May 31, 2021 - Bannon's War Room
44:55
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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Well the virus has now killed more than a hundred people in China and new cases have been confirmed around the world. | |
| So you don't want to frighten the American public. | ||
| France and South Korea have also got evacuation plans. | ||
| But you need to prepare for and assume. | ||
| Broadly warning Americans to avoid all non-essential travel to China. | ||
| This is going to be a real serious problem. | ||
| France, Australia, Canada, the US, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, the list goes on. | ||
| Health officials are investigating more than 100 possible cases in the US. | ||
| Germany, a man has contracted the virus. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| Japan, where a bus driver contracted the virus. | ||
| Coronavirus has killed more than 100 people there and infected more than 4,500. | ||
| We have to prepare for the worst, always. | ||
| Because if you don't, then the worst happens. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to our Memorial Day Special 2021. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice, John Frederick's Radio Network, everybody that helps the War Room apparatus put on these specials that we try to do on Veterans Day, we try to do on Memorial Day, Fourth of July, all of it. | ||
| Today, this weekend, and the shows we have, and of course the special, we try to honor our sacred war dead. | ||
| This is not about service. | ||
| We have plenty of time to talk about that on Veterans Day and other days. | ||
| But today is about the, I think, on the highest civic holiday we have. | ||
| It's not the 4th of July, to me, it's Memorial Day. | ||
| in honoring our dead. I want to bring in now Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent out in Washington. He's actually decided to get involved in politics, I think in Washington 3. He's running against an incumbent there as a Republican. | ||
| Chief Warrant Officer Kent, you deployed what, 11 times in your Army career? | ||
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unidentified
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Correct. I was very privileged to serve 11 times in combat for this country. | |
| Talk to us about any of your comrades, any of your fellow warriors that gave the ultimate sacrifice. | ||
| Give us any memories you've got of that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| So I joined the Army in 1998 before the wars kicked off. | ||
| So I had a couple years in. | ||
| I started out in Ranger Regiment. | ||
| A very good friend of mine, Jay Blessing, lost his life fighting in Afghanistan in 2004. | ||
| And so Jay was An absolutely magnetic personality with a contagious smile. | ||
| A great warrior, dedicated friend. | ||
| Lost his life fighting in Afghanistan. | ||
| I was in Iraq at the time when I learned of him being killed in action. | ||
| He was a great patriotic American from here right in Washington State. | ||
| He always wanted to be an Airborne Ranger and join the Army to do just that. | ||
| As the years went on, the losses just continued to come as the deployments kept coming. | ||
| Shortly thereafter, I lost two good friends fighting in Iraq to my brothers from 5th Special Forces Group in 2004. | ||
| Aaron Holliman was killed by an IED out in Anbar, Providence. | ||
| And then Mike Tarlofsky was killed in a pretty hellacious gunfight in Najaf in 2004. | ||
| He was the team leader of that team. | ||
| He was killed and another good friend of mine was Very wounded in that engagement. | ||
| Shortly thereafter, on another deployment, we lost two of my teammates in 2005, Brett Walden and Bob DiRenda. | ||
| Brett was a Green Beret and he was a mentor to me. | ||
| On a Special Forces team, you have two individuals who have the same skill set. | ||
| One's a senior, one's a junior. | ||
| Brett was my senior. | ||
| He was killed manning a machine gun position in a Humvee. | ||
| The driver of that vehicle was a member of the Kentucky National Guard, a citizen soldier who volunteered to come on that deployment. | ||
| He was killed as well in that engagement. | ||
| And then after that, a really good friend of mine from Ranger Regiment was killed on that same trip going after Al Qaeda and Iraq members. | ||
| He was tackled by a suicide bomber. | ||
| He got in between the Suicide Bomber and the rest of the Rangers, and him and John Bren was also killed with him. | ||
| Shortly thereafter, a mentor of mine, Tony Yost, who put me through the Special Forces Weapons Course, was killed by a Suicide Bomber in Mosul, Iraq. | ||
| He was chasing a terrorist into a house. | ||
| The house was rigged to explode. | ||
| The house imploded on him, but Tony saved many members of his team that day and took out I'm kind of a cell leader in that engagement. | ||
| As the years went on, the unfortunate losses just kept coming. | ||
| 2007, we lost Captain Ben Tiffner. | ||
| He was killed by a uranium-made explosive device while he was convoying in Baghdad later on in that trip. | ||
| We lost many other great Americans just as the years went on. | ||
| It just kept coming and coming. | ||
| A good friend of mine, another mentor, a Navy SEAL named Brian Hoke gave his life many years later. | ||
| He had left the service of the military and was working as a paramilitary officer for the CIA when he was killed in a pretty savage gunfight in Afghanistan. | ||
| Um, just recently I lost a friend, a few friends who suffered from injuries on the battlefield and eventually succumbed when they were back in the States. | ||
| Sage Park, Todd Lowe, they both had complications that developed into very lethal cancers from toxic exposures. | ||
| We're more than confident that that's what happened. | ||
| The issues with burn pits and just everything that we get exposed to. | ||
| Overseas so that's I just a handful. | ||
| I know I've forgotten some not forgotten, but just failed to mention. | ||
