John Dailey, a Marine Raider turned mentor, writer, and coach, as he lays bare the gritty reality of establishing MARSOC and the transition from military excellence to civilian innovation. Through tales of accountability and the mentorship that underpins elite military units, John provides us with a firsthand account of the resilience and adaptability required to succeed both in uniform and beyond it. His voice brings a raw and authentic perspective on guiding others using the principles refined through service, offering a masterclass in leadership that transcends the battlefield.
Check out John's website for more info on his coaching program and book!
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John Dailey, a Marine Raider turned mentor, writer, and coach, as he lays bare the gritty reality of establishing MARSOC and the transition from military excellence to civilian innovation. Through tales of accountability and the mentorship that underpins elite military units, John provides us with a firsthand account of the resilience and adaptability required to succeed both in uniform and beyond it. His voice brings a raw and authentic perspective on guiding others using the principles refined through service, offering a masterclass in leadership that transcends the battlefield.
Check out John's website for more info on his coaching program and book!
Walkingpoint.org
If you enjoy our content, sign up for our Patreon and get access to additional content, bonus episodes, and access each episode before they drop on Spotify or iTunes.
We greatly appreciate you and your support, so please remember to LIKE, FOLLOW, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE!
Patreon: patreon.com/securityhaltpodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/securityhalt/
X : https://twitter.com/SecurityHalt
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@security.halt.pod
Produced by Security Halt Media
Let's go.
Speaker 2:The man who is the best, the man who's been trained to ignore Ignore weather To live off the land. Job was disposed of enemy personnel To kill Period Win by attrition.
Speaker 1:Get that little bit of stillness and it's like, alright, something's coming. Well, welcome back to another great episode of Secure Out Podcast, always on your host, danny Caballero. Today I have the pleasure of bringing you John Daly Marshawe, grader, writer, coach, and today this is your episode, sir. We're going to talk to you about your life during the military, after, and one of the things that I'm passionate about talking a lot more this season is mentorship, not only within the military, but how do we bring all those lessons learned into our civilian work space? How do we mentor, coach and guide our non-military brothers and sisters?
Speaker 2:Great Well, I'm super happy to be here and I've been told that before I do anything, I have to say that my opinions are mine alone and don't reflect the United States Special Operations Command or Martsock or where I still work, or anybody else, or my wife she was adamant. No, my opinions reflect her. John Daly's opinions Absolutely.
Speaker 1:No. So, john, tell us, how did you find yourself into the War of the Mars sock? Because you were in it from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was really fortunate throughout my career. I started as an infantryman and then was moved into a sniper platoon very early on. That step kind of led to moving to Fort Recon after that where I spent the bulk of my career. And then in following 9-11, the Marine Corps was told the Secretary of Defense recognized that there's going to be more of a requirement for special operators, sf, the Form of the Battalion, the SEALs were told to form more teams and the Marine Corps who had opted out in 87 when Socom stood up, was told that hey, you're going to participate.
Speaker 2:I was really fortunate to be selected to be one of the team leaders in that first test bed unit. It was called Detachment 1 and that's largely that time. That's what my book's about. That unit existed for three years and then, when post our deployment to Iraq in 2004, the decision was that Mars sock would stand up a full command and when that happened that one was disestablished. I moved straight over to Mars sock to help get the school started and figure out how we were going to train the Marine Raiders.
Speaker 1:It was definitely a tumultuous time period those early years, because everybody thinks that it would be an easy thing to adapt. But Marine Corps command they didn't see it that way, the Marine.
Speaker 2:Corps has never really been a fan of any organization within it that considers itself special or really different. It was the same with the Marine Raiders in World War II that we draw our lineage towards. They only made it for two years, even though they were responsible for the initial landings in Guadicala and Macon Island. And then you're really holding the island of Guadicala after two years. The Marine Corps got rid of them. The Marine Corps, we're really, really good at what we do, but we're that way because we're very tight-knit and parochial. We had some fights in the early days of Mars sock to remain in existence.
Speaker 1:Waiting for that place at the table and then having to constantly advocate for yourselves as a fighting force. That's a beauty of Mars sock that the guys within there, they've all had to really live up and be that walking standard. In SF you can get away with screwing up and it's not going to take your entire mission. Within Mars sock it's. Every man has to be accountable and has to really understand that. When I put on that uniform, when I'm presenting myself to the rest of the force, I got to represent for the entirety of Mars sock.
Speaker 2:That's. The Marines always feel that way, but we're to put it in context Mars sock is, I think, less than 10% of the size of a use of sock. We're small. We've always been prided ourselves on doing more with less, and that certainly transitions over into Mars sock. We also one of the things we pride ourselves on is starting with the Marines who've already been in the Marine Corps. So we don't have there's not the opportunity to go to the recruiter in high school and say, hey, I want a chance to be a raider. You got to do a little time, get a little dirt on your fingernails, before you get that opportunity.
