Rick Schroeder is an actor, director, producer, and combat veteran who served 13 years in the U.S. Army. He's also known for his documentary series A Fighting Season, which tells the story of his time embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. In this episode, Rick talks about how he got into the military, why he decided to go to war, and why he wanted to make a documentary about what it's like to be a combat veteran in the military. He also talks about the challenges of embedding with soldiers, and how he was able to build a relationship with the men and women he met along the way. It's a great episode for anyone who's ever wanted to know what it takes to become a combat vet, or someone who's been in the business for a while and wants to know how it's done, or who's always wanted to get into the business, and what it really takes to do it. This episode is available right now on iTunes and is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Thanks for listening and share this episode with your friends and family! Thank you so much for being a part of the podcast and supporting the podcast. It means a lot to us and we can't thank you enough of you enough for your support and your support. -Joe and Rick's efforts to make this podcast and everything you do to make it a reality. Thank you, Rick and Joe, you're a rockstar in this episode! -Your support is so appreciated and we appreciate you, thank you, we really appreciate it, we're looking forward to making this podcast a little bit more than halfway through the process. xoxo - Joe and Rick and we'll see you next week, next week! - Thank you for listening, Rick & Rick -A Fighting Season - P. P.S... -PODCASTING -TODAY'S EPISODE: A FAST FOOTBALL WEEKEND: -RICK & RYAN MCCARTO - MURDERER - THE FAST WEEKEND! - PODCAST: A FRIENDS - - SONGS - A FALLING THROUGH THE DAY - SONG - ENCOUNTERS - KAVANA - TALKING WITH ME AND AVAILABLE ON INSTAGRAM - BONUS EPISODES?
00:00:58.000You were with the soldiers in firefights.
00:01:02.000I mean you were there pretty much every step of the way.
00:01:05.000Yeah, I was there 110 days from March until July 2014 and I needed to be there because I needed to be there that long because just to build trust with the soldiers and the units that I would embed with took sometimes weeks.
00:01:20.000Alone, just because everybody looked at me like, you know, what's this journalist doing here?
00:01:25.000A lot of the guys were 20, 22, 25 in these platoons, had no idea of my past.
00:01:30.000They thought I was just a journalist, a camera guy that was, you know, there to tell a story that was probably negative.
00:01:35.000So it just took time to build a relationship with them before I got into their worlds.
00:02:02.000So what was the motivation to do this and like when did you decide how long did it take to plan this out like?
00:02:09.000Yeah, so the motivation is probably you know, I was always curious about what war was you know war is just such one of those things that has affected mankind and Changed the course of history since the beginning of time right the act of war and so You know,
00:02:28.000I was always curious about what war was.
00:02:29.000And in my mind, I always thought, wow, I have to experience what it is.
00:02:33.000Or else I don't have, like, a whole picture of what it means to be, you know, in this state of, you know, this condition as man.
00:02:41.000So I was always looking for an opportunity where I could sort of experience it.
00:02:48.000But, you know, I didn't come along for a long, long time.
00:02:51.000But after 9-11, you know, I've been sitting there watching, you know, us fight in the War on Terror for 13 or 14 years from my living room, like most of us.
00:03:01.000And, you know, I... I had an opportunity because I knew a three-star general named Lieutenant General Anderson at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who was deploying to Afghanistan in the spring of 2014. So I asked Joe, I said, Joe, can I go with you guys?
00:03:17.000And I'm like, well, Joe, I think it's important to document What we've accomplished or failed to accomplish in that country for the last 13 years.
00:03:29.000We've had a lot of handicaps and amputees come from that war.
00:03:32.000And I think it's important to show what Ending a war looks like how hard it is how complicated is how ugly it is and So he agreed and he said okay, I'll make it happen Now this was when you had already started doing that show for the army you had done this show What was the show called?
00:03:51.000Yeah, the project that I started working for was called starting strong started working for the army for that's a branded content show.
00:03:57.000It's like a long-form kind of Infomercial, in a sense, ultimately, starting strong for the military.
00:04:13.000It's messaging that they want in there that I help produce.
00:04:16.000And I have a government contract, and I produce that for them.
00:04:19.000So in that sense, one of the conversations that we had about that, they're fairly restrictive about what you air and what you don't air, and you didn't have a lot of creative freedom with that.
00:04:34.000There's nothing in it that's not truthful, but it's definitely controlled by the Army and the messaging that they want to put into it.
00:04:41.000So it's not necessarily balanced, like the negative aspects are not really shown.
00:04:45.000You're just kind of showing the things that they want.
00:04:49.000Yeah, and ultimately they have the final edit.
00:04:51.000They're the final judge and jury on those decisions when you have, you know, a creative difference.
00:04:57.000So that really kind of opened your eyes to this possible, or opened your mind to this possibility of doing this non-restricted, embedded reality.
00:05:11.000I mean, this is John Paul DeGioia, the guy who owns Patron Tequila, and me, each kicking in a chunk of money, and putting together a film crew, and I scrambled.
00:05:22.000After I talked to Joe Anderson in Fort Bragg in February, I was in Afghanistan by March, and I brought three camera guys with me.
00:05:30.000I hired a local there, And the only limitation the Army put on me was they said, we are going to have to review for operational security any things that could endanger our soldiers or give away capabilities, tactics, techniques, and procedures of certain weapon systems or things that we employ to defeat the enemy,
00:05:53.000I can talk about a little bit with you some of those tools that we have.
00:05:57.000What were the things that you were not allowed to put in?
00:06:00.000When we were trying to do dynamic or kinetic strikes with drones on bad guys, we were following known terrorists that had pictures and names, and we were following them from the air and looking for opportunities to shoot a Hellfire missile and eliminate them.
00:06:22.000There's certain information That's on the drone feeds, the monitor feeds, that gives away sort of capabilities of the drone.
00:06:43.000Things like the Area 51 stuff and the Groom Lake, where they test all this crazy technology out there, and people don't even know about it until it's too late.
