WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 You're listening to the Spear, a podcast about the combat experience from the Modern War Institute at West point. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Speaker B: More than 100 meters outside the village. You were definitely getting in a firefight. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Speaker C: My first patrol I took, we had a far ambush 4 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:22.000 Speaker D: and then it was just a huge explosion. 5 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.000 Speaker E: The primary threat was RKG3 grenades, 6 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:26.000 like machine guns and 7 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:30.000 Speaker G: AK47s, that kind of thing. Small arms fire, 8 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:36.000 Speaker H: RPG fire, explosively fire, penetrators, suicide bombs. And then that's 9 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:41.000 Speaker I: about the time that the third IED went off. And that's when another grenade comes spinning over the side of the wall. 10 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:46.000 Speaker J: And it's at that point the IED chain detonates. 11 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:49.000 There was enemy in the wire, there's all these Humvees on fire. 12 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:54.000 It was truly bullets flying from every angle that you could see. I 13 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:00.000 open the door and look outside and all I see is muzzle flashes. 14 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.000 Speaker M: There's a guy on top with a 240 and the Rallis passed right past his head. 15 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:05.000 At that point, our instincts kicked in. 16 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:16.000 Speaker N: One pilot on the controls, the other pilot was using his M4 to engage single man targets on the ground. You're shooting at everything. 17 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:26.000 It was a fight. Welcome to the Spear, the podcast about the combat experience brought to you by the Modern War Institute at West Point. Hi, I'm your host, Tim Heck, and today I'm 18 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:27.000 joined 19 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:28.000 by Scott Neal, 20 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:28.000 a 21 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:29.000 retired Special Forces master 22 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:31.000 sergeant. Many listeners might know 23 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:42.000 him from the opening campaign in Afghanistan. Scott arrived in Afghanistan with his Special Forces team in November of 2001 and was instrumental in the initial American campaign there. Today we're going to talk to Scott about a variety of 24 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:43.000 experiences 25 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:43.000 he's 26 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.000 had in the Army. 27 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:44.000 Scott, welcome 28 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:51.000 to the Spear. Well, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to come back to West Point and see the beautiful surroundings. 29 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:52.000 To give our 30 00:01:51.000 --> 00:03:05.000 listeners a sense of your background. How'd you wind up in the Army? You know, that's all I've ever wanted to do. So as a young kid, I played cowboys and Indians. You know, if you think back, you only had movies that you watch which was the Green Berets or you know, all the war movies that would come on in the holidays, from John Wayne to the Longest Yard to the Bridge over the River Kwai. And so, you know, I knew this is my path and I wasn't that good of a student. You know, I'm probably a C minus student out of the public education in Central Florida. And I joined the army in 1986 right out of high school. I had actually had two scholarships at the time. And I turned them down just to go right into the army. And my first duty station was Fort Ord, California, the seventh id. You know, it was the beginning of my kind of infantry career. And I was just talking to my son earlier. You know, when you're light infantry, you have nothing but your feet. Right. And we would do road marches. Every quarter was 25 miles. Every third month was a 50 miler. And if you wanted to earn the Manchu belt buckle, you had to do a hundred mile road march. So I did three of those before we went into Panama in 1989. So that was the start of my young military career. 31 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:07.000 Your experiences in Panama, can you share a little bit about that? 32 00:03:07.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Yes. You know, we had went a couple times because of Fort Sherman and the jungle warfare training and obviously light fighter, you can't take any mechanize or motorized in there. So we, we were sent back in June of 1989. And that's when a lot of the riots and the population control measures that the Red Brigade, which is more of the kind of enforcers for the Panamanian government, not as much as the military and President Bush one at the time, who was president, we didn't understand the complexities that, you know it today with the drug running and just kind of the lack of confidence of Noriega. But as young soldiers we flew there and we probably four months in a foxhole in Fort Espienard at the Officers Club because Fort Espienard was a joint base between the Panamanians and Special Forces that from their commanders and extremist forces were staying there. So we dug a foxhole one night and we lived in that foxhole and we would go to the Officers Club and kind of camp out of there for four months until the invasion. And then it was over three days later. 33 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:16.000 And you were a young 11 Charlie or 34 00:04:16.000 --> 00:05:01.000 11 Bravo, right. So infantry at the time. You know, you have all these fantasies. You got your bayonet, you know, you got your Kevlar. And I was in the seventh id. So you had all of that sandbags tied to it, you know, so it didn't do your profile and you know it's real. First of all, you think it's real when they give you your basic load of magazines, but they didn't give you the hand grenades. But then you know it's real when they issue your two hand grenades. And so that's kind of the marker as a young private when it's time for war is taking off the blank adapter because beginning we called It Operation Blank Adapter, we knew it wasn't real. But then once you took the blank adapter off and you locked and loaded and then you knew it was really, the battle's about ready to happen when they issue your two hand grenades. 