a part of what I've done. And I could get away with it if it was just that, because then I could be like, you're having personal feelings about this, it doesn't have anything to do with the career field, you have personal shit to worry about. But when you add in that other part where I had a command that told me these, I felt like I was gaslit my entire career. Like flying back from that plane, slamming vodka sodas, you know, as I'm flying back to Tacoma, Washington. Man, you know, I those good men that I trusted that I always thought had our best interests and would get us into scenarios where we could do the most amount of work. I felt like that wasn't true either. And something in me broke on that flight, and then it was exacerbated by going through COVID and watching these commanders and the vaccine mandate. And okay, well, if you don't want to get the vaccine, then you have to wear a mask at work, but not everybody has to wear a mask at work, and we're not coercing you, but we aren't gonna let you PCS or go TDY unless you get this little shot. You know what else? It just turned the volume up on all those decisions because they had no home base anymore.

Host 6:42:52

Yeah, and that's really interesting. You know, I I we we've we've I don't even think we've talked about COVID too much on this podcast because I think I'd block it out of my mind. Everybody pretend like it didn't happen. Yeah, because I also at the time lived in an extremely liberal area and we paid for it uh very personally, not to make this about me, but um, so I I am curious how the whole COVID vaccination mandate went over in the PJ community because you guys are the tip of the spear when it comes to medical stuff, so like, and you guys are extremely fit, right? And and so how did how did how did that go over?

Aaron Love 6:43:29

We didn't we didn't even talk about this. This wasn't part of the prep either. Not good, bro. I mean, well, and it's because like it was largely geographically enforced. The dudes at the 2-3 in Florida, Florida wasn't playing a whole lot of the COVID games. Like this, this bubbled over a long time. The vaccine mandate wasn't a thing until late in 21, right? So the entire, you know, winter of 19, really December of 19, through the lockdowns, through 2020, that entire year, we've been playing all those fuck fuck games for a year. But you would you would talk to your bros at like the 2-3 and we're like, oh yeah, man, wearing masks inside the building sucks. And they're like, You guys are wearing masks for what? They don't work, you know they don't work. And and everybody's like, Wait, what? Who made that call? And they're like, Oh no, we just decided kind of like as a unit, and the commander was like super cool with it. And if you're in the building, like you're we're not wearing masks in the building. Meanwhile, I'm at the 2-2 STS, and my commander decided that if you were in a room by yourself, you weren't allowed to have your every team room door has a lock on it. You weren't allowed to lock your team door, it had to be open for ventilation. Everybody in that room had to have a mask on, even if you were in the office working by yourself to work at the unit. That's like the dudes that drive around with masks in their cars by themselves. It made zero sense. Like this same commander that brought me home from this that I really didn't, you know, like, like a lot of my feelings were over the COVID stuff because we were doing this thing where we were trying to like, well, we're still gonna be ready and whatever. Well, he closed the gym down. And we're like, I was like, listen, man, COVID is novel. But here's the thing we know that working out is good for any respiratory virus. Like, we had 24 hour access to the gym. He made it basically like during work hours, like you could only do it. He had really Oh, bro, that's just conspiracy, dude. Brother, meanwhile, well, and again, like comparatively, he's like, Well, the Rangers are doing it, everybody here's doing it. I got off, I got out of that meeting. I went, I hit my boy up at second bat. I was like, You guys wearing masks at your gym? He's like, What? No, that's gay. And I was like, Yeah, okay, but it was just everything. It was like, you know, certain commanders would decide that they were doing these things like they were playing it. Like this, you couldn't work out in the gym without a mask on, like you're working out doing cardio with a mask on. Nothing made sense. Like YouTube's probably gonna censor this video just because we said COVID. Probably at this point, I think you're good. It'll probably do more. But like, you know, watching the inconsistency in it, and you could never, again, there was no home base now, right? Like there was no principled area where they could go back where the commander's like, well, it's about readiness because we're gonna go downrange and I'm gonna ask you guys to do big things, so you got to do the little things. Well, then I'd look at them and I'd be like, Well, yeah, big things until it's too risky, and then you won't let me go, right? Like that, what was going on in the back of my head. So you had no, there was no moral high ground. I got laughed out of a I we went to our flight doc, and I am conspiratorial by nature. I am I have a medical background. We went to the flight docs and I looked at the flight docs early in COVID and I was like, why are you guys not prescribing high dose vitamin D, getting out in the sunlight, working out, and maintaining high cardiorespiratory fitness for this respiratory virus? That's what you do with respiratory viruses. And they last me out of their office. And two years later, a study came out that said that comorbidities in COVID, it was exacerbated by one thing, and it was vitamin D deficiency.

Host 6:46:47

Oh, I'm pretty sure that they've found that most of the stuff they ridiculed people, except for maybe drinking bleach, which was already, you know what I mean? Most of that stuff came true, dude.

Aaron Love 6:46:56

I was just early, but that's the situation I was in where I brought what I thought I was like, hey man, nauseating, man. I'm a well, and and again, it all played not everything is connected. Like women, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but men think in boxes and women think in electrified balls of yarn. So as that electricity touches other parts, that's why you're arguing with your wife. You're arguing about what to eat for dinner. She's like, this is just like that time that you talked to that waitress that I didn't like in 2009. And remember when you didn't put the kids to bed? This is all part of your thing. And you're like, what are we talking about? This is like a family guy episode of like the first plot is nowhere near where you end up. I was in that sort of electrified ball of yarn thing because I'm like, all of these things are interconnected in my mind at this point, and it made it so that I could never move on. It was never like, okay, you're making dumb medical calls here. That's one thing. We don't know what this is, so you're being overly risk averse to everything. Okay, that's another thing. Also, I've got this experience where I feel like maybe the commanders aren't as hard-assed as they led us to believe, and the command is really way more risk averse than they are. That's a completely separate thing. But to me, they were now all connected. Common sense couldn't penetrate the COVID stuff. They couldn't tell me that, like, hey, this is really important for readiness because we need you to have a mask on so that you don't get COVID, so that you can be there when we need you to do the biggest event that you've ever had. Like, oh, really? Only to show up and have you call me off target, right? Oh, all of those things were interconnected with me, and I was unable to get out of that spiral. And we haven't talked about a lot, but like, what's going on at home, man?

Host 6:48:26

I mean, you got kids, wife, you've been gone a lot, you've struggled with drinking.

Aaron Love 6:48:31

So I was separated from my wife in 2015. There was a long process to get to the formalized divorce. When I PCS to go to Washington, it was the first time that I'd left my older kids. My older kids were like finally doing well in school. They were finally had a support system, they were super stable in Albuquerque. You know, the move between my wife and I, who were co-parenting at this point, was like, well, you know, am I gonna follow you up to Washington so that you're close with the kids? And, you know, I'm just we're gonna uproot them again. And we made the really hard decision. Like, I went to Washington alone. So it was the first time I ever left my kids. My kids were old enough to know that, you know, you think your dad is a superhero. Like when you're 10 and you're at a family event, you look at all your aunts and uncles, and they're like 35, you're like, oh, these adults have it figured out. No, they don't. They're juggling flaming chainsaws every single day, and they're just making it up as they go. You're just a kid, you don't know. You have that same realization kind of with your parents at one point. And my daughter was old enough. My daughter and son are both super smart, super intelligent people, doctor and a lawyer. Like they're literally in pre-law and pre-med. That relationship was a grown-up relationship that I was failing at. I didn't have a real relationship with my daughter the way that I needed to, or my son. That's how I showed up to Tacoma, you know, essentially alone. Um, you know, going through a protracted divorce that eventually was more legal than we needed it to be. Um, and I I mean, just when I say that I drank hard for 25 years, people are like, oh yeah, you probably turned it up with the boys. No, I would drink to blackout like six nights a week, like with my kids, alone, like all of the whatever. I don't know what it is about my family. Like, we kind of talked about it with like tolerances and stuff, but it was sure it has nothing to do with the Irish. I'm genetically superior in that regard. But like, man, you know, it almost became a badge of honor for me. Is that they'd be like, dude, Aaron, you were blackout drunk at 2:30 off of just a bottle of liquor, like going hard in the paint, and you're at the gym at 5:30 working out. Like, I had a name for like you should. There's a a joke among the friends of the love brothers. It's called getting love fucked. When we have friends that come out and would drink or party with us, we would get people in trouble because they'd be like, he came home, he puked everywhere, and whatever else. How much did you guys? We were like, No, it was like a normal night. We all got up and went to the gym. Like, for whatever reason, that's just who we are as people. I mean, I did that for 25 years, homie. And then you're telling me that like we were locked down, everything was via Teams and Wicker and Zoom, and I wasn't going to work. Like, we were crushing a handle of my brother. I live with my brother, he just happened to get orders. My youngest brother happened to get orders at the exact same time at JBOM that I did. So I rented a room in their house, like with his two young kids and his wife. He did his army job, and then I was Uncle Aaron that lived upstairs, like full house, sort of shit. Like that was my life, dude, completely alone, away from my kids, failing as a father, drinking every single night, every single day, just getting absolutely just shithouse hammered. Like doing the absolute worst for that entire time. And I just never, like that assignment to me, it was literally and figuratively the darkest period in my life. Like, even the weather was against me. Just overcast and raining every day, and dealing with COVID and dealing with, you know, I am unapologetically a conservative dude in my normal life. So to be in an extremely liberal area, I'm not gonna shit talk anybody, but that made it even worse. Like, I'm talking way late. This is like 2022. I was just getting an energy drink on my way into work, stopped at the local gas station off base, like right by my house. I walk into this gas station, nobody else in the place. Plexiglass still hung up, like they had a plexiglass thing hung from the window that the girl would work behind. And like, meanwhile, you could just look around at what the fuck are we doing? Anyway, I walk in and the chick has a mask on, and she was like, Oh, hey, and I was like, Hey, hey, how are you doing? She tried to talk to me and say something. I just ignored her because I was like, I'm just getting this energy drink. So I go up to it and she was like, Oh, hey, I was trying to tell you, but unless you put a mask on, I actually can't check you out. Another guy was like, What do you mean? She was like, I can't, I'm not gonna sell you the monster that you have here because you don't have a mask on. And I looked at her and I got into my little wallet and I had a $5 bill and I showed it to the camera and I put it down. I was like, You ring up whatever you need to. I'm fucking leaving with this energy drink. And I just picked the energy drink up and walked out. That was late in the game, brother. That was 2022, like late 2022. So all of these things, it was like, if I was gonna make the worst possible scenario for me, nothing in life is more important than my kids and my family. I don't miss bedtimes, bath times, or birthdays anymore. I will not take a trip. Taking this trip, even like we went through a formal process like, how important is it? Are you gonna like I'm missing two bedtimes and two bathtimes for this brother? Um, but that's who I am as a person. You know, a PJ doesn't define who I am as a person. That was a cool job that I did, and it made me who I am and I love it. But being a dad, being a father, being a good spouse, that's what defines me as a person, and all of that was gone.

