Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So on September 12th, like 09 in the morning, I'm making phone calls to get back in.
Yeah, it was, I mean, I felt for the people, obviously. But I knew that I was in a unique position to make a difference in the fight. Because I was an NCO. I mean, I was a noncommissioned officer. And I knew that there was an opportunity for me to get in the military and fight and get some vengeance. And that's what I wanted to do. I joined the Army to fight.
The reason I got out, because there was no fight to be had. If there was a war, if there was something going on, I would have been in it. You know, I think something important to note is the biological instinct in men, most men, the men I associate with, to fight. I mean, it's to fight each other in training, because that's what we do as kids.
We fight and we grow up in those environments where we're displaying our masculinity and there's a whole bunch of psychological and physiological things that are associated with that. And I don't think we grow out of that. We grow up and we want to fight and defend. That's what men do. And so it definitely was part of my character and my DNA. And I don't think it was fake.
I think it was something very real and I wanted to fight. So I had to go back in. How'd you get back in?
it was a battle because the army didn't really know how to handle a whole bunch of dudes who were prior service guys that wanted to go back in was there a lot of guys that wanted to come back there was a lot of guys there in that time period a lot of people who were prior service who had gotten out i mean even older guys who had gotten out wanted to come back in and serve
So I had to go through the whole process again, which was I had to go through MEPS as an E5, going back through MEPS, the whole duck walk thing, all that stuff. I had to go back through all that to get back in. And they had a program, which is kind of similar to what's called 18X right now, where you can come in off the streets and try out for selection.
And if you make it, they'll send you to special forces training. And if you don't, you simply just go back to your sister unit. Or if you don't have a unit, whatever your job is, they'll find a job for you in that position. Now, how old are you at this point?
yeah that's a lot of courage I was young when I hit the ground I mean I was running we immediately deployed to Afghanistan how many guys are on your team roughly well I think at that time maybe 10 10 dudes yeah we're most attachments are light by nature of guys coming and going and like I said my 18 Bravo senior was got was uh in surgery So he had to get a surgery, recover.
And so we deployed that year to Afghanistan with a little bit of a light package. What year? This was 05, early 05.
Yeah, part of the job is running Indige. I mean, when I reported... As an 18 Bravo, I was in charge of about 144 Afghan commandos.
So I was in charge of all of them. As a new guy. As a new guy. Holy shit. I'll never forget. He said, hey, your guys are formed up waiting on you. Waiting on me? Yeah, you're the 18 Bravo. Get up there and... and be their commander because everybody else had other stuff to worry about.
I mean, the 18 Charlies had to run the fire base, which is a full-time job of the base security and the actual physical structure, the generators, the water system, everything, the commo, base defense.
What are your living conditions like? Shit, I mean tents living on a cot living on a cot surrounded by stacked sandbags and a Concrete ish just mud mud hut. Okay on the second floor of a little structure. I
Are you eating local food? A lot of the time we were, or Mermite or MRE. I mean, we were the furthest northern fire base on the border with Pakistan. And we had really not a lot of support. I mean, the closest... support was J-bad, which is still hours away. I mean, if something went bad.
No, some of them were trained up by prior ODAs. I think first group was there before us. Before that, there was another third group team. And so they had a little bit of training But that's, I mean, man, when you're talking about Afghans in a rural province of Afghanistan that have no education, have no aptitude, don't know how to read, write. Yeah, I mean, it's all relative.
no matter what the the condition or the situation when you come into a new fire base or or fall into new indage you gotta vet them you gotta put them through some kind of process to be able to see what their current capability is we did that it wasn't much so we started from scratch wow we were doing small unit tactics every single day i was doing small unit tactics with them every single day that we weren't operating and this would be the force
Not only, this is before Afghan commando units, Afghan border police, Afghan national police, this is before all that. So they didn't have a job. Their job for us were, they were Afghan commandos working for special forces guys. We paid them directly cash. These were our first line of defense and QRF if anything went wrong.
Well, I mean, again, that's relative as well because when you infill into a remote fire base, the one we were at in the middle of nowhere was surrounded by high ground. It was just a couple Americans in the middle of the Wild West. So we were getting rocketed. We were getting reports of attacks and all these things that were happening. So we were in it. We were in the thick of it already.
But I mean, we didn't have any time. It was immediate. I think we went on an op two days, three days after we hit the ground. Immediately went and did a link up with one of the Afghan seniors or Afghan elders in a village. And that's a movement to contact. I mean, you're just rolling, hoping you're not going to get blown up, hoping you're not going to get in a tick.
Showing 781–800 of 855 · page 40 of 43
← Previous
Next →