SOFREP RadioDan Pace, Former Special Forces Company Commander and Author of 'It Was What It Was'
Dan Pace is a former Special Forces company commander and battalion executive officer (XO) of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He is also the author of "It Was What It Was," a book detailing his experiences and the challenges faced by his unit during their deployment in Baghdad as part of the 1st Infantry Division's "Surge" Brigade.
Pace discusses moral injury and how it is a product of cumulative and accumulated damage. It is difficult to address but must be nipped early because of the danger it poses to the integrity of the entire organization. Ethics matter and should be at the forefront of training, as the difference between a person being alive or dead is just one trigger pull away.
Get a copy of "It Was What It Was": https://amzn.to/3SmxgTb
Join the SOFREP Book Club here: https://sofrep.com/book-club
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Hey, what's going on? This is rad the host of soft Rep Radio, and you're tuning into a very cool episode. But first, before I go into my next guest, I want to talk about our merch store. So soft reap dot com forward slash merch. We have our branded goods, the stuff that says softwap, it's got softwarep radio. You might even see my mug on something if you want to show it on a mug or something like a mug. Where's my mug? I don't have me on a mug. I like some flowers. What can I say? But look, thank you so much for tagging us on social media. It really helps to keep the fireplace going. And then I also have to recommend our biggest, our biggest pride and joys our bookstore. So we have a book club and it's soft rep dot com Forward slash book hyphen Club. And that's a book hyphen club. So go check out the book club, enroll in it, and hopefully my next guest and author and former Special Forces Company Commander and Battalion XO of the seventh Group. We can get his book into our book club and it's called It Was What It Was a Tale of the First Infantry Division in Iraq two thousand and six to two thousand and eight by author Daniel Pace. Welcome to the show, Daniel.
Hey, Rad, thank you so much for having me on. It's really a pleasure.
Well, thanks for you know, hitting us up. We really appreciate those that want to be on the show, especially coming from your level. And you know, you're really just like an extreme athlete who has put himself through mind control told be the best surgical scalpel blade of combat for our military. Sir, you are that, in my mind, the blade of the scalpel.
Let's let's let's put a perspective that I am a former extreme maybe athlete. I don't know, I don't know if I qualify anymore, but I appreciate the I appreciate the price.
Did you ever run a marathon?
We have done a lot of distance running. I've actually never run more than ten miles, but I did a thirty mile walk, so I don't know if that counts.
That's pretty good. That's pretty good. No, And did you ever jump out of a perfectly good airplane against all your body's movements and just did it?
One hundred percent? I've had the worst exits, and that's a pretty good ones. I think, of course my career.
What's your worst exit? What is it? What happened? Think? What's the one thing that pops in your mind of jumping when you like?
Oh no, so one hundred percent. If you forget to put your legs through the leg straps of your rucksack when you jump out, your ruck will hit you in the face and then you will have a lot of problems getting control of yourself, especially in the dark when you can't see. So I'm just gonna throw that as a life lesson for anybody that's jumping with a rucksack. Don't forget that. It's it's really painful.
Was that a halo jump? Was that like a high altitude?
It was square shoe? And I wasted pretty much the entire jump fighting through the air and tried not to h screw it up, but landed Okay, no major injuries, just my pride.
So your shoe was like hanging I mean your ruck was hanging off of you.
So it hangs and stormyly supposed to hang your leg your face, but but it just kept flipping on me in the face. Yeah, it's uh. Actually it ended up being kind of dangerous because if you tumble when you open, you'll you'll get tangled up in your risers and just die. But it worked out. You know what they say about night jumps is as long as you land successfully. It was a beautiful jump because nobody could see.
And you know what, I hear that, Yeah, you got so instructure out there. He's like, that's a ten, yeah, ten ten.
Nobody saw.
Oh you already had your ruck undub. You're fast. What's your technique? Let's talk about it. Step into your ruck, Step into your ruck. Good tips, good tips. Now let's talk about the younger damn who was just about to go to Iraq in two thousand and six for just a minute. Okay, let's crack open that guy. So, first of all, how old were you when you enlisted in the military, and were you enlisted or officer? Like, which one did you pick or did you go one of the others?
I enlisted, So I enlisted at twenty one straight out of college. Didn't know what to do with my life was kind of a screw up, to tell you the truth, A little bit of a drunk figured I was going to like I got to do something fun and just enlisted in the army. Did a four years in enlistic guy kind of probably one of the worst and listening guys did ever live, to tell you the truth. But eventually I found my way, ended up going to a CS and then by a two thousand and seven and we deployed. I was a lieutenant in the cavalry. You run in an infetry two, no kidding.
What's your degree? Your what was it that helped you propel you to get to that officer? You know?
So I agreed philosophy actually, which it might surprise you. There's not a lot of career options for a guy with the philosophy degree, so you pretty much joined the army, or go to grad.
School or teach philosophy.
You teach philosophy, yeah, right.
Really, and why philosophy should be taught and continue to be taught, and why we shouldn't have philosophy right, it's a really important thing.
It's funny I graduated with kind of a you know, a college. You were I'm pretty smart in there, as I wasn't really kind of an idiot, but in the Army taught me a lot more about the real world. So it's a it was a good learning process and it's good to kind of come around on that.
So when you joined so the CS, is that a selection for green Borough? What a CS? When you said you got your CS combat selections or what is that CS?
CSS school school? Yeah? I had a guy named Dan Romero who was a patuone star, and he thought maybe I was better than I think I was, and so he wanted me to try out for it and actually went really well, and I ended up being I think an okay officer.
And were you already green Beret at that point? Special Forces? No, so you went.
To a yeah. Yeah, so we have to do a platoon lead time in the Army and then after that you go try out for Special Forces and if you're picked up, you come back as a captain and a team leader and then you kind of take your career from there.
Yes, right, right? Is that an eighteen Zulu Alpha Alpha?