35 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:04.000 After the three days in Panama, did you go back to Fort Ord? 36 00:05:04.000 --> 00:06:31.000 I went back to Fort Ord, California and it was time for me to reenlist. So I reenlisted and I went to Germany and I was stationed at Neum, Germany. And at the time I was part of a guard force for a nuclear weapon site. Now I only lasted about four months in Germany because I had gotten in, you know, we'd come off the base and I got in a little bit of trouble. So as a young sergeant I was sent back home and I went to Fort Carson, Colorado and it was now mechanized infantry. So I went from super light infantry to sitting on a nuclear base, right. And sitting in a foxhole in a guard shack to now being in 113 armored tanks. And that's when the first Gulf War happened. Well, that was over so fast that Fort Carson didn't deploy the 4th Infantry Division. So I kind of felt I missed out on it. So at the time you reach a rank of staff sergeant, you start getting, you know, these notices from the army, hey, you've been selected to try out for Special Forces. So at the time I really had not known any Green Berets. I didn't know that much other than the John Wayne movie about Special Forces. And I said, you know what, I'm going to try out. And I went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We started with about 360 applicants. At the start of the course, in the end of three weeks, there was 62 that made it through. And out of that 62, 40 were actually selected to begin the Special Forces training. 37 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:34.000 Any particular memories from the Q course? 38 00:06:34.000 --> 00:09:44.000 Probably the funnest time of my life. You know, this is all I had. Once again, as a young kid, I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do. So the Special Forces Weapons Sergeants course is very unique because right away you start into every pistol and automatic pistol that's ever been manufactured by us. Warsaw Pack. You know, think of Makarovs and Tokarovs and 1911's and Smith and Wesson pistols. And at the time you don't understand why you're learning so much old weaponry. And then we would get into submachine guns. So all the submachine guns you learned about or you saw in a war movie to modern rifles, then sniper rifles, then mortars to light artillery, then base defense, to close air support. So all of those skill sets are taught to you pretty much, you know, it's nine to five, classroom or field environment all the way, six days a week for six months. And at the end of this, you then go to the final culmination, what's called Robin Sage. And it puts you in the mountains of North Carolina where you link up with these hillbillies, right, who are culturally inappropriate, who you know, are old minded. And your, your job is to integrate with them, get accepted into their community, help understand their military capability. Then you're to train and advise them. So the weapons guys would make, you know, teach them how to be better marksmen or to choose better weapons than a shotgun for different objectives. The medics would help treat battlefield casualties in the smock scenario. So all of this lasts for about three weeks. And it's quite different Ranger school, where if you think about Ranger school, you're given a mission, you have a squad, you kind of develop this operations order, you patrol out past the wire, maybe you go through a mock attack. You know, you have a Ranger sergeant, you know, with a clipboard, evaluating it. In the Robin Sage phase of this, nobody says anything to you. You don't know who really the instructor is, what they're evaluating. You're just placed in this scenario. And at the end of it, once again, you could fail, go all the way through this whole process, but maybe this exercise exposed a moral flaw or a character flaw and you could get recycled or you could get asked to leave Special Forces. But luckily I made it through. And then at the time, I had to go through another six months of foreign language training. So the Special Forces Foreign language school at Fort Bragg, I was selected to go to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is the 5th Special Forces Group, which our area of operations is the Middle East, North Africa, all the way up to the ST is fifth Group's area. And so I had to learn Persian Farsi. So imagine as a young, rock solid E6 Green Beret who just got all the knowledge on how to do secret special missions with unconventional warfare partners, and then you have to go sit in a classroom again for another six months to learn Persian Farsi. So it was a bit of a mental drain. I don't think any of us wanted to be there. Because once again, you're young and naive, you didn't understand what you're being prepared for. So at the end of this, it was 1993, I graduated the language school and Special Forces Selection School. And I went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 39 00:09:44.000 --> 00:09:46.000 What was your first assignment at Campbell? 40 00:09:46.000 --> 00:11:31.000 My first assignment to Fort Campbell was ODA Operational Attachment Alpha 571. Now how Special Forces is organized is five is 5th Special Forces Group, seven is 3rd Battalion and one is the first team in Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion. And the history of Special Forces at the time in the 50s and 60s, why an ODA is because they wanted to throw off the order of battle intel collecting from the Chinese and the Soviets. So you had ODA 026 and you had these different names. If you ever looked through the history, you know, Special Forces. It was a way to throw off the order of battle intelligence collection. So I went to ODA571. I was the youngest team member. That team had previously in 87, 88, had brought Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They also ran the Kuwaiti underground during the first Gulf War. So it was a very seasoned team. And I only say this because when I left his Special Forces group, I had 17 years on only two teams. So I don't think a lot of even military understand that once you're in Special Forces and once you're on a team, you practically are there until you retire or maybe you go to a service school or something and you head right back. So that's a lot of years. So when I got there, just looking at all these legends in the Special Forces community, and here I am a young guy thinking I knew everything from the schoolhouse, right? And that's all I knew was what I was taught in school. And so that kind of began the book education of my Business. And then, you know, we started deploying throughout the Middle east immediately. And I would spend months upon months, I think I deployed each year, nine months out of the year. 41 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:36.000 In those nine months you were gone, what were some of the mission sets that you were doing? 