This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show.
Well, since then, I have actually been using my products and I've had incredible success.
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Now, Transcend are also offering you the audience 10% off their protocols, and you can find that on JamesGearing.com under the Products tab.
And if you want to hear more about Transcend and their story, listen to episode 808 with the founder Ernie Colling, or go to TranscendCompany.com.
This episode is sponsored by a company I've literally been using for over 15 years now, and that is 511.
Now, my introduction to their products began when I started wearing 511 uniforms years ago for Anaheim Fire Department.
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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 on the show, Sean Spencer and David Waterhouse.
Now, these two men were brought together, ironically, by simply being neighbors.
Whilst both dreamed of entering the military, David became an Army Ranger and Sean found himself down the path of filmmaking.
Sean has since made several films, including the powerful documentary Ranger, which features David's story.
So we discuss a host of topics from their journeys into their career fields, David's path into the Ranger Regiment, Afghanistan, Pat Tillman,
David's heartbreaking story of retrieving the bodies from Operation Red Wings, Ramadi, Transition, David's powerful mental health story, their perception of war, policing in America and so much more.
Now, before he gets this incredible conversation, I want to underline two things.
Firstly, you must watch the film Ranger.
It is such a powerful perspective on what we asked our men and women to do the last 20 years.
Secondly, please take a moment and just 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 well over 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So that being said, I introduce to you Sean Spencer and David Waterhouse. Enjoy.
Well, David and Sean, I want to start by saying two things. Firstly, and we will get to this.
I just finished watching your incredible documentary Ranger.
So I just commend you both on your storytelling, David, and your storytelling, Sean.
And secondly, I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you very much for having us. Yeah, we appreciate it.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you today?
We are currently sitting at my residence in Lyman, South Carolina.
Beautiful. So I would love to start the very beginning of each of your stories.
Let's start with you, Sean, and then obviously then we can lead David through his kind of military career as well.
So tell me, Sean, where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
Gotcha. So I was born in Miami, Florida. I've got one brother.
My dad was into information technology in the early 90s, worked with a lot of different companies in the Florida area and then up in South Carolina.
Mom was a stay at home mom for a long time and then got into doing nonprofit work with the Ronald McDonald House when I was a teenager and kind of worked with with them for a long time.
So grew up in Florida and then we moved to South Carolina in the late 90s.
And that's kind of where I ended up meeting David.
We were actually next door neighbors for a long, long time, growing up, 15 plus years.
We were both in the residence beside each other there.
But yeah, that was kind of what that was like.
So two things. Firstly, let's talk about the Ronald McDonald House.
There was one next to the trauma center I used to work in Orlando and I heard nothing but amazing things about some of the families we had on the show and the support they got when they had a loved one, obviously a child going through cancer, for example.
So what was your mom's kind of perspective of that organization?
She started out as a volunteer there and now she runs a Ronald McDonald House like herself.
She's a CEO there. So I think she just wanted to do something to give to give back.
You know, we were lucky enough to grow up and, you know, she had two healthy kids.
And I think it was just a way for her to get back into the business world and also to to help people out.
I've helped there a good bit and volunteered, even did a lot of early video work for advertisements for them.
So it's kind of somewhere where I, you know, as a budding filmmaker, kind of started telling stories for them.
Beautiful. Yeah, I know there's a lot of nonprofits out there.
Some most of your money will go to what it's supposed to go.
Some, as we've discovered, not so much even in the veteran space.
But Ronald McDonald is one that I definitely hear over and over again that it's a great place to donate to them, them and St. Jude's.
Yeah, they're absolutely amazing.
The work they do there and what they're able to provide families and just giving them a home away from home, especially, you know, any amount of convenience or comfort you can have
when especially when a child is going, your child is going through something as traumatic as that, you know, any little bit helps.
So it's a it's a fantastic place.
Absolutely. And just touching on your dad's experience, I'm assuming you got into IT somewhat early on.
When I look at the Internet now, I feel like we're there.
You can do so much now with the Internet.
I mean, thank God for GPS. I've got such a bad sense of direction and driving dying from the back of an ambulance, for example.
Super helpful. But when it comes to AI, I personally can't help feeling like everyone was raving about Internet when it was dial up.
Like, we're not there yet. You know, and I've had people making mockups for my second book that I'm finishing up.
And you can tell it's AI generated because there's not a firefighter on planet Earth.
It looks like this figure that he sent me with all squished shoulders and head that's like twice as high as it should be.
What's your perspective? I mean, it can be tied into how your dad's seen the progression.
But what's your perspective of the world of AI growing up around IT?
You know, growing up, you know, we had a dad that was into that stuff.
You know, obviously we had computers pretty early on the dial up thing, you know, AOL, instant messenger and all that stuff.
Yeah. It was also an interesting way to also kind of get into filmmaking just because, you know, linear editing systems were very new.
And he was a big photographer when he was younger.
So that kind of started me on the path of like learning photography and things of that nature.
It's it's pretty wild to see some of the stuff AI is doing, especially as a as a film editor.
Now, seeing what is capable of some of those tools, I think it's it is getting there.
It definitely is getting there is a lot of things where I feel like it has the edge.
I feel like it still lacks in the ability to to really tell an authentic story.
I think it does a good job at a lot of base level stuff, though.
Brilliant. And now what about career aspirations when you were going through high school?
What were you dreaming of becoming? Honestly, I you know, I was I was really wanting at the time to either be a Green Beret or a para rescue jumper.
I was very big in the military history growing up, and that was something that I really wanted to I really aspire to do.
And so having David as a next door neighbor, it was kind of like, oh, man, this is the ultimate source of military knowledge and perspective.
You know, I kind of thought I'll have like kind of a leg up on guys who are are joining because I've got this inside perspective from somebody who, you know, just came back from the war.
Film was kind of a secondary thing.
It was kind of like I think both of those things kind of fought within me 50 50.
And kind of after hearing the stories that David told and kind of having that veil pulled back and understanding the nature of what I was wanting to get into.
I think at some point there was a turn where I said, you know, I think there's a lot of guys going over there and doing this.
But this might be something that I need to tell, just seeing the profound way that this story touched me as as a teenager and an adolescent kind of growing up with that kind of Hollywood notion of what it means to be a soldier or what it means to die in combat or have your friends die.
I definitely was among the generation who, you know, you kind of have blinders on.
You see all that stuff in TV and movies and you're like, oh, man, I want to I want to do that looks bad ass.
And like there's definitely is a there's a bad ass part to it.
But at the same time, there is the reality of what is actually happening.
And I think there's a line in the movie where David says, you know, when you're actually doing it and your friend, your life is on the line, your friend's lives are on the line.
It's a very different story.
And hearing that story from him and kind of looking at my life, it just it changed my perspective on what it meant to be to, you know, to go serve.
We're jumping way ahead now in the timeline we're going to get to.
Yeah, I'm going to jump a little there.
No, no, no, no, I'm about to.
I'm going to bring something in deliberately.
Because this is what I talked about with the recruitment crisis at the moment with the military, with the first responders is the job is pretty much the same.
But in twenty twenty four, what's happened is that people have seen the other side as well.
So in the fire service, it's all heroic and you go into fires and you cut people out of cars and then, you know, everyone loves you and then you take your shirt off and do a calendar.
The reality is all the horrible shit that you see on a near daily basis and the support or maybe the lack of support from the agencies that you work for and the shifts and the understaffing and the mandatory overtime.
And obviously, with our veterans, the same thing, you know, the cancers from the burn pits and the mental health issues.
And so what's happening now is that people are seeing what it actually looks like, the good and the bad.
And so this is, I think, a beautiful opportunity for us to make changes in these professions and certainly take some of the romanticism out of war and put the horrors where they should be to send children off to kill with our flag on our shoulder.
So I think this is what's so powerful about this.
And obviously, David, you talk about that at the end is it's not about diminishing the role. It's about being truthful in telling a young recruit. And obviously, in Sean's case, that was something that swayed him away from combat and into storytelling instead.
Absolutely. And excuse me.
Absolutely. And that's, you know, that was that was one of the hard things because I was conflicted.
You know, part of me was like, hey, I did all this. I did it for a reason.
And I'm proud of that. But I also don't want my kids going and doing that.
And so it's almost like, yes, all that happened, but it's almost a precautionary tale in a way.
It's definitely how I took it, you know, when I heard it and like
it had a very significant effect on me because it was it was no punches pulled. I said, I want to know, you know, give me you tell me what this is really about.
