All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone with veteransradio.net.
We are recording today from the Legal Help for Veterans Studio in Northville, Michigan.
Legal Help for Veterans is a Veterans Disability Law Firm.
You can reach us at 800-693-4800.
We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today US Air Force Veteran Andy Kubik.
Andy, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you very much, Jim.
Good to be here.
Well, it's always a pleasure to speak to somebody with such distinguished service.
And a Michigan boy, nonetheless, you grew up in a harbor beach, which for those who
don't know is over on Lake Huron in Michigan.
Andy, you joined the Air Force right out of high school, I assume.
What put you into that direction?
I wanted to join the military.
I knew I was eventually going to go to college sometime down the road, but my initial thought
was I need to get out there and not just see the world, but do some of the hardest work
out there.
And I was introduced to this by, do you remember Tom Clancy?
Oh, sure, yeah.
Quite a writer, quite a novelist.
Yeah.
I read all his books and I knew I was going to be, I took off, found out about the Air
Force and learned that they had special operations and that's what I wanted to do.
I was set.
And I would meet other kids who were just like me.
They may have played football or baseball and they didn't want to go to college, but
they wanted to do something hard and they had heard a word about special operations.
And you know, you eventually would get surrounded by them.
Well it was an elite group and let's, let me frame this a little bit for our veteran
radio listeners.
Andy served from 1990 through about 2004, about 15 years of service in the United States
Air Force.
He was in special operations, a combat controller and saw activities, saw the battlefield in
Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan throughout his 15 year career.
And Andy's activities in Bosnia in 1999 when he was involved in rescuing a down pilot,
that same year he was named the United States Air Force Special Operations Command NCO of
the year.
Anybody who's ever been in service knows, you know, if you achieve that kind of recognition,
you had one hell of a year and you indeed had one hell of a year.
But why don't you tell folks about what being a special operations command operator in the
Air Force is about.
I think a lot of people simply just didn't even know that the Air Force had such a group.
Sure.
Everybody knows Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Rangers, Marine and recon.
The Air Force comes in and has their own specialties to work with those teams.
And they specialize in air power and rescue.
So they produce combat controllers who are air traffic controllers and forward air controllers.
That means they know how to control up to 30 aircraft at a time or more and they can
fight with airplanes if that's a way to explain it.
And then rescue specialists known as para-rescumen who specialize in going behind enemy lines
and rescuing down pilots shot down behind enemy lines.
And or fighting alongside other special operations and going in on a stack clearing a building.
They'll be right there amongst the team.
And if one of them goes down, he'll pull away from the stack and immediately work on the
individual or get him out.
He'll rescue them.
That's what it is to be an Air Force Special Ops or Special Warfare.
And there's also air crew and pilots who fly especially modified aircraft like MC-130s,
AC-130s, used to have the Pave low helicopter.
They still have the Pave Hawk helicopter.
They have the Osprey.
Any kind of specialized aircraft to get special warfare personnel in and out of the battlefield.
Andy, I don't know that you would know this number, but maybe you will.
How many, put some context around this.
How many combat controllers or special operation command folks are in the United States Air
Force?
When I was in, there was 400.
Now there's possibly 600.
That's still a pretty small contingent of men.
And I assume some women nowadays.
No, we're trying, but there's no women.
And is that because none have gone through the qualifications or are they precluded
from these particular slots now?
We fully support them.
It's none of them have passed.
This forward air command, you say you fight with planes is one way to frame it.
And I think some of us maybe have seen this in the movies or read about it in what happened
in Afghanistan.
But it's that air combat controller who's on the ground marking targets for the airframes
to come in and deliver their loads, right?
Yes.
Yep.
For fighter, bomber and intelligence aircraft.
I suspect the guy in the ground is there pretty much in a stealth mode by himself.
Tell us what a typical mission might look like in that role that you played.
Okay.
Take the deployment at 9-11.
