Charlie Mike The Podcast
Charlie Mike The Podcast
Postcards from the Frontlines: A Story of Service and Resilience
Alan's journey from Toronto to the Texas firehouses is nothing short of extraordinary. This episode features our engaging conversation with Alan, a former Navy corpsman and seasoned firefighter paramedic, whose career has spanned over 45 years. From contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan to authoring the gripping book "Postcards Through Hell," Alan shares his motivations, the highs and lows of his extensive career, and the personal stories that have shaped him. His dedication to serving the community as a suppression lieutenant and his 33-year marriage offer a heartwarming glimpse into the life of a true hero.
Prepare to be captivated by Alan's vivid recounting of his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shares the chaos caused by new MRAP vehicles hitting low-hanging wires, leading to a brief firefight in Iraq, and the intense response from authorities to a laser pointer incident near the Ministry of Interior. Hear about the logistical challenges and harsh conditions in Kabul, and the critical role of delivering essential supplies and mail to military sites. Alan's firsthand experiences provide a gripping look into the operational intricacies and harsh realities of life in conflict zones.
Finally, delve into the emotional and professional repercussions of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Alan reflects on the sacrifices of third-country nationals and the impact of abandoned equipment and vulnerable local allies. He also discusses the therapeutic journey of co-authoring "Postcards Through Hell" with fellow "knuckle draggers," including the emotional perspectives of their wives and mothers. This episode honors the resilience and dedication of those who serve, offering listeners an insightful and moving narrative that extends beyond the battlefield.
Buy The Book Here!!
https://a.co/d/7zZDyWI
Please like share and follow..
Support@CharlieMikeThePodcast.com
Website
https://www.facebook.com/CharlieMikeThePodcast
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNyGgJYIgU8b02NypoJgHAg
Charlie Mike Military Apparel
Veteran Owned & Operated
This is Charlie Mike the podcast Veterans helping veterans. Talking about things happening in the veteran community, Things we've experienced and overcome, such as addictions, PTSD, depression, legal trouble, and we also promote veteran-owned businesses. If you're talking about it, we're talking about it. This is Charlie Mike the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Charlie Mike the podcast. As always, I'm your host, Raul, and I'm so excited. I feel like we've been on a hiatus for a little bit, changing studios and doing a lot of back work, but we're officially back and I'm excited to have my guest. My guest today is Alan. We've been trying to link up for a little bit of time and, alan, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm a firefighter paramedic with Community Fire Rescue in Houston. I've been a paramedic for about 45 plus years. Former Navy corpsman, I started contracting in 2005 in Iraq and I did five deployments over there and then eventually went over to Afghanistan where I picked up a contract for delivering the mail to US troops. So we wrote a book about it called Postcards Through Hell.
Speaker 2:So I want to speak on that and I want to learn more about it, but where are you from originally?
Speaker 3:I was born in Toronto, ontario it, but uh, where. Where are?
Speaker 2:you from originally.
Speaker 3:I was born in toronto, ontario, um. I'm canadian citizen. You know I served in the united states navy. I've been in texas for about 39 years okay, okay.
Speaker 2:How many years did you do in the navy? Just three years?
Speaker 3:no, let's say just three years, that's a long time I was on a three by six so I only did half my tour okay, I have to ask uh, do you play hockey? I, I dabbled yeah yeah, is it?
Speaker 2:Is it true that every Canadian plays hockey?
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 3:No, most Canadian hockey teams have Americans on them.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, yeah. So what brought you from Canada to the United States?
Speaker 3:We grew up in Phoenix.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Phoenix Arizona for a while. So you were just born in Canada, I was just born in Canada.
Speaker 3:We immigrated to the United States Both we have a very large, large family, and most of them were in California and once my parents had gone back to Canada I decided to stay. And then at that time I joined the military. I was in the ROTC for three years as well, so I kind of got a leg up when I enlisted. So I got to go in as an E3. And my family had all moved back to Canada. After I got out of the military I went to Canada, but I couldn't find work that sustained my income for any length of time. You know a lot of unions up there and whatnot so I just came back to the United States and went to Texas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what brought you to Texas?
