Episode 31: Patriarchy in Our Armed Forces – with a Navy SEAL

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: Have you ever heard the analogy of the sheep, the wolf, and the sheepdog? It’s a metaphor used in the military and law enforcement, and it became popularized with the 2014 movie American Sniper, which is based on a true story. In this scene, a father teaches his sons what to do in the face of a bully. “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world, and if it ever darkened their doorstep, they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. Then you’ve got predators who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re the wolves. And then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression, an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdogs.” This analogy makes sense to me, and I am grateful for the service of people who stand up to the world’s bullies and put themselves in harm’s way to keep others safe. At the same time, I have a lot of concerns. I worry about the physical and mental safety of the sheepdogs. I worry that we as humans so often incorrectly identify people as wolves when they’re really just other sheep. I worry that people who tend to mistake sheep for wolves also tend to recruit young boy sheep to be sheepdogs. I don’t have any firsthand experience with the military, so I’m honored and grateful to talk about this issue with someone who knows it inside and out. He’s a former Navy SEAL, and he has asked that we keep his identity anonymous, so we won’t use his name or any identifying information, but he’s agreed to speak candidly about his experience and about the larger systems at play on this episode. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Anon: Of course. It’s a pleasure. 

AA: Maybe we can start by having you tell us about yourself, where you’re from and some of your life experiences that led you to the SEALs and led you to do the work that you do today. 

Anon: Yeah. My parents were immigrants, so I grew up in between cultures, which kind of makes you feel out of place. Where do I fit, where do I belong? And my brother and I both overcompensated, and I became a SEAL and he became a Green Beret. 

AA: Wow. 

Anon: And I think that was just the reaction of a young man trying to find his place and trying to do something that at the time he perceived as valuable. 

AA: Hmm. Amazing. 

Anon: I spent 10 years in SEAL teams, got out, went to grad school, and it’s been about 10 years since I’ve been out. I had a lot of time to process and to reconnect with the people that I knew at that time, and it’s fun to talk about it. It’s interesting to look back on what you’ve learned over the years.

AA: Yeah, awesome. Thank you.

Anon: Can I actually address the sheepdog analogy? 

AA: Okay, yeah. 

Anon: There’s a man named Colonel Grossman, who wrote a book called On Killing, and he’s the one that came up with the analogy. And I remember that he came to speak at my BUD/S class when we were early in training – BUD/S is the initial selection process for Navy SEALS – and I reject it completely. I’ve never heard anyone in the military use the analogy. I think it’s something that– who was it that made the American Sniper movie? Clint Eastwood? 

AA: Oh, okay. Yeah. Interesting. 

Anon: I think he just did it for the movie. I heard Colonel Grossman speak about his book and talk about his philosophy, and I think most SEALS are aware that they’re multidimensional. It’s silly to bucket somebody as a wolf, as a sheepdog, or as a sheep. You know what I mean? We’re all all three.

AA: Interesting. 

Anon: And I think most people understand that, especially once you’ve had time to process and you’ve gone down range and you’ve experienced both sides of this thing. So, I don’t love that analogy. This might be controversial, but I’m not necessarily sure that there are bad guys and good guys most of the time. There’s just points of view. And I’m not saying there aren’t terrible things that happen and terrible choices that happen, but I think it’s all way too complicated to bucket in those three categories.

AA: Well, let’s circle back to it at the end of the episode, because immediately as you start digging into this, you realize that the bedrock of this conversation is human nature, right? The nature of human beings. So we’ll get to that, but I’m really glad that you said that right off the bat. And this just demonstrates why it’s so important to talk to someone like you, because for me, I saw American Sniper in the theater, and then when I was doing research for this episode and for the YouTube episode we’re doing, that came up and the way it was presented on the internet and in the movie, I was just like, “Oh, the military promotes this ideology.” That’s so interesting. I’m totally the layman audience that would buy whatever was being sold by Hollywood. 

Anon: It’s not a thing. I actually got in trouble in SEAL training the day that Colonel Grossman came, because I was challenging him with some of my questions and I was a very low-ranking young kid at the time, and my instructors did not like that at all. I got in big trouble for that. 

AA: Well, thank you so much for that. As we jump into the conversation, we’ll start broad and then go specific after that. Since this is a podcast on patriarchy, I want to make sure that we tie in these issues to patriarchal principles, where one small group of men exerts control over and sometimes exploits other men and all women in some way, right? It’s what Riane Eisler calls a dominator mentality. I’m just wondering if you see that at play in the military, and if so, how? 

Anon: Yes. I don’t think you can deny that. There’s a chain of command and it’s very specific. A couple things are worth mentioning, though, which is that every unit in the military has a very distinct culture. SEALS are very different from Marines, very different from Army rangers, are very different from fighter pilots. And every unit has a history and a culture. Some of these organizations are more flat and some are more vertical in terms of authority. So, it varies depending on your experience in the military. I don’t think that anyone, including the women, can’t speak for them, but I would imagine it’s difficult when we talk about social issues in the military because we are quite literally talking about a job where you put your life on the line. Efficiency and efficacy is king. So when we talk about social issues, when we talk about who should be allowed in this unit or that unit, it’s difficult when people try to prioritize anything but being the most effective, because that is the safest way to go about this job. A couple things that are interesting, in my opinion, when you talk about diversity, for example, in the military. Yeah, you still get the racist jokes and stuff, like the stereotypes you see in the movies. I have never seen a less racist place than the military, ever. I was fortunate enough to go to an excellent graduate school, but I saw a lot more racism there. 

AA: Wow. 