We were doing unconventional warfare with Army special forces and Afghan native tribes.
unconventional warfare is when special warfare personnel align themselves with tribal foreign
forces and they teach them how to fight.
Then they go in and they fight alongside these native tribes.
It was, it came to the public side in Vietnam and it wasn't really until 9-11 that they
really had equal action doing it for real.
I was an example of a combat controller aligned with the Army special forces team.
At 9-11 we had eight of us, eight combat controllers with eight different teams go in, into Afghanistan.
And we fought alongside the special forces and tribal forces.
We snuck in by helicopter and the tribal forces had Toyota pickup trucks for us or some of
them had horses.
And we rode with them.
We rode a couple hundred miles for the city of Kandahar.
That was our objective to take Kandahar and to hunt down and kill as many Taliban and
Al Qaeda with our weapons or with aircraft.
And imagine getting to the last set of mountains before the Kandahar Airfield airport and getting
on top of the mountain and sitting there with a native Pashtun tribal leader who used to
live in Kandahar but now lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
And he is telling you all the specific things about the area.
You're getting eyes on the location.
It's flat desert terrain.
And then two days later you're dropping bombs.
You're looking through scopes and binoculars.
You have laser pointers.
The aircraft have laser-guided bombs, GPS-guided bombs.
One of the aircraft could be an intelligence aircraft who's been orbiting overhead, listening
to cell phone conversations, tracking locations of Al Qaeda.
And you're targeting.
You're calling the aircraft in hot, which means they can drop their bombs.
We did that for about three weeks and did over 350 close air support missions fighting.
Well, and you're using at that point, you know, the latest and greatest technology, the
guy next to you may have ridden his horse.
But you're showing up there and commanding and controlling these as a combat controller
for the United States Air Force with the latest and greatest technology that you hope is going
to work in this high mountain desert place.
Did it always work?
No, no.
There were times where it was just terrible tragedies.
Not on my team, but my teammate and his team who was north of Kandahar.
They had one mistake, that's all it took was one mistake out of hundreds of successes.
A B-52 bomber came in and dropped a 2,000 pound bomb on their coordinate.
And it was an accident using the GPS.
One of the teammates switched out the battery and continued to process the mission and didn't
realize that the GPS reverted back to his position.
And it dropped the bomb right on their position killing three Americans and eight Afghans.
There were times when I have the pilot coming to drop bombs in three miles away, the bomb
would land away from the target.
You'd shake your head.
So it was a time when it's too long of a story now, but we dropped the bomb and at the last
second after the bomb was released from the aircraft, the Afghan leader was like, no,
no, no, that's our friend.
I was like, what do you mean that's your friend?
You just told me that was Taliban.
Then the guy survived the bomb.
Yeah, I think, again, we get to Sanita's version back here in the states as to what, how do
this really works?
But anybody up close knows, you know, it's not only brutal, but it's got all kinds of
rooms for error.
Let me just remind the veteran radio listeners that we're talking to Andy Kubic, who's a
U.S. Air Force veteran served 15 years.
And among other things was awarded the Silver Star for his activity in November of 2001.
He was attached to operational detachment, Alpha, which was attacking north through a
valley toward Kandahar, Afghanistan with a 500-man anti-Taliban force that began decisive
engagement that took quite a long period of time.
And there was a withering barrage of anti-aircraft gunfire and rocket grenades that had the team
pinned down.
As a massive volume of fire rained down on them, stunning the coalition, Staff Sergeant
Kubic stayed in an exposed position and calmly coordinated emergency air, close air support
with devastating effectiveness.
Staff Sergeant Kubic controlled numerous bombing runs that set the conditions for a counter-attack
by Special Forces team in anti-Taliban force, which led to the battlefield being swept of
the enemy forces.
Staff Sergeant Kubic's decisive actions were overwhelmingly responsible for breaking the
back of the Taliban resistance and cleared the way for the final offensive on Kandahar
and subsequent victory in southern Afghanistan.