Speaker 1:I would have to imagine it is a big step up, especially so looking for the senior candidates, looking for the guys who are well established, that have proven and have that commitment already there. They've already shown like, hey, I'm in here for the long haul. In those early years, what was it like? What was it like going through those first deployments? We often focus on the Navy SEALs, ranger, green Berets, to have, you know, gpc cards, get whatever you need off the shelf. I know from talking to a lot of guys it wasn't like that from our sock. It wasn't this like, hey, we're going to give you everything. It's a very, still very hard fought, you know, to survive in combat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I can only talk about, like my deployments with the Debt One Deployment with Debt One. When I came to Marsock I spent all my time in the school. But when we stood up with the Detachment One, the budget that they had set around and figured out was inadequate to outfit us right. So we had to buy, you know, weapons and buildings to live in and you know everything and communication. There was nothing. You know, nothing existed. So you know toilets and toilet paper for the. You know the duration, you know quad cons, foot stop and vehicles and all the maintenance stuff for the vehicle. So it was, it was an interesting time being able to, and we had some folks that were able to borrow, that really understood the soft procurement side of things. A good buddy of mine, you know, came over and really helped us out and was able to, you know, kind of show us how he could, you know, recruit money from other places and pay the bills. But, you know, at the end of the day we were very well outfitted.
Speaker 2:But it's always with the Marine Corps, like I said, we pride ourselves on doing more with less. So you know, especially the early days in Marsock when the Marine Corps had no idea of what you know special operations was, or in some cases they thought they did. You know no idea of what the equipment was required or why the equipment the Marine Corps had wasn't good enough. Really, before they figured out the funding streams in House, o'conn would take care of its. You know self-procure type of equipment and responsibilities. So there was a line I'm not a budget guy, you know, sitting in the back row in the periphery of some of those meetings and just mine was, you know, blown when people start talking. You know big, big, you know numbers with a whole lot of equals behind them to outfit. You know a force, a brand new force, yeah.
Speaker 1:When you climb up and rank, we often like for the outside perspectives like it's always cool, it's always fun, you're always in it. It's like no, but a lot of times when, when you grow and rank, now you're sitting in these meetings going over the numbers, and that's the boring but vital situation that we live in. It's how do we make sure we get everything we want, everything we need, and you got to get it before the end of the year and if there's any money left at the end of the year, come up with something to buy. Dear God, please come up with something to buy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that there's a saying, that's, you know, inexperienced tacticians discuss tactics, but experienced tacticians discuss logistics. And that's you know the absolutely true. You know the, you know special operations organizations do nothing, you know, without the support, backbone and infrastructure that that allows them to be successful. And I saw that, which the first time it really boggled my mind was, was when I was with Forrest recon in 2001.
Speaker 2:We were on deployment, hanging out in Australia at a pub when the soccer game that was on TV switched and it was the trade center, the towers, you know, and it was kind of late evening, you know, 10 or 11 o'clock at night there. And then, before we knew it, we were sitting off the coast of Afghanistan and they, you know, trying to make a 800 mile movement, you know, in helicopters and figuring out how many people you could get on board, how many pallets of water, how many, you know, rolls of toilet paper, how many batteries of each of the million types of batteries that we use, so that really being able to watch that was was wildly boring but also incredibly fascinating, Because it was, you know, nobody could have done the things they did on the ground were it not for the, the logisticians and the people crunching numbers and figuring out pallet size, space and cubes yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's all fun and games until your heel little crashes because somebody then allocate the right thing to go on that pallet with human beings and the weights were off. That's the things that we forget about when we're young and so gone hold again in combat. We only focus on rifles and bullets and the reality is it's a giant machine. Even the smallest organizations. You make your money on the support, the support mechanism. That's why it's an imperative. Like we, we live and we live and die by the support structures that we develop before we go into the fight. And our support people are the best in the world. Yeah, you can't do it without him. You can't.
Speaker 1:One of my closest friends, he was one of those guys early on, G want, you know, he was a support kid and he said to himself I'm not that important. And next thing, you know, he did an entire career as support NCO and his mission was the most important thing in those early days, Like where are you getting your bullets? Where are you getting your batteries, your fuel? It was those guys on convoys, those guys that were fighting out of their soft skin vehicles getting the vital resources to our troops. And nowadays we don't think about that. That's. It's one of the biggest components to any fighting force. We saw it play out with Russia recently.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, I mean an army moves on its stomach or you know, on its, on its logistics. The early in in F Afghanistan we got a bad batch of fuel and you know a whole marine expeditionary unit kind of ground to a halt because the you know the just bad fuel. So there's just so many things that go into that, other than you know what we think of as the fun stuff and the war fighting stuff. So it's it's always good to give a shout out to the you know the people that don't get. Get it, we're behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:And I would. I would argue that those lessons learned, those hard lessons learned of failures, those become amazing teaching and coaching lessons later on in life as you're mentoring and helping people understand how to plan out to accomplish the impossible. All those hard lessons learned are easy things. You can pull out of your bag and be like oh wait, I have a situation we can talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and, like you said, not just with coaching military folks but, you know, making sure that a civilian organization has. You know, if you thought everything through right, you know the first question I ask is where are you going Right? Do we have a really clear idea of, you know, the tentative grid on the map that you're headed for? Because we really, you know we're wasting our time, we're spending our wheels if we're not heading in the right direction. So, before we run off into a different, you know, asthma, let's, let's get on, get a whiteboard and let's, let's you know a map and pinpoint the objective you know, just like you would in training or in an operation.