So Zulu Zulu is the old man on the team. He's the he's the eight He's the one that really knows the most about the f world. And then the alpha, you know, where the young captain we joined the team. We h we try to figure out as we go and then then hopefully bring a little bit of knowledge of perspective.
Uh, did you live Did you guys live in a salute free zone at your headquarters?
So it's funny that is that is kind of a touchy subject. So I joined at Bragg and joined St. Brag which is for Bragg or Liberty now is in no way a salute free zone, and in no way it is the most salute zone that you could ever go to, right. Uh. But then we moved down to Eggland Air Force Base and got this compound out in a place called Duke Field, which is north of the main base, and then all of a sudden we did have a salute free zone and even a hat free zone eventually, which is every guy is just that's that's the pinnacle of happiness.
Just walk around with no hat with aircut exactly.
Exactly, you know, in your pocket.
I'll point that out. My dad, being a Green Beret, I was a little aaron and he was toting me up to Hillar Air Force Base to the medical clinic for an appointment or pick up my mom's prescriptions. And he was just in his BDUs and he had his beret on. Normal dad, normal day, and we're just walking and I just see like this air Force guy walking out of the double doors. He had like a trucker hat, said like tr four three seveny five, like his flight on it. And I'm just like, Dad, how come he doesn't have a green beret? And he's like, just come along. That's all he did. He'said, come along. First of all, I'm on an Air Force base. Second of all, he's Army green beret. And it's just not every day. And then I learned, you know what it takes for you guys to really do those push us with me on your back every night? My dad said, there and do push us with me on his back. And that's not the easiest thing. I say, hey to my kids, come get on my back, and I just sit there, just.
Lay there on the floor. It's funny you talk about that, because from a parenting point of view, my kids have no perspective about anything I ever did in my career, and so it really hit me. One The other was like two weeks ago, my youngest boy, well, my second youngest boy, six was saying, you know, hey, So his friend asked him what dad. He's like, Hey, what's your dad doing? He's like, he works in an office. I'm like, oh, that's what my kids think, you know what I mean? Like it takes time and perspective for kids to even understand what you do. Like he goes to the office every day, that's it.
Oh yeah, See, I had to go to the office every day with my When he would and take me, I was like, why can't I go? When they'd go jump, I'd go with them to the runway and the tarmac. They would do plfs off of the picnic tables, and I would stack up with them and just do a plf off the picnic table.
So it was like, shout here they jump.
Here dude. They would take me up in the mountains, we'd repel off waterfalls. Not one time did they say, hey, why is little Raidal tagging along? Not one time they were just like, hey, come along. He's making it. He's doing it. He's repelling.
Awesome, it's recruiting, right, it's trying trying to ba big win.
It's probably eleven, twelve, thirteen, years old doing these types of adventures, you know, et cetera. It was just a really good time and I'm glad I had that experience with my dad to be able to appreciate what you guys do, you know, one hundred percent, And they always like to be in their civilian clothes. We'd go hike, not in gear, just like polo striped shirt and jeans, and.
Deep within every green brak is a guy that doesn't want to wear his uniforms clothes. That is a true statement, Like it's it's just just part of the game.
So my dad, growing up, he was a pretty integrity driven individual. I feel that, you know, he presented himself to me, even as an older man. I didn't find any faults with what he tried to teach me, you know, other than my own choice in religion. So you know, I can't faull for who he picks or whatever. It's just like my really find religions your own preference. However, I didn't find any like integrity issues with my dad. You know. It always seemed like, hey, son, I'm really trying to hold up the core values, to teach you the core value so that you can have them and be a steward with them. But I know that you know, you've been in this community for a long time and you're kind of seeing some of maybe this waterbed effect of ethics and integrity happening within the community right where it's like these waves coming in. It's like, I know that you and I kind of talked, you know, correspondent, and you talked about how nobody's really ready for a lose lose type situation in combat, and how are we supposed to deal with this on an ethical manner? And then it's not just about and I'm throwing a lot at you, it's not just about the one guy that learns ethics that he tries to keep that going right. It takes the team to have that ethics, you know, to employ it all together and as a skill set, almost as the guy that knows how to run a crank on a radio, you know, to generate it, you got to know how to do it. Everybody on the team knows how to do it in case of an emergency. Would you say ethics is great, classic glass, you should have it always that you're like the fire extinguisher of.
So it's funny, rights, it's this problem, right, and so the problem is really kind of two parts, right. I would say that the first thing is kind of what you talked about, guys going down range to do operational work, and we're going to take misconduct off the table for a minute. I'm not going to talk about guys just doing wrong things, right, that's almost a different problem. What I'm really talking about is guys going down range and bumping into these lose lose situations. Like you're working with a partner, you're in a house, you're clearing a building, you're doing your thing. You have to maintain a relationship with these guys and then they murder detaining or they sexually assault to detain, and you're there and you're in that moment and you're like, what do I do with this? I mean, there's nobody growing up and I think America that has that kind of background to really just know how they respond. And so what that produces is it produces these situations where guys are doing what they think is operationally right. They make the decision, they make one way or the other. I mean, you've had cases where guys beat up guys that were doing that, and you had other cases where guys kind of underwrote it, and in either case, it creates this problem because guys down range are making decisions that get them into the zone where they just kind of start wandering off ASTHMA. They're like, all right, I'm making these decisions. I get comfortable making these decisions. I'm getting in this terrain where I'm not sure I'm even doing I'm trying to do the right thing, but I'm doing things that get so questionable that it becomes difficult to kind of come home and unwind. And the second piece of that problem is really that the commands structure that we have kind of promotes dishonesty on the subject if we're being just totally honest. And the reason I say that is people want to know that you're doing good work, but people always don't want to talk specifically about what you're doing, and so we get used to kind of lying to each other, Okay, what are you doing. I'm doing I'm good, I'm making effects. But that comes to a head when something happens on the news, or something comes a public or a guy comes home and he's just kind of so far off asthmth that he's not really able to kind of fit back into the world and I think we can do better. I think we can fix those problems. We just got to talk about them, and then we got to train against them.