Anon: Genuine racism with intent, more than I did in the military. Now, there are way more racist jokes in the military, there’s way more banter about it because these are kids and they’re trying to act like they’re tough and they can build up the courage to do their job. But when you have a shared purpose and you suffer together, whether that’s in training or in combat, you become a tribe. Woman, man, any race, any religion, I’ve never experienced in my life any other context where all of that goes away and you just see yourself as, “These are my people.” And most combat veterans will tell you that they may have joined for patriotic reasons, for altruistic reasons, but at the end of the day, when things get bad, you’re there for the person next to you. Absolutely. So, I do think it’s patriarchal because it’s usually men that are the flag officers, the generals, and the admirals. But I don’t think it’s about putting the man above anyone else. I think it’s about efficiency and having a clear chain of command because you need to make decisions. It’s not like a business where the bottom line is going to be hurt and you have time to go to the board with this. In combat, it has to be clear who’s making the call, or else people die. 

And even when you talk about women in combat roles and whatnot, I struggle with this one a little bit because I think women are absolutely capable of being the president, of being the admiral, of being the general, of being a fighter pilot, of being anything they want to do. I have no problem with women serving in any role. What I do struggle with is, for example, in the SEAL teams, if someone doesn’t meet the bar, the physical and the psychological and all the different qualifying evolutions you need to go through to take that job, I resent that. I resent anyone trying to put somebody in that job that’s not capable of the job. If a woman can meet that standard, I have no problems serving with a woman. But men and women, genetically, because of testosterone and biology, are different. So for me, what scares me about the bureaucracy when we start having these social conversations, is, are they going to water down the process to make their agenda work? In a puristic sense, as long as someone meets the bar, I don’t care. I think it has to be about efficiency, and I don’t think it’s right when someone’s life is on the line to put any other variable above that in that context. 

AA: Mm-hmm. Well, with no experience, I’ll also say for the record, that totally makes sense to me, too. As a woman, I actually wouldn’t want to know that the bar was being lowered for me anyway. That totally makes sense. And you wouldn’t want to think, like, “Am I endangering myself or others?” No, you wouldn’t want that. That’s great.

Anon: You throw a Ronda Rousey in my platoon, I’m gonna feel pretty safe. 

AA: Haha, yeah, me too. That’s awesome. I love that answer, and I’m so glad you talked through that. And it is interesting, I think anytime you talk about a hierarchy of people, it’s really important to unpack why there’s a hierarchy. And what you just described makes, I think, perfect sense. If you are having to make decisions quickly, you need a clear leader. The only time I have a problem with hierarchy is if it’s unearned. If it’s because of an inherent characteristic, these people always are at the top of the command, which is not the way it functions in the military, it sounds like. Well, maybe. 

Anon: It’s not supposed to. 

AA: It’s not supposed to. But structurally, I guess what I was referring to more when I said a small group of men exploiting men under them, I wasn’t picturing like an officer doing that so much as a president of a country, for example, Putin, sending other people’s children into these jaws that are going to chew them up and spit them out. Or leaders who, from the safety of their own palaces, their own homes, are maybe too cavalier about going to war when their children are not at risk and they’re not at risk. That’s what I was more referring to with the small group of men exploiting especially other men, because so many more men than women go into the military. Does that track for you? 

AA: Kind of. 

Anon: There are up to six players, you’re basically strategically going to war against each other and trying to take territory and you roll the dice and that dictates what options you have on your next move. I don’t think the average citizen realizes that there’s a constant game of Risk being played globally. So when you hear somebody talk about the military and like, “They keep us safe,” sometimes that’s true, sometimes it’s not clean cut. It’s not because they diffused a nuclear bomb moments before it blew up Manhattan, it’s because our intelligence communities, our think tanks, our government and those of other countries, we know where all of our ships are. We try to know where all of our submarines are. We know how many tanks the Russians have, how many tanks the Chinese have. They know how many missiles we have that are high tech. We’re always keeping tabs on each other, and we’re always playing Risk. All the time, every day, even when we’re not in an active war. So when Russia makes a move or China makes a move, or any of these peer-to-peer nations, we make a move, every other country in the world is positioning their pieces at all times waiting for this to happen. So when you see an administration decide to take a retaliatory act against Yemen and the Houthis, right now, for example, I’m not in the White House or in the Pentagon right now, but the way it’s supposed to work is that they are calculated and they’re looking at this big game of Risk that’s being played all the time. And most of what we do is preventative. Does that make sense? 

AA: Yeah. It definitely does. It’s just a lot of power that they have, and if it is misused, it’s one of the most devastating things that can happen to humanity, right? 

Anon: There’s no way that it’s not misused by some people. But I think it’s a case by case thing. 

AA: Mm-hmm. For sure. Okay, here’s my next question. I’ve been reading bell hooks a lot, as I have for years, and she says that governments are motivated to keep men and boys separated from their emotions and from human connection because they need to make sure that those boys and men could kill people if they needed them to. So, she makes it sound quite deliberate, right? That this is an intentional ideology that they’re kind of pumping into the culture. Do you think that’s true? Do you think there’s any evidence that there’s a deliberate strategy to cultivate a culture of violence in order to be able to recruit boys and men into the military? And I will just say that I recently learned that the US military invests in movies, for example, and that was new information for me and blew my mind. What are your thoughts? 

Anon: It’s definitely true. And I think I read somewhere that they invested heavily in the new Top Gun movie, for example.

AA: Yes. And the old one, the first one. 

Anon: I know that recruiting went through the roof after the first one. 

AA: Yes, yes.

Anon: I think that’s true. Look, the way I think about it in my mind is that there’s the deeper philosophical question: is violence necessary? And I’d love to share my thoughts on that with you. And then let’s assume for the sake of argument right now that it is. A lot of what you see and what we’re going to talk about are coping mechanisms. Other than investing in movies and stuff, it’s more cultural than systemic in my view. And it’s just carrying on the psychology and the mind games we play with ourselves as a society and as men, so that people will continue to do that job.

AA: Can I ask, when you say it’s more cultural than systemic, do you mean that perhaps at one point there was actual policy and a system in place and even after that’s gone then the culture just takes the ball and runs with it, and there’s nothing necessarily legislative or any policy that’s driving it, but it’s just like force of habit in the culture that it just goes on its own? I’m just trying to think, what’s the difference between structural and cultural in your mind?

