L.O.G. 144 First Casualty with Toby Harnden

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis. If you would like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media; the links are also in the episode details. Hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

All right, so we'll just go ahead and jump in and get started here. Toby, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I'm a big fan of your work; Greg and I both are. So, first off, just thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your book.

Well, thank you. It's very good to be with you.

Yeah, so I actually found you a while back, back with when I first read Bandit Country, all about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Yeah.

And that's what got me on. I think my dad gave me the book and said, "Hey, you got to read this." I read through that; it was incredible. I actually ended up going through some training with some people out on the East Coast in Virginia. One of the instructors there is from the UK. It was interesting because he started talking, or he was telling these stories, and no one in the room knew what he was talking about really, but it all had to do with the overall concept of the course we were going through. I walked up. I said, "Hey, is that farm you're talking about, is that the Slab Murphy farm?" He kind of looked at me like, "Yeah, how do you know that? Most Americans..." I was like, "Yeah, I'm well versed in the Troubles and everything." I mentioned your book, and everything. He said, "You know that's an incredible account of everything that went on in that area." So, you had the street cred, I guess, from folks who were undercover, for sure, in that area, which was pretty cool.

That's great.

Yeah, stuff like that. I know you wrote, I think you and I might have been in Ramadi or Al Anbar province around the same time. I know you wrote about stuff like that. You're a former British naval officer, correct?

Yeah.

Yeah. You've got your own incredible perspective on this stuff, which I just want to set all that up for our listeners to understand. This book that we're talking about, First Casualty, all about the CIA going into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. We're at about the 20-year anniversary when this stuff got started, obviously. One of the things that impressed me about this book is you really had the access. You had to people involved in this operation, and you really tell such a great, great story about the individual and everything they do. I feel like I know some of these characters. I don't know how you got that, but I would love to first understand where that came from.

Yeah, well, so it wasn't automatic or accidental, put it that way. I mean, it's funny because sometimes people, a couple of people, have written stuff like, "Oh, you know, he was granted access by the CIA or something," as if some guy with a deep voice from Langley phoned me up and said, "Hey, Toby, would you like to just come meet these people?" In a way, it'd be nice if it was like that. But no, it's kind of a painstaking process of tracking people down, pitching them if you like, introducing yourself. "This is what I do. This is who I am." Certainly Bandit Country and Dead Men Risen, my second book about the Brits in Helmand in 2009, those are kind of calling cards. I'd quite often be mailing copies of those to people saying, "Hey, this is who I am. This is what I do."

But yeah, it started really, I was in DC on 9/11. As a newspaper reporter, I was walking into the Telegraph bureau as the first plane hit the Trade Center, and then I watched the screen of the second one going in and kind of pretty much knew what it was. So, I was profoundly affected by 9/11 like most people were, certainly most Americans. I wasn't an American at the time; I became American in 2009. But I reported on the aftermath of the months or year or so, a bit more than actually, in the US. I was really wanting to be overseas, but that came a little bit later.

I vividly remember the reporting on Mike Spann being killed, and I wrote a couple of news stories about it. I remember Sharon Spann speaking very movingly at his funeral in Arlington. It was in Iraq, probably a couple of years after 9/11. Just oddly enough, somebody said to me, "Have you ever seen the video of that CIA officer running for his life in Qala-i-Jangi, the fort near Mazar-i-Sharif?" I hadn't seen it, and I looked at it and I was like, "Wow." It was David, a guy called David Tyson. He was running for his life. He just killed a lot of people. He'd seen Mike Spann being killed, or kind of disappear under a pile of bodies. He had to basically kill or be killed, shoot his way out of the southern compound and killed, I don't know, a dozen or at least a dozen to maybe several dozen Al Qaeda in very, very close quarters. Then he was running to relative safety at the northern end of the fort. I just remember looking and thinking, "What's going through that guy's head? He's seen his comrade killed, he's nearly been killed himself, he's killed people. He doesn't know who's going to live another five minutes or another five hours or what." So, I just became really interested in him.

I decided to track him down. I eventually tracked him down in 2013, and we met at a Panera Bread in Vienna, Virginia, a few miles away from where I live in McLean. He was friendly, cordial, but he was still serving in the CIA, he couldn't really talk. But we kept in loose touch. He kind of dropped off, and I'd be like, "Oh, he's disappeared," but eventually he contacted me and said, "Hey, I've retired, I'm ready to talk." So, I started spending a lot of time with David, and a couple of other guys were visible really, like J.R. Seeger, who was the chief, or I should say J.R. Seeger, Mike Spann's case officer. Like David, he started writing spy novels, so I contacted him. And Justin Sapp, who was the youngest of the eight members of the team, he was a Green Beret, a 29-year-old captain at the time, still serving now as a colonel at the US Mission to the UN in New York. He was on LinkedIn, so I hit him up.

So, after those three, I guess people started to realize that I was serious, I didn't have an agenda, I just wanted to hear the story. It went from there. People like Cofer Black, Hank Crumpton, you have to persuade those people, but I did. Then these things, if they're working well, they reach a tipping point. At a certain point, I thought, "Okay, I've got enough to write a pretty good story here." So, I contacted the CIA public affairs, who I didn't have any connection with at all, and asked them if they would help. Up to this point, I'd been a little bit worried about them, that they may try and put the kibosh on it or something, or they may have some competing project or some pet author or something, so I didn't really want to tell them at the outset.

I contacted them, they said, "Yeah, we know, we've heard, surprise, surprise." But they were helpful. They facilitated Andy—who was still serving, is still serving—so they facilitated an interview with him, a couple of other serving people: Brian, who's head of the Special Activities Center, former Marine, and contemporary of Mike Spann's; Amy, who was on the same course as Brian. Shannon Spann, Mike's widow, Brian and Mike were on the same farm course in '99. And a couple of other guys who were retired but still contracting and wanted to know that the agency was okay with it because they have security clearances. So, eventually, I spoke to all six of them. It was a long, involved road, and so you bring everything you've done in the past, your experience, your personality, to bear, I guess, in building rapport with people and getting them to trust you.

Yeah, you did a great job with that, and I can tell. Even when you talk about David Tyson, I still remember the video that you're talking about. I remember a still image from that, him coming over a berm or something, just ingrained because you can see in his face his weapon's probably still hot and very warm at that point. You could tell he was in the middle of something. I just remember that sticking. Here's this guy with a lot of experience who just saw something really, really bad, and he's still in the middle of that fight. So, it's incredible. He comes alive in this whole book. The whole story. I feel like I know the guy because you have the photos in there, and you're looking at him, and his own little personality comes out with the way you tell it. It was really, really incredible.

