Ep. 246 Scott Jones aka Saint Scojo Electronic Warfare Operator 2nd Commando Regiment and Combat Controller.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

It's time for the Zero Limits podcast, hosted by Australian veterans. Give me a call. Operator Kyle hocked him up. Awking up is slavery. No weapon or radio can be seen. The Afghan is compliant and quiet on the ground. Soldier Z trades his weapon on the Afghan from very close range. Crack, oh, crack, stop, zero limits listeners. Yeah, have I got a surprise for you? Generally, when I put a story up, asking a question, who do you want on the podcast? There's three there's three big ones that always come across at the table. One's uh Oliver Schultz, obviously. BRS has always been the top of the list. And there's another one. This is going to break the internet. Spotify, Apple. They're gonna collapse. It's who knows? This could cause some cause some issues, we don't know. But it's time he tells his story. I think you all know who I'm talking about. We've just recently done a debrief episode on the latest uh BRS uh controversies in regards to him getting being arrested. So now I think you definitely know who it is. The one and only the Saint they call him. The Saint Sky Joe, and there's many other names, but his real name is Scott Jones, mate. Matthew. Someone said to me, he said brother a lot in that debrief and brother, brother.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

It's because I converted to Islam. So it's uh I feel that if I convert to Islam or Judaism or say that I'm a tranny, well then how can I be done for hate speech? Because can you be done for hate speech if you are if I'm a Muslim, can I be done for hate speech against Muslims? If I'm a Christian, can I be done for hate speech against Christians?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

And who do they say to what you are and what you what you're not? Yeah. What you're feeling. If I'm feeling something different tomorrow, I'll be that.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

In that debrief, I identified as an investigative journalist.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

I can be whatever I want.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

It's 2026. Exactly right. There he is, the Saint Scojo. Now, this has been in the works of probably the last week or two. He's decided to come on and share his life story because we all know, we've all seen the Saint. I'll call you Scott. Scojo. Scojo. Scott. Scojo. Same thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Anyway, fuck everyone knows. Fuck with Dumb Dog.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Dumb dog.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

White dog. You fucking white dog.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Everyone has seen his stuff on Instagram and it blew up the first time round, you know, last few years. First Instagram account blew up, putting some exotic photos of traveling the world, meeting exotic people, and then shooting them in the face. Putting all those stories up, and it was wild. And then obviously it got shut down eventually by ADF and Instagram.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

That's fair enough. Like looking back on it, Instagram's a tool to show what fucking green match he had for fucking your morning walk. You know, it's not to see Scojo standing over a pile of dead bodies. Like I understand that now. I'm older and wiser, and I won't do it again because I like having Instagram, and this is my third account.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

But uh, we've all seen the the life that he lived, but no one really understood exactly what he's done because you know we uh I I think if you don't know um Scojo himself, you know that he might have spent the last two years of his career within the Air Force, which a lot of people don't know that. So we'll definitely talk about that whole transition to that, moving to Newcastle and just your life in general, especially when it comes to the life in the defense force as a SIG first, then becoming a qualified commando, which we'll talk about, especially your rotations into Iraq and obviously Afghanistan. Fuck yeah. So this is strap in because this is going to be wild. This is the first tell or mate.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Well, I'll summarise it real quick. Was born, joined the army, became a commando, went to Afghan, wrapped that one up, went to Iraq, won a war, came home, victory parade. Now I'm on Instagram, famous. Play on, let's go get a fucking schnitty at the pub. I think that pretty much sums it up. But no, I want to say, Maddie, I gotta say your podcast, and and a few people have said this, and and it's not just notional. Like, we honestly believe that what you're doing is phenomenal. And and everyone knows that I started a podcast and it got shut down and whatnot, but my goal is to do exactly what you're doing here. You know, you've got a studio, you got all these trinkets and coins from some absolute weapons that you've had on. You've had some of the best stories I've ever heard in my life on your potty, and that's exactly what I wanted to do. I just wanted to tell people's positive examples of their service as a cop, as a firefighter, as a soldier, even if they're a cook. Like Cordo, Cordo came on and I loved his potty, hearing about how much he loved the navy. It made me love the navy, and that's what I wanted to do in my potty, but I wasn't allowed to because of some of the you know the things I was saying. But um, I really appreciate what you what you've done, and and we appreciate as a community you giving people this platform. It's we only give like the roses to people when they can't smell them, you know. Like how many times have you seen a special forces dude or anyone in general die? And then everyone comes out and there's all these photos, podcasts, memorial bands, books about how much of a sick cunt they were. Why didn't we tell them when they were alive? How many dudes that offed themselves after Afghan? If you had to fucking hyped them up the way that some people do on me on the socials, which I still don't understand why, but imagine like how many dudes would still be with us if they realized like how cool we think their service is. Like everyone's got war dog photos, and some of the some of the commando boys like they'll be like, cunt, you took so many fucking photos. What the fuck? I've only got a few photos. No, you don't, bro. Like your trip video went for an hour of HD footage. Like, we've all got it, and it's just our culture is we don't share it, but it's awesome. Which has changed. It's changing, it is changing. And like some of the people you've had on this podcast, I fucking hope they die in a house fire, but I still listen to their potty, you know. I still think, oh, this is amazing. I'm I'm hearing about the early days of two commando, you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Uh in the studio, we we do have uh another uh guest in here, but uh it's PR advisor, I'd say, and uh basically we'll be keeping tabs on Scojo's uh words, and that that's one mark already that's uh clip out. But no, I appreciate the words on the potty, and that's the whole point of it, you know. We not not to mention we me, you, and obviously when we flew to New Zealand, we shared a pretty fucking magical like time. Like it was wholesome. It was it was wholesome to spend it with Hamish McLaughlin as well. Like one of the the way I explain it, he's a gangster of gangsters. There's gangsters, and then there's fucking Hamish and the and the rest, you know, BRS and all those boys, absolute warriors, and that's what the podcast has done. It's brought us together, it's brought communities together, it's brought people together. You know, we're linked in with Nstate Zulu and all these clothes brands now, and everyone's just chatting now, like it's just brought everyone back together, and obviously common goals, yeah, exactly right. And now people are reaching out saying, you know, they want to be friends again and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

So but which is good because that's that's so it should be it's it's building that community back up again rather than because you know for a fact that veterans are probably the worst the worst, like the worst it's like some you you join Kabuka, you join the army, and you get told instantly you are now a soldier, fuck civilians, they're a bunch of weak gutted dogs for not joining, and then you're like, Oh, okay, and then you get into and then they're like, and also the navy's faggots and the air force, they don't do anything, and then you get to your unit, and it's like, well, the other core, they're fucking shit guns, the other platoon, the other section that you live with, they fucking suck. And it's like we're bred from the get-go to hate on each other.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Everything, everything, everything outside of your unit, yeah, same as a paratrooper, like three. Where do you think people, you know, it's just quickly with BRS, you know, he's obviously got that arrogance with his within his personality, but where do you think he got that from? It's not from the SASR, it's from being a fucking paratrooper. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly where it all comes from. A lot of the three RR guys that come out, they've all got problems because they've all come from three RR.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, and a lot of yeah, I won't say that. Time stamp that. Um, but yeah, like I think you you're dead right. Like, there's a lot of issues in the veteran community, and we're we're out we're our own worst enemy. You know, like we don't need to be like this. I'll have a beer with anyone. Fuck, you're a cook in Afghanistan. Fuck yeah, like that's sick, mate. Good on you. That's fucking that's cool. I'd be a Kiwi. Fucking, yeah. Oh, you're a oh, I was just a Kiwi, so my service isn't like yours. Can't I fold some fucking blankets for the same pay as a grunt and fucking go in the mess every day, get huge, go the range when I can. That'd be a sick life. So yeah, I'm I'm I'm happy about I think to wear your nation's flag in the battle is the greatest honour anyone could ever do, you know. Like I've I've had some highs in my life, some real highs, some real lows, but nothing compares to hopping off a helo, running into a gunfight, and you've got an Australian flag on your shoulder. That's fucking that's uncomparable to anything.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

But anyway, yeah, we've got to get to that point.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah, 100%. And what we're gonna do, obviously, you know, we everyone's pretty much focused on your military career and wants to know more about your military career. So we'll just quickly hash on, just a quickly, you know, just a quick grow up, where'd you grow up, you know, family, family history, and then we'll just move straight into that, you know, what what led you into joining the defense force?

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah. I thought you said what alleged the allegations were. Oh fuck, here we go. Yeah, um, so sunny day in a beautiful little place called Campbell Town. Sea Town. Yeah, a little sunny little place out west of Sydney. Some people may have heard of it. Beautiful spot, highly regarded um by many. A lot of rich people out there. The gem of the West, people say. And uh, I was born in Campbelltown Hospital in Ambervale.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Amber Jail, it's referred to as, and um, yeah, that's where I grew up. Mum and dad, um, mum's from Richmond way. So my pop was a raffy, did like 30, oh yeah, 30, 35 years in the raft. So she's a raft brat, and um, he's now buried at the end of the runway at Richmond. Oh, no way, and my grandma too. They love it that much. Like he his whole life in Richmond, and then uh my mum was born in Nelson Bay because he was posted to Williamtown, so he just bounced between Williamtown and and Richmond the whole career. So obviously big RAF uh family history on my mum's side. Um, also her uncle, uncle, Walter Bach was in did three years in Changy. So he yeah, yeah, fucking Singaporean dogs. Time stamp that. Um, so yeah, he he got um captured, um, which obviously I never would, never did. Um, but um, you know, maybe should have done selection, um, a bit more resilient. But yeah, he got he got done in and uh he did three years in Changy. And I remember growing up, like he he he survived, so he came home, obviously. And um at family gatherings, like when I was younger, like they're they're like he's a hero, he's a fucking family treasure, and they're like, This dude was in prison for three years getting tortured. And you see those old videos of like how skinny they were and whatnot. And I'll be honest, like, there was a bit of hatred towards the Japanese in my family, eh? Like there was you know, absolutely fair. Yeah, absolutely fair, absolutely like for real. Like, like, you know, I'd be like, oh mum, like that what's this sushi? That looks alright. I fuck those cunts. Fucking Japs. Sorry, mum. But we all just went on a family holiday to Japan and we and um it's awesome, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, and and I love it. I've been a few times, been to Nisiko, but I remember I was thinking about uh everything that happened with Walter, and I thought I was sitting in an onsen naked in Nisiko snow village, and I looked an old Japanese man dead in the eye while I pissed because you're naked, and I was just pissing and just staring at him, and then I stood up, big old Aussie cock swinging in the breeze, and I just looked at him, and he I don't think he understood a word of English, and I said, Walter sends his regards, mate, and just walked off. That was my payback. So hopefully he's smiling down at me in heaven. And then on my dad's side, dad was in the Navy cadets. Oh, is he? Yeah, yeah, froths it. Yeah, mate. He's Garden Island Warriors from Cadets. You think you're talking to Hamish McLaughlin about T-Zack? Loves it, loves it, but it fucking loves it. He's chariot. Imagine Cordo, Cordo's attitude towards the military. That's that's my dad talking about being in the Navy cadets. Yeah, he loves it. Um and his uncle, uh, yeah, his dad's brother, uh, Roy Sidney Jones killed on Kokoda or up the Kakota track, yeah, part of Marubra Force. So they fucking the Japs got him too. And um yeah, he was missing for a while and then killed. And uh yeah, they miss him.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

So yeah, it was like a big family history, I guess, of wild shit, mostly fighting the Japs.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yeah, you know what, you know what changed the Japs, the big boy and the little boy.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yeah. Shit, it's a sushi train. But um, yeah, so there was a military history there. Yeah. And so before I was even born, it was like I'm sitting with my dad on a Saturday before the footy starts or whatever, and you're watching there. Used to be a show on SBS called World at War. Yep. Fucking hectic. And it was all like the the Hitler speeches that we see now on Instagram. I know about everyone else's algorithm, but um, pops up a fair bit, and you're like, oh wow, I've only seen these speeches saying this guy's a piece of shit. But anyway, um, and all the videos of like soldiers, you know, with flamethrowers going through villages in in fucking Iwo Jima and whatnot, and just like this is fucking wild. And um yeah, it was always in the back of my mind, I guess. Yeah, this is fucking pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

But uh going through school, you went through schooling up here. Ah no, sorry, Campbell Town. Yeah, Sea Town, baby. Yeah, Sea Town, and obviously, we know for a fact that you got into your your soccer, you love your soccer now, or football as they call it, and you're on that uh that television show as a young fella saying you're gonna become a pro professional football player.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yep, yeah. So that was my that was my dream. Yeah, yeah. Anyone that knows me from back home knows like I just want to be a pro soccer player. That's all I even to this day. I'll be in the park like kicking a ball, and I see some dude watch me, and I think, like, is that a real Madrid scout? But it's actually just a pedophile. But um, yeah, um, but yeah, like from what from the earliest years, like that's all I cared about. And that's the only reason the teachers could get me in a class is saying, like, well, we spoke to your parents, and you you'll go, yeah, you're not playing soccer on the weekend. Um, so I made like um Woolongong Wools, which at the time was like uh uh an NSL before the A-League. Um so I played for an NSL club, the highest league in Australia, you know, the comparison plan for the Brisbane Broncos juniors. But there's no academy, it's just like under 10s and then under 11s, 12s, 13s, 14s. You get to first grade, you're in the first grade team, you're in the highest league in Australia, and then you probably go to Socceros or whatever. So I was playing at the highest level um coming through like school, and that's all I wanted to do. And I was just like trying everything I could to be a baller, but it just um ultimately didn't work out. Yeah, went on some reality TV show, and like the winner got a contract with Sydney FC. Uh I think came like 13th or something, and then uh had trials like the Mariners. I was trialing with Marconi, but um yeah, um the sports high school Westfield, but like Harry Kuhl and all those boys went. Um so we've all got like mutual friends, like a lot of the soccer roos from that era we know, like because they're the boys that you know, the older brothers and stuff like that. Um yeah, so it was it was sick, but I kept getting myself into trouble. So I uh it's probably I don't think I spoke about this on bedtime warriors, but Campbell Town Genetics. Yeah, mate. I got my house rated when I was in fucking high school, so yeah. So I wasn't a bad kid, but they put me in. If you Google Thomas Reddle High School, it's probably one of the lowest rated schools in the state, if not the country, but it was a sick school and and a sick area, but it's in the middle of you know, housing commission, right? Like it's it is Campbelltown is what it is, you know. It is what it is, and I loved it and I love the boys um and everyone we grew up with, but it was a rough area, as as you can imagine. Like I saw, yeah, I saw fucking people get killed, stabbed, shot. You know, my best mate in year seven, he he's dead. Like he he he went into this dude's front door and just unloaded a magazine at him. He ran out of bullets, tried to run away, didn't do his stoppage through, and they stabbed him to death on the end of the driveway. And it's like these are all like because the Rebels clubhouse is is in Campbelltown on Blackson Road, and and a lot of the boys, like the hottest chick in our school in our school, her dad was the president of the rebels. And uh it's like, so you want to be like one of the boys, like maybe you've got to nominate and go through. So a lot of the boys did. So a lot of the boys grew up and went went that path. And then I had a lot of family friends that were cops, and uh, my next door neighbors were all cops, and you know some of them, um, a family full of cops, absolute weapons, and like I'd shout out, boys. Three three brothers, yeah. Three of them are uh yeah, three of them are cops and one's uh landscaper, I guess. And um, and we're we're good mates with those boys, and they like I'd be 15 years old, look over the fence next door, and it was one of the boys' eighteenths, and it turns out it was half of Campbell Town police station down there next door, and they're like, Scotty, come over. I'm just they can see me through the fucking window. I've got wide, there's a stripper, tits out, and they're doing yard glasses, and it's all cops in cop uniforms, and I'm like, oh boys, and they invite me over, and and and so my opinion of the police force was like, This is fucking sick. I'm gonna be a cop, but um yeah, I was in trouble. So I was um I had a cap gun and it was a very good cap gun, like not just the little snub nose revolver one, it was like a Smith and Wesson it's a metal one, yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. Got it from Fairfield Markets, some little shonky vet congude. And um, I pulled a drive-by on my mates playing touch footy on their front lawn. Well, my brother was driving and mum's Toyota Sika, and we just fucking let loose out the, you know, everyone hit the deck and we all thought it was funny and we drove off. Turns out half of Campbell Town were looking for us, and that includes Raptor. Raptor 13 told me later, he's like, I remember that. And I was only like young, and so obviously, someone in the street reported it as a real shooting because real shootings happen a lot in Western Sydney, as we all know. And um, I just come home from school one day and I just got dropped by mum, like, like, hey mum, you know, yeah, let's go, bang. I was like, whoa, what did I do this time? And I've done a lot of bad things, so I'm like, Well, what was it? And then she's like, look at the table, and there's like a business card from New South Wales Police, and I was like, Oh I know. Again, what did I do? Like, I don't know. What didn't I do today?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

And then um the drive-by didn't cross your mind.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Yeah, no, it didn't cross my mind.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

That was the least of the issues, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

So they they they took me to the police station, and as a as a 15-year-old, I was in the cells at Campbell Town. Yeah, right. Yep, they put me and my brother in the cells and tried to, you know, do the do the whole fucking you gotta be better. And then uh I thought that was the end of it. I promised like I'll I'll do better, and then got arrested at school for selling marijuana. But it wasn't marijuana, it was a bag of oregano, mum's mum's oregano in a sati for the spaghetti, and we were just gone up to the year seven kids trying to get 20 bucks out of them, and then no one would pay because it was clearly fucking oregano, and I'm not trying to make a spaghetti, so we just left it in like a vending machine, you know, where the coin comes out, and we're just watching cunts pick it up and go, like, oh fuck, someone left weed in here. And then the teachers came over and like, cunt, I know that's oregano, fuck off, go back to class, but then one of the year sevens told their mum the next day I got arrested at school. So I wanted to be a cop, obviously. After everything that I'd experienced cancel that out. Well, I applied and I went through set so I applied for ASIO, ACES, D FAT, New South Wales cops, everything. I chucked it all in. And I'm like, This is when you left school? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 18. Like, I was like, I'm gonna be a cop. And or like I went pretty high. Nah, I'm just gonna go straight to ACES. They they must want me. I'm a sit gunt. And they were just like, you've passed all the aptitude testing, and they even AFP flew me to Brizzy. They're all if I can do a bodies on the AFP. I went and did all the testing up there, passed everything. But essentially, all of them said, Come back in two years of some life experience. You're literally a high schooler, you fucking loser. And uh I agree, like looking back, like, yeah, you don't want a cop that's just come straight out of high school. Shout out to all the cops that have done that now. Fucking, if you're 18 year old female, you're straight in, but that was that was that. So Also, I like had like I didn't display P plates and I had one fine. And they're like, well, because you can't follow the law, how can you in enforce it? So come back and get some experience. So I was like, well, what can I do to get some experience? I know. I'll join the fucking army. So I applied, uh, went to recruiting, uh, went to be an officer. Because the assumption in I think everyone's mind listening to this is that officers, or if you're going to be in the army, you want to be an officer. They're the pinnacle. Turns out they're actually a bunch of fucking faggots who do nothing. Oh, sign my leave app, sir. Yawn. Not doing that. But at the time, so I went down to RMC and I sat in front of the commandant and I all the testing, like I flogged everyone in the beep test, push-ups, and I was a skinny little runt, but whatever. And then um I did everything I could to get there. And then the final interview, I treated it almost, and then I was working like a white-collar corporate job while I was going through these processes. I was working in Sydney CBD in the fine in the finance sector, so very fucking upper market, you know, Bridge Street, Circular Key, over in an office overlooking the harbor bridge, doing financial stuff. And so I went into that interview, not knowing anything about the military, like it was a corporate job interview, and I crushed it. But at the end, they were like, Not once during this interview did you refer to me as sir. Do you understand that I'm the commandant of this place? And I was just like, Oh, my apologies, sir. Like, I really want to be here and um I'm willing to give it my old blah blah blah. And then he's just like, I want you to join the army as maybe a reservist or in the infantry so you can understand more about our culture and then come back. And I was like, Oh yeah, fuck yeah, sick. I didn't realise at the time he's calling me a dumb cunt, like, go be a grunt, you're fucking dickhead. You're not an officer. So I went back to recruiting at Parramatta, like, hey yeah, I did really well down there, but he said I should be a rifleman. And they're like, Oh, well, you tested, you unlocked everything in your U session that you could be like whatever, an engineer or whatever. And they're like, You probably don't want to be a grunt. I was like, No, I'll be a grunt. Because the commandant of the RMC, he told me to. Turns out he's a peacetime boomer who served in the 80s, never seen a day of combat in his life, but I gave him respect because he had pips on his shoulder. And I wish I could go back in time and spit on him. But um, he did me a favor because I think everyone would agree. Yeah, exactly. I'm not an officer. Imagine, imagine. Imagine me as either a police officer or a military officer. Nah. Oh, nah. I'd be worse than Andrew Hasty dropping bombs on kids, mate. Fucking there'd be a bit more of that going on. So why a month later I was on the bus to Kapuka as a rifleman, as a grunt. So you you enlisted as a grunt? Yeah, mate. Mark and oy, fist pumped.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Yeah, bugging oy.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

