The War After the War: A Soldier’s Fight to Find Himself Again

What happens when a warrior’s greatest battle begins after the war ends?

In Episode 396 of the Security Halt! Podcast, Host Deny Caballero sits down with Seth Ryan, a former U.S. Army Ranger and veteran advocate, for a powerful and unfiltered conversation on faith, trauma, and transformation.

Seth shares the raw truth of what it means to wear the uniform, lose yourself in the chaos of war, and rebuild life through faith and purpose. This is not just a story about combat—it’s about the fight to heal, to forgive, and to find meaning when everything else fades.

Together, Deny and Seth dive deep into the reality of invisible wounds, the cost of service, and the strength it takes to rediscover who you are beyond the battlefield.

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Every listen helps raise awareness for veteran mental health, resilience, and faith-driven recovery.

Chapters:

00:00 – Early Influences: The Making of a Warrior

03:47 – Forged in Fire: Marine Corps Transformation

07:51 – Becoming an Elite: Joining the Ranger Regiment

11:45 – 9/11: The Day Everything Changed

15:58 – Inside the Regiment: Pressure, Pain, and Purpose

19:45 – Faith in the Fire: Resilience Through Chaos

23:57 – First Deployment: Entering the Unknown

34:08 – The Jessica Lynch Mission: Expectations vs. Reality

46:58 – The Aftermath: Loss, Guilt, and Reflection

54:46 – The Suicide Mission That Changed Everything

01:08:42 – The Close Call: Discipline Under Fire

01:12:52 – The Hidden Battle: Imposter Syndrome in Veterans

01:19:27 – Faith, Fatherhood, and Healing

01:29:06 – Finding Purpose Beyond the Uniform

01:35:01 – The Mission Continues

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-ryan-servant-leader/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Guest Introductions
• 1:56 Marine Corps Boot Camp And Identity
• 8:20 9/11, Reserves Reality, And Drive To Deploy
• 15:42 Choosing Rangers Over SF And FO Path
• 22:10 RIP, Culture Shock, And Faith In Regiment
• 33:58 First Mission: Jessica Lynch Rescue
• 45:04 The Daylight “Suicide” Mission And Restraint
• 55:30 Discipline, Divine Timing, And Law Enforcement Parallel
• 1:04:10 Embassy Siege 2019 And Imposter Feelings
• 1:14:32 Purpose Beyond Kill Counts And Moral Injury
• 1:25:04 Transition Out, Hitchhiking Home, And Paperwork
• 1:34:20 Fatherhood, Loss, And Leaning On Faith
• 1:42:20 Closing Reflections And Seth’s Podcast Plug
• 1:44:25 Host’s Calls To Action And Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

The level of discipline that the Marine Corps drill instructors beat into your head, quite figuratively and literally, was off the charts of what I thought when I watched a Hollywood movie. So that transformed me from a overweight, buck-tooth little kid to I'm going to now be who I really am underneath. I think surely there's also gonna be super Christian Rangers. Nope. There weren't a lot of us, it turns out.

SPEAKER_00: 0:27

But it's one of those myths we have to crush. Like, you can't be a lethal warrior and uh be a man of God. It's like actually you can. You can absolutely decimate and kill your enemy and go to war and do what you're supposed to do. Execute your mission with extreme violence and be a man of faith. And I've met those guys. Our force is better for having them.

SPEAKER_02: 0:47

I've already come to the brink of death and came back.

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

Seth Ryan, welcome to Secure Dev Podcast, brother. How's it going?

SPEAKER_02: 0:59

It's going great, brother. Glad to uh be on your podcast, man. I've been following you for a long time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05

Awesome, man. I appreciate it, dude. It's um like I always say, every voice, every veteran matters, and these are stories I like to collect. Individuals who have done some amazing things and they're moving on to their next chapter, and they're not focused just on their trauma. They're focused on all the great stuff that got them out of there. The things that we go through in our service. It doesn't have to define us for a second chapter. So today, before we dive into the podcast and the new show, I want to talk about you, your service, but more importantly, the things you struggled with and how you overcame them. I feel that our stories serve a greater purpose. They're not clickbait, they're not uh supposed to be these things that get glamorized on YouTube. They should serve a purpose to help everybody that's uh still in or on their way out figure out how they can put together their best plan of action, or as I say, is it's a PDSS for the next phase in life. So today, Seth, we're gonna dive into your journey, man.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57

Awesome. Again, grateful to grateful to share it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00

Yeah, man. So take us all the way back, all the way back to the very, very beginning. Seth as a young man decided to serve.

SPEAKER_02: 2:07

Yikes. So uh yeah, that started out with a dad who always put down military service and told me that you know being owned by the government was not really a good idea. So he he joined during the Carter administration in the U.S. Navy, and after living through a race war on the ship, and people were getting into fights constantly, and there was so much bickering and just contention that he got on his Harley, rode off the ship, and never came back.

SPEAKER_00: 2:41

Oh shit. Are you talking about AWOL or just Oh yeah, yeah, straight up just left.

SPEAKER_02: 2:45

But they were trying to get rid of so many people during the Carter administration and downsize that they didn't even call him, they didn't look him up, not one thing. So it wasn't for I think like 10, 15 years later, somebody finally asked him a question, was like, hey, uh, weren't you in the Navy? And he's like, I mean, I was, but it wasn't a big deal. And they're like, Yeah, it wasn't a big deal. If you could just sign this and we're good. So that that was my introduction to uh you definitely shouldn't be in the military. And my my family um is as it's hard right now because I'm sharing about my family, and it's Christmas, and people are now listening to some of my podcasts, and I'm like, listen, guys, I'm gonna tell it straight. Um my family that I was raised around, I was raised around a lot of alcoholism, around a lot of drug addiction, specifically pills and weed. Um, but it was just this perfect example of what I don't want to be, what I don't want my life to look like. And my parents were both Christians and they were very focused on their faith and walking that life and not using alcohol at all, ever. Not cursing, which my parents beat that out of me, so I never had an issue with that. But I carried that through my entire military service, law enforcement, private contractor, living on oil rigs, still never dropped, touched a drop of alcohol in my whole life, still never said a curse word out loud that somebody heard. I did once at eight years old into my pillow when I was really angry, and then I never did again after I asked God for for uh for uh, you know, hey, please forgive me for this. Um, so that's my background. I come from a very uh everybody's construction workers in my family for the most part. And the the ideal was to get a construction job, get onto Tinker Air Force Base, which was there in Oklahoma where we lived, and that was it. Like that's your that's the apex of what life could possibly be. That's the highest ideal. So for me, high school guys are getting recruited, you know, recruiters are coming through there. Didn't show them any care whatsoever. Finally, I uh after working construction one uh one day, and I'd been going through night school at college, and I see three Marines walking through the mall. They're jacked, they're hanging out, they're laughing, they're having fun, and that's what I don't have in my life. I'm going to community college at night, I'm miserable, I don't have any any friends that I'm hanging out with other than my buddy from high school. I decide I'm gonna join the Marine Corps just just like that. I was like, this is something that would put me, that would separate me from everybody else. It would give me respect, it would, it would put me on a different plane, and I have absolutely nothing to lose. What what if what's the worst that can happen? I fail out and get sent home broken. Okay, then that I, you know, at least I would have tried. And that that was my thing, is I just wanted to try. So I hunted down a recruiter and I convinced them to let me join the Marine Corps. Um, I scored up into the 80s on my ASVAB. So they're like, hey, any job that you want to do, it's open to you. What what are you interested in? I said, I want to blow things up, I want to, I want to shoot guns, I want to do fun stuff. And they're like, but you could do something that translates that. I was like, I don't, I'm not looking for translation. You don't understand. I'm dirt poor. I have nothing going on. I don't care about any of those things. I want to do the hardest thing I can possibly do in the entire military. And my understanding is Marines have that. And so the the recruiter's like, well, I do have an infantry heavy weapons specialist uh reserve slot if you're interested in that. And I was like, Where's that at? Uh, like an hour and a half away. Cool. Sign me up, bro. So I go home, tell my mom she cries, tell my dad he thinks I'm dumb. Nobody thinks I can make it. My sister's crying because she thinks I'm gonna die in boot camp. This was before Google, so you couldn't look any of that up. It was just horror stories. And uh fast forward, I've already graduated. Now I'm a Marine, I'm in the reserves, and I'm I'm at Walmart, and this girl sees I'm wearing a marine shirt. She's like, oh, my boyfriend leaves from boot camp in in just a few months. Uh is there any like advice you could give him for boot camp? I was like, actually, yes. I said, um have him watch the movie Full Metal Jacket. Has he ever seen it? She's like, that's his favorite movie. I was like, cool. Have him re-watch it again. But I want him to pay close attention to every detail in that movie because when he gets to boot camp, he's gonna dream of that as being the place he would want to be. Boot camp is way worse than that movie. Now, I did that not out of spite, but at the same time, like I watch Full Metal Jacket, and yeah, there's there's uh, you know, crazy psycho who decides to shoot drill and start. Not that part. The rest of it though, bro, like what the level of of discipline that the Marine Corps drill instructors beat into your head quite fit, you know, figuratively and and literally, was off the charts of what I thought when I watched a Hollywood movie. So that transformed me from an over overweight uh buck tooth little kid to I'm going to now be who I really am underneath. A lot of people say, you know, Marine Corps bootcamp changed somebody. No, it didn't. It didn't change them, it didn't take who they were and twist it or break it. It took who they were and it shed off all that outer skin and it let them be who they really are underneath. And that's exactly what I was. Now I'm very secure. Now I'm actually talkative. Whereas as as a kid, I was told, hey, shut up, sit down, you don't have anything to say until you're an adult. And even then, we'll see. So I kind of came out of my shell, and that's what really transformed me. Then 9-11. Uh, and I I needed my unit wasn't going to deploy for a year and a half minimum, and I was thinking the war's gonna be over by then, so I need to get out of here. Uh, the Marine Corps won't let you go active duty if you're in the reserves. No recruiter will help you, also, because they don't get any points for putting you in. You're already in. Yeah. So that that's where I ended up re-enlisting for the Rangers. I had no idea what a Ranger was in reality because that was still all secretive. Like you couldn't look that up, read books. There was there were no books. There was LERPS books from Vietnam. So I joined the Mar uh the Ranger Regiment and I was wearing a tan bray, and I still had to raise my hand and ask what I did for a living because I had no idea.

