July 5, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:09
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| We are the guardians of the republic. | ||
| That's how we really see ourselves. | ||
| And it's important that our country sees us that way also. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me on The Rubin Report today are two U.S. | ||
| combat veterans, one a former member of the U.S. | ||
| Congress and one a former MMA champion, Colonel Allen West and Chad Robichaud. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thanks for having us on. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| I am glad to have you guys here because, as I mentioned to you right before we started, we haven't done enough generally on military and veterans issues and all of those things, so we're going to dive into all that, talk about your nonprofit and why you guys are here together and all of those good things, but first off, what Well, for me, it was a family tradition. | ||
| You know, we just celebrated the 75th anniversary of D-Day when my father fought in World War II. | ||
| He was a corporal in the United States Army. | ||
| Initially started in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and that's where he was wounded, running | ||
| supply dispatches. | ||
| My older brother was a Marine infantryman in Vietnam, wounded at Khe Sanh. | ||
| And at the age of 15, my dad challenged me to be the first officer in our family. | ||
| So I went through high school, junior ROTC in Atlanta. | ||
| What did 15-year-old Allen West think about that? | ||
| 15-year-old Allen West wanted to, you know, follow his dad's lead. | ||
| And I think that that is why positive, strong role models, male role models, are so important in the black community, because my dad gave me a direction and a goal and objective. | ||
| So on 31 July 1982 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, he was on my right shoulder, my mom was on my left shoulder, and they penned Second Lieutenant Barr is on me. | ||
| And now today, his grandson, dad passed in 1986, but his grandson is a major in the United States Army. | ||
| So that's four generations. | ||
| And how many years did you serve? | ||
| 22. | ||
| Long time, yeah. | ||
| Chad, what about you? | ||
| Well, three-generation Marine Corps family. | ||
| My father served as a combat Marine in Vietnam as infantryman. | ||
| And my son is now in Afghanistan right now, part of 3rd Anglico, supporting the Georgians in Afghanistan. | ||
| So, and I was a Marine as well with eight deployments to Afghanistan. | ||
| So I, my father being a Marine, probably suffered with a lot of things that we helped our warriors with at our foundation. | ||
| And he came home, he's an angry guy, a lot of alcohol and physical abuse. | ||
| And so I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. | ||
| I had a brother who was a year older than me, and when we were about 13 to 14 years old, we decided we were going to join the military to escape that life. | ||
| And so we started running and swimming and teamed up to prepare for that goal in life. | ||
| And unfortunately, about a year after that, my brother was shot and killed. | ||
| And so it put me in a very... what I had left of a family dissolved. | ||
| It put me in extreme isolation and in that isolation I just continued to focus towards that goal of being in the military and when I was 17 years old I met a Marine Corps recruiter named Staff Sergeant Brown who I hadn't even, I wasn't going to graduate high school. | ||
| I was living on my own by that time and I wanted to be in some type of special operations and I expressed to him You know, what I wanted to do, and he told me about being a reconnaissance Marine, so I set my sights on that, and so the Marine Corps for me, joining at 17 years old, was a clean slate of life, a brand new chance, and at that young age, I was aware enough to embrace it, and it's been an amazing part of my life. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think that regular people that don't serve, who love America, you can see I've got a giant American flag in the control room, we've got another one right over there, we've got the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in there, what do you think that regular Americans should know about you guys, people that serve, that maybe we don't know? | ||
| Well, one I don't, I don't think people often realize how special it is for someone who serves in the military. | ||
| Currently we only have a half a percent point 5% of our population, United States serves in the military, and, you know, stands in the gap, not just to protect the The freedoms that we have in America, but to protect the interests of others around the world and stand up for people that can't stand up for themselves. | ||
| That's one of the things I always loved about the military. | ||
| And I think people don't understand is the fact that we do serve as strength for the world, not just our nation, and are able to protect these people around the world that don't have the ability to defend themselves. | ||
| Yeah, we're gonna get into some of the policy parts of that. | ||
| What do you think we should know about you guys that maybe we don't? | ||
| I think the most important thing and, you know, my Christian faith is very strong in my life. | ||
| When you go to John chapter 15 verse 13 where it says that no greater love has another man that he would lay down his life for another. | ||
| Then also in Isaiah 6 and 8 when Isaiah is there with the host of the Lord and they're saying, whom shall we send? | ||
| Who will go for us? | ||
| And Isaiah says, here am I, send me. | ||
| You have to understand that the freedoms and liberties that we have here in the United States of America is that we Because we consistently raise generations of these young men and women that are going to continue to give that last full measure of devotion. | ||
| And that's why Abraham Lincoln talked about the increased devotion that a nation should have for those in the Gettysburg Address. | ||
| And so when people come up and say, thank you for your service, I mean, that's all fine and well. | ||
| But I think the real tribute and the real honor to people like Chad, myself, and all the generations that have worn the uniform, We want you to understand why we took a note to support and defend the Constitution. | ||
| Do you guys think that there is a little rebirth of that happening right now? | ||
| Because it's not a coincidence that I put the flag there in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| I don't think it's a coincidence that as people have watched me sort of evolve politically and Talk about these things and pride in the country and those things. | ||
| I don't mean blind pride. | ||
| I mean, you know, really understanding where we came from and where we're going. | ||
| I do see a rebirth of that now. | ||
| Are you seeing that? | ||
| I am. | ||
| And I said this just recently at a speaking event. | ||
| I think when people turn on the news, they think, you know, The country's lost its way, but that's just, I think there's a loud invoice and the loud few. | ||
| When I go around the country and speak about the work that we do and supporting our warriors, I get to witness firsthand a grateful nation of Americans who are patriots, they love their warriors, they love their country, and they would kind of have the same views that you have, that this is a special place, and it's a sacred place that we need to uphold the values that we have in this nation. | ||
| Yeah, I know you have no love lost for the mainstream media, but do you think that it partially is that? | ||
| That they've sort of gone so bananas in making it seem that America is so evil and we're patriarchal and racist and all these ridiculous things that eventually you push good people to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| No, we're not, and that's actually good! | ||
| No, and it is. | ||
| I don't think that, you know, it was so interesting you and I were talking off camera how you said five or six years ago you thought I was a nut. | ||
|
unidentified
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I thought you were the bad guy, man! | |
| And now we're sitting here having a great conversation. | ||
| And I think all of us, if we really understand the objective truths about this country, we come to realize what America really is. | ||
| It's a beacon of liberty, freedom, and democracy. | ||
| That's why people come here. | ||
| When I lived in South Florida, I never saw anyone get on a boat to go to Cuba. | ||
| I saw the opposite. | ||
| No one is leaving Guatemala. | ||
| They don't leave. | ||
| They don't leave Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras to go to Venezuela. | ||
| So, you know, this is a very simple thing. | ||