And after hearing that story, I had my own kind of journey into
a field like that. I was a first responder to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
I was 19, so I had I had those aspirations of being a PJ or Green Beret or possibly even maybe trying to join the Ranger Regiment.
But I went to Haiti after kind of having that story
and kind of said to myself, all right, this is kind of like a proving ground. I want to see if this is something that I can go do and see how this affects me.
And obviously going down there at the time, I mean, dealing with mass graves and burning bodies in the streets, you know, it was a
it was quite a journey to jump into and to see. But it gave me an extra look, you know, behind that veil again of just seeing the fragility of life and seeing so many people's lives taken from them.
Family members die. So I think it helped in my journey as a storyteller to have experienced, although not a combat zone,
you know, a natural disaster area where, you know, so many tens of thousands of people lost their lives.
So I think it gave me an extra ability to understand some of the trauma that David faced when it came to policing bodies up off Sotalo SAR and, you know, the Red Wings Recovery Mission.
Absolutely. I had a firefighter on Trevor Williams, who his family had actually been over there.
I think they were missionaries in theory, but they were present during it. So he had done special operations training in the fire service, but now wasn't with the department at that moment.
And that happened while they were living there. And so he became a kind of impromptu first responder to that tragedy and the way he reported it. I mean, absolutely horrendous.
Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, when I arrived there, I had David at the time worked with a company called North American Rescue, and they were nice enough to set me up with a couple bags of medical supplies and a lot of stuff.
You know, the guys didn't have down there. You know, it was it was a brutal time. I mean, there was a when I first got there, there was a guy that his hand had been smashed and they were basically using bolt cutters to remove the tips of his fingers because they didn't have any sort of medical shear.
So as a 19 year old, my first task there was I was a big, strong guy. They were like, I need you to hold this gentleman down. You know, we're going to perform this surgery. You know, he'll probably pass out at some point, but we need you to hold him still so we can get this done.
So is these very intense engagements with graphic violence, although to help somebody, it was still something that, you know, it's like something you'd never encounter in a regular life where it's like you got a guy, you're cutting somebody's fingers off with bolt cuts.
It's like something out of a mob movie or a terrorist video. But you're you're there, but it's like, you know, you're you're helping people.
But seeing that kind of stuff and understanding the the effect that that violence and that tragedy and trauma has on the individual just go, you know, hand in hand with telling the story in Ranger.
Well, let's get to the beginning of that story then. So, David, same question to you. Tell me where you were born and tell me a little about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
I was I was born in Natick, Massachusetts. Both my parents were from Needham, Massachusetts. My mother was the oldest of five and my father was the middle child of four. Yep.
And so that's where I was born. I lived up there. Lived up there until I was about four years old.
Parents got divorced and I ended up down in South Carolina when my mom moved down here for a job. She worked at a for Port Clyde. I have no idea what they did, to be honest with you.
And my father is in the environmental business. A lot of work on shipyards, Navy vessels, doing tank work and things like that.
Again, when you were young, obviously you got into a very physical profession. What were you playing as far as sports and exercise? I played very competitive soccer.
I played golf, which is my the way I was able to decompress a lot in the military, played a lot of golf in the military just to just to get the hell out in the way, you know, on my own.
And I played baseball. And what about career aspirations? Were you exposed to any kind of military mentors when you were young?
My grandfather was in the merchant marines, but I honestly I think I only heard him say about 15 words in my entire life. He was a very quiet guy.
So I really have no idea. I don't think any of his children have any idea. Nonetheless, you know, his grandchild.
But no, everyone in my family known was in the military. I was the only one.
But I always enjoyed running around in the woods, you know, as a kid and in playing war. And it was just kind of always in the back of my head.
But I never actually thought that I would do it. I figured I'd play baseball in college.
I had a scholarship to offer to me, but my grades were absolutely terrible.
And so I ended up getting out of high school and started working in 9 11 happened. And then that was it for me.
I was I was like, OK, this is my calling, I guess.
But it always been in the back of my head. So talk to me about your 9 11 experience.
How did that day pan out? You know, what age were you and kind of what was your response to them?
Yeah, I was. Let's see, I would have been about 19 when it happened.
I was living down in Myrtle Beach with a couple of my friends from Boston.
And, you know, we were just down there kind of being stupid 19, 20 year olds. And I was actually sleeping.
And one of our neighbors worked at a sandwich shop and she came to the manager there and she had a key to our apartment
because she would let our dog out when we were, you know, busy or whatever.
So she keys in and comes into my room and wakes me up. She said, Boston's under attack.
So I jump out of bed, run in, turn the TV on.
I'm like, Danielle, that's not Boston, honey, that's New York.
And I woke my other two roommates up and we all kind of, you know, still wiping the crap from our eyes.
And the second we saw the second plane hit live.
And it was just I remember one of my roommates saying, what movie is this?
And it was just so surreal. And we watched TV all day long.
And I'll just I'll never forget the emotion that was pouring out of me at that time being like, man, I can't do anything.
Stuck here, sitting down in Myrtle Beach, watching the shit on TV.
I would rather be, you know, up there helping those dudes.
And I think in the long run, that's what ended up kind of pushing towards the military is like, well, I can do this.
I couldn't help with that, but I can do this.
And that that was kind of like that decision was made pretty much on that day.
What made you choose the army specifically and then Ranger Regiment?
Well, no offense to the Navy, but I'd been around boats for my entire life.
And the last thing I wanted to do is be on another boat.
So, you know, when I told my dad I was joining, he was he was like, are you going to be a seal?
I was like, absolutely. No, I'm done with both.
So I look, I just kind of research into it.
I was never good at foreign language. So that kind of ruled SF out.
And then I looked at I was like, OK, well, I, you know, I want to jump out of planes on a rope, out of helicopters.
You know, I want to be an assault force. I want to be kicking those doors in.
I want to be clear in rooms. And the Ranger Regiment was was it was the best fit for me at the time, you know, with my mentality.
Now, Ranger Regiment or Ranger selection, excuse me, is known to be pretty arduous, you know, between the sleep deprivation and the physical exertion.
What was it that allowed you to complete each of these selection processes when some people rang the bell?
Stubbornness. I'm a stubborn son of a bitch.
And if you tell me I can't do something, I'm not going to go show you that I can.
And that's literally that's all it was.
Beautiful. So I know that, you know, this is in 2002 by this point.
Walk me through, walk me through the the discussions that were going on, because if we look back at very early on post 9 11, you know, one minute we're in Afghanistan, the next one we're in Iraq, totally different country.
So what were you guys being told? And then let's talk about your first deployment to Afghanistan.
There was I mean, we heard all the whispers about possible invasion in Iraq.
In all honesty, I don't think at least I didn't in the kind of the guys I was running with didn't didn't really think that was going to happen.
It was almost like, you know, we're going to threaten them, you know, all of all let the inspectors in, let them do this.
And I didn't we didn't really see it escalating to that point.
And then as it got closer, it was like, oh, shit, this is going to go down.
And it was it was it was strange because it reminded me of like World War Two, where you're like fighting on two fronts.
You're fighting in the Pacific and you're fighting, you know, you're invading Europe.
And it was like, how are we going to allocate troops like who's going where?
How are we going to break it up? And so for for that, that was the main conversation was first it was it's not going to happen.
And then it was like, oh, well, logistically, we need to start working these issues out because we're about to go on a two front war.
Very different fronts to just just like in World War Two.
I'm not comparing our war to World War Two, but as far as the separate theaters of war.
When I speak to people who were on the ground early on each of those conflicts, a lot of times the stories initially of our troops, the allied troops being well received.
We're here to kind of get rid of the people that were oppressing the native people of those countries.
What was your reception like in Afghanistan the first time?
It was mixed. Some people were happy.
I mean, some people like run up and try to give us like crackers from their market or whatever.
And some people would just mad dog the shit out of you when you're walking by.
So, I mean, it was it was pretty noticeable who was happy and who was who was upset and Afghanistan way more difficult than Iraq.
So when we kind of lead us through the story on Ranger, one of the things that kind of struck me is you were part of what you call winter strike.
And you just kind of mentioned about certain groups within the military turning down a certain operation and then one saying, we'll do it.
I'm not saying this is applying to this particular event.
However, I've heard, you know, in almost a thousand conversations now, many who've been military, you know, rumblings of the danger of ego sending some of our troops into areas or in the time of day,
maybe that they shouldn't be, which maybe kind of increase the danger to those people.
It can be about that. It could be about just in general.
What is your perception of ego and leadership in the experiences that you had?
