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Peter King: Welcome to the ninth episode of the PK Experience. My name is Peter King, I'm the host of the show and I'm excited to bring to you today my guest in Tom Satterly. Tom is a former Delta Force military veteran, and he's also a St. Louis resident, which is where I'm from. So we got to sit down and have a chat. This is the first time I've been able to interview somebody live, which was great. And for the occasion, I purchased a new microphone, which is why you're hearing my voice in crystal clear quality right now, and why you will be in future episodes as well.
So Tom's story's fascinating. Tom, as I mentioned, was in the military. He was a part of the Battle at Mogadishu, which you may have heard of. It was the battle that was portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down. And Tom's account of the story is the most detailed account I think is even out there on the internet, anywhere. In my research for this I didn't hear him go through the level of detail that he's about to share with you.

I do want to preface this thought by saying, ironically, I actually sat down with Tom before we started recording. I said, hey look, I don't know all the military lingo and acronyms and whatnot, and I don't think many of my listeners would either, so if we can try to tell the story without using all the acronyms and lingo that'd be great. And of course, he agreed. Then of course as we started the interview he launched into a whole bunch of acronyms and lingo. So, if he's listening to this now he's probably laughing because it's just normal language for him.

Now, I had a choice as I was interviewing him, do I stop him every two seconds and ask, well what does that mean, what is that and what is that? I decided to not do that and just let the story unfold. So, I will say that the first sort of chunk of him explaining some of his military experiences, military career, can be a little bit confusing if you're not familiar with the language. But when he starts to get into the Battle at Mogadishu he really just starts to tell the story, and it's unbelievable. It's a very vivid account of what happened.

Without further ado, I'd like to launch into the interview. Thank you so much for listening.

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All right, we are recording. Tom Satterly, thank you so much for joining the show. I appreciate it.

Tom Satterly: Thank you.

Peter King: It's kind of nice, this is my first in-person, live podcast, as opposed to doing it over the internet.

Tom Satterly: Oh cool.

Peter King: So I ended up scrambling a little bit to find the right mic and stuff, so hopefully the settings okay for you. So, as I was doing some research in your story and watching the videos that you had out there and things like that, I was just, I mean it's some heavy stuff. For those who are listening right now, could you sort of give them a brief overview of who you are, what your story is, and we can start to get into some of that in a little bit?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, absolutely. So again, Tom Satterly. I was born in 1967 in Seymour, Indiana and grew up basically in small town in Indiana. Middle class family, not broke, but my parents didn't buy me anything. So I had to mow lawns at an early age just to be myself a bike or anything else I wanted. My parents were always working and always going to school. Pretty much left alone to my own devices. I have an older sister, middle aged brother, and I'm the youngest.
I had no idea what I was gonna do with my life, just like any other kid growing up. Definitely not the military, wasn't in my mind. I didn't know what it was. But I know my brother joined. He's two years older than me. My sister's four years older than me. My brother joined the military when he was junior in high school, so he went to basic training in the summer between junior and senior year. So I'm a sophomore, he's a senior now, and I'm making fun of him for joining the military. Just dogging him out. Of course, he beat me up for it.
I had no idea what the military was, I just knew to make fun of it. Nobody in my immediate family had been in the military. I mean, my dad's brothers were in Vietnam, and my grandparents were in the war and joined the military for years at a time. But, never crossed my mind.
And then one of my best friends joined the military after high school. I was building houses and still thinking about going to Indiana University. Trying to save some money, my parents had money that I'd blown, for college. He came home from basic AIT, getting ready to go to Germany and there was a John Cougar concert up in Indianapolis. We were driving up there together and he's telling me all about basic and AIT and going to Germany and how great it was. He was indoctrinated for sure.

Peter King: Yeah, I was going to say. Talking about how great basic was.

Tom Satterly: He was a sales pitch all the way up to Indianapolis for that hour and a half drive. By the time I got to Indianapolis, I had just decided I was going to join the military. We went to a recruiter office up there, because we got there way early. Instead of sitting around drinking and doing whatever, went to a recruiters office and talked to them. I'm like, my mom's studying to be a doctor. I think I'll be in the medical field. I'll try that. Of course he pushes me towards his quota, which at the time was a combat engineer. Wouldn't you like to blow stuff up? You do build stuff, so you get to do both. That sounds really cool.
I signed up that night for the army. Nobody knew. Went to the concert. Went home, told my parents the next morning. They about passed out.

