Killing from Afar: The Untold Struggle of America’s Reaper Sensor-Operators and Pilots That Is Being Scrubbed From Google

    What is the real cost of killing from thousands of miles away?
In this powerful and deeply personal episode, Tanner (a former U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper Sensor-Operator & Instructor) opens up about the hidden psychological toll of waging war through a screen — a burden ALMOST No-One outside the community understands.

For years, Reaper pilots/S0's have carried out lethal missions, tracked terrorists for days/week/months/years (watched them commit atrocities but Not be permitted to intervene) directed strikes, and watched the aftermath in high-definition detail. But the emotional, spiritual, and moral impact?
That part has been silenced.

***** His Website: https://www.remotewarriorllc.com/ *****

In this conversation we expose:

The complex PTSD plaguing America’s drone-pilot community

Sleepless nights, moral injury, and unending replay of mission footage

The crushing exhaustion from 12–16 hour shifts of life-and-death decisions

The suicides among active-duty members that never make the news

Why stories like his are being scrubbed from Google and social platforms

And what really happens to a human soul when killing becomes routine

This is not a political episode.
This is a human episode — an honest look at the invisible wounds carried by those who fight America’s wars from afar.

If you’re a young man, a veteran, or someone seeking the truth behind modern warfare, you need to hear this.
This is the cost nobody talks about.

🙏 If you or someone you know is struggling, reach out. You’re not alone.
Veterans Crisis Line: Dial 988, then Press 1