00:06:52.000Not too late, necessarily, but until it's already employed.
00:06:56.000One of the things that they attribute to a lot of the UFO sightings is like stealth bombers and the B-52 and B-51.
00:07:04.000Different technologies they had created out there in the Nevada desert.
00:07:07.000People had no idea they even existed until they started using them.
00:07:11.000You know, the technology that I saw and experienced with the Army and the way that they can, you know, fight and conduct war and gather intelligence and stuff was phenomenal.
00:07:23.000That being said, there's only so much you can do to overcome an adversary that's a suicide bomber that's going to, you know, load a car with explosives and drive it into your, you know, checkpoint or walk up to you and detonate.
00:07:37.000There's only so much you can do with technology.
00:07:40.000And there's just certain things that's hard to mitigate against, and that's fanatics.
00:07:45.000Yeah, and this war in particular, and the first Desert Storm War, was really the first time that they had experienced that, the United States military had experienced that, from the enemy, right?
00:07:58.000Except the Japanese suicide bombers, but the kamikazes, it was sort of a different story.
00:08:03.000Yeah, I mean, that's the only time I can really remember is, you know, the weapon of choice becoming a human, you know, is World War II with the kamikazes.
00:08:12.000And then, you know, you started hearing about it in Iraq.
00:08:16.000And that really wasn't employed in Afghanistan for many years early in the war.
00:08:20.000And then they decided to change tactics and bring that to the battlefield.
00:08:24.000But, you know, the real disgusting thing with some of that is...
00:08:28.000You know, they use kids a lot for suicide bombers.
00:08:31.000You know, kids that are handicapped, kids that have mental problems, Down syndrome, or handicaps in some way.
00:08:37.000They'll actually, you know, radicalize the kids in Pakistan at madrasas or schools.
00:08:42.000You know, teach them that, you know, it's the highest degree of glory to die in the act of jihad.
00:08:50.000Without Jihad, actually, you can't actually get the 72 versions.
00:08:54.000So the kids are actually trained to thank the Americans, kind of, in a way, or thank the infidels, because without the infidels to kill, you can't get the highest degree of Celestial glory that term 72 virgins apparently I looked it up what a lot of people think that it's actually like the number 72,
00:09:15.000but it's like a shitload It's like saying a shitload.
00:09:19.000You know like you have 72 more than 72 well, you know what I mean?
00:09:23.000It's like it's a term like you know like it's not it's not an exact term I don't know what the the definition that would be but you know um You know people say that it's a kajillion.
00:09:33.000Yeah, you know let's say something exaggeration It was the original...
00:09:59.000You separated yourself from your family for many months, a hundred plus days, and then went over there.
00:10:06.000Was there any point in time in the process of this before you launched where you had second thoughts?
00:10:13.000Did you know that you were going to commit yourself to such a long extended stay?
00:10:19.000So I did have second thoughts before I went you know especially because like three days before I left Andrea my wife said don't go if you love me don't go whoa and so if you love the kids don't go so I got that and so I had to deal with that like three days before and That was pretty tough um because I do love my wife and do love my kids,
00:10:40.000but I went so and But, yeah, I mean, it was definitely a hard thing to come to terms with, to come to grips with.
00:10:52.000You know, one of my camera guys backed out the day of the trip, and I went out there one time before my team, actually, just to scout and look for different embeds and different characters and stuff that I could follow, different soldiers, different units, different missions.
00:11:08.000And we follow everything in this, just, you know, from Three Star General, who was the commander of the battlefield, all of Afghanistan, to, you know, Colonel John Graham, which is a great embed where he advises the chief of police in Kabul, which is 6 million people,
00:11:24.000cops with RPGs, 13,000-man paramilitary police force in Kabul, heroin industry thriving, black market for weapons thriving.
00:11:31.000And our embed was with Colonel Graham, embedded with the chief of police for Kabul.
00:11:38.000You know, trying to secure the city and build a ring of steel, they called it, which was like 50-something checkpoints to try to keep suicide bombers and vehicle-borne IEDs out of the city before the election.
00:11:49.000Because the Taliban had threatened immense bloodshed to disrupt the elections.
00:12:11.000And so 2014 ended up being the deadliest fighting season in Afghanistan's history, at least while we were there.
00:12:18.000I don't know about the Soviets, but while we were there.
00:12:21.000And more civilians, more Taliban, and more coalition forces were killed in 2014 than any other year.
00:12:27.000So, yeah, so, I mean, going into this, I started to get some, you know, jitters here or there, cold feet, but, you know, I commit, and, you know, I know how to jump, you know, like hold your balls and jump kind of attitude, right?
00:12:51.000It was, you know, and really what was really stressful, though, was they started killing journalists in Afghanistan in 2014, specifically targeting people that had cameras.
00:13:02.000And so, you know, while I was there, you'd get news reports of, you know, two dead journalists or dead journalists here or two dead there, you know, purposely shot by...
00:13:12.000Our allies, our own, not our allies, but our own Afghan partners that we were partnering with, whether it be Afghan National Army, ANA, or Afghan ALP, Afghan Local Police, would turn guns on journalists.
00:13:27.000And it turns out, you know, you never quite understand why it happened.
00:13:31.000A lot of times it's Taliban that infiltrate the ranks of the Of the security forces in Afghanistan that do that.
00:13:40.000But sometimes it's cultural differences.
00:13:42.000They don't like cameras pointed at them.
00:13:49.000If you talk to women or open a door for a woman, you could insult somebody so much that it's the kind of place where they pull a gun out and they kill you.
00:14:00.000So the stress, the anxiety just never ends because like on that embed with Colonel Graham and the Kabul police, you know, we were a six or seven person team embedded with a 13,000 man Afghan police force.
00:14:14.000And so all day long, we're surrounded by Afghans with AKs and RPGs.
00:14:17.000And so every building you go into, you're surrounded by Afghans with guns.
00:14:20.000And there's just six or seven of you, sometimes two or three of you.