Peter King: Right, I can imagine.

Tom Satterly: I was old enough to do it on my own so it didn't matter. They were like, what about college? What about the construction company you work for? The guy wanted me to take over his company even though I was just starting. He had older guys, contractors and things. I had a little bit more intelligence, a little bit more know about construction because I took it in high school as well. I told him and everybody was kind of let down. I felt a little depressed about it. That was the fall of '85. I didn't leave until February of '86 for Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Came straight here to Missouri, unknowing that I'd ever be here again. Did OSUT, which is one station unit training where you do basic and AIT at the same place, instead of basic then they ship you off somewhere else. I did it all right there at Fort Leonard Wood.

Peter King: How long was that?

Tom Satterly: That was about three months, about three months long. In June I got sent off to Germany for my first duty station. That was a two year assignment. I ended up getting married in between AIT and leaving for Germany, when I was on leave for 30 days. That changed it to a three year assignment. I go to Germany. I'm in a combat engineer mechanized unit in Veelvlakken, Germany. The walls still up so our major job at the time was when the Russians were coming thought the Fulda Gap, the horde of Russians had taken over western Germany from eastern Germany. My job, my units job was to basically preposition with preposition explosive charges about three feet across, about six inches thick called cheese chargers. You would lower them in the manhole covers in the roads and then prime them and blow the roads to slow the Russians down, along with their bridges were pre-built.

Peter King: This was, what year was this?

Tom Satterly: '86.

Peter King: Late eighties, mid eighties, okay.

Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Peter King: What were the Russians doing there at that time?

Tom Satterly: They were all in east Germany. Everyone was afraid the Russians were going to push through, take over western Germany. They only had basically one way to go. It was the Fulda Gap near Fulda, Germany. The mountains and everything, there was this huge gap where all their armor could come through. Our job was to blow all the roads and all the bridges to slow them down for the units in the United States to have time to load up and come over and defend and push them back. That's all we did was practice for that, blowing up bridges and roads all the time.
A lot of the platoons at the time were Vietnam vets. They were kind of burned out and tired and I get it now. Back in the day I thought, what's wrong with these old guys? They don't wanna do anything. They had done their stuff and they were kind of tired. My platoon sergeant was a former Hungarian sergeant. He had done a bunch of other things. He was more familiar with Europe and different training through different armies, the German army, the French army. He took us as the first full platoon to go through French Commando School in Nufbriez, Germany, down in the Black Forest area. Went through a month long course as a platoon down there.

Peter King: Through the French program?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, the French ran it.

Peter King: Oh, wow. That's interesting.

Tom Satterly: The barracks were on the German side. It was kind of right on the border in the wide land of Germany. You got the river down there, the Rhine River, and all the beautiful wine country. We did training on both sides. We went through ENE training where they took all your clothes away and gave you these potato sack pants. Gave you your boots back with no shoestrings in them and a brown t-shirt. Lots of cool unconventional warfare type stuff. If the tanks were coming up rolling up on you, how to roll underneath a tank and put a sticky bomb on it and roll back out. It was weird stuff.

Peter King: Saving Private Ryan.

Tom Satterly: Lots of ops ... exactly. They're still living in that area. Lots of obstacle courses and long hikes through the Black Forest carrying all your gear, which was horrible. It was fun. He took us to the Swiss March. It was a 40 mile hike a day in the Swiss Alps for five days. We went down there for three of those five days.

Peter King: Forty miles a day?

Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Peter King: With all your gear and everything?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, we took all our gear. Everybody else is kind of hiking and drinking beer along the way. We're hiking for real. In the end, we stayed in Burn, Switzerland. Their cities in Switzerland are built up like little, they don't really have a military. They all have guns and they all have leadership in blocks of the city, who's in charge. If there's a war, what you do. There's bunkers built up underneath. We stayed in those bunkers, those fall out shelters. It was basically like this table. If this was one shelf of bunks in a hole in the ground, there was like seven layers of this. There'd be twenty people laid out just sleeping next to each other. People were coming in drunk and falling asleep. I'm already asleep because we're waiting for the next day to do good. People just climb in next to you, falling asleep. All those different experiences.
Then they had a slot open up for German Ranger School. They were going to send an officer from the headquarters battalion. I kind of spoke up. I said why don't you fun a competition and send the best guy, you know? Send the best person.

Peter King: That's cool.