Transcript

1:31

Welcome, Tanner. This is going to be a whole series on your background, specifically in the space of drone. See, I'm going to start using the terminology wrong. On piloting remotely piloted vehicles and the cost on the people that are doing this on killing remotely which for those who are familiar with that terminology "On Killing" by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman "On Combat" by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman and then now Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Phelps writes "On Killing Remotely" the psychology of killing with drones and so he says that so that's why it sticks in my head. But just share with us a little bit about you and then we will get into this podcast. Yeah, for sure. Well, first off, I appreciate you being willing to do this, you know, and tell this story. I'm excited to, you have another platform to get this out there and talk about it. So Tanner Yackley, former US Air Force, I was a sensor operator on the uh MQ-9 Reaper, that big, beautiful bird right there above me, you get the predator right below it. I technically operated on both at a time. Granted, most all my hours are on the MQ-9 It's always funny, I'd screw with new pilots and they'd be like, hey, you know, how many hours you got in the MQ-1? And I'm like, 40. And they're just like, oh God. And I'm like, I got 3000 in the MQ-9, you're fine. but yeah, so I amassed 3000 combat hours on the MQ-9 3,400 hours total. all of my combat time was in under four years. So, you we were doing a pace 10 times that of any other aircraft flew over thousand combat missions for every mission set out there, especially in the Teams 2011 to 2015 is when I did my combat time. And then I went on to the schoolhouse afterwards, taught down there, was a lead evaluator down there. Taught through a bunch of different mission sets that, you know, people don't realize that we were trained in, right? Like CSAR - combat search and rescue. You know, I say that and people are like, wait, what? And I'm like, yeah, we attacked and support for it all. So, you know, air interdiction, strike coordination, reconnaissance, CSAR = Combat Search and Rescue close air support. I trained varying different mission sets there at the schoolhouse, left that after 8 years and worked for General Atomics for a couple of years as an evaluator sensor operator there. And then I was extremely burnt out after a decade of doing it. So I needed to change one academia for a couple of years, taught as a professor for four years on uh UAS. courses on unmanned aerial systems. There's a bunch of different vernacular out there right UAS, UAV, RPV, RPA. It's changed so many times in the last 15 years, and then drone it's all all boils down to the same thing right and the biggest thing is understanding that it's not this little quad that's buzzing around this thing has a 66 foot wingspan. It's over 20 feet in length so it's a decent sized bird Awesome. in 2005 when we were in Mosul, the guys that we were working with were going out on the hand launching, drones at that point. What were, what types can hand launch as opposed to the Reapers and the large ones? Yeah, absolutely. it's like the RQ 11. I think if I can reach way back The Raven I believe is what it was called with that is usually a hand launch one that you literally fold out the wings and chuck it you actually have 5 different classes of drones. And they're all they're all dependent on altitude, weight, and different things your hand launch one would fall underneath your class one and 2 and then you get into larger ones like scan eagle rq7 shadow those if remember right falling with like your class 2 or 3 there those actually need like a physical launcher right it's literally a catapult that that shoots it off Um, there I got to see RQ seven shadow unit, at my time at the school house, cause they were right down the road and they'll pass over us. which was kind of cool, to be able to just see that kind of stuff. Right. And then they, those ones, they literally land it on a dirt ball runway. and they've got a hook on the bottom of it that literally catches a cable. It's stretched across just like how you think with like Navy and stuff like that. Um, then step up. You've got the MQ9 that that is a standard takeoff and land on a runway right, uh you know but the beauty is you can launch and land that thing in like a couple hundred feet It is so quick to get up and off the ground There that it barely needs anything, Usually you're buzzing around 105 knots. It's pretty standard, 120 in transits. So it's not fast by any means, but the loiter time on it. You know, it's just insane. You've, you've got so many variants to it and different things. You know, you can add like extended fuel tanks to it. That could be like an extra 500 pounds per tank, but the ramp weight is actually like 10,500 pounds. that's including obviously, missiles, bombs, stuff like that, right? Usually it's running with missiles. I love saying this now that it's things have changed enough. I'm like back in my day. I feel like I just left yesterday. But, you know, back in my day, we carried four missiles on the MQ-9. Predator was super common to carry one. Only because of the weight with it. It just you could sneak to on there, but it was a little sketchy Right and It just killed your endurance right the MQ9 came on in 2008 the MQ1 has been used since 2001 MQ9 is the Reaper. MQ1 is Predator, right. Okay. yeah, and I misspoke. It was actually 2000 that they said they started using it. it was 2001 one when they actually first shot with it. Because actually the very first time they had it, it was unarmed. They didn't even have missiles on it back then. And so I think it was a general jumper back in the day that was like, dude, we need to arm these things. they had at one point, no kidding. it was, Bin Laden. they had him under the crosshairs of a predator. but they had nothing back then. They they had no, no weapons, anything like that. So it was just like, well, there he is, you know, it couldn't do anything about it. it took us a while, right. It really, 2011 was really the big ramp up for the. RPA world, remotely piloted aircraft world it's with the draw down of the combat missions. I know specifically because I was a recruiter for the company that bought Blackwater, that bought Triple Canopy, that bought all these defense contractors. I was recruiting guys to be the bodyguards for the ambassadors of Kabul and Baghdad. And we were looking at bios and we're like, okay, when... When are these things falling off? When are all these rotations? Because you Had to have 365 days of combat deployment specifically with that skillset PSD, whether you're doing bodyguard work as a driver or wherever everybody knew that 2010 was when combat deployments, cause people will lie says, 2011 is what he wrote down 2012. And then you look back on his DD 2 14 and it says 2008, 2009. So I think when, when you're saying 2011, as if that's common knowledge for most of us, we don't remember where it was when troops stopped being on foot and we started really focusing on the drones of course it's a general who's going to go, but can we put a missile on it? Yep, yeah, exactly. Yeah. the first question was guns and the second is a missile. the 3rd was, we put guns and missiles on it? So just to, just so everybody. Yeah. And just so everybody understands, I'm just going to give a little bit of familiarization. What you just described the group one is the small UAS, which technically to be a group one is weighing 20 or fewer pounds. and flying no higher than 1200 feet. we get to group 2 is the tactical UAS. That one is between 21 and 55 pounds flies no higher than 3500 feet and speed of less than 250 nautical miles per hour knots. So you were describing how many knots it takes and how fast I don't use knots a lot. So You just described 80 knots being not very much to me. yeah, to put that into perspective, Let's take an F16, Usually they're whipping around at plus or minus the Viper guys don't don't crucify me on this, but around, 600 knots Um, you can put that in a perspective there, with it, obviously different maneuvering, transit versus on target, you're going to have different varying speeds, uh, if we had like a generator failure, right. That was our most common, um, this is a bad day kind of thing. we were max performing that thing, you know, like a whole whopping 180 knots. you know, so it's, like I said, at the end of the day, not a quick aircraft by any means, but it's not meant to be it's meant to be able to sit there over a target sip gas and just provide that unblinking eye, recording at all times and so nothing like you just said nothing goes unseen and nothing goes unrecorded that you guys would then have to go back look over that so the the tactical just to run through because there's 5 groups tactical UAS group 3 weighs less than 1320 pounds and flies between 18,000 feet and speed of less than 250 knots. So that's 3. As you can see, the jump up from 2 to 3 is pretty significant. The four, which is the one I was remembering most was the acronym, MALE, M-A-L-E, which is medium altitude long endurance, like you describe sipping gas, providing the, the unblinking eye. This is the next largest, looks more like a traditional airplane. and helicopter, weighs more than 1320 pounds. I don't know why the 20 is there, but 1320 pounds specifically is what they decided on flies up to an altitude of 18,000 feet and predominantly is the platform for the Navy's. MQ-8 Fire Scout, a helicopter and the Air Force's MQ-1 Predator. And then the Army's MQ-1C, which is the Gray Eagle. So you mentioned the Predator. So one thing I've never mentioned. we are in Saudi Arabia. the war hasn't even started. We haven't attacked Iraq yet. uh Operation Iraqi freedom was my first combat deployment. So we had to sit in the Saudi Arabian desert, at the AR, AR airport For the first time ever, they brought us into the talk and me specifically because we were the Froward observers. we were going to be the ones who were in charge of aircraft and, you know, calls for fire from whatever the military had They actually brought us in and it was like super secret, like not everybody in the talk that had a separate room that you had to get had an armed guard in the talk to get into this part of the talk. And you walk in there and there's this massive screen. And what you see is the entire, Baghdad international airport. And what they had done is had a, a re a predator fly circles around it, smaller, smaller, smaller. So you actually, and then it recorded it all. So it blew my mind, obviously. Like this was the first time I even knew really what a predator drone was, what its capabilities were was we could take the mouse and scan over any part of the airport and we could go back there. Obviously it's frozen in time. We're not seeing a live feed at that moment, but we could literally go in like look at different angles of the entire airport. And that was our first combat mission was going to be to take down the Baghdad International Airport. So for me back then, I was like, what is this wizardry? How in the world are we able to literally scan over this and look wherever we want to look that capability as you describe. And as he starts to point out in this book, once that clicked, when a general saw, holy cow, can we put a missile on it? It completely changes warfare for all of human history. going forward because like you said, unblinking eye doesn't take breaks, right? Everything everybody talks about with AI and these future, you know, soldiers that look like us, actually, this they're already here and they're in the sky and it's way scarier because you don't even see them. They're way up there, far above what the human eye is actually seeing. Absolutely. Yeah, because that's the thing too that people always think of, know, with even the smaller ones and stuff like that, you know, it's like the shadow, for example, the RQ seven, that one you're usually sitting around like 7500 feet But the MQ nine, I mean, there's very common that we'd operate 20 to 30,000 feet, you know, constantly. And then I think the highest I ever saw was 38,000Ft once, most of the time, know, your fuel efficiency, everything else, right? Obviously, the higher you get, the better that's going to be to an extent with it. So, you know, we're always trying to max perform. So it was this juggling and balancing act of like, I need to get up high to be able to sip gas and sit there and provide that unblinking eye and That was the beauty of it is you could also you you could have the full motion video, right? Because the MQ9 is full motion video. It's not like the, let's take the RQ4 Global Hawk, for example, right? Big, much bigger. That one's like got like double the wingspan of an MQ9 and it gets around like 120, 130 feet in length there and can go up to 60,000 feet. that one, they'll launch at like the north side of the US and fly down to Africa It's crazy. able to sit there for a day then come back. again, we were 20 to 30,000 feet, 105 knots, and sit there and just kind of buzzing through. then you could also add, the Spaceballs reference, the beeps and the squeaks, right? With it, we could track all that too. it was dependent on, what we carried. we could have other imaging devices too one super common one. that's common knowledge is the synthetic aperture radar on it, the LYNXR. So we could be able to take, not LIDAR, but essentially like that, right? Where it's just scanning. gives you this grainy image, one cool thing it could do is called "change detection." if I shot an image at something, scanned it, and then came back over like an hour later, it could highlight like what had moved at that point. So it was those little things, right? We didn't use it commonly. I hated it. That one especially, because it was usually on one of us. what they called saw operators occasionally that could sit behind you. So it was just another task, another freaking mouse click Because that's the piece too, right? Is like kind of setting the scene We talked with the aircraft a little bit, but the ground control station, right? It's a 30 foot by 10 foot Con-X box literally is the size of a shipping container. we were shoving one of those it had carpeted walls. It was real nice to pet, know, when you're 3 in the morning and you're trying to stay awake dark room because obviously we're killing all the lights in there mainly because screen glare because we're staring at 8 different screens a lot of info to take in. Right. A lot of things to process. So the more you could take off your plate, the better, obviously, because at the end of the day, I cared about the screen directly in front of me. And that was, you know, really it, because that was our heads up display. That was what was providing the live video. Everything around that was tack maps, uh, Intel briefs, imagery for targets. battle management systems, right? Being able to track like where other aircraft, right? We could be, incorporated in with like link 16 and fighters imagine if you're flying right at level four, level 5, you've got to know where the other aircraft are so you guys don't have crashes. that ever happen? Did you guys ever lose one by accidentally like it ever hitting aircraft? I would imagine not. But then again, know, real life happens. yeah, we had some close mid areas and stuff like that. But, no, I mean, They've been trying to figure that out for years. they brought in like ground base, sensor avoid systems, to be able to try to alleviate that. there's no real perfect answer per se yet just because. Nothing can replace being able to pick your head up and look outside the cockpit and see, sh*t, there's an aircraft right there. you know, and, and with ours, it's like, I had to physically, we had a little nose camera on the front, it was a little 30 degree slice. the pilot could switch over to that, but most of the time they were looking at what I'm looking at. Right. Cause they need to know what's on the ground, what's happening with the target. So It's this weird, you're zoomed in, right? And if I'm staring at my coffee cup and sitting on my desk, right? I'm zoomed in on that and we call it the soda straw view, right? With it, because I'm essentially, you know, just looking through this soda straw at this and I could have a f*cking thunderstorm building right off my nose and not have a clue, right? And so all of sudden you