"Special Projects" in Special Forces | Randy McElwee | Ep. 390

The Team House

dee takos

History, Government, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 166 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of The Team House, we sit down with a former U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) combat medic who also spent time with the 75th Ranger Regiment, tracing his path from enlistment through the SF pipeline and into high-tempo operational assignments. He breaks down the realities of unconventional warfare, battlefield trauma care and medevac under pressure, and lessons learned from deployments and partner-force work (including the Gulf War and training alongside Pakistan’s SSG). We also get into building combatives and medical training programs, leadership on an ODA, and how 9/11 reshaped the mission and the generation that followed.
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09:15 — Choosing Combat Medic Over Comms
33:50 — Q Course Graduation & Desert Team Assignment
50:21 — Operation Salam: Mine Strike & Emergency Care
54:43 — UW Reality Check: Tribal Politics & Taliban Ties
1:02:20 — Gulf War Deployment: CAS Teams in Saudi Arabia
1:07:34 — Friendly-Fire Risks, Lock-Ons & Breaching Minefields
1:23:29 — Training with Pakistan SSG at Cherat
1:40:44 — Building Ranger Downed-Pilot / Trauma Rotations
1:46:38 — Life in Ranger Regiment Without a Tab
2:04:52 — Taking Command of an ODA & Raising Standards
2:13:01 — Combatives Program → Gracie Week → 9/11 Shock
2:22:41 — Transition to UGA: Training the Post-9/11 Generation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park.
0:11.3	Hey, guys, this is episode 387 of the Team House.
0:15.6	I'm Jack Murphy, here with today's guest, Randy McAwee.
0:19.7	Randy served in Fifth Special Forces group. He is a veteran
0:23.3	of Desert Storm. Also, some interesting special project missions that he did in the Afghanistan,
0:31.1	Pakistan region. And a whole number of other things. Martial arts plays a big role in his life.
0:37.2	He was a part of bringing
0:39.2	combatives to special forces he did some cross training with uh third ranger battalion after black
0:46.5	the black hawk down or operation gothic serpent um and was also a team sergeant not once but twice
0:53.2	uh which is super rare and really cool.
0:56.3	And today he runs a jiu-jitsu business,
0:59.9	a number of different businesses, you know, around martial arts.
1:04.3	So, Randy, thank you for joining us on the show today.
1:07.7	Thanks for having me.
1:09.9	Randy, tell us a little bit, you know, I always ask everyone this. They're, you know, the regular people who watch the show are probably sick of me. But the origin story. If you tell us a little bit about what your upbringing was like and how that took you towards military service.
1:25.6	Okay. So I was a kid from a real small town in West Virginia, right in the center of the state.
1:33.1	The town had two stoplights and really didn't need either one of them, but they had two
1:38.3	because the county seat five miles up the road only had one, so they had to just do better.
1:51.0	I grew up my entire life there, you know, a lot of outdoor stuff, hunting, fishing, camping, and, you know, played high school football.
1:54.0	Didn't really have a vision for what was going to happen after high school.
1:58.0	Didn't see myself as academically, you know smart enough to to go on and
2:03.9	do college so when I got out of high school I graduated and took a construction job quickly found out
	...

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