SOFREP RadioDon Bentley, Former Apache Pilot, SWAT Member, and Author of 'Capture or Kill'
Don Bentley is a former U.S. Army Apache pilot and author of "Capture or Kill". During his time in the Army, he was deployed to Afghanistan and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal with a "V" device for valor.
After his military service, he joined the FBI as a special agent, where he focused primarily on HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and served as a SWAT team member. Bentley provides insight into the inner workings of flying an Apache helicopter and the qualifications required of a SWAT team member, making him proficient in a variety of firearms.
Three years ago, he transitioned into writing full-time and has since taken over the Mitch Rapp series from the late Vince Flynn. In "Capture or Kill", Bentley throws back to 2011 to explore the intrigue behind the hunt for Bin Laden and Mitch Rapp's involvement in it. New readers will get drawn in the intrigue-filled world of Mitch Rapp while longtime fans will love the Easter eggs in this latest thriller.
Get a copy of "Capture or Kill" here: https://amzn.to/3MuesOu
Join the SOFREP Book Club here: https://sofrep.com/book-club
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Hey, what's going on? It is rad I am the host of soft Rep Radio. But you already know that because you probably clicked on the link that says let's listen to rad on soft Rep Radio with my guest, who I usually tease you with. But again, you can probably read it in the title that I've got this cool author guy right over here with me. However, before I introduce you as name, I like to tease you with what say it with me? The merch store rad All right, soft rep dot com Forward slash merch Go check it out. Pick up some of the branded goods that we have from soft Rep. I really love the flashlight go check that out and a lot of other things that we have. Thank you for buying and supporting soft rep and being a part of our world. Also the book club, so it is soft Rep dot Com Forward slash book hyphen Club. The Special Forces and Navy Seal guys behind the scenes have curated this book club for someone like yourself, So feel free to check out the Soft Rep dot Com Forward Slash book Club. Now, I have a lot of authors that come on the show. They request to be on the show. It's flattering to have them on the show. And this is no different. And today we have the author of New York Times bestselling books, Don Bentley with us. Everybody raise your hands and smacking together. Welcome.
Thanks so much for having me rad.
Hey, it's very nice for you to take the time out of your busy day. I know that you have a book coming out and that book is called Capture or Kill Vince Flynn. You're going to be doing this in honor of Vince Flynn, who was the original author, correct, who passed away probably around two thousand and thirteen, maybe.
Yeah, right around ten years ago or so. He unfortunately passed away from prostate cancer. So for a long time the fans didn't know what was going to happen with the series. And luckily the estate taped Kyle Mills on the shoulder and he has done a fantastic job for about the last nine or ten years. And now I get to fill Kyle's very very big shoes.
It's like the Olympic Tours getting passed. Hey, you're now in time to run with that. So it's like, here you are, okay, okay, and let's talk a little bit about you real quick. And first of all, sorry for the loss of Vince Flynn, but I just want to point out prostate cancer. So please, if you're a guy and you're really like hitting the forties, you should go get that checked out, all right, go talk to your doctor, and let's be advocates for that. He would want us to say that. I bet you anything. He'd be like, okay, cool, take the time to use my name to go get yourself checked out. Don't be embarrassed to go get looked at. I got it done at forty The day after my fortieth birthday. They said, aren't you too young to be in here to get a colonoscopy. I was like, well, I'm predisposed, my family history has had it. And they're like, oh yeah, let's get you in then, and so they did in three and a half polyps later. Now I'm forty six, almost forty seven, and I had to go in and like, you know, do the whole baby poop and the cup thing. Hopefully, hopefully that's what I'm hoping for. Bro. I don't want to be probed again, man aliens. Bro. Okay. So now that we have that out of the way, Okay, I just want to put that out there. Let's be advocates for our own health and bettering ourselves. So down, you went in to the military as a healthy person. You showed all those orifice to a doctor who said you're good to go, bro, and then you were you enlisted or officer when you joined.
Yeah. So I went to the Ohio State University on an Army or RTC scholarship and was lucky enough to get branched aviation, and so I spent ten years active duty as APACHE pilot, most of that in air cavalry units, including a tour in Afghanistan from two thousand and five to two thousand and six as an Air Cavalry Troop commander. I got out and thought I was ready to enter the real world. And three years later wasn't quite my first day. It was a great company, it just I wasn't ready for it yet. And I came home from work my first day and told my wife, like I am living that movie office space now, like that is my life. I went from chasing bad guys across Afghanistan to sitting in a cubicle, and wasn't quite ready to do that, and so fortunately the FBI had something called the Tactical Recruiting Program where they were looking for folks with military experience, and so I came in under that and was a agent in the Dallas Field Office. I did primarily human stuff and then was also a squat guy, and then worked for a series of companies that made technology for the special operations or intelligence communities before I finally got to write full time about three years ago. So my wife likes to say that I can't figure out what I want to be when I grow up, which is probably true. But I'm going to ride this writer gig for all that's worth.
One hundred percent, bro, And you should and if you've got the skill set to put it on paper. I think that's what a lot of folks hit me up, because I do get a lot of authors on the show, and the questions are an email, Hey Rat, can you publish me? Or Hey Rat, where do I start? And I'm like, well, bro, I need to write my own book, okay. But they feel that I have this and I do have some acumen and what it is is a lot of writers have said just start to get it out on paper, because you don't have a book, you don't have anything to You don't have anything until you have it on paper.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's true.
