Former U.S. Army Green Beret sniper Tim Kennedy joins us to discuss the lessons learned from Afghanistan, the bravery, the sacrifices, and the painful realities of a war that has shaped a generation of soldiers. Join us as we explore the life of a man who s faced adversities most can only imagine, and how those experiences have shaped his views on leadership, national security, and moral obligations of our nation. Tim Kennedy is an entrepreneur and a passionate advocate for individual liberty, but his service to our nation doesn t end overseas. His work at the US-Mexico border has exposed him to a different kind of conflict, where the struggles of migration, border security and human tragedy unfold daily. In this episode, we not only honor Tim s military achievements, but also confront the hard truths he s encountered in war zones and at our border. Tim's life story is a tapestry of achievement, and his journey is a testament to the power of resilience, discipline, and versatility. When war breaks out, Tim runs toward danger to help. As a former special forces operator, he s been in the thick of the action, serving with distinction in Afghanistan. His firsthand experiences in this tumultuous region, particularly during the critical moments of the U-S. pullout, offer a unique and sobering perspective on the complexities of modern warfare and the consequences of foreign policy decisions. We ll discuss how to deal with the challenges faced on our own borders, and what it means to live up to the standard set by our own leaders. . Thank you to Tim Kennedy for joining us on this episode of the podcast and for his courageously fighting for freedom. - Tim Kennedy - Ben, Ben, Tim, Ben, Tim, and Ben, Thank you Ben, Thanks Good Looking Good - Thank you, Ben Gooding, and Joe Rogan, and Thank You, and God Bless You, God bless You, Good Morning America for listening to this Podcast - Thank You for Listening, Thank You For Listening to This Podcast, and for Your Support, God Blessings, Blessings and Blessings & Blessings! - Your Thoughts, Goodbye, Good Night, Good Luck, Cheers, Good Blessings - Eternally - Mentioned, - Yours Truly - - Alyssa, Maureen and Good Morning, Eternally, Yours, Amy and Good Luck -
00:00:00.000I have a journal here that every time I traveled overseas, I would write what was happening and what I felt.
00:00:09.000I said, I find this sad, pathetic, but ironic.
00:00:12.000Not only a few nights ago, did we track down and kill a man as he ran home trying to avoid us, maybe to survive, maybe just to live another day.
00:00:21.000And there his wife and his children saw him die.
00:00:46.000I don't know where morality is in war.
00:00:50.000Today we delve into the depths of military valor, the harsh realities of conflict, and the challenges faced on our own borders.
00:00:58.000Our guest is none other than Tim Kennedy, a name synonymous with courage and resilience.
00:01:02.000Tim Kennedy's life story is a tapestry of achievement.
00:01:05.000Both a distinguished Green Beret sniper and a UFC headliner, Tim's journey is a testament to the power of resilience, discipline, and versatility.
00:01:12.000When war breaks out, Tim runs toward danger to help.
00:01:15.000As a former special forces operator, he's been in the thick of the action, serving with distinction in Afghanistan.
00:01:20.000His firsthand experiences in this tumultuous region, particularly during the critical moments of the U.S.
00:01:25.000pullout, offer a unique and sobering perspective on the complexities of modern warfare and the consequences of foreign policy decisions.
00:01:32.000As the co-founder of Save Our Allies, Tim evacuated thousands of people from war-torn Afghanistan, Ukraine, and most recently, aided in the safe exit of American citizens from Israel under Hamas attack.
00:01:42.000Tim's an entrepreneur and a passionate advocate for individual liberty, but Tim's service to our nation doesn't end overseas.
00:01:48.000His work at the U.S.-Mexico border has exposed him to a different kind of conflict, where the struggles of migration, border security, and human tragedy unfold daily.
00:01:56.000Tim has witnessed atrocities that challenge the conscience, and his stories that shed light on the human cost of these crises.
00:02:02.000In today's conversation, we not only honor Tim's military achievements, but also confront the hard truths he's encountered in war zones and at our border.
00:02:10.000We'll discuss the lessons learned from Afghanistan, the bravery, the sacrifices, and the painful realities of a war that has shaped a generation of soldiers.
00:02:17.000Join us as we explore the life of a man who's faced adversities most can only imagine,
00:02:21.000and how those experiences have shaped his views on leadership,
00:02:24.000national security, and the moral obligations of our nation.
