# From West Point to the 101st to 1 Million Subscribers | Preston Stewart | Ep. 402

An episode of [The Team House](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1492797340), 19 Mar 2026, 1 h 29 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/clrtpod.com/m/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70721402/preston_sewart_audio_apreaker.mp3

We sit down with West Point graduate Preston Stewart to talk about combat deployments in Afghanistan, the realities of leadership under fire, and the challenges of transitioning out of the military. He shares how he built a YouTube career breaking down modern warfare, from Ukraine to emerging drone tactics. We also discuss how technology is reshaping the battlefield and what it means for the future of war. Find Preston here: https://www.youtube.com/@PrestonStewart Today's Sponsor: Quince go to: https://www.quince.com/house for free shipping and 365 day returns For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ PRE ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://a.co/d/0eOl8czU Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 0:00 West Point to War 01:18 Why He Joined After 9/11 07:23 How Army Jobs Are Assigned 14:12 What a Fire Support Officer Does 19:10 Afghanistan: Kandahar Surge 24:13 Combat Stress & Leadership 34:10 Second Deployment Reality 45:24 Leaving the Military 52:49 From Army Officer to YouTuber 1:05:20 Drones Changing Warfare Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, I want to tell you about my new novel,
[0:03] Speaker 1: The Most Dangerous Man, out in June. It is a
[0:07] Speaker 1: novel about a Regimental Reconnaissance Company soldier who gets kidnapped
[0:11] Speaker 1: while he's on a mission to West Africa, and when
[0:14] Speaker 1: he wakes up, he finds that he is now being
[0:17] Speaker 1: hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through
[0:20] Speaker 1: the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on
[0:24] Speaker 1: stories that I heard over the years about safari guides
[0:27] Speaker 1: taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa.
[0:32] Speaker 1: I took that and I took a century old short story,
[0:35] Speaker 1: The Most Dangerous Game, and modernized it. And the product
[0:39] Speaker 1: is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and
[0:42] Speaker 1: resonate with audiences today. Thank you, and please check it out.
[1:01] Speaker 2: Guys.
[1:01] Speaker 1: This is four hundred and two, Episode four hundred and
[1:05] Speaker 1: two of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with
[1:07] Speaker 1: our guest today, Preston Stewart. He is a former Army
[1:11] Speaker 1: officer and today runs a YouTube channel, amongst other things.
[1:15] Speaker 1: And if people want to find you on YouTube, it's
[1:18] Speaker 1: under your name. It's Preston Stewart. Correct it is.
[1:21] Speaker 3: Yeah, try to keep it simple. There.
[1:22] Speaker 1: Cool, cool, and so thank you for coming on the
[1:27] Speaker 1: show today. I really appreciate it and looking forward to
[1:31] Speaker 1: talking a little bit about your military career and kind
[1:33] Speaker 1: of veteran transition experience afterwards.
[1:37] Speaker 3: Yeah, appreciate Jackson. Honored to be here, man.
[1:40] Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks. So let's see.
[1:43] Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the question I pretty much ask
[1:45] Speaker 1: all of our guests is about their origin story. If
[1:48] Speaker 1: you can tell us a little bit about you know,
[1:50] Speaker 1: where you grew up, what your upbringing was like, and
[1:52] Speaker 1: you know how that took you towards in your case,
[1:55] Speaker 1: West Point.
[1:57] Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a feeling very similar to a lot
[2:00] Speaker 4: of folks in our generation. I'm forty, so I know
[2:03] Speaker 4: we're about the about the same age. And I was
[2:05] Speaker 4: a sophomore in high school when the nine to eleven
[2:08] Speaker 4: attacks occurred. So I was in that period of my
[2:10] Speaker 4: life trying to decide what's next, and military just jumped out.
[2:15] Speaker 4: Both my grandparents were in service, so grew up playing
[2:19] Speaker 4: army like all boys, and that just that was kind
[2:22] Speaker 4: of a driving factor of wanting to do something. So
[2:26] Speaker 4: from high school, the kind of agreement with my parents
[2:30] Speaker 4: is they said college and I said, I don't know,
[2:32] Speaker 4: military sounds pretty good, and we found this middle ground
[2:35] Speaker 4: of what if I can go to college and do
[2:37] Speaker 4: the military. So came across West Point kind of started
[2:41] Speaker 4: looking in that route and it was fortunate to get
[2:44] Speaker 4: in and ended up doing a I had to do
[2:46] Speaker 4: an extra year kind of postgrad between high school and
[2:51] Speaker 4: college to get the grades up a little bit and
[2:53] Speaker 4: to meet their criteria. But then in two thousand and
[2:55] Speaker 4: five entered the academy and yeah, that was so the
[3:00] Speaker 4: war was still pretty hot.
[3:01] Speaker 3: At that point. It was its interesting experience looking back.
[3:04] Speaker 4: I mean the seven time period of course, pretty nasty,
[3:09] Speaker 4: with a lot of casualties coming out of a rock,
[3:11] Speaker 4: and they would at breakfast or lunch announce graduates that
[3:18] Speaker 4: had been killed, and it was there was a stretch
[3:23] Speaker 4: in there where it felt like almost every day. So
[3:26] Speaker 4: it was it was interesting being there, going to classes
[3:28] Speaker 4: and kind of knowing what you're what you're getting into,
[3:31] Speaker 4: for better or for worse. It's a year, two years,
[3:33] Speaker 4: three years down the road, but a great benefit the
[3:36] Speaker 4: Harris We had instructors that had they were all captains
[3:39] Speaker 4: and majors that uh and then senior NCOs running the companies.
[3:44] Speaker 4: All of them had one, two, three, four, deployments, and
[3:47] Speaker 4: they would tie that into everything and then of course
[3:50] Speaker 4: keep you on your.
[3:50] Speaker 3: Toes and you you know, you'd be.
[3:52] Speaker 4: Late or something and they'd say, at least you were't
[3:54] Speaker 4: getting shot at, and like the guy telling you that
[3:56] Speaker 4: was in Fallujah. So you're like, all right, I got it.
[3:59] Speaker 4: My problems aren't so bad. But the great experience there
[4:03] Speaker 4: and then then off into the Army hundred and first
[4:05] Speaker 4: Field Artillery.
[4:05] Speaker 2: Yeah, so West Point. I got to ask.
[4:10] Speaker 1: Did they have again I didn't go to West Point,
[4:13] Speaker 1: I was an enlisted dirt bag. Did you have to
[4:16] Speaker 1: do or did they get rid of it? By that
[4:17] Speaker 1: point where you get the merits and they make you
[4:19] Speaker 1: like marching back and forth across the field.
[4:22] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's called hours. And you just don't have
[4:26] Speaker 3: a lot of time when you're there.
[4:27] Speaker 4: Is this right you just they give you, you know,
[4:30] Speaker 4: you have seventeen hours of homework in a night or
[4:33] Speaker 4: something like that.
[4:33] Speaker 3: You just can't get to it.
[4:34] Speaker 4: So you're you're constantly which big picture looking back is
[4:38] Speaker 4: a good thing because it makes you prioritize and kind
[4:40] Speaker 4: of figure out how to get through some stuff quickly.
[4:43] Speaker 4: So they would take away your time was the punishment
[4:46] Speaker 4: and they.
[4:47] Speaker 3: Dole these out.
[4:47] Speaker 4: You could march two hours on Friday and five on Saturday,
[4:51] Speaker 4: so you couldn't leave posts until they were all done.
[4:55] Speaker 4: So seven hours a weekend was max.
[4:59] Speaker 3: I think I had some total.
[5:02] Speaker 4: It's awful, man, You're in your full dress uniform with
[5:05] Speaker 4: a rifle and you literally just march back and forth
[5:07] Speaker 4: in a line for fifty minutes and then they give
[5:09] Speaker 4: you a ten minute break and then you do it again.
[5:12] Speaker 3: It's just a waste.
[5:14] Speaker 1: And yeah, on top of all that stuff you said
[5:16] Speaker 1: mentioned how little time you have, I mean academically, it's
[5:19] Speaker 1: very challenging. Do you have to play one or two sports?
[5:24] Speaker 4: You have to be involved with sports. So if you're
[5:26] Speaker 4: a you can be a Division one athlete and then
[5:28] Speaker 4: you do that. You can be a club athlete and
[5:31] Speaker 4: then you do that. If you don't do either one
[5:33] Speaker 4: of those, you have to do intermurals and you just
[5:35] Speaker 4: play against all the other cadets. So I did intermurals
[5:38] Speaker 4: each year, and I mean they had a ton We
[5:40] Speaker 4: had rugby, we had football, soccer, swimming, wrestling, all that stuff.
[5:45] Speaker 4: And the challenge there is like everyone's a good athlete
[5:50] Speaker 4: that's there, Like the vast majority of them are varsity,
[5:52] Speaker 4: and like we would go out to play intermural football
[5:55] Speaker 4: and the guys that were going up against were like
[5:57] Speaker 4: four year varsity letterman in their high school. Right, they're
[5:59] Speaker 4: not They're not just strapping on pads for the first time.
[6:02] Speaker 4: So every one of those was, uh was interesting. And
[6:05] Speaker 4: each time, like is swimming once and one of the
[6:08] Speaker 4: guys was like the captain of his swim team in
[6:09] Speaker 4: high school. But it just couldn't, you know, it wasn't
[6:12] Speaker 4: able to pull Division one. But for us, you know,
[6:15] Speaker 4: it makes us look silly. So yeah, intermurals, but it's
[6:19] Speaker 4: fun time.
[6:19] Speaker 1: There's a book out and I'm really sorry, sorry that
[6:22] Speaker 1: I can't remember the title offhand, but there's a book
[6:24] Speaker 1: out about the rugby team at West Point. Yes, yes,
[6:29] Speaker 1: it came. It came out right around kind of. I
[6:31] Speaker 1: think it's about the cohort of guys in like maybe
[6:36] Speaker 1: the year after nine to eleven and then it kind
[6:39] Speaker 1: of attracks their career and I don't want to speak
[6:43] Speaker 1: out of turn. I believe one of them was killed
[6:45] Speaker 1: in combat. I believe one of them may have died
[6:48] Speaker 1: tragically outside of uh combat. But there's a whole book
[6:53] Speaker 1: out there about you know rugby at the Academy and
[6:55] Speaker 1: how it kind of shaped these guys' lives.
[6:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's called brotherhood. When West Point Rugby went to war. Yeah,
[7:00] Speaker 2: thank you, thank you.
[7:02] Speaker 4: And they've got a new little documentary that just came out.
[7:04] Speaker 4: I don't know where it's airing, but it's called Brothers
[7:06] Speaker 4: on three all about Army rugby.
[7:09] Speaker 2: Oh cool, that's that.
[7:12] Speaker 4: My roommate for a couple of years was the captain
[7:15] Speaker 4: of the rugby team when we were seniors, John Wagner,
[7:18] Speaker 4: and they were good, like they actually competed at the
[7:20] Speaker 4: national level.
[7:21] Speaker 3: But that is holy cow man.
[7:22] Speaker 4: That is a brotherhood more than anything else I think
[7:25] Speaker 4: at the Academy. Those guys are tight knit, they're still
[7:27] Speaker 4: in touch. Incredible, incredible group there. You should talk, You
[7:32] Speaker 4: should pull those guys on. They'd have some interesting stories
[7:35] Speaker 4: to tell because they've they've got some of the guys
[7:38] Speaker 4: that from the rugby team went off and did just
[7:41] Speaker 4: incredible things.
[7:41] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[7:42] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, that would be very interesting. I interviewed
[7:45] Speaker 1: years ago the he's a journalist that wrote that book
[7:49] Speaker 1: and he was talking about the head coach for rugby
[7:52] Speaker 1: at West Point. It is like this legendary guy that
[7:54] Speaker 1: was there for like forever decades. But yeah, I'll have
[7:58] Speaker 1: to look into that.
[8:00] Speaker 3: They're cool. They're good dudes.
[8:02] Speaker 1: So graduate West Point and you know, how can you
[8:08] Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about how you got assigned
[8:09] Speaker 1: your branch and how that process sort of worked and
[8:12] Speaker 1: for civilians out there or people thinking of joining the military.
[8:16] Speaker 1: When I say branch, I'm talking about like the speciality
[8:20] Speaker 1: of service that officers get put into artillery, aviation, infantry, whatever.
[8:26] Speaker 1: On the enlisted side, it's called an mos a Military
[8:28] Speaker 1: occupational specialty, just what your job is in the army. Sorry,
[8:32] Speaker 1: Preston had to lay that out for people.
[8:34] Speaker 4: Oh that's good. We're not choosing Navy or air Force
[8:37] Speaker 4: or army. We're all going Army for the most part.
[8:39] Speaker 4: Like one or two that would cross over, they'd be lost.
[8:42] Speaker 4: But it was I think it was a pretty cool process.
[8:46] Speaker 4: We kind of got to choose both branch and post.
[8:50] Speaker 4: So for the branch, I chose field Artillery. We had
[8:53] Speaker 4: a set number of slots for every branch. From you know,
[8:57] Speaker 4: there's certain like Special Forces is not a branch and
[9:00] Speaker 4: go into as a second lieutenant, so that wasn't an option,
[9:02] Speaker 4: but infantry, armor, field artillery signal quartermaster. All of that
[9:08] Speaker 4: cybers knew, so we didn't have that when I was commissioning.
[9:11] Speaker 4: But you had to rank order your top twenty at
[9:13] Speaker 4: the start of your senior year. So freshman, sophomore, junior year,
[9:17] Speaker 4: you're doing summer training, and they do a really good
[9:18] Speaker 4: job of exposing you to these different things. So a
[9:21] Speaker 4: little bit of time with pilots, a little bit of
[9:23] Speaker 4: time with most of it, a little bit of time
[9:24] Speaker 4: in tanks, a little bit of time with howitzers, so
[9:27] Speaker 4: you kind of get a little taste of what each
[9:29] Speaker 4: one of these jobs could be like. And then you
[9:32] Speaker 4: rank order at one through twenty, and the number one
[9:35] Speaker 4: person ranked in the class gets their number one choice
[9:38] Speaker 4: and then like that one comes off the list and
[9:40] Speaker 4: you just kind of moved down that my field artillery
[9:44] Speaker 4: is my first choice.
[9:45] Speaker 3: I was excited about that.
[9:46] Speaker 4: I wanted to be a fire support officer, and fortunately
[9:48] Speaker 4: there were always more field artillery slots than there were
[9:50] Speaker 4: people that wanted it at that time, so it was
[9:53] Speaker 4: an easy one for me to get. But things like
[9:56] Speaker 4: military intelligence, aviation, infantry actually was always you had to
[10:01] Speaker 4: be top half of the class to get infantry. Kind
[10:04] Speaker 4: of peak g Watt guys wanted to do that. Yeah,
[10:10] Speaker 4: so that was branch. You did branch in the fall,
[10:13] Speaker 4: and then post was in the spring. So I want
[10:17] Speaker 4: to say it was a round spring break and you
[10:19] Speaker 4: would get together with your branch. So I was with
[10:21] Speaker 4: all the field artillery guys. I think we're at the
[10:22] Speaker 4: football stadium.
