I understand that you're well versed in the area of drones.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that is correct.

All the time I spent in the Marine Corps, we studied, worked, and thought on how we would

either attack, use, or defend against them. And then now

that I'm retired, I've opened my own company and one of the things we're doing is working

various things to support either anti-drone or anti-drone proliferation. How long were you

in the Marine Corps? Thirty-three and a half years. Oh, thank you for your service your service. My pleasure. I enjoyed it. It was great. And you were, is it true that you were an attack helicopter pilot? That's correct. That was a cobra pilot. Gotcha. And you've flown like hundreds of missions, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've got about, I say about, but every pilot pretty much knows.

I got just over 3,500 hours in the cover.

And what areas were you flying in?

You know, I've flown in most of the area, but a lot in the Middle East.

I've had four trips to Iraq, three as a cobra pilot,

and then one as a forward air controller.

Did you have any, uh, do you have any like close call stories that you can share? Like anything that you like, like any wild times in the helicopter that you were like, oh man,

I don't know if I'm going to make it out of this one.

Well, yeah, I had a few.

Yeah. Any that you can share or if you prefer not to. It's interesting. Maybe you're not tracking us, but I wrote a book about all that. Yeah, I haven't read your book yet, but you want to tell us a little bit about the book? Yeah, so the book is called Gunfighter's Rule. And it really takes kind of a path.

And, you know, there's some tragedies along the way of me starting out as a very, very young private in the Marine Corps, even before that.

And then taken up through, I become a private, then I get commissioned, then I become a forward air controller and deploy to Iraq during OIF1,

survive that with many, many close calls, and then get through that, go to a staff tour and then get selected for command of the gunfighters. I end up going back to combat with them before I took command for a few months and then came

home, did 11-month workup, deployed back to Iraq.

And then, you know, throughout all of that, there's many, many different close calls.

...