literally pick your head up and go, oh sh*t! Like, we gotta avoid that sucker. You know, kind of thing, so. right? Because the weather over there can be super extreme and especially the altitude you guys are flying at. we think, there are storm clouds. You're going to get wet. No, you're up in the clouds where the lightning and where everything bad is happening. uh had one come back, the Ray Dome, The cover on the front. That's the big hump on the MQ-9. Again, let me see if can get my finger there. That little hump right at the top. That's for the satellite dish in there. And so that's what bounces the signal off the satellite, you know, and comes back down and for the controls there because these operators are sitting. somewhere in the states right they're operating these things 7,500 miles away halfway around the world just a whole bunch of just bouncing signals at that point Which is wild because with all of that connection you have a 2 second delay so if I make a right hand input right to move the camera to the right I make an input then the input happens. you get into this weird paradox in your head of like thinking 2 seconds ahead. Right. And you're trying to predict and you're trying to analyze, you know, with it, which is a weird paradox to be in, especially when you're like, I don't know, actively guiding in a missile. Um, and I've got to be like, I hope I don't miss, right? Like, I hope to God this dude doesn't just decide the last 2 seconds to do something crazy. really at like 3 to four seconds to impact, was like, I can try to do something, but then there ain't sh*t that I'm truly going to be able to do. That's going to make an impact here for it. So yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what you just described, that's that was another question that I had because group 5, right. specifically the MQ nine Reaper, the Navy's MQ four Triton and our Q four uh global Hawk all fall under the high altitude long endurance. HALE H-A-L-E which are the largest weights more than 1320, which I thought was interesting because group four and 5 have the same minimum weight, but it doesn't have a particular airspeed or altitude limitations. what you're describing is flying at 60,000 feet, something that's flying at 38,000 feet or 30,000 feet that time delay and that was going to be one of my questions for you after reading oh this book and learning a little bit more about the MQ-9 specifically is capable of doing with a 2 second delay. You still have to wait for the missiles to impact because they're not lasers. So like you talked about the higher you fly great on gas great on all those things. However, that adds to the error margin of the time difference. So I would assume you guys aren't necessarily dropping from 60,000 feet. But then again, I don't know at what altitude you guys are going, but that was going to be my question was how many seconds are you really dealing with anywhere from not specifically, I mean, anywhere from, you know, four or 5 seconds up to, I mean, what's the longest delay you're dealing with like 10 seconds, something like that. And that is a huge margin of error. Cause like what you just described, president Trump did this and it stopped him from being assassinated. And it takes somebody who's going, walking out of their house to go get in a vehicle to leave. Now you've got ID's him You guys still have to go through your checks to make sure you're, you know, the guy's there. So as a Froward Observer, what I can offer is. We are the guys on the ground that are the human eyes that can't have to be the ones who confirm. And then we call in, right? We're not, we're not seeing what you guys are seeing. We are in contact with specter gunships with the Black Hawks with little birds and we're physically seeing them. Well, specter is way up there. Love that. I actually got to fly a mission with them one time. I'll share that with you on another uh episode that we'll do, but It was really cool because I thought of this all as like this, for me, was how warfare has now changed. I grew up, saving Private Ryan" came out, but you see how warfare was you have to be able to almost make eye contact with somebody. to know where the enemy was and to confirm that's the enemy so you can shoot them to skip forward to now I'm able to call in weapons that are up there that they can't identify so I'm their eyes on the ground and now we move forward from that to the next uh evolution of warfare which is you guys are being able to see crystal clear and this is the main point this is what I want to drive home Mm-hmm. got, the only reason you're flying at 60, 40, 50, 30, 20, 10, 5,000 feet, a few hundred feet, you have wherever you are has to be crystal clear to where you can make identification of what it is that you were watching. Otherwise you wouldn't even be there and there's no purpose to have you there. And that technology is advanced so far that even at those altitudes, which instantly when I hear this, and if I'm not from the military background How in the world are you able to physically see somebody on the ground and make visual confirmation that really is the terrorist. And especially since this isn't a generalization, but a whole lot of people who wear the same things and have big beards in that area kind of look alike, especially as I'm imagining from 30, 40,000 feet. when we switch switch from standard def to high definition With the camera technology it gave us a lot right and that was especially why? In the early days, right? Let's say that the you know, 2 early 2 000's right? So 2000 to 2010 even or 2012 drones, RPAs, everything else were being used, but at the same time, they were still looked at as like, it's a nice toy, when like the high def came on, So at 20 to 30,000 feet, I always tell people, you know, I could see a license plate color, right? And I could maybe make out, you know, what color like the letters were, but I can't tell you what the license plate specifically says, right? Even with high definition, things like that. So. A lot of it goes into it, right? With the whole targeting and we won't get into the nitty gritty on that, um obviously. But at the same time, it's different. There's a lot more to it, right? Than just, hey, let me look, is this the guy? Yeah. You know, it could be, hey, do they have a specific way that they walk? Right? Because everybody's got a unique walk and things like that. Yep, exactly. Your gait. So like, you know, we'd have people in the background that were like literally measuring out the dude's gait. and comparing it side by side with like live video to recorded, or their arm swing, right? and no surprise when you deal with a bunch of people that in a lot of drone strikes, they start losing limbs. So it makes it a little easier to identify when the dude's like, oh yeah, that's the one arm dude. and, know, and just, then the military humor and stuff would come into it as well. Um, We had one dude that he always wore a white Thobe, right? The man dress that they wore. And, he was, he was a big guy on this cherry red motorcycle. We called him Mr. Stay Puft, Hey, you on Stay Puft tonight? All right, cool. Like, Because you knew everything about them, right? And that's the big piece that people don't realize is how much of a you got personal intimate, especially with the high value people, right? I knew who their wives were. I knew who their kids were. I knew how many goats they had, right? I knew what left turn they were gonna take out of their compound every single day. at the exact same time. And then one day they're not there. Right. that's the aspect of it. that was unique. And people, just think it's this, oh, you know, just rogue. especially all the god awful movies that have been done about it. You know, it's everybody thinks like, you're just in there and some Captain's making the call and going rogue and pulling a trigger. Bullsh*t. You know, it's like you and I sitting here and I can see you, on my computer screen. Well, guess what? I can take this computer screen and push it anywhere in the world. Same thing with, you know, with the RPA and drone footage. It's, know, I could push a live feed anywhere in the world. All right. So you can get decision makers that aren't even in the same country seeing a live feed and go, yep, do it. Right. And that's the part that people don't understand. right with this is this wasn't just some, you know, 2 operators and there being the pilot and the sensor operator. and I guess to clarify too on that thought is the pilot, right. That's the one it's stick and rudder for one, right. The MQ nine. It's not a, like what we call point to click loiter, with like the RQ four, the bigger one, cause that is literally you're clicking a mouse and saying like, I don't know if you could, you know, it's, it's dropping way points, you know, along the route and saying, fly here. Right. And it goes and does it. Right. You don't have a manual control over that. Where the MK9 is like almost exclusively, especially for launching and landing weapons, employments, all that stuff. Like you are all hold modes off, right. Cause it can do heading hold, altitude hold, airspeed hold, all those things. But you pretty much shut them all off whenever you're going, all right, it's game time because I need to max perform. Right. This Cause of course you have limitations with the satellites, it's not a fighter jet, right? It's what I'm getting down to. I can't sit there and just, all right, 30 degrees, right? Real quick, like the satellite's gonna be like, uh-uh, So everything was this slow and smooth, methodical movement we weren't built to do that either, right? We weren't built to be that aircraft that's sitting there knifing through the sky, cutting in and out. We were there to just be that lawnmower in the sky, right? With it that's just sitting there buzzing along, flying that circle, burning that hole in the sky to be that unblinking eye. And it was really just a bonus that we could also sling weapons from that to that of those altitudes too and be like, here we go. Yeah. than right. Cause a fighter jet, the reason why they need those capabilities is because everybody else has fighter jets. And so you've got to be able to actually have a dog fight and maneuver in the air and go to battle with each other, but we're the only drone in the sky. real quick, just because you introduced. Several things there, which I'm just going to, I just want to leave this out here for people to understand. Marine Captain Douglas Wood described in vivid detail how he experienced the humanity of the targets he struck. Now this was, this was back in 2016, striking the Islamic state, right? ISIS, I believe. And he did a nine month deployment to Iraq. and him and his team facilitated more than 650 strikes. That's kind of mind boggling when I think of nine months and 650 strikes. Now I know because we had the highest tempo in the military in the Ranger regiment because we were direct action. All four of my combat deployments. We're getting details as to where this guy is, that guy is, and we're going out and hitting that. place early as we possibly can, because we're going to get intel from that. And we might literally have already have some information as to where the next person is on our target list. But we, we get enough information off of this one, this objective that we can then go straight onto the next mission. And so a lot of times we were doing one. but then it would roll into 2 or even up to as many as 3 missions. Again, it's as long as you can work in the dark guys are flying all the time, day and night, and you guys are able to see at all times Mm-hmm. able, you don't have the limitations we had. so nine months and 650 strikes doesn't mean 650 objectives. That means you're actually pulling the trigger 650 times. uh 800 ISIS members were killed at a 650 strikes. You're not just shooting onesies and twosies when you're doing it. he describes in vivid detail his experience and the humanity. of the targets he struck. this a quote from him, you're getting really intimate look into a person's life, because the cameras are so good. We watched this guy in place the IED's for 30 minutes and then go home and have a fight with his wife as he constructed more IED's in his backyard. It was very humanizing. It's incredibly voyeuristic. the key here at the very end, he says, the killings weren't without a cost on his psyche, even though he, he wasn't at the controls of the RPAs. that is when I started to understand what it is that you guys deal with, and you just described he's going home and talking with his wife, playing with his kids. Mm-hmm. doing all these things. He just implanted an IED to murder a bunch of our soldiers that are out doing patrol. And now you guys you have to try to stay. away from overly humanizing these people to where you get attached. And that's something that is is mentioned. And again, we're going to get really far into this as we go through this series. But I want people to understand Let's let's go over real quick, let's recap the numbers that you threw out. So a thousand combat missions. As I described to you on a four month combat deployment, which is pretty much the max. Mm-hmm. ops, they've already learned at the highest level, SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, Air Force PJs, the highest level guys, that's the only people I worked with. I didn't work with anybody that wasn't the tip of the spear. I didn't work with SEALs. I worked with Dev Group. I didn't work with other, you know, special forces guys. I only worked with Delta. The high, at the highest level, these people that have been in combat for many, many, years. Three months is typically where they want to be. this they've learned the hard way. Of course, because they want to push these guys to six, nine, 12 months. about that time period is where people start making mistakes because the amount of sleep deprivation that is naturally going to happen, no matter how much you want to sleep and no matter how physically exhausted your body is, your brain is wired awake. And I was sitting there one night, we still had to pull guard duty because we have, we're on the special operations compound and a mortar lands the big sandbox that we built our walls out of. There was one about, 50 yards away from me, maybe. And I just hear this kind of thump noise. they're all running around trying to find where this impacted. It was in the sand right there. Literally, if it was 50 yards over, I'd be dead. it doesn't even have to be that close. Your brain. When you're deployed, you have a certain amount of bandwidth at the highest level 1,000 combat missions. When you pair that up against a fighter pilot from the Air Force, from the Navy, what does that really look like? How many combat missions are they flying in that same? in an entire 20, 30 year career. the one thing I can equate there is, the hours for sure. cause the missions are going to vary. Cause that's the other hard thing too, is like our missions, like I could technically do like one or 2 missions, In a night because I could go step into a box, right. We call it, just call it the box. but I go step into that box and then I might go and bounce to a different one, 2 hours later. Four hours later because again now you're just needing to make sure that people are flying, The correct amount of time and not granted they max performed us constantly right? We're six seven hours constantly in the box the pilots pilot manning back then was even worse. They were almost always doing seven 8 so it made it difficult because like I said, not uncommon for us to fly over a thousand hours in a year. And so like, let's take my one guy I knew was an ex fighter pilot, 30 year career in the military. he, did like 3,100 hours in 30 years Now obviously the entire 30 years of staff duty and everything else. But you know, you're still racking up those hours at that rate. And we were doing it, you know, 10 times the rate of that. Um, I did mine in 3 years and 10 months. was, was 2,900 and like 64 hours that's the biggest thing is, is our pace was so breakneck, but they just looked at it as like, well, you're sitting in, you know, essentially an office. staring at a bunch of screens, no big deal made it even more difficult because there was such a disconnect and such a drastic disconnect between the 2 that it really didn't allow for your body. Like you said, you're trying to operate at this high level and that's why we dealt