Speaker 1:That is so. That's such an easy step that so many people are lacking. There's all this fire and passion. You want to do something right now, whether it's you want to bring the next greatest product to market, you want to do the greatest. You want to be a great individual in your organization. But you have all this power burning within you and you're just spinning your wheels, but there's no direction. At the end of the day, you come home you're like, yeah, I did so much. I feel that, but what's that? How do you drive that? How do you actually put it towards something of purpose and usefulness?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what do you have to show for it? You know, at the end of a hard day's work, you should be able to look back and say, hey, I accomplished this and this. You know two, three things and I generally think that, hey, you know, if you can not three things out, that's a, that's a pretty good, solid day's work. You could be proud, yeah.
Speaker 1:I often look back and I realized the analogy of picking things up from one pile and moving it and making another pile. In the military. We see that in the civilian space all the time. After your time in service, looking at where you're at now, how difficult is it to mentor and coach? Or is it perfectly in line with how you were leading in the military?
Speaker 2:I think it's very close and that's what drove me to it. You know, I started I'm not even sure how it's the initial kind of getting started. The idea came up, but I think I was talking to a friend there that works in the civilian sector and he was kind of venting about, hey, you know, my organization is this, this and this. And I'm like, well, you know, did you ever just I mean some really basic things, things that you know a young NCO knows, right, yeah, and you know his eyes got real wide and he's like, hey, can you come in and talk to my bosses about this? I'm like, well, yeah, yeah, man, and then I realized that there's, you know, almost one for one.
Speaker 2:You can, you can really look at anything in the military planning process or the military decision making process and, you know, tie it directly to you know, any other organization. And I think that I found that you know there's a little bit of, you know, military worship or hero worship, you know, and from the people who hadn't been in, and that's, you know, nice. But if you kind of make things tactical for them, right, you know kind of explain, hey, you know, on a patrol you've got to. You know, your primary concerns got to be security. You know, hey, here's how kind of here's how that applies to you. You've got to plan for you know what might happen and have immediate action drills at the ready. You know, and they, you know they seem to respond well to that. So that's really how I got the got started.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's something that I've realized as well there's a lot of people that will seek us out for the background, and that gets our foot in the door. But then the next part is being able to take the lessons learned. What made you successful in the military? Be able to craft an approach that takes whether it's working with somebody that works in a plastic production company or somebody that's in a supply or even a software company be able to break down their issues and understand their pain points, and I think that we're perfectly suited for that. We're often put in places where it's the problem is really abstract, it's ill-defined and it's like oh, I got a planning process, the planning guide that they give us. It's a pain in the ass, but I tell you what in the civilian world, it works. It still works, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, we don't always, you know, as a military, we don't always execute plans really well, yeah, but we have a really good process for developing them, you know, and we think through everything. And particularly we're working with kind of an R-line to work. A host nation force, you know, and probably doesn't have no clue what they want or where they're going. You know, and so you've got to. You've got to. But you also can't come in and say, hey, here's what you're going to do, right, you've got to make it. You know their idea and you've got to, you know, finesse a little bit to make sure that you know we're accomplishing our mission, we're enabling them to. You know, help us accomplish our mission in the future.
Speaker 2:And, like you said, you know I think the military pedigree resume will get you in the door, but you know that won't last long unless you're providing real value to whomever the customer may be. There's, you know there's a lot of people that have that, that idea that, hey, I'm out now, I'm going to be. You know there's 20 million. You know former military consultants, you know special operations guys on LinkedIn. You could, if they kicked all those guys off, there would be like two people on LinkedIn, and then I'm sure some of them are good, but you know, if you're not consistently, you know, showing value you're providing your customer with, with a benefit, then their appreciation for your service will only go so far.
Speaker 1:Now I want to take it back to your transition specifically, which is a constant issue and a point of fear for a lot of guys that come from our communities. I mean, we've, we are willing to go into the unknown, willing and comfortable going into firefights, doing insane things. But the moment that the sun starts to set on our careers, a lot of brothers start getting a lot of fear. They start feeling that trepidation of I don't know what I'm going to do next. I've never done or thought about what I would do next and they begin to be paralyzed by fear and it's almost like they're completely unaware of who they truly are. Like dude, you've done the impossible. You've literally done the impossible. You've been through things that half of our American populace would never even dream of doing and even less would even actually take on. What do you got to fear when you went through your transition? What got you out of that fear and into taking actual steps towards success?
Speaker 2:Well, I, mine, was a little bit atypical, I think, because I I retired like two weeks later, went back to work, you know, the same place, kind of the same job, as a civilian. And have you know, I've worked there for 16 years now at the Marine Raider Training Center, which you know I love. But you know, a couple of years ago I realized that, you know, I wanted to do something else. You know I wanted to act, yeah, and then I had, you know, the Marine Corps had given me so many skills, you know, that I could, I could use. So I'm still in the mode of kind of working both, both gig, which leaves me really tired, but at some point I'll be able to step away. You know, I also really, really like said, I love what I do, I love being around Marines. You know, I was five this morning. I was out, you know, rucking with the young guys. It was a phenomenal time. So you know it's really hard to let that go, but you know I do, you know I do want to take on it.
