You ever heard of the Afghanistan War Commission? No, I’m not surprised. I have heard of it, but not for a while. Well, it seems as though the Afghanistan War Commission is gearing back up. They have been meeting, they have been doing whatever it is they claim they’re doing. But it seems as though now, as we are well into President Trump’s first year back in office, it seems as though now information is flowing a little bit freer. There’s a little more progress being made. But to what you ask? Well, that’s what we’re going to discuss today. We are going to discuss today this rejuvenation of sorts, or at least that’s what it seems of the Afghanistan War Commission and how it relates and integrates with the power of a personal story.

We’ve talked before on this show about how just learning from the mouths of people that have been there and done that in any situation, not just war, but anything, cops, firefighters, teachers, business people, janitors, everybody always has a story to tell and it can be very impactful. We’ve discussed that many times. But let’s discuss today how this, this idea of story and the seemingly rejuvenation of the Afghanistan War Commission coincide. So stick with us. Don’t go away. We start now. Hey, folks, and welcome here to another episode of the Richard Leonard Show. And as always, if you’re new here, thanks for stopping by.

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And that is the advantage of Cortez Wealth Management. Carlos is an America first fiduciary and he wants to help you get down the road of the tax free retirement plan. So get on over to AmericaFirstRetirementPlan.com check out all the materials, contact them for any help or questions, and then make an appointment and start down this road. You deserve it. You owe it to yourself to have yourself as comfortable a position as you can when you decide to retire. So AmericaFirstRetirementPlan.com get on over there. Okay, now, the Afghanistan War Commission. The Afghanistan War Commission is a commission made up of lawmakers, bureaucrats in Washington.

And what they want to do is learn about what happened, what happened in Afghanistan and how did things work, what worked, what didn’t work, what was good, what was bad, how did the soldiers feel about it? Because now they are the ones that lived it. They ate it, they slept it, they shit it, they drank it, they were there and did the work. And so apparently this commission wants to understand more about that. And so now they have. Recently, I don’t want to say that they reconvene because I believe that they never really adjourned or broke up or whatever.

I believe that they’ve always been a commission and they’ve always been been there. Just we really don’t know much about it. But recently they have now found themselves in a position where they’re able to get information from the White House, from the dod, from other agencies within the government, and also have included this initiative to learn from the mouths of the men and women that fought the war that were there, that Lived this whole thing for 20 plus years. Which I gotta say, I don’t want to say that I was surprised, but I was pretty damn surprised because it doesn’t always seem like our government and our leadership outside of the military really give a shit about what the man and the woman who fought the battle really have to say about it.

Now they will welcome you home and they will celebrate you and they will recognize you and all those other things. But it is not very often that you hear the government asking to have a conversation with members of the military, whether current or former, about, well, what happened? What was the experience like? How did you feel? Did you feel like you were supported? Do you feel like the mission was worthwhile? Ultimately, I believe what they should be asking in these interviews, if they’re not, and we’re going to go over it, I found some news about it.

What they should be asking these men and women are, do you believe that the work you did there furthered good things for humanity, for our society, or the ones that you found yourself in while you were there fighting or doing whatever you were doing? Now, thinking about this and thinking about why people serve, why do people join the military? Well, people join the military, some of them can’t afford to go to college, can’t afford trade school. The military is a very good option for that to be paid for, for you. And in return, of course, you sign a blank check for the cost of your life to the government.

You, you risk having lifelong injury or ailments or conditions or illnesses or whatever, but you get something for it, or at least that’s what they say. And for many people it holds true. They’ve gotten things that were promised to them. I have. Although it was, it was a hell of a fight. If I would have gave up, I’d have been, I’d have been, I’d have been in a pretty shitty spot right about now. So what is it that these guys are really into? Let’s dive in here and we’ll try to get through this quickly because I, I have a lot of opinion about this and, and maybe it’ll get a little more aggressive once we hit, once we get through all this.

Anyway, this was, this, there was a, there was a series of interviews, a day or two of interviews done in Columbus, Ohio recently, very recently. Here we go. U.S. this is Columbus, Ohio. U.S. veterans of the war in Afghanistan are telling a commission reviewing decisions on the 20 year old conflict that their experience was not only hell, but also confounding, demoralizing and at times humiliating the bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission aims to reflect such veterans experiences in a report due to Congress next year, which will analyze key strategic, diplomatic, military and operational decisions made between June 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which happened.