I think a lot of us, Like I wrote three books over seventeen years that didn't sell before I wrote my fourth that did sell in a two book deal. And it doesn't necessarily take you seventeen years to write three books. There was a lot of sulking involved in there after each one didn't didn't sell. You know, you gotta feel sorry for yourself for a while, and so, but you definitely have to What I tell folks is you got to write a lot, and you got to read a lot. And so if you're writing a book, especially commercial fiction, it's no different than if you're a woodworker making a chest to yours for somebody. You got to understand what that customer wants. And the way that you understand that as a writer is you got to read a lot, and specifically in the genre you're trying to write in. And so if you don't read a lot and you don't write a lot, you're going to have a hard time being a writer.
Well, question, question, I have a question in the back, in the backs me in the back what I mean, like, how did you get to be, you know, a writer? Like what was it that I just mean? You know?
Yeah, So I think I was always a storyteller. I'm a kid of the eighties, and they had some magnificent television back then, things like The A Team and Airwolf and Night Writer and Duck Tails uh. And I remember being a kid, you know, watching watching The A Team, and after you had done it for a while, you'd think, Okay, at the fifteen minute mark, this is going to happen. At the thirty minute mark, this is going to happen. And then they're going to shoot a bunch of people, but nobody's gonna get hurt. And so, you know, I remember thinking about what could they have done differently? How could that story have turned out differently? And so literally, as a kid, I remember writing kind of what you'd call fan fiction now, and some of that was TV shows I love that I had ideas for. And so I started working on my first book maybe when I was in high school. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I had an incredible teacher, my senior year of high school, who you know, We had an assignment to write a short story or scene or something, and she pulled me aside afterwards and said, hey, I really think you have what it takes to do this.
You could be a writer.
And so I listened to that and went to the Ohio State University and majored in electrical engineering, as all good writers did. And so it took me a while kind of to get the tools in my toolbox that I needed to be able to tell the kind of stories I wanted. And that's partly why it took me three books to get published. But it was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading about writing and how to do it better. I actually wrote my first two books while I was in the military. I wrote my second one while I was in Afghanistan. We'd come back from missions and everybody else would play Xbox or whatever, and I'd go back and hammer out part of a book on my laptop. And so kind of a combination of those things, both persistence and then you know, developing the tools that you need in order to be a more effective writer and storyteller.
No, I love that, and that's that's very inspiring. When you went back in Afghanistan to go write on your laptop. Do you feel that that was a little bit of like of an outlet for you to be able to like kind of journal but in a way that you're writing this book out, you know you're able to get some things off your chest.
Yeah, for sure.
And I don't think I did that really well until the fourth book, the one that sold that was called Without Sanction. That's the first book in my Matt Drake series. And you, I have a really good friend of mine, So Brad Taylor is a fantastic writer.
He was a Delta Force troop.
Commander and squadron commander and now he writes the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series. And I remember talking to Brad about it and him giving me the advice that in order to write commercial fiction, you have to do something that's the same but different, meaning the bookseller has to know that. Okay, Don's book hopefully belongs on the shelf next to Brad's book, but I'm never going to write a better Brad book than Brad can. And so part of that for me was trying to decide with my fourth book again, knowing what writers were already doing. What could I do that was a little different, And part of what I did different. My protagonist and my Matt Drake series is a guy who is a former Army ranger and a current DIA case officer, And so that's kind of just slang for saying he's a spy. He basically does the same thing for the DIA that a CIA case officer would do, And so I had some kind of ancillary experience with that. But what I really had, like a lot of folks, I had a bad day in Afghanistan and had some baggage that I was dragging around with me since then and had never been brave enough to put into a book. And I thought, you know what, if I'm going to write a fourth book and try something different, I'm going to make my protagonists struggle with the same kind of things that I have. And so when the book starts, that case officer is on a leave of absence from the DIA because of an operation that went tragically wrong in Syria where he lost his asset and his assets family and he blames himself for what happened. And so a lot of that was me coming to terms kind of with my own bad day in Afghanistan and what that meant personally. And I think readers recognize veracity on the page.
Right.
They might not know about the tactics and weapons and stuff, or maybe they do, but what they what they can resonate with is the emotional core of that book and say, you know, I've never been to Syria, I've never been to Afghanistan, I've never run an asset in Isis, but I understand what this guy is struggling with. Like I feel that at a visceral level, and I think when you can do that, it resonates with people. But it also means you gotta be brave enough to put the stuff that scares you down on the page.
You gotta be well, you gotta be vulnerable, is what you're saying. You opened yourself up, which is hard to do because again at the beginning of the show we said go take care of yourself and go get yourself tipped out. It's like, you gotta be vulnerable. You got to open up, and then you can grow from that though you can, yeah, totally, yeah.
One hundred percent. The hardest book I've ever written. The fourth book in my series was called Forgotten War. And it took place during the fall of Afghanistan, because as a veteran, I was watching Afghanistan crumble and getting all these text messages from friends or call who were fellow veterans, and the kind of thread through all of it was.
Was it worth it?
Was the twenty years of blood and tears and money and being away from their families, Was any of that even worth it? And I didn't know how to answer that question, and so it kind of came out in my book. And so I think the best books are books in which the writer is trying to understand something for themselves in the pages of that book.
And you're right, and there are books out there and people have written on that topic, but you come at a different approach of yees, you know, how is that going to be? And I like that that's a good way to do it, you know, because even in your book, there's a way to probably branch off of something else to write about in that specific Yeah, you.
Know, absolutely.