[10:23] Speaker 3: I don't know.
[10:24] Speaker 4: They'd put you into a room and up on a
[10:26] Speaker 4: wall is every post and the number of slots at
[10:30] Speaker 4: that post. So I chose Fort Campbell. So they had
[10:33] Speaker 4: Fort Campbell and then you know, ten one hundred first
[10:36] Speaker 4: patches underneath it, and the same thing. They go top
[10:39] Speaker 4: to bottom class rank. Now by branch, they call out
[10:42] Speaker 4: your name, you walk up there and you grab your spot.
[10:44] Speaker 4: There was for field artillery one spot in Italy, two
[10:48] Speaker 4: spots in Hawaii, six spots in Germany. You know, all
[10:51] Speaker 4: the good spots are going fast, eight in Hawaii or whatever.
[10:54] Speaker 4: And Fort Hood. Anybody that wants to go to Fort
[10:57] Speaker 4: Hood could go to Fort Hood. Fort Polk was wide open,
[11:01] Speaker 4: but Campbell was. I wanted to go to Campbell. I
[11:04] Speaker 4: was Midwest and from the Midwest. Banner Brothers played a
[11:07] Speaker 4: big role in in my I was in high school
[11:11] Speaker 4: when that came out and like, Holy cow, was incredible.
[11:13] Speaker 4: So the idea of being a part of that organization
[11:16] Speaker 4: and yeah for Campbell was an option, so jumped on it.
[11:19] Speaker 2: Oh that's cool.
[11:20] Speaker 1: I'm so tell us about getting to your first unit
[11:25] Speaker 1: there as a first lieutenant and what that reception was like.
[11:30] Speaker 3: There wasn't one, and it was.
[11:31] Speaker 4: It was a great intro to the army too, because
[11:34] Speaker 4: they and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
[11:37] Speaker 3: I enjoyed the second Brigade Combat Team hundred first.
[11:40] Speaker 4: They were at JRTC when I showed up at Fort Campbell,
[11:44] Speaker 4: so they were in their deployment train up to go
[11:47] Speaker 4: to Afghanistan.
[11:48] Speaker 3: So I showed up and I don't know.
[11:51] Speaker 4: All the contacts that I had are in Louisiana and
[11:54] Speaker 4: don't have cell phone reception and they can't help me.
[11:56] Speaker 4: So I just have to find my way on post
[11:58] Speaker 4: and just start looking around at different signs and asking
[12:00] Speaker 4: random soldiers where am I.
[12:01] Speaker 3: Supposed to go? And most of them have no idea.
[12:04] Speaker 4: So I checked in with the rear Detachment Group and
[12:08] Speaker 4: didn't really do anything for the next two or three
[12:10] Speaker 4: weeks because the entire organization was prepping to go to war,
[12:16] Speaker 4: so it was it was kind of a weird intro.
[12:18] Speaker 4: And then when I did meet them, all these guys
[12:20] Speaker 4: came back just after this pretty tight bonding experience, and
[12:24] Speaker 4: those are until you go down range, those are your
[12:27] Speaker 4: war stories, what you do at a major training event
[12:30] Speaker 4: like that. So all the I'm outside for all the
[12:32] Speaker 4: inside jokes for a while. But I think it worked
[12:36] Speaker 4: out well because as soon as they got back, we
[12:38] Speaker 4: started packing containers. So I got all my gear and
[12:41] Speaker 4: immediately started loading up with these guys and got to
[12:44] Speaker 4: know them, of course very well, because then we're I
[12:46] Speaker 4: think a month or two later, on a bus to
[12:48] Speaker 4: the airfield and going down range them.
[12:52] Speaker 1: Do you want to explain for folks real quick what
[12:54] Speaker 1: the brigade combat teams were? Obviously you know more than
[12:57] Speaker 1: I do. I believe there was four of them eventually
[12:59] Speaker 1: in the hunt and first mm hmm.
[13:02] Speaker 4: It was a good concept. It changed around a bit.
[13:05] Speaker 4: I don't know when these first rolled out. By the
[13:07] Speaker 4: time I got there in nine they were standard, so
[13:12] Speaker 4: at least a couple of years prior. But the concept
[13:14] Speaker 4: was that these were individually deployable units, so Fort Campbell
[13:18] Speaker 4: would have we had four infantry brigade combat teams, but
[13:23] Speaker 4: then we had like some aviation and sustainment brigades things
[13:27] Speaker 4: like that. The second brigade combat team that I was
[13:30] Speaker 4: in had a field artillery battalion, two infantry battalions, a
[13:35] Speaker 4: cavalry battalion, and then a logistics and then a sustainment
[13:41] Speaker 4: support and logistics.
[13:42] Speaker 3: They kind of broke it out.
[13:43] Speaker 4: It was like a Special Troops which was military police
[13:45] Speaker 4: and intel, and then Sustainment, which was more logistics focused.
[13:49] Speaker 4: So like that brigade as a package could just go
[13:51] Speaker 4: commanded by a colonel and then they would they would
[13:55] Speaker 4: put that brigade in charge of a battle space, and
[13:57] Speaker 4: you had a lot of what you needed. You know,
[13:59] Speaker 4: we didn't have internal air support, no internal aviation helicopters
[14:04] Speaker 4: and anything like that, but for that type of fight,
[14:07] Speaker 4: I think it worked pretty well.
[14:09] Speaker 1: It was sort of the concept of like you know,
[14:11] Speaker 1: you can have a brigade that's green, yellow, and red, right,
[14:14] Speaker 1: you have like you know, the training cycles once deployed downrange,
[14:19] Speaker 1: ones in training at JRX or whatever the case may be,
[14:22] Speaker 1: and then one is like on leave doing admin stuff,
[14:25] Speaker 1: professional development schools, that sort of thing.
[14:28] Speaker 4: And we didn't really train side by side either, Like
[14:31] Speaker 4: we didn't really do division level training with like third
[14:34] Speaker 4: brigade over here in first I think probably to your point,
[14:37] Speaker 4: like because one of them would be in a rock
[14:39] Speaker 4: and the other one would be coming back from Afghanistan
[14:41] Speaker 4: and the other one would be like getting ready to go.
[14:43] Speaker 4: So it was built for that type of war where
[14:47] Speaker 4: you're kind of rapidly deploying small units.
[14:51] Speaker 1: And now let's tell take a second to tell folks
[14:54] Speaker 1: about what a field support or a fire support officer
[14:57] Speaker 1: and FSO does is. Again, I've limited exposure to this stuff,
[15:02] Speaker 1: but there's a lot of maths involved, you know, you
[15:06] Speaker 1: got there's a lot going on there, a lot of
[15:07] Speaker 1: things that you have to keep in your head.
[15:09] Speaker 2: At one time, I.
[15:11] Speaker 4: Loved it, man, That's the reason I wanted to go
[15:13] Speaker 4: field artillery. And it was risky because on the officer side,
[15:17] Speaker 4: So on the enlisted side, you can choose to be
[15:18] Speaker 4: a thirteen fox, that's your mos. You are a fister,
[15:22] Speaker 4: you are a fire supporter. If you want to be
[15:24] Speaker 4: on the guns, you can be a thirteen Bravo. And
[15:27] Speaker 4: they're like they're different specialties. Oh really, On the officer side,
[15:31] Speaker 4: you do all you're supposed to do all of them.
[15:33] Speaker 4: So you're either going to be on the guns as
[15:35] Speaker 4: a platoon leader, in the fire Direction Center, or forward
[15:38] Speaker 4: as a fire support officer. The FDC is all math,
[15:43] Speaker 4: and I'm not good at math, so that was terrifying.
[15:47] Speaker 4: But I got to be a fire support officer. So
[15:49] Speaker 4: my first first three years in the Army three and
[15:53] Speaker 4: a half years was all as either a company or
[15:56] Speaker 4: a battalion fire support officer.
[15:58] Speaker 3: And the job there at a at the.
[16:00] Speaker 4: Company level is as a second lieutenant. I had a
[16:03] Speaker 4: team of my team was three, but it could be
[16:06] Speaker 4: up to ten other artillery men that were ford observers.
[16:09] Speaker 3: We would we were a part of that.
[16:11] Speaker 4: Infantry company, so I was in Dog Company two five
[16:14] Speaker 4: oh two Infantry, and then it was my responsibility to
[16:17] Speaker 4: coordinate kind of all of the big things, so mortars, artillery, airstrikes,
[16:22] Speaker 4: close air support, helicopter gunships, apaches, kiowa's, things like that.
[16:28] Speaker 4: We were the ones then that was our responsibility, so
[16:31] Speaker 4: we would plan that ahead of time, we coordinate when
[16:34] Speaker 4: it was needed, and then the guys on the ground
[16:36] Speaker 4: could focus on just you know, not stepping on IDs
[16:39] Speaker 4: and watching out for the taliban ahead. So I loved
[16:43] Speaker 4: that job. It was It's a lot to keep in
[16:45] Speaker 4: your head because you're trying to figure out where you
[16:48] Speaker 4: are on the ground. Also like what aircraft is one
[16:51] Speaker 4: space over? And how how far away are those helicopters.
[16:53] Speaker 4: Should you call in mortars now or wait because the
[16:56] Speaker 4: helicopters are inbound.
[16:58] Speaker 3: It was good. It was stressful in a good way.
[17:01] Speaker 4: It felt like a lot of pressure and I'm sure
[17:03] Speaker 4: you've had probably dozens of guys at this point that
[17:06] Speaker 4: just kind of reiterate you just don't want to let
[17:08] Speaker 4: anybody down, so it kind of, yeah, it felt like
[17:12] Speaker 4: a pinch point. So it made me Folcus even harder.
[17:16] Speaker 4: I loved it. It was a favorite job.
[17:18] Speaker 1: Were at that time, were you guys still using the
[17:21] Speaker 1: big plotting boards or was it going digital?
[17:24] Speaker 4: They kind of so we were still learning that at
[17:29] Speaker 4: the schoolhouse. But then once you you know, it's that
[17:32] Speaker 4: dynamic of schoolhouse to the active army to deploy, and
[17:36] Speaker 4: at the schoolhouse they were still teaching it as like
[17:39] Speaker 4: you have to know how to do math without a
[17:40] Speaker 4: calculator kind of thing. But then once you get into
[17:43] Speaker 4: the field, like it was all digital at that point,
[17:46] Speaker 4: and it could be because it's Afghanistan and like they couldn't,
[17:50] Speaker 4: you know, stop us from using a little handheld device
[17:54] Speaker 4: to calculate this stuff.
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[19:18] Speaker 1: slash house. Thanks for supporting the show everyone. So, I
[19:24] Speaker 1: mean you kind of described the job there and you mentioned,
[19:27] Speaker 1: you know, you were just a month or two away
[19:28] Speaker 1: from deployment when you got to the unit. How did
[19:31] Speaker 1: the job differ from the way you were trained or
[19:34] Speaker 1: maybe what you were expecting versus what you found when
[19:37] Speaker 1: you got to overseas.
[19:40] Speaker 4: It was a lot more problem solving than I thought of.
[19:44] Speaker 4: Just you wake up and there's some issue and you
[19:47] Speaker 4: don't know what the issue is. You've never come across
[19:49] Speaker 4: it before, and you've got to piece it together and
[19:51] Speaker 4: just talk to the right people. And I don't know,
[19:54] Speaker 4: there's not really a way to prepare for that. The
[19:57] Speaker 4: schoolhouse is very this is exactly how things will go.
[20:00] Speaker 4: And I essentially went from the schoolhouse to a deployment
[20:03] Speaker 4: because that time in the active military was just packing containers.
[20:06] Speaker 4: I mean, we were it was that pre deployment period
[20:09] Speaker 4: where we had long weekend after long weekend. We weren't
[20:11] Speaker 4: going to the field, we weren't shooting. We were just
[20:13] Speaker 4: spend time with your family before we go. So it
[20:17] Speaker 4: was very regimented. Here's the process for planning fires, here's
[20:20] Speaker 4: how everything will be called in, and then you get
[20:23] Speaker 4: there and kind of find out it's different for the
[20:27] Speaker 4: for the better, Like it's more streamlined. They've removed all
[20:30] Speaker 4: of the things that are kind of unnecessary bulk. But
[20:33] Speaker 4: the big thing for me was just and I thought
[20:36] Speaker 4: it was a lot of fun as a fire support officer.
[20:39] Speaker 4: You know, I only had three guys that I was
[20:41] Speaker 4: directly in charge of, so I ended up kind of
[20:43] Speaker 4: working in the headquarters element. And it was just a constant,
[20:47] Speaker 4: constant new projects of things that happened, Like you move
[20:50] Speaker 4: into a new strong point and there's one hundred things
[20:53] Speaker 4: you've got to figure out to make it operational. And
[20:56] Speaker 4: it was a lot of that that And I haven't
[20:58] Speaker 4: found that anywhere but in the middle Harry, where you're
[21:00] Speaker 4: just constantly having to identify and solve problem after problem.
[21:05] Speaker 2: After problem, put out fires.
[21:08] Speaker 3: Yeah, constant.
[21:11] Speaker 2: So we're in Afghanistan. Did you get deployed.
[21:15] Speaker 4: So twenty ten to eleven was in Tsari District that
[21:18] Speaker 4: was in Kandahar Province, so the southern portion of the country,
[21:22] Speaker 4: and then in twenty twelve was in Logman, so up
[21:26] Speaker 4: in the east.
[21:28] Speaker 1: Okay, let's start off with the first one. You know,
[21:32] Speaker 1: where you guys were garrisoned and were you just supporting
[21:35] Speaker 1: your combat team or there are other units in that
[21:37] Speaker 1: ao that you were providing support for.
[21:40] Speaker 4: We were a We went down there as part of
[21:43] Speaker 4: the surge in twenty ten, so we ended up being
[21:47] Speaker 4: a brigade combat team. Plus Colonel Candarian Art Candarian was
[21:50] Speaker 4: our brigade commander and he I want to say we
[21:55] Speaker 4: had seven battalions, seven maneuver battalions or something like. We
[21:58] Speaker 4: just kept pulling more people in, so we really held
[22:03] Speaker 4: all of Kandahar when you went west of the city
[22:05] Speaker 4: from the outskirts of the city all the way over
[22:07] Speaker 4: to my to helmet was held by our brigade combat team.
[22:11] Speaker 4: So it was a big area, but it was falling
[22:14] Speaker 4: in on of it. So because it was a surge,
[22:16] Speaker 4: our brigade fell in on a battalion, so it was
[22:19] Speaker 4: a battalion's worth of infrastructure. Our companies went to platoon outposts.
[22:24] Speaker 4: Our battalion went to company outposts and just started building.
[22:28] Speaker 4: So there was a battalion brigade base there called Passab
[22:32] Speaker 4: or Bob Wilson. We were just a little ways down
[22:35] Speaker 4: the road at an old Canadian base called Housing Madad.
