Serving in Special Forces isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, becoming a Green Beret is rewarding because it’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, anyone could do it; but not everyone can – or should – be considered elite.
Retired Sergeant Major John McPhee is one of America’s most distinguished and experienced Special Operators. For decades he led America’s most lethal units in the Army’s elite Delta Force. The self proclaimed Sheriff of Baghdad, John tells it like it is and leaves nothing up to interpretation.
The Jedburgh Podcast, the Jedburgh Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation are proud to announce our partnership with the University of Health and Performance outside of Bentonville, Arkansas. UHP is dedicated to building the world’s most elite fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs out of our Veterans.
To kick off our partnership, John and Host Fran Racioppi climbed into the back of an armored Humvee to reminisce about the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what America did right, what we did wrong, and why the counter-terrorism battle is far from over.
John also shares his thoughts on the Army today, how to fix recruiting, the Israeli pager war, and why we must never forget that a Special Operator’s job is to close with and destroy the enemy.Watch, listen or read our conversation from a vehicle many of us spent too much time in. Don’t miss our full Veterans Day coverage from UHP. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
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John, it is an honor to have you on the show. It’s awesome to be here with you in such a cool spot, University Health & Performance. Matt Hesse and his crew here have done some amazing work out here, in the middle of nowhere, on a 500-acre farm. They’re working to provide fitness certifications as certified personal trainers and everything that goes into building a business around physical fitness for our veterans. On this Veterans Day, we had to be one small part of this big event they’re having. I want to talk for a bit about you and your career and the evolution of that. I think about where to start. You are the sheriff of Baghdad.
Thank you. I started in the Rangers 1-75. I was in SICO. Somewhere around five years in the Army, our major back then was like, “You’ve got to go give your experience to the big Army.” A guy in my platoon ended up on orders to Korea. I was like, “What in the heck? I don’t even want to go to Korea. All I heard was it was cold. I can’t be having that.” I need to be in control of my own destiny. Another guy in my company got back from the selection. I asked him, “What was it like, Special Forces selection?” He was like, “Honestly, it was nothing you couldn’t do every day.” I’m like, “I like doing stuff I can do every day.” I went to the Q Course. I was in the seventh group for less than a year.
You’re on vacation?
No, I did deploy. I did some mid-’90s SF stuff, but that stuff sucked.
What was mid-’90s? We’ve talked so much and we’ve been fortunate on this show to have all the senior leadership at Ustasa in the first SFC. We sat down before this with General Dietrich, who was the first Special Forces command commander and commanded special operations command Korea before he went on to some other roles. We always talk about what happened almost 9/11 and then after. What were the ‘90s like?
The ‘90s were messed up. No bullets, no training. There was no war and we had been fighting Vietnam for so long. Even the Q Course was still about Vietnam.
All the tactics and training.
Everything was about Vietnam. It’s a war behind. We weren’t training for new shit. We were training for shit the guys knew what to do, but that situation was over. We had no bullets and no money to go train. The Army didn’t have a budget. The ‘90s Special Forces sucked, in my opinion. Maybe there are guys out there that disagree. Bring them here and I’ll tell them they’re smoking crack because it sucked. We had no bullets. We didn’t train. We started to do a ton of paperwork in the 90s. ‘This was when the Army went from triplicate carbon copy to digital. As soon as we went to digital word documents, the paperwork ramped up.
It didn’t take up space. The files were in the computer.
Range control used to be like, “Go make coordination with them.” Now, it’s a thirteen-page document, a risk assessment. CQB is high-risk. It always has been. We were doing it before but we can’t do it because we didn’t get a signature.
What did your warrant officers do before there was a risk assessment that had to be read?
I’m not even sure what they did. I don’t know. All the warrants will hate me and send me hate mail. Fuck them. Should have stayed enlisted, dudes. They wouldn’t have had to do the paperwork. Your fault. I don’t feel for them. Choose your path and your retirement was better, too. The last joke’s on you. You get a better retirement.
You go through the ‘90s and come into SF. You’ve got this cataclysmic change on 9/11. Where were you? How did that change? I want to bring it up here because I’m going to ask you about Afghanistan.