And I think with Forgotten More in particular, I tried really hard to make it a political because I don't I don't consider myself it's fiction. First of all, people get politics. Twenty four hours a day, they don't want more of it in their books. And the second of is, I don't think I'm a spokesperson for all the veterans who ever served, but I could give people who hadn't served a window into some of the thinking of the folks who had and what their reactions were. You know, the amazing thing about the entire global War on Terror is it was an all volunteer army, and that all volunteer military rather was less than one quarter of one percent of the US population, And so that means the average person doesn't know anybody who served in Afghanistan or Iraq. And so I thought, you know, I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I have these friends who could be characters in my books, and a lot of times they are. I tend to put my friends in my books, and I thought, you know, if I can, if I can give people a vantage point into the men and sometimes women who really do do these things while you sleep safely in your bed, man, that's a fantastic thing I could do.
One hundred percent. You know, I've got friends that fly the Apache here in Utah, and you know, I usually see them coming in as like a warrant officer or they've turned in like a WAFFA packet. And when I asked earlier if you had gone in as an officer and then you kind of got in, So you went in and kind of got in as lieutenant. Yeah, I climbed all the way to colonel. Maybe in ten years major lieutenant Cantle.
That'd be a fast, fast move now normally.
So I got out as a captain promotable, which just means that my name had come up on the list for major, but I got out before. And so usually from an officer perspective, you spend your first ten years as lieutenant three captain, you pin on major about year ten, and then lieutenant colonel is something you get about year sixteen or seventeen through around twenty or so. So Yeah, for aviation, it's a little bit different in that you only fly when you're in a platoon or when you're in a leadership position rather than a staff one. So you get to do your mission as a platoon leader as a lieutenant, and then once you make captain, you go off into staff world kind of purgatory for a couple of years, and then you come back as a trooper. Company commander, and you get to fly again and do the mission, and then you spend as a major about six years may PowerPoint slides before you maybe get to fly again as a as a lieutenant colonel, as a battalion or squadron commander. And I did not have it in me to spend another six years making PowerPoint slides. So little did I know I would go to that job where I was sitting in a cubicle and be making PowerPoint slides again. So maybe the joke was on me, But that's kind of how the aviation career works.
Now. There was a movie, a very historical document called Firebirds. Okay, Nicholas case I'm not even going there. No, I just wanted to say it. We don't even says.
Tom Cruise, and we get Nicholas Casey Jones.
He's just trucking along k along the fence slide. Okay, what's up, Chief, what's up? Cheef? He's come on? Now you are? So you're an eighties kid, grew up you know those movies? Right? Yea? So so was that something that you know? You're like, I'm gonna put a pair of panties and a periscope on my head, and drive a jeep and get my optic down and all gone, bye bye.
So the funny thing about that is I remember watching it whenever I was maybe in middle school or high school when it came out, and there I was. You know, every good flying story starts with no shit, There I was, And so there I was in flight school.
And so in the.
Apache, you actually fly with your right eye, and so there's something called the helmet display unit that folds over your right eye and it's connected to a sensor at the front of the aircraft, one of two that sees in the infrared spectrum, and so wherever you move your head, the sensor moves.
And so the movie made a.
Joke about, well, if you're left eye dominant, it's really hard to fly out of your right eye, and this guy is left eye dominant. And so the way that that worked is when you're flying, it's called the bag because you sit in the second seat of the helicopter, the rear seat, and they take garbage bags, very high tech garbage bags, and tape them all over the glass canopy so you can't see out, and it forces you to use that right eye to fly while your instructor pilot sits in the front seat during the daytime and keeps you from killing yourself. And so as you're trying to fly and you're sweating because you're working so hard, what variably happens is you're coming in to make a landing and there's a tiny pinhole in that garbage bag and the shaft of light comes in and your left eye takes over, and so now instead of seeing the landing area, you're looking inside the cockpit and you're like, oh, my gosh, how do I cover the eye? And so the bag is why the APACHE it's called the Aircraft Qualification Course, the course to learn to fly. It takes so long, and in fact, I actually had a progress ride during the BAG and failed it and it had to go back and get extra hours and stuff. And so once you learn how to fly that way, it's incredible because you can literally look through the cockpit floor right because anywhere your head moves, the sensor moves and you can see. But it takes a long time to get used to flying out of your right eye and then using your left eye to look inside the cockpit and look at your instruments and such.
Does that affect your rifle qualification as well, are you? I mean, so it not rifle.
It did.
When I was an FBI agent, especially as a swat guy, I had to learn because I'm right handed and left eye dominant, and so what I had to learn how to do was when I brought the pistol up is post it under my right eye so that my left eye wouldn't take over right because obviously you want to have both your eyes open.
When I'm shooting.
It wasn't so much a problem, especially using like the reflex sites, because you could dial up the brightness enough that that right eye is going to take over. But pistol is is much much harder to get good at. And if I post it directly in front, then I get into the thing like you're talking about where my left eye takes over, but I'm using my right hand and so it uh yeah, who knew.
Yeah. As an FBI agent, how many how many hours of trigger time do you have on your on your service weapon? A lot?
A paaramount as an agent as a swat guy a ton, so once you make swat. When I was still in the FBI, we had the glock twenty threes, which is the smaller forty milimeter. They've now switched to the nine millimeter. And actually it was funny because you used to be able to tell who failed firearms as an FBI agent. So in the academy, if you fail the final firearms, you get one more shot, and what they would do is pull you out and transition you from the forty caliber to the nine millimeter. And because the nine milimeter has less kick, it's got less report and stuff like that. Right, So now everybody's gone to the nine milimeter, so you can't tell that anymore. But when you make SWAT, you have the option of transitioning to the Springfield nineteen eleven the forty five, and so you would go through this two and a half day course where you would shoot something like twenty five hundred or twenty six hundred rounds in that two days, and so literally by the time you're done, your hands are blistered. You got you know, you've shot so many rounds and so still not obviously anything.
Approaching what the Tier one folks shoot.