And I'm reading from his Silver Star citation.
So Andy's seen it all in theater.
Getting out as you did in 2004, so three years or so after that hellacious activity in Afghanistan,
the transition back to civilian life was not particularly easy for you, was it Andy?
No, it wasn't.
And as we transition to that, let me emphasize a couple things.
That what you just read, that was my second of, I'm sorry, that was my fourth of six deployments.
And I would return to Afghanistan a second time and then do the invasion of Iraq.
And my wife at the time, she was also in the Air Force, Special Operations Command.
And she deployed and she ended up choosing to leave the Air Force early and take our
son and move back with her family in West Virginia, leaving me to do the final deployment
to Iraq.
And we were separated pretty much from 9-11 until January 2004.
And you have to imagine the deployments were, I'm trying to show you how it was so difficult
for me personally to transition.
The experiences fighting were not regimented.
It was a gray world.
It was not black and white.
It was making decisions, battlefield decisions, command decisions.
It wasn't waiting for a commander to tell you what to do.
Each of us were making our own decisions and choices.
We were working with the latest technology.
Some of it we had never used before.
We were handed it as we were heading out the door and we had to figure out how to use it.
It was a mind-blowing experience, realizing that we could accomplish so much, so little.
And we were responsible for disruption of modern warfare.
In real time, when you experience that, you either don't realize it or it's so profound
that it's mind-blowing and you can barely communicate that to others, especially when
you get back home.
I had to make my decision on whether or not I was going to stay in or leave and return
to my family.
I made my decision on my final day of my contract at like 4.30 in the afternoon, just as personnel
were going home.
I decided that I would leave and accept risks.
I was going to make a traditional transition into the CIA and return to the war later.
First I had to get my degree.
I started seeing the first signs of PTSD.
That last year, away from my family, I was living out of a storage unit because we had
our house rented out.
I started abusing a commercial drug to calm my nerves.
I would go on to use that drug for six years after I left the military, after a divorce,
after I failed out of college and was fired from a couple jobs, had treatment.
It would take seven years before I was treated for substance abuse.
I was given powerful psychotropic and was treated for a wide range of mental health
issues versus being treated for substance abuse.
I was abusing a hallucinogenic.
I wasn't abusing marijuana or cocaine or any other street drug.
That's what made the problem hard to decipher for doctors.
Plus I wasn't telling them that I was abusing the drug.
It was a catastrophe.
It wasn't a traditional story of PTSD and struggling.
It was bad choices.
It was I couldn't believe that I was such a high functioning individual who had experienced
success, had raised a family, a loving wife, who was my best friend.
I had reached a point I was by myself with my family, my parents and my siblings struggling
to help me.
Everything was failing.
I had a six year old son and he would go on to witness me struggle all the way up until
he graduated high school until it finally stopped.
I left the VA and off and on I returned to working for the special operations command
with different jobs, never really getting my fetus established on the ground.
I had success with civilian healthcare, private industry who were experts with head trauma,
brain injuries and PTSD.
In fact they specialized working with NFL football players in concussion.
That came in 2014 and ever since then I've been okay and I've returned to work and rebuilt
another life.
I have a very close relationship with my son.
He also joined the Air Force and is doing the same job that I used to do.
He's surrounded by people that I know and we have a very, very close relationship.
He's the reason I ultimately left the military in a time of war and I don't regret anything.
I made bad choices.
I shouldn't have abused the drug.
But I had not done that.
It would have been totally different.
I take responsibility.
It's very rare for special warfare guys to abuse alcohol but they won't typically abuse
drugs.
I was an anomaly.
Despite that they've never left my side.
It's a close community.
It really demonstrates it's a family they haven't let you fall through the cracks.
Although it sounds like at times you were trying to force yourself through the cracks.
I know that you had some hospitalization.
14 times.
Did you find that the VA wasn't?
They weren't ready for.
I was the first Afghan Iraqi veteran in the Ann Arbor VA and the Dayton VA and the North
Carolina VA.