Excuse me, which happened in August of 2021. The group released its second interim report on this last Tuesday, drawing no conclusions yet, but identifying themes emerging from thousands of pages of government documents. Some 160 interviews with Cabinet level officials, military commanders, diplomats, Afghan and Pakistani leaders and others in forums with veterans like one recently held at the National Veterans of Foreign Wars Commission in Columbus, Ohio. So they did this at the National Assembly. They have every year for vfw. Okay, that’s good. I guess, if you’re going to, if you’re going, if you’re looking to interview a bunch of veterans about their experience in war, VFW Convention is probably a good place to do it.

But I will say this. You know, the VFW is the Veterans of Foreign wars congressionally chartered organization. But I wonder if this commission plans on tapping into resources outside of things like the VFW or the American Legion, because what we know about those organizations, albeit they’re great, it’s a great place for veterans to meet, to have fellowship and that type of thing. What we do know about them is that enrollment and participation from the younger veterans in our communities is extremely low. And I believe that a lot of these places, especially VFW posts, are really trying, or at least intend on trying to engage younger veterans, I would say from the ages of 40 and under, maybe even 35 and under, because if you walk into a VFW in most places in this country, you’re going to find a lot of Vietnam veterans, you’re going to find some older, and then you’re going to find a lot of just anybody from the community who wanted to come in, have a beer and some chicken wings or a pizza or something.

They’re not as we know. They’re not as they used to be back when they first started, especially back in the 60s and 70s and things like that, when World War II veterans, maybe even some World War I veterans, if there was any left, Vietnam veterans and people that are just fresh getting home, they were there all the time. That was their place. In fact, I hear stories about my grandfather on my dad’s side who was at the VFW or the Legion multiple nights a week to play cards and have some drinks and things like that. And so they’re just not as well attended of establishments as they used to be.

And so, not that it was a bad idea to do this at the VFW convention, but my thought is they probably missed a lot of perspectives because there are a lot of veterans who don’t sign up for this stuff because they don’t want to be counted for whatever reason. So anyway, let’s, let’s continue what we can learn from the Afghanistan war. Asked an Aug. 12 discussion session with four of the commission’s 16 members, what they got was two straight hours of dozens of veterans personal stories. Not one of them was glowingly positive, and most of them were saturated in frustration and disappointment.

I think the best way to describe that experience was awful. And this came from a Marine veteran by the name of Brittany Daymond, who served in Afghanistan back in 2012. Also, Navy veterans Florence Welch said that the 2021 withdraw made her ashamed that she has ever served there. It turned us into a Vietnam, a Vietnam that no one that not one of us asked for. Which I can see the comparison, however vastly different. Vastly. Members of Congress, some driven by having served in the war, created the Independent commission several months after the withdrawal after an assessment by the Democratic administration of then President Joe Biden faulted the actions of President Trump’s first administration for constraining U.S.

options. A Republican review intern blamed Biden. Views of the events remain divided, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered yet another review this coming spring. So there is a, there is a report due any day now from this commission about these things, about what happened there. And as you probably can guess, Trump’s blaming Biden and Trump’s people are blaming Biden and Biden, if he even knows where the hell he’s at right now. But certainly his people are blaming Trump before him. And so this is exactly what I mean when I say that I was surprised to see that this is happening and also that they are incorporating veteran stories because this commission has been, has been meeting in.

Since when did they say this, this thing was put together several months after the withdrawal. We withdraw in August. So let’s just for, for conversation sake, say around November of 2021 to now. They haven’t really come up with much. They don’t really come up with much because they’re blaming each other. The Trump people are telling, telling us that the Biden people were incompetent and they didn’t do nothing. They didn’t give a shit. There was ulterior motives, somebody was getting rich and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those people are saying the same thing about, about President Trump and that he, he he limited our options.

He made us. He made us a target. He put us in situations that. That weren’t feasible just because he likes to talk big. And I think that now, now we can see that, whether you love him or hate him, now we can see that President Trump seemingly on. On some of this stuff, walks the walk. Not only talks to talk. I got to tell you, when I saw Putin and Trump walking down the red carpet and then they pan up to B2 bombers flying over Putin’s head, I thought to myself, all right, well, it’s confirmed. Uncle Donnie, old Teflon Don has some pretty big fucking balls on him.