| So when you have someone like a Governor Cuomo that stands up and says, ah, you know, America has never been great. | ||
| Tell that. | ||
| Tell that to those men who 75 years ago landed on those beaches in Normandy and jumped in, you know, the night prior. | ||
| Tell that to your dad and my older brother who fought in those jungles in Vietnam. | ||
| Tell that to my dad. | ||
| Go to his, you know, final resting spot. | ||
| A man that fought for this country when this country did not afford him all those rights and privileges it did others, yet he wanted his son to still be an officer in that exact same army? | ||
| That's America. | ||
| That's what it's all about, Dave. | ||
| So how do you balance that, which I think we obviously all agree with, with that also we do make mistakes, also we're flawed, also depending on political leadership there might be times when you're really all gung-ho about all of our policies and sometimes you're not. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think as a nation, we are going to, we are, like you said, you're not, you don't have people leaving to go to Cuba. | ||
| I mean, we have a line from Guatemala to San Diego for people to come here, and they're coming here for a reason. | ||
| It's not just for free health care and college. | ||
| You're coming here because it's a land of opportunity. | ||
| It still is, and I pray it always will be. | ||
| But we're not going to do things right all the time. | ||
| We're not going to have leaders that are always going to make the right decisions. | ||
| But I believe America as an institution, the great experiment of America is something that still stands true. | ||
| And it's the reason why the world looks towards us. | ||
| And America as a nation and as a military, the strength of that makes the world a better place. | ||
| What do you think it is fundamentally about the military that allows it to keep America strong despite having administrations that can wildly go in different directions? | ||
| I mean, just look at the last two. | ||
| The policies of Barack Obama versus the policies of Donald Trump are vastly different, but we haven't had a coup, you know. | ||
| The military is still functioning, still doing its job. | ||
| Where does that strength come from? | ||
| Well, if you go and you read the Constitution, you know, the founding fathers talked about moving toward a more perfect union. | ||
| So, we're not a perfect country, but we understand that we have a foundation, we have a fundamental values, we have a rule of law that enables us to move in that direction. | ||
| That's how we continue to amend ourselves. | ||
| And that's the interesting thing about our military, Dave, is that we don't take an oath to a political party. | ||
| We don't take an oath to a person. | ||
| We take an oath to that document that, you know, I'm carrying right here, that unifies | ||
| us as a nation. | ||
| That's our rule of law. | ||
| That's our standard. | ||
| And so our military is focused on that and nothing more. | ||
| And we are the guardians of the republic. | ||
| That's how we really see ourselves. | ||
| And it's important that our country sees us that way also. | ||
| So no, we're not going to go in and throw a coup because one administration to the others. | ||
| But you know, maybe there are going to be some orders that are not exactly ethical that | ||
| we will stand up and challenge. | ||
| And that's why we have these generals and that's what we expect them to do as the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
| But we take that oath to the Constitution and I think that's important. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about your service specifically. | ||
| So you served in Afghanistan and you served in Iraq. | ||
| You know, Afghanistan seems to me to be the weirdest military adventure or war, whatever you want to call it at this point, because it's the longest ongoing war that we've ever had in the United States. | ||
| It's still going on now. | ||
| People seem to be very confused as to why we went in the first place. | ||
| Why are we still there? | ||
| Sort of break that down. | ||
| Well, I think, I feel a lot clearer, more clear about Afghanistan, why we went there. | ||
| I mean, great, September 11th, you know, planes were flown into World Trade Center, and it was done so by the Taliban, and we had an obligation to go and hunt down Osama bin Laden and the Taliban that were responsible for it. | ||
| And part of that meant to align with the Northern Alliance, which would have been a Masood, | ||
| would have been the leader of the Northern Alliance, which bin Laden cleverly killed | ||
| at the same time, assassinated at the same time. | ||
| And so as we went to Afghanistan, we had to, you know, not just go after one person, but | ||
| we had to go at the infiltration of the, out of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the occupation | ||
| And so, going after the Taliban meant an occupying of Afghanistan, not to overtake the country, but to eradicate the Taliban. | ||
| And obviously, that's still going on 20 years later. | ||
| I would have never thought after eight deployments there, my son We're there fighting the Taliban right now. | ||
| So is that a failure of our policy? | ||
| Is there an inconsistency between administrations there? | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| Well, I mean, you think eight years, for eight years of doing this, of that 20 years, the military was completely handcuffed. | ||
| They cut resources, manpower, and rules of engagement that were not favorable to our troops. | ||
| I'm talking about the Obama administration at the cost of many American lives and I truly believe that an administration is responsible for that. | ||
| And luckily now the rules of engagement have changed and we're able to go after and more offensively go after the Taliban and I think we're having a more effective footprint there. | ||
| However, I think Americans should understand that we're not there as a In the same capacity we was in the early days. | ||
| We're there to support the ANA, the Afghan National Army. | ||
| We're there to support other allied forces, such as my son right now is assigned to the Georgians, who are out doing combat patrols and presence patrols. | ||
| So we're there in more of a support and advise capacity right now. | ||
| And I think, even with my son, Aaron loved him to come home, but I think we belong there in that capacity to support, advise, and help for our nations. | ||
| Because these nations like the ANA, they can't. | ||
| If we left the ANA, Afghan National Army, to do this themselves, they would fail. | ||
| So that actually is a good segue to talking about Iraq, because one of the things that happened in Iraq, you served in Desert Storm, but after this last Iraq war, there was this big debate, when do we leave? | ||
| And basically Obama took us out. | ||
| With just announcing the day we're going, and they were having free and fair elections. | ||
| There was actually the beginnings of a democracy there. | ||
| Now, you could argue that we maybe should have never been there in the first place. | ||
| You could argue that we had to leave no matter what. | ||
| All those things. | ||
| But democracy was spreading, and then we left, and now it's gotten much worse. | ||
| So actually, first, why don't you talk about Desert Storm, just in general? | ||
| Because that's the forgotten one now, because people only think about this second Iraq War. | ||
| You know, it's incredible that that has happened, and one of the committees I sit on is to establish a National Desert Storm War Memorial in Washington, D.C., because it has been forgotten. | ||
| But it was an important bridge for us coming from Vietnam to once again reestablish that respect and regard for our military. | ||
| But there will never be another desert storm. | ||
| No one is ever going to take on the United States of America in a wide open desert of conventional warfare. | ||
| You know, two of the best training facilities for our military is right here in California, Two Niner Palms and then also the National Training Center. | ||
| We are experts in open desert warfare and the Iraqi Army learned that. | ||
| in 96 short hours. But the real thing was that we built a coalition. We held to the | ||
| objective that we were going in under the United Nations mandate, it was to get the | ||
| Iraqis out of Kuwait. But what you have seen metastasized now is a world that understands | ||
| you don't fight the United States of America up front, face to face. | ||
| Now you have this ideological war against Islamic jihadism. | ||
| They don't wear uniforms. | ||
| They don't openly declare themselves. | ||
| They are non-state, non-uniform belligerents. | ||
| And that's what, you know, Chad had to deal with in Afghanistan. | ||
