Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And as the sectarian violence was going, some of the Al-Qaeda militants who'd moved into this neighborhood called Amaria, they liked his car. And they just pulled him out of his car a block away from his house, shot him in the head, and then just had his silver Mercedes that they would then drive around. And she had to basically look at her husband's murderers every day.
And so she took her three kids and she walked the down this super dangerous road to the Baghdad International Airport for maybe seven or eight kilometers with like a three and a five-year-old. And she just showed up and she said, I want justice. Now we let her down. The legal system let her down. Everything checked out. We caught the guys she talked about, found a lot of evidence.
They were tied to Al-Qaeda. The car was there. We lost the war in our prisons. Why you serve is for that woman. And that if you believe human rights are universal and what America has is special, then it is worth defending. And therefore, politicians have a sacred responsibility to make sure that our military is used judiciously and to protect our way of life.
Because the men that I just talked about who gave their life, they were just exceptional men who could have had amazing lives, could have had families and accomplished great things in industry. And they sacrificed everything for all of us. And you can't help but be moved by that.
If you go to Army, Navy, and you watch the cadets and the midshipmen who are literally willing to give their life to protect our way of life, it's the most noble thing that you'll see. And I believe firmly that humans are meant to live free and to be a part of a group whose very nature is to be selfless. is an incredible thing, and it's an incredible thing to be around.
I think a lot of Americans are jaded. If you spend some time around our military and folks who put the whole country and our way of life above themselves, you won't help but be inspired and start to feel patriotic about why America is so special.
The closing chapter in Iraq, which was the last thing that we did, was we were asked to target a vehicle bomb network that had set off, I think, at least 17 vehicle bombs in Baghdad. It killed thousands of people. And the British SAS had been targeting them, had not been successful for various reasons. and asked us to help.
And over the next two weeks, actually, I think it was like 10 days, we caught nine of the top 10 and the entire level of hierarchy underneath it, it was gone. The last thing I did in Iraq was I stood in front of my 32 guys, all of whom came home, thank God, to their families, which I'm grateful for every day. And I said two things. I was like, I'm pretty sure we all know Iraq.
The story of Iraq probably isn't going to turn out the best. But I was like, but for what we were asked to do, the math is pretty simple. This network killed thousands of people. And if it continued, it would have killed thousands of people more. It doesn't exist anymore. Intel folks come in and say, we've never seen a network taken down this fast ever.
And I was like, you'll never see the faces of the people that you save from the car bombs that didn't go off. But man, what an amazing thing to tell your grandkids about that you made a real difference here and an impact for those people.
And you go from that, and I didn't believe America's, and the strategy was making the world better because we were just creating these power vacuums and everything else. And I didn't want to be a part of taking life or risking life if I didn't feel like we had a strategy and a specific end that made sense.
And so I didn't feel I could continue to serve in the military because there wasn't a strategy. But man, I missed the purpose that I felt. You don't have to question the meaning of your life when you're trying to get to a terrorist in a phone before a car bomb goes off in a market full of innocent civilians.
So I went from that scene and got into Harvard Business School because my battalion commander refused to write me a letter of recommendation unless I applied to Harvard. I was like, sir, I haven't used a three-syllable word in the last year. I don't think I'm ready to write an essay for Harvard. He's like, you're going to apply to Harvard. I'm not going to write a letter of recommendation.
So all of a sudden, I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm 26 years old. The biggest decision is like where to go on Friday to have a beer with my friends. I just couldn't shake it because I'd seen I'd been exposed to so much. And I just knew that life is short. You don't have a lot of time. None of us know how much time we have. War had just infused lightning into my bones.
Every time you get one of these kill capture alerts, it's just a flood of adrenaline. So in some ways it makes you an addict. And so I realized, oh my gosh, like I've basically been turned into an addict by this 15 months of like really high intensity tempo. I want to make an impact. And what combat taught me is that you can't take anything with you. So material stuff, like who cares?
What matters is making a positive impact on someone else's life. And looking for that sense of purpose, I started to see stats around there was so much goodwill trying to get the military suffer from identity theft at rates that were nearly twice as high as the general population.
And I can walk you through the story, but that ultimately became the thing that I gravitated towards because I felt it was a worthy mission to solve with my life.
And that if something happened to me, that if God forbid I were to die, I would do it trying to accomplish something that mattered and not being a cog in the wheel at a consulting firm or in banking that's just making capitalism work a little bit more efficiently. And so I think just the nature of risk was quite different.
I thought risk was going into an organization where I didn't believe in the mission. I felt like I was wasting my life. I didn't really care about the financial side nearly as much because how could you after coming out of combat? And so I'm super grateful for that.
But it was very schizophrenic to go from a time in your life where you're like 70 years old, maybe a normal time your friends are dying, you're contemplating your own mortality. Most of us will get there later. I kind of had already been there and then felt like a time traveler coming back. And it really just shifted my whole mindset.
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