42 00:11:36.000 --> 00:15:23.000 You know, I hate to say it became routine, but you saw the rhythm of what it was going to be. Every year we would have a four month rotation to Kuwait, an Iris Gold exercise, that was the name of the exercise. And it was to be prepared in case Saddam was going to invade again or we were going to invade him. So every year you would go into Kuwait, you would sit at Camp Doha, you would kind of get a mission. Whether you're going to train with their Ministry of Interior, which is like their Special Forces, or maybe they're preparing for some kind of larger exercise. There was always a US Brigade there. So we would liaison between the Kuwaiti military and the US elements. So you had to quickly learn Arabic and speak, you know, basic functions of Arabic. You know, we were getting ready to go in. I think there was some lack of confidence of what Saddam was doing with the Kurds in the north and he was some incursions on the kind of the border. So they were getting ready to do an air campaign. So we had basically personnel recovery. So it was always, you know, going to Kuwait and that was probably the best time because once again, if you recall, I said, you know, you thought you're going to war when you got your magazines as a private and then you got your two hand grenades. Well, when you wait to Kuwait with Special Forces, you got all your vehicles, all your missiles, your TOW missiles, everything, a complete complement of explosives, everything as soon as you showed up. So you're ready to go and do deep strategic reconnaissance or counterterrorism or security force assistance at a moment notice. So those exercises really honed your training because you had a desert opportunity to do any kind of mission rehearsal you wanted to. Then in between those deployments, we would get just a normal, what they called joint combined exercise, a J set. Sometimes that would mean that we would go into Kenya and we would take doctors and vets. And one particular mission, there was a Somali group that was coming across the Kenyan border and they were killing this Brunei tribe, which are very small tribal folks with the smallest spears you ever seen. You always think the Maasai and the Samburu, the big six foot seven, you know, warriors with the big tall spears. Well, these were very small, not quite pygmy sized, but their life was built around grazing their cattle. And they would take 5000 head of Brahma and just run them from range to range to range grazing. And then sometimes they would rustle each other, still five from one tribe and still two from another. It's just part of their history and lore. But then the Somalis were coming in with AK47s and killing the tribal members and rustling the cattle. So they wanted to take the vets and the special forces medics and at least start inoculating the cattle and create a buffer between the Somalis and the small tribes. Create a buffer between the small tribes. And that's what we did for seven months. We lived in the bush. Lions and tigers and bears ate with the people. You know, we've got raided a couple times by the Somalians and fought them back. We had a couple of our interpreters got shot as they were doing supply runs. It's just, you know, that was a quintessential or quintessential Special Force mission at the time. I've worked with the SSG in Pakistan. So once again, every year we would go for 90 days into Pakistan. We would go up to the Eagle's Nest, which is their compound. You know, we did some DEA missions in Pakistan. So it's hard for me to recall in the 90s just the amount of and the variety of missions we did. You know, you would just sit in a team room and one day the captain would come in and say, we got a mission. And you would typically have maybe three weeks to prepare for it. And then you would deploy and execute the mission. 43 00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:26.000 That process went on, I'm assuming until 2001. 44 00:15:26.000 --> 00:19:10.000 2001. So 2001 there was two things in special Forces. You kind of have a partner team that they'll deploy, you'll support them while they're deployed, they'll come back, they'll refit, and then they'll support you with intelligence and information, kind of your research rmy and take care of your families and things while you're back. Well, ODA 595, which is where sister team at the time had just gotten back from Uzbekistan and they were training the Uzbeki Spetsnaz on how to fight Al Qaeda remnants that were coming from Afghanistan and keeping open the drug corridors into Central Asia and Soviet Union. So we were in a training exercise on 1st October. We were deployed in the Middle east and we were there to be prepared in case there was a counterterrorism scenario. At the time, our specific team was part of what they call the commanders and extremist forces. So that is any counter terrorism or strategic reconnaissance before any of the national forces come into the area, we're already there, we're language trained, we understand the Middle East. We've got multiple years in the area. And so we were on a training scenario that the United States had been attacked and we had already deployed different sniper elements all throughout the United States that throughout the weekend were giving us situational reports. So they were looking at terrorist training camps. So they were rehearsing long range communications, whether it was fm, long whip or it was satellite communications or whatever. And we would receive the information and we kind of build this, this model of understanding of, of the scenario that's developing. And I remember that the intel sergeant walked into the isolation room and wrote on the whiteboard, the World Trade center has been hit. And we thought it was part of the training exercise. And an hour later he comes in and says, the second one's been hit. And it wasn't until about four hours later that then Colonel Mulholland came in and said, stop what you're doing. This is for real. And we walked into the mess hall and we saw it like everybody else. And so we knew immediately what that meant. And that meant that we would be deploying immediately. Even though we were slated to deploy on the 1st of October, we left the 28th of September and we moved forward to two locations. Mark and Bob's team 595 went to Uzbekistan and we went to Oman and we began to start determining what our mission set would be. At the time, nobody knew what to do, right? There was no pre canned battle plan for Afghanistan. There was no targets of strategic importance that the Air Force could start hitting, right. Bridges or communication centers or pol centers. Nobody knew anything. And there was a plan that was presented that would have the larger army and the Marine Corps do an overland invasion because Afghanistan's landlocked and an airborne drop into the Kabul region. But it was told that it would take at least six months to organize and get the forces together and deploy those. And at the time, the National Command Authority couldn't wait that long. And if you think about Pearl harbor and the Doolittle raid, right, the President needed some kind of psychological win, mostly for the American population that we are. This is America's response. So that became the first set of missions was how do we get behind the lines, link up with the Mujahideen, organize some kind of resistance through the wintertime, gain intelligence and information on the enemy, the population, the terrain, and feed that into a larger system that would support the airborne and overland invasion in the springtime. 