| There's so many So here's the you know, we're talking about In the first hour and you know either World War one highly concentrated in what 18 months or World War two Incredibly lethal, but three three and a half four years how What do you have to do mentally? | ||
| And this is why I think this younger generation, you know, Mo and you and Joe Kent and all these, that don't get credit. | ||
| When you just hear that and you go back to when you came in in 98, but in 2004, you lose your first, you know, your first friend. | ||
| And here we are in 2021. | ||
| We're still not out of Afghanistan. | ||
| We're really not out of Iraq with no plan to really get out of Iraq. | ||
| And those people are just as in harm's way as at the height of the fighting back in three and four. | ||
| What do you have to do as a unit? | ||
| And what do you have to do continually as you go back to these deployments? | ||
| The people understand that we're not all going to come back out of here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that there's no definable, you know, we're not hitting the beach at Omaha and we know where you've got to take Berlin. | ||
| Or we know we're going to go to Belleau Wood and we're going to drive them back to the Rhine and we'll end this thing. | ||
| When there's no end in sight, it's just a continual deployment. | ||
| I remember, Mo, when you were at Fort Lee, I think it was, I met your non-commissioned officers, your NCOs. | ||
| 10, 11, 12 combat deployments, right? | ||
| It's just over and over and over again. | ||
| So, Joe, walk us through, what do you have to do to motivate As a Chief Warrant, what do you have to do to motivate young people? | ||
| How do they have to come and comprehend that you're going to have death, you're going to have tragedy, they're not all coming back, but guess what? | ||
| We're going to return and we're going to come back again. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
|
unidentified
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First and foremost, the volunteer force that we have nowadays, especially the generation that came in knowing that they were going to combat and asking for that, they've already committed themselves because they love this nation. | |
| And it's an amazing thing to see in our armed forces. | ||
| People come from all walks of life, all socioeconomic classes, and come together and want to go fight because our country is the greatest country in the world. | ||
| But as far as the grind goes, it does become that and you really rally around your tribe. | ||
| And for me personally, even though I had major issues with the way that our foreign policy was being conducted and harbored a lot of resentment for the permanent ruling class that had no issues of sending us off to war for no clear-cut objective, even though I felt that way, I didn't feel that I could essentially get off the ride and get out of the fight knowing That other young men and young women would have to go in my place. | ||
| So I had to steel myself and say, hey, look, I'm going to take the little bit of knowledge that I have that I gained on all these trips and try to impart them on the men and women who are volunteering to go so that maybe I can bring more of them home than we actually lose. | ||
| And that becomes what binds us. | ||
| And so deployment after deployment, you get more experience, you suffer some losses, but that just steals your resolve. | ||
| And you want to keep going back over and trying to make a difference. | ||
| But also, even when you realize, like I did many years in, that the objective that we were over there fighting for just wasn't attainable, or there wasn't a clear-cut objective, that it was your responsibility to fight for the men and women on your left and right. | ||
| You were fighting for your tribe. | ||
| What sent us there was the motivation to fight for our country, but what kept us going back was our commitment to each other, because we knew that no matter what, we were going to get sent back into the fray. | ||
| So most of us that go back over time and time again, we just don't feel comfortable letting someone else go and fight for us. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Patrick, in your books too, these elite units, you can tell that this is the thing. | ||
| Joe, I want to pivot now. | ||
| You're a very unique individual in that you're a gold star husband. | ||
| I want to talk about the sacrifice of your wife, who was also a warrior. | ||
| Can you tell us about what happened there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So my late wife, Shannon Kent, was killed fighting ISIS in 2019. | ||
| And so Shannon is a true American hero, American warrior. | ||
| She enlisted in the United States Navy. | ||
| Right after 9-11, Shannon's a native of New York. | ||
| She's from an amazing family. | ||
| Her father's a police officer, mother's a teacher, her uncle was a New York City firefighter. | ||
| So on 9-11, when the towers got hit, her father and her uncle were responders to Ground Zero, and that inspired Shannon and her brother Who's a year younger than her, who's still on active duty in the Marine Corps, to go and do what many young Americans did and find a recruiter and say, hey, send me, put me in. | ||
| I know I can make a difference. | ||
| Shannon knew that she had a knack for languages. | ||
| She was a true polyglot in every sense of the word. | ||
| She self-taught Spanish and French and Portuguese. | ||
| So she said to the Navy recruiters, hey, I can learn Arabic. | ||
| I can do this. | ||
| I can go commit to my country and give back to my country this way. | ||
| So she Got exactly what she asked for. | ||
| She went to the Defense Language Institute, learned Arabic in 18 months, and then gunned first thing smoke into combat. | ||
| And she went to Iraq, earned her way into working with a special operations task force, which was pretty unique for the time because women weren't allowed to go directly into combat. | ||
| But As we all know, the war on terror doesn't have any clear-cut battle lines. | ||