00:14:24.000And so you're always trying to put your back to the wall.
00:14:26.000And the anxiety of that Just relentless, even though nothing may happen, but just the potential that something's gonna happen is kind of exhausting.
00:14:36.000Yeah, I can only imagine, especially knowing that some of these security forces were killing journalists.
00:14:42.000Did they give you a list of things to never do?
00:14:50.000I mean, I think that's one of the weirdest things about, like, going to a place like that is there's no rule book.
00:14:56.000All you can look is for people that I've experienced that have done it before been there before and Ask and hope somebody takes you under their wing and you know decides to give you a little bit of Comfort, you know and decides to try to teach you something along the way That's got to be insanely stressful So I could just only imagine being a small number of people also surrounded by all these Afghan security forces and then also having the knowledge that some of these people,
00:15:27.000the Taliban had embedded in some of these people.
00:15:30.000They had infiltrated and they were in the ranks and they were upset that the Americans were there in the first place and they were resentful of the whole situation and very angry.
00:15:43.000Yeah, it was mind-exhausting, mind-numbing.
00:15:48.000It was almost like you don't know where the enemy is.
00:15:51.000It's like once you know where the enemy is, then at least you can focus on him and you can face him.
00:15:56.000But the enemy can be anywhere in that kind of environment.
00:16:01.000So you'd be on a patrol walking through a village and there's a bunch of guys around and they all got shovels.
00:16:08.000But you know some of them are Taliban.
00:16:11.000You know that for sure some of them are Taliban, but they're holding a shovel and you can't prove it.
00:16:15.000So you have to really wait until, you know, they decide they want to fight that day.
00:16:19.000Because typically it's up to them, you know, where they fight, when they fight.
00:16:25.000They're the ones that determine those things.
00:16:29.000So it's very difficult to figure out who exactly the enemy is.
00:16:33.000You're looking at one guy, he might be a farmer, and the guy next to him might be Taliban.
00:16:38.000Or the guy might be a farmer one day and then he needs money the next so he picks up his AK or plants an IED the next day because he needs money and he becomes Taliban.
00:17:29.000And then the people in the South, or the Pashtuns, You know, very, very connected to Iran, you know, kind of culturally.
00:17:38.000And so there's a conflict between just those groups.
00:17:42.000And there's also conflicts with, you know, the states around there, like India.
00:17:46.000Afghanistan really likes the Indian people and Indian way of life and, you know, the sports, the music, Bollywood, cricket, you know, the Indian businessmen all over Kabul.
00:17:58.000And Pakistan, you know, sort of is at odds with India.
00:18:00.000And the last thing they want is Afghanistan to be an ally of India.
00:18:04.000So Pakistan doesn't kind of want surrounded by, you know, people they find unfriendly.
00:18:11.000So the conflict is, you know, diverse.
00:18:14.000It's heroin, it's poppy, you know, opium.
00:18:27.000Yeah, and also the soldiers have to actually help some of these guys that are growing poppies because they get information and because it keeps certain allies in place.
00:18:40.000They had this thing on Fox News where Geraldo Rivera was over there and he was trying to help explain why these soldiers were guarding poppy fields.
00:18:50.000To people at home, I was like, what in the fuck is going on over there?
00:19:31.000Taliban makes $200 million a year from some of the analysts I talked to, from taxing the growing of it and the movement of it back to Pakistan.
00:20:05.000And then they can trade it like gold or silver.
00:20:07.000And so it's not like, you know, another kind of food or other item that spoils.
00:20:14.000Because they don't have infrastructure to move stuff to market either.
00:20:17.000So it's partly, those are the reasons partly too that it's such a big crop.
00:20:23.000There must have been an insane experience, an insane culture shock for you, going from, I mean, you were a child star, and now you're a grown man producing documentaries, and then you're in this insanely odd world.
00:20:53.000Like, what is it like to travel around that city?
00:20:57.000It's a very small downtown center that looks fairly modern, that has fairly modern-looking buildings that even may have traffic lights and sewer.
00:21:05.000But once you get out of that sort of nucleus, that may be two or three square miles of infrastructure, it just basically becomes a city of six million mud huts and six million people, but all living in mud and dirt roads.
00:22:54.000One of the things that I remember from the election was when there was a debate between John McCain and Obama, and Obama was talking about Afghanistan, about bringing troops into Afghanistan, and he was doing it in a way that John McCain thought was very ignorant of the environment.
00:23:08.000And he said, you know, I don't think you know, I'm paraphrasing, but he was saying essentially, I don't think you know what it's like over there.
00:23:15.000Like, that place hasn't changed since Alexander the Great came through.
00:23:19.000And when you describe it that way, I think it kind of puts it in perspective for people.
00:24:09.000And so the big thing is to try to give that core group of people in that country the time and the space to grow, to develop, and to get, you know, roots of democracy and roots of, you know, civil order established.
00:24:25.000To try to deal with the corruption, the huge amount of corruption in the Afghan government.
00:24:30.000I mean, this is a place where fuel trucks will be coming from Pakistan to, say, fill the police department's fuel reservoirs in Kabul.
00:24:40.000And on the way, so much fuel will be stolen along the way from Pakistan that by the time it gets to the edges of Kabul, all eight trucks will be RPG'd and burned because nobody wants evidence that the trucks were empty.
00:24:55.000And so, that's the kind of level of corruption that is going on that, you know, that you have to try to, at the ministerial level, the ministers, like, that's where we've got to make sure we fix it.
00:25:09.000I mean, the other problem with that country is, like, It's sustaining itself.
00:25:15.000So, like, you'll go to an outpost and you'll see vehicles that look fairly well, like they could be reused for patrols, and they're just sitting there.
00:25:25.000And they've been sitting there a long time.
00:25:26.000And the commander, the army gal, will say, what's up with the vehicles?
00:25:29.000The guys are like, we can only do foot patrols.
00:25:36.000And we can't get a fan belt until we bring the vehicle back to the brigade headquarters 150 miles away to actually get the fan belt put on.