45 00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:18.000 The story of your ODA and your sister ODA team is pretty well known. After you left that first deployment to Afghanistan, where did your career take you? 46 00:19:18.000 --> 00:22:17.000 You know, what about the day after, right? We, we thought we had victory in Afghanistan. We had just finished the, the Battle of Anaconda, right? And I think that's when the conventional forces came in and, and wanted to have a pitch battle and air assault to the left and right. We came home no fanfare, no ticker tape parades. The families really at the time didn't know anything that went on. There was little information about it. I would say about a month and a half later we got a be prepared mission for the invasion of Iraq. So we're talking maybe August of 2002. And by November of 2002 we deployed into Kuwait. So once again, fifth group moved ahead the very same teams that were the key teams with the resistance and Afghanistan were given resistance missions with the Kurds in the north. Some teams worked with the CIA and in the population areas. Some teams were advanced reconnaissance for the maneuver units. Our particular unit had weapons of mass destruction mission. So we had all the scientists and the doctors and the packages that basically, you know, what we found we had to live with until it was all decommissioned. And so that began the planning for the invasion. So the invasion was very quick. Once again, it was sort of like Afghanistan. It was over before you know it. I remember that, you know, there wasn't a lot of weapons of mass destruction activity. And they started changing our mission to where we started trying to secure national museums and universities because they were being pilfered and looted. And nobody had a plan for all of these functions of, you know, Iraqi society because it just turned into utter chaos. Now, the Ba' Athist government was told to go home, don't come back. The Iraqi army was told to capitulate, don't show up. The police force was told to stay at home. I don't want to see you with a gun. So we had all of this invading forces just kind of doing checkpoints and activities. And I remember sitting in downtown Baghdad at a cafe, drinking tea, eating a falafel. War's easy, right? Three months, it's over. Just like, look at my experience, look at Panama, look at the invasion of Afghanistan, and now look at the invasion, Iraq, 90 days, mission complete. And so we kind of wrapped up. There wasn't a lot of use for our skill set. You know, that's why they're finding missions for us. Came back home. And I would say it's two and a half, three months later that we got noticed that there's this phenomenon of foreign fighters that are coming through North Africa. And we need an element to go into North Africa and map out, you know, half hajj, journey to Mecca, half, you know, foreign fighter rat lines, and how individuals would go from Tanzania through Egypt down to Djibouti, cross the shortest land route to Yemen, then get facilitated up to Saudi Arabia and then cross into Iraq and basically way stations that would sort them out and put them into Iraq to be battlefield multipliers for lots of networks. 47 00:22:17.000 --> 00:22:21.000 Your role at the time, are you still a weapons sergeant? Have you advanced in the ranks 48 00:22:21.000 --> 00:25:36.000 by the time we get into Africa? I am a senior E7 intelligence sergeant, part of the commanders in extremist forces and the commanders in extremist forces is this hybrid Special Forces Company that is three part assaulters, one part sniper and one part human intelligence capable. And so once again, we had this formula that could go further behind the lines. We had special equipment, communications, all those things that became normal to units today. Because we had the language skills and because a lot of us had already been in Africa, we had relationships with other host nation countries and intel services. So we could visit them in the embassy one day, we could go out to an environment and see how transfers are being made over land at bus stops and poalas and souks and just get to understand it. Because at the time, America didn't have this large human terrain mapping capability. They didn't understand how humans moved across the battlefield unless it got to the battlefield, right? So there was a big lack of enterprise corporate knowledge in special operations that would inform commanders of how is this happening. They were fighting them and seeing them on the battlefield in Iraq. But the commanders couldn't execute a solution in Tanzania, right? They couldn't in Chad. They didn't know what to do. And so we begin this process of mapping this out, right? This observation, this informant, this, you know, communication with the embassy and our other intel services, other law enforcement mechanisms, right? DEA to FBI to whatever. You had to get the whole of government involved to understand this problem. Because once they, you can't do very much about it until they got onto the battlefield. So we did that for about six months. You know, understood the whole system, helped develop a whole of government approach to start disassembling these, these facilitation networks that have been there for thousand years. It literally was the underground railroad. Any jihad action that's ever gone on in any since the Crusades, this was the rat line that provided it. And that was probably summer of 2004. We came home for two months and we were told that the whole entire south and central part of Iraq is in a civil war. We need more special forces back in the area. At the time, as we were rotating out in 2003, other special forces groups that weren't regionally aligned and had the language started coming in. And they really couldn't communicate to, to understand or do intelligence work to understand what was going on. So they wanted fifth group to go back. And by, I would say, August of 2004 is when you started seeing really this complication of Sunni and Shia, this retribution of generations of families that were taking it against other families. The effects of Iranian influence and their intel mechanisms coming and infiltrating into Iraqi units. 49 00:25:36.000 --> 00:25:39.000 And was your role still as an intelligence Sergeant 50 00:25:39.000 --> 00:26:34.000 at the time. Then I became a troop sergeant major and a team sergeant. So I had about 45 special forces that I was in charge of. We divided into three different locations in the south. So I had a small element in the Jaff, a small element in Iskandariyah, which is right outside of Baghdad, and one on the outskirts of Baghdad, halfway to Fallujah. And we would either come together and do hits. Once you have enough intelligence and you find a key personality or key financier you could organize. And whether it was unilateral or with some host nation forces, we began to train the Iraqi counterterrorist force and make them a viable force. We also used the 36 commandos. We also used different tribes and kind of as a surrogate force, especially when it came to doing some reconnaissance activities. And each night was a mission literally for seven months at a time. You were fighting every night 51 00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:36.000 on those raids. You accompanied the raid force? 