with so much burnout and they still do. you know, with it because you're not able to operate. I there was there was four years, no breaks, Half the time, frickin our training time, right that we'd get, we'd get like a 2 hour to do training There's plenty of nights where I would train on an active target. And they'd be like, Listen, well, this is too important. We can't pull you off. You need to stay on this target and sit there and you can do your training. Right. And we're having to like cut corners on, on banking and, know, on the tactics because we had to balance, the Intel that we're collecting over the strike profile we're trying to achieve. So we're doing this weird, you know, balance and try and, one screen away. I'm sitting there behind a student, cause I was a combat instructor. taking my notes, push them through the scenarios that we build they'd be like, hey, snap back to target, we need to get you right there right now. that was always in the back of my head. I need to turn around and be ready to, jump in and go to target or at any time, right, there was always the reality. We were always 60 seconds away from a trigger pull. regardless of what we were dealing with, I think of my very first strike, right? it was just, Hey, move to this target. And it was like, okay. And then we roll in there and I'm like setting up my camera. like temperature differences and things like that, cause you can have an electro optical or day TV camera You can have an infrared camera and then you can have what's called a low light camera. there and we'll leave it at that so sometimes that stuff gets out of calibration and that's my job as a sensor operators to sit there and know how to tweak it, how to recalibrate it, how to fix it to make it ready to go I really wanted to help people to understand that aren't in this space. One of the things you mentioned, it's not like the movies. One of the movies that's very popular that has Denzel Washington in it. And one of my favorite movies of Denzel, to be honest, when you see the reveal in the movie Deja Vu to where he's brought in. and they're trying to solve this crime of where this girl was murdered. And they're trying to keep him in the dark. And so they bring him in and they see he sees a screen and all this crazy equipment and they're looking on the screen. And with this crazy new technology, they can move from room to room and they can try to figure out any details in this lady's house to see who it was that murdered her. Mm-hmm. doesn't know why they're trying to find who murdered her. And that reveal comes later on in the movie for anybody who hasn't seen it. Feel free to pause now and go watch that movie because it is an great movie and I don't want to ruin it for you. But here we go. Spoiler alert. They have in this movie the capability of going back in time and what they're seeing on the screen is happening in real life in real time. Mm-hmm. So he, Denzel discovers this by taking a laser pointer And he shines a laser pointer and moves it around on the refrigerator in front of her and she sees it. And now he knows and they know that he knows. And he's like, all right, stop playing games with me. What is this? What are we doing? They don't care about saving this girl. They're looking to find out who this guy is because this guy is what they believe is the terrorist who ends up blowing up a boat. and killing hundreds of people. So the reality is that you guys are looking in real time at these people. You're able to see what they're doing on a daily basis that isn't evil. You're able to see what they do evil. But my wild guess is when you are brought in and they just need you to jump in on a mission like you described, you might be training somebody else, which how long were you in and experienced before they started having you train people? I finished my initial training, It's like six months of like, here's what the buttons do. Here's the general mission sets, you know, to kind of get you into understanding how that plays into the fold. then you go on to your mission training after that, which is specific to the unit you're going to. That can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month or 2. I think mine was about a month or 2. Um, by the time I was like fully operational on my own, right. With nobody over my shoulder, would have been June of 11. and then I was put up for an instructor, 2 years later, I would have pulled the trigger, the year later and then I was pulled and I was put into an instructor role. like 2013 from on your own. Now you're training people to do this and something else you just said is pulling the trigger. and we'll, come back to that. But my point is during your time there, you spent half of it, essentially training other people how to do this job, which adds to what we've already described. In a vacuum is a crazy amount of trauma that you're witnessing. And this is the key, you're witnessing it. So even though you saw a guy plant an IED, you also get to see him at his house. Not, you know he's a father or not, you know he has a wife and kids. It's, you're not just taking him out there. You're going back and seeing who he's connected to, who's coming to visit him, who he's handing IEDs off to. Because you got to keep that going. when I think of that, I immediately think of like the DEA and drugs, right? Where you're not looking for the drug dealer who's on the street handing out crack to people coming to him on the street corner. You're following the crack dealer back to his house, finding out everybody who's in his family, who they're connected to. And then who he's getting his shipment from and then following that guy to his family and everybody he's connected with and then keep going back up the chain and then eventually you're taking these people out or and this was the part that I never even thought of until I was reading this book someone else takes him out while you're not at work. Mm-hmm. so you didn't take out, stay puffed. Someone else did. So you spent all that time as, as the general described, very voyeuristic watching this guy on a daily basis, being human, having positive interactions with people that love him, that he loves. you're not seeing the evil Nazi coming across the battlefield and you were. Shooting him with a well-placed shot putting him in the dirt and he ending evil there that day It's you're following him back home after he gets sent back behind enemy lines and now you're gonna follow his family and follow all the people that they're connected to and watch him for months and That's the part that blows my mind because it's not days and it's not even just weeks. Sometimes it's months. Sometimes it's years that is mind boggling if you stopped and tried to process. It's going to take a lot of processing to understand the things that you guys have been through. And I think that might be a book title for you, the process, there's so much in that. It's the actual process that you're going through for the kill chain to know who this is to pull the trigger. But you're also having to process all the information from this guy going back to his family being connected to another human, even though you know he's bad, even though you know he's murdering people, even though you know all these horrific things, you see him in the other light. And then also, right, trying to process this after. And I think that's where your story hit me right in the gut. And the second I heard about it and started looking into this, I was like, this needs to be a series and I want to share your story and as much. as people want to dismiss the things that you have been through because your feet weren't on foreign soil. Brother, I'm not going to save this to the end. Like, I want you to know, brother, like you have been through combat. You have seen the evil firsthand and more so than I've ever seen. You've had to witness the things about the enemy that you don't even want. You don't even You don't even have to deal with that in special operations on the front lines in our capacity. It is just go run. That's the bad guy. He's going to try to kill you right now. It's you or him. You kill him. And I think a lot of the PTSD and the complex PTSD, which again, we're going to get deep into this in the next podcasts that we go through. You have been through war brother and you have seen things that other people would I would absolutely not trade places with you. I would rather be there and be in fear for my life and have made it back but to know that all I ever saw was pure evil in front of me. I never got to see them be good to anyone pet a cat. They kicked every cat they saw. They kicked every dog. They were never they were they were a caricature because that's That's how far gone it was with the people we were going after. So I, again, I just wanted to say that to you, brother. No, absolutely. And I appreciate that. It's it's, you know, because that's the thing. It's you know, we were put through such rigorous pace with it. And then and then you're adding all these complex layers to it all. Right. You're adding, know, that the Intel briefs, you know, that we'd get ahead of time and, know, the god, the hours and hours and hours of, you know, target planning the expectation was perfection throughout because you couldn't afford to miss because the people we're going after were the Bin Laden's of the world you didn't know what the implications were if you were gonna miss that, right? So then you add in, we talked about earlier about the whole having somebody look at your feed and see what you're doing. Well, that's also a layer to this, right? I think this whole thing is like an onion, I can quote Shrek there with it, right? it is though, because you start peeling this thing back. And it's like, yeah, on paper, you're like, it's just a video game. What what's the big deal? And it's like, no sh*t. But if you look and see the complex nature of understanding someone's life, right from you know, days, weeks, months, years on end. I mean, we had one dude we tracked for six years, right? And finally got them because one of the very famous things that we always said in combat was, the enemy gets a vote, right? Because we can have the most perfect plan, right? I mean, this thing can be generated up to the T, can have aircraft that are doing this crazy dance and you know, People are scanning, people are clearing for collateral, all of it, right? We factored all of it in, right? It wasn't this wild west, you know, shoot out every single time that people think. Like, no, we were executing it perfection and precision because we could, you know? Granted, it took its toll on a lot of people because you're held to this insanely high standard. You're 60 seconds away from a trigger pull at any given time. And then you're having to watch these people's lives unfold and then... just like you said, right? When you're following those couriers, when you're following those other bomb makers, things like that, right? We called it spider webbing, so we'd follow the spider web. And it was, all right, track this guy to, know, you take the small fish to get the big fish kind of thing you're watching all the interactions and you're going, oh, well, that's this guy because of X, Y, Z that I saw last week. Right. And you're making all these connections But On the other side, it's just next target, next target, next target, next target, right? I remember, we'll get into this a lot more detail, but one, you know, tidbit of this is I remember 2 guys, I remember walking down an alley and I was watching them in infrared. they're in, the standard traditional garb of a, of a man dress or a Thobe one dude literally reaches underneath. his though pulls out a pistol, turns the dude to his left and just shoots him. And the dude drops and then the guy walks away. And they're just like follow the guy. Four hours later, I was still following the guy. Right. And it's like, are we like, no, like just nothing. Just that's that's a normal Tuesday, And it was That's how it was treated, right? Because it wasn't like anybody came up to me after a shift and was like, hey man, that was pretty f*cked up. You wanna talk about it? You know, it was just, all right man, see you tomorrow. if that was an isolated incident, this would be different, right? But it was four flipping years of this. It was every single day, and going through it and having to deal with this complex piece of it. And oh, by the way, I was 19 or 20 years old when I first pulled the trigger. so the cognitive effects there and everything else along with it and being so young doing it and so much responsibility, in the moment, sh*t, I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt like I was a god, you know, I mean, I was strutting around at 20 years old, f*cking combat instructor. You know, arrogant is all h*ll and just because it was, was the business we were in, you were either f*cking perfect and professional or get the f*ck out because our, that's the one thing people don't realize, the whole 2011 ramp up almost all the pilots, right? That came into that class when they started really cranking out the numbers, they were pushing the like 60 plus combat air patrols Essentially the overarching number of how many aircraft they want So they're ramping up training for it. Well, then obviously like they needed pilots, right? when they're building this up They don't want to put a bunch of people that are green and you know in here and have them You know go and do these missions because they're they're gonna suck at it, right? They want experience they reach out to like well the fighter pilot community pull a bunch of people literally rip them out of their cockpit, throw them into a fricking box and say, hey, go fly this lawnmower now fun fact, the MQ1 Predator had a Rotax snowmobile engine on it. So close enough But the Reaper's got a 900 shaft horsepower, a little bit bigger there. I think it's, I want to say it's Rolls Royce. It's one of the big ones. I think it's Rolls Royce if I remember right. But I, Yeah, yeah. You know, so they yanked a bunch of fighter pilots out of their out of their cockpit threw him in the box and said, Hey, go fly this thing. she was talking about a bunch of people that were p*ssed off and angry. I was trained by the most angriest group of aviators in the world. Right? They were so p*ssed. Right. I mean, should chips on their shoulders. All of a big X Navy pilots I flew with, some of the best of the best, in their day. And then they get kicked over to this and they're just like, oh, fly this thing. And man, they were p*ssed. But holy sh*t, were they good!! I had f*cking pilots I was 19 years old. Right. I was a snot nose punk. Didn't know sh*t. And, I had pilots just f*cking, they thankfully saw something enough in me I came in and was struggling. I came in and I sucked at the job, I just kept getting all these barriers put in front of me and I just kept crushing through them. I was like, f*ck that. I'm going to be an instructor. You know, I'm going to be an evaluator. I'm going to do this, Um, which led me to, running units and just see how far we can go with this mentality, But, you know, that was the big thing was those pilots that, they even got the rap of like being like the redheaded stepchild, R PAs in general, right. We were always treated as like the redheaded stepchild, because of how that career field was built. even the sensor operators, right? In 08, when all the sensor operators started ramping up there, they were a bunch of one-in-ones, which was imagery analysis. They literally were like, hey, dude, we're going to take you from behind your screen and put you behind this screen instead. And that'll be good, right? No issues there And so that was like the whole entire career field was imagery analysis in the right seat, fighter pilots in the left. That doesn't f*cking happen at any other career field, right? That is so off the f*cking cuff and out like whoever the f*ck thought of that one. was just wild how we got there. Right. but it worked you bring people of that caliber and they're going to make it work. Right. And, and, but there's a cost and this is, this is what we're going to keep going back to in every podcast. There's a cost. It's called pay to play. You can do it with steroids. You can do it with anything in life. Sure. You have the capability of ripping a pilot out of his seat that he dreamed of since he was 3, four years old of being a fighter pilot. And now he's there and