542: Stronghold: War, Rescue, and Resistance. With Ephraim Mattos

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[UNKNOWN]: This is the Jocco podcast for 542 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco willing.

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[UNKNOWN]: Good evening, Echo.

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[UNKNOWN]: Good evening.

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[UNKNOWN]: On the morning of Thursday, June 8th, 2023, just a few miles from the location of the massacre.

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[UNKNOWN]: The Burma Army attacks several villages looking to root out and kill any of the villagers who would dare defend themselves from the Burma Army's tyranny.

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[UNKNOWN]: Mortars rain down on unsuspecting civilians, killing some and wounding others, as the Burma Army assaulted the undefended villages.

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[UNKNOWN]: However on this day, things went differently.

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[UNKNOWN]: Reacting quickly to the mortar barrage, the civilians knew what to do.

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[UNKNOWN]: They stopped the major bleeding of the wounded using makeshift turnicates made from bandages and clothes in the village, tightening them with sticks and other items until the patients were stabilized enough for immediate evacuation.

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[UNKNOWN]: Relying on a series of strategically placed handheld radios, the fleeing villagers communicated with other nearby villages and coordinated for a safe place to run, and they took their wounded with them.

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[UNKNOWN]: At the outset of the battle, local village defenders moved into place to slow the enemy advance and buy enough time for the families to escape.

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[UNKNOWN]: Some of these young brave men were killed and wounded.

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[UNKNOWN]: The defenders used cat-turn tickets to stop the bleeding of the wounded and tactical field leaders to quickly evacuate the patients when the defenders could no longer hold the line.

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[UNKNOWN]: When the battle subsided, the villagers who fled were provided rice and medicine that had been stockpiled in secure locations around the jungle, the critically wounded were taken to the bank of a large lake where a medical boat was waiting with medics, extra supplies, and advanced life support.

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[UNKNOWN]: And that right, there's a little section of an article from the online magazine called Coffee or Die, and the article was written by Ephraim Matos, and although the article paints a pretty gruesome picture, just a few months prior, there was another devastating attack that had taken place.

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[UNKNOWN]: Only in that attack, the villagers were not prepared.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were not ready.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were defenseless.

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[UNKNOWN]: And 17 people, including a handful of children, were not able to escape.

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[UNKNOWN]: And they were captured by Burma Army soldiers.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were tortured.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were violated.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were murdered.

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[UNKNOWN]: And their bodies were set on fire.

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[UNKNOWN]: and the difference between these two situations, one ending in a massacre and the other ending in people actually escaping was training and preparation and supplies provided by an amazing charitable organization called Stronghold Rescue and Relief.

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[UNKNOWN]: and this is an organization that was founded by E. from Maddoz who is a former seal that fought in Afghanistan.

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[UNKNOWN]: He also fought as a civilian in Missouri in 2017 where he was shot by ISIS.

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[UNKNOWN]: during the rescue of a young girl who is hiding in a pile of corpses in front of ISIS HQ.

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[UNKNOWN]: But that wasn't enough for E from he had more to give and he founded stronghold rescue and relief and has been working.

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[UNKNOWN]: All over the globe with a particular focus in the violent war in Burma, training the locals and giving them the ability to fight and survive.

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[UNKNOWN]: And he has joined us before podcast 398, and it's an honor to have him back with us again tonight to share some of his experiences from the frontlines and the incredible work that he, his people and his organization do, eat from welcome back.

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[UNKNOWN]: Good to see you.

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[UNKNOWN]: Thanks for having me on.

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[UNKNOWN]: Appreciate it.

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[UNKNOWN]: And do we need to talk about your name change?

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[UNKNOWN]: Sure.

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[UNKNOWN]: Why not?

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[UNKNOWN]: I was going to like.

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[UNKNOWN]: I forgot.

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[UNKNOWN]: So you have a new podcast and your podcast is called Overwatch with eForMados and I was listening to it.

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[UNKNOWN]: And in the beginning of it, you introduced yourself as eForMados.

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[UNKNOWN]: And as soon as I heard that, I felt bad because on the last time you were on this

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[UNKNOWN]: three years ago, I called you F from the whole time, and you responded perfectly well, and it seemed like normal.

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[UNKNOWN]: And then when you got here today, I said, hey, man, do I mess up your pronunciation of your name last time?

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[UNKNOWN]: And you said I kind of didn't, so what went down?

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[UNKNOWN]: So, so basically what happened, so I growing up, I was called, yeah, Ephraim, my parents called me Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: But then when I joined the military, literally the day I was leaving for boot camp, I just sort of, in my head, I just said, well, you know, I'm just going to start saying my name is Ephraim because that's going to be easier for people to pronounce.

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[UNKNOWN]: And that was, that was the entire amount of thought that I'd put into that.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so for the past decade and a half since I went to a boot camp in 2010, any time, but any time somebody asked me my name, I said, well, it's Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: But then about a year or a year and a half ago, I was just sitting there and, you know, I'm married now, I have a daughter and I was just thinking about,

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[UNKNOWN]: He was like, why did I change my name?

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[UNKNOWN]: I was like, my father named me Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: My mother named me Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: Why am I saying Ephraim?

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[UNKNOWN]: I just had never really thought about it.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so I was thinking, I was like, well, you know, if I just doubled down and Ephraim, that's what people know me.

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[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's like, that's what Jaco calls me.

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[UNKNOWN]: That's what everybody calls me.

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[UNKNOWN]: I'm gonna look like an idiot if I go back.

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[UNKNOWN]: But I was like, no, I was like, no, my father named me Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: My mother named me Ephraim.

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[UNKNOWN]: So I'm gonna go back to Ephraim and, you know, so, yeah.

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[UNKNOWN]: It's my first person to call you out on this today.

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[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so what did you do with like your friends that had been calling you F from for the past six years or whatever?

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[UNKNOWN]: Well, most of them call me just Matos or some some people still call me F from and it's still totally fine I don't I don't correct people and I don't I don't really care It's not that big of a deal usually just let it slide

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[UNKNOWN]: The only, so my nickname has been Jocco since my parents gave me that nickname before I was born.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so everyone called me Jocco, my family called me Jocco, my friends called me Jocco, my fan, my immediate, now family calls me Jocco.

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[UNKNOWN]: The only time I didn't go, but

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[UNKNOWN]: It caught.

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[UNKNOWN]: I got a letter.

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[UNKNOWN]: This now got to the teams because I got a letter in Buds and they handed us letters and it said Jocca wanted one of the instructors like Jocca what the hell is that and so that's that's how it kind of got back into the teams or into the teams because otherwise I didn't really bring it up

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[UNKNOWN]: But when I went to college for three years, there was, you know, they have a whatever roster sheet.

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[UNKNOWN]: What do you call that?

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[UNKNOWN]: A roster sheet, like a class list.

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[UNKNOWN]: There's some real particular name for it, isn't there?

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[UNKNOWN]: Attendance.

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[UNKNOWN]: Attendance.

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[UNKNOWN]: Attendance sheet.

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[UNKNOWN]: And on there it's John Willink, right?

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[UNKNOWN]: And so that's the only place where the teachers and the students call called me John.

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[UNKNOWN]: Because I didn't, I didn't say, well, actually, it's really

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[UNKNOWN]: You know, but actually my nickname is July, like it didn't, it didn't ever feel, it was a professional.

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[UNKNOWN]: I guess if I go into a bank or something, of course, you know, they're like, oh, John.

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[UNKNOWN]: So I felt the same way about college, like this is a transactional relationship.

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[UNKNOWN]: These people don't really know me.

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[UNKNOWN]: So they're, their John is cool, whatever.

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[UNKNOWN]: And that's kind of, that's kind of how it's been.

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[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that works for me.

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[UNKNOWN]: Pretty much for anybody.

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[UNKNOWN]: Anybody that just calls me the letter anything with the letter E. I'm like, okay, I know you're I know you're talking about me.

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[UNKNOWN]: E big E E is like, okay, because most people they don't even try to pronounce it.

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[UNKNOWN]: They just go here.

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[UNKNOWN]: Go E, but I really don't know, like, what is your wife call you?

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[UNKNOWN]: E for him.

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[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

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[UNKNOWN]: What did you call you five years ago?

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[UNKNOWN]: Well, I didn't know where five years ago, but after three years ago, I think I think I was saying after I'm still at the time So she's made the transition Yeah, yeah, she's totally she's totally probably that she thinks it's funny so she's Yeah, right on all right well

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[UNKNOWN]: you've been done a lot and anybody wants to hear your story which is an amazing story and including how you grew up very very fascinating kind of way to join the military growing up in a pretty sheltered environment and that you just go straight into the sealed teams pretty awesome.

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[UNKNOWN]: But go listen to 3.98.

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[UNKNOWN]: You did your time in Afghanistan and see up a tune.

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[UNKNOWN]: Another, I think, a paycom deployment, and then eventually end up over an Iraq as a volunteer, trying to help people.

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[UNKNOWN]: And then from there, you eventually get this stronghold, rescue and relief going.

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[UNKNOWN]: And like I said in the beginning, a lot of this centered on Burma, although you guys have worked in Ukraine, like a bunch of places, besides Burma, but Burma certainly focus.

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[UNKNOWN]: So before we get into stronghold, let's get a little bit of background on Burma because it's one of those things where there's a lot of people that probably couldn't find it on a map.

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[UNKNOWN]: But there's been so much history there and before we hit record today, I was talking about my childhood.

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[UNKNOWN]: And how I remembered as a child but Burma being this brutal battle that was fought in the jungles and you know when I'd be out with my buddies in the woods If things got really gnarly while we were having BB gun wards wars, you know if I really had to break it down I'd be like yo boys

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[UNKNOWN]: Because World War II was brutal.

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[UNKNOWN]: Imperial Chinese, it was the monsoon season, the jungle, the whole nine yards, but a lot of stuff has happened there.

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[UNKNOWN]: Let's get a little bit of history.

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[UNKNOWN]: I mean, starting with the fact that the Brits ruled Burma from the 1800s up until 1948, with some excursions by the Japanese Imperial Army in there.

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[UNKNOWN]: What else?

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[UNKNOWN]: What else do we need to know about Burma?

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[UNKNOWN]: Well, I think the most important thing is to kind of just basically start from World Hortue up to where we are now.

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[UNKNOWN]: So the important thing, like you said before, the British had controlled the country.

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[UNKNOWN]: And then after World War II, what would I always say is that World War II basically never ended for Burma, like the war has basically just continued on.

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[UNKNOWN]: The generations of guys that I go and work within the jungle,

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[UNKNOWN]: their father's father grandfather's father great grandfather's father.

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[UNKNOWN]: It's it's never ended.

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[UNKNOWN]: So So when the when the British were there it was called Burma and then after after 1940 the British leave But there's there's an important thing that happened during World War II and so during World War II the Japanese They They invaded Burma Specifically because they actually wanted to cut off China, which is very important to modern-day geopolitics by the way

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[UNKNOWN]: But so the Burma Army attacked, or sorry, the Japanese attacked Burma, and their whole purpose was to cut off the British and allies from resupplying China, because Japan was trying to take over China at the time.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so during the war there was like you said brutal fighting in the jungle, but the very interesting thing about what happened in Burma was, so the ethnic Burmese,

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[UNKNOWN]: they originally sided with Japan against the British.

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[UNKNOWN]: So they were fighting alongside the Japanese, so the Japanese show up in the Burmese, or like, oh, thank God.

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[UNKNOWN]: Thank God the Japanese are here to ridists of these foul British people.

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[UNKNOWN]: But the many of the ethnic minority tribes, in particular the current tribe that I work with.

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[UNKNOWN]: They loved the British, the current loved the British because the British would protect them from all of these ethnic conflicts.

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[UNKNOWN]: The British wouldn't allow the Burmese to come in and attack and try to take over their land and stuff.

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[UNKNOWN]: So the current loved the British and fought with the British the whole time.

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[UNKNOWN]: So the Burmese, they side with the Japanese and they work with the Japanese not only to fight the British, but also to fight against these ethnic minority tribes and some of the hills and some of the valleys that I still work in today.

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[UNKNOWN]: So the Japanese make it all the way to India, and there's these big battles, and then eventually the Japanese are defeated, but the logistics lines are impossible to keep going through the Burma, through the jungle, and so then the allies start to win the war and start to push the Japanese back, and it's this brutal march way more Japanese soldiers were killed, just trying to march back to Thailand, but at the time, called Sam.

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[UNKNOWN]: Then we're actually killed by the British.

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[UNKNOWN]: They were just all, they all just died in the jungle from starvation and disease and all this But so as that's happening the Burmese Suddenly decide that they now like the British and so they actually switched sides during the war and started fighting with the British and started to help expel the the Japanese

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[UNKNOWN]: So, during the war, they were eventually able to push the Japanese out and then, you know, war ends around 1945 and then around 1948, just a few years later, the British, obviously, they've taken heavy casualties across the entire sort of empire and so they were pulling back from all these different places and one of the places they pulled back from was Burma.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so when they pull back, they have all this weaponry, they have all this stuff, and they leave it there, and now the current had some weapons, the other ethnic tribes also had weapons, but the Burmese who lived in the middle of the country, they sort of live in the coastal lowlands and the sort of breadbasket that the rice fields in the middle of the country.

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[UNKNOWN]: They got a large amount of these weapons as well, and so basically from 1948, the Burmese then just immediately started doing what they were doing before the British showed up, you know, 150 to 100 years earlier.

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[UNKNOWN]: They just started immediately trying to subjugate all the ethnic minority populations, including and specifically the current.

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[UNKNOWN]: Now also before we go on, there's multiple other tribes, there's the Rohingya, there's the kitchen, there's the Shaan, there's the Wathers, these other major tribes, but just for ease of explanation, I work with the current tribes specifically, but I don't want to make it sound like the Burma Army isn't attacking these other people because they definitely are.

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[UNKNOWN]: So then at the current tribe, the most prominent tribe, I think the largest tribe, I think is actually the Kachian, I think they're largest, but the current are arguably one of the most prominent, because they also were on the border with Thailand and they've been, yeah, they're one of the stronger tribes, for sure.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so then during World War II, or so after World War II, this fighting then continues on.

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[UNKNOWN]: And long story short, over the last 75, 80 years, the Burma Army has just become stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger.

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[UNKNOWN]: And the government of Burma now is the military.

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[UNKNOWN]: The military just says we're in charge, you know, they call it a hunter.

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[UNKNOWN]: We are now in charge.

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[UNKNOWN]: It's like again, imagine the US Army, whoever's the top general.

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[UNKNOWN]: The US Army says I'm the president now and the army's in charge.

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[UNKNOWN]: And that's what's been going on for the last 75 years.

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[UNKNOWN]: Now, what the Burmese want, but the Burmese Army wants is they want to subjugate and control all of these ethnic minority populations that are around all that are basically around the the rim of the country and all the borderland areas.

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[UNKNOWN]: But it's very difficult to do because the borderlands

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[UNKNOWN]: are a lot of them are very mountainous, particularly in the coronary, it's very mountainous.

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[UNKNOWN]: So if you go into the mountains, so mountain warfare is hard, jungle warfare is hard.

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[UNKNOWN]: Mountain jungle warfare is even harder, especially if you're the attacker and you're not used to living there, you're some guy from the city and the lowlands and you're trying to go up in the, in the, in the Coronel Hills.

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[UNKNOWN]: You're going to get smoked, but the Burma Army for years has been trying to build roads into these areas, and that's in short, kind of what's going on now, but there's an important inflection point that happened in 2021.

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[UNKNOWN]: during the last sort of decade and a half, the Burma Army has been sort of making these kind of fake overtures, putting in civilian rule and some democracy, but it's totally fake democracy.

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[UNKNOWN]: For example, under their constitution, the military was given automatically no matter what, at least one-third of all the seats in their parliament or whatever they call it.

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[UNKNOWN]: Typically, what would happen is basically another third of the people who were elected, quote-unquote, would be just guys who used to be, they were a Burma Army officer yesterday, now they just got elected today, and so basically the Burma Army had total control of the government, and then maybe a third of the seats were actual, you know, legit, we're legitimately elected people.

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[UNKNOWN]: But then in 2021, the Burma Army basically just said, we're no longer going to play this charade anymore.

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[UNKNOWN]: And we're just going to take over and we're going to get rid of any of these semblance of democracy.

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[UNKNOWN]: Now, when they did that, as far as governance, nothing really changed.

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[UNKNOWN]: But what did change was now the ethnic Burmese, who were the ethnic Burmese, the younger generation who were excited about this idea of democracy and they're not this sort of warring tribe.

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[UNKNOWN]: You know, they're not

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[UNKNOWN]: They're not fans of the Burma Army because the Burma Army became corrupt and started to oppress their own people and that kind of thing.

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[UNKNOWN]: So then in 2021, when this coup happened, now the ethnic Burmese young people fled to the hills and started joining all the resistance groups.

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[UNKNOWN]: So now they have the people's defense force, the PDF, which is this large ethnic Burmese army that it's now fighting against the Burma Army, whereas that did not exist four years ago.

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[UNKNOWN]: So, now it is full on total war.

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[UNKNOWN]: The Burma Army is almost like an occupying army in their own country.

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[UNKNOWN]: So they're almost like a foreign army that's occupying their own country whereas before, they were the dominant power.

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[UNKNOWN]: And the war, unfortunately, over the last year or two, has shifted the rebels, when I say rebels throughout this, the rebels are the good guys, I think Star Wars rebels.

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[UNKNOWN]: So they're fighting, fighting against the empire.

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[UNKNOWN]: But the rebels have been, unfortunately, losing a lot of ground because now Russia and China are heavily backing up the Burma Army.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so just so we understand that geopolitical situation on the ground there as well.

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[UNKNOWN]: So both, if you look at a map of sort of the greater Eurasian continent,

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[UNKNOWN]: And you look at Russia, let's start with Russia.

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[UNKNOWN]: So Russia, they have multiple ports, but all their ports are really farm north.

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[UNKNOWN]: So they can get through the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, but most of their ports and most of their access to the ocean is very farm north.

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[UNKNOWN]: And it's only accessible during parts of the year because the rest of the year, it's frozen over.

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[UNKNOWN]: And China is in a fairly similar situation where they only have their east coast and they're pretty high up.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so if China wants to do any kind of shipping or expand their naval power, whatever they have to go past Japan, they have to go past the Philippines, if they want to get over to India, if they want to go through the rest of the world, they have to go through the streets of Malaka, which is, you know, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia right there, which are, you know, nominally allies of the United States.

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[UNKNOWN]: And so you basically have a straight-of-home, moves-type situation in the straight-of-malaka down there and south of East Asia.

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[UNKNOWN]: So what are Russia and China is supposed to do if they want to have access to the rest of the world?

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[UNKNOWN]: and not be sort of beholden to the entire world with these naval choke points.

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[UNKNOWN]: Well, you go through Burma, because Burma is the one place where both Russia and China can get access to the ocean and that's what they're doing.

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[UNKNOWN]: So if you go to Burma,

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[UNKNOWN]: down in the south.

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[UNKNOWN]: You're looking at maps are down in the south.

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[UNKNOWN]: China has these special economic zones and Russia is setting up a special economic zone as well, where they're building these deep water ports and they're bringing in large amounts of weapons, they're bringing in fighter jets, they're bringing in massive amounts of firepower to back up the Burma Army.

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[UNKNOWN]: And the Russians now are even, they're in the process of, they're in the planning phase right now, and they've already announced their intention to build a nuclear power plant there in Burma.

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[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and it's, so that's, which is obviously not a, not a great, not a great look.

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[UNKNOWN]: But basically, so Russia and China are heavily involved in supply weapons to the Burma Army.

19:35.883 --> 19:41.747
[UNKNOWN]: And so the situation is very dire because now all these new drones,

19:42.848 --> 19:51.532
[UNKNOWN]: And with the advent of and with the advent of drone warfare and obviously, you know, Russian fighter jets and all kinds of, you know, Chinese weapons and stuff.

19:52.492 --> 19:58.195
[UNKNOWN]: The Burma Army is now using that to just pummel the rebels anywhere that they can find them.

19:58.215 --> 20:01.276
[UNKNOWN]: So the war is greatly shifted over just the last couple of years as well.

20:01.861 --> 20:12.909
[UNKNOWN]: Now, last time you were on with 2023, and you ended up going to Harvard and getting a degree from where the Harvard Harvard Kennedy School, it's Cassia.

20:13.029 --> 20:14.110
[UNKNOWN]: And so what did you study?

20:14.850 --> 20:20.995
[UNKNOWN]: I got a master's in public administration, so I focused on decision science, policy, that kind of thing.

20:22.550 --> 20:29.012
[UNKNOWN]: how was it going to there through your lens of life that had to be kind of crazy?

20:29.132 --> 20:30.512
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it was very crazy.

20:30.632 --> 20:34.774
[UNKNOWN]: So the funny thing is, I actually got my acceptance letter too Harvard when I was in Burma.

20:34.994 --> 20:40.415
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm sitting in Burma and I got an email and I was like, hey, you've been accepted to this program and I thought, oh, this is great.

20:40.675 --> 20:45.657
[UNKNOWN]: And actually maybe six months earlier, I'd been sitting in a jungle, or sorry, in a village,

20:46.537 --> 20:53.202
[UNKNOWN]: that is now controlled by the Burma Army, and I had sat there and used Starlink to put it in my application to Harvard.

20:53.222 --> 21:02.829
[UNKNOWN]: So I was sitting there on my phone writing out my application essays with a bunch of drillifieders, I'm the only white dude there within 50, 60 miles.

21:02.849 --> 21:03.550
[UNKNOWN]: Let's face it, bro.

21:03.570 --> 21:04.771
[UNKNOWN]: You both had a sick essay.

21:05.591 --> 21:08.394
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it was like right now in the middle.

21:08.614 --> 21:10.795
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, surrounded by there.

21:10.935 --> 21:12.737
[UNKNOWN]: That's freaking as unique as it gets.

21:13.177 --> 21:22.188
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so I wrote my essays, had submitted that, and then a few months later, yeah, I got the Inberman, I was like, oh, I got the acceptance letter, this was really cool.

21:22.568 --> 21:28.375
[UNKNOWN]: Now, the one reason I was able to apply to the program, the one reason I was willing to do the program was because it was a 12-month intensive program.

21:28.616 --> 21:32.000
[UNKNOWN]: So you have to go to Harvard, you have to move to Boston, you got to go to school in Cambridge in person.

21:32.560 --> 21:47.106
[UNKNOWN]: But it was a one-year program, so it was 12 months, and so you did a summer term, and then you had to do 2 semesters at more than full time, so it was 12 months straight, but you know, and it's designed specifically for people who are mid-career, it's called the mid-career MPA.

21:47.426 --> 21:49.647
[UNKNOWN]: What other unique people were in there with you?

21:50.167 --> 22:07.929
[UNKNOWN]: all kinds of people from all over the world different high-up people and different from different countries there was some there's actually a bunch of guys who were active active military who were sort of getting masters so officers who were there working on masters programs as well guys who were going to be stationed at the Pentagon and

22:08.750 --> 22:09.911
[UNKNOWN]: in that kind of thing after.

22:09.971 --> 22:14.615
[UNKNOWN]: So their next duty station was going to be the Pentagon so they were also going through this program as well.

22:14.655 --> 22:21.720
[UNKNOWN]: So yeah, lots of very interesting people, people who are going to like run to be prime minister of some country in Africa.

22:21.740 --> 22:24.942
[UNKNOWN]: And it's a very, very, very interesting classmates.

22:25.683 --> 22:30.706
[UNKNOWN]: Lots of Chinese people who were clearly you know,

22:31.667 --> 22:34.890
[UNKNOWN]: clearly loyal to the, clearly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, we shall say.

22:35.170 --> 22:38.673
[UNKNOWN]: So that was that was an interesting experience to kind of interact with those people.

22:39.934 --> 22:45.599
[UNKNOWN]: But yes, I did the program and so it was actually really good because it forced me to do two things.

22:45.619 --> 22:53.085
[UNKNOWN]: So with strongholds, my full-time job is running stronghold, but my, so I just got married and my wife is pregnant.

22:53.945 --> 23:09.211
[UNKNOWN]: And so it was a, we needed, I needed some stability in my life, and I also needed to learn how to kind of let go and let the other operators let the people, let the employees at stronghold, go and go and work in the field without me there.

23:09.711 --> 23:12.993
[UNKNOWN]: And they're totally able to do it, they're totally competent, like, really incredible people.

23:14.894 --> 23:27.770
[UNKNOWN]: But I needed I needed to let go as a leader just like I let you go to that so this forced me to do that I was home for for the birth of my daughter and in school and stuff But then during during the Christmas break which was like six weeks as a very it was pretty long

23:29.432 --> 23:29.732
[UNKNOWN]: time.

23:30.072 --> 23:32.533
[UNKNOWN]: I actually, I still went to Burma on a mission.

23:32.593 --> 23:33.893
[UNKNOWN]: So I went to Burma.

23:34.053 --> 23:41.035
[UNKNOWN]: So that was, and we can talk about that later, but basically I get back from that mission and, you know, people like, oh, how was your Christmas break and everything?

23:41.055 --> 23:42.495
[UNKNOWN]: And I just, I didn't want to talk to it.

23:42.555 --> 23:43.035
[UNKNOWN]: I was about it.

23:43.055 --> 23:44.935
[UNKNOWN]: I just know what to ask.

23:45.155 --> 23:45.876
[UNKNOWN]: It was wonderful.

23:46.256 --> 23:56.418
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I literally been just sleeping in a hole, getting, you know, hit with air strikes and, you know, getting moored, living in the jungle, like, you know, stabbing scorpions, as I'm trying to jump into what trenches like air strikes are

23:57.478 --> 24:01.760
[UNKNOWN]: And obviously we had some guys run some of the local guys were killed and some of the missions out there.

24:01.920 --> 24:09.322
[UNKNOWN]: And so yeah, so then I get back from that and it's just walk back into class at Harvard and everything's just totally, everything's totally normal.

24:10.243 --> 24:13.103
[UNKNOWN]: So it was a huge culture shock.

24:13.124 --> 24:15.584
[UNKNOWN]: It kind of interesting to see that.

24:16.045 --> 24:19.326
[UNKNOWN]: And it was also a Harvard during an election year.

24:19.566 --> 24:21.846
[UNKNOWN]: The Harvard Kennedy School of Government during an election year.

24:21.866 --> 24:23.147
[UNKNOWN]: So that was very, you know, obviously.

24:24.067 --> 24:31.950
[UNKNOWN]: I was there when the, you know, attempted assassination on Trump and he was, you know, nicked in the ear and then also obviously the election and stuff as well.

24:31.970 --> 24:35.092
[UNKNOWN]: So it was just, it was just very interesting to sort of just be a flying the wall.

24:35.312 --> 24:43.135
[UNKNOWN]: I wish I had engaged a little more with everybody, but I quite frankly sat back and was just a little bit more quiet and just didn't engage a bunch.

24:43.275 --> 24:47.076
[UNKNOWN]: I was also dealing with a lot of, I don't know what it was.

24:49.777 --> 24:50.937
[UNKNOWN]: shell shock or something.

24:51.658 --> 24:58.459
[UNKNOWN]: So I'd had a, I'd had a, but between, between submitting my application of Harvard and getting accepted Harvard.

24:59.139 --> 25:04.580
[UNKNOWN]: During that time, I was in a battle and we'd been hit with air strikes and I'd showed you some of the videos before we started recording here.

25:04.620 --> 25:09.161
[UNKNOWN]: But when that happened, I was like, oh, I'm totally fine.

25:09.181 --> 25:10.122
[UNKNOWN]: I felt totally fine.

25:10.622 --> 25:12.762
[UNKNOWN]: But I think I, I think it did something to my nerves.

25:12.942 --> 25:15.423
[UNKNOWN]: And so I found when I was at school, when I was at Harvard,

25:16.363 --> 25:22.872
[UNKNOWN]: just raise my hand to answer a question or whatever in class and I'm not I'm not shy I'm not particularly outgoing, but I'm not shy.

25:22.912 --> 25:31.964
[UNKNOWN]: Like I'm not I'm getting nervous speaking in front of people, but anytime there was any kind of if my if my adrenaline was coming up a little bit or any just a little bit of nerves

25:32.624 --> 25:33.685
[UNKNOWN]: social nerves or anything.

25:34.145 --> 25:39.548
[UNKNOWN]: My hands would start to shake, I would get all clammy, not noticeable for other people to see, but I could feel it.

25:39.848 --> 25:56.397
[UNKNOWN]: My voice would shake and so I knew I knew something was up with me and so that time at at school was a good time as well to just sort of let my I had some sort of underlying stress level going on that I didn't understand and that was able to kind of come down a little bit during that time.

25:57.002 --> 26:16.328
[UNKNOWN]: Now, where the air strikes, and again, you should show the video, it's horrific to watch because like I've been murdered before, which is, you know, one thing, but the air strikes is kind of next level, you know, when you're on the ground, you can hear the aircraft coming in.

26:16.728 --> 26:20.830
[UNKNOWN]: And of course, you know, I've seen air strikes from the, from the,

26:21.470 --> 26:25.533
[UNKNOWN]: perspective of where dropping bombs and they're going to hit someone else.

26:25.933 --> 26:35.040
[UNKNOWN]: It's a lot different clearly from that video when, you know, as an American, that's not supposed to be like that, especially, you know, for our experiences in the G-Wat.

26:35.060 --> 26:40.904
[UNKNOWN]: There is no, we have total mastery over the air, we do whatever we want up there, so for you to be on the receiving end of that.

26:41.845 --> 27:07.098
[UNKNOWN]: when did that when did that start happening the the air strikes and so yeah well i mean the air strikes been going on for forever but i guess i can kind of just get into that specific story and and and and dive into the details on that so um so i was on the i was on the i was a podcast it was whether that was July 2023 and so then a few months later i was in i was in Burma now so now the the the the rebels so the karen i was working with the karen

27:07.718 --> 27:13.305
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the things that they were trying to do was try to take back territory that had been taken by the Burma Army.

27:13.886 --> 27:22.497
[UNKNOWN]: And so there was this town, and I'm going to leave out some of the little identifying details just for op-sec reasons, because these places are still under under.

27:23.337 --> 27:26.120
[UNKNOWN]: under threat and still, you know, there's still a lot of fighting in these areas.

27:26.821 --> 27:30.745
[UNKNOWN]: But so there was this town and the the current wanted to liberate the town.

27:30.765 --> 27:37.052
[UNKNOWN]: Now, in order to understand why they need to liberate the town, we've got to talk a little bit about what the Burma Army does when they go into these places.

27:37.092 --> 27:39.975
[UNKNOWN]: So you will alluded to it right at the beginning.

27:40.936 --> 27:49.282
[UNKNOWN]: But the Burma Army basically, this particular town, they had been occupying it, so they weren't trying to like ethnically cleanse people and the town is a fairly large town.

27:50.604 --> 27:55.668
[UNKNOWN]: But it was a very important river crossing, so there's a large bridge there to cross a strategic river.

27:56.148 --> 28:06.698
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Bermarb have been occupying it for the longest time, but they still commit these atrocities against the local people because they're sort of this domineering occupying power.

28:07.659 --> 28:18.630
[UNKNOWN]: One of the things that they will do is they will take the civilians and they'll have the civilian population and they'll take current people and they'll make them walk in front of Bermarb army patrols as the Bermarb army patrols out to these different villages.

28:19.370 --> 28:30.053
[UNKNOWN]: And so if there's landmines, if there's booby traps, if there's claymores, if the rebels are wanting to ambush the Burma Army, it's like, well, you can't do it because there's civilians men are mixed with the Burma Army soldiers.

28:30.594 --> 28:33.315
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's, so basically they'll use people as human shields.

28:34.355 --> 28:43.938
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously there's, you know, going to be sexual assault, there's going to be, you know, beatings, there's going to be all that kind of stuff that's going to go on, force disappearances, murdering people, things of that nature.

28:44.718 --> 28:48.381
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's kind of what's going on in these towns.

28:48.401 --> 28:55.486
[UNKNOWN]: So anyway, so the current wants to go and take back this town and so they assembled around 500 men to go take back this town.

28:56.426 --> 29:02.831
[UNKNOWN]: And now keep in mind, the current their entire life for the last 75 years has been guerrilla warfare.

29:02.871 --> 29:04.392
[UNKNOWN]: So they're used to working in groups of...

29:04.852 --> 29:11.298
[UNKNOWN]: maximum 20, 30, 40, I mean maximum and they're used to hit and run tactics and they're used to fighting in the jungle.

29:11.479 --> 29:21.148
[UNKNOWN]: So they are excellent at ambush, excellent at reconnaissance, excellent at sort of all the unconventional warfare stuff, sort of Vietnam style war, like Viet Kong style fighting.

29:21.708 --> 29:23.749
[UNKNOWN]: But they don't know anything about urban combat.

29:23.769 --> 29:29.052
[UNKNOWN]: They've most of these guys have never fought in a town where the buildings have concrete walls.

