Episode 22 – Lessons Learned From A Legendary Tier 1 Operator – CSM Tom Satterly (Ret.)

Jon Becker: My guest today is Tom Satterly. Tom is a highly decorated combat veteran having served in the army for 25 years with the last 20 spent in the US Army's most elite tier one unit, Delta Force. During his career, Tom was involved in and led some of our nation's most important military campaigns, including the battle for Mogadishu portrayed in the film Black Hawk down, the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Tom is the recipient of numerous medals, including a silver star and four bronze stars, one for valorous axe. He was also the first American to ever attend Germany's ranger school. Tom retired from Delta in 2010 as a command sergeant major.

Tom's willingness to speak openly and honestly about his mental and emotional struggles have saved the lives of countless other warriors who believed they had to suffer in silence or make it alone or not at all.

Today, Tom and his wife and partner Jen are the co-founders and co-CEOs of the All Secure Foundation, a nonprofit organization serving special operation warriors and their families to help reconnect and to heal.

Tom's best selling book, All Secure, is available at all major bookstores. I'm excited to have Tom on the debrief, not only because of his extensive leadership experience in one of the world's most elite units, but for the amazing work he has done since leaving Delta.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Tom, thanks so much for joining me today on The Debrief! It's great to have you!

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, thanks, Jon! I appreciate you having me on!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start just for those that are not that familiar with a quick Satterly bio so that everybody kind of is brought up to speed with who you are.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I think I hate to date myself. Back in 85, I graduated high school and it was a John Cougar moment. A friend of mine had just got out of basic training from the army and he was on his way to Germany and he was telling me all about it on the way up to this concerte.

By the time I got up to that concert, about an hour and a half drive, I decided to join the military just to get college money. Yeah, I'll go for four years and get out. And ended up going to Germany, was there for three years and had one more year to get out.

But during those three years, I went to french commando school, german ranger school, tuned confidence training, and the swiss march. It was like 40 miles a day for five days. And it just felt good. It felt different, you know, and it felt more than just motor pool Mondays, where you sit in the motor pool and you do s*** and you're never gonna go anywhere. You're never gonna do anything, and you know it. You're in the regular army, you train a little bit.

But once I got a little taste of more of a special operations environment, I guess I just wanted more. And a friend of mine used to showed me a picture of him as a baby, and his dad's holding him in his arm, wearing his dad's green beret. And I kind of adopted that dream right then and said, that's what I want to do, you know. So I kind of enlisted. Re-enrolled for jump school.

So I get to Fort Bragg, get a green Beret, you know. And as soon as I got to Fort Bragg, I started hunting down the green Beret recruiter. But come to find out about two years ago that that was a stolen valor picture. His dad really wasn't SF, so, you know, my career started out with a stolen valor moment, which was fine. I took that valorous moment, made it my own, and then I went to become a green beret.

And then when I was in language school, I got approached by a couple of guys that were in the unit, you know, and they're like, hey, we saw you in the cue Corps. I think you have what it takes. You should go try this out. I'm like, okay, sounds cool. So I put in first selection date and got accepted and made that in 91. And I stayed there for 20 years.

Jon Becker: Through 20 of the most probably tumultuous years in special operations. And if you're going to pick 20 years, 91 to 11 would probably be the 20 busiest years in special operations history.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, it was a fun time, I'll tell you. It was, you know, after a year and a half, you know, thrust right into Somalia as my first combat, you know, engagement. That was. I remember thinking, holy s***, that's not any idea what I thought this would be. You know? I mean, you don't think about it, right? You train and you. You're the heroes and you're the winners, and you're the good guys. But when your friends start dying, you realize, oh, okay, this s*** goes two different ways. It comes back at you, too.

Jon Becker: Well, and, like, why don't we put context on Somalia? Because I think there were a lot of things that happened in Somalia that were bad. The operation you were involved in was so historic, and, for lack of a better term, so rough that we made a movie called Black Hawk down about it. Why don't you give us kind of a quick thumbnail sketch?

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, that was a quick day of a time sensitive target where a guy on the ground had done the signal, you know, of, hey, the guys are here. We're looking for some people on the ground. And he had done what he was supposed to do, pull up with his car, open the hood, shut the hood, and drive away. And that tells us, oh, he's there, and it's this house, you know, the guy did the wrong house. They're all idiots. But still, we figured it out.

So we loaded up while the team leaders were getting a quick debrief, we all loaded up, you know, after the pagers went off and sit on our helicopters and wait for the team leader to come up and scream at you with a piece of paper pointing, and you're just nodding your head going, sure, I got it. But you don't know what the h*** you're doing, right? I mean, you can't hear him.

The helicopters are cranked up, and he's screaming and pointing, and you're like, whatever, we'll do that. Infiltrated and realized immediately we're already under fire. You know, it was in the heart of the beast. It was in the Bakar market. So that's where all their weapons were and just bad guy territory, of course. We thought, in and out, right? In and out before they even know we're there.

And, you know, you shoot one helicopter down, and then they shot another helicopter down. And I remember watching it fly overhead off to the northeast and then crashing. And I knew that's when I knew during that mission that it had changed. It was going to be a lot longer. You know, up to that point, I was still joking about, we're going to make a home for dinner. I wonder what they're going to have for dinner tonight, you know, and we're still kind of cracking jokes like we did.

And then people started getting shot, and five ton trucks started blowing up, and helicopters were shot down, and we had to fight our way up the street to the crash site, and then basically were pinned down to that crash site for 18 hours. It was like the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam at the time. And it may still be. I don't know.

But it was the night that I watched friends die. I thought I was going to die. I kind of gave in. We ran out of ammo, and my team leader came in, and I asked him a question, because you could hear the convoy trying to make it to us, but had been going on for hours, just hours of raging gunfight going off in the city as they tried to fight their way to us. There's a gunfight at our house as they pick our house apart with rocket propelled grenades and, you know, AK-47 fire.

But thank God we had the little birds to keep them at bay. And we were kind of, in the Alamo situation, the best we could be at that crash site, but they just kept picking us apart. And when my team leader came in, I asked him, do you think they're going to make it? And he looked at me, and I was, like, waiting for that motivational speech, you know, like, hey, you know, f*** up young camper. And he just looked at me, goes, I don't know. And he turned to left, and I thought, well, s***, you know, s***, this sucks.

And I kind of, at that moment, like a calm, you know, washed over me versus the harried, like, what's going on? What's going on? And looking everywhere. And it was kind of like, here we are. Right? Here we are. I'm going to break as much s*** as I can tonight, kill as many people as I can, and help as many of my guys as I can, because I didn't figure I was going to make it. And it just kind of gave me that courage and strength to keep going.

And then when we got back the next morning, that run out, I'll tell you the run out. When the two vehicles finally showed up, maybe at dawn, right before dawn, and they hooked up chains and pulled the helicopter frame off of the pilots that were stuck underneath, which is why we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't leave and then fought our way back. You know, we put all the dead on top. We put all the wounded inside those vehicles.

And then when I went to get in and pull the door shut, it was like, there's no room inside, you know? And it's like, all right, we hashed out a new plan. We'll run alongside the vehicles. They'll use this cover, and we'll work our way that mile back to where everyone else was. And as soon as the first shots fired again, they took off. Those vehicles just took off. We're sitting there like, all right, new plan, we're just going to run back, you know, so we just ended up fighting our way back until we ran into the tanks and Bradleys and Humvees that we climbed into and made our way back.

And when I pulled back into the two Humvees I was in got lost. I went the wrong way. Everybody else went to the Pakistani stadium. Our two Humvees got lost. And I didn't find that out until about three years ago when I made a post and somebody wrote back, that's my vehicle from the 10th mountain. And I'm like, hey, what happened, man? And he told me, we got lost. All right, good enough, you know, good enough. Now I know 30 years later that we got lost, but we made it to the back gate of the airfield. I waited a little bit. Nobody else came. I'm like, well, s***, let's drive all the way around to where our hangar was.

And when I did, I noticed, like, twelve bodies laying on the street, covered in poncho liners and whatnot. And I started looking. I could see the boots, and you see desert boots, then you see black Adidas boots and then some more deserts and more black Adidas. And I knew ours were the black Adidas. And that was the first hint that I had of how bad the night was, how really bad it was, how many lives we had lost, you know?

And then I just went inside and started rearming and cleaning up, charging my radios and getting ready to go back out. And then everybody started flying back in from the Pakistani stadium. And then we started getting word that Gary and Randy were missing. There were live people out there missing. And it just anger. Anger washes over you. Everybody packed up, rearmed, and got ready to go back out, and they just wouldn't let us do it. They wouldn't let us go back out. I think they knew, like, don't let them out. Don't let these angry people out. It'll be bad.