Anon: Look, I got out as a senior enlisted sailor, so most of this stuff is way over my head. I never worked at the Pentagon. I can’t answer definitively what they’re doing systemically. I do know that they invest, I do know that they have marketing strategies and they’re always trying to get the best recruiting commercials and go to the high schools. And they’re always doing studies for the special operations world, like which type of athlete makes it through training. So there’s definitely a division within the Pentagon, which has the job to figure out recruiting. I don’t know that other than investing in movies and that kind of thing, which I think is more of a reaction than a proactive move on their part, I don’t know how much deeper it goes systemically. When it comes to culture, you know, I have two boys and I always feel like they need to be able to handle themselves. I think it’s ancient. I think it comes from caveman times, you know what I mean? I think for most of human history, the role of men has been to hunt and protect the village. And I know it sounds a little bit trite to say it that way, but it’s true. And I just read the book Dopamine Nation, and the premise of the book is that our minds have not evolved fast enough to keep up with technology, to keep up with how easily accessible cheap dopamine is. And I think it’s similar, I think it’s parallel in that we haven’t evolved beyond a lot of this old stuff that’s been a part of our species for hundreds of thousands of years. So whether we’re talking about the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages, the Civil War, you just see passed down from generation to generation this culture of “This is what a man’s supposed to do.” And I think a lot of times it manifests in really ugly ways. There’s no reason to pretend that’s not true. I think anyone who is thoughtful can see that that is a coping mechanism, that that’s one-dimensional and certainly not the only thing I want to teach my boys.

AA: Yeah, thinking about bell hooks attributing motive and like, there are people who are actively trying to, I think she said separate boys from their emotions so that they can be killing machines if the government needs them to be that. 

Anon: I’ve never met anyone like that. 

AA: I was going to say, it sounds overstated to me. I tend to not think that it’s deliberate like that. But it is true that, like you’re saying, some of the recruitment or the money that goes toward war movies, war-themed video games, I was really surprised by that. Because my tendency was to think, “No, that’s not intentional.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” They really are feeding the war hero narrative, pumping it into the culture for sure, which did kind of surprise me. 

Anon: I don’t know if this makes sense outside of my own head, but I was a boy, I grew up with kind of a macho father figure, and he was tougher on me than he was on my sisters, and my brother. And I joined rah-rah-America thinking, “I’m going to be that,” and then I got there and I went to Iraq for my first deployment, and I experienced combat for the first time, and what an awful experience. I mean, it’s paradoxical because you walk away exhilarated. You walk away feeling like, “I did something instinctual.” It’s crazy, but at the same time, it’s horrific. And for the first time I understood that this is why the old men that send young men to war, pump you up. I think that culturally, for generations, we have always had a Veteran’s Day and honor our troops and do all this stuff because these are the psychological games you have to play to get people to do a very, very difficult and sometimes horrific job. And I don’t know how conscious it is. I think when the military invests in video games and movies, I think they’re thinking about it like marketing people. I don’t think there’s this deep think tank that’s like, “This is how we’re going to trick them.” I think they’re thinking about it like, “I need to get recruiting numbers up and I’m thinking about it like a marketer does.” 

And I think this Veteran’s Day stuff and pumping up the soldiers and pumping up the young men and glorifying this stuff, I think it’s been that way since the beginning of time for us, and I think that’s why they keep doing it. And I do think there’s a little bit of ego in there too, because, I don’t if you agree with this, but there’s a lot of talk in our society about how men don’t have a place anymore and men don’t know where they fit anymore. And women are more educated than men, in most cases they’re making more money now. And these men are lost. And again, I know it’s a little bit trite to talk about caveman times and the way it’s always been, but I think modern society economically has evolved such that we don’t need people to defend the village anymore. You know what I mean? But I don’t think our evolution has caught up to that. We don’t need men to fulfill the roles that they’ve always fulfilled before. So now, you know, I have a friend who I was talking to at lunch the other day, and he’s paying $1,800 a month to be part of one of these men’s groups. He just wants to feel like he’s part of a tribe, you know? And I have that in a very real way with the SEAL teams. The vast majority of SEALS in the state, we all know each other. We spend a lot of time together and I have that intrinsic tribe because we suffered together, we went through training together, went to combat together. We’ve known each other for years, very, very intimately. And I see my friends from other parts of my life missing that. I think it speaks to a man’s desire to feel his instinct and feel like he has purpose. Even if it’s misplaced, I think it’s just an emotion. Is that crazy? 

AA: I think it’s true. It’s definitely true. I mean, all humans need belonging and acceptance and a purpose. If you’re not getting it, then you’ll look for it somewhere. And there are more and less healthy environments and groups that can give you that sense of purpose. If you’re willing to talk about your experience a little bit, I’m curious if you remember, like you said, you and your brother both went into the armed forces, and he was a Green Beret, at what point did that pop onto your radar, like, “Oh, that would be something that I could do.”

Anon: I’m happy to share, but we joke, well, mostly the wives, SEAL wives joke about how the Navy has done all this research trying to figure out, is it wrestlers that get through SEAL training? Is it swimmers that get through SEAL training? Who gets through SEAL training? And they’re always trying to figure it out, and they’ve got stats and data and all this. And the wives always joke, “Just go to a boy’s home, and you’ll find out who makes it through SEAL training.” And I don’t know if you know, but the attrition rate in SEAL training is incredibly high. It’s 75 to 80-something percent. My class started with 292 guys, there were like 30 at graduation, but only 12 originals. 

AA: Wow. 

Anon: Because the other graduates had come from other classes and they rolled into the class. So the attrition rate is staggering. And it is a brutal six months of beatings in every way you can imagine.

AA: I want to hear more about that in a minute, but keep telling the story. 

Anon: The wives joke that you go to a boy’s home and that’s where you’re going to find everybody who makes it through SEAL training, and there’s some truth to that. And I didn’t grow up in a boys’ home, but I had an abusive situation. I had a very difficult father. I was raised to believe that I was of no value. So for me, it was like, “I’m going to pick the biggest, baddest thing that gives me status, that makes me tough, that makes me unafraid, that I can find.” And I picked the SEAL teams, and I was fortunate enough to make it. It was definitely me trying to compensate for my upbringing. No question. 