Speaker 3:Truthfully yeah, hispanic women.
Speaker 2:Man I like this guy yeah, that's why I've been trying to leave man, that's why, you're trying to leave yeah, no, uh. Oh well, there you go yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you married currently?
Speaker 3:oh yeah, um just celebrated my 33, 33rd wedding anniversary with my wife.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I met her in San Antonio. I used to be an officer with Bear County Fire and we were working a location that required furniture. And I went into this store to buy some furniture and there she was, and I kept asking her out and she kept saying no, but I just I kept pressing. And there she was and I kept asking her out and she kept saying no, but I just kept pressing, and pressing, and pressing and she finally said yeah, and we got married about a year after that.
Speaker 2:Man, that's awesome, congratulations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:Do you have any kids currently?
Speaker 3:Yeah, three kids, six grandchildren Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow, okay, this is a little on the personal side. How?
Speaker 3:old are you 65.
Speaker 2:Man, you look good. Yeah, I don't feel good, but I yeah, okay, you look good, so you're still working right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I'm a suppression lieutenant at Station 2. I might have mentioned this earlier, that I worked the Mission Bend Aleph area, right.
Speaker 2:So let's get back to your military. So your first time, you okay. So you did three years in the Navy but saw. Did you see any combat during that?
Speaker 3:time. No, no, never deployed yeah.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't until after you got out of the military that you went into combat. Yeah, I got out in 1981. Okay okay, okay, yeah, and I into, yeah, I got, I got out in 1981.
Speaker 3:So, okay, okay, yeah, and I I just started doing, I cut my teeth on 911 in Oakland, california. I used to call that the knife and gun club so I saw a lot of trauma there. Um, and then, uh, I moved around. I was like a very diverse background. As a paramedic I've done, uh, aeromedicine, I've done clinical medicine, I've done sports medicine, industrial medicine, wilderness medicine, just about everything that you can think of. When it comes to being an EMT, once I was nationally registered, of course, and then when I got to Texas, at that time they didn't recognize national registration. But it kind of opened a lot more doors. And the interesting thing is, when I started contracting, I was applying for jobs as a police liaison officer. I was going to go to Iraq and train Iraqi police on checkpoint procedures and searches and things of that nature. But once they found out as a paramedic, they shifted me over to the PSD side, which is personal security detachment, and I ended up working on the shark teams with DynCorp for a couple years. Dyncorp, dyncorp International yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so what was your first rotation like? Do you remember that?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, it was an eye-op opener because I didn't have what year was this 2005.?
Speaker 2:2005. Yeah, late 2005. And this was Iraq.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:We were stationed out of Baghdad. We're right across the Tigris River from the Green Zone and so our mission there. We had actually several different types of subcontracts. One of them was Bering Point, where we were taking attorneys around and settling cases with local nationals. Another one was CivPol, which was all the international police liaison officers. We'd take them back and forth to the Ministry of Interior or to the shooting range where the Baghdad Police College was, and then did a lot of runs on the biop, which was called Route Irish, which was a pretty dangerous route at that time to and from the airport. And then of course we had other VIPs and dignitaries that we ran around to different places. And the last one was the CPAT, which was all the prison wardens, and so we were making runs to all these different prisons and making sure that apparently the money that America was putting into these prisons had to be monitored and whatnot, so that these wardens were teaching these other Iraqis on how to run prisons and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And that was just your first tour. How long did you stay there? The first go-round?
Speaker 3:Well, the contract lasts a year and then I, you know, re-signed for a second year and I was kind of talking to my wife about, you know, kind of calling it quits. But I switched over to another company and ended up working for, uh, sock at that time it was sock smg, which is special operations consulting, but eventually they got bought out by day and zimmerman, so it'd be called securing our country, which was the same act, you know, same um abbreviation, but different acronyms.
Speaker 2:so so what did? What did your roster look like? You worked with a lot of individuals like, okay, let's say, uh, was it mainly all special forces and things of that, of that mostly, yeah, um, and in iraq.
