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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing,
and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome two guests to the show,
Alan Chaison and Edward Ford.
Now, Alan is currently a firefighter paramedic, but began his military journey as a Navy corpsman.
Ed is a career Marine, and their paths intersected in the world of contracting,
protecting what came to be known the Pony Express.
So in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from their individual journeys into the military,
tactical medicine, some of the notable attacks and firefights,
the world of contracting, some of the devastating losses they endured,
protecting the military's mail, mental health, transition,
their book Postcards Through Hell, and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation,
as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback, and leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of over 850 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women's stories,
so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Alan Chesson and Ed Ford. Enjoy.
Well, Alan and Edward, I want to say firstly thank you not only for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today,
but your patience, obviously coordinating this.
It's been a challenge and then I had to rush back to the UK when we were supposed to do the interview.
So I want to thank you firstly for coming on and secondly for your patience.
Oh, yeah, no problem. Yeah, thanks for having us, actually. Yeah, thank you.
So I want to kind of walk both of you through your early life journey into the military,
because I mean when you come together and what you wrote about in the book,
there's so much there, but just to give some context of how you both got there in the first place.
So, Edward, let's start with you. Tell me where you were born.
Tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
Okay, yeah, born in Boston, Mass. I lived in Jamaica Plain most of my life.
My father was a chef. My mom was a nurse. It's just one of those things.
I'd always wanted to be a Marine, so ended up going after graduating high school.
That's exactly what I did. I went down and actually I played hooky on,
I skipped school on my 18th birthday, signed my name on the dotted line
and enlisted in the Marine Corps on delayed entry.
And then like five days after I graduated high school, I was standing on yellow footprints.
And the funny thing is I was like, all right, I'm just going to go there to get some money for college.
But I ended up really liking it. So after my first enlistment, I went out to Hawaii for a couple of years.
Then after Hawaii, I got over to Second Force and that's where I really found my niche.
It was in Force Recon. I mean, just being with like-minded individuals,
guys that focused on the mission and were challenging and pushing themselves.
That was the big thing there. You look at it initially when you walk there,
like, God damn it, I don't know if I can do this. But then when you do that first event,
then you pass the second event, then you get the third event.
And before you know it, though, I mean, you're in a platoon, you're in a team, you're on patrols.
Yeah, matter of fact, our first platoon, the first platoon I was in, in Second Force,
we ended up deploying to Desert Storm. And if you remember, the little bit of the hubbub about the embassy take-down,
when we took back the embassy, that was our platoon, Piglet 2-1, we took back the embassy in Kuwait City.
And yeah, the Army was not pleased with that because they already had like a big hit plan,
flying in Chinooks and everything else. So we took down the embassy, hung out there for a couple of days,
and then we were told to get out of the city. As we're leaving the city, they even had a Black Hawk helicopter
follow us out of the city to make sure we left. And I guess that's when they flew in with the helicopters
and they all fast roped in. Kind of funny though, because we're sitting there, before we left,
we were like, police called the area, cleaned everything up. There was a couple of pictures there,
we all signed them and put them back up on the wall, nice and neat. They had our names on them.
And as we're driving out, we're like, man, we really hope we clean this place up really good.
And it turns out the Army went in there, blew open doors, blew the place down,
and it was like they actually had to rebuild another embassy because of that.
And yeah, but everyone was like, but the media pool was like, you can't, what are you saying you secured the embassy?
We were talking on the marines that were there like two days prior to you guys,
and yeah, nobody was happy, the Army wasn't happy about that.
But yeah, I stayed in the second force up until 96, went to New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico,
was on part of the I&I, I worked with the Reserve Recon Unit out there in New Mexico for three years.
And then I went over to First Recon Company right before they stood back up to battalion.
They were a company. Picked up a platoon out there. I was a platoon sergeant now.
Awesome job. I had a blast doing that.
And it was just, I mean, you're so influential in all those younger Recon Marines,
and you get to mold them, help mold them.
And a lot of them, you know, they take what you taught them and they apply it later on.
And took a platoon out on float, came back. That was the float that the coal got hit on.
And so my platoon, because we had divers in there, we provided some dive support for the recovery mission
when the Blue Marlin came in and they put the coal on top of the ship.
They were in the boats as dive support.
After that, came back, was up in the S3 doing ops and stuff like that.
I was like, man, there's got to be more to it than this.
And then another buddy of mine over at First Force was like, dude, we're looking for people if you're bored with the S3.
And I was like, you know what? I'll do one more platoon before I retire and get out.
And yeah, I got to run around one more time with our First Force.
And this time we went to OIF and I was in fifth platoon then.
But after the Marine Corps, I went right into contracting.
And funny story about that is another Force recon guy, a buddy of mine, he had just retired and he was working for the crucible.
And he said, he sent out a mass email.
If you want to do this kind of work, making this kind of money, working with these kind of guys, send me your resume.
So I shot him my resume and that was my first gig was working with Dyncor in Afghanistan at the embassy.
And then from there I went to, I did that for a year.
And then I worked for crucible for, geez, like two years.
And then I picked up with SOC in 2009.
And that was pretty much the last company I worked with.
Started off in Iraq, went to Afghanistan, did static site security.
I was a security supervisor for the construction going on down at Camp Chapman.
And so whenever we had trucks coming in, I had to talk to the actual security guys from Blackwater.
Let them know what was coming in, they'd search the trucks and we'd bring them in.
And after that, then I got on the convoy program with SOC.
And that's where I ran into Al again.
I ran into Alan, in fact, the first time in Iraq, bad gagged in 2005.
So yeah, and since, yeah, that's it really.
Brilliant. Well, I want to, a couple of things I want to pull from you before we go to Alan.
Firstly, the USS Cole, was that an al-Qaeda attack as well?
Yes.
So talk to me about that.
They pulled right up to the side of it and they blew the hole in it.
So from the perspective that you had, because not many people were really on that attack,
what were, what was the tragedies and the heroism from that day that you heard or saw?
Oh, I mean, I guess, you know, the ship was sinking in the harbor.
And I mean, I guess, I mean, there was talk.
I heard, we heard that there might've been some talk or like, hey, maybe we ought to just give up the ship.
But the captain of the ship was like, no, we stay and we're going to save this ship.
And, but yeah, I think they lost like 19 on that ship there and a whole bunch wounded too.
But no, yeah, from what I heard, you know, the crew pulled together and that's what saved that ship.
They, the flooding and the fires, they were able to get it all under control.
And then they were able to fly in the, like this, all the support, like the Mutsu guys, they flew in from Bahrain.
And then we were with the Mew, the 13th Mew, I believe.
Yeah, the 13th Mew. And we were in the Seychelles.
They cut our libo short and we all backloaded and we should, we sorted right up to the Gulf of Aden.
And then that's when we started pulling all the security ops there.
They put a rifle company on the beach in the harbor.
So they had a hard area to work from.
Plus we kept a ship there also so the FBI could launch its, could run its investigation.
Yeah. Oh yeah. They flew the FBI out also for investigation and the forensics.
So you're on scene of that and then a few short years later, the same organization attacks New York and other parts of America.
You know, I've already been in uniform for quite a few years by that point.
What was your personal 9-11 experience and how did it change your world?
I was go, I was heading to work and I heard, I was listening to the radio, driving into work at Camp Pendleton.
And I heard about a plane hitting one of the towers.
But I remember the Empire State Building back in the 40s got hit by a B-25.
It flew into the building in the fog. I was like, probably couldn't see.
And I'm thinking it's a smaller plane.
And now I'm sitting in the chow hall watching the first tower burning on fire.
I'm like, wow. And then you see the air, the second jet, the second airliner in the background.
It disappears behind the two towers and it doesn't come out the other side.
But then all of a sudden you see that second tower, just a fireball shoot through it.
And it was like, I'm sitting there reading. I'm like, oh wow, looks like we're going to war now.
I mean, everyone's just like, oh wow.
And then, yeah, that was the big news. That whole time there was,
that whole day we were just watching as the towers fell up in the battalion, at the recon battalion.
And battalion commander, Colonel Ferrando, was like, okay, get ready. We might be going to war here.
We just don't know when. We are going to war. We just don't know when.
So, yeah, that was, yeah, that was us. That was when I knew we were going to war.
Where did you find yourself deployed first? Was it Afghanistan or was it Iraq?
Iraq. All my work in Afghanistan was done as a civilian. I was a civilian contractor.
OYF was like my last big, was my last operation with the Marine Corps.
We, the platoon I was in, 5th platoon, we took down Safwan Hill.
And then later on we were up in Baghdad just because things were starting to, you know,
a lot of people were starting to get killed that didn't need to be getting hurt.
They were starting to use the force recon platoons for the surgical CQB stuff for the Klairs.
Just to try to keep the civilian casualties down up in Baghdad.
Other than that, yeah, yeah, and then after, like I said, I mean, after I came back from that,
I was going to be retiring in six months and that's when Chris Boyd sent out that email.
That's what got me into contracting.
Well, let's bring Alan in then. So same question for you first.
Where you were born and then what your parents did, how many siblings?
Well, I was born in Toronto, Ontario. I've got four sisters and one brother, twin sister, of course.
My dad was a welder, my mom's a nurse as well.
We immigrated to the United States, I guess in 1964.
And we stayed there for a while and then relocated to Arizona where I went to high school.
I was in NJROTC for three years.
And so when I went into the military, I wanted to join the Marine Corps too, but I wanted to be a medic.
So I went into the Navy, became a hospital corpsman so that I could be attached to a Marine Corps unit.
But my military service was insignificant.
I never did anything other than training up until my discharge in 1981.
And when I was in the Navy, I went to a civilian training program for paramedics.
And I became one of the first, I guess, Navy corpsmen to get nationally registered as a paramedic under that program.
And when I got out, since I was already nationally registered, I just started working in EMS in 9-1-1, actually in Oakland, California.
So I kind of cut my teeth on 9-1-1 in Oakland, which they call that the knife and gun club over there.
So I saw a lot of trauma and whatnot.
After that, I relocated back to British Columbia because my parents had moved over there.