SPEAKER_00: 9:37

That's a lot of fast forwarding, man. Let's uh let's let's go back and um dive into this a little bit. So going into the reserves, man, like that's I always tell I always tell young men um the reach out to to be cautious. I mean, I I fell victim to it. Um I thought being a citizen soldier would be a great idea when you're young, but it really leaves you wanting more in life. Is that the same way you felt when you started, you know, you get out of basic training, you know, you get out of boot camp, you have that pride, you feel like you're ready to take on the world, and then it's one weekend.

unknown: 10:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:14

Two weeks.

SPEAKER_02: 10:15

Yeah. And and ours specifically, because I was infantry and on the on the heavy weapon side, that meant that we were gonna do both our heavy wet right toe gunner. We're gonna be doing drills constantly, we're gonna be constantly working on our skill set, but we are also infantry, which means they could throw us into an active duty infantry, you know, hypothetically at that point, but it came to fruition, obviously, later in reality in the war on terror, where they're just pulling people from reserve units and throwing you into an MP company, they're throwing you into a reserve uh uh active duty infantry squad because they're low on people. And so that reality was constantly beat into our heads. And so we were doing the most miserable, they just tried to make things miserable. So we would go to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and we would go out and we you know it would be freezing rain in the winter, and we would literally just go just do infantry stuff playing, you know, the us versus them 50-50 in the woods, but also then one time we did it with paintball guns, they didn't have sim rounds back then. So you're actually getting to blast each other, and and that was exciting, but we're literally just laying in the mud, and you don't get to do anything else, you just get to lay there and get hypothermia. And they just tried to make it miserable to be like, we've got to out infantry the infantry because we're reservists, we've got to be just and it was great because I had really very motivated, very capable leaders both uh individually, but our officer corps was phenomenal at that time in uh Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I was at. So I really looked up to those guys. I didn't know that I had it to be right because when you're in the reserves, you're like, I went through boot camp, I went through all these things, I did well, and I kind of excelled physically speaking when I went through boot camp. I was one of only three guys in running for Marine Corps Iron Man, which meant I had the under 18-minute three-mile uh run, and only three of us uh got that in boot camp in the initial PFT and then kept that. Obviously, uh we got better faster as we went. Yeah, but that separated me, and then when I go to my unit, I'm lapping people on the PT test. Like it wasn't, it was kind of a joke because most people don't want to run, especially in the reserves. So that's where I kind of had already been separating myself. But at 9-11, I saw that happen on TV, and I it completely changed my brain. I literally started waking up with no alarm clock. As soon as the sun came up, I woke up. And I was I was just motivated to be as ready as I could be for however it was gonna happen because I trusted that God wanted me to be here. I'm I'm at this age, I'm in this shape, I'm ready to go, and this just happened, and thousands of my fellow Americans just died. Now I have to pull back for a second because what most people don't put together when I say Oklahoma is I was in eighth grade when the bombing happened in Oklahoma. We already had our 9-11. The rest of the nation saw it and was like, oh, that that sucks. That wasn't that sucks for us. That was we know people who died. We I had family members that were working construction right around the corner, and when it happened, they ran over there and just saw kids' uh limbs laying everywhere and pieces of people, and they just threw up and and took off running, you know. And I was just like, I wish that I was I always wanted to be a grown-up, I wanted to be there. I knew that I had underneath, I knew that I had more than what this physical body was showing everyone else. And I got to play football in high school, and that's what really physically changed me, because I went from just I'm out here running, running on the road by myself to I'm in competition and I'm able to hit people. I'm able to take out aggression. I'm allowed to be aggressive, and that's where I was terrible at it, but that's where I I I'm not I'm not skilled, but I had the aggression and I had the ability to take a hit and get back up. And that's really the only talent that I have. I have the ability to get hit and to get back up and to push through things that most people wouldn't sign up to do. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 14:51

Yeah, I think there's more to that. I think that it's like like all of us, we undersell our strengths and our weaknesses. I mean, it's uh it's definitely a lot more, you know. I think that the terms are grit and resilience. Uh you your your ability to bounce back is is uh a lot more tempered and a lot more uh it's well developed versus um a lot of individuals out there, but you've been through a lot. It's easy to s to look back and say that these decisions were real quick, real fast. Now I'm a marine, now I'm a ranger, I'm gonna become a ranger. Take us through that process, man. Like it's one thing to see the Marine Corps commercial with the guy slaying the dragon and say, Man, I want to be that. But Ranger Regiment doesn't have, or at least back then, didn't have this giant media mechanism. I mean, you can go online right now to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and you can find 15 different reels of Ranger Regiment doing amazing things in training and in combat. Back then we didn't have that. What was the catalyst for that idea and how did you approach it?

SPEAKER_02: 16:03

So this this is a uh a longer story that I'm I'm gonna make very short. My dream as a child, if I was ever gonna go in the military, was Rambo. Come on. I was an 80s child. Of course it's Rambo. So my dream, and I'd always listened for stories of Green Berets, and I didn't know they were called Special Forces. So my dream ideal was to be Special Forces, but I thought the stories of these guys who get dropped off by helicopters in NAM and they just disappear into the jungle and nobody knows what happens. And that was what I was playing in my head. That's where John John Wayne and the Green Berets, these things had this effect on me, but I didn't really know that I had I never thought I'd be smart enough to get in physically fit enough. And I would just always assume that it was like that's for some NFL player's son. That's for some guy who, you know, his grandpa was uh special forces and his dad was special forces, so of course he knows he has it to be special forces and he was mentored. What's my mentorship? Now, again, this isn't to to belittle or anything, but my dad broke his back uh when when I was young, and so he ended up gaining hundreds of pounds, and so he was he was around 400 pounds. We don't know because they literally told him we don't have scales to weigh you, you have to go to a truck stop. And that just I thought that was like just a really mean thing to say to my dad. I didn't realize until many years later that that's a legitimate thing that people do. They drive up onto scales at truck stops, then they get out of their vehicle and and re-weigh the vehicle, and then they know how much they weigh. And that blew my mind, but it was it was that bad. It was so bad that they knew he was over 400 because they didn't have skills big enough. And so my idea of right, the the guy who's leading me, the guy who's training me, the guy who's my uh father, I'm supposed to kind of follow in his footsteps, and he's morbidly obese and and he hates the military. So for me, I always wanted to be special forces. So when this happened, I was already in the Marine Corps, infantry, and heavy weapons. So when you go into another branch, your training supersedes the initial. So I don't go to basic training, I already bypassed that. I don't go through infantry school, I've already superseded that, bypass that. So my that was my problem. The problem was they had contracts that they won't break up in the army, especially September 12th of 2001, that they had these pipelines, and one of those was the Ranger Regiment. Now, I wanted to be a Green Beret, so I go and I finally find a recruiter who will sign me up. I could go be uh try out to be a Green Beret. 18 X-ray is this new thing.

SPEAKER_00: 19:06

18 X-ray, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:07

And I was the very first person to sign the 18 X-ray out of the Oklahoma City maps, is what they told me. They're like, I don't know. This is a brand new contract, so we're just gonna have to play it by here. But the guy that was in the recruiting office was a special forces, uh, he was the top 10%, so they made him be a drill instructor or a uh yeah, drill sergeant or a recruiter, and he decided to recruiter because he's not yelling at anybody. And he did not, he never recruited anybody. I mean, he chatted with me, but he mostly played video games because he was not, he wasn't a used car salesman. He wasn't gonna lie to kids. My recruiter was lying to me, uh, but that's that's kind of the relationship I had. Moving forward, I go sign it, I I go take all the tests, redo MEPs, and I scored higher on my ASVAB. I think I got like an eighty six instead of an 82. And they're like, yeah, you're good to go. Your GT score is high. So we're not going to worry about anything. You're good. Um, that it was supposed to be July of that year of 2002, was when I was supposed to report for my initial training, which would be airborne school. Because I again superseded until they're like, Yeah, you're going straight to airborne. I was like, Oh, this is awesome. So I'm super motivated. I'm already running 10 miles as my warm-up before I would work out for about three hours at a gym because I had nothing else to do. So I was just being a cardio machine. And then the recruiter calls me up out of the blue, like weeks later, and just says, hey, we've got to run to MEPS real quick and just take this little test. It's not a big deal. Your GT score says you're going to be fine. It's called a D lab. Uh, don't worry about it though. It's it's a made-up language. You're just gonna kind of, I don't know, man. You're you're just gonna figure it out. I'm sure you're gonna be fine. So I'm like, okay, I'm freaked out. I didn't take even foreign language in high school. I hated it. I couldn't stand, I tried to learn, I did poorly. So I go take the test. Well, there's a girl in front of me who is going to be a linguist. She just graduated with her bachelor's degree in foreign language. She's fluent in three languages. She fails the D Lab in front of me. Okay, I have no skills in foreign language. And this lady who literally speaks three languages just failed before me. So now I'm gonna get go in here, sit down, and I just A, B, C, C, B, A, A, B, B, B, C. I fail. It was miserable. I already knew I failed. I just walked out and was like, hey man, that didn't work. And and so, of course, I have to sit there for an hour waiting for him to tell me I fail. And then he says, Okay, well, we've got to find you another contract. And I was like, bro, I'm the Marine Corps infantry, and no offense, man, I'm trying to do harder things. So, unless you've got something that's harder than what I'm doing, I'm not signing it. And he starts trying to play hardball with him. Like, bro, I've already put people in the Marine Corps. I do recruiter help. So I'm not signing anything else. Long story short, he calls me up finally after we bicker back and forth and says, hey man, 6 a.m. He gives me a call. He's like, hey, we got a Ford Observer slot. I'm sure you're not going to be interested, but it's it has a guaranteed tryout for the Ranger Regiment. I said, Why didn't you tell me that the Rangers had Ford Observers? I don't know what they do in the Ranger Regiment, but my experience in the Marine Corps was 29 palms going out there and doing active duty training for two weeks during the summer. We had two sniper teams like roll up, wearing ghillie suits, check in and disappear, walk off into the desert by themselves. One was a sniper team and the other was a Ford Observer team, and they looked identical to me. And I was just like, I don't know what those guys actually do, but that is hardcore. And that stayed in the back of my brain. So he says Rangers do that. I'm like, dude, I cannot believe this. This is awesome. And he's again caught off guard because we hated each other at that moment. And I go down, immediately sign it. And I told him, I was like, man, I am going to be the easiest person you ever put in the military. You do not have to convince my parents. I will, I will smoke any PT test you put in front of me. I will show up for the plane ride, the bus ride, whatever it is. Like, just give me the piece of paper, put it in front of me, I'll sign it, and I'm ready to go. You don't need to even worry about me. I'm automatic. And that's what ended up happening. And so I end up April of 2002 showing up to Ford Observer School because I have to read class by doing that, um, at Lawton, Oklahoma, which I already live, you know, 45 minutes away, an hour away, so I get to drive my own vehicle down there. Um it was a unique experience. I ended up failing the final test because there was a tornado that happened while we're trying to do the live fire final test. So they made me take it indoors on the stupid computer machine, which is way off. It's never accurate. And uh so I ended up having to sit back through another cycle and then retake the test and I passed. And then I get to go through rip because there was no rasp back then. It was rest in peace. And that all I know is the only thing I had had a conversation with somebody was high school coach who said, I don't know what rangers do. All I know from being in the military and my buddies who are in the military is rangers don't like other people, and people other people don't like rangers. The only people who work well with rangers are rangers. That's all I got for you, bro. And I was just thinking, like, I kind of like that. I kind of like that villain idea. Now, again, you I'm talking you're talking to somebody who doesn't curse and doesn't drink alcohol. So I'm the worst candidate in the world to go to Ranger Regiment, but I don't know that. I think surely there's also gonna be super Christian Rangers. Nope. Uh there there weren't a lot of us, it turns out. There wasn't a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 24:59