00:03:03.000I've been in special operations for nearly 20 years.
00:03:08.000You know, from ISIS to Al Qaeda to Taliban, I unfortunately have seen the terrors of what this species can do to each other.
00:03:17.000This was something entirely different.
00:03:20.000This, you know, going to some of the kibbutzes and talking to the police and hearing the stories of the things that they saw, seeing the videos and seeing the photos, you know, as we're trying to find Americans that were missing.
00:03:33.000Indescribable horrors occurred there, and it's something that's not being reported, something that's not being talked about.
00:03:39.000It was profoundly evil, the things that they did to those people.
00:03:44.000So, you know, since you were actually on the ground there and since you've come back and been in the media talking about this sort of stuff, it is amazing the narratives that have taken place around the conflict, the attempt to establish moral equivalence between what Hamas and, by the way, many civilians in Gaza did.
00:03:58.000I mean, civilians were crossing that border and taking part in the massacre and taking part in the atrocities.
00:04:03.000The attempt to create moral equivalence between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing
00:04:14.000What exactly is it that Israel is facing in the Gaza Strip?
00:04:17.000Why are they doing what they're doing and how are they pursuing that?
00:04:21.000Well, making out an insurgency is historically nearly impossible.
00:04:28.000And what we see Israel trying to do right now is identify military targets that are in Gaza,
00:04:36.000that are the Hamas terrorist organization, that not just, you know,
00:04:41.000we don't want to just leave October 7th as the standalone thing that has happened
00:04:45.000because that's intellectually inaccurate and historically wrong.
00:04:49.000Hamas has a long history of attacking Israel in Countless occasions.
00:04:58.000Not just intifadas, not just big assaults and attacks and the things that we saw on October 7th and terrorist attacks, but it has been a constant execution of this long plan of trying to incite Israel to lose in a propaganda battle.
00:05:16.000Israel is trying to do the right thing.
00:05:22.000They are trying to limit as many civilian casualties in a group with a group that are intentionally hiding in and amongst civilians in a populace that frankly is sympathetic to Hamas.
00:05:35.000When Hamas was returning from the attacks into the Palestinians into Gaza, what we saw was rejoicing in the streets.
00:05:45.000They were excited about the success of the attack.
00:05:48.000They were getting constant updates inside of Gaza.
00:05:53.000You can go and look at the Palestinians rejoicing at the death of 1,400 people, taking now 200 captives.
00:06:00.000The rape, torture, and murder of children and Holocaust survivors.
00:06:07.000It's atrocious, and Israel now has to go block by block, door by door, fighting an embedded insurgency, and they're trying to do it in a way that is acceptable to the world, and that's the problem right there, Ben.
00:06:20.000You know, if you read, you know, there's a ton of literature now that the question is the new rules of war.
00:06:27.000We're not going to be able to fight the state-on-state thing that we so desperately have been wanting to fight.
00:06:32.000You know, the last time America was truly A dominant aggressor in a war was in World War II.
00:06:41.000Since then, we have not really decidedly won any wars.
00:06:47.000And it's because of what's happening here in Gaza.
00:07:13.000And every time that you try to take a block, You're of course going to incur civilian casualties because the bad guys are hiding with the civilians intentionally and using them as human shields.
00:07:24.000So anytime an Israeli soldier tries to move to try and find an insurgent, of course there's going to be a civilian casualty because that's what Hamas wants and that then continues this revolving door of propaganda.
00:07:36.000So it's a real tough situation that Israel's in right now.
00:07:40.000We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
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00:08:18.000My wife and I, we've rewritten our will several times, primarily to make sure our kids are taken care of should, God forbid, something happen to us.
00:08:24.000I don't want the state deciding what to do with my kids.
00:09:51.000Nobody wants to see any of this stuff except for Hamas.
00:09:53.000But that puts Israel in a very difficult situation.
00:09:56.000I mean, what's amazing to me is you watch the footage and you see these aerial footage of Israel bombing targets and you see buildings wrecked, you know, for miles around and people are suggesting that this is some sort of attempt to kill as many people as possible.
00:10:09.000But the last statistic I saw is that for every bomb that Israel was dropping, it was killing about 0.8 people.
00:10:13.000Which is an extraordinarily low ratio.
00:10:15.000Israel's telling people to clear out of these areas.
00:10:17.000They're essentially hitting infrastructure in a lot of these areas before they send their own guys in on, as you say, a block-to-block basis, attempting to clear these areas and putting them at risk.