| So women were fighting on the front lines of combat, it just wasn't officially codified. | ||
| So women like Shannon were kind of on the forefront of working their way into the front lines. | ||
| Of the Global War on Terror working in special operations. | ||
| So due to her linguistic skills, she became one of the better hunters of humans. | ||
| She was trained as a cryptologist, so a signals intelligence collector, but then Shannon had a knack for talking with people. | ||
| So she got pretty good at talking with local Iraqis and getting information out of them. | ||
| So she became part of a specialized Navy SEAL outfit that combines Navy SEAL intelligence folks and then the actual Navy SEALs. | ||
| So she would go out and help hunt down terrorists, usually using her intelligence skills. | ||
| I met her briefly once in 2007 when she was briefing my Special Horses team on the location of a terrorist. | ||
| Met her for about 10 minutes, never saw her again until 2013 when we both ended up at a specialized unit in the military that combines all kinds of special operators and intelligence folks to do a pretty unique mission for this country. | ||
| About a year later we got married, started growing our family, we had two small children. | ||
| My wife had already deployed at that point four times to combat, three times to Iraq during the height of the surge, height of the violence with Navy SEAL teams, and then she did a Deployment to Afghanistan, where she was living in an Afghan village as part of a SEAL platoon hunting down terrorists. | ||
| So she was already very battle-seasoned by the time that I met her and we got married. | ||
| In late 2018, she went back over to Syria with the Special Operations Task Force to go help defeat the territorial caliphate. | ||
| She was in Syria trying to hunt down some terrorist cell leaders in 2019 when a suicide bomber infiltrated their perimeter, killed her and three other great Americans that day. | ||
| John Farmer at Green Beret from my old unit, Scott Wurtz, a former Navy SEAL working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then Ghadir Taha, a Syrian-American linguist who volunteered to go back over to her native country to help bring some stability and give back to her country. | ||
| I tell you what, we're going to take a short commercial break and we're going to return with Chief Warrant Officer Kent to talk about what the impact it had upon him and his family, how he found out about it, his wife, an American hero who died in combat in defense of her country. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're also going to come back with Patrick K. O'Donnell. | ||
| We're going to talk about the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| It's the 100th anniversary. | ||
| of the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| It will be commemorated on Veterans Day, but this is Memorial Day 2021. | ||
| Obviously a big ceremony over Arlington National Cemetery today. | ||
| Okay, a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll be back with Joe Kent on his story and his journey next in the War Room. | ||
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unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| Welcome back to our Memorial Day Special. | ||
| I want to thank our sponsors for assisting us in putting on, also Real America's Voice, John Frederick's Radio Network, all of our distribution partners. | ||
| I want to return now to Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent, talk about the death of his wife, a warrior who died in combat in Afghanistan, Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent. | ||
| Joe, how were you informed? | ||
| How did you find out about this, and then what impact? | ||
| How did you tell the children? | ||
| How did you find out that the Senior Chief had died in combat? | ||
|
unidentified
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Pretty, I think, unconventional notification process. | |
| I didn't have the typical knock on the door. | ||
| I was I retired from the military in 2018. | ||
| I retired on a Friday and then swore in at the CIA on a Monday as a paramilitary officer. | ||
| So I was actually overseas myself when Shannon was killed. | ||
| So Shannon and I were in contact because we both had, we could communicate more directly on a classified network. | ||
| She told me that she was going to Manbij that day and she'd be kind of out exposed. | ||
| So, you know, I said, hey, just text me when you're, When you get back. | ||
| Um, I got back from doing my mission for the day and the individual that I was working for, an old friend of mine from Special Forces said, Hey, come here real quick. | ||
| I got to talk to you. | ||
| And I didn't know what he was, you know, what, what was that? | ||
| I thought something had gone on that day. | ||
| I didn't even really think it involved Shannon. | ||
| He, he just gave it to me really frankly. | ||
| He said, Hey, look, there's been an attack in Manbij, Syria. | ||
| There's four American dead. | ||
| Two of them are female. | ||
| We don't have confirmation yet. | ||
| Do you know, do you know where Shannon is? | ||
| Um, and I knew she was in Manbij, um, and there's only so many women that, women that are in this line of work. | ||
| So I, you know, spent the next frantic hour trying to get a hold of her. | ||
| Um, but then we had confirmation from the Special Operations Task Force that it was, that it was Shannon. | ||
| So I, uh, I had to go then decide how I was going to tell her, her family and how I was going to get out of the country that I was in. | ||
| Cause I was over in a third world country. | ||
| Um, those arrangements were made for me, but I felt that I needed to call Shannon's parents and tell them before they just got a knock on the door themselves. | ||
| So I made the most difficult phone call of my life was to Shannon's mother to tell her that her daughter had been killed. | ||
| So from there, I kind of a whirlwind. | ||
| I flew home and, you know, my two sons when she was killed were very young. | ||