29:29.092 --> 29:32.174
[UNKNOWN]: They just don't know that's just not their culture.

29:32.234 --> 29:37.617
[UNKNOWN]: So essentially what happened was the current they went to take this town.

29:38.257 --> 29:52.643
[UNKNOWN]: And they crossed over this river by night, knocked out a couple of enemy bridges, and then that same night as they knocked out these enemy bridges, which is where they reinforced them from then the main assault of several hundred men, then attacked the town.

29:53.403 --> 29:58.967
[UNKNOWN]: from one side of the river and, you know, this massive urban battle ensues.

29:59.387 --> 30:09.294
[UNKNOWN]: Now, during this, I was with the team of a total of three of us, so myself and two other stronghold guys, and our mission was to provide emergency medical care for them.

30:09.694 --> 30:12.838
[UNKNOWN]: And then myself, I was basically acting as an advisor to the commander.

30:13.198 --> 30:22.248
[UNKNOWN]: So if there was any sort of tactical stuff we need to talk about, I was there as a sounding board for him as well to, you know, because he's obviously dealing with this highly complex situation.

30:22.288 --> 30:23.790
[UNKNOWN]: And okay, how do you, how do you get your logistics?

30:23.810 --> 30:24.951
[UNKNOWN]: How do you move hundreds of men?

30:24.991 --> 30:26.753
[UNKNOWN]: How do you make sure that they've got ammo?

30:26.773 --> 30:27.754
[UNKNOWN]: How do you make sure they've got...

30:28.174 --> 30:40.988
[UNKNOWN]: food, how do we have any back plan to get our patients out of here, how are we going to move them the several miles through open ground with all these rice fields to get them to back to the mountains where they can be safe and that kind of thing, how are we going to set up communication.

30:41.008 --> 30:44.351
[UNKNOWN]: So this is a whole new level and so one of the things we do.

30:45.152 --> 30:57.798
[UNKNOWN]: At stronghold, 99% of what we do is emergency medical care, but we're in these situations where there's a tactical situation where we're trying to liberate people's like, yeah, we're absolutely going to help you if we're able to in those situations.

30:57.819 --> 31:00.880
[UNKNOWN]: So we go into the town on part of a three-man team.

31:01.460 --> 31:04.102
[UNKNOWN]: We go in there, we're embedded directly with the locals and the

31:05.022 --> 31:15.170
[UNKNOWN]: The C2 element, the command and control element, the command of the forces, we move into the town, which in hindsight was not a good move.

31:15.250 --> 31:18.052
[UNKNOWN]: We should have stayed back a little further and coordinated comms.

31:18.072 --> 31:22.595
[UNKNOWN]: But we also needed to provide that emergency medical care because a lot of stuff.

31:23.296 --> 31:24.777
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously a lot of wounded and urban battle.

31:25.337 --> 31:26.958
[UNKNOWN]: So the battle starts.

31:27.859 --> 31:28.559
[UNKNOWN]: We get in there now.

31:29.140 --> 31:31.061
[UNKNOWN]: The Burma Army, these guys are professional.

31:31.301 --> 31:41.006
[UNKNOWN]: This is not dealing with some Army that isn't motivated, that isn't well trained, that is poorly supplied, that has no experience.

31:41.026 --> 31:42.086
[UNKNOWN]: That's not what you're up against.

31:42.106 --> 31:48.389
[UNKNOWN]: You're up against a military machine that has that is decades and decades old, and it is part of their culture.

31:50.050 --> 31:56.035
[UNKNOWN]: I hesitate to call them sort of I hesitate to call them Spartan because that's too much of a compliment for them.

31:56.495 --> 31:58.537
[UNKNOWN]: But it's sort of like that they are raised.

31:58.737 --> 32:02.640
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of these Burmese guys are raised and with the understanding that they are going to be a part of the military.

32:02.660 --> 32:08.605
[UNKNOWN]: If you're ethnic Burmese it's like you are going to be an officer in the Burma Army and you are going to help take back.

32:08.845 --> 32:23.353
[UNKNOWN]: you know, you're going to go take back your country from these, you know, inferior, these inferior ethnic tribes and, and many of the Burma Army soldiers, many of the Burma Army officers in particular actually go to Russia to learn how to fight from the Russians.

32:23.533 --> 32:27.376
[UNKNOWN]: So they go to their military Adams, their academies, they go to their flight schools,

32:28.436 --> 32:40.089
[UNKNOWN]: and they're supplied by Chinese and Russian fighter jets, and so they learn all this stuff, and they have artillery, they have mortars, and the Burma Army actually makes their own weapons.

32:40.149 --> 32:46.055
[UNKNOWN]: They literally pull raw material, and they have their own factories, they make their own bullets, they make all of their own stuff.

32:46.795 --> 32:53.777
[UNKNOWN]: And so they are highly, highly self-sufficient, which is one of the reasons why sanctions and stuff doesn't quite work with them because they're highly self-sufficient.

32:54.197 --> 33:03.059
[UNKNOWN]: But my point is, the berm army troops that are defending this strategic town, these are not, these are not shumps, these are not legit soldiers.

33:03.079 --> 33:03.539
[UNKNOWN]: They're legit.

33:04.519 --> 33:09.200
[UNKNOWN]: So, and how many, what do you think, what do you estimate the berm army forces are in the town?

33:10.534 --> 33:12.035
[UNKNOWN]: probably seventy five to a hundred.

33:12.275 --> 33:12.716
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.

33:12.736 --> 33:15.998
[UNKNOWN]: So we have five hundred on our rebel force.

33:16.578 --> 33:19.840
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, but we have them we have our rebel forces is spread out a little bit.

33:20.581 --> 33:28.526
[UNKNOWN]: So the main element is I'll say a few hundred talks after about specific numbers, but the main element is a few hundred guys that go away.

33:28.806 --> 33:31.508
[UNKNOWN]: So it's not it's not a huge numerical advantage.

33:32.009 --> 33:36.972
[UNKNOWN]: It's enough, but not quite going into an urban environment where they're in the defensive position.

33:37.332 --> 33:39.274
[UNKNOWN]: You're supposed to have 10 to one by the way.

33:39.434 --> 33:42.757
[UNKNOWN]: Like, that's the doctrinal number going into an urban environment.

33:42.817 --> 33:43.618
[UNKNOWN]: So this is rough.

33:44.319 --> 33:45.339
[UNKNOWN]: We're well short of 10 to one.

33:45.399 --> 33:46.621
[UNKNOWN]: Look at that way.

33:47.101 --> 33:50.364
[UNKNOWN]: So we get in there and the the burn army they were ready.

33:50.584 --> 33:52.546
[UNKNOWN]: They were ready because the rebels had attacked this town before.

33:52.866 --> 33:53.747
[UNKNOWN]: And so they were ready.

33:53.767 --> 33:56.750
[UNKNOWN]: They knew exactly what their defensive strategy was going to be and they sort of hedgehogged.

33:57.910 --> 34:12.176
[UNKNOWN]: fell back to defensive positions and they fought for roachously because they know that if the current guys get in there, it's like, yeah, you're going to go be a prison of war, best case scenario somewhere for the next, when are you ever going to go home?

34:12.736 --> 34:15.797
[UNKNOWN]: It's like you're done, or obviously you're diet fighting, that kind of thing.

34:15.917 --> 34:16.898
[UNKNOWN]: So they prefer to diet fighting.

34:17.679 --> 34:23.004
[UNKNOWN]: And so, we get into the town, and now the Burma Army is several miles away.

34:23.124 --> 34:29.631
[UNKNOWN]: They also have how witsers set up in these positions, and we knew the how witsers were there ahead of time.

34:29.651 --> 34:36.818
[UNKNOWN]: We just didn't know specifically what types they were, or whatever, anyway, the Burma Army starts firing artillery into the town, and it's fairly accurate.

34:37.138 --> 34:43.322
[UNKNOWN]: So we go into the town and we are under a almost 24 hour artillery barrage.

34:43.362 --> 34:51.267
[UNKNOWN]: There's a few hours in the middle of the night where they would stop the artillery, but every couple of minutes you would have one, one, you know, I've been like 105s.

34:51.467 --> 34:53.829
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not really sure what size they were, but artillery is coming in.

34:54.069 --> 34:54.809
[UNKNOWN]: And you can hear it coming.

34:55.170 --> 34:58.212
[UNKNOWN]: So you're just, you know, you're here at coming.

34:58.232 --> 34:59.152
[UNKNOWN]: You just lay down flat.

34:59.472 --> 35:00.393
[UNKNOWN]: Hopefully it doesn't dig.

35:00.433 --> 35:01.033
[UNKNOWN]: I promise you.

35:01.394 --> 35:01.674
[UNKNOWN]: That's it.

35:01.834 --> 35:04.776
[UNKNOWN]: And then it goes off, boom, wait for the shrapnel to fall.

35:04.796 --> 35:06.337
[UNKNOWN]: And then you kind of get up and keep doing what you're doing.

35:06.937 --> 35:08.238
[UNKNOWN]: And we're in this for several days.

35:08.258 --> 35:10.059
[UNKNOWN]: We're in this for three or four days.

35:11.460 --> 35:12.901
[UNKNOWN]: And we're in the town in my team.

35:12.921 --> 35:20.006
[UNKNOWN]: And we were our little headquarters slash medical aid station was a Buddhist temple.

35:20.466 --> 35:23.228
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're in this large kind of Buddhist temple area.

35:24.009 --> 35:25.810
[UNKNOWN]: And we're treating the wounded as they're coming through.

35:25.830 --> 35:29.553
[UNKNOWN]: Now, also while this is happening, civilians are fleeing the city.

35:29.993 --> 35:34.316
[UNKNOWN]: But they're not fleeing on mass, like you would see in Iraq, for example.

35:35.657 --> 35:40.840
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know what it is, but culturally, I just think they didn't quite understand what was happening or what was going to happen.

35:40.961 --> 35:49.527
[UNKNOWN]: And so in their minds they're thinking, well, I'm just going to stay here in my home, walk the door, everything's going to be fine, the rebels are going to leave, or the rebels are going to win.

35:49.547 --> 35:50.147
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm good.

35:52.128 --> 36:03.034
[UNKNOWN]: But so not enough of them left, quite frankly, and so we were getting civilian casualties and there were so, for example, the Burma Army's firing artillery into the town, but then they're also bringing in air strikes.

36:03.134 --> 36:15.100
[UNKNOWN]: Now, keep in mind, just a 15 or 20 minute flight away from this battlefield is a Burma Army air base where they have Chinese built fighter jets with Burma Army pilots.

36:16.241 --> 36:23.008
[UNKNOWN]: And so they are just putting a little bit of gas in the tank, load up some bombs, go hit targets.

36:23.028 --> 36:27.292
[UNKNOWN]: That are being called out by the Burma Army soldiers and then go back and refuel and just do it again, do it again all day.

36:27.913 --> 36:30.876
[UNKNOWN]: Basically, from sun up till sun down.

36:31.536 --> 36:46.497
[UNKNOWN]: They're coming in and just constantly doing sorties and they're dropping 500 pound bombs sometimes multiple 250 pound bombs And then they're also strafing so they drop a bomb come back around and strafe drop a bomb come back around and strafe and they're doing heavy sorties plus our tillery So that's that's that's the world I'm living in

36:47.618 --> 37:01.101
[UNKNOWN]: And so the reason I mentioned the civilians, so some of the civilians are leaving and in there was one particular case where there was a man, he Himmin is why he has a relatively more of a poor guy and He lived close to the river and our artillery came in.

37:01.761 --> 37:14.344
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know He probably somebody probably saw him the Burma Army probably saw him and thought there was like rebels in his hut or something like that So they called in an artillery strike on his on his house and he's got he was a guy's maybe 45.

37:14.384 --> 37:16.285
[UNKNOWN]: He's got three young kids and

37:17.445 --> 37:22.288
[UNKNOWN]: The artillery round comes in lands, and basically blows off the top of his wife's head.

37:22.648 --> 37:30.173
[UNKNOWN]: And her head was completely sort of like watermelon by this artillery right in front of all the kids.

37:30.714 --> 37:37.778
[UNKNOWN]: And so he grabbed her body, dragged her down to the river, and just kind of pushed her body into the river, and then he walked out.

37:38.378 --> 37:43.802
[UNKNOWN]: And you know, as he was walking out of the town, he, you know, came over and showed us and explained to us what it just happened to his wife.

37:44.562 --> 37:48.305
[UNKNOWN]: And I have a video of that conversation that I was having with him.

37:49.086 --> 37:51.768
[UNKNOWN]: But so civilians or civilians are coming out.

37:52.349 --> 37:53.369
[UNKNOWN]: So we're several days into this.

37:54.550 --> 37:58.293
[UNKNOWN]: And the rebels, they're not used to this urban fighting.

37:58.614 --> 38:04.799
[UNKNOWN]: And so one of the things that we would do, like if we were urban fighting is you kick in the door of any house and you use it as a firing position.

38:04.819 --> 38:07.040
[UNKNOWN]: You get the civilians out of there, but you use it as a firing position.

38:07.060 --> 38:07.681
[UNKNOWN]: You get up high.

38:08.361 --> 38:09.102
[UNKNOWN]: You're kicking in the windows.

38:09.122 --> 38:11.304
[UNKNOWN]: You're kicking in the doors and you move house to house.

38:11.864 --> 38:16.990
[UNKNOWN]: They didn't want to do this because they didn't want to sort of be disrespectful.

38:17.030 --> 38:21.255
[UNKNOWN]: They didn't want to be they didn't want to damage the local civilian population.

38:21.275 --> 38:22.737
[UNKNOWN]: They felt bad about that idea.

38:24.851 --> 38:27.513
[UNKNOWN]: And so they're basically just fighting in the streets.

38:27.533 --> 38:34.659
[UNKNOWN]: And they're in some of the houses that they can reach a little bit more easily, but they're not fighting a proper urban battle.

38:35.000 --> 38:36.121
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, so they get exhausted.

38:36.141 --> 38:38.583
[UNKNOWN]: They're trying to rotate their troops back and forth.

38:39.083 --> 38:48.791
[UNKNOWN]: So they're not able to really rest and they're very stressed out, obviously because of the constant artillery and the constant air strikes.

38:48.811 --> 38:51.633
[UNKNOWN]: So everybody's, you're not sleeping, you know, things are rough.

38:53.895 --> 39:05.563
[UNKNOWN]: And so I think it was a 3rd or 4th day, they said, okay, we're going to hold, everybody's going to hold positions, we're calling for reinforcements, so there's more rebels are going to come and keep in mind during this time that Burma Army is also sending reinforcements.

39:05.643 --> 39:18.131
[UNKNOWN]: And so the troops on the other side of the river are holding off these air strikes, as the Burma Army is trying to gather their forces to come liberate the town, and there are guys that are stuck inside the town,

39:19.412 --> 39:32.056
[UNKNOWN]: And so on this particular day, I just, my team and I will all just so happen to get sick, we realized it afterwards that we were getting sick, but so that day I was like, man, I feel really bad.

39:32.076 --> 39:32.676
[UNKNOWN]: This is not good.

39:32.996 --> 39:35.517
[UNKNOWN]: So it's on our end, it was relatively quiet.

39:35.557 --> 39:38.318
[UNKNOWN]: There's still our children reoccasionally coming in, still an occasional gun run.

39:38.618 --> 39:53.114
[UNKNOWN]: which at the time, I think I was recording, I think there was 30 or 40 impacts, just been then the first sort of 12 or 13 hours of the day of daylight, of bombs going off from artillery or air strikes.

39:54.155 --> 39:58.417
[UNKNOWN]: And I was keeping track of it, but on our end, we're not advancing and so the Burma Army is sitting quiet.

39:58.437 --> 39:59.517
[UNKNOWN]: They're not going to come out of hiding.

39:59.877 --> 40:02.459
[UNKNOWN]: They're conserving ammo and just waiting for their troops to come.

40:03.019 --> 40:06.400
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's a relatively safe environment for us.

40:06.880 --> 40:07.841
[UNKNOWN]: Like we're not going to get attacked.

40:07.861 --> 40:10.022
[UNKNOWN]: No one's going to come through your windows, start throwing grenades at you.

40:10.102 --> 40:10.582
[UNKNOWN]: That kind of thing.

40:11.142 --> 40:19.406
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're sitting there and so I lay down in this Buddhist temple and the other two guys on my team, they lay down as well.

40:19.426 --> 40:22.467
[UNKNOWN]: We have no patience to take care of.

40:23.147 --> 40:29.411
[UNKNOWN]: And the one and only time, I took my boots off, I took my boots off and laid down.

40:30.712 --> 40:35.395
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're laying there, it's built so be quiet, nothing's going on.

40:36.516 --> 40:36.776
[UNKNOWN]: Well,

40:39.960 --> 41:03.173
[UNKNOWN]: We're sitting there and what we don't realize is that one of the civilians who left the town Bratodonus, they saw they were loyal to the Bermarmy because there's ethnic Burmese who like the Bermarmy and there's people who are Karen who who don't you know who don't like so that in these mixed meanages it's very dangerous you don't know who's who who's loyal to who anyway so somebody had spotted us They'd spotted the white guys in the building and they had contacted the Bermarmy

41:04.613 --> 41:21.020
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't know what day they had contacted them, but anyway, they'd got word up there and they said there's white guys in that building and they had I think that through Facebook or something they had we found we saw something later basically they had contacted the Burm Army through social media and said hey there's white dudes in this building over here and of course at the time we don't know this.

41:21.900 --> 41:28.823
[UNKNOWN]: And so what the Burm Army did was they so the entire time that they had been doing these these gun runs on the on the town that we're in.

41:29.723 --> 41:48.437
[UNKNOWN]: they would always come north to south and so we would always hear them coming so any time a plane would take off from the base you know obviously there's a early morning that worked the berm army knows that because we know okay there's aircraft taking off they're going to be here in about eight minutes or ten minutes or whatever it was and so we're kind of mentally prepared for that and we could and we could hear them coming as it comes from a north.

41:49.629 --> 41:54.230
[UNKNOWN]: Well, what the Burm army did was they cut all the cell phone towers.

41:54.650 --> 41:56.231
[UNKNOWN]: So there was no communication.

41:56.251 --> 41:57.771
[UNKNOWN]: Of course, we didn't pick up on this until after.

41:57.851 --> 42:01.312
[UNKNOWN]: But there was no, no, all the cell phone towers went down because the Burm army controls them.

42:01.692 --> 42:04.773
[UNKNOWN]: So they cut all the cell phone towers and they took three aircraft.

42:05.493 --> 42:08.954
[UNKNOWN]: And they flew from west to east and were on the east side of the river.

42:09.414 --> 42:11.935
[UNKNOWN]: So they came at us from an angle that we would not hear them coming.

42:12.415 --> 42:15.176
[UNKNOWN]: And there was no early morning except for, you know, radios and things like that.

42:15.196 --> 42:16.096
[UNKNOWN]: But it was just way too late.

42:16.136 --> 42:18.017
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm laying down on the ground.

42:18.817 --> 42:27.859
[UNKNOWN]: And the Burma Army, they use this tactic where their first bomb, they typically drop it short of the target.

42:28.220 --> 42:31.640
[UNKNOWN]: So their idea is they drop the bomb just outside of a building.

42:31.660 --> 42:34.241
[UNKNOWN]: If they're targeting a building, they drop it just outside the building.

42:34.661 --> 42:41.003
[UNKNOWN]: And then the idea is the frag, the directional frag wounds everybody in the building, like forces them to sort of freeze in place.

42:41.823 --> 42:44.006
[UNKNOWN]: And then the next aircraft comes in and drops on the building.

42:44.367 --> 42:53.040
[UNKNOWN]: So the idea is you want people to run to the building or you want people to be wounded and so they're stuck and then you hit the building and so they use this tactic on us.

42:53.401 --> 42:56.225
[UNKNOWN]: So we all just so happen to be laying down.

42:57.246 --> 43:03.074
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm laying there and I'm just trying to rest and then no warning, no sound, no nothing.

43:03.475 --> 43:12.186
[UNKNOWN]: The roof of the building I'm in is blown off right on top of us and the windows are obviously just blown in just huge, huge, huge explosion.

43:13.067 --> 43:28.656
[UNKNOWN]: And I look over the guy next to me at him and we just we both just kind of look at each other and for a second we're thinking I'm like okay, was that just like artillery did they artillery get close but we're like no Because it keep on this all happens over the space of like two milliseconds as we're thinking okay, was this artillery?

43:28.676 --> 43:31.578
[UNKNOWN]: We're like no because we hear the artillery when it's coming

43:32.678 --> 44:01.480
[UNKNOWN]: And then we hear the jet, fly right over us, and so we're like, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out

44:02.220 --> 44:20.257
[UNKNOWN]: in the in this trench and I just pop my head I just pop my phone right above my head because I'm just going to record Basically record my death or record whatever is whatever's about to happen nothing I can do and That second jet comes in boom hits direct hit on the building completely destroys the building Again, we're within you know they drop a 500 pound bomb.

44:20.277 --> 44:25.062
[UNKNOWN]: We're within you know a hundred feet of it and so we're in the trenches and

44:27.884 --> 44:31.445
[UNKNOWN]: We don't know how many aircraft there are, and we don't know how quickly the next gun run is going to be.

44:31.725 --> 44:42.949
[UNKNOWN]: So we just hold tight for a second, and because sometimes they would bring, sometimes the Burma Army would attack in valleys of two, so they'd bring in a flight of two aircraft, and sometimes they would bring in a flight of three aircraft.

44:42.989 --> 44:47.671
[UNKNOWN]: In this particular time, they brought in three aircraft dedicated to this one specific target, which we had never seen them do before.

44:48.491 --> 44:50.854
[UNKNOWN]: Because the white people in there because the white people are in there.

44:51.194 --> 45:03.006
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so not not big fans of the white people But so so we're in the trench of the first so the first bomb is gone off now the second bomb has gone off because they just bomb a swimmer in the trenches and

45:04.287 --> 45:09.231
[UNKNOWN]: So we've got about 90 seconds, maybe maybe two minutes before the next bomb comes and we don't know that we have that much time.

45:09.531 --> 45:16.597
[UNKNOWN]: So we're hunkering in place and one of our guys Adam, he's, he's, you know, like, you want to talk about a guy under pressure.

45:17.177 --> 45:18.759
[UNKNOWN]: You see, you see someone's true character.

45:19.279 --> 45:23.162
[UNKNOWN]: So he, I get up and I'm checking on my guys, my head is anybody hit, is anybody hit?

45:24.503 --> 45:35.286
[UNKNOWN]: And I see Adam and he's on top of a wounded soldier and in a trench and he's shielding him with his body and he's treating his wounds.

45:35.306 --> 45:39.967
[UNKNOWN]: He with this, the soldier was lightly wounded but he had shrapnel through some of his, through his shoulder and stuff.

45:40.447 --> 45:50.049
[UNKNOWN]: And Adam is, you know, he's wearing his stronghold shirt and there's an image that we have of it because I was still just filming with my phone and I thought like that is what stronghold is.

45:50.109 --> 45:51.389
[UNKNOWN]: That is what we are about right there.

45:51.729 --> 45:52.850
[UNKNOWN]: Got a guy with a stronghold shirt

45:55.370 --> 46:17.436
[UNKNOWN]: covering a patient with your own body, as bombs are falling, you can't make that up, you can't stage it, you see so much true character in that moment, and literally in the trenches with these guys, and so then I hear the aircraft, I hear the next aircraft coming, immediately jump in the trench, and I start yelling, you know, go ball you head, go ball you head, which means airplanes coming, airplanes coming.

46:18.036 --> 46:23.441
[UNKNOWN]: And the next aircraft comes in and drops another bomb right on that same building.

46:23.461 --> 46:27.364
[UNKNOWN]: So they'd already hit the building two times before that, but then they hit it a third time.

46:27.384 --> 46:31.567
[UNKNOWN]: Because this was like a big, you know, they wanted to make sure that they killed whatever was in that building.

46:32.428 --> 46:33.569
[UNKNOWN]: There was no chance of survival.

46:34.230 --> 46:36.291
[UNKNOWN]: So they expanded a lot of ammunition on that.

46:36.892 --> 46:38.793
[UNKNOWN]: And then we knew now they were going to follow up with gun runs.

46:39.254 --> 46:44.298
[UNKNOWN]: So they slept three aircraft and they slept machine guns on these, these are Chinese built aircraft.

46:45.279 --> 46:49.482
[UNKNOWN]: And so we just exhale on foot, we're like, go, go, go, go, go, go, let's just get out of here.

46:49.542 --> 46:52.444
[UNKNOWN]: We need to put some space between us and your barefoot.

46:52.524 --> 46:54.765
[UNKNOWN]: I'm barefoot and there's a trap-null and stuff everywhere.

46:54.825 --> 47:10.457
[UNKNOWN]: So we get up and we start running and you know, I'm showing the guys, all right, we're going to go out this way, and as we're going, the Burma Army had placed, they placed these bamboo sticks in the ground, they sharpened these bamboo sticks and they

47:10.957 --> 47:27.349
[UNKNOWN]: push them in the ground because they don't want the rebels crawling in through the exact routes that we would use to kind of go through alleys and stuff so they don't want the rebels to come through these areas and so and they also put down broken glass because it makes noise you know cuts people's feet if you're barefoot that kind of thing.

47:27.949 --> 47:34.232
[UNKNOWN]: And so as we're running to kind of go through this culvert, this drainage ditch which is which has a bunch of these bamboo spikes and glass.

47:36.253 --> 47:41.916
[UNKNOWN]: I look over and there's a pig, five or six feet away from this and it's been blown in half.

47:42.396 --> 47:46.318
[UNKNOWN]: And so the shrapnel was more than had been flying everywhere.

47:46.338 --> 47:50.480
[UNKNOWN]: So we're extremely close to like we're in the killbox and obviously a pig is pretty close to the ground.

47:50.900 --> 47:56.704
[UNKNOWN]: And so they're shrapnel flying from these air strikes that was, you know, that was low enough to, you know, again, kill this pig very close.

47:56.724 --> 47:58.625
[UNKNOWN]: Just one of those sort of odd memories you have.

48:00.166 --> 48:04.688
[UNKNOWN]: So we start crawling through this and we got to get, we got to get under this culvert and get out of there.

48:05.569 --> 48:08.871
[UNKNOWN]: And Adam was in front of me and so he was kind of pointing on his, I hate glass glass glass.

48:09.171 --> 48:14.714
[UNKNOWN]: So I was luckily able to make it out of there with without a scratch and sort of tiptoeing through all this stuff.

48:14.734 --> 48:16.155
[UNKNOWN]: Everybody screaming at me like, go faster.

48:17.075 --> 48:27.678
[UNKNOWN]: So we get out of there and show enough that the three jets come back and they start then doing machine gun runs from different angles Just leveling the whole area just just spraying the whole area at this point now.

48:27.698 --> 48:37.060
[UNKNOWN]: We're maybe 150 200 yards away So we're pretty safe as as as it goes and more so we you know we were able to you know move out of that out of that position

48:38.220 --> 48:46.889
[UNKNOWN]: And then we found out later on, so then basically all the cell phone towers suddenly came back on.

48:47.150 --> 48:54.417
[UNKNOWN]: As soon as the air strike was done, all the cell phone towers started working and then the Burma Army started doing all their gun runs north the south again.

48:55.568 --> 49:00.253
[UNKNOWN]: And this was during your Christmas break that I didn't know this was this was not that we'll get to that story later.

49:00.293 --> 49:06.159
[UNKNOWN]: This was This was actually I was after you left after the last podcast.

49:06.500 --> 49:17.532
[UNKNOWN]: This was actually this was just a few days after Christmas actually so I was This last year I found the head my first Christmas at home with my wife because I missed the first you know two three Christmas as we had so

49:18.072 --> 49:18.252
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

49:18.532 --> 49:22.054
[UNKNOWN]: So did the rebels get the village back, get the town back?

49:22.214 --> 49:25.956
[UNKNOWN]: So the rebels held the town for about two months.

49:26.516 --> 49:28.097
[UNKNOWN]: And then they ultimately lost it.

49:28.437 --> 49:31.138
[UNKNOWN]: Now, there was just no way to hold.

49:31.718 --> 49:41.182
[UNKNOWN]: There was several tactical blunders that were made during that, which we can talk about offline, because I don't want to give way to TTPs or basically let the bad guys know, because they'll certainly listen to this.

49:41.202 --> 49:42.423
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want them to know why they won.

49:43.424 --> 49:57.005
[UNKNOWN]: But there were several tactical errors that were made, but the Burma Army, so this is this is crazy and also entirely true, so one of the days Where it is before before we got bombed out of the city, so after I got bombed out of the city, we

49:58.267 --> 50:02.129
[UNKNOWN]: My team at all of our gear was destroyed and so I had no clothes.

50:02.169 --> 50:23.282
[UNKNOWN]: I had no shoes Nothing everything was everything was leveled in that building So there was a our guys were able to go on the rubble and find a few things for me My backpack with my passport and stuff and it so that was good So we got that we got that out of the rubble and So I was I moved back to a village where I could still advise and help a little bit But our guys had lost everything of them then their passport.

50:23.302 --> 50:25.563
[UNKNOWN]: So anyway, so I'm there sort of alone at that point

50:26.443 --> 50:26.864
[UNKNOWN]: I'm sick.

50:27.604 --> 50:34.770
[UNKNOWN]: I'm literally crapping my pants because with the day, you know, that we got bombed out of this village was this town was the same day, we all we all got sick.

50:34.810 --> 50:47.820
[UNKNOWN]: So, but anyway, so but before that happened, so before the bombings had happened, I think it was like maybe day two or three, I was hearing this, I was hearing this noise coming from the berm army side of the river.

50:47.840 --> 50:51.443
[UNKNOWN]: Now we have guys over there, we have our own troops on that side, but I'm hearing this boom.

50:53.409 --> 50:58.071
[UNKNOWN]: like it sounds like you know like a beat coming from them like what is that?

50:58.951 --> 51:13.017
[UNKNOWN]: And so then our guys radioed over, our guys from the other side of the river, they radioed over and they say basically they told us the Burma Army was driving down the road to come attack the the rebels who were defending the other side of the river.

51:13.637 --> 51:17.379
[UNKNOWN]: and they were coming down this road and they had these giant trucks with huge speakers on them.

51:17.599 --> 51:27.184
[UNKNOWN]: Mad Mac style and they're blasting some sort of like war, death metal music and all of the soldiers or many of the soldiers at least were on, were on meth.

51:27.504 --> 51:30.105
[UNKNOWN]: So the normal, or that's a totally normal tactic for the bomber army.

51:30.125 --> 51:32.907
[UNKNOWN]: So they'll give their guys meth when they want to hype them up for a particular fight.

51:33.887 --> 51:48.857
[UNKNOWN]: And so you have these meth-addled troops, you know, high, and then they're, you know, shooting their guns in the air, just, you know, raging on this music, and then they were assaulting our guy's positions, you know, doing a ground assault to try to clear out our guys.

51:49.217 --> 51:53.760
[UNKNOWN]: And while, while there's air strikes, also coordinated air strikes before the ground assault comes in.

51:54.240 --> 52:01.925
[UNKNOWN]: And so needless to say, that's not something you're going to defeat with, you know, a handful of guys and some, you know, rusty M-16s that barely work.

52:02.746 --> 52:10.596
[UNKNOWN]: So anyway, that's sort of the level of commitment that the Burma Army had to get this down back.

52:10.716 --> 52:12.518
[UNKNOWN]: But our guys held it for two straight months.

52:12.578 --> 52:19.447
[UNKNOWN]: They held it for two months, which was a massive victory, actually, because that prevented the Burma Army from resupplying

52:20.647 --> 52:22.629
[UNKNOWN]: a bunch of different bases deeper in the hills.

52:23.089 --> 52:32.974
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Burma Army actually had to surrender or not surrender, but they had to abandon five of their bases that were at the most extreme edge of their territory.

52:33.355 --> 52:39.978
[UNKNOWN]: And had to pull them back to this main base because they couldn't re-supply them because these guys had held this ground for two straight months.

52:40.659 --> 52:42.940
[UNKNOWN]: They held it for long enough and so they were able to pull these guys back.

52:42.960 --> 52:48.363
[UNKNOWN]: So basically we liberated five enemy camps which would have cost many, many lives.

52:49.123 --> 52:55.526
[UNKNOWN]: And an ordinary amount of fire power that the rebels just quite frankly just don't have enough of.

52:56.407 --> 53:03.170
[UNKNOWN]: So it was a, it was still a strategic victory, even if it was not ultimately a tactical victory in that moment.

53:03.190 --> 53:05.751
[UNKNOWN]: But yeah, it was quite the, quite the word deal.

53:06.271 --> 53:23.525
[UNKNOWN]: Now, another video that you showed before we hit record today was a village that you're doing, like a reconnaissance mission of through thermal, and it kind of presents how the how the Burmese Army operates when they take one of these small villages, what they do.