Do you think that, you know, it becomes this quid pro It's like status quo almost like where you got say you're the new guy on the team. You just get onto this new team and they're doing these missions and then they've already gotten this click going, and then you fall into the click. But you know, what's happening is not the right thing. But these are the guys you're with for the next ninety six years, even ninety days to six You know, for a long time there's been talks in the news in the media about navy seals who went against that green brain and killed him because of known things that was going on within their little circle of badness.
You wish talk about, you really talked about. It's a combination of moral injury and moral drift. And so I haven't heard the term moral injury until you know, I started working on this book and researched it. But it's the idea that you have just damage. It's like accumulated physical damage. You Injoe, your leg, you injured your leg before you know what, your leg just doesn't work that well. It kind of works the same way with moral injury. Like you you get used to doing things, and if you never get kind of rebaselined and brought back, it can happen that small groups of people can become so accustomed to doing things that are so far outside the norms that they just start thinking's normal and you never get brought back. And I think the way we don't talk about things and the way we like to avoid these conversations like hey, team or in mentality we protect the team room like that's not good. I think in the end that actually bites us. And we've just got to find a way to kind of break that down. And that's yeah, that's in essence kind of what I think.
Would you guys are so sworn to your own selves to keep things to yourselves. You know, you are to go to the grave with many things. And it's some.
Of it's necessary, right, because there's a degree of deception required in the business, and I think everybody accepts that. That's why we have classification, that's why we have secrets, right, But if we internally don't even tell the truth with other people that are authorized to know this stuff. Then then what are we doing? You know, I think we're setting ourselves up for failure.
Yeah, because then the acts that are happening are really happening, and it's not just fake news. If it gets out, it's like this is really occurring, you know, like these things that just happened that are being accused of our own team. You know that's right, and so that's right, but we don't want to like acknowledge it. It's almost like in Full Metal Jacket when jokers like, uh, you just want me to say we took out up Italian sir. You know, he's like, no one was killed today. He's like, we need kills five of them at least.
It's like it's it can be it can be easy to get sucked into them mentality. It can be easy to just like, hey, now we need we got to keep this thing going. We got to get to say the right things. And and commanders also have this obligation, right if you hear about misconduct, you're obligated, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to investigate. And so there's a lot of difficulty really wanting to dig because it's a great guy, and you know he's doing great work, and you know, if you dig, you might have to investigate. And that just puts everybody into the spotlight. It invites a lot of criticism. It invites people that don't have a lot of perspective on what's going on to get involved. And people are terrified of that because it kills careers. It kills individuals, you know, sometimes it kills their entire career. But there's ways around that. There's ways, I think where we can be internally more honest and we could stop having that effect happen. But right now we just keep running that same circle.
Well, the thing is is that you know, it goes all the way to the top, right the person that's at the top, with the person in his unit, he or she, he or she, whoever's in command. They're just like thinking, hmm, if I open up this can of worms on Bill, that's going to open up a can of worms on everybody, including myself as the manager of the team. And then my career's at jeopardy because of what Bill did. Because I'm not paying enough attention to what Bill was doing outside of normalcy.
It's a trap. As we fall into this trap, and nobody wants to because once you do, it's like picking at a little termite spot on your wall. You're like to see a little bubble of paints make it open. You're like, oh my god, repaint. It never looks, but you have to book and you just have to otherwise it's going to come out eventually. And then as falls down and then we see that. We see that every couple of times. It's a couple of times a year we get one of these that just explodes, and we've got to get ahead of them. We've got to start working with it, because we're not doing ourselves as a regiment or or a people, any any favors. By avoidant, I think.
I mean, you know, not being in your exact position, but in a management position as a business owner, et cetera. You know, I find that there's a lot of that commonality. You know, I'm supposed to, you know, provide my team with the you know, the means to get the job done, the place to do the job, the team against the team. If it's war games and we're going up against another team, you know, you're supposed to put all of those logistics together in hopes that the guys, you know, just throw the trash out for you without you having to ask, Hey, bro, will you throw the trash away? And he's like, yeah, bro, no problem. And you're sitting there typing up the orders for like the next mission, and you're like, oh, my trash is overflowing. It falls off every time I throw a piece of paper. And so that bro goes down the line and he's like, hey, bro, will you throw the boss's trash away? And he looks down he's like, there's no more bros. So I guess I'm the bro. So he goes and throws it away. But then there's the guy on the team who sees that, oh man, the captain is going to give me the best mission becau, I'm gona throws trash away without aim asking. I'm gonna go in there right now, grab his trash out, go throw it away. He goes say, hey, you're not a bro. You're a friend, a friend on the team, not the bro on the team, right, So you know, the friend versus bro. Do you think that's kind of a thing also where it's like, hey, you know, go do what he needs or should just get done without being asked.
So one hundred percent, and a lot of times you do get into that kind of insider outsider mentality. You get into the hey, this is my guy, this is my guy. I trust this guy. There's a lot of long relationships here, so we're talking about people that have known each other for many, many years. You get comfortable, like you said, you know, the trash is getting taken out. You're not worried about how the trash is getting taken out, like maybe the trash is getting taken out because somebody illegally paid somebody else to come in and take that trash out. Ma'am's like, hey, trash is out. We're good, right, I'm not worried about it. But that's not what you want. You don't want the organization to be like illegally getting the trash take it out or carry this crazy like roup Goldberg mechanism that takes it out with all this like yes, what are you doing? Nobody wants that. No, Sometimes we end up with that if we're not careful.
Yeah, and so you know, it kind of goes to these movies that get made where you see a rogue unit that strikes their gold streak in like an Iraq movie and they see gold and like, oh, there's gold, guys, three gigs, right, yeah, right, right, you know, and I'm just like, oh, you know, and they're trying to show, like, you know, how can we hoist it and get away with it? Et cetera.
You know.
I mean, that's ethics, that's the morals.