| And even after I retired, I was in Afghanistan for two and a half years as a civilian military advisor down in Kandahar. | ||
| We have to, we have not done a good job of understanding this modern battlefield. | ||
| understanding this enemy that we're facing. | ||
| Even Russia, you know, when they went into the Crimea, they didn't go in as the Russian military. | ||
| They went in as a paramilitary force, and you see what they're doing in Ukraine. | ||
| China, when you look at what they're doing all over the globe, | ||
| they do say that this is our strategy, the one belt, one road, | ||
| but they are covertly doing things that we don't understand. | ||
| China is in Venezuela, as a matter of fact. | ||
| Iran, the number one state sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. | ||
| But, you know, Hezbollah is not out there really, you know, declaring their state, or what have you. | ||
| And ISIS— Well, they are flying their flags in London. | ||
| They're flying a flag, but, you know, Hezbollah doesn't have a country. | ||
| And so I think that we—the incredible thing, I got to be at the tactical level. | ||
| And then also I got to be at the strategic level, having sat on the House Armed Services Committee. | ||
| And just the same in Vietnam, we lose strategically. | ||
| We don't lose tactically on the ground. | ||
| It's at that level with the policies and everything where we make some really dumb decisions, you know, rules of engagement, not understanding the enemy, their goals and objectives, that, you know, it filters down and we set our warriors up not for success. | ||
| And I think that's what we have to learn. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that George H.W. | ||
| Bush, there's sort of the famous moment where he decided not to go to Baghdad, not to topple Saddam the first time around. | ||
| He was obviously under pressure from more of the neocon types to take Saddam out at that point. | ||
| The irony being that we left Saddam and then his son ended up going in 15 years later. | ||
| What was it like to be there when that decision was made or not made, depending on which way you want to look at it? | ||
| Yeah, because I was in the 1st Infantry Division, and we were the ones that had secured Saffron Airfield for the peace negotiation talks to come in. | ||
| And we just sat there that night and said, man, okay, so, Major, Lieutenant Colonel, when do you think we'll be back? | ||
| Because anytime you fight half-measure warfare, you have ongoing residual consequences. | ||
| I mean, you look at the Korean War, you look at the Vietnam War. | ||
| The last time we fought a total war was World War II. | ||
| When we wanted the enemy to capitulate. | ||
| I mean, they signed a document of surrender. | ||
| We don't have that today. | ||
| So you believe in the power of doctrine, basically? | ||
| That if you're going to do it, you just... You've got to do it right. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's what Carl von Clausewitz talked about. | ||
| He said, war is about imposing your will upon another. | ||
| You just don't do half will. | ||
| Now, with Desert Shield, Desert Storm, we would have lost credibility, though. | ||
| If we had continued on, but I think that we did not do a good job of degradating the complete capacity and capability militarily of Saddam Hussein, because we had two, the Republican Guard divisions just right ahead of us. | ||
| We could have taken those guys out and maybe brought him to an even better position at the table. | ||
| Do you think the military brass wanted to? | ||
| I don't know if they wanted to. | ||
| Or at least the people there? | ||
| I think the thing is we kind of felt we didn't seal the deal, and we kind of knew that eventually we'd come back. | ||
| But even more so, we could have done better with the Kurds. | ||
| I really feel that we continue to kind of, you know, backslap the Kurds when they are so pro-American, and they so want to be an ally of ours. | ||
| And what we have done with ISIS couldn't have done without the Kurds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that just one of those situations where Iraq really is three countries? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, all right, I suppose we could impose some sort of partition and give the Kurds what they justly deserve. | ||
| That then will probably make Turkey is not exactly our friends under Erdogan, but if you go back post-World War I, the Sykes-Picot Treaty, when the great powers of England and France went in, they just divided the Middle East up arbitrarily. | ||
| Just the same as you saw in Africa. | ||
| They didn't pay attention to tribal allegiances or what have you. | ||
| They created artificial nations. | ||
| They really look ridiculous. | ||
| They are ridiculous. | ||
| If you really look at them, the shapes and all of these things are just insane. | ||
| So I think that there's an opportunity now for us to maybe look at how can the Middle East be restructured. | ||
| I mean, the Kurds are the nation's largest ethnic group without a homeland. | ||
| And I think that they have suffered, you know, from increased persecution. | ||
| I think that they could be more friendly to, you know, the Assyrian Christians, the Chaldeans, who are also persecuted. | ||
| And so I think that that's where, you know, we don't do strategy. | ||
| In long terms. | ||
| We do strategy in election cycles, Dave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can't win. | ||
| That's just the part of this that probably never changes, that almost screws up everything. | ||
| And it does screw up everything, because you can't win against people that are thinking in 50 and 100 year cycles. | ||
| So with all that in mind, if we look at Afghanistan today, and now you're saying some of the rules of engagement have changed, we're doing things a little more effectively, how do we eventually not be in Afghanistan? | ||
| Is there any road that you can see to getting us there, Don? | ||
| I don't think there's any successful road to a complete, full withdrawal. | ||
| I think we probably will maintain a base there, maybe a Bagram base, and continue to support in this advisory role. | ||
| I have to say this. | ||
| My capacity in Afghanistan was much different than the conventional troop. | ||
| I was a 4th Reconnaissance Marine. | ||
| I had the unique opportunity to try out for a JSOC, a Joint Special Operations Command Task Force. | ||
| And so the capacity I worked in was I didn't live on a base. | ||
| I lived out with the Afghan people. | ||
| I was embedded with the Afghan people and wore civilian clothes. | ||
| And so I lived in their homes and ate dinner with their families and played soccer with their kids. | ||
| What do they think about you guys? | ||
| Well, this is the point. | ||
| They love the fact that America was there because they had been truly oppressed by the Taliban. | ||
| When I first went, I deployed like every other warrior after 9-11. | ||
| We were going there to right the wrongs of 9-11. | ||
| That's a very patriotic cause. | ||
| That's what motivated us. | ||
| But very quickly, I went from that to understanding what these people had endured from the Taliban, to see their hurt and their pain and what the Taliban had done to the women and the little kids, little boys and little girls, and seeing this and hearing about stories and understanding this, it really turned my heart from this patriotic sense of retaliate for 9-11 to these people are oppressed and we need to be there to help these people. | ||
| This is where I'm torn today because I still have a heart for these people. | ||
| I mean, I lost Afghan brothers in combat, and so I still have a heart for these people. | ||
| I couldn't imagine. | ||
| I was there for the 2004 election. | ||
| I remember sitting in the living room. | ||
| Everyone's like a Super Bowl party. | ||
| Everyone's tuned in TV because John Kerry and Bush is up and everyone, these guys, these people are having this food everywhere, they're having this giant party. | ||
| I've never seen anything like, no one in the United States excited for a presidential election like this was. | ||
| And when Bush won, they were so excited. | ||
| Because they were so terrified that if Kerry won, he would withdraw the U.S. | ||
| troops and what would happen to them. | ||
| They know what will happen to them if we leave. | ||
| And so it really changed my perspective on being there. | ||
| Again, as a father now, I'm like, does my son belong there? | ||
| It made me ask these questions all over again. | ||
| But I do believe that we don't belong there in a in conventional capacity, but as a support | ||
| and advisory role, I do believe we still blow. | ||
| So with that in mind, what is a sound policy then? | ||
| What is a sound foreign policy that you can do some good, you can try to build the, not nation-build per se, | ||
| but-- - Yeah, I was just gonna say. | ||