Speaker 1:That's like a transition within a transition. Yeah, yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that, there's. There's a lot of guys find those GS positions and they're like, oh man, like I love what I'm doing, I'm going to transition into this. I've got a friend that found himself in that situation. One moment he's like I can't wait to get out, I'm done. And then finds a job another state, doing the same thing he was doing in the airport. He's like you know what I love this? Every morning I wake up, I go do the one part of the job that I loved. I work out with the guys I've got access to things that I love to do and work with. Like this is it, this is this feels home, this feels right. And a lot of guys do that. And then, just like you just said, it's like now I'm getting that itch, now like I'm wanting the, the pivot and yeah, I can imagine it's extremely exhausting, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think I really want to do something like totally on my own. I mean the brain core going to took me at 17 and taught me everything I needed to know. You know I was able to use all of that for now 16 years as a severe yeah, and I've been a good guy for what? 30, 7, 38 years. I've kind of I've kind of been sucking off the government tip. So at some point I've got to grow up and get a real job.
Speaker 2:But you know it's the and that's the other thing, because there certainly are, you know, civilians that work, yeah, that people have bad experiences with people that are. You know, don't keep in mind that the, you know the man and woman you know on the battlefield, the warfighter, you know I'm fortunate that. You know I'm working with same types of people that I've always been working with. So I don't, you know I have any issue reminding myself of that, but I do get to, you know, practice by coaching on on a lot of those. You know younger, you know Marines, yeah, so it's, it's good, but that's that really kind of kicked started the love of that and the idea that, hey, you know I can, I can do this on the free market.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And I got to ask you how rewarding is that to be connected with the next generation of Marines, like that's like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know when I get a moment or get a chance to just connect with another young Green Beret, it is one of the most rewarding moments. They're the next generation being able to impart just a little bit of knowledge. What does that feel like?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. That's the reason I'm still there. That's the best part of it. And there's a drug to end. They're super receptive. They want to suck in everything. Certainly, there are people that they've been doing it since thousands of years, that this generation is weak and soft and not hard like us. But there's massively, incredibly capable folks coming through our training and, I'm sure, coming through everybody's training. So I think our future is in pretty good hands, pretty capable hands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we tend to forget that the same things that people are saying now about the current group and generation of service members are the same thing people were saying about us when we first raised our hand and wanted to serve and we went through a meat grinder. I think we did pretty damn good for ourselves. The right people will find themselves in the jobs. The standards aren't being dropped to the point where it's just an online course. It's still really frigging hard to make a Marine. It's still really frigging hard to make an infantryman. It's still really frigging hard to make a Marsock Raider and a Green Beret. We're still targeting and actively recruiting individuals that want to accomplish the impossible. They're going to find them. Maybe the pools get shorter and smaller for a little bit. Then it'll get bigger and wider and we'll get more people in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they still exist. They're definitely still tough and rugged, but they're smarter, I think, yeah, smarter than we were. Obviously, as the battlefield changes and we're seeing that now, technology is yeah, I mean, it blew up during our time, from what the guys in Vietnam were accustomed to when I first came in a. Prick 77 radio. That was it A little knob to turn the frequency that?
Speaker 1:same radio. I was talking to a younger Green Beret on my team about him before I retired and they were looking at me like I was an absolute frigging alien. They're like what are you talking about? Yeah, you guys don't go through all these radios. No, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm like I'm not that old, yeah.
Speaker 2:Some things have absolutely gotten easier, but the rucks are still heavy, the miles are still long and the water's still cold. All of those things haven't changed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the misery factor is still there and it will always be there. When you started thinking about writing a book, what was the first thing that came to mind? What was the first driving force for that book?
Speaker 2:I took an unusual, got a pass. While I was in on active duty, right before I retired, I finished a bachelor's degree in Homeland Security. I was thinking I was going to be a security consultant like everybody. Everybody came.
Speaker 2:Yeah now they're everybody's coach. I pivoted from that as well. I got a degree in Homeland Security. I was going to take the world by storm. I didn't do that. I realized that I had the GI Bill to use because I had used a tuition assistance for the bachelor's degree. I also retired just about a year before you were allowed to give the GI Bill benefits to your spouse or children. I was damn well going to use every last penny of it.
Speaker 2:I went back. I really said, hey, what's the easiest thing I could do? I went up getting a master's degree in liberal studies and studied mainly literature. I've always loved to read, always loved to write, though I didn't do much of it. Then, when I finished that, I realized it was still a pretty good chunk of money left. One of my professors recommended applying to the Master of Fine Arts Writing Program at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. How I got in, I don't know, is actually like a very selective. It's one of the best in the nation. Maybe they had some veterans quotas they had to fill, but I sent in the only thing I had written and they accepted me. I got to go spend three years studying writing, having all night time and after work and whatnot.