The thing is, I think the one leads to that, because everybody would agree that stealing money off the battlefield is probably not good. But people don't get there overnight. People get there one step at a time by doing things that feel like now, I think I'm in the right. It's a little but I think I'm doing the right thing. Over time, you can get far enough gone that you just stop seeing the distinction and then you're you're killing a guy for reporting on your financial misconduct or you're you're stealing gold. I mean, these things start happening. Yes, you got to head them off to pass, because by the time you get to that point, it's too late, right, those guys are pretty much lost and your organization is gonna.
Take a for it, you know, I mean, it does. It doesn't mean that the load master on the team who's been certified load master is the ones that you talked to you know, yeah, yes, right, it's his plane at that point, don't even come on here.
Yes, And that gets into other problems with like, you know, corrupting a broader swath of the organization by kind of bringing people in. And again it gets ugly. It's that termite problem again. You just don't don't want that. And if you can stop it early, then you can stop it early. You don't ended up with the problems. You end up with the spin off damage.
It is. It's a termite with a woodpecker doing double damage. So the woopecker's damage. Where's that termite at and the termite little holes, got all these holes, and you're like, stop, just stop. I mean, just the water. He's got to water it. Just water the tree. It'll kill the buzz Just give it water.
Please, please stop pecking up my house. Please at least eat the termites. At least eat the term at least get the two working together. But oh gosh, I mean, how much how much damage does this stuff cause? When we talk about house, it's falling down. But this couple of years back with the cocaine smuggling out of South America, and you look at that and that is that is regimental damage that takes years. Like people still remember these things and they just never go away. But but we don't. We don't treat that like something preventable. We treat it just something like, well, it happened again. I guess we'll blow up everybody that was involved, throw them all out, and we'll just kind of move on with their day. But we wouldn't tolerate that answer in anything like marksmanship or jump efficiency. We would say you need to train better so you don't have these mistakes. We ethics just kind of ends up getting brushed aside. I think people just not comfortable talking about it or don't feel that it's a solvable problem.
You know, they might turn it into this, uh this word that was made up of like you're too woke, okay, Like I hate the word is just like I think people use it and they don't even know what they're saying. They're like this term. It's like, isn't it okay first of all to be that I'm awake, I'm awakened to my environment and my surroundings. They say head on a swivel, I'd say the guy with the head on a swivels kind of woke. However, isn't it where they're like, oh, our military is too PowerPoint presentations and like I got to sit through like hit enter and like listen to someone tell me about you know, conduct and how to become better, and I just want to go shoot people because I'm good at that. How do we it? That's true?
It's one hundred percent true. We do love the military loves I mean everybody does to an extent, but the military loves to throw slap a term on something, give it some online training and say, hey, you know what that problems fixed? I addressed that problem, Like we did address it, but I'm not sure that online training is really the tool that's going to get us out of this. But you know that is a solution. That mean commendorates shown that he has done a thing. We did the thing, and therefore we're better, right Like, well, not necessarily not if the solution's not really getting after the problem.
So not just SF teams. I'm not talking to just Special Force teams. Let's talk as a whole, like military as a whole with ethics period. Do we just pull everybody out onto the bleachers, have him stand there and then have someone walk back and forth and say, hey, you know, you guys have to understand that this is real. Ethics are real. Your integrity means you're going to do the right thing when no one is looking.
I think that's honestly kind of what we do now. And that's it's just a little silly, right, Like you'll get the jag. The poor jag always gets tagged with these jobs. He just gets up there and he gives his brief on the law of war. We talk about the things you legally can't do, and you're like, that doesn't answer any of the questions that I have about what I actually need to do on the ground. But nobody wants to extend the training because it's the last thing on a Friday, or it's right before lunch and weeks go home. But no, the answer really isn't that that classroom is such a small piece of it. But really, what you have to do is put people in stressful situations like let's say, a full live, close quarters battle like FTX, and then you throw a little ethics in there, and then you find out really how a guy under stress is going to react, because that's how you can teach him. It's not to punish the guy. But if a guy does really questionable things under stress, you need to know it because you need to be able to help that guy like work through that and say, all right, hey, what you did was a little crazy. It's training.
Good.
Training is good. We fail in training and then we you know, kind of correct and then we you know, evaluate where we are, and then we help you build to the next level. But we don't want that to tap down range. And so if you never test it, if you never have a guy shoot at a target, how do you know if he's going to hit the target right? And so that's that's what I think we've got to do it. So you need like give classrooms a little piece.
Of FTX of exactly that you got the targets involved. But they don't realize that it's ethics that they're being tasked with. They think I'm just doing a seventy two hours stress test. I gotta go from point A to point B, from point A to point B, I gotta use my map, I got use my track order. On the way, there's like maybe like something to drink, and you're like, oh, should I drink that? Do I take the eat me, drink.
Me so partners. Partners make it so easy to inject this material in because that's man. There's some cultural disconnects when we're working with people from different parts of the world, and when you inject those partners into ftx's you can really generate some pretty realistic situations that you're going to bump into that the guy is not going to necessarily know the right answer to. And that's what you're trying to do. You want to create these quandaries and then you want to see how he solves them so you can get a handle on is the guy like a dirty bird, Like some guys are always going to go with the darker half of gray, and some guys are really kind of boy scouty and going to go with no straight right or wrong. You just need to know who's who so that when you have a really kind of grammy mission, you could put the guy on there and you can know how he's going to react. But you don't want to have the situation where a guy that's super black and white ends up with a really gray situation and reacts very poorly, like we saw happened in Afghanistan a few times, because that's again, that's bad for everybody. It's just knowing your guy's capabilities and then helping them train to maximize their potential.
Yeah. I have stood in a circle of some spec Ops guys and you know, one guy looked at me. He's like, Rad, we don't always need the boy scout. It's just like I was like, you're Polish grom. Right. I was like, are you Polish grom He's like, no, bro, United States Navy Seal And I was like, okay, all right.
It's some things don't require voice scouts. Some things do. You just have to make sure you don't put the wrong on wrong with them.