he's been doing this for a few years. And now you just put him in front of the screen where He doesn't get days off like he used to, and he's not actually everybody's hero anymore. Now he can't even talk about what he's doing. He can't share with his wife. He doesn't get to stand around and tell stories, you know, with his buddies. And that also rips him away from his, from his community. And sure, some of them were probably taken together, but that's like, you know, netting a few fish together to eat. Like, yeah, it's great that I'm here with somebody else that's suffering with me, but they're going to suffer things that that they didn't sign up for because and this is what I want to get back to you and what you just said being 19 years old. Obviously, we know 16, 17, 18 year olds went to World War One, World War Two and fought right some of the most horrific like land battles ever fought. And yet they had signed up for and knew full well what they were going into. When you signed up, what was it that you signed up for and what was described to you about your job when you signed up? Cause I guarantee you, weren't recruited by the air force to be a Reaper pilot. Nope. I signed up for it, I actually I picked sensor operator, right? I picked the job. But I didn't have a f*cking clue what you know, in all reality, what I was going into, you know, and then neither did the recruiter the dude pulls up the job on the Air Force dot mail page, right? And and it's like, here's what the job is in four sentences. And it's like, disseminates live, you know, full motion video, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, my first tech schools I was like 3 four weeks into it and some other guy he was a prior service and he looked at me and he's made some just one-off comments of like Well, you know and we're you know employing weapons blah blah blah and I like turned and looked at him and I'm like wait what and he's just like yeah, man, we're gonna be employing like hellfire missiles and I'm like The f*ck is that? Like, I didn't have a clue! know, 18, 19, and, you know, young and dumb at that point, didn't have a clue, you know, going into it, and then it was like, oh sh*t, okay. you just mentioned how far along it was before you even heard that they had munitions and that you were gonna be in some way employing that. What were the milestones as you went through when you started recognizing what you were actually going to be doing we went through a lot of academic training and things like all the way down to, know, they call that air crew fundamentals. I don't know what they still call it because they've changed the courses like, 69 times in the last 15 years, So you learn just basics, right? Of like how a fricking fixed wing flies, how a helicopter flies. you know, what a cyclic is. And I've never f*cking used that piece of information in my life, but I learned it, And then you get into a little bit more of like doctrine level, like I said, it was a one off comment. It wasn't even in the training itself that I heard that because it was so, you know, here's how, you know, aerodynamics work. Not, Hey, here's what you're going to do. You know, overall, we didn't really get that until cause it was about, I don't know, 3 to four months you might sit for a month, 2 months, you know, waiting for a class date, whatever, there. So there was a lot of, especially back then they were ramping everything up and transitioning everything down to the school house in New Mexico. But at one point they had the school house, outside of Vegas. Um, I was slotted to go there. So back in May of 11, um, and then they were like, wait, no, we're shutting that pipeline down. We're going to open this other one up, in, New Mexico. And so I went July of 11 I was there until October. so it kind of puts into perspective the initial training that's initial qualification training, there, but you know, you're doing. training missions at all hours of the day doing simulator training, academics, live flights, right? Where you're actually at the controls at a local range, right? learning the basic button pushes, All the way to here's how you do like basic intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance is about 3 to four months. Everybody's a little bit different just because weather and sh*t like that, um in class with everybody on the exact same pipeline or are there people taking courses with you in it that aren't going for the same job? so early, early on we, know, like the aircrew fundamentals course and stuff like that we went through, that was kind of shredded out to like a ton of different, AFSCs But once, once you got into like the initial qualification training or even the, some of the later tech schools, you were kind of like lumped in as a class, you know, So, yep. Yep. thing. And how large are classes of that? mean, are you dealing with like 20, 30 people? Are you talking about 100 people? You'd get to know the other classmates. It's small enough that you guys would all end up working together at some point and getting very familiar. I still got, well, like one of my best friends, like I met in it at Hallman, right? When I went through the initial training, technically I met him before in tech school. We, you know, it's passing and things like that. he'll tell this outright. He hated me, I was an arrogant little sh*t back then and, just running my mouth everywhere and everything else. And, you know, I've gotten a little bit better. I've known him for 15 years, you know, now. we kind of followed each other along and that was the one thing with these pipelines, right. once you got into like the initial qualification training through the school house, then you kind of were, I don't want to say locked in, you were kind of following those people around if you will, So. There's plenty of times, you know, I had people that went in that same unit I did, people that went to different units, but then that's the crazy thing is even if you had somebody that was doing like counterinsurgency missions, and somebody doing high value targets, right? We were also on this really weird schedule of a 5 day on 3 day off schedule. So you had an 8 day work week, right? So that moves your week every week to the right by a day. which for four f*cking years is really annoying. Right. there's so many times especially like I was in Las Vegas. Right. The city that literally rivals New York. Right. You know it's a city that never sleeps still there was so many things where it was like oh sh*t there's this thing this event going on downtown or down on the strip this weekend. But Saturday is my Tuesday so I'm f*cked. You know, and so that was also a hard part with it is you had to manipulate that. we had people that would, you know, rent out houses together for cheaper. So you'd have, you know, 2, 3 people living with each other. I'd like go over to a buddies to watch football or something. And one guy's work in one mission set, you know, for one squadron, one guy's work on a different mission set for another squadron. But it's. his Saturday, my Tuesday, his Friday, right, and we're all just like, after shift and if it lines up, right, and, because occasionally, your schedule would shift or change for one thing or the other, right, And so then it was always, Hey, what's your weekend? or what day of the week is it for you? it was was a very common thing. and this is what I wanted to get to my point with this question is the camaraderie, right? So when you go through select, whenever you go through buds in the Navy SEALs, these dudes are gonna be Navy SEALs. You're gonna see each other. Mm. same thing with everybody in special operations, the Ranger Regiment, I'm going through with these guys. Some of these guys are going to be at <1> Battalion, some are going to be at <2> Battalion some are going to be at <3> Battalion. Eventually we're going to see each other. And you know, some guys I never saw again, some dudes I met only on combat missions. As a matter of fact, my next podcast episode coming out is the Jessica Lynch mission. I ended up running into a bunch of dudes from 2nd Battalion and 3rd Battalion that we hadn't seen each other since then. we had at least a core group of guys that all came with me to first battalion and they divvied us up between the companies. And even though a lot of times our company would be deployed different times of the other companies too, even still in the same battalion. Bro, just having the ability to know that your buddies are here and it not, and everybody has the same, everybody's on essentially the same rotation work-wise. And if everybody's going out to go do a training, combat training missions, which were worse than combat, because you were, you're getting beat in the dirt there. Cause then, then they could sleep deprive you, stress you out of your mind and, and overwork you to try to make sure Mm-hmm. your ability to handle that stress when you get to combat is actually going to be reduced from this. And then it will make it that much easier for you to continue going So with you guys essentially not knowing who's going to end up where, because again, you didn't sign up to go to a place. Mm-hmm. Yep. want to go back to you said that these, these fighter pilots, poor guys, man, wrong place, wrong time in history. you signed up for one thing and here you are. Now you're ripped away from what you want to do and you're stuck with these kids who by the way, didn't sign up for this job. And that is the part that now I'm going to keep going back, especially if you, if you read through "On killing" and "On Combat," you'll learn very quickly. He does a masterful job of breaking down all of the different decision-making catastrophes that are the Vietnam War, that are the Vietnam conflict. And everything that every idiot, and we know this now, right? And we can say you guys were absolutely idiots for coming up with the idea of drafting people, sending them over, and they know their start date and they know their end date. Mm-hmm. they're gonna go home at this date if they can just survive to that point. You literally just pitted them against everyone else to try to keep yourself alive and that's complete human nature. can't unknow that. And then these are guys that you don't even know, so you're getting dropped in again with people that didn't sign up for this. They were forced to go to prison or go. to the War Well, of course, nobody wants to go to prison and you're seen as a coward. And especially back then, everybody from World War II was around I think that we're, as we go through your story, I want this, I want that parallel to be there because understanding what somebody signs up for versus what somebody has told they're about to do, like you and people that are currently, cause this is still happening, being ripped out of their career fields and pushed over here because of the needs of the military. think that that is a failure by design. are literally building a flaw in our computer and wondering why these bugs keep screwing everything up. Your rotation, work week and the rotation of your days off and everybody else not knowing when their days are off and knowing that this could change at any day. All of those things builds in a uh sense of dread of not knowing actually what it's going to even look like. So on a day-to-day basis, trying to have a relationship, trying to talk with your family, trying to plan to do anything fun that you want to do. In the back of your brain, there's a, there's a dread of, but I mean, if it happens, I mean, I don't know. And that's what I got to tell my family all the time when I was in, I'm just like, Hey, I'll be here when I'm here and I'll be gone when I'm gone. I'm not even allowed to tell you when I'm going to leave for a combat mission. When I get over there. I may be able to contact you guys, the card deck, we were going through one through 10. If you were number on 11 on the list of the most wanted people in the war, we passed you onto somebody else. Cause you weren't important enough. Now, once we cross off one of the top 10, Hey, guess who graduated? You did. We're coming after you. Um, but I signed up for that. And this is the point. I joined the Marine Corps and I was indoctrinated into the mindset of the word kill for everything. Everything was killed. Something good happens, kill. Something bad happens, kill. I know everybody makes fun of Jocko for the good, right? It's good. No matter what it is, good. Okay. That's what kill is for the Marines, for every Marine. Doesn't matter if you're a member of the Marine Corps band or Or you're going into MARSOC you're going into force recon, you're going to be recon EOD, whatever. Those dudes signed up for that. When I came out of Marine Corps bootcamp, I was so ready to go to war. And then Sept 11 happens and I want to go to war and I'm not going to get there with my unit. So I reenlist for army special ops and I go in with a Ranger of regiment. this is why I'm only continuing to talk for this, this amount of time. Mm-hmm. I had no idea what a Ranger really, really was. I didn't. I just heard that they're maybe they're infantry. Maybe they take down uh airfields. But what airfields, bro? What are you talking? Like, are we really doing that? These guys are are doing shadow things that we don't necessarily know about. I'm signing up with a blank check of I'm going to get to kill bad guys. That's all I'm signed up for. Whatever this looks like I'm down for. You guys did not do that. And I think in the book and I have, I'm about 2 thirds of the way through the book. I haven't finished it because I want to go over all these things with you on this podcast fresh. this is just my personal belief. I believe that you guys are being set up for failure from initial training. I think that if you are pulling people out of Marine Corps boot camp where the word kill is ingrained in your skull to the point that you are familiarized in every single thing you do with it being the purpose of taking the life of an enemy combatant. That is one thing. When I just read an article, the Air Force has once again decided that Mm-hmm. And they're going back and forth between an empty rifle, a rubber rifle. Should we have a real rifle, but no live rounds And the outcome of the article says, this is the person in charge of the Air Force, basic training for every person going into Air Force that are eventually going to be flying Reaper drones and all these other drones and dropping bombs on people's heads. he didn't see the value. He didn't see the value in having live ammunition and a uh real rifle that could take someone's life. He didn't see the value in that being introduced back into Air Force basic training. yes, somebody could accidentally shoot themselves. Somebody could go angry and become an active shooter. Absolutely could happen. And that would be horrific. And a second that that happens, knee jerk reaction means that it's all getting ripped away anyways. However, Here's the pay to play. Here's pay to play. Pay to play is you were hamstrung at the beginning of the race. You didn't even know you were in a race that you were in. Everybody's sprinting all over the world because they're in Active of combat. You didn't even know that you were walking onto the track of an Olympic sprint and everybody sprinting around you. And they go, by the way, hey, how about you catch that guy real quick? Mm-hmm. and stay up there for the next four years sprinting. Could you do that for me real quick, please? I'm sorry. Did I say please? I mean, do it now. You have no choice. I mentioned that. and by the way, if you try to crack or pretend that you can't do this job, we're going to have to take somebody else and put them in your spot, which is your fault. And if that person cracks, if that person fails on their mission, which is even worse, because that gets actual special ops guys killed in real combat. That is on your soul, bro. That's on you. Dude, that's so many, this is the biggest cauldron of mistakes since Vietnam. it's it's a upset this handful of times. It was it was and is a melting pot of bad decisions. Right. It just they took it and went, oh, let's have these guys not f*cking sleep. Right. Because I was I was an insomniac for f*cking a year and a half. I was running on 2 hours of sleep. F*cking, you know, and rolling in there. And I can't f*cking tell the Air Force that because, again, exactly what you're saying. Right. You know, we sit there and fill out