And so things like that make me think that maybe the Trump people, Trump’s cabinet and all of his staff and all of his organization and his administration, maybe they’re telling a little bit more truth than the other side. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just my perspective. The commission wants to understand the bigger picture of a conflict that spanned four presidential administrations and cost more than 2,400American lives. So we’re interested in looking hard at the end of the US Engagement in Afghanistan, but we’re equally interested in understanding the beginning, the middle, and the end. That was a comment that came from the co chair, Dr.

Colin Jackson, the other co chair, Shamila Chandri. And if I. Again, if I butcher your name and you see this, I apologize. She said that the panel is also exploring more sweeping questions. So our work is not just about the US about what the US did in Afghanistan, but the what the US should be doing in any country where it deems it has national security interests. This is what she said. And not just should it be there, but how should it behave? What values does it guide itself by, and how does it engage with individuals who are very different from themselves? Look, man, if we as a country, and I shouldn’t even say if, I think that it’s probably.

If the world keeps going the way it’s going right now. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. We are engaged in another war somewhere in this world, and at this point, maybe even here on our own soil, hopefully not. Because I believe if it does end up starting here, whoever we are fighting against is going to be decimated. Absolutely decimated. Because here, not only do we have our military, but we have the Second Amendment and we have a lot of people with a lot of guns that love their property and love their communities.

So, anyway, but this seems to me like some DEI bullshit. If we are engaged in war and we’re sending troops there to fight a war. I don’t know that we need to be concerned about what the US should be doing in any country where it deems a national security interest. I don’t know that we should be concerned about, or at least our soldiers should be concerned about. Should we be there? But not only that. How should we behave and what values does it guide itself by? What values are we going to display? Well, I will tell you what, Ms.

Chandry. If we send young men and women to fight an enemy anywhere in this world, we are going to bring American values. We are not going to have our soldiers question whether or not they should be there, because the government should have already answered that question. And the government shouldn’t be sending soldiers somewhere that, that, that we. That we shouldn’t be anywhere anyway. We should already know that we’re going to war to fight a bad guy. We’re not. This, this idea. And we talked about this when I was deployed to Iraq, all of us together, when we.

Every now and then we would sit down and say to ourselves, what the hell are we really doing here? What is really going on? This idea they told us about, well, we are going to bring democracy to the country of Iraq. We are going to get Saddam Hussein out of power. We are going to find him. He is somewhere. He dug in deep, and he was. And then we’re going to bring democracy and freedom and hopefully leave some American values behind to help them thrive and become a wealthy, respected country once again. Is that the job? Is that the job of thousands and maybe even millions of soldiers? Should not.

We have thought about all of those things before. And if we are going to send soldiers there to bring democracy, why weren’t we trained on bringing democracy? Why, when we’re training to go overseas and be deployed to a forward area, why are we training on all these weapons systems and combat driving and combat lifesaver courses and medical stuff and things like that? Well, the answer to that is because it’s a fucking war. We’re going to fight a war. All the. All the moral compass bullshit should have already been talked about and figured out at levels above the men and women were sending there to maybe die for whatever this idea is that we had.

So things like this. Yeah, I believe when they’re interviewing these veterans about their experiences in Afghanistan, it doesn’t surprise me. What did they say up at the top here? It doesn’t surprise me that their stories were full of frustration and disappointment. It’s not a surprise. I mean, I think That I think that soldiers in general, soldiers are inquisitive, right? They, they want to know what’s up. And there’s always an effort to just give lower enlisted soldiers. I mean, every. We, as we know, everything comes from the top down. And so we only give, we only give the troops as much information as they need to get the job done to be effective.

And so I believe that if it’s not, if the mission is not clear and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, you’re going to get soldiers who are confused about why they’re going and doing what they’re doing. Are they going to do it? Yeah, for the most part, most of them will. We did. We didn’t quite understand exactly what the hell was going on. Were we there to bring democracy? Are we there to find weapons of mass destruction? Were we there to, to, to. To just destroy this insurgency that’s infiltrating the country? Maybe the answer is all of the above, but that’s not what it seemed like.