| Yeah, but try to set the seeds of democracy and freedom, which we were doing in Iraq, | ||
| which we're doing in Afghanistan, but make sure that we don't become the imperial empire | ||
| No, we don't want to be mired down. | ||
| So what do you think just broadly, because we're sort of talking about this at a personal level from your perspective, what do you think broadly just a sane foreign policy looks like? | ||
| Well, that's the key thing. | ||
| It should not be about nation building. | ||
| It should be about strike operations. | ||
| It's about having a force that is able to make sure that these Islamic Jihadists are not able to have a defined sanctuary, a base of operations. | ||
| And what we have been doing up to this point, Dave, we've been playing whack-a-mole. | ||
| And you can't win playing whack-a-mole. | ||
| So what we need to be able to do is, instead of having this massive, forward-deployed military, you have a power projection platform. | ||
| And so you have, you know, a Bagram, you have a base, you know, somewhere close in Iraq where you can launch troops very quickly. | ||
| And you have a strike operation, you hit a critical capability capacity of the enemy, and, you know, then you pull back. | ||
| But you stay in that very basic region to let them know that we can quickly respond once again. | ||
| And that's what you just saw when we brought in the carrier group into the Persian Gulf area to stand up against Iran, to say that we do have a credible military deterrent. | ||
| So your foreign policy It's worthless unless you have that deterrent. | ||
| And they teach you in the Staff College of War about the four elements of military, I mean, national power. | ||
| Diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. | ||
| And I think that what we have to do is continue to use the diplomatic, the informational, the economic means first and foremost. | ||
| But we have to show that, you know, if push comes to shove, we can do this if you're not willing to So with that in mind, do you regard the Obama red line in Syria as just, like, the biggest blunder of three years? | ||
| Because I remember, I was a lefty at the time. | ||
| You can watch videos of me on The Young Turks. | ||
| I was saying we should not be there. | ||
| I was saying they've got to take care of it, or the regional actors have to take care of it. | ||
| Let Turkey help some of these people. | ||
| Like, I did not want anything to do with it. | ||
| I was completely anti-war. | ||
| But then, once Obama said the red line thing, I was like, all right, well, if you set the deal here, then you have to follow through. | ||
| Do you view that as just, I don't know, has there been a worse blunder? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, you lose all credibility whatsoever. | ||
| And then people see you as a joke. | ||
| I mean, when you come out and you say ISIS is just a JV team, then, you know, you're saying that I'm dismissing this thing. | ||
| When you deal with someone like Kim Jong-un, saying we're going to have strategic patience. | ||
| Well, the guy keeps shooting off rockets and missiles and everything like that. | ||
| So, you know, Compromise, appeasement, negotiation, things like that. | ||
| There are people in the world that only understand strength and might. | ||
| And Chad and I, we've seen those type of people. | ||
| We understand that. | ||
| Anything else is deemed as weakness. | ||
| So when you draw a red line, then all of a sudden you say, well, it wasn't really my red line. | ||
| It was everybody else's red line. | ||
| Leaders take responsibility. | ||
| And that's what, you know, you failed to see then. | ||
| Now, we have someone that has come in. | ||
| He's saying, okay, rules of engagement got to change. | ||
| You generals, you go in, you take care, you do what has to be done. | ||
| We don't hear about ISIS. | ||
| Now, they still exist as an ideological enemy, but they don't have a territorial integrity. | ||
| You know, you have China that is now saying, you know, what is going on here? | ||
| I mean, we just had the run of the mill for all of these years, Republican or Democrat president, Now something has changed. | ||
| North Korea, the same thing. | ||
| Even Russia is starting to be concerned. | ||
| So I think that's the important thing is, you know, you have to be able to come out | ||
| with that stick when it is required, when it is necessary. | ||
| And if you create a void, like President Obama did in Iraq, Someone's going to fill that void. | ||
| That's a law of physics. | ||
| So I think we got some hints as to what Colonel West thinks about Trump's policy, you know, foreign policy. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, I think, you know, all four areas that you're talking about, particularly in economic sanctions right now, I mean, a lot of people, you know, continue to, every time the president says something that he's going to impose these imposed tariffs or do economic sanctions, people laugh and mock him. | ||
| But it turns around weeks later, you know. | ||
| But then Mexico. | ||
| I think he keeps pushing these things, both military strategy, diplomacy, and economic, and you're seeing him win in these areas. | ||
| It's becoming hard to doubt the president. | ||
| What do you think about his decision-making abilities when it comes to selecting certain people? | ||
| I remember when Bolton got put in, it was like, all right, now Trump's going all neocon, and the base, which was very anti-war, was very pissed. | ||
| And I remember sort of thinking, well, it's like, that doesn't mean you're going neocon, because you bring a guy like him around. | ||
| It actually means you're bringing somebody around that is known as a threat, and that kind of keeps the enemies going, we don't, and then you have Trump who says anything, so it's kind of like, wait a minute, the combo here is a guy who we think likes war, or who does like war, let's say, or however you want to phrase that, plus a guy like Trump who says whatever he wants, now we don't know how to react, basically. | ||
| And that is the thing. | ||
| No one understands that decision cycle. | ||
| So people are completely off base. | ||
| They don't know what is going to come out, you know, in the morning. | ||
| They're sitting around saying, OK, what is he going to tweet now? | ||
| And in the Marine Corps, because I did three years on exchange with the Marines, they call it the OODA loop. | ||
| And what you want to do is to be able to get inside the enemy's decision cycle and you want to completely throw them off their game. | ||
| And that's what President Trump has done. | ||
| You think he really gets that at a military level, or is that just that thing that he gets? | ||
| Yeah, it's just a thing. | ||
| I don't know if it's a New York thing. | ||
| It might be. | ||
| Well, I think it's sort of, I always say, it's sort of like he's just kind of, and I don't even mean this, I don't even, truly don't even mean this negatively necessarily, but he's kind of just a crooked New York businessman, but you gotta do a lot of stuff within that. | ||
| Gotta do a lot of stuff. | ||
| We've got to do a lot of stuff within that to make things happen, because the whole system is out of whack. | ||
| And see, a normal politician is going to follow what everyone says. | ||
| Okay, you've got to do X, you've got to do Y, you've got to do Z. I mean, they've got this set battle scheme or whatever. | ||
| And he just is completely throwing that playbook out, and folks aren't used to that. | ||
| He is not predictable. | ||
| And really, on the battlefield, you don't want to be predictable. | ||
| And this is a battlefield. | ||
| This is an economic battlefield. | ||
| It's a diplomatic battlefield. | ||
| It's a military battlefield. | ||
| And he is just completely outmaneuvering our major adversaries. | ||
| China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. | ||
| The world's in a better place because of it right now. | ||
| Do you think that's empirically true? | ||
| I mean, if you listen to the media, it sounds like, you know, any moment World War III is going to happen or something's going down with China, Iran's going to get the bomb, this, that, the other thing. | ||
| But do you really feel that there's empirical proof that actually things are safer or more stable? | ||
| Well, I mean, we have, I mean, what's North Korea going to do? | ||
| What's Iran going to do? | ||
| We have no No way to predict what they're going to do, but I think the actions that the president and the administration has proven that they are responding. | ||
| North Korea has responded in a way that we never thought they would respond with the relations to the United States. | ||
| Iran has backed down. | ||
| Mexico, who's really taken advantage of the United States for many, many years, is finally coming around. | ||