00:10:26.000I mean, Israel has complete air superiority.
00:10:28.000If they wanted to, they could simply bomb Gaza into the Stone Age or forward into the Stone Age, as the case may be morally.
00:10:33.000But what exactly would you be doing if you were in charge of counterinsurgency operations in this sort of situation?
00:10:41.000You said something incredibly accurate and understated.
00:11:08.000What you have is terrorists, and then terrorists have a pretty sophisticated network of enablers, supporters, advisors, communication observers, and all of this network supports the warfighter.
00:11:24.000So for every insurgent that is carrying a gun and going and doing war, you're going to find anywhere from 10 to 20 support personnel behind that single warfighter.
00:11:35.000Now if you look at the dense population that is Gaza and you look at the number of people that are in there and the family relations, so if you started building out a family tree to one freedom fighter and you then build out his support network with people not just aware but complicit in the activities of this terrorist, Use the Amesh network that almost connects every single person there to being a direct supporter of the terrorists.
00:12:12.000There's a whole bunch of women and children that live there.
00:12:16.000Yeah, man, we're talking about an insurgency.
00:12:18.000An insurgency does not wear a uniform.
00:12:20.000An insurgency does not say it has to be a military age man.
00:12:23.000When you look at the things that they're educating the young children in Palestine, they are radicalizing them just like they do in Africa.
00:12:31.000Just like they do in Eastern Europe, they get them as young as they possibly can, preferably illiterate, and they start feeding them these radical ideas of a violent extremist organization.
00:12:43.000And by the time these are eight, nine years old, they are actively supporting, in an active support role, the warfighter, the terrorist.
00:12:52.000And so being able to use The moral high ground of saying, like, this is an actual terrorist, you know, it's going to be a man between 18 to 45 years old, is just totally false.
00:13:07.000It's absolutely wrong and clearly factually inaccurate.
00:13:11.000You know, nobody's more dangerous than an 11 year old with an AK.
00:13:17.000And they have been training these young men and women how to fight.
00:13:21.000So, you know, not only do they have no allies there, In truth, the vast majority of the Palestinians living in Gaza are directly supporting, not just philosophically, but militarily, the terrorist organization that is Hamas.
00:13:35.000So what do you do in a situation like that?
00:13:37.000I mean, obviously, that's actually nothing new in the Middle East.
00:13:39.000Besides during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian government literally giving golden keys or
00:13:43.000metal keys to kids and sending them out to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War to get
00:13:52.000As you mentioned, it's not uncommon in Africa either.
00:13:53.000It's something that boggles the Western mind.
00:13:55.000It's something that we can't understand because we would never treat our own children in this
00:13:59.000fashion and we don't want to see other people's children treated in this fashion either.
00:14:03.000But that, as you say, it puts militaries all over the world in an unwinnable situation.
00:14:07.000The American military was in unwinnable situations in Afghanistan and Iraq specifically because
00:14:11.000of similar tactics that were being used.
00:14:13.000And this is sort of the gap between civilian leadership and military leadership.
00:14:18.000Civilian leaders are constantly, you know, kind of projecting their own perceptions about
00:14:22.000the world into the world of the military and then assuming that that's reality and it's
00:14:28.000And so they're creating rules of engagement for members of the military that are putting members of the military in dire jeopardy, in actual risk, in positions to be killed or wounded very, very seriously.
00:14:38.000This goes all the way back to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
00:14:41.000And long before that, the United States setting out rules of engagement and make it incredibly difficult for our military to operate.
00:14:47.000And this is true for Western militaries in general.
00:14:49.000So what exactly should a military, when confronted with this sort of situation, do?
00:14:53.000Is there anything that can be done other than what Israel is doing,
00:14:57.000given the fact that, again, there's two constraints.
00:14:59.000In an unconstrained world, the military could do what it would want,
00:15:03.000and it would look a lot like the caveman, horrific warfare that we saw
00:15:07.000throughout all of human history, up until the post-1945 era,
00:15:10.000which would include enormous numbers of civilian casualties, obviously.
00:15:14.000And it might end wars more permanently.
00:15:16.000I think one of the things that we've done as a society is we've made war more palatable in some sort of weird way by saying, well, it's a humane war.
00:15:24.000And so this has simultaneously made it easier for us to get into war and harder to get out of it.