00:25:45.000Because they won't push the parts out because of the threat of them being stolen on the way.
00:25:53.000So they want all the equipment to go back to the brigade headquarters, which you can't get the vehicle there.
00:26:52.000And then you talk to the enlisted guys and typically every one of them says it's gonna take generations and generations to change this and if it changes.
00:27:00.000I mean, how would you possibly get the internet to these people in these mud huts?
00:27:06.000I mean, it seems like if the internet is the hope, how do you get the internet to people that don't have running water?
00:27:12.000I mean, it seems like that would be their number one priority first.
00:27:15.000Well, I mean, they're doing a lot of good there.
00:27:17.000I mean, life, you know, like I was reading some statistics since we got there, like, you know, the amount of literacy has gone through the roof, life expectancy, infant mortality has gone down, life expectancy has gone up.
00:27:31.000So many good things have happened in 13 years in that place.
00:27:34.000We've built some roads now and some infrastructure that go all the way around the entire country of Afghanistan.
00:27:42.000And so we've done a lot of good things.
00:27:45.000But basically, the international community, because it wasn't just us, this was a NATO mission.
00:27:50.000The first time I was told that NATO was ever invoked, NATO was started to, you know, work in Europe to defend everybody against the Axis, I guess.
00:28:04.000And we invoke NATO's support after September 11th and NATO came to our aid and so that what was interesting was, you know, there was military members from like 50 or 60 nations in Afghanistan when I was there.
00:28:18.000A lot of them weren't going out and doing patrols like the Germans were and some other countries were actually out there engaged but most of them were sort of, you know, doing stuff that was Nation building kind of events as opposed to direct combat,
00:28:34.000but you know, so that's the hope is that the international community doesn't Abandon this country because if they don't have the money to pay their army and pay their soldiers It falls apart So now the United States is pulling out the majority of troops from Afghanistan And what happens then?
00:28:55.000What's the number one concern from the people that have been there, that are on the ground?
00:29:06.000The President Ashraf Ghani and the Prime Minister Abdullah Abdullah came to Washington, I think, recently to talk to the President and basically both thanked him and thanked America for all the sacrifice that it's made to help their country,
00:29:21.000but basically pleaded with him, don't leave.
00:30:18.000I mean, life under the Taliban was brutal and horrible.
00:30:22.000But back to your point of nation-building and stuff, you know, you either got to, you know, commit and do it, or you got to just go do what you got to do and leave.
00:30:30.000So, like, you know, when we went to Afghanistan, right, it was to kill Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
00:31:04.000And 14 years later, we're still there.
00:31:08.000So, you know, I think there's going to be a debate, national debate, one day on nation building and using, you know, the military to build nations.
00:31:18.000Because I always thought the military was designed to destroy an enemy and then leave.
00:31:24.000But now maybe that's changing and politicians want them to destroy the enemy or kind of destroy the enemy, but then help build up a nation.
00:31:35.000If that's what you want them to do, then at least build them like that, right?
00:31:40.000Build them to succeed in that environment.
00:31:46.000But I think the fighting season, the importance of this is we're going to show, you know, how we left Afghanistan with the fighting season docuseries.
00:31:52.000And whatever happens in Afghanistan down the road, if it crashes and burns or it's a success story, you know, we'll be able to reference the fighting season from the soldiers' perspectives of how we left it.
00:32:05.000In 2014. There's a lot of people that are very cynical about nation building because there's a lot of money involved.
00:32:11.000And that money involved, I mean, especially when Dick Cheney was the Vice President, of course he was the former CEO of Halliburton.
00:32:18.000Halliburton got those gigantic multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to go over there and rebuild areas that we had destroyed.
00:32:27.000And a lot of people recognize that there was a whole industry behind that now.
00:32:33.000Not just the military-industrial complex, but this rebuilding industry, the contracting industry.
00:32:39.000It became an enormous source of money.
00:32:45.000I can't really speak to that too much.
00:32:48.000What I can say is that, you know, I saw some places that the Afghans had built, some Afghan bases that they had actually constructed on their own.
00:32:58.000And, you know, some of the guys that control the money were telling me, you know, this would have taken us two years and this much, lots of money to build.
00:33:07.000These guys built it in, you know, Nine months and for way less.
00:33:12.000Yeah, maybe the craftsmanship's not as good, you know, it's more like Mexico kind of block housing as opposed to what we might have built, but it was enough.
00:33:22.000And so, you know, these guys I was with with the Army were very proud of the fact that they were able to get money cut loose From that contracting process and get it to the Afghans to help their local economy, to help them build stuff, you know, employ their people.
00:33:37.000And so, you know, Joe, I'm sure, you know, I don't discount what you say at all.
00:33:43.000I'm sure that when there's money involved, people do crazy things.
00:33:48.000But, you know, I just know the guys that I was with, they ain't getting paid a lot of money.
00:33:51.000The soldiers ain't getting paid a lot of money.
00:34:53.000And so it just feels like, okay, I'm on my own.
00:34:58.000And it's kind of, you know, and then eventually, you know, that wears away.
00:35:02.000You start meeting people, and you start seeing friendly faces, and there's certain Afghans that you start to really like, especially the interpreters.
00:35:09.000These young men that are in their early 20s, that are risking everything to work with the U.S. Army, On the hopes that they're going to get, on the promise that they're going to get a green card from the State Department.
00:35:20.000And there's many of them that aren't getting them, for whatever reasons, I don't know.
00:35:26.000But these young interpreters that are risking it all, I mean, I remember them saying to me, please don't put my face on the picture.
00:35:32.000Because if the Taliban see it, and they can see it now, anywhere, they said, then, you know, they may kill me.
00:35:39.000They may, one guy said, they may hang me in my village by quarters.
00:35:43.000And yell to my family, come get some meat.
00:35:47.000And so I said, okay, man, I won't show your face.
00:35:49.000But anyway, so you start to meet these young Afghans and you start to see the commitment they have for their country, for a better way of life.