| They were three and one. | ||
| So I had to tell them as best as I could. | ||
| I sought some professional help for that. | ||
| I talked to a child psychologist and got some advice, but you know, the boys are, kids are resilient. | ||
| We have Shannon's pictures up kind of everywhere throughout the house. | ||
| We talk about her every day. | ||
| I'm working on a book right now about her life so that's something the boys can have when they get older and they can really get to know their mother through that book and through the memories they have. | ||
| So that's my goal. | ||
| One of my goals is preserving Shannon's legacy and telling her story as much as I possibly can because I think that's the best tribute that we can pay to our fallen. | ||
| So that's my That's how I found out that Shannon was killed and, you know, kind of where we're at right now. | ||
| Let me, let me ask you a mystery. | ||
| When Afghanistan, she actually volunteered, this was the war, the war to actually destroy and basically crush the caliphate and to crush ISIS. | ||
| She volunteered for this to go back on another deployment to go into this fight? | ||
|
unidentified
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She did. | |
| So it's a little bit of a, Longer story, so Shannon had wanted to be able to put the family first. | ||
| She had attempted to go into psychology because she was very aware of the growing epidemic of mental health in the military. | ||
| She was accepted into a PhD program that the military has there in Bethesda to become a psychiatrist. | ||
| There was a Catch-22 issue with the military paperwork. | ||
| They They said that she wasn't fit to go become a doctor because she had had cancer before. | ||
| She had thyroid cancer cut out. | ||
| She only missed two days of work, had been cancer-free, but technically... | ||
| She was ineligible to be commissioned as an officer to go from officer to enlisted because of having cancer previously. | ||
| So the Navy deemed her unfit to become an officer, but she was still physically fit enough to go deploy to the front lines of Syria with special operators. | ||
| So Shannon had every opportunity to get out of that deployment if she wanted to, but she knew, like I said, Describing how I felt about going to combat continually, she felt the same way. | ||
| That, hey, this was her duty. | ||
| This is what she trained her entire adult life for. | ||
| ISIS was a real threat. | ||
| The Caliphate was truly evil. | ||
| She could go over and use her skill set, especially her knowledge of the language, the culture, and how to hunt terrorists. | ||
| To really go make a difference because she started her fight back in 2006 to point of combat and by the time she deployed it was it was 2018 so she was a seasoned warrior so she knew that her her role that her nation needed her to do was on the battlefield so she enthusiastically went forward to go fight. | ||
| We always on our specials try to keep politics out of this, and we will today, but it's one thing we got Patrick K. O'Donnell, one of the great, if not the greatest, combat historian we've got living today about the details of these elite units. | ||
| If you go back and look, even in the revolution where, you know, there's one-third Tories, one-third Patriots, one-third in the middle, and there's always this discussion, was it 3% or what percent was it that actually fought? | ||
| We've gotten to the point now from World War I and World War II, even Korea, even Vietnam, that's a narrow, as we've gone to an all-volunteer force, it's a narrower and narrower window, or not window, of parts of the country that are actually involved in this. | ||
| And so many parts of the country have relatives, I mean, Moe's got six relatives that are buried in Arlington National Cemetery from the Civil War. | ||
| Fighting with MacArthur in the Philippines and all that. | ||
| And you come from military families, maybe not career military families, but have a tradition of serving. | ||
| It gets smaller and smaller. | ||
| And Joe, the question I got, is the nation, like today when we do Memorial Day, one of the reasons we love doing the special, we did the special this previous Saturday with the generals. | ||
| People say it's kind of like the kickoff to summer it's it's let's go to the beach and that's that's it's very Americana that's perfect but we've kind of lost sense of what the holiday is it's about honoring those that have made the ultimate sacrifice and as now you're getting to such a small part I mean you talk about Motivating people over 10 and 11 combat deployments. | ||
| I mean, the reason they're doing 10 and 11, the non-commissioned officers that report to you, the reason they're doing that, that there's not a lot of people signing up to volunteer to do this, right? | ||
| It is a fairly limited amount of people. | ||
| So Joe, just as you've gone on these over and over again and come back to the country, do you think the country's forgotten And that's one of the reasons they're left over there, that the country's forgotten what the sacrifice of this and what the purpose of this is, and it gets to be a community of people that have volunteered and of warriors, and they speak a nomenclature and have an esprit de corps, as you saw, Patrick, when you embedded with the Marines in Fallujah. | ||
| They have an esprit de corps and a great tribe. | ||
| As you said, Joe, you fight for your tribe. | ||
| Is the tribe now So, kind of, it's separated from the rest of the country that the country itself doesn't understand and appreciate what that sacrifice is, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think having a volunteer military is a real double-edged sword that we need to closely assess and monitor because having a volunteer force, you get these professionals who want to go apply their trade. | |
| So they are eager for a fight. | ||
| I was eager for a fight. | ||
| But then you also get this ability to continue to use this volunteer force without having an impact on the American people. | ||