Speaker 2:The culmination of that was to write a book. That was your thesis. You had to turn in a book. I had gone in for fiction, so I wrote a novel. That is not that great. That's a horrible sales pitch. I'll go back to it. It's a good story. I need to do a better job Too much. It needs a little work.
Speaker 2:I wound up really looking into this, meeting this lady who was writing a book about the Marine Raiders and it reached out to me for some questions about World War II Raiders. In the process I was like, yeah, I write. And she was like, can you send me something? I sent her a thing I had written about being in a Jaff and I wrecked in 04. She was like, hey, do you mind if I send this to my agent? He got ahold of me. He's like, yeah, I'd like to be your agent, let's turn this into a book. I'm like, yeah, I could do that a year. He got me a book deal and I spent a year banging out the story of my time in Detachment 1 and the startup of Marsock. It's kind of a whirlwind when you decide you're going to write a book in your spare time, even the thing that I'm realizing a lot of us have.
Speaker 1:I mean, we tend to discount what we've gone through and we don't value it. We are very quiet about what we've done. I mean, green Berets are horrible about this to a point where we're losing our history, the older history, because guys don't want to talk about it. We have some amazing Green Berets like John Strachler, meyer, james Dayskull, who are writing their prolific writers and they're putting out their history out there. But our generation of soft professionals we need to start kicking it into gear and start writing about what we experienced, what we saw. It's vital, it's important.
Speaker 1:I look at authors who have written. You know, alona Dawn is a great example. A lot of people don't know about the history of those early years, of what men were able to accomplish on the ground. And when we look at Marsock right now and we look at the individuals that we have, some service members have written. But I think our stories need to be told. Our soft professionals need to kick it into gear, need to find some time and tell the stories, because even as you sit here and you say, oh, you know, that's a little bit like no, like your book, we got to promote it. We got to get it out there because you're part of something that our youth need to read about and I think for us, our guys are age and be able to revisit that moment in time.
Speaker 2:I think you know. For me, about a year and a half ago I had the opportunity to bring a bunch of the debt one guys out to Marsock and most of them had never seen it.
Speaker 2:You know the facilities, the compound we were living, I mean literally in like plastic you know those pop-up, you know we were so to come out and see you know multi-million dollar ranges and shoot houses and breaching houses and dog kennels and everything you know. But a lot of them were like, hey, man, rio, thanks for telling this story and I think it's important. I'm a good friend, actually, with John Stryker Myers. You know his stuff is great and I think you're right, there's, you know there's, of course there's plenty of seal books you can get, but you know when you.
Speaker 2:So I work with a couple of, or volunteer with a couple of organizations that really are focused on trying to get veterans to write, because you know saying hey, I'm going to write a book is daunting, you know I mean that's huge, so I'm going to churn out 250, 300 pages. But you know, just putting something down something, and whether it's only for you, you know whether it's to, you know, share with your kids at some point. Or, you know, maybe you realize that, hey, you know I'm pretty good at this, yeah, so there's a couple. The Lethal Minds Journal is a really easy place to get stuff published and just kind of get your feet wet. Poetry, art, fiction, nonfiction, the Dead Reckoning Collective guys have got very, you know this veteran-focused writing.
Speaker 2:I was able to sit in on a I think it's a VA-sponsored veteran writing workshop earlier this week and just, you know people from all walks of life Vietnam to active duty that are just like, hey, man, let me write. So I think you know the big hurdle. The first hurdle is getting over the voice in your head that says you can't do it or you're not a writer. Yeah, you know. And then sitting down and actually putting pen to paper and shutting that voice up how did you structure?
Speaker 1:obviously you had, you know you had do outs, you were in a course. Is that what kept you an honest broker, having those deadlines from a class For?
Speaker 2:the during the class. You know, like I said what I wrote, there was a totally fiction book that, yeah, that kind of kept you focused. A looming deadline of hey, you want to graduate, you've got to write this for this book, for the actual memoir, same thing. I had a, you know, I told them a year. You know I probably if I would have told them six months, I think I probably would have finished it in six months. But as it was, I took a little over 11, right, yeah, and I would.
Speaker 2:You know there's, there's often the thought you know people say it all the time that hey, if you don't write every day, you're not a writer. I would go for weeks, you know, probably a month, you know, without you know the wheels turning but not actually putting any words on paper. So I mean there's, you know people write, you know I mean as many different ways as there are people. So you know that's. My thing is if you know somebody tells you, hey, you can't write or you're not a writer because you don't do this or you don't do it this way or that way or my way, you know the Stephen, stephen right Pressfield, who's a writer, legend of bag of ants.
