From Helmand to Homeland: PTSD, Redacted Truths, and the Coming 72-Hour Terror Attack on America | Ep. 269 | Pt. 3

Mike Drop

Mike Ritland

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Documentary, Politics, News

4.9 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The final chapter of Matthew Brunnemann’s gripping three-part appearance on Mike Drop. In Part 3, the former Marine intel specialist and author of War Business: The Hired Guns of Helmand Province pulls no punches as he talks leaving the Corps, battling unseen PTSD, transitioning to civilian life, and the four-year journey to turn his private journals into a published book. He and Mike dive deep into the big-picture failures of Afghanistan and Iraq, the cultural incompatibilities that doomed nation-building, what America should (and shouldn’t) have done after 9/11, and why the 2021 fall of Kabul still stings. Brunnemann also unloads his controversial master’s thesis: a chilling, open-source prediction of a coordinated 72-hour terrorist attack that could cripple the U.S. Raw, unfiltered, and brutally honest – this is the conclusion you don’t want to miss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kevin Harlan here tomorrow night, 5.30 Eastern, the NBA on Prime crew is back as the Emirates
0:06.7	NBA action heats up from Vegas for a thrilling semifinals doubleheader. Then on Tuesday night,
0:12.3	December 16th, at 8.30 Eastern, the last two teams standing will square off in the championship
0:17.8	game for a shot of the cup, bragging rights, and a place in NBA history.
0:23.3	And Prime is your exclusive home for it all. Not a prime member? Sign up for a free 30-day trial to get
0:29.4	started today. Restrictions apply. See amazon.com slash Amazon Prime for details. Don't miss the
0:36.5	thrilling conclusion of the Emirates NBA Cup live from
0:40.1	Las Vegas, starting with the semifinals tomorrow only on Prime.
0:44.1	All right, so after that deployment, obviously you had a number of things happened between the
0:49.8	sniper chasing you for a good majority of it, the horrible things that you saw done to kids
0:57.5	and just being in that environment for, you know, 500 days.
1:05.6	Obviously there came a point where you decided to separate from the military.
1:09.7	Was it as that deployment wrapped up that
1:12.5	you decided you were kind of done done with what you were doing or how did that process go getting
1:17.4	out? Yeah, it started in that deployment. So anybody from my first deployment would have said
1:22.4	this guy's going to do 20 years and I would have said the same thing. and I got some advice that I shouldn't have
1:30.2	taken but I didn't respect the leader who gave it to me so I just discounted it
1:36.0	but he said hey instead of getting out you just need to go to a unit to chill out for
1:41.0	a few years and decompressed that way but I just I wanted nothing more than to
1:46.1	get out so where I got in from a troop surge there was also a force reduction program and I hopped on
1:56.6	that so I should have done five years but I did like four years and 10 months or something like
2:02.2	that. And so I started putting that package in before we got back home to Camp Pendleton. So
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