On 9/11, I was upping my jump numbers to go to the tandem bundle course. Now, everybody does it. We were doing that way before people knew what it was. I was getting my jump numbers up, so I went out to the Raeford jump team. In the past few days, I would jump with the Black Golden Knights and the canopy accuracy teams. They go up to 1,500 to 1,800 feet. They get out and land. I needed the jump numbers, so we were doing hop-and-pops with those guys. Plus, it gets you pretty accurate at landing a canopy.
Those guys are impressive. We had the Golden Knights on, the commander and the sergeant major, at D-Day. When they talk about the precision of those things, it’s insane.
They’re legit. I was doing hop-and-pops. We were getting ready to load the plane when we got a stand-down order. That meant, “We’re shut down. Might as well go to the team room.” We went to the team to chill instead of being hot outside. The first plane crashed into the Twin Towers. It was like, “Some idiot crashed some little plane into the Twin Towers. That’s what it looked like on TV, the first one. The second one hit and the planes were shut down. I had to go back to Bragg that day.
Later, my squadron was already deployed overseas. Later that day, I had to do a VTC as I was the senior representative for my squadron. They’re like, “Where does A squadron stand on this?” Luckily, it was another squadron on alert. That commander went first and he’s like, “Sir, our men are packed and ready. Conduct combat operations anywhere in the world within the spectrum of one hour.” He gives this straight out of the Q Course manual. I’m like, “Do you want to go next? I’m 87. I was trying to get some jumps. I was about to go to Arizona.” I said everything he said.
My squadron was deployed somewhere else, closer to where we were going. “My guys are already deployed.” I added that part in there. He mad-dogged me later. “I’m listening to you and I went up to you.” I had a report. Who was it then at the time? Rumsfeld. I forget who the JCS was, but they’re like, “Don’t do anything. We’re trying to stand down and figure this out.”
When they closed the post, it would take sixteen hours to get on post. People would leave their cars and walk to work. A guy would show up at 2:00 like, “Where have you been all day?” “It’s 2:00. You’re late.” He’s like, “I walked from the gate.” “That’s 18 miles for you.” “That’s why it’s 2:00 and I just made it.” Guys had to walk on and put a lockpost down. The B Squadron guys got on gun trucks and were cruising around the compound.
It was like, “There’s a ghost plane out there. It’s going to hit us.” It was a crazy time. I’ve never been the guy to get caught in the spin. I’ll spin when this is real. Until then, let’s not do anything stupid. Those guys did a ton of stupid shit. I figured it would happen when it happens. Those first few days were so different than anything else I experienced.
The unknown when we think back to that. I want to fast forward to Afghanistan and what’s transpired. Somewhere around the tune of $2 trillion has been spent there. We lost almost 2,500 servicemen and women. We had 20,000 wounded, all components of soft, but primarily, our Green Berets and our Army Special Forces carried a lot of the load for those 20 years. We then left. When you think about that investment we made and the fact that we’re gone, what do you think?
Anybody who’s pissed about that didn’t read the fine print when we went in. This is where nations go to die. What did we think was going to happen? Are we better than that? That’s not going to happen to us? It was in the fine print and we all knew it. The day I went in, my first boot on the ground in Afghanistan, I knew this was going to be fucked up later. I’m not shocked at all.
There are a lot of people who are so upset.
They didn’t read the fine print. You should have looked at the original contract. Alexander the Great was the only one to hang on to it for as long as he did. He was way more brutal than we could ever be.
Think about the Special Forces mission. We’re going to go to foreign nations often under adversarial conditions. We’re going to identify portions of their military, whatever it might be, resistance forces, whatever the situation calls for. We’re going to arm, equip, train, and put them in combat operations, either beside us or on our behalf. That requires an incredible amount of trust that’s developed over a long period.
If we think about when we first went into Afghanistan and we linked up with organizations like the Northern Alliance, we had had some level of trust with them from fighting the Russians when we provided them with stingers, other ammunition, and weapons that helped them to repel and hold off the Soviets. We fast forward. We think about the reports that come out. Is Al Qaeda and the Taliban reconstituted in Afghanistan? Are they working together? We presume so. We know. We’re funding millions and millions of dollars a week as the US over to Afghanistan while they continue to train to have their ultimate goal of revenge on the United States. If we got to go back, what happens?