But then I was too scared. So what happened was the second week of Kapuka, we did a lesson. It was like, hey uh, if you don't think you're liking the idea of infantry, so I was in an all-stag infantry platoon, two platoons. It was when 8-9 RER was being raised, and John Howard was like, fucking open that up. We're gonna need it. Afghan's kicking off. We need more cannon fodder. Scojo, you're in. So it was 100 dudes, all infantry. We went through Kapuka, like 32 platoon, and they're like, Maybe the infantry isn't for you, just notional lesson that they gave. Like, you're getting core transfer. One of the dudes I went to high school with was a direct entry commando. He joined the army at 17. By 19, he's a direct entry commando in Afghanistan, and he's a fucking weapon. And he's just one of the boys we played soccer with. I was as I was coming, you know, me and him, cross-country athletics, state swimming, state athletics, state everything. Me and him were kind of neck and neck. Um, and I knew that well, he did this, and I called him. I said, bro, you showed me some like helmet cam footage of what you did in Afghanistan. That shit was kind of dope. I've just joined the army as a rifleman. Is that a good idea? And he's like, No. What do you why'd you do that? And I go, Well, I want to do what you did. Like, you showed me a helmet cam footage of a of an SOT, like SOTG5 Afghanistan, the boys running around in board shorts like killing cunts. And that was my that's what I thought the army was. So I knew one dude in the army and he was a direct entry commando. So very from the get-go, warped warped view. And I called him, you know, when you got to stand, you're on red tabs at Kapuka, they give you your phone back after two weeks. You've got to stand at attention and face a tree and call call, like he got one phone call. And I called this boy, and he's like, mate, don't tell me your LF6 score, I don't care, because that's what I was trying to tell him. Like, mate, I did really well at the well at the wets the other day. He's like, I can't. The wets. I just got out back from Afghanistan. I don't care about what you're talking about. But he goes, You want to be a commando? Well, there's only one way to do that is to do selection. He goes, or in the meantime, core transfer to a job that we actually take out on missions with us, that we actually want with us. SIGs. And I go, well, tell me. Tell me the two jobs. He goes, there's two jobs that I would recommend. He goes, a medic. We always have a medic with us because someone always gets shot. Or we have these SIGs with us, but not just a SIG. He's like, I can use a radio. They're called bears. It's called an electronic warfare operator. And I was like, okay, what's that? All right, no dramas. He goes, if you want to be one of those guys, we take them out on every job and they're valuable and they're they're they're I he's like, I know your personality, you'll do well at it. Because you want your interest in like ASIO, ACES investigations, you'll enjoy it. And I was like, okay, cool. Went back, put my court, told, told the corporal, I want a core transfer to EW.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Akapuka.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Acapuka. How many weeks in are you? Two. Two weeks. And they're like, oh, okay. No dramas. I filled in some form, handed it to him. We're at the end of Singo. Like, like we're about to go to 8.9 RER. Oh, so you did all the Singo as well? Well, like, yeah, the first month and a half, two months. Oh shit. Yeah. Yeah. And and where and I'm like doing heavy weapons at Singo, doing 84 quals, and they're rushing us through it to get to 8.9 because it was busy. Yeah, it was busy. And the majority of the the um IETs were going to be done in battalions at that time.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Yeah. So that so all the boys are about, we're about to go to Brizzy and I'm about to like finish my IETs up at Brizzy. Um, and I had a fair few courses to go, like we all did. And then um some sergeant just came and I was like, fucking two I say, um, Private Jones. And I went up there and he's like, Your fucking core transfer came in to be a fucking pogue. What the fuck are you doing? And I'm like, uh, yeah, yeah. Like someone recommended it's it's a good role. And he was just absolutely spraying me, and all the corporals were standing there, like shake, like looking at me like, you fucking pathetic cunt. You're a fucking disgrace. And I was just like, yep, I just copped it. I just I just stood there. He's like, So you go on a Monday on Monday, you go to Melbourne and you're learning Indonesian for some reason. I was like, all right, mate, look, no worries. Like, let's go. Years later, I think about 2018, 19, I saw that same sergeant at range control with a green beret sticking out of my pocket and my sleeves rolled up with a mullet. And I gave him a little head nod. Okay, Sergeant, remember me? Ha ha, faggot. Yeah, how's your how's your divorce going, mate? Oh, whoa, one, oh, that's cute. I'm a corporal, got a mullet. Um, but yeah, so went down to Melbourne, and to be a bear, to be a EW operator, um, you to to get onto IETs, you had to pass a year-long Indonesian course. Did you? As a gate. Wow. Yeah. Top 1% of the army, they say. The hardest job you can actually do technically in the army on your youth session. So I'd unlocked that back when I was trying to be an officer and they put me straight on. Um, so yeah, I was in Laverton for a year learning Indonesian, and that's when I first bumped into like uh serving commando and SAS boys, that way they're down there doing short courses, like about to deploy um one of the boys on my IETs was a commando SIG, and he told me about this thing called Cat B. So he was a SIG with a green beret. I was like, What? You've got the commando beret and you're a SIG? He's like, Yeah, man, I did selection and um uh I'm a a SIG, a radio operator SIG. So he he carries the radio out on the job with the boys. He'd done Afghan rotations, shotguns, and he's showing us footage and showing like the SIG blew this cunt's leg away. Like, and I was like, What? This this dude's a fucking weapon, and he was humble as fuck. Now he's in ACES, he's an ASUS operative, and I see him walking around Canberra, and I give him a nod and he's like, Look, give him the eyes like don't fucking look at me because I'm on a job. Like he's he's tailing someone through the fucking city, yeah, and and and it's high stakes. And he's like, and then he'll message me later, hey, I was on a job, sorry, man, I'm good to catch up. So, anyways, like these dudes are starting to shape my like opinion of like thoughts on where you wanted to be thoughts on who they are, yeah. And then there was some SAS cats there that were injured, like that had been hurt, um, and they were doing like pigeon courses and stuff. So, anyway, we got to the end of that year-long course, um, and three out of the 30 army dudes had passed. It's hard. You got to get to level two reading, writing, and speaking Indonesian. And I've never been to Bali, I don't give a fuck about that place, and now I'm never allowed to go there because of I did that course. And then if you pass that course, you go up to seven SIG in Kabbalah. And the reason why that base is there is because the signals from Vietnam, the HF signals from back in the Vietnam War, would perfectly bounce off the ionosphere and land in that area of Queensland, and that's where the the operational SIGs would sit there and and log all of the communications from the Vietnam War live, like the Battle of Long Tan. They're listening to it at 70. Yeah. And um, so you go up there, and that was about almost a year as well, 10 months, and um you learn how to be a bear. But it was a strategic role at that time. So IETs is a strategic tri-service role. So you're learning how to um obviously I can't get into it too much because it's like the the highest clear job in the army with its all of its caveats, top secret clearance. Um, and yeah, you you you learn how to um log enemy communications and then uh touch type. So obviously your keyboard skills need to be fucking quick. So they're like basically blindfold you, put a cover over your so you can't see your own hands, and you've got to pass typing tests at certain words per minute, or you get kicked off. And if you get kicked off, you go back to be a normal SIG, like a loser SIG like Chris Brennan. Yeah. Bruno. Nah, love you, Breno. But um, yeah, so we call them drop bears. And a lot of the SIGs in our army at that point in time were drop bears, dudes that failed either the language course or the IET component. So you learn the language, then you listen to a certain foreign language, and you have to, in your own mind, log that in real time. So, like your Zero Limits podcast intro, right? Imagine you're listening to that for a foreign army live because uh the SAS are over there doing a job, and you're listening to that and logging it live as to what the enemy are seeing. How are they mobilizing? Where are they? Where are their tanks? Where are their submarines? Have their jets taken off? And you're logging that in a foreign language, translating it in your head to English shorthand, and then passing it on. And that needs to be real time. And if you don't do it within a certain amount of seconds, you fail the course. So it's very difficult. And um, I met some absolute weapons up there on that course, um, especially like the commando dudes that would shape my career. Um, and uh yeah, essentially I passed that, and then the extension of that is you go to Canberra, that you then first post to the Australian Signals Directorate, which is one of those buildings in Russell offices, a basement within a basement with no windows, no sunlight, and you're there for 12 hours a day and you're doing the job. So I'm doing the job and I fucking hated it.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Like I've been in this is once you finish IETs, you get posted.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Yeah, and I've so it's technically though I've been in IET for like fucking two and a half years now. I'm on IETs, it's the middle of the global war on terror, and I'm in a fucking basement in Canberra, and I remember vividly like this this basically sums it up for me. And I don't think I've said this before, but you've got a live, uh, you've got no access to the outside world. You're in a basement, but there's like ABC News 24 hours like scrolling through. And I look up, another soldier's been killed in Afghanistan. They show the face of Brett Wood, Green Beret in his pollies, looking like a sick cunt, look like a hard cunt. And an email comes out like another soldier's been killed while we've been at work. Um, there'll be a vigil service at R1, which is one of the buildings where like the chief of the defense force and all those boys work across the across the road at 6 p.m. And I was like, oh, okay, everyone, like all the boys, it's like all the army boys. I'm like, oh, we we're going to this um memorial service site, power respects. And they're like, no, I can't. It's fucking at six o'clock at night. I'm going home. I'm going to the gym. I'm going to go cook dinner. I'm like, what do you mean, cunt? There's a fucking Australian soldier just died for us. And they're like, nah, not interested, mate. See ya. So I stood in the dark and like the cold Canberra night, six o'clock at night, it was pitch black. And a group of commandos came out to brief all the APS staff, and they read out his bio and who he was as a person. And they're reading it. And I'm like, this dude's a fucking sick. He's got a medal of gallantry for like running through gunfire and doing all this shit. And there's fuck all the people in the dark scene here, but the dudes with green berets that all look jacked, they all looked fit, they all look like weapons. I was like, these guys are who I want to be, not some fucking cunt just sitting here that takes a paycheck, you know. Like they were a different breed. I could just look at the way that they carried themselves, the way they spoke. I was like, these dudes are hitters. And then I was like, fuck this. I went back into work and I filled up my application for selection for two commanders. Oh, did you? Yep. And no one in that building had ever filled one out before because it's a tri-service civilian. My bosses were civilians. It was like a Navy petty officer, and then his boss was like a civilian APS 7 or band one, whatever it's called. So I pulled my app in and it says on the app, you got to do 18 months in an infantry battalion or because they gear it towards a grunt, right? Every grunt wants to do selection. Some aren't good enough. Most aren't good enough. But uh, I was um, so yeah, I put my app in and and no one noticed that fine print. They're just like, what is this? I'm like, oh, it's just a course to make me a better soldier. I just want to be a better soldier for for ASD so I can perform at a higher level. And they're like, oh yeah, well, that sounds good, mate. Well, good on you, mate. Go and do some quick. He signed off on it. He signed off on it, mate. Panel me on special forces selection. Was it did you have any thought about SASR? Was that uh well look, I thought about it. Um, but then like it had a drop-down tab and it said, like, um, do you identify as homosexual? And I selected no, and then the only option that came up is two commando. I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's weird. But um shout out to Breno. Yeah, shout out to all the boys in Perth. Yeah. Nah, but um, I did, and a lot of my mentors um and like dudes that introduced me to Ben Robert Smith and and all those guys were absolute fucking sit cunts, man. My idols. Um, yeah, everyone knows. Like, and originally I absolutely would have wanted to be S. I think everyone on your podcast says this. Like, for sure, I would have been SAS if they had a cat B stream, which is means you could be, you can earn the Sandy Beret, but you still do your job. And that's what a cat B is. A cat A pass is a is a shooter, an operator, and a cat B pass can be a Sig, a medic, uh the fucking QE can get a green beret if he really wants one. A Chippy got his green beret. So in two commando, there's a fucking dude walking around in King G's with a green beret. It's funny as, and he's a legend. Um, but SAS removed that when I came through. So that wasn't an option. But the SAS boys were calling me when they knew I had my application in, um, saying, like, please don't do that. We'll just post you into the SAS. And I was like, well, cool, give me a posting order and I'll remove my selection app. But they couldn't justify that to schema to get me over there as much as they wanted to, and I honestly believe that. And they they still come and visit me to this day, and yeah, they're upset that I became a commando and not a not a P troop um cat.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

Because that's how Breno, Breno obviously got posted SAS out and eventually fell into the stream.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

And he he became a cat A. So he was a SIG posted there. Correct. And then he he realized, oh, this lifestyle's sick. I don't want to leave Perth because there's an a gay nudist beach directly outside the fence. And if I want to suck dudes off all day, I'm gonna need to stay here and do selection. So um yeah. So um, yeah, I put my app in and uh then I got paneled for accelerated infantry training. So that SIG that was on my IET course pulled some strings, got me on a course, which is an eight-week course at Singo, and it's basically like the infantry IETs on steroids, and you use an M4, and all your instructors are hitters from the unit. And I went up to Singo and it was fucking amazing. So you basically get walkthrough selection slow time, and that 13-week training program that you do is a part of the course. So the the selection PTI, Campo, whoever I know, he's on the DOCO and stuff, they film my selection. If you Google like uh commando selection, I think it's on VMO, Scott Evanant posted it, and um you'll see me in there like struggling and you'll see the entry tests and everything. But the eight-week selection course is designed for pogues. The dudes that are on the DRS program, direct entry commandos, if not say 60 of them start at Kapuka, but only five of them are left at the end of Singo, that and there's 30 spots on the AIT course. You've got 25 spots for pogues to learn how to be a grunt before selection, and that's what it was. A lot of Rafi combat controllers, um, a lot of um, yeah, pogues, navy divers. Um, we had a few navy divers on absolute weapons. Um, we also had two F-18 Hornet pilots. Oh shit. And they were the high performers. So they're they're literally flying fucking jets in the morning. They come out to sing on the AVA and learn how to do an ambush um from a bunch of recon commando dudes. And it taught me a lot. And honestly, that was like the blueprint for selection. It made life very easy. So all the nav checkpoints, for example, on AITs where we had to go out and do our nav phase ended up being the checkpoints on two commanders selection. Oh, is it?

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

So I get a fucking checkpoint 19 kilometers away, and I'm like, oh, the monument. Never before. I was there a couple of weeks ago. I took a shit on the on the northern side of it in the bushes, and I never covered it up. And uh, yeah, so I literally like get my nav data sheet. So then yeah, I'm I'm on selection now. I tuck my fucking compass away. I'm like, yeah, I know where that is. Just start walking 19 kilometers, just like fucking singing fucking Molly Cyrus on the way and just fucking hanging out. And it wasn't hard, it was like peaceful. It was like, oh yeah, I know where I'm going. So I think on selection, I finished my nav. You gotta do like a certain amount of kilometers. Let's say, let's say, for example, it's a hundred kilometers. I've done it in two days. There's four days left, and I'm just watching grunts, career grunt, recon sergeants fucking lost in the bush, like and just sitting there laughing, like, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

So and so this is the 2012 period as well. So yeah, Afghans in full fucking swing. Commandos are spitting out dudes, they lost a lot of dudes, a lot of dudes are injured. So obviously, these instructors and DS that are on this uh selection are all just all gunfighters, mate.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

They are fucking weapons, man. Like the dude, yeah. I'll say like the dude, the CSM of the course, like the first dude you met as a commander when you got there, Rufus. Like, man, I was captivated, man. This dude is the biggest hitter I've ever seen in my life. The way he spoke, like he stood there, we were all formed up, like 150 of us, and he just walking up and down the line by himself on like a Sunday Avo for two hours, just talking about the the history of the regiment and how much it means to him. And I was like, fuck yeah. And then the instructors come out and they're beasting you, but you can see it in their eyes, like this cunt's killed bulk bad cunts. He's a fucking weapon. He he's he's beasting me and calling me a shit cun and everyone else is shit gun and spitting on people. And it's like, good, thank you. Like, I I just appreciate being here with you, mate. It's lovely to be here. Like, you know, I had the utmost respect for these dudes and what they've been through. And they would give us um, you know, uh arousals to say before we're about to do a sh a stores carry or a stretcher carry for 19 kilometers overnight through iRus terrain, they're like, the reason why we're doing this is because I had to fucking carry um, you know, X person. I had to carry Luke Worsley off target. And this is why we're doing this, because it's important as a commander to be able to know that you can do this. I've had to carry my mates, I've had to carry my mates' corpse like this far. And you're just sitting there like, well, I'm not gonna quit and I'm not gonna bitch out because this is the job, like this is why they do it. And and I agree, like I I saw the lessons on selection and why they do certain things when the chips were down in Afghanistan. I was like, Yeah, okay, I know why we did that on selection now. This job's fucking hard, so selection has to be fucking hard.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Yeah, exactly right. And I think uh going back on previous podcasts, Heath Jameson spoke about it.

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Yeah, and exactly, yeah, yeah. Um, and yeah, like Jammo, he's one of the instructors, you know. Um Craig Hamburger, one of my mates. Yeah, yeah, like so Berg's uh story about Berggs, sidetrack. Um, listen to his potty, probably one of the best you've ever done, I feel. Um, I listed to my mate in the unit again, the the dude I grew up with, and I said, I'm I'm I'm I'm on selection, I'm doing this or whatever. Um when I finish selection eventually. And he goes, Who are your instructors? And I listed them all. And I expected him to be like, Yeah, this dude's a good cunt, this dude's a good cunt. He basically said, This dude's a shit cunt, he's a good cunt, he's a shit cunt, shit cunt, he's there because we're Kicking him out of the unit. That's why he's there. He's a fuckwit. And I was just like, oh wow. I thought he was a hitter. And I go, and Craig Hamburger. And I thought he was going to say, like, ah, you know, Craig's a little fella. You know, he's like, out of everyone you just listed, Craig Hamburger is the hardest cunt I've ever worked with. And I go, really? And he's like, Yeah, I saw that cunt. Someone dropped a machine gun in the middle of a cornfield. He ran out there laughing and hooting and going, Yeah, bullets flying everywhere. And he ran out and picked up this gun and ran back into cover. And he got, you know, metal gallantry later on. He killed a few cunts. And I was just like, Wow, this dude's a fucking hitter. Like everything that he said from that moment onwards to me, like Bergs, I listened intently, you know. Um, and then like there's another fella you gotta get on, um, Shorey, um, Steve Shaw, and he people, I think, what's what might be different from dudes at the unit doing select? Let's say you did selection, Maddie, and a lot of the boys did selection, and they're from an infantry battalion. They may know people there, but I felt, and it's it's bad to say it, I felt that I was wanted at the unit because of my capability, and maybe I got an easier ride, potentially at times, right? And um, I was doing a smash session, it was they call them signature sessions, like once every few days, it's a three-hour session. And what this session was was on the footy field at Singo behind the Curry Club. We had to do the BFA three times in a row in patrol order from level three to level eight. But everyone had a machine gun, either a mag 58 minima, paramai, and they're fucking heavy and they're awkward. And every fucking um, every time you got to the other end of the beep test, you had to be in a laying in a prone firing position, and then get up, beep, run to the other end. And if you didn't make it, you can kicked off selection. And I'll everyone's fucking hurting. Dude's had Mag 58s, and you gotta be prone doing the normal beep test and laying down. It was horrible. And I was hurting, and I felt a dude coming down the line, um, going, What's your name? What's your name to each candidate? And he got to me, and I was like, Oh, uh, Sig Jones, staff. And he's like, Are you Braddo's mate? And I go, uh, yes, staff. And he goes, I'm gonna tell Braddo you're a fucking faggot. I was like, Oh, okay, thank you, staff, and just carried on. Get to the end of selection, first dude I call, my mate Braddo, we'll blur that out. And I go, Oh, I passed selection. And he goes, Yeah, I know you passed because I was getting messages from people saying you're a faggot. So yeah, like um, yeah, got through. Yeah. Off to Rio. How long was that selection? Five, five weeks, five weeks or so. Yeah. I think a few weeks longer than the SAS one, I think it is. But um, yeah, it was um harder one that say twice twice as long, twice as hard. That's what I say. But um, yeah, we got through it and um and yeah, just uh went down to Sydney for the reinforcement cycle. Now, a lot of the cat bees, a lot of the SIGs have become qualified. This is the point of contention where a lot of as you know, a lot of shooters will say, ah, Sky Joe's just a SIG, you know. It's like, yeah, I am. Um, so back in the day, the cat bees only had to do certain portions of selection. You only had to do like um the ACQB four-week shooting package, and then like say demolitions course, you only had to do the first two days where you learn how to safely like blow up a little baby charge like the size of a matchstick, right? Because that's not your dedicated role. That's right. So you just need to be comfortable around that stuff. Um, for the amphib course, instead of doing the four-week amphibi course where you're doing surf negotiation at night under NVGs coming into the beach on a on a um, you know, essentially like a surf life-saving craft, uh, the the the pogs just do like a three-day course and we call it bum cities. You just got to learn basically how to fall out of the boat at night, put your hand in the air, and someone will come pick you up and not die. Um, I didn't. I did the whole Rio with the boys because I wanted to. And they would ask, like, well, um, you you just got to do the first couple of days of Dems, bro. And I'm like, no, I'm gonna do the full breacher course. So I did like the full tag breacher course doing repelling off the roof tag kit with satchel charges. I did the full amphib course, I did PLFs over the horizon, I did um yeah, I did my full SF Sig course in Perth with the SAS. So it really hurt one uh commando in the later years when he chipped me for being a cat B. And I said, bro, when you did your Rio and I did mine, at the end of my Rio, I was more qualified than you at the end of your Rio, and it was a woe-to commando, and he didn't like that. Let's put it that way. Yeah, so yeah, I was like, Oh, I uh um I'm Dems quote, are you? And I knew he wasn't because someone had told me. I was like, oh yeah, um, we're gonna go do a Dems practice at the range. He's like, Why are you going? I was like, Oh, because I'm a I'm a qualified tag breacher, are you? And yeah, it wasn't good. Wasn't good, but yeah, um, no, I was learning, like, imagine learning off the dudes though, like these instructors, man. It's like, imagine right now getting dropped as like the 5'8 in Penrith Panthers. Like, you are just put in a team of fucking superstars. The the best, like, yeah, imagine being Tiger Woods caddy in his prime or getting you know put in the Chicago Bulls in the late 90s, like as a like as a player, you just get dropped into the best team in the world at what they do.

SPEAKER_00 50:25

Yeah, you you gotta look at the timing you come in, like that 2012 period. Like I said, all everything's happened. Yeah, yeah. And I everyone has established multiple deployments already. Now they're instructors, yeah. Teaching the real stuff, so there's substance behind what they're teaching. Because obviously, when I went through sing-o, the substance was there was no substance, there was no, there was no war, you know. Last year, real war was Vietnam. Yeah. So the substance behind the training, you're like, it was intense. It was so now they had that substance behind what they were teaching.

SPEAKER_01 50:55

Yeah, and I um I spoke about this on on Bedtime Warriors back in the day, where like towards the end of my rear, I just started paying stuff off. Like, let's be honest, I was back home with all my mates getting loose every night, going to the cross, partying, and and my drills got sloppy. And I'd never had a safety breach, never had a UD ND, but at the end of my urban course, um, they're like, you finished the course, but you're not at the standard, bro. And I was like, oh fuck. I was I was Devo. But in the back of my mind, it's like a it's a it was a bit of a it's probably my own fault where uh the unit had already told me I'm posting. Oh, bro, you've done enough to post in, and we need to get you over to Afghan ASAP. So hurry up and finish Rio. That's probably the wrong thing to say someone who, you know, to say, and and I I was young, I was like, you know, 23, and um going out rampant it every night because I knew it didn't matter as much as a grunt that needs this, or yeah, or he goes back to fucking Darwin. Yeah. And um, so yeah, I had to come back the next year and do uh the urban package was like a three-week course, but like I passed CQB and everything, like I I loved it. Like people were freaking out about CQB. I was like, I get to run around this kill house and just shoot stuff all day. This is fucking sick. I was sharking people, like getting in, like trying to be first in the door. Um, I loved it. I thought it was fucking phenomenal. And like learning from these dudes that had just done it overseas and shot cunts in the face. I was like, yes, like tell me how to do this better. Like, what's the what's the best angle to get in there? I want I want to beat you. Like the I'm going in the door first with the instructor. I'm like, no, I want to beat, I want to shoot the target before him. And and and that's what it's about. Like, um, you know, they say in the Bible, he who enters first killeth the first cunt. And um, you know, which Bible's that? Uh I think it was maybe the Padre 2 commander or something. I don't know. But uh, yeah, so Rio was sick, but I did have to come back the next year to do my uh to do my urban course again. Yep. And I did that and I finished it on the Friday, and on the uh on the Tuesday, I deployed to Afghanistan on an SOTG.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Yeah, right. Yeah. So how long was that entire Rio process for you?

SPEAKER_01 53:01

Uh it was only like eight or nine months. Like the first.

SPEAKER_00 53:03

But you did the full.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

I did the full Rio, yeah. And um, and like I think um the amphib course is like what I did externally. So that's when I met like all the alpha company boys. So I I I came off Rio and got put into Charlie Company and we're on tag. And like day one, I'm at Lucas Heights assaulting the nuclear facility with the boys. Like, what a what a fucking drop into the fire, like straight into the fire. But um, I think the start of 2013, everyone's doing workup training for the Afghanistan trip for Charlie Company. But for two or three months I got put with Alpha Company in Hesto's boat on the tiller with Hesto all day, you know, living up the tiller with old Hesto. And um, yeah, man, I had a fucking ball with those boys. Like they were, they were weapons, like you know, you've had heaps of them on. Um Oki, yeah, chain cav, Hesto, T-Bone. I got put with those dudes that just got back from Afghanistan, just killed 150 odd cunts in six months, did an amazing effort over there, lost their mates, lost Merv McDonald. Yeah, um, so Merv was one of my instructors, and you know, I had a lot of time for him. He he had a lot of time for me, sat me down and gave me some hot chips, and um he was my TL on selection for some of the phases, and um yeah, horrible that he died. Um, but it was like, yeah, I I was sitting with the these hitters and they were teaching me amphibi. So most dudes on the amphib course have to go down to Cerberus and it's freezing cold and you're hating it. And I love the ocean. That's why we live here. Like, I'm I'm in the water every single day. I grew up in the water, very comfortable around big swell. I'm a booger. Like I I love, I love the ocean. I love the water, I love being underwater. So dudes from the country flip the fuck out when like surf negotiation. So down in in uh that's the second hardest course to pass after CQB. A lot of people fail amphib, right? Um, but I didn't do it with our Rio because I got I got booted off at the end, and then Amphib was the next course. So I did it with our company, and it was fucking just the shooters doing amphib to catch up some dudes, but I got the full qual out of it. So we were doing surf negotiation at Crenolla, pulling up in PT kit, middle of the day, up to like all these commando flotilla just up on the on the beach in PT kit, fucking road crossfit shirts, fucking slick haircuts, walking over to the cafe, getting a coffee, and then fucking hopping back in the that was my amphib course, a little bit different. But then they went to Papua New Guinea and did a whole bunch of MFib stuff, and I uh I um I went back to Charlie Company, but during that time, I think we did something like 10 PLFs. So you push a boat, an inflatable boat, out the back of a plane, you then jump out after that boat and you chase it down to the water, you land in the water, you set it up, and then you go wait for the next plane to come over and drop all your mates off, and then you go and pick them up. So you're literally jumping out into the open ocean in with a fucking uh a craft, setting it up, and it's the most fucking hectic SF shit I think that we do on the Rio. Um, and um I was doing over the horizon landings with Hesto, uh 38 kilometers off Cranola. Like literally 38 kilometers, like you can't, it's called over the horizon, you can't see it. And we're that far out into the ocean over Crenola, and then jumping out, setting up a boat and coming all the way up the Georgia's River and doing a hit on the Holzworthy facility. Like, so I learned a lot with Alpha Company because all their TTPs and and slick drills were just from Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_00 56:28

So and just on that, so you from when you finish your reinforcement sole, you'll posted to one, two, six signal squadron. That's right, and then attached to Charlie Company.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

That's right. Yep. So um there's like say 15 bears, 15 EW operators at the unit, and then three uh get put in each company. So one in the company headquarters position, and then there's two assault platoons. So if you're a bear, you go into one of those.

SPEAKER_00 56:49

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 56:49

Yep. And I was um in Charlie Company.

SPEAKER_00 56:52

Just a quick question. How did you find it being a bear on selection? Obviously, this is going to be it's you know, it's a selection that is more catered towards the shooter, and obviously there's you know these cat bees that come on and do these courses. How were you treated?