| These things may seem extreme because people aren't used to it. | ||
| But I think they're, I believe the world is in a better place right now. | ||
| Yeah, think about this Dave. | ||
| The president said, I do not want to see people dropping bombs on innocent women and children. | ||
| And he bombed Syria. | ||
| Now, from a tactical level, you know, you look at the battle damage assessment, it was not really a big thing. | ||
| But the fact that he took the action, that was the most important thing. | ||
| I mean, when Iran starts to maybe do a little saber rattling, he doesn't, you know, get back on his heels. | ||
| He says, send a carrier battle group. | ||
| And let's show them that, you know, we'll go toe to toe. | ||
| You're not going to see sailors on a riverine assault boat on their knees at gunpoint because | ||
| of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy. | ||
| That ain't happening. | ||
| Right, which we saw. | ||
| Which we saw. | ||
| And every American, you talked about the flag, every American should have been incensed that | ||
| we had sailors who surrendered instead of fought and were on their knees at gunpoint | ||
| to the Iranians. | ||
| Well, that must be why Trump, within two months of being elected, he dropped that mother-of-all-bombs and people were like, oh, now he's going all Warhawk. | ||
| But your argument would be he did it because it's like you show a little bit of erratic behavior. | ||
| But you show strength, too. | ||
| And that keeps these guys on their heels. | ||
| What do you guys make of our alliances and the way they've really sort of shifted over the last five years, let's say, and just what's going on with NATO and the United Nations? | ||
| I mean, Trump has basically obliterated the United Nations. | ||
| NATO is shifting. | ||
| More than that, that if we don't do anything, nobody does anything. | ||
| And that is the sort of bargain that the United States is in that's very difficult. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair thing to say? | ||
| If we don't do anything internationally, no one does anything. | ||
| Well, NATO sure isn't. | ||
| I mean, the UN has proven to be, I think, exposed to this point, as they will in this. | ||
| And so, yeah, I mean, America has had to step up and fill the gap. | ||
| But I think also the President has kind of exposed that, that we, everyone needs to come to the table and contribute. | ||
| And, you know, he's really called them out at the UN Summit. | ||
| I think it was the UN Summit where he really exposed them on this. | ||
| And so, yeah, but I do believe that there's, America does have a responsibility to fill the gap. | ||
| I don't believe we're in nation building and handle of it probably to be a firefighter for every fire in the world. | ||
| But I do believe we have a responsibility as the strongest nation in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why don't other countries step up? | ||
| It doesn't seem like anyone steps up anymore. | ||
| They all say they like to hate us, and then they ask us for help, and then sometimes we overstep the line, and now it gets worse. | ||
| I mean, there's this crazy bargain always happening. | ||
| Because we've been that security blanket for them for so long. | ||
| My first tour of duty was over in Europe and I was part of a NATO unit and when you looked | ||
| at the other airborne units that were part of that NATO unit, you just kind of scratch | ||
| your head. | ||
| Like, dudes, what are y'all doing? | ||
| Do y'all even train? | ||
| I mean, you can't hit the broad side of a barn. | ||
| But these collective body politics, United Nations, European Union, I think they're being | ||
| rejected. | ||
| rejected. | ||
| And now when you look at these security organizations like NATO, President Trump has gone in and said, hey guys, whiskey, tango, Foxtrot. | ||
| When he called out Angela Merkel for having a deal with Russia for natural gas, and now you're asking me to protect you from Russia, but yet you're doing economic deals with Russia. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| And furthermore, you're not owning up to your 2% responsibility of financing in NATO. | ||
| I will tell you, when I was in Afghanistan, the biggest problem for the German army was obesity. | ||
| because they were just sitting around, they were eating lotion, you know, | ||
| good sausage and bread and everything. | ||
| They weren't getting out, they weren't fighting anyone. | ||
| In Southern Afghanistan, we had the Brits, we had the Canadians, we had the Romanians, | ||
| and we had the Dutch. | ||
| And they each had a separate province. | ||
| And each of them had their own rules of engagement or, you know, orders from the Ministry of Defense. | ||
| They didn't coordinate within each other. | ||
| And so the Taliban would just easily understood, well, we can do this in this province | ||
| 'cause the Dutch are not gonna drop bombs on us, they're just gonna fly over our heads and, you know, | ||
| be real loud. | ||
| So at that point, NATO doesn't have a standard operating procedure? | ||
| No. - You're all doing something? | ||
| They're all doing something based upon their respective ministries of defense. | ||
| Everyone knew that the Romanians, the orders for the Romanians, they could not leave the roads. | ||
| They could not get out of their vehicles. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, I mean, how are you going to win against an enemy when you have your ministry of defense dictating all of these different, you know... Is that changing under NATO now? | ||
| Well, I haven't been back to Afghanistan since 2008 or 2007, so I wouldn't know, but I think that, you know, maybe when you look at the Georgians who are going out and doing patrols, maybe it is different. | ||
| But these major NATO member countries, they're not stepping up. | ||
| And I would even begin to question why we have Turkey and NATO, because Erdogan is not a friend to Western civilization. | ||
| But the other countries are stepping up, because of what you said. | ||
| I mean, as the U.S. | ||
| comes back and moves to that support and advisory capacity, They have to. | ||
| They have to do their part. | ||
| I mean, this is a strong presidential administration saying that, hey, you guys are going to do your role. | ||
| We're not going to go out there and do all these combat patrols, send our American warriors to do all these combat patrols while you sit back on the base. | ||
| This is a strategy and shift of the military and the administration. | ||
| You see a big surge in the special operations community and that support and advisory role too. | ||
| So let's shift to veterans, because I think that's what brings you guys really together, I think. | ||
| How did you guys meet, by the way? | ||
| Was it through the non-profit? | ||
| How did you meet? | ||
| How did we meet? | ||
| Heck, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think you needed some army friends to just kind of, you know, calm you up. | ||
| We're in the same circles of people, and we have mutual friends, and we both have a very, I mean, obviously we're both patriots and love our warriors, and outside of uniform, we're both still serving. | ||
| And we are kindred hearts to do this mission. | ||
| So you started Mighty Oaks. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Can you tell us a little bit about that and Colonel West sits on the board? | ||
| Yeah, maybe it's hard to tell you without sharing a little bit of my story. | ||
| You know, after my eighth deployment to Afghanistan, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
| To give you kind of how that started, for me it started with You know, just coming home and being frustrated, angry. | ||
| I have a wife, and I've been married for 24 years, and three amazing children, and they really adored me coming home and just being a tyrant to them. | ||
| You know, lots of verbal abuse, and never physical abuse, but throwing things, breaking things, just acting like a lunatic around my house. | ||
| Did you know something was wrong with you, or were you even aware of it enough? | ||
| I was. | ||
| I tell you when I first, like, I was, that anger intensity worked really well in Afghanistan. | ||
| Like I said, the Afghans that I worked with, they hated the Taliban. | ||
| The task force I was on had a Viking kind of war culture mindset, and so it worked really well in Afghanistan. | ||
| But 24 hours later when I'd be home, wife and children, it didn't work well there. | ||
| I couldn't like flip a switch and turn it off. | ||
| So I recognized that, but it was a moment that I came home From Afghanistan. | ||
| I made it home for my daughter's birthday. | ||
| She was so excited I was going to be there. | ||
| And I remember she's very opinionated. | ||
| She still is. | ||
| And she didn't like the icing on her cake. | ||