Host 6:53:42

January 2024, you stopped going to work. What did the first week of not being in the Air Force be like?

Aaron Love 6:53:48

Man, you know, I I'd love to say that I missed it right away. I didn't. I was ready to go, bro. I was, I was, I was so done. I mean, I was, you know, doing those, I was a vetted jump master at the squadron, right? So every once in a while, so I was the op soup. So I ended up going up to, you know, I got off the troop. We had a great deployment in 2021, you know, got off five troops and ended up fleeting up. They had me in standards and evaluation inside of the squadron. So that's just literally doing evals and getting the the processes right. This came out of that safety stand down because that everybody had to have a formal.

Host 6:54:19

So you deployed right at the end of COVID then.

Aaron Love 6:54:21

I didn't in the middle of it. I deployed in 2021. Where'd you guys go? To Kenya to CS Almanda Bay. Yeah.

Host 6:54:28

How was that trip? Anything eventful? Fantastic.

Aaron Love 6:54:30

So it was uh, so we were doing the ST mission. So my mission there was global access. Global access or force projection is far outside of what a PJ does. But man, our job was to go around, like, there's you know, 30 embassies or something that live in Africa proper. And our job was like to go and like, hey, if we needed to land an aircraft, what airfields will support it? Has it been surveyed? Can the aircraft just pull it up on the special system that they have and land at it? Like we were doing that, and we were training partner forces, training those Kenyans that I talked about, because they have like basically they want to structure it just like an ST, but they want to have like a quick reaction force. It's gone through a couple names, like RRD was one of them, which is like another is the Ranger Regiment Detachment. I can't, I think they call it, but I was like, you know, somebody else uses R RD, right? Regimental reconnaissance detachment. Exactly, right? I was like, hey guys, cool branding, but you know it already exists, right? But they called it RDU at one point, like you know, something unit. Um, but basically it was like teams of guys that were medical, and some guys did radios and some guys did airfield stuff, and they wanted to put them together as a team, and we obviously were like, hey, we do that. So we would go on these long, you know, month or two month-long trips where we basically helped the partner force get better at tactics and TCCC and shooting and worked with Green Berets. It was great. Just absolutely outside of the wheelhouse, but super interesting. You know, China with a huge influence in there, like everything was like, what are they doing? Has any have any Chinese military folks like we want to be the partner of choice for you? Is anybody else courting you? Like, is anybody else talking to you? They give you any money. Like China has invested billions into the infrastructure doing one belt, one road initiative. They want to be able to own infrastructure, so they'll give you these no interest great loans where they're like, nah, man, we'll build all of your we'll build this huge. They want to build the Lopsat port. It's got three slips in it. Now they want 25 deep water slips in there, and China has just dumped money into there. That is 1.5 kilometers away from an American base.

Host 6:56:25

Africa is the new next frontier, man. It's just not being talked about. I believe so. Yeah, let's take one quick break before we finish off the the back half of this interview. Cool. So coming off the break, man. I just want to, you know, you it COVID hits, uh, you go to Africa, you come back, um, you know, you finally make the call in 2024 that you know you're ready for the next the next phase in your life, the transition. And you know, I we've talked a lot about transition on this podcast. Um, our podcast platform in general. You know, it's it's quite a thing. I I suffered through it. I know you kind of went through it, but the Special Operations Transition Foundation really helped you. Um, and I know you're you're sober now. We've talked a lot about alcohol during your your your your journey and and kind of your relationship with it, which is pretty common. Like, you know, that's a common common thing. It's just really odd in the military, you know, that's they it's really a part of our culture. Like the whole drinking and partying, and and then we get people in trouble for drinking. It's you know, it's I I do think there's been a cultural shift where that dudes getting sober or are starting to become more and more and more. And the younger generation is not drinking, yeah.

Aaron Love 6:57:33

And it makes me so happy, like it's not even a thing. I think they're drinking at like 40% less than the generation in front of them, which is great.

Host 6:57:39

Yeah. So um talk to me about you know, your the transition foundation, the special operations transition foundation, and then kind of you know how you got sober and and and you know, your your life. We've kind of glanced over some life events um, you know, that aren't necessarily maybe should you want to talk about or whatever, but but but talk to Me about like you know your transition and and how it went and how you got help and and how you ended up kind of in the situation you are now sober and thriving.

Aaron Love 6:58:08

Yeah, yeah, just moisturized, thriving in my lane. Um, man, can't can't say enough good things about the special operators transition foundation. It's a fantastic organization. There's a bunch of them out there that help, you know, from Honor Foundation to you know a couple other ones, but they really just help just idiots like me that never left the team level, how to really communicate what value I can hope to do.

Host 6:58:30

I love how you say idiots, bro. You like went through some of the hardest medical training. Um you're not an idiot, but don't talk about my friend Aaron like that, bro.

Aaron Love 6:58:38

I say it to my wife all the time. My wife will say something really self-deprecating and be like, listen, I wouldn't let anybody talk about you like that. But don't talk about my friend Aaron like that, bro. Don't you do that, Aaron. Um, you know, but I man, the the mentorship and the guidance that they gave through that program. You had somebody, it's four phases, and they just really teach you like, man, it's it's all good in the military environment when dudes transition out. They're just like, oh yeah, I've ran squadrons and I've been in charge of a lot of money and I've been shipping. Not like the civilian world, you haven't, man. Like those skills don't translate. Just because you were a special operator, you're not owed some golden parachute into the gig of a lifetime. Like most veterans quit a year in to that first job after that they after they they get when they get out. Is that stuff is that the statistic? It is, yeah.

Host 6:59:21

I didn't know that.

Aaron Love 6:59:22

About one year, yeah. And it's I mean, it's a large most, like it's not like 51%, it's like a crap ton of them. I don't know what that percentage is, but you know, thanks to the special operators transition foundation, I was eat I was able to communicate those things that I had done at my level and translate them in a way that other people can see the value and go, oh, hey, wait a second, you could actually do this thing. Like, you know, I my entire job was taking teams of dudes and deploying and coming back. And in one context, that's really impressive, and you know, and in another, like, I can't tell you what EBI D T A means. I can't tell you about profit and loss statements, I can't tell you about valuations, I can't tell you about all of these other things that are really primary food groups of these people that are really good in business. There's sort of a misnomer in the special, not a misnomer, but like a misperception in the special operations community to be like, oh yeah, I've done all this stuff. I can totally lead businesses. Let me tell you, no, you can't. No, no, you cannot. Like, you need somebody to to help you translate those skills and those experiences and and what value you do bring. And Soda was it for me. Like everybody that I work with was just absolutely amazing.

Host 7:00:30

What is it that they you think they gave you that you wouldn't have got had you not gone and seen like this this type of thing?

Aaron Love 7:00:36

Well, confidence mostly. You know, you when I stepped into a room, you know, when I was interviewing for kind of the first bit funny, I like I am definitely in, like, I did a year at my first gig before I found, you know, the gig that I'm at now. Like, I am one of those veterans that made it exactly a year and you know, parted ways with the folks that I was working for, you know, for a number of different reasons, all positive. And it's just one of those things, like you don't know that you actually have that value. Like when you and I were talking yesterday, just about like, bro, somebody asked me like, what's your hourly? Like, I don't know. Like, I talk, I'm a knucklehead that talks on a microphone to teenagers and try to help them through this specific thing. When it when one's ready and the other projects started becoming a thing, I walk out of every meeting and they're like, Okay, yeah, just you know, give us your perspective and your analytics and like let us know like what it what is it gonna be for an hour and whatever else. And that would literally lead to conversations. Like, I have no clue. Like, if it wasn't for SODIF leading me through the process and be like just teaching me those things, it was literally a training uh program that is no kidding, set up through four phases to get you like this is conversations are different, and emails are different, and the way that you communicate is different, and unless you could communicate these things, you can have all the experience in the world. The person listening to you doesn't know how to make that a thing. So that was probably the number one thing is you know, you did these hard things, and in a very niche context, like saying I'm a PJ, I mean that matters to some people, and they understand the the pipeline and the selection and the job and what you're you what you're gonna do, but the vast majority of people don't.

Host 7:02:13

Yeah, man, because you know, everybody here is Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, but I mean, PJs, not only are you guys not a big community, you're very niche, man. And like as a guy who spent 22 years in the military, I mean, I know obviously I know what a PJ is, but I I didn't run across tons of them, and and even I mean that's why I was really I was interested in talking for a whole bunch of reasons, but the pararescue and it's a hard community to break into.

Aaron Love 7:02:36

Yeah, um, it really is. It's really insulated, it's really insular, you know what I mean? And that's good and that's bad, right? Like, there is still like the standard, you know, dudes, you can't train dudes to be the number one Jason Bourne special operator guy that you call when everything goes wrong, and then expect them not to be competitive with their friends. Like that shit happens. Sometimes that turns into toxicity. We have that just just like everybody else.

Host 7:02:58

Well, that's why Trent didn't want to give me your phone number, bro.

Aaron Love 7:03:01

Trent's just bad. I just can't wait until I smoke. I told Trent I was like, I'm gonna do so many more views of you.

Host 7:03:06

That's funny, dude. So many more views. I I like I know a guy that you podcast with, bro, and I still had to reach out on I got a hold of you via Instagram. Thanks for nothing, Trent.

Aaron Love 7:03:15

Such a trend thing. I just laughed as soon as you're talking about classic. Um, but you know, just having that confidence to step in that room and be like, listen, no, I have done things and I do know things, and I have done things with higher costs and higher risk. And, you know, while the numbers may not match up, like me saying when I was the op soup at the 2-2, like saying that I had, I don't know, $135 million of equipment that I was responsible for, you know, it looks good on an EPR.

Host 7:03:42

Yeah, that's what all of us do on our resumes because that's what they tell you on the transition. Like, I was responsible for 26 million. It's like, bro, you're an E4 tank driver. Right.

Aaron Love 7:03:50

Exactly. Like, you know what I mean? So and and guys will say that it looks good on an on a on a performance report for the military stuff, but when you try to like, you need somebody, a subject matter expert, that can be like, this is valid, this isn't, this is how this connects, and this is how it doesn't. So diff was that for me, you know.