53:23.914 --> 53:24.074
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

53:24.635 --> 53:48.111
[UNKNOWN]: So, yeah, the video I showed you, it was, that was a few months before this, this operation in this town, but the, so basically the burn armor, like I said, they use people as human shields, whether it's to go through an area that they think might be mined or also they'll use the civilians and force them to basically carry military supplies for them just as either forced labor or to go through a dangerous area.

53:48.151 --> 53:48.771
[UNKNOWN]: So, for example,

53:49.632 --> 54:16.388
[UNKNOWN]: they might tell the local guys sort of at gunpoint and again they've got your family back here to say hey take your motorcycle and take this bag of supplies and go drive it over to this other berm army base and if you don't make it you know we're gonna we're gonna kill your family and so those guys they don't want to help the berm army but they're forced to and so they're driving through these areas and they're like wait I don't know what to do like please let me you know if the rebels capture them they're like please let me deliver these supplies they're gonna hurt my family that kind of thing

54:16.908 --> 54:23.731
[UNKNOWN]: So it's a horrible situation for the civilians caught in the middle, which, again, is everything that strongholds about us about helping those people.

54:24.571 --> 54:35.795
[UNKNOWN]: And so there was one particular day where we were down and working in this area in Burma, sort of in a flat in the flat area.

54:35.815 --> 54:39.517
[UNKNOWN]: So we're not up in the jungle, up in the jungle mountains, we're down in the flat rice fields.

54:40.597 --> 54:54.942
[UNKNOWN]: and it was actually during the deployment and time that you read right at the beginning of the episode where we had been working in this area for a few months and the locals were able to respond properly when an attack happened.

54:55.223 --> 54:56.803
[UNKNOWN]: So this was during that preparation time.

54:57.583 --> 55:03.126
[UNKNOWN]: And so one of the and there's all these different villages spread out over like hundreds of square miles of

55:05.026 --> 55:17.640
[UNKNOWN]: And so it is not abnormal for the Burma Army, like for a Burma Army patrol of 20 guys, to or 50 guys, to walk into a village and sort of say, hey, we're gonna post up here tonight because we've got somewhere we've gotta be.

55:17.660 --> 55:22.946
[UNKNOWN]: And either as a patrol or just as a sort of relief other Burma Army positions later on.

55:23.807 --> 55:31.450
[UNKNOWN]: And so while we were out there, there was a, there was a particular village that had gone dark, had gone silent.

55:31.990 --> 55:43.294
[UNKNOWN]: And we knew the Burmami was moving around, and the rebels knew this, and they were looking, they were kind of looking at the situation and going, we think the Burmami's in that village, because we can't reach anybody there.

55:43.915 --> 55:50.237
[UNKNOWN]: And so the rebels aren't able to go in and just sort of smoke the Burmami in those kind of cases.

55:50.297 --> 55:51.778
[UNKNOWN]: It just doesn't work like that.

55:53.058 --> 56:04.050
[UNKNOWN]: Because you don't know exactly where they're at in these villages and they're highly complicated and you don't have any kind of night capability But the the rebels do have in some cases They have some thermal and some night vision stuff.

56:04.330 --> 56:10.096
[UNKNOWN]: It's like civilian grade stuff that they get on the you know open market It's nothing it's nothing military great or very fancy

56:10.917 --> 56:16.699
[UNKNOWN]: Um, but the, the, the, the locals were like, oh, we don't know if the Burma armies in that town and that's like, well, let's go do a reconnaissance mission.

56:16.719 --> 56:18.840
[UNKNOWN]: Let's go, let's go get eyes on the situation.

56:19.100 --> 56:28.363
[UNKNOWN]: And so, um, I led a, I think it was a five-man team as myself, my interpreter, and then three other, um, sort of, uh, some of their like reconnaissance guys.

56:29.063 --> 56:33.425
[UNKNOWN]: And we, we moved over, um, maybe a thousand yards could have been a mile.

56:33.445 --> 56:35.685
[UNKNOWN]: I don't remember exactly how big this open area was.

56:35.705 --> 56:37.606
[UNKNOWN]: But it was a large open area of just rice fields.

56:38.166 --> 56:46.368
[UNKNOWN]: And so we moved at night and got to within, we crawl in there and we get to within a hundred yards of the of this village.

56:47.069 --> 56:51.490
[UNKNOWN]: And we're using, we're all, we all have these thermal scopes that they have.

56:51.910 --> 56:57.391
[UNKNOWN]: And so then I pull up the thermal scope and the thermal scope allows you to record what it is that you're looking at.

56:58.172 --> 57:02.553
[UNKNOWN]: And so I start recording the edge of the village and what I see.

57:03.993 --> 57:09.318
[UNKNOWN]: And there are these orange blobs of its people.

57:09.418 --> 57:13.482
[UNKNOWN]: There's these orange blobs of people laying at the edge of the village.

57:13.502 --> 57:14.843
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm like, what is that about?

57:15.704 --> 57:18.226
[UNKNOWN]: There's also a dog in the video.

57:18.286 --> 57:22.971
[UNKNOWN]: And he's kind of, you know, looking at us and he knows something.

57:23.011 --> 57:26.594
[UNKNOWN]: This dog knows something's up, but he never gave away our position, which was nice.

57:27.615 --> 57:32.200
[UNKNOWN]: So we go in there, and we can see that there's villagers, we can see there's these people laying on the ground.

57:32.901 --> 57:34.863
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're like, all right, cool.

57:34.903 --> 57:39.267
[UNKNOWN]: So we pull back because we got eyes on the situation.

57:39.307 --> 57:43.152
[UNKNOWN]: And then the rebels explained him and they said, oh, yeah, that the Bermaries and that village.

57:43.492 --> 57:44.553
[UNKNOWN]: And I said, well, how do you know that?

57:44.573 --> 57:48.277
[UNKNOWN]: And they said, well, because those guys laying on the ground, those are villagers.

57:49.238 --> 57:55.306
[UNKNOWN]: So what the Burma Army does is they'll go into a village and they'll go to someone's house and they'll say, hey, congratulations tonight.

57:55.526 --> 57:56.587
[UNKNOWN]: I'm sleeping in your house.

57:57.108 --> 57:58.710
[UNKNOWN]: Under the same roof as your wife and your kids.

57:59.210 --> 58:01.714
[UNKNOWN]: And you are going to go sleep at the edge of the village.

58:02.515 --> 58:06.399
[UNKNOWN]: And you need to sound the alarm if any rebels are going to come in here and try to get us out.

58:07.180 --> 58:13.507
[UNKNOWN]: And you better sound the alarm, because again, I'm sleeping 10 feet away from where your wife and your kids are in your hut.

58:14.088 --> 58:22.817
[UNKNOWN]: And so the people that we saw sleeping at the edge of the village were men who were forced to go sleep there while the Burma Army is sleeping in their homes.

58:23.938 --> 58:26.181
[UNKNOWN]: And then the Burma Army was there for a couple of days and then moved on.

58:27.602 --> 58:40.812
[UNKNOWN]: And as shocking and as crazy as that is for us to understand, and obviously I witnessed it firsthand and saw it, it's kind of a normal Tuesday, just a normal Tuesday in Burma for a lot of these people in these areas where we work.

58:41.912 --> 58:49.978
[UNKNOWN]: And again, that's why the work that we do at Stronghold is so vitally important because there's nobody else there helping.

58:50.219 --> 58:51.900
[UNKNOWN]: It's a very difficult place to operate.

58:52.440 --> 58:59.126
[UNKNOWN]: But you have these people that are caught in the middle of these wars, and what can you do to help them?

58:59.526 --> 59:00.106
[UNKNOWN]: How can you help them?

59:00.126 --> 59:03.389
[UNKNOWN]: And that's our mission is to try to help them as much as we can.

59:04.850 --> 59:05.070
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

59:05.090 --> 59:13.037
[UNKNOWN]: Speaking that, you had a story about a girl that was wounded in an air strike, and I thought it was a good example of how the stronghold team can help.

59:14.276 --> 59:14.516
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

59:15.056 --> 59:24.061
[UNKNOWN]: So the way that we operate is, so I'll take one step back and kind of explain our mission, sort of our bigger picture mission in Burma.

59:24.081 --> 59:27.883
[UNKNOWN]: So right now, like I said, 99% of what we do is going to be emerging medically evacuations.

59:28.183 --> 59:36.147
[UNKNOWN]: Now we're up there on the front lines, getting mortar and shot at with the locals, but the vast majority of the work that we do is that medical capability.

59:37.007 --> 59:48.030
[UNKNOWN]: So currently in Burma, we provide stronghold provides the only ambulances, the only ambulances for an area inside of Burma that is larger than the state of Delaware.

59:48.630 --> 59:52.031
[UNKNOWN]: And to put that in context, that is 1 million football fields.

59:52.872 --> 59:56.172
[UNKNOWN]: So we have the only ambulances for this wars on that's that's that big.

59:56.613 --> 01:00:01.274
[UNKNOWN]: And we currently have eight ambulances and an ambulance boat to serve all these people.

01:00:02.254 --> 01:00:07.695
[UNKNOWN]: And people are stepping on landmines as particularly in sort of the edges of the areas where we work.

01:00:07.715 --> 01:00:12.676
[UNKNOWN]: So the more extreme edges, you know, people are stepping on landmines, people are getting shot all the time.

01:00:12.956 --> 01:00:15.497
[UNKNOWN]: And now with the drone wars, the drones coming in.

01:00:15.897 --> 01:00:19.237
[UNKNOWN]: Now villages are getting bombed all the time, air strikes are hidden villages.

01:00:19.497 --> 01:00:22.398
[UNKNOWN]: And there's no strategic reason.

01:00:22.698 --> 01:00:25.858
[UNKNOWN]: And the Burma Army knows there's no strategic reason to hit these places.

01:00:26.659 --> 01:00:28.359
[UNKNOWN]: Basically, the Burma Army's mentality is,

01:00:29.099 --> 01:00:32.600
[UNKNOWN]: If you're not with us, we basically can just kill you.

01:00:32.720 --> 01:00:40.723
[UNKNOWN]: Sort of like an ISIS mentality where ISIS would kill Muslim Iraqi civilians who are running away from ISIS control area.

01:00:40.743 --> 01:00:44.004
[UNKNOWN]: They would just start gunning these people down and shooting them, shooting kids in the back of the head and stuff.

01:00:44.584 --> 01:00:48.967
[UNKNOWN]: because their thought process is, well, you're abandoning us, you're now a positive.

01:00:48.987 --> 01:00:49.567
[UNKNOWN]: We can kill you.

01:00:49.827 --> 01:00:50.908
[UNKNOWN]: The brand army feels the same way.

01:00:50.928 --> 01:00:56.170
[UNKNOWN]: It's like, well, you're an ethnic minority group that is not that will not bend to our will.

01:00:56.711 --> 01:00:57.871
[UNKNOWN]: Therefore, we can just bomb your village.

01:00:57.891 --> 01:00:58.592
[UNKNOWN]: And they will do it.

01:00:58.612 --> 01:01:06.676
[UNKNOWN]: They will intentionally target weddings, they'll intentionally target, you know, funerals, things of that nature, just to inflict mass casualties, they'll intentionally bomb churches.

01:01:07.776 --> 01:01:09.798
[UNKNOWN]: as well, and things of that nature.

01:01:09.858 --> 01:01:11.819
[UNKNOWN]: So this is very normal.

01:01:12.079 --> 01:01:18.863
[UNKNOWN]: So even in the areas where we're working, where there's not like fighting where people are throwing grenades and shooting rifles at each other, these air strikes still happen.

01:01:19.584 --> 01:01:24.627
[UNKNOWN]: So the way that we operate, we run our ambulances, I have a very small team.

01:01:24.967 --> 01:01:28.869
[UNKNOWN]: And what we do is when we go in, we train the locals entirely on their own.

01:01:28.969 --> 01:01:35.773
[UNKNOWN]: So it's local leadership, it's local medics, it's local drivers, it's local managers, and we teach them everything the logistics.

01:01:35.793 --> 01:01:36.654
[UNKNOWN]: Here's how you get your supplies.

01:01:37.234 --> 01:01:39.236
[UNKNOWN]: Stronghold, we provide the money for all this, right.

01:01:39.256 --> 01:01:40.717
[UNKNOWN]: We provide the truck.

01:01:40.937 --> 01:01:51.345
[UNKNOWN]: We provide all the logistics support, all that kind of stuff, but they run it, and we provide all the supplies and stuff that they need to run these ambulances.

01:01:51.365 --> 01:02:02.254
[UNKNOWN]: And we transport hundreds of people, every I think last year, transport 600 people, 40, 40% plus were active, like war injuries from gunshots and things like that.

01:02:03.395 --> 01:02:03.755
[UNKNOWN]: And so,

01:02:05.999 --> 01:02:14.642
[UNKNOWN]: Again, this is all run, maybe 30 plus whatever given day is more than 30 locals who are running, who are running all these ambulances.

01:02:15.143 --> 01:02:21.465
[UNKNOWN]: So the reason I say that is because we run everything that we do based on a concept called charity with dignity.

01:02:22.025 --> 01:02:32.949
[UNKNOWN]: We talked about this last time on the podcast too, by within through the locals, you need to build up their capability and the way that we measure success, the way that strong will measure success is what the locals are able to do when we are not there.

01:02:33.389 --> 01:02:34.610
[UNKNOWN]: That is how we measure success.

01:02:35.431 --> 01:02:43.724
[UNKNOWN]: So now with that being said, we're working in a very volatile area and it's extremely difficult to move through these areas.

01:02:44.305 --> 01:02:46.769
[UNKNOWN]: So you think, well, it's okay to stay to Delaware.

01:02:46.789 --> 01:02:48.551
[UNKNOWN]: That's pretty small.

01:02:48.912 --> 01:02:50.154
[UNKNOWN]: You can drive across that pretty quick.

01:02:50.594 --> 01:03:08.007
[UNKNOWN]: Well, when you're in the jungle, and the maximum speed that you can do is 10 miles an hour over extremely rough terrain, you know, all of our ambulances are in souped up highluxes, wedges and bumpers and lift kits and everything in order to be able to move these people.

01:03:09.568 --> 01:03:15.452
[UNKNOWN]: And so, the only way that it works, though, is we have to do relays.

01:03:15.512 --> 01:03:18.934
[UNKNOWN]: There's not a, there isn't a medical facility in every village.

01:03:19.474 --> 01:03:20.295
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't work like that.

01:03:20.355 --> 01:03:30.922
[UNKNOWN]: And there's only one or two places where they can actually do legit surgeries, where they have, either Western volunteer doctors or local people from Burma who work in these different clinic sort of deep in the jungle.

01:03:31.542 --> 01:03:34.945
[UNKNOWN]: And so we have to get these patients to these clinics.

01:03:35.666 --> 01:03:46.294
[UNKNOWN]: Well, the problem is, is when you're dealing with traumatic injuries from gunshots, lots, we deal with lots of amputations every single week, we're moving an amputee every single week.

01:03:47.555 --> 01:03:48.356
[UNKNOWN]: usually multiple times.

01:03:49.097 --> 01:03:51.960
[UNKNOWN]: And when that's happening, people are losing a lot of blood.

01:03:52.281 --> 01:03:54.463
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, I am not a further record.

01:03:54.483 --> 01:03:55.324
[UNKNOWN]: I am not a medic.

01:03:55.564 --> 01:03:58.928
[UNKNOWN]: I used to be EMT qualified, but I'm not like a combat medic.

01:03:59.288 --> 01:04:00.169
[UNKNOWN]: The guys who work for us are.

01:04:00.650 --> 01:04:01.251
[UNKNOWN]: But, um,

01:04:02.612 --> 01:04:08.560
[UNKNOWN]: Basically what we realized very quickly was we kept on losing all these patients because we just needed to do blood transfusions.

01:04:08.580 --> 01:04:09.721
[UNKNOWN]: We just need to give people blood.

01:04:09.881 --> 01:04:14.467
[UNKNOWN]: That's the only way that we can stabilize them because you have somebody steps on a landline.

01:04:15.348 --> 01:04:17.331
[UNKNOWN]: There's no golden hour for them.

01:04:17.912 --> 01:04:20.074
[UNKNOWN]: You're not seeing a doctor within an hour.

01:04:20.695 --> 01:04:25.859
[UNKNOWN]: If you're lucky, if you're lucky and we're there, you might be seeing a doctor in 12 to 16 hours.

01:04:26.399 --> 01:04:34.565
[UNKNOWN]: And so you've got to go through the jungle in the back of this truck up and down jungle mountains with half your leg hanging off.

01:04:34.985 --> 01:04:36.286
[UNKNOWN]: And so people are dying all the time.

01:04:36.346 --> 01:04:40.869
[UNKNOWN]: Like we just had a young girl a few weeks ago.

01:04:41.389 --> 01:04:42.471
[UNKNOWN]: she was hit by an air strike.

01:04:42.972 --> 01:04:49.501
[UNKNOWN]: I believe it was a drone, triple amputee, both legs in an arm, and she unfortunately passed away.

01:04:49.521 --> 01:04:56.351
[UNKNOWN]: She was maybe 10 or 12 years old, but that's like a normal, that's a normal day in Burma, in the areas where we work.

01:04:57.132 --> 01:05:14.811
[UNKNOWN]: And so, so what we did was one of our guys on our team Adam, the same guy who's in the trench, you know, shielding the patient with his body, we sent him to a school to basically learn some more advanced kind of combat trauma techniques and he learned about blood transfusions.

01:05:15.231 --> 01:05:35.992
[UNKNOWN]: And so he came back from this school and he goes, hey, I think I can set up blood transfusions in the middle of the jungle and in my mind, I'm thinking, no way dude, I was like give it a shot like how much how much is it going to cost what kind of equipment do you need and he had gone through and done all the research and figured out, okay, here's here's how we can do this and I thought I said, okay, like I'll I'll I'll approve funding for one set go, you know, go to see if we can get this thing up and running.

01:05:36.692 --> 01:05:38.994
[UNKNOWN]: And lo and behold, he got it up and running.

01:05:39.274 --> 01:05:43.678
[UNKNOWN]: And so we are now, and he trained the locals on how to do this in the middle of the jungle.

01:05:43.958 --> 01:05:57.649
[UNKNOWN]: So it's so difficult to explain if you haven't been in those environments, but man, we're pulling blood from one person, from a donor who's just sitting there and then you're putting it into another person, in the middle of the jungle.

01:05:58.650 --> 01:06:04.875
[UNKNOWN]: in an active war zone, and it's just the level of care that we're now able to give in these situations, it's just astronomically higher.

01:06:04.895 --> 01:06:14.622
[UNKNOWN]: And so, a lot more people are surviving these injuries, and it's all, it's all thanks to Adam figuring out how to do this, and then now we have a bunch of different places where people can get blood.

01:06:15.042 --> 01:06:21.127
[UNKNOWN]: So now that 12-hour journey, you can get topped up on blood two-three times, in some cases.

01:06:21.767 --> 01:06:24.049
[UNKNOWN]: Sometimes it's just a one-stop, you can get topped up on blood.

01:06:28.172 --> 01:06:33.796
[UNKNOWN]: Now, I say all of that because we had this event just recently, this was just a few months ago.

01:06:35.677 --> 01:06:45.624
[UNKNOWN]: After we hit established the ability to do this, this blood transfusion we wanted, we wanted now all of our medics and all of our ambulance teams to have an understanding of how to do this.

01:06:45.784 --> 01:06:48.846
[UNKNOWN]: And some of the medics were advanced enough to do it, some of the medics were not advanced enough to do it.

01:06:49.227 --> 01:06:53.389
[UNKNOWN]: But we wanted everybody to be trained on it and on how to assist on these operations.

01:06:54.470 --> 01:07:10.816
[UNKNOWN]: And so Adam, he was in there, and we brought in all of our ambulance teams, and he showed everybody, gave him a full training for several days on how to do blood transfusions, and these guys are doing blood transfusions on themselves, where they basically take their own blood out, and then they put their own blood back in.

01:07:11.237 --> 01:07:16.879
[UNKNOWN]: And you're just doing this in the middle of the jungle, and it's just incredible that we're able to do this stuff.

01:07:17.779 --> 01:07:23.182
[UNKNOWN]: And so they finish the training and again, everything we do is about charity with dignity.

01:07:23.202 --> 01:07:25.764
[UNKNOWN]: It's about you need to stand on your own when things happen.

01:07:25.804 --> 01:07:29.506
[UNKNOWN]: So they finish this training and literally the next day.

01:07:29.526 --> 01:07:30.646
[UNKNOWN]: It was within 24 hours.

01:07:30.786 --> 01:07:31.587
[UNKNOWN]: They finish this training.

01:07:32.047 --> 01:07:34.629
[UNKNOWN]: All of our medics are in one location at this clinic.

01:07:35.109 --> 01:07:37.030
[UNKNOWN]: In the middle of the jungle, which again, is just, you know, wood,

01:07:40.832 --> 01:07:47.458
[UNKNOWN]: This jet flies over, and boom, it's a village, you know, the next, you know, on the other side of the mountain.

01:07:48.179 --> 01:07:56.226
[UNKNOWN]: And so our guys immediately respond, they kind of know the general area of the village, so they just start going and then they're on radio, it's kind of coordinating and they go in.

01:07:56.646 --> 01:08:02.311
[UNKNOWN]: And it's just our just our current guys, our just our current guys go on this ambulance call because we didn't know if there were going to be patients or not.

01:08:02.672 --> 01:08:04.033
[UNKNOWN]: And our guys didn't know.

01:08:04.633 --> 01:08:17.899
[UNKNOWN]: And we sent one of our camera guy, he's a former Ranger who works for us full-time doing video editing, and that kind of thing, Garrett, and so Garrett goes along, just to observe, get some footage of what the guys are doing.

01:08:18.140 --> 01:08:24.663
[UNKNOWN]: So they get to this village, give him a minute, they just finished blood transfusion training, and they get there, and there's two wounded people, one of them is a 14-year-old girl.

01:08:25.543 --> 01:08:34.811
[UNKNOWN]: and she was, you know, got traumatic injury from the, from this bomb going off in her, in her village, zero warning, you know, middle and nowhere.

01:08:35.371 --> 01:08:39.915
[UNKNOWN]: And so our guys, they realized they, the strike is just like one strike.

01:08:39.935 --> 01:08:41.796
[UNKNOWN]: Just one drop bomb and just just a bomb.

01:08:42.036 --> 01:08:45.259
[UNKNOWN]: Just a bomb for no reason, no warning, no reason, no rhyme or reason.

01:08:45.279 --> 01:08:45.959
[UNKNOWN]: There's no troops there.

01:08:46.800 --> 01:09:09.947
[UNKNOWN]: just they just show up and they intentionally do the attacks now they're doing them very quick so they kind of pop up over the mountain immediately release their ordinance and then jump out of the way so used to be that they would kind of circle look for a target and then vomit now they just pop up hit their target and go so there's zero warning so 14 year old girl in the jungle just live in her life hanging out and then all said the next second she's laying there and you know she's heavily wounded and

01:09:10.567 --> 01:09:35.512
[UNKNOWN]: And so our guys are current guys that realize oh, we need to do a we might do blood transfusion on her because it's going to be a couple hours so we can get it back to the hospital And so sure enough our guys right then in there and it's it's the it's the perfect Sort of image of again what what's stronghold does it's we have a current guy he's in his you know stronghold uniform He's giving his own blood to help his own people and we aren't doing it.

01:09:35.672 --> 01:09:37.452
[UNKNOWN]: He's the one doing it's the local current team

01:09:37.872 --> 01:09:53.779
[UNKNOWN]: doing it and we have, you know, luckily our camera guy was there and so he filmed this whole thing as they, as they give this girl blood, they were able to stabilize her, they get her back to the hospital and we talked to the doctors and the doctors said, yeah, if there was no blood, she, there was no way she would have survived the, the hour or two to get here, she would have died.

01:09:54.239 --> 01:09:56.160
[UNKNOWN]: And so this is the day after the training happens.

01:09:56.600 --> 01:10:00.962
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's just a perfect example of blood transfusion in the middle of the jungle.

01:10:02.203 --> 01:10:05.124
[UNKNOWN]: That's the kind of, the kind of stuff that we're, that we're doing over at that strong

01:10:08.205 --> 01:10:23.113
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's awesome, and amazing to get that training done and then have somebody utilize that to save someone's life the next day and have to be all current staff across the board.

01:10:23.674 --> 01:10:29.477
[UNKNOWN]: Now, I know we mentioned World War II, I mentioned it, and there was a story about a World War II village, too.

01:10:29.857 --> 01:10:30.637
[UNKNOWN]: What was that all about?

01:10:31.118 --> 01:10:32.498
[UNKNOWN]: So, so when the so

01:10:34.687 --> 01:10:37.908
[UNKNOWN]: Remember, the current were very loyal to the British during World War II.

01:10:38.448 --> 01:10:49.310
[UNKNOWN]: And now when the Japanese invaded Burma, they came from Thailand, at the time called Siam, they crossed the river, and they then started moving from east to west across the country.

01:10:49.770 --> 01:10:51.230
[UNKNOWN]: And they had to go through the current hills.

01:10:51.430 --> 01:10:59.052
[UNKNOWN]: The first place the Japanese had to fight was the current hills, the place where we work today, like the exact villages and roads and rivers, the same spot.

01:10:59.672 --> 01:11:07.058
[UNKNOWN]: Well, when the Japanese they advanced really quick and it was, you know, during, you know, at a time when you can't just e-vac all of your people.

01:11:07.439 --> 01:11:17.607
[UNKNOWN]: So there was a British officer, there were several, there were several British officers who stayed in the current hills to sort of work with the people and the British drop some like radios to them so they could, you know, radio back occasionally.

01:11:18.047 --> 01:11:23.071
[UNKNOWN]: And so there was one guy in major sea grim, a British a British officer and he stayed with the current people.

01:11:24.332 --> 01:11:35.815
[UNKNOWN]: And during his time there, he was training the locals and making sure that he was coordinating supplies, getting brought in and things of that nature.

01:11:35.895 --> 01:11:39.175
[UNKNOWN]: And his whole thing was like, I'm going to stay here until the British show up again.

01:11:40.136 --> 01:11:45.297
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm going to make sure that we have, you know, our forces are ready for when the British finally come back in a couple of years.

01:11:45.337 --> 01:11:46.817
[UNKNOWN]: And so he's out there completely by himself.

01:11:47.477 --> 01:11:53.422
[UNKNOWN]: One or two other times he was able to kind of link up with another one or two British guys in the area But that was a very seldom.

01:11:53.442 --> 01:11:59.166
[UNKNOWN]: So he's on his own out there committed committed committed to the cause.

01:11:59.306 --> 01:12:11.274
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and so so during this time not keep in mind the the Japanese are going through the area and the and they're working with the the Burmese to again attack the the local population.

01:12:12.195 --> 01:12:14.617
[UNKNOWN]: Well, we're gets at there's British officers.

01:12:16.179 --> 01:12:16.739
[UNKNOWN]: in the mountains.

01:12:16.999 --> 01:12:23.481
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Japanese were like, okay, because they were here in radio signals, the Japanese know that air supply drops occasionally happen in the middle of the night.

01:12:23.981 --> 01:12:25.082
[UNKNOWN]: There's British here somewhere.

01:12:25.802 --> 01:12:34.384
[UNKNOWN]: And so they start going to the locals and they start basically they demand that the locals, they demand that the current, they say, tell us where the British are and the current won't do it.

01:12:34.524 --> 01:12:35.344
[UNKNOWN]: They're totally loyal.

01:12:35.804 --> 01:12:37.485
[UNKNOWN]: They say, no, we're not going to, we're not going to do that.

01:12:38.326 --> 01:12:46.753
[UNKNOWN]: Another element to add to the loyalty aspect, so many of the current in this particular area, most of the current I would say, are actually Baptist.

01:12:47.634 --> 01:12:56.782
[UNKNOWN]: Because hundreds of years ago, a missionary named Adonirem Judson went to Burma and the current have this legend.

01:12:58.343 --> 01:13:01.345
[UNKNOWN]: That's goes back thousands of years, and it's this legend that they passed down.

01:13:01.365 --> 01:13:12.270
[UNKNOWN]: It says one day a man a one day a man with white skin Is gonna come to you with a golden book, and he's gonna tell you the truth And so I don't know I'm dressed in several hundred years ago.

01:13:12.330 --> 01:13:18.253
[UNKNOWN]: He's in Burma and he's working with the Burmese and the Burmese aren't interested in him It all he didn't get any converts and then one day a Kurman man comes out

01:13:19.253 --> 01:13:36.682
[UNKNOWN]: And out of the jungle and he meets Adam and I'm Judson and he says, oh, I know I know who you are you're the white man with the golden book And so then Adam and I are in Judson goes into the current hills with the Bible and Many many of the current convert to Christianity

01:13:37.302 --> 01:13:50.093
[UNKNOWN]: And so now there's, so there's like this deep connection that they have with, so that, you know, with the Western world with what they call gullawah, white people, just anybody that's not from, from, from, from Burma.

01:13:51.033 --> 01:14:01.182
[UNKNOWN]: And so Cigram, major Cigram, he's, he's deeply religious, the locals are deeply religious, the local pastors are, are, are protecting him and and as well.

01:14:01.542 --> 01:14:05.045
[UNKNOWN]: And so when the Japanese come to the current and they say, hey, tell us where the white man is.

01:14:05.745 --> 01:14:10.689
[UNKNOWN]: Most of them don't know exactly where he is because the current are trying to keep it hidden, but they have a general idea of where he is, they refuse to tell him.

01:14:10.930 --> 01:14:12.391
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Japanese start killing.

01:14:12.451 --> 01:14:14.673
[UNKNOWN]: Current people say, tell us where the tell us where the white man is.

01:14:15.153 --> 01:14:21.378
[UNKNOWN]: And so current people are dying being executed by the Japanese for refusing to give up where this British officer was.

01:14:21.658 --> 01:14:24.160
[UNKNOWN]: That's how committed he was to them and they were to him.

01:14:24.540 --> 01:14:27.583
[UNKNOWN]: And they, so he was a younger guy, I believe in his early thirties.

01:14:29.064 --> 01:14:39.432
[UNKNOWN]: But the current, if they greatly, greatly respect you, even if you're young, they'll call you grandfather, just as a sign of respect.

01:14:39.953 --> 01:14:44.116
[UNKNOWN]: And so his nickname was Long Legs, because he was a really tall British officer.

01:14:44.136 --> 01:14:47.239
[UNKNOWN]: And so they call him grandfather Long Legs, was his name.

01:14:49.861 --> 01:14:54.243
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Japanese in the Burmese are killing this Karem people.

01:14:55.104 --> 01:15:01.788
[UNKNOWN]: Well, eventually it gets to Seagram that the Karem people are being killed and they're dying to protect him.

01:15:02.489 --> 01:15:05.731
[UNKNOWN]: And so he says, hey guys, I can't have any more of you died.

01:15:05.851 --> 01:15:07.692
[UNKNOWN]: I'll just go turn myself into the Japanese.

01:15:08.352 --> 01:15:13.074
[UNKNOWN]: So he leaves the hills now now he was hidden in this specific area now.

01:15:13.094 --> 01:15:32.540
[UNKNOWN]: There's a cool cool little anecdote that happened on my first or second trip into Burma So I'm in this I'm in this mountain hill area and my I didn't know much about Sea Grim at the time I hadn't really looked him up much, but they told me it might my interpreter told me he said this is the area where they kept the where they kept the Galawa

01:15:33.200 --> 01:15:51.476
[UNKNOWN]: During the war and I said the call of the white man they're like, yeah, this is where they kept the the white man The kept him on this mountain in this hidden area here and one of the generals one of the current generals his mother It was one of the people who helped hide him and so he's they're like yeah, he's from this area and so the current are very like under understated So I'm trying to pull more information out of him and he's like, oh, I don't know I don't know more than that.

01:15:51.496 --> 01:15:58.502
[UNKNOWN]: He's like I just know this is where the white man was and I'm like this is so cool I want to know more about this he didn't have much more information But so he tells me that

01:15:59.543 --> 01:16:25.663
[UNKNOWN]: I keep on, this is a few years ago, and then there's a villager comes out of the jungle because he heard that there was a white man with the current, and he comes down and he's looking at me funny, he's kind of doing his third world squat, just kind of staring at me and smiling, and my interpreter is kind of talking to him a little bit and kind of giggling, and he looks over me, my interpreter looks over me and he says, he's like, yeah, that guy right there, he's he's never seen a white man before.

01:16:26.483 --> 01:16:30.828
[UNKNOWN]: And so he's this guy's only ever heard of white people and it only hurt pick.

01:16:30.928 --> 01:16:33.150
[UNKNOWN]: It seemed pictures then but he's never seen he's never seen a white person.

01:16:33.170 --> 01:16:36.394
[UNKNOWN]: That's why this guy's like squatting there kind of like staring at me with this big grin on his face.