And so maybe, maybe we just are too low on the totem pole to really understand the bigger picture. But even I think that that’s bullshit. If you’re gonna send me out to eat IEDs on the side of the road and watch, and watch fucking RPGs fly at my, at my face and fly at my brothers and my sisters, why don’t you give me all the fucking information and then maybe we wouldn’t have to have things like convening councils to figure out what really happened. Maybe we should check our moral compass once we’re engaged in combat. Well, I’m here to tell you that once you’re engaged in combat, unfortunately for most people, your moral compass is pretty low on your priority scale at the given time.

Now, it absolutely moves back to some top position when the fire goes out. Which is why we find veterans who are depressed, they have survivor’s guilt, they didn’t like what they did. Maybe they killed innocent people. Who knows? All of the above. But at the time, while engaged in combat, moral compass isn’t very prevalent. Let’s continue. Jackson said one of the commission’s priority priorities is making sure that the final report due August of next year isn’t under recognizable to any veteran of the Afghanistan conflict. Their goal is to make sure that the nature of the report should be representative of every soldier, every sailor, every airman, and every Marine who had had an experience there.

Damon, the other co chair, told commissioners a big problem was the mission. You cannot exert a democratic agenda, which is our Foreign policy. You cannot do that on a culture of people who are not bought into your ideology. I would agree with that. What else do we expect the outcome to be? And so we had two decades of service members lost and maimed because they’re trying to change an ideology that the people there didn’t ask for. The experience left eight year army veteran Steve Orff demoralized. He said he didn’t go there to be the bad guy.

Those of us who served generally wanted to believe that we were helping to improve the world. And we carried with us the hopes, values and principles of the United States. Values and principles that also seem to have been casualties of this war. For many of us, faith was our faith, faith with our leaders is broken and the trust in our country is broken. Now, comments like that, statements like that should be very, very profound for not only the people that are members of this commission, but for all of us. And that’s why I say a lot of this shit should be figured out before we send soldiers there.

A thousand percent faith in our leaders is broken and trust in our country is broken. And I think that everybody in this country who pays any attention can understand this, because I believe that there are things that have went on and happened in the last 4, 812 years in this country that broke that faith, that broke that trust, not just for soldiers, but for everybody. I mean, hell, it wasn’t very long ago they were talking about putting Obama in prison for what he did. Hopefully he still goes. If all of the, if all of the intel is correct, then that son of a bitch should go to prison.

Hillary Clinton, if all that is true, all these things that we’ve seen over the last few weeks come out, if all that is true, she should go sit her ass in prison. This idea that these guys have that they’re above the law because of positions they hold and who they know and how much money they have and all of this other bullshit as we, as everyone talks about all the time, is ridiculous. And so they should sit in prison. Of course. Tuesday’s report identifies emerging themes of the review to include strategic drift, interagency incoherence, and whether the war inside Afghanistan, Afghanistan and the counterterroris or beyond were pursuing the same aims or at cross purposes.

So that means, was all of these operations Afghanistan, Iraq, the global war on terrorism, are all of these initiatives have coinciding goals or were they counterproductive? Were we pushing things here to be successful on this side? But the things we’re doing on this side are giving this a step back. And I guess I don’t have an opinion on that because there’s a lot of information to digest and to go through, man. It also details difficulties the commission has encountered getting key documents. Here’s an interesting part. According to the report, the Biden administration initially denied the commission’s request for the White House materials on the implementation of the February 2020 peace agreement that Trump signed with the Taliban called the Doha Agreement, and the handling also of the withdrawal, citing executive confidentiality concerns.

H. Was it. Was it more than just Obama leaking secrets? Was it more than just Comey? Was it more than just Hillary? Of course it was. And maybe this stuff will help them understand a little bit better about who it was, especially in relation to the withdrawal, which in my opinion, Biden should have been put in prison for that in the first place. The death of those soldiers is solely on his hands. He should have stopped the whole thing, but maybe that’s a whole other conversation. The transition to Trump’s second term brought further delays and complications.

But since the commission has pressed the urgency of its mission with the new administration, critical intelligence and documents have now began to flow. So even right there, that helps me. That helps me to understand that the Trump side of the argument is probably telling a little more truth. Every document the commission is asking for, they’re getting. They’re getting the ability to bring in veterans and other people, as we heard, to talk about their story, to tell their story, to talk about their experience, and hopefully they’re asking very well constructed questions, to not steer answers, but to get real, concrete, true data and information.