But as a squat guy, unless you're in a really big field office like the New York Field office or the Washington Field office, squat is an additional duty and so what that means is usually one day a week would be a SWAT day, so that it'd either be a training day or maybe a mission day or a range day. And I feel like we went to the range as swat probably at least once a month, if not twice a month. Now you do a lot of shooting, and so I got infinitely better with a pistol and a rifle once I made the SWAT team.
Dang bro. Now, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but let me ask you something. Since you have some experience here, do you have any opinion on what happened in Pennsylvania with the whole attempt on the former President Trump to you know, just from if you do you do. If you say no, then we'll just move on. But if you have any.
Thoughts, yeah, only from a very high level is that obviously it was a failure, and it was a failure in every sense of the word.
I did.
So when you're a squat guy, one of your additional duties is personnel protection, and so you don't do it very often. What would happen is like if the FBI director came to town, you would augment the director's detail, or I did work with Secret Service a couple times because Eric Holder came to town and so we would augment their detail.
And so my experience is very, very small.
And certainly not anything to do with the site survey stuff the communication between local law enforcement. But where it seems like, again for me just sitting on the sidelines, where it seems like the huge breakdown occurred was the coordination between local law enforcement and the Secret Service, and that you know, apparently and again we're still waiting for the rest of the information to come out. That the critical information of there's a guy on that rooftop somehow didn't make it to Secret Service. And so when local law enforcement and federal agencies coordinate together, well it's a huge force multiplier. And so every squat operation we would do, the Dallas PD had officers that were embedded with the FBI. They're called task force officers specifically, so they could do the outer cord on if we're going to hit a target, or we might use them to pull somebody over on a pretext, you know, you violated a traffic signal. And so we worked and it was something that there was an habitual relationship, something that was fostered over a long period of time, and so when those two work together, it can go really good. Now in secret services defense, it's much harder to do that when you're in a different place every single day, and maybe you don't know the local law enforcement folks there or not, but I don't know. It was obviously a huge failure, and I kind of thought we would have known more about what has happened thirty days out than we do now. I've been really disappointed by that too. So hopefully we will with the hearings in Congress or whatever, we'll get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later.
It just does seem though, that both sides of Congress to bring that up, and I really try to stay a political seem to agree on the same thing here, like it was a failure. You know, you have Jamie Raskins, who at heart yeah Democratic side, and you have other sides on the Republic of both agreeing like I agree with my colleague on the aisle.
And I think one of the things that frustrates me, I think across government and government organizations is that as a leader in the military, especially as an officer is a young lieutenant, you're taught that you are responsible for everything your platoon does and does not accomplish, which means regardless of what happened, regardless of Knucklehead fell asleep, and that is still your responsibility. And with responsibility comes repercussions. And it seems like it is just rife throughout the senior leadership of a lot of these governmental agencies that it's really easy for them to say, I accept responsibility, but there are no repercussions for the failures that happen under that person's leadership. And as somebody that served in the military, I just can't wrap my head around that.
You know. And what's outcome of that is the Secret Service director did some of her resignation after that deposition. I guess in front of Congress, you know what, Jamie Raskins and all that. Yep, she just said, well, this is what I have to do.
Yep, under duress, she certainly did that. It would have would have been a little more, you know, because again, if you think if that, you know, whatever the military equivalent of that would have been, that commander would have been relieved, right, There would have been no question about it. You would have been relieved because you're responsible for everything the men and women under your command do or don't do, period And like.
At my store, my employe, you may have done something and the person's upset, but at the end of the day, it comes to me that I have to resolve it or fix it or take it on my shoulders. Even at that level, let alone this high level of bro, you're talking top secret security clearance that we don't even know exists, resigning right, right. You know, books are written about that kind of mind, Like what's in there? You know, it's like, holy cow, let's go back to talking about your book Capture or Kill. Right, So that's supposed to be something where you, if I understand, wrote it to be put into tweting a couple of books that Vince Flynn had created already. You're like, let me kind of insert myself here. Yeah.
So when Vince started writing, and he was he is my all time favorite writer, and he was really the first of the post nine to eleven writers that came up with this character whose job was to go hunt down Terraces and shoot him in the face. That's basically what Mitch Rapp does. And so when he started writing those books, he aged Mitch and had them reflect current events, right, so every time a new book came out, it was that time. And so he did that up until a book called Pursuit of Honor, and then he stopped and went back and wrote two prequels that were kind of telling Mitch Rapp's origin stories, and those were American Assassin and Kill Shot. And then he fast forwarded again and jumped in with what was unfortunately his last book before he passed away, that was called The Last Man. And so when I was looking at that and trying to figure out, Okay, what am I going to do? Because again I was lucky enough to write for another legacy series. I wrote some books for books in the Tom Clancy universe two when You're Coming to This, and that was amazing too. But when you're coming, when you're coming to this, what you want to do is give the readers what they expect, but also tell a new story. Right again, going back to the kid in the eighties thing. I love the movie Top Gun still, Like my kids know all the time that when I say no, I say negative, ghost writer, you know, it's all the time things of that movie. And so I was super nervous when Top Gun Maverick came out because I'm like, am I gonna watch this? And is it gonna ruin everything I loved about the original movie? And to their credit, I think they did a great job of paying homage to that original movie, given the nods to everything we loved, but still taking the story in a different direction, right, and growing those characters and giving you something new. And so that's what I really wanted to do with this Vince Flynn book. And so as I was looking at it and realized he had left that couple year gap in the books, I thought, what happened during those three years? And I started looking at him and lo and behold, one of them was the Ben Loden raid. And so I thought, you know what, he never addressed the.
Ben Loden raid.