And I was working mostly in the logging industry as a first aid medic.
And then that industry is wrought with a lot of unions and whatnot.
And so they would strike quite often, and it was hard to get work in between.
So I ended up coming back to the United States and got a job as a paramedic.
And I was working on a tiered service.
It was a contracted 9-1-1 service.
So it was a private ambulance that was pulling 9-1-1 out of a fire station.
And these guys were making maybe a little bit more, the same amount of money that we were.
But they were running all the good calls and we were getting all the crappy stuff.
So I said I wanted to be a firefighter.
So I went to the fire academy.
And it's kind of funny because my whole direction towards where I wanted to steer my career was in arson investigation.
And I went to arson school and became an arson investigator.
And they said, well, if you want to get certified in the state of Texas, you have to be a peace officer.
So I ended up going to the police academy.
And of course, when I was in the police academy, they found out I was a paramedic and wanted me to join a SWAT team.
So I ended up doing SWAT for about 10 years.
And I was also a member of Texas Task Force One.
And I deployed to Hurricane Katrina.
I actually did two deployments back to back.
And I met some black water guys there.
They were telling me they were hiring medics in Iraq.
So I applied for that job and I got it.
And I went overseas.
And one of my trainers was at that's where I met Ed at Baghdad Hotel in Baghdad when he was working for the crucible.
And so he trained me and we became pretty good friends.
And then he had deployed to Afghanistan when he was working for SOC.
And my contract was up.
My next job was working for SOC, but I was still in Iraq.
And over there, I was supposed to cover down for other medics that were going on leave.
So I was jumping from FOB to FOB to FOB while these medics were out on leave.
And then the last one I was at was at Adiwaniya at FOB Echo and that medic never came back.
So I ended up staying there for like another three months.
And so while Ed was in Afghanistan, one of their teams got hit and they didn't have a medic on the team.
I mean, they all had training in combat lifesaver and they were able to take care of the situation, but they needed a medic and they needed somebody to put a program together for them.
And they dropped my name in the hat.
I just went from Echo to Afghanistan.
So a couple of things.
Firstly, Oakland.
When I think of Oakland in the 80s, obviously that was, as you said, knife and gun club, a lot of gang violence, especially back then.
Your introduction into EMS.
Talk to me about that.
What were some of the career calls you had when you were wearing that uniform?
You know, they have a thing about differentiating between colors and a lot of these gang members, they all basically dress the same.
They might be a part of a different gang and they use colors to segregate the gangs, but you can't tell one person apart from another.
And I think that they do that to minimize their incarcerations and whatnot, where you can't identify suspects and whatever, not.
But there were a lot of calls where, you know, if somebody is going to kill somebody, they want to make sure they're dead.
And a lot of times you got out to a scene, you might not have the benefit or protection of law enforcement or whatever the case may be.
And then you have to deal with the situation as it arises.
And there have been a lot of times where we've been assaulted.
We've had ambulances stolen.
People have pointed guns at us to say, leave them alone, that kind of a thing and whatnot.
But you just, you know, you push through it.
That's the nature of the business.
I know one of my paramedic friends was transporting a gang shooting victim to the trauma center and they were actually hunted down and they're shooting at the ambulance, at the rescue.
And I don't know what happened. They've got spooked or something, so they didn't end up, you know, getting the driver or the medic.
But I mean, terrifying.
I mean, you're completely unprotected as a paramedic in the back of an ambulance.
Yeah, it's funny because there's been times when we got back to the station and there'd be bullet holes in the truck, but we didn't know that we were being shot at, at the time.
But yeah, that's an interesting thing.
Now you worked, as you said, you're a paramedic, SWAT, law enforcement officer. What was your 9-11 experience and was that what sent you into the military side again?
Not really. I mean, I got out in 1981.
So, like I said, there was really, aside from my experience as a corpsman, the task force was probably the greatest motivator for me.
I was on the tarmac getting ready to fly to Virginia when the plane crashed.
And so all flights were canceled at that point.
And so I'm at the airport. You know, I was supposed to go to Virginia to do some training with Darius Gonzalez on WMD and hazardous materials.
And so I basically turned around and instead of going home, I went to the task force to see what was going to happen because I knew we were going to be deployed.
And we have three tiers, red, white, and blue. And it was the white team that was up.
And so once they sent out the notification to deploy to New York for the World Trade Center, we all sat on the tarmac for a couple of days before we actually deployed.
And they ponied up enough people to send the white team there. And then our team was set up as backup.
So I went home, just watched the news and, you know, just trying to stay in touch with the guys, you know, get a lot of video feed photographs and updates on how the team was doing and whatnot.
And then from there, they mitigated the situation in 10 days as far as body recoveries and whatnot.
I stayed with the task force for about 12 years. I did other deployments like the Columbia shuttle incident and Hurricane Katrina, the Texas tornadoes.
They did a lot, quite a bit of stuff. As a USAR medic, my job there was assigned to hazardous materials.
So I was considered a WB specialist and I was the manager of the blue team.
I had some friends in Anaheim that went to Katrina and I remember vividly I was on probation still being in station six and watching Geraldo bitching on the television because he had come back to some bridge somewhere and the same people that were there last time he was there were still there.
And I remember thinking, well, why the fuck didn't you put them on your helicopter and fly them out then? And the reporting from Katrina seemed so opposite than the reporting from 9-11.
That community, that togetherness, you know, that we saw in New York, the way it was being reported was, you know, there was the woman, the media was literally saying they're just getting the white people out.
All the black people have been left. I mean, it was absolutely horrendous. And, you know, my friends that were out there, one of whom was almost killed, the washroom, one of the helicopters picked up a bunch of pallets and hit him in the head, almost killed him.
You know, I know what these men and women were doing, you know, for all these people of all colors and creeds that were in need at that time.
So what was your perspective of that deployment specifically?
The first mission, the objectives were clear, obviously, him life is the priority and we rescued a number of people.
It was interesting to see all of the other things that kind of bothered me, like animal rescues would be one thing that we weren't allowed to do.
I remember seeing this one dog that was standing up on a porch that was almost neck deep in water and it was close to the window sill of the first floor of the building.
And this dog had been up there for so long that it was falling asleep. And so we pulled the dog into the boat.
Not that it was we were going to try to rescue the dog and we certainly didn't deviate from our plan.
But as soon as he got into the boat, he fell asleep and they woke up. And, you know, that kind of bothered me.
And other times we would hear like babies crying. We would go to a house and find out it's just like a cat that's stuck on the inside and whatnot.
And there were a lot of people that had already perished in the storm that were body recovery is not the primary objective.
And a lot of people were getting on our case because we weren't taking these people out in the process of trying to find people that were live victims.
And so they would be there for two or three days at a time. And it was kind of sad to see.
But again, I don't think they understood what our objectives were.
And, you know, we can't take the time to try to explain that. I'm certainly not in a position to talk to the public.
I'm not a PIO or anything like that. But we just have to, you know, avoid some people didn't want to be taken out of their homes.
There were people there that, hey, can you get us some beer and cigarettes and then just bring them back?
And I was just going, hey, we're not a taxi service. You know, we just have to continue on with the mission.
The second deployment was a lot harder. The water was starting to recede.
We had a lot of decontamination that we had to do everywhere. We had to go and research homes that hadn't been marked properly.
We had to forge our boats across areas. It got to be manually intensive in terms of the amount of work that we had to do.
And it certainly took its toll. And as a matter of fact, at the end of that deployment, another hurricane, I think it was, hit in up near Fort Worth in Texas.
So as soon as we got back, another team ended up going there. And so Houston was being evacuated.
And I ended up just going to San Antonio and waiting it out because, you know, 22 days, it just, it wore on you.
And I needed the time off to decompress.
Well, thank you again for that insight. I think it's important, you know, whether it's military, whether it's first responders,
it's amazing how when you ask the people that were actually there, you know, you hear human stories and you hear, you know, just simply taking a dog out of his suffering to let it, you know, transition peacefully, for example, that's beautiful.
We don't see these, you know, if it kind of aligns with whatever political narrative is at that moment.
And it's heartbreaking because I know that my brothers and sisters in uniform are out there risking their lives to do everything they can to save these people.
And I found it so disgusting that it wasn't reported that way, that it was, you know, used as a, you know, as a porn by that point.
And, you know, to have a reporter that isn't carrying people away, bitching about people not being carried away, for example, was like the, you know, that that summed everything up as far as the way it was presented versus the people that were actually there doing the work.
Yeah, if I could caveat onto the paramedic thing, when I had applied for a contractor job, I initially applied as an international police liaison officer.
I was going to go to Iraq to train Iraqi police on search and seizure and whatnot.
And again, when I got there, they found out I was the paramedic, saying, oh, you would be better served on a PSD team.
And I didn't know anything about PSD, so it was kind of like on the job training.
When I met Ed, I kind of latched on to him because, you know, he was one of those kind of instructors that kind of put things on a ground level for you.
And I learned a lot from him. I actually wrote a couple of articles that got published, and he helped me out with that.
We just stayed in touch. And when I was, I was ecstatic when they called up for me to go to Afghanistan, I was more happy to be with him than I was to actually go to Afghanistan.
So it was pretty cool.
Well, Ed, Alan was talking about you needing a medic. So educate us on the mission, on what you were doing as far as the Pony Express, and then kind of walk us up to the point where Alan joined you.
Okay, the convoy, it wasn't known as the Pony Express until we actually picked up the mail contract, which happened a little bit later. But when we brought Alan, we were doing secure, we were escorting secure loads for a, well, for a government client.
Yeah, yeah, three letters. So we were, we were escorting those loads, and that was our mission there.
Just get the loads there, and then bring the empty trucks back so they can backfill them again. And that was Money Mike's team, Mike Hardy's team that got hit on the way to Schkinn. Schkinn is on like the Paki border.
And so they drove down through Ghazni to Sharona to Orgeny, uneventful, just a long day, then it was, all right, we're going to push on to Schkinn, and they said, if you can make it past this, I forget what mile marker was, 44?
24.
