Ray Mendoza
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Ray Mendoza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm trying to like, remember what I learned, you know, a year ago about tourniquets and, uh, morphine, uh, packing wounds and stuff like that. Um, So, yeah, it requires a lot. But I think there's times where we're all concussed and we're all going through these ins and outs. That's the beauty of a team. I think there's times where I was blacked out.
One minute I'm nailing it, the next minute I'm standing. What happened in between that? But someone else is doing something in between that. And I think they probably noticed I was passed out or just like, who knows? Who knows what the fuck that was then?
um but we're all kind of helping each other and we just need a lot of times you see like 30 seconds to just like get it back and like all right cool i'm good i'm back in and we're all kind of like taking turns with each other um until the other ops arrives so it's very much a team effort um Like I said, a lot of it's autopilot stuff, but there's just things that you just notice.
It's what's ingrained in us. It's like always find work, always find work. Even as I'm trying to get out or applying pressure onto Elliot's leg, Joe's leg, like I'm trying to make calm.
Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, there's definitely a disconnection from the top.
um and how what decisions are being made for to the person who's executing on the ground 100 uh you can find examples of that in every major company the person who's in you know in the trenches working i'm sure they get a sense of like the guy who runs this thing has no idea what's happening uh and that's like the culture of it right um The why, again, we're trying to get into the why.
So, yeah, the why, I don't question it too much. I think I could at the time. I can now. I can look back and say, okay, let's see, one, why it started. Two, why did we stay there so long? Could we have been out of there? Could it have more people to save? 100%, yes. Can't argue that. With the ROEs constantly being changing, the restrictive ROEs, and it's all optics.
As a JTAC, we have some of the most accurate, like the amount of money we dump into our munitions and how accurate they are. And they're worried about collateral damage. You're like, but that's why we spend so much money on these damn munitions. Why these contractors are getting all this money to design these awesome weapons.
And we can't use them because optics, because, you know, we bomb a school. There weren't any school children in it, but the optics is we bomb a school. Like, well, the insurgency took over the school. There weren't people in the school because they don't allow kids to go to school, women and little kids to go to school. So there wasn't any students there.
So it's just like optics and things like that where you're like, you know, And instead, we end up throwing a main gun around through that thing and the building collapses anyways. But just because the optics of us dropping bombs on somebody looks so bad, where instead we just run it over with tanks. It's the same end result. It's just the optics look different.
I guess dropping bombs from an airplane looks bad versus, like, sending a main gun around through it and collapse, you know, throw a barrier around and collapse and it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense. So when you're on the ground, you're like, that doesn't make any sense. They don't care that the school dropped down. They just care how it was dropped down, the optics of it.
So that's kind of like the sense that you get. The flip side of that is, you know, we're not animals, man. There's a lot of things we did. Once you're there and you see that there's a misurgency, which they're not local Iraqis. It's called a misurgency for a reason. You know, they're, they surge from other countries.
And oftentimes, you know, they would force some guy who had a family like, hey, you're going to go plan an IED. If you don't, we're going to chop your wife's head off. So he does. And then we shoot him. We don't know. We don't know that the guy was forced to do that. He probably does not want to do that. 100% he doesn't. I know he doesn't. So there's like these situations you start to discover.
All right, cool. All right, so now that we know this, you start to discover that there's these people that need help. It doesn't mean like we're their savior and we're trying to like Show them to Jesus. It's like, no, you do see that there's this insurgency that's coming in. They're doing things to little boys and girls and women, forcing men to do these things. And they're evil people.
And, uh, we, we helped as many, you know, we would put on clinics for women that were beaten to death and kids that were taken advantage of since, you know, and we try to help them out because we have the money and we have the facilities to do it. So we went, nobody told us to do that. That was just us contributing. We're, we're also living in their, their, their towns and their cities.
And if we can help, uh, we would, but simultaneously there's a lot of evil people and,
In a selfish way, it's like, I think we're doing some good here. It may not last forever, which it didn't. ISIS came in, created a vacuum, and then ISIS came in. For the time we were there, I think for the bad stuff that was going on, some of the decisions you have to make on the ground, quick decisions too. Sometimes guys live with those.
Guys have taken their lives for those decisions they made, and some can't live with them. um you have to try to find some sort of good i think we did i think you know obviously you have your friends and things you do for each other but we really you know there's a lot of effort that goes into helping the local people uh it just never gets reported but i've witnessed it so in a lot of ways
Oh, man, I was nervous. Yeah, that was like the first gate I had to go through. That was the most important one. I could care less, but I do care. But, you know, it's something to realize that your movie sucks. Whatever. It's not for you. Yeah.
so uh but yeah so they uh yeah the guys who helped with it did the interviews but also some of the guys that were just at other ops uh with a lot of guys came to watch it and They liked it. The same kind of same reaction you had. A lot of people have is just super realistic, immersive. And Ali was there as well. He watched it for the first time. It was like a rough edit.
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