[22:39] Speaker 4: And then about pretty early in the deployment, we pushed
[22:42] Speaker 4: south into the Taliban area and started setting up these
[22:45] Speaker 4: strong points that we would live at for the duration
[22:48] Speaker 4: of the deployment. Little you know, take over house, put
[22:50] Speaker 4: some sandbags in the in the windows and roof and
[22:52] Speaker 4: call it home.
[22:53] Speaker 3: Kind of thing.
[22:54] Speaker 1: And I remember we interviewed not so long ago, maybe
[22:59] Speaker 1: they were hundred and first they were artillery guys, and
[23:04] Speaker 1: they packed our artillery went to Afghanistan. Never took them
[23:08] Speaker 1: out of the warehouse. They were basically used as infantry
[23:10] Speaker 1: the whole deployment. But I mean for you were bringing
[23:13] Speaker 1: were you bringing one to five to five's with you
[23:15] Speaker 1: out to these outposts?
[23:17] Speaker 3: No, but I think those artillery men might have been ours.
[23:20] Speaker 1: So the h the argandas argandaut Valley. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[23:26] Speaker 1: that was this deployment so oh no shit, Okay, that
[23:30] Speaker 1: was there's some pushback on that man because they that
[23:33] Speaker 1: was a serious fight, a very serious dismounted fight, and
[23:37] Speaker 1: our artillery were there doing it.
[23:39] Speaker 3: So while they were in that, we.
[23:42] Speaker 4: Had our first, second and cab battalions training to get
[23:46] Speaker 4: into the fight, like we weren't really doing anything yet,
[23:49] Speaker 4: and those boys were up there getting after it. Yeah,
[23:53] Speaker 4: and we moved. We moved some of our senior platoon
[23:57] Speaker 4: leaders up there. Our scout platoon leader went up there,
[24:00] Speaker 4: are some of our scouts went up there to try
[24:02] Speaker 4: to kind of backfill because yeah, it was an artillery
[24:05] Speaker 4: unit and like you know, your audience knows, like guys will,
[24:08] Speaker 4: they'll figure it out and they'll get the job done.
[24:10] Speaker 4: But that was a nasty fight and they were in
[24:13] Speaker 4: it right out the gate, so they did not bring
[24:16] Speaker 4: the howitzers out at all. We ended up being supported
[24:20] Speaker 4: by a unit that had triple sevens. But yeah, Top Guns,
[24:24] Speaker 4: that was no joke.
[24:25] Speaker 1: Yeah, those guys were in the shit. I mean some
[24:27] Speaker 1: of the stories they've told is like, oh my.
[24:29] Speaker 3: God, Yeah, it would have been nasty for anybody.
[24:33] Speaker 4: And you know, so when I came back, I went
[24:36] Speaker 4: to Top Guns for a couple of months before moving
[24:38] Speaker 4: back to the Battalion fso spot they're so proud of
[24:43] Speaker 4: what they did, and they should be, yeah, because it
[24:46] Speaker 4: was just a complete hodgepodge. Like one of the guys
[24:48] Speaker 4: that was one of the studs on the deployment was
[24:51] Speaker 4: a weatherman.
[24:52] Speaker 3: That was his job.
[24:53] Speaker 4: And an artillery unit, you have guys that tell the weather,
[24:55] Speaker 4: and he was a weatherman and he ended up being
[24:57] Speaker 4: like one of the most lethal, most effective plat in
[25:00] Speaker 4: sergeants they had in this close range like jungle fight almost.
[25:05] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like Vietnam War stuff.
[25:08] Speaker 1: Yeah, and so you get to where you're going and
[25:12] Speaker 1: set up your fire direction center and what was the
[25:15] Speaker 1: unit actually providing the guns for you?
[25:17] Speaker 4: Again, So we had a unit out of Germany to too,
[25:22] Speaker 4: I want to say, the second Battalion, second Striker. Yeah,
[25:29] Speaker 4: we had striker support out of a couple different bases
[25:31] Speaker 4: and they put their howitzers there and we didn't fire
[25:34] Speaker 4: a lot of one five fives though we had battalion mortars.
[25:37] Speaker 4: And then again because it was a surge, we had
[25:39] Speaker 4: so much air support. Yeah, I mean, and it was
[25:42] Speaker 4: just look, that's easy for us. It's probably easier for everybody,
[25:47] Speaker 4: especially when it's helicopters like you see that thing, Yeah,
[25:50] Speaker 4: that's the bad guy and they do it like. So
[25:54] Speaker 4: we did fire a fair amount of mortars, a little
[25:57] Speaker 4: bit of one five to five, but for the most part,
[26:00] Speaker 4: it was just having those helicopters over day and night.
[26:05] Speaker 1: Any other I mean you mentioned putting out fires, but
[26:07] Speaker 1: with any other big challenges that came up during that
[26:09] Speaker 1: deployment for you could be you know, leadership challenges or
[26:13] Speaker 1: combat challenges or whatever came across your desk, so to speak.
[26:19] Speaker 4: Yeah, I was a new second lieutenant and our first
[26:24] Speaker 4: big fight I wasn't a part of at all. It
[26:27] Speaker 4: wasn't supposed to be a fight, probably how it normally goes,
[26:30] Speaker 4: and our guys were just rolling out to do a
[26:31] Speaker 4: quick battle damage assessment and you know, seven hours later
[26:34] Speaker 4: and black on AMMO and all that nonsense.
[26:38] Speaker 3: And it was a small element.
[26:40] Speaker 4: So I was back in the command post, and it's
[26:43] Speaker 4: an important job to be moving those resources and relaying
[26:47] Speaker 4: information and all of that, and it has to happen.
[26:50] Speaker 4: But I felt sick to my stomach, like is this
[26:52] Speaker 4: what I'm going to be doing while these guys are
[26:55] Speaker 4: out there, the guys that I'm with, the guys that
[26:57] Speaker 4: I want to help. It did not end up being
[27:01] Speaker 4: like that the entire time, but it was kind of
[27:03] Speaker 4: a It was a learning curve to recognize, like, especially
[27:09] Speaker 4: as an officer, your job is not going to be
[27:11] Speaker 4: very sexy a lot of times. Like the most I
[27:15] Speaker 4: had three studs for fire supporters and we had three
[27:18] Speaker 4: maneuver platoons. They went with the platoons like that was
[27:23] Speaker 4: their job. They were good, that's what they were supposed
[27:25] Speaker 4: to do. My job was to be back a little
[27:27] Speaker 4: bit and helped kind of sift through the assets to
[27:29] Speaker 4: give them what they needed when they needed it. And
[27:34] Speaker 4: you know, you're not out there getting the cool pictures,
[27:36] Speaker 4: and I mean with the cool pictures come dodging IDs
[27:39] Speaker 4: and gunfire. But that was a that was a tough
[27:43] Speaker 4: one to navigate recognizing that my job, my role was
[27:50] Speaker 4: to be more often than not back, not forward.
[27:54] Speaker 2: That's a really stressful, isn't it.
[27:56] Speaker 1: I think I think people on the outside kind of
[27:59] Speaker 1: underestimate how stressful it is for someone like what you
[28:04] Speaker 1: were doing at the fire support center or fire direction center,
[28:07] Speaker 1: i should say, or even people who are like intelligence
[28:10] Speaker 1: analysts and things like this, that they have to get
[28:14] Speaker 1: it right and if something goes wrong and somebody gets hurt.
[28:17] Speaker 1: The first thought is, oh, my god, that's my fault.
[28:19] Speaker 1: I missed something, I didn't do something, which is not
[28:23] Speaker 1: usually the case, of course, but there's this tremendous internal
[28:26] Speaker 1: pressure that folks put on themselves because the stakes are
[28:29] Speaker 1: so high.
[28:31] Speaker 4: Yeah, and we had a first sergeant who just pinned
[28:35] Speaker 4: and he I think he I don't remember if he
[28:37] Speaker 4: came from regiment or if he was maybe doing some instructing,
[28:41] Speaker 4: but maybe he was at the schoolhouse. But anyways, great,
[28:44] Speaker 4: great guy for starting. Eric Allen was his name, and
[28:47] Speaker 4: he showed up and wanted to be on every patrol.
[28:51] Speaker 4: And as a first sergeant, you're not supposed to be right.
[28:54] Speaker 4: There's so many other things that only he can be doing.
[28:56] Speaker 4: But he just kind of said, screw that, I'm a
[28:58] Speaker 4: first arget, I'm to do it I want and would
[28:59] Speaker 4: go on like squad level patrols because he wanted to
[29:02] Speaker 4: be out there with the guys. I never felt like
[29:06] Speaker 4: I could do that as I get a second lieutenant
[29:09] Speaker 4: until towards the end of the deployment, but it did. Yeah,
[29:15] Speaker 4: I think I navigate. Everybody's on good terms in the unit.
[29:18] Speaker 4: We all loved each other so I think we it was.
[29:21] Speaker 4: It was probably more in my head than anything else.
[29:23] Speaker 4: I doubt any of the soldiers were like that, Stuart
[29:25] Speaker 4: Chump won't go won't you know, he's not going out
[29:28] Speaker 4: as much as we are, because like, I'm not even close, man,
[29:31] Speaker 4: not even close. These teams and squads were doing two
[29:33] Speaker 4: or three patrols a day. I was doing two a week.
[29:38] Speaker 3: Yeah. That was a weird little demon to battle throughout.
[29:42] Speaker 1: And that changed a little bit towards the end. You
[29:44] Speaker 1: said you started getting outside the wire a bit more.
[29:48] Speaker 4: Yeah, we wrapped up the deployment with a fair number
[29:51] Speaker 4: now to be to be fair, our our outpost was
[29:54] Speaker 4: like a mud hut that took fire almost every day,
[29:57] Speaker 4: so you know, it wasn't like living on an airfield
[30:00] Speaker 4: air conditioning or something. But I wasn't out doing the
[30:05] Speaker 4: movement to contact that a lot of our our studs
[30:07] Speaker 4: were doing. So at the end of the deployment, we
[30:11] Speaker 4: spent the last like sixty days doing aerosaults across southern Afghanistan,
[30:15] Speaker 4: and it was kind of this like mop up idea
[30:19] Speaker 4: with RC South where some special operations team would go
[30:24] Speaker 4: in and just kind of kick the hornet's nest for
[30:26] Speaker 4: six to nine hours, and then right before the sun
[30:29] Speaker 4: came up we'd come in and so like now there's
[30:34] Speaker 4: a massive, like a battalion size presence in that area
[30:37] Speaker 4: where this raid took place. The night before we'd stay
[30:40] Speaker 4: for forty eight hours and then in then X film,
[30:43] Speaker 4: So for that everybody was there, all hands on deck.
[30:46] Speaker 3: So yeah, by the end was going out more.
[30:52] Speaker 4: But again it wasn't even maybe I've just felt more
[30:55] Speaker 4: comfortable with it at that point, like recognizing it's stupid,
[30:59] Speaker 4: did you you know, you get shot at, you dodge
[31:02] Speaker 4: a couple IDs, Like what do you need?
[31:04] Speaker 3: What are you trying to? What am I trying to
[31:07] Speaker 3: prove to these guys? Right?
[31:08] Speaker 1: Like yeah, yeah, you know it's like, uh, you know,
[31:13] Speaker 1: I heard a quote from a film director recently and
[31:15] Speaker 1: he was saying something like, unless you're Ridley Scott, everyone
[31:19] Speaker 1: else working on this film knows more about filmmaking than
[31:22] Speaker 1: you do, because you're just a director that comes in
[31:24] Speaker 1: every couple of years and makes a movie. I mean,
[31:26] Speaker 1: it's kind of kind of the case being an officer
[31:28] Speaker 1: that you're there for a couple of years and these
[31:30] Speaker 1: NCOs that have been there for such a long time.
[31:33] Speaker 1: You know, you really have to rely on that on
[31:35] Speaker 1: that experience.
[31:37] Speaker 3: We had a great team.
[31:39] Speaker 4: I yeah, across the board, just awesome guys that were
[31:43] Speaker 4: I mean I got the normal picking on as a
[31:45] Speaker 4: second lieutenant, as one should and as you should expect,
[31:49] Speaker 4: but in a good way where all of them were.
[31:52] Speaker 3: We had a small company.
[31:53] Speaker 4: It was an anti tank company, so we were about
[31:56] Speaker 4: seventy or eighty soldiers all in and across the board
[32:00] Speaker 4: the NCOs are just awesome, like they what can we do?
[32:04] Speaker 3: How can we help? Yeah, that's that's the team.
[32:08] Speaker 2: Loads of combat experience in that unit too.
[32:10] Speaker 3: Oh Jesus.
[32:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, And it sounds like towards the end there you
[32:14] Speaker 1: were actually doing some like really classic one hundred and
[32:16] Speaker 1: first air mobile operations.
[32:19] Speaker 4: Yeah, that was that was nerve wracking because you you
[32:22] Speaker 4: make it through an entire deployment, right and you're like,
[32:24] Speaker 4: now it's time.
[32:25] Speaker 3: Now we're going home like one of them.
[32:27] Speaker 4: Now we're just gonna bounce you all around the AO
[32:29] Speaker 4: and uh and good luck out there. So you finally
[32:32] Speaker 4: get used to like, you know, don't go by that
[32:35] Speaker 4: house and that road is bad news, and this tree
[32:37] Speaker 4: line is where they shoot from to completely new areas welcome,
[32:43] Speaker 4: So that was interesting. We I think we did four missions.
[32:47] Speaker 4: It was a cool experience because we had they moved
[32:50] Speaker 4: us out of an operating AO. We were off on
[32:52] Speaker 4: the side a place called fob Ramrod out out west
[32:55] Speaker 4: of Ways and our only job there was to plan
[32:59] Speaker 4: for these missions. And there are usually two company missions,
[33:02] Speaker 4: so we would I mean, it was vary by the book,
[33:05] Speaker 4: like we get the Warnoh, we'd have three or four
[33:07] Speaker 4: days to start prepping. You'd be coordinating with the other units.
[33:10] Speaker 4: We'd have full on sand table rehearsals, like big ass
[33:13] Speaker 4: sand tables.
[33:15] Speaker 3: Yeah, it was. It was cool to be a part
[33:18] Speaker 3: of that.
[33:18] Speaker 4: It was overall pretty uneventful, but as uneventful as like,
[33:25] Speaker 4: you know, they're dropping bombs on the LZ or when
[33:29] Speaker 4: we're coming in so they can clear it from any
[33:30] Speaker 4: IDs and you're you're landing in the middle of the
[33:32] Speaker 4: night on top of that, so as uneventful as that
[33:34] Speaker 4: can be.
[33:35] Speaker 1: It was how many birds does it take to get
[33:38] Speaker 1: that many soldiers in the air?
[33:41] Speaker 3: Oh gosh, let's see.
[33:44] Speaker 4: So we we had we were doing that with our
[33:47] Speaker 4: ACAN partners because everything was partner at that point, but
[33:50] Speaker 4: they were probably about fifty percent our strength. So if
[33:53] Speaker 4: our company was seventy. There may be worth thirty of them.