And I remember, as a like, I said, I read a bunch of his books in Afghanistan, because you know, you had the official libraries and then people would just leave paperbacks at the gym or you know, everywhere else that you could just grab one and put one in. And I remember when President Obama walked out and stood behind that podium and said, we just killed Ben Lauden. You know, my first thought is hell, yeah, we just killed him. And then my second thought is I wonder what Mitch Rap had to do with that? And so I remember looking back and saying, did Vince ever address that? And so there were some questions fans had written on his website and he kind of said, well, there was, you know, a whole bunch of intelligence preparation of the battlefield that happened beforehand, and that was probably what Mitch was doing. And so when I dug into that, I'm like, you know what, there's a story here, and I could tell what did Mitch Rap do to help with the ben Laden?
Right?
And so that's what Capture Kill answers the question that Vince Flynn fans have been asking for the last thirteen years, which is what did Mitch Rap have to do with the ben Laden raids? So there's a ton of fun to ride when you dig into that. There was you know, there's been Zero Dark thirty and stuff like that too. But there's a bunch of really interesting things that CIA officers did in order to set the battlefield, to get that intelligence, to be able to set the conditions for the Navy seals that went in and punched his ticket and so exactly.
That's capture kill.
That's so awesome because Mitch Rapp has to tell us for sure what's going on in the ground. Yeah. Yeah, you know, in Pakistan, only one guy, Mitch. You know what I'm saying. I love it, dude, No, I do. I think it's so cool. And uh, you know, because we couldn't go in and just start causing conflict. You know, hean't forbid we just go into a place, so we've got to have for sure, for sure that we know for sure. Dude. I love it, Mitch.
And I think that's one of the amazing things about looking back, Like we look back at the ben Laden raid or even d Day and stuff with the benefit of knowing it succeeded, And so you can't really put yourself in the position of the men and women who had to make that call, not knowing whether it would succeed right, And even like President Biden is famous for saying that he told President Obama at the time when he was vice president, He's like, don't do it right, because you are risking starting a war with Pakistan. If it goes sideways, you're going to have twenty something Americans stuck in Pakistan. You know, you could ignite a regional war if this goes sideways. And to his credit, President Obama authorized it. But I wanted to dive into that and show that a little and say, what were the stakes, what were the folks on the ground trying to do? How do we set the conditions for that? And that's what capture kill is.
That's awesome. So has your book ever made it to the airport or are you excited for that? I have? I had.
That is kind of the pinnacle of being a writer, if you can see it at the airport. Though it was a little bittersweet because the first book of mine I ever though at the airport was a Tom Clancy book. And now when I see him, I just walk up sign him and put him back and don't say anything.
But at the time, I'm like, do I ask permission?
Do I?
And so I took it to the person behind the cash register and said, I wrote this book? Can I sign him? And she's like, yeah, just a minute, and she gets a little pa and she's like Tom Clancy's in the store right.
Now, and I'm like, no, no, no.
Just me. The Browns fans come running, They're like where where where Oh wait, no, the Huff for October is just off my bow, you know what I mean exactly. I talk about what a cool genre to write in is Tom Clancy's world. My dad being a Green Beret. My dad grew up, I grew up around him reading all the tom Clancies, and what he liked about it was how detailed Tom Clancy was about, like the switch that they flipped, you know, and it's like where it comes from or whatever, the color of it, you know. But when he watched Hump for October, he was like, it was okay. He's like, he's like, it's all right. You know, it's okay. You know, you gotta Scott's been playing a Russian commander. You know, it's totally fine. You know, I want to go to Montana. We love that movie. I love that movie, love it. But he was like it was okay. And I was like why, He's like, well, the book is always better, Aaron, That's what he told me. I was like, the book will always be better in your mind. And he had he wanted to probably seem the switches engravings or whatever. Yeah, you know, but I love my dad always read all the books out loud, so I would probably fall asleep, but in different voices.
Oh that's awesome.
Yeah all the time. So yeah, and as I grew up and was married with my wife, I call my little brothers twelve years younger than me. My dad was doing that with Harry Potter, so he'd always be like this Dumbledore. So I kind of get where I get a lot of what I got, okay from my dad, I had to put it out there. So a lot of voiceover work and animated attitude about acting and movies. So what about what about you? Do you have that in your life? Your father and your inspired you military wise or who kind of put you in that direction? Yeah?
I knew I wanted to serve from a pretty young age. So I was the third generation. My grandfather served. Actually both grandfathers served in World War Two, one in the Army and one in the Marines. My father served in Vietnam in the Vietnam conflict. Neither of them went to war. They were both state side. But I like to say that I am the first one to serve voluntarily. The other two were drafted. And then so I knew from an early age I wanted to serve, and then actually last weekend. My son, our oldist, just graduated from Texas A and M. And he made poor choices. So he was commissioned as a Marine Corps second lieutenant, which was graduations and yeah, it was really really neat. It was my gosh, Texas A and M. First of all, isn't that the longhorns?
That?
Oh my goodness, I can't believe you just said that. Those bang horns are actually University of Texas or Texas University. The A and M are the Aggies, and so they will tell you is that the University of Texas is actually just a Texas University. The Aggies consider themselves the actual University of Texas Texas. Yeah, yeah, and it really is. It's an incredible place. Like it's fighting. Let's go to Texas still. Yeah, let's let's go fight me. Let's go plumbing down below, let's get into this. Come on, tell me what's up right? And you don't know who longhorns are, Well, let me tell you something. We have the Utah State Aggies up north. We have the USU Aggie. So you guys have your aggies, we have our aggies. Let's go that one. That what It's awesome.
Yeah, but congratulations to your marine, thank you his commission, and to you right spreading that seed, bro.