SPEAKER_01 57:08

So initially, I think one of the first days that we got there, we had to line up, we were formed up in teams. Your number was called out, and the officers went to the front, and the officers became the team leader. So these are infantry officers from an infantry battalion, and they're now your team leader. And you know, two IC, Demolitions Guy, Breacher, SIG, all through the teams for selection was actually um your position number for that series of events. It might have been a 48 or 72-hour period. For some reason, initially, I got put as an officer. So my 2IC was a senior infantry captain, and he was asking me, Um, who are you? Like, where are you from? Like, oh, I'm just a SIG, you know? And he's like, Why did you get called out to be the team leader? And no one knew, and it was very confusing. Uh, and then the so not only am I stressing about like being on selection, I got tasked to do an infill. So we're gonna go just do a basic infill, patrol out through Singleton to do a uh a small task overnight to sort of shake out in our team, and I had to deliver orders to my team. I've never done a subject course, I've just come out of ASD, never been field before other than Kapuka, and I was giving orders to senior infantry recon dudes, including a captain in the infantry, who's now I believe, like a major lieutenant colonel in second commander, very, very senior dude. And he uh to his credit, I said to him, mate, how do you give orders on selection? And he he to his credit, like instead of filling up his water bottles and doing his ammo, he was in the mess with me uh for a few hours showing me what SMIAC was.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_01 58:51

This is my level of soldiering. Yeah, to him, yeah. Absolute weapon. He knows who he is. Um, and we saw each other throughout our whole careers, and I'd always like say to him, like, You're you're a thanks for that, eh? Like you're a sit gun. Um, but anyway, it wasn't until about like a few days into selection that um everyone else, like after that, obviously the DS were like, Who the fuck are you? And they moved me out of that position. It was it was a fuck up, I think. Um, but all the dudes in our team could just were completely paying me off. So on selection, if you're from one RAR, all the one RAR boys stick together. Of course. If you're from six RAR, they all have their little clicks and clans. And because I was just a one SIG on selection, when you do this thing called rate your mates, everyone gets together and you get told it's good and it's bad as a double-edged sword because it teaches you to dog your own mates in your team, which the SAS found out later on. And there's, you know, I don't think they do it anymore because it encourages you to dog your mates, you know, rate your mates. So you've got to write and write everyone's name in order who's the best in the section. And if you had to kick some cunt off selection, who would it be? Yeah, yeah. So that that's what we did. And literally, the person who got the most votes for being the shittest cunt was kicked off selection immediately. And that some sometimes I feel that came down to well, that cunt's just to Qie doing selection in a team full of grunts. They're all just gonna gang up on him and choose him. It's the best way to do it. It's smart, but that poor Qie could have been the best operator in the world, you know. Some some of the best operators in two commando were Raimi dudes. So it was a few days. Or transportees. Exactly. Yeah, yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

Black Goody.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Yeah, yeah, black goody, good cunt. And um, so I'm sitting there in a room. We had a day where we just went away with our DS and we sat in a room with our team, and it was kind of like tools down. You can ask them any question you want about being a commando. We're sitting in a circle and everyone had to introduce themselves. They all went around. I'm I'm uh, you know, two IC in a sniper section in fucking two R hour or whatever. They got to me and I was like, Oh, I'm I'm a SIG, um, come from Australian Signals Directorate, I'm an EW operator. And everyone's just like eyes glazing over, like, who the fuck are you? Why are you here? The DS, his name's Wags, and shout out to Wags, absolute sick cun, um, who's related to a few of our mates. We found out later in life. I didn't know at the time. And Wags, I'm pretty sure, had done a few SOTGs um in a mortar section. And he goes, Ah, interesting, electronic warfare operator. And he starts spinning a worry about bears to these grunts. He's like, These cunts, mate, we couldn't, we're we're carrying these mortars around all day in Afghanistan. We couldn't get rounds off. And then the bears were able to triangulate a position where the enemy signals were coming from, where you could only use indirect fires to target them because they're in a series of compounds. And he starts raining down mortars on this location blindly that the bears had given him. And later on, when the assaulters cleared through that position, whole bunch of dead enemy. So he got his first kills from mortars purely based off a bear's intercept and intelligence and analysis. So as he's telling this story with a lot more gory guts detail, all the grunts just like staring at me like, oh, okay, these cunts are good. But if he didn't say that, they would have fucking fucked. Of course, yeah. They would have fucked me off. Yeah. And it and and I wouldn't have not know that any of these stories, I would have been a seven sig bear uh from the conventional army. So small world, eh? Like, you know, a little worry from uh a shooter with experience um gave my team a bit of respect for me. Yeah, of course. Because I wasn't earning it by myself as a skinny little fucking house or cunt. But um, yeah, so shout out to again, you gotta look at it too.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

It's it's an unknown trade, especially to the regular army. You know, we've just got six, that's it. That's right. You'd rarely use a bear for that for that because that's more an SF role.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:34

And and on that, so if you think about look at the honor, all you gotta do is look at the honor role. Sean McCarthy, everyone knows that name. He was killed in Afghanistan on his second rotation with the SAS. He's he's one of the main characters talked about in the bravery and betrayal doco, that he was killed in a horrific way in an IED. And prior to that, he climbed a tree in a gunfight to hold up a panel marker to mark the forward edge of friendly troops and received a commendation for it. He's a non-qualified bear. He hadn't done selection, and most it's it's important to know that most bears haven't done selection. Most bears are just posted in for three, six years and then they roll back out and go back to the regular army. Sean McCarthy was killed by the Taliban fighting with the SAS in Afghanistan, but yet you've got fucking some sh some of the lower IQ shooters on social media and in our society saying, I fucking chook cunt, fucking cat bee, fucking faggot. Like, go say that to his mum and dad on Anzac Day when they're staring at his at their son's name on the honor roll. Um, and another dude in my team, you know, so when I got um off selection, like just fast forwarding a little bit, uh, Gary Wilson, um, he was the bear in the Hilo crash with with Scott Ryder. He's there with uh Scottie Palmer, Tim Apple, and Ben Chuck, all killed in action. The bear was on the helicopter with him. He's got a significant brain injury now. He's on social media, he does a lot um about um you know soldier welfare, I think with soldier on and whatnot. He's a bear. He's not he hadn't done selection, he's originally from 3R, actually. So he's a paratrooper that then became a bear. All these horrific injuries happen to bears. The most injured soldier that has ever come home from war, and I'll fucking I'll put my fucking put my bloody mortgage on it. That his name is Tim Pereira from my team. He's a bear. He is now a quadriplegic, and there's only 15 of us in two commanders. There's only 15 bears in two commando. Tim Pereira was coming home from a job with Hesto's like uh Oscar Platoon, Alpha Company. I think Hesto was November, but the other sister platoon were doing a job out in uh Afghanistan. They're coming home in bushmasters, and on the way home, one of the last jobs of rotation 18 2012 in Afghanistan, my mate Tim Pereira, who we call Dids, is in the rear hatch of a bushmaster manning the Mag 58. A shooter's job, right? But he just wants to help out. He hasn't done selection, but he wants to help the boys. His sole purpose of being there as a bear is to make sure that the boys are safe purely by listening to what the enemy are doing and taking away the situational awareness from the enemy. He's up in the hatch while he's doing that, manning the gun. The rear of the bushy slides out in some mud around a roundabout and crashes into a jingle truck, and all of the six-handle green trunks that are bolted to the top of the roof of the bushmaster slide back, slam the hatch on his neck and snap his neck in half. And he was completely unconscious. The medic did a phenomenal job of keeping him alive, but now uh, you know what, fuck 15 years later, he's in Melbourne in a purpose-built house and he's a quadriplegic. He can't move anything from his neck down. But there's a shooter out there going, fucking chill cunt, fucking cat, fucking sig, dumb cunt. Like, come on, mate. Like, and how many dudes from Alpha Company right now listening to this? I'm sure there's a few. How many have been down to visit him in the last 15 years? Or potentially because he didn't do selection, he doesn't have a green beret, he's not one of the boys. You're happy to pay him off. And that, you know, from a small team of 15 dudes, there's just like three dudes that I've mentioned that are fucking fully fucked, you know, the most injured soldier to ever come home from Afghanistan, maybe even to ever come home from World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, is actually a bear from two commando. And no one knows that until now, maybe listening to this. So Google it. It's you know, the Commando Welfare Trust, not I'm not a big fan of, but they do a bit to help him. And uh there you go. So there's a bit about bears and what they mean to the regiment. They just don't get the props because people aren't going on podcasts, people aren't gonna, with the sensitive nature of the job, it's very hard for me to talk vaguely about what we do and how we do it with the equipment we use and uh not breaching compartments. I'm not trying to do that. I'm just trying to say, fuck, the bears do a good job. They're pretty a pretty violent. Vital part of the team, but they go unnoticed because of their sensitivity of their role. But it's not to say that these boys haven't done some some pretty heavy lifting.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:13

Of course, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And just on the whole Sig McCarthy thing, like I heard the explosion that night. I was only I was in the Blue Chieve Valley, heard the explosion, not to mention the cats came to the base, the uh Ford operating base that we're at, and mate, you could just see the devastation they would they were going through. Because he Sig McCarthy, Sean McCarthy, he was consolidated within that team. You know, he was I feel like it was just a different, you know, SASR just have I don't know, they might have a bit of a better connection with their yeah, look, look at um look at Breno.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Um, so who knows what what it is, but um, yeah, you certainly hear a lot of people say, ah, he's just a SIG or whatever. Like, okay, well, Sean McCarthy's just a SIG too. Yeah, um, but yeah, less we forget.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:03

Yeah, mate. Yep. Uh we spoke about obviously how you were treated being a bear within the selection. Did they try and make anything hard for you, or what was the hardest part for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:15

Uh it wasn't, I don't think, targeted at me, but what kind of fucking sticks to me, whenever someone brings up selection and you get that shutter down your spine, it's towards the end of selection. I think we started with I don't know, 150, 140, something like that people. And uh we were maybe down to about 50 dudes towards the end, um, maybe like yeah, week four or so. All the boys are in the shower, as you do, you know. So sudden, sudden up with the boys. That's the only reason I did selection, just see heaps of cocks.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:46

Eston's favorite.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:47

Yeah, that's what Esto was there the year before. Um, he was a DS, he wasn't even working that day, Estonia. What were you doing in the showers, Esto? Um, but yeah, we were in the showers, man, and I was just in there fucking, you know, washing my noose, and most of the boys are in there scraping each other's backs with metal rulers to get this thing off your back called prickly heat. And for the non uh singo uh indoctrinated, basically it's the middle of summer, it's 40 degrees, especially if you're in the jungle. Um, your pack on your back blocks the pores. So the dirt and the sweat mix with your shirt and your pack over your back. Your pores can't breathe, it gets all clogged up and you get acne. So you get these real big fucked up pimples all over your back. I I never got them.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:32

I got it, and it was fuck. It looks it's one of the most uncomfortable things. I didn't get the pimples, but it the prickly heat.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:40

Yeah, fuck, man. Like, and you can't stop it. It looks gross, yeah. And and selection doesn't stop for you. So the boys are in there with the there's one on the table here, like a ruler and soap and naked in the shower, like scraping that ruler down dudes' backs to try and clear the pores out. Um and I was watching that happen just you know in the corner jerking off, and then um eventually some one of the DS came in and is like, what the fuck are you faggots doing? You know, and um, oh, we all got prickly heat stuff. So he's all right, hop out here. So we all formed up in three ranks out in the sun. And this DS said, Does anyone have a problem with the CO's or the the chief of the army's directive about sun smartness? And everyone's like, No, obviously not. Um, and he goes, All right, everyone then take your shirt off. And in uh cam pants and boots, he goes, What we're gonna do, the best way to clear up prickly heat is to sweat it out with your shirt off. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do burpees with our shirts off in the sun until someone quits. And that's exactly what we did. We we lined up in three ranks, and by the by the end of it, you know, say af after about 150 burpees, and this is at the end of selection when you're absolutely fucked, like there was just three ranks of footprint like chewed up grass where you were standing, because you were just dragging your feet through the dirt. It was fucking horrendous. I think after every block of 50 burpees in cadence, with DS checking your form, we had a break for like a minute and then said, All right, we're gonna go again. No one's quit yet. Okay, we'll go again. And we literally went for a very long time until some dude was like, My shoulder stuff. Okay, cool. He's now off selection. How's everyone's prickly heat? Everyone put their shirts back on and said, shut the fuck up, and that's it. Fixed. That was just one random session that wasn't even planned. Yeah, it just happened. Yeah, some dude that I think it was a sergeant, the dude that pulled off, infantry sergeant would have been a great hand in the unit, gone. Never saw him again. Because fucking some dude complained they had prickly heat. Don't whinge. That's that's selection.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

That's selection though. But that that you know, that ties into again. We go back to the the stretcher, you know, carries and the stores carries. Don't whinge about it because there's a reason for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:59

Yeah, just shut the fuck up, no pain face, no noise, just fucking carry on. Just do it. Yeah, be a man, hide your injuries. You got a problem later in life, hide your injuries, drink it away.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:13

Now we're talking about the obviously deployments. You spoke about that deployment before to Afghanistan. We're coming to the period where Afghan's starting to obviously the the chats. Did you ever think at one stage you think, fuck, I'm not going?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:25

Yeah, yeah. Oh, hard. So I get there, I rock up, and the first thing that happens is we get told we're not actually gonna be doing anything because uh one squadron SASR just cut off some hands. Handgate. Yeah. That's when I got well, I got there during Handgate. So we were on CSOPs. So we we thought we're actually never gonna go out. I'm never gonna get to go outside the wire because um that incident occurred. And that incident I know was an honest mistake. And how I know because my roommate was the one who got rid of the hands. And the SAS operators came in and was like, hey, you're the medic. Can you please uh dispose of these respectfully, their body parts from a job where we were told to remove and and fingerprint because we didn't have time on target. And he's like, Oh, yeah, no dramas, man, I'll uh um I'll get rid of them for you. Went up to the burn pit, put all the hands down, put a pallet on them, and stirred the hands around like a big old soup kitchen in the fire, so that local Afghanis didn't come over and start stealing people's hands, because that's what they do. Like you'll throw a batteries in the aggregate, yeah. Yeah, they'll run straight over. Yeah, so um old mate stirring the hands, and then like a few months uh uh like recently after that, like he got dragged in, like, you committed war crimes, you just got rid of body parts and you're you're in the shit. Advis came over, he's getting grilled. And he he was just like genuinely trying to do a respectful like thing, like like he it was, he just thought it was medical waste. And um, I was like, Okay, well, we're in, I might not ever go outside the wire because of this incident.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:51

But uh you're in country. In country, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the first time I've ever seen a bushmaster is in Afghanistan when they're like picked us up from the flight line. Like, if you think about my career, the only time I ever went field before like selection is like Kapuka. And then AIT, like I like I was in an office for two and a half years in Canberra, like learning how to be a pogue, like sitting behind a desk writing a keyboard. Now I'm in Afghanistan. I'm like, oh, this is a this is a bushmaster. Like, oh sick. So saying all that, what what I haven't really people might not have connected the dots here. I've never brought this up yet, because it, you know, it was a little bit embarrassing for me, but I've never done I've never done the training to be a tactical bear. I've gone straight from an office block to selection, and now my sole function in the platoon, the reason why I'm in Afghanistan as a special forces bear is because I'm the best bear that there is. I don't know how to use the equipment. I'm not qualified. Yeah. I never went to seven sig. So after you are at ASD in Canberra, you go to seven sig. Gotcha. And you learn how to be a bear, you learn the equipment. I don't know the equipment. I got a soldier's five in country, which is fine. Like in World War I, World War II, there was a there's no Pam Keys qualification, but these days you have to, you know, you're using a bit of equipment to kill someone, you probably need a Pam Keys quall out of it. And I didn't. So my boss gave me a soldiers five. Like my corporal was like, all right, come over here, we'll fucking go turn it on. We'll make sure you're all over it because you're going out tomorrow. And then the the CSOPs finished. Um, and we went out on a little cheeky uh KLE to I think it was Firebase, Firebase Cobra, but I think now they call it um FOB Tinsley, just at the southern end of Shahidia Sass. So we went out, that was the first like nursery patrol thing we did. We just went out there low speed, landed inside a fob, had a meeting, and left. Two or three days later, we went back and we actually were gonna fight the Taliban in the valley.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:57

So this is the first time experiencing hostile intent.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:01

First time outside the wire. I'm the lead helicopter in Afghanistan. What company is this? Uh Charlie. Charlie Up. Yeah, yeah. Shout out to the Wolfpack. And um, so rotation 20. It's it's called like the people refer to it as the pack up trip because they've done bulk trips and it was a trip where like Afghanistan's winding down. So there's no more schools being built, no more mosques being built. It's just we're packing up the base, and Charlie Company, your platoon is to go out there and kill these cunts because they're coming into Tarant and trying to bomb us on the way out. They're trying to shoot down the planes on the way out, knowing we're leaving, right? So um retrograding the base, but we still had a job to do, and I think that it make it makes my uh my reason for serving in that conflict a lot easier to justify, maybe, than some others whose job was to build a school or a school for Afghan women or a mosque where if the woman went to the school, they're gonna get their head cut off. We we weren't doing any of that, bro. We were just out there fucking smashing cunts, disruption operations. Um, you know, and so we went up to Shahidi Sass to disrupt the Taliban so that they couldn't get their shit together and come and attack the base as we're leaving, um, which is all the indications that's what they wanted to do. So I'm the lead helo flying with the sniper team because I'm best employed um as an electronic warfare operator up in the high ground with the snipers. So the idea behind that is you've got an uh antenna, the one that looks like a landmine that I'm doing a shoey out of on the socials. And uh that's the antenna head. And the way that I'll nerd out for a bit, the way that when someone transmits off a radio, the signal will flood across that antenna head, and and the microseconds between each antenna, to say there's four or five hundred mini antennas inside that land mine looking thing, and the way that the signal sweeps across it, it can tell the way that the signal came from. Yeah. So you don't necessarily need an EW operator out on the job because an interpreter walking around with one of the shooters can listen to that and tell the the person next to them, oh, they're the the Taliban are about to shoot us. The Taliban are saying they're putting the watermelons in the road, they're putting the IEDs in the road, they're they're they're bringing the big thing around. So can you bring the melons for the big thing? It's like, okay, they're they're they're they're gonna kill us, right? Um, whereas the advantage that we gave the shooters, especially the snipers, was we can tell them the direction that came from.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:28

And if you've got two bears on either side of the valley, so let's picture uh an Afghan valley, and I'm on the southern side on a on a on a large feature, and another bear's on the northern side, and the Taliban are down the green belt left to right in front of us, east to west. And when they transmit, I get a line that points directly to where they transmitted from.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:47

Yeah, gotcha. So it crosses.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:48

It crosses, and the other bears crosses, and if you had three bears, you'd get a triangle of error. Yeah. And and rather than a sniper, like the boys are sitting there with a scope and they're looking up and down the valley, left and right, getting fucking.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:00

You can give them position. I can be like just like a rough triangle.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:02

Yeah. Oh, I can go look along this bearing. Hey, get your compass out. 3194 mils mag. And they pull it out and they go, yeah, what do you got? And I go, This dude laying IEDs. And it's coming in pretty clear. So I reckon he's probably within one, one and a half, two Ks. And they look and they go, Scojo, I can see a dude digging. And I go, just wait, wait. And then he he'll start talking. And they go, I'm almost I'm almost finished digging, but like we're gonna kill these guns. And I go, hey, John O, did you just see him talking on his radio? He goes, Yep. And he just stopped talking now. And I go, yep. His name is X. His Taliban, he's implementing an IED. Smack, and they shoot him in the back of the head. So that is a tactical advantage that in general a EW operator brings to the to the party. So we take the only thing that the Taliban had on us is um the ability to surprise us. And I, with my capability, could take that away from them. And that I think was pretty fucking cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:05

When was that introduced, that type of warfare? The electric electronic warfare.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:10

Well, back in the day, mate, like fucking, you know, look at like World War II dockers, and there's um, you know, um, listening to the enemy, listening to radio transmissions, Vietnam, that's why Seven Signals there. Yeah. Um, but Timor, it was very active, and it depends like on the on the enemy. So the enemy might be using mobile phones, they might be using radios, VHF, UHF, HF, SATCOM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. It depends on the target, the enemy, what they're using, as to what we are then employed to target. So it's like a golf bag solution. Um, if the Taliban are using unencrypted VHF communications, which they were, I'm gonna take this antenna. If they're using UHF, I'll use this antenna. And yeah, you just got to be all over the whole spectrum so that essentially you can kill cunts. So for the conventional army, it's all the throwaway line for a bear is we do situational awareness and threat assessments and force protection. So they tell the boss, like, hey, the the Taliban are about to shoot at us and and and and the boys will go to ground. Like the MTF might go to ground and like halt, patrol, halt, they're gonna kill us. Whereas when I would tell the boys, hey, they're about to assault, they're like, oh good, which way? Like, and literally they would change their patrol bearing to what I gave them. I'm like, yeah, all right, slight, slight left, like uh two our two o'clock, reference our access, two o'clock. They're talking about hitting us, and the TL's like, yeah, good. All right, which way? All right, oh Johnny, you take point, we're gonna head that way now, change direction. They want to get into a fight, and so there wasn't a time that I can remember that I wasn't on a job or a bear was not on a job for that reason. Um, and also just to you know, obviously make up intelligence, yeah. Yeah, according to Nick McKenzie. Yeah, I carried all the throwdowns, mate.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:56

That's what everyone says, literally. So that obviously that's the sole purpose of what you were doing in Afghanistan was basically becoming an early warning for the the shoot shooters on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:08

Exactly. And um, and then when it was a flat terrain, then I'd go out with the the boys on the ground. Like, so some jobs like we'd go out to Durarwood and it's flat. So I just patrol with the boys and I have the kit on my bag and and it is fucking heavy, like you know, 20, 25 kilos just for the kit. So most dudes are 25 kilos with their chest rig smack. Yeah, this is just the backpack, so it's hard to keep up, like honestly, it fucking hurts. And um, and it takes a certain dude to do it. Like, yeah, there's a lot of bears in the army that are extremely technically savvy that could never be a special operations bear because of the speed and movement you had to conduct, the ability to shoot, the ability to move, communicate, carry that weight on patrol, not sitting in a connex at a fob with an antenna listening to it. So that first job was the first time I ever got shot at. Like I heard that I know I'm the first helo coming into land on a sniper OP, and I just hear like, you know, when you're you can just hear in the distance it singing, like, do do do do do do do. I was like, that fucking sounds like what is that? Is that gunfire? Is that another helo shooting? And I stick my head down, like we got the door open in a black hawk, full Hollywood style, mullets flapping in the breeze, M frames on, sleeves rolled up. And I look down and there's literally a dude with a PKM blasting me. And I'm looking in his eyes. It's it's probably less than a hundred meters because we were about to land, and he and we're going slow, and I can just see the the circle of dust around him from the percussion of his machine gun, and he's just pointing that thing from the hip, just fucking unloading a belt at us in the helo. And I looked down, like, what the fuck? And I punched the door gunner in the leg. I'm like, fucking kill him. What are you doing? Like, that's when the ball dropped, like, oh, I'm in Afghanistan. This isn't a range practice. And I didn't hear or feel any bullets hit the helo, but I imagine they they fucking did. Um, because I could see it. Yeah, yeah. I was looking in his eyes as he's looking in my eyes, and then we landed, and this one of the snipers goes, Well, why didn't you fucking shoot him then? I'm like, Oh, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like I was like, honestly, I was like, Oh fuck. You could have, yeah. I was just cucking in the fucking the black hawk, you know? And I and I was like, fuck, from that moment onwards, no one ever said that to me again. Quite the opposite.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:30

Scojo stop shooting, like, calm down.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:33

Did the uh door gunner rib?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:36