00:36:25.000Yeah, so there's a process called the Military Decision Making Process, MDMP. And it's when an order comes down from above that you have a mission, you sit and you do a big briefing and you do what's called mission analysis.
00:36:38.000And so the leadership of the battalion, in this case Task Force White Devil of the 82nd Airborne that we were embedded with on one of these missions, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Larson, the commander of Task Force White Devil, would call a mission analysis meeting.
00:36:53.000And so all of the leadership of the battalion, 800 guys, but just the leadership would assemble and you would go through the mission.
00:37:27.000All operations are driven by intelligence.
00:37:30.000You don't just go somewhere on the hopes.
00:37:33.000You go there because you have a reason to go there.
00:37:35.000There's bad guys there that there's routes there that they're moving explosives from Pakistan into Afghanistan on and So you do an emission analysis and then you know everybody comes back together a few days later You lay out the plan you refine the plan you do the locations get I call them location scouts like a movie you do like a movie because I shot it like that But you you actually go to the potential forward operating bases.
00:37:58.000You're gonna strike bases you're gonna operate from and You scout those.
00:38:02.000You meet with the Afghan partners that you're going to partner with because all these operations we were on were joint operations, Afghans and army mixed.
00:38:09.000And so you meet with them and then you come back and you run it by the general and you say, okay, we've done our homework.
00:38:49.000It's also on DirecTV, for any of you that may have it, DirecTV.
00:38:52.000The CEO, Mike White, really quick, I cold emailed him when I got home from Afghanistan, and he decided to move out and make this.
00:39:02.000But I had 650 hours of footage, and...
00:39:07.000And you know a lot of it was you know Kind of dead-end stories because you would go out off for a few days with different soldiers on different operations and nothing would happen and It was just sort of a dead-end Opportunity that you couldn't develop So did you put any of that in there to show that there's a lot of frustration a lot of these things don't pan out?
00:39:32.000We didn't put any dead-end characters in, let's say.
00:39:34.000We put in all the characters that we wanted to, and the missions that we wanted to show, and sometimes there was conflict in those.
00:39:42.000Sometimes, you know, between soldiers, you'll see that there's sometimes, you know, everyone has this perception that if you're in the army, you blindly follow orders.
00:40:31.000If it's in the moment and they don't have time, like in the moment, if the guy said, go, jump off that bridge, I think you would confront him face to face because it's imminent, right?
00:40:58.000I have three camera teams plus me, and so I would embed each camera team with different units doing different missions, and I would rotate through the camera teams.
00:41:07.000And so we would shoot on cards, and we would every night have to back up our media to hard drives, to rugged hard drives.
00:41:18.000And then we would, you know, have to charge our batteries because we would run out of batteries oftentimes if we didn't.
00:41:25.000And then we would send that media back every three, four weeks.
00:41:29.000We'd send a dump of footage back home.
00:41:31.000And in my editorial facility, we'd ingest it and start, you know, organizing it.
00:41:59.000So you're dealing with hundreds of hours of footage then?
00:42:03.000And you've got to break this down to a six-hour docu-series, and you have to do it justice.
00:42:08.000And you have to do it justice, not just because it's a significant part of American history, it's the lives of these soldiers that you have become friends with and comrades with, but you're trying to do this whole thing justice.
00:42:27.000I mean, the reason to do it is to do it justice, to do it right, to show the way it is, to not come at it with an angle or a spin, but just to tell their story and to honor how hard what they do is,
00:42:43.000and to honor all those who served there and lost there.
00:42:48.000You know, it's I did it because I wanted to tell their stories.
00:43:26.000The best of us, the best of America, I think.
00:43:28.000I mean, they are some of the smartest, bravest, courageous people who are doing this because they feel a sense of love for their country, true love for their country,
00:43:51.000They have a true love for our country and true love for the values.
00:43:55.000And what do they think they're accomplishing by being in Afghanistan?
00:43:58.000What is the primary sentiment that they think that they're accomplishing by being over there, by eliminating the Taliban, by weakening the Taliban, by empowering the locals so that they can help rid their area of the Taliban?
00:44:15.000I don't think they even necessarily think about some of those things because they go where the president tells them to go.
00:44:20.000They go where our country orders them to go.
00:44:25.000I think it's a more personal kind of thing for them, and that is that they...
00:45:16.000And so I think that's the message that I've got from my experience there and watching them, and I think that they're proud of, is that they're willing to do whatever it takes.
00:45:32.000As long as I got my body armor and my helmet, I'll go wherever the hell you want me to.
00:45:36.000What do you think is the difference between the perception that the average American has over here, safely guarded, protected in our country?
00:45:49.000What do you think the misconceptions that most people have are about what's going on over there?
00:46:05.000The ones that don't want, you know, radical Islam and Sharia law to govern the land, they want us there.
00:46:12.000And so I think that's the thing I didn't understand when I went there, is how much the locals are grateful and thankful that we're there and that we've done what we've done.
00:46:24.000I mean, I had Afghan officers in the army thank me.
00:46:28.000I would point the camera at them and say, do you have any messages for America?
00:46:32.000And they would thank America's parents for sending sons and daughters here to die for us, to fix us, to help us.
00:46:38.000They really, really are thankful that we're there, and that's just something you don't get a sense of back here.
00:46:47.000One of the other things I'm most proud about the fighting season that I think you'll get to see is we show how...
00:46:54.000The rules of engagement work in ways, you know, when it comes to drone warfare.
00:47:02.000You know, there's a perception out there that, like, the U.S. military establishment's out of control, that they're just sort of shooting missiles randomly at bad guys and don't care about killing civilians.
00:47:13.000Well, I can tell you, if you watch the fighting season, you'll see something different to that narrative.
00:47:17.000You'll actually see how it works and when they're willing to and when they're willing to not risk collateral damage.
00:47:25.000The real issue that people have is when they read just raw numbers.
00:47:29.000When they read the raw numbers of innocent civilians killed by drones versus the intended targets.