The last time they saw an extreme case like mine was Vietnam.
It sounds like that through the service you had some traumatic brain injury situations
but you found a civilian healthcare provider that kind of specialized in that area?
Yes.
I want to say their name if that's okay.
Go right ahead Andy.
Yeah.
It's the Eisenhower Center in Ann Arbor.
I found this through the Special Operations Command and they have a ranch out by Chelsea
in Chelsea, Michigan that houses former NFL players and typically special operations
warriors.
We're familiar with Eisenhower and Camp Liberty out there.
They do great work and we're glad you were able to mention them specifically.
As those bad choices led you down one path it took years.
Maybe it's 10 years or something to kind of get back on the right path but you got some
education in.
I found a book that you wrote, The Art of 21st Century Warfare, talking about how warfare
today is more surgical.
You kind of got yourself back on the right path the same way probably you made yourself
a combat controller just sort of one step at a time it sounds like.
Yes.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Yep.
And the fact that your son has joined the Air Force we often ask this question but I think
this already answers it.
We often ask veterans looking back, you know, if you had a son, a daughter, a niece, a nephew,
and a neighbor's kid who is saying, do you think I should join the military?
What would you say?
Oh I support them 110%.
I can't live that life and have all those successes and failures, the amazing experience
and not share that or support someone else.
I got equal experience as going to an Ivy League university.
It's hard to put into words.
I'd support them 110%.
Well let's tell.
Everything's dangerous in their own way.
Oh absolutely.
Let's tell people today what you're doing for Air Force Special Warfare.
I am a field developer working alongside Special Warfare recruiting, helping select, train,
and develop candidates who want to try out for the same work that I had done.
And I represent Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.
And are these candidates already in the service or thinking about getting involved, Andy?
They're thinking about joining and they're typically in high school but also college.
Andy, if somebody says, you know what, that level of adventure and patriotism and hard
work is something, is a challenge I want to take on, how do they get in touch with a
field development recruiter like you?
They go through a typical Air Force recruiter who will immediately direct them to this local
Special Warfare recruiter.
Every state has a Special Warfare recruiter.
Now let's clear this up because you explained it to me earlier and I don't think we've mentioned
it on the air.
Special Operations Command in the Air Force is what you were a part of back, you know,
a decade or more ago.
It's now changed its name, is that right?
It's still known as Special Operations Command but they have changed from being known as Special
Operations to Special Warfare.
Okay, great.
Just wanted people to understand the right language as we go forward here.
Andy, we really appreciate you taking time today talking to Veterans Radio and certainly
Andy Kubik, the service that you have performed for the nation and continue to perform for
this great nation cannot be simply, we can't thank you enough and awards and medals don't
do that either.
We realize how difficult post-service is for a lot of guys whether it's because they made
bad choices or because, you know, there's state of mind coming out of service, lend
them to make bad choices.
We're always thrilled when we hear a story like yours that says, hey, this is how I got
myself out of it and what I'm doing today.
So Andy, thanks for taking some time with Veterans Radio.
Hey, Jim, thank you very much and my family appreciates those kind words.
One last thought, there's going to be experience of mourning and grieving.
That's what they rarely talk about.
Give those, your listeners a heads up if they're in the same shoes and that can be easily
dealt with.
Oh, absolutely, you have to give somebody time to do that and I think you also have
to recognize that having a purpose is so important for you.
It was the son and trying to be the father you want to be and the family that you want
to create.
And I think sometimes guys don't get off the couch and get moving because they kind of
lost that purpose.
They really do need that purpose, don't they?
Yes, definitely.
Again, Andy, thank you for taking time with Veterans Radio.
All right, take care, Jim.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawson.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
800-6934800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by going to veteransradio.net and until next time, you are dismissed.
If you have a VA claim denied by the Board of Veterans Appeals, contact Legal Help for
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The number again, 1-800-6934800.
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