| So the American people are very, very isolated from the sacrifices and the real true cost of war. | ||
| And because the American people are isolated from it, then our elected political leaders, they're not really held accountable either for these wars just going on essentially endlessly become, you know, the endless wars. | ||
| It's cliche to say at this point. | ||
| But that's exactly how it's happened. | ||
| It's just failed to be a priority for any elected official to get us out of these conflicts, even though it's been hard to articulate exactly what our clear-cut military and national security objective is, even when it's actually become very detrimental to our national security. | ||
| As a whole, the American people just have a hard time seeing that. | ||
| And then it's created this entire industry. | ||
| You can go into the military industrial complex, but then it just also creates this. | ||
| The American people really can't ask hard, informed questions about the military, about war, because it's so foreign to so many of them. | ||
| So I think even some political leaders who are very motivated to reign back the endless wars or be more responsible with our national defense. | ||
| They don't really even know the right questions to ask because the service and the sacrifice and just the nitty gritty is just so far removed. | ||
| And then within the military, within our own culture, I've only been removed from it for a couple of years now, but we're our own isolated little tribe of people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Very many service members who serve in the Global War on Terror who just did one tour. | ||
| I mean, there's a handful of them here and there, but the old model of you go and you do your tour and you come back home, that's foreign. | ||
| The norm for us, and this always sounds weird, the norm is you're going on a deployment every year or two years, or you're in the process of training for that deployment. | ||
| It has become an absolute recipe right now for endless war, this volunteer force that we have. | ||
| And so that's something I think elected officials have to really carefully thread that needle and know that they have this at their disposal, this great American volunteer, all volunteer force, but to not have responsible civilian oversight, it is literally the recipe for perpetual conflict. | ||
| We've got about a minute, Joe. | ||
| Is this what motivated you? | ||
| You could have come back, obviously with the tragedy in your family, the two young boys, to go get a job somewhere and just focus on the family. | ||
| Is this what motivated you to actually now return to volunteer essentially for service in a political capacity? | ||
|
unidentified
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So my wife was killed one month after President Trump tried to get our troops out of Syria the first time because we had actually met our clear, definable military objective. | |
| So seeing the deep state and the establishment really turn on him to keep us at war motivated me to start speaking out and get into politics. | ||
| And then seeing everything that happened in 2020 from the way the lockdowns were weaponized, what happened with the election, Seeing all that, I realized that I wouldn't be able to look my two young sons in the eyes and explain to them that this is the country that their mother gave her life for. | ||
| So I realized I had to get back in the fight and try and turn the tide back that our country is succumbing to right now, the wave of leftist oppression that's coming our way. | ||
| So this is my continuation of the oath that I took 23 years ago. | ||
| Joe, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Joe Kent will be our co-host of the rest of it. | ||
| We'll come back. | ||
| Patrick A. O'Donnell, Maureen Bannon, the War Room Memorial Day Special. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment. | ||
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unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Memorial Day 2021. | ||
| This is the War Room Memorial Day Special. | ||
| We've got Chief Warrant Officer Joe Kent, who's now running for Congress as our co-host. | ||
| I've got Patrick O'Donnell, the combat historian. | ||
| Of course, Captain Maureen Bannon and Stephen K. Bannon, United States Navy. | ||
| I want to go to Patrick O'Donnell. | ||
| The Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| We're in the 100th year of the anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown. | ||
| That'll actually be commemorated on Veterans Day, I think is the 100th anniversary. | ||
| It was very controversial at the time. | ||
| France had already done this. | ||
| I think the United Kingdom had done this. | ||
| And to have our own Tomb of the Unknown known but to God, right, from battlefield remains that couldn't be identified. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So walk us through, how were these people, how were they selected to not just get who the Unknown Soldier was, but then to get actually the Honor Guard that was going to actually bring them back from France to the United States? | ||
| What the army did is they selected a graves registration unit to select bodies from the main cemeteries in France where our unknown were resting. | ||
| And they went to specific graves and then they examined, they exhumed the body and then they examined whether or not there was any kind of paperwork, dog tags, etc. | ||
| that could identify this person. | ||
| They determined that there wasn't, and then they took the burial ticket from that grave and they burned it so that nobody would ever know exactly who that person, those remains were or where it came from. | ||
| They then had five American bodies from these graves, from the cemeteries, and they brought them to Chalon, Paris. | ||
| And the plan was basically to have an American general officer select the Unknown Soldier, but the night of the selection process, or the night before it, the French said, hey, we used an enlisted man. | ||