Speaker 2:I mean he's, he's got some great books yeah, the War of Art, the, or, you know, anna News, the weekly email that he sends out, that's really just kind of focused and I've had the chance to email with him a little bit. You know a great guy and he, you know, offers great advice for young, or not even young, anybody who's wanting to break into writing, and there's like there's tons of opportunity for it. So no excuse not to try at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's, it's our history. We lived it the last 20 years. We. We owe it to our communities to be able to sit down and, even if it's just a newsletter, even if you start a blog sharing lessons learned. War is cyclical the same things that we went through, the same experiences. At some point, some young, non-commissioned officer is going to sit there and be like man. I really wish I had some lessons learned from somebody that's seeing this type of stuff. And it turns out that a lot of the things that I went through. After talking and reading the books of other green Berets, I'm like, oh shit, these are lessons learned that I could have picked up from Barnes and Noble and been reading my entire military career. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I remember it was passed around like the Holy Grail when I was, you know, when I came in in 87, there was this list of just stuff. You know, just patrolling tips, I think it's what it's called. It was just everything. You know. Make sure your mags are inserted with the rounds facing out. You know this. You know, wrap the riggers tape around your canteen so that you have it, you know, if you need it, you know, cut your toothbrush handle down to save weight. You know, a plastic MRE spoon, like on 15 inches of 550 cord well, you know you can use that to sketch. You know, or you know to use that. So I mean, there's just so many of these things that are. You know, I found it the other day and I was like sharing it with the young guy and they're like a lot of the equipment. They're like what the hell is this? But there are now a lot of more timeless things, like you know.
Speaker 2:Coming back on your you know, as you try to head into an ORP, you know, double backing on yourself setting up a sprinkling CS powder, like all of these things that the guys in Vietnam had to figure out, you know are likely to, you know, come back around.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe not a lot of them were not as useful in the desert, you know, eventually, but you know, I think you know we'll probably come back around and find that they are. You know, and then in the Jaff was kind of a big sniper battle. I had a sniper team there and there was stuff clicking in my head that you know I had read about Stalingrad and letting you know those sniper battles there and using, I mean, we were sticking hats up on sticks and observing, you know we found the sniper that way, you know, watching a you know Iraqi, you know, pulling like a brick that he had kind of chipped out, pulling it out and taking shots through like man. You know I've read about this. So there's just, you know, everything comes back around All right and the more the bigger the toolbox you have, the more capable you are of fixing any situation. You know, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So I'm a big fan of reading. It is. It's one of the things that we tend to lose when we're dealing with TBI's. And I tell guys like just because you have TBI doesn't mean the world's over. I survive it, I deal with it. Memory's compromised, but I got my reading back and all you have to do is be committed.
Speaker 1:Don't put it off. Don't just settle for audio books, Don't settle for the limitations. Take some time, keel up, take a knee and it is frustrating it with migraines but sit down for 10 minutes, Read for 10 minutes, even if you have to restart, and maybe you have to start with five minutes. I know when I was starting it was very much five minutes, 10 minutes. Read, follow along with your fingers. Don't lose place Every morning. Start back, Keep going with it. You will get that back.
Speaker 1:I know that first I didn't want to, I didn't want to engage with it. I'm like I get migraines, I can't focus on anything unless I highlight and I follow along. But after that's a beauty of retraining yourself to read and then afterwards it was like I couldn't stop. I've read more in the last three years of my life than I ever had in school, ever had in SF is because once you realize how easily you can lose something and how vital information is in these books, you're willing to do it. You're willing to sit down and you realize like, oh shit, I can be a master of these things if I just dedicate myself to reading, dedicate myself to go back to school, it's all there. You have the power to do it.
Speaker 1:Don't just get comfortable with audio books and having somebody else read it to you in that awesome voice. Be willing to buy that actual physical book and challenge yourself. I know it's made a difference in my world. I could not see my life going back to not reading consistently, and it's really freaking awesome to be able to sit down with somebody and then pick up their book and be like, oh damn, that is amazing. I just had that guy on the show, yeah.
Speaker 2:I've always been. I mean, since I was a kid I was a big, big reader and I really kind of went down a little bit. You know, as I was in the Marine Corps, especially as I got more senior and had kids, you know I was reading in books and reading Harry Potter or whatever. You know, the reading for learning is really ramped back up and, like you said, I get just killer migraines and sometimes just can't do it. But I've never been a fan of the audio books. I wish I was, almost so I could just learn more stuff.
Speaker 2:And I think once you hit a certain age too, you realize that man, I'm on the downhill side, man, and there's so much shit that I want to learn. Right, and there's, you know. I think that's one of the things that a lot of veterans feel like, hey, man, the best is over. You know, and then have trouble adapting and you know, particularly with all the just singing amount of suicide and things like that. But I mean, man, the world's an awesome place. You know America is an awesome country. You know not every day, but you know most days and you know there's so much cool shit to learn and see and do and you know people to talk to, and so you know it breaks my heart when people decide you know whatever, for whatever reason. They can't stick around for that. So you know, I think, the more we are curious, really, I mean, I think that's the key right Is just keeping a curiosity about everything around us and reading Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Certainly, you know, is a great way to get that fire burning.