And then I, but I think they also knew that we were decimated. We just didn't realize it. That had never happened to us. We were just angry and probably wanting to go back out. But they had decided they're going to bring another squadron over and replace us. And all we got to do after that day was train with the other squadron, show them what we knew, talked about what we knew before we packed up and left. We had. I think I'll screw these numbers up. I know it was 19 Kia, and I want to say 98, probably wounded.

Out of all of us being a little over 100, you know, I'll screw those numbers up this much later, but there's very, very few left that were unscathed. But a lot of the walking wounded made it out and then finally evac back to the rear. And it was kind of more of a decimation than I realized up front how many people were injured and couldn't go back out.

Jon Becker: That was a pretty violent way to start your career at Delta, too, wasn't it?

CSM Tom Satterly: My first trip was to Jackson hole, Wyoming, skiing. I was like, this is the life, man. I've never been skiing before. Paid by the government. And then you go out and crawl over a mountain at two in the morning, make it all worth it, and sleep overnight in a snow cave. But, you know, the skiing was fun. I thought, this is a pretty cool place to be, you know?

And then I went, did a trip down south and early 93, and then, boom, Somalia pops up. You know, we rehearsed for Somalia before they called us up to go in August, I think. And I remember. I remember landing on the ground, like, ready to roll as a kid. I was a kid, you know, and I remember how hot it was. Just how hot. And then the rainy season kicked in, and then, you know, your hanger's full of holes, right?

So it's just raining on you all the time. And then you're on the ocean, you're like, well, let's go swimming. And then some tigers eat a couple of 10th mountain guys. You're like, all right, no more swimming. You know? So everything that you can do, they kind of take away from you over there. This is a horrible place to be.

Jon Becker: Does it? How did Somalia – So at that point, you're young in your army career. How did that inform your leadership later as you got older and got responsibility, how did that impact you?

CSM Tom Satterly: I relied upon that a lot, and I screwed that up, too. It had been such a long time. 20 years before I'm back, and now I'm in charge, and I'm calling Black Hawk down, and I'm like, we don't have enough water. I did it again. It was one of those things that we learned so much. Then we rewrote how we do mount training and urban warfare. I think the whole military changed how they did it. And I had one of those feelings like, this will never happen again. We're just going to keep training until this never happens again. I just put my head down, and for the next 30, 20 years was like, this will never happen again. Just keep training, keep training, keep training.

And it kind of drove my leadership into the arena of, I know what the most horrible things are, and that's what we need to prepare for because we're so highly trained that we don't need to keep being so highly trained. We need to maintain that. But the things we had never done. The downed Hilo, the occupying of a four way intersection properly, was a small element. We don't operate in large elements. Understanding that that was not our real mission. Our real mission is in and out in small elements, you know, and.

And then fast forwarding to 20 years of war in the Middle east again, and we're doing the same things. We start doing the same things again because we've lost a lot of knowledge. So I started instilling a little bit of that back into our people as much as I could. Like, hey, we can't have our helicopters hovering over the target. It tells everybody where you're at, and then they get shot down.

Then you have another issue. So that started to repeat itself, you know, and what caught me was that mission we went on where I said I had to call Black Hawk down over the radio. Cause right up on infill, a helicopter got hit with an RPG and had to do a hard landing, like about 150 meters away in a field.

So I had to send all the rangers over to protect that and surround that crash site while our guys were taken down. The target, which was, by the way, not a wedding party, as they told us, was a weapons training area. So they had all their weapons ready to go, and they were training and just Starburst everywhere. So that night ended up being ac 130 gunships. I mean, just everything went wrong that night. Nobody. Nobody killed one person injured that night with a suicide vest in our house. But other than that, man, we found a huge cachet in the carport of 155 rounds, setting up huge IED. So once we left, we blew that house up.

But that was another all nighter that wasn't as violent. And it kind of gave me that feeling that maybe we handled it better this time, you know? But it wasn't an urban area as much as Somalia was. It was still a little bit of an open area where we had some advantage. Plus, we had our night vision. You know, we had everything we were supposed to take with us.

So I tried to instill that along the way of people like, don't think that your plan will be executed the way you think it'll be executed. Right? You bring everything that you think you might need to stay overnight, 24 hours at a minimum, no matter where you go. Instead of cutting out things like, well, we'll back in there. I don't need a lot of extra water. It's a daytime. I don't need my nods. You know, all the things that we did back then that the newer guys were starting to think of again, like, let's lighten our load. I'm like, hmm, no, why don't you go work out and carry that load, right? Do extra workout with that load in your back, because you need that s***, you know?

And when you need it, it's better to have it, right? So that's kind of what I went with Washington was that deep thinking of beyond our training, beyond the plan, when it all goes to s***, that's what we need to worry about.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting! In your book, one of the things that really stuck me was you described the second event and the helicopter going down and calling Black Hawk down. And it instantly struck me that the contrast of now being in a leadership position and having what appears to be the beginning of a very similar event, it starts in a very similar way. Had to be kind of a profound emotional event for you, where it was like, oh, God, now it's going to happen. On my watch!

CSM Tom Satterly: I was. And when I get emotional or when I get scared or when I feel shameful or when my wife calls me out on something, I get Madden. I go straight to rage. I used to. I used to, I don't. Now I just get mad like normal people. But I would go, because I was living at a seven, right? Most people live at one or two. I was. I was living at a seven. That was my normal day. So when you made me mad, I go to ten right away. It's not very far to ten, you know, or eleven even. I go all the way to eleven.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

CSM Tom Satterly: And it was one of those. I had to break that process of the rage that came up. And that night when that happened again, and it came over me, my boss was a new officer, and he was like, on the roof. And I was telling him, we need to do this, we need to do that. And he was kind of timid about putting it in because it was one of his first hits, you know, that was like that.

And he kept telling me, hey, the command wants us to go chase these squirters. And I'd tell him no, and I'd go about doing more business, say, hey, hey, they kept hitting me up again. They really want us to send a team after those squirters. I go tell them no, you know, and I'm over there doing my job again.

He goes, hey Tom grabs me, and he goes, listen, we're on the roof of this building. He's like, they really want us to either take a helicopter, fly over with a team, and chase the squirters that ran into this house about, you know, half a mile away by now. And I looked at him. I go, let me show you how to do this. And I grabbed the radio from him, and I got on there, and I called back to headquarters, and I said, we've got a downed hilo. I've got rangers surrounding it. I've got my assaulters scattered about this target area, trying to figure out we're still under fire, we're still chasing people. We're not chasing squirters out. And I threw it back at them and go, that's how you f****** do it, you know?

And I turn around so freaked out and so mad that I. Since then, I've learned to operate. I was operating out of fear back then, right? Since then, I've learned to operate out of love and get the same thing done, but on target, there's no time to mess around. And I was just overwhelmed with those emotions from Somalia and being in charge and thinking, this can't happen. I can't let this develop into this.

So they were trying to make us still go and do things while I'm trying to secure something now, right? I just couldn't. I couldn't do it. And I'm glad I didn't separate our men more, you know, I'm glad I did, because I already had a guy missing, and he was out there in the field, just messed up on ambience.

So once I found him in, then I could use the ac 130 to suppress the site. So that moment of Somalia, I was just a kid breaking s***, you know, and shooting people, and it was just me two. You're in charge of all these people was a great difference. And it was worse to be in charge, even though you might not be in as much danger entering the door first, you know?

Jon Becker: But I think it's – You raise an interesting point, and maybe it is a lesson that we learn out of trauma and pain and mistakes, but as a leader, we've got to have moral courage. We have to have a willingness to stand up even to those above you when there is peril.

And I think that one of the things that came through to me in reading that story was that you had come to this point where it's like, I have responsibility for these guys and I'm willing to put myself, you know, I'll call it in political harm's way to make sure that we're not going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

CSM Tom Satterly: I just, I felt it was my job. That's what I get paid to do. That's what my men expect me to do. I think they might have been using the timidity of the new commander, or they're sitting back in the back and they got an overall picture at the top and they think they know what's going on, but they don't know what's going on under the trees, in the building, and running around as much as we do on the ground.

My point to him was, you're the ground commander. You're number one. You make the decisions. You deal with it in the rear when you get back. Don't let them bark in your ear about, go do this, go do that. I mean, they're sitting in the backseat driving right now.

You know, they can shut up, put some socks in the kids mouths, let's go get this target secure. Then we can call them up and tell them what's going on and ask them what else they want us to do. But they don't drive the target from afar. And that's what I was trying to teach.