| And just saying that, like, I flipped out and I grabbed my little girl's birthday cake and picked it up and threw it against the wall and destroyed my little girl's birthday. | ||
| And I remember in that moment thinking, like, what kind of person does that? | ||
| What kind of dad does something like that? | ||
| And that was one example. | ||
| At that moment, I realized that I had to just back off. | ||
| Instead of fixing the behavior, I just kind of distanced myself. | ||
| And so between these eight deployments, I would just stay busy at schools and training and workups and just stayed busy and isolated myself from them. | ||
| And over time, that anger started turning into anxiety. | ||
| I started having these physiological symptoms. | ||
| My arms would go numb. | ||
| My face would go numb. | ||
| I'd feel like my throat was swelling shut. | ||
| Sometimes I'd feel like I had like a thousand pounds on my chest. | ||
| I started researching what this was and learned it was panic attacks, but I didn't want to say anything to the guys I worked with in this little special operations group. | ||
| I figured the guys would think I was weak, maybe I'd lose my clearance, and so I didn't speak up. | ||
| I tried to push it down and do my job, and eventually those symptoms got much worse. | ||
| I actually started having these moments where I almost felt like a detached, like out-of-body experience. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'd wake up by these fogs and realize I didn't remember the last few weeks, and so I had to speak up and say something because I wasn't only putting myself in danger, but I was putting other people. | ||
| and danger as well. | ||
| And so that's when I was brought home and I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
| And that began-- that wasn't my rock bottom, but that began a very downward spiral in my life. | ||
| My wife and my psychologist were trying to help me move forward. | ||
| And I was in such a state-- | ||
| the only way I really know how to describe the state of panic | ||
| that I was in, I just recently kind of came up with words for it. | ||
| It's like if your ankle was handcuffed to the bottom of a pool drain, and the surface was | ||
| about a foot above your head, and you at just how desperate you would be for one breath of air, | ||
| You never die. | ||
| Like, that's how I was like 24-7. | ||
| And on top of that panic, I felt totally ashamed because I was so proud of the job I was doing, and my whole identity was wrapped in that job, and now it was gone. | ||
| And so my wife and my counselor were trying to find something for me to do and that's where the MMA and Jiu Jitsu came in. | ||
| I'd say I did it since I was little but I'm still little. | ||
| I did it since I was five years old and so I was already a professional fighter so I dove into that and just invested my time in that and I had a great deal of success. | ||
| I ended up being 18-2 as a pro fighter. | ||
| I won a world title belt from Legacy FC and fought in Strikeforce and all these shows but really what I did was I never got well. | ||
| I found something to hide in, like somebody climbing a bottle of alcohol or drugs. | ||
| For me, that's where I just made myself occupied. | ||
| Do you think that's where most people are at when they start getting into MMA? | ||
| Because as you know, obviously, it's absolutely blowing up, and Joe Rogan's talking to all the fighters all the time, and there really seems to be this thing about getting your shit together, that that seems to be the beginning point. | ||
| It's a disciplined lifestyle. | ||
| You have to be disciplined. | ||
| I mean, I'm competing. | ||
| I was telling Alan West today, he's like, you still compete? | ||
| I compete in jiu-jitsu tournaments. | ||
| I'm doing the World Championships in August. | ||
| And the reason why is because it helps me regiment my life. | ||
| It's something I put a date on the calendar, and everything in my life becomes disciplined. | ||
| The way my family life is, the way I eat, the way I sleep, the way I manage my schedule for traveling and speaking, everything becomes regimented. | ||
| So I try to compete twice a year for that. | ||
| When you live in the lifestyle of a professional fighter and competing at that very high level like I competed at, it really helped me manage my life. | ||
| And my life was still dealing with panic attacks. | ||
| I was still angry. | ||
| My life was still kind of in disarray. | ||
| And my marriage really began to deteriorate because I wasn't addressing the problem. | ||
| And so eventually I ended up in an affair. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| I was so callous at that point. | ||
| And so we sat our kids down and said we were getting divorced. | ||
| In fact, my wife filed for divorce. | ||
| We sold our home, moved into separate apartments, like signed 12-month leases. | ||
| And my wife and I had two very different reactions. | ||
| And my wife went into a church, and I don't mean like on a Sunday, she went like every day, got connected with a group of people, and she said she started praying for me. | ||
| And at that time, I was probably as far away from God as you could possibly be. | ||
| But I asked her now, of course, what was she praying for me at this time? | ||
| And she'd just pray, God, let me see Chad the way you see Chad. | ||
| Let me love Chad the way you love Chad. | ||
| Let me forgive Chad the way you forgave Chad. | ||
| And so you have this woman that's like fighting for me. | ||
| Meanwhile, I'm in this apartment, Immediately, like, I'm separated from this woman I don't have to deal with anymore. | ||
| I don't have to be responsible for the problems I was causing anymore. | ||
| And so, I had a big fight on Showtime, Strikeforce. | ||
| And that's what I was focused on. | ||
| And when that fight was over, I ended up winning that fight. | ||
| But as I won that fight in the Toyota Center, there was like 10,000 people there. | ||
| And I remember thinking when my hand was raised, like, my wife wasn't there. | ||
| And she'd always been my cheerleader before. | ||
| Something about that, I went back to my apartment that night and I started thinking about all the problems I caused, the people I hurt, my family mainly. | ||
| And I thought, well I blamed everyone else before, like I was the common denominator, like the problem was me. | ||
| And when I came to this thought, this idea came over me that somehow my family would be sad | ||
| without me, but they would be better off. | ||
| Now, if you know anything about the veteran suicide rate, that same hopeless thought finds | ||
| a home in the hearts of 20 plus veterans every day. | ||
| That not I'm going to kill myself to escape my pain, but somehow you think that people | ||
| around me would be sad, my family would be sad, my friends would be sad, but they're | ||
| going to be better off. | ||
| And so that decision really seemed like it made sense to me, and I made a decision to take my life. | ||
| In that apartment, I had all my family pictures. | ||
| I'm ashamed to say, but it's true. | ||
| I had all my family pictures in my closet because, you know, girls coming over and whatnot. | ||
| And so I would sit in my closet with my... I'd shut the door, I'd put my family pictures on the floor, and I'd try to build up the courage. | ||
| I'd put the pistol to my... I had a Glock 22 pistol. | ||
| I'd put it to my head, I'd put it in my mouth, trying to build up the courage. | ||
| And I don't know to this day if I had the courage to actually pull that trigger, because I didn't. | ||
| But what did keep me from doing it was my son Hunter, the one that's in Afghanistan right now. | ||
| He had the only key to my apartment, and I knew he'd be the one to either find me or open the door for someone to find me. | ||
| And that Kept me from actually doing it and one morning. I called my | ||
| wife. She says I call she says I was frantic I don't really remember the call, but she came to my | ||
| apartment and when she came I was actually in the closet with that pistol and | ||
| And she knocked on my door and unwittingly you know intervened and saved my life | ||
| I remember hiding that pistol under my blanket I didn't want her to find it and and she I answered the | ||
| door and we got in this confrontation And she asked me a question that it radically changed my | ||
| life She asked me how I could do everything I did in the Marine Corps. | ||
| She saw me become a recon Marine. | ||
| She saw me train for these deployments and all these things in Afghanistan, and train for MMA fights, cutting weight, and all the discipline it takes to do that. | ||
| She's like, how could you do all of that? | ||
| And when it comes to your family, you'll quit. | ||