52 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:37.000 Yes. 53 00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:41.000 And what was your role as a senior intelligence sergeant or a troop sergeant major? 54 00:26:41.000 --> 00:29:26.000 I like to give the analogy of kind of like a bullseye target, right? You have the X, which is the compound where you suspect them to be. Then you have the nine ring, which is, you know, almost 10 meters outside of the area. And then you have the eight ring and the seven ring. So if you think of a bullseye target, you see these circles. And so for a sergeant major, I'm not there to go inside the room and clear the room, right? I'm there as soon as they enter the compound. So one side of my ears are listening to actions and the fight, the firefight, the intensity, everything in the center of the compound. And now I'm starting to position medical, right? I'm starting position outside blocking forces, right? So where's the alleys? Where's the sprinter spark? Where do you might have rooftop fire? Because usually after about four minutes is when the local neighborhood, you know, wakes up and starts trying to engage you, right? So we started to understand, you know, it's not as much managing the chaos inside the rooms. That's what you have your cell leaders and your assault force leaders on the inside of the objective sorting it out. You needed somebody that could then start arranging all of this support mechanism around the objective, whether you needed to maneuver Marine Corps block positions or you needed to start looking for aeromedevac extractions in case there's injuries. And then the captain or the major, at the time, they were worried more of the bubble above everything. So your flight ops, your UAV ops, your close air support so it's hard to get young captains at the time who wanted to get their battles on and fire the gun and face the enemy to say stop, right? Your mind has to be communicating back left to right and to echelons above you. But you got to manage assets and synchronize them and call them and get them. You've got three people next to you. You've got the close air support coordinator, you've got the host nation liaison coordinator, and also the battlefield coordinator if you're in somebody else's backyard. So the hard part about this was it wasn't the fun stuff, you know, blowing indoors and kicking indoors and, you know, measuring your gun prowess against an enemy. It was managing the chaos on the outside. Because if that started to get away from you, you can never get it back. So that's what a sergeant typically would do, would manage slightly inside the compound to bring in the assets, and then the team leader and the company commander would start managing larger ass on the battlefield. 55 00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:30.000 When you were doing that, what were some of the considerations going through your mind? 56 00:29:30.000 --> 00:30:35.000 I'll tell you the hardest thing to do is in your ear sets, you have three forms of communication, right? You have what's going on in the ground. So when everybody's talking, right? You have to remember to tell everybody to shut up, right? Call us if you need something. So you get the casualness of just being in the room and talking to each other or cell one's clear, I'm on the rooftop, we're clear. And you start getting this chatter, right? It's easier when you have this row of communication in front of you or in a truck, right? You kind of can look at it and see it, but when it's in your mind and it's in your headset, you don't, you know, it becomes too clustered too fast. And now you start to see these multiple buttons on your chest and you're cutting comms off on one and you're stating comms because sometimes you'll get cross traffic and the commander will hear the panic, you know, the doors blowing up. And then they get hiking frightened. And then they're saying, I'm going to send you this and that, or, you know, you know what I mean? So this, the chaos of battlefield over the airways becomes hard to manage in your mind when you have so many people talking at once. 57 00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:41.000 And how did you on a physiological level handle that chaos or mitigate it? 58 00:30:41.000 --> 00:32:12.000 One is you have to have an extra sense of calm, right? Everybody always tells you that time slowed down when I got in a firefight, right? I got shot in the world. It does the same thing in the battlefield. And you detune yourself a little bit, right? And you're looking for the brevity of code words. If you have a good, strong team in a battle, they're calm. If all of a sudden they get very hyper, you know something bad is going on. So you tell the other teams to remain calm. You want to hear where the firefight's developing. So as you're going in, you're trying to stay as quiet, as repetitious as you can. You try not to breach explosively as long as you can. You're climbing walls, you're, you know, block picking. You're doing all of these repetitious skills. Once chaos happens, you also want to keep it as calm as you can, too, because the intensity of the firefight will tell you where the location of the enemy is. And then you can flood it with resources. If everybody's chattering and everybody's communicating, you'll get lost in just listening to the battlefield and the intensity of the resistance. So part of it is just mentally going neutral, and then it becomes routine. You've done it. Remember I told you we did it every night, seven months, three to four years at a time. You get into this rhythm of the battle, and, you know, when everything's going right, maybe you got one or two guys in there, you know, and then you see when it's starting to go wrong, and that's when it's going to fall apart quickly. 59 00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:13.000 Were there times that it started to go wrong? 