Jon Becker: I think it's easy if you are not managing up, right, if you are not as the ground commander, if you're not delivering ground truth to those above you, it's very easy for them to go, oh, well, let's go do this, and let's go do that. And I think that one of the things that came through to me in the book was that kind of realization, probably born from the fires of Somalia, that in the end, the ground truth is really the only one that matters, because that is where the guys are in contact.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. Cause the same thing happened in Somalia. They were passing information from above. They were trying to drive the convoy, but by the time they radioed down, it was too late. The delay and the radios turn right and they missed that and then turned right at the next one. Now they're lost again, and they had to keep doing it, trying to guide them to where instead of just telling them where to go and letting them navigate there. They were trying to help them through the burning tires and the roadblocks, but the system wasn't in place, so they were trying to drive it from the top down. And it just made it very difficult on the ground.

Jon Becker: When you raised one other point, kind of in passing. But in the 20 years that you're in the unit, are certainly 20 of the most tumultuous years in American military history. And I think that you were on the front end of the great American experiment of how hard can we drive our special operations forces and not kill them? How many times can we deploy them? How many times can we. How much can we feed them Ambien and energy drinks and see if they go psychotic?

And I think one of your lasting contributions, not only from the book, but the work that you've done since, is this realization that we were doing it wrong. I look at how many of our best and brightest, right? The assumption is that the guys that are in the unit, the guys that are in DEVGRU, the guys that are in our SOF units, are the best and brightest our country has.

And I think the lasting consequence of the war on terror is that we ground up hundreds of our best and brightest through, you know, overworking them in attention imbalance and everything else. I would love to hear kind of your thoughts, you know, as. As the canary in the coal mine, Tom, I would love to kind of hear your thoughts on our approach to that.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think our leadership has found out that it's cheaper and faster to send special operations in repeatedly and then pull them out, versus sending a large organization and that they've never really trained well. You zero your weapon once a year. You work on your vehicles. Tankers do their tanker s***. I get it. You know, they've just. We used to call it 1% does 99% of the work. We just keep deploying over and over again.

And it got so bad that they added another unit to every special operations organization. We're going to add another SF company, we're going to add another ranger. Whatever company. We're going to add another squadron over here to the organization. Probably added another SEAL team group. It's one of those. We'll make four instead of three of everything. Change the whole cycle. Guys will get an extra 90 days off. Never happened. What it did was allow them to deploy to two different locations with two different elements while one was on alert and while one was training to go again.

So you're still training all the time. That whole bullshit about, oh, there's an extra squad or an extra element, you can get an extra whatever off. Never happened. Leaders just took that because, honestly, again, we're humans. And leaders chase promotions. Leaders chase. You know, it's their job. They want to show off. Right? It's where we show everybody what we can do and how we impress people.

So the leaders want everyone to do other jobs that aren't their legacy tasks, like hostage rescue or taking out foreign leaders. And now we're out running around chasing everybody. The Rangers are running out chasing everybody. The SF guys running around chasing everybody. They all got out of the legacy tasks until near the end of the war, when I think General Sokolik started pushing everybody back to your legacy tasks. We need that. We brought these people up for a reason. SF, you're nation builders, right? You shouldn't be running around killing people all the time. It's time to start training and building the nation. Rangers, you know, you're designed to do this. Oregon Delta, you're designed to do this.

So pulling people back, there was a start of that. I don't know how far it got. Didn't get too far. Special ops organizations are still doing the 99% of the work around the world in places we don't even know about. It's never ending. And they abuse. I say abuse, but it's abuse on the body. They abuse the operators. I know in the unit we were never fully manned. It might be now, but I doubt it. We're never up to our full tone. It's always just a six man team.

Well, I've had four, you know, so we're always short anyway. And you're barring people from here and here. So this guy might be off around training. Okay, we need four. Horse of hands go up. You know, you have four guys now. Now there's four wives with no husband again for another 90 days. And it's such a high competitive place that no one's going to back down.

I mean, I'm talking to my friends now, some people that are still in the organization, I get some help. When you're healthier, you'll be a better warrior. It's not like, you know, and it's not like you're going to hide behind a car and say, please don't shoot at me when you go get help, right? And you deal with this stuff where you get a stellit shot which turns down your fight flight or free, so you're not an a****** at home.

And they're like, well, when I go back, I want to be aggressive. I go, oh, you'll be straight aggressive, right? This just calms you down while you're here. But it takes these guys. It took me a good. I've been working on it for a good ten years now to get past that a****** phase that I'm in the military still phase, you know, where you talk like a pirate when you want to be mean and angry, but I – You got to give up your past or it develops you and destroys you, especially when it's a past like this. Because the things that we had to do were not natural.

Those aren't natural things to do, and it affects everybody. I don't care who you are. I don't care the story you try to tell me, it will affect you, the s*** that we've done, and it will take you a long time to get back to feeling good.

Jon Becker: Do you think it's possible to do that job and not be that way? Is it possible to have that balance now retrospectively? Is it possible to do, you know, to be in the unit, to be in one of these units and have a normal balance? Or is it just going to be an unbalanced state for the whole time you're there?

CSM Tom Satterly: I think it's an unbalanced state while you're there. But I think if leadership took an active role in making you do things right, they don't want to make you do that. It's an extra thing for them. It costs more for them, you know, on up. But I think if we came back as a squadron, they made us go and have two sessions with a counselor that was really had our interests at heart, and you weren't going to get fired, and you weren't going to have somebody say, well, this dude's crazy. Because we're all crazy, right? We're all crazy. That's who they pick, crazy people.

But if you come back and you have a class on, this is how it affects you, here are some tools to work on it. When you go home, you're going to be angry with your spouse, you're going to scream at your kids, you're going to get mad about everything, and you don't want to. You're going to have that Homer Simpson syndrome where all this s***'s going on in your head and you're going to say it, don't say it, don't say it. And you say it because you just can't help it because we've been inbred to win everything we do, so everything we take on, like dishes in the sink, I'm going to win that argument. I don't care if you're 16 or 15 and you got all these excuses.

To me that's bullshit. Back in the day, that would be bullshit, and I don't want to hear it. There were no excuses because my mind was operating under the aspect that if it's chaotic, you could die. So it takes over, you get hijacked and you start behaving like everything needs done right now, or we're going to die. To include the ditches in the sink.

So I had to get past the fact that I was programmed to be that way. I've been given awards and rewarded for being violent. It got me through all the h*** on earth I'd been through, you know, hate and anger and just lack of love for mankind. But it's time to let all that go because I no longer need it to keep me alive, right? I don't need to act that way anymore.

And I think a lot of it is guys can't let go. It's your identity, it's who you are. It's the last best thing you did, right? Some people talk about college all the time. You see them flying their college flags. They're like 55 flying a college flag, wearing their college shirt and going to the college games all the time and having college parties.

And I'm like, is that the last great thing you did? You didn't do anything since college or that last high school touchdown pass you through. That's your story for life. Move on, make something else happen. Just like the same guys at the organization or any special ops unit, when you get out, no one gives a s*** what you did. No one gives a s*** what you did for a living. Generals get out, they go to Home Depot like, get out of my way, old man. They don't give a s***. You know what I did? I don't give a f***. Get out my way, right? They don't care. And it hurts and it will affect you. So you have to go get some professional help. Not even help. You need to retrain. You need to retrain how you act in your relationship. You need to retrain how you behave around normal humans. You just don't need the help, you just need retraining.

Jon Becker: It's an interesting point because we, you know, human beings have a wide range of sensitivity to stimulus. We have a wide range of how we respond to that. And in normal life, it's very easy. Somebody bumps you in the store, it's no big deal. A group of military age males are standing around with their hands in their jackets. That doesn't mean anything other than their hands are cold sometimes.

And I see it especially when my friends come back, they're at eleven because they've had to be at eleven because everything is life threatening. And I think there is this kind of balance that we have to strike as warriors. That is a really difficult balance, and it becomes more and more difficult as the assignment and the op tempo increases.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, we definitely have a lack of trust issues of our own. You end up only trusting those that are around you and that know what you're going to do and what you do, and then you forget that you've gone out to do it for those people that you're running around and bumping into. Right? I mean, people that are burning a flag or something, I don't like it, but I fought for the right for you to do that. Right?

So I think that a lot of guys need to understand the job that they're doing is what they're doing. And then deep down, think about the job that you're doing. You know, you're protecting and defending the constitution of the United States, which states you can protest and burn a flag. Right now, it's very emotional for others, but it's not emotional to some who are doing it right. To them, it's a protest, which we fought for the right for them to do that.