Speaker 3:On the shark teams it was a large mix of third country nationalists, a majority of them were south African. That were prior police defense force and special forces New Zealand, australia, england. We had a lot of French Foreign Legion guys. You know it was a very, very diverse mix of personnel. Every team it was a 10-man team. We had 10 shark teams.
Speaker 2:Bunch of badasses huh, pretty much yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:And that's where I met my co-author, ed Ford. He was working for Crow Crucible at the time and they provided all of the in-country training for us. So they did IED awareness, they did foreign weapons handling, all all of your shooting qualifications and and things of that nature, and then they would eventually go out on on runs with us to evaluate the effectiveness of the training. And so him and I became really good friends and he also worked for sock after dine core and was deployed to afghan Afghanistan. I was covering down for some medics at a FOB down in Al-Hilla and one of their teams got hit and they didn't have a medic on board. So him and the guy that I worked with at Al-Hilla or it was actually at Diwania FOB Echo, his name was Mike Hardy, him and Ed were in Afghanistan and they dropped my name in the hat and I ended up going up there to fill that void.
Speaker 2:It's night and day huh between Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 3:It was a different animal, because now we're doing convoy operations that have nothing to do with PSD and so all of my experience on the job there just basically kind of set you up for IED awareness and two-way range ambushes and stuff like that, but in Iraq we never saw the enemy. They pop off a couple shots or blow an IED off or something like that, but you never saw them. In Afghanistan we fought the Taliban and they liked to fight. They stayed and fought. In Afghanistan we fought the Taliban and they liked to fight.
Speaker 2:They stayed and fought. So you were in Iraq in late 2005, and a few years after that. It was pretty hot. You didn't see any. Y'all didn't go through any. Oh yeah, jesus.
Speaker 3:Christ, we had all kinds of shit going on. We had teams that got hit. We did counter-assault teams, we did QRF quick reaction force. I'll have to say something. There's not really anything. We did counter-assault teams, we did QRF quick reaction force.
Speaker 2:I'll have to say something. There's not really anything quick about a quick reaction force, man, you're telling me that's like waiting on. Oh for us, waiting on EOD.
Speaker 3:And then there's other PMCs like Blackwater and Aegis and different private security companies that are out there and you're kind of coexisting with them and doing pretty much the same business. And not that it was competitive, but you know, between DynCorp and Blackwater they were the two big names.
Speaker 2:So, with there being so many different I guess corporations doing similar jobs, did y'all ever have friendly-unfriendly when it came just to that? Because I know sometimes the military had friendly-unfriendly with different organizations as well. Did y'all go through any of that?
Speaker 3:Well, we didn't with other companies, but other companies might have done it with themselves or something.
Speaker 3:I think we had one incident that we were coming out of a prison where, when the new MRAPs had come in to replace the Hummers, they were so much taller. And so everything in Iraq has got, you know, everybody's plugging into electricity and running cable and wires, and all this stuff is really low, and we're running on a street and we're parallel to an MRAP that's running on a couple blocks up. And then we're, as they're going through there, uh, they're hitting all these things and sparks are flying and stuff like that, and I'm not sure who made the, made the judgment, or whatnot, but uh, we got into kind of like a little bit of a firefight as we're going through these blocks, you know, shooting back and forth and stuff. But it turns out it was, you know, the military and the sparks were not gunfire or anything like that, it was just kind of a misread, so to speak. And then you just kind of get off the X and go the opposite direction and no harm, no foul, nobody's hurt.
Speaker 2:Yep and whatnot. That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just taking the power, yeah, and then you know I hate to put myself on the chopping block here, but a a friend of mine had sent me this laser pointer and it's the stupidest thing. But I went up on the rooftop with a buddy of mine and we were sitting there just shining it around, whatever, and apparently I flagged the Ministry of Interior and they opened up with 50 cal. We're on this rooftop At you guys.