Yeah, it's it's uh it's weird how we've um changed what it means to be a warrior and and I talk about it a lot more, and the uh the separation between our most elite warriors and faith has been like completely removed. And I think a lot of harm was done during the GWAT. I mean, I I'm I'm guilty of it. I had leaders that didn't talk about it, they weren't open about it, then speak about it. But it's it's uh one of those myths we have to crush. Like you can't be a lethal warrior and and and uh be a man of God. It's like actually you can. You can absolutely decimate and kill your enemy and go to war and do what you're supposed to do, execute your mission with extreme violence, and be a be a man of faith. And I've met those guys, I've I I've seen them, and they do better. They they 100% do better. Their faith is rock solid, their family comes number, you know, it's faith and family, and uh it's just uh it's just a shame. But they're out there, they exist, and that we're better, our force is better for having them. And I'm telling you right now, if you don't believe me, check out Mike Edwards, go check him out. Um, he's a living testament to somebody that is uh an insane Ranger Regiment guy, uh former member of RRC, hardcore dude, and he's a man of faith. I mean, he preaches and talks about the Bible openly. And I'm like, the best and and and greatest warriors are guys that walk the path with God. Trust me, they want you to be lethal. He wants you to be the good, he wants you to be a good man of faith, and you can go to him and uh bring your burdens to him. Uh, we we do a lot of things, a lot of things that we talk about on the show, things like moral injury. Um, one of the biggest things that can help you with that is when you're strong in your faith. It's the guys like myself that have to work harder on the back end to build that pillar because it's mind, body, and spirit. You already had the spirit, you already walked into it. And and even though at some points I know it can be tough because guys don't want to talk about it, they don't want to be open about it. They they want you to be the guy that drinks, womanizes, and um goes out in town. And you can still be part of the boys' club, you can still have fun with the guys and be strong in your own faith and your own opinion. I wish I would have known that. I wish I would have been that person, but I don't live in the past and I don't I don't look back and say, oh man, I wish I'm grateful for what I have today, and I'm grateful for the the knowledge that I can now share with people by being able to say, like, dude, we need them, we need those guys. But that uh it doesn't that's not to say that you didn't have your own trials and tribulations when you got there. So what was it like getting the Ranger Regiment?

SPEAKER_02: 27:46

Again, it was surreal because you know, I didn't the only beret I ever expected to wear would be a green one, and so you uh keep in mind black beret just changed. So I'm one of the very first classes. I don't know that I'm the first, but I'm one of the very first classes with tan. And so then I take that as a badge of honor. I'm like, so the so uh Shinseki gives the black beret. He has other names in the Ranger Regiment. We'll we'll call him by his actual name at this point. Um he gives the black beret away because he has his Ranger tab, but he's never earned a Ranger scroll or a Black Beret, so he wants to give it away. I think really he wanted to just have one and he decided he was gonna just take it from the Ranger Regiment, but that's that's for another conversation. Um so I'm wearing a tan beret, and I'm glad that I've never worn anything but the tan beret. And so I'm I'm wearing this thing and I'm showing up, and I know I'm gonna get smoked, and I know I'm gonna get destroyed a little extra for uh for being the Christian Ranger, but I didn't go in through rip. So going through rip, it was a hundred percent like it was level, it was a very level playing field. They tried to they tried to, I mean, Marine Corps, I'll put it this way, let's Marine Corps boot camp and rip. I've never actually contrasted this. So in boot camp in the Marines, the drill instructors are trying to turn the screws every single second of every moment to see if they can break you. Now, the exact same thing is happening in Rip back then, but Marine Corps boot camp, you've got 13 weeks. You know, the last week is graduation, so realistically, you got about 11 weeks of they can turn the screws on you. And rip, you got three weeks. So it's not that they're not tightening the screws, they got a power tool to tighten them. So they they need to get down to the brass tacks of you immediately. And so they're putting you, even when you're not screwing up, they're in your face, screaming in your face that they're gonna drop you and they're doing everything they can to stress you out as fast as humanly possible and physically. Marine Corps boot camp, physically, it wasn't that hard for me. Doesn't mean that it was easy, but it wasn't that hard because I had been pushing myself like crazy already before I showed up, so I'm in good shape. And Rip, it's it's they're it's right, it's not hazing, but it's as close to like we're just gonna keep making you physically go until you can't physically go, and then you're gonna have to keep going, or we're or you have to give up. And they play those games where you've got to hold this log and lift it over your head, and we're playing log games, just like in the SEALs, until somebody quits, and then everybody has to close your eyes and raise your hand if you're the one. And it ended up, uh you know, I think our attrition rate in my rip class was somewhere around 50%. But I I think our my class was special, to be honest with you, because the majority of the guys that I serve with just in my rip class, I think the majority of them are retiring out of uh Special Forces operational detachment delta. And so all my buddies right now are going through the process of graduate or of uh retiring out, and of course they're all retiring from the same unit. And that's a testament to the product that was being produced, the the people that were volunteering for and the people that were coming out of rip before it was this better version, which I maybe it is, but as people have talked about recently online, and I'm getting I'm seeing some traction in this, like there was a difference between the rip guys and the rasp guys because you're way more confident when you're rolling into the ranger regiment coming out of rasp. You don't know, you just know you got destroyed, and you were told the whole time that that still wasn't good enough. And you just are what you're more scared, I think, when you show up from Rip. When we graduate, we go to check into our base, and somebody got murdered directly across the hallway from us in our in uh in uh Fort outside of Fort Stewart. Like, and we were just like, I guess this is this is Ranger Regiment. We haven't even got to our unit yet. We're but we're put up in a hotel where people are getting murdered next to us. So it was just it was a wild time, and that that's why I kind of just say, man, back in those days, it was anything went, and and there was so loose regulation and oversight. I know there really was more, but it really felt like prison rules, like anything could happen. Somebody could just come up and and beat the snot out of you, and nobody's gonna care. And and that was one of the first things I saw when I got to the chow hall is a dude had full red eyes, like out of a movie, like solid blood in both eyes. And they're like, hey, don't talk to him. Uh you know, he got beat up by a bunch of other rangers downtown. That's what happens whenever you're a dirt bag here.

SPEAKER_00: 33:12

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SPEAKER_02: 33:31

Oh, okay. So this is prison. So we're in prison now. Okay, so I need to start making a shank when I get back to my room because I don't know what's going to happen. Um that so it was a little wild. It was a little wild back then. And for a Christian Ranger, that was disconcerting. Uh disconcerting, but it was just like, man, I got to keep going. I I'm I will never quit. So here I am, and I'm gonna make the best of it.

SPEAKER_00: 33:57

Yeah, and you got to Ranger Regiment right as um, you know, right after 9-11 and deployments.

SPEAKER_02: 34:05

Right after after um Operation Anaconda, and we just lost three Rangers going in to get Navy SEAL uh Roberts. So I got there at the height of everybody's emotion, and they were redeploying to Afghanistan as I was rolling in, and the our barracks were condemned, and everything was covered in black mold, so I had bronchitis and pneumonia, and I was spitting blood out of my lungs while I'm being destroyed. Um, so it was it was way worse for me. So I think a couple other guys had it too. They got that crud, but man, it was just the worst timing for me to show up. It was around August because I went through I went through uh airborne school in July. Then I um oh yeah, then they made us sit out because they needed medics, and so they ended up like making us do holdover for an extra month. So I ended up not getting to Ranger Regiment until I think it was September, is when I rolled in, and again, everybody was just freaking new guys, just you know, just just destroy them. We're busy though, we got to do stuff. And for me, I think that will that was good because I was able to get over my crud and get acclimated before I deployed.

SPEAKER_00: 35:20

Yeah. What was that first rip? What was that first deployment like?

SPEAKER_02: 35:24

First deployment, first mission was Jessica Lynch Rescue.

SPEAKER_00: 35:27

So our Hold up, hold up, hold up. First, first rip out the door. You're going, you're going after our our uh uh our hostage American, uh our POW, our first one.