It's interesting because a lot of the guys like, you know, are humble guys in normal life.
But I think, unfortunately, in this job, it pays to have some ego.
I mean, you have to believe that you can go out there and whip anyone's ass at any given moment, whether it's a shitty time of day, a terrible place that you're getting in filled into.
You have to believe that you're going to go in there and knock the shit out of these people.
And so there is a certain level of ego built into the job.
If you're going to be successful, you have to know that you're going to be able to go out there and win.
So I think ego has to be a part of it.
Now, some people have too much.
So where's the checks and balances?
I'm talking because, I mean, operationally, I mean, it could be the same as a firefighter.
Get in there and it's a burning structure.
It's a commercial structure.
You know, there's no one actually to be saved and someone's beating their chest saying, oh, we're going to go inside.
Sometimes that's just the wrong choice.
Full stop.
How do you temper that ego?
So you have enough as far as a self belief, but you don't put your men and women in unnecessary harm.
In all honesty, it's common sense.
I mean, there's certain situations where you look at it and you're like, there's no winning here.
So why am I going to unnecessarily put my people in harm's way?
And there's certain situations that kind of toe that line where you're like, we might get fucked up, but we might win.
And then there's other situations where you're like, we're going in that place.
And it's just to me, it was always common sense.
I mean, I'm sure it's different for every person out there, but that's how I personally viewed it.
One of the things that struck me early on in the film, and it seemed like this haunted you probably as much as anything else that we'll talk about.
And it kind of your career reminded me of the Banner Brothers.
I mean, you guys were there and so many horrible things.
But when I look back at the fire service, I've had this conversation quite a lot.
It's not so much the grotesque things we see.
It's the screams of the loved ones who just lost that person that really kind of haunt you.
So talk to me about your experience.
I know that you were there when Pat Tillman was killed, but obviously his brother was made aware during that too.
Yeah, that was a really tough day.
We had come to that valley earlier and I had said to my squad leader who was sitting in the passenger seat, I was like, this is a bad spot.
And we came through and we got to Fobb Salerno and we re-kitted up everything,
dusted down all the weapons because it was just moon dust coming into there.
So we got all the vehicles all squared away and got our kit all squared away.
And then we bedded down and then we weren't asleep for very long.
And someone was like, hey, one alpha is in contact and get your shit off.
So we all kitted up, jumped on the vehicles and were ready to go provide QRS to them.
And then we got the call to stand down and be prepared to receive casualties.
And we had no idea at that point.
I mean, it doesn't matter. It's a Ranger that's down.
We're going to treat everyone the same.
Pat Tillman was no different and he didn't want to be looked at as different.
He wanted to use just one of the dudes.
He's out there doing the same thing we were doing.
But it was having his actual brother there that made this exacerbated the situation
because it was like now you're not only dealing with one person.
And I served with a dude that had a brother in battalion as well.
There were only a handful of maybe three or four brother duos in battalion, at least in 275.
So like the having the brother effect added a ton more emotion to it because I just couldn't imagine.
I mean, bad enough when you see one of your guys die or you got to go on to this place
and get these dudes or whatever, but like your family, I just couldn't imagine.
And it was just so hard to just be standing there and not be able to do anything.
And that's the hard part about it.
It's like when bad things happen, you don't get a chance to stop.
You don't get a chance to mourn.
You don't get a chance to feel sorry for yourself.
Get over it.
Tuck it down.
You'll deal with it later on in life.
Trust me.
And you keep moving.
And that's the way you got to be.
You can't sit there and pout.
It's a tough sport and it comes with consequences.
Absolutely.
And you've also said when we enter these professions, a man should be a yin and a yang.
When you go into the job, but you're in combat with you go into a fire, whatever it is,
at that moment, it's time for you to be a white circle, like all hard.
But when that's done, you've got to find those moments to then start processing what you've seen and done.
And obviously, when you're in a deployment that's unending, that might be weeks, if not months later,
a firefighter, a police officer, it might be after the shift.
But if you just keep burying it, burying it, burying it, you stay that white circle.
And then that's where it becomes very dangerous.
And I thought that was one of the things that Sean did a great job of was capturing and keeping me on point to help me
realize that what I did was necessary and help me begin the process through the telling of because Rangers started out as a book.
How was the origins, origins were.
And then we realized that we didn't know how to write books.
So we were like, well, we're good at movies.
So let's try our hand at this.
And it was honestly, it's probably the most therapeutic thing that I've ever done because I was able to get all that emotion out there.
And I rolled over and showed the world my belly, which was very uncomfortable.
But if it could help one guy, it was worth it to me.
And it helped me in return.
So at this point in my life, helping people makes me feel good.
And it sounds a little selfish.
Obviously, the majority of it's for them.
But I do take a lot of satisfaction in as well.
That seems to be one of the reoccurring themes when people make a healthy transition.
And it might not have been an even transition.
It might have been two, three, four years after.
But it can be so jarring for some people.
But finding that purpose again.
And I've always said, when we enter these professions, you want to help.
You do.
You might be playing with your GI Joes or your Action Man, as they call it in England, and thinking about combat and killing.
But ultimately, it's a very selfless thing to do.
And then you get into it and you do the job.
And then when you come out the other end, people go into real estate or whatever it is.
And it's just not the same.
It's not rewarding.
In some cases, some it might be.
But when people find another way to serve and realize you don't need a uniform solely to serve others, that seems to be a very healing element.
And one of the interesting things is when we made this, we didn't know how it was going to be received.
It's not your traditional war documentary.
It's graphic.
It's got some terrible language in there, unfortunately.
I'm from Boston and I was an Army Ranger.
I was set up for failure.
But we wanted to tell it real so that people, you know, they wave the flag.
They welcome you home.
Thank God.
It's not like it was for those poor guys in Vietnam coming home.
I mean, we've at least come strides for that.
But the thing that they don't understand is what actually happens when you're there.
Thank you for your service.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I really do.
But I'd rather just be left alone because I'm trying to process what the hell I just went through.
And you have no idea what goes on over there.
You see, you know, some stuff on TV and you're like, oh, man, our troops are kicking ass.
But like you don't know that I just had the worst day of my life.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's as much as it's appreciated and it is God, it is.
But sometimes it's just it's too much.
And it's like, please, I don't want any attention.
Just let me just float amongst you and be left alone.
At least for me.
We don't get told that too much.
But when we do, I just feel super awkward.
And I haven't been overseas or anything.
We're just talking about purely as a firefighter and a paramedic.
But yeah, it's you know, you're not doing it for accolades.
And like you said, sometimes that attention can make you more uncomfortable.
Yeah, I didn't do it for anyone to notice me.
I just did it because it felt like it was the right thing and it needed to be done at the time.
And and that's all it was about for me.
I didn't. It's such an awkward question or statement to answer.
Thank you for your service. How do you answer that?
You're welcome.
Like I did that. Doesn't that sound impersonal?
I don't know. It's just such an awkward position to be put in.
It's like, hey, man, I'm just trying to have a beer in the airport.
Like I just sit here and have my overpriced Sam Adams and get on my plane.
My $11 glass of beer.
Yeah, yeah.
All right. Well, then you talked about how you received in Afghanistan.
Now you find yourself landing in Iraq.
So, again, how was the reception initially?
And then we'll talk about Operation Red Wings.
By the time we got to Iraq, the mood had changed.
I think the invasion forces probably got a really good reception from what I know.
By the time we got there, I think people were starting to get a little restless, to say the least.
We were very, very busy in Baghdad in 2004.
I mean, we were out every night, multiple objectives, fall-on objectives.
I mean, we didn't stop.
But it was so much different than Iraq.
For lack of a better word, the pace of play was like going from playing varsity to going to the NFL.
Like there were so many more people, so much more condensed.
You're in a much more urban environment.
And people were friendly, but we were also blowing their doors off
and coming in and flex-cupping people.
Like you're going to piss people off.
I mean, there's just no way about it.
I mean, you go onto a neighborhood or a city block, everybody knows everybody.
I mean, it's so different than here.
I mean, you know who your neighbors are for the most part.
Oh, what happened at John's house last night?
Well, a bunch of assholes fucking blew his door off and came in and drug him out.
We don't know where he's at.
Well, that's probably going to irritate a few people on that block.
And I mean, how many times are you going to do that before people start to chatter
and kind of build up a little bit of resentment to you?
And I think that's a natural thing.
I mean, I think we would react the same way if that happened on my street.
Absolutely.