We’re going to whoop that ass. Motherfuckers can’t even do jumping jacks. They had six Blackhawks. They’re down to one cause Ahmed crashed the other five, thinking he could fly. Look, it’s a waste of our time and manpower. The reality is we’re going to go back and fight them. They’re going to have our equipment because our politicians generally don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and won’t listen to DOD going, “We can’t leave $60 trillion worth of shit in a fucking savage country.” You can’t do that. If they did leave all that shit, they should have EOD’d it or air-bombed it all into just fucking dust. My two cents. The only thing I would have left the Afghans if I pulled this country out of that, I’d have left them fucking gravel. The gravel we stood on. You can have that.
It will be interesting to see what happens if the reports we see are true if America’s next fight is with the terrorist organization that comes out of Afghanistan, which presumably it may.
It will never end.
Let’s talk about Iraq for a second. Why were you the Sheriff of Baghdad?
I was always in Baghdad, first off. A buddy of mine was a State Department guy. He ran the Crisis Action Center in the State Department. He made these shirts. On the front is the Baghdad Embassy logo. On the back, it said, “Sheriff of Baghdad, serving strategic policy, one citizen at a time.” No one in the State Department thought it was funny, so he ended up with a ton of these t-shirts he made as a joke.
Later, this guy quit working for the State Department and came to work for me. He was like, “Sergeant Major, what size are you?” I’m like, “I don’t know, double or triple X. What do you got?” He’s like, “I got a ton of t-shirts. Do you want them?” I was like, “Yeah, dude. Give them to me. I’ll wear them.” We wear civvies. I wear it for jujitsu and working out. We don’t wear uniforms. I started wearing these Sheriff of Baghdad shirts everywhere, sniper comps, pistol comps, three guns, and anything I was doing.
One day, someone asked, “Where’s that Sheriff of Baghdad guy you’re with?” It became a joke among a group of friends of ours. One of them is a business guy. He was like, “When I retired, if you’re going to do this, you got to be a business.” As he’s giving me this business talk, I have no idea what he’s talking about because I’m an Army guy. He was like, “If I was going to name a business, you’d be missing a big opportunity if you didn’t use that Sheriff of Baghdad.”
That’s the branding piece you don’t think about when you’re in the Army.
I was like, “What do you say?” He was like, “If you open a business, name it the Sheriff of Baghdad.” That’s what I did.
That’s your overnight success. We’ve talked about Iraq in a number of different episodes that we’ve had over the years. I went to Iraq three times. You probably went three times that. We look back at that conflict and you said about Afghanistan, “What did we expect when we set forth there?” That makes me think about Iraq. We went into that country and disbanded all of their legitimate forces. What’s your take on the decisions that were made early on in that conflict about disbanding the Army, the police, and every organization and then creating some semblance of chaos?
We fucked that up big time. You can’t do that. You can’t just get rid of the whole Army like that. Saddam was very meticulous. He might have been a fucking devil. His kids were fucking demons and evil, that’s for sure. However, Saddam had a good grip on the Middle East in general. He had a good grip on Iran. He had Iran in check. He had the Middle East in check.
What Saddam did as a super clever guy is he put different groups together. You got Sunni, Shia, and Kurds. He put the Shia in charge of the Sunni battalions. He mixed it up so these units were as powerful as they could be. He separated them by religion. We put all the Shia by the Sunnis so the Sunnis wouldn’t fuck with them and vice versa. He was very clever in picking these military commanders. He was very good at this. In my opinion, he was winning the war against Iran. All those years, no matter how many people they lost, he was keeping Iran in check.
Overall, the biggest mistake we could have made is to scatter those guys to the four wind because we’re too lazy to pay for it but yet we’re not paying anyway. I will tell you this. In general, we had enough money to buy where the fuck Saddam was without ever firing a shot. Why the fuck didn’t we spend that money? I would have rather given someone $1 trillion and gone got them than fight for 20 years, all those needless deaths of all the sons of this country. Saddam had a great hold over Iraq and we fucking blew that.