[33:58] Speaker 4: We were packing those shinnooks pretty tight. Dudes on the ground. God,
[34:03] Speaker 4: I'll bet it was probably there's probably four birds for
[34:06] Speaker 4: our company and we were a smaller company.
[34:11] Speaker 3: They were.
[34:11] Speaker 4: Basically what they were doing is they would they would
[34:14] Speaker 4: shuttle us to a nearby base and you'd get off
[34:18] Speaker 4: and you'd sit on that airfield and then they do
[34:20] Speaker 4: runs in and out. So it wasn't like so it
[34:24] Speaker 4: wasn't like sixty birds in the sky or gotcha.
[34:26] Speaker 2: Gotch.
[34:28] Speaker 3: But yeah, it was a lot.
[34:31] Speaker 2: I bet so.
[34:33] Speaker 1: So you wrap up that deployment and then you're going
[34:38] Speaker 1: back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Yeah, and now you're going
[34:42] Speaker 1: through the full like scope of training, you know, to
[34:46] Speaker 1: get ready for the next deployment.
[34:49] Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of.
[34:51] Speaker 4: We we this was during the period and you don't
[34:54] Speaker 4: like the hundred and first where you kind of know
[34:56] Speaker 4: and your next deployment is before you're even.
[34:57] Speaker 3: Home for better or for worse.
[34:59] Speaker 4: And and we got tapped to you back in about
[35:02] Speaker 4: eleven months, so we had kind of a modified train
[35:05] Speaker 4: up period. So as soon as we hit the ground
[35:07] Speaker 4: back home, it was starting to look towards that different,
[35:12] Speaker 4: different mission set more of the advising we were tied
[35:15] Speaker 4: into a I was advising like a brigade level officer
[35:19] Speaker 4: on artillery and we only deployed a very small contingent
[35:22] Speaker 4: to do that. But yeah, I mean before we even
[35:25] Speaker 4: got back home, they were talking about you're ready, You're
[35:29] Speaker 4: ready to come on back.
[35:31] Speaker 2: What was that training cycle like for you?
[35:36] Speaker 3: That was tough for me.
[35:39] Speaker 4: I was my first deployment that uh and and towards
[35:43] Speaker 4: the end of it, you start to recognize how much
[35:45] Speaker 4: of it is luck and like the soldiers, the super
[35:50] Speaker 4: soldiers that are stronger, faster, smarter than me, and like
[35:54] Speaker 4: they're they're better than me in every way that stepped
[35:58] Speaker 4: on an id for some reason, that like you know,
[36:03] Speaker 4: that type of stuff that start for me, that that
[36:06] Speaker 4: started to settle in towards the end of the deployment
[36:08] Speaker 4: of just how many lucky steps people took, or how
[36:11] Speaker 4: many times you step on a bomb it doesn't go off.
[36:16] Speaker 4: So I was still kind of processing through that when
[36:18] Speaker 4: we got tapped to go back, and I just had
[36:21] Speaker 4: a real nasty lapse of like how.
[36:24] Speaker 3: Many times you're gonna roll those dice? Man? You can
[36:26] Speaker 3: do it?
[36:27] Speaker 4: For you know, there's probably not not too many times
[36:29] Speaker 4: you want to go down that path. So I that
[36:33] Speaker 4: that period of time was a lot of a lot
[36:36] Speaker 4: of drinking, a lot of.
[36:40] Speaker 3: A lot of eating. Got got pretty big.
[36:42] Speaker 4: You'd think that it would be all about, like, now
[36:44] Speaker 4: that I know what it's like, train, get ready, get
[36:46] Speaker 4: back of the fight. I kind of took the other
[36:48] Speaker 4: approach of I don't know if I'll make it back,
[36:51] Speaker 4: so I'm just gonna enjoy life for the next nine months.
[36:57] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[36:57] Speaker 3: Not ideal, but it was.
[37:00] Speaker 4: It was a different deployment and it was mostly in
[37:01] Speaker 4: an office, so maybe I willed.
[37:04] Speaker 1: That well, yeah, thank god, you know, you're like in
[37:06] Speaker 1: your twenties and your body can handle it.
[37:11] Speaker 3: Yeah it Sorry cut off a little bit there.
[37:15] Speaker 1: Oh, I was just saying, well, thankfully you're in your
[37:17] Speaker 1: twenties at this point and your body can handle all that.
[37:21] Speaker 3: Yeah it could Papa John's every night, dude.
[37:24] Speaker 4: If there's you know, a twelve pack and Papa John's,
[37:26] Speaker 4: and if there's every time to like dial it in
[37:29] Speaker 4: and lose weight, it's it's on unemployment. So oh man, yeah,
[37:32] Speaker 4: I got I was in great shape by the time
[37:34] Speaker 4: that next one wrapped up. But the train up was
[37:37] Speaker 4: it was good as fast and furious. We all kind
[37:41] Speaker 4: of expected something different. It was being pitched as this
[37:44] Speaker 4: was the beginning of the s FAT teams going to
[37:47] Speaker 4: Afghanistan and twenty twelve, and it was being presented as
[37:54] Speaker 4: like Special Forces Light. So the guys kind of took
[37:59] Speaker 4: that mind of like we're gonna be out in the boonies,
[38:02] Speaker 4: you know, kind of running offs with these Afghan commandos,
[38:07] Speaker 4: and like it wasn't quite that, or at least at
[38:09] Speaker 4: our level. I was on a battalion staff, so we
[38:11] Speaker 4: were on a major base talking about logistics and showing
[38:15] Speaker 4: up to work with Afghan officers.
[38:19] Speaker 1: So, yeah, where precisely in Afghanistan did you get deployed
[38:22] Speaker 1: the second time around?
[38:25] Speaker 3: Bob Gamberry and logman province?
[38:27] Speaker 1: Okay, and you said, now this is very much like
[38:31] Speaker 1: you know, making that transition. Our Afghan partners need to
[38:34] Speaker 1: stand up and start standing on their own two feet.
[38:38] Speaker 1: And you got paired up, I believe you said, with
[38:40] Speaker 1: a Afghan fire support officer that worked at a brigade level.
[38:47] Speaker 4: Yeah, that was a weird one man. I in retrospect,
[38:51] Speaker 4: this is where I again I deployed. This time I
[38:54] Speaker 4: was a first lieutenant when I went over, so you're
[38:56] Speaker 4: still learning everything. But we started writing our end of
[39:02] Speaker 4: Tour awards the first month we were there, and just
[39:06] Speaker 4: because of the time I guess it takes to get
[39:09] Speaker 4: that approved, So our end of Tour awards, we were
[39:12] Speaker 4: writing about all of the successes that we had had,
[39:15] Speaker 4: and it was just this surreal feeling of like what
[39:19] Speaker 4: are we doing If we're writing up our successes before
[39:22] Speaker 4: we even start, it feels like this is just made up?
[39:25] Speaker 3: Or what's what is this game? Again?
[39:28] Speaker 4: In retrospect, you know, I think that was probably how
[39:32] Speaker 4: a lot of that, a lot of that war actually went.
[39:36] Speaker 4: But yeah, not to go down that rabbit hole.
[39:39] Speaker 3: It was.
[39:40] Speaker 4: It was coaching and training for me. Our battalion trained
[39:44] Speaker 4: in Afghan brigade, so it was just like a battalion
[39:47] Speaker 4: staff minus. I think there were fifteen of us on
[39:50] Speaker 4: the team. I was the fires guys who brought over
[39:52] Speaker 4: as two S three at our signal all of that commander,
[39:57] Speaker 4: sergeant major, and then I helped them stand up. We
[40:02] Speaker 4: fielded D thirty howitzers and they stood those up and
[40:07] Speaker 4: trained their guys and using artillery. So which is you know,
[40:13] Speaker 4: which was a wild run, but that was the job
[40:15] Speaker 4: that year.
[40:15] Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to ask you, like, how does
[40:17] Speaker 1: that go? What artillery is even organic to the Afghan
[40:20] Speaker 1: Army at this point, and how did it go for you?
[40:23] Speaker 1: Trying to get this capability stood up.
[40:27] Speaker 3: It was a unique experience.
[40:28] Speaker 4: Many they so the d thirties, it's the old Russian
[40:32] Speaker 4: howitzer they're getting blown up in Ukraine left and right now.
[40:35] Speaker 4: So it's one hundred and twenty two millimeter toad howitzer.
[40:39] Speaker 4: And they didn't have a lot of them. They most
[40:43] Speaker 4: Afghan units and kandas did not or cores did not
[40:47] Speaker 4: start with artillery.
[40:48] Speaker 3: We kind of ruled it out to them.
[40:50] Speaker 4: We did the training there at Gamberry because we had
[40:52] Speaker 4: a pretty big open area to conduct it.
[40:55] Speaker 3: But it was it was tricky. I mean, they could
[40:57] Speaker 3: learn it.
[40:58] Speaker 4: The big challenges we had that were didn't really see
[41:03] Speaker 4: coming is the concept of indirect fire was very challenging
[41:08] Speaker 4: to get across, like you can't see to try to
[41:12] Speaker 4: explain to the gunner that you're not going to see
[41:14] Speaker 4: the target and explain to the Ford observer that you're.
[41:17] Speaker 3: Not going to see the gun.
[41:19] Speaker 4: We had a very very hard time getting that to
[41:22] Speaker 4: really mesh, and most of the time by the time
[41:26] Speaker 4: we left, they were using them in direct fire and
[41:28] Speaker 4: just slinging arounds into the sides of hills.
[41:30] Speaker 2: When you say direct fire, you mean like line of sight,
[41:32] Speaker 2: not actually.
[41:33] Speaker 3: Line of sight. Yeah, yeah, like looking looking over the barrel.
[41:37] Speaker 4: They're going to go right and it you know, it
[41:40] Speaker 4: does work in some areas of eastern Afghanistan because of
[41:42] Speaker 4: those mountains and where some of the bases are located.
[41:46] Speaker 4: That was a big challenge. And then, like any with
[41:49] Speaker 4: any Afghan unit or any unit, we had guys that
[41:52] Speaker 4: were great and very focused and spent a lot of
[41:54] Speaker 4: time digging into the weeds, and then others that just
[41:56] Speaker 4: didn't want to be there at all. So of course
[41:58] Speaker 4: navigating that, but when it came time to actually deploy
[42:01] Speaker 4: the systems, that too ended up being something that was
[42:04] Speaker 4: just hard to anticipate. We're looking at like where are
[42:08] Speaker 4: the hotspots, where do you have the most you know,
[42:11] Speaker 4: the most fields of fire, where you could utilize this
[42:14] Speaker 4: weapon system, and where could you support the most of
[42:17] Speaker 4: your maneuver elements across the AO. And they only wanted
[42:21] Speaker 4: the howitzers in the most populated city center because they
[42:25] Speaker 4: wanted to show it off that they had howitzers, So like,
[42:28] Speaker 4: what good is a howitzer? If I got to put
[42:29] Speaker 4: it out there at a cop in the middle of
[42:31] Speaker 4: the mountain, then nobody's gonna see.
[42:35] Speaker 1: You know, it's this isn't like an interesting thing, and that,
[42:38] Speaker 1: you know, when you're dealing with people in a country
[42:41] Speaker 1: black Afghanistan, they're surprisingly very mechanically inclined to actually like
[42:48] Speaker 1: the stuff they can do to like Jerry rig a
[42:51] Speaker 1: Toyota high locks and keep it going to get those
[42:55] Speaker 1: vehicles unstuck. And they're good drivers too. They know how
[42:58] Speaker 1: to drive those things around the mountains. They know what
[43:00] Speaker 1: they're doing. But then when it comes to something that's
[43:02] Speaker 1: like a little bit more abstract, like you were saying,
[43:05] Speaker 1: just the concept of you know, having a uh, what's
[43:10] Speaker 1: the term I'm looking for field, like the call for
[43:16] Speaker 1: fire dude, you know, who can't see the actual mortar pit.
[43:20] Speaker 1: It's sort of a more abstract concept like that. It
[43:23] Speaker 1: is just something that's hard for them to grasp.
[43:26] Speaker 4: I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but we
[43:28] Speaker 4: had a stretch where they would shoot through bushes or
[43:34] Speaker 4: and we would have to be like, guys, we are
[43:36] Speaker 4: on the other side of those bushes. You can't shoot
[43:38] Speaker 4: through that. Like they would hear a crack crack crack
[43:41] Speaker 4: in the distance and and spin and start shooting, and
[43:44] Speaker 4: we have to explain like the bullets just because you
[43:46] Speaker 4: can't see what's over there, Like the bullets are going
[43:48] Speaker 4: straight through that stuff, man. And it was the same
[43:51] Speaker 4: thing of like, I feel like this should be landing.
[43:53] Speaker 1: It's not landing, right, Yeah, yeah, there's something that's not
[43:57] Speaker 1: a connection that's not really being made there.
[44:00] Speaker 4: And to be fair though, like I'm generalizing, and we
[44:03] Speaker 4: had awesome Afghans doing really really incredible work and plenty
[44:06] Speaker 4: that did understand the nuances of like indirect fire and
[44:09] Speaker 4: to not shoot at bushes when your friends are on
[44:11] Speaker 4: the other side. But there were always a couple where
[44:15] Speaker 4: it was like, wait a minute, I feel like we
[44:17] Speaker 4: should have this under control.
[44:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean yeah, so you need to keep
[44:20] Speaker 1: in mind that every American soldier has a high school
[44:22] Speaker 1: diploma or a GED at least people in Afghanistan have
[44:27] Speaker 1: not had that benefit.
[44:28] Speaker 2: So it is what it is.
[44:30] Speaker 1: When you're trying to teach complex topics, sometimes you're just
[44:33] Speaker 1: not going to get through to everybody.
[44:36] Speaker 3: Yeah, good people.
[44:38] Speaker 1: Though, Yeah, Well, so how did kind of that deployment
[44:43] Speaker 1: like wind down for you as you got to the
[44:45] Speaker 1: end of it. Did you feel that they at least
[44:47] Speaker 1: had a pretty good starting point when it came to
[44:50] Speaker 1: field artillery.
[44:52] Speaker 3: Yeah, that was tough.
[44:53] Speaker 4: That was so when you're My first deployment, we were
[44:57] Speaker 4: with a company of Afghans and they were out there,
[45:00] Speaker 4: you know, we had like one Afghan officer and they
[45:01] Speaker 4: were out there like getting in fights with the Taliban,
[45:04] Speaker 4: and we could we heard stories of the corruption and
[45:07] Speaker 4: the problems up the chain of command, but really weren't
[45:09] Speaker 4: exposed to it at all. This second deployment, we were
[45:12] Speaker 4: at the brigade headquarters, so we got to see a
[45:17] Speaker 4: lot of the kind of inner workings and it just
[45:20] Speaker 4: wasn't working very well. It seemed like they were doing
[45:24] Speaker 4: things for us, if that makes sense, like checking the
[45:28] Speaker 4: box while we're there, and if we weren't showing up,
[45:30] Speaker 4: then they weren't showing up. It wasn't a very optimistic
[45:33] Speaker 4: feeling leaving because it was you know, about a year
[45:38] Speaker 4: about a year and a half apart from when I
[45:39] Speaker 4: left the first time for the second time, and in
[45:41] Speaker 4: both cases it was I don't think they can do
[45:43] Speaker 4: this on their own yet, and it's just a little
[45:46] Speaker 4: bit nerve wracking of how long is it going to
[45:49] Speaker 4: take until they can. But on the on the personal side,
[45:53] Speaker 4: I was I was planning on exiting the military after that.