I think that this is a good thing. If it’s legit, I think it’s a good thing for us to learn about what went wrong, what went well. What I disagree with staunchly in this whole thing is that we should be doing this to make sure that our moral compass is on track and pushing that responsibility all the way down to the lowest level. I think that that’s bullshit. The moral compass check should come at many, many, many levels above military members. That should be done in the Oval Office or in a Cabinet meeting and have real conversation about implications and what this might cause.

The idea that it is possible that we sent thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers to combat. We weren’t quite sure what we were doing. We don’t know exactly what we all agreed on, but these guys have their mission here. These guys have their mission here. There’s another mission up here. Let’s just. Let’s just get it. Let’s just get it. Done. And were there ulterior motives? I believe there was. I believe there was ulterior motives, for sure. I mean, not that Dick Cheney wasn’t rich before the war in Iraq, but after, for sure, his great grandchildren probably won’t ever need to work.

Halliburton had everything KBR had, every contract, all of them, it seemed. Anyway, where we were, at the bases I went to overseas, the moral compass of the soldier should not come into account because. Because the government trains us to do whatever you need to do to complete the mission. We got to take a break. We’ll talk more about that when we come back. Don’t go foreign real quick. Before we get back to the show, it’s no secret that we have been experiencing a loss of sponsorships. Sponsors have been leaving the network or the network leaving sponsors due to our convictions.

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So before the break, I was on a soapbox as usual, talking about the moral compass of a soldier and whether or not this should come into play about future conflicts or future, I’ll just say, conflicts that we may find ourselves in. And the question that I would ask people asking veterans questions, the question I would ask, the question askers, if that makes sense, is number one, do we as a nation, does this commission as a whole, do they understand what the individual responsibility slash mindset of let’s just say an infantryman, right? An army infantryman because I was an army infantry.

So I can speak more to that mindset than I can anything else. But the soldier overall, do they understand what it takes to get up day after day while deployed and go out and fight again? What mindset you have to be in? How do you need to go about your day before and after the mission? I mean, just think about it for a second. If you are a person who is going to get up tomorrow and go on a 5 to 10 hour long patrol or longer, or go out to an OP and observation point and man that for a day or two or a day or whatever, what is the mindset that you have to be in? There’s a lot of things that you have to remember, a lot of things that need to be done before you, before you strap on your helmet and your body armor and load your weapon, there’s a lot of things that need to happen before that happens.

You need to make sure that your weapon is clean and your functions checks are done so that your lifeline, your rifle, your machine gun, your pistol, whatever weapon it is you’re assigned, that’s your lifeline. It’s your lifeline to going home on your own two feet, on your own accord. So whatever you need to do to make sure that thing is in tip top fucking shape. That’s number one. Clean it, get it fixed. Go to the armor and get it fixed if you need to. If you can fix it yourself, get it done. Because not only is your weapon your lifeline, but your weapon is also your buddy’s lifeline, your team’s lifeline, your unit.

Nobody wants to go home a failure, Nobody wants to go home in a box. Nobody wants to come home maimed. But it happened a lot. So your weapon needs to be in proper order. Your vehicle, if you have them, need to be in proper order. Is the oil change, does it have fuel? Is there any damage to your armor from last time that may have weakened it? What are the things that we need to make sure are in place before we get in that vehicle? Put on this helmet and this body armor, load this weapon and go out there and do the job that we were sent here to do.

So is your vehicle up and running properly? Are your radios working? Can you communicate with higher. Can you communicate with the people that are going to send you help when and if shit hits the fan? Because being stuck alone as a unit against a force that maybe is bigger than yours, maybe has more firepower than you have, maybe they have more equipment than you have or bigger equipment. So if you need help, you got to call for it. So whatever mechanism you have to communicate, to hire, is that working. And usually, hopefully there’s more than one, hopefully there’s more than two.

Just in case, if this one goes down, I’ll use this one. If this one gets shot or blown up or the battery dies or whatever, I’ll go to plan C. Is that working? Did you eat? Did you get enough sleep? Do you have. Do you have your. Is your body armor in order? Are your plates in your body armor, are they broken? Are they cracked? Or is there any weak spots? Can you feel, I mean, all of these things that each individual soldier has to do just to. Just to. Just to get in the truck and go out there.