Yeah, you know again, really someone's got to snatch the car and take it from Grandma and get to the ocean and swim away with Charlie Sheen. Come on, someone's got to do this.
There's a time and a place for everything, right, You just to make sure you know.
What gosh, yeah, and the right guy for the right job, you know, Like, Okay, it's like, hey, uh well, Bill, Chris and Steve are going to get on this mission as the captain.
I feel that that's their placement because he knows them and you know, he's worked with them and he's seen them in these processes, and he knows ethically that they've done some really good things, so he's going to trust them to use their laurels and their ethics. Then you get somebody who's brought in who thinks that it's like in another country, like you said, who's an interpreter, and he might just go a little rogue against the rest of the guys, like yo, man, you haven't been taught on this ethics situation. Over here. We still don't hit. We don't hit the women, don't hit them.
We don't do that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But so that's every team, though. Every team has guys that are strong of things and guys that aren't. Like my last team, we had a guy who was just not that good in the house. Frankly, he wasn't that good in the house. He was he was just he was a little reckless. He was hey, you know what though, he was an amazing builder, and the dude we would send him out to cock every target, to build everything. If you needed a house built, if you needed forty guys put to work to go build a house and a day, that guy could daial it. And most of us are building kind of crooked stuff. If I'm honest, I'm a pretty bad carpenter. But he really was, sure, great, we have a place for you. And ethics, it's the same way. Not everybody has to be the best shot, but everybody needs to have something to do. And you sure don't want to get the guy that's a bad shot in a situation where he needs to take it, or you're gonna you're gonna find your team in a real bad way, you know.
I think maybe talking to Raddy Searles, who we had on the show here, I think he's a friend of yours. He mentioned that he didn't even shoot his gun in the first entire selections process, like and he it wasn't even anything to do with, you know, hitting the target at the point. It was like just getting through you know, the situation and and everything along those lines. You concur with that type of sentiment like hey, the gun comes like kind of later on in the training it does.
Really, I mean you get into the community mostly off character and kind of grit and endurance, and then from there, you know, you can teach people the rest of it. And that's kind of I think what Randy was talking about, Like, yeah, you have to train, you have to eventually learn to shoot. But we don't necessarily select people on marksman. They call it the whole man concept. But you're really looking for guys that can think on their feet and interact with people and kind of deal with the suck for long term and then and then get in. But honestly, also we probably do select people because we're looking for people that are comfortable in the gray, right, We're not, We're not always looking for boy scouts. We probably do select people with kind of a tendency to be willing to act on their own I guess you could say, be willing to take the steps they feel are necessary. And a lot of training emphasizes that, Okay, it's a bad situation. You need the best you can. You just have to make sure that knowing that you you take those people and kind of show them like where the left limit of what that means is, Like, Okay, I know I said get the mission done, but sometimes you might be doing a little too much to get the mission done. We need to make sure the guy really understands what we could do.
Did you really need to take a selfie on that mission? Boss? You know? Was that something that you really were.
It's never probably okay, probably never want to take the picture. But you know, everybody those things different.
I'm just saying. I'm just saying that would be ethical.
I was fortunate enough to grow up before the cell phone was really a thing, so thank goodness that I didn't have a cell phone in college. I don't know what would be on camera or the internet. But you know what, dude, that's all safely in the past, so we can do get their.
Dude, if I made okay today, I mean I was born in seventy seven. Let's be clear. I said no cell phone. Yeah, yeah, so weird Zennials, right, You and I are that five years of Zelda came out and we are.
That, okay, exactly exactly. My control still had a cable on.
It, yes, yes, and my dad was still doing Morse code and winding a generator. And he said, I'm the boss, as the eighteen echo on the team, because I make the captain have to I make the commander have to do the five minute everybody rotates. He's like, everybody rotates jokingly, but you know those guys, and those guys all had a first name basis it was Jack. You know it was Maynard. It was just you know, or call sign bugs. It was never like you know, it was always like except for one time I heard the major yell for my dad. I never heard him swear before. They had set up a booby trap on the Major's desk. Okay, because they were always booby trapping each other. I bet you know this kind of game.
Bit, Yeah, a little bit.
It was a whistling, real loud whistler device and they attached it, put a primer in it, put it under his desk drawers. When he pulled his pencils out, it blew up like he's gonna check his pencil drawer in his office.
You know.
Oh dude, when that I was in the oh, the armory when that went off, it was so loud. I heard right all. My Dad's like I'll be right back, That's all he says to me. As we're on the armory part of it, and he's like, I'll be right back, and he just goes up and handles it like, hey.
You gotta make sure it stays funny, right, you know. Occasionally people across the line, you know, you don't want that, you don't want it to be received badly, Like I thought it was funny. I thought we were joking. We're not.
We're not driving.
Okay, we're serious.
Yeah, we're serious. Oh you're serious enough. Well, they always try.
To kill each other, that's true, but it's kind of part of the Yeah, the teamer and mumor teamer mumor is hard to stop with. Right, there's things that are funny in the team room that you realize. My wife's like, you know, people don't talk like that. That's really not funny. Like what, Oh is that not funny? Oh? That was funny. It's kind of a microp. You're a team guy.
It's supposed to be funny. You're a team guy, honey.
But that's a microcs, right, these little cultures that they just kind of start diverging from the main the mothership. You're like, got to bring it back, got to bring it back.
Yeah, it's true. It's true. And you know again, yeah it's true. Man, those are some good times. We'd repel off the building together Green Bray Family Day. They'd pull out the m sixties belt fed and we'd be shooting them with blanks at houses. No one even questioned us. We're in the like this field behind the armory at the school, just going ham with M sixteens and M sixties, and obviously law enforcement had to be made aware. I'm thinking about these things as I get older in life, like could you ever do that? Today?
Right? Oh? How many things that you did as a kid? You think, what was I do? Did I do that? Was I really that dumb? Like? Yep, we were. They still do that though, So that Seth group here still runs right Empire week every summer. They bring everybody up they could shoot, you know, blanks out of two forty they could do. You know, they tell them they could do all the marching. It's cool. I mean people love it though, right, That's that's good. That's community average.