[45:57] Speaker 4: I made the decision to leave active duty. So coming home,
[46:00] Speaker 4: I had about a year and a half left on
[46:01] Speaker 4: my active obligation and that was kind of the kind
[46:05] Speaker 4: of the focus as that deployment wrapped up.
[46:07] Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, someone told me a while back about how
[46:11] Speaker 1: they tried to teach the Afghans to fly drones at
[46:14] Speaker 1: one point, and I believe it may have been scan
[46:17] Speaker 1: Eagal and that went hysterically as I understand it, meaning
[46:23] Speaker 1: not at all basically, So, yeah, there are limits. But
[46:28] Speaker 1: you get home from this deployment and you have a
[46:31] Speaker 1: year and a half left, how did you kind of
[46:33] Speaker 1: finish out your time on active duty?
[46:36] Speaker 4: I was in a planning shop, so I went back
[46:38] Speaker 4: to the top guns and you kind of within a BCT,
[46:42] Speaker 4: you kind of move as an artillery ven you move
[46:43] Speaker 4: between roles and kind of always come back to the
[46:46] Speaker 4: mothership that is artillery. And I was a assistant S three.
[46:51] Speaker 4: I pinned Captain right about the time we got back,
[46:54] Speaker 4: and then just they were they were one hundred first,
[46:58] Speaker 4: they were getting ready to go back again, so they
[47:00] Speaker 4: started their train up, and my time then was focused
[47:03] Speaker 4: on kind of facilitating that train up. I was the
[47:07] Speaker 4: kind of a unique role because you're there, but you're
[47:09] Speaker 4: not going, so I could help kind of move things
[47:11] Speaker 4: behind the scenes and and get things going for all
[47:13] Speaker 4: the guys that would actually go back down range. So
[47:17] Speaker 4: then it was kind of an uneventful end to my
[47:20] Speaker 4: active career because they were all gone, they were down
[47:22] Speaker 4: range or in the process, and I just you know,
[47:25] Speaker 4: went to work on Tuesday and didn't go to work
[47:27] Speaker 4: on Wednesday kind of thing.
[47:30] Speaker 1: And describe for us kind of like how that transition
[47:33] Speaker 1: process was for you.
[47:36] Speaker 3: It was weird. I you don't know. What you don't
[47:40] Speaker 3: know is the first job I'd ever had.
[47:41] Speaker 4: I mean I had high school jobs, but trying to
[47:43] Speaker 4: move back into the civilian workforce and not really knowing
[47:49] Speaker 4: what I should be looking for, not trying to trying
[47:52] Speaker 4: to the nightmare of moving your military service onto like
[47:55] Speaker 4: a civilian resume and looking at it and be like
[47:57] Speaker 4: what the hell is this? Like it doesn't make doesn't
[48:01] Speaker 4: make sense anymore, And you want to be proud of
[48:03] Speaker 4: the things that you did. I remember my first resume
[48:05] Speaker 4: write up was talking about like number of fire missions
[48:07] Speaker 4: we called in southern Afghanistan, Like that was awesome. Man,
[48:10] Speaker 4: It's like the most in the entire brigade. That's such
[48:12] Speaker 4: a cool thing. Means nothing, of course, it means nothing
[48:15] Speaker 4: to anyone else, So that was tough. I ended up
[48:19] Speaker 4: my wife was finishing up medical school or then fiance
[48:23] Speaker 4: in Michigan, so we went up there and I took
[48:27] Speaker 4: a job that because it was available at Northwestern Mutual.
[48:31] Speaker 4: I thought it was going to be like financial advisor
[48:34] Speaker 4: type stuff, and it was just selling insurance. And I
[48:36] Speaker 4: was miserable from about the first hour. So we the
[48:40] Speaker 4: pretty again. You're coming out, You're like, I don't I
[48:43] Speaker 4: don't know what I'm going to like to do. It's
[48:48] Speaker 4: between the Army and West Point getting ready for the Army.
[48:51] Speaker 4: You know, it's been ten years at this point, So
[48:55] Speaker 4: just kind of kept trying and eventually found a good job.
[48:59] Speaker 4: Former army guy set up a software company in Chicago,
[49:02] Speaker 4: and I was I worked with them for a couple
[49:03] Speaker 4: of years.
[49:04] Speaker 3: Just more I don't know. It's tough because you don't
[49:08] Speaker 3: know what you're looking for.
[49:09] Speaker 4: You don't know what the thing is, you don't know
[49:11] Speaker 4: where you'll fit, and you don't know what'll like make
[49:13] Speaker 4: you happy or at least personally.
[49:16] Speaker 3: That was something I struggle.
[49:17] Speaker 1: With, Uh, what kind of software company was this that
[49:22] Speaker 1: you know, kind of got you doing something interesting again,
[49:24] Speaker 1: something you enjoyed it was.
[49:26] Speaker 3: It was called Configure one.
[49:28] Speaker 4: They ended up being a part of Autodesk, but it
[49:30] Speaker 4: was the software is boring, and I'm not very technologically inclined,
[49:35] Speaker 4: but it was right back to the same role of
[49:37] Speaker 4: just putting out fires and figuring out projects left and right.
[49:39] Speaker 4: So every day was different and I go in and
[49:41] Speaker 4: there just be something to sort out. The boss there again,
[49:46] Speaker 4: old army guy. I loved it because he would just
[49:50] Speaker 4: he would just this one's on you, Hey, can you
[49:52] Speaker 4: figure this out? Yep, let me know what it's done,
[49:55] Speaker 4: and just delegated, delegated, delegated, And it was a a
[50:00] Speaker 4: breath of fresh air to be able to just kind
[50:03] Speaker 4: of get after stuff again.
[50:03] Speaker 3: He felt trusted.
[50:04] Speaker 4: That's another you know, it's random when you get out
[50:07] Speaker 4: is think about how much trust you know a captain
[50:10] Speaker 4: in a battalion has and you go from that to
[50:13] Speaker 4: people that are like, we can't we don't know, you
[50:15] Speaker 4: can't do anything, or you know you might be you
[50:17] Speaker 4: can't be in charge of anybody for the next five
[50:19] Speaker 4: to ten years until you've done this. And I get it,
[50:22] Speaker 4: but it's just for everybody. I'm using myself as the example,
[50:25] Speaker 4: but for everybody coming out of the military.
[50:26] Speaker 3: That's tough.
[50:28] Speaker 1: Yeah, when you talk about the insurance company, it's funny
[50:31] Speaker 1: because when I got out of the Army, the first
[50:33] Speaker 1: job I applied for was to be a pizza delivery man.
[50:36] Speaker 1: They said, you're not You're not qualified. The second job
[50:40] Speaker 1: I went for was insurance salesman. And yeah, yeah, that
[50:45] Speaker 1: first hour, Yeah, I went in there and did the
[50:47] Speaker 1: little intro thing. I was like, see you later, guys,
[50:51] Speaker 1: I'm not doing this. Yeah, it is. You bounce around
[50:55] Speaker 1: a little bit looking for Yeah, what are you going
[50:59] Speaker 1: to feel passionate out? And of course what's going to
[51:01] Speaker 1: pay the bills? You know, ideally you can check both
[51:03] Speaker 1: those blocks.
[51:05] Speaker 4: And you don't know when you're in the when I
[51:07] Speaker 4: was not actively searching for a job. My entire time
[51:10] Speaker 4: at West Point was not searching for a job when
[51:12] Speaker 4: I was in the Army, So I don't really know
[51:13] Speaker 4: what the opportunities are that are out there or aren't
[51:16] Speaker 4: when they're out there, or that did yeah, right, networking
[51:21] Speaker 4: is what everyone says, just networks, Like I'm trying the network.
[51:23] Speaker 4: I feel like I have a decent network.
[51:25] Speaker 2: I don't know.
[51:27] Speaker 3: Yeah, isn't it. That's it right? But that was tough.
[51:31] Speaker 4: I ended up coming back into the National Guard at
[51:34] Speaker 4: one point because I couldn't figure out. It was a
[51:37] Speaker 4: combination of like, I don't feel anything. I'm not excited
[51:41] Speaker 4: to like to be blunt, like not excited to get
[51:43] Speaker 4: up in the morning, seems boring. It felt like everything
[51:46] Speaker 4: was in the past, because at least in the Army,
[51:48] Speaker 4: you're like working towards the next deployment and you're getting
[51:50] Speaker 4: ready to go and it's life or death.
[51:51] Speaker 3: It's serious.
[51:52] Speaker 4: And now it's like configuration software might not go live
[51:56] Speaker 4: on Thursday. So I went back in the National Guard
[52:00] Speaker 4: at that point thinking that that would be and it
[52:03] Speaker 4: did checked a lot of the boxes of being back
[52:06] Speaker 4: with soldiers. Even just the one week in a month,
[52:09] Speaker 4: two weeks a year kind of thing was was really good.
[52:11] Speaker 3: For me at that time.
[52:13] Speaker 1: Did they let you come into the Guard as an
[52:14] Speaker 1: officer Yeah, cool.
[52:18] Speaker 3: Iman as Is.
[52:19] Speaker 4: So that was an interesting They don't teach us enough
[52:23] Speaker 4: about the garden reserve at West Point, so I didn't
[52:24] Speaker 4: know what I was getting into at all, and what
[52:27] Speaker 4: such a shortcoming there, because I would have stayed in
[52:30] Speaker 4: one of those components instead of taking a couple of
[52:33] Speaker 4: years off. And I have a lot of friends that
[52:35] Speaker 4: were excellent officers and got out, but I know they
[52:39] Speaker 4: would have stayed if it was a you know, an
[52:41] Speaker 4: administrative role once a month in there in the town
[52:45] Speaker 4: they lived in. Maybe even a non deployable unit or something. Right,
[52:48] Speaker 4: there's countless non deployable units if you really want that stability.
[52:53] Speaker 4: And I just didn't know what these options were. But yeah,
[52:57] Speaker 4: joined a field artillery unit down in Texas.
[53:00] Speaker 3: So right back into that.
[53:01] Speaker 2: Cool and uh you did that right up until just
[53:05] Speaker 2: a couple of years ago.
[53:06] Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, ended up moving over to the reserve, uh
[53:09] Speaker 4: kind of some administrative roles and then about a year
[53:11] Speaker 4: ago just wrap that up. So it got to the
[53:14] Speaker 4: point on the so the the benefit I guess on
[53:18] Speaker 4: the officer side, or once you get to a point,
[53:21] Speaker 4: as you you can just say like I'm that's enough,
[53:23] Speaker 4: it's been fun.
[53:24] Speaker 3: I'm gonna move on. I didn't have any more obligations.
[53:27] Speaker 4: So hit that point about a year and a half ago,
[53:31] Speaker 4: like this is now boring and I'm not looking forward
[53:34] Speaker 4: to going in. And I found myself getting frustrated more
[53:37] Speaker 4: than I probably should, bitching about a lot of stuff
[53:40] Speaker 4: that like is just part of the army. Sure, all right,
[53:44] Speaker 4: that's probably a sign we'll uh, we'll hang it up
[53:46] Speaker 4: for now.
[53:47] Speaker 1: Are on the other side of it, on your civilian
[53:50] Speaker 1: life and your civilian career where things starting to pick
[53:53] Speaker 1: up for you, And maybe that played into the decision.
[53:56] Speaker 3: Also it did.
[53:57] Speaker 4: I love what I do every day, I'm excited about it,
[54:01] Speaker 4: and going to a drill weekend meant two days of
[54:03] Speaker 4: sitting in a random classroom learning about sexual harassment or something.
[54:08] Speaker 3: And I couldn't do this.
[54:10] Speaker 4: It was starting to bleed into getting phone calls on
[54:13] Speaker 4: Tuesdays to knock something out for the army, like, no,
[54:16] Speaker 4: I've got other stuff I've got to do. And then
[54:19] Speaker 4: I knew that it was going to be a headache
[54:22] Speaker 4: at some point that I'm talking to so many different
[54:26] Speaker 4: people around the world.
[54:28] Speaker 3: I just went to Ukraine a few months ago.
[54:30] Speaker 4: I didn't even want to consider that while I was
[54:33] Speaker 4: still in the army, and then you know, the chats
[54:37] Speaker 4: are filled with soldiers in units from Israel to Ukraine elsewhere,
[54:43] Speaker 4: just like keeping up with what's going on, and that's
[54:45] Speaker 4: a nightmare if you want to stay in government service,
[54:48] Speaker 4: you know. And if I had to choose one or
[54:51] Speaker 4: the other, it's I like what I'm doing.
[54:52] Speaker 1: So but yeah, so tell us about that. What you're
[54:56] Speaker 1: doing now, how you kind of came into that.
[55:00] Speaker 4: We moved to Tennessee about five years ago. My wife
[55:03] Speaker 4: and I were started a little business and it was
[55:05] Speaker 4: during COVID, so it was a weird time. I started
[55:08] Speaker 4: making some content about military history because I like military
[55:12] Speaker 4: history and was just doing well. People would watch it,
[55:15] Speaker 4: which is crazy to see that the War Ukraine kicked off.
[55:20] Speaker 4: My background is international relations and terrorism. That's what I
[55:23] Speaker 4: studied at the academy, so I've always liked that. And
[55:27] Speaker 4: when the War Ukraine kicked off, all of a sudden,
[55:29] Speaker 4: there was a large audience of people trying to understand
[55:32] Speaker 4: what are tanks versus artillery?
[55:35] Speaker 3: What is air defense? All of those things.
[55:38] Speaker 4: So I started just trying to provide some updates on
[55:41] Speaker 4: that and try to break it down for folks. And
[55:44] Speaker 4: that's there's an insane audience out there for this stuff.
[55:47] Speaker 4: I mean, just the segmentation of the Internet today, there
[55:50] Speaker 4: are I mean I've got friends or all they do
[55:52] Speaker 4: is talk about cartel activity in Mexico, and they made
[55:55] Speaker 4: a career out of it.
[55:57] Speaker 3: So it's just each.
[55:58] Speaker 4: Month more people would watch, and it it was not
[56:01] Speaker 4: intended to be a career. Kind of got there Accidentalian
[56:05] Speaker 4: just kind of kept making these update videos and went
[56:08] Speaker 4: from TikTok over to YouTube and started making longer videos
[56:11] Speaker 4: and then started doing some interviews and and and all
[56:14] Speaker 4: of a sudden you kind of woke up and it
[56:16] Speaker 4: was it's a it's a career.
[56:18] Speaker 2: Wow.
[56:19] Speaker 1: What was kind of like that turning point when you realized, like, wow,
[56:22] Speaker 1: this is more than just you know, a side hustle
[56:25] Speaker 1: or a hobby.
[56:28] Speaker 3: Oh gosh.