Host 7:04:07

That's awesome. And you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, dude, he retired Marine yesterday, actually, when I was going to pick you up from the airport, and that's the conversation, you know, he's looking at retirement, and you know, but that you it's almost like we get institutionalized in the military and working for the government. You're used to your paycheck coming, you know, no matter what, promotions, unless you're really a piece of crap, you're gonna promote, you're gonna get pay raises, but you get institutionalized. But then it's almost to the point where you think like some people are like, oh dude, the this thing that I did for the last 20 years, it doesn't, there's no translation in the civilian world. I don't believe that, but you know, I I figured it out on my own. But I'm glad that there's those organizations that exist that can take that guy and like, hey man, you did this over here, and and yet, you know, some of that doesn't translate, but your leadership skills, your logistical, your planning, your decision making, um, you know, a lot of a lot of employers look for that. Plus, we, you know, we we we we do well in high stress environments too. Totally. Some like pressurized sales, and so there's tons of things that so that that's a lie, I think. That you know, a lot of veterans tell themselves um that you know, your your skills aren't transferable, but it you you do you you do you I mean it's a total mindset shift. You have to shift your brain and realize nobody's shooting at you, you know what I mean? You can't, you know, especially for those of us that were in leadership positions, you can't talk to somebody in the civilian workplace like you did at your previous job. No, you might do it once.

Aaron Love 7:05:25

No, yeah, you you absolutely can't. And that's you know, there's a ton of skills that do transfer over, but it takes work. Sure. You know, my problem the there's you look at these dudes that get out and you're like, oh, look at this guy. He went to this amazing position, getting 300k right out. He, you know, you retired for six months, but then he was right back into it. And this I'm like, brother, you were talking about a unicorn that would be successful at anything that they wanted to do. Like that guy was successful in special operations where he probably shouldn't have been. That that reason alone is why he's gonna be successful in business. There's so many of my friends, because I because I was a cross-trainee, like my PJ peer group, I'm older than all those dudes. So I, you know, got to my 22 years and was ready to step away. And now all of my friends are getting ready to go. So it's like the retirements are popping up and whatever. I say the same thing to every single high performer that I go there. It's like, I can't wait for you to get out of the military and break that institutionalization because you are going to be successful at what and you're gonna be compensated for it. Like, I have guys that you know worked at the North Carolina unit that they came up with of their own IP, their own ideas. They were just like, no, what if we had a piece of equipment that did this and you could do this, and here's the specs, and I kind of drew it out and whatever else. And the military goes, that's tight, and then they make it, and then they don't see a dime from that in their career. And how I don't know how many times I've heard that story, and it's it's not all about making money, but you have that ability somewhere in you. And when you transition to the civilian world and you're able to live that part of it, like I've always said that I probably wouldn't have been in the military if it wasn't for being a PJ. You know, all of the other things I accepted 99% BS for the 1% of good there. I am one of those people that I got out in the space and it's taken me a little bit to orient, but now I'm kind of like in that zone of like, it's not all same, same, but different. Like these problems are different and they require different fixes. But who I am as a person and what being a PJ made me is I can look at that and go, wait, I'm here to solve problems. I'm here to provide value. I'm here to just like when I attach to different teams, I'm not here to come in and big dick the room and be like, oh, I can do everything. You wait for your shot, you give value wherever you can, and then you solve problems for your boss that is solving these problems. And if you do that, you're gonna be successful no matter what you do. But guys that just assume, oh, well, I wore this beret and I went through this training, so what, like 250k a year to start? You're like, bro, no. No, no, the mailroom employee has more experience in this business space than you do.

Host 7:07:58

That's a great point, man. Um, you said you told me something I think every transitioning service member should hear. And that's, you know, you're not that guy anymore. When did that hit you?

Aaron Love 7:08:09

Man, for I mean, I was stepping away from the second that I mean, I was having panic attacks at work. Like I was, I was out of it. Like there were there were times in my life where, you know, just because of the mental state that I was in, I would walk into meetings and I would literally just be a potted plant in these meetings and listen to these conversations. You know, how many VTCs I've been in that could have been an email that we didn't make any decisions or do anything. We walk out with the and we ended it with like, okay, guys, that was a really good talk. You know, there'll be a follow-on email and we'll we'll reschedule another meeting. And you know, when I would have when I would walk out of those meetings, and not only did I not give a shit about the conversations that were going on in these meetings, but I thought that all of it was bullshit anyway. Like, even if everything that they said would come true, which it never does, none of that matters, and it doesn't matter. Like when I was that disconnected from it, I was like, all right, I'm I'm done here. I have to satisfy this military contract and go through the correct process to do so. But man, like I was I was done skis.

Host 7:09:07

So talk to me about your kind of your DMT experience, what led you to it, and how did it uh how did it change kind of your life, man? And psychedelics has become you know quite the popular topic, especially with uh Trump's recent uh I don't know, is it emergency FDA approval? I can't remember. Anyway, he signed a bill basically, you know, uh they're authorizing, I think, Ibegaine, yeah, as well as maybe a couple other treatments and the tr as alternative treatments for mental health, which is pretty huge. Um but but talk to me about kind of your your your the DMT thing, how you kind of found out about it and and and what it did for you.

Aaron Love 7:09:44

Yeah, so I was retired for a little bit, so I'd been out for you know about a year. Uh earlier in that year, you know, I had my random, you know, stop drinking. Sorry, I wish there was like some rock bottom or some realization that I could give that people would resonate with, but I'm just sort of a psychopath in this regard. As my brother, you know, I we I actually played by the rules, uh, my deployments. And if it was general order one, I really wouldn't drink, we get screwed up. So I mean, I would go for like six month periods of sobriety, and I was always like, wow, I feel I feel great. Weird. Wow, weird. What did I change? Nothing. I just deployed, I just worked out more. Oh, okay. Um, but you know, I was I was desperately looking for anything to get to that next level. Like there was a time, like I that entire assignment in 2019 to 2024, I just felt stuck. I wasn't living a real authentic life. Like one of my favorite things. Like you're like, oh wow, thanks for talking about that. You know, you're only as sick as your secrets, right? So, me not telling people like I am a classic for people that will talk to me and they'll be like, Hey, I haven't talked in a while. How are you doing? How are the kids? And I'm like, Oh, they're great, they're in college, whatever. The young ones are doing the good. They're like, young ones. I'm like, oh yeah, you know, remarried, started over, have two little kids. And they're like, You didn't tell me about that. I'm like, Yeah, I don't share things about myself very much. Um, that's just not healthy. That's not a thing you should do. So my brother Danny hits me up and he's like, Hey, I read this book. It's an audio book basically take it 30 days off drinking and being sober, the physiological changes that happened, all this other stuff. And I was like, Man, I'll do it with you. So it was like November to December time frame in 24. So I did it, felt great. And then my wife and I had like this one night, I can't remember, it was like a dinner or something, and I drank for a normal person a moderate, not moderate amount, not me, moderate amount, which is way more than you should drink ever. But I woke up that next day and felt like absolute trash. Like I woke up, a toddler is screaming at me. It's like five, my son wakes up at like 5:45 in the morning. Absolute just the worst experience. I didn't feel good until like the second day after that. Like I didn't start feeling normal until halfway through the second day of that event. And I was like, man, something, something has got to change here. My and then right about that time, we found out that we were pregnant with my daughter. So my wife's like, Oh, we're pregnant. I was like, you know what? Hey, cool, feels like a good time. I was like, I'll do the sobriety train for you. You know, at that point, I was like, hey, for a little bit, like, you know, we won't drink together, get you into the pregnancy, see how the first trimester goes. That led to an opportunity where one of my close friends, it was funny because he kind of like soft pedaled it. He's like, Hey man, I know you're coming up for this event. There's gonna be this team of people, and the guy's like a shaman. And I was like, Yes. He was like, he was like, Wait, you don't even know what it is? I was like, I was like, is it plant therapy? Like plant. He's like, Yeah, and I was like, Well, yeah, yeah, I'm in 100%. Good. So it was super odd. The team that came out to do it, like so. He had a team that was on staff at this event that was going on, and uh, you know, engaged with the guy, had multiple calls with him, walked me through the entire process. So DMT uh five, which is toad. Um, but basically he was just like, Listen, you know, the best way that this works is that you have clear intent coming into it, you have outputs that you want into it. He's like, it's awesome for people that want to come in because you know, Joe Rogan popularized DMT and the stories about seeing aliens or meeting God or all that other stuff. I mean, it's it's attractive, you know, to people, but some people do it recreationally. Like, I 100% I was like, listen, in order to become somebody that I I want to become, I'm gonna have to do things that I've never done before. So I was like six months into sobriety, and we went up for this, uh, you know, for the ceremony uh that was, I mean, super, super well done, you know, whatever. Man, I went into it and I had at that point, I mean, I had a note that I'd been working on for four and a half months, and it was about just becoming something else. Like I wanted to go into this thing that was, you know, from all accounts, like earth shattering and crazy things, and you know, you're gonna learn things about yourself, and sometimes it can be super intense. And I was like, listen, in order for me to to make a drastic change, like I have to take a drastic measure here. And I think this is this is the right thing for me.

Host 7:13:49

Who told you about the intentions thing? Because that's so important. It's something that's a step that gets gets gift gets uh uh left out in other places. I I really do think that sets the stage from your experience based on you know what what I've heard from people talking to. Like what where did you get that idea from?

Aaron Love 7:14:04

Or yeah, well, I I mean I got it from the guy that was working like again, like I had been engaged in you know mental health care from 2015 on and then engaged with it at the 2-2. You know, I you know, shout out to Laura, my psych doc that I worked with the entire time throughout my retirement process. And the the one thing that I'll push back on is like the veteran community and plant-based medicine is freaking awesome in all regards, but it's a tool, it is not an end-all be-all band-aid. You're not just gonna do this magical process. Like, what else, what other insane process that you're gonna change your life takes no work on your part. And my, you know, Claire, the therapist that I talked to, like, she was very open and she's like, listen, this is not a thing. Like, if I do my job right, you're gonna leave these feeling worse than you came in. You're gonna spend two days ruminating over everything in your head. She's like, you need to come into every session with intent. You need to come in with like, I'll tell you what we're gonna talk about. Like before we leave this session, I'll tell you what we're gonna talk about next time. Like, you have homework to do. You have to figure out why it is you think you feel this way, and then we're gonna have a talk about it, and I'm gonna dig into that, but it's gonna take work on your end. So the the foundation was laid there, but to the to the team's credit that that came up to do this event for us, and it was all special operations veterans. I was highly selective. Like, I had to be like it was an it was not just like, hey, bro, yeah, just pay your money and show up. I mean, it was months of an interview, and like, why do you want it? And the first call that I was on was three hours long, where he was like, Listen, this is not a thing to come and get, you know, messed up and see aliens and think it's gonna be cool. Like, if you really want to do this, like we'll we'll allow you into the program, but this takes a lot of work. And I I took that seriously because I, you know, I may not have hit you, there may not have been one item or one event that was a the rock bottom event, or like I have to change. It was more of like a slow build where finally when I started getting some space away from the mistress that is special operations and be like, wait a second, man. I have kids, I don't want to have angry outbursts anymore. I don't want to lose my temper over my toddler son spilling milk. I don't want to get mad at my dog for pooping in the house because she's a puppy, man.