And once all of those physical, tangible things are in order and clean and working and serviceable, then you got to get right here, you got to get right in your mind, in your head, because war is hell. And the things that need to be done for survival. At times, as we’ve discussed, and you can probably see anywhere anybody who’s ever discussed it, at times you have to do things to ensure your survival, the completion of the mission and whatever else. Sometimes you have to do things that the human mind seemingly wasn’t designed to handle, to comprehend.

And so then you find yourself in this place like a machine, right? You have your, your processes, you have the things that you do every time some people are superstitious about their pre mission hour or two hours or day before. Whatever you need to do to be right in your head is extremely important. And for everybody it might be a little bit different. So then you do all of that and then you have to go do it. Then you have to go do it. And then when shit does hit the fan and bullets are flying, people are dying, equipment’s blowing up, equipment’s being disabled, your buddy gets hurt or killed, you get hurt or killed.

Then there’s, then there’s, there’s really no time to second guess. And just like there’s no time to second guess, there’s no time to process, there’s no time to be scared, there’s no time to grieve, there’s no time to be pissed off, there’s no time to cry, there’s no time to scream, there’s no time. Because at any second the next bullet could be coming your way. At any second the next roadside bomb could explode. And if you’re not prepared and you’re worrying about what happened two minutes ago or two hours ago, you’re next. And if it’s not you, it could be the guy next to you.

And maybe the guy next to you has been your best friend since you were a child, or maybe the guy next to you is somebody that, that you’ve connected with in your unit over the last couple years and, and you’ve watched each other’s kids grow up or be born, or they play together. And your families are integrated together because you’ve been in the same unit for a couple years. And when that person, you look over and, and, and they’re gone, you can’t sit back in your chair and stare at them and think about the last time you guys shared a, shared a cigar together or played around a golf, or the last time that your families were together and your kids were playing.

Can’t think about that. You have to, you got to shove that down in your pocket somewhere and deal with it later. And then you also have to come to terms with what’s going on at home? If you’re aware of, are your kids doing the right thing in school or is your wife being faithful? Is your family surviving? Are you sending home enough? Are you making enough money? Did the fridge break down? Oh, shit. I wonder if my wife got it fixed. I wonder if that guy showed up to fix it and I hope he didn’t take advantage of her and charge her three times as much because she’s there alone with a bunch of kids.

Whatever the situation is, there’s no time, there’s only time to focus on the mission and make sure that you do the best that you can to ensure you and the person next to you on the right and the person next to you on the left go back in the gate of whatever base you’re going to the same way you left it. And as we saw in this article, 2400, they say, 2400 soldiers, they didn’t make it. And so going back to this commission, of course, of course the stories that they’re hearing are not positive. Of course you are going to hear from veterans who are ashamed and disappointed, feel like they were taken advantage of.

I believe you also have groups of people, groups of veterans who believed, who believed in the mission. And there is nothing wrong with that. They fought as hard as they could because they believed. Okay, but what are we going to do different next time? Because if there’s One thing that 20 plus years of war in two different theaters, some argue many more theaters that we may not know a whole lot about, if there is one thing that we learned and are still learning, is that it’s not rare for the people who were boots on ground fighting the battles.

It’s not rare for them to still be fighting because late at night that darkness comes. And when the darkness comes, it’s a, it’s a fight. And so again, then you’re presented with a situation where you may not know how to find the time to deal with it. You may not have the ability to just shove it down in your pocket and deal with it later. You may not have that anymore. But for many people, that’s what they know. And so they try to find a way to do that. They try to find a way to combat the darkness.

And as we see, allegedly 22 times a day, 20 times a day, 19 times a day, 27 times a day, we have soldiers losing that battle to the darkness. We have soldiers who just, they can’t fight harder. And they still lose. And in turn, we lose them, their kids, lose them, their, their families, Their spouses lose them, their parents lose them, their friends, their colleagues, their neighbors, their community. We as a country lose them. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And so when we talk about this commission and them talking about whether or not we should thrust on our soldiers even more, make sure your moral compass is calibrated.

Fuck that. The military doesn’t teach you to calibrate a moral compass when you’re in a situation for survival, when you’re fighting. At no time during my time in the infantry or at infantry school and any training exercise I was at was, did anyone ever say, all right, well, this is, this is what we’re going to do here, here and here. And before we do it, make sure that. That you’re okay with it. Make sure that it’s acceptable to you before you agree to leave this base and go do your job. We’re not trained that way. I was trained.