our fricking, you know, operational risk management ahead of time every before every flight, right? Hey, where are you at? It's just like the f*cking flight flight dock eval every year. You know, how much do you drink? One to 2 a month. You know, it's like f*cking I ain't saying anything past that because f*cking I'm going to get ostracized. Right. And that's the f*cked up part with all these processes. It's like you can't sit there and tell people, hey, I need you to do this high performing job. But if you can't f*cking do it, we're going to kick you in the junk. No one's going to f*cking admit anything. And that's why we have such a problem now. And that's why all these people that that haven't flown, you know, I mean, I've been out of combat for over almost a decade. It's and it's still f*cking there, right. It's still hanging on because exactly like you hit on, right. Our schedules were all f*cked up. Right. I was on shift work for seven week rotations. Every seven weeks I was changing shift changing shift changing you sh*t for four f*cking years You want to talk about a level of tired like I was exhausted By that time and I remember looking at my Chain-of-Command and like send me to the schoolhouse I can't I am just dead at this point and school also is even worse Right. That's the f*cked up part is everyone's like all Monday to Friday ACC family days. It's so cool. I'm like, uh-uh I'm like you got you can start at 2 in the morning and have to roll in there and brief. I got to, you know, half the time I got to go drag some kid out of bed because he's 18 years old and isn't used to getting up at 2 in the f*cking morning for a brief. Meanwhile, I've been there since, you know, midnight 30, uh prepping everything, going over grade sheets, going over sh*t like that, and then doing potentially, you know, sh*t, we got double turned constantly throughout because it was just, eh, just make it work. It's like, it was just a bunch of, eh, just make it work. And it's like, that's fine and all, but you can't f*cking sustain that. You can't keep doing that 15 years later. We're, we're well past the make it work stage. We're the holy crap. We made a lot of mistakes in this mission set. We need to fix them. And there's plenty of ways to do that, but they've got to f*cking be willing to do that. I will never go after anybody by name or individually or anything like that. But that being said, there are plenty of people that I have worked for and everything's like that, that aren't doing sh*t to recognize this problem and elevate it. And there's a bunch of people out there that fricking all look right at the f*cking camera that I hope to God one person f*cking stares at this da*n video and you're the f*cking problem is because you will not. make a f*cking call and save people's lives. We just lost a da*n fricking instructor pilot four months ago at Holloman Air Force Base. What do they do about it? Nothing. Google it. You can't find it. But f*cking anybody that was there da*n well knows it happened. And I was standing in the room 24 hours before one of my teammates put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the f*cking trigger. This sh*t isn't going away. You know, and we're sitting here and acting like ah. The war in Afghanistan is done. We're all good. It's okay. Bullfucking sh*t. You guys have f*cked this up so da*n bad and are literally getting people killed because of it. And if you would just... I'm not saying go out and, hey, we need to scrap this and turn into all the protesters and sh*t that I dealt with freaking all these years ago. That literally people marched from Las Vegas up to Creech Air Force Base, which was just wild. It's like 40 f*cking miles. and then lay in the road for us to not be able to get on base. It super fun to deal with. Right? Like, I'm not at that level, But holy sh*t, you gotta do something because this crap is not sustainable, It's burning out people. It's killing people, And all it needs is a little bit of care, To go, hey, you guys aren't robots. You know, you can't just sit here and do this day in and day out on these f*cked up schedules, I don't know when I'm going to see, you know, my friend or my coworkers or things like that, Because I might be lined up on a weekend with them and then one week I roll in and they're just like, you're on a different sh*t. You're on a different schedule now. And it's like, well, f*ck, I built my life around this on, you know, going and watching football every Sunday with this dude. Now I got to change that again. what we were told when, right? And the zero, zero help on mental health, period. I mean, because, and they'll say this till the end of the time, that they're like, we've got operational psychologists embedded in the unit. Bull f*cking sh*t. Nobody's going to them. Nobody. Because they don't trust them. Yep, this is in the book and this is something I can attest to. Here's what happens for everyone who believes that all the special ops, the ranger regiment had, we had to be cleared by a professional mental health expert. Here's what that actually looks like. And this is the way it will always happen if you leave it up to your chain of command. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna give you a scenario. You are in charge of the 75th Ranger Regiment guys. We went to combat. Everybody was sprinting. They handed us the baton. And right now we're getting bad guys every single night. None of our guys died. A lot took. you know, rounds and shrapnel and got injured, but none of them have died. We saw a lot of people die. We took a lot of lives. Our compatriots, our British SAS, you know, all these other dudes, regular military guys that were around us in the base areas around us in Baghdad, they had deaths. And so we would have to attend funerals for these guys, but we didn't, we didn't die. So these are your men. All of them have to be cleared. before they can really go out and start doing the decompression, which when you get back is a mandatory of, you have to give 2 four day weekends, right? 96 hour passes. So they're going to work for 3 days and then be off for four. Work for 3 days, be off for four. Then they're going to work for four days, be off for 3. And that is our plan. That's the red carpet that we roll out for the mental health. of getting these guys reintegrated back into society. But they do have to be cleared. How are you going to do that? How are you going to have all of these people be cleared? And what's your timeline on that? What would that look like for you? Well, and that's and that's the hardest thing, right? As I can tell you exactly from like my standpoint with this, it's that it's so hard to put something like that into a standard regiment, right? The military answer is we need to have some type of, you know, process and everything else, but it's going to be f*cking different for everybody. Right. And that's that's the part where it's like, holy sh*t, like you can you can put anything in play. But when you don't when you're not accepting of when somebody can't fit into that. because their brains wired differently or they're taking something differently or they're saw some really f*cked up sh*t or whatever. You've got to account for that. And that's the part where I think especially, and that's why you and I, when we first talked, related so much is because it's like, holy sh*t, yes, is what you did and what I did completely f*cking different, Not even the same book, let alone the same page. But it's the way that it's handled. Right. It's the way that those career fields are looked at and and going, hey, you know, yep, we recognize this sucks. Right. We recognize you're putting you through some really f*cked up sh*t. And that's the answer, right? It's just like, eh. we'll give you a couple extra days off. You'll be good. Right. You know, and that was that was the funny thing, too. And I meant to bring this up earlier is like, you know, our first day off, right on that 3 day weekend was technically what we call the recall day. So if all of a f*cking somebody, you know, broke their knee or something and, you know, doing snowboarding and dropped off the schedule. somebody else had to fill that slot, It's the next man up mentality. And so there's plenty of times where it's like, holy sh*t, you're sitting there and you're like, all right, weekend, 3 day, that f*cking phone rings and you're like, son of a b*tch. Right. And then, or the great one, because I don't know why this was a thing, but you know, drugs are drugs are common in the military, obviously drugs, alcohol, things like that. Right. Everybody uses different things to cope. And by no way am I, saying like, yeah, do it. I'm saying it's common. For some f*cking reason in our career field, it was cocaine. I mean, I kind of do when you look at it. But f*cking everybody, man, everybody got busted for it. It was insane. So that was also the other thing is we have f*cking sh*tload of times where we'd get drug tested up at base. So you'd be sitting there on a weekend and you're like, all right, cool, I'm good to go. I remember literally one time I was playing with one of my best friends, right? We were sitting playing video games, just chilling out, all of sudden he's like, you know, we're on a overhead set talking to each other and he's like, he's like, ah, sh*t. He's like, we got a fricking drug test. Cause he gets the call. I'm like, just pick up my phone. And I'm like, just staring at it, waiting for it to ring. it rings and I'm like, all right, dude. And he's like, I'll be there in 10 minutes and pick you up. it was just it was so f*cking commonplace that it was just like, oh, all right, some idiot f*cking went and did coke again. Like, seriously? I know that got a little bit away from what you originally asked with this, but it's it's insane you sit there and put these processes in place and think, well, we're doing enough. We're doing enough. But when you just yeah, exactly, exactly. you even said it earlier, right? Well, you know, what were you trained right out the Battalion? Right. Kill, kill, kill. But when you don't train for the other side of that. and recognize that, yes, there's these issues and yes, that, you know, there's psychological effects that can happen from this and everybody's going to handle it differently. And you don't provide any education, any support there besides, "Hey go talk to someone." I don't mean this as a diss to any, you know, clinician But it's such a cheap f*cking answer at the end of the day. Because at the end of the day, that psychologist, even with the embedded, you know, psychologists in the units and things like that, or the people checking that box and things like that, they don't know what it's like to sit there and hack that mission day in and day out. And so as much as they can hear the war stories and everything else, they don't truly get it. And so for a group, where just like you said earlier, You got the times where you're like, hey, I can't tell you where I'm when I'm going, where I'm going. I can't might not be able to talk to you when I'm there kind of thing. Same thing. Right. We couldn't be like, hey, man, I did a drone strike last night, you don't get to do that. how to process it. You don't know how to talk about it. You don't know how to deal with it. And then you're just shoved in this tube of go, go, go, go, go until you move bases. And that's really the gist because just like you said, when you did have those conscientious objectors or things like that that threw their hands up and went, hey, I can't do this anymore. One, it was a huge stigma in the career field, And he's a p#ssy, he can't frickin' do it. when I was in it, like, of course, you know, everybody thought it, but at the end of the day, you're still, you're not understanding truly what the effect is. And that's also highlights. You want to know why we have stigmas in sh*t? It's because we don't talk about it. We don't talk about the tough stuff. We don't talk about the things that, need to be talked about. We don't talk about mental health, right? We don't talk about the impacts that it's having psychologically, because if we f*cking did, There wouldn't be stigmas. Those stigmas wouldn't exist. So for f*cking, my community your community, it doesn't matter. It's like all you have to do is start fricking talking about it and recognize it. And that will in itself shatter the stigmas because sitting there and being quiet, if there's any fricking group that's, you know, shown that that doesn't f*cking work, it's ours. Right. I mean, this has been going on for, you know, we're coming up on the 20 year mark. of when the Reaper came on station. That also means we're coming up on the first time that people did this job for 20 years that were career sensor operators, career RPA pilots, I can tell you, it ain't f*cking good because anybody that's in that boat that I know at 17 or 18 years is literally, I can think of 3 different people getting med boarded for PTSD right now off the top of my head. There ain't a big pool with that because not a lot of people can f*cking sit there and, you know, hash it out for that long. In fact, most people I knew because I did 2 four year enlistments. Only because there's money involved. But most of the people did like six years. Right. And then they punched. They got out. Right. Nobody's staying in that career field. No one's sitting in that career field, especially coming in at 18, 19 years old because you see so much sh*t, you deal with so much crap right off the bat. Then they send you to the schoolhouse and you're a young, you know, E5 or whatever. And then it's like, oh, you finish up your schoolhouse rotation at 3 to four years. And then it's like, well, you won't go back to combat. And I'm like, f*ck that. You know, I don't want to go back and have to re go through that again after I am already just exhausted. the school house was no cakewalk either. I remember having generals you do the, do the dog and pony shows Where, you know, some top brass comes rolling through the squadron. Holy sh*t. Everybody clean it. It could look perfect pristine. and you know, I, I'd get thrown on a couple, you know, talk about what we did how our training was all that stuff,"Hey, you're the type of guy that we're trying to, uh retain... You know, what can we do?" you're on, on, you know, seven years, got all this experience, you know, how do we retain you? And I'm like, f*cking pay me more and stop putting me in the desert. I'm like, cause that's the problem is all our f*cking bases are in sh*tholes even the newer ones they've done, it's f*cking South Carolina in a really sh*t hole part of South Carolina. Right. You've got that Missouri, New Mexico and Nevada. Like you're not talking about, you know, lush green valleys here where you're putting these da*n things. then you can't figure out why you have retention problems. Give me a da*n break. So going back a lot of that brother, there's so many things to unpack there. we're going to get to those and it's going to help me because my brain's firing so fast that so many different things I want to stop and talk about in depth. my initial question, right? So. You're, you're in charge of the 75th ranger regiment, first ranger battalion. just got back from combat. This is our training cycle. You got, we got four days off. We got 2 of those coming up and then we got work for four days and have 3 days off. So if, if you got to pick, how would you roll that out? Your average person would go, Every person in the entire battalion that was on this deployment. Mm-hmm. to talk to one person. We don't have 2, we don't have 5, we've got one. we need to check that box, bro. We've got to check that box because mental health is really important to us. That's why we have one person here that everyone needs to talk to. And by the way, while we're in deployment, somewhere out there, we don't know where because we work at night and we're busy killing people for a living. Somewhere there's somebody who's asleep, but I'm sure that there, could wake them up. Mm-hmm. could go talk to them at any time. You could go talk to them at any time. Yeah, just feel free. I know you're going to be packing and leaving, going out the door to go on a combat mission. And if you go to talk to this person, who are you screwing all of your guys to your right and your left? We'll go back. We'll come back to that part because I want to touch on that here. Here's how it was rolled out. You would assume uh