SPEAKER_02: 35:42

First one, yep. And what's crazy though is we had been training nonstop. I had memorized the Baghdad International Airport. You couldn't point to a spot on that entire objective or anything around it, and I and I not know all the moving parts of where everybody's gonna be. As a Ford Observer, not only do you have to know where you are, you have to know where everyone is. And oh, hey, guess what? You have to be smarter, you have to have a higher GT score. Well, guess what? We're gonna make sure that you memorize so many things that we're gonna destroy you if you don't. So a lot of the regular, like a lot of the infantry dudes, they're getting smoked, and then they're getting back up and they're drinking Red Bull and playing video games with everybody else. We're just getting destroyed because I'm not the smartest person on the planet, so I'm just gonna have to keep going and keep screwing up and keep doing push-ups and keep getting smoked until I've got this memorized. So our very first objective was the takedown of the Baghdad International Airport. We were gonna jump in during the invasion prior to anybody getting there. So we were gonna jump in and start taking over Saddam's palaces from within while everybody else was screaming up from south and trying to take over and get to us. But we were gonna be on our on our own. Obviously, there's gonna be other special uh operations and special forces guys going in, but that was what I thought we were gonna do. And one of the Delta Recon guys was like, hey guys, on the lowdown, we already know that they're planning for you guys to come in. They already know you're coming in. When you guys jump in, they're expecting to uh they they've dug holes in the in the dirt next to the airport flight line and the runway, and they're going to they have barrels of oil, they're gonna dump it all into this big huge spot, they're gonna light it on fire, so your nods aren't gonna work, and you're gonna jump into a fiery death. And they have crates and crates of RPGs laid out with you know covers over them, so they're gonna shoot your plane down. There's no way they can miss. You're gonna be jumping for 400 feet. We already knew we're not even taking reserves, we're jumping from 400, and we've got to have everything on us to sustain 72 hours of continuous combat. And they already told us we're issuing you guys speed. Like our medics already have these pill bottles full of speed that they're gonna issue us as we go for 72 hours, no brakes, no anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 38:12

Yeah, just to be clear, to let the audience know it's provision. Same thing from modafino.

SPEAKER_02: 38:18

Yes, yeah. We were just we don't know, I didn't remember the name. They're just like it's your it's your go-go juice, is what it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_00: 38:25

It's a bit of all right. Yeah. Fun fact, yeah. On the back side, when your brain's fucked up, that's the same thing they will prescribe you to control your sleep. So if you enjoy, if if if you're a fan of ProVigio from back in the day, go talk to the VA and talk to them about your TBI, they'll get you squared away. Absolutely. Yeah, but it won't work the same, it won't have the same effect, it'll help you go to sleep. That's that's the that's the thing that blows me away. They can fuck up your brain so much so that the thing they gave you to stay up for hours at a time ends up being the thing they give you to go to sleep. I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me. Smarter people than me.

SPEAKER_02: 39:06

I don't know. I don't know how that works. Yeah, but yeah, yeah. Yes, so my so my first mission is the Jessica Lynch, and keep in mind that they were they it was billed to us as this is going to be Blackhawk down times you know, whatever the number was they gave us. They're like, this is going to be the the Marines, this is what they told us at the time. The Marines came up, they tried to go into the city, they were kicked out. Then they essentially decided it's not worth it to go into this Hornet's nest right now. We're gonna just stop here and and provide security. I think they set some tanks up on the one street that comes out right to Highway One, and then they bypassed, and everybody just kept going to flow past. Now we're gonna go into the air or the hospital that is right outside. So the city walls are maybe two clicks away. I just looked it up on Google Maps before. I did my podcast, which I had Command Sergeant Major Mike Burke, who was on the mission with me. And when I found that out, I was like, bro, we have to have a podcast because he does Legends of the 75th podcast. And so I had him on, and we talked it all out. And I pulled up a bunch of those pictures. And man, that really brought it back to life because I just knew that the city was right there and I could see the lights when we got dropped off one click away from the hospital out in just kind of a sandy area. Meanwhile, Burke was dropped off in a landfill. They literally dropped him into the center of a landfill and he had to work his way out of a landfill. That was awesome. Yeah, so we're so we're walking into the Jess Glench rescue. And I'm, you know, again, I'm I'm my very first mission. So I don't know what to expect. I just know it's going to be crazy. And we have some.

SPEAKER_00: 40:51

Just to go back and clarify and just make sure like we got the intel. You're not jumping in. How fast and what was the alternative infill platform you guys ended up going with? Because I and I can imagine you're like, I'm going to get a fucking mustard stain. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 41:05

Well, so so we weren't we were gonna jump into BIAP uh to Biop to take over that. But then whenever Jessica Lynch they said, no, we're gonna we're gonna bring Helos, and I assumed we'd all do it at one. I figured they would have a bunch of Helos and we would all go in at the same time, but I didn't realize how many people were really there in total um because they were in different different locations, evidently, because I saw some people where I was that I hadn't seen in a while. Guys I went through rip with, I saw from 2nd Battalion, 3rd Battalion. And then uh later on they they moved us over to another little spot right before the mission, and that's where I saw uh Pat Tillman for the first time, the only time in person where I actually got to um yeah, even see him because again, he was 2nd Battalion on the other side of the nation, and whenever we came in for a deployment, they they would always be leaving. We would replace 2nd, and then 2nd would replace third. And so you never really had any time to see those guys. They were they were getting on the planes and leaving as you're coming in. Yeah, so it was it was surreal because again, keep in mind that I don't know what a ranger is. I am a Marine who just volunteered to do whatever it is that I do, but my initial training was all artillery. We're not using artillery in real life. We trained it nonstop because we had to memorize uh everything about it so we could be the most proficient in the United States military, period. And later on, I ended up doing a joint training operation with CAG, with uh Devgrew, with some agency boys, with people that nobody even knew who they were. And uh ironically, back at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, that was full circle. We're staying in the same area that I was when I was in the Marines as a reservist, and now I'm here with the elite tier one guys and even people that who knows who they are. We did this huge combined thing, and we, I mean, just blew everybody else out of the water when it came to knowledge and and the actual getting rounds on target, calling everything in perfectly. And we ended up, we had some near misses where some Delta guys were like calling it in and calling this in and the air assets coming over as artillery's landing and mortars landing, and it it was scary. They laughed, we laughed nervously. Uh, but it was it was that also right set me up. We always say that we're the best, and whenever we go and we do training exercises, we we show that we're unbelievably proficient at range estimation, which is one of the hardest things that you can do to make sure that you're just gonna look at a map, look out there, and call in a round from miles away to land over here, maybe a mile away, and and be deadly accurate with it. So now that I'm doing my real job, what am I gonna do on the Jess Calition? I'm calling in, right? And they're they're like, okay, you you're not gonna be calling in artillery, but we do have our mortar teams. We've got a tank, we've got M1 Abrams somewhere around here, but we definitely have spooky up in the air, and we've got um little birds buzzing right overhead. So at one point, I end up having fire control um as my Ford Observer goes in, and I'm the F I'm his uh RTO. And in in those moments, it was it was very surreal because again, I I kind of got an idea as how important this was, but for me, you know, I wasn't watching the news all day, every day. I was focused on this woman. I was focused on we have to get this woman, Jessica Lynch, back. And every second that she spends there could be evil being done to her, and it made me sick to my stomach. And so I had knots in my stomach while we're getting ready for this. Like, let's go. And we had to sit there for another night um until we actually went. And so we were all frustrated because we're like, I get it, this whole plan is coming together super fast. Everybody's trying to rush, but then we're we're like, let's just go, let's go, and and we're gonna still sit here for another night, but we had to wait for illumination. So there was no moon out. We had to wait for zero loom so that when we went in, it would be the darkest. We had nods, they didn't back then, and it was just a perfectly uh executed mission from the standpoint of you know, we didn't have any KIAs, we didn't take any um real injuries. One of my my my uh roommate in Ranger Regiment ended up getting hit in the head when he got inserted on top of the hospital, uh, like Devgrew did. They put him up there and he ended up getting hit in the head. Something smashed over his head and knocked him unconscious. That's literally like the only casual uh injury that we had on the entire mission. But we get her out, and I'm literally kneeling there as her, they're carting her out next to me. So I get where what you guys see in the footage, there's dudes that are taking a knee facing out. We don't really know what's going on at that second because all the call on the radio was kind of everybody's yelling, and it's it's a little bit chaotic. We got her, but they got her way too fast because this is a six-story hospital, and they sprinted through that hospital, grabbed her, and just sprinted out. I mean, is the way it really felt when you're there, boots on ground, while you're living it. So it just happened so much faster than I expected, and there was not the resistance we expected. There's an entire military barracks built around the hospital. That's how it was built and designed so that we wouldn't blow it up, right? It's next to a hospital. And it was empty, completely vacant. There were no soldiers there whatsoever. So we expected, again, this is Blackhawk Down. We're gonna be going straight into enemy fire, it's gonna be very heavy. You guys are gonna be struggling, and that's just how it's gonna be. And you're gonna have to earn it just like the rangers that came before you. And these are the pep talks, you know, that we're getting before we go in. So we're psyched up and we're ready to go. And then we get there and it's just so anticlimactic, we're going through and clearing, and there's just nobody here. But then they get, you know, we get the call that uh that the other people taken from her convoy did not survive. And there's some mistranslation, there's some issues with trying to figure out what the guy's saying who works at the hospital and our interpreter is getting from him. But they're they're in the soccer field, they're in the soccer field. We have to go out, and that's when we figure out they're they're all buried there, they're buried in a in a shallow grave. Say shallow. It was a couple feet down, it was a few feet down. Um, and so that's when the the digging begins to to return um our soldiers back to America, and we're not there with you know pickaxes and and shovels. So we a lot of digging by hand and just man using anything that you could find to break up the dirt and very hard ground. And so it was I think that was being my very first mission, and then I'm I'm sitting there, and that's where I got fire control, and I can't get in the hole to help. And again, I'm a brand new dude. This I'm not I'm also not really like that's not my position. Yeah, but the the guys Commander Sergeant Major Gunny Martin Barreras, uh former Marine as well, was my first sergeant. And I talked to one of my buddies after I did that podcast because he was one of the guys that was in the hole digging, and he told me that when the the the the soldiers were coming out and not in one piece, he refused to let anybody carry those parts over to where the collection was was being uh kind of formed up. He did it 100% himself because he didn't want that to be on anyone else. And so again, the the the bodies are severely decomposed, and it's it's you know, the the site the sight is rough, the smell is rougher, um, and and it's can so confusing because in the back of my brain, I picture all this as this we're gonna go in, we're we're we're gonna get shot up, but we're gonna save everybody. They don't know, they have no idea what's coming down on top of them. We got all these rangers, we are going to surprise them and we're gonna end up getting more than just Jessica out of this. We only know confirmed that she's alive, but we're certain that there's gotta be others that we're gonna be able to get out alive. And when that's obvious that that's not happening because they're right here, but also we don't know how many are actually here because again, it's not it's not a clean, neat thing. Once once those bodies are recovered, we we've dug and we found everything we can. And that's where I think uh I mean, a part of my soul was so felt so fulfilled, but at such a tragic cost. I think a part of me just as a human suffered uh a loss there that that I self-imposed by putting it in my own brain that we're going to rescue all these people or we're going to be able to get more out. And that was out of my control, and I shouldn't have put that on myself. But I did, and so the feeling when I got back, the mission's over, the sun's coming up. We just got out in the nick of time, nobody we didn't take any RPGs, and we go back to our staging spot, which was 9.1 miles from the hospital, blown up uh bunkers from where the Iraqi Air Force used to be that we blew up during Desert Storm. And we watched the sunrise, and and several of my good buddies, also fellow Christians, like we just like hugged and was like, man, that was that was insane. But we got we got her out, and we got the bodies back. And it's like, okay, so I've already peaked, I'm done. I've checked all my boxes, and it's my first mission. Like I wanted to be a part of something where somebody was saved, where I save somebody, where I'm I put in my work and I help. I'm not expecting to do some congressional medal of honor feat. I'm just I want to be a part with these guys, and I've done it now. And it's not just that we went and took out a bad guy because that's what we're gonna do from then on. This was the only rescue mission that I was a part of. So the very first one is to get her alive, and we've accomplished it. And now, where do I go from there? Now, when I get smoked, though, I have this deep-seated feeling of accomplishment that you can't take that away from me. Oh, you want me to do push-ups until I pass out, and then you want to, you know, wake me back up and then let's keep doing it? Cool. That it doesn't matter to me. Like, I'm gonna get to be a part of this when I'm here. For me, it was like being drafted onto a Super Bowl team, and then my first game was a Super Bowl.