Why’d we go to Iraq?
Fucking WMDs. We never found them. They found tons of shit. All the chemical weapons in Syria came from Iraq. The smoking gun is out there. We’ve seen evidence of it. It’s just no one wants to admit it. With the nuke program, he had all the precursors and everything we thought he had. The smoking gun was found. The news never put it out. All the chemical weapons went right to Syria.
There are a lot of reports, even in open-source reporting, about the convoys leaving in the early days of the war as we were coming up from the South and getting out of there, going into Syria. We’ve been in Syria for quite a long time, continuing to fight ISIS. We were, by and large, pretty successful there. What was the difference between there and Iraq?
Honestly, the difference is Syria can never be tamed and it’ll always be a problem for us. We have to work with the people who are there. This is a British concept and this is what the British government does that we don’t do. A lot of times, the SAS guys wouldn’t come with us. We’ll go kill that motherfucker, but we’ll create the power vacuum. A lot of governments won’t do that. They don’t create the power vacuum. What they do is play all sides. When you play all sides, you end up being the ones needed.
This is a British strategy for the wars. What ends up happening in Syria is we play all sides. We’re super needed. In Iraq, we didn’t play all sides. We get rid of the Army. We try to create our own. Look what happens with the Afghanistan Army. They can’t even do jumping jacks. In those videos, they’re fucking terrible. That’s what’s going to happen when you try to create your own Army.
You talked about Iran. Iran’s front and center in the news as we’ve seen the escalation in the Middle East, you can’t even call it a proxy war anymore with Israel because they’re directly bombing each other at this point.
The proxy part, take that away. This is war.
Where does this go?
I don’t know, but I’m going to tell you this. Thank God, as a nation, we don’t have the balls to stop Israel early. What happens is every time the Palestinians kick off, we tell Israel, “Stop it.” Did the problem get solved? Under the situation of doing things right, this problem’s going to have to be solved. How does the problem get solved? The people that want everyone dead have to get killed. That’s how you win a war. Everyone says, especially in America, “We need to kill everybody.” Nazis tried that. That doesn’t work either. We can’t kill everybody.
Is there a diplomatic solution?
Probably, yeah, but we’ll never see that. That means two grown men got to eat crow as the head of their countries, sit at a table, and be like, “Boobie, you do this and I’ll do that.” Both of them are going to be drawing lines in the sand. Everything’s negotiable. War is only a failure of politicians and politics. I had a real high-level terrorist tell me one time that this war was never about religion. It’s about money and power. It’s all those guys want. It’s not about ideology or any of it. Isn’t that what politicians want here? Money and power? That’s the way I’ve always seen the war on terror. This is for money and power.
When you look across the Middle East and the conflict that’s going on, and I don’t disagree with you that money and power are a big part of that, what keeps Iran in check?
Nothing. I’ll tell you what’s kept them in check after Soleimani died is they don’t have the networking to pull off any big moves. That one guy has all the network. As soon as that guy’s gone, you have to rebuild the network. That network has been dismantled so many times. How potent is this network even though it has new leadership? It takes time for these to gain potency.
What do you think about the pager incident?
I loved it. I wish it was my idea. It was blowing dicks off from 3,000 miles away. I thought it was great. Am I not supposed to think that?
A lot of us felt that way. You’ve been around covert clandestine operations your career that we all have here. You think about the amount of planning that has to go into something like that. Planning is one thing. The technology to be able to do it. That’s all one component. When I look at it, I look at the balls to make the decision to execute that mission.
Let’s go. There are a million people with those balls here and every day, we got told no to clever shit. Let’s go, America, more clever shit in war. We’re the smartest motherfuckers out there. We’re the unconventional warfare guys of the century. They should have got that from us years ago. We all know the Israelis are pretty good at a lot of stuff. This should be our playback. I always wondered how Israel got all their intel on these guys. How do they know this shit?
I’m going to tell you this. When we went into Iraq or Afghanistan, there was no intel. Our agency was worthless, in my opinion. We’re doing operations to gain intel. I think for years, “How do these guys get all their intel? How do they know all this?” This is how embedded they are. Motherfuckers was AT&T that shit the whole time. They had all the messages. They didn’t even have to do the pagers. The fucking pagers, iPads, phones. I fucking love every minute of this.