Host 7:16:06

I don't love that, bro. That's that's uh I mean, that's uh a lot of people just never get to that point. Um, and so that's that's cool. And I don't mean to interrupt you, I I try generally not to do that, but what how did you like what was it that got you to that point? And I know there's probably not, you know, you've already said it's there's you know, it's not like Jesus came out of the sky and said, you know, hey, go do drugs. Right, yeah, yeah. But you're you're articulating that, you know, you you wanted to get better and do better and be better. Like where where did you what was that defining moment or or things that that that led to that?

Aaron Love 7:16:39

Right. It was really just, you know, I've said it before, but it's like I finally got to a place where it was bad enough. Like it's a thing in politics, right? Like Rudy Giuliani was famous for turning New York around. And the the the underpinning of that is because it finally got bad enough in New York. They started doing the broken windows policing, and it's because it finally got bad enough that people were ready to make a drastic change. You know, it wasn't one event, but it was this clarifying moment that I got to over a slower timeline where I was again, I was just disgusted with who I was. You know, the thing that I struggled with early in therapy a lot is that, you know, I'm a shitty person, I don't deserve love, I ruin everything that I touch, like all of those things that we feel. And the the allegory or the example that I would use, and I said this to to Claire the first time that I talked to her, is I was just like, listen, my problem with me is that if you just wrote down all of these things that I know about myself, the times that I've screwed up, the time that I was a bad husband, a bad spouse, a bad father, a bad operator, a bad military member, if you just wrote those down on a piece of paper and you had my name off of it and you gave it to my friends, they would read that piece of paper and they'd be like, That guy's a piece of shit. I don't want to work with that guy. I don't want to trust that guy with my life, my wife, my car. I don't want to let that guy in my house around my kids. It was this moment where I was like, I don't want to be that person anymore. Like I, my online persona is also, it's it's always very adversarial. I am like that in real life. Like talking about going into conversations that turn into knife fights, it's because it's who I am as a person. And it like I just I accept that. Like people, I I jokingly refer to it as the Aaron Love like ability scale. And the people that hate me the most are the people that know me just enough to know me. Like six months worth of time or you know, consistent interactions, they're like, I hate that motherfucker.

Host 7:18:31

Hey, when I first saw you, man, I you know, you you I think we judge like it's a it's an innate ability of our human beings. And I yeah, you see this online persona, and it wasn't until probably I talked to Trent um or somebody where I'm like, you know, that's not that's just a thing that we do, you're right. Like online is not real, it's not real world.

Aaron Love 7:18:50

And and again, it's not like I'm playing a role because something that we've always housed ourselves in is like we want to be open and honest and vulnerable and transparent and available. Like we want to give you those things. And when I speak, like when I'm ripping off a 90-second reel that's a highly nuanced topic, and I'm doing it for a specific reason. People look and they go, like, oh, that guy's a dickhead, he didn't even think about these other 400 things. No, I I did, but I did it, I housed my input in a way that would have you DM me and go, Hey, you're an idiot, you didn't think about this. But like, well, actually, I did, but here's why I didn't mention it, here's why I didn't get to it. And this is a larger nuanced conversation, and I'm doing this to drive a learning where you and I come together, right? Yeah, but that's not the way that it gets presented, and I get that. And newsflash, I'm like that in my regular life. Like people that don't know me well, they'll say something. I'm like, well, that's not actually factually true. And you know, here are the reasons why, and you know, whatever else. And that may be okay for somebody that knows because they're like, Well, you don't have to be a dick about it. You know, my I don't know how many times my wife is like, you know, it's not what you said, it's how you said it. Like your tone was bad. It's just who I am as a person. And that obviously gets projected and amplified out into the space, right? But I look At how I was, and I think when you couple the drinking in and me probably being hung over and dealing with my own personal stuff, like I think my my standard response to people now is they're like, Oh yeah, you know, you were a student, you know, I was a student of yours, and we just had a guy on the podcast that was like, you probably don't remember this, but you smoked the living dog shit out of me and paramedic. And you there, I did give a guy rhabdo, so it was a pretty heavy session, which is funny story. But he was like, Oh yeah, man, that was like that smoke session lived in infamy for like years. And I just looked at him, I was like, brother, first of all, I am sorry of that version of Aaron. Like, I'm sorry for that version of me that you had to deal with. I hope that we can get to a better place. But I say that because it really took me being honest and looking at it and being like, and it's as stupid as like looking at all these, you know, reading the stoics or the Indian gates of, you know, before you say something, is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? And if it doesn't meet those three gates, then you don't say it. Man, I look at the way that I interacted with people, that people that just met me like for a couple times. I think about the inputs or the things that I said, and it really got to a point where being disgusted is the only way that I can describe it. It was revolting to me to engage with somebody like that in this this the second part of my life. I was lucky to find the love of my life that wanted to have new kids and give me the only thing that I care about to live the rest of my life with her. Why would I be the same version of myself that got me to that point?

Host 7:21:30

Yeah, and when we did our podcast prep, I mean you were very, you know. I I never know what to expect when you do a podcast prep with somebody, especially somebody I don't know personally, and I didn't know you personally, I just knew of you um through reputation, which was a good one. But you were who you talking to? They lied to you, brother. Trent. Okay, then yes, he lied to you. Then he stopped taking my calls. Um so maybe I don't know if he did lie to me. Uh, but you know, dude, you were very open and you know, I I actually didn't expect it. And you know, you were very kind of hard on yourself, if if I'm honest. Um, and I I can tell you've made peace kind of with um you know the old you as you embrace the new you, but still understand that not everybody's got to meet the new you. Uh so I I think it's I I I think it's cool. Uh, do you really attribute that to some of I mean, obviously we're talking about intention. So you had the intention of doing DMT to hope kickstart you a change because you've already kind of articulated and we've said it here before, like it's not the end all be all. It's just a it's just a new start point if you were to kind of turbo you into finding the new thing. But what was your DMT experience like? Like, what did you feel?

Aaron Love 7:22:33

It's not a very long-lasting it's not it was the shortest, I think, out of all of them. It is, yeah. So I mean, it for me it was fantastic. Like the funny part of this story is like the guy, you know, I I spent a lot of my life being intoxicated at many different levels. So, like a lot of it, you know, when you're talking about, you know, doing plant-based therapy, DMT, ayahuasca, anything, they're like, listen, there's gonna be wacky things that pop up and that your brain is gonna need to show you, and they may be super uncomfortable and you could throw up and whatever. I just even in the lead up, I was like, listen, brother, I am all in. Like, there I do think though it's the medics in you, bro.

Host 7:23:05

Like, you guys go through so much medical training, you get desensitized to like, so what normal most normal people's like, yo, that's too much. You guys are like, Yeah.

Aaron Love 7:23:14

Well, I mean, you know, my injury, like, I had ketamine in the hospital. Like, they, you know, I've I've had those experiences before, and they were never crazy for me. There were the the re-emergence effect, never really like I don't think about it, I don't re-trip later. It's not a thing. I was just like, hey man, I'm in. Like, if I see the worst things about myself, and it's it's for you know, for me, because my intention going in was you're becoming something new. Like you people forget when they talk about sacrifice, and we use that word so much, they forget that in a sacrifice, something has to die. That all you have to kill that part of yourself. Like when people talk about interactions that they had with me years ago, even you know, as few as like two or three years ago, they'll talk about an interaction and they'll just be like, Yeah, and then you said this, and I'll be like, brother, that person isn't even alive anymore. And I and then I'm glad that they are dead because that person was not who I wanted to be as a person. So when you go in with the entire intent that this experience, you're gonna use this as a jumping off point and you're gonna let those old things die, like that was the intent of that of that ceremony. Like, I we he was super good. He's like, we're gonna ease into it and kind of do a smaller dose. I went through the first experience, and it was, I mean, it was everything from the geometric shapes to you know, deep intention uh walks through crazy things and things that I hadn't thought about for years, and you know, some trauma, and I focused a lot on my kids. Like I was obviously very connected, you know, with my two young kids at the time. So feeling, you know, my daughter that was, you know, gonna be born and my son that was already live, you know, thinking through those things and feeling that love and you know, feeling a home and being a father, like that was great. I sit up and I was just kind of doing my breath work, and he comes over and he goes, Hey man, so you you took to that pretty good. And I was like, Oh, thanks. Yeah, he's like, usually there's a lot of resistance. I was like, nah, brother, I'm I'm here for it, man. And he goes, You want to do another one? Yeah, yeah, I do. And he goes, Well, how strong? And I was like, just hit me with a sledgehammer, dude. I was like, just short of you think it might be dangerous, let me do that DMT experience, and we'll go from there. And man, just deeper into the hole, like the I can describe the visuals for you.

Host 7:25:22

Yeah, can you can you describe what it was like the first time? What was yours about like 15, 20 minutes? Do you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just about that, like 30 minutes. I don't think we've actually had somebody describe DMT on the podcast. So it'd be helpful if you're willing to.

Aaron Love 7:25:32

Yeah, so super crazy. Uh the way that it goes is especially for the one that I did, is it's a flame induced, so it's a smoke, you smoke it through a uh like a a peace pipe sort of thing, like a uh an actual. And again, these people were like, they had like all the blessings from the actual tribe that does this as a thing, and they they're like constantly like they have to go through their own training and all this other stuff. So I mean it was again world class, but you know, you take it, you take this big deep breath in, and as you're done, it'll tell you keep going, keep going, keep going. Okay, you're good, and you blow out, and then the antenna is like to lay down. From the second that you blow out, the second that you start having that exhale, the world around you just fundamentally changes. Like everything for me went to geographic shapes, sounds would kick my brain off into different areas, like there were different music and different instruments that they were using and different tones, like bells and other, you know, vibration things. Um, you know, from their explanation like helps move the medicine through you as you're as you're breathing. So they would come over and you know, different sounds and different bells at different points. Uh, everything was bright and welcoming, and uh everything went to like geometric shapes, like geometric patterns of everything. I didn't have the experience of, you know, some people describe as like seeing through the matrix or talking to sentient beings or seeing, you know, God, but I definitely felt that reality, the reality that I was engaged in is definitely not the reality of everywhere. A definite connection to energy, to the universe, universal requirements. You know, I was going through my own, you know, I was an atheist for a long time. I mean, a long time. And I was an and and because I am who I am, like, man, I could argue, you know, I spent a good amount of my adult life arguing against the existence of God and luckily have found my way again. You know, but that event, it's not that I was already there. I'd already kind of like made my decision in my head, but like, oh, I wasted a lot of years talking about something that is so immediately readily apparent to me that exists and that is a part of our lives.