Tom Satterly: They were like, I don't know, okay. They had a Green Beret, the first Green Beret I ever saw showed up in Germany. He was wearing his Green Beret and he was changing units. I don't know why. He was an older guy. They put him in charge of running the event. He set up a three day event with a PT test, a 12 mile rough march, swimming, land navigation, tactics. He set this whole competition up for over a three day period. I ended up winning it so I got to go to German Ranger School, but I didn't speak enough German so they sent another guy with me that spoke German. He fell down after the first week so I was alone for the rest of the month and a half there.
That was kind of a breakdown for me. A lot of how you get over things is through comedy and telling stories at night when you're sitting around pulling security. I'm trying to tell stories to these Germans and they're looking at me like, what? I'm like, alright. I literally grabbed my boots and walked out to pull security. I'm shining my boots and I just started crying. There was just nobody to talk to. I was tired and miserable, lonely. I kind of got over that hump and passed German Ranger School.
I decided I wanted something different other than going to the motor pool every Monday and working on our 113APC, you know?

Peter King: What is that?

Tom Satterly: It's armored personnel carrier. It's not a tank, it's just a troop carrier. You got machine guns on top. The back will open up and everybody can peel out. Now they're bradleys. Every Monday, motor pool Monday, driving that thing all week and then parking it. Then Monday back to the motor pool. It's just the same over and over again. I wanted something different. I tried to reenlist for special forces. They had a $25,000 bonus program.

Peter King: What made you decide to try that?

Tom Satterly: I knew I was going to stay in, versus I came in for four years to get $25,000 for college, and then get out. I knew after going through those schools that there was more and it was fun and challenging. I decided I would re-enlist to be a Green Beret. The bonus made it easy, but I couldn't get the bonus. I had made E5 so fast that I didn't get a school you needed to get, to get E5. I got promoted to E5 because I won soldier of the year doing some competitions. They sent me to the E5 board and basically their question was, my first sergeant who was an old Vietnam vet. Our company was the 54th engineer battalion raiders.
Sitting in the board in front of all of these majors for the E5 board he's like, "I just have one question for you. Who runs this mother fucker?" I was like, I jumped up to attention. I was like, "Raiders run this mother fucker first sergeant." He's like, "That's all I got. Sit down." I sat back down and he looked over. He's like, "No one else has questions, right?" They're like, "No, first sergeant." He goes, "Get out of here." I got out of there and he came in. He's like, "Alright. You're E5." I was like, okay. Cool. I'll take the pay.

Peter King: That was easy.

Tom Satterly: I didn't have primary leadership development course, which I was supposed to go through. You have to have it to go to SF. I couldn't get the school because I was already E5. They were like, let all the E4's go first, let them get promoted. I went ahead and just re-enlisted for jump school just to get to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I knew when I was in Fort Brag that's where some of the special operations was. I could dig around and find something.
I come back in '89, about the summer of '89 I came back to Fort Bragg. Went to jump school. Ended up at Fort Bragg. Then I started hunting down the Green Beret recruiters. Signed up and went at the end of '89, I went to SFAS, the special forces assessment and selection course.

Peter King: What was the training like for that?

Tom Satterly: It's about a month long. They take you out to Camp McCall and Fort Bragg. They put you in some, now they're nice, they were some old barracks back in the day. They give you four hours of sleep a night. During that four hours you have a 15 minute period you have to pull fire guard. You have to wake up before that 15 minute period to get dressed. After you're done with fire guard, you wake the next guy up. Once he's ready, you lay back down. You try to go back to sleep. You're getting about maybe three hours of sleep a night. They did some research. It was like four hours a night is what you need not to go crazy. That's what they kept it at for the month.

Peter King: Give them a little less than that.

Tom Satterly: Do some classes, do some land nav, lots of team events where you'll have maybe 12 guys on a team with your rough sack and your weapon and food and water. You're carrying everything. You'll have to push a Jeep, a 3/4 ton Jeep with three tires on it and some poles over here and some stuff you can build with. You gotta push it through the sandy roads for 6-7 miles.
Once you get there, you do about two events a day. You get to the other end and they're like, alright. Drop everything. Okay. Here's about 50 sandbags. You have to fill each sandbag up to only where there's a fistful on the top. You gotta carry these sandbags 500 meters and drop them off. Okay, sure. We got 50 sandbags, we carry them. All along the way there's these berms, these huge berms you gotta climb over all the way there. Drop them off. You get to the end and the other guys like, nope, not full enough. Dumps it out. Go back and fill it up. You do that all day for hours, just to see who quits.