So we have to be real careful what we try to shut down because then someone else is going to shut us down. But we've been at war too long. We're probably going to beat another one soon. Right? And it's just, it's one of those things where people are going to get more and more screwed up. Society's going to change because of it, and it's going to be another divisive line between us all.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The thing that I find we're seeing more and more of is we are training our rank and file, like, you know, TTC, law enforcement. We're training our rank and file less, we're putting them in more missions, making their lives more complicated, which then, you know, elevates the need for special units. I look at that, it elevates the need for SWAT teams and for soft units. And the whole point of a special unit is it's doing something special. Right?

The point of a Delta is, like you said, hostage rescue and very difficult small team insertion kind of stuff. And they were like, no, actually what we want you to do is go do these normal missions because you're just better at it. And it doesn't strike me as a particularly intelligent plan.

CSM Tom Satterly: Take Fallujah, you guys, you 15 guys. Go take Fallujah over. It's like the marines couldn't do it. 80 seconds, can't do it. I don't think we're going to do it. It's hard, but we're going to try and even law enforcement. This comparison thing, I call comparison a thief, right? It's a thief of healing. It's a thief of joy when we compare and when we judge versus being curious about people, and we've. I've spoken to law enforcement often, and sometimes they're the worst.

You know, I look at the regular law enforcement like the regular army. They get very little training. They're expected to do so much, but there's no time to train because they're always out doing so much police more. Police are more doing their job on a daily basis versus training. The regular army doesn't do their job and train.

So do they rely on your SWAT guys more to do more than what they're supposed to be doing? They call the SWAT guys out or, and they, they use them even more and more and more. Right? And then those guys get burnout, and they're the ones that do the comparison. Well, I don't mind. I don't have combat time or, you know, the s*** I go through is nothing like yours. I mean, how do you know? You live in your own combat zone, your family lives with you in your combat zone, and you never leave it. You can bump into the enemy that you fought recently at a store. Right?

So consider that when you sit there and judge that, well, mine's not like yours. Mine's not like yours. I got to come home from my combat zone. I got to relax.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's one of the guys that I interviewed last season, beginning of this season, was one of the guys that made the entry in Batta Klon as the team leader for the Bau Declan rescue. And he made a really interesting point that I'd never thought about. He talked about when the operation was over, they went back to their headquarters. They'd had two suicide bombers blow themselves up. They're covered in suicide bomber and all kinds of stuff.

And he said, we took a shower and then we went home. He said, it's the first time it ever struck me that in a military deployment, which was very similar to, there's processing time. You get to fly home. You're going to transition back. And he goes, I got home and my family said, well, what happened? He's like, I just needed to go to bed. You can't say those things.

CSM Tom Satterly: You can't. I mean, when I got back from Somalia, I didn't talk to my wife, took her to the house, and then she said, how was it? I mean, literally, how was it start bawling. I didn't know what to say. I just broke down. It was too much to even try to make someone understand because, you know, they can't. They'll never understand it, right? So why even try? And I literally could feel his feelings in that, you know, I just want to go to bed. Just let me just don't talk to me.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Just kind of let it. Let it work its way out of you. How do you know now, retrospectively, how do we find that balance between what we do and who we are? Right? Like, what struck me, as you were saying that is, you know, Delta was what you did. It wasn't who you were, right? The two get conflated, and at some point, like you said, you move on.

And I think that the guys, like, I see it in my law enforcement friends, the guys who police work is what they do, retire pretty well and go on, and they find meaning in being a Walmart greeter or being a soccer coach or just being a good dad or moving on to some other thing. The guys that being a cop is who they are are the ones that struggle. How now, retrospectively, how do we better strike that balance?

CSM Tom Satterly: You know, you need a hobby. You need something that you do other than work. I never had hobby. I don't think I still have a hobby now, other than cleaning. I literally. People are like, what are you doing? You're offtown, I think. I don't really have off time. I'm still always helping people. I'm still always waiting around to help somebody or the phone call or to talk somebody down off of something, but I don't have a hobby.

I mean, my wife and I, we drive our convertible at the end of the day when we're just wiped out from talking to people or hearing people's s*** problems in their lives, and it just weighs you down. You have to have a thing, and I would suggest it being in nature, you know, where we go out and get grounded again, and you just. My wife and I'll get in the car at the end of the day and just start driving out towards the Ozarks, hitting those hilly roads and just staring at nature, not even talking, just wind in our hair, just driving. Drive about 45 minutes in one direction on this nice, straight, beautiful highway. We turn around, drive back.

We get back, and then we might start talking about things we've done that day. But you need to decompress. Like, really decompress. And I don't mean go get drunk, you know, I don't mean start taking pills and getting drunk. Because that's what most people do to decompress. That's just another depressant. Right? Added to it. I'm not saying don't drink. I'm not a teetotaler. Everybody's like, I didn't know you drank, tom. I go, I don't drink at all anymore. Okay? I just have a couple. I've set limits and rules, which is how I think people can learn to manage that at work.

People don't tend to have problems, right? They're showing off. They're shining, they're doing their thing, and they can prove who they are. They can climb up and get rewarded for it. And, you know, it's happiness. It's kind of like, hey, you're my bros. I feel good here.

We're torn between going home. Guys are torn between having second lives. You know, you're gone so much. It just happens a lot. That adds more stress, the stress of getting caught, the stress that you're doing wrong. You know that, right? You have this feeling that one day you're going to get caught, you know, the shoes going to drop. And that's a horrible feeling to have every day of just waiting for an email, a phone call, knowing you're doing wrong.

But if we set rules and abide by them, like with our spouses, how we fight, making rules for fighting. I ask people who has rules for how you fight, and they're like, stupid. Like, we have the law of land warfare. We make rules for war. We have signs everywhere posted, don't jump in the tiger bin. Because people have done it before, right? So they post a rule, don't eat the gum off the railing underneath the f****** seats or something.

You know, you make rules. And when I see a rule, I'm like, that's because somebody did it and they had to write it down, you know, or a bunch of people did it. So if you make rules about how you fight, you know, you make rules about, you know, your wife's got you up against the ropes and you feel bad. You're like, you cussing her out? She's cussing you out and she's winning. You pull out the nuclear option like, oh, yeah. Acting like your mother, knowing that that's going to freak her out, right? You're both just trying to be right, right? I know I'm going to win and be right. And I've told her that before.

If she started talking to me about something and got a little elevated, I've looked at her before and I'm like, you know you're going to lose. You know, I will do anything to win. You know, I will tear you down. I will say the dumbest s***. You'll walk away crying, and I'll feel like I won, and then I'll feel bad, and I'll come say I'm sorry.

Or we can follow the rules of we, you know, we only take it so far. If it gets emotional, we back off. Because emotions are s***, right? You go back to logic. You talk about those things. If it gets emotional, you back off. Because when we get emotional, we start arguing and fighting. And when we do that, our relationship starts to tank. The kids start to know, and they start to tank.

And then you have this stressful home life, which carries over to your work life. People can't have take one out of the other. You bring your work life home. You bring your home life to work. And so with that, I tell leaders, you need to know your people more than just at work. So if he starts having an issue at work and he's fine at work, you can determine, oh, are you having a trouble at home? You know, your wife have cancer, your kid dying? Are you just arguing a lot? Is it you?

I think we could do a lot better with that. Be open and honest about it. And that will help people nothing, trash their home lives as much, because you can get it under control. You can control it while you're doing it. If you have the awareness that you're doing it. And most of us don't think we're doing it. We don't realize. I would prove that. I would prove it all the time. Those are facts. You can't tell me those aren't facts. You know?

And my wife would say, it's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it. I'm like, oh, I don't need to scream that. I don't need to scream at you when I talk, you know, so the awareness of how we behave and that it's not needed here in the civilian world, they don't want it.

Jon Becker: I think you raise a really interesting point, which is I teach a block on culture centric leadership. And one of the things I talk about early in that block is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For those that are not familiar, Abraham Maslow is a psychologist who determined, came up with a framework to explain that people have a hierarchy of needs that starts, picture it like a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is physical security and safety and the ability to eat and all those things.

And, you know, when you get up to the top of the pyramid, you're into self actualization and concern for others and everything else. One of the things that I talk about in that class is you have to understand that people you're interacting with people who are in a variety of positions on that hierarchy of needs.

And as a leader, you better know where your people are because, you know, if somebody's life is well grounded, and things are great, and they're happily married and their kids are wonderful, then, then they're going to be thinking different thoughts than a guy that has a wife and a girlfriend and, you know, a side job and a drug problem and a drinking problem, and is way down at the bottom of that triangle trying to survive every day. And I think that one of the points you make is as a leader, we need to know that.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I mean, just to fully know what's going on more than just at work, because that's a human. You get to know the human, then you can help that human be better. And if that human's better, that makes you look better.