Once I got done with basic and got to my unit, I was trained by an Army Ranger. You know what I was taught? Speed and violence of action. No mercy to our enemies. We will take every tool of war that we have been given that we have access to to overwhelm our enemy with firepower and violence, scare them, make them frightened of us so that they cower and they don’t fight harder. And when and if we get in line with them or we get to a place where we can destroy them, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

That’s what war is. And so if anybody believes that, that trying to thrust upon combat soldiers anyway before we think about thrusting this idea on them that they need to be morally okay with the job that they are, they have been given the job they chose. I think we should stop and reevaluate because the, the second that we send soldiers into combat and they’re not, they’re not mentally ready, as ready as you can be to kill anything. And anybody who, who stops you from doing your mission, anybody who, who shoots at you, throws, throws, shoots RPGs at you, puts roadside bombs in to destroy us, to try to stop us from doing our job.

Well, you got, you got a lot of hell coming your way, and it’s not, it is not acceptable to ask those people, those men and those women to stop and think about that before. As I said, I think that this is a good thing, that they have this, this commission and they want to learn these things. But let’s be real about it. Nobody should be surprised that we have Afghanistan war veterans not giving positive feedback because even if I volunteered to go to Afghanistan once or twice and I was denied, but even if I completely lost what I was going to say, I’m wrapped around the axle about this moral compass thing because it goes against everything that as a combat soldier you’re taught.

And I don’t mean. I should probably clarify, I don’t mean that we should have no moral compass. I don’t mean that because we’re combat soldiers, we have the right and it’s okay for us to gallivant around the world or the country or our communities and just wreak havoc and not have to worry about it, because we’re trained to do that. It’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is when we assemble and get an order to move, and this is what the mission is, our mission is to go to point A and secure it, given the rules of engagement, given all of that bullshit, we’re going to go and take this, this position.

And anybody who stands in our way and doesn’t comply after, after one time, they die because then they got something to lose. And the people who have something to lose are there to make sure that we don’t go home to our family. And so, man, it’s astounding to me that, that, that anybody would be confused about getting these negative or less than pleasant reports and feelings from soldiers who were there. Because even if you were there and your particular mission was successful or your particular experience wasn’t all that bad, you didn’t see a lot of gory shit like the one lady said she was ashamed to ever have served there after watching what happened when we left, when we ran and just gave up.

It made me. And I never even went to Afghanistan, but it made me ashamed. All the men and women who had come home in boxes draped with flags, came home to their families just to be buried or cremated and spread somewhere or whatever their last wishes were, all for what was the mission accomplished? I don’t know. Do we look like fucking cowards? Yeah, either we look like cowards or we look like our leadership had some kind of ulterior motive. And I believe that either one of them is possible, if not both of them true. I don’t know, man.

I think that we will keep monitoring. I’m really interested for this time next year to see this report. There’s another preliminary report due anytime now, so I can’t wait to read that one. Anyway, folks, have a. We’re out of time. I went over time once again, as usual. Have a great rest of your evening. We’ll see you next week. Take care of yourselves. Good night. As Christians in a Christian country, we have a right to be, at minimum, agnostic about the leadership being all Jewishly occupied. We literally should be at war with Israel a hundred times over, and instead we’re just sending them money and it’s craziness.

Look at the side of Israel, look at the. The state of Tel Aviv, and look at the state of Philadelphia. You tell me where this money’s going. You tell me who’s benefiting from this. I am prepared to die in the battle fighting this monstrosity that would wish to enslave me and my family and steal away any rights to my property and to take away my God. Go fuck yourself. Will I submit to that? And if you’ve got a foreign state, you’ve got dual citizens in your government, who do you think they’re supporting? God right now? Would you protect the nation of Israel and protect those of us, not just our church, but every church in the world and in this nation that’s willing to put their neck on the line and say, we stand with them, we stand with them.

You go to Trump’s cabinet, you can Biden’s cabinet, it’s full of Jews. I have a black friend in school. I have nothing against blacks. She has nothing against me. She understands where I’m coming from. Excuse me, I’m a Jew, and I just like to see. Say that, you know, in our Bible, it says that you’re. You’re like animals. The Jews crucified our God. There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for our pets. They’re like our children. Our friends at pet club 247 have developed natural products that contain the most potent strain of a mushroom that’s been used for thousands of years to help support the immune system.

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