00:15:56.000No, I think in the current political climate and the civilian understanding of the violence that is war, we are not equipped or capable of winning the war.
00:16:09.000You know, the definition of a war that Americans see, you know, like you want to see a guy in a gray uniform with like a swastika on his shoulder, right?
00:16:17.000And like Estes on his collar and like that's such a visible bad guy.
00:17:46.000I said, I find this sad, pathetic, but ironic.
00:17:49.000Not only a few nights ago did we track down and kill a man as he ran home trying to avoid us, maybe to survive, maybe just to live another day.
00:17:58.000And there his wife and his children saw him die.
00:18:23.000I don't know where morality is in war.
00:18:28.000We've been asking this question for a really, really long time.
00:18:32.000There is my strategic military brain that says you build out this target list, you identify every single supporter, you identify who is funding them, you identify the enablers, you identify every level of the support echelon that goes to the terror organization, and then you wipe them off the face of the planet.
00:18:58.000That would look like pushing Gaza into the sea.
00:19:02.000That would turn that place into a parking lot, specifically there.
00:19:07.000With Iran, that would be... Iran would have very similar tactics in where they have their military and strategic positions within the country.
00:19:17.000It would be unpalatable for Americans to have a war like that.
00:19:23.000So the two answers are What we would have to do, Americans and Congress would never accept for us to actually see a legitimate win.
00:19:32.000And if we did that, I don't think the world would ever accept America as the leaders of the free world again.
00:19:42.000We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
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00:20:45.000So there is one possible alternative that I'll suggest.
00:20:48.000You don't want to get your take on it, which is the thing that no one wants to do, which is extremely long term occupations in which you just assume that there's going to be a certain number of casualties.
00:20:57.000And that's just going to be the reality from here on in.
00:21:28.000I mean, the fact is that we have military bases literally everywhere all over the planet, and the places where those military bases tend to be are the most secure places in their respective countries.
00:21:38.000The kind of bizarre choice that we are faced with is a utopian world in which the United States retreats within our own borders and things don't get worse.
00:21:49.000So what's going to happen is the United States reverts to a sort of defensive posture, which we could do because we do have uniquely amazing geography.
00:21:58.000We're surrounded on two sides by ocean, on one side by Canadians and on the southern side by Mexicans, which is a pretty good position to be in strategically.
00:22:05.000Everything's going to get a lot more expensive.
00:22:07.000Everything's going to get a lot more chaotic.
00:22:08.000You're going to see a lot more human rights violations.
00:22:10.000If you don't like the stuff you see on your TV now, wait until the American influence is gone.
00:22:13.000And if you don't like the prices that you're paying right now at the grocery store, wait until those multiply by three, four, five times because all of the supply chains get broken due to the lack of dominance of the American Navy, which is really what guarantees the freedom of the seas.
00:22:26.000Things are much more expensive and much bloodier outside of our borders, but we have the moral purism to be able to say that we're staying within our own borders and we have nothing to do with any of it.
00:22:33.000And then choice number two is a very aggressive American posture.
00:22:38.000Doesn't mean we get into wars uselessly or that we don't assess the costs and benefits to begin by getting into wars, but there is a core recognition that once, if you want a place to be stable, that is not going to be a four-year commitment.
00:22:49.000That's not going to be a 10-year commitment.
00:22:50.000That's going to be maybe a 40 or 50-year commitment.
00:22:52.000I remember when John McCain was mocked for saying this with regard to Iraq in 2008.
00:23:07.000I mean, the reality is you probably have to occupy those places for longer,
00:23:10.000which maybe is an argument for not getting involved in those places in the first place.
00:23:12.000I can certainly see that argument, but there are going to be military conflicts
00:23:16.000where to even guarantee our own economic and strategic interests,
00:23:20.000we are gonna have to be involved there.
00:23:21.000And that's gonna require some long-term thinking from politicians that they refuse to do,
00:23:25.000especially if they won't do the short thing.
00:23:26.000The short thing is the ugly thing, and the long thing is an unpalatable thing to the American people.
00:23:31.000So that's the only available alternative.
00:23:32.000In Israel, I think, by the way, the long-term alternative is the only alternative available, because they're not going to do the ugly and horrific thing that you're talking about, you know, pave Gaza, push it.
00:23:41.000They don't want to do that, and they're not interested in doing that.
