Obviously you guys got them to, or you convinced them to be a part of it.

Yes.

And what role did you play in that?

So at this time, I am now the operations officer for the battalion.

And I said that way, I regard myself as somewhat the architect of this plan.

It's my job to develop the plan and then prepare for the plan and supervise the execution of this plan. It's my job to develop the plan and then prepare for the

plan and supervise the execution of this plan. So I'm very involved with, I've got my

pilot team that is in-country coordinating on the ground with the CIA's team. And, you know,

we're trying to get ground truth. We're trying to figure out what we got to do. My pilot team leader was one of our senior warrant officers, Andy Grunlin, longtime friend of mine, was with me on the Neo in Liberia and, you know, Stuttgart, six or seven years earlier, whatever it was. We've known each other for a really long time. So it's really convenient that he is the pilot team leader because we have just an easy communication and rapport And I always joke that he comes back and he's like okay here's the here's the deal

They're willing to work with us. They've got one tricky stipulation

There's this fanatical Islamic extremist group that's taken hold in the mountains to their rear on the Iranian border

It's entrenched in the mountains. They just on the Iranian border. It's entrenched in the

mountains. They just need us to help wipe that out before they can divert their forces to go fight

Saddam. And like the way they said it was, hey, we would love to help you, but we can't because our

main threat is this crazy Al-Qaeda affiliated group that's on the border. And we joked that it felt like a used car salesman like, like, what's it going to take for me to walk out of here today with an agreement? You know, I'm going to write a figure on a piece of paper, but that's- I can get the payments to 350. Can we do business? That's exactly the way it felt. We're like, so wait a minute. And actually, Andy did say this to me, Andy Grunlin. He goes, I got good news and bad news.

The good news and bad news.

The good news is they've agreed to work with us. The bad news is I agreed to help them defeat this entrenched fanatical enemy in mountainous terrain where we're going to do a frontal attack. I was like, oh, that's great. That's all we got to do. But that's the deal. Like, you help me defeat this enemy and we will then help you fight Saddam. You know, I mean, at the time, too, we're like, well, as it turns out, we're comfortable

fighting Al-Qaeda affiliated groups too.

So, deal.

Yeah.

And I mean, I say it all jokingly, but it's pretty similar to the way it really went.

We're like, okay, we just agreed to conduct a major

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