Host 7:27:32

That's so wild, bro. I I can't tell you how many people I know that have the same story that didn't believe in God or you know, what whatever, and they go have a meaningful psychedelic experience and now you know all of them believe.

Aaron Love 7:27:47

I don't know what why that is because it's undeniable, because you're presented with new information. And if you're an intellectually an intellectually honest person, when you're presented with new information, you internalize it and you go, Okay, well, my previous assumption was wrong, and I need to change these assumptions has now become facts. These facts now play into this calculus, and now I'm sure of it.

Host 7:28:06

Is it funny to hear yourself talk about like the the the I don't know for another word, but like the woo part of it, because that's that's part of it. Um, you know, as you hear yourself say it, you say these things like the old you would have made fun of, because that's also very common in this case, too.

Aaron Love 7:28:21

That's okay because I would have beat young me's ass. I'll tell you what, you know, evolved Aaron 2.0, I'm I'd still beat the shit out of stupid Aaron 1.0. Um, I you know, I don't know what it is. It's you know, it's as simple as, you know, when you're getting ready to come home, when I'm when I'm getting ready to come home, like my wife doesn't tell my dog miss that Aaron is coming home, like, oh daddy's gonna be home soon. But every day when I get close to the house at different times of the day, she goes to that door and she sits and she waits because she knows I'm coming home. To believe that dogs and humans have a connection that spans time, distance, or possible explanation by any other means, and then to limit that to dogs and to animals, and to not think that there is possibly a higher power that you're connected to. And then looking at the actual outputs, like when I stepped away from drinking and I got closer to God, everything in my life started lining up and I was able to become that person. Now, was it the drinking? Was it the connection to a higher power? Was it me trying to live in a way that God would be happy with me about? It's not my personal religious feelings, they are not about a heaven or a hell or a checkbook, cookbook item sort of thing. It's like, hey, this is how God said to live. Are you living like that? Like, would you be allowed in God's house? Would you, if you had to write down, if I get to start the second half of my life and I get to write a new piece of paper and I get to write out all those things because I control them, and eventually I have a piece of paper that's like, oh, that's a good man, that's a good father. That's somebody that God would be happy with, and that's somebody that would be good to his fellow man. And as you said before, a good dude. Just being a good dude. Just being a good dude.

Host 7:29:57

How'd you do it? I was a good dude, put out, I didn't quit. Yeah, DMT. Uh I believe that's the same drug that your body releases when you die. It is. So it's cured a lot of people, like their fear of death.

Aaron Love 7:30:10

Did that did it I have a I have a very close relationship with death. Uh, one, because I should have died a bunch of times. And and number two is I I denied death the ability to take some people every once in a while. So I don't, I don't necessarily I've I've never been super afraid of death. I'm very much more in the stoic camp of like, you know, it's not the death that you're afraid of. You were dead, you know, essentially for all of eternity before you were alive, and you're gonna return to something resembling that later. And we can the Stoics weren't obviously weren't Christians because that didn't exist until later in their in their life. It was an early thing for them. But you know, it's not necessarily about heaven or hell or being afraid of death. Like when it's my time, it's gonna be my time. Did did DMT change any of your opinions on that? Or is it it it made me want to use the time greatly like coming out of that? Like, uh and again, I'd been six months, you know, off of alcohol and you know, trying to do the sober thing. I don't know what flip like switch got flipped during that thing, but literally, like I can smell alcohol like across the room now, and there hasn't been a single day after that event that I'm like, oh, it'd be really nice to drink. I have this really quick process that I go through. Huge brunch guy. Bitches love bubbles, it's me on bitches. If if you I would go to brunch in bottomless mimosas on like a Saturday or a Sunday in Vegas, it's gorgeous. It's 11 o'clock. I'm having a couple of drinks. Like that couple of drinks would turn into way too many drinks. It was my favorite activity. There's not been a single time that I've gone out to brunch after that event and been like, you know what'd be great? A mimosa right now. Because I go, you know what would be great? A mimosa. And then I go back to that intention and I think to myself, one mimosa turns into five mimosas, turns into ten mimosas, turns into a hangover tomorrow. And when when my son, the beautiful innocent child that he is, comes to get me out of bed at 5:30. I'm gonna say, I don't I don't want to get out of bed and spend this time with you because I'm hungover. And I go through that in a heartbeat now, and I'm like, nope, it is not worth it. My attachment to the fleeting amount of time that we have on this earth and every second with those kids is so value, and my wife is so valuable to me that I refuse to not engage with it because of a choice that I decided to make.

Host 7:32:24

How do you reconcile that now with, you know, the fact I mean, you have two kids that are really young and then two kids that are a lot older in college? Is that yeah, is that hard sometimes when you think about that? I mean, bro, we can't live in the past, but um, I'm just curious because I know there's dudes that listen to this and they're either estranged from their kids or they're trying to rebuild relationships. And you know, sometimes that can be hard to make peace with.

Aaron Love 7:32:45

Yeah. And I I'll never make peace with it. Like I don't have to live in the past, I don't have to constantly revisit the lifetime of missed chances I had to be a good father or miss those chances to foster that relationship. But what I can do now is, you know, the the time machine example or hypothetical is the best. If I told you you had a time machine that you could go back 10 years from now and you could right all those wrongs and make your future exactly what you wanted to be, there's nobody in the world that would be like, no, I'm not doing that. But when I tell you that you're in this present moment right now, and the actions that you can take will affect you in 10 years, and the the groundwork that you lay right this second, in 10 years, you won't have regrets about being able to go back. So I did fail in those regards with my kids. I did fail. I did have, objectively speaking, I was a piece of shit for a long time. Now you can either ruminate on that and you can live in that space and you can let that continue to drag you down a spiral, or you can realize that you can make a change right this second and you can start rewriting that.

Host 7:33:42

I think it's really important too, man. I mean, it sounds like you I'm I'm sure you've done it because you've you did it with me early on and you didn't know me that well. Uh, you know, I I think it's just you know, having that conversation with your adult kids and just apologize. I mean, uh, you know, I grew up in a pretty broken family, and to this day, my my parents try to pretend like it's it wasn't the way it is. Right, right. But I do think there's some power in acknowledging it. And then not, you know, I I have this analogy I've been using a lot lately to people, and it's like, you know, the the windshield is a lot bigger than the rear view mirror for a reason, right? Because you're supposed to check it every now and then to look what's behind you, or maybe in this case remember where you came from, but you know, focus on the windshield and the road ahead.

Aaron Love 7:34:20

That's great.

Host 7:34:21

Yeah.

Aaron Love 7:34:21

So yeah, I mean, you're never gonna people that say that they don't have regrets in life are just stupid. You should you should have a shit ton of regrets, and those should drive you forward as a behavioral modification tool to make your next choice better than the one that you failed on.

Host 7:34:35

So just kind of wrapping up the DMT thing. Um, what do you think? Uh do you think it helped you a lot because you gave it permission to help you, I guess if you will, and that was the intention? 100%.

Aaron Love 7:34:45

Yeah. I in, you know, the placebo of the fact is real, right? So I went into this thing and the entire time for six months prior, I'm writing this note and I'm like, I'm gonna come out of this different. I'm gonna feel like that.

Host 7:34:54

Oh, so you had six months before you decided to do it before you're gonna do it.

Aaron Love 7:34:58

No, this yeah, when my good friend came to me, he's like, hey, here's this event, whatever. That that event was like eight months ahead at that point. And then six months in, I started, you know, getting with the team and talking about it and whatever else. So, you know, for really six months, you know, once he was like, you know, I want you to have a you know good intent and good plan and use this as a tool and it's medicine, you should use it like that. Like, no medicine is just a fix right away. Like, you have to actually work on it. Like, I had plenty of time to think about that. So I say it at my my current gig all the time like, I'll take placebo effect all day long. If I just said something to you and then you believe that thing and you believe it so much that you actually physically manifest the results, I don't care if the pill I gave you worked or the talk I gave you worked or whatever worked. That was just what you needed at that time. So, you know, there's a distinct possibility that I could have just been ready for that change on my own and been going into this thing and it's ready to go. And now I'm attaching all of these good things. Like I constantly look and like, I don't know, man. I can't tell you that it was the the the DMT, but I can tell you I have not wanted to drink. And the one time I I was at one of those fantasy football drafts and I was drinking soda water and I picked up a vodka soda, which was my drink of choice, and it was my favorite vodka as well. Tito's shout out, not sponsored. I won't be. I can't, I don't like your product anymore, but I'll pay me off solid. Um, I picked up a Tito's and soda with two limes the same way that I always drank it. I took a drink of it and literally spit it out. Literally was like, oh god, what was that? Oh, that's alcohol. I've hated it ever since. Like, I won't, I am not going to drink again. Like it is just not gonna be a thing. Now, can I tell you, bro? Can I tell you that was the that was the event that did it? No, I can't call it.

Host 7:36:38

Yeah, because you had already, I mean, I feel like, and again, man, I can't speak for you, it's not my experience, but you had already gotten sober a little bit. You're you made this decision, hey, I'm I I want to change, get better, do better, be better, you know, and and then you know, you have the the some more time that goes by, you set those intentions. I I do think there's something powerful in writing down goals, writing down gratitudes, and so yeah, I wonder if that's a culminating thing.

Aaron Love 7:37:01

That's it's it felt like it to me. And you know, and I mean that's the reason why we're not talking about my second DMT trip because I didn't need it. Yeah, it wasn't one of the it was one of those things where it's like, man, I learned the lessons that I was supposed to learn, and then I made that intention reality, and now I'm living that life that I've set forth in it. Like, and I'll go back and read that note and be like, all right, check in. Did you do it? Like, are you doing these things? Is this still a thing? And I've still been able to stick to all those things because I the second part of that note is I just described the type of person that I wanted to be. Like the first was like, here's some things I don't want to do anymore. But the second part of that, when it was way longer, was here's who I want to be, here's how I want to interact with people, here's what I want people to think of me when they meet me for the first time. Here's what I want old people to say, the people that I've known forever. Here's what I want them to say to me when they talk to me this time. I want them to say, Wow, you're completely different. You have changed.

Host 7:37:52

Love that, man. Uh, what do you think the hardest part of civilian work is that nobody warns you about coming from the military life?

