Aaron Reitz

Yeah, sure was.

Wife and I from San Antonio went to Texas A&M on a Marine Corps ROTC scholarship.

Not to age myself, Steve, I know my hairstyle gives away a little bit, but 9-11 happened when I was a freshman in high school and went to A&M on a Marine Corps ROTC scholarship, commissioned as an officer, went to Afghanistan, deployed to the northern Helmand province of Afghanistan, then went to law school, but I'm still in the reserve as a major.

We're proud of the fact you actually way more hardcore than the academies, brother.

Yeah, so I deployed with my battalion, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards.

And we got there in the fall of 2011.

We left in the spring of 2012.

I was assigned to our battalion's embedded training team.

And so I actually lived with the Afghan National Army

on the afghan side of our marine ford operating base in the northern helmand province and look what i saw where there's some good guys that were there that were sadly born in a in in a in the stone age sure but at the end of the day what i saw in afghanistan what we see more broadly

in the Islamic world is we see anti-civilizational forces at play that are informed by their religious and cultural views, okay?

Anywhere Islam is on the march, anywhere you see a Muslim majority country,

You see chaos, you see crime, disorganization, oppression, chaos, disease, economic stagnation and decline.

You see nothing but anti-civilizational forces.

I saw this firsthand.

Look, Steve, I went to Afghanistan.

as a true believer back then, that all we needed to do was to go kill a few bad guys.

And that at the end of the day, we would hand out pocket constitutions and pocket declarations of independence.

And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan, Iraq, all of these other countries would just become Western overnight.

But when I got there, all of the scales fell off my eyes.