No, no, no, no, no, no. By the time, by the time like the door gunner looked down, like you're in a blackhawk, you're gone past him. And then so we spent the rest of that day trying to kill the cunt, but um, it was hot and you know, um that for it didn't it didn't work out. I had to wait um until I saw Adam Smith blast that cunt in his podcast that he talks about, Smitty. Um, for the first time I ever saw someone get fucking schwacked, got slimed on the side of a hill. So I'm up on a sniper feature a couple of jobs later, uh, a place called Patan. And um the boys are clearing and they're clearing all it's almost like if you can picture a sombrero, I'm on this feature in the middle of everything. So 360 degrees around me, the boys are just causing chaos, and I'm just looking down all around me, like, oh my god, is this really happening? Like, I had a front row seat to the best show you could ever watch, you know? And um, I'm looking this way, I see like the boys blasting some kind on a motorbike. I look that way, there's another gunfight taking off over there, and I'm in the middle with the snipers, in the middle of like the snipers pointing their barrels in all different directions, just like having a ball. Just like, how did I end up here? Like, I'm a criminal from Campbelltown, you know, like what's going on? And um, yeah, like it was the first time I think I got to use my technical equipment and and and change the fate of the battle. And um, I remember like the the boys have been engaging people, but then there was these two these two dudes like on the radio saying, like, we're fucking we're gonna kill these cunts with these fucking infidels when they come over this creek line. I'm gonna fucking kill them. And you and you can tell an important part of that IET course that I do is like the tone of of the voice, right? If someone's like, Yeah, we're gonna kill these cunts, I guess, you know, like it's just that yeah, you know, but when you've got an interpreter with you, yeah, interpreter, yeah. So he's listening, and then I'm using the kit to point where you can understand that. You can understand, yeah, yeah, in any voice. You know, you can hear a dude in Fairfield fucking blowing up at someone in a cab. You know he's angry. I can't speak Arabic, but so I'm getting these indications that probably like 200 meters in front of where the like, so it's important to know where the teams are moving. So you've got a battle track and you've got to be like, okay, well, team three is walking in that direction, and about 200 meters in front of them, through my like my judgments um and what I'm plotting on my map where this shit's coming from, there's two dudes in a creek line. And then I pass that on, like break, break, break, you know, um uh three, one, you've got dudes to your front. Um, they're looking to engage you. And I don't do that, I don't jump on the radio, I don't transmit much. So when I jump on the radio and they hear like Scojo's fucking popped up, they know it's serious. Um most of the time. But then um I passed it, the boys, and then the two lead scouts for that team were on my Rio, right? Like these are all boys that I went through Rio with, and um I was concerned, like it was the first time I'm like, oh fuck, like they're gonna kill my mates, you know? And I I could I I pass it as if like you're you're about to be engaged. I I I feel it. And then and then like when it for the next five minutes, there's no engagement, and that's because the boys have changed their field craft, they've changed the way that they're posturing from like patrolling at the hip to like the boys, yeah. The boys would be on instant, weapon in the shoulder in that hunting stance as they're clearing. And later on, I saw the helmet cam footage of this, and that's how I know, like, wow, my you know, I gave them potentially that split second to react. Advantage, yeah. Yeah, that advantage. So nothing happened for like five minutes, and I was like, oh fuck, they're gonna, we're gonna get back to base and they go, Oh, Scojo's on the radio, fucking, oh, the television gonna shoot us, you fucking big faggot. And I was like, oh fuck, here we go. And the snipers again are looking at me like, oh, hope you got it right, mate. You you're gonna back yourself. And all of a sudden, you just hear this huge burst of gunfire, and then uh Scojo, this is 3-1, two dead enemy, stand by. And I was just like, and then, but um, nah, it was like two armed dudes that and the and the boys got the drop on them. Two dudes with AKs in a creek line that were waiting, and it's their home ground, their home court. You know, they've got the advantage, they knew where to lay, where we were gonna come from. But the boys through through their Rio, their selection, their infantry training, they were both grunts, they got the drop on these cunts, and it was because I gave them that little that little chance. On top, like, hey, hey, get ready. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. And um then they came over the radio and they're like, hey, um, and by the way, the icon frequency that they were operating on is uh 161 decimal one one. And I got a tattoo of that on my arm. And a journalist had a sook about and said, Oh, this is about war crimes. Like, nah, this is pretty meaningful, bro. 161 Decimal 11 is the first frequency of the two Taliban that I aided and assisted in in that kill. And the boys came back home alive.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:33

And and journalists ripping me years later saying, this tattoo is like, no, like it's my job to find the dude with a radio so the boys can kill him. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:43

Just on that, we with those, you know, these dead bodies eventually. Do you have to do any like site exploitation on on those? On the obviously the technology that they had, you know, the radios, like you said, with the frequencies, or did you ever find anything else, like mobile phones or seas all that stuff?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:58

Yeah, absolutely. Um, that's part of our job, like between us and the engineers. So SOA, the boys that you've had on this potty, like um Hemo and so um absolute sit cunts, they have the remit to do a lot of that in that operation. Exploitation is their bag, but if the SOA dudes are on the other side of the valley, it obviously comes down to me. So um of the stuff that I found on their phones, the Taliban phones, made me very happy that that those cunts will never breathe another breath of air.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:28

And what do you mean? So what what were you finding on these phones?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:31

I think if you Google the term bachabazi in Afghanistan, it's a very common practice to rape little boys. Yep. So, you know, you've had dudes on this podcast, child exploitation teams, you know, like these in their messages, like text messages as well. Videos. Videos, videos, you know, like the old fucking just after like 3210s and stuff, we had Nokia like the first. You know the first yeah, granny videos and shit. And I'm just going through it, and it's mostly just shit music, like Taliban music, Google Taliban music. It's terrible. It's the worst fucking. But like the videos that I was seeing was like literally this dude that I'm looking at with missing half his head, his phone has a video of him and his mates doing unspeakable acts to like an innocent person, minor. And I fucking, yeah, I won't sorry, to my lawyer legal team. I won't, I won't talk about that anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:26

Because I didn't take it too well. But um, yeah, we had to exploit them, get their fingerprints and stuff like that. But then literally just like an hour after that incident, I'm still just eating Mars bars up on the hill, man. Like I'm fucking, I'm I'm about three Mars bars deep by this point. The boys are doing all the work, and uh, I'm just sitting in the one spot on a poof mat, fucking, you know, whipping my turp with my antenna and make it so he doesn't fall asleep. And then I know there's one dude left. I've I've spoken about this before. Like, there's one more dude out there. There's a dude on the radio going, I'm still here. Like, brother, did you go? I heard the gun by brother. What's going on, brother? And I'm like, uh, well, uh, there's one dude still towards the end of the valley where the boys are still going down to. And he kept talking. And eventually, like, I pass it over to the radio because they're like, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna bed down for the night. Like Adam Smitty's team, and the partner force are all here. We're looking for a place to crash out for the night. And uh, we'll reassess this in the morning. I'm like, yep, fine update for me. Like, there is one dude still out there, and he's um the direction it's coming from is down your way. And he, the team leader's like, okay, sweet, we'll keep an eye out. Um, we've got dudes like looking that way anyway. Cheers, mate. Then one dude walks, one of the partner force goes to walk for a piss and just gets absolutely obliterated by gunfire down in this dry creek bed next to where the all the boys were setting up to sleep. And through the dust, like his finger just pointed up to the hill, like, there's a Taliban there, and across the creek bed, like I'm guessing like 45 degree angle. Um, the roving firing squad of Charlie Company just absolutely obliterated this cunt with an AK just standing in a blue man dress up on this cliff. He had nowhere to go. He thought he had the drop on this one dude, missed him somehow, and then he just he just met two commando. He just met a few teams worth of shooters with minimum. Everyone just let go. Mate, yeah. The biggest rate of fire I've ever heard in my life to this day for one dude, man. Everyone had to go. And Adam Adam went up there and Adam was so I'm watching it. Like I'm I'm on the next hill, like watching, like, oh, that's where he was, and that's where my intelligence was pointing, but I couldn't see him. Um, and then he was hiding behind a rock. And when Smitty went up there, like his nose is on one rock, his ears on the other rock, like he was just swish cheese. And um later that day we flew out. We we went down to that location and we flew out over it. And when we did, like it was just him, his blue mandress fluttering in the breeze with just blood and guts everywhere, and everyone got a run on the board that day. Like, you know, those footy games where everyone gets a try. Yeah, bruh.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:11

It was good to see. Yeah, right. Like, this is like your first couple of weeks in Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:18

That was patana. And then we went back to the exact same village a couple of days later for whatever reason, and we rocked up exact same place, probably poor field craft, like same OP and everything. And when we got there, it was just their whole village burying their mates. Yeah, it was a funeral. We rocked up to the funeral. Imagine the disrespect. The dudes that killed you rock up to your funeral while your family are bothering like burying you, and just sit on a hill and eat Mars bars and just stare at you. You can see why they didn't like us. You can see why now they're accepting all this money to talk shit about us. Because I I understand that's that's the height of disrespect. And I loved it. Fuck them. I loved it personally. Absolutely fuck them. Um, yeah, then we went out, uh, but um, then we went out to Langar and I got to sort of layer some more effects out there. So we did like a five-day job, and on day four, I've posted the helmet cam footage where like I um obliterated a dude with a with an Apache, and that's because like everyone had given up on like for the day. We're getting extracted, we're going home, we're just trying to go home to make the mess timings, hit the gym. You know, boys have got other priorities, the footies on. So no one had shot anyone on that day, and then old mate just hops up on the radio and is like, well, when this heal they come back every day, they they do this every day, and at four o'clock they go and fucking the the Chinooks come in and pick them up and they go home. So when the Chinook comes, I'm gonna get my RPG and blow them out of the sky. And whether or not he was talking shit or not, I took offense to that. I took offense to that, and uh, you know, um no one else cared about it. And I was like, boys, like you said this. I know they don't, I know they talk a bit of shit, but he seems pretty serious. And the boys laid down, we could see the dude. I'm like, it's that dude. There's only one dude out in the desert laying against sitting against that wall. And um, the boys wanted to shoot him with uh like the 41416. Yeah, but the and one of my Rios, he's he's laying in that video, he's laying prone, he's like, Oh, I could maybe get him, but if I miss, he'll go behind the wall. We won't we won't see him again. And the JTEC's like, you know, I may be of some assistance. You know, he gets two Apaches in and and and absolutely obliterated. And before they kill him, they're like, Um, so what are we looking for on this dude? And on the video, the the Apache air crews, like the footage and audio says, like, yeah, I can see the device, I can see the icon, I can see everything, and he's there waiting for you. And he's he's exactly where the helo's gonna take off and fly belly over him. My whole platoon would be fucking dead at another extortion 17 situation. Yeah, Scojo wouldn't have an Instagram, the OSI would be much happier, but um, yeah, uh the Apache just blew him into the wall, turned him into what looked like dog food when we flew over him. Like it looked like someone got a few cans of dog food and threw it against the wall. Yeah, that's a 30 millimeter cannon, isn't it? Yep. And I said, um, and then as as it as it was done, one of the partner force snipers standing next to me, he's talking to my interpreter, and he's like, Yeah, well, it's good you got rid of Derwesh. And I was like, What? What's his name? Derwesh. He goes, That's my cousin. And I'm like, Bullshit. And I go, like, I'm like coming off safe, you know. Like, I thought he was about to, you just killed my cousin. He's like, Yeah, here's the reason I can't come back to Langar anymore. This is my valley. This is why, this is why we live on base now. Because if I come back here, he'll cut my head off. Here's Taliban, thank you. And I was just like, Oh my god, you're welcome, yeah. Awkward. Um, yeah, man. And then so these are the type of jobs that we're doing, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:51

Standard rooms, everyone's talking about Afghan. You're obviously getting used to the technology and the platforms that you're using.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:56

Well, this is where it gets interesting because uh I'm there with two squadron, my SAS uh two squadron there, e-troop, the boys, and um they for the last month of the deployment, they leave. They're out, right? And their their primary role is different to ours. Ours at two commando is more uh vague. We can just say, we're going out to that Langar to do a disruption operation. We're gonna disrupt the enemy. You know, task verbs if you're in the military and you're listening. Um, whereas the SAS task verbs are like neutralize, kill, um, assassinate, like more direct targeting high-end individuals. So the SAS Lee for the last month, so the only people SF dudes in two commando. It's two commando. Welcome to tier one boys, welcome to A-grade. So uh we got the for the last month, we got the remint where we could target. We had all their assets, we had all their ability to target and do the kill capture missions that you know is is obviously a hot topic in the media right now. So the difference between that, we're not going after icon radios anymore, we're going after commanders, right? So, this is how I'll explain it is that Maddie, yourself, um, all the grunts that have served are over in Afghanistan, and you may be, in general, doing a cordon for the engineers building a school, right? For for women or a mosque. The grunts are there doing um patrols and cordons around that area so that they don't get shot at while they're building a school.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:31

Yeah? Yep. And then two commando is one valley over going to kill the low-level fighters that are going to come in and start shooting at you in your cordon and planning IEDs. Then the SAS are the next valley over killing the commander who's giving them the weapon parts, who's giving them the ammunition and funding to go and conduct these activities. So that's in general how I feel that the special role of the special forces is purely to support the infantry operation.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:01

Yeah, of course it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:02

It is, yeah. So we're going out now and we know the commander's pulling, we're about to leave Afghanistan, but we know the commander's pulling the strings on the suicide attacks that are happening at the TK roundabout while while we're there, right? So we've got to go out and whack those cunts that the SAS were trying to kill, but they've just they've bugged out for the last month in country and given us an opportunity. So I am the lead. Uh, given that these are signals intelligence targeting roles, I became the lead for these jobs. So one of the first jobs at night, okay, they basically say you've got a four-hour window now where during this time with a certain asset on station, if this individual flags up, we're gonna go out and kill him. And what's important to note is the role of the infantry is to seek out and close with the enemy, to kill and capture him. And there's a reason why they put the word kill before capture, and that's why I have it tattooed on my arm because in my first orders, I wrote kill capture, and then I crossed out capture, because it's easier to kill. The reason why it's written that way, I feel, in my own opinion, is because it's easier to kill someone than capture them if they are the bad dude. Go and go and catch a suicide bomber. Go and catch a rabid dog. It's easier and safer for everyone in your team and everyone around you to kill that individual. So that is why in orders, the first slide of orders, it says kill, kill, capture. So ROE 429 Alpha gave you the ability to kill people that were on the JPEL. So if the individual that we're going to kill, the dude that we're targeting during this mission window, the objective, it is written in law in ROE, ISAF ROE 429, any person placed on the JPEL is deemed to be taking a direct part in hostilities at all times. This came out in the Burrodan report. And I had to read this like countless times at night when everyone else is asleep. I gotta I want to make sure of this because the way I read it is if I see the dude, I'm required to kill him on site because at all times he's taking a direct part in hostilities. At all times. When he's asleep, when he's in the shower, while he's taking a shit while he's working. He's already participating. Yeah, he's he's involved.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:24

It's basically it's that's in the ISFR.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:26

Yeah, it is. It's an offensive ROE that the regular army never heard of because they didn't do this. They had to wait to be shot at reactive ROEs, 421, 422. 429 Alpha says just shoot that gun in the head. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's safer for everyone. That's why we're going out there. Which the UK and the US were operating under. Correct. All coalition. Yeah. So essentially, if everything goes to plan for mission success to happen on this job, we need to commit premeditated murder. That is a fucking wild statement. Yeah. But say it's not true, right? So I go out there and the first job was at night, and um, the team leader's at the front, and there's just a team of us, right? And we're it's at night, and the target is being tracked by uh an overhead asset, and they're telling us, like, okay, he's 200 meters in front of you, and we're we're advancing, and we're in a creek. It's like ankle deep water on the outskirts of the TK bowl, ankle deep water, not a cloud in the sky, no wind. Just the most SF shit I've ever seen in my life. You know, like Zero Dark 30 when the boys are creeping in the compound and the lasers are going across the windows and everything. Imagine that, but in a creek bed, and we're walking so slowly through the through the water that he's not gonna hear us. But then he hears something, maybe something spooked him, and he starts running. And we start moving quicker. So we're all listening to the comms, and the JTEX like, he's moving, boys. We need to, we need to speed up. Everyone starts speeding up, and then the team leader who I'm next to is like, well, Scojo, are you listening to the comms? I'm like, Yeah, and he's like, Well, then get to the front. This is your target. And I move to the front, like the bear. I just move to the front, like the pointy end of the spear, like the formation going through the creek, and I just start charging. And then the the dudes around me, everyone, everyone's amped up. Like everyone's like, yeah, let's fucking go. And either side of me is a dude from my Rio. And we talked about it later, like three dudes on the rear, and we were just charging, like sprinting, 3.2 kilometer pace. That's why it's the entry mark for the S Fit. We're just charging through this creek and we're getting constant updates. All right, he's moving, he's moving, he's moving left. He's staying on the creek, he's on the right-hand riverbank. And I know in my head, the first person that sees us out of us three gets to kill him. And it's the first time I'm like, no, he's fucking mine. This kind of because I know what he said, I know why he's on the JPL, I know what he did. He was an ID facilitator and he can he killed a whole bunch of innocent people in town. But the more we ran for hundreds and hundreds of meters, the further he got away. It's his home track. And he ended up and he got over a feature, he got away. So then, a few days later, different mission window. It's the daytime. Same cun's popped up again. He's he's not far from where he was last time.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:07

Boys, go kill him. Just quickly, how are they popping up? Like, where does this intelligence come in? Like, just just broad. Broadly. Are they being watched or are they?

SPEAKER_01 1:45:16

Signals intelligence is the broader term for it. Um, you know, you can use your own imagination. Why would why would you be able to find someone in a sea of Afghan people farming? You know, there's technology at play. And we get told he's standing in the middle of a fucking cornfield. This dude that's been trying to kill us. So over-air asset will eventually get eyes on them. Yeah, yeah, and confirm. And he's like, okay, yeah, yeah, we've got him. Go, boys, go. You've only got another two hours left of this uh asset on station, depending on its fuel, you know, capacity and where it flew from. So we're in like three or four bushmasters. We get out there and they're like, Yeah, he hasn't moved, he's still there. And we're pulling up, we're pulling up, man. I'm pulling up at the field. I am flicking on one time zoom, red dot on. I'm like, oh, here we go. And I am the last, uh, the first dude out of the last vehicle in a formation. So say you're going along a road, four bushmasters, I'm the last one. And then the the vehicles stop, like the first vehicle stops next to this dude in the field, which means the fourth bushmaster, I'm about 50, 75 meters back, right? I pop the door as quick as I can. And then I hear over the radio, he's in the middle of the field talking to his mate. He's with there's two fighting age males in the middle of the field. One of them is the objective. I pop out the back of the bushy as quick as I could, and I'm fucking quick, and I start running. But everyone in the bushmasters in front of me starts doing the exact same, and they're coming from the back door in like a 45-degree angle to the dude. Because I'm the last vehicle, because of my arcs of fire, I can't engage through the back of someone's head. I would if there was a tiny gap, and I'm confident, but we don't do that, so I start beeling 90 degrees out from the door, like walking, pivoting at the hips and just walking straight out into the field so that I could get the first shot off. By the every time I went to pull, like my fingers on the every time I went to to pull on this dude, another fucking commando pops out in front of me from his bushmaster. I'm like, no, get the fuck out. That's why I understand when I saw that bunker footage of the S like, get the fuck out of the way, cunt! Fuck off, cunt! Like, you that's what it's like, you know, the um the desire to to kill these cunts because we know what they're up to. But then also in the back of my mind, there's two dudes. So I've just talked about at all times you're taking a direct part in hostility. Who's taking a direct part in hostility? Which one? We don't have a photo of him. So I either kill them both, or 50-50, I get it right. I either get the objective killed and wiped off the battle space, or I go down for a murder of an innocent person. They're both civilians, yeah. So this is what happened. So I hesitated and I fucking I applied safe, I couldn't get the shot off, and I couldn't tell which one am I gonna L prez these two cunts, or am I gonna what what are we gonna do? And one of the boys just grabs him and grabs both of them and threw them on the ground, captured, and we took them back to base. And I was I I I think about it often, but my lawyer my legal team was said in in hindsight, it probably saved you a few pages in your in your war crime allegations. So you know, it's like think about that. So I'm trying to why why tell that story? I'm trying to put people now, think about what you've heard in the media about other people's infamous cases. Like compare that to them, you know? It's it's it's a split second, it's a split second, and you you don't know which one the bad dude is. They didn't give you a photo. Well, they're exactly right. You know, without being racist, they all look the same. All the just target descriptions are the same. Man-aged 20 to 35 fist-length beard with a turban. Yeah. Okay. And then the ones on the JPL. And they're telling you go commit premeditated murder against this individual. I know, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:17

You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's it's it's it's not like a targeting package that no uh the cops get no thing. No, it's not at all. Yeah, not fucking social security number or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:28

But we're told to kill them.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:29

And in our country, you're not allowed to execute, we don't have the death penalty. But you're telling me to do that. So I assume that when it goes right or wrong, you're gonna back me. And obviously they're not now. And we're seeing that play out in the media. So I think that's important to know. And and I can only give my perspective because I've experienced that situation where I was in a split second decision. Do I kill? Do I not kill? Didn't kill, regretted it for years, was fucking dirty. Uh the dude that captured him, like, you fucking dickhead, you know you could have shot him. And he's like, but shot which one? They're not both on the JPL, only one of them is. I'm like, ah, for fuck's sake.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:06

And I'm sure there's scenarios out there where an operator or an infantry guy or whoever, yeah, should have taken the shot, they didn't, and it's ended up to be an IED. They've facilitated. I'm sure you've got stories about something like that. But we captured him.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:18

Yeah. So we took him back to base. The partner force take control. And uh, I don't remember ever seeing a jail cell in Tarrancout. So a couple of days later, I went down there. I went down to the partner force compound because I had to get a whole bunch of phones off dead cunts from the job that we'd just done. And I'm talking to the boot dudes, and I go, hey, whatever happened to uh that that fella the other day, Objective Australian Idol was his name. And I go, whatever happened to Objective Australian Idol? And they go, Oh, he's just over there in the cupboard. And I go, What? I thought he where's the jail cell? He's like, Oh, that's it there. And and the partner force compound is the old um fire station on TK, and they're all pointing at the fire hose real cupboard. You know, when you're halfway down a hallway in a Government building. Yeah, the red fire fucking with the red reel. And they go, go have a look. I'm like, well, I'm better. See what this is all about. Walking down the hallway and they're watching me. They're like giggling and stuff, drinking, trying, smoking. I crack the door open. There's a dude on the floor. Fucked up. Fucked up. He I can see the look in his eyes. He's been having a bad time. And we know what they do to people over there. He was alive. He didn't look like he wanted to be. And I just slowly shut the door and walked off. I was like, well, I think it's better that we kill these people. And then uh I walked off. And then I think that very night they let him go. He went back into TK. Reporting came through. Just before we're about to leave the country, boys, targeting window. We're going after Objective Australian Idol again because they let him out. Because we can't give them signals intelligence. We can't give the Afghan people, the Afghan partner force, top secret signals intelligence as to why we're out there trying to kill him. We can't give it to him. It's top secret. So they're the Afghan's like, well, we gotta let him go. You won't give us anything. And we're like, no, no, you gotta keep him in jail. He's he's a bad cunt. They're like, well, what for? What for? He's telling us he's not. We beat him up and he said he's not. He went back out. And we're that night going out to target him again. Because he jumped on his communications and said, Ha, they let me go, the fuckwits. Have you still got those IEDs? Let's go kill these cunts. And then that was it. That's the end of the rotation. We go home. Like he's still out there. He's still out there, mate. He's probably a boss in because he's he's served time in the extreme prison. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:46

Shit. Yeah, right. Anyway. Uh how long was that whole deployment, that first deployment? Six months. Every deployment I ever did was six months. Six months, and majority of it was just flying, fly out. Yeah. FIFO type work.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:59

Yeah, Hollywood style. Fucking not going out there, fucking patrol, long-range patrols. Like we did a couple of vehicle jobs and we did a couple like of like 20k infills, like big, big one, big ones. And like on one of them, my TL, we we went, we like went halfway in the Afghan um green ranges, and we were all sitting in the tray of the car because they're like, there's IEDs all through this road. The TL sat in the front seat and was like, Well, if we hit an IED, I'll die, but you guys would just get blown out the back. And we drove for 10Ks on this dusty road through Taliban held territory to save ourselves walking 20K, so we only had to walk 10k. And I was just thinking the whole time, like, you're literally like it's probably the first time I was just like waiting to die, you know, like I was like, you you know the feeling like oh I'm trying not to think about it, yeah. I'm trying to focus on my job, but like every bump, you you're like cringe, you know, and you know you're gonna get like bucked off a horse, like it blows up the front of the car, and everyone inside dies, and you just get flung off. And that we've seen that happen to countless dudes, and I was just like, oh god. I know, yeah. My soccer career, I need my legs, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:07

And this is inside of Bushy.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:09

No, this is inside a is it like a soft skin, you know, the um green Ford Rangers, the Afghan army. Yeah, they're oh, was it? Oh yeah, we just hijacked one for the job to save the infill because we're commandos, we're precious. We need a, you know, can't be walking 20 Ks. Just do 10. We go naughty. How many so how many jobs do you reckon you did on that? And I think we did almost 50 and we killed 28 insurgents in six months. So that is nothing compared to the earlier rotation. Of course, yeah. Like RS and Hamish and the boys in T Zak killed 100 dudes in one day, in a few hours. We killed 28. I saw 28 bodies in that time.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:47

Yeah, yeah. Terrorist. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Bad dudes civilians.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:52

Yeah, well they are. Technically, that's what maybe we were the terrorists according to the media, but um yeah, yeah, it was it was fucking eye-opening, it was sick, and we thought we would probably never deploy again. That's it, war's over. Um, anyone that did selection after me has not experienced combat, and I think that's a that's a fact, I would say. I could be wrong. Some cats like I got into a stash in fucking Africa last week. Maybe you did, but I don't know. As far as I know, to that extent, definitely, yeah, definitely to that extent. Yeah, and because I was on the last job where we got into a tick, I I said this point and uh it pissed off a lot of the boys. But on the extraction of one of the last jobs, uh, we're getting lit up by a bolt action. Um, and I was engaging like the cave where I thought he was shooting from, like I put up a whole like 30 rounds into that cave, and um uh it was Drake shooting, like you know, a known firing position where we were being engaged from before. And I I was shooting at um this cave and I put like 30 rounds in there, and I assume that I killed 30 people because I fired 30 rounds, but more than likely I missed every single one. But I like to hope that that happens. And someone said, Well, when we left Afghan, you were the last one to shoot, so you're the last person to ever band tick and fire around in Afghanistan. The poor little Sig. But isn't he just a cat V Sig?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:13