SPEAKER_01: 52:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 52:41

And I didn't get to do any cool play, but I got to go out there and block a couple times. And so that that I'm sitting there with a an internal Super Bowl ring, and I'm like, okay, it doesn't even matter. I'll go through any training camp you put me through. And I got hazed, you know, roughly for being a Christian specifically, and and I got a lot of isolation. And while I was gone on that deployment, some guys emptied my oil reserve in my car. So when I got back, I got in my car and drove off, and the the motor, the engine blew up. And there wasn't a drop of oil underneath my car. But I didn't care. Like, obviously, I cared and I was very angry. But at the end of it, I was just like, but I made all this money on deployment. God's still taking care of me. And I ended up getting a better vehicle. And so it was so it was one of those things where that's that was my mindset, though. I was always just like, man, whatever we're gonna do next is gonna be crazy, and I'm gonna get to be a part of that. And this is the part where going through ranger school, people don't get. When you come from the ranger regiment, it is 100% required that if you're gonna be a leader in the ranger regiment, you have to go to this course, successfully pass it, and come back. And we know and we're telling you ahead of time, you're not gonna learn anything. You are gonna learn how to be tired, you're gonna learn how to be hungry, and you're not gonna learn anything that's gonna directly come back here, and then now you're high speed. But you have to go through this suffering because we've all been through this suffering. And you know, if you suffer more than others, good on you. Go through a winter phase, sew your tab on with some white thread, show them, show them that your yours wasn't this cakewalk. You were in hypothermia the whole time you're going through. And so that's what happens. My second deployment, um, I go through. Now our deployments are three to four months at a time. So we go back, I do deployments, we get to go on cool missions. I think that I'm gonna die. I sign up for a suicide mission, but I come back. Now I will go back to the back. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. I'm gonna go back to that though. Because I yeah, no, I know. What I what I was gonna just say. All right, man, let's brief the suicide mission. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. What I was gonna just say, just to tie the knot on the Ranger School, was now I just said I'm wearing a Super Bowl ring in my head. Now I'm gonna go, and now I'm gonna die for my country, and I'm not gonna do it because I'm signed up for it. I'm gonna do it because I volunteered to be on the mission that I'm not even on the roster for. Mentally, I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I'm still trying to deal with that at this at this point in my life as a new father, where I'm like, I know that I had such an absolute belief that I was gonna go to heaven if I died here. And I also understand that our enemy believed the same thing. And what does that what does that say when it's somebody who isn't just throwing my life at a wood chipper and seeing what happens? I'm really believing that I'm gonna I'm going to come back from this. I don't know how, but I'm gonna be the one who survives. And if I'm not, I'm 100% okay with that. And I send out my death letter. Now, the ranger school thing was that that keep this in mind as I'm going to graduate and I go through this hard training. But that my point is if you just zoom back out to I'm going through this training and it's hard training, and I I sign up specifically to go through a winter phase, but that doesn't matter. And that's what happened when you come from Ranger Regiment, especially at that time, all these things that are so hard for other civilians and other military people to even understand how Ranger school could kind of be fun and it's really not that hard. Yeah, but bro, here's what happened before I got there. I've already come to the brink of death and came back. I already went out and volunteered to go on a mission to get the bomb maker who was in. I don't know for sure which city it is because I didn't write it down. I don't have notes in my journal of it that I can find. But I've talked to other guys that were on the mission with me, and their belief is that it was uh it was Fallujah that we went into. Just like Al Nazario during the hospital, it was not taken. This was what would end up being at one of the bloodiest battles in Iraq, and that's why I'm very cautious about saying I believe that that's where it was. What we were told is nobody is gonna go into this city during daylight hours and snatch one of the guys who they're protecting most of all. They're protecting this guy not because of he's in charge or his cousin is somebody important. They're protecting him because he is the guy with the knowledge that he has learned as a professional bomb maker, and he is orchestrating an entire cement truck full of explosives that they're going to drive to the city's capital and they're going to annihilate four city blocks, which will take out our uh military advisors, the people we put into power, though, the prime minister, whatever it is in Iraq at that time, whatever the guy was named, I forget his name, but the guy that we had put into power at that moment, and this the law enforcement, because they were all right there in that one section. So we only know this guy's gonna be here at this time on this day, and it's during daylight hours. They first took it to uh either DevGru or Delta, and they said, nah, not doing it during the day. I'm sure they were like, we'll do it at night. And they're like, Yeah, that's we do we only know he's gonna be here during the day. Then they go to the other one, DevGru or Delta, and they were like, Nope, that's a suicide mission. Nobody's rolling in there during the middle of the day and coming out alive. So when they they they offered it up, all right, is anybody else willing to go on this? Immediately the Ranger Regiment is like, Yep, we got that. Now the the leadership I explained, Gunny Barreras, there were there was um there were so many of these guys that were absolute the the hardest core just but their leadership they they led from the front. They weren't the guys who just wanted to make life miserable like so many others did, or or take pleasure in doing stupid things for the sake of doing it. These were some of the best leaders. That our nation has had in the GWAT era that roll in volunteering to go in and knowing that none of us are going to come out and see our families. And it was my buddy who, uh fellow Ford Observer, who was like, hey, maybe we can find a slot on the floor of one of the trucks. And sure enough, that uh one of our command sergeant majors at that time was like, Yeah, you can you can ride in the floor. I'm just gonna be sitting on the back.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:30

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SPEAKER_02: 1:00:45

Well, your command sergeant major, why are you going on this just as a shooter? Like, this makes no sense, but it does make sense. And that's when a lot of that the gears clicked in my head. That's when I really got what it was to be a ranger. Because again, I still, right? I was wearing a tan bree. I didn't know what I did. I didn't know why the rangers had the reputation they they did. And it was that mission. We roll in there during the day. We have spooky above. We have little birds, I believe. I don't remember seeing the little birds, but I'm pretty sure we had little birds on station. But we did have Bradleys. We had a couple of Bradleys that went with us. And we roll in there. Now keep in mind we have Doom Buggies. They're they're Humvees that are made to look more like a Doom buggy because they have a rail system on the back. So we can hold about 12 guys fully outfitted, all guns out. We have no armor. We have MREs in our floorboard. That's the closest thing we've got to armor. And that's, I can't say that's why we never got hit with IEDs, but we moved fast, and we were the guys who wore sterile uniforms, and people knew had already learned the lesson not to mess with those guys. So we get, with all that being said, we roll into this mission, and we're they can see us coming. It's this big wide open desert before we get to the city, uh, and we roll in, and instantly everybody starts coming out, and it's all men. Now there were some kids, but it was so many dudes walking out, and of course they got AKs. And of course, this is exactly what they just described to us in the intel briefing. This is it, guys. This is and I'm an I'm not a Ford Observer on this mission because again, I'm not slotted. We got way better Ford Observers. My supervisors, the Ford Observers on this. I'm just a I'm just a crazy guy who volunteered, so I'm wearing as many magazines as I can. I jump off the truck, lay down in the dirt, and I'm just pulling security along with my buddy Parker on the other side of the street. And I hear the gunfire start. Bow bah bow bah bah bow. Here we go. And then I start seeing people coming toward us down the street looking, seeing what's going on. And I see somebody popping out and doing this. But it's a kid. And I'm like, I'd I would rather I'd rather go out without that on my soul, but I'm not gonna go out with that on my soul that I didn't take him out, and he gets to take out my guys. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna die letting this kid shoot at me without me returning fire. So I take the safety off of my, I've already got my finger on the trigger, safety's off, and I've taken the slack and I'm breathing as I'm looking through my ACOG, looking at this kid. Now he's under the shadows of a building, so I can't see what the rifle is in his hands. I don't know if it if it's just an AK or what it is, but he keeps popping out and pointing it at us, and there's other kids that are joining in and kind of egging them on. And we'd just gotten the word of maybe at that deployment, maybe a few weeks earlier, that kids on bicycles were an absolute green light because what 82nd had been hit with, again, this is the intel I got. 82nd had been hit with kids are riding two, one's on the back, one's on riding the bike, and then they roll up, kid on the back jumps off, he's been holding an RPG behind him, he levels it and takes out a group of guys. So they said you see kids on bicycles, and of course there's kids with bicycles there. And so this is the moment where I'm just like, all right, here it is, but the gunfire doesn't continue, and nothing is happening, and and people are looking and they're coming at, but nobody's firing at us yet. And I time just took so long. It felt like I was there for 12 hours on this mission. And it was only like a matter of, I'm sure it was only a matter of a half an hour total time. But I see the glint, I see sunlight finally hit the stick that this kid is holding. He's just a stupid kid like I was. He's just pointing a uh a stick at us, just like his dad does, you know, all the time. And I'm sure they were raised shooting guns.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:08