AA: That’s really interesting. Okay, so do you remember, was it someone who mentioned–

Anon: Yeah, I remember the exact day. 

AA: Oh, okay. 

Anon: I worked in a hotel at a ski resort. I was 14, and that was the peak of conflict with my father. I worked on Saturdays, and there was a guy on my wrestling team that worked with me, and his father was a colonel in the Army. And he had just retired and they moved here, and he told me what a Navy SEAL was, and talked about how hard it was and what the reputation was. And I just decided that day, like, “I’m going to do this no matter what.” And I never deviated from it. And I did it, and I held onto it as, again, a coping mechanism. Like, “This is what I’m going to do to bring value to my life. This is what I’m going to do to show the world.” Definitely a chip on my shoulder situation. 

AA: Okay, wow. And that lasted from the time you were 14 until… When did you actually enlist?

Anon: Yeah, I remember we were in the back room stocking up our cart to go clean more rooms, with toilet paper and all this stuff. I was 14, just trying to get a ski pass, and he mentioned it and I said, “I’m going to do that.” And I stuck to it and I did it. And then I went to a fancy school and I did all this other stuff and I finally realized that none of this stuff is going to fill my emotional void. I had to do some inner work and actually grow up. And eventually I did that work, and I’m very happy with where I am today. But one thing that I did get from the SEAL teams is a belief that I can do hard things. 

AA: I bet 

Anon: Going through that, I walked away feeling like, “Okay, I’m not this bad person that I was led to believe that I am.” And I did gain that confidence. I got a big win under my belt, which gave me the courage to do other things. 

AA: Wow. Could you tell us a little bit about what it’s actually like? You show up on the first day, and what do they put you through that is making all those people drop out? 

Anon: SEAL training itself is broken up into, let’s say three or four parts. BUD/S is the selection, it’s a six-month selection period, and that’s the part that most people have seen on the Discovery Channel or whatever. And then you have SEAL Qualification Training, SQT, which is where you actually start to learn the skills. And then if you go to SEAL Team Six, you have to go through another screening process called Green Team. And then the fourth type of training is on-the-job training. These are schools and specialty skills that they teach you once you’re at a team and they have a need. So those are the four types of training. BUD/S itself is six months long. I went in in 2005, and things were really picking up in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the classes were big. The typical SEAL training class was close to 300 at that time. I think it’s down to like 150 now because we’re in garrison right now. 

But BUD/S is broken up into three parts. In phase one, you don’t really learn a lot other than you start to learn the culture of the teams and teamwork. And it is a beating. I can’t remember specifically, but they’ve done the math a million times on Hell Week. Hell Week is the third week of the first phase. You literally don’t sleep for six days except for a total of two hours, which is broken up. You’re put in boat crews of six by height, and you have to carry around this 350-pound boat on your head everywhere you go. And during Hell Week, in those six days, you run multiple marathons. It’s almost from Virginia to the coast of Florida, they’ve done the math. And you swim so many miles and you just get beat and you’re cold and wet the whole time. They continuously put you in the water and they have tables for this to say this is how long these guys can be in the water, but in practice, back then it was like until the skinniest guy starts to hype out. It’s just brutal.  

We called them evolutions. There’s one evolution in Hell Week called Steel Pier, where they take you to the bay side, this is in Coronado, California, and you’ve got the ocean on one side and you can actually go over to the bay just on the other side of the island, the strand. And it’s like two in the morning and you’ve been awake for three days straight already, they make you strip down to your skivvies, they ask you to stand at attention but laying down on a steel pier and they’re spraying you with a fire hose the whole time and you get in and out of the water. It’s the first time my body literally ignored signals from my brain. And they’re telling you to stand at attention, but laying down, and my body’s just forcing me to go into the fetal position. And they know what they’re doing. This is a long-held tradition in Hell Week. Every Hell Week is the same. And then as soon as you can’t lay down at attention, they make you get back in the water, in and out for hours. Hours. And it’s just brutal. And sometimes you’ll bear crawl, you know, you’ve seen the football drill, you’ll crawl for miles. 

AA: Oh my. 

Anon: And I mean, miles. No kidding. And everyone’s falling on their face and they just didn’t care. You just keep going and going and going. There’s another one I hate. For me, this is the worst part of Hell Week. It’s called False Hope, where it’s the last night or the second to last night of Hell Week, I can’t remember. And they let you go on the beach and set up a teepee with your boat, you put up the paddles and you set up a lead to, and they let you fall asleep under the boat. And as soon as you’re asleep, they get on the siren and the bullhorn, they make you wake up and run into the ocean and get completely wet and sandy, sand in your ears, your eyes, everything. And then do a bunch of push-ups, sit there, and then come back and fall asleep. And they did it for like eight hours. 

AA: Oh my gosh.

Anon: You know that feeling of having to wake up after you pulled an all-nighter in college? It’s like doing that 300 times in a row. It was so awful.

AA: Oh my gosh. That’s awful. Even when you said no sleep for three days, I just think of what I went through every time I had a newborn for like a year after, and it is torture. It’s awful. People don’t know if they haven’t been sleep deprived, and you know in ways I don’t, going day after day after day. 

the biggest, baddest thing that gives me status, that makes me tough, that makes me unafraid

Anon: Even the agency, when they do actual interrogation, sleep deprivation is a big part of it. I don’t know if they’ve deemed that ethical these days or not, but that was a big part of it. 

AA: I’m not surprised. 

Anon: So, Hell Week is one long tradition, and it’s awful. Everything about it is awful. You’re bleeding everywhere. Most guys have to have their boots cut off with medical shears and your feet look like jello because all the liquid hasn’t had a chance to even out while you sleep. And I didn’t know that was a thing. You feel like you’re drunk because you haven’t slept for six days and your feet literally look like jello. It’s really awful. 