So it's easy, it's, you know, I call it choosing your hard. It's hard to train people, it's hard to corral those stallions that work for you, you know, I mean, they're not mules you gotta whip, they're stallions you gotta steer them and hold them back a little bit, and that's great. But they're humans. And if you don't get to know them as humans, you won't know what's bothering them. And if they're not operating fully, then you're not gonna get all you can get out of them.

So not hate and anger gets you through, but love and respect will get you through. Hate and anger can make you feel better, like you don't have any emotions. But I think a lot of us try to hide our emotions and keep the emotions at bay because we think they'll make us do our jobs differently versus actually helping us heal by venting out those emotions and releasing it.

Jon Becker: Well. And it's interesting, as you're saying, that I'm thinking back to earlier in our discussion, when we take a group of people and we place them in a harm's way for an extended period of time, and we turn them up to eleven, and we're putting them to sleep with Ambien, and we're waking them up with energy drinks, and we're sending them out on 4, 5, 6, 7 hits a night, and we are pushing them so far down the Maslow triangle that there isn't anything else.

After 20 years of war, I'm not sure that anybody comes out, quote unquote, normal or healthy. And I think that it's something that we really need to think about as leaders, what we're doing to the people that work for us.

CSM Tom Satterly: It's our job to care for them, not work them to death. Right? They always say humans before equipment, you know, blah, blah, blah. But they don't do that in their actions. They don't behave that way in their actions. They've taken all the money for the preservation of the force and family funds. So military organizations that used to bring us in to talk to people like, we don't have any money.

All of it went to COVID vaccinations, this and that. They pulled money. They don't have money to help families anymore, even though they save, you know, people before equipment, families before this. And that great motto, you can shove it up your b***, doesn't work. You know, it's – They don't. They don't behave that way. They behave as if you're another number, right? It's a big organization. You're another number. They'll replace you. They're already working on replacing you, right? So if you're just not working out fully for them, then you can be gone.

Jon Becker: Which, I mean, organizationally, it has to be that way. Right? Like, organizationally, the trains have to run on time, et cetera. And I think that one of the difficult balances to strike is between the organization and the individual. And there's always a tension between the organization and the individual.

If Tom is having problems, somebody has to move into Tom's spot because we need to go capture, you know, Saddam Hussein. In your case, literally, we need to go capture Saddam Hussein. And so we do need to have that organizational readiness. I just question whether we run these organizations. And I see this with SWAT teams. I do it all the time. Are we running them too lean to be able to effectively protect the personnel?

It's like you said, we added a fourth team, and the net effect was that now we have two missions and nobody gets any more rest. Like, is the right answer here for us to say no? Let's have six teams. Let's have six squadrons in Delta, and two of those at any given point are at summer camp and are running five ks on the weekend for fun and tour training and tour operation. How do we do that, you think?

CSM Tom Satterly: Logistically, it's a nightmare, but there's so much money out there, right? There's so much. There's obviously trillions. We give it away all the time. You know, we print it, we f****** borrow it, but we give it to things that, well, I don't know. We should be giving it to other things, like the mental health, the care of our warriors.

And then again, old people are going to go, what about the old people? What about this? The money's there. I don't think that they sit back and honestly care about the humans part of this. You know, I think they want the numbers. They got to fill the slots. They got to get a job done. And that's what they'll tell you is our job.

When we spoke at Congress and we were talking to the Department of Defense and the VA, we were speaking to the VA about biomarkers, right? Picking up on biomarkers that will determine if you have post traumatic stress early on so you can go get help. That way you can't, you know, somebody can't say, oh, you're just saying it. You don't want to go somewhere, right? There's actually biomarkers in your body that tell you things are wrong with you, and you probably should go get help.

And the VA was saying, I love this. I love this. And then John McCain at the time, he sent his staff over to listen in, and they came up and they said, look, John McCain wants to move this into the DoD, too. Help the warfighters while they're fighting. Maybe they don't need to help them as much when they get out.

And I said, that would be perfect if you could give them the help while they're in. You probably won't spend as much when they get out. You probably won't have as many problems. Just like you used to teach us in the army, you know, preventive maintenance checks and services. They always have these little cartoon books. They hand out this little dude with big muscles and a wrench in his hand, keep it running. Right?

You know, take care of your equipment, because if it breaks, it costs more and takes longer to get it back. We need to do pmcs with our humans. We need to do that with our relationships, right? We need to do that with ourselves. Why wait till we're so broken that it takes so long to fix us? Why not keep maintaining?

I'll sit there, and it goes to the same thing with relationships. I have a stadium full of couples I'm talking to, and I'll say, show of hands. How many people have a perfect marriage? Zero hands ever go up, right? Zero. Okay. How many people here see a therapist? Couples therapist? A couple hands go up, I go. Why aren't all of you seeing someone every now and then? You just said, it's not perfect, which means you could work on it. If you work on it, it'll stay perfect. If you let it fall off and trash and die and you rock bottom and you're all the way down, it's going to take so much more to come back.

We apply that to everything, keep our operators healthy and maintain them and still train them. But as part of that training, they get the training on mental health and how to take care of themselves. They'll be better all along the way, and I know it. You'll get a better warrior. I won't have to worry if this guy to my right or left has got an alcohol problem or he's taking pills or he's on Ambien because he's hooked to him or his kids are hate him and his wife's leaving him and is his head in the game.

I'll know that I have healthy people with happy families at home that they're not worried about and that they know how to take care of themselves as well, versus only knowing how to kill other people.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's very challenging as a type personality and as a man, especially a man in the kinds of units that we're talking about. They have a hard enough time admitting when they're physically damaged, much less emotionally damaged. We've created such a disincentive to look at our mental health, and I've had conversations with friends where it's like, you need to go to a therapist. I gotta be a therapist. If your knee was damaged, you'd go to an orthopedist.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. You break your arm. Imagine breaking your arm and just going to work and saying, f*** it, I'm fine. And it heals at an angle. It's all screwed up now. It's worse now. If you want to fix it, you got to re break that sucker. Right? It's biological. I know. You can get a brain scan and a doctor can tell you what you do day to day by looking at your brain scan without even knowing you at a doctor in LA, look at my brain scan and called me. So I had to call you because this was such a difference between when I got a Stella shot before and after.

He said, before you have the brain of a 35 year pro football player. He goes from the colors of your brain. From the scan, I can tell what's firing wrong. Do you do this, this, this? And this and this, and I was like, oh, my God. You know me perfectly dang, over the counter pills, hyperbaric oxygen, tenta, other things along the way. Not one prescription met, and I had a stellate ganglion block shot. And he said it overnight, that my brain looks so much different.

So I try to tell people, and I felt different immediately, which is not the end all, be all that. Put me in a space where I could go get more help to change my behavior. Right? Because people don't like our poor behavior. So you have to do behavioral change. No matter what you do along the way, you have to change your behavior. And that's muscle memory developed. I got rewarded for being aggressive. I got awards for it.

So I have to change that muscle memory of being aggressive to be thanked. I got to behave differently, and that takes a lot of work. It's like when you try and teach somebody how to shoot, and they have anticipation recall, right? You're like, I got to break that before we can go anywhere. So I have to back up, stop this one thing, and then start again and start working on shooting.

So I have to back up with people, stop what they're doing, and then start piling on top of that with the new stuff. And that takes time. It takes a lot of time, and I honestly just don't think people have the time for it. You got to be persistent and diligent, and you can't quit. You just can't quit. It takes time.

Jon Becker: But I think we've got to. We've got to. As a society and as leaders, we have to prioritize it. Right? Like, people do what. What they have to do. Right? We, most of us do what we have to do and a little bit of what we want to do. Yeah. If we want to spit out healthy warriors, we need to require that they stay healthy.

CSM Tom Satterly: Mandatory, like sexual harassment, whatever. Sharks, whatever they call it. I mean, we have to take computer classes in the army, we had to take them. I got to check the block. You know, sexual harassment. Everybody did that. Okay. Drug and alcohol. Yep, yep, yep. Checking the block. Nobody's even tried to check the block on mental health, even if it's s***** and doesn't work. No one's even done that yet. How about check the block?

Jon Becker: No. If anything, in this realm, in the tactical realm, it's actually the exact opposite because we've weaponized mental health. Like, oh, Tom isn't right. We need to take Tom out of service here. He's not right. And we're focusing on using mental health as an elimination tool.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Rather than as a maintenance tool. And it strikes me, you know, you see it in shootings all the time with, with police officers. You know, they'll get involved in a shooting and they don't want to talk to the therapist because the therapist is going to say, oh, he's not. Right? He's got to come off duty. There isn't this, you know, it's become. Mental health has become a hurdle. It's become a means of us taking you out of service in much the same way in specialized units, you know, like yours, physical ailment becomes like, oh, well, he's not, he's not fit for duty.