That's a conversation that's interesting.
Quite a few of the Green Berets I had on the show, when I asked them,
this is about Afghanistan specifically, you know, you're a king for a day.
What would you have done differently?
And almost all of them said we would have gone in basically with with SF, you know,
attack the training camps, take out the key targets.
But then a big part was then the exit strategy, get out.
And they were they were talking either side of a year and a half.
And I'm a complete layman when it comes to military.
But as you said, if you imagine someone came into your country
and you were being terrorized, initially they get rid of some of the terrorists.
You're like, oh, these guys are great.
Two years later, like, are they going to leave?
Why are you still here? Yeah.
So you can see how you create enemies.
Yeah. As an occupying force versus just a quick hit, get in, get out, you know,
and don't have, you know, so much extra damage happens where it's all of a sudden
you get civilians killed and then that just adds fuel to the fire
for that, you know, occupied force.
And that was the thing that was interesting for me in Iraq was that was the first time
I had really I started to change in Iraq and I started to see the other side.
It didn't stop me or prevent me from being executing my duties and being out there.
It didn't. But there was a shift in my brain where I was like, man,
I could see why these people are pissed.
You know, and I think that's where at first it was all gung ho kick ass.
And then I started to see like what we're doing and how these people were, you know,
not being treated, but, you know, the life that they were having to live under
this constant threat of either is an insurgent going to kill me?
You know, what's going to happen?
Can I go to the store and get some chow or am I going to end up getting caught in an IED?
Like you start to put all the pieces together and you're like, that would be terrifying.
I mean, I couldn't imagine what it would have been like on the other side, a hundred percent.
So it's never on the other side.
But I started to realize, oh, man, this is this is harsh.
War is not a friendly place for anyone involved.
I honestly I don't think anyone wins in war.
I don't think there's a winner and a loser.
I think everybody loses.
That's just my personal take on it.
Yeah. What's that quote?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I actually just interviewed Tulsi Gabbard a couple of weeks ago.
And, you know, this is what I find interesting about her is, you know, she's in the military,
but she's definitely a diplomat.
Literally her role in the Army National Guard at the moment is diplomacy.
But I think this is why films like yours are so important and Restrepo and some of these other
really excellent ones that have been made is if we are chest beating and flying American flags
and yee hawing about the idea of war and having t-shirts saying stacking bodies and all this shit,
then you're going to spur on people into the Hollywood version of war.
Now, to counter that, you put powerful books and poems and documentaries about war.
You educate people on what it's like, because if you're not deterred from war,
you'll get behind that politician that's like, yeah, we're going to go into the next country.
But if you take a step back, yeah, and now you think about my son 16.
Imagine if there was a, you know, constrict conscription now, then he would be sent off to war in a year or so.
When it comes to your actual front door, your doorstep, and you see the horrors of it, it reframes it.
Would I have been listed back when I was little? No, I didn't.
But would I have signed up during World War II? Absolutely.
Two very different missions, two very different times.
But it is terrifying. This is what happened with the Falklands.
Even though that, I've had more people on there, it was a justified conflict.
As a little boy, I was like, wow, a politician can just snap their fingers and a bunch of men at that point,
are sent off to kill, you know?
So I think it's just important that people see the horrors as well.
It's not doom and gloom in the whole thing, but it's like,
understand what the potential is for your country, for your children,
if you are agreeing and getting behind this particular conflict.
For sure. I have four kids and I have always said this and Sean kind of tested this.
I went to war, so you guys didn't have to.
I don't want you to have to go through what I went through.
And like, their intentions would be the same as mine.
But I don't want them to have to live through and deal with the aftermath of what war.
If you're actually in war, out on those streets every night, on hits every night, it changes you.
It changes your entire perspective on life, on people, on relationships.
And I don't want that for my children.
Yeah, I think I've heard a lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, et cetera, talking about this,
that their children grew up when they were at war, 20 years of war.
So the advert for the military was very different than during peacetime,
because we were kind of relying on Chuck Norris movies and whatever else we were watching.
So yeah, when it's dad or mom at home for a month every nine, or come back so different when they left,
that reframes it for our young generation now that's looking to go in the military,
because it is a very cautionary tale.
And again, we need military and we need people to get behind it.
But this is a perfect opportunity to fix some of the things that we did wrong,
to take care of our veterans properly after they leave war,
to be more diplomatic, to avoid wars that we shouldn't be in.
I completely agree. And I want to make sure that I make this quite clear.
I'm not in any way, shape, or form talking shit about the military.
I love my service. I love my friends.
And it absolutely needs to be an integral part of our strategy as far as how our country interacts with the rest of the world.
But I would root for diplomacy first.
Absolutely. Well, you mentioned earlier, you know, special operations.
So one of the most devastating few days for the SEAL community, obviously,
was Operation Red Wings and all the other people that were lost.
So walk me through when you became aware of that operation and then your actual boots on the ground interaction with that tragedy.
We were actually just kind of hanging out in one of the hooches and someone kind of,
I use the word kick the door in, but like aggressively pushed the door in and said, get your shit on.
A bird just got shot down outside of a sodabed.
So we all kid up real quick. I mean, this is something we're accustomed to.
It takes us like a minute to get our crap on and out the door.
And then, you know, with the elevation, we had to start cutting guys.
And so it was mostly NCOs and what we call TabSpec 4s that were on Red Wings recovery.
We immediately loaded up, got on the airfield, flew to Jalalabad.
And then we were waiting for dark. And then when dark came, we launched and we were going to go do a fast rope into the side of the mountain.
And there was a terrible mountain rain storm that had come through that night.
And it was so foggy. We got about 30 second mark.
We turned around, flew back to Jalalabad.
And then we had to sit there for a whole nother day into the next night, which was agonized, knowing that there's guys out there.
I mean, you talk about anxiety. It was probably one of the only times I had anxiety.
I was like, what if it was me? I'm out there running around the mountains like by myself.
And we're sitting here like to do like, come on, let's go.
So like I think that was across the board for everybody.
It was like, can we just go and get this over with?
And then the next cycle of darkness we flew in, we did about an 85 foot fast rope into the side of this hill, which is damn near the whole length of the rope.
The rope's about 90 feet. And guys were falling off towards the bottom and stuff.
One guy got his forearm stepped on. So right off the bat on infill we had injuries.
But there was no getting medevaced. You're going to have to walk it out, dude.
And so we walked all night and it was so foggy. It was foggy that night, too.
And the guy that was in front of me, he was a team leader in third squad, which was I was a team leader in third squad.
And he stopped and it was so foggy, even under night vision, I bumped into the back of him.
I couldn't see my hands in front of my face. And he was like, dude, you walk point with me. I can't see anything.
So we walked point together and ended up getting to the edge of the hill right at dawn.
Sun was just coming up and my platoon sergeant went and kind of peeked over the hill and could see that it was going to be a bad day.
And choice words that I won't use on your show here.
Use any words if you like. That's why I have a E on it.
This day you'll never forget. This is going to be a motherfucker. But we got to get it done.
And those of us at police, we kicked out security and had roving patrols and there were about 12, no more than 15 of us.
We dropped our kit, kept our med pouch on our hip and our weapons, but we dropped all of our plate carriers.
And we walked down, descended the hill and started putting bodies in bags all day from dawn until dusk all day.
And yeah, he was right. It was a motherfucker.
I'm not going to lie about that one. That was a tough day for everybody. Everybody.
SEAL community, the Ranger community, 160th SOAR community, special operations community. Everyone felt that.
But it was our obligation. That's what the country expects of soft guys.
Is to go get guys in shitty places that no one wants to be. Including us. We knew we were going.
There was nothing in the world that would have not had us go. No one could say anything. We were going.
But I mean, you're flying in and you're like, we're probably going to get shot out of the fucking sky.
A bird just got shot down and we're going into the same area.
I mean, we all kind of assumed like, OK, this could be it.
And then we got on the ground and got to the crash and somehow we all managed to survive.
But yeah, it was definitely a day I will never forget. That's for sure.
Well, when you think about, you know, we went in, we got the bodies, we left. I mean, as you kind of storytelling in the film, you're on this extremely steep mountain.
And, you know, obviously when a helicopter goes down, everything goes everywhere and there's some areas of intense heat.
So, you know, I'm not wanting you to be super graphic and drag you down that road.
But I think it's important to underline the extent that some of our military members go to make sure that they bring their brothers and sisters home.
And even if it's just remains of so going to talk to me about some of the some of the extents that you went to you and your men to make sure that each of these men came home.