They blow up later like, “This page is a little warm in my pocket.” The guy falls sideways. I loved it. The future should be filled with a ton more of this shit. I’d also tell America that we need to start doing assassinations again. No one respects us in the world. We’re bad neighbors and we proved ourselves to be bad neighbors. I’m not going to lie about that. The reality is bad neighbors that’ll come fuck you up makes good neighbors.
There’s a big change in the culture of the military. We see it in the news and all over the place. Where it manifests itself is in the recruiting numbers. One of the things that we know that you certainly know is that it takes a certain person, psyche, set of character traits, and mental capability to be able to do the job of a special operator, not only a special operator who may wear the Green Beret or Ranger tab but also to go to an organization like Delta. We’ll include the SEALs in that conversation.
You could take that back. We don’t have to include the SEAL.
I didn’t say they were on parody.
I’m excluding the SEALs. I want everyone to know that I want to exclude you guys. He’s nicer than I am.
It does take a certain type of person to go and do those things. What we’ve seen over the last couple of years, which we could credit down probably to about a decade ago, is a significant reduction in the recruiting capability, specifically the Army, but the broader military. What do you think’s attributing to that reduction?
I don’t know what would be contributing to it, but I would say this. We didn’t have an Army before World War II. We fielded six million men quickly. When America gets pissed off, you’re done. We see this drawdown Army. This happens every time. There’s no conflict. As soon as some shit sparks up, a new generation of kids is going to be like, “I want in on this shit.” I don’t worry about it at all.
Recruiting is always going to be an ebb and flow. Americans only want to be patriotic when it comes time to be patriotic. I don’t think there’s a lack of recruiting. This is always like the tide. It’s an ebb and flow. Sometimes, the Army has more people than they need. They’re giving out a lot of money to get scrubs, whatever the fuck they get. It’s the nature of things, history, and how it works.
I’m going to put some viewer feedback into the conversation, too. As we’ve done our tour of all the senior leadership within SOF, we also had Sergeant Major Weimer on.
Mikey was one of my new guys. I lived next to Mikey for many years. The only reason I live next to him is he moved.
He was great. It was a great interview with him and his perspective on it. They got the right man in the job right there as a Sergeant Major of the Army. A topic that comes up a lot from audience feedback is the Army’s woke.
It’s the Pentagon and all the fucked up officers. In World War II, there were 12 officers, for like every 100 men. In 2009, it was 72. Think about that. Where the fuck are these 72 officers at? They’re not in your company because you only have one captain. He’s a major in an SF company, and he only has so many guys. That isn’t a big lot of guys. Where the fuck are these officers? That would be my thing. The ruling class of the military has always been liberals. It goes back to the Civil War. If you read pre-Civil War books, people thought as a nation, we were too big to fail. The wokeness comes from these officers and schools ingraining them to be woke, but the reality is the Army needs to do two things only, kill the bad guys and break their shit. The rest is bullshit, in my opinion.
How do you re-institute that culture?
You get rid of the pussies up top and you stop layering, leveling the truth. You start saying it like it is. That’s how it starts, a culture of honesty. I was a troop sergeant major in Iraq. I had 56 guys under me every night. I had all races and colors. It didn’t matter. Do your job. Pull your weight. The guys did normally flawlessly, but none of that shit mattered.
I got to come back from war to an America that’s more racially divided than ever when I didn’t have any racial problems my whole life, including my whole years in the Army. It’s made-up problems. I never had any problems like that with any of the guys. We did our job. You do your job, I do my job. Let’s go. It doesn’t matter to the guys or me.
It’s fitting that we have the national anthem playing in the background. Chase Rice is back there. I’ve been able to talk to a lot of the senior officers we’ve had on the show and it’s funny because people ask me all the time, “You get to talk to all these senior officers.” We’ve started bringing in a lot of the sergeant majors and we’ve even talked to a number of the senior warrant officers to start getting their perspective.