01:16:37.094 --> 01:16:44.262
[UNKNOWN]: And so he and he and he had and so I I asked my interpreter something about it's like, well, it's like, is it only white people?

01:16:44.282 --> 01:16:47.125
[UNKNOWN]: So it was confirming I said why the only white person he's ever seen.

01:16:47.745 --> 01:16:55.449
[UNKNOWN]: And the villager said something along the lines, if he's like, yeah, I've heard about white people and I've heard and I know that we used to protect white people here.

01:16:55.869 --> 01:16:59.591
[UNKNOWN]: He said something along those lines, but you're the first one I've ever seen.

01:16:59.911 --> 01:17:02.392
[UNKNOWN]: So that was a double confirmation that we were in the right spot.

01:17:02.412 --> 01:17:04.353
[UNKNOWN]: So they kind of know within the tribe.

01:17:05.353 --> 01:17:19.461
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, so Seagrim, during the war, their Japanese were killing the Keren, and so then he turns himself in, and he goes down to this village, down in one of the valleys, and this will also be larger village, he goes down there, and he turns himself into the Japanese.

01:17:20.502 --> 01:17:27.266
[UNKNOWN]: And the Japanese, so he'd been up there, major Seagrim had been up there for one or two years at this point.

01:17:28.126 --> 01:17:31.809
[UNKNOWN]: So as uniform as in tatters, he doesn't have any, you know, Western clothes.

01:17:31.829 --> 01:17:33.610
[UNKNOWN]: He doesn't have any more military uniform.

01:17:34.571 --> 01:17:35.952
[UNKNOWN]: And so he's wearing sort of like local garb.

01:17:36.592 --> 01:17:41.916
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Japanese go, ah, you're in civilian clothes, you're a spy, we can kill you.

01:17:42.817 --> 01:17:47.320
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Japanese, he turned himself in and the Japanese basically just sent in some to death.

01:17:47.340 --> 01:17:49.762
[UNKNOWN]: So he turned himself in and this village just current village.

01:17:50.322 --> 01:17:58.224
[UNKNOWN]: And then they take him over to another town, like a larger town, and then they execute him as a spy and kill him there.

01:17:58.604 --> 01:18:06.586
[UNKNOWN]: Now, the Corinne never forgot about, never forgot about him, and so they greatly and deeply respect this man who died for them.

01:18:06.986 --> 01:18:11.687
[UNKNOWN]: So that way, you know, people would stop, you know, the way the Japanese would stop killing them.

01:18:11.707 --> 01:18:14.588
[UNKNOWN]: And again, there's a very strong allegor there with Jesus.

01:18:14.628 --> 01:18:15.208
[UNKNOWN]: Jesus dying.

01:18:15.588 --> 01:18:17.309
[UNKNOWN]: giant for your sins and dying so you can go to heaven.

01:18:18.109 --> 01:18:20.730
[UNKNOWN]: And big props to the gullaloa of the of the region.

01:18:21.011 --> 01:18:22.291
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:18:22.871 --> 01:18:38.579
[UNKNOWN]: So, so a couple months ago, or no, not even a couple months, maybe a month ago, one of my guys he's in, he's in Burma, and this village where major sea grim turned himself in, we go through that village all the time.

01:18:39.679 --> 01:18:41.440
[UNKNOWN]: I've been through that village a hundred times, easily.

01:18:42.360 --> 01:18:47.283
[UNKNOWN]: And so our guys are at this clinic that's relatively near where that village is.

01:18:48.123 --> 01:18:53.006
[UNKNOWN]: And they're, I think our guys were just doing some training or something.

01:18:53.706 --> 01:19:03.712
[UNKNOWN]: And also in the here three or four fighter jets, like a full like squadron of fighter jets, come over to the mountains low and fast, real low, real fast.

01:19:04.052 --> 01:19:04.992
[UNKNOWN]: And then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:19:05.012 --> 01:19:09.915
[UNKNOWN]: They just start bombing the crap out of someplace that's a couple of mountains over, a couple hills over.

01:19:11.476 --> 01:19:22.325
[UNKNOWN]: And then these slower bomber planes, called Y12s, these are Chinese build planes, they're basically cargo planes, but they push packages of 120 millimeter mortars out the back of the plane.

01:19:22.585 --> 01:19:28.510
[UNKNOWN]: And so they use it as sort of a strategic bomber, like World War II style bomber, and so they'll drop.

01:19:28.710 --> 01:19:31.432
[UNKNOWN]: So the 120 millimeter mortars just lay it on impact and blow up.

01:19:31.472 --> 01:19:32.293
[UNKNOWN]: Just land on impact.

01:19:32.333 --> 01:19:32.493
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

01:19:32.553 --> 01:19:33.514
[UNKNOWN]: So they're like bombs.

01:19:33.694 --> 01:19:35.955
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, just just dropping bomb, like just dumb bombs.

01:19:35.975 --> 01:19:43.797
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and so then those planes show up and start circling that village and then dropping bombs around around where this village was.

01:19:44.117 --> 01:19:51.660
[UNKNOWN]: So our guys get in their vehicles and they're the again, the again, the just amazing thing about about stronghold our guys at the first ones on scene.

01:19:51.680 --> 01:19:57.482
[UNKNOWN]: So they get there and this village is completely decimated half of it has gone.

01:19:58.242 --> 01:20:09.971
[UNKNOWN]: many people who are killed and Luckily luckily there weren't that many people in the village at the time I think people were kind of outworking or something But many people killed many are wounded houses are destroyed.

01:20:10.011 --> 01:20:27.405
[UNKNOWN]: Our guys got there right around dusk and And I have video footage of this as well and so they get on site and it's just a lake of a fire and the entire village is destroyed and there's just folks You know dead laying in random places and people who were wounded and people who have their legs amputated from the explosions and

01:20:28.305 --> 01:20:32.066
[UNKNOWN]: Ar guy's going and, you know, evacuate, evacuate all the wounded and that kind of stuff.

01:20:32.766 --> 01:20:42.508
[UNKNOWN]: But the village that was destroyed is the same village where Sea Grimm surrendered himself to the Japanese to give his life for the current people.

01:20:43.469 --> 01:20:52.691
[UNKNOWN]: And so we always call Sea Grimm's village when we go through, but that's just another example of the Burma Army just coming in and completely annihilating a place.

01:20:53.071 --> 01:20:54.591
[UNKNOWN]: No reason, no rhyme or reason for it.

01:20:58.153 --> 01:20:59.255
[UNKNOWN]: But you're not loyal to us.

01:20:59.736 --> 01:21:01.039
[UNKNOWN]: You're not going to bow the knee to us.

01:21:01.721 --> 01:21:03.224
[UNKNOWN]: We're just going to wipe your village off the map.

01:21:03.564 --> 01:21:04.005
[UNKNOWN]: No warning.

01:21:04.126 --> 01:21:06.050
[UNKNOWN]: So they rebuild the villagers it just going.

01:21:07.028 --> 01:21:08.789
[UNKNOWN]: They'll certainly rebuild most likely.

01:21:09.469 --> 01:21:19.574
[UNKNOWN]: Many, obviously, many people are unfortunately dead, but they will, it's at a strategic, well, not a strategic, but it's in a valley, so it's close to water, so they will rebuild the village.

01:21:19.794 --> 01:21:24.556
[UNKNOWN]: And most of the people live in bamboo huts, so they can kind of have it up and running again within a couple of weeks.

01:21:25.637 --> 01:21:35.301
[UNKNOWN]: So when you were at Harvard, when you did the Christmas break trip, what went down with that, because that sounded like it was a pretty horrific scenario, too.

01:21:35.581 --> 01:21:48.248
[UNKNOWN]: So yeah, so we finished class and I think I turned in my, I did my, yeah, I did my final like exam for one of my, for one of my classes again, this is just the first semester.

01:21:48.308 --> 01:22:00.115
[UNKNOWN]: So I know I still had to come back and, you know, submit my exam whatever, I think the next day my wife dropped me off at the airport and she's, you know, heavily pregnant at this point.

01:22:01.055 --> 01:22:08.703
[UNKNOWN]: And so how you get in the way with this with you well, she's well, she's well, she's She's correct.

01:22:09.083 --> 01:22:10.505
[UNKNOWN]: So she's correct.

01:22:10.665 --> 01:22:12.727
[UNKNOWN]: And I stand corrected.

01:22:12.827 --> 01:22:21.915
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and it's it's it's still a struggle But so I go out there.

01:22:21.935 --> 01:22:23.577
[UNKNOWN]: I get out to Burma and

01:22:24.718 --> 01:22:35.270
[UNKNOWN]: I go in and the the the rebels their plan at the time is to go in and Basically liberate and basically knock the Burma army out from this particular outpost now We're deep in the mountains now.

01:22:35.310 --> 01:22:36.812
[UNKNOWN]: So now we're now longer in the flat lands.

01:22:36.832 --> 01:22:39.415
[UNKNOWN]: We're sort of deep in the current in the current hills

01:22:40.195 --> 01:22:43.678
[UNKNOWN]: And there's this mountain, not a mountain.

01:22:43.718 --> 01:22:46.080
[UNKNOWN]: It's just sort of a large, very, very large hill.

01:22:46.641 --> 01:22:48.142
[UNKNOWN]: And there's a Burm army outpost.

01:22:48.182 --> 01:22:57.950
[UNKNOWN]: So basically what the Burm army does is when they go into the current hills, they set up these outposts on like the most prominent hilltops, but they then use those positions and they fire mortars.

01:22:57.970 --> 01:23:01.653
[UNKNOWN]: They're big on mortars and they fire these mortars into the villages.

01:23:02.253 --> 01:23:10.435
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm there, it's, you know, Christmas time, so for example, as the, as the rebels are kind of getting prepared to go and launch this assault to take this hilltop.

01:23:13.036 --> 01:23:15.976
[UNKNOWN]: Not fortress, but this hilltop enemy camp, berm army camp.

01:23:16.617 --> 01:23:22.638
[UNKNOWN]: The berm army, just one or two camps overs, on Christmas day was firing mortars into Christian villages.

01:23:23.238 --> 01:23:32.623
[UNKNOWN]: And I got photos like on Christmas Day or was the next morning of multiple little girls who had been killed by these mortars.

01:23:32.683 --> 01:23:38.927
[UNKNOWN]: So these mortars had just gone in, the little kids are celebrating Christmas, and then they're just blown up in front of their families.

01:23:39.767 --> 01:23:47.750
[UNKNOWN]: And this is all this same road, very close to the area where I did the reconnaissance, the thermal reconnaissance mission.

01:23:49.630 --> 01:24:00.734
[UNKNOWN]: So I get out there to, I get out there and the rebels are planning on taking this town, not not this town, but this hilltop outpost, which has been controlled by the enemy for 50 years.

01:24:01.534 --> 01:24:06.896
[UNKNOWN]: They've never had a friendly boot stand up there in 50 years and now they're going to try and take it.

01:24:07.596 --> 01:24:22.592
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm helping coordinate the medically evacuation plan, just making sure, you know, everything's set for them to be able to liberate this area, and I'm at this time my team had been in Burma for like the previous couple of months, so I was like, hey, you guys go home for Christmas, I'll go in solo.

01:24:23.493 --> 01:24:25.015
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm operating solo out there.

01:24:25.855 --> 01:24:25.976
[UNKNOWN]: And

01:24:27.837 --> 01:24:52.879
[UNKNOWN]: So the rebels then sort of launched the attack and they're using drones so the the rebels are using drones and they're and they're dropping these bombs on the Burma Army base And the Burma Army has jammers and things so there's this interesting whole other topic in conversation about drone warfare in the jungle, which is a very very Another I'd talk about another weird thing that Americans are not used to experiencing You know being on the receiving end of that kind of thing

01:24:53.339 --> 01:25:01.064
[UNKNOWN]: So the rebels are bombing the hilltop fortress and then eventually they launch a ground assault to go and take it.

01:25:01.585 --> 01:25:15.134
[UNKNOWN]: And it takes several days of fighting to really take the, to really take it because they had to do several different like sort of fakes and attempts and it's not just a clean Hollywood style charge and take the enemy camp.

01:25:15.294 --> 01:25:17.515
[UNKNOWN]: It's a lot more strategic and you're kind of battling.

01:25:17.535 --> 01:25:20.017
[UNKNOWN]: How many enemy fighters were up there on that hill you think?

01:25:20.037 --> 01:25:20.758
[UNKNOWN]: 30 or 40 maybe 60?

01:25:23.019 --> 01:25:44.365
[UNKNOWN]: And our guys had a couple, a couple hundred, and so, and so, as that's, as that's going on, eventually our guys push the berm army out, the berm army leaves, our guys take the hill top, and when they, when they take the hill, the berm army has placed landmines all around this, all around this, all around this place.

01:25:45.085 --> 01:25:53.032
[UNKNOWN]: And so in the days, keep keeping on, I, you know, I developed very close relationships with a lot of these, a lot of these guys.

01:25:53.172 --> 01:25:54.453
[UNKNOWN]: They're like, they're like brothers to me.

01:25:54.473 --> 01:26:00.118
[UNKNOWN]: And you know, obviously, how it is, it's like, there's a deeper tie than just than a familiar bond when you're.

01:26:00.998 --> 01:26:15.106
[UNKNOWN]: Me and battle with with these guys and again, I'm not a direct combatant in this situation But I am on the receiving end at this point of like mortar fire and you know air strikes and stuff coming in And so as the as the rebels are trying to take this town So what do they call you?

01:26:16.046 --> 01:26:16.967
[UNKNOWN]: They have a nickname for you.

01:26:17.127 --> 01:26:18.868
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, can you say it or is it?

01:26:21.640 --> 01:26:23.681
[UNKNOWN]: I probably better not to say that.

01:26:23.701 --> 01:26:25.641
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it's not a classified thing.

01:26:25.661 --> 01:26:28.002
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I'd rather just not say that.

01:26:28.042 --> 01:26:28.522
[UNKNOWN]: I'll tell you off that.

01:26:28.542 --> 01:26:29.662
[UNKNOWN]: I'll tell you off that.

01:26:29.962 --> 01:26:30.922
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

01:26:31.803 --> 01:26:35.043
[UNKNOWN]: But so I'm there, you know, working with them.

01:26:35.063 --> 01:26:39.605
[UNKNOWN]: So as the, you know, the Burma Army knows that this camps about to get, you know, attacked.

01:26:39.625 --> 01:26:45.406
[UNKNOWN]: And so they're dropping, you know, they're bringing in fighter jets and stuff and dropping in the jungle and, you know, looking for us.

01:26:46.546 --> 01:26:48.447
[UNKNOWN]: And so, but so before this attack had happened,

01:26:49.847 --> 01:26:57.074
[UNKNOWN]: I had slept in a abandoned village, maybe a couple of miles away from this berm army outpost.

01:26:57.094 --> 01:27:00.597
[UNKNOWN]: So I had slept in this village and a abandoned village.

01:27:01.037 --> 01:27:11.807
[UNKNOWN]: And the hut that I was sleeping in, I had been one day I was sitting in the doorway of it as some civilians on motorcycles came by and they were driving toward the berm army territory.

01:27:12.327 --> 01:27:15.830
[UNKNOWN]: So, and they saw me, and I saw them kind of, and I understand enough of the language.

01:27:15.870 --> 01:27:36.689
[UNKNOWN]: They're like, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

01:27:38.170 --> 01:27:42.652
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't hear it because I was asleep at the time and I had little sleep with the earplugs in.

01:27:43.552 --> 01:27:47.354
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm waking up, I'm woke and up by this huge explosion.

01:27:47.674 --> 01:27:48.474
[UNKNOWN]: Boom goes off.

01:27:48.515 --> 01:27:50.875
[UNKNOWN]: And keep in mind, I'm in the middle of the jungle and I'm like, what the heck?

01:27:51.196 --> 01:27:54.997
[UNKNOWN]: So I pop out my earplugs and I hear shoo, you know, a jet flying over.

01:27:55.317 --> 01:27:58.879
[UNKNOWN]: And then you hear it just sort of circling, you know.

01:27:59.399 --> 01:28:01.420
[UNKNOWN]: And it was very, very close, very close to where we were.

01:28:02.100 --> 01:28:16.772
[UNKNOWN]: And the next morning we realized so we had moved out of that village, but the jet had come in middle and night popped up over the hilltop and put one bomb right outside the one building in the village that I had been sleeping in.

01:28:17.693 --> 01:28:27.621
[UNKNOWN]: And so I don't know for sure that they were targeting me, but somebody said something somewhere because they only dropped the one bomb and then they dropped another bomb somewhere else.

01:28:27.641 --> 01:28:27.841
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

01:28:31.504 --> 01:28:32.524
[UNKNOWN]: So how did the battle turn out?

01:28:33.445 --> 01:28:34.365
[UNKNOWN]: So for the hilltop.

01:28:34.586 --> 01:28:38.608
[UNKNOWN]: So our guys take the hilltop after so days they take the hilltop.

01:28:38.648 --> 01:28:40.589
[UNKNOWN]: But it's because the Burma Army sort of fell back.

01:28:40.789 --> 01:28:53.837
[UNKNOWN]: So the Burma Army falls back into the woods or falls back into the jungle and I learned later like months later that actually the Burma Army had done a gun run, had dropped bombs, trying to hit the rebels and it actually hit some of their own Burma Army guys.

01:28:53.857 --> 01:28:55.218
[UNKNOWN]: So they had their own sort of...

01:28:56.038 --> 01:28:57.180
[UNKNOWN]: Blue on blue or red on red.

01:28:57.200 --> 01:28:58.662
[UNKNOWN]: You know what everyone call it.

01:28:58.782 --> 01:29:00.764
[UNKNOWN]: So they bomb some of their own guys, which is which is nice.

01:29:01.806 --> 01:29:05.070
[UNKNOWN]: So our guys take the take the hilltop and we're very excited about this.

01:29:05.090 --> 01:29:05.831
[UNKNOWN]: This is wonderful.

01:29:06.051 --> 01:29:07.073
[UNKNOWN]: This is this is a big deal.

01:29:07.633 --> 01:29:09.836
[UNKNOWN]: But we know the Burma Armageddon realistically going to take it back.

01:29:10.037 --> 01:29:10.798
[UNKNOWN]: We can't hold it.

01:29:10.838 --> 01:29:12.480
[UNKNOWN]: That's not the it's just not going to happen.

01:29:13.280 --> 01:29:27.204
[UNKNOWN]: But anyway, so our guys are in there, we've got about 30 or 40 guys in the camp, and they're cutting down all the trees in the camp and trying to pull out all the berm army guns and weapons and stuff like that that they can get from this hilltop fortress so they can use it against the berm army later.

01:29:28.245 --> 01:29:38.128
[UNKNOWN]: And to get, again, there's landmines everywhere to get into this camp, so, but our guys had sort of cleared a footpath that's maybe a foot wide to get into the camp.

01:29:39.468 --> 01:29:56.573
[UNKNOWN]: And so I believe that the time we had 40 guys in the camp, so we have 40 guys in the camp, and one of the, one of the guys I'd become good friends with, I'm not going to say good friends with, but you know, friendly with, one of the guys, he, he was, so there's 40 guys leaving the camp, so he's still a bunch of supplies, our guys can't hold a camp, so you're going to get bomb.

01:29:56.593 --> 01:30:04.275
[UNKNOWN]: So they're walking out, so 40 guys, so 39 guys walk down this single, you know, single lane path,

01:30:05.336 --> 01:30:10.762
[UNKNOWN]: And this other guy that I developed, you know, some friendship with, he was the 40th guy.

01:30:11.363 --> 01:30:17.090
[UNKNOWN]: And he's walking out on the same little path, he steps on a landline, 39 other guys stepped over it.

01:30:17.410 --> 01:30:20.314
[UNKNOWN]: He was the last guy out of this camp, steps on a landline.

01:30:20.754 --> 01:30:23.237
[UNKNOWN]: Now, it's a kind of landline that just sort of blows off half of your foot.

01:30:24.058 --> 01:30:24.798
[UNKNOWN]: So it's not going to kill you.

01:30:24.958 --> 01:30:25.518
[UNKNOWN]: You're going to be fine.

01:30:26.379 --> 01:30:29.719
[UNKNOWN]: So blows off half of his foot, but he panicked.

01:30:30.379 --> 01:30:37.861
[UNKNOWN]: And I was told later that he had made some different comments before he basically said, I never want to live as a cripple.

01:30:37.881 --> 01:30:39.501
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want to, you know, whatever.

01:30:39.541 --> 01:30:47.263
[UNKNOWN]: So he flipped around his rifle, put it on fire, and shot himself in the head right there on top of this on top of this mountain.

01:30:47.583 --> 01:30:49.703
[UNKNOWN]: And the other guys are four or five feet away from him.

01:30:49.943 --> 01:30:51.304
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, they they'll recover

01:30:53.044 --> 01:31:11.582
[UNKNOWN]: And they, you know, they're trying to reach him, they're like, they're screaming, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

01:31:12.683 --> 01:31:23.108
[UNKNOWN]: His father was like a platoon commander or squad commander or something as part of this force as well And so his father was in a different spot.

01:31:23.128 --> 01:31:39.536
[UNKNOWN]: He wasn't his father wasn't on the hill But yeah, his father was was there as well and had to you know come take his body and And yeah, so the The just the reality of the the horrors of war and what these people you know go through is is

01:31:40.436 --> 01:31:41.397
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's, it's very difficult.

01:31:41.437 --> 01:31:42.817
[UNKNOWN]: So I went through that.

01:31:42.917 --> 01:31:44.939
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm, I mean, Christmas break.

01:31:45.019 --> 01:31:46.079
[UNKNOWN]: And this is my Christmas break.

01:31:46.099 --> 01:31:46.259
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

01:31:46.659 --> 01:31:48.981
[UNKNOWN]: And then the berm army comes back and takes the, takes the hill.

01:31:49.381 --> 01:31:50.762
[UNKNOWN]: And then our guys take it a second time.

01:31:50.782 --> 01:31:53.663
[UNKNOWN]: So it changes hands two or three times while I'm there.

01:31:54.484 --> 01:31:55.944
[UNKNOWN]: We had a couple of other guys get killed.

01:31:56.525 --> 01:31:59.066
[UNKNOWN]: But ultimately it was, it's still a strategic contact with victory.

01:31:59.466 --> 01:32:01.227
[UNKNOWN]: We knew we were going to be able to hold the hill.

01:32:01.247 --> 01:32:02.208
[UNKNOWN]: So that wasn't ever the objective.

01:32:02.688 --> 01:32:23.012
[UNKNOWN]: But it was basically letting the enemy know like, hey, we can we can punch you guys in the face too And it was a big symbolic victory knocking out these mortars, but you're being used to murder people and Subjugate the people now the Burma Army still now controls that place again, but You know that they now know that they're no longer vulnerable, and so it was a that was important

01:32:23.792 --> 01:32:27.776
[UNKNOWN]: one really bizarre thing that I just still don't fully understand.

01:32:29.657 --> 01:32:33.300
[UNKNOWN]: So the current, a lot of them are Buddhist and a lot of them are also animist.

01:32:34.001 --> 01:32:46.592
[UNKNOWN]: And so the best way I'd like to describe that is the sort of like think about maybe like Native American sort of style of spirituality, like the rocks and the trees and the rivers have, you know, have a spirit that kind of thing about, you know,

01:32:51.596 --> 01:33:06.812
[UNKNOWN]: But I think because of that, they have this interesting custom where if somebody commits suicide, they punish the weapon that was used to commit suicide because they believe that there's, you know,

01:33:07.232 --> 01:33:10.996
[UNKNOWN]: It's just culturally, just believe, like, hey, this thing needs to be punished, just sort of a cultural remnant.

01:33:11.396 --> 01:33:21.707
[UNKNOWN]: And so the weapon that's rifle that the soldier had used to commit suicide, you know, they unload it and they go put it in like a hut in a prison and they tie it tied up.

01:33:21.727 --> 01:33:24.610
[UNKNOWN]: And I think they were hitting it with sticks and and some stuff like that.

01:33:25.270 --> 01:33:31.532
[UNKNOWN]: And the grand, it's, it's, it sounds really hocus-pocus and, like, really, superstitious, like, they're, like, they're, like, they're complete bumbling morons.

01:33:31.752 --> 01:33:32.533
[UNKNOWN]: That's not it at all.

01:33:32.873 --> 01:33:36.494
[UNKNOWN]: There, there's a very intelligent people, but this was just their custom.

01:33:37.034 --> 01:33:46.977
[UNKNOWN]: And they, um, they, yeah, they basically imprisoned this rifle for a short time for, for what it had done to to kill this guy, um, it punished it.

01:33:47.057 --> 01:33:49.218
[UNKNOWN]: And then, you know, now it's back in circulation.

01:33:49.238 --> 01:33:50.459
[UNKNOWN]: Somebody's, somebody else is using it.

01:33:50.519 --> 01:33:54.140
[UNKNOWN]: So, um, I guess the, the point of that little anecdote is, uh,

01:33:55.801 --> 01:33:57.042
[UNKNOWN]: It's a whole different world over there.

01:33:57.202 --> 01:34:01.085
[UNKNOWN]: There's an entirely different world, entirely different way of thinking out there.

01:34:01.525 --> 01:34:05.509
[UNKNOWN]: And so that was, yeah, so that was the world I was in.

01:34:07.030 --> 01:34:08.371
[UNKNOWN]: And then so the way that that ended.

01:34:09.351 --> 01:34:15.176
[UNKNOWN]: So the Burma Army eventually kind of takes back that the camp, we go back and forth a few times, it's still a victory, it's still a really good thing.

01:34:16.337 --> 01:34:20.220
[UNKNOWN]: So I now need to head back.

01:34:21.200 --> 01:34:23.962
[UNKNOWN]: I need to go back to the United States to go back to school.

01:34:25.262 --> 01:34:37.089
[UNKNOWN]: So I've got maybe an hour, hour and a half left there, and I'm going to leave in a short amount of time before the sun goes down, and I'm going to start driving back through the jungle to start my long journey home back to the United States.

01:34:38.069 --> 01:34:45.192
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm sitting there, and all of a sudden we hear this, we hear a plane, a plane pops up overhead, and it's just one plane.

01:34:45.952 --> 01:34:53.816
[UNKNOWN]: And it's again, it's one of these Y-12 bombers, where they just drop payloads of 4,5, 120 millimeter mortars at a time.

01:34:54.757 --> 01:34:58.401
[UNKNOWN]: And it starts circling the camp, the Burma Army camp.

01:34:59.722 --> 01:35:03.386
[UNKNOWN]: But it's circular path actually took it right over us.

01:35:03.627 --> 01:35:04.187
[UNKNOWN]: So it was right over.

01:35:04.207 --> 01:35:08.072
[UNKNOWN]: I'm literally, I can stare up and I can look directly at this at this bomber.

01:35:08.112 --> 01:35:10.214
[UNKNOWN]: I can look at the bottom of it and it's flying right over us.

01:35:10.675 --> 01:35:12.036
[UNKNOWN]: Now, it's just one bomber.

01:35:13.257 --> 01:35:15.078
[UNKNOWN]: I've been through a million times worse.

01:35:15.399 --> 01:35:16.579
[UNKNOWN]: This is not that big of a deal.

01:35:16.779 --> 01:35:28.167
[UNKNOWN]: It should not be that big of a deal and so I go and I We get in the trench and we're in the trench with my interpreter and I'm sitting there and I'm just going

01:35:29.708 --> 01:35:38.076
[UNKNOWN]: I was sitting there, and mentally I was very calm, I was like, okay, but this is not the big of a deal, the chances of the dropping bombs where we are very, very low chance.

01:35:38.896 --> 01:35:44.521
[UNKNOWN]: But I started getting that shaking, my hands and my feet are shaking, and this thought

01:35:45.262 --> 01:35:48.867
[UNKNOWN]: was just going through my head the whole time and it was just I just want to meet my daughter.

01:35:49.107 --> 01:35:50.128
[UNKNOWN]: I just want to meet my daughter.

01:35:50.389 --> 01:35:51.270
[UNKNOWN]: I just want to meet my daughter.

01:35:51.590 --> 01:35:58.218
[UNKNOWN]: And it was this intrusive thought that was just poking through in my brain because my wife was going to get birth in just a couple of months.

01:35:58.258 --> 01:36:01.743
[UNKNOWN]: She was maybe six months, eight months pregnant at this sex or seven months pregnant at this point.

01:36:02.524 --> 01:36:18.845
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm sitting in a trench on the other side of the world with this current guy I'm just you know and my hands are shaking a little bit and all I can think about is I just want to meet my daughter And that as long as I can meet my daughter, I'll be happy to die, but I need to I need to meet my daughter first

01:36:21.287 --> 01:36:32.514
[UNKNOWN]: And that was, again, not a particular danger situation that the bomber drops all of its bombs, no, we're even close to us, but it did multiple sorties right over our head.

01:36:33.195 --> 01:36:35.156
[UNKNOWN]: And each time I just want to meet my daughter, I just want to meet my daughter.

01:36:35.637 --> 01:36:38.058
[UNKNOWN]: And so then the plane goes away.

01:36:39.039 --> 01:36:45.964
[UNKNOWN]: I then hop in the car, so hop and it's off-road vehicles and I just start my drive back.

01:36:46.505 --> 01:37:02.757
[UNKNOWN]: But yeah, that really stuck with me and I just thought, man, what is my heart and my head are now in an entirely different place and so I drive out of there and eventually I get home and create my pregnant wife and I miss Christmas and

01:37:03.237 --> 01:37:14.944
[UNKNOWN]: and all that stuff, and then I just walked back into school at Harvard, and, you know, and then people go, well, I was your, I was your Christmas vacation, how would you do it, you know, all that kind of stuff.

01:37:14.964 --> 01:37:28.072
[UNKNOWN]: So, and I just, I, I, there was like a, there was one or two other guys there that were, former, you know, SF and stuff, and so I kind of told them a little bit about where I'd been and what I've been doing, but not all the details and stuff, because I was just like,

01:37:29.520 --> 01:37:44.043
[UNKNOWN]: you know, I don't know, I just didn't want to talk about it, and so yeah, that was definitely an interesting experience kind of walking back into the classroom and then everybody's talking about whatever matters to them at the time.

01:37:44.083 --> 01:37:49.625
[UNKNOWN]: And yeah, so we're just kind of an interesting mental, mental rollercoasters to go from one extreme to the other and back.

01:37:50.045 --> 01:37:50.185
[UNKNOWN]: And

01:37:51.578 --> 01:37:54.681
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and then a few months later my daughter was born and yeah, I'll love her to death.

01:37:55.521 --> 01:37:55.821
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

01:37:55.942 --> 01:37:56.502
[UNKNOWN]: That's awesome.

01:37:56.822 --> 01:38:06.830
[UNKNOWN]: Um, I had the little bit of the feeling of, you know, coming back from combat of a little bit of, hey, all this other stuff.

01:38:07.231 --> 01:38:08.051
[UNKNOWN]: It doesn't really matter.

01:38:08.091 --> 01:38:10.113
[UNKNOWN]: It's not that, nothing like this doesn't really matter.

01:38:10.133 --> 01:38:11.474
[UNKNOWN]: This really gonna teach me about something.

01:38:11.494 --> 01:38:16.138
[UNKNOWN]: You're gonna do something like I remember I had to do like evaluations and fit reps and stuff.

01:38:16.178 --> 01:38:18.259
[UNKNOWN]: And you're, I really had to like,

01:38:19.320 --> 01:38:22.863
[UNKNOWN]: Like actively consciously Focus and be like all right.

01:38:23.003 --> 01:38:23.884
[UNKNOWN]: This is my job.

01:38:23.924 --> 01:38:35.392
[UNKNOWN]: I have to do this and I would break it into smaller like When I went to college, I was a grown man that was already a seal and stuff and I've gone to college and I would sit down without a second thought and do

01:38:36.373 --> 01:38:38.175
[UNKNOWN]: academic school work for eight hours.

01:38:38.395 --> 01:38:55.028
[UNKNOWN]: I would just get them just go and I and even up until that deployment, like, you know, any time we had to do fit reps, so we had to write e-values, or I could just, I could just kind of lock in, but when I came home from my last deployment, it was like, it was, I had to really kind of actively

01:38:56.129 --> 01:38:58.651
[UNKNOWN]: Consciously go, all right dude like you got to do this right now.

01:38:58.731 --> 01:39:00.852
[UNKNOWN]: This is your job This is important.

01:39:01.073 --> 01:39:22.027
[UNKNOWN]: I had to tell myself that then that probably lasted for about six months And I got kind of got back to normal, but it seems like rolling from from you know Sitting in a trench waiting to have mortars dropped on your head from an aircraft above you and then the next thing You know like okay tonight's assignment is you know I want you to read this article about whatever thing Well, did you find that a little bit difficult?