AA: Oh my gosh, I did not know that could happen to a person. 

Anon: Yeah. And that’s just the first phase, that’s just your first beating to see like, does this person belong here? Hell Week is by far the evolution that eliminates most people. 

AA: Yeah. 

Anon: And then you go to the second phase, and the second phase is the dive phase, so you actually start to learn some of the basics about being a frogman. You learn about scuba diving, open circuit and closed circuit. Open circuit is what you think of when you see scuba diving. Closed circuit is a different device. It’s called a rebreather, where it doesn’t give off bubbles. So it takes your exhale and it scrubs it through what’s called SodaSorb, and then you can dive for hours without putting off a signal. 

AA: Wow. So does it put oxygen back in–

Anon: You’ve got a small compressed pure oxygen tank, and it’s just remixing it and scrubbing. 

AA: Wow. Crazy. 

Anon: The crucible for the second phase is what’s called Pool Comp, where it’s basically like getting jumped underwater by the instructors. I broke my nose in Pool Comp, they beat on me pretty hard. 

AA: Oh my gosh. 

Anon: And some guys will go away for that for sure. Second phase is just brutal. Again, very little sleep, very technical, you’re learning dive physics, you’re doing these technical dives out in the ocean. And diving in San Diego is rough because you can’t see anything. So what you have to do is you have to build a dive plan and you literally learn how many right kicks takes you a kilometer. 

AA: Wow. 

Anon: You have to just dive in the dark, basically saying, “Okay, 3,000 kicks, and then turn,” and you have a compass that glows in the dark, and then you turn at the right bearing, and then you go 150 kicks. And you build this dive plan, and every once in a while you come up and peek to see where you are. And it’s fun, but it’s hard. And it’s a different kind of suffering where you’re underwater and you’re cold all the time. And it’s a little bit more technical. Then third phase is the last two months of BUD/S, and this is where you start to learn small unit tactics and land warfare. So you go out to San Clemente Island, and it’s meant to simulate what life is like down range. You’re planning operations and you’re going out every night and you’re coming back, 5- to 10-mile movements every night with your gear on. And you have to build out the plan, you have to give the CONOP, the concept of operations, to your leadership. And again, very, very little sleep, very physically demanding, very isolated. And if you make it through those phases of training, what you basically said is, “I want to be here.” And then they will start to invest in you and actually teach you how to be a SEAL.

AA: Wow. 

Anon: And that’s where you go to SQT, where you go to free fall school, you learn combat medicine, you learn comms, you learn cold weather training. You start to do CQC, which is like SWAT team tactics, where you’re going through a building in our modern military, the standard for a specialized unit is their ability to move through a three-dimensional complex space while covering down on each other, think of a SWAT team in a movie, but it’s much more complicated than that. It’s that skillset that’s considered the bar for special operations units. 

AA: And how long does that whole process take? 

Anon: It’s designed to take just under a year and a half. Most people get hurt at some point, and most people roll, so it ends up taking about two years just to be a new guy. And then you’re assigned to a team, and once you’re at a team, then you go to individual schools. I went to sniper school, other guys go to comms school and they learn in depth about the radios. And guys go to JTAC school, which means you are the air traffic controller in a combat zone controlling the bombs and the planes and the helicopters and everything. You go to personal schools for about six months, it’s called PRODEV, professional development. And then you come back to the platoon and you guys do unit level training together. So you go through all the skills together as a unit. You dive together, you jump together, you do land warfare together, and you do mobility together, where it’s like driving from boats to trucks to all of the armored vehicles. And then you deploy, and if you’re at a tier one unit, their deployments are for like three months, but they deploy more often. If you’re at a traditional special operations unit, it’s like six to eight months and then you come back and do it again and again and again. I was gone for almost 300 days a year even when I wasn’t deployed, because you’re always training somewhere else, in the US or abroad.

AA: Hmm. Okay, wow.

If you’re okay talking about it, I’d love to know more about your deployments. What are some representative anecdotes that you could share, some of the missions, and what you ended up doing when you were there? 

Anon: I did Iraq once, and I did Afghanistan twice. I remember the first time in Iraq where we got into a firefight and we actually had to hurt someone, had to prosecute a target. And I remember, I went through training with this guy, I won’t use his name. We had been through all of training together and we showed up as new guys together at the same time. And I remember looking at him after our first combat experience, and both of us were just numb. We didn’t feel anything. And I remember being worried about that. And it’s going back to the point you made originally, like, there is a culture of inoculation. There is a culture of teaching you to be the predator and not the prey. Because when we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, we went out most nights. The operational tempo is like, you wake up at noon, you’re given a briefing about what’s going to happen that night, which target you’re going to go after, which bad guy you’re going to go after, whatever the case may be. You prepare your gear, you prepare the routes, you sometimes coordinate with the helicopter guys, you do whatever needs to be done in preparation for that mission. And then you’re given downtime for a few hours and then you go out as it gets dark, and you work all night, and you come back and sleep until noon, and do it over and over and over again. 

And it’s a bit paradoxical, because on one hand, I do believe that it’s human nature to go to war and to do all this stuff. It’s the way it’s always been. And there’s an instinct in it for I think most men, but it’s also not natural to be afraid. It’s also not natural to put yourself in danger all the time. So it’s a bit paradoxical. And to get you to do that job, there is some indoctrination that happens in training. It’s why they brought Colonel Grossman in to talk about the book. And I remember it worked. I remember I was brainwashed and I’m glad that I was for the sake that I had to do that job at that point. I was there, and it’s definitely brainwashing. It’s definitely some of that. 