00:23:43.000Well, the only alternative is going to be what it was before Oslo, which is essentially a long-term occupation, military occupation of these areas.
00:23:49.000Hopefully they get some sort of help from the Saudis and the UAE and the Egyptians or whatever.
00:23:54.000But they're going to be there for the long haul, and that is not going to be cured anytime soon.
00:24:00.000For America to thrive, for us to be able to have commerce, we have to have security and stability in the region that we are trading with.
00:24:07.000And it's one of many reasons why we have loved having Israel there since 1948.
00:24:11.000They have provided a democracy and stability within the region that just had not existed in a really, really long time.
00:24:19.000You know, when you look at Germany and you look into Eastern Europe, you know, obviously we have bases in Poland.
00:24:25.000In 1945, when we started setting up our, and we have gigantic bases in Germany, not just strategic, but you know, if you're going to Ramstein or Landstuhl or Baumholder, you know, the largest, most complex hospital in the world is in Germany.
00:24:44.000And it's an American hospital and it's staffed by the most brilliant surgeons on the planet, doctors within the American military.
00:24:53.000The positions of our military bases in Africa now, also strategic, but also like geographically strategic, but also in positions that try to force stability and security in that region, which is a really difficult thing to do.
00:25:08.000What I hate is that our young men and women are the ones that have to go over and Sit there or fight.
00:25:17.000We have to go sit on ground and hold ground or we have to go and fight foreground to keep back these radicals.
00:25:25.000And there's no skin in the game with any of the politicians.
00:25:28.000You know, currently in Congress we have the lowest military service records of in the history of both the House and Congress.
00:25:37.000People that serve the military that are now serving in a political capacity and they're And they are not on a whim, but they're casually and not flippantly, but I think without fair regard, sending American or girls and boys out to fight these wars.
00:26:00.000I don't want to be in wars, but I do want peace in the world, and I do agree that I don't know another or better way to do it besides us forcing security and stability in a region, and that is us physically being there.
00:27:02.000You know, when President Biden said that we're going to be leaving Afghanistan, you know,
00:27:09.000I had this expectation of, hey, we're going to keep military, whoever controls the outer
00:27:14.000perimeter and controls everything that's inside of that perimeter.
00:27:19.000And so I thought we would keep our military bases in place and we'd start a slow, intentional downsizing of the military footprint on the ground.
00:27:31.000And then when they announced, they literally proclaimed to our enemies that we're just leaving, and here's the date that we're going to leave.
00:27:39.000We're going to be abandoning these bases, these very strategically placed bases, with a bunch of equipment that is very useful for war.
00:27:49.000And it's going to take years for the Taliban, if the Taliban even wants to, to try and take over that land.
00:27:57.000Myself and all of my friends were like, Are they idiots?
00:28:08.000You know, it was a rapid as fast as a vehicle could drive into Afghanistan from those neighboring countries was as fast as they as Taliban took land.
00:28:19.000They barely and in the Afghan Army's defense, even though they had been trained and they had been equipped, they have never fought without us.
00:28:31.000We had always advised and, in some instances, accompanied them.
00:28:39.000In this instance, we just said, hey, good luck, you know, buenos fuerte.
00:28:44.000And the Taliban rapidly took the most strategic portions, took our military bases, repurposed all the military equipment that was there to give them even more momentum to take even more land even faster.
00:28:58.000So by the time you get to Kabul in Mid-August of 2021, it's completely surrounded by the Taliban.
00:29:08.000The Taliban there, they're using night vision that they took from us, M4 that they took from us, M249s and 240s that they took from us, ammo that they took from us.
00:29:19.000And they are the most equipped that they have ever been in the history of the Taliban.
00:29:23.000And they now have the last place for us to get the remaining Americans and our allies out of the country.
00:29:32.000Everybody remembers the videos and photos of people holding on to wheel wells as the landing gear as a plane, a C-17 was taking off and watching people fall to their death.
00:29:46.000Honestly, thankfully that they fell because the other option was them to freeze to death or be torn apart by the wind speed of that aircraft.
00:29:56.000So the 90 or 30 second fall was far more humane than what they're about to experience.
00:30:04.000Then you have people trying to get out.
00:30:07.000You have women taking their babies and just passing them forward on the heads and hands of other people.
00:30:13.000They have women taking babies and trying to throw them over the walls, unaware that on the far side of the wall is Constantino wire.