You know, ten twelve years old holding a sixty I go, hey, can I hold it like rambow? And he's like yes, And so I got a hell the bolt. He had to take it from me because it's so heavy. But at the end of the day, where else can you do that? Where else do you get that indoctrination into such a cool world as a kid watching Dad and all of his guys and all of the other kids growing up. I'm still friends with kids from his nineteenth group.
It's funny, but they eat a little taste of it. Some people really get hooked and just got it. I gotta do it their lives, you know.
Yeah, he apologized to me about that. He's like, I'm sorry for introducing to you at such a young age all of this equipment and stuff. And I was like, why, Dad, I love it. He's like, that's one of.
My kids have toys. My kids have toy guns and toys, sores and toy everything else. So what's the difference. It's just it's just a little cooler and a little hand air.
Frankly, Well, the dan funny thing is is I have two full blown airsoft stores that are like armory set up full of equipment inside of it, okay, with all of the gear. And then we have an indoor shoot house here outside of Hill Air Force Bace that has exactly what it is, and we'd go in there and do just ten on ten for three or four hours off the time, every single day. You know. My ops maners an infantry former infantry guy who started air softing and then went to the infantry and then got out and now he's like can I come back? And we're like come Home, Come Back.
It's the appeal and Airsoff really demonstrates I think the appeal of this work in general, Like people like that stuff. Not everybody's a chance to do for real, but it's just it's fun, right, It's like I got a Peter Panish. You're like, I always wanted to be this awesome dude that you see on TV or all the eighties movies that we watched growing up for that guy, and then you get a chance to kind of do it.
You know, that's cool. You're very very cool about that because I would always tell people, you know, just because these kids are wearing something that resembles them, they're not out there claiming to be them. It's like Kobe Bryant going on to the court and saying, hey, kid, take off my jersey. But all they're trying to do is just like look up to Kobe Bryant. He'd be like, oh, here's some shoes, and I wear these wristbands and I got to sweatbout for you, and here now you look almost like me. But try to dunk, you.
Know, yeah, exactly. I mean, there's no there's no question, right, I don't think I don't know to be honest, I don't know why people feel negatively about it. It's just like historical war, reenacting. You set anything else. If that's what makes you happy, that's what you want to do, who cares. It's enjoyable.
I love you, you're great.
Well, I appreciate that, but you know, I just people got to be a little more loving living that live in general. Right, Like, Hey, whatever you do your thing, whatever makes you happy, that's great.
I totally great. You're pretty savvy. I kind of looked into a little bit of you and found your your LinkedIn profile and saw that your six sigma.
Yes, yes, oh gosh, yes, I'm a PMP and six sigma. And you know, I have a day job. I love my day job. I'm a program manager. So I do a lot of fun stuff working with the old guys and try and you know, put good training together with them. But the realities you got to check some blocks to get there. And so yep, six sigma and pm I and you do it, and you know there's goodness be at and anything. I won't say that I'd probably do it again for fun, but it's a it's good to have done it.
Hey, you know, it's it's it's good because you know, I've done some six sigma training and I didn't get to the black belt status of it. But like my ops manager at my arena, he's six sigma, and I'm always going up to him like you ready, six sigma? Yeah, come on, bro, what kind of words are you gonna throw at me today?
That's the part that makes it feel so silly, like there's some good material there, but sometimes it's just really heavy hand and you're like, I can't take this seriously and talk about it because I just feel a little embarrassed, not just like black belt ie, like what am I doing right now? But it's just there's good concepts there. They just try and make them sound a little a little too cool. I think it makes me a little embarrassed.
No, it's good. It's good. It's good to be able to you know, have that here. You know, you never know when the silliness of six sigma actually helps you. I may use it and not even realize I'm using it because I'm like, oh, nice.
It does. I mean, the reality is it's useful stuff. I mean you're looking at like taking a task and breaking it down into components and figuring out how to push, you know, work and effort into solving these tasks. I mean a lot of us really very military training. It's got different words. It's a very similar structure to how we think. And I mean it's goodness. I can't crap on it as a as a as a thing that I learned. It's just again, it just it's just packaged, kind of silly, you know. It's like it's like that car you're a little barrass to drive, Like I drive a Honda Odyssey because I got five kids, and you drive this Odyssey and you're driving around like I feel a little ridiculous, tell you true to many van, But I kind of like it because it's actually a really comfortable car. So hey, you know, you just do what you can. You try to get past them.
Let me let me, let me put you up on a pedestal. You know, every bass player who loves your van, okay, because you could put in a base amp and a crate.
You can put all this stuff in it, and I could see my kids in a little mirrord thing when they're doing stupid stuff, so I could pull over and make them walk home, or well you you could. You could do all those things because it's Odyssey. You know, it's it's not the most beautiful car ever, but she functions.
Honda sponsored me handa honysty babe.
It's even maroon. It's like, I think I have the most common car for a person with kids in America. There's like five of them in every parking lot at Walmart. It's just amazing. But you know what, whatever, man, that's okay.
You don't have to wear your green beanie everywhere.
Bro, Okay, just drive you're I passed it. I passed it.
How long ago did you get out? Are you still active? Are you still out? What's going on? You're out now? Right? Yeah?
So I retired at the beginning of twenty three, so I'm just over a year out. I was actually in Germany doing some work with Ditro for my last active duty gig, and then I decided it was the end. It was the end for me. Actually, U kind of the old twenty twenty with the COVID thing and being honest, I didn't get my I didn't get my shot. So they told me it was time to retire. And you know, I would have talked to my wife and agreed that maybe it's just time to retire. You know, it's not for me anymore. And so we hung up the spurs and come back, came back to Northwest Florida, and I been happy since.
That's good. I'm happy for you and you've made it back through all your trials and tribulations in the military. Obviously you've been all over the place and done a lot of things, and I think you're what theater of operation was it like South America.