24. They said, if you can make it past mile marker 24, you're going to make it clean. I think they hit them right at mile marker 24.
They sure did.
They hit them right at mile marker 24, and that's when, you know, they lit up the first vehicle that was Cookie's vehicle. They didn't end up rolling, flipping over.
And then when Mike got up to it, that's when he got out of the vehicle, cleared the vehicle, and was like, where the hell are they? And then they got back into the vehicle, but this time they had to fight their way off the X.
And then as soon as they got off the X, they see Cookie and the driver, Wolf, I think his name was, standing there right next to one of the fuel trucks that they escorted.
And I was like, dude, we thought you were gone. I was like, yeah, we didn't know how to get out. And we saw the fuel truck drive by. We're like, okay, we're jumping in that truck.
So they both ran up there and they opened the door and they just jumped up into the truck and he drove them out.
Then Mike was able to drive out on his own with his vehicle, and then they made it to the skin, the fire base there.
And yeah, that's where they got debriefed by the client, the agency, and then they had to retrograde them back. They had to fly them back.
Because I know Cookie, the concussion, I think, yeah, that ambush was caught on a satellite feed too.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And they were surprised. They were like, man, these guys are gone. We're going to lose all this fuel. These guys are going to lose that team.
They were shocked that they made it in with just minor injuries.
So talk to me about that early point where you're not protecting the post specifically yet. When we think of IEDs, obviously we're thinking of patrols, we're thinking about the Hummers and all those getting hit.
Talk to me about the danger that it was simply logistically moving supplies and the protection that you needed to give to them.
Oh yeah, because they had to be a secure load because, well, there's so much corruption over there. If you just sent those trucks out there on the road with the drivers, they probably would have sold everything, either aid to the Taliban or they would have been selling it off for themselves.
So you have to deal with the logistics of moving those trucks because those are local truck drivers. And surprisingly, there was always that concern. Are they buying drugs down from one place and moving them to another?
And this is why it was nice. I was a military guy, but so it was like contracting was my first time really working with cops. And that's when you realize, man, these guys are going to walk to the table.
You've got to search a vehicle for anything, send your cops in. They know where all the hiding spots are.
Oh yeah, and the Afghan drivers, sometimes you see them because I remember money and a cookie would go up there. They knew right where to go. Boom, boom, boom. They were pulling all the contraband.
A lot of the drugs and it was like, all right. They would just get it destroyed is what they would do.
It wasn't just IEDs though. It was RPGs, small arms, fire, IDF, all kinds of shit. I mean, when they attacked you, they attacked you with everything and they did it with a purpose.
It was try to choke the column, get the first vehicle. Sometimes these drivers wouldn't stay on the X. They tried to back out or leave or even ditch their vehicles.
And the next thing you know, now you've got to be able to jump into one of their vehicles and figure out how to drive that. So I mean, everybody was trained to drive the vehicles.
And we did a lot of training in tactical tire changes, towing out vehicles, pushing out vehicles, cross decking, the whole nine yards. So yeah, they were dangerous, dangerous missions.
Yeah. And yeah, so yeah, so you're dealing with the corruption. Now you're also dealing with the Taliban, the complex ambushes. It wasn't like Iraq where they would just pop off an IED and that's it.
These guys were running complex ambushes all the time. They wanted to fight us. They wanted to fight us. And we were like, God damn, man.
I remember Chris Vail when I first picked him up and I briefed him up on that and he was like, ah, a worthy adversary. I was like, dude, be careful what you wish for.
But yeah, like Al said, it was all a lot of rehearsals. I mean, what to do on enemy contact, but also the mundane also.
How to take down a refueling site, how to change a flat tire, how to set up a tow, how to cross deck the wounded.
You know, a lot of the routine stuff that you need to do too.
Oh, shoot. But other than, you know, what am I, I'm missing something here.
You're fine. Actually, I'm going to throw a question in for you quickly. When I first started doing the podcast, there was a lot of avoidance when it came to drugs in Afghanistan.
And then I don't know what happened. There was a shift about four years ago. People were like totally, you know, open to it now.
So I don't know if some kind of gag order was lifted or lifted or what.
But when you look at the harm that the illicit drug trade has done domestically, that's why we have, you know, gangs like Alan was talking about in Oakland.
If you take away the drugs, you know, that's the ability to make money. You probably disassemble a lot of these gangs.
But a lot of the military guests that have come on now was saying about especially the opium and that funding a lot of the terrorism that you guys were fighting.
Now you're seeing all this smuggling. Was there a connection through your eyes back then?
I mean, we knew it was there. I mean, I remember on my first contract with DynCorp, we flew down south.
The DEA wanted to talk to this drug lord and we landed and we're looking at acres and I mean acres and acres and acres of poppies.
And it looked beautiful. It was all like pink and the pinks and the whites and stuff. You're like, wow.
And it was like, that's 90 percent of the world's heroin trade.
And we were at first we were pissed off at the warlord like, dude, man, what are you doing here?
He's like, I'm a businessman. I don't use this stuff. But you know what people they want it. I'm going to provide it.
And I'm providing a good quality product here. You know, when the demand goes away, I'll grow something else.
And it's like, and how do you answer? And he is like, ah, so it's weird because harvesting opium is not illegal in Afghanistan.
I mean, that's that's their that's their trade.
And it's weird because in Colombia they have like DynCorp was running cocaine eradication programs.
And I thought, well, why don't they do that here?
And that was kind of confusing to me because these guys, these farmers, they're not drug dealers.
They're just they're just cultivating a product that's that's needed.
And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of that money went to the Taliban and supported terrorism.
It was really nothing that we could do about it as far as that was concerned.
But I think our main our main focus was operational security.
And these people that were trying to take advantage of us as a team or were tasked with a mission, we have to we have to deal with the corruption of these local nationals.
SoC could not operate in Afghanistan without a counterpart, which was called SoC A, SoC for Afghanistan.
And that was designed to twofold. It was one to give local nationals an opportunity to get work and two to stimulate the economy, which is putting American dollars back into the economy.
And so we had no choice but to hire some of these LNs.
We certainly used them as our top gunners.
And then, of course, our drivers, they came from all over the place.
I mean, they were Somalians, they were Indians, they were Afghanis. They they they and they the vetting process went through SoC A.
So we didn't really have a choice on who was driving these vehicles.
Whenever we got a mission, we would ask, you know, have to try to search the vehicles, look for cell phones and whatnot, because a lot of times these guys were giving up our locations, our our timings, our routes and things of that nature.
And it became difficult to work in that environment.
So it was a never ending conundrum of operational security that was causing problems for us on these missions.
Well, it's just interesting because looking at it at the lens of the user, I think the US think we consume 75 percent of the world's opiates and we're four percent of the world's population.
So when you look again, and we're going to get into this, you know, the mental health crisis that exists, whether it's in uniform, whether it's the average person and the way that we viewed addiction for a long time, you know, criminalizing and locking people up, that in turn was ultimately feeding, you know, was was funding the terrorism indirectly.
So it's it's just really, I think, important to hear all the stories of all these different people in these different layers so that we, you know, the Brits, the Americans, whoever's listening and whatever country you're from, can go, oh, OK, we can we can see a much bigger picture than, you know, good guy, bad guy and, you know, guns and money.
And there's a lot more.
You think about all the crime that the prohibition of drugs is created the same way as alcohol did with, you know, Al Capone. It's not just on our shores. It reverberates to other countries and even some of these wars.
Yeah, yeah, we were going back to the the Afghanistan with the opium. I mean, the during the harvest time, they call it the threshold. They actually slow down the fighting season just so they can get out there and harvest the opium tar. What they would do one day, they would go out there.
They would cut all the bulbs. You know, you'd see all the Afghans online with a razor with a knife just cutting the bulbs. Then like two days later, they come by with a big pan.
They scrape it. So you do the cut a couple days later, you do the scrape. And then like the next day out, you're doing another cut. You can get three cuts out of a poppy bolt. So out of like a two week period, you would like, you know, you would get three cuts out of a poppy bolt.
So out of like a two week period, you would get all that all that opium, all that opium tar out of the poppy bulbs. And then they'd bag it all up and then they'd move it across the border, depending upon where you're at. Down south, they get or along the RC East, they get it into Pakistan.
Up north, they get it into the other countries up there like Tajikistan. But yeah, they would actually slow down the fighting just so they could move to get that hop that opium tar harvested and moved out of the country.
So, I mean, everybody could make their money because everybody made money. The A&A made money. The A&P made money. Everybody was made. Everybody was in on the take out there when it came to the opium harvest. And then, you know, once they got it all, boom, fighting season back on again.
It was it was it was weird like that. You know, it's like, all right, man, we're gonna go. We're going all out to kill all these guys. Well, to go kill each other. All right, let's take a break here. All right, let's we just need to go ahead and harvest our drugs here. And then two weeks later, they're back at it. You know, they got it all out. And everybody's making their money.
It was so quite a few farming plots with marijuana as well. I just thought that was for local use, you know, with the elders and whatnot.
You have the hashish. Yeah, I mean, those are like some tall plants, like six, seven foot tall. It was like you could walk by me and you'd smell me like, oh, wow.
Well, I mean, I think this is that you said that's how they made their money. I think this is the thing is whether it's Mexico or Afghanistan supply and demand. I heard the Mexico, some of the cartels are moved into avocados now. Someone was telling me the other day because there's such a demand and I just had one today. So obviously, I'm part of the problem there. But you know, you can you can fund that supply or that demand, you know, in a healthy product, coffee, you know, vegetables, whatever it is. So, you know, still empowering.
The farmers were just taking the power away from from some of the shit bags of the world.
Yeah, I think that's that's the ideology behind the reconstruction as well. You know, I mean, the America's efforts and trying to create a different type of economy kind of fell to the wayside after we after we all ended up leaving, you know, I mean,
it, you know, one objective is to, you know, to try to take back the country. The other objective is to try to to help the economy get along, train these people so that they can have regular jobs, things like that. And then all of a sudden we leave and everything goes back to the way it was before, if not worse. So
yeah, it's heartbreaking. I mean, the number of people I've had on the show, whether they're allied forces or even Afghan national sort of come on since, you know, and they're talking about what they're going through now, you know, the starvation, the cold and the Taliban and then, you know, the eviction from Pakistan, all these things that are happening simultaneously where a lot of people now are left, you know, so helpless after the war.