His, you know, his knees blown, man. His brain is blown. He's not fit for duty. And it feels like we have to turn that around. We have to get out of a mindset of using it as a means of pulling you out of duty and get into a mindset of using it as a means of keeping you fit for duty.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think we need to get out of the mindset that if you can't see it, it's not real. Right? I bet people if you break your leg, they'll give you light duty and you sit at a desk for six, eight weeks, right? Heal up, bro. You got a broken leg, you had a cast on it. But if the same guy said, hey, I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking, I need six or eight weeks to dry up, they'll fire you. Mental health.

Hey, I'm having trouble at home. I need to speak with my wife more. I need to get some help because of the things I've gone through have made me behave poorly at home. They'll get rid of you whether you break your d*** leg, get a bone sticking out of your head. They're like, oh, poor you. They want to take care of you and then throw you right back in the game. Right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think one of the things that made me initially want to talk to you that I loved about your book is, you know, there's so many instances in mental health where, you know, people perceive the attention to mental health is weakness. Where we go, yeah, that guy, he's a big sissy. He's emotional. He's whatever. I read your book, and my reaction is telling one of my friends that he should read the book. And he's like, why?

And I said, it's very easy in a mental health context to attack and make an ad hominem argument. Oh, that guy is this. I said, I will challenge you to invalidate Tom Satterly's man card. Like, if you can. If you can invalidate Satterly's man card, then we're all f*****, right? 20 years in the unit doing the things that he did. What I loved about the book was that it is difficult to impugn your man card because of what you did.

And yet the book is so raw. It is not. There is no candy coating at all in the book. It is absolutely raw emotion. This is what's going through my brain, and it feels to me like, that's really what we need to be doing, is we need to be telling those stories.

CSM Tom Satterly: It was cathartic. Very, very cathartic. Difficult to do. Still difficult to do, but not as difficult. But writing that book got a lot out of me. It terrified me. I mean, it literally terrified me. But we got to the end. I started thinking, maybe we should take may – I don't know. You know, everybody's going to think I'm this, and then my friends are going to, you know, and I started thinking of all this crap.

Then I talked to my wife again, and the final answer was, we wrote this book for a reason. You know, not to brag about anything I'd done, but to help others understand and see that it affects you and you can get better. You know, my wife wrote arsenal of hope right after that and published it, and it's a continuation of that story.

And it's an add on at the end of when I met her, how horrible it was for us and how we fought to get through because we chose each other versus the easy part. You know, it's hard. It's hard. Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. It's what hard do you want to choose? Right? So I chose being married hard versus the divorce hard. And. And it turned out. Right? It just – It works out. If you put the effort in, things really work out. And that was hard to throw everything out there, right, and worry about being.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, no, it is raw and naked. Like, it's, you know, standing in a room naked with 40 your friends and bright lights on. Like, there. There is no. There's no hiding in the book. You know, there are a number of things that struck me. The description of you sitting in your truck, contemplating killing yourself, being literally seconds from doing it and deciding not to because of Jen was. Was, to me, kind of the pivotal moment of the book and may have been a pivotal moment. What was a pivotal moment in your life? It strikes me that she was kind of your spirit animal for a while there in a way that you say in the book that she saved you. But it strikes me that that's very much how you feel about it

CSM Tom Satterly: To this day, her wisdom, her calmness and demeanor, and I've made her tough. I made her real tough. Tougher than she was. She thanks me for some of it. We've duked it out. She's pretty hardcore. And it's. I mean, she literally did save me. And she'll say, I didn't save anyone. You did the work, but I wouldn't have done the work, and I wouldn't have done the work if I didn't have somebody to do the work for.

And I certainly didn't love myself at the time, and it made it very difficult to love anyone else. But she was lovable and taught me how to start liking myself, and so that made it doable. And then I got to a point where, okay, I appreciate me and respect me again, and I don't hate me, because when I hated me, I hated everybody. You know, you can't love anybody unless you at least love yourself first. And I just couldn't. She helped me see that, pulled me out of that s*** and then stayed strong the whole time when I fought it the whole way.

So, yeah, I credit her with saving me and to this day, over and over again. And she'll deny it, but without her, I wouldn't be here.

Jon Becker: Well, I think sometimes we can be catalytic in other people's lives, though, right? Like, it, you know, she was. She was the spark. Obviously, you had to do the work. But I think that, especially from a leadership standpoint, it is important to realize that frequently we are having an asymmetric relationship with somebody and we need to pay attention to it. Right?

Like the things that she said to you that day that, you know, led to you going and meeting her at a bar rather than blowing your brains out in a car, probably were not that significant to her.

CSM Tom Satterly: No.

Jon Becker: But they had a very large asymmetric effect on you. And I think that it's important for us to realize the effect that we have on other people.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, she dug in and grabbed the one thing she knew I hated because she didn't know what I was doing. She knew something was up and she took the one thing I hated, and that's being late, and threw that at me, and that snapped me out of it. And it was that easy. And that's when I started to realize after we talked about it down the road, because that's how easy it is to interrupt that process for somebody. Right?

Everybody's terrified. I think about killing myself. I don't know what to do, right? And they call us. I'm like, I don't either, man. Just talk to them. Talk to him as a human. Don't tell them not to do stuff. Talk to them. Say, don't. Say, don't do it for your kids. Right? Their kids might be the reason they feel like they're f****** up. Right? So just listen. Just listen. And then offer love. Because you can change somebody in a second. All they need to do is feel worthy again or needed, and it goes away pretty quick.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think that, you know, we can. We can walk this balance. You know, you and I talked before we went on the air about this balance between work and family, and it is an achievable balance. It's never, you know, it's kind of like riding a bike. Right? You're never, like, just balanced.

CSM Tom Satterly: Right.

Jon Becker: You're actively, constantly balancing. And I think that it's a difficult message for a type personalities who want to win everything that we have to work at it. But it strikes me that we do, and we need to do a better job in leading people, of helping them to achieve that.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think we could learn to swallow our ego, you know, would all do a little better.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. Ego and pride are definitely not the way to go. Why don't we? I'd love to pivot and kind of get your thoughts on some things. So there's been a lot of overlap since the global war on terror and the rise of SOF.

There's been a lot of overspill from the SOF community into the law enforcement tactical community. You've got everybody doing training all over the place, and we see law enforcement units equipping themselves and training more and more like military units, and we see this kind of rise of the warrior. Copy the arguments against militarization.

I think that there are, from my seat, dealing with both sides, the law enforcement and military side of the house, it seems like a lot of times we're actually taking the wrong message rather than taking tactics and moving the tactics from SOF units to law enforcement. I think what's missing is the amazing levels of proficiency and the leadership skills in SOF units, and that could be what is carrying over. What are your thoughts on that?

CSM Tom Satterly: I had to be careful. Teaching law enforcement was one of those things that I had to think about, you know, when I first started. Oh, just teach them how to shoot, right? CQB, blah, blah, blah, blah, just like we do. And then you have that realization of, well, they don't have the powers that I have when I'm at war. Right?

You guys, you do a shooting, it's a big, big, big deal. And so the whole. When I would teach them, I would say, listen, you have a certain thing that you have to do. You have to call out, you have to announce yourself. Whatever those things are that you have to do, that's on you. My training for you will be this teaching, marksmanship training, and anything after that moment that you decide that you need to protect yourself or someone else. That's what I'm teaching. You don't hold me accountable for anything else. You're supposed to know up to that point where you have to make that decision.

I'm just giving you the skill, once you've made that decision, to engage a target properly, you know, and I've tried to help law enforcement with the leadership aspect of it and the training aspect of it, but the budgets are different, the jobs are different. So I think a lot of these soft guys that get out and do the training really need to be careful. It's a lot more than just marksmanship and CQB and dominating the room.

There's a lot more in law enforcement that comes before that happens that they need to understand as they instruct. It's a lesson I learned. You know, we don't come in and say, drop it, drop it. If you have a threat, you're dead, right? I mean, your rules could be different about that and individualized and politicized and s***.

So I would wish the soft guys, I hope that what they're doing is that method of, you have a certain job to do, up to a point. I can't teach you that. I don't want to. I was afraid to even think about becoming a cop when I got out, because if I saw somebody with a gun, I'm afraid that my instincts would be to shoot them immediately.

Any threat in your hand, a knife, whatever, my instincts are to kill you. So very difficult to get out and do that job, and it's very difficult, I think, to get out and teach that job unless you're thoughtful about telling them what you're teaching them after the point of they made that decision.

Jon Becker: I do think that there are things that carry over from the unit very well to law enforcement. I think that, for instance, selection, I don't think anybody pays more attention to selection than Delta does.