Speaker 3:At us, oh wow. And so I just kind of like jumped down this little elevator shaft and my South African friends with me and everybody was kind of on my shit about one using the laser pointer and the other one was kind of like leaving this guy behind. And I said I never left him behind, he was behind me the whole time and he goes well, how do you know? And I was going, he was going Fook, fook.
Speaker 1:He was so heavily accented.
Speaker 3:you know that's too funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so now you're in Afghanistan. What tell me? Tell me about it. What's life in Afghanistan? Like I never got to experience Afghanistan. I did Iraq for a couple of years, but never Afghanistan.
Speaker 3:You know when you could be blindfolded and fly into Afghanistan and you would know you were in Kabul. Yeah, you know. They burn tree roots for lack of lumber. There's open sewage and feces everywhere, there's decomposition and dead animals, and then, of course, generators are producing all of this diesel and when you combine that stuff it has that particular odor and you know you're there that sounds sounds like a lovely place yeah, they, they, you know they're, I think they're.
Speaker 3:They're mean. Average age for elderly is is a lot lower because they're breathing all these carcinogens and so it's not a healthy place to live when you're in the city. Yeah, um, what interesting to me is they knew I was coming up and when I arrived there was nobody at the airport to pick me up and it's kind of like trial by fire. They were actually out on a mission to recover one of their vehicles that had been hit in a previous ambush and so nobody was available. So I ended up hopping into a taxi with somebody that I didn't know. I didn't know where I was going, I didn't even have an address, I just knew the name, no-transcript. I finally went down this one street and I saw a guy wearing a sock uniform. I'm like oh, there it is.
Speaker 3:I was in this cab for like an hour and 40 minutes just driving around trying to find this freaking bill, and I lucked out. I got there and everything, and I think my bill was like $40. I threw some change at him and I didn't even know if I tipped him, but I got there and then I was there for about an hour when the team that was supposed to pick me up finally showed up and I was going hey, what the fuck guys? And so that was my orientation, and then we went right into running these missions. Initially they just had some thin-skinned and up-armored vehicles Tahos or not Tahos, but Toyota Land Cruisers, right. And then they finally had ordered some Ford F-550 gun trucks. That arrived, they were white-colored. There was a learning curve. They had sent a trainer named Dave Gangenbach, who ended up being my driver at the time, and he trained us on off-road driving and all kinds of tactical driving. The Achilles heel on this thing was the flat bottom. Yeah, it's a catastrophic takedown if you hit an IED.
Speaker 2:I can imagine yeah.
Speaker 3:Most of them had the V-holes that you would prefer, but you know they served their purpose. They were quick vehicles, um, loud as hell. I mean. They eventually painted them black, you know, so we could run missions at nighttime and kind of like reduce our, our visual signature, but they were loud. So I mean, uh, we might have the element of surprise when we were going there, but the taliban knew when we were going to have to take the same route back Right, so it was on.
Speaker 2:So just tell me a little bit about this. The Pony Express, how and just how?
Speaker 3:Well, initially we were running critical supplies to support military infrastructure to O ODA sites. Operational attachment alpha. We had a great deal of success where other people had failed, and eventually we got the US mail contract. So the military was tasked with delivering the mail, but it wasn't a priority for them.
Speaker 3:And so a lot of times if they're out doing recon missions or other types of missions, the mail would sit for an extended period of time and you know kind of like troop morale is going downhill and whatnot. So they contracted out to us and we had like a 98% success rate on our drops. We still delivered all of these other things fuel, ammo, weapons, even vehicles but we always tacked the mail onto it as well. So we made these runs and they started to call us the Pony Express. I actually named the book the Pony Express, but there's, I guess, a group that had a trademark on it or something. We got a cease and desist letter saying we couldn't use that. So we changed the name to Postcards Through Hell. And that was the priority was to deliver the mail.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a badass name too Postcards Through Hell.