The first. Bunch of them were kind of kind of visible.
I mean, we were kind of, you know, anyone in the army that will know this term like hands across America in a way, like just kind of home in the hill.
And then we come up on one and, you know, take a couple guys and put them in a bag and then we have to lug that bag up the hill and we put it underneath the tree.
And and we just kept going down and some bodies were charred, some bodies didn't even look dead.
But, you know, their eyes weren't blinking. It was it was such a different. Everyone, every one of them was different.
So it wasn't like it was like, oh, we got there. And when we got there, the aircraft is still smoking.
It was still smoldering. And that was almost two days after then shot.
I may be about 36 hours. And so we got to got there and it was like, you know, there were some spots that were still hot.
Like you said, the helicopter was scattered every year. There were pieces everywhere.
It didn't. I mean, with the exception of the rotor blades, if you if you took the rotor blades off that and stumbled across that in the middle of nowhere, you'd be like, I don't even know what kind of vehicle this is.
I mean, it was it was just it was unrecognizable.
And the 160th guys, they were still strapped in when it went down.
So most of those guys were still in the attach the aircraft and a lot of the seals had been thrown out of the back and suffered a lot of blunt force trauma when they when they hit the ground.
So, I mean, it was it was just without going into too much detail, it was it was pretty gruesome site.
So I think it's just like I said, it's it's to underline the extents that some of our military go to make sure that those members that we've lost are returned home to their loved ones.
So it's more about that than than the horrors that you saw, even though you did.
There was another kind of powerful moment, though.
I actually never reached out to Marcus to try to get him on here. I need to still. But his book, you really I was really moved by the courage of some of the Afghani villages that that kind of sheltered him while he was being hunted.
But I know you guys ended up interacting with him on that same mission.
Yeah, that was third squad that actually ended up finding him.
But to speak to your first point, yeah, the the Sharia law that they follow and it doesn't matter even if it's it's, you know, one of our guys, if you find someone and you bring them into your home, you're responsible for them and you protect them.
And I know that this guy, you know, from firsthand account, these guys, you know, the bad guys were coming up saying, give them up, give them up.
And he was like, no, I'm not giving them up.
So, I mean, just imagine the set of fucking balls you have to have to sit there and defend someone and all these people want to kill.
Now you're in their way and to have the courage to stand there and just see that through.
I don't know that I'd be that strong.
Yeah, I don't think they did that justice in the film, but they obviously did in the book. I think that should have been underlined more just the heroism and selfish selflessness, excuse me, of some of the Afghan people during that particular time.
I mean, imagine if someone was banging on your door every day saying, give them up.
We're going to kill you and your family.
And he just said, No.
I mean, imagine that I can't. I mean, that's just that's just incredible to me.
Yeah, well, true, true selfless servant leadership, something a lot of us could learn from.
Absolutely.
All right. Well, then, now you find yourself down the Euphrates.
I'm just kind of chopping into some of the areas of the film so we can get to you, you know, your transition.
Talk to me about that final kind of mission that you had and your near death experience.
Yeah, it was it was my last day. I should have already been home, but I was there and they were like, All right, well, my platoon started was like, Hey, how's you know, I need you to come with me on this.
This could get hairy. And what they were we had picked up was that guys were coming and burying their weapons in the field next to this pump house and they dig them up in the morning, go conduct their attacks and then go back in the evening and rebury them so that they weren't bringing them home in case the house got raided or something.
And so we got picked up on this. So we infilled and we were in what we call the pump house.
And we were kind of sitting there day broke and all of a sudden, you know, vehicle came up. There were a couple of guys. There was an engagement by our snipers.
And then there was a car coming down. We had to a split element. One was up by this market. It was pretty bad news.
And the other one was down by the river, which was where I was at.
And all of a sudden, the car kind of starts barreling down towards us and we were like, Oh, you know, we thought it might be a vehicle born ID coming.
And the other house engaged that vehicle and stopped it when they came out to clear the vehicle, though, because it was daylight and just the market had just opened.
They were immediately compromised. And from that point throughout the entire course of the day, it was just mortars, rockets.
They were splashing down in the river behind us. They were landing in front of us.
I mean, we were in probably eight foot high concrete walls. I asked one of the mortar guys, one of those lands in here, what's the damage going to be?
Oh, he goes, I'll be dead. Oh, OK. Thanks. I guess that's a simple answer. Appreciate it. Thanks for keeping it short and concise.
And then it was towards the end of the day. We like I said, we got engaged all day from morning until dusk with IDF and rockets and stuff like that.
And I got up on the roof and I was like, hey, I'm going to pull my last guard shift to give the shit I've pulled so many.
So I get up on the roof with another team leader of mine and we sit there, we pull our hour.
And as we go to stand up, we were silhouetted because it was it was dust.
And there was a single sniper out that went right between the two of our heads because my right ear was ringing and his left ear was ringing.
Never found the shooter, never, never. But no one got hit, obviously.
But yeah, that was that would have been my last day. And the irony that is before we went on that mission, I told my platoon, sir, I'll go with you.
But just know I've seen this movie before I get killed.
It's going to be on you. And he's like, I got you. I got you.
And last shot of the day almost took my friggin head off.
So gotten gotten the exfil got back to the base, flew back to Germany and then back to the States.
So as we touched on earlier, that transition can be very jarring for a lot of people.
I mean, not only have you got the actual excitement, I guess you'd say, of war or first responder profession, but you've also got that tribe.
You've got that sense of purpose. You've got that shared suffering that's created a bond that most people will never even understand.
And then one day you find yourself outside a fire station with the doors of clothes behind you or you find yourself back on US soil.
Walk me through the first days, weeks, months of your transition from an extremely high up tempo combat deployment in Iraq to US.
I'd say the first thing was that the volume on life got turned down.
Everything was so mundane compared to what we had been doing on a daily basis.
Like, oh, we're going to Home Depot or something. I don't give a shit about Home Depot.
And the one thing that I never thought of until it was probably a couple of years ago, maybe it was like one of our first podcasts I think we did.
I was like I was never for one minute in the military. I was never by myself.
There was always someone within like arms reach.
I mean, whether you had to go to the bathroom, whether you had to go on a patrol, you were never alone.
And all of a sudden I found myself completely and utterly alone.
And to me, that was a dangerous place because it was all the stuff swirling in my head about what we had done and coming back and the adjustment and all this.
But I'm not I mean, with the other than a phone call, it's only I can sit down and have a conversation with someone.
There's no one here that understands me.
And I felt lost. I felt just completely isolated.
And then that kind of fed into the fact where I wanted to be isolated and I didn't want to talk to anyone, which made all the problems in my head a million times worse.
And, you know, I'm not going to say that I still don't struggle with certain things to this day.
But, man, that first year, I don't know how I survived it.
I really don't. And then Sean, starting in 2008, so that would have been 2007.
And then in 2008, I moved from Boston back down to South Carolina.
And Sean had all the interest that he previously discussed in the military.
And I had a wealth of knowledge.
So we sat in the garage and just shot darts and talked about shit.
And he was he was all pumped. He was ready to go.
Things didn't work out. And then we were like, well, let's start writing a book about this, because I was starting to begin to forget stuff.
Yeah. And I said from the get go, I was like, this is a very powerful story.
People need to hear this.
I mean, it was a it was a battle for years because at that time you were still, I think, going through a lot of it.
And you're like, I don't think anybody wants to hear this.
Yeah, that was my initial. That was my initial.
Like there are so many guys that have done so much more. Nobody needs to hear this.
But we continue to I was like, let's just at least make a war journal just so you have it, just so it's there.
And for years, you know, I'd come over or he'd come over.
We chat in the garage. I maybe take notes or like, you know, record them on my phone and then jot down what he said later, you know, until we had, you know, a hundred or so page.
And you script of basically the whole story laid out.
And that's kind of where we said, you know, we don't really know.
There's no way that I can turn this or we can turn this into a full fledged novel.
But I was like, I got the camera equipment. I had been, you know, getting into film and video at the time.
And I said, hey, man, let's let's sit down and record this thing.
And, you know, I don't know if we ever thought it would turn into what it turned into.
But I remember getting done with that and saying, like, I don't even know if this is like a film that anybody will watch it or because we were just so close to we had watched everything over and over and over until it no longer makes sense to you.
And, you know, to speak to Sean's point about the war journal, when we when we started the documentary, you know, it kind of it was like it was like our little pet project.
But in a way, it was like, hey, you know, my kids are still a little young.