So we went in South America, and then I went over and did a lot of Europe and Africa work between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, and then obviously sank. Nobody can get away from Middle East if you were if you've been in two thousand and one. But no Pacific. But I think it touched everywhere else pretty well.
That's actually my dad's theater was the Pacific, the theater of operating.
He was in a very different time, right, everybody's in the Pacific back then.
Yeah, eighties and nineties, Yeah, eighties and nineties. He got out in ninety one. So yeah, he'd go over to Thailand and the Philippines and like six months at a time. I never went. He always went. Like the families in I think the ssef kind of stay home and they get to establish you know, school and friendships and you know, church relationships for a long period of time and then the dad goes.
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of separation time. It's probably the number one thing my wife is happy about me getting out. It's the amount of time home and the predictability. Right, there's a lot of like we're leaving now, Like, oh, okay, I guess we're leaving now. Like she's had to pack up the house and you know, three weeks notice and moved to California. She doesn't miss that part and I don't either. Yeah, she's getting a little tired of it. It's fun, but little burned out on it.
Maybe, Yeah, that moving life. But you know, I'm just really really happy that you made it through it all. And I'm sure you're happy too. And now you're living life and you're writing a book, and so you've transitioned into being an author. And now were you writing your thoughts out journaling through your career in the military so that you could have it later on?
Yeah, So I'm old enough that my wife and I on our first several deployments only wrote letters, like they really had no comms plans. Back in one to three oh four, that kind of time, you couldn't do any other thing except write. And so I got kind of in the habit of just writing down my thoughts and we'd send letters, you know, almost every day. We married twenty years, so twenty two, twenty two years. But yeah, so I got in a habit of just scribbling stuff down, and then honestly, during COVID sit on a back porch doing remote work like everybody else, just started really kind of putting thoughts on paper and really trying to capture some of the stuff that happened and put my thoughts down, and it just started smith stuff started writing, and it really kind of kind of fell in love with it, and now I just enjoy it, really enjoyed the process that kind of put thoughts down, polishing them up, and try and tell these stories that you just don't want to seem lost.
Now it was what it was, a tale of the first Infantry Division in a Rock twenty six, two thousand and eight. I probably watched it, you know, I mean, there were so many embedded journalists back in the day that were just going everywhere Ham, I mean all the news media was different than it was, Like you really couldn't you just watching what was going on? You know, did you guys have embeds and stuff like.
That in the in that so many so yeah, so many that. I mean that was we were in Bagdad at the heart of the surge, and obviously you're getting toward election year two, so it became a politically really really sensitive place and we ended up with everybody. There's the book, right, that's uh actually came out. Well. I have a friend that put that cover art together and we sat and created that chalkboard and I was like, I want this chalkboard. I want a guy to look confused bad. I wanted to look like he's this overwhelming amount of information. And he really did a good job putting into the cover, so good good on him him. Chad Woody really really.
Summon artists, get a rocky culture. Bad guys create stability, keep my guys alive.
Keep the family intact, family intact. Yeah, but that was that deployment. It's just this, You're this lieutenant, you don't know anything from anything, and you've got this overwhelming situation of like I want you to rebuild a piece of Baghdad, so defeat all the bad guys. You go live there in the town. Just go live there, and then defeat all the bad guys and also re establish the entirety of the architecture of governance there. So I want you to stimulate the economy and get some security running, maybe get the utilities fixed. And I'm like, I don't know any of that. I don't even know where to begin, but you just you just start. And that's that's the story I really wanted to capture. Is just this, just this bunch of people. They were like, here, we are a bunch of dudes living in downtown Baghdad, and we're just going to put this place back together. And and yeah, that's it. Fifteen months, it's a long time.
That's the books.
That's it. Love of trial and error. You guys have time to figure things out.
We is your book available right now for purchase on the web. Where can we find it out?
Yeah, it's it's Amazon, Barnes and Noble Books. A million.
I went.
I self published it, which you know, you you learn as you go, and I'm happy I did it that way, but ended up hanging out there. It's on Amazon today. You get it for three bucks if you want the digital copy. It's a nice, nice cheap.
What a three What a three bucks? Dude? Easy? Three bucks?
What importance?
You're supporting Dan pace O. Hey, you know his goal of writing another book? It's three bucks. If a million people could just buy your book once?
Yeah, that's the challenge. Oh, it's uh, you know, I never realized writing exactly how much there is to do after you write. You write the book, You're like, I finished the book. Awesome, I'm done right, Like, nah, that was like twenty percent of the work. Like, I know you're in the you're obviously the digital production business as well. There's so much more than just talking right now that goes into this, and it's it's a lot of work, like and.
Talking and the questions and the producing and the whole back in and then putting them up and making it you know, palatable. You want your you want your listeners and readers to enjoy it. You're like, oh, please, you know the word tell me you hate my voice? Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me you could do it better? Go ahead, comment, go ahead.
Feedback is another side of that altogether. Like you just got to get a nice thick skin. Like you get some you know the deal. You know, I'm sure you know better than I do. But gosh, you get some comments you're like, wow, man, that is a great thing you said to me.
I appreciate that, but I usually talk it up to that. They just are in my shoes. If you're supposed to be doing it, you be wearing my mother f and shoes. Bro.
Maybe it's having a bad day, you know. I trying to give the person the benefit of doubt, but you do sometimes staying a little bit. But uh, but yeah, there's just so much. I mean, people were producing content every day, books, videos, everything else. I mean so much is produced that getting anything to stand out, I mean, it's got to be good. But then also even if it's good, there's a chance and nobody will ever read it, because you really got to get that word out and kind of help you'll see it. Otherwise it just dies. I mean, it just gets buried in the sea of other things.
Yeah, and one thing we don't want to get buried is ethics, and whether you're in the military or you're out of the military, ethics matter, and just you know, being that person behind the desk as the CEO being the dude behind the desk over your security watch at the job that you got because you got out of the military and now your security guy.