60 00:32:13.000 --> 00:35:33.000 Oh, very many times. Sometimes you're hitting one objective and you may hit one or two key personalities, and it's part of a bigger assault force. So maybe you have about a thousand marines, let's say, and they're itching for the battle. And the Marines, I love them to death, but, you know, if a goat crosses your path, they're getting it. And they, they. I call it. I call it the Marine Death Star. They all love to face out and fire for effect. And one battlefield, it was, you know, your instincts are wrong. When you start looking at the size of the blue forces and the green forces, which was 700 A Battalion, five M1 tanks, you know, a couple armor, personnel carriers, some gun trucks, and then The Iraqis had 750 cops, and you're just like, oh, this is not. This is not going to end well. And it was a town that basically was a little village that had been capturing contractors and kidnapping them. So it was more of A criminal syndicate. And they were hit supply chains and they would pick off a few trucks, right, and then black market the truck. So it wasn't qu battlefield enemy positions, but it was just a thorn in the whole. And it set right on the cusp of multiple units. So nobody had direct responsibility. So, you know, I go into the coordination meeting and I start looking at these maps with all these colors on them. You're like, oh, this is going to get complex. Somebody's thought about this a little too long because you could tell just military map, you know, topography over everything. And then after about three days of briefings, you start thinking, boy, everybody's getting hyped for this battle. And that's when you start knowing that something has the potential of going wrong. So usually Special Forces, they would like us, along with our partners at the time to go in first and we'd want to go in the night before so we could capture the key and critical person before they split. What was happening is you had all of this early warning in a village and say like you're a kingpin or you're, you know, you know you're bad. As soon as you hear the first weapon shot or the first helicopter or the first truck, you just jump the wall three buildings over and you're not in the location. So you have to really go in there as quiet as you can and insert and observe the target area. And that makes you the most vulnerable in case things go wrong. So we inserted, we watched this area. We hit them very early in the morning. Then we watched the forces of the Iraqi, you know, army come in. The Marine Corps came into an area. We watched the Iraqi police force came into the area. Then we're listening to communications, we know that the gig was up already. What we started to learn was they didn't want to take on the forces on a head on battle. So they started in placing IEDs on all the supporting roads. So now how do you now tell all of these subordinate units and create a plan for IEDs? And what happened is as we were leaving, the Marine Corps started to get hit by IEDs, which amped them up even more. And so now you're in the middle of this fire for effect Death Star that just lays waste at everything. You know, it's kind of hard to regain discipline sometimes when it happens. 61 00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:39.000 When you went back after hits like that, what was your process? 62 00:35:39.000 --> 00:37:02.000 A lot of tremendous amount of energy. You have to do passage of lines back into whatever base in Escondaria. It was a power station, it was Manned by a battalion of Marines. You get back, you shake out your kid immediately. The intel actions happen with the people you captured because they'll get interrogated right away and you got to sort them out and understand if you got the right people or not. If not, they get into the system and they're let go within 24 hours. Hours. We refit very quickly because you never know during the interrogation process that they may develop other information that you don't want that person to fly, you know, flight risk. So you may go back out again in an hour. So you have to be prepared. So whether you reload your guns and bullets, you just have to immediately get mission capable. Usually starting about daytime six in the morning, you'll shut down the operations because that's also when they start in placing the id. So you, you want to be careful because the next day of just normal activity at the time in Iraq would start again and the Marine Corps, the Army would start their normal patrols and that's where you would see all the IED attacks and everything. So it became kind of a reverse operation strategy that you work as hard as you could and then once it turned to daylight, you're out like a vampire. And as soon as you wake up at three in the afternoon, you begin to coordinate what the evening activities are. 63 00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:05.000 And how did you take care of yourself in all of this? 64 00:37:05.000 --> 00:38:15.000 At the time, I was a fit, you know, nimble person. You work out. I remember in our team house we had all the workout, fitness equipment that we could do this. I think the Internet was, you know, becoming more capable. When we first went in Afghanistan, it was letters, right? Maybe an occasional sat phone call once a week, you know, as it became, you know, 2004, 2005, 2006, you know, you could communicate with your family a little bit more. And it became harder, I think, on the families too, because you couldn't write this darling love letter, you know, and talk about, you know, when you get home. Now you're into the daily grind of Tyler was a crap head this morning and he won't go to school on time. And, you know, so you get burdened by life. But personally, I think that's part of why Special Forces is selected, right? All of those battery of tests that you see in Special Forces assessment selection, you find guys that are basically more mountain men. They thrive in chaos or they seem to be more centered. You put it in a special place until you came home because most of the time you knew you were going right back anyways. 65 00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:26.000 You mentioned coming home and processing These things. There's been a resurgence of discussion about preservation of the force and family. Was your role as a troop sergeant major in that vital. 66 00:38:26.000 --> 00:41:07.000 You know, in the beginning, nobody knew nor cared about ptsd. Nobody knew or cared about tbi. Most guys would mask it so they could go on the next mission. We had some, as I look back, I'm wise now, right? As I look backwards, I saw some that fell. You know, they drank a whole lot and they were getting a lot of trouble back at home. And the kind of joke was, well, let's get them back to war and that'll stop that real quick, right? People hid their family lives and the toll that it took on their family lives, right? So you don't want to show any flaws, so you don't get taken off the team, so you can't deploy on a mission. There wasn't services at the time like you see today, when I go back to fifth group or I go back to other places. I mean, they have physical therapists, they have highly trained and skilled counselors. You know what I mean? There's more awareness, more services that were available than there was in the early days of the war when there's absolutely none. If guys were shot and injured, you know, they took it upon themselves to rehab. A lot of guys that were shot and injured hid and let the Special Forces medic take care of it so he wouldn't be deployed back home. So he had a lot of guys that were, you know, blown up or injured or whatnot, that the medic would practice being a medic and treat you up. I mean, we have friends that basically left a stretcher in Baghdad hospital, caught a ride to go back to battle. That's the mindset. And