| So they did sort of an audible, and they found Within a, if you will, part of the Honor Guard there in France, a gentleman by the name of Edward Younger. | ||
| And Edward Younger was a doughboy. | ||
| He did not receive a Distinguished Service Cross or a Medal of Honor, but he had been through all of the major battles with the 2nd Division. | ||
| He had been there and done that. | ||
| And he'd been combat wounded twice. | ||
| You know, especially near Bella Wood, for instance, and he was at one of the great... | ||
| There's a battle that the Marine Corps and the 2nd Division were involved in and it was an epic fortress. | ||
| The French tried to take this German fortress called Blancmont for four years and they had suffered tremendous casualties. | ||
| Thousands upon thousands of dead around the place. | ||
| He was part of the storming of Blancmont and it would be Some of the French that would claim that that was one of America's greatest victories during the Great War, because it cracked what was known as the Hindenburg Line, which was an impregnable fortress, practically a line of fortifications that stretched through France. | ||
| The book that I wrote, The Unknowns, is really a combat history of World War I through the eyes of these most decorated men, such as Younger. | ||
| Who are selected to be, essentially, the honor guard? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The body bearers, if you will. | ||
| And Younger is given, really, the highest honor, though. | ||
| He's told that he will select the unknown soldier, and he's given a A spray of white roses. | ||
| And that morning in the City Hall at Shalom, there are five flag draped caskets of these unknown Americans. | ||
| And he is given this monumental task of selecting the unknown. | ||
| And he walks in there, and I found his original notes that reside at the National Archives. | ||
| It's actually buried in his personnel file. | ||
| They're handwritten. | ||
| He talks about how he prayed and literally felt the presence of the men that he served with as he walked into that room and his hand literally moved, he said. | ||
| to one of the caskets, and he believed that that was somebody that he had served with and died. | ||
| Through prayer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he lays a spray of roses on that casket. | ||
| He thought that there was a power coming through him to put that spray of roses on that casket. | ||
| On that casket, and he thought that that might have been somebody that he had served with and had died. | ||
| And that's what the unknown soldier represents. | ||
| It represents all of America's combat casualties that have died in the service of our country. | ||
| As we talked about the 12,000 from the Army Air Corps that have died at sea, not just on the Arizona, but are buried at At sea in unknown graves. | ||
| How big a deal, take us back in time, how big a deal was this? | ||
| Because I remember as a little boy, when the Korean War veteran was, I think in Eisenhower's administration, I think 57 or so, it was a huge deal. | ||
| It was just so many, hundreds of thousands of people, and you had the howitzers, and I remember my dad showing me the newspapers, it was just so, not that I could read, but I could see that this was the adults, this was something massive. | ||
| How important was it When the Tomb of the Unknown was first done in this first ceremony. | ||
| A hundred years ago this year on November 11th, this ceremony was the biggest ceremony in Washington, D.C. | ||
| It was shut down. | ||
| But it was a way to heal our country in many ways. | ||
| It was a way to recognize all of those who had served in World War I, but all of those who had served in prior wars. | ||
| They invited all the Medal of Honor recipients from the Civil War there. | ||
| They had guys from the Spanish-American War. | ||
| They had the NAACP, it was a who's who in America, came together for this procession. | ||
| And it starts at the Washington Navy Yard, where the USS Olympia, which is an incredible ship that still exists in Philadelphia, brought back the unknown, the remains. | ||
| And it's quite an amazing story, Steve. | ||
| The casket was on top of the ship as it went across the ocean and it hit a storm. | ||
| And it almost went overboard. | ||
| But the Marines that were on that ship literally lashed themselves to the casket and prevented that from happening. | ||
| They brought it off. | ||
| And the men in my book were the body bearers, if you will. | ||
| And they represented the great combat history of all of the service branches in the war. | ||
| And their stories, if you take them together, tell the combat history of World War I. | ||
| Let me bring in Joe Kent and Mo Banna for a second. | ||
| This current war we have, and Joe, your wife, before she died in combat, was going to go be a psychiatrist, because you mentioned the PTSD, and Maureen, I know it's something you've mentioned a lot about the people, the folks, the men and women you serve with. | ||
| When you have a situation like the Tomb of the Unknown that's brought together to heal the nation and bring the nation together about World War I, which is very controversial, right? | ||
| And you've had the Korean War and you've had World War II, which becomes a moment to do that. | ||
| In these endless wars that we have, how do you actually bring together and heal for this generation that has fought this war now for 20 years? | ||
| How does that actually happen? | ||
|
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I think first and foremost is ending the endless wars and I think we just have to be relentless on our elected officials to bring about a national security policy that is that actually benefits our country keeps us out of these endless wars and puts our nation in a position of advantage now we're continuing to bleed out in these these third world Backwaters, essentially, because that's what Afghanistan is. | |
| We can do much better in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. | ||