And then I remember the next appointment, I was in Afghanistan and I was at a special forces base, I was with the Army guys. It was on the eastern border of Afghanistan, and there was a bus of Pakistanis coming into Afghanistan. I think it was a religious holiday, it was families and whatnot. And the Taliban are Sunni, and this bus of people were Shia, and the Taliban just took their machine guns and just raked the sides of these buses. And we are called out as a QRF, a quick reaction force, to go and help these people and try to get them out. So we engaged with the Taliban, and that took about 45 minutes. And then we spent our time medevac’ing these people back to our fire base. And I remember I got back to the base and it was the last truckload of people and we had a medical room with five or six tables where we were working on people. And I was helping a boy, he must have been 10, and I was pumping oxygen with a bag over his mouth. And his father was on the table next to him, and I’m standing behind the boy’s head, looking down at him, and somebody else was working on his leg, taking the tourniquet off and putting QuickClot on the wound. And I looked at this boy the moment he realized his father died on the other table. And that, for me, was the first crack in my brainwashing. That was the first crack in my indoctrination, where I was like, “Oh, wow, this is real. These are people.” 

Until you start having personal relationships with these people, whether it’s your interpreter or your partner force, it’s easy to think of them as other. And it’s not great. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s healthy, I’m not arguing for it. I’m just saying it’s a coping mechanism for doing the job. And I think most of the bad behavior that people who are not violent, people who are pacifists, that kind of thing, I get where they’re coming from, genuinely. And I think most of the behaviors they point to to show how toxic it can be are coping mechanisms to do that job. You know what I mean? Some of those coping mechanisms, some of the culture is necessary. There’s a balance. A lot of it’s toxic, but some of it is necessary to say that this is a noble thing. I just think that we need to do two things in addition to the healthier versions of that. One, teach them that it’s not glorious, it’s not glamorous. It’s noble to want to protect people, it’s noble to want the brotherhood, but it’s not glorious. You have to know that it’s a rough job. And two, all the things you talked about, a Diplomat’s Day, and there’s no reason we have to be binary. There’s no reason it has to be one or the other. We have to do both. We have to do the encouragement in the healthy ways, not the toxic ways. And there’s a lot of subcultures that do it very toxically. And I think the way to do it healthily is by really encouraging thinkers, is by really encouraging people to have empathy, emotional intelligence, to understand different points of view. Again, to change their mind. People that know how to do that, I think, make better protectors. 

AA: Yeah, this does get to the heart of the matter, right? Where does violence come from? Because you are having to act in these violent ways, and then you’re finding yourself looking into the eyes of a child and realizing like, “Oh no, I’ve been brainwashed so that I can do this.” And you’re doing it in response to the Taliban acting violently. This is getting at big human questions. How do you make sense of that violence and what our response needs to be to it? 

Anon: Yeah. Look, I think that at a high level, if your highest ideal isn’t nonviolence, and if that isn’t unanimous, violence is part of the equation.

AA: You mean as a society? 

Anon: As a society. I don’t want to be dramatic or ask awkward questions, but most people have a line. It’s like if someone’s attacking your children, is it okay? If someone is forcing you to believe in their God, is it okay? 

AA: To be violent in response, you’re saying? 

Anon: I mean, either way. Pick your side of the issue. I’m just saying that most people, in my opinion, have things that they would prioritize above nonviolence, things that they would be violent for, whether it’s to protect your family, your faith, the economic system you believe in. I mean, pick your favorite topic. I think it’s a reality. There are a lot of things I would put above being nonviolent. I don’t want anyone to hurt my kids, I don’t want someone to force me to believe in a God I don’t believe in, I don’t want someone to put me under communist rule. I don’t want that. So I think that the idea of nonviolence, when you look at it as an isolated principle, is beautiful. How great would it be if we were all evolved enough to see that there’s a better way to resolve our differences? That would be great. But if you can, I can’t picture a single issue that my family agrees on, let alone my state, my country, the world at large. I can’t think of a single issue that we all agree on. And because that’s the reality of humans, I don’t think nonviolence is an option. I don’t think nonviolence is realistic. 

I love the idea of let’s all be evolved enough and choose to do things in a better way. But as soon as somebody loses something they value dearly to that system, violence is back on the table. Whatever we come up with to be nonviolent, whatever rules of the game, as soon as someone loses something they care about deeply, violence is back on the table. And I spent a lot of time in parts of the world where I’ve seen textbooks that say, “If you have 10 Jews and you kill five, how many Jews do you have left?” That’s a real thing in the world we live in. There are a lot of different philosophies out there that are nowhere near nonviolence. 

AA: Well, it’s good for me to hear, because honestly I am such a nonviolent person. When I take religion tests, all my scores are like, “You’re a Quaker!” I am a nonviolent person to my core. I’m just wondering, it’s hard for me to reckon with what you’re describing, but I have also read enough as a historian that I know that what you’re saying is true. And I read the news. I know what you’re saying is true. It’s just really hard for me to reconcile that and to confront it. But I’m wondering, if we’re talking about, like, on the other hand, there are cultures that really idolize war. You think of Vikings or you think of Spartans and Americans now. And there are cultures that are more nonviolent generally, and so maybe their governments are putting way more money into nonviolent education for children so that people have more skills of diplomacy and problem-solving so it doesn’t come to violence as often. So I wonder if there is a way to say, “Okay, let’s acknowledge the fact that a small percentage of people are going to be violent and we need to be prepared for that.” And then we have citizens that say, “I will do that, that can be my job. For whatever reason, that interests me, I’ll be good at it, and we have enough to keep ourselves safe.” But it isn’t just this outsized response to violence or paranoia about it, and also idolizing it and heroizing it so that we become more like Spartans or Vikings or other cultures that are just so oriented toward violence. I’d rather be a culture that is oriented toward nonviolence and uses violence only as a last resort if attacked. How do you see that? 

Anon: I’m not going to pretend to have the answer. I can share my opinions with you, but I don’t know what the answers are. What I think, if I were king for a day, I think you need a little bit of both. Some of these coping mechanisms are ugly, but some of them are necessary. 

AA: What do you mean by coping mechanisms exactly?