[56:29] Speaker 4: Though it was slow as part of the problem, like
[56:31] Speaker 4: even when I was making military history content, TikTok opened
[56:34] Speaker 4: up their creator fund and I started making like six
[56:37] Speaker 4: dollars a day or something, and I thought, oh, yeow,
[56:40] Speaker 4: what is this right, like that that's beer money, Preston,
[56:43] Speaker 4: That's what it is. And then with it probably three
[56:47] Speaker 4: years ago, three ah maybe longer than that. I started
[56:50] Speaker 4: putting shorts on YouTube when they opened that process up,
[56:54] Speaker 4: and a couple of those went viral and it made
[56:58] Speaker 4: like seven thousand dollars in a month, and I was like,
[57:00] Speaker 4: wait a minute, this is actually like if I could
[57:03] Speaker 4: do that every month, that's that's we're good taken care of.
[57:09] Speaker 4: It did not work out that way as the Internet,
[57:12] Speaker 4: you know, the Internet gives, it takes away. So it's
[57:14] Speaker 4: like a great month and then the next one is
[57:15] Speaker 4: like it didn't exist. So there wasn't like a tipping point,
[57:19] Speaker 4: but just a lot of those little signals that hey,
[57:21] Speaker 4: this could be a thing, right, just a little six
[57:24] Speaker 4: dollars a day on TikTok is Like okay, but what
[57:27] Speaker 4: if that was sixty dollars a day and then YouTube
[57:29] Speaker 4: one month is seven thousand dollars you see, Okay, but
[57:32] Speaker 4: what if like every month was three and just kind
[57:35] Speaker 4: of keep going.
[57:36] Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you mentioned going to Ukraine for one
[57:41] Speaker 1: of these projects. Like, if you were to tell people
[57:44] Speaker 1: a little bit about your channel again, the channel you
[57:47] Speaker 1: can find on YouTube, Preston Stewart, if you were to
[57:51] Speaker 1: kind of pitch folks out there on it, what are
[57:53] Speaker 1: like some of the projects. Some of the videos that
[57:55] Speaker 1: you've done on there that you're particularly proud of that
[57:57] Speaker 1: you think are particularly insightful, people should go and check out.
[58:01] Speaker 2: Right after they finished this interview.
[58:03] Speaker 3: Oh perfect.
[58:04] Speaker 4: I only have one video pin to the channel and
[58:06] Speaker 4: it's kind of a recap of the trip in Ukraine CO.
[58:08] Speaker 4: So that was just a once in a lifetime opportunity.
[58:13] Speaker 3: That I don't have.
[58:14] Speaker 4: A lot of the way that I make the content
[58:16] Speaker 4: is kind of looking at the last twenty four to
[58:18] Speaker 4: seventy two hours and here's what happened with the war
[58:21] Speaker 4: in Iran, or here's how things between Israel and HESBLA.
[58:25] Speaker 3: So in turn, a lot.
[58:26] Speaker 4: Of the videos, even like three or four days later,
[58:29] Speaker 4: they're just not all that relevant because things have changed.
[58:32] Speaker 4: So most of the videos don't stand out as you know,
[58:36] Speaker 4: something that you really want to. Nobody's gonna a lot
[58:38] Speaker 4: of it. Nobody's gonna watch in a year, two three
[58:40] Speaker 4: years unless they're doing research on this period of time.
[58:44] Speaker 4: Some of the interviews have been awesome, being able to
[58:46] Speaker 4: talk with soldiers that are in the fight, especially with
[58:50] Speaker 4: Ukraine and Russia where it's new tactics. They're fighting a
[58:53] Speaker 4: war that we're learning about in real time. So getting
[58:57] Speaker 4: those guys to come on and explain like what is
[59:01] Speaker 4: happening day in and day out is wild to hear that. Yeah,
[59:07] Speaker 4: it's been it's been really cool.
[59:09] Speaker 3: Man. I didn't you're talking.
[59:11] Speaker 4: We were joking about networking earlier. This is networking, yeah,
[59:14] Speaker 4: and I didn't ever think of it that way, but like,
[59:17] Speaker 4: that's what it is. You do have an interview with somebody,
[59:21] Speaker 4: and especially one of these soldiers, and we share a
[59:23] Speaker 4: fundraiser or here's there, here's their unit page or whatever,
[59:26] Speaker 4: and they introduced you to their friend and then their commander,
[59:30] Speaker 4: and you know, it's it's networking.
[59:33] Speaker 3: Content is networking in so many ways.
[59:35] Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, you're absolutely right.
[59:37] Speaker 1: And I have also found I'm not very good at
[59:40] Speaker 1: schmoozing and and that's sort of a go into these uh,
[59:43] Speaker 1: dinner parties and things like that. But I am good
[59:46] Speaker 1: at like going after things that I'm interested in the
[59:48] Speaker 1: sort of things that we're talking about.
[59:50] Speaker 2: And through that, as you just describe, you end up networking.
[59:53] Speaker 2: You end up meeting a lot of interesting people.
[59:56] Speaker 3: Absolutely, and it's it's it's cool. It's awesome.
[59:59] Speaker 4: Now because the channel has done well and the different
[1:00:01] Speaker 4: platforms have done well to where like I can actually
[1:00:04] Speaker 4: offer something to these folks. It's not just uh, it's
[1:00:08] Speaker 4: not just hey, will you please, because I'm sure you
[1:00:10] Speaker 4: get it?
[1:00:11] Speaker 3: Somebody will will you come on my show? Will you
[1:00:12] Speaker 3: do this? Will you?
[1:00:13] Speaker 4: And people are asking for your time because they're trying
[1:00:16] Speaker 4: to get you know, any number of things. It's awesome
[1:00:19] Speaker 4: to be able to go to these guys and say like,
[1:00:21] Speaker 4: can I share that for you?
[1:00:22] Speaker 2: Right?
[1:00:23] Speaker 4: And I like, would it be okay if I linked
[1:00:25] Speaker 4: to this and just yeah, it feels good to be
[1:00:28] Speaker 4: able to to something Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[1:00:32] Speaker 1: And it's particularly important too. I mean you mentioned Ukraine.
[1:00:36] Speaker 1: I'll ask you again about that in a second. But
[1:00:38] Speaker 1: everything going on with a RAN right now, there is
[1:00:41] Speaker 1: a role in Our government doesn't necessarily do a great
[1:00:44] Speaker 1: job of it, and unfortunately even people in the space
[1:00:48] Speaker 1: as we work in don't necessarily do a great job
[1:00:50] Speaker 1: of it too. A lot of times explaining how the
[1:00:53] Speaker 1: military works, explaining the military and combat to a civilian
[1:00:58] Speaker 1: audience and sometimes even to the military itself. I mean,
[1:01:01] Speaker 1: I was in the army, but what do I know
[1:01:03] Speaker 1: about aviation? What do I know about you know? The
[1:01:06] Speaker 1: how do you close off the straits of her moves.
[1:01:08] Speaker 1: I don't know, that's not my area. So the types
[1:01:12] Speaker 1: of videos that I think you work on are really
[1:01:15] Speaker 1: important to get that kind of information out to the public.
[1:01:19] Speaker 4: Right now, it's a it's a balancing act there too,
[1:01:23] Speaker 4: because we have too many acronyms and too many fancy words,
[1:01:28] Speaker 4: and it's very easy to go down that path and
[1:01:31] Speaker 4: then you're talking to one part of the audience, right
[1:01:34] Speaker 4: That audience appreciates it, and you're a part of the team.
[1:01:37] Speaker 3: But it's it's an.
[1:01:39] Speaker 4: Active thought to step back from that and say, you know,
[1:01:42] Speaker 4: instead of saying jatach or fob, like, let's open that
[1:01:46] Speaker 4: up a little bit and explain the guy that talks
[1:01:48] Speaker 4: aircraft onto targets or whatever. Yeah, that's the nature of
[1:01:53] Speaker 4: this is you can't when you put the video out there,
[1:01:55] Speaker 4: you don't know who it's going to, and you're trying
[1:01:57] Speaker 4: to reach a larger audience.
[1:01:59] Speaker 1: So then and then if you've sort of like used
[1:02:02] Speaker 1: more generalized language so that the larger audience can understand it,
[1:02:06] Speaker 1: the person that does work in that field is going
[1:02:08] Speaker 1: to be in your email box, like why it's really
[1:02:12] Speaker 1: called this? It's really that It's like dude, I know,
[1:02:14] Speaker 1: I know, but there's this whole world out there I
[1:02:17] Speaker 1: have to also speak to there's.
[1:02:20] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's and there's some great people to do it.
[1:02:22] Speaker 4: Like when it gets when you get into the naval
[1:02:24] Speaker 4: side of things or tanks or small arms. There's the
[1:02:27] Speaker 4: Internet is so awesome because you can find like the
[1:02:29] Speaker 4: genuine experts on that stuff. I've found a try to
[1:02:35] Speaker 4: more and more add a little bit of clarity to
[1:02:38] Speaker 4: some of the things that seem confusing but maybe shouldn't be. Recently,
[1:02:41] Speaker 4: there was a spike in stated US casualties and run
[1:02:47] Speaker 4: and immediately it went to conspiracy theories of the US
[1:02:52] Speaker 4: is hiding this and here's why they don't put the
[1:02:54] Speaker 4: information out. And I don't know if this worked or not,
[1:02:58] Speaker 4: but tried to explain that we.
[1:03:00] Speaker 3: Cannot announce that right away.
[1:03:02] Speaker 4: It hurts the United States if we were to say
[1:03:06] Speaker 4: this strike on this base caused this many casualties yesterday,
[1:03:09] Speaker 4: Like that's not information that we should share. And trying
[1:03:13] Speaker 4: to get across like there's a window. You know, you
[1:03:16] Speaker 4: can't sit on that for a month. Yeah, but but
[1:03:19] Speaker 4: you cannot expect it the same day, And trying to
[1:03:22] Speaker 4: figure out like we're just we're not we're not used
[1:03:24] Speaker 4: to that. That's not a world we've grown up in.
[1:03:28] Speaker 1: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean it's interesting that it almost
[1:03:33] Speaker 1: feels like d O D. I don't want to be
[1:03:35] Speaker 1: a conspiracy theorist, but they we don't have a history
[1:03:39] Speaker 1: in this country, really, at least modern history of concealing
[1:03:42] Speaker 1: our casualties. We've been you know, very transparent about that
[1:03:46] Speaker 1: stuff throughout the War on Terror, and for them to
[1:03:49] Speaker 1: now like kind of slow roll that stuff to the
[1:03:51] Speaker 1: public is sort of new as far as I can tell.
[1:03:54] Speaker 4: Yeah, oh MESSI uh, not done well, there's a ton
[1:03:59] Speaker 4: of different yeah uh, the descriptors I would use there,
[1:04:04] Speaker 4: but still trying to provide a little bit of like, Okay,
[1:04:08] Speaker 4: it's not going to come out the same day, we
[1:04:09] Speaker 4: can't do that. There has to be some degree of
[1:04:12] Speaker 4: you know, it doesn't do any good to overnight. Let
[1:04:14] Speaker 4: ron know that that strike took out half of a company.
[1:04:17] Speaker 4: I wait, but yet the way that it's come out
[1:04:22] Speaker 4: has not been good. I don't know if that's a
[1:04:23] Speaker 4: broken system or something more sinister.
[1:04:28] Speaker 3: But yeah, hopefully that proves.
[1:04:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it probably isn't something sinister. It's more just
[1:04:32] Speaker 1: like how incoherent. Everything is right now, frankly, But back
[1:04:38] Speaker 1: to Ukraine for a moment. I want to ask, because
[1:04:40] Speaker 1: of your background as a as an FSO, and you've
[1:04:45] Speaker 1: obviously been interviewing a lot of people working over there
[1:04:49] Speaker 1: keeping tabs on all the developments with the drones, what
[1:04:53] Speaker 1: are you seeing like if you were to write your
[1:04:55] Speaker 1: thesis paper today about the future of field artillery and
[1:05:00] Speaker 1: direct fire, what are some of the things that are
[1:05:02] Speaker 1: coming out of Ukraine that you would, you know, really
[1:05:05] Speaker 1: want to highlight.
[1:05:07] Speaker 4: Got to stay adaptable is the one hundred percent. The
[1:05:10] Speaker 4: biggest thing is we've got to be agile, We've got
[1:05:13] Speaker 4: to be able to change.
[1:05:15] Speaker 3: So something that we're seeing right.
[1:05:16] Speaker 4: Now, like day to day, is the kill zone has
[1:05:21] Speaker 4: gotten too big to where artillery cannot range enemy targets.
[1:05:26] Speaker 3: So to get howitzers close enough.
[1:05:29] Speaker 4: To be able to hit Russians, they're in drone range
[1:05:32] Speaker 4: and get taken out. Gotcha, And a howitzer is no
[1:05:35] Speaker 4: like you know, the minute that thing goes boom, there's
[1:05:38] Speaker 4: a dozen drones zeroing in on it. So if you
[1:05:40] Speaker 4: can't move the howitzers forward, they're repurposing artillery men to
[1:05:45] Speaker 4: serve in that same general role with drones. They've retrained
[1:05:50] Speaker 4: them to operate instead of the short range drones and
[1:05:53] Speaker 4: instead of the deep striker recon drones. They're hitting targets
[1:05:56] Speaker 4: in the twenty to forty kilometer range. They're going after
[1:05:59] Speaker 4: artillery focused targets, so they're supporting maneuver elements, and they're
[1:06:05] Speaker 4: set up where you might set up an artillery firing
[1:06:07] Speaker 4: point and there's kind of a call for fire type
[1:06:09] Speaker 4: thing that goes out and these guys respond, and.
[1:06:13] Speaker 3: That's how they have to be used. Right now. I
[1:06:16] Speaker 3: don't think, you know, I think we'd be I think
[1:06:18] Speaker 3: it's foolish. We do.
[1:06:19] Speaker 4: We do a good job of this, jumping too far
[1:06:21] Speaker 4: in every direction, over compensating. It's not the end of artillery.
[1:06:26] Speaker 4: There's still plenty of artillery being used, but in some
[1:06:28] Speaker 4: of the hotter sectors the front it can't be. So
[1:06:32] Speaker 4: they're changing those artillery men. Those bodies still need to
[1:06:35] Speaker 4: be used, and they're just doing that same skill set
[1:06:38] Speaker 4: with a different tool.
[1:06:40] Speaker 1: I mean, you could see the DoD making all these
[1:06:42] Speaker 1: investments in counter uas, and I guess that's exactly the
[1:06:46] Speaker 1: reason why that you mentioned there. But if America were
[1:06:50] Speaker 1: to go to war, in the future. Well, I mean, okay,
[1:06:53] Speaker 1: that's kind of a stupid thing to say. If we
[1:06:55] Speaker 1: were to go to a large scale conflict with the Russians,
[1:06:58] Speaker 1: for example, I mean, we would bring different military hardware
[1:07:01] Speaker 1: to the table, We would fight a little bit differently.
