you know your job as a breacher yeah and uh and the reason i want to cover that a little bit more extensively is because uh the amount of explosions that you've been uh that you've been that you've initiated i'm sure plays a tremendous part in in your downward spiral and and getting into the uh the alternative medicine and and that kind of stuff so you know you said you know you were a breacher at

10 and you guys were going out all the time you did one da it sounded like uh but then when you went over to development group you know it got a lot busier yeah i was you know training yeah so you know like and i know you you have no idea but if you had an estimate you know how many explosives did you do you think you may have detonated i'd say we're talking thousands yeah well i'd

say several hundred to a thousand yeah you know i'm trying to be conservative um just because of the multiple trips the training trips you know being rso range safety officer so then you know being the safety officer for guys that are you know blown breaching charges and then blowing them myself um it was definitely a lot yeah definitely a lot um because we're learning right sub-concussive blows um are are actually worse than you know

concussions falling concussions so we've i think we've all had a lot of those and again i always tell people you never know who it's going to happen to some people can yeah what did you just say what's worse than a concussion sub-concussive blows so sub yeah and again i i hope i'm getting this right but i'm i'm almost positive that the sub-concussive the repeated sub-concussive blows is what are causing

you know what is going on right now with the special operations community and why guys are having this quote-unquote operator syndrome what i obviously was experiencing is the constant um you know the the um the you know charge goes off blast wave goes through you charge goes off blast wave goes through you minor sub concussion blows maybe not you're not fully knocked out um but your bell is wrong

you know you eat that charge you feel it um just like in football when you get your your bell rung those are as an impact these are um you know blast yeah a little bit different but um but similar what they're you know what the end result is at the end at the end game which you're hoping not to get which is cte right um but all these mild tbis are you know they're adding up you know body keeps score i think there's a book oh the body keep score so walk us through like a standard pit on a target as a

breacher how close are you what are you using sure sure um so standard target um say i was carrying you know multiple breaching charges from you know tiny little little explosives i could just blow a small lock to you know heavy uh you know i'd say hey you know heavy heavy demolition charges that you know can blow a

um a reinforced you know steel like door on a compound and blow the thing and like cut it in half well how much is it c4 uh see i don't know if i want to get into the uh or maybe a haversack would be competitive haversack you're going to go through a wall yeah so you know if we blew if we blew a haversack we're you know blown through a wall um so i i wish i had the numbers if i

remember the pounds in the poundage but you know say we thought we say we below a pound charge or half a pound um on some of these door on some of these like you know big steel gates yeah we were doing that every night yeah and then again if i go back to training we may be doing that all week like hundreds of times over yeah right and in training we'd always make sure we got the standoff that we needed

there's minimum safe distance in combat we didn't there was no there was no ranged safety officer yeah you know like you are breacher like you're in charge of making sure everybody gets back everybody's out of the way nobody's looking at the charge if you look at the charge you could eat you know something a bolt a nut you know something that'll basically go through you um but really all we cared about is not seeing the charge so as long as we could not see it like we felt like a lot of times we were

good so we would be well inside mean safe distance as long as we're out of the blast zone not getting hit with a piece of frag so a lot of times we're eating that minimum safe distance we we were we were well inside that well like what would a minimum save distance be uh it's it's all figured off it's it's matt it's ma it's math it's easy math like so whatever the charge was again this is this is going to be wrong math but if it's a pound charge say i need to be 17 feet again those numbers are off but um

so instead of 17 feet i'm at like eight yeah right but there's a reason for that mean minimum safe distance because there was you know really smart guys engineers years ago that calculated all this and said by the way if you're in this distance like you're probably gonna have brain damage yeah right so we won't quote you on the minimum upside right saved yeah i don't i don't have i don't know the numbers like i said i've been i've been out of the game for a while but yeah you know we knew them at the time knew them at the time of course and you could just see what your standoff is but many times we were within

excuse me inside that means safe distance so that blast wave it is really [ __ ] you up it is it is jacking you up and there are sometimes i've had buddies tell me that hey man you remember that charge you set off remember you know multiple times that where we were in an enclosed area so like corners and walls and now that concussive blow yeah is just exasperated it's amplified two times three times who knows right yeah um i mean shattered your teeth literally

like it's crazy like headaches and i mean i did a thing recently we shot uh like maybe two three years ago i was doing like a watching some guys shoot a 50 cal for like three hours dude i had such a pounding headache like you know at the end i said well you know this is obviously why i'm not doing this anymore you know um but yeah i mean like i said as a breacher you're taking an explosive you're putting in a spot to make entryway into somewhere

and that when that thing goes off it is it is rocking your work it is going right through your brain yeah it's why we're having problems with our endocrine system why are hormone you know why are testosterone is down below 300 now when we get back from deployment um why guys can't sleep um why guys are gaining weight why guys are drinking so hard why they're depressed why they have anxiety you know doctors want to throw you know the

military wants to throw this ptsd diagnosis but like i don't even know what ptsd is you know if it's depression anxiety okay yeah i had ptsd but it's it's it's a brain thing this is this is definitely a brain thing we we me you maybe maybe you're not feeling it we have traumatic brain injury mild traumatic brain injury that may not be that may not be seen by other people but it's affecting us on a regular basis

yeah you know and some days we feel good and some days we don't um but again looking back at the history of events it's obvious what happened like i most likely started seeing some of those things early you know and then it just slowly slowly declined maybe took you know maybe it took a while i don't know i just want to go through that because i want you know i just want people to be able to visualize exactly how close

you are especially as a breacher he's done you know give or take a thousand you know what i mean yeah and again i you know i commend the ones that i did a thousand what about the guys that are in there for 25 or 30 years i've done 2 000 3000. yeah what what do their brains look like or what are they what are they going to look like how fast are they going to decline um [Music] you know explosives happen like you know when you see it like it's done that's

how fast they are right it's just like boom and you see the concussion you see the smoke you know you you eat that whole energy yeah i mean just for example like you know from my own personal experience for those of you that uh have never have never detonated a bomb or you know which is awesome by the way yeah it's fun as [ __ ] right but you can feel like um like a lot of times you'll feel like your sinuses almost feel like they're clearing out your ears if they're clogged they feel like they've just been drained like

yeah our master breacher i felt you know terrible for he again he's that guy who had two or three thousand charges and we'd do a trip and he'd um he he'd bleed from the nose and the mouth and call for blood and i'm like i don't think that's good yeah you know and again i'm telling you like right now what i'm doing is i'm seeing the bag of gold and i'm telling you it's [ __ ] heavy and i don't want to carry it instead of saying there's a lot of money there and we're going to be rich right like

i loved doing everything i did like don't get me wrong every you know but there was just some you know i loved all of it but there was a price yeah you know there's a price that nfl players you know when they stop playing at 35 if they're lucky enough to get to 35 like they're really they're jacked up you know they're jacked up but they'll never say they wish they never did that yeah right you