I actually thought it was funny that one of the photos you have in there had one of the best captions, because it was one of the village elders, or someone they were working with in the Northern Alliance, and they couldn't figure out, when they're trying to explain where David was from, he just said, "Okay, well, he's west of Herat." Meaning anything but. It just shows such a perfect, succinct explanation of what it means to be dropped into Afghanistan, especially back then. It's changed, but not a whole lot for some of those generations, especially way up in the Pashtun people living way up in the mountains. Their concept of how far you are from is literally they know the western part of their country, that city of Herat, they've heard of that. Whether or not they've been there, they understand it, but anything past that is like, "We don't understand." I mean, that really just, that alone, that little anecdote, it tells you what their mission was, what they had to do just being dropped in with all these folks, and some people we had ties to, and you have these different kind of warlords and generals and all this stuff. It's just an absolute incredible story, and a lot of it kind of focuses around that whole, the fort of war, I think is the best way to translate it, that Qala-i-Jangi, where that prison is, and where it was. Did you choose that for a specific reason, or why did you want to make that the focal point, or just tell the story from there almost?

So, it was interesting. The initial concept of the book, you always have an idea and you do some research enough to put a book proposal together and get the book commissioned. But what I, I told this publisher, and I remember a similar thing previously, when you say, "This is the proposal, this is what I know so far, and we'll talk about the things that how it may develop, but the book is going to be different, and trust me, trust me, publisher, who I want to give me some money, it's going to be better." Because it's a journey; you never know quite where the destination is and what you're going to learn. But the process of researching full-on with a book deal and writing it means it becomes something else. And yeah, trust me, it's going to be better.

My actual initial concept of the book was to focus very much on the six days in Qala-i-Jangi, because I didn't know that I was going to get the access and the connections I did with the CIA. I knew I was pretty sure I was going to get Green Berets. I was hopeful I would get some of the British SBS, although they're very secretive, and in fact, they turned out eventually to be more secretive than the CIA. But I was going to focus on those six days, where the uprising on November 25th, 2001, to the prison uprising, Mike Spann is killed, David Tyson fighting his way out, then a 15-man rescue team coming in, Green Berets, a SEAL who was serving with the SBS, Steph Bass, a couple of random people, a CIA medic. So, then a big friendly fire incident on November 26th, first Purple Hearts of the Afghanistan War awarded to five Americans wounded in that, a bunch of Afghans killed, but Brits wounded as well. AC-130s, jet pilots overhead, combat controllers, Abdul Rashid Dostum.

I was very attracted to this as one place, the American Taliban, so-called American Taliban, although he's Al Qaeda really, John Walker Lind. We have all these disparate elements in this one place, and I thought that was super exciting. So, I always thought about the centerpiece of the book. But what happened really, it shifted a little bit more towards Team Alpha. So, it became, it's funny because the British edition of the book, they marketed it as "the six-day battle that began the 20-year war in Afghanistan" or something, which that was kind of the concept of the proposal. But the American version was "The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11," and that's more true to what it actually ended up as. It ended up more as the story of Team Alpha from, well, really from 9/11 because it starts with David Tyson. He's on a flight from Tashkent to London to talk about Stinger missiles, so he's here on 9/11. Justin Sapp is at the Special Forces diver course in Key West; he's underwater on 9/11. Shannon Spann's in a giant supermarket in Manassas Park, and Mike Spann's in CIA quarters. So, it starts from there, goes through to their insertion, they arrive, they fly from K2 on October 16th, and then through to the 40 days to November 25th. So, it's more of the sweep from 9/11 to November 25th, rather than those six days that began on November 25th.

I mean, the things you say about, I'm pleased you picked up on that about "west of Herat" because what I was able to learn, especially from David Tyson, but other members of the team as well, like J.R. Seeger, as I think I said, was a Dari speaker, and out of Islamabad with the Mujahideen in the 1980s. But David's an Uzbek linguist. He speaks, I think, more than a dozen languages. He was an academic at Indiana University. He'd lived in Tashkent before at one point. He was so close to going fully native, he didn't own a pair of shoes. He was really immersed in the culture. He was so interested in kind of psychology, human motivation. He loves and is fascinated by people. So, he was so interested in the Afghans, the Uzbek fighters from Dostum, the Tajiks from Ata, who was the other commander there, some Pashtuns. He was really interested in their quirks, their humor, how they lived, their customs. That gave me, and I'm really interested in that stuff as well, because there's only so much "bang, bang" and bombs going off. I feel that I got an extra dimension from all that, and that was just fantastic.

I was going to say, I know you're taking notes. Every time we have a guest on like you, and there's no guests like you, but somebody that's so inspirational and is so talented and has done so much research, I just take copious notes, and then I go, "Okay, here's the string theory connections that are amazing," and Brian and I talked basically about these. But I want to lay out how ridiculous my life was and how I missed all the things, thank God, that you wrote about.

So, two dear friends of ours, one that's an associate with our company, Martin Woolley, and his dear friend and ours, Martin Metcalf, were in Ireland during the Troubles as bomb techs, EOD, working on the ground for the Brits. Okay, so we have half Irish and British friends, and they recall the Troubles very differently. There are still very big moments of attention. We were doing a counter-terrorism course in Ireland, and Dolores O'Riordan had died, and I made a mention about the song "Zombie" and how powerful it was and got into a near fistfight with folks that, you know, she—and I won't say all the words—and what she was. It's like, I'm a First Amendment, freedom of speech type of person. That went out the window quickly.

Brian Marren's dad, and they come from a long Irish roots, I'll let Brian talk about that, but his dad turned me on to Say Nothing, the McConville murders book, which I would say definitely in the top ten. Yours just pushed it aside with when I started reading Bandit Country. It was like, "Oh my gosh," it was such a refreshing way of looking at then and now. So, I tell everybody they got to read it, so I felt a personal link to it. Then Brian says, "Hey, how about First Casualty?" And I'm like, "Same author?" He's like, "Same author." I go, "Great."