01:39:23.189 --> 01:39:37.792
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, to an extent a little bit, but honestly, I mean, I, for the last, you know, five, six, seven, eight years, I've been going back and forth from sort of civilian world to, you know, these war zones and back and forth, you know, a bunch is figured out.

01:39:38.313 --> 01:39:39.273
[UNKNOWN]: I have not figured it out.

01:39:39.333 --> 01:39:39.973
[UNKNOWN]: No, that's not true.

01:39:40.093 --> 01:39:41.273
[UNKNOWN]: I've learned how to suppress it.

01:39:41.573 --> 01:39:49.035
[UNKNOWN]: And that's why I'm sitting there in class, you know, but before the before that's a little deployment I had done, I'm sitting there in class and my hands are shaking just to answer,

01:39:53.096 --> 01:39:57.757
[UNKNOWN]: You know, nobody there's, you know, super, super impressive that I need to be like, you know, nervous around it.

01:39:58.718 --> 01:39:59.258
[UNKNOWN]: Nothing like that.

01:39:59.478 --> 01:40:04.219
[UNKNOWN]: So there was, there was definitely a, you know, a lot of stuff kind of pushed down.

01:40:04.620 --> 01:40:14.182
[UNKNOWN]: And, and then also too, I think there's this sort of a certain level of emotion and part of my brain and my heart that I didn't even know existed until I had a daughter.

01:40:14.683 --> 01:40:15.783
[UNKNOWN]: I just didn't even know it was there.

01:40:16.663 --> 01:40:45.970
[UNKNOWN]: And, you know, one example was this past summer, I was, you know, at home in Milwaukee and a couple of my young cousins had had come over there like 14, 15 years old and then they had another one of my cousin's sons was there and he's also 14 or 15 and so these three, there's three young men are there at the house and my aunt said she said, hey, can you, can you show them the video and so there's a video of me getting shot by ISIS on this rescue mission on Iraq as a civilian.

01:40:46.771 --> 01:40:48.594
[UNKNOWN]: And so I was like, yeah, no problem.

01:40:48.714 --> 01:40:54.823
[UNKNOWN]: I'll use this as an instructional time, because I don't really talk about that unless I'm doing fundraising or something.

01:40:55.284 --> 01:40:56.225
[UNKNOWN]: I don't talk about it.

01:40:56.966 --> 01:41:01.293
[UNKNOWN]: But so I said, yeah, this is a great learning opportunity for the young man here.

01:41:02.214 --> 01:41:17.398
[UNKNOWN]: And so I said the boys down in the living room, I have the video kind of ready to go on the TV and I explained to them what was going on and sort of the context and then I show them the video and they're watching this and he's like 14-year-old boys, you know, they don't really know what to say.

01:41:17.418 --> 01:41:20.158
[UNKNOWN]: They're just like, what the heck, you know, what are we watching here?

01:41:20.178 --> 01:41:23.939
[UNKNOWN]: Because given mine in that video, there's, you know, I'm getting shot, there's dead bodies everywhere.

01:41:24.659 --> 01:41:31.041
[UNKNOWN]: And I started explaining to the boys that there's about how the ISIS had massacred these people.

01:41:32.481 --> 01:41:36.386
[UNKNOWN]: was telling them about some of the different, some of the different people that I could see in the bodies.

01:41:36.946 --> 01:41:50.481
[UNKNOWN]: Little young girls, but their heads blown off, and then there was one particular, when we talked about this last time, but there was one particular casualty that it stuck with me, and I wracky, husband, and wife, and their dead baby was laying between them.

01:41:52.243 --> 01:42:08.414
[UNKNOWN]: just based on the pattern of, you know, how the, where they were laying and stuff, it was very obvious the father was carrying the baby, he'd been shot on the back by ISIS and he'd fallen forward in the rubble, dropped his baby and the baby's head had been bashed open by falling into the rubble and the mother was also shot and died right next to them.

01:42:09.054 --> 01:42:11.576
[UNKNOWN]: As part of the, you know, this massacre that I'd seen.

01:42:11.636 --> 01:42:11.836
[UNKNOWN]: And so,

01:42:13.697 --> 01:42:27.586
[UNKNOWN]: I don't remember if I told the boys that, but it was vividly in my head, but there was this moment where that wasn't, that wasn't some other kid's baby, that was my baby, because my baby is now that same old, you know, whatever, just a few months old for four or five months old.

01:42:28.466 --> 01:42:37.192
[UNKNOWN]: And so I told the boys the story, and then I just, emotion, I mean, I went to the bathroom and I just started weeping, I just started weeping uncontrolled.

01:42:37.892 --> 01:42:38.913
[UNKNOWN]: And my wife is like,

01:42:39.133 --> 01:42:41.735
[UNKNOWN]: But it's wrong, I'm like, I don't know.

01:42:41.755 --> 01:42:42.616
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know what's wrong.

01:42:43.056 --> 01:42:44.798
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm just sitting there with a weeping in the bathroom.

01:42:45.498 --> 01:42:49.281
[UNKNOWN]: And I got control myself and I was like, OK, OK.

01:42:49.301 --> 01:42:55.727
[UNKNOWN]: So there's a lot of deep stuff that I just didn't even know was there, but having to have it a daughter now.

01:42:59.168 --> 01:43:17.165
[UNKNOWN]: It's all come to all come full circle because the reason I started stronghold was because a firefight in Afghanistan were almost had to kill two little girls and you know and then I go to Iraq and I wounded while rescuing a little girl and then I have my own little girl now and so this

01:43:19.327 --> 01:43:29.113
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, just sort of this, and now all that protective instinct is now to protect my daughter and to keep her from all the evils of this world that I know are out there.

01:43:31.175 --> 01:43:34.417
[UNKNOWN]: Did the, uh, how long did the shaking hands last?

01:43:35.337 --> 01:43:43.099
[UNKNOWN]: Um, it lasted pretty much, um, for the, for the, for the most part, um, so, so what, what I did was, um, so lasted most of the school year.

01:43:43.599 --> 01:43:47.720
[UNKNOWN]: I got back from, um, Burma, obviously that, that did not help the shaking.

01:43:48.301 --> 01:43:53.562
[UNKNOWN]: Um, and so what I got back, basically what I started doing was mentally, I felt fine, mentally I felt fine.

01:43:53.582 --> 01:43:54.942
[UNKNOWN]: I wasn't having like crazy nightmares.

01:43:55.342 --> 01:43:59.764
[UNKNOWN]: You, you get, you have a few when you first come back as you're, as you're decompressing, but I was like, that was normal, totally fine.

01:44:00.424 --> 01:44:00.584
[UNKNOWN]: Um,

01:44:01.204 --> 01:44:04.968
[UNKNOWN]: So what I started doing was just for a couple of months, I basically just started every morning.

01:44:05.188 --> 01:44:12.695
[UNKNOWN]: I would just wake up and I would just take a freezing cold shower and just force myself to not like wince or, you know, not allow myself to shutter.

01:44:12.795 --> 01:44:14.157
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's what I did.

01:44:14.297 --> 01:44:20.443
[UNKNOWN]: Literally just to get control of my nervous system, just to force my mind to just stop the shaking and that and that helped.

01:44:21.023 --> 01:44:22.925
[UNKNOWN]: And so then since then it's pretty much gone away.

01:44:23.245 --> 01:44:24.647
[UNKNOWN]: I just needed to kind of get control of

01:44:25.407 --> 01:44:29.149
[UNKNOWN]: My body and my nervous system or whatever were just not linked up with my mind.

01:44:29.409 --> 01:44:37.452
[UNKNOWN]: So I just did that for maybe two months or so, and that really helped with the shaking any time, you know, my adrenaline would go up, because again, mentally I felt fine.

01:44:37.472 --> 01:44:40.593
[UNKNOWN]: It was just my body was not reacting how my mind was reacting.

01:44:41.546 --> 01:45:06.936
[UNKNOWN]: It's interesting, you're kind of like a person because the last time you were on, you kind of told the story of you had gone to a pretty dark place, you were addicted to food, you weighed 325 pounds, your life was just not going well, and you went to a hotel in Florida, rented a room, and you, like, parsed your life mentally to try and figure out what was wrong and how you were going to fix it.

01:45:07.577 --> 01:45:08.777
[UNKNOWN]: And you made those decisions,

01:45:11.558 --> 01:45:15.122
[UNKNOWN]: And here's what I'm going to do to fix it, and then you fix it.

01:45:15.902 --> 01:45:26.132
[UNKNOWN]: It's very interesting that you have this capability to assess yourself, root, cause the problem, and then figure out what you can do to solve that problem.

01:45:27.862 --> 01:45:30.885
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I guess I've probably spent a lot of time.

01:45:31.105 --> 01:45:32.026
[UNKNOWN]: I'm very introspective.

01:45:32.646 --> 01:45:46.298
[UNKNOWN]: I believe Aristotle said the unexamined life is not worth living, and that's one of my favorite quotes, and it's just, I'm constantly trying to examine myself, and just, where am I at mentally, where am I at, emotionally, why am I doing, why am I doing, what I'm doing?

01:45:46.658 --> 01:45:48.640
[UNKNOWN]: Why am I here, why am I there, why am I doing this kind of work?

01:45:49.080 --> 01:46:05.174
[UNKNOWN]: And then also just trying to analyze and anything that I'm doing, like how can I be more effective at this, how I'm going to be better at this and and by no means am I a perfect person in any way, but it just I just think it's kind of maybe just comes naturally me to try to just try to you know figure out figure out what's up and sometimes it works.

01:46:05.654 --> 01:46:12.836
[UNKNOWN]: the other the the danger of that mindset is sometimes you can't figure out the problem and so you're just spinning and you're just like, why can't I figure this out?

01:46:12.856 --> 01:46:13.656
[UNKNOWN]: Why can't I figure this out?

01:46:13.676 --> 01:46:14.336
[UNKNOWN]: What is wrong with me?

01:46:14.816 --> 01:46:17.017
[UNKNOWN]: Did you get any advice on the on the shaking?

01:46:17.037 --> 01:46:31.340
[UNKNOWN]: Did you read anything because the last you know the last one you talked about reading Russell Brands book and he had a book about addiction and you figured out that you were addicted to food so you read his book and these are protocols I'm going to follow that you have anything similar here with you know getting over this

01:46:34.081 --> 01:46:39.987
[UNKNOWN]: No, because I, no, I just sat and thought about it a bunch because I thought my mind is fine, but my body is not, is not fine.

01:46:40.167 --> 01:46:42.409
[UNKNOWN]: So I was like, there's a split between my mind and my body.

01:46:43.009 --> 01:46:50.937
[UNKNOWN]: And that was pretty obvious to me, because that none of the shaking had happened before we been hit with these bombs in, in, in, in, in, in, in Burma.

01:46:51.357 --> 01:47:06.085
[UNKNOWN]: And so, and again, during the the Burma bombings, we weren't like we had you know there was like a structure kind of between us and where these bombs are hitting so it's not like I had TBI it's not like I was concussed there was nothing like that at all It was just purely my nerves and so I thought okay, what can I do to call my nerves and like well

01:47:06.685 --> 01:47:07.306
[UNKNOWN]: Go back to buds.

01:47:07.806 --> 01:47:09.908
[UNKNOWN]: You just got to sit there and just just be calm.

01:47:10.228 --> 01:47:10.888
[UNKNOWN]: Just be calm.

01:47:11.069 --> 01:47:11.789
[UNKNOWN]: You're very cold.

01:47:11.809 --> 01:47:12.470
[UNKNOWN]: You're very tired.

01:47:12.490 --> 01:47:17.313
[UNKNOWN]: You're you know, you're pissed off Yeah, you know, you got a long you know, you're Monday night a hell week kind of thing.

01:47:17.634 --> 01:47:25.860
[UNKNOWN]: You got a long way to go dude So you just you just mind over matter and so I just realized that there was a there was a separation between my mind and my body And I was like okay, I just need to sort of force my body.

01:47:26.380 --> 01:47:29.423
[UNKNOWN]: I need to do something that's gonna be very uncomfortable that I don't want to do

01:47:30.244 --> 01:47:36.391
[UNKNOWN]: And so I just did that ritually every morning for, yeah, like I said, like two months and then that helped massively.

01:47:37.492 --> 01:47:42.357
[UNKNOWN]: What's the current status and the trajectory in Burma right now?

01:47:42.878 --> 01:47:46.222
[UNKNOWN]: So right now, the Burma Army is starting to gain ground.

01:47:46.962 --> 01:47:53.590
[UNKNOWN]: And the reason for that, like I alluded to earlier, is both that Russia and China are heavily backing the Burma army.

01:47:53.610 --> 01:48:06.386
[UNKNOWN]: So there was a period from 2021 until maybe 2024, mid-25, where the Chinese in particular, because they share a border with Burma, with the Kachin tribe up in the north.

01:48:07.166 --> 01:48:17.410
[UNKNOWN]: But the Chinese specifically were kind of playing both sides and they were going to see who was going to win because at the time back in 2023, 2024, it looked like the rebels might win and it looked like the Burma Army might fall.

01:48:17.951 --> 01:48:26.834
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Chinese actually gave a bunch of drones and weapons to some of the rebel groups, to help them.

01:48:27.595 --> 01:48:29.095
[UNKNOWN]: Ultimately, the rebel groups never united.

01:48:30.056 --> 01:48:35.178
[UNKNOWN]: There's cultural differences, there's language differences, it's very difficult to unite in the jungle like that.

01:48:35.578 --> 01:48:40.819
[UNKNOWN]: but then also some of the tribes, so the current tribe are very, very, very, very good people.

01:48:41.059 --> 01:48:44.980
[UNKNOWN]: There's splinters, groups within them that there's criminal elements like you'd have in any tribe.

01:48:45.340 --> 01:48:49.541
[UNKNOWN]: But some of the tribes are heavily involved in the drug trade in weapons trades, things like that.

01:48:49.941 --> 01:49:02.043
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's very hard to unite sort of the pro-democracy, you know, Baptist, you know, peaceful Buddhists with, you know, the people that are traffic, Crystal Method to Southeast Asia, some of those tribes.

01:49:02.704 --> 01:49:08.251
[UNKNOWN]: So the Burma Army is able to also use that against the tribes that kind of put them against each other.

01:49:08.651 --> 01:49:14.899
[UNKNOWN]: So basically because the tribes did not unite, the Burma Army is just sort of reasserting control is what it appears to be at the moment.

01:49:15.861 --> 01:49:20.427
[UNKNOWN]: And trying to, like I said, Russia are backing them heavily up with weapons and that kind of thing.

01:49:21.027 --> 01:49:22.869
[UNKNOWN]: And that drove the drones in the jungle.

01:49:22.949 --> 01:49:25.452
[UNKNOWN]: What's did you have drones coming after you while you were there?

01:49:25.852 --> 01:49:26.593
[UNKNOWN]: I have in the past.

01:49:26.633 --> 01:49:29.736
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so I'll so the first time I ever had a drone come after me.

01:49:29.776 --> 01:49:31.438
[UNKNOWN]: This was a couple of years ago.

01:49:32.499 --> 01:49:42.209
[UNKNOWN]: I was I was at night and I was in a just in a village sleeping in a hut and I hear this hear this, you know, the this the

01:49:42.950 --> 01:49:47.256
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, the motorcycle, the motor or the long lower sound is like it was a little bit more deeper.

01:49:47.296 --> 01:49:53.926
[UNKNOWN]: It was like a, it was a big one and I hear it fly at first slow low and slow middle the night right above us.

01:49:53.946 --> 01:49:57.551
[UNKNOWN]: So it either has night vision or has thermal because this is being controlled by somebody remotely.

01:49:57.591 --> 01:49:58.793
[UNKNOWN]: So it probably hit thermal on it.

01:49:59.433 --> 01:50:14.020
[UNKNOWN]: And so it flies right over us and I just immediately start sweating because I'm like I can't get up and run out of this HUT because they're gonna see me So I just you just have to sit there and hopefully everyone else stays in their huts and hopefully they bomb someone else's hut and don't bomb my hut

01:50:14.800 --> 01:50:21.125
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm laying there, laying there still as if it matters, but I'm under a straw roof.

01:50:21.986 --> 01:50:23.607
[UNKNOWN]: And so the drone comes right over.

01:50:24.688 --> 01:50:25.809
[UNKNOWN]: I feel buzz right over.

01:50:26.329 --> 01:50:27.891
[UNKNOWN]: And then it drops a salvo.

01:50:28.051 --> 01:50:30.152
[UNKNOWN]: I want to say of 15 or 20 bombs.

01:50:30.993 --> 01:50:34.596
[UNKNOWN]: If this was like a large one that the drop like a smaller amount of

01:50:36.538 --> 01:50:51.833
[UNKNOWN]: Well, a larger amount, but smaller projectiles, and they dropped maybe 150, 200 yards from where I was at, and I knew the building that they were targeting, because it was like a concrete building that wasn't in the jungle, and I was like, oh, I know exactly what they're bombing, and so certain of boom, boom, boom, boom, these bombs are going on.

01:50:52.153 --> 01:50:53.815
[UNKNOWN]: And then we hear a second drum wall.

01:50:54.175 --> 01:50:56.698
[UNKNOWN]: And so the Burma Army had launched at least two drones,

01:50:57.138 --> 01:51:06.822
[UNKNOWN]: And then I was hearing reports of up to three or four, who knows, but they were also bombing some of the villages And they were close to where we were, so there was multiple places that had been bombed at night.

01:51:06.842 --> 01:51:10.303
[UNKNOWN]: And I don't, again, I don't know if it was the same drone, but it was at least two or three.

01:51:10.864 --> 01:51:15.125
[UNKNOWN]: And so my interpreter, he comes, he comes running up to me and we're like, do we got it?

01:51:15.165 --> 01:51:16.986
[UNKNOWN]: We got to go hide in the jungle because they're going to come back around.

01:51:17.006 --> 01:51:18.967
[UNKNOWN]: They're going to start bombing all these huts that were in.

01:51:19.427 --> 01:51:31.860
[UNKNOWN]: So grab my AK, throw my gear on, I got my bolt bag, you know, with my water, you know, water and passport in it, and we just run into the jungle and we can hear this drung, and we don't know if it's right above us.

01:51:32.121 --> 01:51:34.103
[UNKNOWN]: We know it's on thermal.

01:51:34.403 --> 01:51:39.068
[UNKNOWN]: It was at a very dry part of the year, and so a lot of the leaves on the trees aren't there, so it's not like thick.

01:51:39.628 --> 01:51:40.748
[UNKNOWN]: Green jungle that hide under.

01:51:40.788 --> 01:52:09.055
[UNKNOWN]: It's like many of the it's almost like fall time where many of the leaves are gone And so we're hiding under these trees where like literally sort of hugging trees As this drone is won't try to fly over because we're just trying to stay under the branches of the thermal doesn't pick us up and it's Like boom boom boom boom boom, dropping dropping bombs in this you know in this local area And so that was that was not a that was not a pleasant experience To put it to put it mildly so that was yeah, so we've been hunted by drones and in that case

01:52:09.835 --> 01:52:20.062
[UNKNOWN]: Um, and so I, so you know, you talk about G-Watt, you know, global war and terror, we're used to when our drones are aircraft show up, we have what we call squirters, guys who run, they scored, they get off target, they start running off target.

01:52:20.202 --> 01:52:20.623
[UNKNOWN]: That's you.

01:52:20.763 --> 01:52:21.423
[UNKNOWN]: I was that guy.

01:52:21.663 --> 01:52:31.490
[UNKNOWN]: I was that guy just grabbing my rifle and just sprinting into the jungle just get away from the path of this aircraft and there's nothing and I mean literally nothing you can do to stop it horrifying.

01:52:31.826 --> 01:52:32.506
[UNKNOWN]: No, it's the worst.

01:52:32.627 --> 01:52:33.447
[UNKNOWN]: It's the absolute worst.

01:52:33.487 --> 01:52:43.013
[UNKNOWN]: It's being in combat when you are at least equal with your enemy is one thing.

01:52:43.053 --> 01:52:46.556
[UNKNOWN]: That's already terrifying enough where you're relatively equal with your enemy.

01:52:46.616 --> 01:52:48.137
[UNKNOWN]: When you're dominating your enemy, it's kind of fun.

01:52:48.277 --> 01:52:52.659
[UNKNOWN]: You're out there, you're out there with your silver tune and you're like, yeah, we're going to go smoke these dudes daylight.

01:52:52.680 --> 01:52:53.220
[UNKNOWN]: I don't care.

01:52:53.240 --> 01:52:54.361
[UNKNOWN]: We're going to crush these dudes.

01:52:54.381 --> 01:52:55.461
[UNKNOWN]: We're going to call them AC 130 and A10s.

01:52:56.802 --> 01:52:57.723
[UNKNOWN]: we're going to own this.

01:52:59.064 --> 01:53:03.847
[UNKNOWN]: But then I was in situations and I rack where we were sort of even with ISIS.

01:53:03.907 --> 01:53:12.513
[UNKNOWN]: So they're in trench, they're dug in, but they don't have air power, but they've got rockets and mortars and, you know, and where it's sort of equal, and that was terrifying enough.

01:53:13.013 --> 01:53:19.157
[UNKNOWN]: And then now you go to Burman, it's like, no, now you're the dude with an AK or running through the jungle as bombs are going off everywhere.

01:53:19.337 --> 01:53:20.898
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, and fast movers overhead.

01:53:20.918 --> 01:53:21.538
[UNKNOWN]: And there's fast movers.

01:53:21.558 --> 01:53:24.681
[UNKNOWN]: And there's very thing runs and thermal on drones.

01:53:25.541 --> 01:53:37.595
[UNKNOWN]: So you won the first time I ever felt like my hands completely shaking in Burma, so after this bombing it happened, I was back there a month or two later and after the drone bombing?

01:53:37.915 --> 01:53:40.198
[UNKNOWN]: No, so this is after the jet bombing.

01:53:40.218 --> 01:53:40.758
[UNKNOWN]: The jet bombing.

01:53:40.778 --> 01:53:46.485
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so I was out there kind of visiting some of the troops, this was during that two month period where they still controlled the town.

01:53:47.065 --> 01:53:51.089
[UNKNOWN]: And so this was the first time I experienced the shaking.

01:53:51.610 --> 01:53:56.234
[UNKNOWN]: So I was just up there kind of visiting those guys seeing what was going on, seeing if we could get them any medical supplies, whatever.

01:53:56.835 --> 01:54:02.981
[UNKNOWN]: And so I hop on the back of a motorcycle and there's a, you know, I've got my motorbike driver, so he's driving me.

01:54:03.341 --> 01:54:04.963
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're driving across these rice fields.

01:54:05.343 --> 01:54:12.411
[UNKNOWN]: Totally open, there's like maybe at a tree or two over like the next two or three square miles.

01:54:12.731 --> 01:54:13.592
[UNKNOWN]: So there's just nothing.

01:54:13.853 --> 01:54:18.678
[UNKNOWN]: And we got to go a mile to get to this village where there's trees and stuff.

01:54:19.058 --> 01:54:34.825
[UNKNOWN]: So we're driving along and maybe 200 yards in front of us on this just one road going to cut through the rice fields is a tractor that's pulling a trailer with maybe 20 people on the back of it, just villagers kind of going wherever it is that they're going.

01:54:34.986 --> 01:54:44.110
[UNKNOWN]: And I look at the I'm watching them and also and I see all of the people in the tractor just jump up and scatter and they just start running and I see them pointing and I'm like what are

01:54:46.811 --> 01:55:04.302
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not even kidding, 100 yards away from me, maybe 100 feet in the air is a Russian-hined helicopter paralleling me because I didn't hear it because we're all the wind in my ears and this attack helicopter is paralleling me.

01:55:04.322 --> 01:55:12.407
[UNKNOWN]: I look up and I can see the pilots, I can see the pilots luckily, and to keep on I've got an AK on my back, I'm with like three or four other guys who have

01:55:17.070 --> 01:55:19.132
[UNKNOWN]: And this attack helicopter is 100 yards away from it.

01:55:19.552 --> 01:55:23.775
[UNKNOWN]: Luckily, it was clearly the pilots were staring and probably laughing.

01:55:23.795 --> 01:55:24.736
[UNKNOWN]: I go, oh, that's so funny.

01:55:24.756 --> 01:55:26.777
[UNKNOWN]: Look at all the villagers running away.

01:55:26.797 --> 01:55:29.859
[UNKNOWN]: So the villagers are all running away from this attack helicopter.

01:55:29.879 --> 01:55:30.259
[UNKNOWN]: It comes in.

01:55:30.880 --> 01:55:34.162
[UNKNOWN]: And so the guy in the bike, he slams the brakes.

01:55:34.202 --> 01:55:36.964
[UNKNOWN]: We jump off because we're getting ready just to scatter as well.

01:55:37.024 --> 01:55:39.006
[UNKNOWN]: And so I'm staring at this helicopter.

01:55:39.806 --> 01:55:43.347
[UNKNOWN]: Like this, you know, it's like a dragon dragon in the sky that can kill you.

01:55:43.367 --> 01:55:44.387
[UNKNOWN]: It's for a reference echo.

01:55:44.407 --> 01:55:47.288
[UNKNOWN]: This is the the famous helicopter from like Rambo.

01:55:47.388 --> 01:55:48.348
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's okay.

01:55:48.388 --> 01:55:48.508
[UNKNOWN]: Cool.

01:55:48.528 --> 01:55:50.769
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, just making sure you, you know, connect that.

01:55:50.789 --> 01:55:51.329
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, I'm with it.

01:55:51.629 --> 01:55:52.809
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, horrific.

01:55:52.829 --> 01:55:53.729
[UNKNOWN]: No, it's horrifying.

01:55:53.849 --> 01:55:54.910
[UNKNOWN]: And so you're just sitting there.

01:55:55.390 --> 01:55:57.210
[UNKNOWN]: All that has to happen is the pilot just has to look.

01:55:57.510 --> 01:55:59.611
[UNKNOWN]: All he has to do is look 45 degrees to his right.

01:55:59.651 --> 01:56:02.631
[UNKNOWN]: And he's going to see me standing there and me and like six other guys.

01:56:03.131 --> 01:56:08.833
[UNKNOWN]: And we would have to run like I said, a mile across open territory just to get to a tree to hide in were dead.

01:56:10.073 --> 01:56:23.223
[UNKNOWN]: And he just never looks over at us, and he just keeps, you know, flying along, you know, 150 feet in the air, whatever, how it really low, really, like a chuck to rock and hit him, super low, and he was, I don't know where he was going, doing whatever he was doing.

01:56:23.263 --> 01:56:35.852
[UNKNOWN]: But, yeah, so that was, and my point is I was standing there on the road, and that was the first time I felt the shakes, and I was like, oh, okay, this is a, this is a new experience, but yeah, just these really just close calls,

01:56:36.672 --> 01:57:02.070
[UNKNOWN]: just nothing you can do and so I guess that the thing that makes us so terrifying is there's nothing you can do about it again it's different if you can fight like okay if we got a fight you know like if you and me get into a fist fight I know you're gonna win but I feel like I but it's like okay like I'm gonna like put up a fight and I'm gonna be less afraid then if I'm just standing there and I just know somebody's gonna come up and stab me you know I mean that I can't defend myself or someone's gonna shoot me it's so much worse if you don't even have a chance to fight back so

01:57:02.850 --> 01:57:15.082
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's I've had some discussions with some guys about like what's what's more horrific The drone that's coming after you or your the next step that you take you know the ID environment of

01:57:16.453 --> 01:57:32.046
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I think is bad in Ramadi, bad in Iraq, Afghanistan, like it got horrific because I didn't fight now, Afghanistan, but guys, I don't know if it was like this when you were there, but it got to the point where it was like the immediate action drills were like, don't move.

01:57:32.747 --> 01:57:38.112
[UNKNOWN]: You know, so, hey, if we start getting shot out or something blows up, no one move because there's so many IEDs.

01:57:38.852 --> 01:57:43.697
[UNKNOWN]: So, is that worse where you're like, well, this next step could be my last.

01:57:44.357 --> 01:57:54.786
[UNKNOWN]: Or is it worse to say, oh, this thing is hunting me down and finding me at my beginning thought was, I thought it was like, well, it's scarier if you don't kind of like what you just said, like, you don't know what's going to happen.

01:57:54.806 --> 01:57:56.188
[UNKNOWN]: You take your next step, you could get blown up.

01:57:57.068 --> 01:58:11.069
[UNKNOWN]: But as I think about it more and as as I see more of like the Ukrainian Activities going on I'm starting to think Yeah, that seems like the most horrific thing is to have these drones coming that are just like nothing you can do about it

01:58:12.130 --> 01:58:20.557
[UNKNOWN]: So I would definitely say the drones are worse and the reason for that is not because they're you know Less deadlier more deadlier whatever than an idea.

01:58:20.837 --> 01:58:24.540
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously you don't want to step on an idea The difference is the drone is hunting you.

01:58:25.000 --> 01:58:25.721
[UNKNOWN]: They're looking for you.

01:58:25.941 --> 01:58:29.884
[UNKNOWN]: They they they're called Loitering munitions is sort of the technical term for it.

01:58:29.904 --> 01:58:30.585
[UNKNOWN]: So it's just sitting there.

01:58:30.685 --> 01:58:31.365
[UNKNOWN]: It's just watching.

01:58:31.806 --> 01:58:38.811
[UNKNOWN]: It's just watching and Once it finds you You know, you can jump into a trench But it's just gonna hit you from the top being around to a building.

01:58:38.831 --> 01:58:39.792
[UNKNOWN]: It'll just fall you into the building

01:58:40.252 --> 01:58:43.534
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's sort of like being, you are the prey.

01:58:43.794 --> 01:58:46.516
[UNKNOWN]: It's kind of like the movie predator, right?

01:58:46.656 --> 01:58:49.038
[UNKNOWN]: Where, you know, what's more scary?

01:58:49.478 --> 01:58:54.742
[UNKNOWN]: There's room that you shouldn't go into because you know, you'll get hurt or this thing is actively hunting you and there's nowhere to safe.

01:58:55.182 --> 01:59:04.528
[UNKNOWN]: And that's the, in my personal experiments for at least me, definitely worse being hunted by a drone that's on thermals at night, looking for you.

01:59:04.608 --> 01:59:05.749
[UNKNOWN]: It's got a ton of munitions.

01:59:07.270 --> 01:59:08.271
[UNKNOWN]: there's just nothing you can do.

01:59:08.311 --> 01:59:13.594
[UNKNOWN]: And I've been in a lot of different situations where there's landmines and things of that nature.

01:59:13.894 --> 01:59:20.017
[UNKNOWN]: The only thing I can think of that was kind of nearly as freaky was clearing an ISIS tunnel because you're just kind of worried about getting buried alive.

01:59:20.437 --> 01:59:21.978
[UNKNOWN]: But even that two is different.

01:59:22.018 --> 01:59:28.462
[UNKNOWN]: It's just the fact of being hunted and there's nothing you can do about it is a whole other level of just horrifying.

01:59:28.702 --> 01:59:39.213
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, especially now like the thing about an ID is a lot of times the ID was not was just victim activated meaning like it's just going to go off.

01:59:39.934 --> 01:59:45.819
[UNKNOWN]: It seems like that's a little something that you can have a better chance against than another human that's trying to kill you.

01:59:45.900 --> 01:59:49.964
[UNKNOWN]: You know like on the end of that drone is a guy that's looking for you going up.

01:59:50.024 --> 01:59:50.444
[UNKNOWN]: Got one.

01:59:51.365 --> 02:00:07.592
[UNKNOWN]: and you're just in a video game and he's just going to roll that thing in for yeah exactly he's just in there having a cup of coffee watching you one thermal so yeah good luck good luck you know good luck running away uh yeah definitely so it would seem that that

02:00:08.832 --> 02:00:19.719
[UNKNOWN]: It's almost impossible, or it will be almost impossible for the Burmese Army and the Burmese Junta to get complete control over the current, right?

02:00:19.779 --> 02:00:24.402
[UNKNOWN]: I mean, it's just, it's just insurgency, like a continual long term insurgency.

02:00:24.782 --> 02:00:30.426
[UNKNOWN]: Is there any, is that what you see for the kind of indefinite futures just continued insurgency?

02:00:31.286 --> 02:00:38.392
[UNKNOWN]: There will be continued in surgency, and the Burma Army is not going to be able to control the hill regions.

02:00:38.572 --> 02:00:42.415
[UNKNOWN]: So the only reason the current even exists as a people is because of those hills.

02:00:42.815 --> 02:00:46.278
[UNKNOWN]: That's the only reason, because they are the Burma Army so much stronger than them.

02:00:46.578 --> 02:00:51.321
[UNKNOWN]: So they have a terrain and sort of home field advantage when the Burma Army has to go in there.

02:00:51.361 --> 02:00:52.062
[UNKNOWN]: You go into the jungle.

02:00:53.242 --> 02:01:02.626
[UNKNOWN]: It's a whole different animal out there and that place is heavily landmined as well by the locals because it's only the only defenses that they're like, okay, well there's three trails in here.