00:30:20.000The babies are falling into the Constantino wire and bleeding out.
00:30:23.000You know, you see the Taliban executing people.
00:30:27.000So after they set up this outside corridor, every route into the HKIA was controlled by the Taliban.
00:30:34.000So if A special forces commando, an Afghan soldier that served with the American special forces, if he's trying to come in, they have a list of names.
00:30:45.000And if you're trying to hide your passport or all the things that would get you onto the base, those are also the things that will get you killed if you're caught with them by the Taliban.
00:30:54.000So the Taliban is executing people on the hoods of their car.
00:30:57.000You know, they're doing it in front of Americans to make sure Americans recognize that they're powerless in this instance.
00:31:02.000And the initial footprint on the ground was a small contingent of British military.
00:31:20.000And when I got on the ground, it was the most dissimilar to any airport that you can imagine, right?
00:31:29.000There's broken cars, there's burnt out cars, there's dead bodies, there's trash everywhere, and this is where we're about to do the largest evacuation of military personnel since Dunkirk.
00:31:40.000You know, like, this is, it was absolutely bonkers, Ben.
00:31:44.000I mean, like, you talk about Wild Wild West, that was savage.
00:31:50.000We'll get to more with Tim Kennedy in just one second.
00:31:52.000First, if you're a business owner and you need to grow your team, you have a perfect gift available to you.
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00:32:52.000So I want to talk about Afghanistan in a couple of layers.
00:32:55.000One is the strategic failure and one is the tactical failure.
00:32:58.000So sort of the grand strategy for Afghanistan originally was that there would be an occupation, that this would eventually transition into a democratic Afghanistan.
00:33:07.000That was obviously an ideological failure by the Bush administration and then follow on by the Obama and Trump administrations as well.
00:33:13.000It's a 20-year war in which the basic idea that this tribal country that had never had a centralized government was somehow going to resolve into a centralized government,
00:34:48.000An American, using the lens of the Western idea of capitalism and democracy and this beautiful constitutional republic that we live in, and thinking that other people are capable of that, there are some cultures that are not capable of that.
00:35:04.000There are cultures that gave human sacrifices of little children or prevented other people from having children or, you know, force people to cover their entire body and then beat them in the street when they don't do what they're supposed to do.
00:35:17.000Not all cultures are created equal, but then we think that this culture that we are at war with is going to accept the ideas that we want them to have to see the democracy in this area to provide the security and stability that we want to have there But I still can't understand that they're not capable of it.
00:35:35.000It's so sad that we're so ignorant in recognizing, and it's altruistic of us to be like, oh, all humans are equal.
00:35:45.000It says so in our beautiful founding documents.
00:35:50.000We might be created equal, but from that point forward, things can change within a society, within a culture.
00:35:56.000And the knowing and seeing the things that These people will do to each other.
00:36:04.000They're not going to be able to have the democracy that we so desperately want them to have.
00:36:10.000That was the first failure, is us being too dumb and too entitled and too proud and too human, too American, to know that Afghanistan will never be able to handle real democracy and a centralized, organized government, which is not possible.
00:36:30.000On the strategic side, Afghanistan has lots of value.
00:36:36.000There are minerals there that are now being mined by China.
00:36:41.000It's in a position where it's buffering the southern portion of Russia from access into the Middle East, which is useful.
00:36:52.000Obviously, it's immediately adjacent to Iran, which is useful from a military perspective.
00:36:59.000We knew that it would be very useful for us to have that piece of ground, that area controlled and secure and stable for us to be able to influence positively neighboring countries and to the north and to the west.
00:37:19.000Since we have left, as we can see, Iran has just been going Insane with supporting, financing, and pushing every single limit.
00:37:29.000And that has really escalated since 21.
00:37:33.000Since they knew that now all of our gigantic bases, Bagram, Kandahar, Kabul, those are all gone, right?
00:37:42.000Like what do they have to fear to the east?
00:37:59.000So, the other hot conflict that we're seeing in the world right now is the conflict in Ukraine.
00:38:05.000And there are a wide variety of perspectives on what the United States should be doing in Ukraine.
00:38:10.000Obviously, I think that the Ukrainian offensive has, by all accounts, stalled out at this point.
00:38:15.000I think that it was a noble mission to prevent Ukraine from falling to Vladimir Putin's invasion.