Just before I went to Iraq, there was a company called The Crumpton Group that called me to McLean, Virginia. Anybody that doesn't know where McLean is and where Toby lives, look on a map. There's a big building right next to McLean that's very important. I meet Hank Crumpton. So, a non-distinct meeting. I meet Cofer Black. Cofer Black certainly could pass as a waiter in an upscale bar. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Not an operator. And Shannon Spann. So, I meet all of these people all at the same time, and I'm walked through by a former J-BAD station chief. I leave the meeting, and it's not until days later that it dawns on me who I just met and what was going on in the place that I had been. Then I read your book, and it all comes flooding back, and it's like, you have the ability of going in and putting such granularity and fidelity to the characters that you can't look away. So, I applaud you for that. I don't know if you've always had that ability. I don't know if when you were a kid and making the noodle sculptures for the fridge, if people came in and just admired your ability to dig that deep. But I tell you what, in those two books, and a funny side note, when you wrote Dead Men Risen, again, amazing for anybody that's been there, didn't it get pulled from the shelves the same way that you were worried about maybe the CIA blocking this one?

That's maybe, maybe I had a bit of shell shock from that leftover. Yeah, so I got into a big fight with the Ministry of Defence in the UK. So, it's a very different culture over there, no First Amendment, and this is one of the reasons why I'm an American. I mean, I've lived here for, I guess, I've lived here for nearly 20 years out of the last 22. But, so, to do that book in 2000... so it was about the Welsh Guards in Helmand in 2009. Basically what had happened was Rupert Thorneloe, who was a battalion commander, who was a friend of mine and had been a friend in Northern Ireland, and in fact, he was a regular officer, but he worked in an intelligence liaison role basically between the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary police. It was Robert Nairac's old job. Robert Nairac famously disappeared and his body's never been found in 1977 outside a pub in South Armagh. Beaten up in the parking lot. They found blood and teeth and stuff, but that's it.

So, Rupert was the commanding officer of the Welsh Guards in 2009, battalion commander, the lieutenant colonel, and he was killed in action. It was like, holy (expletive), Rupert's been killed. They'd already lost a company commander and a platoon commander, and I knew Pete as well as Rupert. I knew other people in the regiment. I had connections there. So, I decided that this would, I didn't know what the full story was, but I knew that it was going to be an amazing, powerful story. So, I talked to the regiment, and they were like, "Yeah, we can facilitate it." Again, Bandit Country helped with that process, because the Welsh Guards had been in there. There's a guy called Ben Bathurst, who's now a lieutenant general, who'd been a major company commander at the time, who was in the book, and I'd spoken to. Actually, I knew his father, who was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Benjamin Bathurst, when he was first SEAL when I was still in the Navy. So, you make all these connections through your life.

But I needed to get out there quickly. Rupert was killed July 1st, and the Welsh Guards were leaving in early October. So, the clock was ticking, and to get out there, they gave me this contract, an inch thick almost, and it basically said that I had to pay for certain things, and I think I had to give them a proportion of the proceeds, but we agreed that that would go to the Welsh Guards charity, which was fine. But they said that it gave them the right to read the manuscript to check for, I think it was, operational security and accuracy. I'm no lawyer, but at the time I said, thinking like, "God, you could drive a coach and horses through those terms." I had a sinking feeling, but I was like, "I just need to get out there. I'll worry about that later." So, I signed it, and that's, I mean, otherwise I wouldn't be able to go out.

So, I went out there, everything was good. I spent nearly a month there, had a great relationship with the Welsh Guards, but as time went on, it became, talk about a journey with a book, I guess at the beginning it was like, "It's a story of heroism and sacrifice in Afghanistan," and it stayed that. But it also became, "What happens if you under-resource a war with too few troops, not enough equipment, and you don't have much of a plan?" These were, and you have six-month tours, because Brits were in for six months at a time, which means a month settling in, a month handing over, and four months of effectiveness in the middle, usually with a big operation which results in lots of medals for senior officers, but does it really change anything? And then the next group comes in.

Yeah, I got a lot of documents. Rupert actually had, very courageously, because it wouldn't have done his career that much good, he complained about the lack of resources. He pushed really, really hard for more people, and at a certain point he said, "I, there was an operation called Panther's Claw, the big operation of the summer of 2009, and he was like, "I can't do it. I can't do what you're asking me to do with what I have." So, the plan got changed, and actually, tragically, he was killed on that operation. He was killed in a vehicle that wasn't properly, didn't have proper armor. He was killed by a low-metal content IED, which his soldiers and him personally actually that day were using metal detectors to search for. So, all the things he was complaining about, or drawing to the attention of his superiors, were factors in his death, which was really eerie.

But anyway, when the MOD got the manuscript, they were, the regiment got it, and there were hundreds of, they wanted hundreds of changes, redactions. I methodically went through them all. A lot of them were just (expletive), like, "You can't mention electronic jamming." I'm like, "Really?" And then you look on the MOD website, they'd have stuff about that first thing. So, I went through all that, and I could see that it's starting to creep into areas of, "Well, we did have enough helicopters," and stuff like that. Well, you know. And then somebody tried to change that, a guy tried to change his quotes, soften them. But anyway, they signed off, and then after they'd signed off, they suddenly said, they raised issues like stuff to do with the Estonians, revealing the identity of special forces officers, which is one person, which I don't think I had. But yes, we had a big fight with lawyers at midnight between the publisher and the MOD, and they ended up having to buy the first print run of the book and pulping it. It cost 150,000 pounds, so 200,000 plus of taxpayers' money to pay for this, and then we made a few little redactions and reprinted it. So, yeah, that was, I mean it was good publicity, I guess, and we definitely did a bit of a judo move on the whole thing and used it to our advantage, but it was pretty brutal, and it did damage some relationships for me absolutely within the UK defense community. So, I didn't want a repetition of anything like that, and I think that probably was in my mind actually with CIA this time.

How long did it take you to put this book together for First Casualty? What was the time frame on that?

So, I did some work in 2013 because I had the idea in 2013, so I did a bunch of interviews, not very many, maybe half a dozen, and then for various reasons, it kind of got shelved. Then I put the proposal together in 2019, the fall of 2019. I got the book deal in December 2019, and so really it was about 17 months full-time. It's one of those things I could have taken 10 years, and at a certain point, but I had the 20th anniversary of 9/11. That was always going to be the publication date, and it was a scramble to get there, but I've spent more than 20 years as a journalist. I need a deadline.

Yes, of course.

But it was, yeah, it was a pretty intense 17 months. And also, we had COVID, which I actually think was a net plus because I think more people were at home, more people were reflective. And also, the type of people I was dealing with generally weren't that worried about it, so they were in fact, they were craving personal contact. When I'd go meet people, shake their hands, they'd be like, "Great, we should, let's take our masks off, let's shake hands," and have a big, so. But, I had to navigate all that. I had to get to Afghanistan, I had to get to the fort.