[1:07:05] Speaker 1: Do you think the introduction of like lagger munitions and
[1:07:09] Speaker 1: things like this would kind of switch up the dynamics
[1:07:12] Speaker 1: that you're currently seeing in Ukraine.
[1:07:16] Speaker 4: This is one of the tough ones because we look
[1:07:21] Speaker 4: at the war in Ukraine and it's so tempting to
[1:07:23] Speaker 4: take away those exact lessons. But if we are engaged
[1:07:28] Speaker 4: in this type of fight with Russia, we failed, yes,
[1:07:31] Speaker 4: because I mean, the reason that this is happening the
[1:07:34] Speaker 4: way it is is because there's no air superiority. Neither
[1:07:36] Speaker 4: country will fly anywhere near at the front lines, and
[1:07:38] Speaker 4: we would think, I mean, in the US has done
[1:07:40] Speaker 4: it now and Iran right, we have air superiority at
[1:07:43] Speaker 4: least over good portions of the country. That's the fight
[1:07:46] Speaker 4: we want to fight. So if we are in some
[1:07:49] Speaker 4: ground pound match, artillery duel and drone duel with Russia,
[1:07:52] Speaker 4: we screwed up and it failed somewhere along.
[1:07:54] Speaker 2: The I don't think trench lines. Something's gone wrong.
[1:07:59] Speaker 4: Yeah, So like, I don't think we should spend a
[1:08:01] Speaker 4: lot of time planning for that to be a portion
[1:08:04] Speaker 4: of war, maybe being ready to adapt if needed. My
[1:08:07] Speaker 4: concern is less about the offensive aspects and more about
[1:08:14] Speaker 4: how adversaries are going.
[1:08:15] Speaker 3: To adapt to this.
[1:08:16] Speaker 4: This is such a low cost inexpensive which is the
[1:08:20] Speaker 4: same word that I use twice, low cost, easy to
[1:08:23] Speaker 4: use weapons system that we haven't experienced yet. Again, id's
[1:08:27] Speaker 4: are flying at you and like to be blunt, we
[1:08:31] Speaker 4: aren't ready to deal with that.
[1:08:33] Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't know what it'll take.
[1:08:35] Speaker 1: Did you see the video footage of the Iranian drone
[1:08:38] Speaker 1: file flying I can't talk today, flying over one of
[1:08:42] Speaker 1: the fobs over and I believe it was in a Raq.
[1:08:45] Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, clear as day, right. I think that one
[1:08:48] Speaker 4: had a fiber optic cable. So that's another one where
[1:08:51] Speaker 4: like we've got electronic warfare for days, but electronic warfare
[1:08:55] Speaker 4: doesn't do anything to a drone that has a cable
[1:08:58] Speaker 4: attached to it.
[1:08:58] Speaker 3: And like, again, night, I don't know.
[1:09:03] Speaker 4: We have to be flexible that that it is that
[1:09:05] Speaker 4: is not an easy threat to adapt to. When those
[1:09:08] Speaker 4: things start hitting in numbers everything changes, and I don't
[1:09:13] Speaker 4: know that's that that makes me nervous. I got a
[1:09:15] Speaker 4: little sick to my stomach when I saw that one
[1:09:17] Speaker 4: that video.
[1:09:18] Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, uh one more sort of like tactical question.
[1:09:22] Speaker 1: I guess if we're going to shift over to the
[1:09:24] Speaker 1: Persian Gulf. You know, I was having a conversation with
[1:09:28] Speaker 1: with Dimitri before we got started today. You know, the
[1:09:32] Speaker 1: war in Ukraine is certainly the war that really fully
[1:09:35] Speaker 1: introduced medium and you know, short range drones into the battlefield.
[1:09:43] Speaker 1: But I think this war with Iran right now, maybe
[1:09:47] Speaker 1: it's going to be debated by historians, of course, but
[1:09:50] Speaker 1: maybe the defining characteristic is that it's the first war
[1:09:53] Speaker 1: where AI is really in the mix as far as
[1:09:56] Speaker 1: like us used as propaganda and psychological operations. And it's
[1:10:00] Speaker 1: gotten good enough that I watched those and you see
[1:10:03] Speaker 1: like a video of missiles falling on supposedly Israel at night.
[1:10:09] Speaker 1: I honestly, I can't tell if a lot of them
[1:10:11] Speaker 1: are or not. Some you can, but a lot of
[1:10:15] Speaker 1: them it's pretty difficult to discern. I was wondering if
[1:10:18] Speaker 1: you had any thoughts on that and about you know,
[1:10:21] Speaker 1: the use of AI as a force multiplier in psychological
[1:10:25] Speaker 1: operations and what that maybe means for the future.
[1:10:29] Speaker 4: Terrifying there was for whatever reason, we haven't seen a
[1:10:33] Speaker 4: ton of that with Russian Ukraine.
[1:10:35] Speaker 3: But you're right, I don't know what it is.
[1:10:37] Speaker 4: I mean, it's the same thing when when the war
[1:10:40] Speaker 4: was thick in Gaza for some reason, there was just
[1:10:43] Speaker 4: a shocking amount of miss and disinformation being shared from
[1:10:46] Speaker 4: like Syria.
[1:10:47] Speaker 3: So I don't know what the dynamic is in the
[1:10:49] Speaker 3: Middle East.
[1:10:50] Speaker 4: We're seeing more of that, I think, But the one
[1:10:53] Speaker 4: that stands out to me was the Pakistan Indian conflict.
[1:10:58] Speaker 4: There was and I'll mix up who did it to who,
[1:11:00] Speaker 4: but for sake of argument, will say that it was
[1:11:02] Speaker 4: a Indian press briefing and they're chief of staff or whatever,
[1:11:06] Speaker 4: get up and get the talk every night, here's what
[1:11:07] Speaker 4: we did, here's what happened, here's what's coming in for
[1:11:10] Speaker 4: the next twenty four hours. And then Pakistan, if I
[1:11:13] Speaker 4: remember correctly, kind of deep faked it because he did
[1:11:16] Speaker 4: the same press or over and over in the same uniform,
[1:11:18] Speaker 4: the same background to where he got up there and
[1:11:20] Speaker 4: he said, we regret the loss of seven aircraft that
[1:11:23] Speaker 4: were shot down over Pakistan, and.
[1:11:25] Speaker 3: The thing went viral. Wow, and it took a while.
[1:11:28] Speaker 4: And for me when it's like it's being translated on
[1:11:31] Speaker 4: the screen, like I don't have a chance. Right, it
[1:11:32] Speaker 4: looks like every other video, right, that kind of stuff
[1:11:36] Speaker 4: seems very simple to do.
[1:11:41] Speaker 3: I don't know.
[1:11:41] Speaker 4: The thing that makes me nervous about some of the
[1:11:43] Speaker 4: like you're talking about the strikes in Iran, or how
[1:11:46] Speaker 4: about like a jet flying over that gets hit and
[1:11:49] Speaker 4: gets knocked out of the sky. My guess is you
[1:11:51] Speaker 4: have probably seen some of those and you don't know
[1:11:53] Speaker 4: for sure.
[1:11:54] Speaker 3: You're like, ah, is it the screen?
[1:11:58] Speaker 4: And if you're doing that, we're in trouble, right, Like
[1:12:02] Speaker 4: the vast majority of people aren't spending that much time
[1:12:04] Speaker 4: on it and wouldn't be able to tell the difference, right, So,
[1:12:07] Speaker 4: I don't know. It's a messy information space. How much
[1:12:10] Speaker 4: that impacts things, I don't know, because yeah, I don't
[1:12:16] Speaker 4: know what the measurement would be there, but it's I've
[1:12:18] Speaker 4: definitely seen folks with Gaza just tune out in the past.
[1:12:22] Speaker 4: They said there's too much, too much fake information. I
[1:12:25] Speaker 4: can't keep up with what's happening out I wonder if
[1:12:29] Speaker 4: that's a desired effect.
[1:12:30] Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I hope I'm not checking out, but I
[1:12:33] Speaker 1: mean there is enough of it out there that as
[1:12:35] Speaker 1: far as like if I see a video on social
[1:12:37] Speaker 1: media of a strike in Iran or Israel or I
[1:12:41] Speaker 1: just assume it's not real at this point. No, really,
[1:12:44] Speaker 1: I can't. I can't believe what I'm seeing, Like, I
[1:12:47] Speaker 1: just can't trust it.
[1:12:49] Speaker 4: Well, we've also were also in this weird spot where
[1:12:52] Speaker 4: there's a lot of censorship. Wartime censorship are going on.
[1:12:57] Speaker 4: So in Iran they just shut down the internet, like
[1:12:59] Speaker 4: so nobody can do anything. That's a different level of censorship.
[1:13:02] Speaker 4: But from Israel to the Gulf States, they are doing
[1:13:06] Speaker 4: you know, arguably at times more than we would. But
[1:13:09] Speaker 4: they're telling the citizenry like, do not share missile impacts
[1:13:12] Speaker 4: because Iran will learn from that. So there's not a
[1:13:15] Speaker 4: lot of footage or pictures of the battle damage shown
[1:13:19] Speaker 4: from these strikes, so it's they're happening. I think a
[1:13:24] Speaker 4: lot of them are being intercepted.
[1:13:25] Speaker 3: Yeah, not all.
[1:13:27] Speaker 4: So there's a very strange there's a short there's a
[1:13:32] Speaker 4: gap in that footage, and I think that's allowing some
[1:13:35] Speaker 4: of the AI to thrive as people are expecting, like
[1:13:38] Speaker 4: we know there were two missile barages fired at Israel earlier.
[1:13:41] Speaker 4: Today we haven't seen anything from Israel, so it probably
[1:13:45] Speaker 4: opens the door for some fake footage.
[1:13:47] Speaker 2: It's so crazy.
[1:13:48] Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, you're firing the missile at that point
[1:13:51] Speaker 1: to support the psychological operation.
[1:13:55] Speaker 2: So yeah, we're in interesting times here.
[1:13:58] Speaker 1: I'm any other ones anything going on with Iran or
[1:14:03] Speaker 1: anything else that you're you have your eyes on that
[1:14:05] Speaker 1: you'd like to talk about or direct people towards something
[1:14:10] Speaker 1: you've done on your channel about.
[1:14:13] Speaker 3: Well, Iran is really interesting.
[1:14:14] Speaker 4: One of the reasons that I started doing this getting
[1:14:17] Speaker 4: into more of the current events I always happened to
[1:14:20] Speaker 4: back my mind are build up to the Iraq invasion.
[1:14:23] Speaker 4: I think that's that's like one of our defining moments
[1:14:25] Speaker 4: for our generation. And in retrospect, I always wonder if
[1:14:29] Speaker 4: there is more of an independent media or YouTube or
[1:14:32] Speaker 4: Twitter or whatever, would more people have been able to
[1:14:35] Speaker 4: kind of flesh that out and say this doesn't make sense,
[1:14:38] Speaker 4: or you're fabricating this, or this is an exaggeration, Like.
[1:14:42] Speaker 3: Would we have had the ability to do that?
[1:14:44] Speaker 4: I don't know, but I think about that a lot
[1:14:48] Speaker 4: now and hope that we could do that if there's
[1:14:51] Speaker 4: a misleading statement or an exaggeration or something that's pulling
[1:14:54] Speaker 4: us into a war for any number of reasons. I
[1:14:57] Speaker 4: hope that we have the ability now as a as
[1:15:00] Speaker 4: a society to look at different sources and say, wait
[1:15:02] Speaker 4: a minute, that doesn't add up. So the Iran one
[1:15:06] Speaker 4: is is interesting right now because I think we are
[1:15:08] Speaker 4: we're right in the middle of that. It's building up,
[1:15:11] Speaker 4: like we can see the path to escalation, we can
[1:15:14] Speaker 4: see the path to boots on the ground, we can
[1:15:15] Speaker 4: see the path to a prolonged conflict, and it's just
[1:15:20] Speaker 4: it's really interesting to be in the middle of that,
[1:15:22] Speaker 4: with Iraq in the back of our minds again not present,
[1:15:27] Speaker 4: not trying to say that there's something.
[1:15:29] Speaker 3: Evil or lies or whatever, but just it's a moment
[1:15:33] Speaker 3: in history.
[1:15:34] Speaker 4: This is like going back to, you know, the Winter
[1:15:37] Speaker 4: of three, trying to wonder, like which way is this
[1:15:39] Speaker 4: going to go?
[1:15:40] Speaker 2: Now.
[1:15:41] Speaker 1: I don't want to like drag you into politics or anything, Preston,
[1:15:44] Speaker 1: but I mean my kind of take on what's going
[1:15:48] Speaker 1: on right now, I mean, I think it's in the past.
[1:15:51] Speaker 1: When you and I were teenagers, our government still had
[1:15:54] Speaker 1: to in the case of the Iraq War, manufacture a
[1:15:58] Speaker 1: certain amount of consent. They had to lie to us
[1:16:00] Speaker 1: about WMDs and some other things to get people on
[1:16:04] Speaker 1: board for this conflict. But what we see today is
[1:16:07] Speaker 1: our government doesn't even have to do that anymore.
[1:16:10] Speaker 2: It's not necessary.
[1:16:12] Speaker 1: You know, we'd have these debates like, you know, we're
[1:16:14] Speaker 1: fighting for freedom, we're fighting for democracy, and now our
[1:16:17] Speaker 1: government just says we got to get the oil, got
[1:16:19] Speaker 1: to get the oil. Guys like like, we're not hiding it.
[1:16:22] Speaker 2: We're not.
[1:16:23] Speaker 1: There's no pretext, there's no you know, just cause theory
[1:16:27] Speaker 1: of warfare, you know, they're all that seems to be
[1:16:29] Speaker 1: out the window. And I mean, yeah, I think you're right.
[1:16:34] Speaker 1: We're seeing the escalation, the possible build up to something
[1:16:37] Speaker 1: even bigger. But I mean, I think it's mind blowing
[1:16:41] Speaker 1: that the government doesn't even have to make the case
[1:16:43] Speaker 1: to the public anymore, that they can just go to war.
[1:16:46] Speaker 1: And after the fact, Congress is just sort of like
[1:16:49] Speaker 1: in this state of limbo, like, well, we don't not
[1:16:51] Speaker 1: support the war, but we also don't support it. Uh, well,
[1:16:54] Speaker 1: what's going on here, guys?
[1:16:57] Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't.
[1:16:58] Speaker 4: It makes me nervous because if if they don't really
[1:17:00] Speaker 4: need our support to do it, then what does it
[1:17:02] Speaker 4: matter if we catch them in like, right, we're not
[1:17:06] Speaker 4: on board? Like well, or say the American people say
[1:17:08] Speaker 4: we're not on board, what does that even matter?
[1:17:10] Speaker 2: Well?
[1:17:11] Speaker 3: Fine, now that means.
[1:17:11] Speaker 2: It's too late. Now, bro, we're in the middle of it.
[1:17:15] Speaker 3: We're hearing that a little bit right now.