Aaron Love 7:38:01

It's the pacing. You know, the pacing that people don't understand is the civilian world, the military builds in a certain rhythm to things. It's completely fine to send somebody an email and have them not respond back for like a week and be like, ah, sorry, bro, I was off the grid and now I'm back. And let's there's like a little delay, and then you set a meeting, and then you know, whatever. You know, working at my first gig out of the military, there was, you know, I'm trying to break that institutionalization. I'm trying to adjust the way that I like the first email that I sent out, they were like, bro, this email was like, you know, everybody else is sending emails that says, like, K, thanks, C thereby. And I'm sending like five W's, right? Like a bluff. Right, exactly. I mean, we're doing dangerous stuff. Like, we're I was in the pyro industry, we're blowing stuff up at sporting events where people could really get hurt. And I'm like, where's your wrist matrix? They're like, Oh, we don't do that. And I was like, You don't? Like, you understand people get killed from this stuff, and you got okay, cool. Like, you know, but the pacing is completely different. Like, if something needs done, you know, the when you're out of the military, like you do get institutionalized to like hey, checks coming every two weeks, no matter what. I can have a great two weeks or I can have a shitty two weeks, even in a non-commission based structure. In my contract, they were like, Hey, if you really suck, we could fire you. And we it's a two weeks notice, and you'll get your next paycheck and buy. You know, like that is that is a lot different than the military world. Like, you don't have time, like the pacing is just so fast. Like, if there's a problem, you know, being on a I was doing just a wacky thing about getting support items to a venue, and like we're having this phone conversation, and during the phone conversation, my phone is pinging like off the freaking ringer, and I'm not looking at it because I'm on the phone. I get done with a phone call, and the two guys that I was on the phone with were physically fixing the problem, like, like, okay, here's the number for the closest place that has a thing. We can get an Uber driver to pick it up. They do a parcel delivery. This is how we get it to the venue. And by the time that they got off the phone, they'd already oriented to the problem and started to fix it. And I was like, Okay, yeah, cool. So I'll get off the phone and then I'll start making these phone calls and I'll call the guy on the ground. And my plan that I had work was in that military structure of like, okay, these things are deliberate, and then this happens, and this happens, I get this approval and this approval. That ain't the same, homie. Like the pacing of and especially when you talk about entrepreneur stuff, there ain't nobody to blame. Like, if I suck on the podcast and I do something stupid or say something dumb, or you know, cause whatever the podcast turns off. People just stop listening and they're not there. And there's only one person to blame. You don't get to blame chain of command, you don't get to name some unnamed dude that sits in a room that made a decision. No, that was your decision. This is your thing. This is what you were doing. Are you gonna win or are you gonna lose? Like, that is that safety blanket of you know, in the military, you could fail your way all the way to the top. You'd be just good enough to not get in trouble and not good enough to really like get you into other spaces where it's like whatever. You can have an easy 20-year career, make E8, year, E9, and not really do a ton of stuff. Like you can totally do that. You cannot do that in the civilian world. If you suck, if your bottom line sucks, you will get fired.

Host 7:41:08

Just to transition a little bit uh on on the family stuff uh as we're coming towards the end of this thing. You have a 22-year-old and a 20-year-old from your first marriage, and you have a toddler and an infant with your current uh wife. What's it like being a father in two completely different seasons of life at the same time?

Aaron Love 7:41:24

So, first of all, it's great. Just first of all, outstanding. So there'll be 21 and 19 in August. They're 20 and 18 now. So shout out. I got your I got your ages right.

Host 7:41:34

Sorry, I I screwed that up.

Aaron Love 7:41:36

It's okay. Big fans of the podcast.

Host 7:41:38

Chink, chink in the armor, dude.

Aaron Love 7:41:40

You know, people uh and you know what's funny is like I had a vasectomy uh in 2010. So, like, in order to start over, like I had to get a vasectomy reversal. They told me it was only I the a funny story about that. The surgeon was like, listen, you got it done in the military. If they did a really good job, it's gonna be harder to make it. If they did a crappy military job, it's gonna be easier because the way that everything. Well, we know how that went. Yeah, exactly. 100%. Well, it was the funniest part about this is like, you know, I'm like, hey, gonna get the vasectomy reverse. By the way, don't recommend it. The vasectomy, no problem. Walked it off. I was squatting that weekend. The reversal put me down for like six weeks. Like it was, I dude, bro, I trained for it. I was physically in shape. I was hydrated. I had been taking like ginger and turmeric like for a week to cut down an inflammation. At this point, I cannot tolerate pain meds or opioids of any type, like from my injury, because they just they just had me on like dilauded and morphine on a pump for like a straight week. I can't take anything with opioids in it right now. It just makes me immediately sick. Like they gave me oxy at the end of this thing, and I came home and threw it. I was like, I'm not gonna fill it. And they were like, Well, we we have to. It's protocol that we give you three to go home with. I took those three, I walked in, I threw those three pills in the toilet and flushed. Like, I'm like, I just cannot do it. They make me, whatever happened, it just made me completely unable to take oils. Right. So, but that put me down for for six straight weeks. The whole point being, the surgeon was like, Hey, you got to do a sperm test to see if it worked. Like, you're I'm only giving you like a 70% shot that it's even gonna work. Surgery went okay, it was longer than it was supposed to. She's like, We're gonna have you back in six months for a sperm test. And at three months, I canceled it. And she calls me and she's like, Hey, saw you canceled this appointment. We need to have you come in and check it. And I just sent her a screenshot of the pregnancy tests, and I was like, I think we're good. And that's how we got pregnant. Did she respond? Yeah, she liked, she was like, Oh my god, that's a bit like she was super pumped about it, right? Um, but you know, my friends would just laugh because they'd be like, dude, you went through a surgery only to start over again. All of my friends are older, like my peer group has kids that are all, you know, Anna and William were born a little bit earlier than some of those other kids again because I was older. So I had kids, and then there was like this natural delay where the team guys finally settled down, and then there our kids were like the older kids of the stuff, but they were like five and six, and then everybody else had newborns. But all of my friends kind of in that area, they'll be like, Bro, you're starting over again, like you're doing midnight feedings, like you're not getting any sleep. You have all these other entrepreneurial stuff that you're going after. It has to be the worst. I'm like, brother, have you ever had a baby laugh? Like, if has your daughter ever recognized you and smiled because you came into their field of vision? It is the best thing on the face of the planet. Like, starting over is great. The older kids, I get to have like real adult conversations with them now. Like it is it is completely different seeing the fully realized, at least in a young sense, fully realized version of who it is that they've become, you know, during that time when I was largely not there, and this is a huge shout out to their mom. Like, their mom really took on the bulwark of making them into amazing adult humans, like just generally kind and smart and all those things. Like the fact that I get to do both of those at the same time, like have these deep philosophical conversations with my daughter, who is a freaking genius, and learning things from my adult daughter. Like, oh, I never thought of it like that. That's really interesting. To be able to have that conversation and then go put a toddler in bath time with a bath bomb that he calls fizzy balls, and he just laughs because it makes bubbles.

Host 7:45:12

It is the fucking best, man. Yeah, and and I know they're super. I mean, you and I haven't had a conversation since we decided to do this podcast where your family wasn't at the center of some part of that conversation. So yeah, it's obviously and it's and it's really cool, uh especially since you know I I know your your life story um to just see that transition because some guys never they either never don't seek it out or or whatever, man. So so good for you on finding it. What what kind of father are you now that you weren't capable of um being when you were you're younger?

Aaron Love 7:45:43

Well, first of all, I'm present. Man, bedtimes, birthdays, and bathtime. Like I don't miss them. I'm actually there. I prioritize like everything that I do now. Like, there is nothing more important than them now, but it's because I had that failure from before because I was chasing the mistress that is special operations. Like, you don't have to go on every trip. Like, sorry, everybody, but if you if you were the spouse of somebody in the military and they're like, hey, sorry, I got put on this trip, I've really got to go. They probably didn't have to go. I volunteered for most of my they probably saw the trip come up on the calendar. They're like, Where are you guys going? You guys are going to rip off nine free fall jumps a day in Key West. Oh, yeah, I definitely have to go. My boss made me go, babe. I have no choice. Listen, babe, I don't want to go to the panhandle for seven straight days, but like so, you know, first of all, just being present and then, you know, being honest with myself and just understanding like I do have, like, I am a violent individual. Like, I have no problem with violence. I don't ever want, you know, with these kids to ever see me react in a way that isn't a calm, safe space for them. You know, I can't say that for my older kids because I was going through myself. And it was never abusive. I would never put a hand on a woman or a child, like that just isn't who I am. Um, but you know, there is definitely times where I would just flip out for no reason over stuff and bring that negative energy into the house. Or times where I didn't communicate to my oldest daughter like how proud I was of who she was becoming as a person, as a young woman, and learning way after the fact in conversation, she was just like, Yeah, I just, you know, I always felt like I was trying to please you. And I was like, I can't believe I lived in a space where you thought you ever had to do that. I can't believe that I like because that was my fault. You know, she felt that way, but that was because of the situation that I set. So being able to be present, being able to be a fully realized version of myself, like listening to the old podcast and giving, you know, it's like you when you hear it in your own words, you're like, oh my God, I'm a bigger piece of shit than I thought. Like, I've been giving the same information to people and I'm not living it myself. Like, and when you when you actually, at least for me, when I started living in that space of like, no, I want I want them to see their dad as completely put together, and I should be the first phone call that they make for anything. And I wanted to become that person and to be that person, and I'm lucky to have a terrible go at it, like first run, not great, wouldn't give myself a good passing grade there. But I get to use those lessons now to make sure that it never happens again.

Host 7:48:19

That's awesome. Are you uh as your kids as your kids, your older kids have gotten older? Um, have you had those conversations about who you were and who you are now? Oh, yeah.

Aaron Love 7:48:27

Yeah, super awesome. Yeah, it is good. My my my son is the most unavailable emotional person on the face of the planet. Like he is like we used to call him the emotionally unavailable crouton. He's just that guy that like sits on top of the salad and is just chilled out, just a crouton. Um, my daughter is, you know, 180%, 180 degrees out, like away from that. Like she is empathetic and you know, I she was a young kid and like saw somebody that was homeless and was like, Can we just stop and give them whatever we have in the car? Like, that's just who she is as a person. So, you know, more so with my daughter to have those. But you know, lucky to me, they're such good people that they give me the grace, and you know, that we don't have to have those hard conversations about you know the terrible things that I subjected them to.

Host 7:49:12

I always uh give this part of the podcast to you know the dads that come on, and we've had a couple moms too. Um if you could say anything to your kids, what would you tell them?

Aaron Love 7:49:24

Oh man, I'd start off with I'm sorry. You know, I'd start off with being, you know, I hope that we all have these visions of who our parents are, right? And I I really hope that one day I live up to that person that you had me in your mind, like that superhero dad will always be there. And I may not have been able to do it in the first, you know, quarter of your life, but the next three quarters, I got it. And I'm I'm gonna fix that stuff, and it's something that I think about literally every single day. Love that, bro.

