Brandon Tseng

Yeah, so first deployment was out of Tarin Kaut, Aruzgan, multinational-based Tarin Kaut, sort of southeast.

We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Aruzgan, into Ghazni, into Zabal.

And then we forward-staged out of Ghazni, sometimes going, I want to say, Paktika and Paktia.

Um, and, uh, got to go.

Our mission was, uh, we were paired up with the eighth commando battalion, eighth can deck, um, Afghan commandos, 900 commando battalion, every single mission at that time in the war, it was a, uh, 10 to one force ratio.

We had to bring 10 Afghans out for every single operation.

And so, um,

we would bring 13, 14 guys and 130 Afghans.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

Talk about, like, moving pieces on the battlefield.

Wow.

It was not – I did not – like, there's pros, there's cons.

I would say, like, overall, I did enjoy it, right?

It was –

When you go out with that many inexperienced guys, it makes the mission more dangerous.

It was very clear to us that, like,

probably like 85% of them didn't want to be there.

Those guys would sit down in front of like target compounds in front of the fatal funnel.

Like they didn't value like, you know, self-preservation.