| So I think ending them is first and foremost. | ||
| And then from there, I do think we need to have a national Global War on Terror monument on the National Mall. | ||
| There's some progress being made on that front. | ||
| Before I started running for office, that was something that I was working on. | ||
| But I think it's absolutely incumbent that we end the endless wars. | ||
| I think that that should be first and foremost. | ||
| Mo Bannon. | ||
| I agree with Joe on all the things you just said and I also think that we need to raise awareness for the mental health of the veterans and the soldiers that have come back from those continuous deployments because we don't know what they see time and time again. | ||
| So we need to treat them with and get them the help they need for everything that they've seen. | ||
| Joe, do you think, to most point, do you think if we focus on this generation and what's happened, if the policy makers didn't have this open-ended, because in World War I they didn't have open-ended, in World War II, people were mission-oriented. | ||
| We've got a job to do and we're going to go get it done. | ||
| At the working level, the heroism of this generation is unquestionable. | ||
| Unquestioned. | ||
| The heroism of time and time and time and time again. | ||
| But do we need a policy that doesn't allow it just to be an open, a blank check? | ||
| That you need to have defined objectives and a defined mission in order to send... And this is where they say, oh, America first is all isolationists. | ||
| We're anything but isolationists. | ||
| We understand what our role is in the world, but you can't have these open-ended where, quite frankly, these men and women are looked at as cannon fodder. | ||
| And if it just takes 10 deployments or 11 deployments or 12 deployments, well, guess what? | ||
| That's just how long it's going to take because people don't have I couldn't agree more. | ||
| So I think Congress has to get much more diligent about its role as defining the Constitution of being able to declare war. | ||
| on the outcomes and the objectives and not look at this patriotic manpower as just an endless pool of talent that we can continue to draw from and I think quite frankly abuse. | ||
|
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I couldn't agree more. So I think Congress has to get much more diligent about its role as defining the Constitution of being able to declare war. So I think key to ending these endless wars is repealing the authorization use of military force. | |
| That thing was just poorly written and it's allowed us to stay over at war, give a blank check to president after president. | ||
| And then it's created this apparatus of national security, the national security establishment that when we have a president like Trump, who actually tries to end some of these wars, it completely is able to turn and backstab him and make it appear that he doesn't know what he's doing. | ||
|
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So we need to have Congress hold the Department of Defense, the intelligence community. | |
| accountable for the American people and then end these endless wars and make sure if we're going to deploy young men and women into harm's way that there is a clear-cut, defined military objective that has a clear-cut end state. | ||
| Because if we can't explain what that is to the American people and it can't be something as lofty as, well, we're going to go defeat terrorism, we won't define what terrorism is, Then we should not be deploying people to war. | ||
| We have plenty of other tools in our toolbox that we can be using, predominantly having a strong economy where we don't need to go fight. | ||
| We can leverage our economic power, but then also we can use the actual tools of our intelligence community in a lot of cases. | ||
| But I think ending the authorization use of military force and having Congress hold the executive branch accountable for when and how we deploy and use force is absolutely critical. | ||
| You know, we talked about Che's Rebellion, and we talked to Joe's Point, and we'll get back to it in our final segment. | ||
| The book that you wrote that hit me the hardest on this was your book on the Chosin Reservoir, about the Marines. | ||
| These are a lot of Marine reservists. | ||
| I mean, sometimes the country, like after the war is over, we forget about the veterans right away, even about them getting paid. | ||
| And there's so many situations Where we have not, the beginning of World War II in North Africa, where clearly there weren't enough non-commissioned officers and junior officers trained enough at Kasserine Pass and these other places. | ||
| Not just the field officers, but you had problems in the training, just not enough time. | ||
| People were just not trained. | ||
| And you look at your book on the Trojan, Give Me Tomorrow, which is, the thing that blew me away about that book is how It all just came about, and people were not trading that regular. | ||
| We've got to jump for a commercial break, but I want to get to this point. | ||
| It's about preparation. | ||
| It's lack of preparation. | ||
| But it's the country just thinks it's an unlimited pool of talent that's always going to answer the call. | ||
| It does, but you've got to consider that. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| We'll return with our World Day Special with everyone in a moment. | ||
|
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War Room. | |
| Pandemic. | ||
| With Stephen K. Banham. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, we're going to try to get to the military cemeteries. | ||
| We're going to have to do that another day. | ||
| We will do that. | ||
| I want to finish with the Chosin Reservoir very quickly as we wrap up our Memorial Day special. | ||
| I want to thank all of our sponsors for this. | ||
| Chosin, what's so shocking is they just not were prepared for it at all. | ||
| And it's such a brutal, so many lives lost, so brutal in its intensity, the weather, the combat, all of it. | ||