And I think that there are messages in the way Delta selects that are very valuable for state and local teams. And looking for the right people from the outset and paying attention to how you're selecting, I think, actually really matters. And as a guy who's dealing with the top units all over the world, the one common theme in the really good units is they start off with a really good modeling clay.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. You have to start off with decent physical fitness. Obviously, that just keeps you more mentally healthy and things. But I tell you that what they look for is individuality. That can work on a team, but you can be an individual people that can take a lack of information and create something from that.

And then the psychological evaluations, you know, whatever they pick out of that, I don't know. You know, they could looking for the crazy ones or the ones that have a little propensity to be more loose and free, maybe, but they're looking for a specific person that can go do those things. It's the foundation of what we do. Right?

It's the foundation of everything. If you select somebody before you allow them to come in versus if you meet a certain minimum requirement, you can start our training. And if you fell out of that training, then, okay, sorry, we'll recycle you.

But if you make it all the way through, because it's not too difficult, then you have someone, you really don't know what they're doing that you've given equipment to to go out and do a job, versus getting a good foundation of who you let in first, you know, and I think organizations change their selections to meet quotas, and then they can't change it back. So they drop their standards to meet a quota. And then when that trickles off, they drop their standards again to meet another quota.

Next thing you know, every cop used to be in jail and every soldier, you know, used to do something that they would never do. It's one of those, we've never dropped our standard. We've only changed two things since I've been there, and that's because it didn't matter. You know, not everybody saw the one thing, so they had to remove that to make it even. And the other one was like the swim test. They moved it from selection to the training portion because it'll give you more time to learn to swim, and then they'll cut you.

I don't know. You know, I think they're banking on the fact that, okay, in six months I can teach you to swim, and then we'll keep you, you know, but that's the only thing that they've ever really changed. Even though they've been pressured to change other things to increase numbers, they just won't. They say, look, it works. We get good people, we rarely fire people, right? Our guys rarely make real s***** decisions.

Now, when they do, they're real big and s***** decisions, but that rarely happens. So they've done a good job of selecting the maturity type of person with the minimum age limits and things that they're looking for. But I think if everybody could afford to do a selection like that, an evaluation before they hire, one, they wouldn't have enough numbers. Two, it cost a lot of money, but three, that have a wonderful element of people that they could trust and work, you know, and work for them well.

Jon Becker: Well. And it's, there is a lot of pressure to change standards and to drop standards. And, you know, one of my favorite sayings is that your standards are what you told, I, not what you, not what you say. And, you know, we've seen, I had a friend that for years ran buds, and when, when the global war on terror took off, you know, they were trying to increase the number of seals, and so they started feeding them more and more at the top of the funnel, and the same number kept coming out the bottom of the funnel.

CSM Tom Satterly: Isn't that funny?

Jon Becker: And, yeah, and he said, you know, he's, he's arguing with Congress about it. Like, no, like, you can send me a million people. There's, you know, there's, there's 40 guys a quarter. That's, that's what it is. And so I think that one of the things we have to do is, is realize that we may need to create additional units.

We may need to create different standards for different jobs, but we can't take, you know, every single person, you know, in, if you look at, you look at, you know, Delta as a specific unit, like, there may only be, at any given point in the United States, a few hundred guys that would be capable of serving in that unit. And we just need to accept that and not try to stuff the top of the funnel because I think the more we stuff the top of the funnel, the more noise we have and the less signal we have.

CSM Tom Satterly: And it's ruined forever. It's ruined forever. Once you change it like that, you know, it's.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

CSM Tom Satterly: Are you going to take freedoms back? I mean, even though they're trying, but, I mean, it's hard to give somebody something and do a certain thing and then retract it because the next group's going to go, hey, wait a minute, you know, so it's got to hold hard and fast on those things that, you know, you know, works for you, brings in leadership. You know, I'm not saying don't ever change. I'm not that guy.

But if something's working well, and it's always worked well, changing it to meet a number, like you said, you're only going to get the same amount coming out the other end anyway, right? If you're, if you're looking for the same things, you can let as many people in as you want, but you're really just wasting airfare and food money on those guys because you're going to send them back home anyway.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And one of the things that has always struck me with the unit is each of the operators. One of the things, one of the most misconceptions is people think that the unit operators are operating in large teams all the time. And you even talk about it in the book, there are circumstances where it might be one or two guys, you know, it's not going to be the, you know, the entire squadron lands and off we go.

You know, it's a unit that requires a very high level of individual responsibility and also an extremely high level of individual proficiency across a very broad range of skills. What is it about the units approach, you think, that allows, you know, a guy who's dumb enough to go to a John Cougar concerte to develop extremely high levels of proficiency and then maintain those for that many years?

CSM Tom Satterly: What was the question about that?

Jon Becker: What is it about their system that allows them to maintain these high levels of proficiency across broad spectrums of knowledge?

CSM Tom Satterly: I think it's who they select through selection. They know that those people have a propensity to fit into those jobs. Well, I mean, we recruit separately for support and direct support. So those guys do their own thing over here, operators do their own thing over here, and then they bring them all together in the end and they work out great.

But I think they're looking for a certain personality type or whatever it is. I don't know. There's not a lot of people that know the magic of a selection, you know, just a few at any one time, and they're just looking for that individual that can meet those time standards because they know that those certain time standards says something about somebody, you know, here's a distance, here's elevation, here's the weather.

I mean, everything we did up there was kind of analytical. Everybody at every RV took the weather, you know, the temperature and the weather at every RV. So you could calculate the different times for what that does to humans and how cold it is and. And the elevation. So it's real analytical to determine, in the end, that individual that's going to be able to do those things that, you know, you want them to do now, how they built that over the years.

And it's a lot of bigger brains than me that put that together, figured out what worked, and stuck with it. But there's a ton of psychological evaluations before and after and during selection that I know what they're looking for is an individual that will be able to do those things, which lends itself to keeping them healthy. Right? Because you're sending a dude on a mission by himself or maybe with two, and it happens all the time, all around the world.

If he's not mentally stable because of other things he's done, the chances of him making a poor decision are greater. And when you're going out with one or two, the backlash, if you're screwing up, can be greater. And so that's where they need to determine and decide that, yeah, we brought him in. We selected the right guy. Now we got to keep him right. We got to keep him doing that way the way we picked him, because he's going to get worse along the way.

So if you don't maintain it, you've selected a guy that you're beating down and he's getting worse versus maintaining it again. Again, that preventive maintenance checks and services, you know, keep him up and running. Right? And keep him healthy, he'll be able to do those jobs.

But once selection grabs a hold of the right guy and the training gets him trained with what you want, and then you get to the squadron, and two years later, you almost worked your way up to where they think you're worthy and can run with them properly, you're already starting to break down. Just the stress of trying to keep up. Every day you're telling yourself, you're not good enough, do more. All your brain hears is, you're not good enough.

So you start to break down, even with the competition. Every day of trying to fit in, trying to keep up, wears you down, makes you feel like s***. You start putting yourself down, and then you believe it. Your brain doesn't know the difference between perception and reality. So the more you put yourself down, the more you feel bad. And it's just tanks over the years, you know.

Jon Becker: If you were advising law enforcement, especially law enforcement, tactical teams on training and, and how to maintain high levels of skills. What would your counsel be?

CSM Tom Satterly: Know your basics very, very well. Everybody wants to come in and get the magic shooting. Show me the magic shooting. I'll go, yeah, I'll show you the magic shooting. Five rounds, slow, slow fire, 20 minutes. Give me your five best rounds. Guys will fire off in 3 seconds. I'm done. You got like four and the, you know, zeros and you got 110, maybe one nine. I want five in the X, right? I want five in the X. And I want you to do the basics right?

And then I'm going to have you run a mile or run a half a mile carrying cinder blocks and drop them. Then you're going to shoot the same s***. Because now I'm simulating you being hyped up and jacked up and your blood's flowing and you're angry as s***. Because I need you to be an exact marksman within your craft, right? Because the worst thing is shooting a civilian, shooting a non-hostile.

But it's all basics. You know the basics of human contact, right? How to talk with an individual, how to de-escalate. Because cops need to de-escalate, then they need to de-escalate themselves. I know if I get in a high speed chasing somebody for about five or 10 miles, and he's run over s*** and I've almost wrecked, when I get there, I'm ready to beat some a**, right? I am jacked up. What that law enforcement individual needs to think about is, okay, we've crashed, we're here now, count to ten or whatever. Breathe deep, but don't run up there jacked up because you're hijacked emotionally.

So I would tell them to. Excellent marksmanship, learning how to deal with people and de escalation. Because if you can de-escalate those fights, you won't need your gun, you won't need this or that. I mean, now I don't work in that world. And I see the news and it looks a lot sheer than it used to be. And nobody listens to cops anymore. And I've seen a lot less cops on the road and I'm like, I wouldn't be either.