Right, it's the same, but it does it Also, it's funny that same analogy. If you gettings buried, you know, like just like a new book can get buried in the sea of books, ethics can just fall into this sea of other requirements. Because gosh, if there's one thing the special operations the world is buried in right now, it's requirements. You're supposed to be good at everything, and you're supposed to do everything. You have to be culturally tuned into everything and ready for everything in the globe. How do you take a forty hour week or even a fifty hour week and break that down into blocks of like, all right, we're going to prepare for this, we're prepare for that, and ethics just tends to fall through cracks. It's just not it's not seen to be as important as this some man of the other stuff. And maybe it's not. But again, we I think we got we got to change the metality on that just a little bit. No.
I took your call because it is it's important. I wanted you on to talk about ethics and from your level as a professional athlete and Green Beret.
It's I think it's important. I think that we have major problems that come out of it, and we're just not diagnosing the problem and then then addressing a cure that we can apply to it. But I think we can. It's just going to take a matter of somebody being willing to do it.
Yeah, affirmative, affirmative, and we have to do that within ourselves. Yeah, it's it's within ourselves, honestly, I mean, you know, I hold integrity. See I'm going to bring airsoft back here because the game requires one important thing and that you call your own hit. So if somebody's one hundred yards out and they've thrown some rounds at you and you think you got hit, you should call it. Just go with the doubts, say with a doubt, just die, because somebody out there has probably got a GoPro on their gun and they've probably zoomed in on you to see if they hitch. Yes. So it's going on YouTube. So there's there's a lot of things around everywhere you're at and it's not just cameras. It's people and what people see, and it may not just be your own team. It could be the people you're trying to help and those people see you being that way and they are like, oh, I don't know if I want to help them, because look how they just did to that.
You know, ethical, it's one hundred percent. It's reputation. It's all about reputation, and reputations really built the individual level. People need to take it upon themselves to protect their reputations to be ethical and upright. But organizations have to set the condition to make sure to reward that, to kind of keep an eye on that, and to kind of promote it right, because if you if you encourage people to behave unethically or to lie to you, then they're going to do it and it's kind of your fault for encouraging it. So so on the one hand, individual's got to behave right, but you also got to create a culture that discourages in the airsoft devance will cheating, right, the culture should discourage it. And so if we get there, then I think we could solve the problem.
One hundred percent. Please implant ethical microchips into the bots that come out in the future please.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I'm sure Elon Musk will put a put a brain chip in us to make us all behave ethically. I get shocked when i'm bad, Like, but what just happened? I thought it was good? Yeah, you don't want to I don't get my software updates, so my brain doesn't recognize always stopping.
How do we stop RoboCop from you know.
Murphy, it's like at two and nine, right at two and nine, just smoking that dude that that he was getting his little brief like I put my weapon down, like I was programming error. Hopefully it's funny till it's not. Hopefully hopefully no brain chips coming.
But right, well, let's keep our functional brain going and be the best we can be the best stewards out there. And uh, you know, if you promise you're gonna do something and you should live up to that.
Yeah, understand. I mean it's up to us to protect our interputations and that communities. When I mean, if you're a member of profession, then it's expected that profession is gonna police itself and then you're gonna be able to handle yourself as a member of that and it's up to all of us to do that. And so if we see the organization wandering the wrong direction, we need to make sure and check it as members of it with they were the only people who can.
That's right. And if you're out there listening and you're thinking about taking a step into the military, I encourage you to go talk to a career counselor and see if it's the right step for you. You never know if you're going to be s F unless you go try to become special Forces. You just can't say I could have, would have if you never tried or should have?
So you know, it's so true, guys. There's a huge expression in the community. It's like never self self assess right, never tell yourself that you're not going to succeed at something like no, no, go through the process. There's a process that'll tell you if you're good enough or not. But let them make that decision because you might find out one that better than your thought, or at least you might find out what you need to do to improve. And so I gosh, self limiting and self doubt. It's such a huge check on what people think they can do with their lives.
Like not.
Just give it a try.
You know what you can.
You can write a book, you can produce a video. You could be green bereat right. You might not be very good. Abb you can try and then you'll know. But yeah, yeah, I mean that's that's the parent. That's my dad talk coming out right, So I can tell my kids every day. So apologies on that one.
Same here, same here, say no, it's all good. No, I love to hear it, and especially from you and and on behalf of my dad. Thank you, you know for the bloodlines that you have running through you, so you know, there's not much else about that I can't quite.
It doesn't like being a parent. I love.
Your kids will all appreciate everything that you do and as well as I do, and I'm sure my listeners do as well. And I know I've had you roughly an hour on our show and we've been talking and I'd love to have you back and we could talk more and get into other books and things that you've got going on. And you know, it's nice to introduce you to the community here, you know, Dan, and thanks so much for being on the show. And if you have any last minutes of words, I'll let you have them go ahead first.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it, you know, I mean, it's uh, you want to get the message out. You want to make sure people kind of hear what you think is the right thing to tell people. And and I appreciate you you providing that venue, not just for me, but for other people. Right there's a lot of people that have a message to tell on and if there's no place to do it, then you know, that message kind of dies. And so thanks for what you do, and thanks for having me on. I I'd love to come talk again sometime. I probably like talking a little too much, tell you the truth, so I'm always happy to do it.
Bro, we can get into a whole other conversation why I'm even in this job.
Hey, we'll gravitate things for free.
That's true. That's true. And I'll behalf of Brandon Webb who runs soft rep dot com, who gives me my job. Got to give him a shout out. And you know, go check out the book club at soft rep dot com Forward Slash Book hyphen Club. You can go check out Cold Fear, Steal Fear, all the different books that are in there right now, and hopefully we can get Dan's uh to go inside of our book club. I'll link you up with Guy, our manager, our managing editor, and see if that can please do happen? You know what I mean? How that would so? So I'll hook up with us in an email after we're done here. So I'll behalf of soft rep dot com. I'll be of myself, rad and damn Pace in my listener out there, I just want to say peace.
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