Speaker 1:It is, especially when it comes to understanding what we're dealing with, that, rather than suffer in silence, be willing to pick up a book. Be willing to engage and speak up, advocate for yourself in that doctor's office and say, hey, I'm dealing with this, I'm struggling with this. And then Do the research. Research the things that you're finally getting a name for. Nobody knows that they're dealing with anxiety or depression. Until they go and talk to somebody they say, okay, cool, let me go read about how maybe I can do some things on my own.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's not always about having medication, maybe it's not always. Maybe it's about understanding your environment. Maybe it's about understanding like, oh, wait a second, I isolate. Why do I isolate? Or I haven't been working out for the last two years. Maybe I can do something for myself to kick in my natural endorphins. Maybe I can do something. I know that that was a big shift in my mentality when I started reading about everything I was going through and not feeling hopeless, like it's easy to sit down in front of a doctor's office and just be told what you're diagnosed with and say, oh well, shit, that's it, the best years are over. Pack it in.
Speaker 2:That's like no, yeah, I mean that's a lot of especially younger service members that we're kind of used to be told hey, here's what you do, here's what you do Bullshit, don't take a doctor's word on what's going on inside of you. I mean, certainly they know what they're doing and I'm not a doctor, but we've overcome a lot worse things in combat and training. I think most things are surmountable problems if you, like you said a lot of the go back to doing what works. You know little steps, going to the gym, getting outside. I mean that's, you know the VA I wrote an article about it a year or two ago this veterans outdoor recovery act. They said, hey, we will fund outdoor recreational therapy to get, because if you're scooped up in your room playing a video game or in your bed, then no wonder you know you've got issues get the hell outside, man, go for a walk or a bike ride or a paddle, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:And you know, we found as well that the act of just sitting out and writing even if it's something you'll never show anybody, you know, just stream of consciousness, whatever's going on in your head, getting it on paper makes it seem, you know, not as overwhelming. A lot of times, and a lot of people that start that realize that, hey, man, I like this, you know, let me journal every day, let me write down some goals. I was listening to you a couple of days ago. You had a. You're talking about goal setting. You know, and I think that's one of the most powerful things that people can do is say, hey, you know where the fuck am I going, you know figure out where am I going and then you know what are the baby steps.
Speaker 2:You know the checkpoints along the way that I need to use to get there and you know I have a high level of confidence and you know a former American service member ability to you know, move from checkpoint to checkpoint and start solving the real problems. You know, even if they don't in their own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a built-in system of achievement in the military. I remember, even when I was just a young infantryman in the 82nd, you walked in the company area and you had a progress chart that showed all the schools. Like, okay, you're here, you want to get to the next step. You want to be a team leader? You got to go to this. And you got to go to a range school. You got to aerosol, you got to. Oh, now you got to look at broadening assignments, drill, start in school, recruiter, all these things. Well, okay, well, I don't want to do recruiter. What do I do next? Oh, sf, go to the Q-course, go to selection. You get selected. You walk into your team room. There's another manning roster with the same thing. What's the next thing you do? You want to go to freefall school, you want to go to sniper school, you want to go all these different things and you had all these different ways to achieve success and it was like, hey, now you want to be a senior in your MOS, you're going to go this, this and this.
Speaker 1:When you're on the outside it can seem scary at first because there's nobody sitting there with you giving you a month of counseling of how you can progress. But here's the beauty of it Now it's you. You get to determine your success. You get to sit down every morning and say I am going to set my intention for the day to do this because the greater overarching goal is to get here. And if I want to get there, I have these metrics. I got to meet every month or every third quarterly. I got to do this, and there's nobody else in the world that gets a cup unless you're married. Unless you're married, you have kids.
Speaker 2:It's completely different Everything's in the window.
Speaker 1:Then you have, you know little ones that you also have to take into account and you have a wife that also has a say in that plan. But if you're not, that is the ultimate freedom to be and do what you want to do and nobody else is getting in that way. Pursue the impossible, pursue the things that you never thought you could do. You get done with being a Marsock Raider or being a Green Beret or a Ranger or Navy Seal or an Infantryman or Supply Specialist or Fuel Specialist, whatever it was you did in the military and you're proud of that and you're great. And it took a lot to do that.
Speaker 1:Now you're on the outside, set your sights, set your souls on something bigger, something that's of greater and may seem impossible to a lot of people. And the reason why I say that is because the world's full of people that want to do the bare minimum. The world is filled with people that just want to clock in at Popeyes Chicken or McDonald's or Subways and be in a service industry like that, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. But after 20 years of war, you deserve more. You were willing to enlist and fight and do what we needed you to do. You deserve to achieve the impossible again and do something amazing. Don't sell yourself short. You're listening out there. Go after something big.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely capable of it. The same things that made you successful, in whatever job it was, can make you successful. You just don't have somebody else putting the chart on the wall. You don't have an NCO yelling at you to sign in. You up to go to the rifle ranger to do the things that you need to do to be successful. It's a sheet of paper or whiteboard and just line out where do I want to be in a year and five years If that, then X the example I always use because I do a lot of running.
Speaker 2:If you want to run a marathon in December, then I can easily come back and say, well, I need to be able to run a 10K or half marathon by June. I need to be able to run a 10K here. Here's where my time's kind of need to be if I want to do this. I think you talked about smart goals. It's specific timing. Make sure it's aligned with the vision of where you're going. It's challenging but realistic.