That's kind of actually what I wanted my next question to be, I wanted you to describe that because you went there and you walked the ground, which, of course, is, I would say, if you're going to write about it, you got to try and do it. You're going to go there and see it, and I know that probably, it probably really all sunk in for you while you were there. So, tell us about that trip to actually go to some of these places when you went, was it like last year then sometime, or 20...?

Yeah, exactly a year ago, in fact, it popped up on my Facebook or something, some picture of a boarding pass to Kabul a year ago. So, I was about there for about six weeks. Yeah, I mean, the way I've always written is I have to, I have to walk the ground, and particularly with Bandit Country, I spent so much time in South Armagh, and just driving the lanes and sometimes with a stopwatch, you can understand how an operation worked and what was possible and what was not. And just being able to visualize a place just makes a huge difference. And so it was, I felt it was instrumental to me in understanding South Armagh, certainly Helmand as well. Virtually everywhere. I wrote a couple of bases which had been closed and were off limits, but virtually every incident I wrote about in Helmand I had been there and walked the ground. So, I really wanted to do that with this, and particularly in the fort, because there are a ton of pictures of it, and Google Earth is great. Although the fort's a little bit different to what it was 20 years ago. But so much happened there. There was this, like, the cellar of the Pink House, which was where the 400 Al Qaeda prisoners were put, where they were brought out. I really, I really wanted to see that, and I also wanted to interview obviously Afghans and track down people who were there. I mean, there's no way you can get them on the phone; it's hard enough face-to-face. And Dostum, the ethnical Uzbek warlord that they were, I really wanted to interview him because he's just such a character from central casting and such a key figure.

So, yeah, I went over there, and it's like anything in Afghanistan, I'd forgotten. I was thinking, "Oh, I'll spend two, maybe three weeks here." Ended up at six. I spent the first two weeks kind of waiting around in Kabul for Dostum's people to tell me what was going on. The hotel bill is kind of clicking up. I mean, there were a bunch of people to interview, but I really wanted to, two things I wanted to do: firstly, get to the fort, and secondly, interview Dostum. So, I got to Mazar-i-Sharif after about two weeks, and they're all, "Wow, we can do the fort next week. Don't worry, it's no problem." And I'm starting to get like, "Oh, I really want to go." They're like, "Oh," and then they're like, "Oh, there's a Pashtun general in charge of it." And these are all Uzbeks, and they basically hate each other. And so it's, "Oh, he's not going to let you go." And I'm like, "What?" And I'm having to do a bit of diplomacy, like, "Surely Marshal Dostum will be able to speak to the general," and. There were a couple moments where I thought, you know, they were saying I couldn't go, and also they would protect, they were protecting me or minding me, which was good, but it meant that they were calling the shots. At one point, I remember saying, like, "You know, (expletive) this, I'm getting a taxi." And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, come back, it's okay, we'll go this afternoon."

So, it was kind of a relief to get in there because it wasn't, there was no guarantee. But just to go into that cellar where 400 people have died, where 86 of the prisoners emerged at the end, and there was loads of war detritus there, rusty weapons, ordnance. I was careful where I stepped and what I picked up. And the Pink House, this building above the cellar, it was, they'd left it. It might be a little bit like Auschwitz, where part of it they've left it as it was in 1945, and that's what for whatever reason, that's what happened here. A lot of forts have been patched up and renovated and prettified and stuff, but the Pink House is as it was. It's just faded, but it's still got big, lots of plaster been blown off, and they haven't repaired the roof, big massive hole in the roof where I think a JD went in. And then it just enabled me to understand it as well. Where Mike Spann was, right exactly. There's just, you can't, you just really can't get that. And then where Steph Bass saw Mike Spann's body on the evening of November 26th, things like that. So, I could actually go to that point where Steph Bass was and look and see the distance. Maybe I'm just a particularly visual person, but seeing 200 yards is different from knowing it's 200 yards. So, it was fantastic, and it just gives you, I don't know what it, it's not a motivational thing or maybe it just hopefully it comes out in the writing that you really feel it in your bones, and you don't make elementary mistakes as well, because there were things where I thought in my mind a certain route had been taken, but when I got there, there was a gap in the wall, there's no way they could have done that. So, this helps just on that practical level too.

And, of course, for those who are just listening, we aren't too familiar with the book yet, hopefully, you can pick it up. But the idea is, you're talking about this whole where they had all these Al Qaeda, Taliban prisoners, and they had a whole bunch of people in there, and you only had a few officers from the CIA. You had some of the Uzbeks they were working with, some other Afghan guards. It was this mix of people. Everyone was detained, but it wasn't like a prison yet. They were kind of trying to interview people, they're talking to people, identifying people from, I mean, the description is amazing, because even though some of the messages they're sending back to Hank Crumpton, who was overseeing it from back in the United States, was, "Hey, we, this is like the buffet of international terrorism here, right? We've got every language, every, we've got an Irish guy here, we've got the American there, we've got this." You've got people from all over. You have people pleading, and there's these little ominous cues you have in there. I think the one guy who said he was Iraqi, who was telling Mike, "Hey, there's something happening today, or there's something going on."

But at the same time, these guys are interviewing people, and they're all trying to tell them everything. The one guy's like, "Oh, yeah, I work for Al Jazeera and the US, and that." Everyone just like you would with a felon you arrested here in the United States. Everyone's got a story, so it's hard. But I'm reading it, and it's like, because I know what's going to happen obviously, and you're reading these little cues are there, and it's like, "Oh man, they're so focused on just trying to figure out some intel, really collect what they could to find Bin Laden and find out more about Al Qaeda." And these are guys that just got dropped in. So now you've got literally people speaking all kinds of languages. You've got some funny stories about how some of them, including David, would try to fool some of them and say something in a language like, "Oh, you dropped some, he dropped some money over there," if they responded. All those little stuff that we've all done, we've been meeting different places like, "How do I trip this guy up because I know he's lying?" And you see it all, so it's very like, as I'm reading, I'm like, "Oh (expletive) man, come on, it's happening right there." Of course, then they kind of overran their guards, which started this huge battle.

But in those little moments, it's amazing that you got, and it's amazing that you could have some of the photographs. There's still images from the video that was being taken for documenting all that stuff. I mean, putting all that together was an amazing story. I think it kind of reminded me, and even the title of the book, I love it because it's First Casualty, the untold story of the CIA mission to avenge 9/11. Looking back 20 years ago, that's the only reason why they went in there, that's what it was for, and they did their job, all of these guys in a small team really, really well. And then 20 years later, we were still there or just left, and you're kind of like, looking back, it's just an interesting read because I have the perspective now, and they had this perspective then going in, and man, just with a small amount of people, they really did accomplish what they went in there to do, which is just incredible, with them and some small teams of some Green Berets, some ODA teams, and they made movies and wrote books about those guys. But I'm interested to see, with all the people you talked to, what is their perspective now looking back 20 years later, and to include yours in that too, because how does everyone that you talk to, how are they making sense of it all?