Anon: You know, you’re talking about these cultures where they, not galvanize, but they prop up the war hero. Some of that needs to happen. Some of that needs to exist because it’s not a natural thing to do. It’s instinctual, but it’s also not natural to put yourself in harm’s way. So some of that psychology does need to be there, and there’s an argument to be made for the best way to maintain peace is to just carry a big stick, to be so formidable that no one’s going to… You know what I mean? And there’s an argument to be made for that because the world is much more chaotic than we want to admit. So I do think that there’s a lot of toxic manifestations of this. There are subcultures where they take it too far, where it’s the only thing they care about, and I think that’s a problem. I think the solution is, you remember that quote I sent you? You don’t want your warriors to not be thinkers, and you don’t want your thinkers to be cowards. You know what I mean? I think that’s the answer. I think we need to embrace the complexity of this world and our society and our nature, and I think we need to teach both. 

It’s interesting, most of the combat veterans that I know, most of the people who have done real things, they’re not wearing their medals. They’re not beating their chest. They’re not out there because they know how complex and nuanced and paradoxical it all is. And these are the people that don’t want war. These are the people that are not bragging about it. They’re not talking too much about it, and they see the value in diplomacy because they’ve learned the hard way, if that makes sense. I have two boys. My best friends, the closest people in my life, are SEALs. There’s a team guy in my house every other day, if not every day. And I have an 11-year-old son, and he’s such a sweet kid. He’s good with dogs and babies, but he is also one of the best wrestlers his age in the state and he also does jiu jitsu with me and the other SEALs. What I hope I’m teaching him, because I think this is the answer, but it’s just my opinion, I hope I’m teaching him to be strong, be capable, but be kind. Have empathy for people, take other people’s point of view, learn how to communicate, learn how to change your mind, learn how to grow with data. You gotta teach that stuff. 

And I think especially among– I don’t know how to say this diplomatically, but among the uneducated, it’s hard to be a nuanced thinker when you don’t have resources and you don’t have someone to teach you those things. People hold onto what gives them purpose and what makes them feel like they’re fulfilling their instinctual role. But what I’m trying to do with my boys is show that there’s a difference between being kind and being harmless. Being kind is because you’re capable of violence or protecting yourself or protecting your family, you’re capable and you choose to be kind. You choose to be diplomatic. You choose to be a thoughtful person. And being harmless is someone who just is nice because you hope people won’t pick on you if you are. That’s a thing, that’s real. And I’m trying to teach my boys to be kind. To be capable, but be kind. Does that make sense?

AA: It does. Going back to your deployment, and if there are any other stories that you want to share about when you were in Afghanistan and Iraq, please do. I know that at some point you had gotten married and you had a family back at home, so maybe if you want to talk about anything else about your deployment and about what that was like to go back and forth between the war zone and your family life and how that affected your family.

Anon: Not good. My last deployment to Afghanistan, we lost a lot of guys on that deployment. In total, not just my team, but my deployment in total, during my time in the military, I lost seven of my inner circle. I wasn’t there for all of them, but I lost seven of them. Several of them I was there for. And I remember, I think this is an interesting story actually. We were in Kandahar and there was a Marine unit that was in Helmand, it’s a different province over, and their officer in charge, I think, was shot in the neck. And this is the guy who was making all the decisions. And then their medic rushed to help him, and he bent over and he took a bullet in his spine just under his body armor, his plate in the back. 

AA: The medic did?

Anon: The medic did. So they were holed up in this kind of dilapidated building. Most of the buildings were made out of this really thick mud. So they’re robust, but they’re still, you know, a mud home. So we got called in as a QRF, a quick reaction force, to go pull them out. And we were told that we needed to go take pictures of an area that was part of their battle area because they had dropped artillery and the Taliban were claiming that they had dropped artillery on a school and killed kids. And obviously the Marines were saying, “Of course not, we didn’t do that.” So we needed to go get footage to show it was fighters and bad guys and not kids. That was part of our objective. So we flew in there on a Chinook, those big helicopters with the two blades. And we went in there and we immediately started taking fire. We linked up with the Marines and we moved everybody to a different building where we could house everybody and put everyone behind a wall and protect ourselves. There were two doors, and there were two different courtyards in this building. I went left and the second element went right. And the second element, as soon as they went in there, there was this massive explosion, and I look up at the air and a foot comes flying out of the air and hits me in the chest.

AA: A foot? 

He was killed in a different operation where the helicopter was shot down by a rocket launcher with another good friend of mine. I was the team leader, and I was supposed to go home because my contract for the Navy was up and we had one operation left. So my friend from a different platoon had been in western Afghanistan where things had been slow, and he said, “Hey, let me take your place. You go home and I’ll handle this operation.” We were both snipers and team leaders, so we shared the same qualifications. And I said, “Okay.” I introduced this guy to his wife, another inner circle friend, and he came out and I remember taking my name off the board and putting his name in my place on the helicopter. And I got on a plane to the States, and once I landed, I got a phone call in San Diego and they said, “Your friend was killed in the helicopter I was going to be on, and you need to fly to Maryland and tell his parents.” It was brutal. The Viking guy and my friend were both killed in the same helicopter that day. And I was fortunate that his parents were both Navy veterans, so they understood the world and the culture. But I stayed in his room. 

It was such a bizarre paradigm shift. It was so real knowing that it could have been me, that was my spot on the helicopter, I introduced this guy to his wife and he dies, and I’m telling his wife and his parents, I’m there with him. I was the only guy from the team in the States at the time. And I had my first child. My daughter was 11 months old at this point, and I missed her first steps while I was in Afghanistan. It was just such a, I don’t know, it was an ordeal trying to process like, “Why not me? Why him?” And trying to be grateful, like, “Is it my fault?” Your mind can twist things in so many different ways, and you have to manage that. And that took me years to figure out, and that affected my marriage tremendously. And then my absolute best friend in the Navy was killed in training a few months later with another buddy of mine that went through training with me. And then my dive buddy in second phase, my partner that we went through second phase together, he was killed by a sniper getting off a helicopter a few months after that. 

