What's going on guys hope you're doing well this is Austin your host for the ad space today and welcome back to the field crafts survival podcast

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all right guys so we're going to jump into the podcast for today hope you enjoy it and look forward to seeing you guys next time. Hey guys welcome to the field craft survival podcast and I'm your host for this episode Kevin Estella I'm the director of training here at field craft

and I'm joined today by a guest who is someone I've learned to respect over the years we've got a lot of interesting connections but I'll tell you this guy is this is going to be an interesting one I am joined today none other than by none other than Bill rapier of amtax shooting amtac blades Jack car fame if you guys are fans of that book then you know that the character of James Reese carries a

Northman well this is the guy that designed the blade we're going to get into that so bill welcome Kevin thanks for having me on great to be here yeah so you just you just flew in you are in northern Idaho that's where you do all your training and you're now in beautiful Utah another free state yes so let's catch the listeners up to speed I know a lot of your background but I want them to hear it from you you've got a very interesting background and

in terms of like where you lived and it's partly because of your parents so can you just kind of run them through like your family back take it all the way back yeah cool so I moved to Germany when I was five years old my parents were missionaries so we lived two different spots in Germany for total of almost eight years

was thrown into a German kindergarten when I was five years old and I didn't speak a lick of German and within a few months spoke better German than my parents that have been studying for years prior to going over there so did that did did all German schools through K through six grade

then moved to the states got to do about six months in a English you know an American school in Southern California and then we moved to swasely land southern Africa so that was awesome I didn't really want to go when we left but really enjoyed it over there Africa it's just it gets in your blood especially southern Africa it's a beautiful place

so really enjoyed my time there and then only spent about two years there and then we moved to Colorado Springs and I went into high school as a sophomore there and finished out the last three years of high school state side and then joined the military the day after graduating from high school

and it was in the Navy for the next 20 years right right and not just anywhere in the Navy I mean your I mean what really sets you apart was your seal and you have a very very interesting career with them I mean I know you how you started and how you finished but can you kind of give a little rundown of that

yeah so join the Navy went to Korman A school so this is nowadays there's if everyone that is a seal they're they're rating is special operator that's only like a maybe a 10 or 13 year old thing now before that you have a seal source rating

so seal source rating the one that I chose was Korman which for all non Navy people is it's basically the the Navy's version of a medic and that was basically I chose that not because I really liked medicine but because it was my backup plan to try and not be on a boat if I you know if I didn't make it through because you when you just when you look at the odds most guys you know 70 to 80% of guys don't make it through buds so I wanted if at least

as a Korman I could have gone with the Marines so it was kind of backup plan fortunately didn't have to fall back on that so I went through boot camp went through Korman A school and then showed up the buds I believe I checked in on Thanksgiving day of 94 and they promptly told me what are you doing here we'll see on Monday something like that so I took me longer to get through buds than most people I failed out of the way I was going to do it

failed out of in second phase I failed the dive physics test which somewhat embarrassing story that I didn't fail it because I couldn't do dive physics I failed it because I'd forgotten how to do long division and we weren't allowed to use a calculator

so they ended up so I got recycled by two months I got put into a remedial math course and it was it literally started off this this lady got in front of me and you know seven or eight of my compatriots that failed with me and she starts off this is how you add wow just super embarrassing but she did teach me how to do log division again by long hand so

got back in picked up with class 200 ended up failing the runs I had a really hard time running after hell week was very still not really sure why pre hell week I never failed a time drawn never got goon which is kind of one of our expressions for if you fell back maybe more than about a third of the way from the front

to the end of a conditioning run they would you want the instructors would stand there with this hand and you'd see if the hand was raised you knew the cutoff was coming and you better put out and then at a certain point you know everyone that made the cutoff would get the stretch and everyone that didn't

would have another 15 or 20 minutes of you know fun and games running through the surf zone and do another silly stuff like that so never even had any of that pre hell week post hell week I couldn't run a 12 minute mile to save my life

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