Yeah, bruh. Yeah, yeah, right. So uh from there, obviously, you get back to Australia. That's your first deployment down the sleeve. Um, how did you go? Like just getting back into again. I I've spoken about this on many other podcasts, get back into the swing of things, back in Sydney, back at Koji Bay or Northees and straight back into it, just um ramping it.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:35

Uh my missus at the time was uh saying to me, You're not sleeping much, hey, like you're kind of wired, you're up all night, fucking you don't sleep much, eh? Since you got back. And I was like, uh, yeah, I don't know why. Like, I don't think I have any issues or whatever. But then we worked out like a couple weeks later when she saw me at the dinner table smashing a zinger box. She's like, Cunt, are you drinking a Mountain Dew at 10 o'clock at night? I'm like, Yeah, what's the big deal? She's like, It's an energy drink. Look, it says energizer on it's got caffeine. I go, No, it doesn't, it's a mountain dew. She's like, Cunt, what do you no? Look, it's got caffeine. I was like, oh fuck. I was drinking Mountain Dew and staying awake all night because I didn't realize it was an energy drink. And um, yeah, lucky she uh sorted me out. So thought I had PTSD. Turns out I was just drinking too much Mountain Dew. Happens to the best of us. So play on. Play on, ref. Um, cut cut out the mountain dew, you know, no mountain dews after midday, and we're we're sweet. PTSD doesn't get you, boys. So if you're having some issues uh sleeping at night, don't go killing yourself. Just just cut down on the mountain dew, brother. The white monies, cut them down. We didn't have white monsters back down back then. Yeah, no, rip it. Um, but yeah, so 2014, we get put into like AFO, which is our like green roll work up, like back to that amphib kind of jungle training and shit like that. And um I did a bit of that and I I deployed on like a low signature task because the SAS can't our SAS counterparts over in the West tried to do a job in a certain location on another part of the world, and they got carjacked. And obviously, we were like fucking dumb cunts, you know, you should have sent us, blah, blah. And they're like, okay, well, the next one we'll send you. Scojo, you're the TL, off you go. I was like, oh fuck. Talk myself into this one. So we get over there, did the job, and um, yep, got shot at, got got engaged, and um the two individuals I was there with, like one one had done Afghan time and had like a combat badge, and the other one didn't. And um, this is the first time probably saying this publicly, but we all laugh about it. Got back to base, did not report it. Did not report that we Australian soldiers got into a contact in a low signature grey roll deployment because we purely did not want the SAS to have the upper hand. That's the rivalry. Like, I would rather not like my mate now doesn't have a combat badge. He should get a combat badge because he was in tick. Yeah, for sure. Right? He doesn't have one because we never reported it because we didn't want the SAS to be like, well, see, they got fucking shot at. We only got carjacked. No, no, it was flawless boys. Like the the report to the boss was like, No, she's sweet, mate. Got got what you needed, got the got the information on the intelligence, and we came home. Um, and then I went uh to Brazil on the holidays. The World Cup was on, yeah. Yeah, the World Cup was on, and um, yeah, all the boys from back home, my deployment money went into a big old fucking 15 cunts, just absolutely ramping the guts out of following the soccer roos around Brazil at the World Cup in 2014 and hooly dooley. Um, and uh yeah, phenomenal, yeah, phenomenal, of course, Brazil. Oh my god, and um yeah, I'd been there before, like um just after high school. Um, uh my missus has uh Brazilian heritage. Um, and uh we went over there for a couple months, and that's when I was trying to still be a pro soccer player, and I thought, like, if I go to Brazil, I'm gonna make it, they're gonna notice me. I played every fucking day over there, but um, you know, you get paid peanuts, so eventually I had to come back and face some music and join the army. But so 2014 was sick. We were comfortable over there living in the favelas um with like her her family, and it was fucking sick. Loved every second of it, and it was with all my civilian mates like from Campbell Town. Imagine 15 Campbell Town boys cachets in Rio de Janeiro, just turning it on damage. Get back from Rio, and we go straight, like I landed, and the boss is like, You're back from leave? Okay, um, you've got to go to Papua New Guinea and do like some training, train up those fuzzy wuzzies on some amphib drills. So we did a PLF. So because I did that amphibi course with Alpha Company, we're sitting in platoon points, all the shooters, 30 shooters all around me, and the little Sig Scojo's there, and they go, Who's done the most PLFs? Because they've got to jump the OC's boat in. It's a no-foul mission, because then he's gonna pull up and meet the Papua New Guinean like ministers for defense and shit on the beach. And like, like, who's done one PLF and like half the on your amphib course? You just push one off a wharf to simulate you going into the plane to the ocean, and then they're like, Oh, who's done five? My hand's still up. Who's done more than five? My hand's still up. Who's done over ten? Hands still up. Scojo, you're you're the lead fucking jumper. No, I'm the sig. Yeah, but you know, you know, it works for them when it works, you know. Ah, classic. All right, so I I was the lead, the first dude out of the plane in in Papua New Guinea. Um, and um set up a boat on the shore, had some fun, went to Cosmo's nightclubs in PNG. Tell you what, fucking it's dark in there, and I'm talking about the lights. Ooh, doo getting on the KBs and the um the beetle nut. And we were there for a couple of days, and it was really fun, really cool, cool place. And then ISIS started cutting people's heads up. That's it, 2014. Yeah, man. At the same time, um, our sister platoon was back home. They didn't come with us, they got sent to Ukraine because MH 17 got shot down. So we're we're over there like fuck, like we we could go to Ukraine as well. And Scott Ryder was one of those fellas. He was in the other platoon, um, and he got to go, you know, and and conduct that task where you're kind of just babysitting the AFP doing their task to recover the remains of all the poor Australian um people that perished in that in that um incident. And we're in Papua New Guinea, like, fuck. But then we got told, but look, ISIS is cutting people's heads off, and we might need to some send someone over there. Fucking, I fly back to Sydney. We had about three hours to go say goodbye to our our loved ones and get on the plane to go to Iraq. Was it? Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:55

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:56

So I went, I went down to um my parents' place back home, had dinner with them, and they just could tell by the like I'm like, hey, we need to have dinner right now. And they're like, you just got back. I'm like, yeah. And they're like, uh, you're going again, aren't you? Like, yeah, like watch the news, man. Who's the fucking, who's the government's ultimate problem solver? Your son. Your son. So I uh yeah, headed on a plane over there. And um, for the first couple of weeks, we're just in AMAB waiting for like diplomatic visas from the Iraqi government to go in. And during that period, I managed to, because of my uh skill set, uh, my technical role that I play in the in the army, um, I got sent first into like um over Mount Sinjar, um, over the border of Iraq and Syria, um, doing um a role over there, uh, air-based. And um, I was literally one of the first Aussies into that conflict because I was in the air. Well, the first Aussies were the Rafis. And shout out to the Rafis, man. C-130s were dropping, like, I'm listening to ISIS surrounding the Kurds up on Mount Sinjar and Kabani, and that's all over the news. Like the RAF were doing airdrops onto there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and and like you could hear, again, like the tonation of like these people were being slaughtered, they were being put in trucks, driven to the fucking edge of the desert, and dumped, yeah. Shot in the back of the head, like the holo, like, it's another Holocaust. Shout out to Bondi. Um, and and it would, but honestly, it was horrific. Like, it was you could you could watch the ISIS videos online and and and like when you got back from your sorty and know like I literally was listening to them get killed. Like, I listened to it. I listened to dudes saying, like, we're surrounded. Um, should we give up? And then like they're like talking to ISIS, like, ISIS, like, we will you give our families like, you know, um, we're gonna surrender, you know, please, you know, we're gonna come out now. And then ISIS on their own communications, I was just saying, like, nah, we'll just the moment they surrender, just kill them all. And I'm just like telling the pilot, like, we need to fucking get bombs on, like, and I was getting a bit of like probably erratic in the back of the plane. And um, I realized there's just nothing we can do, nothing we can do. And um, and when we got on the ground, we started to do stuff, and um yeah, I I I honestly saw like I listened to a siege and I know exactly where it happened and what village, and the next day I saw on like Al Jazeera that they like hacking babies' heads off with axes and shit in the middle of the street, this footage of it, and I was just like, oh man, I wish we could have done something, but we honestly couldn't. And then a few days later, they're like, Scourge, your team called SFAT special forces advisory team. And you've had dudes on that talked about this that went to later rotations to Alassad Air Base, and um, we went into there in the dead of the night, and we were literally like in shipping containers surrounded by ISIS on this base, man, and it was fucking surreal. Like, I woke up the first morning that the sun came up, and we just caught like 14 grad rockets, and just like I felt like a Jew in Tel Aviv right now, just fucking looking up in the sky, oh no, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's no protection. You literally, it wasn't even a shipping container, you know, the chews, like all the white um houses that we live in, and me and the other Sig are in the same room, and the like the fucking bombs are landing all around the camp, like, and it's got a 30-meter kill radius, and it we're just looking at each other, like there's nowhere to go. There's no bomb shelters, no. We're just looking at each other from our sleeping bags, like trying not to be trying not to show it like that, ooh, that was close. And I'm just putting my sleeping bag over my head and like my hands over my face, so like shrapnel at least hit me in the arms or whatever, and you're honestly just waiting for it to stop, and then like you had to go and all the boys linked up, like, hey, you you're alive, yep, sweet, all right, back to bed. And they would do that every morning.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:51

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:51

And then one morning, the SIG again, my mate, he's on picket. He's up on the there's like a single picket point. Like how big is this base? And it's a huge base, like 20 fucking kilometer fence, and it's got Iraqi army scattered all around it. Um what about coalition coalition forces? Just us and a small team of Green Berets, like American Special Forces dudes. Yeah. And and we're with them. Um, and while we build our own camp, which would later be called Camp Wood, after Brett Brett Wood, which is crazy that I was there that day at ASD, like at his memorial, thinking like I want to be one of those guys. Then me and him are cleaning fucking me and all his mates. Because I I went into his platoon, and a lot of my uh kit that I got issued when I got there was actually Todd Langley's that was killed. Like, and I'm getting issued like a weapon or uh uh CES, and it says like Tango 11, his call sign. I'm like, oh man, it's like getting Jesus' fucking robe, man. Like, yeah, getting fucking Don Don Bradman's cricket bat handed to you, like, hey, go at your baton next. Here's Brad Bradman's cricket bat. It's like, holy fuck, dude. So, you know, some people say that's a bad omen. I was like, nah, man, it's fucking that's phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:04

So um one night, yep, the sig's up on picket. Oh man. Loose drills, single man picket, sig. All the shooters are tucked into their warm farters down in the dreaming about back home. And the sigs up there on picket at 5 a.m. The sun comes up and all fucking hell breaks loose around the base. There's explosions, more so than rockets, there's actual explosions like breaching charges, RPG fire, machine gun fire, AK fire, and the SIGs on comms like caught trying to wake up. The boys like, boys, what the this there's a fucking attack. And the the boys are like, nah, man, it's just a range practice, don't worry about it. Like, go back. Yeah, just keep an eye on it, keep an eye on it. And he covered himself. He was writing it in the proper like logbook up there, like, nah, boys, there's something going on. He keeps getting on the radio, boys, please. Like, there's something going on. And they're like, shut up, you fucking chook cunt. What would you know? Fucking lid, do selection. And um he eventually got them to take it seriously, and they all got outside out of the beds. We all got up and we're in like footy shorts and shit. And like, oh my god, the base is being overrun by ISIS. Like, they're inside the wire, they're all around us, and like, we're like, get in the fucking cars, and like we just like quickly just threw your BA on, like, grabbed your GAT, and we jumped in the bushes. And the Americans were already awake. They like the the special American special forces, but they didn't have permission to leave, right? So they radioed straight back to their talk. They've got competent dudes going, nah, we're being overrun. Send Apaches, the Apaches are on the way, and uh the Australian commanders back in Canberra in Australia and in Dubai are listening to this radio traffic, they're seeing it all live. The commander calls over SATCOM to our SIG and he's like, Holy fuck, are you seriously being overrun right now? And the SIG's like, Yes, and they're like, Well, where's all the boys? And he's like, Sir, sir, they've already gone. We're advancing to contact. And he's sitting there like in his pajamas, like in his undies, one of my best mates, he's like, Sir, they've they're advancing to contact in Bushmasters, and they're back home are like, What? Who said they can go? And he's just a sig, but he's thinking, they don't. You you think two commando operators are gonna ask for permission to get into a fight? That's what we fucking live for. And uh we charged down there and got down there, and as we got there, like I literally just saw like as we're coming up the road, there's like dead bodies on on the side, you know, there's dead bodies everywhere where ISIS had broken in. So the sun came up, they cut a hole through the fence. The ISIS fighters took heaps of stimulant drugs because we found all the packets in the fence line, and this and they just came straight in and just started slaughtering everyone, all the Iraqis, because like Townsville right now, you go into the live-in lines, who's got a gun on them? No one, no cunt, and sorry for stitching you up, but maybe it's a point of fucking contention, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:02

Like I think it has been for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:04

Yeah, bruh. So they went in there into the seventh Iraqi army compound and just started wiping everyone out. And so we're trying to, we're trying to catch them. Like we're trying to, like, we're too late, essentially. But as as as we as I come around the corner, I was like, we got there, um, like the last few suicide bombers blipped himself, and I've posted that before. Yep, I should post it again. And and it was just a turkey shoot. The last dude was in this accommodation block, and everyone's like, get the fuck out of here, get the fuck out of here. And he eventually just hears like, Righto, a lock, but and he just starts running out into the street, and everyone just blipped him. It was like a turkey shoot, and yeah, and he blew up, and then it was my job to go through and like fucking get all their fingerprints, but there wasn't much left of dudes. And I was literally like, come around a corner and an Iraqi soldier's cutting this dude's head off. And I, you know, I'd never seen like um yeah, my lawyers in the corner, just like, oh, don't, don't, don't say it. But like, I it's their country, their rules, Mr. Kelly. Yeah, exactly right. Your house, your rules, Mr. Kelly. And I was just like, well, you know, okay, well, there's nothing for us here. I'll come back later and do the do my job. But they're angry, man. They just lost, I think, 14 of their soldiers, man. 14 of their brothers in the in the in the base just got slaughtered and killed. They're angry. And in their culture, they cut your head off when they're angry, and that's what they were doing. And I had to watch that. And you know when like your missus is fucking you get your roast chicken, you know, you come home on a night out and you get your woolly's roast chicken and it's in the bag, and you just start tearing it apart. And that's the when I hear that sound, it's probably the closest thing to PTSD other day. I was like, I'm like, oh man, you ever heard a man's throat get cut open? It fucking it makes a strange sound. Yeah. Yeah. So then after that, um, we went on the offense and uh ISIS has obviously infiltrated like the perimeter the perimeter how all the compounds around the base. So we had to start killing them. And um, I've posted about it where like um I got an award recently from the RO. Iraqi commissioner of police. I went to the Iraqi embassy to get it because ISIS had cut all the cell towers. Like, so all the phone coverage is dead in the country. But my partner force, our partner force just outside the base, a local police captain, Ahab, he had uh sat like an early Starlink, like a Wi-Fi satellite set up in his house. So they were being overrun too. And he's like, fucking boys, please. And he's he's talking to me on Viber. So I'm just sitting there in footy shorts on Viber, messaging this dude, and he's like, drop a bomb on this house right now. They're fucking gonna kill us all. They're digging under the fences. And we're like, oh fuck. And we got um, because cell phone coverage had dropped, everyone else in the whole country, the Canadians, the SEALs, everyone had lost contact with their partner force. But I randomly had contact with a partner force out there. And so every coalition asset in the sky rerouted to my location and was like, what do you got for us? And our JTACs, um, the CCTs, Combat Controller, Four Squadron, the Commando JTACs that were there, and the American ODA First Special Forces Group JTAX just rained down hell on this village and killed all these fucking cunts, man. And um, it was at the exact same time on the screen, like the Lint Cafe's fucking lint cafe's going on on the live stream on Sky News or whatever. And where and people on Facebook are like, what are we doing to take down ISIS? And I'm like, we're fucking doing it, cunt, right now. We killed like 30 people that day that were trying to assault the families of the cops and the soldiers that worked on the base. Yeah. They're married patch, their women and children. And that that's why they were so intent on like, please help us. Like, my fucking wife's gonna get a head cut off. Like, please. And you can imagine like how you would feel when you're in Townsville and you hear like the married patches being assaulted by ISIS. And um, yeah, we we got busy and we got it done. And um, it broke the back of the assault, like the airstrikes, and they bravely, like, bravely, we didn't, they went out and they went out and and fought through and took back that ground. And um, man, it was it was I was proud. Like, I'm watching on a drone feed, and when you've seen like drone, you've all seen drone feed from Afghanistan of airstrikes, right? That's coming through like 10 layers of satellite communications when you watch it direct direct, it's clear. You can see a dude's teeth, like you can see the facial features from the sky, right? Like it's clear, and and yeah, they'll get them. They were getting them, and it was good. Like, I would hit they're like this building now, and my boss is like, Are you sure? I'm like, he's saying this, hit it. And he hits a building, and you see an insurgent fly out the window with an AK in full battle dress, like ounst, you know, and and hit the building next door and split in half. And you're like, Well, yes, he was right, and then that gives you the confidence to like believe their intelligence, and they're not just trying to whack out like the fucking local butcher who owes them money or whatever competition, yeah, man. So that was um then then the momentum started to shift, and that's when subsequent deployments would happen for two commando. So then the boys are training uh in Baghdad the the command um the CTS, the Iraqi special forces guys, to then come and and and keep fighting and fight through and get ISIS out of their country, and we're supporting them via airstrike. So no one's out there fighting yet, uh, yet. And um, and we set the conditions for what would be like I think the most successful military operation our country has been involved in since the Korean War. Big call. Name a war that we've won since Korea.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:45

Well, yeah, yeah, no, exactly right. And you've got to look at it. Like the the result of Iraq, yeah, it was within two years.

SPEAKER_01 2:16:53

Yeah, no was he got killed.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:54

No, exactly right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:16:55

There's there's no Iraq is uh relatively always gonna be a dangerous place, but they've taken the country back. And um, so that's that that's rotation one. That's 2014, ends in 2015.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:05

So you're how long are you there for? Six months. So six months.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:09

But mm the the I think the biggest uh issue from that deployment um that I'm very proud of is that um there was a lot of Australians over there fighting. There's like you know, 80, 90 Australians over there fighting, and uh every everyone that we struck via an airstrike Australians, yeah, we're looking for corpses. Yep. So they that the the Iraqi police and army would put them all in the back of a Hilux or a dump truck, and I would just get a back up uh a fucking truck full of bodies, corpses, enemy corpses, and they would just dump it off at the front gate. And um, it was my job um because it was the job of the ODA EW guys to get the fingerprints and whatnot and the biometric data of those we'd killed, so we could cross them off the list back home. So ASIO are trying to monitor these dudes. Um, the Americans are trying to monitor their dudes, the British have foreign fighters over fighting for ISIS there. They don't want them to come back. But can we kill them? It's a contentious issue. You can't just kill an Australian citizen. It takes a ministerial authority, it takes the prime minister giving the thumbs up to kill an Australian citizen. So if you accidentally kill one, you're in a lot of trouble. And um it was my job to line out all these dead corpses.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:25

And how like so this truck rocks up, drops off what, 30, 20, yeah, yep, yep, five, ten, twenty, thirty. And that would say I they'd message me like sorry, and when you say Australian citizens, not white ones.

SPEAKER_01 2:18:37

Nah. Well, one of them, one or two of them were. Yeah. Remember the little ginger ninja and um the the dude with the long black hair? So we're looking for these dudes because we don't want them to come back into our society. Of course. No one would let an ISIS fighter and ISIS family back in, would they? That'd be horrible. And Penny Wong would. Yeah, she would. Shout out to China, Chinese lesbians. Um, but um, so we the truck rolls in and they'd call me on the way, like, hey man, got a truck for ya. And they'd be like, I'd be like, How many you got? Because I've got to bring like certain equipment, and they're like, 12. And then when I pull all these dead corpses out of the back of the Hylax, there's only eight. I'm like, bro, you said 12. No dramas, but in it, and then they open the back seat and there's a garbage bag with four heads in it. And my mate's got to hold this dude's head up in the air, and and then another dude's got to hold his eyelids open so I can get a photo of his retinas, like scan his eyeballs. And we're trying to be as respectful as we can, but we're standing there in the 40-degree, 45-degree desert sun with no protection. I've got surgical gloves from the medics, no um, no PPE, and you're holding corpses all day. And one of the corpses I've pulled out a bit too quick from the back of a highlight, like thinking you slide a dude out of the back of a ute, and then he and then you pull him out by his ankles and drop him, and his fucking chest hits or back hits the ground. He had like his rib cage was open, he got hit with an airstrike, he's in in a mess, and it splattered all up in my face. But we've got no showers, we're in the middle of the desert. I didn't have a shower for six months. The only shower we had was the chlorine from the Saddam's pool, which I took a shit in at one point, and I got the chlorine from the pool and post that video up again. Yeah, I should. And um, yeah, we we built like a makeshift shower with creek water, and we'd put chlorine in the creek water to have a shower, but it was like having a shower in a in a local swimming pool. Dirty water. It was better than nothing, but it was like I when I came home eventually, like um I had to have like HIV testing and HEP testing because I'm concerned that a lot of the ISIS fighters come from Africa and they have AIDS, and I got the dude's blood in my mouth. So, yeah, I couldn't bang my missus for a certain period of time until I'd been cleared of like multiple tests. Yeah, so imagine coming home six months, your missus is G'd up, she's fucking the rose petals are leading from the front door to the fucking, you know, the bedroom, the candles are lit.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:06

There's a bit of fucking you know, babe, I've got uh dead Iraqi in my mouth.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:11

Yeah, sorry, babe. Can't do sorry, babe. I sucked off a dead Iraqi foreign fighter. And and that's what we're doing. So we're looking for for Aussie foreign fighters and the and and coalition as well. And then that gave ASIO, the job back here, the ability to cross them off the list so that they could focus their assets on the rest of them that were still unknown. And the one of the main things, the main ways to find out these cunts was whether they had a foreskin or not.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:38

Bullshit.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:38

That is the most easiest way to identify a foreign fighter. Yeah, every Muslim has uh has been circumcised, yeah. So he's got a raincoat. Yeah, so you drag a dude out of the back of the high lux and you look down, he's got a foreign, a big old ant eater hanging out, and you're like, that dude is not from here. And then you bioenroll him. Oh, he's a Dutch foreign fighter, he's from France. And so the the running joke was like, Scojay, got some boys, some corpses coming in, time to check some dicks. And I was like, better warm up the hands, boys gotta fucking touch some dead dudes' dicks. I'm in the Iraqi sun for fucking months on end playing with dead dudes' dicks. Yeah. Shout out to Hesto, it's not that bad. But uh, yeah, so yeah, an interesting deployment. And um and so just quickly on that, like, it's that that's pretty wild.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:29

It's it is a pretty wild, it's a pretty wild concept, and there's photos of it. Well, that's what I mean. Everyone I posted them on Instagram, yeah, which people don't like, and obviously I seen them. But that's the that was the reality of what you were doing, yeah. And that was what you were told to do by the Australian government.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:45