02:01:03.246 --> 02:01:05.206
[UNKNOWN]: We know which one is landmined, we know which one isn't.

02:01:05.887 --> 02:01:08.708
[UNKNOWN]: We know which one's our landmine, we even know which one's aren't.

02:01:08.748 --> 02:01:12.649
[UNKNOWN]: The berm army doesn't know that, so that's the only way that the current can even defend themselves in a lot of cases.

02:01:13.810 --> 02:01:20.835
[UNKNOWN]: And so, I don't see a situation where it would ever be truly tentable for the burn arm to control the hills.

02:01:21.055 --> 02:01:27.941
[UNKNOWN]: They'll go in and set up these hilltop fortresses, these fobs, and they can, again, sort of, fire mortars into people's villages and stuff.

02:01:27.961 --> 02:01:32.024
[UNKNOWN]: But as far as actually being able to govern and control the area, it's not gonna happen.

02:01:32.204 --> 02:01:35.507
[UNKNOWN]: And where do the rebels get their supplies chain from?

02:01:35.832 --> 02:01:40.195
[UNKNOWN]: So they're obviously taking stuff off of dead berm armor soldiers and then it's Southeast Asia.

02:01:40.215 --> 02:01:43.957
[UNKNOWN]: So there's a there's a black market of all kinds of all kinds of crazy stuff out there.

02:01:43.977 --> 02:01:44.518
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so it's funny.

02:01:45.398 --> 02:01:48.520
[UNKNOWN]: You walk through the jungle and you're hanging out with these guys.

02:01:48.540 --> 02:01:49.941
[UNKNOWN]: And you'll see like a berm army rifle.

02:01:50.481 --> 02:01:53.944
[UNKNOWN]: You'll see an M16 with like a serial number.

02:01:54.104 --> 02:01:55.865
[UNKNOWN]: You know, that's, you know, from many many.

02:01:55.905 --> 02:01:56.145
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:01:56.906 --> 02:01:57.727
[UNKNOWN]: Which is actually funny.

02:01:58.087 --> 02:02:11.466
[UNKNOWN]: Some of the guys were doing like target practice with their M-16s and they were shooting a 25-yard target just as zero their weapons and at 25 yards the bullets that 5-5-6 round was hitting the target sideways It was totally spinning just at 25 yards the barrels with that shot out

02:02:12.006 --> 02:02:23.474
[UNKNOWN]: What's even crazier is there are still M1 carbines, not the Grands, but the M1 carbine from World War II standard, standard, our guys are still walking around carrying those.

02:02:23.814 --> 02:02:29.898
[UNKNOWN]: And I have a picture of one, so this guy carrying it, and I just kind of checking it out, and it was made in 1943.

02:02:30.498 --> 02:02:35.161
[UNKNOWN]: And that's his, that's his way to defend his villages, this M1 carbine from World War II.

02:02:36.622 --> 02:02:38.224
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, and it works great.

02:02:38.404 --> 02:02:39.005
[UNKNOWN]: It works great.

02:02:39.065 --> 02:02:44.010
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so that there's literally stuff there from from the British and Americans being there.

02:02:44.130 --> 02:02:46.553
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, so where do you see stronghold heading?

02:02:47.074 --> 02:02:57.926
[UNKNOWN]: So, so right now one of the things that we're doing is, so like I said earlier, we have the only ambulances for an area inside of Burma that's, you know, larger than the state of Delaware, a million football fields.

02:02:58.426 --> 02:03:12.313
[UNKNOWN]: So one of the where constantly trying to figure out how to improve that and to save more lives as much as possible, the blood transfusions was a big part of that capability because now we can extend the amount of time that we have to get a patient to where they need to go.

02:03:12.993 --> 02:03:19.056
[UNKNOWN]: But now we just recently just over the last couple of months have launched a new initiative where we're sending out mobile medics.

02:03:19.476 --> 02:03:24.679
[UNKNOWN]: So where local people who are already trained in they already have medical medical training.

02:03:25.920 --> 02:03:36.106
[UNKNOWN]: At different levels, there's like all that we have to like the PA level and there's sort of like community health workers and things like that who can administer shots and sort of assess people and there's people who know how to deliver babies and things of that nature.

02:03:36.427 --> 02:03:48.835
[UNKNOWN]: So what we're doing is we're strategically hiring some of these different folks because they have this training, but when you're a subsistence level, when you're in a subsistence level economy, there's no job for you.

02:03:53.578 --> 02:03:55.400
[UNKNOWN]: of training because maybe you went to school somewhere.

02:03:56.401 --> 02:03:57.962
[UNKNOWN]: But you have no medicine.

02:03:58.903 --> 02:03:59.803
[UNKNOWN]: So you're totally useless.

02:04:00.344 --> 02:04:02.266
[UNKNOWN]: And so also two, your family has no money.

02:04:02.346 --> 02:04:02.906
[UNKNOWN]: So what does that mean?

02:04:03.206 --> 02:04:04.608
[UNKNOWN]: Well, I mean, you're going to go work on the rice fields.

02:04:04.848 --> 02:04:09.252
[UNKNOWN]: You're going to go try to hunt to bring some home, bring home some meat for your family.

02:04:09.272 --> 02:04:11.714
[UNKNOWN]: You're going to just try to get, you know, rice.

02:04:12.414 --> 02:04:32.172
[UNKNOWN]: And so what we're doing now is we are finding, because there's plenty, people who have this medical training or people who are like medics with like the resistance, sort of like combat medics, and what we're doing is we're bringing in medical supplies and motorbikes and basically putting them in places where it's hard to reach.

02:04:32.632 --> 02:04:37.497
[UNKNOWN]: and then they're going around and actively going to villages and doing medical clinics.

02:04:37.517 --> 02:04:52.651
[UNKNOWN]: And so they're finding all these people who would have passed away from infections easily treatable things and who either would have needed a ride on one of our ambulances or worst case scenario would have just passed away in the middle of the night because they got infected.

02:04:53.853 --> 02:05:02.163
[UNKNOWN]: 12-year-old kid, you know, getting sepsis or something from an infection on his foot because he's stepped on on something, you know, in the jungle and there's no way to really properly clean it off.

02:05:02.183 --> 02:05:10.895
[UNKNOWN]: So anything from that to, you know, people just needing basic, you know, malaria medication or people needing, you know, people die in the jungle from a fever.

02:05:11.395 --> 02:05:14.239
[UNKNOWN]: like we have, you know, basic stuff to help break a fever.

02:05:14.499 --> 02:05:15.360
[UNKNOWN]: They got nothing out there.

02:05:15.821 --> 02:05:27.096
[UNKNOWN]: And so what we're doing is, yeah, that's our latest initiative and we're sending out a bunch of these mobile medics and incorporating them into our ambulance service as well.

02:05:27.136 --> 02:05:29.178
[UNKNOWN]: And so just sort of the last couple of months we've had.

02:05:31.039 --> 02:05:33.020
[UNKNOWN]: I don't I should have looked at the most recent numbers.

02:05:33.140 --> 02:05:41.843
[UNKNOWN]: I'm going to say easily 300 patient interactions in just the last one or two months from these new mobile metrics that we just launched over the last three four months ago.

02:05:43.143 --> 02:05:46.364
[UNKNOWN]: Charlie Mike with the stronghold to continue and to make that work and then.

02:05:47.144 --> 02:06:12.967
[UNKNOWN]: Another thing you've got going on now is you've got a YouTube channel slash podcast Do you have a do you is it a podcast as well as just a YouTube channel so right now I'm just putting it on on the on the channel, but I'm gonna be putting it out on on Spotify and all that stuff and taking it one step Yeah, and you know in a world where there's definitely a lot of podcasts in the world and a lot of YouTube channels right now And Yours is called the Overwatch with E from Matos

02:06:14.007 --> 02:06:18.150
[UNKNOWN]: And, well, first of all, first of all, I've been listening to it, and it's freaking great.

02:06:18.350 --> 02:06:32.138
[UNKNOWN]: It's great because you're clearly a thinker, you're not hyper-emotional, but you're not like completely detached from your emotions, but you have them in check, you've been all over the world, you've seen war, up close and personal.

02:06:32.958 --> 02:06:38.083
[UNKNOWN]: Not just from our perspective as an American, not just from the superpower, but from the other end as well as we just talked about.

02:06:38.663 --> 02:06:43.328
[UNKNOWN]: And so it gives a really, you give really great takes on what's going on.

02:06:43.348 --> 02:06:48.232
[UNKNOWN]: I know that the time that you spent at Harvard, I don't know what you learned there, but maybe that plays into it as well.

02:06:48.492 --> 02:06:52.255
[UNKNOWN]: You have a really good level headed assessment of what's going on.

02:06:52.976 --> 02:07:04.085
[UNKNOWN]: it's I wouldn't say they're like reaction videos to hey what happened to the news today I need to put the word out what happened today, but it's a little bit more strategic view of what's going on in various parts of the world.

02:07:04.205 --> 02:07:04.806
[UNKNOWN]: It's just great.

02:07:04.886 --> 02:07:06.007
[UNKNOWN]: So awesome.

02:07:06.027 --> 02:07:07.068
[UNKNOWN]: What made you decided to start that?

02:07:07.368 --> 02:07:09.610
[UNKNOWN]: So when I was when I was when I was at Harvard, I

02:07:10.190 --> 02:07:37.772
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it was trying to have conversations with different people from around the world and obviously Americans as well and we would talk about different geopolitical issues so obviously over the last couple years there's been a lot of interest in you know the Ukraine Russia war the Afghanistan withdrawal Israel's war on Hamas and Hezbollah obviously right now we're dealing with the the Iran situation and so there's all these different geopolitical events that are that we as a society are having conversations about but I realize we don't quite have as a society through the

02:07:38.833 --> 02:07:45.297
[UNKNOWN]: the sort of mental framework for how to engage with this Americans are where we tend to be sort of more isolated.

02:07:45.337 --> 02:07:49.459
[UNKNOWN]: We don't, we're neighbored by Canada and Mexico.

02:07:49.499 --> 02:07:53.141
[UNKNOWN]: So we don't really think in terms of sort of global geopolitics.

02:07:53.401 --> 02:08:04.107
[UNKNOWN]: And so what I started observing was even people who I'm at agree with politically, they would just have these really bizarre takes on, you know, what was going on in Israel or what was going on in the Middle East or what was going on

02:08:08.509 --> 02:08:14.391
[UNKNOWN]: And I realize like, well, people just don't quite understand how war works and we don't really understand how geopolitics works.

02:08:15.651 --> 02:08:27.735
[UNKNOWN]: And the counter example to that is, you know, in America, everybody already has an opinion on what they, you know, think about, let's say abortion or voting rights or, you know, any sort of domestic politics that we control, gun control exactly.

02:08:29.056 --> 02:08:31.858
[UNKNOWN]: We have the nomenclature and the ability to sort of have those conversations.

02:08:32.219 --> 02:08:40.206
[UNKNOWN]: But what's happening right now is the United States is an American's in particular, are sort of waking up to the realization that, oh China's a threat, Russia's a threat.

02:08:40.507 --> 02:08:42.669
[UNKNOWN]: The middle, what happens in the Middle East does affect us.

02:08:42.689 --> 02:08:45.351
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, we do have Narko Terrorists trying to get in here, wait a minute.

02:08:45.371 --> 02:08:45.972
[UNKNOWN]: We just went and took

02:08:46.232 --> 02:08:50.554
[UNKNOWN]: You know, Delta Force just went and napped, you know, Nicholas Moder, like, what the hell is that about?

02:08:50.594 --> 02:08:51.434
[UNKNOWN]: Like, is that legal?

02:08:51.454 --> 02:08:52.155
[UNKNOWN]: Like, how does that even work?

02:08:52.555 --> 02:08:55.056
[UNKNOWN]: So there's all these questions about how the world works.

02:08:55.336 --> 02:08:59.258
[UNKNOWN]: And so I thought, like, well, this is something that I can contribute to.

02:08:59.318 --> 02:09:03.580
[UNKNOWN]: And so I started a, well, I was at Harvard, I just started a newsletter called the Overwatch.

02:09:03.780 --> 02:09:06.461
[UNKNOWN]: That's at the Overwatch.co as the website.

02:09:06.861 --> 02:09:09.642
[UNKNOWN]: And the idea is just to help explain geopolitics to Americans.

02:09:10.102 --> 02:09:13.484
[UNKNOWN]: And, but then recently over the last couple of months, I've been experimenting with,

02:09:16.005 --> 02:09:40.010
[UNKNOWN]: And so right now what I'm doing is once a week I'm sort of putting together a 25 30 minute podcast and just explaining hey here's six or seven major geopolitically events that are happening around the world and here's kind of how you need to be thinking about them because people don't really understand what's going on in Burma for example because I always get the question like oh like where is Burma like what's going on there and I don't get upset at all that people don't know where it is I'm not at

02:09:40.230 --> 02:10:01.977
[UNKNOWN]: my mindset is not well how dare you're not know like like you know you're living over here I don't I don't I don't care or I do care but it's like I'm not I'm not judging people for not knowing so what I want to do is I want to help I'm helping to try to solve that problem I'm explaining different little conflicts and things are happening in Africa down in South America and I'm intentionally the reason it's called the Overwatch right sort of a you know

02:10:02.697 --> 02:10:11.242
[UNKNOWN]: a nod to my time as a sniper right, you can provide overwatch and your job is to look at surveying the entire battlefield and pass good information back to your commander so we can make a good decision.

02:10:11.663 --> 02:10:18.927
[UNKNOWN]: And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to give a good overview of what's going on in the world strategically, so you as the American voter or just you as the American citizen.

02:10:19.307 --> 02:10:20.908
[UNKNOWN]: can understand what's going on.

02:10:20.928 --> 02:10:31.332
[UNKNOWN]: So your first time hearing about, you know, this past week, we took out an ISIS commander in Nigeria using air strikes, and it was like a joint coalition.

02:10:31.652 --> 02:10:37.475
[UNKNOWN]: And again, immediately, you hear people saying, why do we have troops on the ground in Nigeria, and all this stuff?

02:10:37.795 --> 02:10:44.339
[UNKNOWN]: And so people just immediately don't really have the nomenclature or the ability to kind of discuss and intelligently or they're totally shocked and surprised by it.

02:10:44.359 --> 02:10:59.088
[UNKNOWN]: So the purpose of the Overwatch is just for regular Americans, here's what's going on in the world, here's why it strategically matters to the United States and I try to come at it from a level headed point of view on my am politically conservative and I am very pro-America, pro-Western civilization.

02:10:59.928 --> 02:11:09.551
[UNKNOWN]: But I'm not trying to beat over your head what to think I'm going to tell you what I think about something But I'm going to try to teach it how to think about these things Let's talk about the geopolitical You know ramifications of whatever's going on.

02:11:09.571 --> 02:11:17.034
[UNKNOWN]: So for example, we just talked about Burma like okay Well, why are Russia and China giving weapons to like some Burma army in the middle of Southeast Asia?

02:11:17.054 --> 02:11:17.894
[UNKNOWN]: Why does Russia care?

02:11:18.214 --> 02:11:23.776
[UNKNOWN]: Well, again, you look at a map and you suddenly realize well that gives them access to the ocean They don't have to go through the straight-em-a-lock.

02:11:23.796 --> 02:11:27.517
[UNKNOWN]: They don't have to like that gives them a huge advantage in the world

02:11:28.117 --> 02:11:32.599
[UNKNOWN]: And they're thinking 10 years ahead, whereas Americans were only thinking to the next mid-term election.

02:11:32.939 --> 02:11:39.662
[UNKNOWN]: And so I just basically, the purpose of the Overwatch and the podcast is just so people can understand what's going on.

02:11:39.742 --> 02:11:40.322
[UNKNOWN]: Stay up to date.

02:11:41.203 --> 02:11:43.884
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not trying to get into, you know, grievance culture.

02:11:43.904 --> 02:11:47.005
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not trying to be overly sensational about it.

02:11:47.025 --> 02:11:48.385
[UNKNOWN]: Make up the term grievance culture?

02:11:48.666 --> 02:11:50.506
[UNKNOWN]: No, I did not come up with that.

02:11:51.147 --> 02:11:52.007
[UNKNOWN]: I kind of like that one.

02:11:52.147 --> 02:11:53.108
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:11:53.148 --> 02:11:54.089
[UNKNOWN]: But that's what it is.

02:11:54.129 --> 02:12:00.114
[UNKNOWN]: It's this grievance culture, everybody's playing victim or they're blaming everybody else for their problems.

02:12:00.134 --> 02:12:02.155
[UNKNOWN]: And I'm just not interested in being involved in that.

02:12:02.175 --> 02:12:02.315
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:12:02.355 --> 02:12:07.680
[UNKNOWN]: One of the, I was telling you before we recorded about the podcast that echo and I did, it was called What's Going On.

02:12:08.300 --> 02:12:27.419
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the things that I pointed out was the fact of when you start looking at the forces that come into decision making and how many there are and I think I brought this up on the podcast, but the amount of forces that are in play when you have to decide where you and your wife are going to dinner, right?

02:12:27.679 --> 02:12:28.699
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I'm going to go to dinner.

02:12:28.900 --> 02:12:30.540
[UNKNOWN]: Like there are forces at play there.

02:12:30.820 --> 02:12:33.902
[UNKNOWN]: Hey, you know, have we been to this place before she liked it.

02:12:34.022 --> 02:12:35.822
[UNKNOWN]: I didn't like it or I like it and she didn't like it.

02:12:36.042 --> 02:12:37.643
[UNKNOWN]: What's our financial constraints right now?

02:12:37.683 --> 02:12:38.503
[UNKNOWN]: What's our time constraints?

02:12:38.523 --> 02:12:39.504
[UNKNOWN]: How long is this going to take?

02:12:40.064 --> 02:12:49.348
[UNKNOWN]: What about the time three years ago when I took my wife to restaurant and she didn't like it and then we had a, you know, a bad experience in the whole like you got all these things to try and way

02:12:50.761 --> 02:12:53.263
[UNKNOWN]: and try and figure out like where you're gonna go to dinner.

02:12:53.963 --> 02:12:55.444
[UNKNOWN]: And that's just you and your wife going to dinner.

02:12:55.584 --> 02:13:01.668
[UNKNOWN]: So now we start talking about some major thing happening in the world, some major world event going on.

02:13:02.108 --> 02:13:19.460
[UNKNOWN]: Iron, Venezuela, Nigeria, like you name the place, Sudan, like you name the place, and all of the sudden, people just chime in as if they have calculated all those variables, you know, all these variables,

02:13:20.797 --> 02:13:45.333
[UNKNOWN]: That they probably can't even name 3% of the variables that are in play when you talk about these types of things and so to think like, oh well that's bad because of this one reason well there's a whole lot more everyone needs to know and I like that's what I that's what I took away from your channel your YouTube channel is you're giving some very good nuance

02:13:46.213 --> 02:13:52.016
[UNKNOWN]: And by the way, anybody that thinks they can sit there and predict how things are going to go is an idiot.

02:13:52.256 --> 02:13:55.197
[UNKNOWN]: You know, if you think you're just going to go, oh, if we do that, this is going to happen.

02:13:55.217 --> 02:13:56.438
[UNKNOWN]: You have no idea what's going to happen.

02:13:56.458 --> 02:14:06.203
[UNKNOWN]: You don't know about, you don't know about the the morale of the maintenance crew that's working on the Iranian drones.

02:14:07.103 --> 02:14:07.904
[UNKNOWN]: How do you know that?

02:14:07.944 --> 02:14:08.784
[UNKNOWN]: Like, and that's going to play it.

02:14:08.804 --> 02:14:09.745
[UNKNOWN]: That plays a real role.

02:14:09.805 --> 02:14:10.505
[UNKNOWN]: That's a real thing.

02:14:11.025 --> 02:14:14.127
[UNKNOWN]: So if you don't know that, well, how are you making predictions about what's going to happen?

02:14:14.147 --> 02:14:15.188
[UNKNOWN]: It's very, very difficult.

02:14:15.628 --> 02:14:23.392
[UNKNOWN]: And so to think, you know what, I'm just going to listen more and not try and pass judgment on what's going to happen.

02:14:23.672 --> 02:14:28.975
[UNKNOWN]: But instead of going to listen and try and assess what's happening rather than pass judgment on what's happening.

02:14:29.255 --> 02:14:31.777
[UNKNOWN]: And it seems to me that's sort of what your

02:14:32.597 --> 02:14:56.089
[UNKNOWN]: your take is like hey here's an assessment not so much a judgment but hey here's a topic it could go a bunch different ways and and I definitely like that I also think it's interesting for you to be what you say can semi conservative guy and pro-american and yet you've spent like literally years of your life in trenches in Burma trying to defend this

02:15:01.332 --> 02:15:01.993
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.

02:15:02.614 --> 02:15:03.134
[UNKNOWN]: One correct.

02:15:03.154 --> 02:15:07.459
[UNKNOWN]: I would say I'd actually very, very politically conservative, definitely not definitely not semi-consertive, very conservative.

02:15:07.799 --> 02:15:13.246
[UNKNOWN]: But yeah, I don't, I don't see a big difference between, because I, here's the thing.

02:15:14.027 --> 02:15:19.152
[UNKNOWN]: I, and I think we as human beings need to be loyal to certain principles and certain ideals.

02:15:19.973 --> 02:15:25.962
[UNKNOWN]: and you need to be loyal to humanity as much as you realistically can, right?

02:15:26.243 --> 02:15:33.053
[UNKNOWN]: Now, your loyalty needs to go to, you know, for me, my loyalty goes to God, family, country, and then other people's countries.

02:15:33.433 --> 02:15:34.335
[UNKNOWN]: But, um,

02:15:34.895 --> 02:15:40.799
[UNKNOWN]: So what I'm doing when I'm overseas is I don't see, you know, okay, so I think the best way to explain this.

02:15:41.699 --> 02:15:50.704
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, the event in Iraq where, you know, I got shot rescuing a little Muslim Iraqi girl who is a child of ISIS fighters.

02:15:52.045 --> 02:15:54.507
[UNKNOWN]: You know, why would I go risk my life to do that?

02:15:54.527 --> 02:15:56.648
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a light conservative Christian male.

02:15:57.588 --> 02:16:00.750
[UNKNOWN]: Why would, you know, it doesn't make sense in the modern mind why I would be willing to do that.

02:16:00.770 --> 02:16:03.252
[UNKNOWN]: It's like, well, because she's human and because it's the right thing to do.

02:16:03.952 --> 02:16:08.055
[UNKNOWN]: And because it's the right thing to do, that's what I'm going to do.

02:16:08.815 --> 02:16:15.399
[UNKNOWN]: So for me, there's no cognitive dissonance in my head to go and serve other people and help other people.

02:16:16.099 --> 02:16:17.600
[UNKNOWN]: To whom much is given much will be required.

02:16:17.820 --> 02:16:18.781
[UNKNOWN]: I got to grow up in America.

02:16:19.141 --> 02:16:21.102
[UNKNOWN]: I got incredible training as a seal.

02:16:21.923 --> 02:16:23.403
[UNKNOWN]: I was able to fight for my country.

02:16:23.984 --> 02:16:27.846
[UNKNOWN]: And now I've noticed that there's other people in other places that could use my help.

02:16:27.866 --> 02:16:29.147
[UNKNOWN]: Could use our background.

02:16:29.427 --> 02:16:32.769
[UNKNOWN]: Could use someone to stick up for them and say something for them.

02:16:33.469 --> 02:16:35.470
[UNKNOWN]: And so that's what I'm doing.

02:16:36.430 --> 02:16:38.391
[UNKNOWN]: So I have no cognitive dissonance on that.

02:16:38.411 --> 02:16:41.372
[UNKNOWN]: I think it makes natural sense based on my values.

02:16:42.092 --> 02:16:50.915
[UNKNOWN]: And then specifically around the geopolitics stuff, I see all this infighting and everybody having super strong opinions.

02:16:51.455 --> 02:17:01.179
[UNKNOWN]: One of the things, so I'd already been writing the newsletter, but I was in the process of setting up the video concept, as well, because keep in mind, I'm still working full time running stronghold.

02:17:01.679 --> 02:17:09.983
[UNKNOWN]: But I was during this I the whole I ran things going on and I saw this Influence or fitness influencer woman a nice person.

02:17:10.003 --> 02:17:23.170
[UNKNOWN]: I'm sure she I'm sure she's a wonderful person But I saw this fitness influencer lady and I'm like why is she popping up on my feed and so she's got this video about the straight of hormones And she's got this 35 minute video Explaining this straight of hormones and I got to click on this

02:17:23.490 --> 02:17:32.316
[UNKNOWN]: So I click on it, and again, she's just reading off of a teleprompter that somebody else had gone to chat, GPT, and I'd explain, you know, whatever, what the straight-of-war moves and why, you know, strategically important.

02:17:33.037 --> 02:17:36.799
[UNKNOWN]: And I mean, I mean, you had to have had a million views, a million and a half views.

02:17:37.360 --> 02:17:40.782
[UNKNOWN]: And I got, I got a little frustrated with that because I just thought, I'm going to

02:17:41.162 --> 02:17:42.283
[UNKNOWN]: Nice person totally get it.

02:17:42.484 --> 02:17:43.244
[UNKNOWN]: This is what's trending.

02:17:43.264 --> 02:17:44.165
[UNKNOWN]: She's gonna make a video about it.

02:17:44.185 --> 02:17:54.394
[UNKNOWN]: Whatever, but I just thought okay We as Americans deserve better than to be getting our geopolitical analysis from somebody who's never fought in a war Is never served in the military?

02:17:54.895 --> 02:18:04.043
[UNKNOWN]: Doesn't is not educated on these things doesn't read books about these things two weeks ago Never even heard of the straight-of-harmos let alone the straight-of-malaka let alone you know like whatever all these different places

02:18:04.723 --> 02:18:12.465
[UNKNOWN]: Um, and so I just thought, okay, anyway, that just kind of helped sort of add fuel to my fire that I'm like, you know what, I got to start, you know, speaking up about this kind of thing.

02:18:12.505 --> 02:18:15.346
[UNKNOWN]: And, um, and really my goal, I'm sort of an educator at heart.

02:18:15.466 --> 02:18:17.026
[UNKNOWN]: I really enjoy teaching people things.

02:18:17.086 --> 02:18:19.267
[UNKNOWN]: I really enjoy that philosophy.

02:18:19.627 --> 02:18:23.328
[UNKNOWN]: I love, um, you know, trying to figure out where I'm wrong about something.

02:18:23.348 --> 02:18:25.429
[UNKNOWN]: I'm very comfortable in meeting if I'm wrong about something.

02:18:25.989 --> 02:18:29.830
[UNKNOWN]: Um, and so for me, this, you know, talking about geopolitics and what's going on.

02:18:30.510 --> 02:18:50.075
[UNKNOWN]: This is going to become more and more important to America and to Americans, we can already see that geopolitically events overseas are shaping our domestic politics, you know, whether it's like Israel versus, you know, the Palestinians or, you know, Russia versus Ukrainian, you have people now that are saying stuff about Russia, whether they're going well, like, you know, at least the Russians are trying to, you know,

02:18:50.715 --> 02:18:53.899
[UNKNOWN]: You know, follow Christian values or or something or other and like the Ukrainians.

02:18:53.919 --> 02:19:08.214
[UNKNOWN]: They're all a bunch of humans and, you know, or Zelensky and so and just going guys like what are you talking about like putting his out there just like, you know, murdering and mass occurring people and like his troops are like mass raping people and it's like he's not he's any any any sort of

02:19:08.694 --> 02:19:10.655
[UNKNOWN]: semblance of Christianity that that guy has.

02:19:10.735 --> 02:19:12.696
[UNKNOWN]: It's literally just a tapestry.

02:19:13.017 --> 02:19:18.019
[UNKNOWN]: It's just a covering so that way the local, you know, Russian Orthodox will follow him or something like that.

02:19:18.180 --> 02:19:19.420
[UNKNOWN]: That's all that's going on there.

02:19:19.700 --> 02:19:20.321
[UNKNOWN]: It's not real.

02:19:20.421 --> 02:19:22.022
[UNKNOWN]: And so you need to think about incentives.

02:19:22.062 --> 02:19:26.144
[UNKNOWN]: You need to think about one of my things I was starting to get Harvard was decision science.

02:19:26.164 --> 02:19:31.107
[UNKNOWN]: And so it's just kind of looking at incentives and psychologists, mostly just psychology type stuff.

02:19:32.088 --> 02:19:35.232
[UNKNOWN]: And you look like, why do people do what they do?

02:19:35.833 --> 02:19:38.517
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the biggest things is just incentives.

02:19:38.537 --> 02:19:48.070
[UNKNOWN]: And we're thinking in terms of, again, being at the school there, the whole thing is you're thinking about grand strategy, you're thinking about policy, you're thinking about foreign policy.

02:19:48.771 --> 02:19:54.037
[UNKNOWN]: And so, again, this is just something that most Americans don't really spend a lot of time thinking about.

02:19:54.057 --> 02:20:00.906
[UNKNOWN]: You think about actually, during the Biden Trump election, I believe, I believe it was the one we're Biden.

02:20:01.166 --> 02:20:03.650
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it was the one we're Biden one because he only did one election against Trump.

02:20:04.650 --> 02:20:09.611
[UNKNOWN]: They skipped the second debate, and the second debate is typically centered around form policy.

02:20:09.711 --> 02:20:17.733
[UNKNOWN]: The first debate is usually domestic policy, the second one is form policy, and then they refuse to even have a conversation for whatever reason they're blaming each other for whatever.

02:20:18.173 --> 02:20:20.033
[UNKNOWN]: But my point is, there was no outcry.

02:20:20.373 --> 02:20:26.134
[UNKNOWN]: Nobody was in no American was going, I want to know Biden versus Trump's concept of form policy.

02:20:27.674 --> 02:20:29.935
[UNKNOWN]: The conversation didn't even happen and nobody was even upset by it.

02:20:30.795 --> 02:20:41.325
[UNKNOWN]: but it really matters because it matters to our borders, it matters to our trade policy, it matters to our security matters where we send our troops, it matters as China expands, as Russia tries to expand.

02:20:42.446 --> 02:20:49.252
[UNKNOWN]: We're looking at Iran right now, having a vise grip on this vital waterway directly affecting you at home.

02:20:49.392 --> 02:20:49.492
[UNKNOWN]: So

02:20:50.573 --> 02:20:54.996
[UNKNOWN]: There's that, but at infinitum, going on of the world.

02:20:55.056 --> 02:21:02.100
[UNKNOWN]: And then don't even get me started on the mineral wars and drugs and all that kind of stuff.

02:21:02.180 --> 02:21:03.261
[UNKNOWN]: And then human trafficking.

02:21:03.301 --> 02:21:07.483
[UNKNOWN]: So there's so much there to kind of look at and just sort of generally be aware of.

02:21:07.503 --> 02:21:15.568
[UNKNOWN]: And that's that's my purpose with the Overwatch is to basically just try to help people kind of understand a little bit without being overly hysterical.

02:21:15.728 --> 02:21:22.216
[UNKNOWN]: But while still taking a clear stance, like I'm pro-Western civilization, I'm not going to sit here and pretend like we have some sort of more equivalence with the Chinese communist.

02:21:22.536 --> 02:21:22.817
[UNKNOWN]: We don't.

02:21:23.057 --> 02:21:23.397
[UNKNOWN]: We're better.

02:21:24.399 --> 02:21:25.500
[UNKNOWN]: Screw those guys.

02:21:25.820 --> 02:21:26.441
[UNKNOWN]: And we need to win.

02:21:26.461 --> 02:21:31.167
[UNKNOWN]: We need to beat them on the global stage, and that's what I'm focused on talking about.

02:21:31.543 --> 02:21:34.904
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's better to be a friendly bully in the world.

02:21:36.224 --> 02:21:36.685
[UNKNOWN]: You know what I mean?

02:21:36.705 --> 02:21:43.166
[UNKNOWN]: Like, hey, if you should be a friend, hey, if you're the the biggest strongest bully, but you're cool to everyone, that's life is good.

02:21:43.347 --> 02:21:50.989
[UNKNOWN]: You know, if you're out in the school yard, and the one bully is you, and you let everyone play hopscotch, and you let everyone use the jungle gym, cool.

02:21:51.749 --> 02:21:59.919
[UNKNOWN]: But the minute you, you know, get overtaken by another bully who decides, oh, only I get to play a scrap, hopscotch, or only these people can use the jungle gym.

02:21:59.939 --> 02:22:00.599
[UNKNOWN]: Now we have a problem.

02:22:00.820 --> 02:22:03.222
[UNKNOWN]: And by the way, there's nothing you can do anymore because you're weak.

02:22:03.923 --> 02:22:06.847
[UNKNOWN]: And so you need to be the benevolent bully in the world.

02:22:06.887 --> 02:22:09.550
[UNKNOWN]: That's my political stance when it comes to that.