Yeah, well, yes, we talk about this all the time because I'm in very close contact with them, and they've become friends basically. This weekend I was at the Special Forces Association Convention in Vegas with Justin Sapp, and we're hanging out and doing the 5K and having dinner. David stayed in my house a couple of nights ago because he still does a little bit of contracting work in the area, and he's now living deeper in rural Virginia. They've been doing some events with me and stuff, and so, yeah, we speak all the time. The other big thing we have in common at the moment is getting Afghans out.

Right.

So David, Justin, Shannon Spann, Scott Spellmeyer, who was another on the team who later became Kabul Station Chief, was very senior, retired from the agency a couple years ago, former Ranger who was wounded in the Black Hawk Down battle of Mogadishu in '93. They've been doing God's work getting people out.

Right.

I mean, Shannon's putting together with donors from Christian groups in Orange County a flight. Hopefully, touching wood, it's going to go out in the next couple of weeks. A translator I worked with in Mazar-i-Sharif last year, he's out, he's now at Fort Dix.

Right.

With the help of these people from Team Alpha and Shannon and others. It's always a little bit mysterious exactly how I'll get the full story because obviously some of it you don't want to give too much away. So, right now their perspective, I mean, anger, sadness, mourning, frustration, all those types of feelings, but I think they're mostly putting them to one side to channel it on the mission to get the Afghans out. So, another mission. And, obviously, it's very different from 2001, but it's also Americans putting their thinking caps on, taking action in an ambiguous kind of problematic situation, and just thinking about results. So, I think there is a commonality between then and now.

Going back to November 25th, I mean, David, I've spent dozens of hours talking to him about this, and as with every event, there's this confluence of things that happen, the perfect storm or whatever you want to call it. And so that day, probably 12 things needed to happen for it to unfold the way it did. If you changed any one of them, let's say Justin Sapp that morning was due to go into the fort with them, but he had to deliver a vehicle to Pol-e Khomri. But ODA 595 would have been the 12, the 12 strong "horse soldiers" guys who'd been with them all along. They were in Kunduz, I think. If they had been in Mazar-i-Sharif, a couple of them probably would have said, "No, we're going to go into the fort with you." I mean, David and Mike didn't want anybody, weren't saying, "We need more American security," but I think the ODA would have said, "We don't care what you think, we're going with you," because that was the relationship. But they didn't go in alone. They went in with, as you said, Brian, Northern Alliance guards. Of course, what they didn't know, because you never know everything, that there's Dostum's B-team or even the C-team left behind, the sick, the lame, the young. And a lot of them, as soon as the (expletive) hit the fan, they just, they just ran or they were either killed or they ran. And I think if they'd stood their ground, I'm pretty sure actually if they'd stood their ground in the first few minutes, it would have been okay, but that didn't happen.

And then the other thing I talked to David, one of the great things about David is he's still processing this 20 years later. He lives with it, really, every moment of every day. He has nightmares six nights out of seven, being chased by Al Qaeda, and he's deeply affected by it. I think he's tried, I think with a lot of success, to channel it in positive ways. I mean, he really believes in living his life and taking pleasure from the simple things and all that. But he's, I mean, he's a pretty gentle-sounding guy. He's very unassuming. He's sort of, I don't know, he's very understated. But in the footage, so we have video footage, Dostum had a videographer at the time, so that's what, a magnificent resource, which is another reason why I was attracted to the story because there's a lot of material, not only the interviews, but there's this footage, and including footage of these prisoners and what they were saying and all that. But they have David is there doing a double act with Mike Spann interrogating John Walker Lind, who says absolutely nothing throughout, which was almost alone of the prisoners they were talking to, says nothing. Most of them said something, and a lot of them, as Greg was saying, were spinning stories. But David, David speaking, he's swearing a lot, well he does swear, we all swear, but he was swearing, his voice sounded different, and he was very rough. Now, it was a rough situation, and he was playing the bad cop, and Mike was playing the good cop, even though in a way their personalities it might have been more naturally reversed, but that's what they were doing. But it just doesn't sound like David. And I said to him at a certain point, "That just doesn't sound like you." He said, "Yeah, that's what my wife said." And he said, "Looking back, I think my brain was processing a lot of the things that were going on, and that was kind of, had this physiological effect that I was kind of getting tense, and it was, it was my voice was different, but it hadn't reached my brain to the point where I was like, 'This is a really bad situation that could just go south any moment, therefore we need to draw a line.'" So, it was really interesting talking to him about that.

Yeah, and that's what I was picking up on so much because that's what Greg and I do for a living, right? We train people to understand what all those pre-event indicators are and how to understand how to operationalize information just from what you already know as a human being, plus what you're getting from that. We give words to all those feelings and senses so that you can understand it, right? And so that's why reading through, I'm like sitting here like, they knew, they didn't know, but they knew, if just with a, with a, because of the situation, because of the operation, if they could have taken a step back and taken a breath and looked around, gone, "You know what, this is going to end poorly," I think they really have the experience and knowledge to do that, which is so frustrating. As I'm sitting there reading, I'm like, "(expletive), just listen to the guy, read the tea leaves, man. He's telling you right now something's up." You, it's enough to know, take a step back, "Hey, we can come back tomorrow, this war isn't going anywhere," right? And it's just so, so it's so frustrating. I know that's why I was emotionally hooked, and for Greg, I think the same thing.

It's not unlike a bar fight, and what happens is your brain's chemistry is reading it much quicker than you are. So, in nanoseconds, what it's trying to do is ramp you up to be prepared to do a rehearsal for what's coming, and it's clear that's what's going on. But again, fatigue. What's the number one thing that's against you in a combat zone? You always got to do everything yourself. You're not going to relegate it to anybody else. So, you're absolutely exhausted, and then you're overwhelmed, and then the nutrition requirements are different, and the hydration. So, you have to feel for them in that moment, and I think you do a great job of transporting us into that moment so we can see it from their shoes and feel it. It's so important.