But that's I mean you have to you have to reflect on the the like this is a testament to your training, to who you are, um, your principles. You didn't and and there's no judgment to anybody that found themselves in the same predicament in GWAT. Uh there's countless veterans that have this lived experience where this was not their story ended differently, and it's led them to a lot of nightmares, a lot of trauma, because they did the job. They 100% no one would have been able to fault you if you went through it, if you initiated. It was a perceived threat. Like you you saw it, you took the time, thank God, light shone, and it was a stick. You controlled yourself, discipline, you were trained. Um, there's so many individuals out there that weren't Ranger Regiment that lacked enough, that didn't have the enough discipline, that saw the threat, felt the fear, and hesitate, maybe hesitate just for a little bit and then went ahead and went all the way through with it. They're living with that. I think this is a moment that that you can look look back on and reflect that you know, not only are you are you grateful for the training, grateful for the mentors, grateful for all the hard lessons learned in training, but grateful that you were a man of God that was waiting and that that opportunity, that moment of clarity came through. And there's there's those moments in anybody's life you can look back and see that divine intervention where it's just a little bit, you just waited long enough to let that shine through and be like, okay, not a threat, not a danger. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:55

Yeah. And and I I honestly believe 100% that that was God allowing that to happen. And I say that because it happened to me again as a police officer, and I almost shot another police officer because he was playing clothes, and I was uh there was a big massive brawl, and he's got a gun to some kid's head. Oh shit. And I'm I'm I'm the only res I'm the only responding officer. I see a big mob of kids outside of McDonald's one night, and I'm just driving by, but as I'm driving, I see fists being swung. So I know there's a group. There's more than one that I see is fighting, and I whip in real quick and I call it out. Hey, I'm over here at McDonald's. I'm right, I'm close to the police station, so I know I'll have backup real quick. But I mean, there's there's 150, there's at least 100, 150 kids out here, and they're all egging it all, and they're all cheering as these guys are fighting. I got a pistol, I jump out, and I I don't know what's going on. I'm yelling. I'm not pulling my pistol yet, but I I've got the I've got the the restraint off of it, and I'm ready because I know this can go sideways real fast. This was before the law enforcement the war on law enforcement that that has started in this country. So luckily back then, I didn't feel like I was in danger from the crowd, but everybody's starting to scramble and run. They're jumping in their vehicles and they're driving. What's pitch black underneath this McDonald's uh Ani, and then all of a sudden, um I I'm people are running in front of me, so I'm kind of losing what's going on over here as I'm trying to make my way over because I I pulled over, jumped out. I didn't pull right up next to it, obviously. I have more brains than that. So as I'm trying to make my way to them, though, and I've got my hand on my pistol, I hear drop it, drop it. And it's a very commanding, loud voice, but I look up, finally, like people are moving out of the way, and I see somebody with a a pistol to someone's skull. And I'm like, like, this dude's about to execute this guy. And so I've pulled my gun and I'm I've leveled it, and I'm yelling, drop the gun, drop the gun, drop the gun. And fingers on the trigger, slack's taken out again. I've got a Glock. There's no other safeties. I got a I got a scissor trigger, and I spent, as a police officer, I spent on average a minimum of three days a week at the range. I was that guy. I trained MMA with professional fighters, even though I didn't actually fight, and I was training at the gun range all the time. So I am not at all worried that this shot is gonna is gonna make it home, and I'm not that far away at this point in probably 25 yards. But again, it's still pitch black underneath this awning. They're on the other side of the McDonald's. It's not open, it's closed, by the way. So there's no lights. Um there's a there's an adjoining parking lot, so there's light coming this way, which is in my eyes, and I can't see them. That that helps, you know, it screws me up with my vision. I'm actually being uh blinded a little bit by the light. So as I'm as I'm moving toward them, I'm still yelling at this guy. And as I'm about to pull the trigger, a glint of light from headlights of all these kids that are moving shines and it hits his badge that's on his hip. He was smart enough as he pulled his gun to make sure that his badge was visible on his hip. He was doing a sting operation, having underage kids buying alcohol at the 7-Eleven next door. He heard my call, ran over there, and I I'm I I think I was in my first year of law enforcement. And I almost kill what ends up being the golden child of the police department. He ends up being like the guy who rides around in the uh Mustang that's all decked out, and he is part of the community advisemen and putting on all the things. But yeah, almost take him out. And again, it was one of those moments where I see that glint. I didn't hesitate because I felt like he would have already pulled the trigger, but he didn't, and he keeps yelling. And that's when I hear the wood of the wooden bat that he dropped on the ground. Is the same time this glint has gone off. And that in the back of my brain was like, Okay, okay, this is not what it appears to be. No. I put it up. Turns out that kid who has the bat in his hands, his face is exploded. They hit him face. I mean, he was sucker hit, sucker punched with a baseball bat to the nose. His face has exploded. And he just picked up this bat, got it away from this kid, and is about to give him what he just got from this guy. And that's when uh his name was Jeremy, runs up and puts the gun to his head to get him to stop. I think God has done that to me in those two instances to save me from that. But I want to bring this out because it's not because I'm amazing or it's not because I'm a Christian, that, like you said, it was the training and it was the discipline. Nobody else in the Ranger Regiment that day pulled the trigger either. And I'm sure they saw a lot of other guys with AKs and not just kids. Fast forward to 20 December 31st, 2019. I am on the roof of the CIA housing at the Baghdad Embassy. I'm a uh private contractor PSD with triple canopy. And the embassy is now being overrun. They are burning our gates to the ground, and they are climbing up on top of the walls, and some of them are jumping over. Once again, this is where all of our contractors, everybody from all the companies that were working there, right? Kasak was there doing base defense, but they there was not nearly enough of them to actually defend from a real um attack like this, like we received with thousands of people attacking. Iranians attacking, by the way, and the Iraqi stooges that they were using for this. Once again, that it's literally this was a perfect example with that with that suicide mission where nobody pulled the trigger. They could have, they would have been justified in doing it, but they didn't. And because they didn't, we all lived and we all got to go home. So in some ways, you know, I feel like there's the the feeling of you're kind of a you're kind of a fraud. Like you're like you were there, but you didn't have to shoot anybody, you didn't get wounded in combat, you don't have a purple heart. That I think specifically coming from a direct action unit, so overly aggressive like the Ranger Regiment is so prominent. And I think for somebody who I think for somebody who left the Marine Corps so he could get into the fight and fought so hard to get over there, then peaked mission one and is ready to meet God. I think that is one of the struggles that I'm still right now trying to deal with is the imposter syndrome and along with it, the you know, I I get to put my my ranger stuff behind me and I get to talk about being a ranger. But I'm not getting to tell you the stories where I'm taking, you know, grazing bullets right next to my head, you know, on all these different missions that I'm I'm somehow surviving and I'm taking out this guy, and I run over here and stab this guy with a knife. Yeah. And I've got and I've got buddies though that I serve with that are right, that are on these same missions that have those stories that that did do that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:51