00:38:21.000By the same token, everybody knows what the end of this war looks like, and so the only question is how you get to the end of that war, which is Russia retaining large parts of the Donbass as well as Crimea, Ukraine being given security guarantees by the West to prevent another similar invasion by Russia.
00:38:35.000In terms of America's war fighting machine, I mean, the fact is that this has been a fairly
00:39:22.000I know every Ukrainian is throwing their hands up in the air.
00:39:27.000As Americans, how mad would we be if Mexico invaded and took a large portion of Texas, New Mexico, and we're like, all right, we're just going to leave it to them.
00:39:35.000Every Texan would be like, hell no, we're not.
00:39:37.000We're going to go out and exterminate every single one of them.
00:39:41.000When I was in Ukraine, we were all the way into Kharkiv.
00:39:45.000We're as far east as you can get in the front lines, and going through French Warfare.
00:40:10.000That land is going to cost so many lives and so much money to try and take back another war that's not going to be another type of war, a trench warfare that is not going to be palatable to the West.
00:42:37.000In California, and I watched a young woman in a polka dot dress walk out to the edge of a broken window and look down, I don't know, 50 stories and then look inside of a building and try to make the decision if it was better for her to burn alive or jump to her death.
00:42:56.000And that woman in the two towers had gone in to work early that day.
00:43:01.000She went in work early so she could get off in time to pick up her kids from school so they didn't have to walk home from school by herself.
00:43:08.000And her last act of conscious thought was trying to hold her dress down as she jumped to her death so she didn't burn alive.
00:43:18.000I get so angry now thinking back to that poor woman trying to one make ends meet in the greatest country in the world.
00:43:26.000And then to faced with the decision by Muslim radical terrorists, forcing her to have to make the tough decision of leaving her children as orphans.
00:44:36.000You know, in Ukraine, it was providing humanitarian aid to the last mile as far east as we could in the initial invasion.
00:44:44.000One of my friends, her colleague, was blown up in, he worked for Fox, Benjamin Hull, and he got blown up in Ukraine and his people and his crew died.
00:44:59.000He was dying in Ukraine and Save Our Allies was able to find him and Literally sneak him through an invaded war-torn country, peak conflict, get him across the border into a helicopter and into a military hospital in Germany, full circle here, and saves his life.
00:45:19.000You know, then most recently in Israel getting, you know, there's anywhere from 40 to 60,000 tourists that traveled to Israel from America.
00:45:30.000And Obviously Christians wanting to go see where Jesus walked and where he was baptized.
00:45:39.000Jews coming from all over the United States to go to the Promised Land and see the land that was that has been in their their blood from the beginning of recorded history and uh all those people were trapped you know as American and Delta and United and and every other person and every other carrier canceled their flights um what was left was us trying to find ways to get these people out um because I believe that a war was going to escalate way faster than it did in a way I thought it was going to be
00:46:12.000Um, a little bit feistier, a little bit earlier on.
00:46:15.000It got kind of stable after the attack.
00:46:17.000Israel doing a great job stabilizing the region.
00:46:20.000Um, so I was trying to get as many Americans off what I thought was going to be a total battlefield.
00:46:26.000The last thing that we want, and this is a difference between us and them, is we want our civilians off the battle space so that we can go and do the thing, which is destroy the enemy, right?
00:46:38.000We were in Sudan during the coup trying to assist, fortunately, the American military under the leadership of General Donahue created a corridor to get all those refugees out.
00:46:51.000We have very Brilliant special operations trained people and kind of expeditionary evacuation, extraction of people.
00:47:02.000And the same thing, the same mechanisms that you use to get somebody out are the same things that you use to get resources in.
00:47:25.000You know, this is the beginning of the war.
00:47:29.000We had had a very long, you know, Panama and Grenada and small conflicts, Desert Storm One, you know, which So in the military, in your uniform, you have your unit patch, and then you have your combat patch.
00:47:47.000The combat patch is the patch that you get when you deploy with that unit to combat.
00:47:51.000You could go to every one of the military bases that had combat arms there, and you would very, very, very rarely see any combat patches on anyone's sleeves.
00:48:08.000Those men that had come back, you know, the horse soldiers, there's a monument for them in New York, that riding to Afghanistan on horseback into battle.
00:48:38.000You cannot prepare people to go do the worst thing that our species can do to each other without it being very extreme.
00:48:45.000You know, Definitely not palatable to most people about what training should look like.