Speaker 3:Well, it's going through hell delivering the mail. The thing that's interesting about it is nobody knew about it. I mean, occasionally, you know, gate guards saw trucks coming in, but they don't know what the cargo is. We go to the post office box and we drop the mail off and then we leave, and then so the military would go get their mail. They don't know how it got there. So I mean, if you were in Afghanistan from, let's say, 2009 to 2012, there's a 90% chance we delivered the mail. Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like you say, it's a big uh, more morale bust uh yeah, morale booster, booster yeah go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people don't understand, you know, because a lot of times, sometimes there's no access to internet, there's no, there's no.
Speaker 3:Um well, there's just no access to internet and letters was the way it used to be done yeah, I think the washington post did a story on it uh, right around christmas time and uh it, I think people at that particular fob, uh when, when, uh it was another team that had done this uh delivery, but it was these guys were lining up and they were so happy to, you know, get this, uh, these gifts and and letters and and and. When you think about you know the, the risk that we took. You know, if you were wondering about what it's like, I, I on a personal, on a personal level, if I got a letter, it was really important to me and, and I think, to myself, is that something worth dying for? Of course it was, you know.
Speaker 2:so yeah, that's. It's crazy to think about on this side, because you know I think about the times in Iraq and you know I never really thought about how the mail or anything along those lines got to us. It just.
Speaker 3:It was just there, it was just there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the whole story Postcards Through Hell is based on one experience, or a bunch of experiences, multiple experiences, it's basically the story of my team leader, ed Ford.
Speaker 3:He's a 22-year Marine recon battalion and you know, aside from our friendship, our brotherhood, when he went over to Afghanistan he picked up basically the convoy side. They did have a little PSD element but it was tasked to some other guys and so he had, you know, he had a lot of experience and he had a great team. And when the company expanded they started putting up more teams and so my job there was, you know, to train all the other guys up to speed on combat lifesaver kind of put their medical program together. You know, get get supplies, do safe havens, met outs, route mapping, navigation, things of that nature. We didn't have a lot of stuff, so we depended on the military for support in that area. We had medical supplies that were expired but we still ended up using them. I mean, I always used the good stuff on my guys and the bad stuff on the bad guys.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, you know that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:And whatever we couldn't get. We, you know, a lot of times we would make a run to a fob and I'd go to the battalion aid station and hook up with the medic there and tell them hey, we're hurting for this, we're hurting for that, and they would give me stuff, and in my pack I have to have enough medical supplies to support a 10-man team for 72 hours. Oh, wow, that's a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I lost about an inch and a half in height from wearing all that damn gear.
Speaker 1:You're serious too.
Speaker 3:60 pounds of ballistic protection and another 35 pounds of med gear. You know it's like it takes its toll on you after a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what was the? You were there in Afghanistan and you said I'm done, I want to go home. Was there a particular moment that made you realize that, or was that just you just felt?
Speaker 3:it contract with a company that required a security clearance, which I didn't have. I could have stayed, but they would have taken me out of the medic slot and put me in as a shooter. So then I'm going to even make less money, since I'm a third country national, not an American, and so that to me was one of those risk benefits type of a deal. It wasn't really worth the risk considering the amount of money that I was making, so I ended up leaving that contract and then coming back at a later date when it was bought out by a different company. They didn't require the security clearance. At the time I didn't know when I had applied for this job. I had just applied for a convoy operations, but I didn't recognize the company name.
Speaker 3:And so, when I got there, I found out it was my old crew and it was, you know, same trucks. And so, when I got there, I found out it was my old crew and it was, you know, same trucks, same contract, different T-shirt, you know. And so I went back on board doing the same thing, just under a different name Wow. That you know what was the last time that you were actually in Afghanistan December of 2012.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, okay With the.
Speaker 3:The contract period ended in 2016. We wrote the book from 2009 to 2012. We had eight additional chapters that had mentioned certain ambushes and missions, but because the contract was classified, we had to take those those chapters out. So, you know, the owner held us to our non-disclosure agreement. Plus, we had to get all that stuff declassified, um, and so, at the time of the writing, um, we finished the book about seven years ago, but it took us like three years to get published, so it was a real pain in the ass. Um, so that's that. Post period 2012 is not mentioned in the book.