02:22:09.930 --> 02:22:11.712
[UNKNOWN]: And also, you know, from a neighbor perspective,

02:22:12.593 --> 02:22:22.683
[UNKNOWN]: You know, you look what your neighbor's doing is their business, but at a certain point, if you let your neighbor, your neighbor can get to a point where it's going to impact what's going on your street.

02:22:22.703 --> 02:22:28.268
[UNKNOWN]: You know, you can't sleep at night because they're having big parties or whatever the case in their yard is, you know, a fire hazard.

02:22:28.528 --> 02:22:32.773
[UNKNOWN]: So if that starts to happen, you got to go, hey, listen, I don't really want to interfere with my neighbors, but

02:22:33.731 --> 02:22:41.356
[UNKNOWN]: My neighbor's behavior impacts the way I live my life, and we need to come to some kind of an agreement where it works.

02:22:42.497 --> 02:22:58.507
[UNKNOWN]: Now, another, just to bring up one more thing that I thought was a really interesting take on one of your podcasts you were talking about, the woman that basically defected to Iran, and she went from being like an Arabic or a falsely linguist,

02:22:58.907 --> 02:23:05.041
[UNKNOWN]: of some kind in the navy right in the navy Air Force Air Force in the Air Force She joins the Air Force.

02:23:05.061 --> 02:23:06.123
[UNKNOWN]: She becomes a linguist.

02:23:06.263 --> 02:23:08.709
[UNKNOWN]: She wants you for see yeah for see learns for us see

02:23:10.782 --> 02:23:15.386
[UNKNOWN]: converts to Islam and eventually becomes a spy.

02:23:16.767 --> 02:23:24.874
[UNKNOWN]: What, what road does it, what, what does the algorithm look like that causes that to happen to her in your assessment?

02:23:24.954 --> 02:23:25.394
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.

02:23:25.414 --> 02:23:28.317
[UNKNOWN]: So give a little, I'll just add a little bit more context to a little bit more flavor.

02:23:28.717 --> 02:23:38.085
[UNKNOWN]: So this is a, her name is Monaco Wit and right now to be clear for a legal reason, she's suspected by the FBI of, you know, allegedly spying for the Iranians.

02:23:38.605 --> 02:23:52.793
[UNKNOWN]: But she's white, grew up in a relatively Christian home, joined the Air Force, became a counter-intelligent specialist, ironically, and so then during one of her deployments to Iraq, she started to read the Quran so she could understand the culture.

02:23:53.273 --> 02:24:00.817
[UNKNOWN]: She was trained in Farsi at the Defense Language Institute here in the United States, which were recent, our military folks to learn foreign languages.

02:24:01.477 --> 02:24:05.638
[UNKNOWN]: And then after she got out of the military, she got a private sector job, I'm not really sure what she did.

02:24:05.978 --> 02:24:16.581
[UNKNOWN]: But during that job, she went to two different conferences in Iran, which is basically just put on, basically just propaganda conferences, put on by the Iranian government.

02:24:16.821 --> 02:24:20.602
[UNKNOWN]: And when she was there, she actually converted to Islam on Iranian state TV.

02:24:20.662 --> 02:24:21.963
[UNKNOWN]: So there's a video of it out there somewhere.

02:24:21.983 --> 02:24:24.183
[UNKNOWN]: I'm sure of her actually converting to Islam.

02:24:24.544 --> 02:24:28.805
[UNKNOWN]: And then while she was there, she was then sort of recruited by the Iranians to spy for them.

02:24:30.025 --> 02:24:39.811
[UNKNOWN]: And so she came back to the United States, and started gathering information, and I don't know what her job was, but she had a top-level clearance job somewhere in the private sector, having to do with intelligence.

02:24:40.351 --> 02:24:47.215
[UNKNOWN]: And then the Iranians, they arranged for her to be able to go back to Whiteran, so she moves back to Whiteran.

02:24:47.495 --> 02:24:53.739
[UNKNOWN]: They get herself at the computer and all this kind of stuff, and she's giving the Iranians all this intelligence on her co-workers.

02:24:59.722 --> 02:25:00.322
[UNKNOWN]: and all that stuff.

02:25:00.342 --> 02:25:08.344
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, and so right now that FBI's offering $200,000 for any information that leads to her arrest or whatever.

02:25:08.364 --> 02:25:09.804
[UNKNOWN]: So, and again, this is all alleged.

02:25:10.004 --> 02:25:12.945
[UNKNOWN]: So, you know, she has a right to affair trial and all that.

02:25:13.245 --> 02:25:20.846
[UNKNOWN]: But the way that this stuff happens is people become disillusioned with their own life.

02:25:20.886 --> 02:25:25.907
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, I don't know that specific instances, you know, whatever it might have happened to her in life.

02:25:25.947 --> 02:25:28.208
[UNKNOWN]: I don't know, and I can try to make a psychological evaluation

02:25:30.728 --> 02:25:40.071
[UNKNOWN]: But what I will say is if you are not living your life by principle, and if you are not explaining to people why America is the better force in the world.

02:25:40.411 --> 02:25:55.496
[UNKNOWN]: If you are not giving people the understanding of why that is and why freedom is better than these other tyrannical ways of life, you will become easily susceptible because we take these things for granted as Americans, we take the idea of, you know, private property,

02:25:56.676 --> 02:26:19.625
[UNKNOWN]: for granted like we don't even understand no no no you go overseas there is no private property you know that the the the tribal leader he'll just take whatever belongs to you because it belongs to him and there's nothing you can do about it and we don't even understand that concept and so um what happens is is um people like i ran or russia or china or just any nefarious actor because we also have freedom of speech

02:26:20.625 --> 02:26:42.782
[UNKNOWN]: you can reach the American people and you can tell them anything that you want to and if you are not grounded in your beliefs if you do not understand why America is exceptional and we are exceptional if you don't understand why America is exceptional and why why why we have set things up the way we set them up you become very susceptible to somebody coming along and going well is that really is that really the way it should be well what about the inequality well what about this well what about that

02:26:43.022 --> 02:26:57.889
[UNKNOWN]: And you've never thought of these ideas before, and so then you go, oh my goodness, my entire society has lied to me, and I remember that one time somebody did something mean to me, you're heart turns against the very thing that you're heart should have been engaged with.

02:26:58.309 --> 02:27:02.191
[UNKNOWN]: And so then that's how people become susceptible to being recruited by these foreign adversaries.

02:27:02.611 --> 02:27:06.353
[UNKNOWN]: And then also, we also need to talk about that a little bit too.

02:27:06.453 --> 02:27:10.895
[UNKNOWN]: You look at modern warfare, we're talking about drones, we're talking about coming up against air strikes and stuff.

02:27:11.995 --> 02:27:20.023
[UNKNOWN]: The intel battlefield now, the counter-intel propaganda war is now and everybody's pocket.

02:27:20.503 --> 02:27:21.424
[UNKNOWN]: It is in your pocket.

02:27:21.865 --> 02:27:23.727
[UNKNOWN]: Think about just this Iran war going on right now.

02:27:23.987 --> 02:27:26.709
[UNKNOWN]: So Iran turns off the internet right from multiple reasons.

02:27:27.410 --> 02:27:32.274
[UNKNOWN]: But they then start pumping out all of these propaganda videos on social media.

02:27:32.294 --> 02:27:37.858
[UNKNOWN]: And they're doing it, making Lego videos, they're doing all these things to try and change the minds of Americans.

02:27:38.238 --> 02:27:38.798
[UNKNOWN]: And it's working.

02:27:38.818 --> 02:27:39.939
[UNKNOWN]: We saw Hamas do that.

02:27:39.959 --> 02:27:42.841
[UNKNOWN]: So Hamas goes in and kills a bunch of Israelis.

02:27:43.482 --> 02:27:48.325
[UNKNOWN]: commits, you know, per capita, an attack that's 40 times worse than 9-11.

02:27:48.806 --> 02:27:50.307
[UNKNOWN]: And then all of a sudden, they play the victim.

02:27:50.327 --> 02:27:54.210
[UNKNOWN]: And they're pretending, like, oh my goodness, why are these Israelis coming in here to get their hostages back out there?

02:27:54.230 --> 02:27:54.650
[UNKNOWN]: They do that.

02:27:55.010 --> 02:28:07.057
[UNKNOWN]: You know, and then so but all of that information is being pumped into the brains of anybody who's willing to pick up a phone and look at it I mean while we don't have the ability to get them the same information, right?

02:28:07.077 --> 02:28:15.282
[UNKNOWN]: So you're not able to tell the Iranian people like, hey, you know, lives better over here because because the information control if you look at China, China specifically with tech talk

02:28:16.182 --> 02:28:22.106
[UNKNOWN]: The Chinese, the Tik Tok algorithm in America is entirely different than the Tik Tok algorithm in China.

02:28:22.426 --> 02:28:30.411
[UNKNOWN]: So in China, in China, Tik Tok, you're not going to be getting dumb dancing videos in anti-America, anti-Western civilization propaganda.

02:28:30.811 --> 02:28:33.853
[UNKNOWN]: No, you're going to be getting entirely different stuff.

02:28:33.873 --> 02:28:40.037
[UNKNOWN]: The teenagers there in China, you're going to be getting pro-China stuff, you're going to be getting pro-China history, you're going to be getting.

02:28:40.958 --> 02:28:45.542
[UNKNOWN]: things that are less brain-draining for you, and they're intentional about that because information does matter.

02:28:45.563 --> 02:28:57.995
[UNKNOWN]: So my point is if you go back to World War II, think about this, think about how World War II might have changed if Hitler, every single night, and perfect English, was able to talk to the entire American population.

02:28:58.035 --> 02:29:02.120
[UNKNOWN]: Anybody who wants to tune in can listen to Hitler give a speech anytime he wants to.

02:29:02.640 --> 02:29:20.935
[UNKNOWN]: And he's gonna try to change the hearts and minds of Americans and try to get them to like you really need to come over here Well, you know, you just just stay over there, you know, whatever whatever whatever his mind set would be It'd be an entirely different world, but that's the world we live in now Putin and anybody who works for him can put any kind of information on your phone anytime they want to and say they would try to same thing with their rent

02:29:21.275 --> 02:29:26.238
[UNKNOWN]: And so you as an American, you now are part of the propaganda machine.

02:29:26.298 --> 02:29:27.959
[UNKNOWN]: It's no longer this foreign intel app.

02:29:28.319 --> 02:29:31.401
[UNKNOWN]: It's now in your social media and people need to be aware of that.

02:29:31.661 --> 02:29:35.404
[UNKNOWN]: And again, that's another reason why the Overwatch is important because it's like, all right, let's just take a step back.

02:29:36.144 --> 02:29:38.706
[UNKNOWN]: It's like a level headed look at what's going on geopolitically.

02:29:39.126 --> 02:29:39.946
[UNKNOWN]: What are the incentives?

02:29:40.006 --> 02:29:40.947
[UNKNOWN]: What's actually going on here?

02:29:41.007 --> 02:29:45.029
[UNKNOWN]: Why does this matter to America and being able to just explain that in a common

02:29:47.911 --> 02:29:50.817
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, man.

02:29:50.917 --> 02:29:55.987
[UNKNOWN]: Great assessment and yeah, the things great.

02:29:56.868 --> 02:30:00.195
[UNKNOWN]: I guess how's the how's your physical health, bro?

02:30:00.791 --> 02:30:01.571
[UNKNOWN]: It's been pretty good.

02:30:01.591 --> 02:30:01.832
[UNKNOWN]: Very good.

02:30:01.852 --> 02:30:01.972
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:30:01.992 --> 02:30:02.552
[UNKNOWN]: It could be better.

02:30:02.772 --> 02:30:04.293
[UNKNOWN]: That was a crazy story.

02:30:04.333 --> 02:30:10.896
[UNKNOWN]: Last time we were talking about Wayne 325 pounds and just what you did to get your health back in line.

02:30:10.916 --> 02:30:11.396
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:30:11.696 --> 02:30:12.036
[UNKNOWN]: We did.

02:30:12.156 --> 02:30:12.336
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:30:12.737 --> 02:30:17.099
[UNKNOWN]: Mostly good with the issue I'm dealing with now was dealing with some low back pain, but I'm dealing with that.

02:30:17.139 --> 02:30:17.419
[UNKNOWN]: But yeah.

02:30:17.459 --> 02:30:18.799
[UNKNOWN]: Other than that, it's been good.

02:30:19.120 --> 02:30:25.743
[UNKNOWN]: And I'll tell you what, too, you know, we talked about mental health last time I was on a lot more and, you know.

02:30:26.563 --> 02:30:34.731
[UNKNOWN]: I'll tell you what, like, having, you know, being married and having, having a child, Granted, luckily, I'd got myself sorted before getting married, right?

02:30:34.751 --> 02:30:37.773
[UNKNOWN]: So obviously, don't use marriage and children as a crutch to fix yourself.

02:30:38.214 --> 02:30:41.577
[UNKNOWN]: But what I, what I, what I found is not worth it, it's not worth it.

02:30:41.737 --> 02:30:51.446
[UNKNOWN]: But what I found is that, you know, the responsibility of taking care of my wife, taking care of my daughter, and another kid on the way.

02:30:51.986 --> 02:31:01.331
[UNKNOWN]: That responsibility, if anything that brings us higher level of happiness, of contentment, you wake up in the morning, you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing.

02:31:01.351 --> 02:31:06.674
[UNKNOWN]: I got to take care of my wife, I got to take care of my kids, I got to take care of stronghold, get to do something for Overwatch today as well.

02:31:07.355 --> 02:31:08.835
[UNKNOWN]: And that's your purpose.

02:31:08.935 --> 02:31:17.160
[UNKNOWN]: And I think a lot of veterans in particular, obviously we don't want to veteran suicide crisis and a lot of issues there,

02:31:17.800 --> 02:31:26.642
[UNKNOWN]: I think a lot of it, because when you look a lot of the guys who are who are committing suicide, they're, they're, they're not committing suicide because they bring combat.

02:31:27.442 --> 02:31:29.822
[UNKNOWN]: A lot of them, they're committing suicide, we're never really in combat.

02:31:29.842 --> 02:31:32.883
[UNKNOWN]: They were not, it's not like PTSD from what they saw in the trenches.

02:31:32.903 --> 02:31:34.343
[UNKNOWN]: That's not what's going on.

02:31:34.383 --> 02:31:36.543
[UNKNOWN]: It's this despair, it's this lack of purpose.

02:31:37.103 --> 02:31:43.205
[UNKNOWN]: And I think that when you're in the military, especially as a young man, just experiencing myself, you know, when I was,

02:31:46.065 --> 02:31:47.325
[UNKNOWN]: I don't want it right into the sealed teams.

02:31:48.506 --> 02:31:56.608
[UNKNOWN]: The sense of purpose and meaning that you have and the sense of belonging, even if you're not the most popular guy in your cartoon, so you know what your role is.

02:31:56.628 --> 02:32:00.408
[UNKNOWN]: Like, hey, I'm the machine gun or hey, I'm the whatever, right?

02:32:00.448 --> 02:32:05.530
[UNKNOWN]: And you have a purpose and you have a meaning and you have an identity that you've earned.

02:32:06.270 --> 02:32:13.752
[UNKNOWN]: And when you get out of the military, it's like you lose that, you lose this brotherhood, you lose that purpose, and so now you're gonna go,

02:32:16.152 --> 02:32:18.993
[UNKNOWN]: Become an IT specialist, you know, doing whatever.

02:32:19.033 --> 02:32:31.936
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe I'll do some investing and and there's this Dispair because you peeked when you were 25 at least you feel like you did you feel like you peed your like man I was I was in you know, I have to understand I'm 25 I'm like smoking bad guys calling an airstrikes.

02:32:31.956 --> 02:32:42.498
[UNKNOWN]: I've got responsibility like I'm a man You know, I'm like doing I'm contributing to the world and then you get out in all of a sudden You're like okay, what am I doing now and what does it TPS reports?

02:32:42.738 --> 02:32:44.679
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah TPS reports exactly

02:32:45.399 --> 02:32:47.240
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you're doing CPS reports.

02:32:47.520 --> 02:32:53.563
[UNKNOWN]: And I think there's a big sort of pandemic of despair that I think that is happening.

02:32:53.623 --> 02:32:54.963
[UNKNOWN]: And guys, just don't fully realize that.

02:32:55.944 --> 02:33:04.747
[UNKNOWN]: And so my point with that is just for me, the added stress of being a husband and a father is it's like a good stress.

02:33:04.787 --> 02:33:06.008
[UNKNOWN]: It's a use stress.

02:33:06.308 --> 02:33:08.189
[UNKNOWN]: It's a distress, it's a use stress.

02:33:08.389 --> 02:33:12.491
[UNKNOWN]: It's a stress that forces you to be better and forces you to be more locked on.

02:33:12.631 --> 02:33:13.171
[UNKNOWN]: You can't just,

02:33:13.771 --> 02:33:18.216
[UNKNOWN]: You don't have a bad day and not do anything or whatever let yourself go.

02:33:18.236 --> 02:33:18.817
[UNKNOWN]: You just can't do that.

02:33:18.857 --> 02:33:24.503
[UNKNOWN]: You have to you have to stay more locked in and so I Yeah, so it's a Long story short.

02:33:24.523 --> 02:33:25.524
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, things are good.

02:33:25.544 --> 02:33:28.547
[UNKNOWN]: I could not be happier life is life is wonderful.

02:33:28.687 --> 02:33:30.389
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, very grateful Right on.

02:33:30.989 --> 02:33:31.930
[UNKNOWN]: Is that good as a speed?

02:33:32.231 --> 02:33:32.831
[UNKNOWN]: We're good for now.

02:33:32.931 --> 02:33:33.352
[UNKNOWN]: That's it.

02:33:33.392 --> 02:33:33.592
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:33:34.053 --> 02:33:34.173
[UNKNOWN]: Um

02:33:35.674 --> 02:33:36.634
[UNKNOWN]: where can people find you.

02:33:36.694 --> 02:33:38.755
[UNKNOWN]: So you got on the underwebs.

02:33:38.895 --> 02:33:40.796
[UNKNOWN]: It's strongholdrescue.org.

02:33:41.857 --> 02:33:51.102
[UNKNOWN]: You have the Overwatch.co and then on YouTube, you've got the Overwatch with Ephraim Mattoes.

02:33:51.262 --> 02:33:53.023
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, people can just type my name in Ephraim Mattoes.

02:33:53.043 --> 02:33:56.065
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I tried that and it actually doesn't come up for a while.

02:33:56.405 --> 02:34:10.544
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, so you'll get like 50 videos from Andy Stump for me and like a bunch of other people Yeah, but this far as your actual show I think you have to put in the Overwatch with ephematos to get it to okay, alright, yeah in there Yes, I tried it.

02:34:10.704 --> 02:34:11.005
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah

02:34:11.745 --> 02:34:12.265
[UNKNOWN]: But it's great.

02:34:12.365 --> 02:34:12.745
[UNKNOWN]: It's great.

02:34:13.466 --> 02:34:17.326
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a subscriber, I'm on the newsletter and so it's great.

02:34:17.487 --> 02:34:22.528
[UNKNOWN]: So check that out and then on Instagram and Twitter, X, you're at E from Matto.

02:34:22.568 --> 02:34:23.648
[UNKNOWN]: That's correct.

02:34:23.668 --> 02:34:24.928
[UNKNOWN]: Is that what we're doing with there?

02:34:24.948 --> 02:34:25.468
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.

02:34:25.488 --> 02:34:26.149
[UNKNOWN]: For people to find you.

02:34:26.209 --> 02:34:26.849
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.

02:34:26.889 --> 02:34:28.589
[UNKNOWN]: And then just a quick word too about Stronghold.

02:34:28.629 --> 02:34:31.470
[UNKNOWN]: So again, the way that we operate is we,

02:34:31.910 --> 02:34:56.161
[UNKNOWN]: We work off of a micro donor approach, so again, we're non-profit everything that we do, everything all the stories I told, everything that I was talking about, the ambulances, and again, I've only, obviously, we only have time to talk about a fraction of what's going on, but all of that, all the medicine, all the ambulances, all the stuff, the operators that are going in the field, by the way, we do train our people, sorry, we do pay our people, we do allow, you know, our people that make an actual living and going and doing this professionally, because the people we serve deserve that.

02:34:56.861 --> 02:35:02.787
[UNKNOWN]: So the way that it all functions is 80 or 90% of the money that we bring in comes in just from monthly micro donors.

02:35:02.947 --> 02:35:07.051
[UNKNOWN]: So if people are interested, they can sign up at this strongholdrescue.org.

02:35:07.631 --> 02:35:12.296
[UNKNOWN]: And we ask if you want to pitch in, maybe pitch in a dollar a day, 20 bucks a month, something like that.

02:35:12.756 --> 02:35:17.120
[UNKNOWN]: And if you do, we'll send you a stronghold t-shirt, it's the same kind of t-shirt that our guys wear in the field.

02:35:17.440 --> 02:35:22.145
[UNKNOWN]: And on the back we have our motto, the only thing necessary for the drive of vehicles, we're good men to do nothing.

02:35:22.665 --> 02:35:26.748
[UNKNOWN]: And if you want to help be a part of that, we would greatly appreciate it, and people can check that out at StrongholdRescue.org.

02:35:27.028 --> 02:35:28.629
[UNKNOWN]: StrongholdRescue.org.

02:35:28.669 --> 02:35:29.729
[UNKNOWN]: That's what this is all about.

02:35:31.330 --> 02:35:32.211
[UNKNOWN]: Echo, any questions?

02:35:32.531 --> 02:35:34.432
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, this is just from my own curiosity.

02:35:34.512 --> 02:35:35.533
[UNKNOWN]: So, how long?

02:35:35.613 --> 02:35:35.973
[UNKNOWN]: Uh oh.

02:35:36.433 --> 02:35:37.274
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, oh, here we go.

02:35:37.414 --> 02:35:38.134
[UNKNOWN]: He's pulling up the mic.

02:35:38.195 --> 02:35:39.155
[UNKNOWN]: Oh my god, here we go.

02:35:39.255 --> 02:35:40.356
[UNKNOWN]: He goes full five more minutes.

02:35:40.456 --> 02:35:42.437
[UNKNOWN]: How long at a time do you go over?

02:35:42.637 --> 02:35:45.599
[UNKNOWN]: So, I've done trips that were anywhere from four months.

02:35:46.560 --> 02:35:48.801
[UNKNOWN]: I've been also as short as maybe two, three weeks.

02:35:49.061 --> 02:35:52.003
[UNKNOWN]: So, as far as acclimation, you know, how's the mosquitoes over there?

02:35:52.363 --> 02:35:54.665
[UNKNOWN]: Mosquitoes are actually a very, very manageable.

02:35:54.685 --> 02:35:55.705
[UNKNOWN]: There's not a ton of mosquitoes.

02:35:55.745 --> 02:35:57.486
[UNKNOWN]: It's actually a very, very beautiful place.

02:35:57.506 --> 02:36:07.052
[UNKNOWN]: So the current hills that call it Kathulei, which the direct translation, there's no direct English translation, but it means basically the peaceful land of the Evergreen land.

02:36:07.072 --> 02:36:08.993
[UNKNOWN]: It's like the beautiful emerald green land.

02:36:09.033 --> 02:36:10.454
[UNKNOWN]: It's a beautiful, beautiful place.

02:36:10.494 --> 02:36:11.335
[UNKNOWN]: There's a beautiful climate.

02:36:11.555 --> 02:36:13.898
[UNKNOWN]: Because you know how like, I don't know if you ever watch what I'll touch you.

02:36:14.099 --> 02:36:15.941
[UNKNOWN]: Make it in a free favor of that.

02:36:16.161 --> 02:36:23.011
[UNKNOWN]: I've seen clips that I've never, I've never, I've never, because even when they go into these beautiful jungles and stuff and they're like, you know, oh, yeah, I'll go, but then they get eaten by bugs.

02:36:23.271 --> 02:36:25.494
[UNKNOWN]: And you know, like, everything in there is trying to kill you.

02:36:25.634 --> 02:36:27.357
[UNKNOWN]: You know, in one way or another, so it's not like that.

02:36:27.677 --> 02:36:29.698
[UNKNOWN]: Well, it's not like that with the bugs.

02:36:29.718 --> 02:36:31.279
[UNKNOWN]: There are snakes and stuff.

02:36:31.500 --> 02:36:33.781
[UNKNOWN]: So a couple of quick snakes stories.

02:36:34.561 --> 02:36:37.723
[UNKNOWN]: So I was in a, we're, we're in a reconnaissance mission.

02:36:37.784 --> 02:36:41.986
[UNKNOWN]: We were within a hundred yards of a berm army outpost and this berm army was firing into this village.

02:36:42.827 --> 02:36:46.869
[UNKNOWN]: And so one of the local guys he was a local sniper.

02:36:47.230 --> 02:36:49.191
[UNKNOWN]: And so he had this, he had a rifle.

02:36:49.851 --> 02:37:15.257
[UNKNOWN]: And so I was, we were taking turns watching this particular outpost waiting for the Burma Army to pop their heads out and fire on the villagers and so I'm in this position literally just 100 yards from the enemy but I'm firing across the river the Burma Army has no idea that we're there and so there's all these rockets and RPGs and stuff being fired back and forth by the Burma Army and so what happens is the snakes whenever there's a battle that pops off in the jungle they get spooked and they get sort of disoriented and they just start going everywhere they freak out

02:37:16.117 --> 02:37:18.838
[UNKNOWN]: And so we're laying there at the edge of this village, Hunter George on the berm army.

02:37:19.138 --> 02:37:20.398
[UNKNOWN]: If you stand up, they can see you.

02:37:20.938 --> 02:37:21.778
[UNKNOWN]: We're hiding these bushes.

02:37:22.339 --> 02:37:25.579
[UNKNOWN]: And I was with a couple of commandos, a couple of the current commandos.

02:37:26.080 --> 02:37:31.381
[UNKNOWN]: And one of the guys, he pops up on his knee, he goes like, oh, he's like, makes this, like, totally girly noise.

02:37:31.741 --> 02:37:35.502
[UNKNOWN]: I've been one of the other commandos pulls out this giant knife and just start slapping at the ground.

02:37:35.942 --> 02:37:39.603
[UNKNOWN]: And basically during this firefight, a snake rolled right up into our position.

02:37:40.724 --> 02:37:46.788
[UNKNOWN]: And then actually, the Harvard Christmas deployment, I was Airstrikes coming in.

02:37:46.808 --> 02:37:54.613
[UNKNOWN]: We hear that the aircraft is coming around and I got a jump into my trench and so as I go to jump into my trench,

02:37:55.193 --> 02:37:58.555
[UNKNOWN]: I see a scorpion right on the edge of the trench.

02:37:58.615 --> 02:38:03.899
[UNKNOWN]: And so I pull out a K-bar is actually my SKT graduation K-bar and got your first kill with that thing.

02:38:04.019 --> 02:38:08.762
[UNKNOWN]: So I slap, well I slap at it, try to stab it and I'm like, I need to get into this trench.

02:38:08.782 --> 02:38:09.523
[UNKNOWN]: So I go to slap at it.

02:38:09.823 --> 02:38:13.565
[UNKNOWN]: I miss the scorpion and then it falls right into my trench where I got to jump into.

02:38:14.026 --> 02:38:18.849
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm sprawled over the trench as this aircraft is coming in and I'm stabbing at the ground eventually.

02:38:18.949 --> 02:38:22.371
[UNKNOWN]: I kill the thing and then I jump in as this gun run comes.

02:38:22.391 --> 02:38:23.432
[UNKNOWN]: And it wasn't a close gun run.

02:38:23.892 --> 02:38:26.053
[UNKNOWN]: you never know until the last second anyway.

02:38:26.153 --> 02:38:26.573
[UNKNOWN]: That's crazy.

02:38:26.593 --> 02:38:43.179
[UNKNOWN]: I was just said we did a battlefield review of Chancellor's Ville and Frederick Spurck and one of the, I was doing a bunch of reading people around out there but one of the things I was reading about is when Jackson is making his flanking maneuver on the Union troops and the Union troops had no idea that he had to walk like 14 miles.

02:38:43.199 --> 02:38:49.502
[UNKNOWN]: He did it in a very, a very clandestined way so they had no idea and there's a Yankee guy, a Union guy that wrote like,

02:38:50.182 --> 02:39:02.908
[UNKNOWN]: They're sitting there and all of a sudden from the wood line comes all these like squirrels and rabbits and deer They they like come out And he's like oh, that's where Eddie took him, you know, whatever three seconds to go.

02:39:02.968 --> 02:39:03.548
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, that's weird.

02:39:03.568 --> 02:39:04.348
[UNKNOWN]: Why are all these things?

02:39:04.568 --> 02:39:05.189
[UNKNOWN]: Oh shit.

02:39:05.689 --> 02:39:14.933
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, you know, because it was there was whatever 30,000 30,000 men were online coming their way and

02:39:15.213 --> 02:39:20.436
[UNKNOWN]: and just drove all those animals out and the guy sees him all break out and the feeling goes, oh, that's weird.

02:39:20.456 --> 02:39:22.217
[UNKNOWN]: I wonder what the oh shit.

02:39:22.317 --> 02:39:24.918
[UNKNOWN]: And yeah, that's incredible.

02:39:24.938 --> 02:39:28.060
[UNKNOWN]: So that's kind of weird with the snakes getting disoriented and just going anywhere.

02:39:28.160 --> 02:39:28.760
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah.

02:39:29.341 --> 02:39:34.964
[UNKNOWN]: Other times I've been in trenches and the snakes are coming right at you and you're like start slapping the ground with throwing stuff out of me like it away from me man.

02:39:35.564 --> 02:39:36.925
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, not the not the deal.

02:39:37.473 --> 02:39:54.568
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, you, you know, you hear about all the experiences and stuff, and then for someone who's has never been there, you've got all these little details that are significant in my opinion, like right back here because you have this these huge crazy risky missions, but on top of it, you got the wildlife and everything else, yeah.

02:39:55.028 --> 02:39:56.990
[UNKNOWN]: But that's way secondary compared to what you do.

02:39:57.010 --> 02:40:00.994
[UNKNOWN]: And so a lot of us we don't even We don't understand the full picture you seem same.

02:40:01.194 --> 02:40:01.995
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.

02:40:02.055 --> 02:40:13.466
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, even your minimum most minimal conflict scenario which is like stuff that you're not even mentioning the snakes and stuff is like one of our real kind of Spooky things back here.

02:40:13.626 --> 02:40:16.108
[UNKNOWN]: You want to hear something else is freaky too.

02:40:16.168 --> 02:40:16.789
[UNKNOWN]: So there's these

02:40:17.153 --> 02:40:18.534
[UNKNOWN]: tree leaches in Burma.

02:40:18.894 --> 02:40:29.519
[UNKNOWN]: So you know, you get in the water and there's leaches in the flat chondia and second blood, there's tree leaches and they'll sense the, they'll sense you walking and then they'll sort drop from the, drop from the trees to try to drop on you.

02:40:29.559 --> 02:40:31.601
[UNKNOWN]: So they're, they're pretty small.

02:40:31.781 --> 02:40:32.701
[UNKNOWN]: It's, it's a little freaky.

02:40:33.321 --> 02:40:36.863
[UNKNOWN]: I've only seen him a few times, but that there's been a few times or like crossing rivers.

02:40:37.143 --> 02:40:44.927
[UNKNOWN]: You get out and there's, yeah, you look down, you get pulling leaches off and I've got like videos too of like leaches sort of like inching along my hand and I'm just

02:40:46.388 --> 02:40:59.115
[UNKNOWN]: It's a yeah definitely interesting that reminds me of the first time I saw Jurassic Park I saw it in the theater, but I was on my first appointment in the teams and I had I'd done like a a trip to Pan.

02:40:59.356 --> 02:41:00.136
[UNKNOWN]: Oh no, I'm gonna.

02:41:00.376 --> 02:41:04.438
[UNKNOWN]: I'd done a trip to Thailand I'd done a done some time in the jungle in Guam

02:41:05.639 --> 02:41:18.162
[UNKNOWN]: And like I knew how just everything that you're saying echo, like I knew 100% like mosquitoes snakes hot freaking coral under your neck just just totally the like a like a tough environment.

02:41:18.562 --> 02:41:27.524
[UNKNOWN]: And then in Jurassic Park they like they're walking for a while and there's like hey we're going to sleep here and there is like all laid out around on the ground and we're going to get some sleep and I'm like this is bullshit.

02:41:31.165 --> 02:41:37.409
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, the J is extremely harsh, yeah, it's not a not a fun place to be hang it out if you're not if you're not properly equipped.

02:41:37.529 --> 02:41:48.436
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's it's horrible and I use that term because when I first got to seal team one, there was we used to have the Australian SAs exchange guy there.

02:41:49.037 --> 02:41:52.619
[UNKNOWN]: And so he would talk about when you're going out in the J mate.