00:48:58.000You know, people died in training, people drowned and froze to death, and they got run over by vehicles, and there's no other way that you can prepare people for war without doing hard things.
00:49:09.000So, you know, Special Forces has, once you get selected, you know, you'll have, so in my class we had four or five hundred guys that went to selection that went to special operations preparation course and then ultimately went to special course of selection and there was 91 that made it to the end and 88 of them got selected and then that 88 are allowed to go into the Q course which is a one to two year long
00:49:36.000qualifying course to train that soldier in what the skills that they need to have to be a Green Beret.
00:49:43.000And, you know, from small unit tactics to guerrilla warfare, conventional warfare, learning the language, your target language for that your area of operation you're going to go work in, you know, sheer school, being interrogated, you know, going into concentration camp and, you know, getting the crap beat out of you.
00:50:02.000These You know, in the very end, that group of 88 people that were selected, I'm going to guess maybe 60 made it through, you know, so 60 out of 500.
00:50:14.000And it's the greatest job in the world.
00:50:17.000It's the greatest job to go into a place and to give them the thing that Americans value more than anything else, which is sovereignty and freedom, to be able to go into a poor area and help them dig a well, to go into a broken area that has been scared to death, you know, by By a VEO cell in North Africa, and you come and for the first time in their life, they get to have a peaceful night's sleep because you're on the ground there with them.
00:50:51.000We really take it for granted how wonderful this country is.
00:50:57.000My colleagues have time and time again had to go to places where it was the worst on the spectrum of humanity.
00:51:03.000You know, America's way over here and then there's other cultures that are way over here.
00:51:08.000So then you get to come back and truly appreciate, you know, your, your wife never looks more beautiful than when you first come back.
00:51:14.000Your kids can't be more sweet than the first time that you come back.
00:51:17.000And it is, it is the most magical thing to, to come back to this amazing place that we go and fight for.
00:51:23.000So how do you deal in the moment with the stresses that you're dealing with on the ground?
00:51:27.000How do you deal with coming face-to-face with evil?
00:51:31.000Not only the evil of the person you're fighting, but the evil of war itself.
00:51:35.000How do you deal with that in the moment, and how do you deal with that later?
00:51:37.000Because most of us, I mean, obviously, haven't served in the military, never have to come face-to-face with that sort of stuff, never have to deal with the readjustments or the adjustments in the moment.
00:51:45.000Yeah, I think preparation, no surprise here coming out of my mouth, that's hard work and discipline are the two things that, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
00:51:56.000I would rather do all the things to make sure that I'm a healthy, spiritually well, intellectually capable, morally strong, ethically founded human, so that when I have to go and do my job, I'm making the most rational and just decisions I can in the time.
00:52:20.000Nobody should have to decide if I'm going to engage a machine gun when I know And I know this firsthand.
00:52:27.000As I walked up to a door and the door starts getting shredded with machine gun fire, my friend Mike Goble comes to me back and saves my life.
00:52:34.000As we pick open the door, we see a PKM machine gun sticking out of a window.
00:52:38.000I throw a grenade through the window, right?
00:52:52.000Did I make absolutely the right decision in everything leading up to that, as best that I could with the information that I have?
00:52:58.000Could I go and pull that grenade back that I just threw the moment I hear it go off, and the only thing that I hear is the crying and the anguish of babies and women?
00:53:57.000Right now, unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a three-day water-only fast to try and get a bunch of gross stuff out of my body and make sure I'm healthy so I can live long and be there for my grandkids.
00:54:09.000All of these things, like I'm being a faithful husband.
00:54:12.000This liquor cabinet behind me, this is for guests.
00:54:15.000I've never touched a single drop of any of the things that are in there, but people send them to me, so I take them and I share them when I have friends that come over.
00:54:23.000I try to be a good man, and I think being a good man enables me.
00:54:31.000Sure, there's pain and I have friends that I can talk to about it, but those are the things that enable me to deal with the stresses that I experience.
00:54:40.000And, you know, I can cry with my wife.
00:54:42.000I can get on a flight and watch a sad movie and I'm like crying like a baby.
00:54:46.000Somebody looks over at this 220 pound burly dude with the square jaw that mostly has killed people his adult life.
00:54:58.000And then on the other end of that spectrum, you know, if you're not sleeping and you're drinking and you're smoking or you're doing any substances, you're fighting with your spouse or cheating on your spouse.