Host 7:49:56

Um you've said that if you could tell your younger self one thing, it would be to kill the ego earlier. What would be different about your life if you had it?

Aaron Love 7:50:07

Oh man. You know, so many things that you know, the ego is a lot of voice that you hear in your head. People are like, Oh, I have the you know, the there's this voice inside of my head, brother. That's you. That's your brain talking to itself. Like you control that voice in your head. I just think about all those barriers that I set up purely because of ego, purely because I wasn't willing to be the guy. At this point, you walk into a room and you tell me two plus two equals five. And I go, Oh, that's really cool. How'd you get there? Oh, that's really interesting. Where did you learn that? Oh, that's neat. I'm oh like I'm curious. I'm not here to argue that two plus two is not five. That's not my that's not my place. If you're not hurting anybody and that's just a wacky opinion you have, for so long in my life, it was like, you know, it's the classic meme of like, I'll be to bed, I'll be in bed in 10 minutes, somebody's wrong on the internet. I don't have to engage in every single thing there. Like it has nothing to do with me. The I know we joke about the influencer going through in doc, but it's been one of the or assessment selection now, but it's been one of those things where I I literally zoom out from it, and younger me would have super well-formed and probably aggressive positions about this. Like, I just think about who I was as 25 and even 35, and I think, man, 35-year-old Aaron would be all over the internet talking about, oh, this is damaging the parascule career field, this is besmirching the beret, you can't blah blah blah blah. I'd probably be one of those guys, to be honest with you. But at this point, I look at it and I go, Well, I can't affect it. They didn't ask me for my personal opinion when they were making the decision. I wasn't part of the decision-making process. The only thing I can deal with is the outcome, and the only thing that people are gonna remember is my reaction to this event. So I would like that to be a reaction that I stand by in 10 years.

Host 7:51:40

Yeah.

Aaron Love 7:51:41

And I don't care to be right or whatever else at this point anymore. Yeah, I don't need to be first in anything, like in the online space or whatever else. I'm not gonna ever break news. I don't need to be first. I'd rather be correct and I'd rather be righteous. And I'd rather that take. I'd rather you be able to look at anything, and this is any interaction in my life. I want to be able to look back with pride how I handled it in five years, as opposed to, you know, one of my favorite sayings the entire time that I was in is that I'm gonna I'm gonna light the way forward using the burning bridge behind me if I need to. Like I will, I during most of my career, like I would set a bridge on fire to remind motherfuckers that I don't mind swimming. Like that is who I am as a person, and I can't get away from it. But at least I know that now. And I know that I don't want to do that. You might need that bridge sometime soon, man. Like, there's no reason if you don't have to. You don't have to be an adversarial dickhead about everything just because you have a voice in your head that's like, no, go hard at him. No, he's not allowed to say that in public. Oh, you gotta stand up in front of all these people and you gotta tell the commander that he's wrong. Do you though? What did I get out of that? Other than some people in the I got feedback when I stood up and I said that thing in front of people. Some there were people that pulled me aside and they're like, brother, that's exactly what we needed. We needed you to be the voice in this moment for this thing. We need you to be the guy that said the hard thing. Okay. But there were also people in that room that were like, that was unnecessary, didn't need to do that. Yeah.

Host 7:53:14

Probably because the reality is there was a lot of people hurting in that room.

Aaron Love 7:53:17

Yeah. Yeah. And like it's a woo-woo thing, but like hurt people, hurt people. And I did that for a long time, and I was just unwilling to admit that I was doing it from a place where I was hurt and I was hurting. And the reason that I lash out, that's why I tell everybody, man, I'm super sorry that you had to you had to interact with Aaron 1.0 because I didn't know what was going on.

Host 7:53:37

What still weighs on you now? Um, maybe something you haven't put down yet.

Aaron Love 7:53:42

Man, it's the it's the what ifs, right? So, and it's not the what ifs, like, you know, going to that tier one selection. Of course, that's always gonna, you know, could I have made it? Would I would I have gotten picked up? What would I have done? But it's not from a personal thing, it's those things that I missed. It's when I look back on those times, if I was being the person that I was supposed to be, and then I went and assessed, it wouldn't be about getting picked up to go to a special mission unit. It would be like, holy crap, you actually have value to give to the highest level organization that's out there. And I kind of frame things like that because I look at it and it's it's regret, but it's what could I have been if I didn't do it? And I can look at every mission, every assignment, every interaction that I've had, and go, man, if I was only this version of myself at that time, what doors would that have opened when and earlier? Great point, dude.

Host 7:54:39

Um, looking back across your whole career, is there one moment training or real world where you thought every miserable day in that pipeline was worth it for this? If so, what was it? When the students would graduate.

Aaron Love 7:54:52

Going to I got to see four graduations a year. So I think I've seen like 15 graduations, 14 or 15 graduations out of that schoolhouse. Seeing those young folks put their, you know, when you graduate, the pararescue pipeline, even the uniform changes for you. We're actually allowed to blouse our boots and our blues and wear like you wear combat boots and you blouse your boots and your blues, and there's only a couple career fields that get to do it. You put the beret on, and with these men that you just spent two years of your life, blood, sweat, and tears, in front of your friends and family and giants, legends inside of the career field that come down to see these events, they get to live that fully realized moment for themselves, and they don't know what their career is going to look like. Like they can have a career full of failure and missteps, you know, like I did, or they could they could go on to win the Medal of Honor and you know do amazing things. You know, I've I have friends that their stories would blow your mind. Um sitting through those events, that made it all worth it for me. It made it all worth it for me to know that I had some small part in the training of somebody that was going to go do these things. And again, not to aggrandize myself, not to go, oh well, my student was on the Iranian hostage rescue. I had students that have that engaged in that event. I have I've had students that are doing amazing things that has nothing to do with me. My hope in that event was just like I had the words of my instructors ring in my ears 10 years later. I hope that at least for one of those dudes, they got into a hairy situation and they heard my words and it worked out. And for that reason, when I went to those graduations, I never felt more proud to be a PJ or of whatever my career was or the teams that I was on. Like that was the moment for me. Like watching those guys get the command of Blazer Boots, Don the Beret, and then they all everybody in the room says the motto, the entire career field, you know, motto together, the creed. Man, like those events for me, like I I can remember every single one of those events. It's not like, oh, what graduation was that? I remember every single event from those graduations.

Host 7:56:54

That's awesome, dude. Um, you told another podcast once, don't be blackpilled, have hope. Where does where does your hope come from now?

Aaron Love 7:57:02

Well, I mean, it comes, it comes from getting closer to God, right? Like this, just like selection isn't isn't your goal, like this life isn't our goal. Like this life, you're trying to do as much good as you can possibly can in the blink of an eye that you're here in order to do the most good for the most people. It's easy to be contrarian. It's easy to be nihilist. It's easy, especially in this, and you see it a lot of times, like the the vet milbrough space. You know, you have guys that take these wacky niches and they're like, Oh, I hate the government, I don't like anything about the government. And then all they do is they talk crap about the government all the time with no fixes. And they're like, Oh, we're losing in Iran and we're we're doing all this stuff, and you know, there's other people that talk about other niche communities, and the only thing that they're doing is just being contrarian. Nothing is ever good enough. There's no hope. You know, there doesn't need to be a 5D underwater chess plan for life. But if you can't think that tomorrow is going to be better and you can affect tomorrow in a better sense, then what are we doing here?

Host 7:57:58

I tell people all the time, bro, you want to have better mental health, don't watch the news.

Aaron Love 7:58:02

Oh my god. But there's put the death rectangle of your phone down. I don't need to see Russians getting clacked off by Ukrainian first-person drones in World War I trench warfare with flying IEDs. I don't need to see that every part of my day, but I'm that is shoved in my face every single day. And it's not technology has has evolved so much faster. We were in caves writing pictures on walls for hundreds of years, and now suddenly I can look at a chef in China and watch him make a video. We're not meant to keep up with that, man. No, but if if you don't have hope for the better of society, for the better of the country, for the better of you know the next generation, what are we doing? Yeah, great point.

Host 7:58:48

If your two-year-old son grows up and tells you he wants to be a PJ, what do you say?

Aaron Love 7:58:52

No, just like my older one, go to med school, bro. Now, I I mean, you know, just like my dad that never never shoved it in my face, the the really funny thing to explore is that my daughter and my son that are older, they they grew up in the team room. You know, they grew up calling, like when we would go to parties, my my daughter, who was like four or five at the time, would be like, is this party full of bros? And it was her, she was asking, like, how safe am I at this thing? I would be like, Oh, yeah, it's all bros. If she went to an all-bros party, nobody watched their individual kids. Their individual kids, I mean, they were like fist fights, and some random parent would be like, Hey, what are you doing? Why'd you punch her? You say you're sorry, you do whatever, and then they go away. That was not either one of those two kids. Like, we we are a tribe and a family, right? They grew up in that environment of me leaving and going deploying and you know, watching my oldest daughter, like she went through the period where it was like she didn't even know I was a PJ. Like she went to a school on base, like when she was younger, you know, in England. And they'd be like, or you know, I think this was actually in Vegas, like when we were here the first time. Somebody was like, Oh, your dad's in the Air Force. My dad's in the air force too. He fixes planes. What does your dad do? And she's like, I don't, I don't really know. He just goes, he's gone a lot, like he does stuff. And they're like, You don't know what you what rank is your dad? And she's like, Oh, I don't know. Like she had no clue. She's like 11, you know what I mean? But that led to like a thing where when she like realized what I did, and this is the end of my career, she was like, Oh my god, this is the job you did. Like you did this when you would leave. And I'd be like, Well, yeah. I mean, that was an emotional event for her. She was like, Oh my god, like I had no clue. Now, with these my son, you know, Samuel, he doesn't know that I was a PJ. I'm not going to tell him that I was a PJ. You know what I mean? Like, I did a super good job. It was super dangerous. It was a wacky time in the world, and you know, that's what I did. He doesn't, he, I'm bathtime guy, you know, I'm the guy that he comes and gets when he has a nightmare, and I go lay down and sleep with him. So if he ever came to me and he was like, I want to be a PJ, I mean, we would talk about it. I'd be like, hey, listen. But just like I said earlier, you know, there's gonna be those those people that either stand in your way or they support you. I'm always gonna support him for what it is. And now I I might try to talk him out of it and tell him what the real story is and be like, hey, the pursuit of this thing, like, here's what you're giving up. Like, it is a mistress, and I'm gonna tell you about, you know, what that is. Um and I hope he makes a better choice. But, you know, if if his generation owes a debt to this country and he's got to go pay it, of course I'm gonna support him because, you know, I won't take the I won't take the inverse of that. I won't be, I've done all this good work to be the kind of father that no matter what he does, my kid should be able to call me. And it's not going to be, oh, what happened? Like, you can call me from jail and you can tell me the wacky story about how you ended up in jail, and we're gonna talk about it. Probably not gonna talk about it on that first phone call.

