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.
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Appearances
with the guys that you haven't vetted yet.
How did that go? It went uneventful, we had activity, but nothing significant happened, luckily for us. And we just started building more rapport with them, vetting them, training them, and it improved our situation over time.
No, I will say here's just a little bit of forward history on the guys that I trained. Those same guys that I trained had worked with Special Operations, including Special Missions Unit from the Navy prior to working with us. So there were some good dudes. And when I left that fire base, a guy by the name of Rob Miller ripped into that fire base
and was with those guys as an 18 bravo from third special forces group when he was killed and earned the medal of honor posthumously of course and those men, those Afghans that were with them were the Afghans that I trained, that were trained prior. And so they were squared away. I mean, they had heart, they were disciplined. They wanted it, man. You were impressed with them.
Yeah, I was impressed. A good example was they instinctively knew when or if there was a potential significant act going to happen called SIG Act. And they would immediately get to the high ground and they were good about displacing themselves and then talking to the local community because you have to understand that these people lived in that same community.
So they knew everybody around them and they didn't want to be the guy that failed their mission and got an American killed. So they had buy-in. So yeah, I was impressed with them. We had a lot of work to do, obviously. but they had a good base. And all the guys in Nuristan province that I operated with that were Afghan, in the village of Nure and Asadabad, Barrack out all great great men.
What are these guys carrying? Do they have nods to have helmets at this time in the war? No nods. No helmet. We eventually evolved into that but we we were straight ak-47s and flip-flops Man, I mean it was we like our guys didn't even have uniforms. They're rolling around and whatever we can get them I actually
exploited a program that was a nonprofit that was providing clothes and toiletry items to soldiers overseas and got this nonprofit to send me helicopters full of equipment to be able to outfit my Afghans with just clothes, with just toothbrushes, because they didn't have it and we weren't paying for it. So they needed stuff.
I mean, it's so funny seeing these dudes running around with Harley-Davidson shirts and flannel jackets and USA ball caps, but we had to do what we had to do.
I get back from that deployment and Iraq was getting bad and I wanted to go to school. So I went to put my name in the hat to go to SFARTEC, which is Special Forces Advanced Target Reconnaissance, Target Acquisition, Interdiction, Exploitation, a whole bunch of words and an acronym that doesn't even look right. It's SFARTEC, whatever.
People call it Sephardic, and it's our CQB, Advanced Schoolhouse, for hostage rescue, for direct action, for vehicle interdiction. We learn all that stuff there. It's, I believe, an eight-week school, maybe nine weeks, so it's pretty long. And it is the minimum...
qualification that you need to serve in a commander's and extremist force, which there's one of those per group, which is a reinforced company that's designed to conduct Haas's rescue and crisis response across the world.
Usually at the team level you learn in so it's called so phallic you learn basic CQB Sometimes it's strong wall. I think at that time it was probably strong wall real basic CQB You don't learn points of domination. You don't learn Haas's rescue considerations Maybe a little bit, but it's not there's not a lot of it. Okay, so I
At the basic team level, if you don't have a Sephardic qualified guy, you might not know a lot. You might think you know a lot, but you really don't. And I thought I knew a lot, but I didn't know anything. I showed up and didn't know shit about CQB until I got there. I knew how to shoot. I was a decent shooter with pistol and carbine, but I didn't know much.
No, it was, in fact, I was in Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion. The SIF was Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion. One company designated per group, so they were right next door. So I used to see those dudes come in and they had longer hair, they had cooler uniforms, they had better guns, and I wanted to be in the SIF. At that time, you had to have two years team time to even think about going in the SIF.
But I had real good rapport with my company sergeant major, and he went next door to take the SIF. So he was my sergeant major. He became the SIF sergeant major. And, you know, long story short, I wasn't supposed to go to SIF as a new guy with only a year and some change on the team. But I went to Sephardic and came recommended out of Sephardic, and so they pulled me over.
I mean, I wasn't supposed to deploy to Afghanistan for another year. Holy shit. um but i went next door and i was in iraq a month later i mean out of sephardic i'd from that trip i came back i went straight to sephardic which is two months i had 30 days and i was straight back in iraq so you did a nine month deployment come back
Did you have any... Were you married at the time? At the time, I was married, but I was married young and didn't... I mean, to be honest... Absolutely secondary to the mission. We barely knew each other. I mean, on the ground I had a couple months with her. So it was turning and burning. In fact, I had a hasty marriage because I saw some dudes get killed our trip.
I was part of Operation Red Wing that trip, and we had a couple other Chinooks that were down. We had guys that we lost in the company. So it was a bad trip. It was a bad year. A lot of Americans were killed that year.
I don't sure I I Explosively breached every other target every other night. We went out every night sometimes twice a night and going after bad guys, and it was a real active campaign. It was us and I believe SEAL Team 8, and we did joint ops, where it was like two SIF guys and five SEALs, and we went out with our indage and conducted counterterrorism missions.
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