RESPECT DRONES

“A really good friend of mine, his name is Kyle Pollson. He posted all his guys up there like, 'You go watch that door. You go watch that door. I'll be right back.' Went into the Sergeant Major's desk and took a huge shit right on his desk. The next morning we're all out there standing in formation and this guy comes out, he's like, 'These fucking you fucking seals.' And we're all like, 'What the hell? Who shit on my desk?'”

“My chief, my boat leader, he's like, 'Jay, are you still up on your JTAC stuff?' He goes, 'I'm trying to get us some work.' We were an assault team. We weren't a recce team. Two hours, you got two hours. Go do your radio checks. We're at 10,000 ft. We inserted up on this point, set up our OP site as TF Mountain, the 82nd, 101st Airborne, were moving to clear out this valley, and we just called in CAS for a week. And then one night that March 4th, that was when Neil and his team inserted and got lit up.”

“Jehovah's Witness, going to church three times a week or the Kingdom Hall, that's what they call the church. Having to wear a suit, which I still to this day I don't like wearing a suit. Get dressed up in a little suit, little tie, go to Bible study once a week, like a Tuesday nights, you go to church Wednesday, Sunday for an hour and a half. And you don't celebrate any holidays. You don't celebrate birthday, Christmas, anything.”

“The FAA, we went to Isle of Man. I'm going through the mail and open it up like, 'Hey, we see you're a disabled vet, you got to tell us everything that's on your VA letter.' Some guys are lying. They got in trouble. They got caught. And what's weird is they're worried about some of the veterans that are pilots. You can walk around a flight operations area and see like a 5'4, 350lb man pilot walking around. I'd be worried about that guy more than they'd be worried about having a vet flying an airplane.”

“You got a wife and a kid at home. What's going through your head during all this? You don't even think about them. You can't let that distraction get in your way. That's where people may make mistakes. As soon as that gate closes, you walk in, if you think about that, you're going to let your boys down. You compartmentalize it just like you do losing a teammate. You got to compartmentalize it and put it in the cupboard and try not to let it peek itself out. Keep the cover closed.”

“It's all fun in games until you're tied naked to a spine board hanging upside down from an elevator shaft and they're shooting simmunition rounds at you and then tape your head up and put a little pin hole in your mouth and throw you in the showers. Like waterboarding. We do that all the time, man. Drop a rag on your face while you're hanging upside down and then as soon as you take an inhale, somebody's blowing cigar smoke in your face. Pour whiskey down your throat.”

“When I first got to the command I'll just call this guy Crazy Horse. He was one of the best leaders I ever worked for. You know a humble guy that didn't think he knew everything all the time. We respected him. He was a hard worker. He led by example, but he wasn't hard-headed, right? He was just, hey, if he had a question, he wasn't afraid to ask a question. He wasn't afraid to delegate other people that he knew were better at certain things that he wasn't.”

“Drone warfare, dude, holy shit. You can't hear where the fuck they're at. It sounds like they're right above you and they're over there and it's impossible to get the fuck away from those. Once they're on you, you're fucked. If you shoot one down, there's just going to be a swarm of them coming. You could fly 10 damn drones in, have nine on station, and just, oh, that one went down. Switch to the next one.”

“I was the first one off the ramp. I look at him and he's got his hands and so I'm thinking okay maybe he's got a suicide vest on and he keeps walking towards us and my buddy next to me, he's like, 'Dude.' I'm like, 'Dude, don't.' This is where you got to be a thinker, right? You just don't blast somebody. So I let three rounds rip by his feet and he falls over on his back like a freaking upside down turtle, hands in, here we go zip tie him. My buddy was just getting ready to drill him. He was just a farmer out there, a goat herder.”

“I see this big dude wearing a polo shirt, khaki pants. Throw the guns in the caravan, the C208 little turboprop for a 4-hour flight to Memphis. This dude's asking me all kinds of questions about the deployment. I'm like, 'Dude, are you a fucking team guy?' He's like, 'Fuck yeah, I am.' He ended up down the road, he was a master chief on freaking Neptune Spear and Bin Laden. Come to find out that program was developed back in the beginning just to learn how to steal airplanes if you had to do it.”