I mean, I'm going to say about the I mean, I mean, if you spent any time on the ground and you interacted with the locals, you I think, and I think you all we all saw that once we leave here, this place is going back to the Taliban.
Yeah, you knew in advance.
I mean, we all knew it was going to happen. I remember when I was leaving Afghanistan for good in December 2012, I ran a buddy of mine was an RSO up at the embassy, I hung out, had lunch and I was, yeah, man, six months after we're gone, we pull out this place going back to the Taliban. And he's like, one of the RSOs is like six months, dude, how about six weeks? And I was like, wow.
It turned out to be six days. Yeah, six days. It was like, really? Yeah, it went way too fast. But yeah, it was. Yeah, we all saw it come. We all knew that, hey, this place is going to go back to the Taliban. But, you know, it just just, we just had no plan for it.
So I think that's that's the unified voice I hear is I think most veterans will look in the mirror and know that they made a difference. And I've heard so many stories. And when I ask, you know, it's kind of two sided story. You know, and they talk about the kindness and compassion of the veterinary surgeon that helped the local animals and you know, the, the kids, you know, playing football with the kids, all the human moments that you guys had and empowering women and rebuilding schools and all that kind of stuff. And I think it's a really, it's a really, it's a really important moment.
that we were able to play football with the kids and that's just the way that we did it. And I think that's the, the, the most important part of the game. I think this is the most important aspect of the game is the, the, the, the plays that you guys had and empowering women and rebuilding schools and hospitals and water supplies. So that was all good. But at the same time, to withdraw the way that we did, you know, that's absolutely jamming a finger in the wound as well of all the the men and women that we lost the limbs that were lost the mental health that was lost in, you know, in defense of that country. And I think it was a slap in the face to anyone who served the way that we did it.
but it was just never executed.
The Biden administration just said,
nah, we're gonna go ahead and shut down
our major air base first and then we'll play by air.
I mean, we left all those interpreters,
everybody that worked for us for like 20 years,
we left there and I remember when that withdrawal
was going down, I'm on the signal
and with a bunch of us that were working over there
from my embassy, from my first gig over in the embassy
in 2004, but we were all still stayed in touch
and we were just trying to figure out
how can we help get these guys out
and it's like, hey, try to make it to the Panjshir Valley.
Nah, can't do it.
All right, get north, get up to Mazar Sharif
and we'll try to get you guys across the border
and we got some guys out, but geez,
I mean, there's still a bunch that I know
of that didn't make it out and it's just a matter
of what's going on now with them
because yeah, the Taliban knew that those height machines
that they used to scan the retinas,
they knew how to work those and once they scan that retina,
it's either kind of come back as a suspect
or an employee, US employee and if you came up
as a US employee, you were about to have a bad day
and yeah, that's what they, we left all of them.
So yeah, but I think we have a bad habit of doing that too.
Let me look at what we did in Vietnam.
We left off of a rooftop there, so.
Yeah, exactly and someone was saying,
I forget which guest it was, but the next time
that we're asking a nation to come fight side by side,
they're gonna point at those two and go,
we don't trust you and that's sad
because they trust the people that were actually there
but just the decisions are so often,
of the few people that don't even show up to an actual war,
they just make decisions from the safety of their own homes
and now they've damaged the potential relationships
of allies in the future.
Oh yeah, I mean, I wouldn't wanna work for the,
I mean, if I was like over in one of those foreign countries,
US came in, I'd be very hesitant on putting my family
at risk to work for the US.
It would have to be, I'll go ahead and sign on
but you get my family out, they have visas right now.
They have visas, you're gonna give them training
and then you're gonna give them jobs or else I'm up.
And yeah, that's the only way they're gonna get
interpreters I think for the next go round, so.
Well, Alan, I wanna bring you back in.
Ed had talked about initially not protecting the posts.
So talk to me about that transition
and let's bring you in when you first got boots
on the ground in Afghanistan.
Well, they were doing a vehicle recovery.
So when I got to Afghanistan, they left me at the airport.
I was, nobody there to pick me up
and I didn't know where the compound was and whatnot
and I was just gone, oh crap.
And you know, Money Mike talks about trial by fire.
I just jumped in a cab with another contractor
that was working for a company called Barsa
which was an NGO and that cab took her to her compound
and then I knew that we were in the Shah Arni district
and so the cab driver took me back there
and I kept thinking, I mean, he could just take me
to Taliban headquarters right now
and get whatever money an expat could garner.
But we drove up and down these streets in this district
until I finally saw a guard in a sock uniform
and I said, hey, turn right here.
And he turned right
and I think I spent about three hours in that cab
looking for that compound and I finally found it.
And I got out, just as I got out,
those guys showed up with the vehicle that they had recovered
and I was just going, hey man,
nobody picked me up at the airport.
Well, we had, this was a priority.
And I was going, okay, well, thanks.
I feel the love.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I was totally-
But you hit the ground running.
So your first day there is, you get billeted.
We were in a really small villa
that was kind of split in two
where admin was on one side and ops were on the other.
Just unpack your stuff and then get to work.
We had ordered some F550s that hadn't arrived yet.
So we were running local PSD missions
for people to and from the airport,
taking the client here and there,
some recon missions and whatnot.
And I saw that our medical supply
was really grossly depleted.
We had some med stuff, but a lot of it was expired.
Some of it was the packaging wasn't really good
and whatnot.
So I just went to work and every time I went on a mission
with any crew to a fob or whatever,
I would hook up with the medics at that location
and I would say, hey, what can you spare here and there?
I just started stockpiling med gear and whatnot.
That was my first priority
was to get all that stuff going.
After that, I put together a medical profile cards
for all of the operators
so that if anybody got injured at the time
and they weren't able to speak for themselves,
we had information on their blood types,
their allergies, their meds, their medical history
and their emergency contact information.
And I kept the master with myself
and then each operator had a card
that they had to carry in a specified pocket on their vests.
And then we started training up the guys
in combat lifesaver and teach Ripple C.
And then we got the gun trucks in
and we started running missions there.
I actually left in 2009
just before they picked up the mail contract.
But we had already done missions.
Matter of fact, we did a mission down to Kandahar.
And when we got to Kandahar,
they had another mission back in Kabul.
So they split our team up.
So Ed came down and give us the news and said,
okay, you and I are gonna go to Herat,
which is through Taliban country.
And the other rest of the team are gonna take a gun truck
and the rest of the vehicles back to Kabul.
And so him and I ended up running this suicide mission
to Herat just with one gun truck and a lead vehicle.
And that, I mean, I was shooting bullets
because we drove through Helmand province.
We saw a lot of activity
where the army was engaging military.
The road was just littered with blown out vehicles
and evidence of several attacks.
And it was just like, man,
you gotta have your head out of swivel.
And I kept thinking, man, I wonder what he's thinking.
And I'm thinking that he's wondering what I'm thinking.
And we pulled that mission off
and they dubbed that when we finally returned,
they dubbed that the thousand kilometer club
because we ran one of those missions nonstop
in a 24 hour period.
Yeah, going from Herat to Kandahar back up to Kabul.
Yeah.
That's 800, 881 kilometers or something like that.
They just called it the thousand kilometer club.
So.
So as you get into that role, talk to me,
and we would call it a career call in the fire service,
but you wrote about so many elements
when it came to the book,
but walk me through kind of chronologically
some of the big events, some of the losses of lives
that started to really impact you and your team.
Well, that was more with Ed.
He saw quite a bit more contact with the team.
Then I did most of the stuff that happened with me
was in 2012.
It's kind of strange because the book goes from 2009 to 2012,
but the contract actually ran until December 24th of 2016,
but everything from 2012 to 2016 was classified.
So we were actually not allowed to write
about any of those contacts.
We weren't allowed to mention any names.
We weren't allowed to give any mission specs
because the prime, which is the person
that holds the contract is classified.
So we couldn't talk about any of that stuff.
And we both kind of feel bad about it
because there were a lot of guys pre-2012
that were still on the missions post-2012.
And right when you get to that period of time where I left,
the book kind of stops.
And so we just kind of created the ending of it,
which was with my team leader, Aaron Kirch.
He sent us a letter called the Immortals and whatnot
and talked about a lot of stuff that we did.
The last person that got killed on my stick was a QRF.
So the team was out near Jalalabad and they took a hit
and the top gunner was killed instantly.
And of course the rear gun truck had smashed
into that other vehicle
and their navigator suffered some injuries,
but we had to go out there and recover them.
And that was one on my birthday
and two on the night before we were actually getting ready
to end a mission.
So it was like our last night.
We were supposed to go to sleep
and then go to the airport the next day.
And we ended up running this mission at the last minute.
So most of that stuff was with Ed.
I helped him write up about a lot of that stuff
because as we were talking,
he was telling me about all these things that,
these guys don't get credit for anything.
We're contractors, we're there,
we're getting paid all this money, blah, blah, blah.
And we've been dubbed mercenaries,
we've been called warmongers
and all kinds of other things like that.
But that's not the truth.
It's not the case at all.
We're just trying to do,
we're guys that have a skillset
that are trying to do a job.
And we, aside from not getting the credit,
guys were treated on the teams,
they were treated differently
when it came to repatriation and all kinds of things.
So we had guys that got killed that were sent home as cargo
as opposed to the military honors and whatnot.
And what kind of a position are we in to help them
and how can we help their family members and whatnot?
So that tore on us quite a bit.
And people don't realize a lot of the things that we went to
because we formed this brotherhood.
We're out there, we're working together.
We don't care if you're from Bosnia or Serbia or Macedonia
or Fiji or whatnot.
We're all there doing the same job, taking the same risks.
And it kind of tears on you
because you can't do anything about it.
Yeah, I mean, I remember my first guys,
I had my first mission there.
I had an evac on my vehicle, as a matter of fact.
We tried to circumvent a roadblock.