I was you've got to look for work, you know, like um you've got to justify your position. And and and I I I honestly felt like this is my duty to Australia. Like, I put myself in this position, I volunteered to be here. I don't necessarily want to do this, and I dare say that this is gonna cause some mental health dramas later in life, but luckily, men don't have feelings, we have muscles, so mental health isn't real, so we just sort of carry on. But um, yeah, I I felt it was my duty to the Australian people to like people getting sat on their knees in the Link Cafe and their heads blown off with a shotgun because of this uh religion. And and if I've got to stand in the sun and do this so that my family and friends back home are sweet, then they can tick that person off the list. Yep. No worries, I'll do it. As long as you don't fry me later on in life, and you would never do that, would ya, police? You would never do that. And was there a lot out of that? You know, how many bodies do you reckon you scanned? A lot, yeah. A lot, and it got to the point where I was dealing with so many dead bodies that like I'd forget. So one day, like I was halfway through one, and then they're like, Oh, mess is on, boys, like come grab a feed, you know, like once it once a day we would eat fresh food. Um, and and that was mint. Like, we had an actual cook flyer, an Australian army cook, legend, shout out to him. And then um, I was like, Oh, I'll finish this one when I'm done. And I put a bit of plywood over this fucking corpse just like at the front gate, down near the shitters, and then um we were up in the we were having a party with the Americans watching the Fappening. Remember the Fappening? Yeah, there's all the celebrity leak photos and shit, and there's that chick from the Hunger Games, and we're all like Jennifer Lawrence? Yeah, it was like 30 shooters in a room, jacked up boys, drinking fucking beers in multicams with fucking boners watching a projector screen of Jennifer Lawrence's fingering herself because it was like the biggest thing's happened, and everyone's just like, oh my god, like, yeah, cheering, like throwing beers at the like it was the sickest fucking party, not a chick in sight, just a normal cast, and and everyone's just like, yeah, multicam's really good at fucking concealment in the Middle East, is also good at hiding boners, it turns out. So then I get a call from the boss, like, Scojo, come out of here. Like, oh fuck, what did I do? Again, like the first time I got in trouble in high school, like, oh, what didn't I do? And they're like, Um, did you forget something, brother? Oh, fuck. Yep, I left that corpse over by the toilet cine. And the boss is like, Yeah, I left the skiff and I fucking was walking through the dark and I tripped over a dead body. And I knew straight away. This has got Scojo's name written all over it, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, sorry, boss. So I grabbed one of the boys and I went down there and I had to like fucking grab his arms and then the other dude grab his feet and walk him to fucking where he needed to go um to get rid of him so that the Iraqis could come back and give him a ceremonial burial, I'm sure. You know, proper rights, I'm sure they read him and treated him with utmost respect. And um, as I was like moving this dead body, my bonus like banging him in the head through my pants, and I was like, oh man. Now, whenever I want to have sexual relations with the missus, I can only get hard when I think about a dead Iraqi ISIS fighter, so that's it's always awkward. Hey babe, can we put on some videos? Oh yeah, what do you want to put on? Some ISIS videos. What you're fucking out of eating, you're out of control, mate. But uh anyway, yeah, crazy telling me.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:13

So that was that's Iraq.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:14

Well, that was the first trip.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:16

That's the fair, well, yeah, it's the first trip of Iraq. And just quickly, just for the listener, the differences uh between uh Iraq and Afghan more in regard to the partner forces.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:27

Yeah, so the partner force on that rotation, the Iraqi, our our commandos back in in Baghdad hadn't trained, they were just starting to cycle guys through and train them in CQB. Um, and they did a obviously a phenomenal job. Tarji hadn't kicked off yet. The irregular army, they call Tarji their first, like Tarji Rotation 1. I think he's in like 2015, 16, right? 16, I think. This is 2014. So I hear people say, like, I was on the first Tarji trip. Well, your first Tarji trip, I was on my second Iraq trip. Yeah, yeah, no big deal. But um, so contextually, like the Iraqi army that we would then later train in the subsequent rotations and support in the in the fight of Mosul, they weren't they didn't exist yet. So the partner force were the Iranian militias. Iran. So Scojo, like the story I just told with the dead bodies and everything, I'm wearing an Australian flag on one shoulder and I'm wearing an Iranian flag on the other.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:25

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:25

Shia militia groups. So Hashavi, um, the PMFs, they're they're Iranian-based Shia militia groups from Baghdad, supported by Hezbollah, um, coming in from Iran. So when we met the partner force for the first time and we agreed to work with them, we had to bioenroll those dudes too, right? And the platoon commander flagged up as spending 13 months in Abu Ghraib prison for killing American soldiers. And he's their boss. Hard cunt, epic, killed heaps of Americans in the early days in Fallujah, yeah, yeah. Sadar City. And I was just like, the in dude told me, he's like, bro, I'm gonna go have a chat to this dude, man. It's gonna be super awkward. Can you come with me? Like, action up, you know. I'm like, oh my god, I'm gonna have to blow this fucking platoon commander's head off in a shipping container. And it we sat down, man. I made him fucking poured him a fanner. Fanner's the fucking go over there, isn't it? And um, he just he's like, Yeah, I know what this is about, boys. This is about my time in Abu Grave. I'm like, you know, this is my attitude. Like, I'm like smiling, like, yeah, bro. Fucking, what were you doing in Abu Grave, you cheeky cunt, you know? And he's just like, Yeah, look, different times, mate. Killed a few, killed a few cunts. I was moving YD component tree around. The American soldiers grabbed me and I did 13 months, but that was back in the day. Now we've got a common enemy, ISIS. So look, water under the bridge. Kind of got tortured in Abu Grave prison, doesn't give a fuck because he wants to kill ISIS.

SPEAKER_00 2:28:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:28:52

And um, we're just like, yeah, sweet, no, no dramas, brother. Carry on. Dabbed him up and and off we went. Started running them through CQB, you know, like, and uh yeah, I've still got the patches that I have at home on my patchwork. Like, I was an Iranian militiaman.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:10

Militiaman.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:10

Yeah. And they would go out and do jobs and we would drop bombs for them and we would kill us on support of them. So that was a partner force at that time. But then yeah, came back home and um laid off the mountain dew and did sub one up in Townsville, I think.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:25

Had to learn how to get a leader.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:28

Yeah, met um fuck some notable figures. Keegan Locke was um, I was staying at his house um for the majority of the course. Um, Breno's little brother, just absolute sit cunts. And and I'd never been to Townsville before. And um, so two months there to learn how to fucking give a drill lesson and all this shit. It's just what you have to do in the army to promote. No one needs it, no one cares, no one wants it. But uh it's it's part of being in the army. Um, and uh that's what you have to do. Yeah, yep, yep. Um so I somed that sub one course naturally, like the Fitzy Fizz. Yep, yep. Went over there, went over to America. So all of our equipment as an EW operator is not ours. It's a bit of a tricky one, but the Americans own all of our equipment and they permanently loan it to us so that we can use it. And they'll never ask for it back, but it's the American kit. So when you're dealing with American kit, if you want to learn how to do the job, gotta go to America, mate. And uh three week, three-week trips to America every couple of months as a bear uh from Special Operations Command. Sometimes they go from Seven Sig as well from the conventional army. But um, every time we went, it was a three-week party in America, and they the the instructors there obviously love us because we've got operational experience, we've used the kid on jobs. I wasn't qualified in it, but I got five jackpots already in Afghanistan. So they're like, all right, so this is how theoretically you would use this, and it's like a civilian working at the NSA in America, and I'm like, Yeah, yeah, tracking. He's like, Are you picking up what I'm putting down? I'm like, Yeah, yeah, I've I've got five jackpots in Afghanistan, brother. And yeah, I'm tracking. And he's like, What? And um, so then I went back pretty rapidly as an instructor. So I became an instructor on all that equipment. So every time I went back, it's another course and it's another fucking six grand per diem cash in your hand to go back for a couple of weeks. So back then, that's that's a VZ V8 um ute that I could buy on every trip. So I was just buying shit ute. The front of my house just looked like a fucking junkyard, man. I just had all these ute and um the missus hated it, but like um, yeah, fun money, man, and and good times in America. Um, and randomly, my brother lived over there, like right where the course was randomly. So um I got to visit my brother every couple of months in the States who married an American chick and was over there, and um, it was sick, yeah. Enjoyed those American trips, and it's um it's a good little sweetener for the bears. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:52

No, it's right.

SPEAKER_01 2:31:53

Do you want to pause it? I'm gonna do a piss.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:55

Yeah. Uh all right, just quick uh lizard break. The lawyer, the lawyer had to go throw up around the back of the fucking building.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:05

Sorry, Darlin. It's not that bad.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:10

You she took the job, yeah. I'm paying, you know, I'm fucking getting out of that easy. Uh where we were at, you were doing the fitzy fizz in uh the US.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:21

Yeah, partying with Jordan Fitzgerald. So that was my interaction with the uh New Zealand SAS and uh Commando. Um he is an absolute weapon, runs warfighter athletic.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:32

Shout out to Jordan previous episode, episode I can't remember, maybe about 20, 30 episodes ago, but listened to his podcast. Sit con.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:40

And um then I got back and man, what I haven't brought up yet is the fucking rigmarole I had to go through. So when I did selection in 2012 to be a cat bee commando qualified bear, while we were on Rio, they they said no more cat bees. Because what some cat bees were doing, uh rightly or wrongly so, was like getting qualified as a cat bee. Then after a year or two, they got to post out because you're still just a sig, and then post back to the regular army. And they're like, Well, I don't want to do that. So they just switched over to be shooters, and some of them as now current Bravo's team leaders, killers in the regiment, some sucked ass, you know, because they didn't do quote unquote the full Rio, right? So um halfway through 2012 Rio, they're like brought brought like there's three or four cat bees, one was a medic and three sigs, and they're like, Boys, you have to switch over and be uh a commando assaulter if you want your green beret. And we're like, bruv, like just let us be sigs. We don't want any extra pay, or then give us the beret and we'll go back to work. We're doing this to be better, not just it's not just a prestige thing about getting a green beret and fucking putting it out, hanging out of your pocket and walking past chicks and fucking watching them squirt all over you. That's part of the fun, but it's about being a better asset for the commandos, being a better asset for your team, being a better helper, a better enabler, where you don't have to worry about me at the back of the stack um on instant or fucking, you don't have to worry about me around a breaching charge because I know I know how to set one myself. I know the safety distances. So I'm not just gonna stand on the other side of a door and get blown up because I know that there's a wall charge over there or whatever. Um, in theory, I'd probably still do it. But so I did all these courses and remember I failed CUI, I had to come back and do my urban course, and then I deployed. So I didn't have time to get my beret. So everyone treated me as if I was qualified and referred to me as a commander and whatnot. But technically I hadn't been, I made a mistake of saying, like, you need to like award me my beret. Whereas you literally just go to the Q store and get one and bash it and put it on your head. But then the SIGs felt it was such like my SIG chain of command were pretty fucking some were good, some were spineless as fuck. And it took these cunts forever to get the balls to send an email to the RSM. Who's a commander and say, um, so this um Sig Jones doesn't have his green beret yet. And it was just a fucking process, man. But I deployed and was almost roommates at times with um the CO of of that first Iraq deployment was um Ian Langford, or I think retired as recently as a brigadier and an absolute legend, absolute weapon. I could listen to that man talk for hours, man. He knows everything about war. Um, fit as fuck, good leader, great boss. And I give a lot of shit to officers on socials, but he's one of the few that I would love to have on your potty. You know, he tried, yeah. Yeah, the man can talk, maybe because we're friends, I don't know. But um, I I guess I I felt in a way that I I needed, I just wanted my breath. I was just gonna put it on my head, but they're like, no, Scott, you need to be awarded it like every other commando. We want it to mean something. And but that process took fucking forever because I'm never I'm always in America, I'm always in Townsville, I'm on I'm on leave, I'm in Brazil, I'm fucking doing my thing. I'm I'm hung over, I'm in the cross. No one can find me. I'm passed out on a park bench. So to get the time to actually give me my beret, it took until like the end of 2015. And um Ian Langford called um the whole unit together, and I got awarded my beret after a huge speech about the importance of enablers um in front of all my my crew, man, and it was fucking moving, it was awesome, and it was uh one of the proudest days of my life getting that green beret. And I try, I I talk a lot of shit and I do a lot of funny things that at times could be seen as like you know, bringing heat to the unit or whatever, but I honestly want to do the best for the unit, and I want the best for the unit because I love the unit and I had the best times of my life there. So I got my green beret, and then it was like 2016 back on tag. So I was doing my second tag rotation um with sniper platoon doing like a sneaky peaky kind of role um while the assaulters did their thing and um yeah, we're just doing fucking the most random shit. Like, okay, tomorrow we're going to there's a there's a you get a live call out and you got to go do a hostage rescue mission, and the target is movie world on the gold coast. And you're like, what? We're going to movie world, so they've hired out movie world as like an active shooter situation because that is a potential place. Of course, yeah. So what we have to do is constantly do scenarios at places where we think there might be a terrorist scenario. Westfield's center point tower, the opera house.

SPEAKER_00 2:37:34

Which if you look at Scott Ryder's Instagram, you get a lot of the locations, you know, and but they're all locations that it could be. Who would have thought fucking Link Cafe was going to be a target?

SPEAKER_01 2:37:44

Exactly. And and Scott Ryder, um, I would say I was gonna say he was in my platoon. I was in his platoon. Senior dig. And um, yeah, he's a he's a legend and um a great guy, and I have a lot of time for him. Uh but um yeah, all those photos puts up from those tag rotations, I was I was there um in another role, in another capacity, or asleep in the back of a white flip vehicle somewhere while the commandos were fucking standing too. And um, yeah, we flew up to movie world, fucking Rapsul jumped in like square shoot canopy into like a nearby area and assaulted the fucking Scooby-Doo ride. And the last time I was at the fucking movie world, you know, you're a little kid and you're on the Scooby-Doo ride, and it's the funnest thing in the world. There's a terrorist with a blank firing attachment on his gun, and we're assaulting the Scooby-Doo ride as in full kit as commandos, like surreal, surreal, or like you're in the opera house assaulting the opera house, um, but we've come in through a hidden underground tunnel, and there's people outside at Opera Bar on a Friday night just just doing business drinks, ramping it, having fun. They don't know that inside the opera house right now there's a full-blown shootout with fucking paint rounds and breaching charges and little things going on. And and um Scott Ryder's posted stuff like that, like pictures, like that's happening. You think they close down the opera bar? No, like where are you we're in and amongst the society doing these things and no one even knows? So constantly training, constantly fine-tuning those martial skill sets that commandos have to make sure that if if the balloon goes up and and people need rescuing, that those boys are gonna be slick when they do it. And I think they would be slick when they do it because they're fucking good at it.

SPEAKER_00 2:39:28

Yeah. From there, Iraq is still kicking off, and yeah, you know, they obviously ISIS started coming towards Baghdad, and they they were getting pretty fun close because I was in baggage at that stage on the private contracts, and you know, we're getting the daily in briefs. Obviously, at the Australian embassy, we're getting pretty good fucking briefs, but slowly getting pushed back by CTS and units, uh, and obviously back to Mosul, and then Mosul was kind of their last stand.

SPEAKER_01 2:39:53

Yeah, so the other commando companies that had gone over, you know, like Delta Company, Briva Company, Alf Company that did their rotations really fucking built that relationship with the ground level at Baghdad training the dudes to then when they went out to Ramadi um for Luja and they started moving up the ERV, the Euphrates River Valley back north, exactly. They were pushing them the fuck out, and we were supporting them um with intelligence JTACs and advisory um to to kill and clear those cunts, and it was massive. And although we're using like American assets like to drop bombs, because um there wasn't many Australian assets on on station at that time. The when I got there for my second deployment, the Iraqi partner force were like, you guys saved our ass in Ramadi, like you Aussies are fucking sick cunts, and it was all the hard work that the commandos had put in. And um, you know, the SAS, there was one or two SASCATs there helping out and and advising, um uh, but not in the early days, and it really solidified our reputation as a reputable force in in the coalition soft environment. Um, and I'm very proud of those boys and what they did, um, especially like Alpha Company and Ramadi, they fucking dropped so many bombs. Their JTAX killed so many cunts, man, like unbelievable. And the Iraqi partner force frothed it. So when we got there, and they're like, okay, I so I go back at the end of 2016 and they're like, Righto, Scojo, rot six, um, you're off, and you're now the debt commander. Um, and I was like, okay, so my digger, the bear, went out to Al-Assad where I used to be, and I was just chilling in Baghdad, and I'm meant to just be chilling in Baghdad for the whole deployment, and I was a bit disappointed because not a lot, not a lot of killing going on down there, as you know. Yeah. Um, but then they opened up a set, then CTS, like the Iraqi um special forces, said, no, well, we're gonna go now to Mosul and take back Mosul. That's their caliphate headquarters. And I said, Okay. And then the Aussie Special Forces two commando team said, Well, we're gonna send a team up there. And then I put my hand up and said, Well, you might need a bear. And they're like, Gowmons go, Joe. Off we go, mate. And that's like that's a solidify like solidifying the fact that I was so integrated into that platoon, you know. Like, I've never left that platoon, I've never left that company, that team. They trusted me and and I trusted them and they knew what I was capable of. And they're like, Well, come up and have a little trial, like see if your equipment works on the rooftops of Mosul. Like, yep, welcome, where do you want me? Um, and uh, I got very fortunate, like, got put on a private little plane and flown up to Erbil. And then from Erbil, I the boys were already there in Mosul and they were attached to the SEALs. So SEAL team seven, I believe, was there in in Mosul already. Um, and Hemo and the boys, like a few of the Bravo company boys, were there in in um the outskirts of Mosul with the SEALs, um, getting ready for the clearance. The initial push was about to happen on their what we refer to as the eastern side of Mosul, but the ISIS boys, they refer to their cardinal points are flipped to ours because they think of the world looking from Mecca, so it's confusing as fuck. Yeah. And my interpreter's like, oh, they're they're starting to come on the on the west bank of Mosul. It's like, yeah, they're looking from Mecca, so you've got to flip it around. So sometimes things got wrong, and I'm like whipping my turp, like, you fucking idiot. It's your religion. Think about it. Um, but um, yeah, so I caught a fucking coaster from Erbil Airport out to the eastern flank of Mosul in a white fleet coaster. Yeah, Toyota Hertz Hiker. Yep, yeah. Two American soldiers with like M M4s on the dash, pumping beats, just driving through. And I'm in the back, just like fully kitted up, just like, oh my god. And it's just getting more and more sketchy. The further we go into Mosul, every building's bombed out. There's like women and children on the side of the road screaming and crying like isolated purse, like IDPs, um, refugees, right? Their husbands are all dead, and they're all just like, help me, have you got food? And I'm just like, oh my god, put the window up, you stink. I'm Snapchatting it. Bro, to be on my Snapchat in 2016-17, phenomenal. It's sad that the memories don't go back that far. We'd have some good footage for the gram, but um, probably for the best that we don't get to Mosul, and yeah, I'm I'm straight to work. So that I introduced myself to like the seal JTAX and the strike cell, which is literally just an Iraqi dude's house in in a suburb called Bartala, which is like a little Christian enclave um just on the outskirts of of the eastern side of Mosul. And I get straight up on the roof, put my antenna up, point it towards Mosul, go back down, turn the equipment on, and I can hear these cunts clear as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:44:53

And you can see Mosul.

SPEAKER_01 2:44:54

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:44:55

Yeah, how far is the closest ISIS front line? Two kilometers max.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:00

And every day it gets further away. So every day it gets another block. Because they're getting pushed, yeah. Because they're getting pushed. And some days they would come back at nine, take a block back, and it it would hit and miss, but they were certainly close enough to to shoot at us, uh, to mortar us, and they were this is the very first sign of FPV drones, droppers. So this is the first time where you're like I said 16? Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:24

Yeah, because I remember that we got the brief in baggers.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:27

And then we'd see a drone like, oh fuck with that.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:29

Yeah, yeah. And and you know what the counter drone technology was for us at the time? We would lay down on our backs, on our backs on the roof, shoot, and shoot up, like rest your gun on on the on the on the on the railing of the wall and shoot up.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:42

I've seen the CTS do it a few times.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:44

Yeah, yeah. And it was it worked like machine gun. Um, the snipers had their long barrels. I had my employees.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:48

But again, this is back in the day when there was the old DGR fucking the big white ones. Yeah, three. They were terrible.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:54

Phantom three.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:55

They were slow, they were obviously easy to shoot out of the sky. But they were only dropping grenades at that stage. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:46:00

So they get like your the silicon tube you use to do your bathroom, and they just hollow it out, put a little tiny homemade grenade on mortar, the they push the button for the light, the light engages which draws the hook and it drop drops down, and that that was it. And now that's the biggest problem in the world in not just Ukraine but worldwide, is FPV drones and droppers. And I've felt a few. And um, and some of the Iraqis that I initially met that night, like that I got there, that I would have chai with every night, dead, man, like fucking got blown to pieces by they were just like standing around at night while their bosses were doing their meeting, and they're just standing around a 40-gallon drum warming themselves up, it's fucking cold, and and ISIS dropped one right on the barrel and and killed a bunch of them. And um, yeah, they were dudes that I definitely had a lot of time for. And um I saw their bodies come back through the medical CP. I'm like, ah, fuck. So like the strike cell is just the dude's living room, right? Some dudes, the living room in your house, the front room, it's got fucking eight monitors with just fucking every asset in the country, and then at all times two or three JTACs, either a Navy SEAL JTAC, a combat controller, or a or a JTAC from two commando. Um, and there was one SASR dude that came up with us. And shout out to SASR fucking boys, you you did really well. And um, I talk a lot of shit, but uh that they they all equally pulled their share, and these dudes are killing probably on average about 60 dudes a day, a day. And it was a competition, it was like the the runs were going on the board as if it was a cricket match. Uh two for 22, two bombs, 22 KIA, uh EKIA. And um next door to us is the CP where all the all the injured dudes are coming back through. So um there'll be like a mad shootout, we'd hear it, we'd see it. Um, we'd hear it on the radio, like, oh, eight of our dudes just got whacked by a fucking mortar, they're coming back now. And it was like, no matter what your job was in the house, it was like 10 Aussies, 10 seals, get the fuck next door and and and be a first aid. And and I was there like the first one that come through, the Sig, I'm looking at him putting ketamine into this casual, like the dude's got no legs, his legs are blown off, he's got gunshot wounds, he's fucked, he's dying. But the actual medics and the CFAs are working on more injured people that are actually unresponsive and they're doing chest compressions, and I can see that happening here. I look over at the SIG, and the SIG's putting ketamine in this dude's arms to to fucking put him out because he's fucked. And I look at my mate and I'm like, who's the SIG? Unqualified, not non-commando, and I go, bro, I didn't know you were CFA. As he's putting ketamine in this dude's arm, like injecting, and looks up at me, he's like, I'm not. I'm like, oh my god. Who taught you to do that? He's like, just fucking help where you can, bro. Put a tourniquet on that, do that. I'm like, oh man. So I ended up like I seen this dude's fucking leg was just shredded. And it was literally just his foot was hanging on by like just skin. The bone, the muscle, everything's gone. It's just like Iraqi, yeah, yeah. Iraqi partner force. And I just and I got my leathermans out and just cut his foot off. Like it was getting in the way, like it was flapping around off the table and knocking people was like fucking if it was a soccer game, it'd be a red card. High foot. High foot, mate. Studs up. So um, yeah, man, a lot of death and and sadness in that room, which is only 10 meters from yeah, from the house, man. And and um, but the the nice thing was the dude that owned that house ended up the where we've set the casual, it was just someone's house, like where the medical CP was. And that was just to stabilize individuals to get them back to Urbil so they could put them on a plane and fly them to Baghdad for proper treatment. And um, we were doing our best, like with what we had, and those dudes treated something like 1200 casualties.

SPEAKER_00 2:49:50

I know their casualty rate was massive.

