Ranger Regiment Platoon Sergeant in Syria and Afghanistan | Les Sandusky (throwback episode)
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 253 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Former Ranger Les Sandusky joins the show for a candid, four-hour deep dive into combat, leadership, and life after the Regiment. From firefights in Syria and Iraq to rebuilding purpose after injury and RFS, Les opens up about resilience, loss, and redemption. A raw, unfiltered conversation on what it means to serve — and to find yourself again once the mission ends.
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00:00 – Early Ranger Life
23:40 – Combat in Syria & Iraq
1:05:00 – Mortar Tactics Explained
1:32:30 – Inside Ranger Culture
2:03:10 – The DUI & RFS Fallout
2:45:00 – Injury & Isolation
3:16:00 – Big Red One Transition
3:25:00 – Rebuilding a Platoon
3:34:00 – Live Q&A Segment
3:43:00 – Transition Out
3:54:00 – Restoring Rank & Honor
3:55:30 – Contracting & Closure
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. |
| 0:11.7 | Hey, folks, welcome to episode 180 of The Team House. |
| 0:15.5 | I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park, and our guest on the show tonight is Les Sandusky. |
| 0:20.8 | Les served as a mortar platoon sergeant and third Ranger Battalion, spent some time |
| 0:26.0 | in First Ranger Battalion, had a lot of deployments to Afghanistan and Syria. |
| 0:31.0 | You know, like I was saying the other day, I'm really glad to have you on the show because |
| 0:35.4 | like Dave and I each represent like the Rangers of yesteryear. |
| 0:39.3 | Yeah. Like Dave was in the in Ranger Battalion in the 90s. I came in. I got there 2003. Um, |
| 0:47.5 | but then there's this whole other generation of dudes that came after us. And if you don't hear them talk, |
| 0:53.9 | I mean, there's no books really out there about |
| 0:55.7 | what you guys did yet. And I think there's some incredible stories about what that, what that whole |
| 1:00.7 | era of like, let's say 2010 to 2022, what those guys have been up to. Yeah, definitely. And not only that, |
| 1:08.3 | but I mean, it's Ranger Regiment has changed so much, especially since I was there. |
| 1:14.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:14.6 | You know, we were just coming out of the, you know, the Premier Light Infantry of the world. |
| 1:19.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:19.6 | And moving into, you know, the CQB, J-Soc support element type of thing. |
| 1:25.8 | Yeah, I want to say within like my first three years we changed our |
| 1:29.0 | kit and our helmet three times and our uniform three times that's funny because when i was there |
| 1:34.0 | probably hadn't been changed for since vietnam you know so you know yeah yeah it's um it's hard |
| 1:40.5 | to explain that to like people on the outside that like massive cultural shift that the unit went through. But let's talk about you. Let's talk about your origin story last kind of like. Yeah. What was your upbringing like? And what was it that kind of set you on the path towards the Army and towards the Ranger Regiment? Okay. So I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Like, obviously, I got the rainier shirt |
| 2:02.6 | at the time. They were the Tacoma Tigers. But, so when I was growing up in Tacoma, I was born on |
... |
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