| And that question for me, to be called a quitter, which is one of the most soul-cutting words to me, it just impacted me, and I knew I had to make a change. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| First off, thank you for being so upfront about the personal stuff, because I know that's not easy for anybody. | ||
| Before we get to Mighty Oaks, I'm sure you have heard many, many stories. | ||
| that are like that. | ||
| Did you ever experience anything along those lines? | ||
| Did you ever go down that path personally? | ||
| No, me personally, you know, it was just different for me. | ||
| I have a very supportive wife who, her dad was career military also, did 24 years in the army, in Vietnam, two tours, and he's buried at Arlington National Cemetery. | ||
| So we always tried to have that very strong support. | ||
| And as a battalion commander, I remember before we went to Iraq, I tried to tell the soldiers that the person that you are here When you put that first step on those stairs to go into that airplane, you gotta leave that person here. | ||
| And the person that you are over there, somehow, you've got to leave that person over there. | ||
| And I think that that's what the struggle is for our warriors, to be able to make that switch. | ||
| It's not saying that you're, you're cold and callous to be able to do it, but you just | ||
| understand what's required of you. | ||
| You know, your nation is calling you to be a certain person, but your family is also | ||
| calling you, calling you to be a certain person. | ||
| And that's what veterans and that's what our military men and women are struggling with, | ||
| because we put them in these very intense combat situations and then we extricate them | ||
| from them and we put them back into the family. | ||
| And I don't think we do a really good job of the decompression time over there before they come back home. | ||
| I think that you need a good two to three weeks before, you know, as you're coming out of those combat zones of operation before you come home. | ||
| And it's important that they talk to each other. | ||
| We don't allow that to happen. | ||
| Do we do none of that? | ||
| I mean, traveling across the world takes some time, but you mean some, like, real-time at a facility somewhere? | ||
| I mean, real-time over there, and, you know, instead of rushing, we've got to get them back home. | ||
| You know, we've got to get all the equipment loaded and get them back home. | ||
| Take the time, a couple of weeks, to just let God sit around and talk and get that opportunity to leave that person over there and start mentally preparing themselves to go back. | ||
| Because a lot has changed in your families. | ||
| You've been gone, you know, your wife, your kids, they've continued on with their lives. | ||
| You're kind of the one that's coming back in and you're kind of the guest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you've got to, you know, reaccustom yourself. | ||
| It's got to be a huge catch-22, though, because in their minds, they're all going, I want to get home tomorrow. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Get me home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that in the long run, it will be so beneficial. | ||
| You know, I remember I did a year in Korea in 1995, and my daughter, my oldest daughter, when I left, I think she was a little over a year. | ||
| And, you know, that was the day before Skype and everything like that, and so you're sharing VHS tapes and what have you. | ||
| But when I got back from Korea, you know, she was there and she looked at me and she was like, I think I know who you are, but I'm not really sure who you are. | ||
| And so it was all about redeveloping that relationship, you know, taking her out, you know, daddy daughter time, just, just whatever. | ||
| And then finally she realized, okay, this is a guy I've been seeing, you know, on those video tapes. | ||
| Yeah, he's my dad. | ||
| He's not leaving. | ||
| He's not going anywhere. | ||
| So I think it's important that we allow our guys to have that time, but we are putting them in such a constant deployment cycle. | ||
| And that's why I get so upset about how we have reduced the strength of our military, because we're running these warriors, we're running their families into the ground. | ||
| And that's why Mighty Oaks is so important. | ||
| Yeah, so you handed me the segue. | ||
| Talk to me about why you started Mighty Oaks. | ||
| Well, in that reaction to my wife's question, you know, why would I not fight for my family and my own life? | ||
| I had to respond to that, and through that response, I found the solution that many of our warriors face, not just me. | ||
| I knew I couldn't make those changes by myself. | ||
| I knew I needed help, and so I asked my wife, was there someone at this church she was going to? | ||
| Because I knew I couldn't do it with the people around me as well. | ||
| I had some great friends, but there were more people that were telling me what I wanted to hear, not what I needed to hear. | ||
| And so I met a man named Steve Toth. | ||
| And Steve is a Texas state legislator now. | ||
| And at the time, he was the elder at the church my wife was going to and a small business owner. | ||
| And we met at a Starbucks coffee shop. | ||
| And I had the perfect plan of how I was going to fix my life. | ||
| I was probably slid it over to him really smug. | ||
| And he put his hand on it and slid it right back over to me and told me I was going to fail. | ||
| And I remember being, like, remuneratedly really offended, because I'm like, this is pretty good, and really what I was trying to do was manipulate him to say, take this plan, show it to my wife, because I'm trying to fix things. | ||
| And he tapped on that paper and he said, if this thing doesn't have anything to do with your relationship with God, I'm not going to waste your time, and I'm not going to let you waste mine. | ||
| And I know a lot of people may not agree with my faith or what I believe, but I'll tell you this. | ||
| I tried everything. | ||
| I'd been through all the counseling, all the programs. | ||
| I'd been on the pills. | ||
| I tried professional success. | ||
| I'd been successful financially and in my career as an athlete, as an instructor. | ||
| I had a thousand students in my school that I was teaching. | ||
| And so I had tried all those things and nothing had worked. | ||
| And so it was time for me to try something different. | ||
| We have a saying at Mighty Oaks, if what you're doing isn't working, then why not try something different? | ||
| And so I trusted this man, Steve. | ||
| I surrendered my life to God through his leadership and his mentorship. | ||
| And things in my life started to radically change. | ||
| I found a restoration, a hope. | ||
| For the first time I had hope in a very long time. | ||
| And I found ultimately what I've been searching for the whole time, my whole life, and that's purpose. | ||
| And that purpose was to share what I discovered with other people. | ||
| And that was how Mighty Oaks began. | ||
| Through that process, I learned something really important. | ||
| It sounds so simple, but to me it was so profound. | ||
| That all these things that happened to me, my childhood, Afghanistan, losing one of my best friends, Foster Harrington, we served together for 10 years when he was killed on our first deployments. | ||
| All these things that had happened to me didn't lead me to be in that closet with my pistol in my hand. | ||
| What led me there were the choices I made in response to those things. | ||
| And I still had control of that. | ||
| I still had the control, the ability to choose differently. | ||
| And as cliche as it may sound, I didn't have to let my past define my future. | ||
| I could choose a different future moving forward. | ||
| And in doing that, part of that future I chose moving forward was to take what I discovered and share it with others. | ||
| It was like if I was dying of cancer and this guy Steve gave me the cure, I had to share it. | ||
| I felt obligated to share it. | ||
| And so that's how we started Mighty Oaks. | ||
| We went ready at the time. | ||
| My wife and I were still bleeding as a family trying to heal, but we both felt passionate to do this mission. | ||
| And I'm so thankful we did. | ||
| I mean, to date, I've spoken to over 100,000 active duty troops at bases around the world by request to share a message on resiliency. | ||
| I go to Marine Corps boot camp. | ||
| The Marine Corps allows me to speak at Marine Corps boot camp. | ||
| to young warriors about resiliency and spiritual resiliency, and we run a program called a Legacy Program. | ||
| It's a recovery program. | ||
| We have four ranches in California, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas, and we pay for everything. | ||
| Travel, flights, all the program is totally free. | ||