Brian and I had this discussion just before the last flights out of Afghanistan, sponsored in that manner. The whole thing of John Walker Lind came up in the States, and you see the way it is, and nobody was talking about the 20th anniversary of Mike Spann's son. But everybody was talking about, "Hey, when is it enough, enough with John Walker Lind? He wasn't a terrorist," but, "Why are we still beating this kid over the head with all this?" And I'm thinking, yesterday, just before I go to bed, sleep is overrated, TV's overrated, but I got to have some noise in the background. They're talking about the Holiday Baking Championships, and I see Paula Deen is back on TV. So, in America, we have such short memories. Somebody can commit what others would deem as an atrocity, and other people, if Lind comes back the way that America wants him to come back, we'll see him next year on Dancing with the Stars. I mean, that's how ridiculous we are. And that flooded my emotions with being with people and seeing them trying to bug out of Afghanistan. Being with people that were strap-hangers that went to Herat just because they wanted to put a foot in Iran and say, "I was there." And the same people in Mazar that wanted to be in the stands, the same people in Dushanbe that wanted to say, "Oh, I was the foot of the Koosh." I thought of those people then and thought of all those lives and all that money and all the things that were wasted just to show that they were there, and Mike Spann never got that chance. You know what I'm saying? Mike Spann was in there, and he was the first one in line, silent Mike, to go when they were saying, "Hey, who wants to be on this trip?" So, it's hard not to become overly emotional, and I highly suggest reading it. I tell you what, the excerpts had me hooked before I had, and I don't mean to be insulting, but Toby, I read your books without ever thinking of Toby as a real guy. You don't think of, yeah, you get what I'm trying to say? I mean, I've read a lot of books, and then I made the notation that, "Hey, wait a minute, this is the same author," with Brian. One never thought you'd be on the show. Thanks for that. Two, your style is so hugely appealing. Folks, if you feel you got disenfranchised, if you feel you left some blood or sweat on the ground in Afghanistan, read the book. It's that compelling to me that I'm getting shivers now just talking about how transformative it is being able to read, and the access that you got was amazing. Thank you.

Well, I mean, one thing I really believe strongly in is putting yourself and the story in the place where it happened and the full context. So, there's a lot of lazy commentary at the time. It's persisted really over 20 years, which is like, "Oh, dumb CIA officers, what were they thinking of going into that fort without security? Oh, they didn't follow any of the right procedures. Oh, look at that stupid question. Mike Spann didn't speak any of the languages. Look at that stupid question." Well, where do you start with that? I mean, you start with what the mission was. Yeah, Mike Spann had a six-month-old baby, two daughters. He'd recently remarried. He had every reason not to go, and not only did he not stay, but he fought to go. Justin Sapp was the same. He said he felt like he was riding a tsunami, and he just didn't want to wipe out. He didn't want to screw up so that he was going to get taken off the team. And all eight of them were like that. I mean, Mike in a way more than any of them, but all of them were to an extent. But Mike was kind of like the personification, I feel, of 9/11 and that feeling of, he was, in fact, I went to an event, the Third Option Foundation, which is a very, a great charity for CIA paramilitaries and their families. And one of the current Special Activities Division guys was talking, and you could feel the visceral nature of his sense of 9/11 and what happened since. And he was like, "We're the people who bear a grudge. In the present, we bear a grudge. We're the people who've had our boots on the neck of the enemy for the past 20 years." And that was Mike. On 9/11, it flashed up on the computer screen that, "Evacuate all non-essential personnel, evacuate." He was in Special Activities Division, the Counterterrorism Center. They were the essential employees that day. Mike Spann did not view himself as a non-essential employee, and he said to Andy, who was there, "We're the CIA. We don't go home, we do something." So, he did something.

I mean, I think one of the factors that day was Mike's personality. Mike, he was leaning forward, he wanted to get to Al Qaeda. These were the first Al Qaeda prisoners. He didn't want to delay another day. That's what his whole career, in a way, his whole life, his whole psyche was about. David was different. He was in a way less directly affected by 9/11 because he was living in Tashkent. He was flying somewhere, he wasn't here. So, he didn't have that kind of, he wasn't as affected by it. I mean, he's a great patriot and stuff, but it was different for him. But for him, it was the languages he spoke, his understanding of not only Afghan culture, but the Middle East and jihadism throughout the world. So, I think there was a sense from him, he would never say it like this, but like, he was on this earth for this moment. He could use all his language skills, all his relationships with the Afghans, like the Afghan intelligence officers, like the guy called Amanullah who was killed that day that he built up a strong relationship with. So, they were not the type of people to say, "It's a bit risky today." Every single day in that country was a risk, right? And so on other days, there would have been 12-factor days as well when if 12 things had coalesced, it would have gone very badly wrong, but maybe one of those things or two of those things didn't happen, and then you just forget about it. I've been in situations myself. I was like, you're like, "Oh (expletive)." But it's just a couple of minutes, it doesn't happen, you don't die, and then you don't really think about it. And it just so happened that this day it did happen, but that doesn't mean that they were stupid. They shouldn't, they shouldn't have done it. I firmly believe also that, somebody made a glib comment on social media somewhere the other day, and they said, "Oh, it didn't work out so well for Mike Spann." Like, "Okay, so he was killed, but I don't think Mike Spann would have viewed being killed as, his life was not about avoiding getting killed." And Shannon said at the funeral, "It's, we're not talking about the loss of his life, but the way he lived his life," right? And obviously, tactically, David would change a few things that day with hindsight. Wonderful thing. And I'm sure Mike would as well. He certainly didn't want to get killed, but I don't think he would, in the broader sense of things, I don't think he would have done anything differently because that's, he was that type of person, that's what he did.

Thank God you're controlling the narrative on this, because here's the thing, you've hung around. When you have the opportunity like you do, and luckily sometimes we do, hanging around SAS, SBS, Special Forces, Ground Branch people. We just spent a couple of days a week and a half ago with some Ground Branch folks. They're the most unassuming. You would never know. When they talk, they're not this bravado, horse crap that you read. They're not the ones that are texting out those type of messages that you talked about. So, for them to give you this type of access and talk openly and candidly about what they did, that's amazing. And none of them would have changed. Of course, we all would go back and rewrite history, we don't have that option. But how they lived then, and how we live in the shadow of what they've given, and those people that gave it all, it's amazing. You can never forget. Your book will make sure that Americans and anybody that reads it will never forget those sacrifices and how much they meant to America. Here 20 years later, we should be embarrassed that there's not some national day of reckoning for Spann and for people like him that gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country, for our nation, for our freedom.