I want to make this so that they can look back and be like, oh, I understand.
I might, you know, my dad was a little weird.
So we kind of that's how it kind of started. And then it just kind of it continued to develop.
And then Sean did an amazing job with the editing.
And and then we kind of just sent it out to a few family members and friends and we're like, hey, just give it a look.
You know, what do you think? And we really didn't expect to get the feedback that we got.
I mean, I figured there'd be some pissed off people.
I figured there'd be some people that didn't want to hear all that.
As far as like, you know, I don't want to know what my husband did.
I don't want to know. You know, I don't want to remember that.
I had one guy call me and say, House, I love you.
And I fucking hate you at the same time because it brought back so much stuff that, you know, had been kind of lost in the sands of time, if you will.
And but, yeah, that's how it started.
And then we just got great feedback and we were like, well, you know what?
Let's throw it in the festival circuit and then I'll let Sean take it from there.
Yeah, we put it, you know, we sent out to some family and friends, had a couple, you know, times where we'd have, you know, I'd have a couple of friends over and like, hey, just watch this, you know, see what you guys think.
And then we sent it off into the festival circuit and it, you know, it got accepted.
It was an official selection of over 30 festivals that won several awards and made a good splash there.
And then once we we actually released it, you know, we just had such an overwhelming amount of support from the ranger community, from just the military community in general.
Yeah, I do that in a sense. I almost kind of went viral.
And those first couple of months of us putting it out and it was just it was wild to see that amount of feedback and just the amount of people reaching out and just saying, hey, thank you.
This helped me understand my brother better, my husband better.
We got a lot of feedback from Ranger wives, spouses just saying, hey, you know, I was able to watch this with my husband.
It wasn't something that I ever understood, you know, or he could tell me. But this was a way for a lot of guys to sit down and say, hey, this isn't my exact story.
But like, this is this is what it's like. This is what, you know, being in war and having some of these experiences is like and how it affects how it affected me.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, it was that was the really exciting part was was the reaction that was so unexpected.
You know, but one of the things that I mean, I'm married and I mean, my wife and I spent a lot of time together.
And if I was to tell her a story and this kind of dawned on me when the wife started calling because it was so unexpected.
I was like, but you know, when I tell a story to my wife, we've been together for so long, she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you.
But when another person tells your wife.
Like, hey, I was there with Dave, they'll be like, oh, and then they'll listen to what the other person has to say because they're not.
I've been married for 12 years. I mean, I haven't heard that. Yeah, I haven't heard that one. Oh, my God.
You never told me that. Like, but hearing it from someone else, I think made it easier for them to to understand. Yeah. And, you know, that was that was so gratifying to help to help with all those people that just because I did the same thing.
I got home, I clammed up. I didn't say anything to anyone. So, I mean, I can only imagine most of those guys probably did the same thing.
You know, you don't want to know what I know. You don't want to know what's going on inside my brain, honey. Just leave it alone.
And then to hear all of it, what we all went through.
But from someone else's mouth made the difference. I think. Yeah. And it's just in a compact format to be able to say, hey, watch this, spend a couple hours, watch this film, and you're going to have a better understanding.
And that's what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be as close to what my experience hearing that story was and how much it affected me.
Just kind of having that veil pulled back. And that's what we tried to deliver in Ranger was, you know, this is this is not pro.
This is not against war. This is just here are the cold facts about what, you know, doing this is like.
And here is, you know, a special operations, you know, soldiers experience firsthand and in an intimate telling,
which I think is something that we were able to achieve because we sat for, you know,
better half to two decades, you know, sitting in a garage telling these stories over and over again to the point where it's like we both know the stories in and out.
And we're able to deliver that, you know, dialogue from David in the sense of like it's just like you're sitting there, you know, as a listener, you know, letting him tell you this story.
I tell one of the cool things Sean brought up to one of the we got a message from a dude that I was in the Italian.
And his message was, how did you remember all the names of the places? So some random like non along like that.
No one is going to remember that place. And Sean had a very simple response.
He was like, we never stop telling stories. So those names never got out of your head.
You were able to retain them because we were continually telling the story over the course of 17 years. Yeah, yeah.
17 years. Yeah, just never stop telling.
So I think that led some gravity to the film because it really does puts you there.
It's very, it's very descriptive in his storytelling.
And I think that was the combination of some of the video and photos we had really helped to put a good image in the audience's mind of like what this was actually like.
Yeah, I mean, those images and videos were absolutely essential, I think, to just kind of, you know, take us out from just the spoken word.
You mentioned about people reaching out.
Just so you know, it doesn't say his last name is his handle is the real Pete. But he said I was roommates with Dave at 275.
Great dude. Glad to see this movie about him and RGRRGTRLTW.
I don't know if that's like LOL and smiley face.
It's like Rangers lead the way.
Yeah, we were actually just just talking about that before we hopped on here. I said, hey, somebody posted this. Do you recognize this guy?
And we're pretty sure he had it. He didn't have a beard when I saw him last time and spent 20 years.
So he probably looked a little different, but I believe his name is Peters.
His last name. Yeah, he was a great dude, too.
And he went on to have a good career in the regiment as well.
So that was really nice. I appreciate you reading it to me.
So it's always good to hear nice things. Absolutely.
But I want to go back because you talked about the first year and then obviously we'll move forward with the other films as well.
But because so many people did struggle, you know, and again, it's not just military, it's everyone, you know, human beings,
especially if you've if you've had the kind of trauma that some of us are exposed to.
And then again, that removal from that tribe that was your support system for that.
What were when you look back now, what were the lowest places you found yourself in the film?
You obviously talk about drinking, for example.
So what were your absolute lows?
And then aside from obviously the catharsis from the storytelling,
what have been other tools that have helped you grow from this, heal from this?
I think probably the biggest low for me was when I first got out, the woman that I was with.
I had such a problem, I was hiding beers and I would put a trash bag in the toolbox of my truck
and I'd bring a couple in at a time, slug them down, go out, throw them in the trash bag in the back of my truck
so they wouldn't be sitting in the trash can.
That was pretty low.
I'd never done that before, except for when I was probably like 15.
And I found myself as a grown man hiding beers from my my significant other.
That was pretty damn low.
And that went on for a while.
And finally I was able to get it under control.
But yeah, that was not good.
That first year was just the low of lows.
You come off of such a high from combat, even though it's terrible and you see bad things
and you have to do certain things and then you're alone with your thoughts.
Well, go get a case of beer, slug that down by three o'clock in the afternoon,
get in the car and drive back and go get another.
I mean, just terrible.
Just things I couldn't imagine doing nowadays at this point in my life.
I just didn't give a shit.
I didn't care.
If I slammed my car into a tree, oh well, didn't give a shit.
Just don't hit anyone else.
And that was that was that was definitely 2007 was the lowest lowest point in my entire life.
And what have you found has helped?
Because I mean, I think one of the things that's missing in the mental health conversation,
we've talked about stigma, stigma, stigma.
And I think a lot of us are there now.
We understand that this is something we should be talking about.
But what I don't see is a message of hope, message of post-traumatic growth.
So you see a lot of people, yeah, I'm dealing with my PTSD.
Well, I think there's so much more than that in most of us, not everyone, but a lot of us,
where the other side of going through that that trauma is a stronger, more resilient version of yourself.
And, you know, and you guys with this movie are a perfect example of this.
You become a beacon of light, then you share your story and it helps other people.
So what have been some of the tools that helped you navigate some of that darkness?
Well, the biggest thing for me, I got back into playing golf,
which has always been kind of my crutch to kind of not think about it.
But probably the most important thing that got me through it,
and I'm not going to say it was just this one thing, but this would definitely be the majority of it,
is coming to terms to myself with what happened and being like, I can't change it.
There's nothing I can do about it. I have to do a better job of managing this.
Alcohol is not going to help me manage this. It's going to make it worse.
I mean, I'm not saying don't go out and have a couple of beers or something like that,
but you know, you can't be drinking cases of beers every day. Yeah.
And so coming to terms, having a good job, a normal job,
which I was thankful enough to be in shot and brought their name up by North American Rescue.
I was fortunate enough to be given a home there. And that helped. It stabilized me.
It wasn't just me running out, doing whatever I wanted to with no accountability whatsoever.
I knew I had to be at work, you know, five days a week, this and that, and it provided structure.
And for that year in 2007, I had the structure.
And you know, you're coming out of the military or the fire service or wherever, your whole everything is routine.
It's all based off structure. And then that structure is taken away.