The episodes and interviews we do with the sergeant majors do better than the ones we do with the officers. What I ask a lot of the officers is to talk about the relationship with their NCOs and the importance of the NCO Corps. I want to ask you that same question. When we talk about building a professional Army and we look at what it takes to do the things that you’re talking about and change that culture, it’s going to rest on the NCOs. What do we need from that next generation of NCOs to stand up and prepare for this?
One time it was, I got the first pick of new guys. My boss was like, “What guy do you want? Am I going to pick the best shooter? Am I going to pick the fastest, the strongest, and the best PT guy? Who am I going to pick? I get to pick the first one.” I said, “Walk him through my team room. I want the guy who says this place is dirty, and here’s why. That’s the smart guy. He’s clean and smart. I’ll train him to shoot. I can train him to free fall and do anything. If this guy’s the smartest guy out of the group, that’s exactly who I want.”
I’d tell any kids joining, “Be smart. You don’t have to be strong. You can learn strength. I learned strength. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t even know what RIP was when I was ripping it.” My point is I would tell anybody, “Try to be the smartest guy in the room because, generally, the smartest guy in the room is going to be the best commando.”
As you go through your evolution through your career, especially when we talk a lot about PTSD experiences that people have, I bring it up at this point because we’ve got a large portion of the GWAT generation of operators retiring. They’re either out, but it’s a timeline thing, more than anything else. 2001 was years ago. Everyone who’s hit the twenties coming out and those few who are sergeant majors or colonels and above are the ones who are going to advance. Everybody else is capping out and they’re going to be gone.
In the next years, those numbers are going to continue to degrade in terms of the GWAT generation. You have a lot of folks coming out. We’re not in a conflict, so we don’t have the military on the news every day. What we saw through GWAT was that it was easy to run a non-profit for veterans because you had to say, “I’m a non-profit for veterans. We need money and people threw you money.”
That dries up when you’re not in the news every day. We have other situations around the country in terms of economic policy and all that that have changed some winds. Almost more than ever, we have this large percentage of folks who have all sorts of physical and mental ailments who are coming into the veteran community. 1) How do we handle that? 2) What’s your perspective on this conversation around PTSD? How do we go about treating it?
First off, I don’t think it’s a veteran thing. It’s a human condition. You’re five years old. Your family gets run over by a train in front of you. Tell me that’s not PTSD. PTSD is a human condition in general. I don’t think it’s exclusive to soldiers. I personally do not believe in PTSD. I don’t believe in the symptoms. I believe with PTSD, you get stuck in the same chapter in your book and no book has one chapter. There’s shit that’s going to happen in your life that could be great. We don’t even know it yet, but unless we turn that page, we’re not going to get there.
I believe in TBI and a lot of other stuff, but PTSD is one of those things that there’s a lot of stuff to overcome. I’ve had every symptom. I’ve been driving home, forgetful, and cognitive function. I eat some avocados. I thought I had PTSD and then over time, with diet and exercise, I turned out that I had several other problems that I had to fix first.
When I talk to guys who are feeling the PTSD crunch from time to time, that’s normal for guys. My first question is always, “You’re angry every day. I get it. How many bottles of booze did you drink last night? Two? Cut it down to one a night. I’m not going to tell you not to drink. I wouldn’t do that. I love the booze. However, what I would tell you is don’t drink two bottles. You’re hungover. That’s why you’re an asshole every day.”
A lot of times, guys will try to fix it, not knowing what’s going on and they make it worse for themselves. I would tell everybody, “Cognitive functions, your brain. If you’re in the fog, this is brain shit. You can go in oxygen chambers. I do it all the time. Avocados and MCT oils. There are tons of ways to fix cognitive function. What I’m telling you is you start breaking this stuff down. You’ll see that this is a little bit fixable more so than the last chapter where my buddies are like, ‘Woe is me,’ and I have to go over there and smack them in the face. Let’s keep going.”
I’m not going to coddle anybody. I’m going to shoot it to you straight but at the same time, I think PTSD is curable. It’s something where you learn strategies of how to cope with what happens. A lot of soldiers lack cognitive functions because of several reasons like horrible diet and electrolytes. You could be severely dehydrated. Most of what I find is that food and diet would fix a lot of this for guys, but you can’t get them to do that until they understand that it would work for them.
