Steve Bunting

So we'd have to get very creative on how we were able to accomplish the mission, which was cool for me to get to see, you know, kind of working some of the special activity stuff.

It started opening up a whole nother realm of how to get, get the job done, um, that I wasn't aware of, which actually served me greater as I moved forward in my experience.

Find another way.

Oh yeah.

And we did.

Yup.

And I was very impressed about how well it worked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of what we're doing was a lot of key leader engagement stuff.

Right.

So if it wasn't the SOTIF kind of pulling the brakes on us, it was, it was just the locals not doing what we asked them to do.

So we had a,

We had a town next to us called Machu Cal and it was like a little hot town and that's where the mortar teams were coming from.

So our main goal that deployment was to push in there and kind of rid that area of Taliban activity.

And one of our first missions was to push in there and kind of do a probing mission.

Luckily for me, I was on Overwatch this mission, but as we started pushing in, we realized, one, there's IEDs everywhere, and two, they were ready.

So just like we had been watching them for the first, it's probably about a month, month and a half before we start kind of doing our own thing, they were watching us.

Very quickly, as the other element starts bounding in, they start taking RPGs, right?

And we start realizing that if we push in any further, it's going to be problematic.