Special Forces, so fast forward, you know, even 2010 and 11, you started to see in the initial reports on the stress of the force, right? You started seeing a lot of the SOCOM commanders talk about this issue. And as a leader, that's what you have to do. You have to give a voice to the problem you're seeing. But then again, you know, a lot of it was masked even from the commander. So the sergeant major's network at the time was trying to push friends that they have grown up with in special Operations into rehab, right. Without getting the commander involved. So you saw a lot of the underground network trying to self heal, trying to take care of issues. But at the time, we just weren't given kind of the support necessary. Whereas today, you have the whole tactical athlete mindset, right? You have the physical rehabilitation you have a lot more public, private relationships between nonprofits that maybe have trips that have therapeutic, advanced therapeutic qualities that the command lets team members go on. You see senior leaders admitting their own flaws, right? Given, you know, this, instead of putting it behind the curtain, behind the fence, they've brought out a lot of these issues and personally reflected, which has brought this out to the forefront. It's a completely different offering of services today than it was 10 years ago ago. 67 00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:14.000 You've led us through 2004. You mentioned 2010. What happened in the intervening period for you? 68 00:41:14.000 --> 00:44:26.000 So in 2004, I was hit for the third time with IEDs. Remember, every night was explosive breaching was just as close as you could get to the door of the wall, so you could immediately get in as fast as you could. It started to take a toll on me because I was losing kind of this cognitive skill set, right. I had a horrible time with numbers. I was having a horrible time with memory, even shooting next to somebody, the overpressure in my eyes. I was blinking a lot. So you start to wonder. And I went back for one more rotation in 2005, and I kind of basically said, that's it. I'm not as fast as I was. Right. I'm slowing the assault down. I'm having some issues. And the command at the time said, all right, we're going to put you at the schoolhouse for urban combat. So I went to that for about a year and I naturally came up on time to where either I had to go to Fort Bragg for an instructor position or I could volunteer. And as I'm looking at kind of this, you know, career map, the opportunity to come to Special Operations Command in Florida. There was a position available and I'm like, well, that's where I grew up. You know, maybe I'll go there and I'll retire out of the headquarters. So I went from a very tactically focused mission focus, the legends of Special Forces in one team room focus, to this four star, you know, oak boardroom policies, billions of dollars in budgets, you know, wat tiring over interagency cooperation policy and legislative briefings. And I felt 1000% out of place at the time. I think less than 8% of the staff at Special Operations Command was special operators. So, you know, I was an anomaly as an enlisted person in a four star headquarters that was also a special forces person. So I got assigned to an emerging task force called the Interagency Task Force for Counterterrorism. It came from lessons with JSOC and others that were very Successful in putting these different mid to high level interagency decision makers and workers together in this operations and intel fusion store center. So if I had a Special Forces light colonel next to a GS14 SIGINT DIA rep, the Special Forces colonel would know what he could action. The DIA rep knew how to dig through the systems. Right? So this kind of fusion center became critical as we started testing it in different problem sets around the world. And problem sets would range from how to share intelligence that got into the highest systems. And we're basically just stuck there. And we couldn't share it with any of our partners, with any of our law enforcement agencies, with anything. It was just a treasure trove of the solutions of Where's Waldo? Yet you couldn't have a way to bring it out and put it that could be utilized by your partners. So we started solving some problems and we took one problem at a time and we would garner success and we'd go to the next problem. 69 00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:37.000 You talked about being hit for the third time and how that led to a career change that brought you somewhere completely unexpected. Can you talk us through the mission that happened and what was the sign for you that that was enough? 70 00:44:37.000 --> 00:46:44.000 I think the last time mission we were just doing what's called a milk run to the battalion in RPC Republican palace complex near the airport in Baghdad. And they wanted us to come for a briefing which is in the daytime. And I knew it, I knew it. Don't cross the wire before a certain time because the bombs are still out there, right? It was getting so bad that you knew it was going to happen. The young kids in the Marine Corps that were on these patrols just knew it. Somebody was going to get it. And so I was the last in a column of our trucks. We had a trailer on the back of it because you usually get supplies and kind of refit and you make a drive back and sure enough, you know, a string of 155s went off. You know, my gunner went down in the cupola I think got smashed up pretty good inside because you're just a bouncing ball on the inside. But the vehicle was still mobile and we pushed through it. It wasn't much of a firefight by then. It was just all harassment activities. And you know, for the next three days it was just ears are ringing. You know, the team becomes ineffective. You know, once you get one injury or two injuries on a 12 man team or a 24 person team, you're kind of combat ineffective. Even if you have somebody killed, you usually have three others that are injured. So it takes a while to kind of get the team's bearings back again. And I knew it as I came back home and was trying to adapt. You know, you place the combat experience on one side and you just try to be a family member on the other, and things aren't right. And who knows that it's not right as your family members and your team members, right. You're missing things you can't, you know, understand. Even as you're talking to somebody, you have to now look them and hear them talking to you. If not, you won't even notice that they're trying to address you. So even though there's no physical thing like you think you would see, you know, a missing leg or gashes and cuts and stuff, which, like I say, most of them we just repaired ourselves, you just know things are off. And it's almost like a football player that's got a concussion, right? And the coach, you're putting you down and you just have to accept it. 71 00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:48.000 The decision that you made was that influenced by your family, 72 00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:49.000 the combination of