| 30 below zero weather, no winter clothing at all. | ||
| How can America deploy people with no winter clothing? | ||
| How can we do that? | ||
| It happened. | ||
| Or they were using old stuff from World War II that didn't work. | ||
| Almost everybody in the book that I wrote, Give Me Tomorrow, has trench foot, or they were frozen feet. | ||
| Show the cover of that. | ||
| This is Give Me Tomorrow. | ||
| Historic photograph. | ||
| Yeah, the historic photograph of one of the men that's in this book. | ||
| And, you know, he was asked by this photographer what he would like for Christmas. | ||
| Into that microphone. | ||
| And it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek question, what would you like for Christmas? | ||
| And his response was, give me tomorrow. | ||
| And literally, the unit had suffered so many casualties. | ||
| That night, they were hit by a human wave attack by the Chinese, and they were almost overwhelmed, his machine gun position. | ||
| You know, 20 to 1, 100 to 1 odds. | ||
| It's incredible that the Chinese fought these tough Marines, as well as the Army, which were in The Chosen as well. | ||
| It's a story of human endurance. | ||
| All of yours are human darts. | ||
| Give me your website to get your books, and particularly buy the Indispensables today, one for yourself, but buy one to give on the 4th of July as a gift. | ||
| How do they get to your site? | ||
| PatrickKODonald.com or at Combat Historian. | ||
| Go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, front of the store at Barnes & Noble. | ||
| Some of the older books I've written, Kindle is a good option for them, because some of them are harder to get. | ||
| Make sure to go to Amazon.com and get the Indispensables today. | ||
| Maureen Bannon. | ||
| I just wanted to address that not only do we need to stop these endless wars, but we also need to take care of the soldiers coming home from them, because they don't just die on the battlefield, they die back home. | ||
| 22 veterans kill themselves per day, so we need to get them the help that they need. | ||
| Are they combat casualties? | ||
| I believe so because of the things that they've seen in combat are causing them and they're not getting the help that they need. | ||
| And Congress can help them get the help they need by helping with the VA. | ||
| So I believe that they are combat casualties. | ||
| They just are back on home soil. | ||
| And then also there are this Memorial Day isn't just about people lost overseas that their remains have come home. | ||
| There are still people that are POWs and MIA and there's still units in the military searching for those. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Okay, Joe Kent, about this memorial for the Global War on Terror, any final comments on that and anything else? | ||
| But I really want to make sure we touch base with this. | ||
| There's got to be a memorial to this generation that for 20 years has fought this war. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| The Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation is something that people can Google GWAT-MF. | ||
| They are working on presenting legislation right now to the House and the Senate. | ||
| There was a delay because of impeachment and COVID and everything that happened last year, but we have bipartisan support for it. | ||
| We just needed to get pushed the final hundred yards to make it an actual law to allocate the funds to build the Global War on Terror Memorial on the National Monument on the National Mall. | ||
| I'm also running for Congress for many reasons, but one of which is to roll back all the damage that the permanent ruling class has done to this country and ending our endless wars and having a pragmatic America first national security policy is part and parcel to that. | ||
| So if people want to support me, please go to joekentforcongress.com. | ||
| I'm running against an incumbent who is an absolute Warmonger, she sided with Liz Cheney, so any donation they can make will really help me get rid of her and put America first. | ||
| Last thing, Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, the book that you're doing for her, when do you anticipate, I know our audience is going to want to know, when do you anticipate that book will come out? | ||
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unidentified
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We're going to try and have it out by this time next year, so Memorial Day, Mother's Day timeframe of 2022. | |
| It's called Send Me the Legend of Chief Shannon Kent. | ||
| Chief Warrant Officer Kent, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| I want to thank Patrick K. O'Donnell. | ||
| We've done this again. | ||
| It's an honor, Steve. | ||
| I always love coming on. | ||
| But your treasure, I've got to tell you, the audience loves you. | ||
| The Indispensables. | ||
| You'll find out about Washington's Immortals and Indispensables. | ||
| You're going to find out about parts of American history we should know totally, but have been forgotten. | ||
| And the mass grave, the American Thermopylae, American Dunkirk, all happened within the confines of the greatest city in the world, New York City. | ||
| Today, could not find it if you had to on a bet. | ||
| That's where we've got to make better known. The American Thermopylae, the unmarked grave of those heroes that really saved the founding of the Republic. | ||
| We would have been British subjects if not for that. | ||
| Captain Bannon, I want to thank you very much and all the work that you're doing on PTSD, all of that. | ||
| Okay. Thank you for having me. | ||
| Good. | ||
| We're going to end our now with Hacksaw Williams and the rendition of Minstrel Boy. | ||
| I want to thank all of our partners today for this special Memorial Day 2021. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. | ||
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Upbeat drum and folk guitar music from Drone and Phone | |
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