00:47:35.000And they're pretty heavily on the side of innocent civilians killed.
00:47:39.000I think the last count was something like 80%.
00:47:43.000But here's the thing you gotta remember.
00:47:45.000The Army is different than the CIA. It's different than any other branch of the military that's using drone warfare.
00:47:52.000And I think that's an important distinction that we have to remember, is that the US Army fights according to its own...
00:48:01.000It's a set of values and principles that are different from other organizations that do that stuff.
00:48:08.000And I think that's one of the things about the fighting season, is you're going to see how different they are.
00:48:15.000Now we also have this conception of these This perception, rather, of these people sitting in a room somewhere with an Xbox controller, nowhere near the action, and they're controlling these drones and firing at these black and white screens,
00:48:33.000looking at night vision and very nondescript images.
00:48:37.000They're trying to determine whether or not these are the actual enemy.
00:48:41.000What is the actual reality of using those drones?
00:48:45.000Well, I was never with the actual pilots of the drones.
00:49:15.000The reality is, the guys I was with, Task Force White Devil, when we were using drones, so our guys would be watching the drone feeds, and you would be looking on, you know, the enemy to see if you could pick up an RPG or a weapon that's a prestige weapon system,
00:49:34.000because it has to be sort of a higher level weapon system to make them a valid military target, let's say.
00:49:39.000So you would be looking at the drone feeds, and then the guys would be typing and communicating with the drone pilots in a chat room.
00:49:50.000And so there was real-time communication going on, and real-time coordination, and real-time JAGs involved, judge advocate generals, involved in the process at this point of, you know, Have you met the rules of engagement?
00:50:07.000Because there's different kinds of strikes, too.
00:50:12.000So, like, if you're in a troops in combat situation, and you're the ground force commander, and you're running a company, and you know that there's an enemy fighting position by that rock, you know, theoretically, you have the authority, if there's no other assets available, to get the drone to attack the enemy behind the rock as the ground force commander.
00:50:32.000But then there's other kinds of strikes that are pre-planned, like you're going after a terrorist that has a known name and a known face.
00:50:42.000And so the rules of engagement for him will be different than the rules of engagement for the troops in combat rules of engagement.
00:50:50.000So there's all these different, and depending on where you're on the list, how bad they want you, is how much risk they're willing to take as far as collateral damage.
00:51:00.000Was there ever a time when you were over there where you second-guessed your decision?
00:51:53.000Let's see, you know, if there's any left.
00:51:56.000And so, at that moment, like, when, you know, the platoon is strapping up to walk across 800 meters of open valley desert into this green zone, which is really thick vegetation where they can hide anywhere, and there's mud walls everywhere.
00:52:11.000I'm starting to think to myself at this point, I have a great wife.
00:53:17.000Big army guy, you know, letting them, and these guys came up to him, and after, you know, Captain Adams questioned them, the Afghan army guys questioned them, everybody knew that they were 99.9% Taliban.
00:53:30.000You know, they said that they didn't hear any guns.
00:54:12.000The Afghans look at us and they must shake their heads sometimes.
00:54:16.000Because, I mean, I think I know what would have happened if we weren't there, if cameras weren't there, if the army wasn't there.
00:54:23.000Those guys would have never walked out of there.
00:54:27.000There was a time in World War II where the United States had taken a lot of Nazi prisoners and had them in prisoner war camps in America and treated them very well.
00:54:37.000And it was just before they had found out how badly Americans were being treated over in Germany.
00:54:44.000And there was all these different stories of American war prisoners being gunned down firing squads they would find their frozen bodies Tied and bound and there was a big public outcry congressional hearings and they Were trying to figure out why are we doing this?
00:56:44.000And then, of course, they follow orders and they let him go.
00:56:47.000And they just hope next time, like he said, I'll get you next time, motherfucker.
00:56:51.000They just hope next time he holds his gun a little longer so that you can verify with either a drone or with your own eyes that he was an enemy combatant.
00:57:02.000Is there a time that stands out that was the most brutal or particularly brutal of all the different firefights or different scenarios that you encountered?
00:57:15.000It was a firefight that I wasn't there for.
00:58:11.000Yeah, and now he's moving to places where he can cover ISIS. He's an interesting guy.
00:58:17.000And so Jake had to embed with the Afghans, and I had to go meet with the general to get permission to get him embedded with the Afghans, because there was no U.S. forces on the ground where he was going.
00:58:27.000And it was a place called the Tangi Valley, a very dangerous valley, the site of We're good to go.
00:58:48.000They can plan their operations and attack Kabul very quickly from the Tangi Valley.
00:58:52.000And so it was important that we told this story.
00:58:55.000And so I went to talk with General Townsend, and he said, okay, so, you know, are you prepared to see your camera guy in an orange jumpsuit on his knees on the Internet?
00:59:09.000Because the place you're putting him That's the kind of thing that happens and nobody's gonna go get him.
00:59:59.000Jake was in the Australian Army, and I think he was involved with some event that was really traumatizing, involving some kids getting hurt and killed.
01:00:08.000And so it was somewhere in Indonesia where the Australians were, I think.
01:00:12.000And so he ever since has been involved, ever since that event, and then he left the Army, he's been trying to tell the story of how war affects kids.
01:00:22.000And so he's got a special focus on kids.
01:00:25.000And so that's what motivates Jake, I think.
01:00:28.000And he does this 365. He's over there all the time.
01:01:17.000So he would cover sort of forward operating bases.
01:01:21.000And so he would cover like the drone story for me because that's in a controlled environment And so we would the other three would go out into the field with various platoons and stuff and operations And then he would stay back Was there anybody that you got close to over there that you lost?
01:02:27.000And now the difference between seeing it on the internet and being there live when it all comes home and you realize this is what they're trying to do to the people that are around you.
01:03:01.000Because I think, according to an army intel officer I spoke with who I thought was very knowledgeable, because in order for their prophecies to come true, they have to start World War III, and then their prophet will come back and,
01:03:19.000you know, bring peace and order to the world.