02:41:53.239 --> 02:41:53.740
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, that's great.

02:41:53.820 --> 02:41:55.941
[UNKNOWN]: So that's why I call it still call it the

02:41:56.301 --> 02:41:58.382
[UNKNOWN]: No, I didn't even want my first deployment.

02:41:58.562 --> 02:42:05.564
[UNKNOWN]: There was a bar and it was called the jungle So you can guess what we all called that call the jam.

02:42:05.724 --> 02:42:18.688
[UNKNOWN]: That's so funny my my So I did I did two pull tunes a team one and my second pull tune was to pay account We were based out of Guam and just doing you know for you know training foreign forces out there, but yeah, we started calling it the jam too.

02:42:18.708 --> 02:42:23.069
[UNKNOWN]: We just started calling it and I don't think anybody had heard that anywhere else I think we just started calling it that so it's just

02:42:23.509 --> 02:42:27.653
[UNKNOWN]: It's just real quick, everybody's like, it's the jade dude until you've been there.

02:42:27.673 --> 02:42:36.061
[UNKNOWN]: You don't know Totally fair My dad was in Jurassic Park by the way.

02:42:36.141 --> 02:42:39.804
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, no, no, you know back on actor Same thing.

02:42:39.864 --> 02:42:41.305
[UNKNOWN]: It's one of the first guys in this game film.

02:42:41.325 --> 02:42:41.766
[UNKNOWN]: That's cool.

02:42:41.786 --> 02:42:41.946
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:42:41.966 --> 02:42:43.147
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, okay, cool

02:42:44.448 --> 02:42:45.629
[UNKNOWN]: He's one of the first guys on screen.

02:42:45.729 --> 02:42:47.330
[UNKNOWN]: Well, you know, like, they're kind of a big deal.

02:42:47.451 --> 02:42:49.152
[UNKNOWN]: You know, we're just learning about this right now.

02:42:49.172 --> 02:42:53.315
[UNKNOWN]: And then I might have mentioned that in that first opening scene when they're like, he's explaining to them.

02:42:53.335 --> 02:42:54.957
[UNKNOWN]: They're trying to walk over the rocks and stuff.

02:42:54.977 --> 02:42:56.738
[UNKNOWN]: And you have all the native kind of workers there.

02:42:57.058 --> 02:42:58.540
[UNKNOWN]: This is one of those native workers.

02:42:58.560 --> 02:42:59.540
[UNKNOWN]: He's a little bit Walker.

02:42:59.560 --> 02:43:01.202
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:43:01.302 --> 02:43:02.042
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, that's pretty cool.

02:43:02.403 --> 02:43:03.063
[UNKNOWN]: It's pretty cool.

02:43:03.163 --> 02:43:05.185
[UNKNOWN]: He's still catching those checks too, I bet.

02:43:05.365 --> 02:43:06.506
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, no, I don't know.

02:43:06.646 --> 02:43:06.967
[UNKNOWN]: Maybe.

02:43:07.347 --> 02:43:07.687
[UNKNOWN]: You there.

02:43:07.887 --> 02:43:10.269
[UNKNOWN]: Actually, my dad was pretty in pretty much all the movies shot.

02:43:10.289 --> 02:43:10.670
[UNKNOWN]: I'm quite.

02:43:11.310 --> 02:43:12.931
[UNKNOWN]: Pretty much name like three other ones.

02:43:12.951 --> 02:43:15.232
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, so I'll break that's another one.

02:43:15.252 --> 02:43:24.017
[UNKNOWN]: Okay, keep a good in Jurassic Park and then there's one more for again Okay, what can I probably this one was the the other one was it was that I'm quiet was on a walk.

02:43:24.217 --> 02:43:27.719
[UNKNOWN]: It was like old school movie Before I was born I think but he got in there

02:43:27.979 --> 02:43:28.620
[UNKNOWN]: He's in there.

02:43:28.720 --> 02:43:31.402
[UNKNOWN]: He was like a cab driver some shit any lines.

02:43:32.163 --> 02:43:34.345
[UNKNOWN]: I don't think he had any lines But still looking good.

02:43:34.505 --> 02:43:37.708
[UNKNOWN]: Look that's it.

02:43:37.748 --> 02:43:39.990
[UNKNOWN]: Good to see you again.

02:43:40.010 --> 02:43:43.994
[UNKNOWN]: Get to see you right on it E from any closing thoughts.

02:43:44.535 --> 02:43:48.018
[UNKNOWN]: I know that's all people would check us out at strong rescue and thanks for having me on I really appreciate it

02:43:48.258 --> 02:43:48.918
[UNKNOWN]: Right on awesome.

02:43:48.938 --> 02:43:49.538
[UNKNOWN]: See you again man.

02:43:49.738 --> 02:43:50.499
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks for coming back.

02:43:50.759 --> 02:43:52.279
[UNKNOWN]: I know it's always a gut check for you.

02:43:52.299 --> 02:43:54.440
[UNKNOWN]: I have to travel out here, but thanks for what you're doing.

02:43:54.460 --> 02:43:55.080
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks for your service.

02:43:55.900 --> 02:44:00.261
[UNKNOWN]: So the Navy to the nation, to the teams, and thanks for what you continue to do today.

02:44:00.501 --> 02:44:01.422
[UNKNOWN]: And I think you're going to do a lot.

02:44:01.582 --> 02:44:03.562
[UNKNOWN]: Obviously, continue to work with stronghold.

02:44:03.862 --> 02:44:08.764
[UNKNOWN]: But then the Overwatch, I think is going to help open people's minds, getting them to calm down, getting to listen, and get them to learn.

02:44:09.084 --> 02:44:11.524
[UNKNOWN]: So that we have a better world.

02:44:12.245 --> 02:44:13.085
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks for what you're doing, bro.

02:44:13.385 --> 02:44:13.625
[UNKNOWN]: Excellent.

02:44:13.645 --> 02:44:13.905
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.

02:44:15.786 --> 02:44:19.656
[UNKNOWN]: And with that, E from Maddoz, has left the building.

02:44:20.297 --> 02:44:23.285
[UNKNOWN]: He's clearly got a lot of stuff going on.

02:44:25.931 --> 02:44:29.792
[UNKNOWN]: clearly made a lot of good things happen in his world.

02:44:30.052 --> 02:44:32.493
[UNKNOWN]: So awesome to see him, awesome for him to come by.

02:44:33.033 --> 02:44:41.595
[UNKNOWN]: You know, we touched the last time on that that little situation he got in when he was up to 325 pounds, man.

02:44:42.415 --> 02:44:46.336
[UNKNOWN]: God has went to a hotel and looked at the ocean for a month.

02:44:46.596 --> 02:44:50.757
[UNKNOWN]: He started working out, figured out what his problem was, food addiction to the whole 90 yards.

02:44:51.438 --> 02:44:52.078
[UNKNOWN]: Got to get after him.

02:44:53.278 --> 02:45:17.965
[UNKNOWN]: but you got to be careful and you know what he said on that thing was he can't he's like a if you're an alcohol like a legit alcoholic you can't drink anymore yeah if you're a legit heroin addict you can't be like you know what the the third Thursday of every month like to shoot up you know what I'm saying you can't do it I don't just say the tweakers they're not like hey you know what Saturdays are good for meth

02:45:18.665 --> 02:45:20.266
[UNKNOWN]: Because it gets me fired up for sad.

02:45:20.386 --> 02:45:21.186
[UNKNOWN]: No, I can't do that.

02:45:21.206 --> 02:45:21.786
[UNKNOWN]: It's different.

02:45:21.806 --> 02:45:22.386
[UNKNOWN]: It's a re-straight up.

02:45:22.426 --> 02:45:33.969
[UNKNOWN]: I was like, no, I can't he can't have the sweets can't have or he'll just be like full Fiend activity Now what we can do so we can eat stuff that's good for us.

02:45:34.330 --> 02:45:38.171
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I got some good stuff for you at jacophil jacophil.com We got protein.

02:45:38.691 --> 02:45:39.911
[UNKNOWN]: We got energy drinks.

02:45:40.111 --> 02:45:42.552
[UNKNOWN]: We got this right here this hydration, which tastes so good

02:45:43.172 --> 02:45:43.953
[UNKNOWN]: It's kind of a sweet.

02:45:44.273 --> 02:45:46.194
[UNKNOWN]: I worry if someone is addicted to it.

02:45:46.234 --> 02:45:48.416
[UNKNOWN]: They could get addicted to it But it'll be healthy.

02:45:48.536 --> 02:45:49.196
[UNKNOWN]: So they'd be good to go.

02:45:49.657 --> 02:45:59.583
[UNKNOWN]: No, no red 40 whatever that red right five red 40 die Red die right die 40 and yellow five I think is the two major ones.

02:45:59.623 --> 02:46:00.504
[UNKNOWN]: We don't even want them.

02:46:00.664 --> 02:46:05.187
[UNKNOWN]: This one's clear clear because it's clean we got the best protein powders

02:46:06.468 --> 02:46:06.988
[UNKNOWN]: We got all cut.

02:46:07.008 --> 02:46:07.708
[UNKNOWN]: We got the best stuff.

02:46:08.048 --> 02:46:11.689
[UNKNOWN]: So check out joccofuel.com.

02:46:12.149 --> 02:46:19.391
[UNKNOWN]: And by the way, you can also just go to your local retailer, wherever you buy your groceries, wherever you buy, whatever.

02:46:20.371 --> 02:46:22.632
[UNKNOWN]: There's decent chances, joccofuel in there.

02:46:23.392 --> 02:46:25.012
[UNKNOWN]: So go get some.

02:46:26.053 --> 02:46:28.333
[UNKNOWN]: Also, origin usay.com.

02:46:29.853 --> 02:46:32.114
[UNKNOWN]: We don't want to support Chinese communism.

02:46:33.493 --> 02:46:38.037
[UNKNOWN]: It is very oppositional to what we believe.

02:46:38.357 --> 02:46:39.118
[UNKNOWN]: We believe in freedom.

02:46:39.158 --> 02:46:39.539
[UNKNOWN]: They don't.

02:46:40.399 --> 02:46:41.260
[UNKNOWN]: We believe in liberty.

02:46:41.300 --> 02:46:41.661
[UNKNOWN]: They don't.

02:46:42.622 --> 02:46:45.745
[UNKNOWN]: We believe in individual prosperity.

02:46:45.965 --> 02:46:46.345
[UNKNOWN]: They don't.

02:46:46.746 --> 02:46:47.546
[UNKNOWN]: They believe the state.

02:46:48.347 --> 02:46:52.111
[UNKNOWN]: So when you go and buy something that's made in China, you're supporting slavery.

02:46:54.080 --> 02:46:56.724
[UNKNOWN]: lack of freedom, oppression, that's what you're supporting.

02:46:56.744 --> 02:46:57.204
[UNKNOWN]: So don't do that.

02:46:57.665 --> 02:46:59.027
[UNKNOWN]: Buy American made.

02:46:59.908 --> 02:47:01.070
[UNKNOWN]: And that's why you go to origin.

02:47:01.150 --> 02:47:08.320
[UNKNOWN]: USA.com and you get a pair of jeans, boots, hoodie, sweatshirt, ghee, rash guard.

02:47:09.401 --> 02:47:18.023
[UNKNOWN]: Training gear, hunt gear, you can get it all there and it all is guaranteed to be 100% Communist free OriginUSA.com, go get some.

02:47:18.563 --> 02:47:27.665
[UNKNOWN]: Also, don't forget about jocco store A little bit of hyper on jocco store right now sugar coated lies the shirt Okay, people seem to like that shirt.

02:47:27.685 --> 02:47:37.808
[UNKNOWN]: So we released it to the wild like I've been mentioning this for the past few weeks So you know the people on the email list they got dips We sold out unfortunately, but I did another rush order, so you know, we're still available.

02:47:37.828 --> 02:47:38.648
[UNKNOWN]: We're still rolling with it

02:47:39.549 --> 02:47:42.557
[UNKNOWN]: But you do have to kind of hurry up because they sell out like super fast anyway.

02:47:43.319 --> 02:47:46.086
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah, that's a good on sugar coated lies

02:47:46.613 --> 02:47:50.316
[UNKNOWN]: Do you want to defend your use of AI in your promotional video?

02:47:50.717 --> 02:47:56.002
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, no, no, no, no, I mean, no, I don't, I don't, I don't, okay, depends on which you defend.

02:47:56.142 --> 02:47:57.603
[UNKNOWN]: You get everyone up speed.

02:47:57.703 --> 02:48:12.276
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, Coach Charles made a video in the video he utilized some level of AI to make a creature eating a donut, yeah, that's accurate, and there was commentary on your video.

02:48:13.277 --> 02:48:17.259
[UNKNOWN]: That said, well, a lot of it said, cool, go, great shirt, blah, blah, blah.

02:48:17.479 --> 02:48:21.901
[UNKNOWN]: But some of it said, why are you using AI?

02:48:21.961 --> 02:48:23.422
[UNKNOWN]: Why aren't you paying an artist?

02:48:23.482 --> 02:48:24.162
[UNKNOWN]: Why aren't you?

02:48:24.182 --> 02:48:25.603
[UNKNOWN]: Why are you destroying the world?

02:48:25.763 --> 02:48:26.323
[UNKNOWN]: Echo just.

02:48:26.384 --> 02:48:26.644
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:48:26.924 --> 02:48:27.224
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah.

02:48:27.904 --> 02:48:32.707
[UNKNOWN]: So I want to give you a chance to defend yourself and your use of AI.

02:48:32.887 --> 02:48:34.928
[UNKNOWN]: First off, I would have to clarify.

02:48:34.948 --> 02:48:37.809
[UNKNOWN]: And I kind of tried to because it did hit me after a little while.

02:48:37.829 --> 02:48:39.410
[UNKNOWN]: I'm like, wait a second, is it?

02:48:49.002 --> 02:48:50.923
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I'm like the computers the artist.

02:48:51.423 --> 02:48:58.025
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, oh, I got to yeah, no, but put it this way I think they they're actually getting mad at you.

02:48:58.065 --> 02:49:02.267
[UNKNOWN]: I think because it's like, hey, you Jocka you used AI for your thing.

02:49:02.427 --> 02:49:03.347
[UNKNOWN]: Why couldn't you pay an artist?

02:49:03.367 --> 02:49:09.950
[UNKNOWN]: They didn't realize that like I'm the person who makes all the shirts and stuff So technically hey, I'm the artist apparently.

02:49:10.010 --> 02:49:10.630
[UNKNOWN]: I do got paid

02:49:11.010 --> 02:49:12.171
[UNKNOWN]: I go, we got paid for that one.

02:49:12.191 --> 02:49:13.652
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, we got paid for my work.

02:49:13.992 --> 02:49:15.213
[UNKNOWN]: My labor, my art, right?

02:49:16.113 --> 02:49:17.674
[UNKNOWN]: Now we made a video voluntarily.

02:49:17.794 --> 02:49:21.357
[UNKNOWN]: I made a video and I used for the b-roll of the video.

02:49:21.657 --> 02:49:24.679
[UNKNOWN]: I used AI to make a guy Chomp in a gross donut.

02:49:24.699 --> 02:49:26.060
[UNKNOWN]: Make an extra gross and slimy.

02:49:26.220 --> 02:49:26.820
[UNKNOWN]: Disgusting.

02:49:27.100 --> 02:49:28.401
[UNKNOWN]: It's just a good way to do it.

02:49:28.801 --> 02:49:29.082
[UNKNOWN]: I thought.

02:49:29.802 --> 02:49:30.162
[UNKNOWN]: sent it.

02:49:30.262 --> 02:49:35.223
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, so people got jard will say by the AI.

02:49:35.323 --> 02:49:37.864
[UNKNOWN]: Usually it's going to be a creative type which I understand.

02:49:38.424 --> 02:49:42.385
[UNKNOWN]: But that wasn't the whole thing that kind of made a question mark coming in my head.

02:49:42.405 --> 02:49:45.965
[UNKNOWN]: Mine was like, hey, are they mad because the video was made with AI?

02:49:46.225 --> 02:49:48.086
[UNKNOWN]: Or do they think that AI made the shirt?

02:49:48.306 --> 02:49:50.346
[UNKNOWN]: Because that'd be way different, as you say.

02:49:50.586 --> 02:49:51.686
[UNKNOWN]: So I didn't know because someone

02:49:54.847 --> 02:50:01.460
[UNKNOWN]: That was just a video fun video about a shirt that we're selling like we're not so I think oh man they think it's the shirt

02:50:02.466 --> 02:50:03.507
[UNKNOWN]: So I kind of went in there.

02:50:03.527 --> 02:50:05.347
[UNKNOWN]: I was like, because that's what you clarified it.

02:50:05.387 --> 02:50:06.508
[UNKNOWN]: Did it get cleaned up or not?

02:50:06.568 --> 02:50:08.749
[UNKNOWN]: Did people say, oh, okay.

02:50:09.289 --> 02:50:10.790
[UNKNOWN]: Well, always people still is mad at you.

02:50:10.890 --> 02:50:14.512
[UNKNOWN]: I just found one of the comments and, you know, you finally got some haters out there, bro.

02:50:14.672 --> 02:50:16.152
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it might have been too easy for you.

02:50:16.172 --> 02:50:17.713
[UNKNOWN]: No, no, no, I probably got some haters.

02:50:18.073 --> 02:50:18.514
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I know.

02:50:18.534 --> 02:50:19.234
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, no, you wait.

02:50:19.354 --> 02:50:20.935
[UNKNOWN]: Now that I think about you, you've always had your haters.

02:50:21.115 --> 02:50:21.395
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:50:21.735 --> 02:50:22.055
[UNKNOWN]: And that's it.

02:50:22.075 --> 02:50:23.056
[UNKNOWN]: You've always had your haters.

02:50:23.076 --> 02:50:25.517
[UNKNOWN]: People that didn't want to hear Echo's opinion on anything.

02:50:27.123 --> 02:50:27.563
[UNKNOWN]: It's fair.

02:50:27.583 --> 02:50:37.267
[UNKNOWN]: That's fair and I don't even think it's haters I think it's an accurate look if someone's watching Jockel podcast and they hear me chime in and they don't like that part of it That's a that's accurate.

02:50:37.307 --> 02:50:38.447
[UNKNOWN]: That's accuracy from the field.

02:50:38.467 --> 02:50:43.569
[UNKNOWN]: You see I'm saying that's I can feed that through look easy If you're a man, let's face something like you

02:50:44.769 --> 02:50:45.810
[UNKNOWN]: So I'm not mad at that.

02:50:45.870 --> 02:50:47.731
[UNKNOWN]: I'm not mad at factual feedback.

02:50:47.751 --> 02:50:51.194
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it's not like they were like they really loved it But just for some weird reason.

02:50:51.214 --> 02:50:52.435
[UNKNOWN]: They're you know, it doesn't work like that.

02:50:52.455 --> 02:50:53.756
[UNKNOWN]: You seem saying those these are real.

02:50:53.776 --> 02:51:01.062
[UNKNOWN]: This is real feedback So I from the So I asked somebody like one of the people as it oh shoot.

02:51:01.082 --> 02:51:02.443
[UNKNOWN]: Do you think the videos?

02:51:02.763 --> 02:51:04.164
[UNKNOWN]: Are you mad about the video being air?

02:51:04.324 --> 02:51:07.827
[UNKNOWN]: Were the fact that in the video what are being air or the do you think the shirt was made with air?

02:51:08.007 --> 02:51:11.910
[UNKNOWN]: And then He said oh, I think it's the video everyone's mad at

02:51:12.450 --> 02:51:13.331
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, all right.

02:51:13.371 --> 02:51:14.792
[UNKNOWN]: Well, hey, man, fair fair enough.

02:51:14.892 --> 02:51:23.440
[UNKNOWN]: You know, I think the jarring nature of the AI NIS, maybe that's what's called the AI slot once like by this AI just for the sake of the AI.

02:51:23.540 --> 02:51:25.661
[UNKNOWN]: So if it lands like that, it's like, okay, cool.

02:51:25.862 --> 02:51:26.462
[UNKNOWN]: No, didn't, man.

02:51:27.123 --> 02:51:28.904
[UNKNOWN]: To the change of fact, the shirt was still dope.

02:51:29.765 --> 02:51:30.746
[UNKNOWN]: I like the video.

02:51:31.346 --> 02:51:32.287
[UNKNOWN]: I thought it was cool as hell.

02:51:32.687 --> 02:51:35.750
[UNKNOWN]: I was surprised when when the comments were a very

02:51:38.512 --> 02:51:41.873
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it's more against the AI, but I don't think it's my name, yeah.

02:51:41.973 --> 02:51:42.674
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, that's true.

02:51:43.554 --> 02:51:44.154
[UNKNOWN]: Actually, you're right.

02:51:44.174 --> 02:51:45.995
[UNKNOWN]: You people even know that you do any that.

02:51:46.215 --> 02:51:47.396
[UNKNOWN]: I think a lot of times they don't.

02:51:47.576 --> 02:51:47.856
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:51:48.376 --> 02:51:49.237
[UNKNOWN]: So, I don't know.

02:51:49.517 --> 02:51:50.617
[UNKNOWN]: To me, it's accurate.

02:51:50.917 --> 02:51:52.998
[UNKNOWN]: It's like what do you call a data point, you know?

02:51:53.338 --> 02:51:53.558
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:51:53.658 --> 02:51:56.940
[UNKNOWN]: And by the way, don't you have to design what that guy looks like and stuff?

02:51:57.320 --> 02:51:59.863
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, it's actually, it's like a really hard to do.

02:52:00.003 --> 02:52:02.527
[UNKNOWN]: You know how people are like, oh, it's just a computer.

02:52:02.607 --> 02:52:02.927
[UNKNOWN]: It is.

02:52:03.087 --> 02:52:03.588
[UNKNOWN]: It is true.

02:52:03.608 --> 02:52:07.192
[UNKNOWN]: That part is true, but, you know, it's kind of hard.

02:52:07.272 --> 02:52:08.234
[UNKNOWN]: It's like CGI.

02:52:08.254 --> 02:52:10.496
[UNKNOWN]: You know, it's like, oh, the CGI character.

02:52:10.536 --> 02:52:12.819
[UNKNOWN]: It's like, you know, hard to just make this CGI character.

02:52:13.000 --> 02:52:13.660
[UNKNOWN]: Like, good.

02:52:13.921 --> 02:52:14.922
[UNKNOWN]: It's, it's kind of hard.

02:52:15.002 --> 02:52:15.182
[UNKNOWN]: But,

02:52:16.312 --> 02:52:17.793
[UNKNOWN]: That part literally doesn't matter.

02:52:18.073 --> 02:52:26.397
[UNKNOWN]: Like, let's say a shirt or like the shirt you're wearing are you like, oh my gosh, the guy who designed that shirt spent 12 years on the, like, no one really cares that much most of the time.

02:52:26.577 --> 02:52:27.857
[UNKNOWN]: Seems like so that's not the point.

02:52:28.318 --> 02:52:35.321
[UNKNOWN]: The point is if someone's gonna put out a successful video, me, put out a successful video and it's unsuccessful.

02:52:35.441 --> 02:52:37.802
[UNKNOWN]: I can't blame other people and be mad at whatever it's my fault.

02:52:37.902 --> 02:52:41.284
[UNKNOWN]: You seem saying for doing the unsick or for failing to succeed.

02:52:41.304 --> 02:52:42.785
[UNKNOWN]: Look at over here taking ownership.

02:52:43.065 --> 02:52:43.485
[UNKNOWN]: Good job.

02:52:44.025 --> 02:52:55.734
[UNKNOWN]: Look, I would love to decredit for that, but it's like I said if you if you're flying an airplane and you have a freaking bumpy landing And people are like, yeah, I love your airplane, but it was a bumpy landing You know you're what I'm gonna say no.

02:52:55.774 --> 02:52:58.997
[UNKNOWN]: It wasn't a bumpy landing You know how hard I worked on that landing.

02:52:59.097 --> 02:53:09.245
[UNKNOWN]: It's like the fact is is a bumpy landing That's the fact that everyone thought it was bumpy Just because you didn't think it was bumpy doesn't change the fact that it was bumpy according to all the people you serve.

02:53:09.425 --> 02:53:11.887
[UNKNOWN]: You can see God, man, I take this feedback

02:53:12.175 --> 02:53:20.823
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, sugar coated lies is still available despite or in spite, I don't know, whichever the video having some AI in it.

02:53:20.903 --> 02:53:22.725
[UNKNOWN]: Jocco's real, you were real in the video.

02:53:22.765 --> 02:53:23.665
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, I lie the way.

02:53:24.486 --> 02:53:25.007
[UNKNOWN]: That's the way.

02:53:25.027 --> 02:53:27.108
[UNKNOWN]: So congratulations on that being a real person.

02:53:28.029 --> 02:53:28.330
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:53:28.490 --> 02:53:31.132
[UNKNOWN]: Yes, also, what that came from was the shirt locker.

02:53:31.152 --> 02:53:31.933
[UNKNOWN]: It was the March,

02:53:32.533 --> 02:53:47.369
[UNKNOWN]: 2024, so I made the design way before I was even using it ever, March 204 edition of the shirt lockers shirt, one of the shirt lockers shirts, which is the subscription scenario, you get a new design every month, sometimes are bangers apparently.

02:53:49.027 --> 02:53:52.752
[UNKNOWN]: But there outside of the box, pretty much every time.

02:53:52.772 --> 02:53:54.174
[UNKNOWN]: Anyway, people think they're interesting.

02:53:54.214 --> 02:53:58.180
[UNKNOWN]: It's a subscription, new design every month on jocostor.com.

02:53:59.301 --> 02:54:02.226
[UNKNOWN]: Also, Independence Day is coming up.

02:54:04.668 --> 02:54:11.570
[UNKNOWN]: We're gonna have a this year's independent stature if you want to get a jump on that put your email in in the website in the front page on the bottom put your email in there.

02:54:11.690 --> 02:54:12.830
[UNKNOWN]: I need to confirm the design.

02:54:13.571 --> 02:54:13.811
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.

02:54:13.871 --> 02:54:14.011
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:54:14.031 --> 02:54:15.031
[UNKNOWN]: I'm gonna confirm the design.

02:54:15.051 --> 02:54:15.431
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, sure.

02:54:15.451 --> 02:54:16.191
[UNKNOWN]: It's the after this.

02:54:16.211 --> 02:54:17.692
[UNKNOWN]: I already submitted it for those today.

02:54:17.892 --> 02:54:19.372
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, we can recall it.

02:54:19.452 --> 02:54:20.092
[UNKNOWN]: No, no, it's good.

02:54:20.252 --> 02:54:21.173
[UNKNOWN]: You're like, yeah, yeah.

02:54:21.413 --> 02:54:22.133
[UNKNOWN]: You're not the judge.

02:54:22.653 --> 02:54:22.953
[UNKNOWN]: Okay.

02:54:23.813 --> 02:54:26.254
[UNKNOWN]: I've been the judge literally for 11 years, but okay.

02:54:26.414 --> 02:54:30.975
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, maybe all of a sudden you're throwing some things out there I've been not that I should have judged.

02:54:31.335 --> 02:54:31.975
[UNKNOWN]: You might be right.

02:54:31.995 --> 02:54:32.435
[UNKNOWN]: That was then.

02:54:32.955 --> 02:54:33.135
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah.

02:54:33.435 --> 02:54:33.715
[UNKNOWN]: All right.

02:54:33.755 --> 02:54:34.375
[UNKNOWN]: Well, check that out.

02:54:34.455 --> 02:54:36.416
[UNKNOWN]: Also, we got some books put your legs on by Rob Jones.

02:54:36.756 --> 02:54:37.796
[UNKNOWN]: Dave Burke need to lead.

02:54:38.036 --> 02:54:38.916
[UNKNOWN]: Check those out.

02:54:39.016 --> 02:54:39.556
[UNKNOWN]: Leadership books.

02:54:39.776 --> 02:54:40.796
[UNKNOWN]: I've written as well.

02:54:41.276 --> 02:54:43.317
[UNKNOWN]: And then of course, the warrior could books check those out.

02:54:43.637 --> 02:54:45.337
[UNKNOWN]: Primalbeef.com if you need some steak.

02:54:46.377 --> 02:54:48.538
[UNKNOWN]: Go get some of that or call rattlecraftbeef.com.

02:54:48.818 --> 02:54:49.418
[UNKNOWN]: You can check that out.

02:54:49.738 --> 02:54:58.706
[UNKNOWN]: Ashland Front, we have a leadership conference, instructional in San Diego, July 8th, through the 10th.

02:54:59.807 --> 02:55:07.073
[UNKNOWN]: It is two days where you will learn the skill of leadership that you will be able to apply in every aspect of your life.

02:55:07.914 --> 02:55:12.738
[UNKNOWN]: So if you want to go, go to echelonfront.com and check out events.

02:55:13.819 --> 02:55:15.421
[UNKNOWN]: Also, we have an online training academy.

02:55:16.121 --> 02:55:41.527
[UNKNOWN]: at extreme ownership dot com extreme ownership dot com and that there's where we teach the skills of leadership Through the interwebs and if you want to help service members active and retired Do you want to help the families who want to build star families check out mark least mom mommily She's got an amazing charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org And then of course check out heroes and horses dot org and Jimmy Maze

02:55:47.517 --> 02:55:51.058
[UNKNOWN]: bringing people into the aviation civilian sector.

02:55:51.798 --> 02:55:55.299
[UNKNOWN]: And then finally, as you heard about today, StrongholdRescue.org.

02:55:56.259 --> 02:56:02.400
[UNKNOWN]: To connect with E-Firm and Stronghold Rescue and Relief on the interwebs, go to StrongholdRescue.org.

02:56:02.680 --> 02:56:08.141
[UNKNOWN]: Check out his podcast slash YouTube channel, the Overwatch with E-Firm Matos.

02:56:08.941 --> 02:56:11.802
[UNKNOWN]: And he's on YouTube, the Overwatch with E-Firm Matos.

02:56:12.462 --> 02:56:14.522
[UNKNOWN]: And on Twitter and Instagram,

02:56:17.843 --> 02:56:23.045
[UNKNOWN]: If you want to connect with us go to jockel.com, and then on social media, I'm at jockel willing.

02:56:23.306 --> 02:56:24.126
[UNKNOWN]: Echoes at Echo Charles.

02:56:25.006 --> 02:56:33.190
[UNKNOWN]: Just be careful because you're getting forced fed at giant propaganda sandwich that you don't even know what it's doing to your health, but it's not good for you.

02:56:33.850 --> 02:56:34.630
[UNKNOWN]: So be careful.

02:56:35.411 --> 02:56:37.572
[UNKNOWN]: Once again, thanks to E from for coming by.

02:56:38.292 --> 02:56:45.535
[UNKNOWN]: Thanks to your service to the country and your continued service to protect innocent communities in war zones.

02:56:46.296 --> 02:56:49.557
[UNKNOWN]: And of course, thanks to all of our military around the world right now.

02:56:49.737 --> 02:56:52.439
[UNKNOWN]: in harm's way, protecting freedom and our way of life.

02:56:52.679 --> 02:57:01.066
[UNKNOWN]: Also, thanks to police law enforcement, Firefighters, Paramedics, EMTs, Dispatchers, Correctional Officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders.

02:57:01.446 --> 02:57:05.649
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you for protecting our way of life here on the home front.

02:57:07.050 --> 02:57:07.991
[UNKNOWN]: And everyone else out there.

02:57:09.792 --> 02:57:12.675
[UNKNOWN]: Two things, first of all, be grateful for what you have.

02:57:13.815 --> 02:57:16.778
[UNKNOWN]: Because as bad as you got it right now, and let's face it, gets pretty rough out here.

02:57:17.717 --> 02:57:18.697
[UNKNOWN]: gets pretty rough out here.

02:57:19.998 --> 02:57:43.508
[UNKNOWN]: But if you look at your situation, you compare with other people in the world without basic food, without basic shelter, without health needs, not to mention being under the threat of real violence, like random bombs from the sky, or drones, or mortars, or artillery, just randomly hitting you, that's

02:57:44.768 --> 02:57:51.970
[UNKNOWN]: That's a pretty rough way to live so be grateful if you're in a slightly better environment to that.

02:57:53.210 --> 02:57:57.591
[UNKNOWN]: And the second thing is what can you do to help out?

02:57:59.412 --> 02:58:00.652
[UNKNOWN]: How can you support?

02:58:01.072 --> 02:58:04.573
[UNKNOWN]: What might be a tiny little thing for you, like 20 bucks a month?

02:58:05.523 --> 02:58:13.732
[UNKNOWN]: to strongholdrescue.org might be a little tiny thing to you, but that is likely massive to someone that is in need.

02:58:14.854 --> 02:58:16.916
[UNKNOWN]: So if you can, help out.

02:58:18.358 --> 02:58:22.302
[UNKNOWN]: And that's all I've got for tonight, and until next time, this is Echo and Jocco, out.