| Active duty veterans and spouses come to these programs. | ||
| We do 30 camps per year, and we've had 2,600 graduates from those camps. | ||
| And so it's been absolutely incredible to take the lessons I've learned and realize that I wasn't the only one. | ||
| I wasn't alone. | ||
| 22 veterans every day were taking their lives at the same time I was going through this. | ||
| Divorce rates in some bases are up to 80% for combat veterans. | ||
| A lot of people having the same issues I had. | ||
| I had the solution. | ||
| And now we have the most amazing team. | ||
| People like Colonel West on our board and General Boykin. | ||
| And we have Sgt. | ||
| Maj. | ||
| Marine Corps, Sgt. | ||
| Maj. | ||
| Kent, who's a great friend of both of ours. | ||
| Outshot us both. | ||
| By one shot. | ||
| By one shot. | ||
| But yeah, we just have the most amazing team and staff to serve these warriors. | ||
| We have, I think, 14 full-time staff members and about 40 instructors that are all combat veterans that serve as instructors at these programs. | ||
| This is absolutely incredible. | ||
| There's so much there, so it's really interesting to me that you said you tried everything else and faith is what worked for you. | ||
| Now, I assume that as a man of faith, you hear something like that and that doesn't surprise you. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| It absolutely doesn't. | ||
| And I think that, you know, in the Bible it says that you can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens you. | ||
| And that's the message we need to get out there. | ||
| You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the victim mentality. | ||
| And I always tell people, you've got two choices in life. | ||
| You either be a victim or you be a victor. | ||
| And that's why I hate progressive socialism, because it tells people they're going to be victims. | ||
| And that's not what America's about. | ||
| And even more so, Dave, when you look at what is happening with our young people in the United States of America right now, the suicide rate, it's because they're searching for something. | ||
| And they're out there trying everything. | ||
| They're on the internet. | ||
| They're on the social media. | ||
| They're playing the video games. | ||
| They want to be cool. | ||
| The drugs and everything that the world says that you can have to make you accept it. | ||
| But there's just one thing that can really fill that emptiness in your heart. | ||
| And I think, you know, we talked about an awakening in this country. | ||
| I also see a faith awakening in this country as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| You guys probably know, I've been on tour with Jordan Peterson for the last year and a half or so, and he's not trying to sell religion on anyone particularly, but he is trying to show the power of religious stories and the meaning and all of the things that I think you're talking about. | ||
| And I do see a rebirth of that. | ||
| And it's been, well, I've actually seen it all over the world, because we've traveled all over the world, and it's pretty fascinating to see firsthand, because it's not what the media shows you. | ||
| And he's moved me on this. | ||
| You can't be around that for a year, year and a half, and not be moved personally on that. | ||
| Well, that's one of the things, you know, leftism is about secular humanism, because they don't want you to believe that you can have faith and hope in something other than the government. | ||
| And when you look at what, you know, our founders created, when you look and read John Locke's second treatise on government, Natural Rights Theory, your inalienable rights are not dictated to you by man. | ||
| It comes from a creator. | ||
| Life, liberty... They can take them from you, but they didn't give them to you. | ||
| They can take them from you, but they didn't give them to you. | ||
| And that's the thing that we have to come to understand. | ||
| And that's why you see this drive to move faith out of the mainstream in the United | ||
| States of America, because they don't want people to understand that, "I don't have to | ||
| wait for you to give it to me. | ||
| It's already been given to me. | ||
| I have the ability to pursue my happiness. | ||
| Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Spartacus, all you guys, you can't guarantee happiness | ||
| for me." | ||
| And I think that's what Chad is saying. | ||
| He went to all of these other things to try to fill that hole in his life, and then Steve | ||
| Toth sold him it here. | ||
| Here's the answer. | ||
| I got the Spartacus reference there. | ||
| That didn't get by me. | ||
| That didn't get by me. | ||
| And you see, I mean, there is hope on this because those people that are coming to us, half of those people in active duty military, orders coming, being sent from the military, they don't agree with the fact that we're a faith-based program, but they're looking for solutions. | ||
| 15 years ago, the DOD and VA began just pushing clinical programs. | ||
| We've had We have 1,100 VA and DOD clinical programs. | ||
| At the time, the suicide rate was 16 a day. | ||
| It's only gotten worse. | ||
| And so the military, the VA, the veteran community are looking for answers. | ||
| And faith-based programs like Mighty Oaks have proven to be successful. | ||
| We just finished a three-year longitudinal data, a doctoral study. | ||
| And I could bore you with the numbers from it, but we did outperform clinical trials in this independent study. | ||
| I assume there are some secular organizations that are doing very similar things that probably have decent success rates. | ||
| You're just saying that for you and for people that are like-minded that this works for you, but you don't have any inherent problem with people doing it from a more secular perspective. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Some of those things are going to be short-lived. | ||
| When people go and are inspired or motivated, inspiration and motivation tend to fade. | ||
| Faith and the God that created us tend to sustain. | ||
| It gives you the resiliency to bounce back. | ||
| I do believe that personally. | ||
| However, I've seen some other great programs out there. | ||
| I just believe that That when people make the decision to align their lives with the lives that we were created to live, they find true resiliency and true strength and real hope and real purpose moving forward. | ||
| And we've seen that firsthand, and thousands of guys, and not everyone that comes to our program, or matter of fact, about half of the people that come to our program, would say they share our faith when they come, but they're looking for something that they hadn't found anywhere else. | ||
| So this hour absolutely flew by. | ||
| So if I was giving you guys each a closing statement here, How is it that you'd want that average person out there to get involved, help some of these wounded warriors, help you guys get the mission out there? | ||
| I think we did a little of it again. | ||
| A little of it here, but what would you want people to do? | ||
| I think the most important thing is just don't go up and say thank you for your service. | ||
| Get to know a veteran. | ||
| There are veterans, we should not have homeless and jobless veterans in the United States of America. | ||
| And if you know a veteran that is out there alone, invite them into your home. | ||
| Show them the real love that The love that they extended to you, that they were going to lay down their life for your freedom. | ||
| It's going to be tough to beat that one. | ||
| I'd say, you know, if you are a patriot and you want to be part of a grateful nation, when you are going to meet that veteran and invite them into your home, have a place to point them to. | ||
| And there's plenty of places out there. | ||
| Mighty Oaks Foundation is a place that they can point people to as a resource to help our warriors that are struggling with suicide, divorce, PTSD, all those issues. | ||
| And we're not only a resource, but a free one. | ||
| We cover all the costs of that. | ||
| So, free tool at your disposal as a grateful nation to serve our warriors. | ||
| Any warriors listening? | ||
| Our spouses? | ||
| Just visit our website, and again, we'll take care of you. | ||
| And the website is MightyOaksPrograms.org. | ||
| That's right, yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| It's been a pleasure, guys. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And I should tell you, considering five years ago, I thought you were a complete nutbag. | ||
| I don't know if this says now more about you or more about me. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You have to stand strong, and eventually light will overcome. | ||
| Now you ended the show twice on a solid note. |
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