[1:17:16] Speaker 4: And I think that's one of the reasons that the
[1:17:18] Speaker 4: I think the media around this is so important, especially
[1:17:21] Speaker 4: from people with military backgrounds or with military experience, to
[1:17:24] Speaker 4: be able to say, like, those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and
[1:17:26] Speaker 4: marines are incredible, and what they're doing is so so impressive,
[1:17:31] Speaker 4: and I want the best for them. I want the
[1:17:33] Speaker 4: best for their families. I'm thinking about them. Do we
[1:17:35] Speaker 4: know what we're doing.
[1:17:35] Speaker 2: Here right exactly?
[1:17:37] Speaker 4: That?
[1:17:37] Speaker 2: Yeah?
[1:17:37] Speaker 4: And I think I think it's important for that segment
[1:17:41] Speaker 4: of the media to be I think there's the credibility factor.
[1:17:44] Speaker 1: When you know, when the Special Ops guys pull Maduro
[1:17:48] Speaker 1: out of his bed at night and snatch them right
[1:17:50] Speaker 1: out of there with no friendly fatalities, I mean, incredible
[1:17:55] Speaker 1: tactical proficiency. I have nothing bad to say about that
[1:18:00] Speaker 1: at all about what the job those guys did, or
[1:18:03] Speaker 1: even the big laden raid for that matter. I mean,
[1:18:05] Speaker 1: some things went a little wrong, but the guys adapted,
[1:18:07] Speaker 1: they got the job done and got out of there
[1:18:10] Speaker 1: incredible proficiency. But we have not seen that level of
[1:18:13] Speaker 1: proficiency at the policy side, where the operations made up
[1:18:17] Speaker 1: with the strategic intent. If there is a strategic intent,
[1:18:21] Speaker 1: I sure hope there is.
[1:18:23] Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's that's a I think we're a
[1:18:27] Speaker 3: pretty key moment right now.
[1:18:28] Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
[1:18:29] Speaker 4: I again, I don't know what an off ramp would
[1:18:31] Speaker 4: look like or a dialing back would look like. It's
[1:18:33] Speaker 4: pretty clear what an escalation would look like, but I
[1:18:37] Speaker 4: don't know. I'm still optimistic. I think there's we can
[1:18:40] Speaker 4: still push and if if the American people truly are
[1:18:43] Speaker 4: against something, which I think it's still a bit mixed
[1:18:46] Speaker 4: on this conflict, But if the American people are really
[1:18:48] Speaker 4: against something, I'm hopeful that we can we can make
[1:18:51] Speaker 4: ourselves heard.
[1:18:54] Speaker 1: Anything else you want to get into, you know, I know,
[1:18:59] Speaker 1: Field artillits there's some issues that have come out in
[1:19:02] Speaker 1: recent years about TBI, some of the effects that has
[1:19:05] Speaker 1: has on these guys, particularly the dudes that were in Syria.
[1:19:08] Speaker 1: I think that got reported in the New York Times.
[1:19:13] Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't follow that super closely. Definitely an ish.
[1:19:17] Speaker 4: I mean, the artillery guys more than I'd probably put
[1:19:20] Speaker 4: them up there with engineers and aviators, where even when
[1:19:22] Speaker 4: you're not in a war zone, you're still around those
[1:19:25] Speaker 4: those heavy sounds NonStop all the time. But I think
[1:19:29] Speaker 4: they started when I got out. When I left field artillery,
[1:19:32] Speaker 4: it was still like foam earbunds, yes, which you know what.
[1:19:37] Speaker 4: I'm seeing more and more guys with like actual legitimate
[1:19:40] Speaker 4: ear pro being used when they're on the firing line,
[1:19:43] Speaker 4: which is good, but yeah, honestly not something I When
[1:19:48] Speaker 4: I was starting to make more military history content I
[1:19:51] Speaker 4: was part of it, was thinking of maybe getting more
[1:19:54] Speaker 4: like DD focused and domestic stuff focused. Then Ukraine happens,
[1:19:58] Speaker 4: I was like, well, I'm not gadra just focus on
[1:20:00] Speaker 4: the stuff overseas, the kinetic stuff.
[1:20:02] Speaker 3: So for better for worse.
[1:20:05] Speaker 4: Haven't paid a lot of attention to a lot of
[1:20:07] Speaker 4: the kind of internal things of late.
[1:20:10] Speaker 1: Well that's that was going to be my next question,
[1:20:12] Speaker 1: and maybe as we kind of start to wrap it
[1:20:14] Speaker 1: up here, But I mean, you can speak from your
[1:20:17] Speaker 1: personal experience or whatever you'd like, kind of like being
[1:20:20] Speaker 1: a veteran today. Here we are in twenty twenty six
[1:20:23] Speaker 1: who served in Afghanistan. What are kind of your takeaways
[1:20:27] Speaker 1: from this sort of you know, experience of transitioning to
[1:20:30] Speaker 1: civilian life and sort of what the role the veterans
[1:20:34] Speaker 1: may play in society today and into the future.
[1:20:39] Speaker 4: I think it's still I think it's still net positive.
[1:20:41] Speaker 4: There's still a ton of really good veterans out there.
[1:20:43] Speaker 4: I will still say it now, but like if I
[1:20:46] Speaker 4: was going to start a business tomorrow, I'd want to
[1:20:49] Speaker 4: hire veterans.
[1:20:49] Speaker 3: I want to hire a.
[1:20:52] Speaker 4: Junior or senior NCO and just like, hey, here's the
[1:20:55] Speaker 4: thing we need to get done, because I know they'd
[1:20:57] Speaker 4: be able to figure it out and would run through
[1:21:00] Speaker 4: a wall to make it happen. So I still love
[1:21:03] Speaker 4: running into veterans left, right, and center. It's it feels
[1:21:08] Speaker 4: weird because there's fewer, you know, it's been five years
[1:21:12] Speaker 4: now since anybody was in Afghanistan. I mean there's still
[1:21:16] Speaker 4: guys getting combat patches and of course in harm's way, but.
[1:21:20] Speaker 3: The numbers are nowhere near what they were.
[1:21:22] Speaker 4: So it does feel like we're in a bit of
[1:21:23] Speaker 4: a transitional period, which is net good because that means
[1:21:28] Speaker 4: that we're not fighting wars, right, so it's a good thing.
[1:21:32] Speaker 4: But yeah, I'd be interested to see how From what
[1:21:37] Speaker 4: I've seen, most veterans still speak very highly of their
[1:21:39] Speaker 4: time and service and their experiences in the military, And
[1:21:43] Speaker 4: I wonder what kind of recruitment will look like for
[1:21:45] Speaker 4: a little while here if we don't have you know,
[1:21:49] Speaker 4: I had nine eleven, Our generation had nine to eleven
[1:21:51] Speaker 4: for a long time. I mean there were guys still
[1:21:53] Speaker 4: joining in like nine ten eleven, where like their reason
[1:21:57] Speaker 4: for joining was nine to eleven. That we can that
[1:22:00] Speaker 4: doesn't work now, So what's it going to be. What's
[1:22:04] Speaker 4: going to be the defining factor that get people to
[1:22:07] Speaker 4: uh to, to sign up and serve.
[1:22:09] Speaker 3: That'll be an interesting one.
[1:22:10] Speaker 4: I feel like a lot of it will probably fall
[1:22:12] Speaker 4: in veterans giving good reviews and talking up the experience,
[1:22:16] Speaker 4: even when it's not you know, the the you know,
[1:22:19] Speaker 4: going down range.
[1:22:20] Speaker 3: And into a war zone. So I don't know, it's good,
[1:22:24] Speaker 3: it's good.
[1:22:24] Speaker 4: A lot of good veterans, A lot of a lot
[1:22:27] Speaker 4: of veterans support, I would say, when kind of navigating
[1:22:31] Speaker 4: the transition period because everybody, I think everybody struggled, and
[1:22:35] Speaker 4: there's there's far more that struggled on their way out
[1:22:38] Speaker 4: in some way or another than like knocked it out
[1:22:41] Speaker 4: of the park the first time.
[1:22:43] Speaker 2: So yeah, it's a it's a rocky road.
[1:22:45] Speaker 1: And sometimes for people, I've had people say like, oh, Jack,
[1:22:48] Speaker 1: you had a good transition, Like, dude, you have no idea.
[1:22:51] Speaker 1: You have no idea? How many times I fell flat
[1:22:54] Speaker 1: on my face? Where can people find you?
[1:22:58] Speaker 2: Uh? Again?
[1:22:59] Speaker 1: You tube channel is under your name, Preston Stewart. Any
[1:23:02] Speaker 1: other places people should go to look for you to
[1:23:04] Speaker 1: find you? Social media or otherwise.
[1:23:07] Speaker 4: That's the most content is there on YouTube, But it's
[1:23:09] Speaker 4: the same my name on Twitter or x, Instagram and
[1:23:13] Speaker 4: TikTok all the same type of content going up in
[1:23:15] Speaker 4: each place a little bit different based off the platform,
[1:23:18] Speaker 4: but my name across the board.
[1:23:21] Speaker 5: Hey Priston, I have a question, big fan, By the way,
[1:23:25] Speaker 5: how do you get a million subscribers on YouTube?
[1:23:27] Speaker 2: What's the easiest way? Tell it the easiest way.
[1:23:31] Speaker 4: Yeah, there's some Pakistani bot farms and if you pay them,
[1:23:36] Speaker 4: they know the big jumps and subscribers. It's in a
[1:23:40] Speaker 4: weird way, like not intentional, but like you kind of
[1:23:43] Speaker 4: position yourself and then when an event kicks off, there's
[1:23:47] Speaker 4: a lot of people that all of a sudden are interested.
[1:23:49] Speaker 3: So when.
[1:23:52] Speaker 4: I want to say, it was like after October seventh,
[1:23:55] Speaker 4: I gained like seventy thousand in a month. The Twelve
[1:23:59] Speaker 4: Day War was like fifty a month, just because you're
[1:24:02] Speaker 4: already like established as there's war and conflict, and then
[1:24:05] Speaker 4: when one starts, there's just an influx of people that
[1:24:10] Speaker 4: you know, didn't care at all yesterday and today, or
[1:24:12] Speaker 4: like I have to know what's going on there. So
[1:24:17] Speaker 4: that's the thing. Get into a warren conflict, start a
[1:24:20] Speaker 4: couple of wars. Problem solved.
[1:24:25] Speaker 2: Easy enough. That sounds good.
[1:24:27] Speaker 5: Pizza cake also, Priceton tell us, are you still doing
[1:24:30] Speaker 5: the fundraisers for the Ukrainian guy the Ukrainian trip? Put
[1:24:33] Speaker 5: them like trucks and stuff you want to help, I'll
[1:24:35] Speaker 5: put the link that in the description.
[1:24:36] Speaker 2: Well, just let us know about it.
[1:24:40] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's constant.
[1:24:41] Speaker 4: That's been an awesome experience because we get to such
[1:24:43] Speaker 4: a weird war where you can help these guys on
[1:24:46] Speaker 4: the front that actually need it, and then it's something
[1:24:48] Speaker 4: more than just saying I'm on your team.
[1:24:50] Speaker 3: What can I do?
[1:24:51] Speaker 4: We're providing real stuff. So we've got a couple going
[1:24:54] Speaker 4: right now. One is UH through ziggest Paw. We're providing
[1:24:57] Speaker 4: mid range strike drones to an artillery unit because they
[1:25:00] Speaker 4: retrain their artillery guys to start doing this instead of
[1:25:03] Speaker 4: fire missions.
[1:25:04] Speaker 3: And then another one car for Ukraine.
[1:25:06] Speaker 4: We're picking up I think thirty five vehicles over the
[1:25:09] Speaker 4: course of the year to outfit an entirely. They stood
[1:25:12] Speaker 4: up a new battalion and we're outfitting that battalion with vehicles.
[1:25:17] Speaker 4: So both of them are pretty great organizations, great units. Yeah,
[1:25:22] Speaker 4: I'll send you over both those.
[1:25:23] Speaker 2: Man.
[1:25:23] Speaker 5: Cool is that the fourth Ranger Battalion is there? Do
[1:25:29] Speaker 5: you know anything about that? Because it got somebody reached
[1:25:31] Speaker 5: out to us about that to possibly have them on
[1:25:34] Speaker 5: or figure something out and get something done with them.
[1:25:38] Speaker 4: I can help, I can help navigate that. I've got
[1:25:41] Speaker 4: a flag from them in the in the garage because
[1:25:45] Speaker 4: it's a cool looking flag. But I have an American
[1:25:49] Speaker 4: friend that does a lot of work in their special
[1:25:51] Speaker 4: operations from a civilian side, like helping just coordinate stuff.
[1:25:56] Speaker 4: And I've had a couple of dudes reach out and
[1:25:58] Speaker 4: he's very quick to like vet it or find out
[1:26:00] Speaker 4: is this personal legit or not, or where they've served.
[1:26:03] Speaker 3: So okay, I can. I know you guys have all.
[1:26:05] Speaker 4: Of your systems there as well, but if there's any
[1:26:07] Speaker 4: benefit there.
[1:26:08] Speaker 2: Oh yeah, thank you well, Preston, appreciate your time.
[1:26:12] Speaker 1: Many thank you Jack joining us on this Monday afternoon,
[1:26:16] Speaker 1: and thank you everyone else who joined us watching this show.
[1:26:19] Speaker 1: We'll be back again on Wednesday. Well at the time,
[1:26:23] Speaker 1: when is this going to air on.
[1:26:24] Speaker 5: Preston's episodes coming out Wednesday night, Wednesday morning on audio,
[1:26:29] Speaker 5: Wednesday night on video, and then Wednesday show that we're
[1:26:33] Speaker 5: recording on Friday. Awesome, there you go. But if you
[1:26:36] Speaker 5: join our Patreon you get it for free. You can
[1:26:38] Speaker 5: watch the day of.
[1:26:41] Speaker 2: All right.
[1:26:41] Speaker 5: Also join Patreon. Joined Preston's Patreon as well. Yes, thank
[1:26:47] Speaker 5: you for all Jack, thank you so much. Yeah, thank
[1:26:49] Speaker 5: you Preston. We'll see you next time. Feel free to
[1:26:51] Speaker 5: stay in touch.
[1:26:52] Speaker 3: Awesome man, he everyone, I.
[1:26:57] Speaker 1: Want to tell you about my new novel, The Most
[1:26:59] Speaker 1: Dangerous Man and out in June. It is a novel
[1:27:02] Speaker 1: about a Regimental Reconnaissance Company soldier who gets kidnapped while
[1:27:07] Speaker 1: he's on a mission to West Africa, and when he
[1:27:09] Speaker 1: wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted
[1:27:12] Speaker 1: for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the
[1:27:15] Speaker 1: wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories
[1:27:19] Speaker 1: that I heard over the years about safari guides taking
[1:27:23] Speaker 1: wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa.
[1:27:27] Speaker 1: I took that, and I took a century old short story,
[1:27:31] Speaker 1: the Most Dangerous Game, and modernized it. And the product
[1:27:34] Speaker 1: is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and
[1:27:38] Speaker 1: resonate with audiences today. Thank you and please check it out.
[1:28:00] Speaker 1: Assassssssssssssssssssssssssssss

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