Yeah, it was really really neat. They so he was a member of the chorus. So Texas A and M has was originally a military college and now still has a Core Cadets. I think it's probably three or four thousand folks, and so he wanted to do a private commissioning ceremony beforehand, you know, for friends and family, and so we did it on There's there's a ritual that's called earning your Brass, which your freshman year and the core Cadets there comes a point in time where you're awarded the core bat brass that you can finally wear on your uniform. And so for his outfit, they did it at this particular bell tower, and so that's where he wanted to be commissioned. And so I went and administered his oath. All of his classmates came, so they were thirty or thirty five kids there. And then I had a couple of very close friends of mine who served in the Ranger Regiment, one as an enlisted guy and one as an officer, and asked them to kind of speak and give some context between behind the oath of office he was taking, because I think I don't think you realize it until you're a parent and it's your child.
That's going into the military.
When you're twenty two or twenty three years old and you're a platoon leader, you don't understand what you've been given. And that the most valuable thing to these parents, their sons and daughters. They are entrusting to you to lead. And I don't think you truly appreciate the weight of that until you're on the other side of that and you're a parent, and now you're entrusting your son and daughter to some other twenty two year old kid, potentially to lead and potentially in combat. And so I wanted a couple of my friends to kind of talk about that and what it meant to be a leader and stuff, and so it was fantastic.
Yeah, that's very I'm very chilled by what you just said, you know, because it is very real. Right, I am a father of a twenty two year old daughter and a eighteen year old daughter and a sixteen year old almost son, you know, And yeah, it starts calling, so it starts knocking, and you know, every guy has either thought about it or done it. That's kind of like in our nature, you know. And I always am an advocate to try, right. If you don't try, you'll never know. And so you know, if you're looking for a career in the military, to see if it's something for you here, just go talk to a career counselor see if they can offer you what you want out of it. Yeah, you can talk to them and they say, oh, yeah, we get you to school. You got to give like two years of yourself. But you know, once you get back from that, and then you get discounts at Low's. So you want to do this. It's a good idea, right, the discount part, right, that's great. It's you you get it. You know, if the recruiter would actually be telling you you're gonna get discounts afterwards, and like, okay, I guess so, huh why not? You know the positive in it? Man? Holy cow?
So So your book comes out September third, Yeah, this is gonna be so awesome, you know, and you're gonna have it everywhere.
It's gonna be just Barnes and Noble, local mom and pop bookstores. Are you gonna be doing like a tour where you can meet with these folks.
Yeah, absolutely, So I take off on My first event is the third of September, I think, and it's in Minneapolis, so Vince's hometown. So funny story his first book, nobody in publishing wanted it, and so he self published it and sold it.
Out of the back of his car.
He would literally roll up the bookstores and say, hey, will you stock my book? And so there's a pretty famous independent bookstore in Minneapolis called Once Upon a Crime, and so Vince rolled up there and said, will you stalk my book? And they're like, I don't think so, kid, and he said, I tell you what, when I make it big, I will launch every one of my book tours out of this store first. And I'm sure the owner is like, whatever, fine, we'll stock it. He honored his word, and so even to this day, they start the tour there and we're going to I can't about eight or nine other cities with all these kind of great independent bookstores and stuff to do it. So it's really really fun. It's amazing to meet his fans and friends, and I'm just very honored to do it.
I love that, actually, I love that you're going to Once upon a crime to honor that, and I love that he gave the kid a chance and he said, all right, kid, your head's this big right now, let's put your book on the shelf. And he probably went to that bookstore. He probably always like was arranging it, you know, or wherever he could do. Yeah, you know, i'll see friends books. I'll consider you a friend. I'll see your book. I'll maybe move it, you know. Okay at Costco? Who was I interviewing Brad Thor. He's another very you know his character, right, Scott.
Hart, Scott Harvest.
Yeah, yeah right, And I was like, Scott needs to meet Mitch needs to meet Finn from Brandon Webb needs to meet Jack Carr's guy needs to meet and like have like this, Hey guys, why aren't we all sitting at the same bar. And then they all go off on their own directions in their books. You know, the character he noticed looked very navy sealing the bar. The character he noticed looked very cia interesting, you know, just like these like cosspaths. But again, like I've moved his book at Costco.
We did that at Costco.
Bro holy cow to be in Costco.
Yeah, that's something that you need.
That's right up your alley. Right, you're one of those books we'll see in costco.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And it's fun when you talk about moving your book. I'm on a chat group with a bunch of my fellow writer friends, and our favorite thing to do is to go into stores, see one of their books and put yours in front of it and then take a picture. And so I do that all the time, Like though, Taylor Moore, watch this and I'll put my book in front of his.
I need a book, Okay, note to Rad with this pencil, write a book to be in club to then cover other books. Absolute. I love that. Can I ask you an Apache helicopter question?
Yeah?
So my dad was totally into technology. We had a Commodore sixty four and we played Apache Hellfire the AH sixty so I've always known it as the age sixty Apache. Right, as this video game very dots up and down hell fire missiles. Favorite, did you ever fire any hellfire missiles? And I asked this because a friend of mine is and he's like, Rad, I deployed, but I've never fired a hellfire missile and he's like.