They were like, yeah, go down through there,
cut through that village and pick up the road.
You can pick up the highway a little bit later.
And ended up hitting a landmine.
And I was out of the vehicle at the time
trying to scout a route.
And I heard it, I looked over and it was like slow-mo
where I just saw the cloud come up
and I saw the rear bumper flying off.
And I was like, oh no.
And immediately I thought it was like an ambush.
So I jumped into a ditch, Buddha jumped into a ditch.
And it was just a mine strike.
There was no fall on one fire.
So we get down there, we were running down there.
Somebody, I think it was Buddha that yelled out,
hey, I think we're in a minefield.
So now we have to sit there and slow down,
step in other people's footsteps,
get to the casualties, treat the casualties.
And then after that, I tried to burn the vehicle.
We're starting to drive out of there.
We link up with the Army.
The Army set up an LZ for us.
They brought in the Blackhawks.
We were able to get the casualties out
and they flew them right over to Kandahar.
And then, because that gun truck wasn't a complete burn,
the Army, I told the Army,
you guys can go ahead and destroy that.
And they brought in a couple of helicopters
and they each fired a couple of rockets into it.
And then you could hear them talking on the radio,
yes, nothing left of that truck but a couple axles.
I was like, oh, thank you.
But yeah, that was like, and those guys all lived.
But because the trucks we had were flat bottom,
there was no dissipation of the force
when it came through, when it hit the vehicle.
So all these, all the gunners in the back
had massive lower extremity injuries.
Even when I left, they still weren't walking right.
And then the next time I was on my way to Shkinna,
as a matter of fact, on my way to Organi.
And we had just, I was just pulling around a corner.
My vehicle was and I saw a big cloud come up in the air
and I was like, oh shit, and I'm on the radio to lead.
I'm like, lead, this is Hammer, lead, this is Hammer.
And nothing, and as soon as I popped the corner
in the vehicle, you could see the lead vehicle down,
the doors all blown open, I was like, oops.
So boom, me and Buddha deployed,
I said, all right, hit the pings
because we had the distress pings.
We hit the pings and then I called to the talk
and I was just talking to JJ and I was like,
activate the EMS, activate the QRF,
where I got the vehicle down, I got men down.
And we ran up to it.
And I remember as I'm warning and up to it,
up to the vehicle, I saw this brown form on the ground.
I thought it was a sleeping bag.
I'm like, all right, please just let this be a sleeping bag.
And I grabbed the bat, what I thought was a bag,
but it was a shoulder.
And I was like, as soon as I was getting close,
I knew it wasn't a sleeping bag.
Grabbed the shoulder, turned him over
and it was my interpreter for a while.
He was killed instantly.
And on his way out, it's weird how you process it
because he must have clipped his legs
on the edge of the gun tub when he got shot
out of the vehicle because his legs
were amputated at the knees.
But to show you how quick he died,
he was dead probably before he left the vehicle,
there was no blood.
I mean, there was no blood at all from where he was laying.
I was like, and then Buddha was right behind me, picket.
Now he's a paramedic instructor.
He'd been working the streets for a while.
So he had seen lots of death.
And I must have turned around and looked back
and given him that stupid look like,
gee doc, can you fix this guy?
And he's like, fuck him, he's gone, let's go.
And I was like, yeah, no shit, let's go, boom.
Ran to the vehicle and it was all about working
to save the living.
And John jumped into the back, working on the two gunners
and I saw Scott as we were running up,
my ATL Scott Brown running.
Well, he wasn't running, but he walks out of the vehicle
carrying an AK and he walks up this hill
and I'm running after him now.
And I finally catch him, I was like, dude, you okay?
And he's like, dude, I'm all fucked up.
I'm on adrenaline right now, just so you know.
And I was like, whatever you do, do not leave here.
All right, I need to know where I can find you.
Ran back down, we pulled Pero out of the vehicle.
He was coughing up like huge amounts of blood.
I mean, cause that IED went off probably right
where the interpreter was sitting,
but right behind the driver also.
And it just blew about all his,
it just destroyed all his innards.
So he was coughing up huge amounts of blood.
He was unconscious, we put him on the stretcher,
got him out of there, got him into the back
of the other gun truck and Pickett was just trying
to go to work, trying to save him.
But I think he knew, but you just don't give up.
I mean, amongst those paramedics and the docs,
they don't give up.
He, so I was like, all right, let's go get him.
Let's go grab Scott, we're gonna get out of here.
He goes up the hill to go get Scott.
I thought Scott could still walk by that.
By now I'm still thinking Scott could still walk.
And I'm turning the convoy around,
getting it ready to roll out.
And he carries him down and I'm looking at him like,
oh shit, this ain't good.
So I run over to him when he's on the ground
and he's like, dude, you're gonna have to take him
from here, so I just picked Scott up
and I ran him over to the other gun truck.
And I think it's kind of funny now,
but at the time it wasn't.
He's like, all right, whatever you do,
when you put him down, be careful.
And Scott's weight just shifted on me
and I was like, don't.
And I just dropped him right on the bumper.
Now he's got a broken back and a fractured pelvis.
That's what he ran up that hill with.
That's why I still consider him one of the toughest dudes
I've ever met.
And when I dropped him on the bumper,
he's like, ah, fuck, I'm sorry, bro.
I'm sorry, dude.
Yeah, God, yeah.
And we got everybody back in the vehicles.
Scott, because of his injuries, he had to stand
until we got back to the organi.
He manned the PKM.
He manned the PKM for the next three hours
because we couldn't stay on the roads anymore
because that's where the IED was.
So we had to stay in the stream beds.
Now we're rock popping.
And now every time that gun truck was doing this,
Scott was going bone on bone on his pelvis and in his back.
Yeah, you could hear him screaming for the next three hours.
I was like, oh man, this ain't fucking good.
You know, we had to get out one time
because we saw something weird sticking out.
Turns out it was wires that could have been from an IED
that were just waiting for us to drive over it.
So we had a, the civilians were skirting around it.
So we skirted around it.
You know, I'm like, I'm looking at Scott,
I'm like, dude, you just gotta suck it up, man.
I'm sorry, you just have to suck it up.
I think Buddha gave him like the max amount of morphine
you're allowed to give somebody.
Because if you went over that,
I think it was like 10 milligrams.
10 milligrams, yeah.
Because over that you could shut down their heart.
So, you know, so Scott just had to suck it up
for three hours, I remember that.
And I remember, yeah, we lost Perro.
Because I remember when we first got the convoy going again,
it was one dead and four wounded.
And about 10 minutes later, Buddha comes over the radio,
be advised we're now at three patients.
And I was like, oh fuck, we lost Perro.
So I had to call back to the talk.
And my driver, sir, but he was Perro's buddy.
And I was like, hey, yeah, we're now down to three patients
and two KIA.
And they were like, all right, who'd you lose?
I was like, fuck man, I don't wanna say this.
Right next to Perro's friend here, I was like,
yeah, it was Perro.
And yeah, that was Marich that was the driver.
And he's like, God damn.
So we finally got back to the FAB at Organee.
And it was weird though, they're like, yeah,
we're talking to the client at this time.
I'm like, all right, vehicle down,
we're inbound with casualties.
I need a QRF, I need a medevac.
Yeah, we were on our own for that one.
So for the next three hours, we drove out
and then we finally make it to the hardball.
That's where the QRF was sitting.
I was like, you guys couldn't go in there
and help us out with that?
You couldn't go in there and help us out?
Yeah, they wouldn't leave the road.
Yeah, they wouldn't leave the hardball.
So we finally get everybody up to the medical.
They took the two dead out.
They put them in the freezer, which is a makeshift morgue.
And then we got all the wounded into the cache.
And then after they were being all taken care of,
Buddha went over to the two KIAs, to our interpreter.
He's a practicing Buddha, so he just knew
how to take care of the body.
So he wiped it all down and then made sure it was all good
and then put him back in the body bag.
And then Perro, yeah, he cleaned him up too.
And then, yeah, then after that,
once we got everything all settled down,
we went back up there.
The two Afghans were sedated.
And then Scott was lying there.
We're all sitting there talking to Scott
and then the kind of funny story here,
because the doctor comes in, he's talking,
all right, feeling up, doing the squeezing stuff.
And then he goes under the tailbone
and pinches up on the tailbone and Scott screams,
he's like, yep, that's broken too.
And I was like, oh shit.
But for some reason, it was like we all look at each other
and it's like, gay jokes start coming out right there.
All the gay jokes had to come out, we had to do it.
You know, oh, poor Scott, he can't fuck back.
We look at one spot.
No, he can't laugh because of his injuries
and it hurts him to laugh.
So he's laughing, he's crying because of the pain.
And we just kept on with the jokes.
But yeah, that's how we put him on that medevac.
And he's like, all right, man.
But yeah, I'm sure that he'll always remember that.
So-
He actually came back.
Yeah, yeah, he came back six months later.
He came back and he's like, yep, I asked him,
dude, why are you back here?
He's like, fuck that.
I lead this shit whole country on my terms,
not on the terms of some triggerment man who got lucky.
I was like, there you go.
Do it on your terms.
I wanna just put something in and then we'll get to
Matt and Chris, cause obviously based on the book again,
that was a pretty brutal loss for you.
When initially you were talking about protecting cargo
specifically, then the male starts becoming part
of what you're protecting as well.
When I watched the little kind of 10 minute
front style feature they did on you,
it did a good job at underlining the value of that male
for the actual war fighters themselves.
So talk to me about how you got that contract
and the impact that the male reaching on men and women
was having as far as their own emotional status.
Yeah, we got that contract.
I guess somebody else had it before
and they weren't pulling it off.
So they rebid the contract, Sark got it.
And then that's when we expended the program.
We actually went to 14.
So we're gonna have three teams on the deck at one time.
And two of those teams were gonna be pushing male.
The third team would be pushing the long haul C1
for the client, the C1 runs, going to Harat,
going to Kandahar, going to Lashkargarh.
I think Spimboldak, Skin, Organi.
I mean, yeah, if they-
Jalalabad.
Yeah, Jalalabad.