If I was gonna get fired for pulling somebody over, you know, I'd be f******, I want my paycheck and go home at night, screw it. But if our leaders aren't covering and protecting, you know, our law enforcement officers, then they're not going to do their jobs, they're not going to go out and get in trouble. So, yeah, that needs to clean itself up, too. But, yeah, I would say marksmanship, de-escalation and pretty high up there.

Jon Becker: So why don't we talk about the foundation? Because I think it's important to kind of get the message out. Started by you and Jen.

CSM Tom Satterly: Mostly Jen. I kept working so we could eat food because we were working together, doing realistic military training exercises when we met, and we helped co-found an organization. And then during that time when Jen was working, we were working together, getting to know each other.

People were dying, people were going overseas and getting killed and not coming back on the next iteration and would be doing it, working with the SEAL team four or whatever. And she'd be like, hey, where's Bob? Oh, Bob got killed, you know, or, where's Jimmy? Well, Jimmy got killed, too, so it started breaking her down, you know, once teal got killed on a training exercise we were on, and she freaked out, and we just kept training. She's like, are we gonna. No, we gotta keep going, man. People die all the time. She's like, what? Yeah, people die. She's like, I don't get this.

So one day she said, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to train people to go to war. I want to train people to come home. She used to sit around on target and talk to all these guys about their issues, and they ended up talking about their families. Now they want to be better at home.

And so she decided, and I kept working for a couple years, a year and a half, and she started working on it. I helped along the way, but my job was to make money, and she was researching what to do. Finally got it going. Start in 2016. 2017 went official and started really pushing donations to help. And what we do is we became a resource library up front.

Things that we would research, that I did, I would go do it, video, send it out there and tell everybody this works or this doesn't work. And I tried this, and I trust them. It was easier for people to come to us to find everything they needed, versus what I had to do was go find it myself. And it was very difficult, so we wanted to bring it all into one spot.

Then we got more money, and we hired licensed clinical social workers to be coaches, and we started doing coaching over the phone to people who needed it all along the way. We were the first to start up to help spouses as well, the whole entire family. So we were the first to start that up. And if the warrior doesn't want help, we help the spouse. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We're trying to fix the family.

So we travel around as well and teach about post traumatic stress and relationship issues. And now we've just changed our programs to where we used to run four to six marriage retreats a year with eight to twelve couples, which got to be very expensive because we paid for them to come in, we paid to stay and we paid for their date nights and we. Very effective, very effective. But now we've morphed into a program that we have coming up in October at Fort Bragg, well, southern Pines, to where we're bringing in 150 people.

And instead of doing the real close marriage counseling stuff, we're going to give them a showcase of sleep experts. You know, hey, you guys have trouble sleeping, so here's how you sleep up on stage. Oh, here's a relationship expert, here's a psychedelic expert talking about all the things that helped us, all the information that they may need from the mouths of the people who have done it. And all these guys are special operators as well.

Plus I we're going to throw out music and games and we have 25 glamping tents, you know, 25 couples can sign up for to camp out overnight two day event. So we can dump as much information into them and then offer them the coaching that we offer. Because every time we do a retreat, phone lines start ringing. Hey, that was great. I want more help. More help. So we give everyone up to twelve counseling sessions, unless they need more. But up to twelve counseling sessions for couples all throughout the year.

Jon Becker: I love it! How can people find out more about the foundation?

CSM Tom Satterly: Well, has everything on there. It has the request a coach button, it has a camp home front button on there. It has a donation button on there which I beg people not to pass up because nothing that we do is free and everything that the veterans do and the spouses do that we bring in is free to them.

So it obviously takes donations, anything that you see on the website. Actually, there's a podcast button on there too, for all secure podcasts, which is part of our programs. Because on the podcast you have the listen up series to where we have experts talking in a short form about here's what you need to do, here's what you got to do to this, this, this and this. And then we're done.

And then we have the longer format to where we get to know people and talk about different special things that people can understand. But we consider those programs because they're all learning events for people.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's important for people to understand that nothing that you're doing is government funded. Everything that's happening is happening because of private donations. And I would encourage our listeners to go and support the foundation and support your work.

Tom, I'd love to finish with – We do five rapid fire questions. Short answer. Yeah, short answer. Sentence. Thoughts. Something quick. What is your most important habit?

CSM Tom Satterly: Cold plunge. I started cold plunge in the morning, and that changed my life.

Jon Becker: Give me more.

CSM Tom Satterly: What's that? Give me more about the cold plunge. Yeah, man. You know, I started reading about it, and I'm like, I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. It's stupid because I hot tubbed every morning, and then I finally bought one, threw some ice in it, got in the hot tub, jumped in that thing and about died.

And then I got to where I could do three or four minutes just sitting in it, chilling, and I would get out and have more energy. I feel better. All my sore bones have been, you know, the inflammation that I have so much of from the multiple surgeries feels better. I'm more alert all day, and then if I get in the afternoon, I'm feeling a little down. I just jump in it real quick and get out of. But I got sick of all the ice, so I bought a water chiller, and it's supposed to keep it down pretty cold. And I've got it set at like 39 right now, but it's 105 outside.

So I got out of the hot tub this morning, got in and I went, nah, nope, not even worth it. You can't keep something that cold out there. But that's changed me a lot. It's made me feel a lot better. I have a lot of pain from all the surgeries I've had and all the arthritis from those surgeries. So that really helps out with that pain, and it really helps me sleep at night.

Jon Becker: Love it! What's the most important thing, in your opinion, for building an effective team?

CSM Tom Satterly: Trust. You have to trust the people that you work with in order to expect them to trust you and to work together.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite current online resource? Website or podcast?

CSM Tom Satterly: You know what? I just started, and this is funny, I just started the story of Jesus. I don't know why. I had a feeling the other day I was watching a YouTube video, and it was something about. It was a religious thing, obviously, and it was something about, you know, if you want to go to heaven or you want to feel this way or a certain way, you have to know Jesus. And I was like, whoa, okay.

I mean, I'm not a religious person. I'm spiritual and I believe in it all and everything, but I don't go to church. I do my own thing. I thought, okay. So I started a podcast about the story of Jesus. And a lot of it so far I knew about, but a lot of it was, like, very new to me. And I was like, okay. And I just got into it and I just started liking it.

So I've been listening to it over and over again, different stories. Like, it keeps going on. Not over and over again, but there's like ten minute stories, and I just pop them in and it's like the life of Jesus on up. And I'm like, all right. A lot of understanding out of that. A lot of good lessons.

Jon Becker: What's your most important? What do you think the most important characteristic of an effective leader is?

CSM Tom Satterly: Courageous and not courage to do anything but moral courage. You know, the courage to do what's right, even when everyone else is trying to talk in and doing wrong. And even doing the wrong thing is easy. Right? But choosing the proper, hard through courage.

Jon Becker: A final question. What's the most profound memory of your career?

CSM Tom Satterly: Sitting on a bed in Somalia, pulling guard out of a window with bars on it and hearing a dragging noise coming up. It was dark. I looked out the window, and there's a dude with an ak on the ground crawling towards me in my window between the two buildings about 3ft apart. I just happened to look, and there he was, his little man dress or whatever, and I couldn't get my m four at that angle.

So I had pulled out a grenade, and I was like, oh, my God, I've never done this before. I just pulled the pin and dropped it on his head out the window. And I remember him looking up as I did it, laying on his neck. And I just laid on the bed, and that thing blew up, sprayed the ceiling and broke glass out and everywhere.

And I was like, I sat up and I was like, holy s***. And somebody kept running in the room goes, what was that? And I go, it was a flashbang because I thought I was in trouble. And the guy in the room with me goes, he's lying. That was a grenade. And I go, you're right. It was a grenade. Look at this dead f***** down here. I mean, I'll never forget that. It was almost comedic and gross, obviously. But, yeah.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic! Tom, I can't thank you enough for doing this, man. Thank you, first of all, for your service to the country. You sacrificed a lot for the blanket of freedom we sleep under, and I think it's very easy for us to go. Oh, yeah, these guys did a lot for us. I think everybody should read your book and understand that the price that our soft warriors pay for the freedom we enjoy is very high. And it's easy for us to say thank a veteran and clap at a baseball stadium. It is a different thing to look somebody in the eye and say thank you. Thank you!

CSM Tom Satterly: Thank you! I appreciate that!

Jon Becker: And thank you for everything that you're doing to continue to keep our warriors safe, man. It's the work you're doing now matters more than the work you did previously. So thank you for doing it.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I feel the same way! I appreciate that!