person would go, OK, then I would have of those work days. of those 3 day work days, I would schedule the very first week having everybody to have at least an hour, an hour and a half of being able to go talk to this person. And I would slowly integrate that in because again, we just got back from combat. We're, we have been working out. Let's not focus four workouts a day, like we normally do right now. We need to actually heal from, from all the stress we've been under. that to me would be my initial thought. Maybe other people would go, well, actually, let's let's let them come back and and get back out there to a restaurant and eat and ease back into life first. Let them have time to process this. And then maybe one of those work weeks where we're working four days and having 3 days off, maybe the last one of those, I'll process everybody through those. Or maybe all of those. We we have it. available for everybody, but mandatory that everybody goes and checks that box at some time through here. And I'll work it out with their direct supervisors, with the platoon leaders, with the platoon commanders. Now here's how it actually happened. We fly in and we land. We're in Savannah, Georgia. We are in our own base, Hunter Army Airfield. We have one airstrip that you can land on. Mm-hmm. We get out of the plane, we walk off the plane, we go to the hangar. Our families are now aware through the, support group. They now know that their husband, the father of their children is here. He's here. We haven't been able to tell them when we're deploying back. So now we're here and they just get a frantic call. Hey, by the way, your husband's going to be here in a couple of hours. So they scurry over. to have this party for them, welcome them back, but you can't go to the hangar. Now we're at the hangar. Guess what every single person has to do before they can see their family members? Check a box. And nobody can see their family until everyone has checked the box. Bro, that blew my mind. I'm like... At that point, and I'm older because I come in the Marines at 19, so now I'm like 23 and I'm going, you're telling me that the smartest people that's in charge of us who have been to combat all this time, and this is some slam on them. It really is me trying to understand. Mm-hmm. You know that it's required and I know that what they're probably thinking is if there was issues, we would already know it. Let's just check this stupid box so that when we release them, we can release them and they can go, let's steam off and we don't have to worry about coming back and meeting with a psychologist and let's just get this box checked. that's literally everybody lines up. And we have this lines to get your food. You've got lines to get whatever it is. Cause you're still in your disgusting, smelly clothes that you've been flying back and forth to Kuwait, Germany. I walk in, I've already heard everybody else laughing and they're all trying to get this girl's number. The rule is whoever gets this girl's number is the winner. That is the baddest man in this unit is whoever gets the psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever she was, gets her phone number. I walk in, bro, like, they're like, okay, you checked on the boxes that you've seen. You've seen friend, you've seen friendlies dead, you know, other, other members of other units you've been to funerals, you've seen dead bodies, you've sight, smells, all those things. People burned people, all these things. You've been around dead combatants. And then she's like, how's that make you feel? was like, I mean, I was real hungry when I got here. So ah I would say that I'm good. And she's like, well, but tell me about this. I'm like, I can't tell you about that. We're in special ops and you know that. So what is it you want me to say? I can't even tell you where we were when we did these missions. And I can't even tell my family about what these missions. can't tell anybody except for people in this unit. And technically you're in this unit, but guess what? For real, you're not one of us. So you have no idea. And when you said this, this is what made me want to drive this point home. You mentioned that these people have no clue what it is that you guys are dealing with. I would assume that if anybody had common sense that we're in charge of this, the first thing they would do is, okay, we've had this program up for 2 years, 3 years now. Any of you guys who have the willingness and the want to, to help your fellow brothers and sisters do this job, you can get your degree, be a psychologist. We are then gonna pay you your same grade. I don't care what you're making. You're gonna keep that same grade or we're gonna give you more money. You are gonna be the psychologist we're going to give you a structured life. You're to be able to see your family. You're going to have normal hours, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is how you get people willing to actually talk to somebody, but you have to take away the stigma of how other people are going to find out that you went and talk to them. Now I found this, I just did a podcast last week, last Thursday with a guy who came to my I was working at Quiet Professionals here in Tampa, Florida, former Delta Force Sergeant Major Andy Wilson, started his own private company. Now he found out that a woman with severe PTSD from multiple different things, not one time issue, she had multiple issues and She hadn't slept a full night in years. She comes to an event that we put on, she talks with a guy, he walks her through her memories without her having to explain all of it and then reframes it for her and has her understand and process. All he's doing is helping, walking her through processing what she saw, what she went through. And when that happened, that night she slept for like, you know, better than she'd ever slept in so long. She contacts our CEO who she used to work directly for years ago and says, they just changed my life. I am a completely different person literally was there with them for 45 minutes to an hour. Andy immediately goes, let's bring that guy in. Now here's how he did it. And here's how the military should do it. They're here every day from these hours to these hours. It's sent out in an email. Everybody has it. There's pinned up papers everywhere that says, you can't miss this. It's in the bathroom. It's everywhere. You know that this guy is here. If you want to, be slotted to go talk to this person, you can click on a link that has the calendar, that has the time, click a time of what day you want to do it. You will then go talk to them. Everybody is going to be able to schedule themselves to go do it. And nobody will know that you're there. I'm a recruiter. How is my boss not going to know where I am? That's part of the beauty of this. We have mandatory meetings that are going to be happening with the CEO that he has, where he actually sits down face to face with every single person in the, his entire company. And he talks to them for like 30 minutes and says, for real, what is it you're dealing with in real life? Don't lie to me. You tell me if your boss is screwing you over, if you're having difficulties with coworker, you tell me the truth, everything, and there will be no reprisals. That's how you do it because You have to give them a reason to be gone and you have to give them a reason that people aren't going to know I still don't know. And I helped bring these guys in. have no idea how many people went and talked to them. None. Zero. It was on a different floor. So they went to a floor. You didn't know where they went. They went down the stairs. They might be going to lunch. They might go to the gym. They might go. That's how it should be done. That's how it should be done. that again, that's just my humble opinion. No, I, know, and that's, and that's really, you know, that's, and that's, uh, you know, why I started remote warrior, you know, with the whole thing. It's like trying to bring some semblance of that because that's something that identified super early on, right? Was, yeah, we've got this, these operational psychologists embedded in the unit, but they're not read into the exact same stuff we are. Right. So we can't talk about a bunch of things, right? Exactly. Like you hit on, right? I can't sit there and say, Oh, I was flying missions X, Y, Z. and doing ABC and this happened, it's falling so short on actually getting these guys non-stigmatized help getting them to understand that if you need to go and talk to someone, you can. I've heard horror stories of like guard units and stuff that are pulling vet center records and then holding it against people. And it's like, that is not the f*cking right thing at all. Like, you can't just keep grinding these people away and and punishing them every time they go to seek help. Like one, you're screwing your community. You're screwing the country's security. Right. You want to talk about national security implications like Jesus, like who do you think goes and fills all the contract gigs right that that nobody wants to go do because it's in, you know, god awful places and things like that. And they got to make one hundred and fifty K to make it worth it. It's it's all the ex fricking, you know, sensors and pilots and, know, that go and fill these gigs. if you're not taking care of them at this level, you're hurting yourself overall. It's like this isn't just a hey, well, once they take off the uniform then they can deal with that. It's like, no, you don't understand the long-term implications the leadership and the change makers and the decision makers here, continuing to ignore this problem, acting like it doesn't exist, because exactly like what you're explaining, all it ends up being at the end of the day is people don't buy into it. Which is exactly why, everybody trying to get that girl's number. And it's like, that's, that's the perfect example. they're going to find a way to make a joke out of it or something, you know, right. They're going to exactly, you know, it's freaking thrive off of it. But when you do that and it clearly misses the mark, right. In that scenario, because nobody, nobody, nobody's taking it seriously then. And that should be your first freaking line of like, sh*t, maybe we missed the mark on this, right? And we need to restructure this exactly like you said though, increasing the visibility of it, right? Of those programs, bringing in someone that actually gets it, right? And can speak the language, can understand the culture, Because that's the biggest problem, Why does the Department of Veteran Affairs trying to push for a million people to get enrolled this year and, know, their, numbers are down It's like, because you keep hiring civilians as doctors that don't understand. like, if you truly want to you know, make this work then you need the right people in the room that understand from a baseline level. what the job is, right? I need somebody from, SOF (SpecOps) to be trained in as a psychologist embedded in the unit. need somebody, you know, with our PAs to have a psychological background that can speak to both sides because that's the only way you make that connection. You know, otherwise all we're doing is trying to treat this in a vacuum that just doesn't work at the end of the day, right? Because you're always going to be missing some mark, It's why a lot of people and myself included, It's why I've walked away from different therapies you know, throughout my seven years of being out because I'm like, yeah, I understand what you're trying to do, but we're not, we're on different playing fields completely, And so I'm never going to be able to get there because I can't even get a basic understanding of, know, for me walking into a freaking, let's say a VA appointment and being like, Hey, do know what a drone is? You know, and they're just like, huh? And I'm like, I'm like, here we go. I got to spend 25 minutes of the 30, 30 minute appointment explaining what my job was and how I can be, you know, mentally deployed, but physically stateside. Right. Because even that concept after 20 years of doing this, you know, as a country, I just had it happen to a buddy a couple of months ago. You know, he got, he was getting med boarded. He's one of those individuals earlier that I mentioned that's getting med boarded for PTSD. He's been doing it for 18 f*cking years. That dude's hundreds of people. I personally, I mean, it just, he's been through so f*cking much and the flight doc looked at him and went, well, you didn't deploy, so how can you have trauma? And it's like, are we f*cking serious with this? Like, are you kidding me? 20 years and we're still taking this sh*t for granted. and still ignoring what's happening, even when all the signs are in front of us, And that's the thing that kills me with, like I said, I'll never point direct fingers, but the silence that's in this community is makes me sick to my stomach because everybody wants to act like it's not a problem. But I guarantee anybody that's a pilot or a sensor operator has lost at least one person to suicide. That if they didn't know, they knew, you know, through somebody, something like that, or was at their unit. because it's happened so f*cking many times. So many times. I mean, I've lost count at this point. think in 15 years, I think there's 40 different people plus that I've known that have lost their life to suicide in this community. And it's because of crap like this. It's because of stigmas like this that aren't being acknowledged, aren't being, you know, hey, You know, we need to put a precedence into taking care of these people and not just continuing to check a f*cking box it. And something that you said there that I think, right, it's not just, I think because it's suicide, it's easier for people to mentally go, well, I didn't, air quotes, get him killed, get her killed. She chose that, he chose that. And so it's easier for the command. Mm-hmm. cover that up on Google, to take it away from the internet so you can't know about it. But I think what you just said, I think the silence that I'm hearing from you. Hmm. There's a reason I've been wanting to talk to somebody who's done this job for quite some time. And I'm pretty well connected with a lot of people. I, you are the first person that's willing to openly talk about this. And the reason, as you alluded to earlier, that I think we made such a quick connection so fast is because I have seen firsthand with something as simple as going and talking to uh psychologist where I'm trying to get her number. And I understand that this is was for the same for me. It was a checkbox. I don't think it's as terrible what we were doing as it was for you guys. For this reason, I can, I can rationalize why you would want to just get this done real fast, pull the bandaid off. And then if people have real problems, they've already met her. They've already talked to her. They're much more willing. much more likely in maybe in the, our commands mind to then go seek her out and talk to her later while everybody's gone on 3 day, four day weekends. You can take your time and go talk to this person. They're still going to be at work. I can rationalize that when you have something, a program that's been doing this for 20 years let's just talk about burnout. Just the number of people that are leaving because they can't stay. And when you're brought in on a dog and pony show and they go, well, gosh darn it. Why is it all these people leave? mean, goodness, we think we treat y'all well enough. And I don't know why they sound like they work at a general store in the 1800s, but to me, it almost, they have to come off as being so simple minded that if that were a true question and you fired back a real answer at them, they would be so appalled by reality. that they wouldn't be able to grasp what you said. And of course you would absolutely get hammered and they'd probably kick you out. The fact that here's part of it. The fact that they are, I don't know why that came on, hang on. The fact that they are covering this up on the internet and the fact that they are. absolutely aware of that suicide is an issue, not just with people getting out, but people on duty are committing suicide. I've had that happen with a job I worked at where somebody didn't show up for their shift and they had same thing, put a gun, unfortunately in their mouth and they had taken their own life. That to me reeks of, you can't do that for 20 