Yeah, I mean, you do this for a number of reasons, and it's just, it's an incredible privilege. Because, I don't know, just on a personal level, even if I hadn't been writing anything, to spend hours and hours with David Tyson talking about, I mean, that's incredible. I mean, it certainly beats working in McDonald's or, or whatever it is. But also, it's a huge responsibility because if you (expletive) it up. So, there's a weight as well. But you do it because it's, I've done a lot of journalism, so I'm pretty good journalism, but it's, as they say in Britain, it's the wrapping paper for the fish and chips the next day, or the hamster cage is maybe the more American version, or whatever. But books are forever. And I do hope and believe, I think, that if you capture something, you choose something that's important, not just tactically or in terms of the granularity, I certainly try for granularity because I think that's hugely important. But what I try to do is link it to the big picture overall because that really makes it mean something. It's in a way a moment in time because they're all retired apart from Andy. But basically, they're in a position now where they can speak, but it's not like, I hung out with a load of Vietnam veterans who are getting pretty old now this weekend. So, it's before the memories are still fresh, and so I'm really proud of being able to use the opportunity to capture it now because I think this was the right moment. Couldn't have done it 10 or 15 years ago because classification and people's jobs would have meant they couldn't talk, I think.

You've, I mean, you've covered a lot of conflict and war, everything. I mean, from this, which is a lot different than your book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, because that whole situation is, I mean, it's like one giant gray area of how people grow up, and one person goes one direction, and the other person goes the other direction. But we see that here in the United States with, okay, someone went into the military and changed their life where someone else joined the gang and now they're doing this, and it's kind of similar. And then you've covered everything between, I know Iraq, you've been in Africa, you've been in, obviously, in Afghanistan and talked to all these folks. So, what's, what's your, your lesson learned out of this? What's your takeaway from all of your experience covering these events? Because we each have our own way of looking at it. Greg and I have been involved in stuff, for me, Greg his whole life, mine, for the last almost 20 years. In some former fashion, I've been involved with some sort of conflict area. We just got back from Mexico City, working with some folks down there, and that's a whole other thing. But we see so many similarities in the situation. To us, it's all the same conflict as humans, and it's how we interact, and sometimes it's for, people can look back and say, "That was a just cause." And sometimes we go, "Well, I don't know about that one. What do we really do in the moment?" So, I'm just curious, just kind of what your perspective or lessons learned or takeaway of everything that you've covered in your career.

Yeah, I mean, I think, one of the basic things is, I mean, I think I learned early on, and I've certainly tried to put in practice, it's just go to places, don't, and obviously with this generation now, and I have it with my kids and social media and phones, and people who, they don't want to pick up the phone, never mind go knock on somebody's door, never mind hang out with them for a few hours drinking, or whatever. They just want to text them or just read what this person said on Twitter, and that's enough. So, go to places. Talk to people. I can, I've hung out with people who, IRA, terrorists, if you want to use the term, and got on very well with them. I disagree with what they did and stuff, but actually, David Tyson is very like this: you can have strong personal views and what have you, but you can still talk to the people, and everybody's got something. And sometimes the person who's done the worst things or you might disagree with most politically, it's the most interesting and likable person that you can strike up a rapport with. So, I think that's really important.

And the other thing is, and this maybe comes with age, but you talked about gray areas and nuance. I certainly believe in right and wrong and good and evil, and this is a fact and that's not, and this is what happened, all that sort of stuff. But you don't need to be (expletive) sure about everything. Be changed by going with an idea and maybe a thesis, but be ready to change. And not being judgmental. So, people are, so whenever you're writing about conflict or, you have bravery and heroism obviously, but you also have cowardice and people (expletive) up, right? But all those people, we never know, hopefully we never know how we're going to be truly tested, like in the way that David Tyson was tested that day. "Is he going to run away, or is he going to run towards Mike when he hears his voice, 'Dave, Dave, David'?" He knows that if he runs towards Mike Spann, he's got a very good chance of dying, and he runs. He actually says it wasn't a decision, it was just autopilot or muscle memory. I think actually it's also about the core of your character, and I think that's the core of his character. But there were a lot of people there, and some instances in the book where people did things wrong, or it wasn't their finest hour on a particular day, or people have strong feelings about, "They didn't do this or that," but they were all there. So, there's an element of bravery of just choosing that profession and being there after 9/11. And so, I think it's, I don't know whether it's giving people the benefit of the doubt, it's just empathy really, of like, "This is what they're facing." And I'm not going to sit around in an armchair in Northern Virginia 20 years later and say, "Oh, it was just easy, if only we'd done that." And so, talking to people, spending time with them, talking about what they want to talk about, not just what you want to talk about. I mean, actually the longer I go on, the longer maybe this podcast is an example, but the longer interviews are, I mean, I would go with Team Alpha, if they had the time and the energy, and it would often be like five hours, and we might go down some alleyway where we'd be talking about what they did in Berlin during the Cold War, and that's fine. And actually really interesting stuff comes out that way by just letting it flow rather than doing this gotcha, "Tell me about this." And I've been with colleagues, journalists sometimes in joint interview situations, which I hate, where they, I couldn't believe how they would treat the person. Cut them off and say, "Yeah, anyway, we don't give a (expletive) about how your brother lost his leg last year, I want to know what you think about this." Wow. And so I really, really try not to do that and make interviews like conversations, and just much more comes out. You learn, people are so interesting, you learn so much about them, their motivations, their experience, and just surprising things come out that way.

No, and that's why, it's why I'm so happy about podcasts and in general because it's those, you get those full conversations. It takes a while to get to the great stuff, just like a normal conversation with someone. I think that's why, I mean, there's obvious, people are craving that, and that's why podcasts are popular, right? Which is good. That long-form discussion because it allows us to bring this stuff up and, you know, you brought up a few things in there that I think I've noticed, one of the things sometimes people with different conflict and war, they, "Well, you know, things happen and, you know, this is and this is good versus evil and that person's bad." Where I've had, fortunately, I've been fortunate enough to have experience, I've shown kind of otherwise that, you know, but the idea is, you know, some people say like, "You know, things happen and we did this and, you know, you don't understand it's a fog of war." And I was like, "No, it's actually the people that I see do it best and especially with everyone you wrote about in the book is, it's someone who has a very, very strong moral compass and and has their ethos and beliefs, but understands that that's not how the world is and can navigate that really well." And that's the thing is having that, like all these people he did, like Mike did and David did, and all the other folks on this team, knowing where they fit in in space and time is a huge thing. And just like you're talking about with even with folks up in Northern Ireland and Troubles up there, I mean, before 9/11 there were pubs in my neighborhood in Chicago where you could donate money to the cause.