And you're like, I don't know what to do. Fuck it. Let's crack a beer.
And once I got that structure back in, it was like, oh, you can't do that.
You can't drink at 10 o'clock in the morning. Yeah.
You come home and have a couple of beers after work like a normal person.
And having that structure put back in my life definitely helped.
But also through that process, coming to terms with stuff that I knew I couldn't change.
It was either I couldn't change the only thing that was going to come up, it was going to continue to change me.
And I had to make that conscious decision to say, I did this. This happened.
It'll always be there. And it's always right there. It's always right there.
But I got to be able to have the mental fortitude and the maturity and the responsibility to have it sit right there,
but be able to still complete tasks like a normal human being or what, you know, quote unquote, human being.
So to me, that was the biggest thing. Coming to terms with it and the stability of having structure again.
And that's what that's what pulled me out of that. That dark place.
Now, Sean, I haven't asked you this, but again, obviously these these issues affect all of us,
whether you've seen combat, been a firefighter or whatever it is, or, you know, you're just a regular human being,
especially the impact of some of our earlier years on, you know, when we become adults.
So just to put that same question to you, when you look back now, your lifespan, did you have any lows?
And if so, were there tools that helped you climb out of that?
Yeah, I, you know, coming back from Haiti and seeing a lot of the stuff that I had seen there,
I struggled for many years to kind of understand and cope with what I saw.
And, you know, it's strange relationships I had, you know, you know, losing girlfriends and things like that,
because, you know, there was something, you know, inside me that I wasn't dealing with,
that I, you know, it would come out in, you know, in bad behaviors where, you know, you're being verbally abusive to somebody.
You're striking out in anger because you're in pain and you're looking for anybody as a target
and anybody who's close to you. I'm sure, you know, this is kind of a thing.
If you're close to somebody like that or who's had gone through those things, you're probably going to be, you know,
you've got a target on your back just because you're interacting with that person.
I found that over the years, the best thing that helped me was being able to go and talk to somebody about it,
doing talk therapy, you know, getting with a therapist or somebody who, you know, maybe it's, you know,
I was never one to want to go down the road of like, hey, give me a pill.
I don't want to, you know, think about this. I don't want to feel or anything like that.
I wanted to figure it out. And, you know, it took my entire 20s to accept and understand what I saw there
and how it affected me and how it affects me to this day and just being able to be aware of that behavior
and have a different perspective on it and see how I was treating people closest to me
and how the pain that I may have been going through, how it was coming out,
even if it wasn't something that was always at the forefront of my mind, kind of thinking like, oh,
I'm thinking about, you know, something I saw. It's something that alters you inside and it changes your behavior.
And until you become aware of that change in behavior and you accept that, okay, hey,
this was a before and after moment and I do have these things that I have to work on,
that's, you know, was the major changing point for me is just accepting that that happened,
similar to what David said, and then going and talking to somebody about it and getting new perspectives on it
and seeing how it was affecting my life.
Brilliant. I'm glad I asked. Thank you.
All right. Well, then we've been talking about the movie Ranger and we'll get to showing that you guys are having very soon with that.
I recently had Trang Nguyen on the show and you were behind the documentary on him as well that I watched.
So talk to me about that experience.
Yeah. So we originally kind of met Trang.
You know, I had followed him for a while on Instagram, I think, before he started his company with We Go Home.
And, you know, we noticed that he had said stuff about serving in the Ranger Regiment.
And so I sent him the film.
I just said, hey, you know, I saw that he was kind of like an influencer in that, you know, in that field.
And I sent him the film. I said, hey, man, I just want you to take a look at this.
You know, he had put out a post about Bremen Baraza and that, you know, tragedy in the Ranger Regiment,
those two guys dying in Ramadi.
And, you know, I said, hey, you know, David was on, you know, call for that mission as QRF.
Looks like you guys might have been in country at the same time and come to be, you know, they were.
Trang was with Ako at the time.
And they had had a mission go out where these two individuals, Bremen Baraza, were entering a room.
And both of them, unfortunately, as they came in and split, you know, one guy goes left, one guy goes right.
They both took a round in the side from a combatant bunkered in the room.
When we noticed that connection, I sent Trang the film and we started talking.
We went down the path of, you know, I kind of learned a little bit more about his story and just I said, hey, man, you know, the same way, you know, we told Ranger,
I think you've got a story that is incredibly inspiring.
You know, what your family did to come here and what he had to overcome as a youth growing up in, you know, Chicago in some really terrible areas
as a, you know, as a very low income immigrant family, you know, with his mom and his sisters, you know, working to, you know, put food on the table.
So we got to creating that story.
You know, I went up to Chicago and filmed with him.
And then it was it was months later when we actually sat down and did the interview once he had moved to Katy, Texas, and really went full blown with, you know, his company.
We go home and doing that.
It was a great experience working with Trang.
And again, you know, we put that into the festival circuit, you know, I think won a ton of awards and it was a big hit there, too.
So it is a great experience working with him and putting that out led us to another individual we're working with now, Hector Farrell.
I think he's on Hector Bravo on Instagram.
And we're telling a story about U.S.
infantry grunts with the Big Red One in the early days of Iraq and his time over there as a 19 year old and lucky for us, very similar to David's ability.
He had a archive of photos and home video that he was able to let us use to put this film together.
So very excited about getting that out as well.
Beautiful.
It's funny going back to Trang for a second, hearing his time overseas.
And it's crazy.
I forgot there was that overlap that he told that story, I believe, in the interview.
And then here you guys are, you know, from a different perspective.
But arguably the most jarring thing that happened to him was being betrayed by Chicago as a police officer, like his organization, not all the things that he saw and did.
And I think that really underlines how detrimental it is when your tribe turns their back on you and whatever that looks like.
So, yeah, it was a very powerful perspective.
Yeah, it's really sad to see that.
I think a lot of especially law enforcement deals with, you know, everybody kind of hating them from both sides.
So I think at one time, at least they had the department that was going to be like, hey, man, we got your back.
But in this new wave of culture, especially kind of similar to how you said the thing about, you know, now the perspective on military people kind of see behind all this.
Unfortunately, I think, you know, we're all flooded with everybody wants to watch the worst thing that's out there.
So if there's a video of a police officer doing something that those are the ones that get highlighted.
And so people have this perspective all of a sudden where they're seeing hundreds and hundreds of these types of videos and interactions where they never would have really seen that stuff before.
So it's, you know, it's not that it didn't exist before, but people were not aware of it.
And so now you have both, you know, civilian population and then the department population, you know, just cracking down on police officers.
And so it's there's really no good place for them to turn.
So that's why, you know, Trunks story is the story of a lot of law enforcement officers who felt that, you know, they had to leave that career that maybe they had aspired to retire in just because the risk to them is so great.
The risk to their family is so great, even beyond, you know, they could die doing the job.
It's, you know, if somebody doesn't like what they're doing, they'll destroy that person and their family and their name and, you know, everything about them.
So it's like there's this whole other risk that those guys have to take now that has just never been so present as it is now.
One of the things that's really apparent the last few years is we've just given the minority the microphone over and over again, and they project, oh, this is what our country is like. And it's like, no, that's not.
You know, most people respect law enforcement.
You know, I actually had a guest on Darrell and Monk Jenkins, who was a, he said he didn't elaborate.
He said he was in the Air Force, and then they mutually agreed for him not to be in the Air Force anymore.
So I don't know quite what the reason is for that, but he follows all the neo-Nazi groups around, and he's a black guy.
And so that's kind of his whole world.
And I said overall, because, you know, there's been times in the last eight years where it feels like, you know, there's a lot of fuel thrown on that fire.
You know, where are we actually at today?
And he goes, actually, he said what you're seeing now is a Hail Mary from a lot of those groups.
He said they're dwindling.
But if you listen to certain news stations, apparently every white guy in the whole of America hates everyone.
It doesn't look like him. You know what I mean?
So you've just got to be so careful of who you listen to in that projection.
But I think as we touched on earlier, this is also a great opportunity for us to fix the things that are wrong with each of these professions, including lack of support,
so that we do have young men and women excited to join the military because they know they'll only be sent to somewhere, an absolute last resort.
And the same with police, you know, or fire and police, you know, you're going to be trained at a high level, going to have high fitness standards, defensive tactics, weapons training,
so that you're and you're in pairs now.
So now the chances of you needing to shoot someone have diminished rapidly and fire service,
who give you the rest and recovery and sleep that you need to actually effectively do your job.
