Inside the White House War Room | Special Forces Veteran Mark Grdovic | Ep. 281 | Pt. 3

Mike Drop

Mike Ritland

News, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Politics

4.9 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Part 3 of Episode 281 of the Mike Drop Podcast, I sit down with Mark Grdovic to talk about what happened after the Iraq invasion—getting pulled out of theater sooner than expected, taking those lessons back to train the next generation of Special Forces, and landing in one of the most unique jobs in the military: running the President’s Emergency Operations Center at the White House. We also get into leadership behind the scenes during Hurricane Katrina, the realities of retirement after decades in uniform, and Mark’s perspective on service, war, and what you really take with you when it’s all over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	How much longer were you in Iraq for that deployment?
0:03.8	Not long at all.
0:05.9	We took her cook on April 11th, April 10th or April 11th, and I was out of country a month
0:11.4	later.
0:12.4	And that's frustrating because a lot of us were upset about that.
0:16.2	To my surprise, you know, the Army is still the Army.
0:19.9	And there was a, we can't mess up the summer rotation cycles for PCS.
0:24.2	And like, I think all of us were stunned, like, what?
0:26.8	Because we were prepared to be here for the long haul.
0:28.7	And it felt like we just walked off the field in the ninth inning with two outs and we're
0:34.4	excited because we're up by so much.
0:36.7	Like, that's the way it felt.
0:38.3	Yeah.
0:39.3	Wow.
0:40.3	Man, that's an incredible story.
0:41.3	Again, I love hearing the inner workings of that textbook example of how special forces
0:48.3	is supposed to be used and pulling it off.
0:51.3	I mean, that's remarkable.
0:53.3	That's really cool.
0:55.0	When you got home from that deployment, from then, and kind of, if you can kind of walk us through the rest of your career of...
1:03.0	So I got home, strangely enough, I returned to the schoolhouse now as a company commander in charge of instructors for officer training,
1:14.8	which was really cool because I got to embed a lot of this.
	...

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