01:03:24.000Until they are able to trigger a big event a massive event to start World War three and so that's that's the hardcore jihadist motivation There's a there's a distinction there between the hardcore jihadist and the average person who's a Muslim and this is what gets sort of turned around and churned around rather and And debated back and forth in America when people start using the term Islamophobia.
01:03:54.000Because there are people that practice Islam that are very polite, peaceful people that don't want any harm to occur to anybody.
01:04:02.000And then there are radical people that are out of their fucking mind and want to shoot people for drawing cartoons.
01:04:09.000Yeah, the radicals, I mean, even in Afghanistan, they'll pay a kid 25 bucks, 20 bucks to go plant an IED. The kid's not doing it necessarily because he wants necessarily to fight jihad.
01:04:44.000It's the only way to get someone to blow themselves up.
01:04:46.000It's the only way to get someone to sacrifice their own lives.
01:04:49.000You have to give them this idea in their head that something better waits for them after they do it, and you have to have them really, really believe it.
01:05:44.000And culturally, the entire area is Muslim.
01:05:47.000So it's not like, the idea of not being Islamic is almost more foreign than the idea of being a suicide bomber.
01:05:56.000Oh yeah, especially when some of the suicide bombers are martyrs and revered with posters of them and tributes to them, you know, and...
01:06:06.000There was a school in Pakistan and there was a documentary on it where they were training these young kids to become suicide bombers and they had this sign on the wall that, first of all, they showed all these images.
01:06:20.000They had these enshrined images of these children that had blown themselves up.
01:06:24.000And they had this sign on the wall that said, today's students are tomorrow's holy martyrs.
01:06:33.000And they were explaining, you know, like what that meant and what it means to fight against the enemy.
01:06:41.000And it was just so hard to watch, so hard to look at these young kids that were being indoctrinated into this way of thinking.
01:06:51.000And knowing that this is a wash, you can't fix that.
01:06:55.000You can't go over there now and fix those teachers, tell them they shouldn't be doing this, fix the religious leaders, straighten the mindsets of the people, adjust their perceptions.
01:07:08.000You have an area of the world that's almost inexorably sick, and it is what it is, and now we have to deal with it globally.
01:07:18.000You have to deal with the consequences of those people getting older and going out in the world and affecting people with the ideology that's been sort of embedded into their brain.
01:07:28.000It's that's popping up the worldwide Joe that ideology is popping up in Canada and in the US and Europe all throughout France look at Charlie Hebdo.
01:07:37.000Yeah, so it's like a cancer that is spreading and it can grow anywhere from any mosque from any teacher and It's going to take the whole world to fix it.
01:07:50.000I don't know how else we do it, except it's a world effort to sort of show these people a new way.
01:08:00.000And it's got to come from within them.
01:12:25.000Yeah, because I heard that from guys who had went over there and performed for the troops that, you know, they'd seen a lot of homosexuality and a lot of sexual abuse.
01:12:37.000Women are for breeding, boys are for pleasure, is a statement that they say sometimes, some Afghans.
01:12:55.000I mean, but even not under the Taliban.
01:12:57.000There was a woman beaten to death in Kabul a few months back because the leader in the church, whatever the church she was going to, said that she burned a Quran.
01:13:12.000And in fact, it was like an argument they had, he and her, where she didn't like him charging.
01:13:37.000When you got home, when you did the hundred plus days there and got home and came back to your beautiful family and your beautiful house in Southern California, what was that like?
01:13:59.000But I was so glad when I got off the plane.
01:14:01.000I almost kissed the dirty gutter in LAX because of all the problems we have here, it is such an amazing place when you come from a place like that.
01:15:12.000Yeah, I mean, the more intense the situation or the more intense the experiences are, the more those other experiences seem so dull, which is why spoiled people that don't have anything go wrong, I mean, that's why they will get freaked out about something so minor.
01:17:42.000So going from that To this and At this stage of your your life the current stage of your life with all your life experiences.
01:17:51.000Yeah it boiling down to this this Docu-series that you're putting together, which is probably the most intense thing you've ever done.
01:17:58.000Yeah, I mean what a Perspective enhancer that's got to be to go from being a famous child with this view of the world And then, as a grown man with a family, to be over there in Afghanistan embedded for a hundred days,
01:18:17.000experiencing firefights on a daily basis almost.
01:18:20.000It was a great experience, Joe, and it changed me forever.
01:18:24.000It changed me forever in many great ways.
01:18:28.000I don't see any negative that has come out of it for me, honestly.
01:18:34.000Except maybe wanting to do it again, you know, and you want to do it again I mean that's that's the risk is has that sort of lit a fire in me to like Well, you did a fantastic job by all accounts on this docuseries I've read reviews of it people love it and they say this is really intense and really What was the word that I'd read but Comprehensive I think was the way they were describing it like you you got deep into this This isn't something you can cover in a
01:19:04.00090-minute documentary Which is why you decided to stretch it out over six hours.
01:19:09.000Yeah, I mean we look at it from The ending of America's longest war from various perspectives.
01:19:15.000It's epic in scope, but we get deep inside those those perspectives, you know and I don't know what the future brings for me right now, because that's honestly the thing I'm most confused about.
01:19:29.000How do I go back to certain career choices that I perhaps once was really excited about and wanted to achieve and goals?
01:19:41.000In acting, even in films, in TV, and even in production, even producing, you know, even writing, whatever it may be, like, you know, I gotta figure out, again, I gotta figure out what's next for me, because I have no freaking clue.
01:20:33.000I really felt like I was making a difference.
01:20:34.000Like, educating people about the art of war, how battles are fought, the military science behind it.
01:20:44.000Because that's what I found interesting, is how do you take...
01:20:48.000An op order, an operational order, and then develop it, and then execute it, and then how do you overwhelm and destroy the enemy when you finally find him?
01:21:00.000How do you overwhelm and destroy the enemy and choreograph the symphony of destruction in the moment?
