Going back to your experience within the pipeline, at what point in your career did they send you through American Buds?

Yeah, so that was after my SDV tour.

So I was on an SDV team for two years and then I got an opportunity to apply for US Buds.

So I applied for US Buds and that's a selection in itself.

Like it's competitive because other people want to go.

And they're only going to send, you know, it depends on, you know, the timeframe and what the situation is.

But sometimes, but usually it's one officer and one

enlisted that would go per year sometimes yeah um when i went to buds it was once every three

years so it was a rare opportunity yeah but uh they sent me and one enlisted.

And the enlisted guy, I think he failed his English proficiency or something like that and he didn't, he wasn't able to go.

So I ended up going alone.

But anyways, I applied, got accepted and went to Buds, I classed up with 294.

Bud's class 294.

And, yeah, I was fortunate to go through the entire class without any issues.

And my boat crew would pretty much stay the same.

Our boat crew all throughout Hell Week. So in my boat

crew, we had our class leader, our class, he was a lieutenant. So, you know, same lieutenant. A lot of

guys were younger than me. I wasn't very old at the time, but I think I was 28 years old. So I think

that's your cutoff, right? 28. Yeah. And that's because I was already, you know, I had two deployments under my belt. I was on the SDB team. I was on a tier one unit and went through all this training. And then I go to Buds as a white t-shirt, how to shave my head again. And that part sucked. I didn't want to be a student again for it.

Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, to me, hearing about it, I mean, like, I could see, you know, the benefit of sending a guy, you know, early on in his career, not that 28 is old, but in

special operations, it's, you know, it's, especially with that amount of time under your belt,

I mean, not to sound like a dick, but there is kind of a part of me that's thinking, like, what's the point of sending you through American Bud's training after having done two deployments as a Rock Seal being, you know, part of their SDV team in their tier one unit like why why send a guy like you at that point

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