Oh, yeah.

You could go to the church on Easter and you'd give money and you get to wear your white lily. That was a thing. And then 9/11 happened, all of a sudden that went, that's done. We're lumping them in with everyone. And so it changed things, but I mean, so I, you can't sit here and, and, you know, that my own neighbors, no neighborhood I grew up in funded terrorism. And like, I mean, you even hesitated calling it that right now. I mean, it's almost like, "This is conflict, this is how it is. This is how humans interact." Violence and that stuff is a language, it's a currency, it's all these things. And so when you get into that, being what these guys did, especially when you're talking about the CIA's Special Activities Center and all that folks, the Ground Branch folks, it's like, you really have to have that in you, not as like, "I'm some Jason Bourne badass person." It's, "No, you, you're just at heart a really, really good person that's put in a really, really difficult situation." And a lot of that comes out with all these, these stories and people, and you're just like in awe, like, "Holy (expletive), we have some of the greatest people in the world working here doing this thing." Like, even the story about David and his wife and their poor, basically professors in Indiana, and then decide like, "Hey, I got this offer for the CIA," and his wife's like, "Okay." And he's like, "Really good at health insurance, let's do it," you know? You're like, "That shows the human being behind all of it to go how these things occur." And then I, I mean, I just, I love all that stuff. I'm sure that probably all those stories, obviously you're a writer, you're a reporter, that's what you do. Those stories interest you too. So, I just always think it's important to point that stuff out, that these things aren't black and white. I mean, this is very, it's about relationships and people. And when you get into that, does it get a little, like, is it a little complex sometimes? Oh, yeah, absolutely. But that's, that's where the beauty comes from, that's where the story comes from, that's why you're writing about it. You're not writing about something, an average day in someone's life, you're writing about extraordinary things because they're so complicated. I always like to put that in there because it kind of comes up in these themes where you really get to see who this person was. I'm sitting there like, "Damn, I get Mike Spann." He was 30 years old doing this. If you did a few years in the Marine Corps as like an artillery officer and then went over to the agency and did all that stuff in a relatively short amount of time because you're still a young guy, and then you're going, "Man, like that must have been he's really, really smart and really, really good at making decisions and really tough under pressure." And so you see all that, you're like, just kind of in awe of some of these people. It's just some of the observations I had reading it. So, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's often the little details. So, very late on, almost the last thing I put in the book, I was talking to David, and it was pretty much done, and I don't know what we were talking about, and he just mentioned that he'd sent a letter to the French Foreign Legion when he was 17 years old. I was like, "You're telling me that now?" And he's like, "Yeah, I don't mention that." It just says so much about it. It's this kid, kind of tall, kind of, I remember I'm tiny, so I had bad acne. Kind of awkward kid in, a very modest background in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, near Delaware. A very simple, like Mennonite type family. His brother became a plumber and still lives there, in fact, lives in the same house with their mother, who's 95, the same house that David and his brother grew up in. And for whatever reason, in the chemistry or whatever it is, David's this guy, from that very early age, just wants to go out in the world. And you know, how many kids send off letters? And you got a response as well. Of course, you don't speak French. In fact, they said, they said no, you could come and join, but he didn't have enough money to, they weren't going to pay the flight or anything, so he didn't have enough money. So, he joined the US Army instead. But it's just such an insight into his character. It's just that little detail that just said so much, and I, I love those things.

Absolutely.

Well, Greg, do you have, I'll give some final comments to you before I go back.

I'm so starstruck and fan-struck just being able to talk to Toby. Thanks very much. He just, the flood of emotions coming back, being outside the FOB and the combat outpost and seeing the Flintstone nature of life and understanding that if the generator is not running for that 40 minutes a day, you don't have all the things that we have in America, and people forget that. Read this book, read this book and read about people that didn't say, "I'm going to start as a hero," that people just put a foot in front of the other and went in harm's way to answer the call of gunfire. Just fascinating. I love your body of work. I want to know what's next. Give us a sneak preview on the show.

I'm thinking, I have a few ideas. There's a thing that involves Vietnam and Green Berets and CIA that may be the thing, but we'll see. I hope, but that, that would be an exciting thing.

Don't take too long because we're both holding our breaths.

I need to pay the bills as well, so yeah, that's always a motivating factor, like the deadline.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Absolutely. Well, I'll put the links to everything so everyone can just go straight to Amazon and order if they want, or, I'll put all that stuff in there in the episode details if you're listening now, and I'll have it included. But Toby, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us.

Well, thank you very much. I mean, I love the podcast. I've listened to several episodes. I'll listen to some more, and yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation and thank you very much for reading and clearly you've, you get the book and what I tried to do, and anybody who's, who 22 years later after its publication has read Bandit Country is a friend for life for me.

Well, if it's okay with you, we'll put the link to the PDF up. I don't know, I've had someone reach out before. I was in some Facebook group, someone's asking about some other books, and I said, "Oh, have you ever read this?" And then they reach out to me, they're like, "Hey, I can't find that, where is it?" And I was like, "Hey, send me your, send me your address, I'll send you my copy. I've still got it, my books." But, well, I'll tell you what.

Can you not do that, but I won't.

Oh, all right. People can email me, but yeah, I'll put actually some talk of maybe getting it republished because it's one of the most sought-after out-of-print books and it could be like 75 bucks on eBay and what have you, so I would really like to get out there. There's a very long, complicated story.

I got you. I got you. No, no, no, and totally understand. It's come up again and other stuff, and I always recommend it to people, and then I was doing that without knowing that you couldn't basically get it anymore. And they're like, "Hey, thanks for that book recommendation, but I don't have $150 or $100 to drop on it." I was like, "Whoa, let me send you mine." So, that, yeah, that's, that's I totally, totally get that. Well, I appreciate it and thanks, thanks for coming on and thanks everyone for listening and don't forget the training changes behavior. All right, man, well, that's, that's I'll probably, I'll end it right there, but we, Toby, man, I really appreciate it. I'm either thinking either next week or the week after this one for releasing this unless you want me to, I put them, I released them on Wednesdays. We took a break, but there is one Wednesday, the 24th is the day before Mike Spann's death, so I couldn't even wait until then, but I'll see how we have things lined up and I'll let you know.

Yeah, okay. Fantastic. Thanks, a pleasure meeting you.

Thank you so much and cheers, Brian.

Cheers.

Appreciate it. Keep in touch.

We will.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, man. Take care. Bye.