Speaker 2:I use the example all the time that I can once really, really badly, to play in the NBA. I think that ship is sailed. I'm five seven. I have like four inch vertical jump. I'm 54 years old. It's not going to happen, that's not realistic.
Speaker 2:But that doesn't mean that your goal shouldn't be kind of shooting for the moon. Yeah, I just it drives me bad when I see people that expect veterans to sell themselves short or accept good enough or kind of whatever the first thing that comes along. And if that it is an area where, if a lot of their stigma attached with talking to a head shrink or talking to a counselor, finding somebody that's not a pitch for me, but somebody that's a coach. I call myself a performance coach, not a life coach or a strength conditioning coach. But I just, hey, I work with people that are trying to progress, trying to get better. Yeah, finding somebody like that that can give you some of the direction or at least help you find the direction. And that's when I started my company. I called it walking point, because the goal is it's your freaking patrol of life man You've got to walk point.
Speaker 2:If you're following David Goggins or John Dailey or anybody else, you're going to my destination, absolutely. You got to set your own destination. There's, as a writer, I read a lot and there's this guy, Joseph Campbell, that wrote a lot of the heroes journey, which is really applicable to what he's got.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's got a couple, but hero with the thousand faces, kind of the one that's under it all. And he talks about the. There's a great quote from him when he was studying the Grail myth. You know Arthur and the Holy Grail and the when, the nights of the round table, when, in search of the holy grail, they all said, hey, man, we've got to go into the woods in different places. Right, we can't follow each other because we've got to, like, create our own path. You know each of us and that's kind of allegorical, right, and he was as his thing. He's like hey, if you go into the, you step into the woods and you see a trail there, then you're in the wrong place, brother, you know, because you're, you're following somebody else. You know you've got to be your own man or woman, or you know and do the thing that that gets your heart pumping, you know. You know figure out what that's that is. And you know if he was used to be jumping out of airplanes. Or you know scuba diving or shoot steel. You know maybe you could still be that, but you know, find whatever that is and and do it.
Speaker 2:And, generally speaking, I think you know we as veterans, you probably joined the military for a million different reasons, but you know one of them was to be of service. You know it's like being service is something bigger, to kind of help humanity and and I think when we we find some way to give back, you know, even though the you know, even though we're out now, you know we're not gonna be, you know, blowing down the words and and running into bad guys houses in the middle of the night anymore. You know, if we find some way to make ourselves useful, then I think we generally find a little more peace and happiness and and success yeah, absolutely it's.
Speaker 1:We are mission-driven individuals we have. We look for purpose and in fields and areas where there is a great service to others, we want to help. We want to be the people you can turn to when all hope is lost and everything is gone the shit. We want to be that guy that carries the ball and scores. If I can touch down, that's who we are exactly. And if you find yourself selling yourself short by going into a profession that doesn't give you that feeling of purpose and passion and it's not of service to others, walk the fuck away from there. Be willing to reevaluate, get back, shoot a different as myth and set a new course.
Speaker 1:Too many of us are spending six, seven, eight years doing something else. It's not beneficial to us. Maybe it's great money about the end of the day you go home and you're miserable and your family sees it. Then maybe, just maybe, you pivot and then you find something that you absolutely love and then you're sitting there all those years later like man. I really wish I would have found myself doing this so much earlier. I was like, well, you can do that now. Learn from all of us, learn from all our mistakes and, before you transition. Start thinking about the things that make you feel alive, that you love doing, where you feel like you're connected and a great place. I always said tell people if you're able to go to one of their cohorts is the honor foundation. It helped me greatly, it's helped countless of other soft professionals and now they even have a program for regular active duty individuals spacing the name of it, but check them out honor foundation org.
Speaker 2:I believe yeah, honororg, thsorg, yeah, I'm an error. Great, I volunteer coach for them, for their cohort. That's here near Camp Lejeune and it's just a phenomenal organization. I mean, it's really like getting an MBA, you know, for funny version and all your classmates are people like you right, who have stories similar to you that understand what you're going through. So that's yeah. I would could not recommend that anymore highly.
Speaker 1:Absolutely well, john. Thank you so much for being here today. The name of the book is Tough Rugged Bastards. It's available pre-order right now, correct it is on Amazon.
Speaker 2:You can walk into a it's from Simon Schuster, you can walk into a Marcell Noble and order it there. But it won't. And you can order it, it just won't come to you until August 13th.
Speaker 1:August 13th. Well, that's like almost here. Time goes by so much faster when you're out of the military. Yes, it does, john, thank you for being here today. Thank you for what you're doing, and I can't wait to have you back on here when the book is officially out to the public, and then we can just sit down, discuss the book itself in depth. Brother, thank you for being here thank you for what you do, and we'll see you all next time. Till then, take care, that was awesome man.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, john.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had a great time. If you like what we're doing and you enjoying the show, don't forget to share us, like us, subscribe and head on over to our patreon, where you can be part of our community and get access to all of our episodes as soon as they drop. And remember we get through this together, take care.