years and pretend that's some unforeseen issue. You know it's there at the level, I'm not saying all the way at the top, but at the level of the people that are there on a day-to-day basis, on that base, they're making decisions. They absolutely know that's an issue and they know it well enough to make sure that the information doesn't get out. That's why it's being censored by somebody. that's again, someone in command is making those calls. Somebody in command is making sure that that is taken down. Bro, that to me, we've seen so much in this country of people who are suffering in silence. we have all these campaigns of 22 a day and blah, blah, blah, blah. We're always talking about the veterans after they get out. And nobody's talking about the suffering that's happening in the military right now. As we speak, this is happening to somebody right now who's flying patterns. who hasn't slept well in a couple of years minimum, who is completely detached from society, who's detached from the rest of the military because if you complain, if you tell the truth, the people are going to mock you because you didn't happen to have your feet on foreign soil when you dropped the bombs. One of the jobs I was recruiting for with the Constellas, which bought Triple Canopy, bought Blackwater, one of those jobs that I forgot to mention was, yeah, one of the guys I was helping recruit for was drone pilots. And because of, I remembered it only when I was reading in the book on killing remotely, that it talks about how contractors, there was that conflict where contractors can't be allowed to drop bombs on people. So they're only allowed to fly recon. They're only allowed to do drones without armament. And I was recruiting, I was helping, I wasn't recruiting directly. I was helping the recruiter because they're struggling to find this. And here's what, here's the parameters they gave me. This what they told me. All you need to know is this. We're paying them 60,000 upfront when they graduate from the training. We're going to be giving them basically about between 60 and 80,000 per year to do the job. They're going to be in Kuwait. They're going to be in now. I know they're going to be a metal shipping container, but they're going to be over there. They're not going to be in combat, but they're going to be deployed. And then, they, they, they don't have to have flight. Um, experience, however, we're looking for pilots. If you can find anybody that's ever flown anything that's ideal secondary, anybody who is in special operations, anybody SOF we can train them. I didn't find anybody for that program. And I personally was recruiting directly from SOF went to Fort Lewis, uh, JBLM and recruited directly from special forces retirees. I'm recruiting SOF guys. That's who I want on my team because I'm literally recruiting guys I'm about to deploy within a year. Mm-hmm. It was so hard once you start talking to these people and you're explaining what a great idea this is and they're looking at you like you have a 3rd eyeball. And I'm like, what are you guys looking at? It didn't dawn on me until I read this book, until I'm listening to you. They already knew the deal. Those people already knew the deal. Now will say it is a great idea that if people like me who are very much in touch with combat have been there, can handle the stress of being deployed multiple times, if that person were put in that seat instead of a kid, who didn't even know at 19 years old, that's what he was signing up for. And by the way, you're about to walk into a crap storm and that's going to be your life for the next few years. That that's the thing I want everybody to take away from our talks, man, is this is happening right now as we speak, after this podcast, after you've listened to this entire podcast, it will continue happening. When we do our next podcast, it's still going to be happening and people are likely there's always a likelihood that somebody is going to take their life because no change is happening. And when this loss of life is not counted in the stat sheets and it's covered up on Google, that doesn't make their life any less valuable. And so I personally want to, I want to be very careful with this because I want to give families you know, time to grieve and I want to be respectful, but I also want to bring awareness that their lives mattered, did amazing things for their country. And when somebody looks at you and laughs and is like, you can't have PTSD or any of your right fellow, uh, fellow pilots have, have been told that they can't have PTSD because what they were doing was playing a video game. What they were doing was No more than watching a screen and clicking some buttons. That is not the same thing as taking fire and taking someone's life up close. Well, guess what? When I was, when I first get to Ranger Battalion and they look at me and we're going over just the basics of my job and I'm trying to grasp what it is I'm doing. Cause again, I didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I came from the Marine Corps, so I'm ready. Whatever it is, let's do it. September 11th just happened. That's why I'm here. And I bring this back to 9 11 because we started this podcast at 9 0 3 a.m. on September 11th, 2025. It's the day that changed my entire life's trajectory. It changed your life's trajectory because once again, 9 11 was the flagpole that we have all been drawn to. We wanted to take out evil people before they could do that to our country again, so that that never happens on our soil ever again. Brother, it's, been amazing talking to you. People's lives are at stake as we speak and we're going to continue to hammer this home and you're welcome back as many times as you ever want to be back. You're setting up programs to help people like you. One thing you didn't tell is how many people are involved in this. If you would share the numbers of how many people are involved in this entire process and do the support for these programs. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one where, you know, we're actually working with the VA right now, the Veterans Experience Office, to pull the exact veteran numbers. But right now, my estimate active duty, it's like 200,000 people with this, right? Because it's not just pilots, not just sensors, right? It's the Intel, you know, analysts that are behind the scenes, you know, literally in these people's headsets. saying, hey, that's an RPG or that's a piece of PVC pipe, and then having to sit there and watch the strike and then clip the footage and then replay it over and over and over again, You can't tell me, yep, you know, can't, exactly, exactly, exactly. So, you know, it's, there's hundreds of thousands of people that are, you know, experiencing this at this point, you know, and we all know, especially with Everything that's happened of recent, you know, this year with, you know, drones and remote warfare and everything else with Ukraine, with, you know, the Skydio signing a contract with the DoD. This stuff isn't going anywhere. All right. And this is just going to get worse with it because we don't know what the full blown long-term effects of this are, trying to get this large group of people, lot larger than people think. the help they need because right now it's falling on deaf ears. Yeah. And that's the true tragedy. All right, brother, we're going to stop there. I'm going to get back into a lot of these topics with you and we're going to delve more into it. The one thing that I, I, I'm going to kind of just tease the next episode. I didn't fully go into the movie deja vu. The main point I wanted to make was Denzel Washington recognizes now that they, this girl's life can be saved and now he wants to save her. Mm-hmm. don't care about this girl's life. And that's conflict in the movie initially is the moral, you mentioned an example and you're gonna share more of these, but the one of the 2 guys walking together and one pulls out the gun and just shoots the other and then he keeps walking. The moral injury of bad guy just murdered somebody, let's take him out and you are there amped up ready to kill this. piece of garbage who just murdered somebody. Mm-hmm. And what do you do? Just follow them and just follow them. And then you pass them off to somebody else. Watch that guy. He just killed somebody. And you're, sure the person that you would say that to would be like, I know you're new here. Here's the deal. I've watched people being beheaded. I've watched people burn other people alive. I've watched people torturing people, r*ping people nonstop in front of me in high definition. And I've been doing this for years. Mm-hmm. That's nothing, bro. He shot him. That's not even a Tuesday. that is nothing compared to what we're gonna be watching for years on end. And you may not be the one who gets to, say justice, right? You see him murder somebody, you get to be the one that kills him. You go away on your rotation, you come back and Stay Puft's gone. This guy is gone. And now you feel, cause you're a human being, you feel robbed because that was your guy. You watch them commit murder. You watch them behead somebody. You want payback from this piece of garbage. And instead they're just gone. You're on this guy now. And now somebody else is like, bro, you better watch that guy because I watched him r*pe this little boy, this little girl. And he's like, bro, that's, that's another Tuesday. What are we talking about here? And just to understand. That what you guys are having to see on a daily basis, the whole world yesterday, September 10th, the all of America, I'll say, got to see that there was a Charlie Kirk that this, this guy was out on a college campus, just sharing his beliefs, just sharing a lot of just common sense with people that have been indoctrinated into not even comprehending common sense anymore. And he was murdered. It was definitely, I mean, it was a political murder. He wasn't shot because of a road rage incident. He was shot because of his beliefs, his ideas that he's sharing and whoever it is that pulls this trigger, it doesn't matter. That's not what I'm talking about right now. What I'm talking about is everybody got to witness and we almost saw it with Donald Trump, a person be murdered on live TV, on a live, you know, obviously it's on recorded is where you're seeing it. This is what you guys are seeing and much worse every single day. And by the way, strip away every normal thing that would make your life normal. Any of your ability to talk to somebody about that. Let's take that away. Have all these have that rolling in your brain hundreds of times of all these missions of all the horrific things that you've seen done to children, to innocent men and women, to old people, to people that were defenseless. Mm-hmm. Like, bro, that absolutely breaks my heart there are people out there that are choosing to take their own life because it's better in their mind in that moment than to suffer like this for another day. That's what I know your mission is, is to save lives. There is no greater mission than to save lives. Tell people where they can go to follow you. what you're putting out and that will be the end of this episode and we'll get into more next time. Absolutely. ah So remotewarriorlc.com is our website there. And we've got tons of different resources as well, right? I've created all the way down to a called the Fog of War guide, essentially just putting plain language into some of way that people might be feeling specifically for the operators themselves, being pilots and sensors, Intel, whoever falls into that category. But also, We've got guides for family members. We've got guides for spouses, That like we've had our own spouses and family members help curate and add to, Just to make it seem a little more normal, right? Because that's really what we're coming down to. we talk about suicide what it comes down to is that people feel like they're the only ones going through that. I can tell you from personal experience, that's couldn't be farther from the truth. we're also on pretty much every social media out there. Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, with Remote Warrior under there for it. And I said, we're constantly, you know, being able to push these resources out. And then the last thing that's came from it is actually is ammo can right? So there's our panic packs there and it's actually something that I created because I just got really tired of white not going through panic attacks so it's a bunch of grounding tools in a 11 inch ammo can hits on all 5 senses got to 2 devices, if will, per sense and the beauty of it. There's no internet required, things like, like tuning forks. um And stuff like that just to be able to pull you out of a panic attack lavender rollers Different things like little fidget things right because that's really what comes down to and if you've never experienced one They're f*cking horrible We don't know what the threat is We can't figure it out, but make it stop and you're like, I don't know what to do Alright, so it's to pull you out of that mindset and reground you in that moment we've got a nice little script that we add in there that walks you through exactly what to do. Even if you dumped everything out and refilled it with a bunch of your own stuff, it's still works, We realized really quickly that, holy cow, this isn't just for remote warriors. This is for anybody, right? That, that deals with panic attacks, depression, anxiety, you know, high stress jobs, that kind of stuff too. So. um You know being dads, you know, and obviously the business insider interview coming out next week one week Here so that'll be that'll be a huge one. So look for that on all our socials, too um Yeah for sure for sure Awesome brother, well again, thank you. Sincerely thank you for your service to our country. I know that you didn't sign up for what you ended up doing, but for somebody to have come through what you've come through. And then this is the most important part, having the courage to take on the hate that you're gonna get, the amount of discomfort that... comes from wanting to step outside of the circle and be the one that points back and goes, we need this fixed. And you already know that there's going to be people that are going to automatically call you names, and you're not going to be welcomed in certain circles. That's what I'm saying. are that I already know that's there. Right. And I know that there are already Rangers that absolutely hated the way my face looked the first time they saw me and they hated me then for no reason. And then now I'm giving him all the ammunition because I'm talking about the ridiculous checkbox that we went through of talking to our psychologist, which was a joke. Right. And again, we were very much ready for and very willing to go directly into combat and into the worst of the worst scenarios where we're going to be pinned down. This is going to be Black Hawk down times 2 times 5. And we went on those missions anyways. This is a suicide mission. Nobody's making it back. Who's going? Ranger regiment, because the SEALs won't do it. I'm sorry, DevGru won't do it. And Delta Force refused to do it. So who else is left? Here am I, Lord, send me. And at the end of the day, you didn't sign up to do that and you were put through that. the fact that you had the courage to go through it anyways. and then now having the courage to step out and go, it's not okay that we are committing suicide It's not okay that cocaine is rampant in our circles. It's not okay that all of the shift work is creating insomniacs and we're supposed to be at the top of our game making life and death decisions. we'll get into the next podcast, all the different other aspects and Maybe more of what people want to hear the nitty gritty gross parts of the things that you've actually endured. But I just wanted to make a baseline here where people can understand where you're coming from and some of the challenges that you had to overcome to even be on a podcast and to not put a gun in your mouth and join the numbers of people, like you said, 40 plus people that you're aware of that have taken their life. that should be alive today, that should be with their families, that should be here helping. And instead, we've lost those people. So thank you for being on here, brother. Absolutely. because my brain loves to drop that sh*t off and be like, close the window and I'm like, you idiot, why'd you do that for?