Yeah, but you have to remember too, that's the thing that um that's why these stories are important, Seth. The uh the lived experience that combat veterans have now been tied to is that everybody has a lone operator story, that everybody has a Roberts Ridge story. Like, that's not the reality. That's not the defining factor. What makes you a good soldier, a good man, a good husband, a good father? That's not it. Taking taking contact and reacting and doing the right thing and returning fire and taking out the enemy is a part of many soldiers, airmen's marine, marines story. It is, but not the entirety. It's not the story of the entire force, it's not the lived experience of every veteran. There are many veterans just like you that signed up and served and did their job and were part of amazing operations and never shot their weapon, they never received fire, they did amazing things. It doesn't take away from you. It doesn't. You're a ranger, tabbed and scrolled. That, sir, is remarkable. What you're dealing with, what what a lot of people are dealing with is this idea that because I didn't engage the enemy, my service is here. It's a it's a second tier. That first tier's up here for for all these cool guys. No, dude, it doesn't diminish your service, it doesn't. It doesn't take away from who you are, it's a part of your story, it's a part of your early chapters, it doesn't define the second chapter. And what I'm dealing with and what I'm advocating for is to walk away and kill the myth. Greatness is not directly tied to a purple heart, it's not directly tied to a green beret or a long tap. Just because we got to do some things that few individuals out there uh get to experience doesn't make us better and doesn't make us elite human beings. I've met dog shit individuals who have a DD214 that's very impressive with a lived experience in combat that's very expensive, very impressive, but they're still a piece of shit. And come to find out, a lot of these operations, a lot of these deployments are hyperinflated. We are now living through a time where people are finally getting called out for letting their legend and their myth get too big. Yeah. I would rather focus on our second chapter and talk about the first chapter. Talk about the things that we learned. You holding, you having the discipline not to engage. Think of it the other way. What if you didn't have the discipline, you did engage, and it did kick off a firefight, and you lost 10 to 15 people that can be rich? Because we've we've been there in situations, and the lots of different veterans have been out there through the GWAC and probably put themselves in a situation where they're on the convoy and they stopped, and everybody started coming out and felt that tension, that fucking palpable tension, it's just like fuck, dude. Like I can touch this. But nobody engages, nobody shoots, and you just continue driving. That shit's real. But if you didn't have the discipline and you engage and you killed somebody, God forbid you killed a kid, and then all hell breaks breaks loose, and now you see friends getting fucking hit, shot up. Fuck, that'd be a lot harder to live with. There's more to your story. There's absolutely more to your story, and there's more to everybody else's story out there. If we're willing to champion the idea that we're more than just a deployment, a missed opportunity. Played on the biggest fucking field in the in the in the 20, 21-year war, you deployed, you were out there and you made memories. You were part of history. You were part of an operation to take back and secure our POWs. That's a huge thing, man. And I know that maybe you still think of it as a oh, I got a participation trophy. Brother, you made the manifest. You made the fucking manifest. You were fucking there. You've got dirt on your boots still from that operation. That's a lot. That's a lot. You lived and you served with fucking legends, and that's that's the thing we all have to be be grateful for. You know, I I can't tell you how great it is to be able to connect with individuals like you to hear your story. The first part, and then we've been in this for an hour. Hour and 18 minutes. And this is great. Because we're getting a real view of you and your perceived flaws, the perceived idea that you're not good enough. And Seth, you're more than good enough. You're now a champion and advocate for other people to tell their stories. Your service isn't diminished because you didn't kill somebody in combat, because you didn't shoot a hundred rounds and fire off 15 fucking AT4s in a javelin. It's not. There are tons of individuals that need to hear your story and need to hear the fact that you're still here. Because I'll tell you right now, what you're describing and what you're dealing with is moral injury. The idea that you did all this, but you came up short and you're flawed somehow. You're not. Absolutely not. It's war. You went there and you came home. A lot of our brothers and sisters didn't. But you still have a story to tell, and it's still impactful. It's incredible. It's remarkable, man.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:01

I appreciate it, brother. Like I say, I, you know, I'm looking at this, I'm zooming out, and I'm really kind of trying to process some of this, especially now that I'm, you know, a new dad. My son's two and a half years old, and that's why I went to be a private contractor so I could be a dad. You know, took IVF and I knew I needed money. Yeah. Now I'm a dad and I'm you know, I'm thinking through a lot of the things that I just shoved down and refuse to even bring up. Um and I think podcasting for me is this was a little bit of a therapy. I'm for whatever reason, once the camera comes on and the microphone is hot, I'm like I'm able to be open to the world where I can't be open to myself in the dark. So I'm struggling, I'm struggling with that not just because of me, but because of stories that I'm talking to other people, they're having the exact same experience. That they were there and saw and were a part of amazing missions. But they have survivor's guilt, you know, survivor's remorse. And and I think too when some of my buddies have died after after we left. So that was one of the insane things was while I was there, oh two to oh five, zero first ranger battalion rangers died in combat. We lost one guy, which is an insane statistic because we were in continuous combat the entire time. But we lost one guy, and that was in a parachuting accident when we got home, right before we went home for these. Yeah, Brandon Miller, and I will never forget that jump. It was two, they split us in half. He went on the first jump, and the plane just didn't show back up. And we're sitting there till one o'clock in the morning before the plane comes and lands, and people get off and take their parachutes off. And we're still sitting there all rigged up, and everyone's like, what is happening? We were supposed to have jumped at like 10 p.m. And uh it was supposed to be a night jump, and it was supposed to be quick and easy. And come to find out, they didn't even tell us until you know we got back and everybody started sharing what happened. But yeah, he had jumped out and his parachute got tangled up with another guy. The other guy ended up pulling his reserve and shot out of it. Uh, he ended up hitting the ground uh straight from 1,200 feet and still lived for a little while on the ground. He didn't die until he was in the hospital. Um, and it took him a couple of hours to find him on the ground because it was zero loom, and the medics just have a big truck out there and they don't want to drive over people. Um so that I think that one, right? That was the one death. And so I wasn't surrounded by that, by death of our people. And I think that for me plays into my entire experience, where again, it's too good to be true. It's about it's about to go bad. It's about to go bad. Here I go. I sign up for this mission, I'm not coming back, and I come back. We all come back, and nobody gets killed, and nobody even gets hurt. And by the way, the shooting that happened behind me, that was the guy's dog that came out and tried to attack, and they shot his dog. That was the only shots fired on the whole mission. So it again, it just it the word surreal is is one of my most used words because it didn't seem like this was real life. It seemed like this can't be happening the way it's happening. And after Miller's death, like say, there was there's plenty of people who got shrapnel, who took bullets, who did get purple hearts, but it just we were so lucky, all of all of those deployments. And so I'm I'm gonna get out because I know that I can't be a father, I can't be married while I'm in the ranger regiment. I've already seen people cheat on their spouses with their, you know, a buddy's wife cheating on him while he's deployed, and and you know, that kind of stuff happened. And then one of my friends at church, his wife is cheating on him while he's deployed with one of my ranger buddies. And I'm just like like that, that was one of the injuries that it's so hard to even to share that story and not start tearing up because it's it's one thing for me when I hear that somebody cheated on somebody, but I know both of these people, and they are phenomenal human beings. This guy's that this guy that's deployed regular army is deployed, and I'm seeing his wife at church all the time, and she just seems like such a great person. We have such a great relationship with them. My my other ranger buddy, who's my roommate, and you know, at this point now I'm a corporal in the range regiment, I'm a team leader, and but it's it's it's my across the hallway buddy who's hooking up with her on the regular, and and he says her name, and I'm like, wait, you describe this girl? Is it this is this her last name? And he's like, Oh yeah, you know her. And I was like, dude, I know them so well. I know her husband. And he's laughing, and he's like, and this isn't uh uh this isn't a jab at him. It's like that's just how it was. Like, if your wife wants to cheat on you, who am I to stand in her way? Like that that was the ranger mentality. So again, for a Christian ranger, it was a little, it was a little difficult. Um so getting back, I survived the the suicide mission that I wasn't even supposed to be on. And so I I'm going to get out. I've got four deployments. Massoul, uh, Mosul was my last one, and that's where I was supposed to be getting out of the army in three weeks. And I keep asking my higher-ups. I'm they they made me the battalion commander's driver and assistant, uh, who was, by the way, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Clark. Yeah, that was my last direct supervisor. One of the greatest leaders in our nation's military in quite some time. He wears four stars. Well, he was wearing four stars and running SOCOM recently. But it's like that was the thing. It was just I kept having just such amazing leaders that I would run into there, and that I just got so lucky. But I'm gonna get out. And my supervisor's like, yeah, hey man, you yeah, you do need to head back and do your paperwork to get out. They all know I'm not re-enlisting. And uh, you know, again, a lot of my buddies were going to the Delta tryouts. And uh interesting fact at that time, interesting what I the info I got, because we know how many guys are going to selection, we know how many come back. We sent, I I can't remember the number, but it was over a dozen guys, it was 15 or 16, something like that. We sent them 100% got selected. First time goes. Second battalion and third battalion guys that went, they were still in the same 50% go rate. There was something about the guys that I was serving with at 1st Ranger Battalion that was different. There was something about Bravo Company, because they were we're also the unit that's there at BIOP when they bring us Saddam. When they capture Saddam, they bring him to the SOCOM compound, and that's where we protected Saddam. And I think we had him there for about three weeks or so on the compound. You know, of course everybody's there, Delta's there, uh Dev's there, everybody's there to protect him. But again, surreal, here we are, here we are, and on on you know TV. Everybody's seeing this creepy white tile behind him and this wild hairdo. And I actually get to see him in real, in in life, in real life, in person. And again, it was just so surreal. He's this little fat guy who has bladder problems and keeps peeing himself. And so it was just so strange. Like this is one of the most evil people that have walked on the earth, and he's just this little tiny fat guy who's not scary at all.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:27

Yeah, perception, man. Perception. And that I think that it can be, you know, we we can directly look at our our what we talked about just a little bit ago, the idea of like what it really means, the perception of what it means to be a combat veteran, the perception of what it means to ranger, and it's like shoot 'em up, Hollywood exposure, combat.

unknown: 1:29:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:49

The reality is you you raise your hand, you walk through, you go through a selection, you don't get to determine what that experience is going to be like, but you do get to determine the mindset of what you get to live the rest of your life, or how you get to live the rest of your life. And I think that's important for us to really hammer home, man. Um, you made it home. A good amount of your brothers made it home. That's God right there. In the height of uh violence in that country, you made it home. You made it home to be a father. You made it home so that you could be a good husband, so you could be the best version of yourself. Like that, that's something worth celebrating. That's what we need. Hell, I'll make a bumper sticker and I'll send it to you. We can both rock it. We made it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:41

We made it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:43

That's what we need to be able to talk about. You have a remarkable story, man. But on the uh on the other side of it, the the most the more the most important part of this journey is that second chapter after the service, that transition piece, as we you know start the throttling in towards the end. How was that transition for you?