It was just this cascade of loss. I felt like I had a tab at a hotel by Arlington, because we were in Arlington every few months. It was brutal. And like I said, I’d been gone on average 300 days a year, my entire marriage. We got married the day after I graduated SEAL training, and I went to Iraq a week after that. We went to Catalina for our honeymoon, which was awful, it was cold and it wasn’t a great time, but we went for five days and I came back and went to Iraq and then at the end we lost all these guys and all this stuff happened, so getting out of the military was harder than being in Afghanistan, from an emotional standpoint. Because when you’re there, even though you’re losing people, even though you’re doing these dangerous things, you’re fulfilling your role. You’re doing what you signed up to do, you feel like you have purpose. Whether you do or not is a separate issue. You feel like you have purpose, you feel like you’re relevant, you feel like you have status because you’re part of this elite unit. 

And then you come home, and every family deals with the same four things. I mean, not every family, but the vast majority of families deal with: they have no purpose. You’re a young man and you feel like you’re doing something relevant. You’re there fighting for your country. You’re not just working at the carwash, you’re trying to do something. Politics aside, you feel relevant. So you get out, and you don’t have that anymore. You have no purpose. You don’t know how to earn, which in our modern society is like a caveman being a good hunter. That’s what gives you status in our community. Now, your mental health is a mess. PTSD, yes, but also identity crises, also depression and anxiety. You just don’t know how to drive your brain with all this stuff that’s going on, and then your family suffers. It’s purpose, ability to earn, mental health, and family. The vast majority of guys experience that. And that’s how I was. 

I am so proud of my marriage at this point because we figured it out together after years of fighting and confusion and, you know, “I’m a Navy Seal, there’s no way I have PTSD. There’s no way I have mental health problems.” And it’s ridiculous. Most of us do. And it doesn’t look like the movies, by the way. It’s not like, “Oh, I can’t handle fireworks on the 4th of July.” You’re just angry all the time. It’s just anxiety. Try taking an exam right after a car accident. Like 20 minutes after a bad car accident, you’re fine, you’re not hurt, but you’re shook, right? It’s kind of like that all the time. 

AA: Oh boy. 

Anon: We were in that state of mind. It took me four or five years to get my head on straight. I dated 12 different therapists, you gotta find the right one, and I finally found a therapist that was pretty incredible. She wasn’t a therapist, she’s a psychologist. And at the time, I didn’t know the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a therapist. Now I do. But she did a wonderful job of creating a map of my brain. We talked for weeks. She’s like, “Here are your insecurities, here are your strengths, here are your core beliefs. Here’s a vague map of your brain.” And then together we built a map of what we think my brain should look like, a healthy version of my brain. And then, one by one, we tackled each issue and rewired, one by one by one. It was very systematic. And she would always say that therapy is wonderful in diagnosing the problem and helping you understand how you got to where you are. But at some point, you need to shift to mindset work to move forward and to grow and to build and to evolve. And she also turned me on to ketamine therapy. So when we were at the stage where we were going to rewire each core belief, or each insecurity, I would do a low dose of ketamine and we would do the therapy while I was on ketamine, because all your defenses and everything just collapse, and you’re just open to it. 

AA: So it helped. 

Anon: Ketamine saved my life. It saved my life. I don’t know if it was placebo, I don’t know. You know, the science is still getting worked out. But most of the guys swear by 5-MeO-DMT, ibogaine, psilocybin, ketamine. And most of those options aren’t legal right now, but Ketamine’s legal and it was a lifesaver for me. But it took me four or five years to figure that out. I was high functioning on the surface, I got into a great grad school, got a great job, but most guys are not lucky enough to get into a good grad school. And I was young enough. I got out after 10 years, but most of my friends that stayed in 20 years, they’re too old to go back. They’re in their mid-forties at this point, and it’s tough. They all suffer with those four things. 

AA: Thanks for sharing that. Well, that’s one of the things that I was hoping you could talk about, too, as we wrap up the conversation, which has been kind of mind blowing for me and giving me so much to think about. Thank you for sharing all of this. One of the themes that we have for this season is giving listeners something to do, like an action item that we could take away. And one that I thought of, just as civilians, one way to help is to be supportive of veterans who do come home with the issues that you just described. Maybe that’s one thing that I would ask that you could specifically talk about, and then if there are any other takeaways that you’d like to leave for listeners, that’d be great. 

Anon: Yeah. One thing that I think is very interesting is a book called Tribe, by Sebastian Junger. He is an investigative journalist who embedded with, I think it was the 10th Mountain Division in Korengal, which is a very rough part of Afghanistan. And he basically writes about the brotherhood of men and women in combat arms, and he cites some research that they did that shows that PTSD rates among the Israeli military, again, politics aside, is in the low single digits. But PTSD rates within the US armed forces is mid-20%. And a lot of these people didn’t even see stringent combat. And the researchers believe one of the major variables is their place in the community afterwards. In Israel, the unit you served in matters more than where you went to college. Everyone serves, so it translates very well to your post-service life. In the US, you get a “Thank you for your service” and a pat on the ass and good luck and that’s it. And I don’t think people know how to help the veteran professionally. What they need is a place in the community, they need a job, they need an opportunity. They don’t need a handout. There’s a lot of nonprofits out there that are trying to give them a handout, but they don’t want a handout. They need someone to point them in the right direction and give them an opportunity and let them run with it and perform like anyone else would have to. So, if there’s any way that people are in a position to either donate to a nonprofit that helps in that way, not just these nonprofits that pull on the heartstrings, but that actually provide an opportunity that moves the needle, that’s huge. Or the mental health nonprofits, they do a lot of good too. There are other nonprofits that are well-meaning that send you on a retreat and whatnot, and that’s nice, but it doesn’t move the needle for guys in the long run. And when I say guys, I obviously mean everyone. Like I said, in the military, once you’re part of a unit, nobody cares if you’re a woman, a man, Black, white, it’s all the same. 

AA: Yeah, yeah. Well, I cannot thank you enough for being here today. Again, I learned so much, and we’ll be thinking about this for a long time and I know listeners will be too. Thank you so much for your time.

Anon: This was really fun. Thank you for listening to me. I appreciate it.

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