SPEAKER_01 2:49:52

Insane. So that those dudes, those medics, are easily the most combat hardened medics in the ADF has seen, probably since I don't know, fucking Vietnam or something. And no one talks about him. There's an article on a body. Yeah, there's an article called if you're a medic or a paramedic, um uh contact army medic in Mosul or something. It's a really good article and it it talks about him. And he got a he got post norms for it, like the medic, um, the kilo, he got like uh uh I don't know DSC or a fucking conspicuous service medal or something for how many casualties he saw. A well-deserved DSC. Well deserved, like well deserved, whatever it was, and um no one's jealous of that. And unlike other members in other units, um, jealousy isn't really a big thing at two commando. So um it was cool that the dude who owned that house came back one day and and got through the cordon, was searched and came in. He's like, this is my house, and he was just crying his eyes out. He's like, I can't believe you've turned my house into a um into a medical facility, and it makes me so happy. And just walked around hugging and kissing everyone. You're saving Iraqi lives, yeah, man. And I think he was a Christian because it was just across the road from if you look on a map, St. George's Church in Bartala, yeah, and um, he was in tears, man. And then the dude came that and tried to prove that it was his house that we were in, and we're like, we're not destroying your house or anything, bro, but like we're we're in your house and we're not leaving until this battle's done. He's like, no dramas, boys, and we're like, prove it's yours. And he's like, if you dig up the front garden, there's a Saddam era pistol in the in the front yard, and we're like, engineer, get out here, can't he gets his metal detector out, scans the garden, beep, digs up a fucking Saddam Tariq pistol. No way, and um, that was the going away present we gave because obviously back in Australia, you know, can't really have that. Um, so we gave it to like we had an American special forces um guy attached to us, um, who was a medic and he was a sick cunt, and um, we gave it to him, like polished it up, like one of the commandos, two commando operators, like polished it up, like it was a bit rusty and shit, like made it all serviceable, fully working, schlicky, and just gave it to him as a farewell gift when we left. But um, that fight was fucking hectic. And it was like none of us got a scratch on us, and we're killing 60 dudes a day, and they were all bad, and and everyone can see like the destruction of Mosul, the videos, the documentaries, and we were there, and we were the lead partner force because we initially in 2014 partnered with the Iraqi special forces. So, although we were there with the SEALs, um, and they were fucking phenomenal and doing the exact same thing we were, but they were actually going out a little bit more than we were, like they were going out about a tactical bound back, whereas we were just staying for the for the initially and in the house. Um, they were actually going out and trying to engage, and um, that's when you see like Eddie Gallagher and um Geo and all those boys were starting to get a little bit closer where they could shoot a jab or a long gun from the rooftops. Um and my job again is just like listen to enemy communications and find ways to to kill them, to take away that element of surprise from them. And the the JTAC shooter JTACs that are doing their job, they're working real hard to kill the dudes that are shooting at our partner force with small arms, right? But at night, I got dedicated air assets when everyone else went to bed. I didn't sleep all night and I didn't want to sleep. They're like, Scojo, you've got two AC 130 gunships. If you've got signals intelligence, we will kill them for you. Where do you like it was a gentleman's war? So everyone went to bed. Dudes are in bed, I'm gonna blow up their fucking house where they live, and that's exactly what we did. So all night long, all day, all day long, I'm supporting the tactical fight and all night long the deep fight hitting their headquarters elements. So we're getting drones dropped on all my friends all day. I'm seeing all these body bags with dudes fragged up all day and saying um masayara tayara is like a mini drone, and they're like masayara tarara, and I'm like, I'm in there, I'm in the CP, like, how did they kill this dude? He's our friend. I'm so sorry for your loss. Allah Yahama is like I'm so sorry for your loss. And they and they're like, they would tell me the weapon system. Hawan is a mortar, masayara tayara is a mini drone, and I would learn those words and go, right, you just said Masaya Taara, I'm fucking going back in. And the next cunt I hear, launching a drone, he's fucking gone. And then I would kill him, I would, I would, I didn't kill him, I didn't kill anyone. I'm just a sig. But I got the pilot to kill that cunt and blindly drop on the location that I'd worked out as is his. And then on those occasions, man, we hit this headquarters and it was like their drone where they'd bought like 500 DJI drones and sat him in this building, and I smacked it and and I go, check out this address. The the the I I was there when the ISR slewed over on the building, and you see a dude on the roof and a drone coming back to land and reload the bomb on it, and he's just standing there. And on the bottom level is a dude with an AK standing at the door guarding it like it's a CP. I go, fucking hit that cunt, hit it, boom, gone. No drones for another two weeks. Yeah. Massive, massive impact on the battle space. And then so they're like, okay, well, they've got no drones. So what do they start doing? Mortars. They start filling mortars with chemical munitions and um mustard gas. And and my boys are coming in, the Iraqis, covered in yellow blisters down their arms because they got hit with mustard gas. And I'm like, what the fuck's that? They're like, how one? Ha one, a mortar. I'm like, okay, go back upstairs. Turn my kid on. Interpreter, mortars. Where's the fucking where's the mortar tube located? Where's the boss? Who's controlling? And these dudes were like artillery captains in the Saddam Army. They were good, man. They were good. I never did mortars course, but I I was listening to their adjustments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, these boys, these boys are good, man. So they're using a drone to watch the strikes to adjust their fires.

SPEAKER_00 2:56:04

Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:04

Yeah. And uh much like we would now like I don't even think, but at that time in 2016, did our mortars teams use a drone to adjust fires at high range?

SPEAKER_00 2:56:14

No way.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:15

No way, bro. Still not, still not. Yeah, still not, right? So they were schlick. They were schlick and they were killing our dudes, man. And um, yeah, I'm just like, okay, go to this location. I think I've got to beat on the mortars dudes and the JTAC in front of me, like one of the boys, like, yeah, all right, let me go have a look. Slew to this location, 10 figure grid here, types it in in the chat, boom, yep, sweet. Three dudes setting up on water tube, pacing it out with the stick and everything, like that. I've seen the commandos do. Oh my god, boom, they're dead within two minutes. And I was just like, you know, that that potentially just saved like a whole bunch of innocent lives, and it was like surreal. That was 24 7 all night, all day. And my interpreter, he did the heavy lifting, man. Like, I just pushed buttons and Relay that information. Um, V bids became another huge problem, like they're up armoring Toyota Hiluxes with dumpsters and shit. Um, and then the way that they would do it is they would weld the suicide bomber in once he gets in and sit him on the trigger so that the moment uh he he crashes, he's got no way once he's in that car, he's dying. So he might as well hit a good target. And uh, and those V bids were killing so many people because the explosion was so big they'd worked out that like if they welded steel, solid steel to the roof, it would push the blast radius down. Yeah, because they don't want to kill people in the air, they want to kill you know the boys. So um that shit was going on, and then I was like, okay, well, there's no drones. Now I've killed the mortar team. Let's kill the fucking the V bid guys. And you're listening to the V bid driver say, like, with a drone talking him on, like, turn left, turn right. Okay, speed up, speed up, drive, drive, drive, alark, but then you hear lockbah, and then you feel our building shake and all the dust comes down from the ceiling because they just killed a whole bunch of our dudes. So at night we would put in terrain denials, which is like dropping a bomb into an intersection where we think a car might come from. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:58:13

Make it a crater.

SPEAKER_01 2:58:14

Yeah, make it a crater. So they'll get stuck in there, and they did, and it was very effective. Um, but then they got drones up to just talk them around the V bids. So, how do you get around that? You kill the dude controlling the drone. Yeah. And then you fucking kill that cunt. Yeah. Then the V bid doesn't know where to go, and all these V bids we found getting stuck in holes. So it was constantly just pivoting between like, what is the threat today? And then let's go kill that cunt. And it was so fucking good. Like it was like cat and mouse every day, but the result was like less body bags next door in the courtyard. And like, I've talked about it before, where like to have a break, like, so I've got a lot of photos like up on the roof in Mosul in speedos and shit, you know, like doing dumb shit. But that's like that's like five minutes of the day where I'm like, I need to go outside, my eyeballs hurt, and I take a funny photo and then go back downstairs. It's not like I was outside all day. So when I went outside, I was doing dumb shit. I was calling on the sap phone to people on a gum tree buying fucking buying ute, man. I dropped this one on my driveway, it looks hot. They're like, You're calling from an Iraqi number? I'm like, yeah, bro, my missus is at home. She was all yeah, mate, just rock up. Like, just like quick little bursts of like, get outside, do that, get back in. I was inside all day long staring at a screen. It's not like I was running around in speedos all day, but um, that photo was actually a stray day. And my missus sent me a care package with speedos and shit in it. So I was like, Oh, take a photo and send it back to you. A bit of fun, like a bit of a funny laugh. I never thought I'd put it on Instagram. I never thought I'd have an Instagram, but that happened. And then um, yeah, so it was, it was just it was just a crazy time, man. But I was there to the very end where they pushed into the city, and you see like Eddie Gallagher's footage and stuff like that. And though everyone rolled in too, Commando started to get more comp confident that no one had died yet. A few IDs have gone off around the camp. Like, I went to take a shit. We were shitting on the outside of this graveyard, and then like one morning a sheep herder walked through the graveyard and hid an ID, and all these sheep went flying. There was IEDs where we were like, where we were, taking a shit. Imagine, imagine you're taking a shit. Imagine dying with your own shit. You shit on an ID and it flies up and covers you. The last thing you feel is your own shit spraying all over you. One of the engineers stepped on an IED that had deflagrated, and um, it was in like a plastic bag instead of a hard like tub-ware container. And had it been in a container, he'd be dead. Yeah, and that happened to other dudes like Americans, unfortunately. And um it there was a lot of closed calls, um, but um we got through it and everyone lived, and at the end of the day, end of halfway through 2017 or ish, um it got called that ISIS no longer exists in Iraq, and it was like when we left. That's when we left. And the the only shit thing for me personally, well, I I felt extremely good. Like, but while I was there, the SIG schema rep, like it's like we gotta we gotta talk about your career, brother. You've been in the same platoon, you're just a sig, just a sig with a green barrage.

SPEAKER_00 3:01:21

Someone's cotton on, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:01:22

They're like, cunt, it's time to go, man. You you gotta go back to the regular army and give back, quote unquote, give back these skills. And I'm like, I don't want to. I did selection, I did all this shit. I could have just been a fucking regular thumb and bum SIG that are absolute legends at 126, all the SIG units around the place, but I dedicated years of my life to selection, Rio, AITs, being qualified. When the boys were learning the actual bear kit for our job, I'm on a Dems course. And I sacrificed all of that so that I could get the Green Bray and stay in Sydney forever because I'm from Campbell Town. Well, wouldn't I want to live in Campbell Town my whole life, be posted to Holesworthy? All my friends and family are there, good support networks for my missus if I go away. But no, like they're like, nah, cunt, you've done six years. We gave you a back-to-back posting. Everyone wants you to stay, but I'm your ski's the woe one in charge of your RA Sigs trade. Fuck off, cunt. Where where do you want to go? I'll give you two choices um Canberra or um Seven Sig in Toowoomba. And I was like, cunt. Really? And I'm on Sat phone to him in in Iraq. Yeah. I'm in Mosul. In Mosul. In between killing cunts. And the only outcome of that conversation was like, well, I know that this is probably my my last deployment ever. You know, like I was like, this is this is it then. And for the next few weeks, I went pretty hard. I didn't really sleep. I was like, well, this is it. I better drop as many bombs as I fucking can. I better do whatever I can to get this out of my system. Because they're like, yeah, you'll just go to like seven sig for two years and then you'll come back as a sergeant. Come back as a sergeant. They don't realise to me in my mind, that's a that's a diss. That's a red flag. I don't want to be a fucking sergeant. Why? So I can do admin for the boys actually doing the job. This at this point, I'm like an eight-year digger. So it was starting to get like big army was influencing my career. And yep, I got back to Australia and had to fucking post to the School of Signals to teach IETs on the SIG course that I'd done back in 2010. How to under how to set up an antenna. How to what is a HF signal? How does the ionosphere work at night? Like the most benign shit.

SPEAKER_00 3:03:42

And I was And this is straight after Iraq.

SPEAKER_01 3:03:45

Yeah, bro. Straight after Iraq.

SPEAKER_00 3:03:46

Straight after, yeah. One of the again, like you said, one of the most successful operations. And obviously Trump spoke about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:03:52

Yeah, man. I thought there'd be like a ticket parade for fucking Tucumana down the main street of fucking Sydney or something. No see you cunt. Of you go.

SPEAKER_00 3:03:58

No one cared about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:03:59

Nah, and I and I think no one really knew about Australian soldiers being in. No fucker was on Instagram or no no fucker was on a podcast at that point talking about it. I was it was just like this happened, it's done now. ISIS don't exist. Off you go. And I was like, wow. Even people in the unit didn't care, man. If you weren't on the next trip, they're like, oh well, oh now it's the war's over, you guys won it. Good on your charlie company, there's no more trips to the rest of us. And I'm like, well, let's do a lessons learnt. Yeah, let's go to the range. Oh, okay. And then honestly, this I've been through some sad, sad things in my life. Like I put a lot of those boys in body bags, and um we've lost friends, we've we've done things, but packing up my locker, packing up my grot at two commando, knowing I would never be back in this position, I would never be back in the teams again through no fault of my own, it was like heartbreaking. Oh, I just like slowly packed up my grot. No, I was there, it was like a Sunday just playing sad songs, you know. Um, and um yeah, went up to the school and became an instructor. And the moment I got there, everyone was pissed off and they're like, can't just switch over and be a shooter. You've done everything. And and some of the guys that you know, like um I think I've heard you say their names on potties and stuff that we all really respect, like, but say, like, he's like, I'll have you in my platoon as a shooter right now, I'll sign the paperwork, like fuck that. And then some people at like the SFTC were like, nah, but other SIGs have done that in the past and been shit. And they're like, Yeah, but this cunt, he's integrated, and I've got the receipts and I'll post them. I was at that point, we used to rank who shooting skills, shooting standards, got printed out and posted on the wall. I was the fourth best shot in the platoon, full of operators, and I took a photo of it as evidence because I know someone's gonna call me on this, and I'll post it up. And and I I was integrated, man. I loved it. I love the marshall skill sets more than the bear stuff, but the bear stuff got me trips. A junior shooter can't get on the deployment. Of course, yeah. Whereas there's always a spot for the bear.

SPEAKER_00 3:06:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:06:12

But if a short notice task comes up for a PSD, all the senior dudes go. That's it, yeah. Little swan trip. Yeah. But the bear, well, we have to send a bear regardless. Gojo, you're gone again. Like, yeah, I know. That's why I did it. That's why I didn't want to switch over and be a shooter. I know personally I did my deploym more deployments than the dudes on my Rio who became operators. And and that's just fact, facts only, you know, like because I I I understood that. And I understood that when I eventually get out, I'll I'll have some pretty good skill sets to work in emergencies. And so I didn't want to switch over and be a shooter, but someone, a good friend of mine who was the JTAC who killed little Derwesh in Afghanistan standing next to me on the hill that day, put that 30 mil into little Derwesh against the wall. He called me out of the blue and he was like, mate, I've heard what's going on. You're fully qualified to be a combat controller in four squadron. All we have to do is put you on JTAC course. You're fully qualified. The minimum rank sergeant, you're on full SFDA, and we'll give you a married patch on the beach in Newcastle. Brother, chuck me the blue cams, bro. Like, you know, I I don't think courage lives in a hat badge. Our good friend Hamish says, you know, like I've seen cowards wearing green berets. We've heard of cowards wearing sandy berets. I've seen good cunts wearing those berets, but ultimately courage doesn't live in a hat badge, man. And I've seen the combat controllers in our in Iraq and Afghanistan do some real brave shit. Oh yeah. I know a combat controller with accommodations for gallantry for adjusting fires off his map and killing all these cunts, like brave dudes, man. They've done a lot for that capability.

SPEAKER_00 3:07:52

Troy knight.

SPEAKER_01 3:07:53

Troy knight, weapon, weapon. So I was like, oh, what do I need to do then? He goes, Well, we're running a recon course run by the SAS at Singo like in a couple weeks. If we panel you on that course and you don't fucking fuck it up, we will make you a combat controller and you can post over. I try I what's it called? Like service transferred. I service transferred from Army to Air Force. Army to Air Force, and they just like literally, I got to the grots and they just threw me a sergeant rank slide and said, Slip that on, bros. You're now going to the next JTAC course isn't here for like another year. So to get your pay and everything sorted to make you fully qualified and get the beret. Um, the next course is actually no one's ever done it, but there's a special operations JTAC course in America and destined in Florida. Do you reckon you'll you reckon you back yourself? You'll be the first Aussie NCO to ever pass the special operations JTAC course with the SEALs, the rangers, the green berets? I'm like, yeah, have a look at me, cunt. Have a look at me. I ripped my shirt off. What do you reckon, cunt? And um sent me over, bro. What do you reckon? So there's a lot of JTACs that have been on your podcast, yeah, but not a lot of so tax. Interesting. So I'm a special operations tack, not a JTAC. Yeah. Ah, that's gonna hurt some feelings. Nah, but um, same same course, just I did in America. Yeah, and it was in Florida, and it was summertime. Oh my god. Yeah, Destin, Florida. There's a thing called Crab Island where you just every weekend was just how you're going. And and obviously they love us. We've got a good reputation. I wasn't just a lid coming through the pipeline learning how to be a JTAC. I'd done stuff and and had been there. So I could relate to them. They're like, oh, where you from? Two come on. I'm like, yeah, yeah. And they're like, we were with you guys in Camp Cole. What year were you in Afghanistan? Oh, 2013. Yeah, me too. And like, you know, instantly you're like, oh, yeah. So it was, it was really good, and they were really welcoming. And that course was sick. So I come back to Australia, just had to do a few competencies here to make the Australian JTACs happy that I was fucking I'd done the same course, and um, they were really good about it. The the boys put me through some some drills um out here and and I did a few drops, and I'm a fully qualified Air Force Combat Controller with four squadron under the tutelage of one Havoc 06 Troy Knight. Yeah. Um, so I was Havoc 3-7. That was my call sign. And uh very I love those dudes, man. Very proud of them. I I think their capability is phenomenal, and um I think that a lot of the junior operators in both regiments might be paying that capability off lately because they haven't seen what the CCTs did as JTACs in Afghanistan, man. Those boys are good, they are slick and they can run with the teams and they're fucking weapons. And I had like I had grunts that I did like fucking sub one in Townsville with calling me and be like, Oh, I heard you switched over and became a Rafi. Like, what a gay count. What are you doing? Are you serious? And I'm like, you've never do you know what a combat controller is? Exactly right, yeah. Yeah, and and it was like um, yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 3:11:15

Yeah, I hope because you for the regular army, we never really had any combat controllers, we only had JTAX with us.

SPEAKER_01 3:11:22

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Every day the CCTs are chipping away at it. They got the budget that they have is separate from the army, yeah. Air Force money. So all the kit, bro, like the regul, like the two commando and SS JTAX would come over here to upskill and training, and all the boys like we had the kit, man, Gucci kit, big budgets, good pay, and they just got bumped up to the same um pay scales as as SOCOM. So that at their minimum rank, they're on 180,000 a year, and they've got a married patch, fucking five-bedroom house here in Yui. Life's good, man. Yeah, and you don't have to deal with the army shit. Exactly right. It's fucking good. I'd recommend it. Yeah, um, but I fucked myself. Injury? Yeah, bruh. So we did Talisman Sabre up in uh in Darwin. What year is this? It was a little bit before this, right? It was yeah, it was a little bit, it was a little bit before this, and I I skipped over this part because it was just before Mosul. And we were doing a jump at night, 10,000 foot at night over Darwin square chute, and I long story short, the plane was going too fast. He put the green, the pilot put the green light on. It was an American aircraft before we had Spartans, it was a little mini C-130, and we all exited, everyone had a bad exit. One dude broke his pelvis, one dude's chute opened at about 500 feet. No one knows how he lived from 10,000 to 500, and that's when his chute deployed, hit hard. Other dude broke his arms, like we all just couldn't make the DZ because we all had malfunctions at 10,000 feet, and so we couldn't make the clearing, say eight kilometers away or wherever it was that we're gonna glide down to because we all opened so low sorting our chutes out that we would just have to land in the Darwin wilderness, and it was like little estuaries with fucking crocodiles. Man, it was it was like coming down. I was like, Oh my god, just avoid the rivers. And I chose like the smallest tree I could, and I fucking just before you come into land, you pull your chute. Uh sorry, you pull you know, you pull your cord to drop your lowering line. Is that what it's called? Lowering line? Yeah. CS. You know, you pull that cord and five minutes below, it drops down. My pack's like 50, not 50 kilos, probably 30 kilos, 35 kilos for a three-day job with the bear equipment and it wrapped around a fucking tree branch. Oh, you're meant to cut it away, right? Like you're meant to, the drill is you pull the other one and it and it and your kit will just drop and you'll never find it again, probably. I had the top secret bear equipment. I would never you might as well just tie that in a knot around my power. I'm never pulling that because imagine if you do live and you like the first thing they say, where the fuck's the bear equipment? So I just rode it in and it got wrapped around a branch and just catapulted me into the ground, and I was fucking hit hard, and I could feel like parts of my body were on fire, but on the radio, the SIGs like, I've gone in, I can't walk, I can't feel my legs. He's fucked himself, and I was like, Oh no. And I I pretty much like cached my shoot and everything and went like 8Ks to him to help him. And then when I get there, like the ambulance and then all that get there, and like he's fucked. They give me all his SIG equipment as well. Oh, and I'm gonna carry that for the rest of the exercise. And um the next morning we woke up, like, job's over, and I could not move my leg and my neck. And uh turns out I broke my spine in three places. Shit. And uh I have uh no ACL in my right knee. So I went and got scans, got sent home back. That was in Darwin, got sent back to Sydney, and they printed out like these form, like the MRI, they printed out the form and gave it to me like take that back to the med center. I was about to deploy Mosul. I put it in my pocket and I went to Mosul. So I went, I did the whole Mosul deployment with no ACL and a fractured spine in three places in my cervical spine, like the I think they call it like shovelers fucking something. The little spinous process, they all snapped off, so I don't have them anymore in the back of my neck. Um, old custard neck. And the RAF, when I service transferred to the RAF, they cottoned on. They're like, it says here you were fucking Kazakhd for like a serious injury in Darwin. And what what happened there? And I pulled out the paperwork, I'm like, oh, here you go. And like, can't, that means you still don't have an ACL. I'm like, doesn't it grow back? Like, no, can't. No, it does not. So I was fighting the RAF medical staff. They're trying to medically discharge me. I'm like, no, no, I just Scotty, I'm sweet. I had to do the S-Fed again to switch over. They made me do the S-Fed again with the selection boys, yeah, but not do selection. So I did it. I beat everyone in the run. Special Forces entry test. Yep. I came first, flogged, flogged everyone, nothing like 15 minutes. I did for 14 minutes on selection in 2012. It was pretty much a similar time fucking years later, after all this shit with no ACL, broken spine. And um, they're like, no cunt, you're fucked. We're kicking you out. And I was fighting it, and my the bosses was the to their credit. One of the bosses came into my uh as my support person and like fully backed me. He's like, this cunt's the fittest cunt here, he fucking blah blah blah. We can't lose him. And I fought it for as long as I could, but I was in extreme pain. Like I couldn't do a 90-degree squat, like I was fucked. But we don't do PT in special forces, so it's PT at own pace. So I'd do my own thing and I got away with it. But when I went back to the regular army to do IET shit, they made me do PT every day, and I was in agony taking bulk like stuff to get through the pain. Um, but when I switched back to the RAF, I was like, okay, I might be able to hold on a bit longer. Then something happened. Something happened at work, and it was the last day of my career. That was it, yeah. That was it. And uh so reference this like something happened, three years of my life, I'll never get back. I was in a lot of trouble. And uh at the end of it, like I can only talk about facts. I signed a document, a court order, it's called a service of agreement. It's like an NDA for a legal process, and uh um basically saying, I will never talk about what happened. They can't say what happened, what, what happened on their side from their point of view, but I can't say what happened from my point of view. Whether it's good or bad, I don't know. But at the end of the day, facts only, I've never been convicted of a crime in my life, despite everything that's happened to me. And uh I can't talk about those three years. I'll never get back.

SPEAKER_00 3:18:06

And so when I see sorry, so when you say we'll keep this loose, when you say you haven't been charged with anything, but you were investigated for something that happened on operation.

SPEAKER_01 3:18:17

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. As in something similar to kind of everything going on now, and and and it's um uh Was it any other commandos in the same boat? I think there was 400 of them. Oh, yeah. And um almost everyone went and and played the game. And and and I can say in general, like lawyers told me at one point it was like if someone with rank is telling you to do something, whether it's a cop, a security guard, or maybe not a security guard, but a cop, border force, when someone tells us, even as a special forces like guy, is like, hey, do this right now. You're ordered to do this, you do it, especially if it's a cop. Um, you follow directions because you recognize rank in society. Like right now, if a cop tells me, cunt, stop jaywall. And I'm about, yep. Um, I look and I'm about sorry, Sarge, my bad. And he just thinks I'm some random punter. Because we respect rank, like because we we've been through the we're indoctrinated. You could say we're brainwashed, and a lot of those 400 dudes played the game, they did what they were told to do. I did not, I did maybe the opposite, and I crashed out and I uh sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say it's something I do, and um, I'm from Campbelltown, you know. Like at the end of the day, like we don't cooperate with police. You're doing drive-by's at 14. I love every cop that I know. Yeah, I um I'm a I'm a big fan of law enforcement, I'm a believer in what they all do, and I love listening to all the potties and and and a lot, as you know, a lot of my friends are cops and ASIO employees, ACES employees. Um, but um, yeah, if you try and force me to do something that's ultimately gonna dog the boys, I'm swinging. Anyway, yeah, so um, yeah, I got out of the army. Um, I was suspended for I think nine months on full pay. Out of the Air Force, yeah, out of the Air Force, yeah, yeah. Shame. Oh my god, I've got to hang up my blue cams. But um, yeah, man. And and but the good thing is is that I was meant to go do one thing, and instead of doing that, I went to the med center and uh I was able to have multiple surgeries to fix my broken body. And um, I've got a dead dude's uh knee now, like all the bits holding it together. I was someone that died and donated it to me. So shout out to that fella. It still hurts, but I can walk, and um they can't fix my spine, it's like too dangerous, but um yeah, life's good, man. Trying to stay healthy, trying to stay fit. And I I got out of the military and um moved into the the bought house on the beach and fucking met all you mad cunts. Yeah, yeah, started a potty just like for the boy, like essentially just for the boys. Like, oh, this is which was epic, which just I don't know how it happened, but it went viral. And in 20, like during COVID, it it ended up being like number three in the whole of Australia. Yeah, it was like Joe Rogan, some random podcast, then me, Bedtime Warriors, then Hamish Nandy. And Hamish Nandy had a million followers, and it was just me with like a shitty hundred dollar microphone, like saying these yarns in more detail. Yeah, it was like 22 episodes. I had some guests on. I had one guest on that I tried to get on called Machine Gun Day, right? And he told me a story about a horrific incident that happened to him that he really it hurt him, it ruined his his life, his career, his mental health, and he's doing well now. But I got him on to tell that story that we all knew to give people a bit of perspective on like what was going on in the media. This is before like Schulze got arrested, well before any of the real shit came out, and people were so like because I hosted the podcast, they accused me of war crimes. It's like I'm I'll joke about war crimes all the time because to me it's a joke because the investigation was a joke and the way that it was handled was a joke, and we won't talk about it because what I did on your debrief. So it was like we we think it's disgraceful and a joke, so we're gonna take the piss out of it to disarm people who are killing themselves over it. And I was like, Well, I'll make people have a laugh, you know. Or I know how to make people laugh, I'll do that. I want to be a comedian, I'm gonna do stand-up comedy. Um, and uh that's where it was going. I was gonna do what Jared Gownry's doing right now, and I wrote out all these fucking stand-up sets and everything and had it all planned out, and then the media just kept canceling me. I I had to go through like three Instagram accounts, my my Spotify got deleted, my accounts got deleted, I got removed from Apple, and it was all like the government has stepped in and removed this.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:45

Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:22:45

You can FOI it. Um FOI, go, it's Gojo, FOI, defense, and and it's all publicly available. But anyway, that's all in the past. I got a job um over in Korea and uh started working for the Korean Defense Force for three years doing some uh technical stuff, like teaching them how to do things that we did on operations. And um during COVID, I was the only one on the plane flying back and forth.