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:06

Well, they I'm gonna get out of the military, and my uh first sergeant's like, yeah, hey, hook up with this sergeant. And I was like, Oh, okay. And so I walk over and talk to this random sergeant. Like, I know I know who he is, but I don't know what this means. And where's the manifest? Where are we going? When do we get on the plane? Where I need to get out of the army. And they're like, Oh yeah, actually, I'm I'm just gonna go back real quick. Um, I'm gonna be coming back out here. So, yeah, just hang out with me. So I literally grab my ruck, everything I have, and I just follow him, and we walk to the flight line in Missoul, and we literally just walk up in the dark to planes and helicopters that are sitting there, and we are wearing sterile uniforms. Again, this everybody's used to seeing that now. This was when that first started. We're still wearing the old you know style BDUs, and it's all mix and match green with with desert, and and he literally is just like, hey man, uh we're task force, whatever the number was that week. And he's like, we just need a ride. And they literally let us on. And so we hitchhiked, we hitchhiked from Mosul, Iraq, all the way to Savannah, Georgia by simply asking people if we can get on their airplane. We have no other documentation to show them. We've got military IDs, that's it. Like we can't even tell you who we're a part of. And they just look at your so we're on the plane ride, we're riding with all these regular, you know, military people who, by the way, have cameras and they're doing this number, sit up and take a picture and sit back. Like we can't see the flash that just happened, and they're taking pictures of us sitting on there, like, who's these operators on the plane ride with us? And meanwhile, we're we're landing here, then we're flying back here, then we're flying over there, then we're flying over here. It took us so long to get back. I thought flying directly as it was, which still took like two days to get over there uh initially, dude, it took us like three days, and it was so painful getting back. But I get I finally arrived, and I'm just that was the exact same experience I had with transitioning out. Back then, you just had a checklist, you just need to run through and get all the signatures and then get out. And you don't have any time. And by the way, your whole unit's deployed, so it's not gonna be easy. And so I ended up just essentially, it was a blur. I'm just running and trying to turn in gear, trying to get signatures. I go to the Fort Stewart because you've got to have a sign off there, and they're like, hey, you have to go through this taps class. And I was like, Okay, I don't know what that is. I'm not part of this, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm in the Ranger Regiment. We don't do that. So let just I need you to sign this. Like, I don't have a week to do this. I'm supposed to be getting out like next week, and you're wanting me to be here for like two or three weeks going through this whole process, it's not happening. So I do that, and the worst one, the best one was the DD214. I'm done. I just need my DD214, and I go up to the lady, and same lady that's worked there for 30 years, like this little old lady. So I don't want to be putting her off like she's a jerk or anything. It's just like she was not helpful because she's like, Yeah, um, what do I put down on your DD214 for your deployments? And I was like, I mean, you know what I know. I you you do this for a living. I don't know how you do that. She's like, Well, I have to have something to put here. And I'm like, Well, I can't tell you where I was deployed. So what do other rangers do? And she's like, Well, they usually bring me something that has documentation. And I was like, Okay, so I go back, skeleton crew, our whole units deployed, go back and they're like, okay, let me look something up. And my Sergeant Mashad was his name. Phenomenal guy. Evidently was really rough when he was first started off, but he had turned over a new leaf. So he's actually helpful now. And so when I tell people Mashad, they're like, oh man, that must have been rough. I was like, he kind of liked me actually. He he just types up something and hands it to me, and I go over there, I hand it to him, and it literally just says, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, date to date, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, date to date. Operation Iraqi freedom, date to date, date to date. That was it. I don't know if those were even accurate. And it wasn't until I go to be a PSD, right, in Baghdad that though that that mattered. Like every day had to be accounted for because you had to have 12 continuous months, 365 days, not 364, of training and experience or experience in combat. And so that ended up biting me in the butt where I didn't have 12 months, but I ended up being able to use my law enforcement time uh to get back overseas. And like you say, you know, to be a father, and now I am, and this year has been the worst year of my life, the worst year of my wife's life. Like no deployment has ever touched what my wife and I losing our our two of our IVF children, um, and my wife almost dying in um the operating room after she had lost the second baby. And and this all happened, by the way, in September of this year. And then last week we were in and out of the ERs again. Um, my wife is a combat veteran, highly decorated Marine Sergeant. Uh she was Marine of the Year at her unit, uh, diesel mechanic, and uh and she got meritoriously promoted um to corporal and then Marine of the Year for sergeant. She is a hardcore, she is more hardcore than me, I know it. And I don't say that as like that whole, like, you gotta you always have to brag on your wife. Like, no, legit. If it was we had the same body, she's stronger than I am mentally. She has gone through this, and we have both. And this is just to come full circle here with you. Like all the things I've been through in combat, there are things that I saw with a badge on my chest. There are things that I went through as a private contractor, there are things that I'm now going through as a father and as a husband that make those things pale in comparison. I would I would do 10 suicide missions in a row over having to sit in a waiting room at 2 a.m. not knowing if my wife is gonna come out, if I'm gonna be a widow with a son who's never gonna get to see his mom again. And and my wife ends up losing the ability to have children. And so now we have three embryos frozen that we have no way of having on our own now. And just just to to bring it back to God, mentally, right? It's it's not drinking alcohol and drinking water, it was PT all the time. I was a pre I was a uh PT psycho. On my days off, I would go do beach runs barefoot so I could destroy the bottom of my feet. Like I was that guy, uh, and that's that's what my fellow Christian Rangers were like. Like we had all this extra energy and time and money that all the other rangers didn't have because they were downtown getting beat up and beating people up and going to the hospital and get DUIs and um and guys getting kicked out who went special forces. Actually, one of the guys in my rip class, he got a DUI and they're like, Oh, you're good, you're going to SF. And so he ended up loving life because he he got to leave us and go to SF right out of the gate and stop being hazed and hung out of a third-story window to be a cocoon and turn into a butterfly in the morning. So it uh yeah, it's it's just like God is gonna God is gonna take care of you if you rely on him. And I mean rely on him. I don't mean go to church on Sunday, I don't mean say a couple Hail Marys. I don't mean the the pretend version that the vast majority of Christians have or people have in their mind of what a Christian is and does. I mean legitimately you in quiet times are relying on God for strength to get through this. And it's the times where you think you're gonna die, you think someone who is more important to you than your own life is gonna die. It's those moments that you can come out on the other side and you can still have an absolute love of the life you have, and you have that love to give them because you're not dead inside, you're not blaming yourself, you're not withdrawn, you're you haven't had all that sucked out of you. Even though you've been through the pain and you've seen horrific things first person, you can come out of that on the other side, but that only works if you have a higher power to put it on. Because if you try to offload that on your buddy. Or you try to offload that on the bottle or pills or anything else, it is not going to happen. It's not going to be the same thing, no matter how much you want to think it is. Some guys are just now finding God. I just met a new uh guy at church Sunday morning. He's he just got out of Bravo Company 175. I was like, bro, we've ran the same base. Like we did the exact same. He's looking for God now. And he knows that he was he didn't have that when he was in, and now he's looking for that. And I would just say that to anybody who's struggling. God is always there for you if you're willing to rely on him. Open his word for yourself. Read it for yourself. Don't get on YouTube and go down the rabbit holes trying to figure out what the Bible says. Just open that and read it yourself. Follow that. It will lead you to God.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:52

Yeah, man. That's a perfect place to wrap things up, man. I uh I can't thank you enough for being here and for sharing your testimony, brother, sharing your story. And um I I definitely hope that you can reflect on it and and no longer see this journey as you know a what if uh a string of events where you're constantly asking what if, but rather reflect on it with with pride and and honor of the people you served with and what you did is uh truly remarkable, man. But um real quick, tell us about your show. Where can people uh check it out? Where can they go connect with you?

SPEAKER_02: 1:41:30

Yeah, I got my whole studio here. I'm so focused on our conversation. Yeah. Uh by the way, I'm a podcaster. I have a show called Old Ranger New Dad. And I have been doing some sharing on our IVF journey, as I just described to you. Uh, we got hit sideways with a hurricane, so it's not the ideal thing that I expected it to be. Uh, but that's the reason behind the name. And uh being an old ranger is part of me, but being a uh Marine First, a ranger, a four I uh and then I went into private uh regular law enforcement, municipal city law enforcement. Then I was in a federal prison, worked in there for a little while. I lived on oil rigs, saw a lot of stuff there. That was a wild time. And then from that, I ended up finishing my master's degree once the oil field fell out of the bottom, like end of 2014, start of 2015. I moved to Tampa, that's where I live now, and I'm a podcaster here, and that's where I did uh private contract work and then working for another Delta Force operator, uh Quiet Professionals LLC uh oh Andy is a phenomenal human being.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:45

And yeah, follow those guys on uh on uh Instagram, man.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:48

So I was the marketing manager for the company. So all the posts on everything social media was me from um 2020 to 2022 because I was a recruiter for them for a while and then moved up to run the marketing department for them for a year. Yeah, it's such a phenomenal group. But my point is I have a wide range of education, skill set, uh, experience, and that's where podcasting was just an automatic. I once once it clicked in my brain, I was like, I'm not here to share my stories, although I'm going to. And on podcasts like yours, that's where the opportunity is for me to share and to connect. But I am I'm connected with so many amazing humans, and I want to bring their stories to light. And I have the education and the experience to be able to ask questions that will really help bring their story to people who aren't necessarily familiar with military life or law enforcement or those types of things.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:46

So old Ranger New Dad, I'm everywhere. All right. Well, guys, do me a favor, you know, Spiel. Go ahead and click pause. Actually, you know, let's take a moment to celebrate this is airs in the new year. High five to you for listening. I appreciate you. I wish we'd do it a little more often. Here's a little bit of insight. If you go to Spotify right now and uh leave us a five-star review and then use the text-in feature, I will send you some free supplements from uh Pure Liberty Labs. That's right. No hooks, no hangs. Just send a message, I'll get your info. I'll send you some. Uh I'm really trying to beef that up because I want to talk to you, I want to hear what you guys want. Uh, leave me some comments in there. Let me know what you think of the episode, what you liked, or if you have a message for Seth, I'll relay to him. But yeah, please use that feature. It's great to connect with you guys, or do me even bigger help and bigger favor. Uh head on over to Instagram right here. And follow us. Give us a like, follow, subscribe. That's where I lay out all the reels and all the memes. Check us out. I'm trying to get to uh 50K in this next year. Help me make it. I don't know, be a micro influencer. That's how I get my deals. It helps me pay the bills, and that's how I met Pure Liberty Labs and my other sponsors. So please help the mission, help us grow, and continue to spread the word of Security Hall. I'm Denny Caballero. This has been Seth Ryan. Full go. Thank you all for tuning in. We'll see you all next time. Until then, take care.