Speaker 3:But you know, I gotta give credit out to all my brothers that ran that contract.
Speaker 2:Um, you know the stand-up guys all the way around, we just couldn't mention their names um, over the past few years we saw the I guess the, the, the pullout in Afghanistan. Oh geez, clusterfuck yeah. And you spending so much time over there, probably building some relationships with some people, how did that affect you? I know that had to hurt in some way, because it was exactly what you said a clusterfuck.
Speaker 3:When I transitioned from Kandahar. I was in Kandahar at the time when my contract expired with DynCorp and that's why I was looking for a job in country, and when I got it, they flew me from there and I stayed at the Barron Hotel, and that's exactly the point where that bomb was placed, so I had some familiarity with it. But when they had announced it, the first thing that I had said was this is a huge, huge mistake to do a withdrawal like that.
Speaker 3:And there was no planning. Basically, they had access to other airports that they could have distributed. So much the demobilization of the troops, and it was just a total, total cluster. And then you know, look at all the money that they had left behind, Look at all the people that had worked for the United States that were now exposed to the Taliban. Look at all the equipment that turned out to be used against us and other people at a later time. It was just like you know what can you say, what can you do.
Speaker 2:And it's still being used to this day, the equipment that we left behind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, To, I don't know, to the Taliban's credit, I would hate to say that was their lack of familiarity with some of the technical equipment which turned out to be an okay, but then again, when you just talked about beans and bullets, you know they were able to capitalize on that stuff, so it was a bad move all the way around.
Speaker 2:Definitely so. If there's a particular chapter in the book that stands out, which one? Or is there, or do you just say all of it?
Speaker 3:Well, it's very well written. I mean, we're not writers, we're knuckle draggers. And so when we decided to put pen to paper, I guess the first benefit was we figured out that it was really therapeutic. Pen to paper I guess the first benefit was we figured out that it was really therapeutic. And so I'm basically establishing a timeline of all of these things, from the startup to when we decided to end the book. And I'm writing chapters and I'm sending them up to Ed and he's telling me this is right, this is that. Oh, I forgot that. And whenever he'd send it back to me and I would write it, and we finally got to a manuscript that was tangible. And so we sent it to an editor.
Speaker 3:And that was a back and forth thing for a long time and she never really wrote anything, she just told us. She gave us some really good advice. You know, when I took a couple of creative writing classes, you know, start with an action point, end with a hook, you know, have a theme brotherhood blah, blah, blah, and it actually materialized into something that was really good. So the interesting thing is it's a true story. It's not based on a true story where you're throwing in this fiction and trying to make it more interesting.
Speaker 3:So we start off with, like, the first chapter is basically putting the reader in the driver's seat. And the first chapter is basically putting the reader in the driver's seat. You know we have some missions that we ran so they understand exactly the nature of the business. And then we go into the next chapter, which is describing the routes, has responsibilities on, you know, recon, weapons preparation, fuel preparation, route preparation, alternate route preparation, all that stuff that everybody has to do and they don't think about it. It's very labor intensive and these team leaders had to do even more work, which was billeting, and they handled. You know we'd run missions with $10,000 in cash so we'd run and get out of jail free cards, kind of a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, and then, uh, then we list them by contact. So we have a contact at, say, rpg, you know, or mind strike, or, or small arms fire, or indirect fire, and, and, and we listed all these contacts to date.
Speaker 3:But what was most interesting, the two things that were interesting, is one the editor had mentioned that we didn't have any female perspective, and I'm just going well, ok, what are you talking about? There weren't any women on the contracts. What do you want to. You know what do you talk about? And I said well, what about your wives? What did they feel like, you know, when you were gone? Or what about the mothers of the guys that had been killed? You know in action, that had been killed in action? And so we ended up conducting about 22-something interviews just to get feedback from their point of view, and we created a chapter called Calling All Wives. But I think the most interesting thing about the book is the footlocker. There's a lot of pressure that's on a team leader and Ed had to suppress that in order to be effective, and he couldn't let his team know that he had to deal with you know the psychological impact, and so what he would do is like every time he got an ambush, he would pick up some kind of a momentum.