If there was a site where the client had
its own little secure compound, we drove there.
But yeah, the male was important because they loved it.
They was like, man, you guys are so reliable.
You guys are so reliable.
You get it here no matter what.
I think we had like a 98% success rate on our drops.
There's a couple of times we had to burn mail trucks
but that was due to enemy action.
But I think my best mail run,
I mean, just to emphasize the importance of it,
I mean, it was 22 December, like three days before Christmas
we're driving down to Gardez.
Usually Gardez only gets two mail trucks
but now they were getting five.
And I mean, we drove in there and then we,
they saw and the army saw all these mail trucks
and then we were like the Pied Piper.
They all come out of nowhere and they're all following us.
As we get to the mail, as we get to the post office,
line up all the trucks, switch out the boxes,
but yeah, I mean, they really,
you knew that they were looking forward to that mail call
like those were a huge mail call, so.
Delivering the mail for the military
wasn't one of their top priorities.
They always had other missions that took precedence
like hunter killer or search and destroy, recon, whatnot.
So the mail would sit for several days
without being delivered.
And so, and it's not just mail that's being delivered,
it's outgoing mail as well.
And so once they got the contract,
that's when they kind of dubbed us the Pony Express.
And then we were actually successful
in quite a few of these missions.
I would say that our losses were minuscule
in comparison to the amount of stuff that we actually did,
that we did deliver because of the fact that
we can't allow, we might know that we're delivering the mail
but we don't know what the contents of that mail is.
Could it be cash?
Could it be other things?
We had secure loads that were tagged on
to a lot of those missions too.
So we're delivering ammo, food, fuel, weapons,
sometimes vehicles.
Sometimes we'll run missions without a manifest
if we don't know what it is
and that's how classified the mission is.
But we were the only ones that were ever able
to get the job done.
And then when we, a lot of places that we went to,
maybe some ODA outposts, operational detachment alpha,
special forces and whatnot, those guys, they loved us, man.
I mean, they took great care.
You know, they helped us with medical supplies.
They fed us anything we needed,
they would help us out with.
They took care of us because we were taking care of them.
What was it that you guys were doing
that previous organizations weren't able to do?
You know what?
I never, they never told us why we, it wasn't like, all right.
I can tell you a couple of things.
Like another convoy service called the Four Horsemen.
Yeah.
They were running food and fuel convoys as well,
but when they ran their convoys,
they ran like four or 500 trucks at a time.
And so it's a slow moving process
and they got hit quite often.
So they weren't reliable in that context.
Two, they weren't vetted.
They were a local national company that would run by expats,
but it was primarily an Afghan company.
So you can't trust them with any kind
of a secure load like that.
And then there was really nobody else.
In early on in 2009, there weren't a lot of contractors
there that were available to do it.
And then once we started doing it
and we had a great deal of success, two things happened.
One, we started getting more missions,
but two, we also became primary targets
as opposed to secondary targets.
And we actually got to a point where there was a bounty
on our heads to run these missions.
So it got worse before it got better.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I remember, yeah, Matt,
I mean, couple of times he got hit.
And one time he had to burn a mail truck
and Craig had to burn a mail truck because of ambushes.
One time Matt, he was running his convoy
and one of the mail truck drivers,
the Afghan driver flipped the truck on its side.
And so now they're cross loading the mail.
He pops open one of the other mail trucks, cuts the seal,
cuts the seal on the down truck.
They're cross loading all the mail.
And that's when they got lit up.
I think that was an ambush of opportunity right there
because right then and there, boom, all right, we got to go.
They had to burn what was left of the mail in that truck.
And then they had to make their way to Jalalabad.
And then same thing happened to Craig.
On the Craig Smith, I think an IED knocked out the engine
of one of the mail trucks, was immovable.
He's cross loading mail and then the ambush hits.
And then so he had to fight his way off.
And before he left, he had to burn the truck,
which is weird though,
because I got Craig on one phone talking to him.
I'm like, dude, burn the truck.
No matter if you think you need to burn that truck,
you burn it.
And I'm talking to that guy that owns the truck company,
an Afghan, Mr. Suleiman.
And he's like, no, please don't burn my truck.
Please don't burn my truck.
I'm like, dude, I don't care what anybody says.
I got your back, burn that truck
if you need to burn the truck.
And yeah, I think he ended up burning the truck.
And, but he made, he got the rest of the mail
to the Jalalabad.
Yeah, we burned one when Mark's team got hit
coming out of J-Bad.
So, I mean, they'd already dropped their load off,
but now they're picking up outgoing mail
that's supposed to be transported to bag room processing.
And it was just the one mail truck out of three.
But those trucks are huge and they're full of mail.
So, you gotta think about all that stuff
that was getting sent home.
And obviously that's secondary in your mind
because you're worried about the casualties, et cetera.
But yeah, that truck actually caught fire on its own,
but we threw thermite grenades in there
just to exacerbate the burning process, so to speak.
Because you can't sit around on these exits
for any time at all because they'll take advantage of you.
Well, Ed, you mentioned Matt.
So talk to me about the journey
where you lost Matt and Chris then.
You know, I first met Chris, Jesus.
You know, first met Chris in June or July of 2010.
And now I've been running some other missions and stuff
as a team leader still after I got hit in April, 2010.
I lost those two guys, Fawad and Perro.
Now it's like June or July and I got a new ATL.
And so I'm looking at Chris, I'm talking to him.
And then we go in to talk to Rector
because you got a mission coming down.
Go in to talk to Rector and he's like,
all right, you're going back into skin.
And I think a lot of people were sitting there saying
he's gonna quit when you tell them that.
But the color, I mean, from what they all said,
the color drained out of my face.
I was like, oh, okay.
Talk to Chris.
I was like, all right, we gotta get over to Phoenix.
I gotta go talk to the S2 over there
and I gotta get on the SIPRnet
so I could talk to the guys down in Sharona,
the road clearing crew
and see when they're clearing those routes.
So I get down there and I talk to the platoon commander
of the, over the phone, I'm talking to the platoon commander
and of the route clearing team.
And he's like, oh yeah, we're gonna be there
from this day to this day.
And I was like, that's what I'm gonna be in there.
All right, this is gonna work out just great.
When we do the mission, we push into the valley.
Sure as shit, the one guy, the first guy I meet
is that lieutenant.
Shook his hand and we talked for a few minutes.
And then he's talking to the Apache helicopters.
They fly over us, they mark us.
They say, all right, we know what they look like.
We're gonna keep an eye on these guys.
So I was like, dude, this is gonna be too goddamn easy.
We get down there.
We had a lot, we did the organi drop.
Then we had to pick up these huge generators,
but then we had to cross deck them onto these bigger
off-road like the Mercedes and Kamaz trucks
that can handle the off-road conditions.
Cause that road between organi and skin
is like a dirt track pretty much.
And so yeah, there was a bit of drama with that
because one of the trucks with the big generator on it,
he got a flat.
Now the truck's sitting at an angle like this,
the generator shifting.
So about every half hour we had to stop,
hook up a strap to one of the other cargo trucks
and snap it so it would shift the generator
so the truck would sit level for a little while.
We ended up getting into skin at about a quarter to midnight.
I remember that because we did it with 15 minutes to spare.
We get in there, they took the controller trucks
and I'm just sitting there looking at that one truck
that's leaning like that.
I was like, I'm gonna laugh my ass off.
That thing just falls on its side in the yard, too bad.
But they were appreciated.
They appreciated those two generators
because I guess they were having problems
with their other one to keep their site running.
So yeah, but that was my first intro to Chris.
I mean, he was always on it,
making sure everything was strapped down.
I was handling all the ops details.
Real good dude, he was a former Marine machine gunner
and he fought in Fallujah.
Yeah, so we did a couple missions together there
and then we went up to Fobb Tiger
then to Fobb Hadrian to drop off supplies
then we had to come back down.
No, he's just a solid dude.
And then team five, that team leader,
that was his first time going into the valley to skin.
They just got the mission assigned to him.
So I was like, all right.
And it was RSOP back then.
Last team through the valley,
you go ahead and give up your ATL
because the ATL, the assistant team leader
was also the navigator.
So I could show them the routes
and the do's and the don'ts.
And so Chris and Matt were up on the lead vehicle
and that's when they hit that IED
and it just flipped the truck up on its back end.
And you can see it just sitting up on its back,
rear bumper and it was like, wow.
The three gunners walked away from it
but Matt and Chris were killed instantly.
Matt wasn't buck belted in
so he was blown out of the vehicle.
Chris was belted in so he was still in the vehicle
and the team leader made the call to leave
Chris in the vehicle once he recovered Matt.
And we asked him why.
I mean, his story is so full of holes.
It was like, pretty much it came down to the team leader
didn't do his damn job.
And he just probably, he probably needed it just to be,
I mean, I wanted to hurt him.
And I mean, just to sit here when we're debriefing him
and what happened, what he was saying on the telephone
at the time when he was calling back to us saying,
hey, I've been hit versus what actually happened
with two totally different things like the-
Yeah, he said the vehicle was on fire.
He said they were under fire.
So when we first heard that, we're like, all right,
well, that's understandable.
But then when they recovered the body
and they brought him back, he wasn't burnt at all.
He was just missing his, he was just missing a lower leg
and his right arm from the blast coming up through the floor.
And we're like, this is not jive with what you said
and we wanted to, I wanted to hurt him.
Rector wanted to fire him, but corporate was like,
once again, this goes into the business aspect of war too
while we're talking about it.
Corporate was like, ah, we don't want a lawsuit.
So what we're gonna do, we're just gonna stick him
on a static site and forget,
hopefully he won't screw that up.
But he ended up screwing that one up too
because I ended up taking over that static site
when I got done with the roads.
And I was like, Jesus.
Yeah, he was a piece of work.
Just to jump in there,
just when I was reading that one chapter,
the initially being unclear of as if he was definitely
a hundred percent killed on impact,
I forget how you worded it,
what was that you had this image
of the last moments of his life
watching the truck pulling away.
Yeah, because nobody confirmed the remains.