Yeah you yeah, so not in combat, but in my first studio assignment was Korea, and and it was nineteen ninety nine, so before two thousand and one, when we were still doing Cold War stuff. And so there's this little island off the coast to Korea, and so you'd fly over water and just shoot hell fires at that island and it was it was so much fun. Now in Afghanistan, I deployed Afghanistan in two thousand and five, and we were the first long bow apaches into Afghanistan. And the reason why that's significant is because it was a brand new helicopter that was I don't know about four thousand, five thousand pounds heavier, but it had the same engines and so it was way way underpowered. Like in the summertime, we didn't even have power to hover. You'd bounce along the ground until you could get airborne. And so when we went into Afghanistan, we didn't take any hell fires. We took all the hellfire racks off, we took the radar that controls the RF hellfires, did everything we could to save weight, and so in Afghanistan what we used were the thirty millimeter cannon and then the rockets, and you had a bunch of different types of rockets. You had the high explosive, the flaschetts, the stuff like that.
Now they have sense.
And to be fair, that only hell fires we had back then were the anti tank designed to you know, penetrate armor.
Now they had and they're not.
Those aren't really good against troops in the open and stuff like that because they're not designed to be fragmed. Like yeah, exactly. Now they've gone and there's this whole family of hell fire missiles everything from they've got that crazy they call it the Ninja hellfire that just has blades that cop out pop out of it, and then they have ones that are more Yeah.
I seen that one.
Yeah. I need a poster of just the hell fire missile exploded all out in different hell fire.
It's crazy, bro.
When the F fourteen was, when Top Gun came out, there was a poster of the F fourteen and had every single weaponry that it came. Yeah. Yeah, my older cousin had on his wall. We'd always stare at it. That was our internet, you know.
Yeah, there was I can't remember who who it was. One of the high value targets was killed in the last couple year. I think they call it like the GINSU hell Fire or something, and so hell fire.
Yeah.
So it was designed so that you could hit a car with it and minimize collateral damage. So literally knives pop out that then goes through the roof of the car and takes care of business.
Dude, that reminds me of that movie in the eighties where the orb would flies through the mortuary and like stick into you with the plade. Oh my gosh, dude, I don't know if you remember that movie at all. I don't know. I can't remember. Oh my gosh, everybody less watching common down below what that movie is called. If I remember it during the conversation, I'll bring it up. But it was very scary and there's like this big seven foot tall mortician guy that would just walk the board. These kids broke in and they realized that they were in like this portal of hell, and this like sphere ball would fly around as its security, and then it had like this drill that was in your head and nice came out. Man.
The shell was that I can't remember.
No, I'll figure it out. Someone calment down below. Let me know I'm going off topic. That's eighties movies. We talked about eighties movies. You said, you know, I hope that they didn't like screw up you know, the first version by making a second version. Yeah, what do you think about Red Don versus Red Don?
I think I'm a fan of the first version, so just leave it at that, like the first old right, Yeah, it was.
So much better.
It was in Jack Carr Post Hill Post about Red Down every now and the end of that where it has the the guy talking about partisan rock and the kit. You know, that is such a great ending of the movie. But yeah, I remember when I grew up there was woods behind my house and there were many many afternoons spent prepping for when the Communisk.
Yeah exactly. Yeah, dude, me too. Bro. We trained to be ninjas in the backyard. And you know Red Don. So one of my friends played the mayor's son. Really yeah, Darren Dalton is.
The guy that swallows the little.
Yeah Thomas like yeah, and in that scene, you know how he like he's like, yeah, Patrick Swayst is like I can't do it. You know, he can't do Thomas with a k. Well, he was supposed to fall backwards. That was the whole scene. And what he did was he's like, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna do this on Tommy see Thomas and stumbles into him. Thomas Howe was not expecting that. So that whole scene right there was you know, love that. Yeah, And actually did an interview with Darren Dalton on soft Rep and you know a little while ago, and I'm trying to get Tommy. He's kind of shy. So see Thomas. If I can get see Thomas on that'd be great. They will go all over that place, man, Thomas, come to me.
There's a lot of eighties talent in that movie.
They had Patrick Swayze, Leah Thomas or Thomas, Charlie Sheen.
Yeah, everybody but Emilio and someone. It's like, why weren't they Wolverine? Bro?
You know the Teacher dream Team?
Yeah, yeah, the Teacher at the very beginning. Is there something I can help you with? Bro? Everybody got a little bit of a part in that movie Red Dawn. Well, listen, if you get the luxury that Holly wants to make you into a film, and you need an uber driver that's furry to pull up, Hey, where are you going, spy? Let me take you. I got a couple of accents. Think of this guy right here. All right, you ye, dude, that'd be awesome. I'll do you right, I'll show up and just smile. Now now, now listen, I've had you on here for going on an hour. You've been very pleasant and you have a great demeanor. And I just want to say that anytime that you have something you want to come and talk about, whether it's your book or current topics, you're always welcome here at the House of Soft Rep. Okay. And I just want to say that on behalf of all of us. And then also capture or kill Vince Flynn Don Bentley, the author. He's written numerous books New York Times bestselling author. And I can't wait to see your book at an airport if I fly somewhere, I hope it's there, Okay. And I heard that now they give you like a little logo, right if you go up to them and say, hey, I'm here to sign a book. Oh yeah, they're like, oh you know, hold on, wait, wait, wait, Tom Clancy's here.
Everybody they do, and then sometimes they'll do the little author sign copy. But like I said, I don't ask anymore because I have at an airport said hey, can I sign the books and they look at me and they're like, no, no, you know now I just like yeah, yeah, I just run in there, sign them and run out.
Before they can catch me. So yeah, I love it.
I love it seeing it.
Seeing it at the airport is amazing. My final top tiers. I've never just randomly seen somebody I don't know reading one of my books. So that's what I'm looking for now, random stranger reading one of my books that hasn't happened yet.
Maybe this is you should sit right by the Hey, is that any.
Good hift to the back. That's a good looking author.