Speaker 3:You know, something to remind him, basically, of the ambush, so he'd throw it into that footlocker and continue on, and eventually it got to the point where the nature of these attacks were increasing in frequency and in complexity. So I mean, you might have, you know, a rollover of mine or something like that. You know a couple of guys that are injured, you get off the X, you take care of business. Then the next time you get a guy that gets killed. You've got to deal with that. And then you get an attack where it's a controlled detonation and it involves some people that you know really well. So now you've got close friends that are getting killed, and so every time that he would put something into that footlocker got worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 3:Eventually then we had one incident where five guys were killed in one hit, and I think that's the time you know it had climaxed to the point where he decided to get out of the game because he was going to be the next one on the slab, and that was important to mention. So that's how we did it. It's like when we talked about these things, we always mentioned what was the item that he had put into the footlocker. Was it a bloody schmog or a broken cell phone. We even have a thing called a heart of stone where this rock that got broken in half. They put it together and it makes a heart shape. And he had thrown that in there and the last time that he had to identify a really good friend of his he just dreaded opening that footlocker.
Speaker 1:And when he finally did, he broke down.
Speaker 3:And he just said I've got to get out of this, I'm going to be next.
Speaker 3:And so that's basically how we kind of closed it out, and, of course, we ended up leaving the list of the guys that had been killed and it was important for us to honor them in some way that obviously, third country nationals never really got the benefit of that. They were treated like cargo. If you weren't a veteran or had anything to do with the military system, they just shipped you home. The company didn't even bother to make notifications. In some cases, you get it. You either get it by mail or a police officer's knocking on your door to let you know that somebody had died. And I'm just going. Yeah, this really sucks. Um, my, my end goal outside of that is I want to. You know, maybe, since we're delivering the mail, uh, since they called us to Pony Express I'm hoping to get maybe some kind of a commemorative stamp that we can honor them further, and so we have to go through some channels and talk to some people and whatnot, and hopefully we can get that done.
Speaker 2:How's that coming along?
Speaker 3:Well, interesting thing is one of the guys that gave us an endorsement is Patrick Donahoe. He was at the time that we were delivering. He was the 73rd US Postmaster General of the United States, but he never knew that we were the ones delivering the mail, you know. And so when I talked to him about getting an endorsement, he goes. Well, I thought I thought the military did that. I said yeah, but the military or Department of Defense went ahead and subbed it out to us, and so I sent him a copy of the book and he read it and he gave us this glowing endorsement, and so I think it's kind of a foot in the door for me. I haven't approached him about my end goal, but I'm pretty sure he can tell me what procedures I need to go through in order to get that done. And then, of course, we've got a couple of offers for like a film adaptation and documentary or docu-series from a couple of high-ranking people. We got endorsements from Dale Dye, you know, captain Dye, yeah.
Speaker 2:I saw that.
Speaker 3:And some pretty heavy hitters and we've got five-star reviews. We're just not a bestseller yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, what do you think that is from? Is it just from lack of awareness or promotion?
Speaker 3:I mean, you know, I'll tell you when we signed our publication contract, marketing was dumped into our lap.
Speaker 2:Oh, so you were learning as you were going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I had to learn how to write the book, then I had to learn how to publish the book. And now I've got to learn how to write the book.
Speaker 2:Then I had to learn how to publish the book, and now I've got to learn how to market the book and it's a painstaking process and, like I said, we're shooters, we're not admin types, we're not poets. Yeah Well, warrior poets.
Speaker 3:So you know we split the share of the workload. You know Ed's in Oregon and so he's covering the northwestern side of it and I'm down here in Texas. And then of course we've got some other people kind of helping us out with the endorsements. We do podcasts, radio talk shows, book signings and things like that. But it's just not as well. I mean, we're not traditional authors so we don't have a big name for one.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And then we don't want to do any vanity press because they'll go ahead and write anything, and so finding the publisher is the key. So once this contract ends, we'll probably end up signing with a veteran-owned publication company. That's going to give us more in terms of our royalties so that we can reinvest back into the book and try to get it out there. So the rest of it is all budget-driven.