SPEAKER_00 3:23:10

I remember, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:23:10

Yeah, I get to I get to the fucking airport and it's like it's empty. And they're like, Who the fuck are you? Everyone's in lockdown, and you're catching a business class flight to Korea? Like, yeah, bruh, Scojo, you might have heard of me. Listen to bedtime warriors, and so I was bored and I was in Korea, like working in a foreign land. I don't want to go out and fucking look at a temple on the weekend. So I'd record podcasts just for the boys, but they went viral and uh just because I guess they're a bit more graphic than your well, it's the storytelling.

SPEAKER_00 3:23:39

You've got the you've got the the gift, the gift of the gab.

SPEAKER_01 3:23:42

Yeah, the gift of the gab. Which is weird because I I look up to all like I I can't ever compare myself to what the Anzacs did. And to be when I got to Kapu Kapuka, you know, when I got thrown a slouch at and someone referred to us as Anzacs, oh it was the greatest fucking thing in the world. So I don't want to take any of the shine off them, and but we do have stories to tell, you know, and we I tried to I the like I think I said in almost every episode at the end was like, if we don't laugh, we cry. And there's so many dudes killing themselves, and I'm not a big mental health advocate, like probably the worst, but I could see my mates killing themselves all the time, and I was like, well, maybe if people laugh, like I I can't ever see someone killing themselves while they're laughing, you know. Like if you're having a if you're on a good chuckle, you're not gonna rack your nine mil and blow your brains out. You it's when it's when you're not laughing, it's when you're by yourself and you're thinking about all these hard memories, and like my mate tried to kill himself, like one of the dudes I just discussed in the potty, and I was like, can't, what are you doing? But I I didn't know how to how to deal with it. So I was like, I'm gonna do a podcast right now on that time that you uh did that thing in in Iraq, and we we laughed about it for like a good hour on the phone, and he he's still alive to this day. And maybe it's something I did, maybe it's something it's not, but that's what I was trying to do, man. And and the government took that away from me, man. Yeah, and journalists like they they conspired like they're doing with RS now. We see the relationship between journalists and the government. Um, when they want someone to shut up, they'll find things, man. The way to do it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm waiting for a Me Too fucking you know, Scojo took a shit in my toilet during a room inspection. He's an animal. Like, yeah, I did, man. I I never claimed to be a good person, but here we are.

SPEAKER_00 3:25:30

So yeah, well, obviously, like you just speaking about, you obviously got these jobs in Korea and you moved into other other roles, and you know, sticking within that technology-based yeah, and you know, obviously what you're still currently doing.

SPEAKER_01 3:25:42

Yeah, and uh, we're in Ukraine now. Um, I'm a suit wearer, um, but when I go over there, I get to hang out with obviously the boys that um you've had on your potty and um Sid and um and and uh Traveler Oz and all those boys, they're all over there um and they've got some amazing yarns to give, and we've talked about that before. And I um go over there to learn modern technology and then bring it back and then try and implement things that we can use for our ADF and our law enforcement to protect people, you know. Like look at what's going on in in uh in Ukraine, and we haven't adopted any of that. There's plenty of people saying that online, it's no surprise, but um, we also developed some technology that um we think will will change the battle space and it's non-kinetic, not trying to kill cunts anymore, just trying to um protect the boys, you know, keep people safe, and um it's keeping me busy and I enjoy it and I love it. And I can go to the beach and have a surf and hopefully my knee stays together, but like fuck mate, I'm falling apart. Broke my ankle last year, as you know. Fucking then I'm limping on the other leg and then my hammy blows out because I'm compensating, my hips go, and I'm just having surgeries and fucking cortisone injections just to get by, as we all are. But um these moments where you get to hang out with the boys and talk about military stuff is what I look forward to most, man. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 3:27:06

Yeah. And just quickly, where did you get in contact with uh Geo and Andy Arrobito, spec operator?

SPEAKER_01 3:27:11

Yeah, so when I was working for the um obviously I I deployed with them. I was in in Mosul there and and Geo Is that where you meant them? Yeah, Geo, Gio was the bear. So we would we would talk on on chat and coordinate airstrikes together. So he would be like, We're we're here, we're getting pizzled by this this team. Can you locate them and kill them for us, please? And and I would oblige.

SPEAKER_00 3:27:33

Yeah, and just give the listener a bit of a background on Geo and obviously the edit galley and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:27:37

Yeah, yeah. So Geo, um, my friend, he was the equivalent of my job for the SEALs, SEAL team five, I think it was. And um, they had two platoons in Mosul, and we're all working together to support the Iraqis, whether it was the CTS, Iraqi Special Forces, or their federal police clearing Mosul. And um those boys were going harder. We had eventually commandos going out as well. Um, in the end, I don't think that's been spoken about, but I know some of the boys got some some uh IDF off and got some uh some blood. And um so two commandos were in contact in in Mosul as well, but it's not really spoken about and it um wasn't anywhere near the level that like the SEALs were engaging at. And I was helping Gio, so we became tight. Then I had to do some work in America when I was doing the Korean stuff. I got sent to a conference in San Diego. I was like, Geo, I'm coming over. And um he was staying at Andy Arrobito's house, so I spent I went to day one of the conference, morning one. There was no like swipe in. I was just like, there's like a thousand people in this room. You know what a conference is like. Yeah, fucking walked straight out, went to went to Andy Arrobito's house. We grabbed all these guns, and me and Gio were just fucking doing our thing and and traveling around San Diego giving uh giving the hobos a hard time. And um it was he was doing the we were walking around the streets of San Diego.

SPEAKER_00 3:28:56

I love seeing these videos on Instagram.

SPEAKER_01 3:28:58

Oh mate, we had ISIS flags, just having a ball, man. We had we were having an absolute ball, and then um Andy obviously putting us up, we'd go out for dinner every night with all like the San Diego SWAT teams and stuff, and um, I love all those boys, they looked after me, and we'd go to Andy's factory at Half-Face Blades and hang out and fucking make some knives and stuff. And um then, you know, Gio uh was the main witness in Eddie Gallagher's war crime accusation trial where there was again some jealous fuckwits in the SEAL teams that were absolute coward, pathetic cunts that were literally complaining because like Eddie drank some of their Red Bulls from the free from the team free Joe. He ate one dude's um peanut butter fucking cookie stuff. It's like if you leave your peanut butter spread around, I'm gonna eat it too, cunt. You know how much of that stuff I stole off the seals? It was probably me that actually ate it. And um, so they they just had a big sook, much like the witnesses against RS. They they get jealous and they have a sook. Eddie's getting post-noms for doing shit out on the leading sniper teams out there, and these cunts having a sook. So they went through that war crime trial. Eddie was in the brig for eight months, and Geo was one of the only dudes. Surprise, surprise, the SIG, the only dude to stand up on on trial and and back him. And he he got acquitted. And um, yeah, Gio came over to my house and and lived with us for a bit and stayed with us, and I was trying to get him to stay here, find him a job in our community because he's got a top secret clearance as well, and and we were trying to look after him because we knew his mental health wasn't too good. Yeah, trying to get him on the potty too, trying to get him on, but and we with me and you and Border, everyone were hanging out and having brews and looking at boobs, walked past because he was a ripped massive unit. He would have he was doing specimen. He was doing damage when he was here in Bondi, but he would have done a lot more damage full time, and but yeah, unfortunately he went home and blew his brains out, like um, and then the next time I went over, I was saw him in his coffin, man. It was yeah, uh horrible. But that is the game we play, man. Demons catch up to people, and yeah, that's why I was doing what I was doing at the time. And now I think a lot of other people have taken the torch, you know. I can sit back and just post dumb photos with captions, but um, other people, there's a lot of pages doing funny shit, meme pages, podcasts, fucking merch that's funny as fuck. Like, good on you boys, yeah. And go forth. I'm gonna I'm gonna take my foot off the accelerator and just um live live and enjoy life that I missed, you know, my whole 20s, and maybe Real Madrid will still call me one day, you never know.

SPEAKER_00 3:31:30

A few more Instagram posts, eh? It's sure. Yeah, here and there, man. There's about we we need it. The people need it. There's the thousands of photos in there, but yeah. My favorite was uh the cross with the tins.

SPEAKER_01 3:31:41

Ah, yes, Jesus died for our tins. But I don't know, someone reported that as like anti-Christian post or something and got taken down, but we we just keep trying.

SPEAKER_00 3:31:50

Needs to be on the back of a shirt, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:31:52

Jesus died for our tins on Easter, but um yeah, man, uh it's it's it's phenomenal, man. I thought I'd just be showing my grandkids these photos one day, but now everyone's seen them.

SPEAKER_00 3:32:02

Yeah, cool, yeah, 100%. And uh, well fuck, I guess, yeah, shit. That that's epic. The saints' story is out there. That's yeah, yeah, that's your career, that's your life, that's your story. Yep, and pretty wild. There's a lot of wild things in there, especially the dead bodies off the back of truck stuff. That's wild. That's that's yep, that's that's the stuff where the ADF's like, oh fuck, how do we not control that properly? Nah, and someone had to do it. I know someone had to do it.

SPEAKER_01 3:32:31

Probably probably should have been a shooter, let's be honest. You know, you guys are tougher than me. I'll do it. Nah, scourge, I'll do it, mate. Give me the gloves. Um, but I don't regret anything I did, and if I had to do it all again, I would because I had a phenomenal career. I got some amazing experiences, and I would there's a lot of topics right now in the media, like should people uh join the army or not? I fucking I probably still would, you know. I've been through everything, I've had the shit kicked out of me by the the ADF, but I would still join again in a heartbeat. And that's just me personally, because I think any anyone would.

SPEAKER_00 3:33:08

Yeah. Any anyone that's been in the defence force, yeah. Same as the cops. The the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:33:13

Murph, Murph would go. If someone called Murph and said you want to go back to highway patrol tomorrow in Fairfield, he'd fucking Raptor 13.

SPEAKER_00 3:33:20

Fucking one, version one.

SPEAKER_01 3:33:21

He'd throw his lawnmower off a cliff and get back in a fucking patrol car. So we we love it. We're we're certain people are built for this, you know, certain people are wired for it, and I didn't know I was because I just want to be a soccer player, but if um that doesn't pay the bills if you're shit, so you gotta get a real job. Grow up Peter Pan and uh yeah, they say that like when you leave the army, like they were they were concerned when I discharged that it was like I I I think I'm fine, but they were like, hey, five to seven years from now, that's when people kill themselves. And at the time I was like, don't fucking say that, can't but then uh you look at some of the people that we've lost, and then you're like, You're in that period now. Yeah, I'm in that period now, and uh just uh well you got another year. I am having some bad dreams.

SPEAKER_00 3:34:08

Who knows? Might be at uh Jared Gandry's show tonight.

SPEAKER_01 3:34:11

Yeah, I might just stand up on stage and blow my brains out. But I'm not allowed to own firearms in this state, God.

SPEAKER_00 3:34:16

Shout out to New South Wales Police. Um, all right. Well, I guess we'll just move on to the final part of the podcast. A couple of final questions, and we'll wrap it up and we'll go see our man Jared. Jazza. Uh first question, but uh before that, you know, I appreciate you coming on and finally, like as I said, one of the most requested podcasts wanted people the people wanted to hear. It's just been the Scojo show. You've just spoken the whole time. I've just sat here and just listened, which has been great because you know, I I I do know a lot of your story, and we've spent a lot of fucking time together the last few years, and um I know your story, but again, a lot of the people out there have just seen your Instagram and didn't really know the full story. Now they've got the full story, you know. Outside of that three years redacted, yeah, yeah. They've got the full story. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:35:01

When I die, you can tell that story. Yeah, a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 3:35:04

Oh she's saucy. It should be in about a year when he blows his head off. Yeah, yeah, a few hours. I'm triggered from this podcast, all these flashbacks. But um, yeah, I I think it's been great. And um, like you said, if you're out there listening, fuck the defense force is the way to go. Maybe hold off for a little bit just to piss the government off because it's probably time to rebel against the government for a little bit, make them struggle a little bit and then join next year. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:35:31

But you know, like when the stock market crashes, that's the time to invest. Yeah, exactly. The ADF's crash right now, we can get in there. It's crashed completely so you can get whatever you want, whatever job you want. Steal shit. Like now's a good time if you're in the ADF to go around stealing stuff. They're worried about fucking war criminals.

SPEAKER_00 3:35:45

Yeah, yeah. Go put a fucking pistol in your pocket and walk out. That's it. Yeah, they can't charge everyone. That's it. Just burn down the Q-Store like have it in three hours in 2005. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:35:53

Whoops. Oh no, where'd all those guns go?

SPEAKER_00 3:35:55

Q records went with them, too.

SPEAKER_01 3:35:57

Sell some 66 millimeters to the bikes. It's a fucking good side hustle.

SPEAKER_00 3:36:01

That's been done. Oh no, that's been done. Um, all right, uh first question what advice can you give to people just to keep on, keep it on, complete any goal they set their mind to and to crush in life. Yeah, odds were stacked against you, and oh mate. I was obviously crushed your your dreams were crushed, and they're not becoming a fucking professional football player.

SPEAKER_01 3:36:20

Yeah, failure actually. Now that you reminded me, um loser. I would say don't take advice from me. That's that'd be my advice. Like, you're just gonna get yourself into trouble. Um, I think if I could give people advice, I think the most advice I get asked for in my DMs is some 12-year-old kid in high school asking whether he should go SAS or commandos, which is a daily occurrence. And I think yeah, right. Like you'll worry about fucking just getting phones or fucking finishing high school coming. Like, I didn't know that I wanted to be a commando until I was fucking almost on selection, man. So um, and even then I ended up switching over to be a Rafi because it turns out I'd actually rather be over here doing this. So don't ask when when I went for selection, I wasn't messaging people on fucking Instagram, yeah, washed up fucking broken veterans about what I should should and shouldn't do, man. If you really want it, you'll know. You don't need to ask anyone. You think BRS, Ben Robert Smith, and Mark Donaldson were messaging people on MySpace, hey, what should I do? SAS selection? I heard it's really hard. Like the like think about what you're asking, yeah, and who you're asking, man. I have this thought in the back of my mind. I'm not saying it it's it's true, but like if you if you have to ask a question about selection, you're probably not gonna pass. That's just my gut feel. Like you need someone to inspire you to do selection. Well, when it's fucking tough and it's fucking week five, and your fingers are falling apart, you've got blisses all over you, you've got prickly heat, you miss you misses, you're fucking absolutely cooked, and then some cunt standing over you calling you a fucking faggot. That that fucking attitude of like, I need someone with me to tell me I'm gonna be a good commando and good luck, mate, you can do it. That's not there. Yeah, you gotta want it. Yeah, you gotta have a bit of cun about you and do your own research. Yeah. So my advice is don't ask me for advice. Don't ask anyone for advice.

SPEAKER_00 3:38:24

You know, I think advice, yeah, different. Maybe a tip. I'll give you the tip on my penis. Maybe wear the these boots or these socks. Yeah. You know what I mean? But that's yeah, anyway. Do your own research. Yeah. Don't listen to Scoja. Yeah, don't listen to me, you fucking. You'll be fucking doing drive bys with cap guns. Uh second question, what you know, uh serious one, what's what scares you most in life?

SPEAKER_01 3:38:49

It used to be failure. It used to be like in terms of military, it was always like letting the boys down. Like dudes went down with heat on missions, like real missions, and had to get carried out. You've seen it. Yeah, right. Like it it's fucking hot over there and it's hard work. And dudes would pass out and go down with heat stroke on a fucking job.

SPEAKER_00 3:39:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:39:12

And like that was probably my biggest fear. Like getting injured. Yeah, not like if you get shot or blown up, like whatever. But but going down and letting people down, getting lost was like my biggest fear, always. And I would stay, I would, I would put so much time into making sure like I knew where everything was in my mind. Like I didn't need a map, I knew exactly where I was going. And I think failure was probably something that scared me the most. And luckily, I never failed. So I haven't actually found my fear yet. Never quit selection, came a commando, deployed, won a war.

SPEAKER_00 3:39:44

Oh, save that for the quite book. Yeah, one day I'll know what failure. Write that one down, Hamish. Write that one down. Yeah, yeah. Uh, mate's uh third question. Uh tell us something about you that people don't know. Guilty obsession. We know you love oak, Milo.

SPEAKER_01 3:40:00

I do, everyone knows that. Sometimes I like to stand in a park in a trench coat and when people walk by and jump out and show my dick at them. Um nah, I think I I I hear this question a lot, and I think the only guilty obsession I have that's kind of obvious, but because I come from like a corporate background, like I was I was in an office job and then I joined the army, and I I don't enjoy like going camping or anything. I enjoy like shooting stuff, but you can do that without going camping. Um, you just go to Western Sydney and spray a house. But like I hated in Afghanistan and Iraq how much I smelt, right? Like you don't notice, you know you stink, and you haven't had a shower for six months. That ammonia smell, that smell, man. Smell is stale. And every time we came back from a deployment and you roll back through Dubai and you walk into the mall and you smell like Sapora and Mecca, and I was just like, when I smell it was like overpoweringly beautiful. I was like, I never want to smell bad again. Never want to be dirty every day. And you're the same. I smell you sometimes. I hate it. I smell you when you're asleep. And you moisturize it. Yeah, like we and cologne. Cologne. Like, but not like fucking chemist warehouse. Like we're talking Tom Ford. Yeah, Creed. Yeah, Creed. Like at a minimum standard, you got like on the go, some like$400 bottles of cologne.

unknown 3:41:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:41:18

I know Creed bottle in that bag right now. Exactly. And I think that like it's a guilty little pleasure. Like, I won't leave the house without smelling good because I smelled bad for so long. I don't want to smell like a shit. Like shit can't go.

SPEAKER_00 3:41:28

Well, yeah, there's a certain person that comes out hunting with me, and he knows that I will not live fucking uncomfortably ever again. Me too, yeah. I need a shower. Yep. When we first started going hunting hunting, he would he wouldn't. He's like, ah, don't worry about it. Shower. I was like, can't. I'm gonna have a fucking shower. Yeah. I need a shower, I need a moisturizer, I need to be clean. I can't.

SPEAKER_01 3:41:48

And we're used to just sleeping in the dirt. Like, yeah. I slept in a puddle once and it was the fucking worst night of my life. But now, like my work, you know, put me up in like five-star hotels. You live that life now. And you have too, you know, you know. And now, like, it's like, uh, I don't want to go camping. You're not a peasant. Nah, I'm not gonna stay in a motel. But like, I grew up like veterans, especially dudes that deployed to Afghan, we're the closest probably thing to homeless people you could find. Like, we sleep had a better. We sleep in the bush, we stink, we had beards and long hair, and we're out just fucking being pests, weren't we, to society. That was our job in Afghanistan. We're the closest thing to homeless people.

SPEAKER_00 3:42:27

These homeless people get like at least 7-Eleven food here.

SPEAKER_01 3:42:30

Yeah, we didn't. We didn't, we had fucking whatever you brought with you and whatever you found. So, yeah, guilty obsession, like yeah, boys, get a nice cologne.

SPEAKER_00 3:42:38

Nice what do you what that's just on that top clone. What do you what do you what do you got?

SPEAKER_01 3:42:43

I have uh right now rotating between like Tom Ford Ombre Leather and Tom Ford or Wood. Yeah, I like that. Fucking good.

SPEAKER_00 3:42:51

Yeah, mine's Creed Aventus, expensive, but good. Keeps the wife happy, yeah. Uh fourth question, favorite movie TV show? What what do you what's uh what's the go to? Uh just fucking helmet cam footage.

SPEAKER_01 3:43:04

Yeah, helmet cam footage um trip videos. Um Menace to Society is my favorite movie of all time. And I used to watch that on repeat. That's those ones where like no matter what time it's on, I'll watch it's the most violent, I love it, confronting movie. And the whole premise for the movie, which is crazy, which later on in life would be so relevant, is like they murder a gross uh the clerk of the store, right? At the start of the movie, two boys like get into an argument and one ends up fucking murdering the cashier. They take the robbery take and the the tape, the surveillance tape where the murder occurred. The cops don't have them, but they but they have the tape, and the younger lad, the gobby lad, O Dog, he's at house party showing everyone the murder, like, watch me shoot this car, boom! And and it's like violent as fuck, and they're all like cheering, and then he has a falling out with a jealous dude, and that jealous dude mails the tape to the cops.

SPEAKER_00 3:43:58

And then it's like a current case idea.

SPEAKER_01 3:44:01

Yeah, yeah, and then that like the the movie ends with like them all going to jail over that murder. That if they had just got rid of the footage, yeah, nothing would ever have happened. Hell McCam. Yeah, go out and watch Mess to Society, especially if you're uh an SASR trooper.

SPEAKER_00 3:44:18

Uh music. We know you're a bit of a SA Bah.

SPEAKER_01 3:44:22

Yeah, brah, a bit of a fucking C Town. Man, yeah, grew up pretty cursor, one four. Um I went I went to school, like the school next to Cursor were the same age and stuff. But yeah, then like I joined when I got to Afghan, the the wall next to me had a dude we saw at the Bravery and Betrayal Docker, you can blow it out, but yeah, one of the biggest hicks I've ever met. Drove a fucking F-250 around Holesworthy back in the day, like no one now they're everywhere, but back then it was like fucking hell, what are you driving that around Sydney, Eastern suburbs and shit? And um, I used to he would just pump country music as loud as he could. So I'd wake up every day to like fucking you know, John. Lee Kenigan. Yeah, oh Lee Kenan. Yeah, he does lovely. And um, all the boys, the Wolf Brothers, like everyone just I really got into country just because like it reminded me of home. Like you're in Afghanistan listening to Lee Koenigan or Slim Dusty singing about home.

SPEAKER_00 3:45:15

A bit of slim.

SPEAKER_01 3:45:16

Yeah, man. All you do when you're back here is dream of deploying so you can shoot some kind in the face. But when you're there, you're like, man, I just want to be staring at the waves at the local beach and looking out over a field.

SPEAKER_00 3:45:27

And it's a vicious cycle, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 3:45:28

Yeah, and it never ends. It's just constantly chasing your tail, and yeah, that's what uh yeah, I got a wide range of music tastes, but yeah, mostly this in a podcast when I'm driving. Shout out to Zero Limits.

SPEAKER_00 3:45:40

Oh, shout out to Maddie Morris cracking podcast. Great buddy. Uh yeah, no, you like you said, it's it's a fucking just a never-ending vicious cycle. You're overseas, you start getting sick of it, like, oh fuck, I wish I was home. And you get home, a couple months in, you're like, oh fuck, I wish I was back overseas.

SPEAKER_01 3:45:55

Yeah. Everything just Afghanistan, all right, I had everything I needed.

SPEAKER_00 3:45:59

I know.

SPEAKER_01 3:46:00

Cheesecake at the mess, Milo.

SPEAKER_00 3:46:02

That was and that was a good thing about private contracting, because you do two months in country, come back, month back, and you just do that just for three, four, five years straight. Yeah. I deployed all the de facts.

SPEAKER_01 3:46:12

I in my time at the unit, I deployed every single year I was there. Yeah. Like in 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17. I was overseas in my whole middle of my 20s. And um, that's when you really should be like having kids, having a family. Yeah. So boys didn't do that, man. We put our lives on hold for the country. Yeah, you know. Yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:46:37

All right. Well, uh, if I'm sure people will know where to find you, Instagram. I've obviously now this podcast is coming out just before Anzac Day. Uh, by the time you just heard that right now, it's Anzac Day is probably two, three days away. So see us in Newcastle. We're gonna be in Newcastle. Come and see us, come have a beer. Come and fight me. Yeah, come and fight me. There's gonna be a few uh notable other influences kicking around as well. So it's gonna be a bit of a showing and newy, and good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:47:06

I look forward to it. Lest we forget.

SPEAKER_00 3:47:08

Lest we forget. Do you know how to tie a noose? I'm flying flashbacks. No, I appreciate it, brother. Thanks, mate.