Picture that page, that author page right there. Huh you recognize that guy? Sign it and grab it. Just start signing it. Here you go, number one fan, my number one fan. Here you go. I want to be in my movie. Here we go. Call rad No man, I'm gonna call you health Fire because I think that's awesome that you got to throw health Fire missiles out. I'm gonna brack to my friends. I interviewed an actual patche pilot that got to use.
Health So the last, the last funny story about hell fires is when you so you squeeze the laser trigger and then you squeeze the trigger to launch the missile, but there's a two second delay when you squeeze the trigger before the missile leaves the rack, And so there may have been they tell you about it. They're like, it's gonna seem like a wrong a long time. Do not double clutch that trigger. But there may have been times where you're like, oh my gosh, it's not comingy, and then all of a sudden there's two missiles leaving the rails. So it is two seconds is a long time while you're waiting for that missile to go.
Yeah, because you're trying to fire it like a gun, and it's like, you know, you're you're feeling like, I gotta get this off and going, and why is it not going fire? Right? Your mindset is exactly, I gotta get this situation. So you're like one Mississippi two Mississippi. One Mississippi two Mississippi.
You're like, did I squeeze it? Did I have squeezed it hard enough?
Yeah? Yeah, I bet I could fly. I just use my Commodore sixty four ASDs inter interspace bar.
The other thing they do sometimes when you're out of practice is you have what's called a loud laser. And so if you're shooting the thirty millimeter, what you'll do a lot of times is lays first to get a distance and then shoot. And so if you get the triggers confused, you think you're pulling the laser trigger and you're like firing the laser and all a sudden he goes, it's because you squeeze the trigger to the thirty millimeter instead, And so you have a very loud laser that may have happened to time or two too.
Lift drag rotation laser thirty millimeter. Right, those are the important things. And hell fire to okay, okay, okay, and the.
Bag you got it on that you're ready to go. They can put you in this. They could put you in the cockpit.
You're good, I mean, at least in a trainer. You could at least try to roll me and dunky. Let me try to get out and live. I'll try that water one where you dunk them, you know.
I mean, it was awful. It was awful.
You fly over water in Korea, and so they actually have a mock up of the Apache and they lower it into a pool and they have a diver on either side, And so what they tell you is that if you ever get in trouble where you get confused, you're running out of air, you put both hands on your head like this, and the diver has some kind of quick release where he can pull you out of your seat. And so as it was me and my fellow pal team leaders and so since where the officers were in line to go first, and my buddy Matt Isaacson who just retired as a full bird colonel. He was a one sixtieth guy and everything. Graduate he gets in there, they drop him in and they tell you the very first time, put your hands on your head, just to prove to yourself that we can pull you out.
So they dunk him in there.
He puts his hands on his head and the driver diver goes and he can't get him out, and so they're trying to get him out. They're pulling there, saying do an emergency raise, and so it's this crane, so it's barely coming out of the water and they finally gets up and he's like yeah, and so they're like, oh, it's never happened before. Bentley, You're up next, and I'm like, oh my gosh.
It's never happened before, but use the crane. Raise it up. That's never happened before, but we haven't get him up. Oh my gosh, exactly exactly. So yeah, because you really are getting dunked underwater and you're drowning.
Yeah, you they spin you, they blindfold you, they do all of those things because the and it's really useful training, but it's awful. By the time you get done, your sinuses have been flooded eight or ten times.
Now.
It's not like buds awful, don't get me wrong, like nobody's passing out and they smack you around and say.
Get back in the pool.
But it is a little bit nerve wracking for sure.
A little bit. Dude, holy cat living through all of that, and jeez, and a dad living through all that too, right, absolutely, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Well, praise to you and your family and your wife who you know bore your kids.
Absolutely.
Shout out to her a hundred percent. Right, So I just want to say, capture or kill. Go buy that book comment down below on any place that you buy it online so that the author gets some feedback in a review. So if you buy it on the main Amazons or out there on Barnes Andnoble dot com. Leave a review for the author for the book. You know, you never know, grab a book, read it. You may never know if he's gonna sit down next to you and sign it. Okay, so please please do yeah, you know, make him go to the number one New York Times so he always comes on our show to release his next book. Okay, then move with me now Now, Don, I've really had you for some time and you're awesome, and again you're always welcome back. And thank you to my listener for listening and going to the merch store right now and buying everything in the merch store. We really appreciate that. Okay. And the book club, please go check out our book club and if there's a way that we can get Don's book in there, then we'll work that out. Yeah. Please, you know, and again you're always welcome. Thank you for your service to our country. Thank you for questioning yourself about your service to our country. Thank you for bringing who you brought home alive and well. And sorry for those that didn't make it. Are your friends and loved ones that we don't I don't even know, but sorry about that. So I guess on behalf of all of us here at a humble Soft reap on, behalf of your service. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me rat It was awesome.
Yeah, we're a little different around here, so thanks for rolling with it and I really appreciate it. Now, if you guys are interested anymore about capture or kill, just start googling it. Look it up. It'll be everywhere. If you want to check out as book tour, is there a website that they can go check out your book tour with that? Yeah?
So just Don bentleybooks dot com so b E N T L E y Don bentleybooks dot com. Scott all the info.
Okay, we'll have that broken down in a little dissertation at the bottom so people can click on that if you're watching this on YouTube and everywhere else. Thanks so much. This is the beautiful face that gets to be here. With this beautiful face right here and again on behalf of everyone here at softwarep Aton My producer Guy, our editor Brandon Webb, the creator and managing of everything over. I don't know how you do it, bro, And you're a pilot and an author I don't even know. I don't even know, so thank you so much for having me as your host and listening and taking the time. And thanks again to Don so On, behalf of Don I Say Peace.
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