The team medic didn't go up into the vehicle and say,
all right, he's dead.
At least look in there and say, all right, no, he doesn't.
All right, he's dead.
Nobody did that.
So for all we know, the last sound he heard on this
before he went, the last sound he heard
was that convoy driving away, leaving him.
Yeah, it's hard for a lot of us to choke down
because a lot of times,
you can't chalk this up to fog of war.
You're trained to do a mission.
You're trained to react to a mission.
You're trained to do all of these things.
And none of that stuff happened on that one run.
And to hear one thing and then find out it's something else
that now you're second guessing everything and whatnot.
So it's difficult,
because we stay in touch with all these people
and these family members, they're still pissed off
about what went on and how do you console somebody
when you're not in control?
So yeah, it was bad.
It was a bad thing all the way around.
And oh yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, yeah.
And I still can't, well, I mean, I'm still,
but then I'm surprised that he was at the very least
he didn't get fired.
But I mean, once again, I mean,
when you start getting into a civilian contract,
you're getting into the business side of war
and they wanna mitigate their risk, their liability.
So they don't want a wrongful termination lawsuit.
So they're gonna go ahead and stick them on another jobs,
sticking them up, stick them on another job
where hopefully he won't screw up too bad
is what the mindset was.
So when I hear people talking about issues
in their community, their tribe,
especially if there's stress or even betrayal,
this, for example, a law enforcement officer
does all the right things
and then their department or city turns on them,
the mental health cost of that
is probably one of the least discussed elements
probably behind suicides, for example.
When that happened, you guys have been a cohesive team,
you're leaning into this group
that should have done the right thing and then they didn't
and then they don't hold the person accountable.
What did that do for the rest of the team mentally?
Oh, I mean, people were pissed.
I know Bedford was like,
dude, I can't sleep just thinking about this guy.
I just can't sleep.
I mean, guys were losing sleep over it.
Yeah.
Let's say you find out about having a terminal illness
or whatnot, you go through these stages,
which is denial and then anger and whatnot.
Anger was the first thing that popped in these guys' heads.
And then when you go for a period of time without sleep,
it kind of tears on your emotions even further
because then now your own body is starting to shut down
and you're not 100%.
Now these guys have to turn around and still run missions
and they have this on their mind
and whatnot.
So it takes a greater toll psychologically
that a lot of people will actually come out and say.
So.
100%.
Well, I mean, we see it in the fire service so often
and then sleep deprivation is ingrained in what we do.
And then you add in,
I was just talking to a police officer the other day
who was LAPD, which his experience of going through
their academy said the bar was set so, so high.
Then he went to Chicago and spent,
I think it was 13 years there.
And he said it was the opposite.
And then you saw what happened with the mayor of Chicago
when we got through the last two or three years
and what they did to law enforcement.
I mean, imagine that you've given everything
and then your city just cuts your legs from under you.
I mean, this is a big part of the first responder
of military suicide crisis, I think,
that we don't talk about.
Sleep deprivation and organizational betrayal.
And that's why I wanna talk about the resilience
of some of these guys.
PTSD was probably really low on the totem pole
because when we talk about the business side of war,
the corporate office is making decisions from guys
that don't have operational experience.
Two, it's about saving money
and increasing your profit margin.
We ended up replacing ex-pat drivers
with third country nationals
and third country nationals with local nationals.
These guys couldn't drive a taxi cab,
let alone a tactical vehicle.
And now you gotta run these missions with these guys
that are, if the window could be rolled down,
they'd have it out the window like it was no big deal.
But you have to adjust to this method of operation
knowing that these guys are making decisions
that could affect your livelihood and your lives,
but you gotta deal with it.
And it kinda pisses you off,
but you just roll with the punches.
While we're talking, Alan, let's go to transition.
So you, as we have people watching this now,
I can see you're in a firefight uniform.
So talk to me about your decision to transition
out of the contracting side
and go back into the first responder community.
Well, I retired the first time in 2005.
And then when I got back from contracting,
I took a job working at an urgent care center.
At first I was at Lowe's, which was really nice,
but it wasn't paying very much money.
And then I started doing clinical medicine
because it gave me an opportunity to decompress.
But there's always this need to serve,
to do things greater than yourselves.
I really missed the camaraderie and the brotherhood.
And so I went back into the fire service.
My certifications might've expired,
but I was still in a situation
where I could garner up some CE hours
and get those certifications back.
I started working here and I love it.
I'm getting ready to transition again
from an operations suppression lieutenant into a logistic.
So that's gonna be a lot easier on me
because now I'm at the age where
I just can't kick doors in anymore.
I became an engineer,
so that kind of helped out a little bit,
but now I'm probably gonna go over to logistics
and then retire a third time.
Logistics would be a 40 hour week,
so you finally get off shifts as well.
Yeah, and weekends off,
so spending more time with the family and whatnot.
So that's gonna help.
Now, what about the emotional slash mental health side
for you?
You've gone through a pretty storied career
from early EMS into combat and then out the other end.
What have been your highs and lows for you specifically?
I really never had any issues about it until we started...
Well, there was a guy,
we talked about Money Mike earlier
and he was pulling security on some movie sets in Louisiana
and he had met some people that said,
hey, this would be a great idea for a mini series
or something like that.
So they hired a writer named Michael Sokol,
I believe it was, who started writing some episodes,
but he stopped after maybe three episodes.
Two things had happened.
One, it became a little bit...
It was based on a true story
as opposed to an actual true story.
They came up with things that wanted to generate interest
like having females on runs or recovering a load
that had a large amount of money in it.
Things like that, we didn't do any of that stuff.
Yeah, well, we're trying to expand the storyline
and we wanna broaden the audience, so to speak,
and we weren't really happy with it.
So after he quit writing, me and Ed talked about
just putting it into a book.
And so he had all the mission specs, he had his memoirs,
I had a journal and we just kinda combined the two together
and created this timeline where it was actually a product
that we could actually come up with.
And the cool thing about it was it really therapeutic for us
because we were talking to each other
and we were discussing the admissions
and going through some emotions.
And then we had the incident
where Sean Blad had committed suicide.
And so then we kinda backtracked, figured out,
how are we gonna fit this into the story
and give him the credit that was due
because he was obviously suffering
through a lot of stuff as well.
And we have a little group that we keep in touch with
on Facebook where everybody can rehash memories
and talk about stuff and post pictures and whatnot.
And we celebrate birthdays and eventually we lost Sean
and then Nick and then I was thinking Opie.
Yeah.
We met up in Dallas, him and I went to Dallas
and we were talking about the book.
We were still in the editorial phase
and he came down because he was driving truck
and then it was like six months later,
we found out he had a heart attack
and he was only 44 years old.
And so it was just kinda weird
cause you know these guys
and then Greg Swanson Proxima passed away.
So we stay in touch and we deal with it as it comes along.
But I think writing the book probably was the biggest benefit
for both of us.
Cause we had our own issues and whatnot.
But definitely what we learned is talking about it,
writing about it is the way to go.
You wanna do something constructive, put it down on paper.
Even if it doesn't materialize, it's helpful.
Absolutely.
Well, Ed, back to you.
What made you transition out
and then let's walk through your emotional journey.
May 2011, Team One, Bedford's team took a bad hit.
Their lead gun truck ran over a culvert
that was packed with explosives
and definitely wasn't amateur hour
cause the OP when they figured it out
was about 300 meters away.
And for them, they were probably running
at about 70 miles an hour.
So for them to time it like that,
saying, yep, yep, yep.
And now boom, just hit that lead truck just like that.
Boom, it flipped the truck upside down,
pinned the driver underneath the truck.
Everybody else was killed.
Yeah, five guys.
Yeah, five guys, we lost five on that one.
Bedford had to stay there just to make sure
the driver, Ben, was recovered.
He wasn't gonna leave him.
His vehicle was jacked up because they ran into the crater.
So that only left the trail vehicle, the docks vehicle.
So they loaded all the casualties into there
and drove back to Gosney.
And they ended up losing everybody.
And it took most of the day to get the QRF out to them.
We found out later on that the QRF out of Gosney
was pretty damn busy that day.
And once again, you're a civilian contract,
you make the big bucks,
but you're not a priority for the military
unless it's an actual DOD contract
and you're supporting that mission.
Yeah, but I remember we got all the bodies back.
The Afghans, we got back to their families.
And there was such a big crowd there.
I couldn't get in close.
So I had to have our admin chief, Emredine.
He got over there and I had him,
so you gotta look and you have to confirm.
I mean, this is a young kid.
I think he was only like 20 years old.
I was like, you have to confirm
and tell me who they are because I can't get in close.
They're not gonna let me,
the families weren't gonna let me close.
So he jumped up, hey, it's Timur.
All right, and then you'd see Timur's family,
grab him and then, no, it's Mohammed's family.
No, it's Juarez's family.
So he confirmed the bodies for me.
And then I followed the ambulance to the morgue
out in Kabul for Nes and Ben.
And that's when it hit me.
I'm sitting there going through these pockets
and I'm like, oh fuck, I'm the next one on this slab
if I don't get out of this shit.
And yeah, it scared the shit out of me actually,
but you still had to get it done.
And I wasn't going on vacation for another month
because we just lost a team.
We had to put a headquarters team together
because it was the lead vehicle that got hit.
I just made sure I was up in the lead vehicle
so nobody else could complain and say,
well, I'm not riding up in the lead vehicle.
I'm up in the lead vehicle.
I mean, if you don't wanna ride the lead vehicle, go home.
And so, but I knew right then and there
when I was going through those pockets
that I had to get out because if I, it's not,
I was gonna be the next one on the slab.
So went home on vacation.
I didn't wanna walk away from it just yet
cause I knew I could still pay off some bills
and tie off a lot of loose ends if I went to a static site.
And I'm talking to Scott Brown and he's like,
yep, we've got something for you.
And that's when I took over.
They just fired Tucker and I was going down there
to replace him.
So finally they were able to fire his ass
but he was just such a screw up.
Yeah, I was in Kandahar on a task order one mission
and Ed was at Hadrian and we were kind of talking about it.