People don’t say that because the VA, like me, wants you to take your Percocets and Oxycontin. What did they give me? Dilaudids. That’s what I get. After a couple of years of getting fat and taking all these pills, I’m like, “I’m done with these pills. I’m done with being broke. I’m done with being told I’m broke. I’m figuring this shit out, and here I am.”
If anybody takes it hard that I don’t believe in PTSD, I cured myself. You can cure yourself, too. Anybody can. It’s about turning the page. “I didn’t think I’d be here at 50.” “Me either. Welcome to the club. We’re all going to die. Don’t let it ruin your day. Can we move on? Let’s have a good time if we can.” People lose those simple kinds of insights. I’m not a big PTSD guy. I do believe I’ve had it. The VA says I have zero of it, technically. The reality is in most guys, it’s several different little things they can start to chip away at to get better.
A couple of things you’re doing are shooting and jujitsu. Why are they important in your daily routine? Why is something like jujitsu important? We talked about that a couple of times on this show with a couple of guests. I had a wisdom tooth pulled. It was on Saturday. On Sunday, I was working out at my house. My son looks at me and says, “Dad, I don’t understand. You had a tooth pulled yesterday, but you’re working out today.” I looked at him and said, “Adrian, “It’s because I’m strong.” If you’re strong in life, it makes everything else easier. I truly believe that. Jujitsu is one of those things.
I agree. First off, if I don’t wear myself out every day, like smoking myself, there’s a good chance at some point I will be an asshole. If I get worn out today, there’s a good chance I’ll be giggling the rest of the day because I’m too tired to give a fuck. I wear myself out every day. The next thing with jujitsu is a couple of things for old guys. I go to this doctor and he puts the blood pressure cuff on me. He’s like, “Holy cow, your resting heart rate is 60. You just walked into the room. How’s your blood pressure so good?”
I’m like, “I don’t know.” He says, “What have you been doing lately?” I told him, “I do forced joint manipulation.” He was like, “I’ve heard of this. This is good. Jujitsu.” If I told him I was doing jujitsu, the guy would tell me to quit immediately but I said, “I do forced joint manipulation.” He was like, “You look more mobile and healthier than ever.”
As an old guy, I use jujitsu as cardio, weight training, and conditioning. Believe it or not, jankin on my limbs has helped my mobility and flexibility. All of that leads to being stronger and more flexible. I can do more than ever. I started with Dilaudid. My first year of classes was six classes for a year. I do a 100 or 200. It’s easy. I do jujitsu. It’s my sanity.
I would tell everybody that every human being should be taking 1 hour to 2 hours a day on themselves at some type, whether you meditate, you don’t meditate, or you think about crazy shit, call it meditation. I don’t know. Whether you work out or do jujitsu, people have to do this. Have you ever been around working dogs? The Malinois need about 4 to 5 hours of work a day or they’re biting someone in the team room. I feel the same way.
I don’t think I’m animalistic in any way. It’s a human thing. When we’re worn out, we’re fit, happy, and healthy, when I’m a little tired, I’m as nice as you can be. If I didn’t get jits in a couple days, I’d be like, “What the fuck do you want?” I stay focused and sharp. I look at it this way. I try to learn something every day and I always want to learn new skills. I don’t care what they are.
That’s critical. Here’s what they tell you, John. I was an officer. “If you want to know the truth, go sit down with
the sergeant major.” I appreciate you sitting down with me, hopping in the back of this Humvee, kicking it back, and telling it like it is.
When we sat in the Humvee at first, it was a little cramped. I’m glad Matt invited me out here, the University of Health & Performance. I’m glad to share my story because I was the fat guy on pills. I was a 100% disabled veteran and I believed it. As soon as I stopped believing that shit, I figured out I chipped away at it to get better. That’s why I’m here.
When our service ends, we have a lot more to do.
Amen. Your book isn’t one chapter. If you get out of the service, your book may not even be halfway done. Turn the page. Move on. There’s great shit that’s going to happen, but you aren’t going to get there until you turn that page.
Thanks.
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