So we're at a beautiful point where if you look one way, we can fix a lot of these and get people excited about these professions again.
But we've also exposed that side that if you don't do it, news flash, you might not have a military police or fire anymore.
So this is I think this can be a very exciting time in history, I think.
Yeah, I think we fall prey to news now where it's the effort to be first and it used to be.
It's the effort to be right.
And so people are it's all about getting it out first.
Doesn't matter if it's true or not a lot of times, though, we'll retract it later.
So you have stuff that's what's what's the click bait?
What's the thing that's going to make people so outraged sells when you can make somebody click something like, oh, my God, how could this happen?
Or why are these people doing this?
That's what sells. They don't want to tell you a story of like, oh, hey, this firefighter went in and saved his family.
I feel like you hear that a lot less. But, you know, we do have a responsibility, you know, with the power of, you know, these platforms and the ability to, you know, for someone like us to even distribute a movie.
The technology really just didn't exist if it was back in the 90s or even the early 2000s.
The ability to reach people and do and market marketing the film and actually get it to a distributor where we could actually effectively reach this community.
It just wouldn't have been there. Absolutely.
Well, I got one more area. I just want to hit quickly and then we'll go to some closing questions.
David, this is for you. When I think about everything we've talked about, really, you know, and the future of a nation, no matter what country people are in.
What I realize is if we just point at the fire chief, the county administrator, the president and say you need to fix this, you've just relinquished all responsibility of how your country is.
The answer to that over and over again appears to be mentorship. So first, as they say, you want to change the world, start at home.
You got to make sure that you're a good parent and a good partner, you know, first.
But then to walk outside your front door into your community and go, how can I help?
And what I'm kind of hearing from this story is with Sean, you know, obviously you had this young man aspiring to be in the military and your mentorship sent you guys down this path.
And we're having this conversation now about yet another film coming up.
So just talk to me about mentorship through your eyes.
Well, as the like I said, I have four kids. So like you said, it starts at home.
And I've I have used a lot of the things that I learned in the military about leadership and about how to deal with people.
And I made a lot of mistakes in my early years of leadership because it's, you know, in that area, it's kind of trial by fire and kind of thrown in and slight.
And I figured out and they are like twenty three years old.
It's almost 42 now.
A lot of the lessons that I did learn that were good, I've been able to pass on to my kids.
You know, be good to your friends, be good to your neighbors.
Don't talk shit to your mom.
You know, do your homework.
You know, don't go outside and swear while you're in the street.
Simple little things like that, little pitfalls to like, you know, help them kind of along their way. But, you know, for me, it was Sean, the mentorship factor that was it was purely educational.
And that's how I kind of approach it with my kids, too.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm probably a conventional parent, but I talk to my kids real.
I tell them what to expect.
I tell them, you know, the world can kick your ass.
So you got to, you know, you got to be prepared to handle that when it does happen, when you do get out on your own, you know, when you go to college.
You're going to run into people that are going to be a problem.
You're going to run into situations that you can't control.
It's how you handle those that is the most important thing.
They're going to happen.
It's a mathematical fucking certainty.
It's going to happen.
I have to prepare you for when those moments happen.
Otherwise, it's going to you're going to fall in your face.
And to me, that starts with honesty.
I don't pull any punches at anybody.
I don't pull punches with Sean. I don't pull punches to my wife.
I don't pull punches with my kids.
Here's the deal.
And to me, making them aware of the potential pitfalls and how to maybe sidestep that, you know, sidestep that landmine, you know, to me, that's mentorship.
You know, trying to just help them not, you know, make some I made this mistake.
Don't make this mistake, too.
You know, and you put yourself out there and, you know, you use yourself as an example of, you know, in certain situations.
Don't do that.
I did this and it didn't work.
Try something else.
And to me, that that that's that's mentorship, leadership, however you want to refer to it as.
But that that's kind of my approach is just honesty.
Sean, same thing to you.
It can be as the recipient or as you've grown older, becoming a mentor as well.
You know, I think as as a recipient of that, especially looking to David, it's like a military mentor.
You know, when that was something I wanted to do, I grew up doing ROTC and so I was like very much in that mindset.
And honestly, you know, I've expressed this to him before at that time when I heard those stories and and had that double pulled back, I was almost upset that like I was almost like you kind of ruined this for me.
And, you know, it's kind of like a boy's like version of looking at war and thinking like this is what it's going to be about.
And then the realization of of what that meant and then to have it truly bolstered by my experience in Haiti and being able to take, you know, understanding the lessons that David had told me in these stories and then seeing it firsthand.
When I got back from that, having seen so much death and destruction, I you know, it didn't it didn't make a lot of sense to me anymore to to go do that. I kind of felt after that.
And after seeing the things I had seen, I was like, you know, I've seen enough I've seen enough for multiple lifetimes over, you know, seen enough people die.
I've seen enough bodies have seen enough blood and guts.
And although it's not a it wasn't a, you know, a military experience or being in a combat zone, the mixture of David's stories and that experience took me down a different path.
And I realized, you know, just how much that experience and those stories affected me.
I knew at that point I was like, this is something that I need to do. And I have, you know, a different skill set that will allow me to do this. And I now have these experiences that helped me even better understand somebody like David, because I have experienced, you know, that trauma firsthand, whether it's, you know, pulling
seals off the side of the mountain or dealing with, you know, victims of an earthquake where, you know, you have mass graves and you have children dying have, you know, family members screaming.
It's like you see that tragedy and chaos and trauma and you see that just how fragile life is.
When I came back from that, that alien feeling of coming back to a regular society where things are are working, it was it's a very weird feeling because, you know, just how quickly all that can be taken away.
So it added this fragility to life and this anxiety to life that at any moment this can all be torn apart and just how grateful we all need to be that we live in a free society. We live in a society where I have running water.
I have a roof over my head. I have police and fire service. I have I have great hospitals and health care.
We take for granted so much these things because we're just so used to them.
And until you see that stuff pulled away and you see it pulled away from so many people and you understand that story, that's where, you know, so as a recipient of that mentorship, it it it definitely helped me grow as a man and as a storyteller and led me to the point where I'm at now.
I think gratitude is an absolute superpower. You know, and sometimes we need to remind ourselves of, you know, if you woke up under a roof wearing clothes and your children got food in their stomach that you already doing better than a large percentage of the planet.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
It's just a it's an incredible thing and I think it's it's hard for a lot of people to go there and unless you've seen, you know, or experienced something like that, it's it's not something that's going to be easily grasped.
And we hope that, you know, through creating these films that we give a voice to these kind of stories and help people understand this, you know, very different side of the world that so many people never, you know, really see or get a chance to see.
Absolutely. Well, before we go to where people can find all the films, talk to me about June 28th and the special showing that you've got on anniversary.
So, yeah, on June 28th, David's brother, Alex, has actually put together a charity called the Further Faster Harder Foundation. And through that charity, they're doing, I guess, a screening of the Ranger documentary here in Greenville, South Carolina at the Peace Center.
And it's kind of a, you know, it's a way for us to share this film with people and to, you know, raise, you know, you know, money to help veterans and to help, you know, this charity of basically giving, you know, veterans, you know, a voice.
June 28th will be the 19 year anniversary of Operation Red Wings Recovery.
So we wanted to try and honor those guys and keep that story alive. And so, you know, we put this, you know, screening together of Ranger. It will be the first public screening outside of the film festivals that we've done.
So we hope to get, you know, as many people as we can there, you know, we've got tickets reserved for veterans. So we want to try and help get some veterans in there for free. But, you know, we just want to try and spread this story to as many people as possible.
So where can people find the films and then where the best places online social media to find you as well?
Okay, so online for the both of us, it's at Ranger movie. You know, if there's somebody who wants to send David a message, that's, you know, we're both through that portal there. Online, you can find Ranger and Wynn on Amazon.
There's also links in our Instagram for both films and for tickets for the Ranger premiere here in Greenville. So everything on Amazon and Instagram there, they can find through a Ranger movie.
Beautiful. Well, David and Sean, I want to say thank you so much. I mean, obviously two very different dynamics, two interesting life stories, but a pretty phenomenal kind of synergy when you guys ended up neighbors.
I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and also for your courageous vulnerability, which is so important and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you so much for having us on. It was truly a pleasure and we look forward to seeing it when it comes out. Watching and listening to it. Hopefully we didn't sound too stupid.
No, thank you, James. We really appreciate it, man. And it's been great talking with you. And, you know, thank you and thank everybody who has supported this film.
It means the world to us.