all of it, right? You know, how do you let a high performer down and say it's time? So it takes members of your command, it takes even your own team guys. You know, once again, I'll use a football analogy. You know, when is it time for Brady to retire? Right. Was it time for Joe Montana to kind of step down? Because you notice that you're missing a beat and you can't run fast enough? You know, even if you're doing PT when you're back home, you start to know that your performance, you're doing shooting competitions with each other in the team and you're starting to be the last person, whereas typically you're the silverback, right? You're always out in front, you're leading from the front, and now you're kind of in the mid pack. And after a while, you're missing half your physical workouts because you're in the medics or you're getting rehabilitated or you're doing something, so you kind of self select that maybe it's time to let somebody else take their turn in leadership. Because that's what you don't want to deny is the opportunity for somebody else to get into that position and become a leader as well. 73 00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:51.000 Did you have an opportunity for leadership when you went down to socom? 74 00:47:51.000 --> 00:49:38.000 Yes. So I was my official title and I had it on my desk. The Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Director of the Interagency Task Force for Counterterrorism So what did that mean? I no longer had privates to wake up every day and sergeants to get evaluations. Now I had basically equivalent of a two star position. I had senior ses, interagency people from CIA, dia, nro, nsa, dea, FBI, all in this task force. So my position, you know, wasn't typical. In the US military. It's very unique that a sergeant and a senior enlisted officer or senior enlisted advisor and a senior officer or a partnership, right. A mom and a pop. When headquarters, you don't see that a lot. But in special operations, in this task force, they wanted a senior NCO that had the ground skills that could say no, that's wrong. Somebody is going to have to action that target that you're giving them. Somebody is getting shot today because you're taking your time not getting this packet ready, right. So you're kind of the truth of why we need some urgency, right? The speed of battle at a headquarters to get things done. I also was the crisis action sergeant major for all of special operations. So an additional duty, say Haiti, when they had the massive earthquake and you needed special operations assets to be coordinated ad hockley and brought down there. That was one of my responses, responsibility. So, you know, all around the world there was some kind of natural disaster, some kind of crisis that became a deflection from the command because they controlled all the, you know, maneuvering of special operations assets that were still conus based. So that became another side job. 75 00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:40.000 When did you finally call it quits? 76 00:49:40.000 --> 00:51:39.000 Well, I think the army called it quits for me in 2011. I, it was time to retire. We had a nice ceremony, right? My family came and I think it was the first time they had ever heard of some of the things I have done. I had ambassadors there, I had commissioners of the NYPD there. So as an nco, I had an entourage of people wishing me well. And then the day after I retired, I was nobody. I'm just a retired master sergeant from the Army Special Forces. So typically you see some of these great leaders go on to their second phase or their second life. At the time, some leaders out of SOCOM were getting appointed to nt National Counterterrorism center, you know what I mean? Became ambassadors for counterterrorism, Del Daly, all of these things you served parallel with. And then as an nco, that's it. I was asked by Petraeus staff to go back to Afghanistan for a year. I worked on his counterinsurgency advisory team. I walked the battlefields of southern Afghanistan. I could go on any Aircraft, any mission set in, any meeting. Once again, I had the ultimate pass. And I became what they called a directed telescope. And that's the eyes and ears outside of the command chain. The sunshine pipe of glorious information of things are spectacular. Well, nothing to see here, folks. And as it former NCO that had trust amongst the leadership, I could say that's wrong. This is right. This commander over here really has it going on. You should study why he's effective. This one over here, it's not going well. And so I spent about a year doing that and I was a little disillusioned at the end. I think I was also a little tired. Right. What am I doing running around the battlefield again, carrying a gun as a contractor? And I came home and vowed never to be a government contractor again. 77 00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:49.000 The legacy you've left the army, the legacy you've left leaders, our partner forces. When you look back on that, what do you see as the accomplishment? 78 00:51:49.000 --> 00:53:13.000 Transition. Right. I've been there when I was just a lonely private and we had a Kevlar and an lbe, right. And I watched the army progress to ballistic armor and then ballistic, better scopes and everything. Then I was there in a technology transition phase when we had tagging, tracking, tracking, locating. Right. All of the stuff we give soldiers today. I'm just amazed at the Conex is full of high end gadgets and gadgets, but it also doesn't replace the mind of the warrior that's the ultimate problem solver. So you'd be just as surprised how clever and smart this next generation is and using these technologies. Whereas I was a big caveman, I resisted technologies. Finally, as I transitioned, I had the ability to transition to a four star command where I had to start wearing a suit more than a uniform. And I had to change to the business language of strategy and policy. And I was able to adapt that way. The final part about this is how many people I've met along the way in 25 years of service now, 10 years that I've been out that are still in. Right. And you become a mentor for them or you receive them on the other side when they transition out and you help them detune themselves from the military mindset. And they're just as scared about the business side realizing that the war is probably over too and they need to transition and start a new life. And that's probably where I've been the biggest help in the last couple years. 79 00:53:13.000 --> 00:53:16.000 Scott, I want to thank you for coming on the spear today. 80 00:53:16.000 --> 00:53:24.000 Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. I always love the conversation. 81 00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:57.000 Thank you for listening to this episode of the Spirit. The Spear is produced by the Modern War Institute at West Point. What you hear in each episode are the views of the participants and don't represent the position of West Point, the Army, or the US Government. 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