And then when I had applied for this job,
a convoy job, it was with a company called Reed.
And all I could do, the recruiter was telling me,
yeah, we just lost five guys.
It's a very dangerous mission.
I said, okay, well, I was looking for something.
And I, so I took it and I went from Kandahar
to Dubai, got my work visa.
Five days later, I was in Kabul
when Vince Colon picked me up from the airport
and he was working for Reed
and they took me over to the compound and there it was, man.
My old job from SOC was taken over on an acquisition
by Reed and so I was working a new contract
but some of the same guys were there.
Alex was still there.
Michael was there, Domingue was there.
And the trucks were black instead of white.
And they had painted them black
so they could run night missions and whatnot.
So I kind of felt like it was at home
and I was really happy.
But then I found out that one of my friends,
Ness was killed on that mission.
And that's when it hit me.
I was just going, damn,
because I didn't know that Ness had been killed.
And so that was the job that I actually talked to.
And then when Ed came back from Hadrian on his way out,
they stopped off at the compound.
And that's, if you see the picture on the back of the book,
that's the picture that him and I took.
That's the last time we were together there.
Beautiful.
What about emotionally?
What were your highs and lows?
Oh, like I said, the lows,
anytime you took a bad hit, I mean, you're like,
God damn, man, because you get that sinking feeling
in your stomach and you're like,
I mean, you're glad you came out on the other side,
but man, you just lost guys.
You saw guys, saw you guys get hit.
Yeah, it takes a toll on you.
You don't realize it at the time though,
because you're around everybody else with the same mindset.
So, wasn't until I, yeah,
wasn't until like a couple of years after I came home,
and I was just like, I went through a couple,
I was like, God damn, man.
I think that's when I had to refight the demons and stuff
for about a couple, for a while.
But I think what put it all,
what was most therapeutic for me was January 2017,
I made that, I'd said to myself, this is the year,
we're gonna get a book written.
And that's when I reached out to Al and we got the,
we started putting everything together
and it was just very helpful.
It was therapeutic just to put pen to paper.
And, of course it took us five years
to get the book published because of,
you got a couple of cavemen with crayons writing books.
But, yeah, definitely, the highs and lows,
you know, like you get hit,
you're coming out on the other side
and you're still standing, yeah, that is a high.
But then the lows are like,
when your friends are getting killed and getting hurt,
you're like, God damn, man,
what the hell am I doing wrong?
Is it me?
But sometimes it's just, that's the nature of war.
I mean, shit, we had bounties on our, we were targets,
we knew we were targets,
and we said, you know, we're gonna get this job done.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that we talked about was,
a lot of the guys that had been through some of the same
things that we did, they always second guess themselves,
like, do I have this psychological resilience
that makes me immune to this type of suffering?
And so then you start to wonder
if there's something wrong with you because you're not,
you know, you're not having these flashbacks,
you're not looking into a bottle,
you're not doing stuff
that other people have done in the past.
And so then you start to question your own,
your own mental fortitude,
as opposed to what's really happening.
You know, what's the truth about what you're dealing with?
I didn't have nightmares.
I had, I had like the TTPs for the longest time.
You know, if I'm driving down the road
and I saw a dead animal or something like that,
I'd kind of skirt to the left.
And you know, my wife's going, what are you doing?
Or I would pull into a gas station
and I'm checking everybody out front and back.
Cause I, you know, we're used to dominating
these fuel stations when we're fueling up.
And it was just kind of weird how that,
that stuff kind of stuck with you when you got back home
and people were going, they start to think,
what's going on?
What's the matter with you?
Whatever the case may be.
But it was really just a question of good habits
that being transitioned over into a civilian side,
they kind of carried over, which, you know,
I look back at it and I kind of laugh about it.
But, you know,
we had to deal with some family members.
So, you know, when Sean, when Sean, I had killed himself,
you know, his mom was really curious
about what was going on.
And, you know, we wanted to honor him
in a way that was respectful.
And so we created that chapter for Fairwall Docs
cause all these guys were docs and whatnot.
And I think that a little bit more pressure
was kind of put on them because they're faced with the,
you know, the trauma of the event.
And then they have to, you know, go into rescue mode
and try to save these guys.
And then they ended up losing these guys.
And, you know, I think Clint quit after that hit in Gosney.
He just, he couldn't handle it.
And we tried to stay in touch with him,
but he's just off grid, you know?
So there's a lot of things that we think about.
And Arnie, when they evacuated Afghanistan,
he was one of the guys that was kind of left behind,
but you know, he's an SAS guy,
but you know, he can take care of himself.
And it wasn't a matter of time before he went back in
and just got another job contracting.
And that was his way for getting out of the country.
So we really didn't have to worry about that.
But, you know, there's always something
in the back of your mind.
And it's not like we're trying to suppress it.
It just doesn't surface, you know?
Ed, you made the comment about, you know,
the people around you going through the same thing.
That's what I talked about in the fire service.
You know, we're horrible barometers at how we're doing
because we're all in the same, you know, meat grinder together.
So it's amazing how important-
You're all at the same level.
So everything looks normal.
Exactly.
It looks normal.
It's like, oh yeah, I'm fine.
If he's fine, I'm fine.
But now you take those same, me and that other guy,
you take us and put us in, people will be like,
God damn, man, you guys are, what's going on here?
So- Exactly.
Yeah.
Jesus.
Yeah.
We are horrible barometers.
We're our own worst self-evaluators.
And, but we have to be our own, yeah.
And you need that outside,
you need those outside eyes looking in to say,
hey, you guys need, let's take a break here.
Let's go ahead and talk about this.
You know, since sometimes that's all it is,
is talking and putting pen to paper and boom, you know,
a lot of those issues and feelings
will resolve themselves.
I don't think they'll ever go away,
but it'll resolve itself to a point
where you can actually develop some tools,
find some tools to deal with it a lot better.
So for me, it's working out.
I mean, I love hitting the gym and, you know,
that 30 to 60 minutes of endorphin release, you know,
I think it just helps a lot.
So-
Alan, what about you?
What other tools apart from writing
have you found to be cathartic?
Well, just staying busy, you know,
and the fire service is so dynamic.
It changes all the time.
You know, we, I work in a extremely
violent area of town.
So I'm kind of used to it.
I think I've become acclimated in some respects.
You know, I always tell people 50% of the people
that I save are criminals, you know,
but there are so many things to do.
There's all, you know, just cause the call's over,
we're, you know, we're prepping trucks,
we're fixing things, we're cleaning up,
we're, you know, we're constantly moving around.
We're staying busy all the time.
So there's really never, never any downtime at work.
I think the worst thing that's happened with me
is the disconnect between me and my own family.
Cause I've spent most of my time being away.
My wife was basically the disciplinarian of the family.
And when I came home, if like my son got out of hand
and I said something to him, he just disregarded it.
I think the problem with me and him was that I was his friend
as opposed to his father.
And so he would look to his mother for advice and whatnot.
So that kind of, that bothered me a little bit.
And I think that they probably understood,
but now that I'm back, of course,
all my kids are grown now,
they have kids of their own and whatnot.
So I'm into grandparent mode.
So that really helps quite a bit.
And, you know, I don't wanna lose touch with my brothers.
That's the thing.
That bond that we made overseas is a lifetime for me.
And so I cherish that.
And, you know, me and Ed are the best of friends.
We're gonna stay connected until the day we die.
We even have a clause in our contract where our families
will get whatever royalties from the book sales
when we're long gone.
So, you know, we wanna make sure
that that legacy kind of continues on.
Brilliant. Well, Ed, for people listening,
the book is called Postcards Through Hell.
And it obviously details, you know,
you just touched on a lot of things
that are gonna be in this story as people are led through.
Where are the best places for people to find the book?
Amazon.
And you can order it on Amazon.
It's a print on demand publication.
So either order it through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Those are the two.
There's a Kindle version out and we're,
when our contract expires,
we're going to work on a audio version.
We already have a narrator and everybody in mind.
So we just have to wait until the contract is done
and we'll go ahead and go with an audio version as well.
Brilliant.
Yeah, I wrote my book three years ago
and I remember researching.
It's actually good to let it be a print for a while
because then when you do audio,
it's almost like a rerelease of the same book.
So, yeah, that'll be great.
All right, well, Alan, for you,
I'm sure people are moved by the journey today
that both of you guys have been leading us through.
If people want to connect online,
where are the best places for you specifically?
Well, we had a website
that was actually quite successful for a while,
but we were told that it needed to be upgraded
and in that process of upgrading,
we ended up losing the website.
And so now we're trying to get it back together
where it's kind of under construction right now.
We'll probably have the same domain name,
but it's in the hands of the web developer now,
so we're on his clock.
But in the meantime, LinkedIn
or any of those best for you, Instagram?
Oh yeah, LinkedIn, Facebook.
I think Ed has Instagram.
Got Instagram.
And whatnot, so.
Yeah, we have a group called the Pony Express on Facebook
that we have two groups.
One is Pony Express,
which is dedicated to just the team members only.
There's about 75 of us.
And then the Pony Express is where we put information
about the book and people that want to join the group.
Of course, we talk about things through that medium as well.
Brilliant, Ed, anything to add?
Really, I mean, I think we're going to have to add
some new development to our Starship loves to talk about.
Yeah, I mean...
Yeah, I already have.
Well, Ed, you guys are leaving,
we'll maybe get back together of course,
but that should be very important
now's a little bit只ен
to take a longer break here,
but I think if we keep going,
with your fight to help you win that fight. So yeah, I mean, but like, but as for contact,
you know, we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter or X now. And then I'll also,
instant I'm also on Instagram. So if anybody wants to reach out. So
I want to thank you both so much. I mean, such a story career before your paths even cross,
which has been really powerful to hear, but I don't think I've ever heard a story of, you know,
the men protecting the male, you know, that got to our men and women that were, you know,
wanting that connection with the outside world. And obviously some of the things that were being
transported, I'm sure were important to the mission as well. But so yeah, so I want to thank you so,
so much for firstly, writing the book and secondly, being so generous with your time
and coming on the podcast today. Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us.