01:21:05.000How do you call in the air weapons teams, the Apaches?
01:21:09.000How do you call in the B1s and the fast-moving jets?
01:21:47.000It's the only way I've ever known how to do it.
01:21:49.000As far as anything I've ever made that's worth anything, as far as, you know, any value, has been something that I really was excited about doing and wanted to do and was passionate about.
01:22:01.000And so I don't know what's next for me.
01:22:59.000Well, you also have the freedom to make those decisions.
01:23:02.000You know, you have the freedom to decide what you want to do and then really direct yourself towards whatever your passions are.
01:23:12.000Is there anything that you're interested in at the level that you were interested in this military thing?
01:23:17.000Because I think the military thing, you had always had an interest for it, but it was really sort of sparked by the series that you had done for the Army.
01:23:26.000It's really my grandfather that sparked it.
01:23:28.000Like, he was a captain in the Army in World War II, and he took six, what are called, deuce-and-a-half flatbed trucks, big trucks.
01:23:36.000Each one had two.50 calibers mounted on the backs.
01:23:41.000And so he took six of those as close infantry support all the way through France to Germany, to the Rhine River.
01:23:50.000And I think I was the only person he ever told stories to.
01:23:53.000But I remember sitting at the feet of his chair like a kid growing up, and he gave me all his memorabilia, gave me the dagger that he took off a dead Nazi mayor, gave me his rifle that he carried, you know, gave me the things that his bayonet, the things that he found, treasures to him,
01:24:10.000And so I think sitting at his feet, you know, sort of is what...
01:24:15.000Planted that seed, you know, of the military.
01:24:18.000I remember, you know, he would tell me about the Green Berets and the Rangers and, you know, how they would paint their face black and they could move in the night and nobody could see them and they could, you know, just kill an enemy very quickly with their hands.
01:24:34.000And he would tell me stories about them Germans stretching piano wire across roads.
01:24:38.000And so as you come down in a Willie's Jeep, everybody's decapitated.
01:24:42.000They put it right at the height of your head.
01:24:44.000And so he told me about stories of coming across those places.
01:24:48.000And then we started mitigating it by putting a steel rod at the front of the Jeep to snap the wire before you hit it.
01:24:56.000And so he would tell me all these stories about...
01:24:59.000What he went through, and I think that's really where my interest came.
01:25:02.000And to answer your question, I don't know if I'm as passionate about anything, you know, besides my kids, my wife, and, you know, the U.S., the U.S., and what we,
01:25:18.000you know, and the Army that defends it.
01:25:20.000It's also got to be really hard once you experience something that is as intense as being embedded in combat, in a crazy war like what's going on in Afghanistan.
01:25:31.000It's got to be very difficult to find something that's going to ignite the spark to that extent.
01:25:38.000Yeah, and that's one of the things I'm concerned about, you know, really am.
01:26:07.000And you kind of have to be over there.
01:26:08.000It's not like you just send people over there, film it, and then come back and edit it.
01:26:13.000I can't because as far as right now, it was my working with those units, those platoons, and those leaders and those squads being there that made all the difference.
01:27:16.000You know, and ultimately, though, just so you know, like, the ground force commander at those units, at the unit level, if they don't want you there, there's nobody, no general that said you can come to Afghanistan is going to call up a ground force commander and say, you will take these guys.
01:27:33.000Because ultimately the ground force commander has his authority.
01:27:37.000He's the guy right there that's gonna, you know, that has to keep you alive, that has to protect you, that has to interact with you.
01:27:46.000And if he doesn't want you, you're gone.
01:27:48.000So it's really tough to, you know, to think about how I could produce this without me actually At least going there to open the doors and to embed people, right?
01:28:01.000And when you went over there the first time to scout, how many days did you go over there for?
01:29:42.000Lots of reasons to back out all along the process, but just pushed, pushed, pushed.
01:29:49.000Did you edit the entire thing yourself?
01:29:51.000Me and three story teams and my partner Jim, retired Colonel Rabin.
01:29:57.000And so what we did was we had three major embeds and we put a camera team, sorry, a story, an editor team, a story producer and an editing editor on each team.
01:30:09.000So each team only had to learn, say, 200 hours of footage.
01:30:12.000They didn't have to learn all 600 hours of footage.
01:30:15.000And so then each story producing team and editor would work with Jim and I, and we would craft the episodes.
01:30:28.000I came back from July 2014 from Afghanistan.
01:30:31.000I tried to sell this to different production companies, different networks throughout the entire summer and fall.
01:30:37.000Couldn't make a deal with any of them because they really didn't want me to end up producing it.
01:30:42.000They wanted to bring other people to take it over and just sort of acquire the footage.
01:30:46.000And so turned down some things that could have worked out for different deals and then went into February and had no, like, what am I going to do with this?
01:30:56.000I got a lot of money invested in this, and I've got a lot of hopes.
01:31:01.000I told the army I was going to get it out.
01:31:58.000Some of the soldiers, Joe, on Facebook have sent me messages and said, like, thank you for making this because now my wife and my family understand what I went through in Afghanistan.
01:32:09.000Or thank you, my son was in your series.
01:32:12.000Thank you for showing us part of his life.
01:32:16.000And to be honest with you, that was my goal the whole time, was to make something that the soldiers would look at and say, if you want to understand Afghanistan, Then watch the fighting season.
01:32:27.000Because it's the closest you'll get to war without going.
01:32:42.000The guys I was with were strong, motivated.
01:32:45.000You know, after 14 years of war now, We have some really experienced leaders that have been deployed multiple times and been, you know, in this fight multiple times.
01:32:56.000And so that generation of experience is teaching the next generation.
01:33:01.000And, you know, I just want people to understand that, you know, our military may be having, our army may be having budget issues.
01:34:17.000I heard, I think, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the chairmen said, you know, an all-volunteer army was never designed to be at war for 14 years.
01:34:29.000That's why you have conscripts and drafts and we don't need it because we have that many young people that are willing to go out there and do this and answer that call and show up.