Host 8:01:42

Yeah. Awesome, dude. Um, I didn't ask you tons of questions about one's ready. Uh, we talked a little bit about with with Trent, but can you give us a little bit um the genesis, how you got involved, kind of where it started and and what it's become now?

Aaron Love 8:01:56

Yeah, super simple, man. We just wanted an educational platform again to talk to that 23% of people that qualify for military service, and we just want to tell them the good stuff about the Air Force. Like the jokes about the quality of life are jokes, but it's because they're really true because you get nice stuff.

Host 8:02:09

Oh no, best believed, bro. I'm trying to my kids want to go in the military. My I think my daughter wants to go to the Air Force Academy. I'm like, good for you, bro. Good. Yeah.

Aaron Love 8:02:16

Well, I mean, my wife's an Air Force Academy graduate, she can help it out. Um, you know, we just wanted to let people know it started like everything else as a joke. We're just like, you know, we answer all these questions on all these other platforms and DMs and all this other stuff. Like, why don't we just have a podcast and we can answer all the questions and people stop asking the questions? Newslash, like 500 you know, plus episodes later, they don't stop asking the same questions. It's a new group of people asking the questions. But we just wanted a place for people to go and get actual information and try to just take down the mystique. Like, people lionize special operators, and that was you know, the fall of Tim Kennedy was kind of like the best lesson that people could learn because you think that these special operators are just superhuman, completely different from normal dudes, and they're morally better and they always make the right decision and they're trusted with the no bro, they don't. You know what I mean? Like we're humans, bro. Uh broken humans that are inherently sick, that are constantly trying to be better humans, and sometimes they make a bad uh bad mistake. Our whole platform is the antithesis of what Tim Kennedy came to be. Like, we are not I will not sit here and be like, oh, I'm a PJ certified military free fall, jump master, dive, supervisor, sniper, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that matters. I am a regular dude that failed more times than he succeeded, and you can have a better career in this too. Like, it's not out of Peaches, is two feet tall. He's built like a fire hydrant. The guy's this big, and that guy's killed more people than cancer. You know what I mean? He had a an exceptional special operations career over like 26 years. Peaches, when are you coming on the podcast? I'll actually give him the number, Trent. Yeah, you're the only ones ready, dude. I I have. Interview to but and it just sort of it grew from that educational platform, and then you know, having our friends on to come on and talk, and then you know, that naturally people right at the beginning of it, people were like, Oh, well, when are you guys gonna do in-person training events? We had zero appetite for it. Like, we were just like, No, man, it's not the vibes. Like the the people that are doing these events where you know, even you know, to a lesser regard, you know, there's a lot of crap given to people that do like the men events where you pay X amount of money and they they yell at you and put you through like military-style stuff to get you to learn about yourself. I actually think that's valuable in a very narrow context. Like, you need reach back moments. People need to be able to do something super hard that was the most challenging thing that they've ever done. And they're able to reach back to that moment during the next hard thing. I think that's really important. I also think that's not my lane. I can smoke, I give me a team, whatever special operations teams you want. I can, as an instructor, not evaluate, you know, evaluating the event, not in the event, I can smoke the dog shit out of you in an hour. That doesn't really teach you anything. So the natural educational platform and how we are kind of as a group, you know, with Chris Thomas, who is a senior master sergeant, so he's still in, but he worked in recruiting and scout, and then Taylor Starch is just a random civilian dude, but the the guy is a mad scientist uh for endurance running, running, mobility, all of these other things, like body work. Like, not only does he do it, I mean, he I think he currently owns the Red Rock trail running um record, like the fastest they've ever run this specific part. Like the guy just does hundreds of miles of races a week. That team kind of got together and we, you know, because we'd all known each other and and whatever. And we were like, what if we just did it just like prep team? Like, as opposed, like that, remember that two-week period at the beginning of Endoc where we teach you how it goes and what to say and where to stand and how to set your bag up. Same thing at dive school, right? Like, there's a cadence to this thing, and there's a way to be successful. That's what we did with Operator Training Summit. There's like we turn the volume up and give people like an intent, like a little bit of a click on the intensity just to be like, hey, when you do things wrong, this is your penalty, this is how the instructors are going to do it. But we literally just teach them everything so that when they get down there, it's not the first time that they've gone through it. So reach back events are those, those sort of like hell day sort of events, super important. Um, SOCOM Athlete runs a hell day where they get people together for like three days and it's just intense. It's just a smoker. It's that reach back moment. We are just completely different in the sense we're like, okay, we'll get to that. We're gonna you're like, that's important and that's good that you should do that. But what if I just took you through literally every single part? Some of these guys are wearing their mask incorrectly, and that seems like the smallest thing, but you're like, you're would you rather figure out in this completely calm and structural environment the best way to wear a mask, the best way to clear that mask, the best way to do an underwater? Can I look at your form for push-ups and be like, hey, bro, when you get down to Lackland, now joint base San Antonio, when you get down there, that push-up is not gonna count. You think you did 70 push-ups, you did 40. You didn't pass this event. One, one, one, two, three. Or like the clicker's not moving, like it's click, click, click. And you're like, wait, why is he not clicking? I'm still doing push-ups. That's the entire thing. Like, we literally break every single event down, running, rucking, mobility, all the way from their training. Like, our idea for training is like we want to look at what you're doing for training and show you what right feels like. Take you through an entire two-day program. This is what right feels like when you're running. And Taylor Starch, the world-class runner, is going to show you you've been running incorrectly. That's why your times aren't going down. The way that you're organizing your training, the amount of volume that you're taking in, the way that you're going about structuring your training events, you're wasting your time. You're not being as efficient as you possibly can. So, what we did with the operator training summit that naturally grew out of ones ready is we're like, what if we just had a team for a weekend and we just take you through every single thing that you think you've been doing right your entire time and we go, no, no, no. Now you know what it feels like when you do it right. So now when you're training, you're doing it the right way. And then when you show up to assessment selection, not only have you been training correctly, no more push-ups getting taken away, no more popping during underwaters because you're inefficient under the water, we teach you the most efficient way to do everything from mask and snorkel to buddy breathing. What are all these other like specific exercises? Because then you're not seeing it for the first time ever. And I can turn your stress down. I can pull you out of that mindset where you think it's chaos and everything is just coming at you. And why am I going to the pool and all this other stuff? And I can get you to the point where you're like, oh, okay. So I'm doing this event, but it's just training. It's just an underwater, and I've practiced doing an underwater the right way thousands of times. Now I can do it the right way here, and it takes me less energy. It takes less stress. I am less stressed mentally. I can pay attention to the scenario and I can actually engage in the training. Like the end state for the operator training summits that we run, next one coming up in Nashville, and then we got one in Pennsylvania. So Nashville in May, uh the beginning of May, and then Pennsylvania in the beginning of June. Our goal for the entire OTS is for you to get out of there and for you to be able to take all the lessons you learn, apply it, and then just turn down the volume at assessment selection. Awesome.

Host 8:09:12

Where uh where can people um find Operator Train Summit, Ones Ready Socials, your stuff?

Aaron Love 8:09:18

One's ready, everything is linked through. You can either go to onesready.com or you can go through the link tree on the ones ready page, and that takes you to the splash page that has literally everything to include operatortraining summit.com. If you just if you hate the podcast, you don't want to hear me talk, you just want my training. I get it. You can go over to operatortraining summit.com. It's got everything that you need to sign up through there. It's super we've made it as easy as we possibly can. We've intentionally kept the price point really low. Like the folks that we're talking to are 17 to 25 year old dudes and dudettes that want to come like they don't have $2,000 to put out to this. So we kept it at $500. We're probably not going to change that price point for a while because we want people we we do everything we can. The dudes camp, we don't put them in hotels because we want them, number one, to be together and have that experience of camping together and being with the bros. But number two, it's way cheaper. Like buy yourself a hundred dollar tent. And if you don't have one, we'll give one to you and you can come hang out. That's awesome.

Host 8:10:13

Uh, you also you got a social media presence that's a personal one that's separate from that. Uh we'll uh we'll put all those links in the description as well.

Aaron Love 8:10:22

Yeah, you can come hear me talk shit about politics and world culture and stuff generally. So that's at Aaron underscore loves underscore America. People are always like the haters online. They're like, oh, you don't love America, bro. And I'm like, it's a play on my name. It's Aaron Loves America. It's my America, which is why I talk about what I want to talk about. Yeah, it's it flies over a lot of people's heads, but yeah, I mean that that whole thing has just been it's whatever. Social media is fake and stupid.

Host 8:10:53

Um dude, we covered a lot of ground today, dude. What a what an awesome what an awesome interview. Um, I just want to first and foremost thank you personally for taking your time. I I said that at the beginning, you know, and you we've alluded to it all through the podcast on how important time is. So uh I know like your your kids are young and they're important. So thanks for coming on here and being willing to not only be vulnerable, share your story, uh, and thanks thanks to the service for the country. Thank you for your service, bro. It's always funny when one vet says it to another, but I mean that, man. I mean, you the PJs hold a very, very special place in my heart. PJs 18 Deltas, man. I mean, um, it's uh it's a tough job and it's very thankless, dude. Like I don't feel like you guys get the love you deserve that and you guys don't seek it. Um and I think it just speaks to the aura of that community. But it was really awesome to hear um not only the training, but what you guys do. Um, some some very close personal stories that you were emotionally moved during this. Uh, I I almost was as well. Yeah, sorry. You got all misty pro and I'm like, uh-oh. We got the we got to pause this thing.

Aaron Love 8:11:53

You deal with it.

Host 8:11:54

Yeah, I don't care. Uh but yeah, man, thanks, bro. I I look forward to uh to watching you guys grow. If you guys haven't watched the ones already, uh I've definitely creeped through a whole bunch of them prepping for this. It's um it's a great group of guys. Trent and they have a lot of fun over there, man. Like I I love watching just you guys' all interactions. Uh friends, ever. Yeah. And Trent's got just great hair, dude. He does. It's not as good as mine. There's there was an online, there was a who has better hair. It's the Air Force, bro. You guys it is good. Yeah, it's must be what they serve you guys at the child hall. I don't know. Um, but yeah, man. I hope you guys uh enjoyed this this uh interview. We're there's gonna be a follow on section. If you if you didn't know, Aaron's been on Fox News a bunch lately talking about um Iran and the the PG operation and they rescued it. So we're actually going to have a conversation about that. If you want to find that conversation, um, it'll be on Patreon. But in the meantime, man, uh thanks for tuning in. Be safe out there. If you can't be safe, be violent out here.