Chuck Hayes on SEAL's Post-9/11 Evolution, Crushing Taliban, and Questioning U.S. Wars | Ep. 253 | Pt. 2

Mike Drop

Mike Ritland

Society & Culture, Documentary, Politics, News

4.9 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome back to Part 2 of the Mike Drop Podcast featuring Chuck Hayes, a 40-year Navy SEAL veteran whose career spanned from enlisted ranks to captain. In this episode, Chuck dives deep into the pivotal moments that shaped his post-9/11 journey, including the tragic loss of a teammate during training, the profound impact of September 11th on his career, revamping SEAL training for the Afghanistan theater, intense deployments as a task unit commander, kinetic operations against Taliban leaders, and candid reflections on the purpose, sacrifices, and outcomes of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Listeners will find raw stories of leadership under fire, hard lessons from combat, geopolitical insights, and thoughtful critiques on military strategy, national policy, and the human cost of endless conflict—delivering inspiration, introspection, and unfiltered truth from a warrior's perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	When you have a pixel 10, you may get asked a few questions.
0:05.0	Like, what is that?
0:07.2	How did you do that?
0:09.0	And can we use your camera instead?
0:14.3	Ask more of your phone.
0:17.0	Google Pixel 10.
0:19.9	After your OIC tour at Team 4, not long after 9-11 happens, I'm curious, you know, you'd been in for 18 years, 17, 18 years at this point.
0:30.9	9-11 happens.
0:32.0	Where were you and how did that impact the rest of your career?
0:35.4	Obviously, it was life-changing for all of us who were in before and after.
0:39.3	I love to hear your experience with it.
0:41.3	Yeah.
0:42.3	During my, I had an important thing that happened in my deployment as a platoon commander.
0:48.3	During a training exercise, we lost one of our men.
0:51.3	He jumped out of a helicopter, Brad Tucker, and it was a highly traumatic event, which was pretty...
0:57.0	Was one of your platoon? Yeah, he was one of my platoon guys. We were in the... We were in the Bahamas, and we had the CRC mounted underneath the TF160 helicopter, And when they released it into the water,
1:13.2	it got accidentally released really high.
1:16.0	And two of our guys jumped out, followed it out.
1:18.6	And unfortunately, one of them, Brad Tucker,
1:21.5	lost his life on that.
1:22.6	And that was an incredibly profound thing
1:26.1	that happened to our platoon. Because that was all prior to the war,
	...

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