Speaker 2:Right, right right.
Speaker 3:And we just don't have enough money to do some mainstream stuff. Obviously, if it gets made into a movie or a documentary, that's going to help quite a bit as well.
Speaker 2:After the show I'm going to introduce you to a couple of people. Email you. I want to get you on another podcast a buddy of mine, oh right, real popular here in Houston and he's an author as well, and I think that y'all will have a lot to talk about.
Speaker 3:That'd be cool. Yeah, I'd appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know so, after everything is I don't want to say it like that After everything is done, you're done now.
Speaker 3:Man, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. The interesting thing is Like really how are you doing? Yeah, it was weird. You don't want to talk about my driving habits. When I got back, you know I'd be going down the road and I'd see a dead animal and I'd just swerve to the other side and my wife's going. What the hell are you doing? I thought it was an IED shit. Or you do stupid things at dinner. You know you say pass the fucking salt instead of pain.
Speaker 1:So all that bad stuff kind of catches up to you.
Speaker 3:But you know I'm not having flashbacks, ed's doing okay.
Speaker 3:You know we did have a couple of guys post-deployment that didn't end well for them and of course you know we include that there's kind of like an honor to them post-deployment and it's important to mention. You know, but as a contractor you don't get the same types of services that veterans do. I mean, if you are a veteran you might be able to capitalize on some things through the VA, but that mechanism isn't available. You know we fall under DBA and most of that stuff is either going to be injury related or, you know, burn pit bullshit, yeah, nothing to do with.
Speaker 3:You know that psychological impact, the PTSD side of it. So we have a group it's a private group with the 75 of us that ran those mobile operations and we talk to each other on a regular basis. We have the Pony Express where anybody can join if they're interested in learning about stuff that we went through and we post all kinds of things book related and then if anybody has a problem they can reach out to us at any time. We're there in terms of brotherhood and what kind of support that we can offer on a personal level, but I'm okay.
Speaker 3:Obviously, writing the book was therapeutic, like I had mentioned before, but you know, the rest of it is just kind of waiting it out.
Speaker 3:You know, we I mean I read this book like 10,000 times because I wrote it, you know, and so it's just trying to get, I think, trying to get the point across. You know about the nature of the business. You know it's a business, war is a business, and so we're on the business side of it and all of the minuscule things that we had to deal with in order to be successful. You know, like having an Afghanistan counterpart in order to even operate in that country, having to include, you know, our shooters were local nationals, our drivers were third country nationals, and so now we've got this really weird kind of a thing where you know you have to trust somebody that you can't really trust. You know there's a lot of proxy shootings and proxy bombings and things, and so you never you know you never turned your back on anybody. But when we came back we were successful in decompression.
Speaker 3:I worked clinical medicine for Next Level Urgent Care for about four years. That was really beneficial because I still got to do medicine but I wasn't in a combat environment and so I was able to kind of settle down. And then Ed was working for Lowe's and now he's delivering the mail, but for FedEx.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, so that's kind of an interesting thing, a whole different way yeah.
Speaker 3:But we have a really high degree of psychological resilience. Good, you know doing that kind of stuff and you know the nature of the business, what I do as a medic. So I've been around trauma all my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, I might have been burned out a couple of times, but I would never really think that it was anything PTSD related.
Speaker 2:Right, Okay, man, that's good, it's been man, it's been. Alan, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I really appreciate you having me and speaking with you. I'm going to make those connections after this and we'll, we'll, we'll get that rolling. But again, you guys, some of the subject that we talked on today was very sensitive and always remember that you're not alone and it's okay not to be okay If you are in crisis. Always remember the suicide hotline is 988. You can call or text, as always. Thank you for tuning in and, Charlie Mike, Yo yo yo. What's going on? Everybody, it is me, Soulja Harwell, Redcon1 Music Group, and thank you for listening to Charlie Mike, the podcast. Yay.