Peter King: Just kind of messing with your mind a little bit?

Tom Satterly: Exactly. You're not allowed to encourage each other. You're not allowed to yell at each other. You're just suppose to work together. The guys start losing it. There's guys that just can't do it, but you have to keep them with you. It gets frustrating that you got a guy that can't carry anything. He can't walk that fast. Okay, you take the map. You navigate, just stay ahead of us. They can't do that. It gets really frustrating.

Peter King: Do they drop?

Tom Satterly: They do drop. Nobody gets cut, really, but a lot of people quit. Even the instructors, who wants pizza? Pizza, all you have to do is quit. Some guys really jump on that and go. I don't think anybody ever gets pizza. You'll do things like that. Here's a 3/4 ton trailer with one wheel. Here's a bunch of metal poles to counterbalance it. You all have to stay together. Here's an event where ammo cans, wooden ammo crates full of lead and sand that you gotta carry as a team. It's just all week long you're doing events. It finishes up with a 22 mile road march all the way back into Bragg for time, then testing and psychological evaluations. Made that.
I was going for an 18 Charlie, special operations engineer sergeant. That was easy for me, that six months of training after that, to get the Green Beret was easy because they had weapons. Then they have como. They have engineers and then they have the medics and then they have the intel guys. I was going to be an engineer. I already knew all the formulas. I already memorized them over my years in the army. Basic training I knew them 'cause they drove them into you at the Leonard Wood. I knew all the demo formulas. I knew all the calculations and where to place all the charges on bridges and roads and trees and things like that. That was easy.
Just learning all the unconventional warfare things and how to deal with foreign armies, and how to get them to do what you need them to do when they don't really listen and you don't speak the language.

Peter King: Foreign armies that you're working with in different parts? What are some of the things that you learn to do for that?

Tom Satterly: You have to learn how to teach everything you know. Instead of just knowing it and doing it, you have to learn how to teach it.

Peter King: Are you learning their cultures too?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter King: How to influence?

Tom Satterly: Yeah. You'll take over by with and through. You work by them or with them or through them, or you'll get them to do the job for you. That's their legacy mission as a Green Beret. Since the war started, everybody's assaulting and attacking and capturing people. Then you'll have regular army units are flying in to train these armies back up. Once you take down the country, you have to train their army back up to defend itself so you don't have to be there forever. Does it work? I don't know. We're still in Germany. We're still in Japan. We'll be in Iraq forever. We'll have to be in Afghanistan forever. It just takes a long time to change the culture. The people have to want to do it. They're so used to the way of life. It's foreign to them even though to us it's normal to live free and natural and to go shopping and be nice to each other. To them, it's just more rudimentary.

Peter King: It's a complete shift in a way of being.

Tom Satterly: A lot of people are like, you don't like Walmart? You don't like to show up and go to Walmart? People are like, I hate Walmart. I want to go shopping every day for my food and it's fresh and that's what I'm used to. It would be like trying to get us to go shopping every day without a refrigerator.

Peter King: Of course. Who are we to impose our exact way of living on completely different type of culture, which makes sense.

Tom Satterly: That's what's tough when you're a Green Beret. I never did the legacy mission as a Green Beret. I was in such a short time before I already had selection to go to Delta. I was only in 5th special forces group at Fort Campbell, Kentucky for several months.

Peter King: What is the difference between Delta and Green Beret and some of the other special forces?

Tom Satterly: You've got Seals. You've got White Side Seals, which are not special ops. They are special ops, but you've got White and Black Side. Let's say Seal Team Six is Black Side. White Side Seals in multiple teams on the east coast and west coast. They're more like, let's say Rangers. Rangers are also special ops. They're at a different level. They're more like shock, go in and take something down to large numbers of people.

Peter King: Black Ops meaning ...

Tom Satterly: More secretive. They call it White Side or Black Side. Really, then you have different tiers, tier one and tier two. Everybody nowadays is just an operator. It's just a cool term.

Peter King: Yeah. How has that shifted, just given our culture with social media and the truth coming out? I remember growing up just hearing the word Navy Seal, or even Delta Force was like, who are these guys? Now it's like, you got your movies and you've got, everybody knows about Seal Team Six.

Tom Satterly: Rangers, you're allowed to be in the Rangers, talk about the Rangers. There's really nothing secretive about what you're doing, where you live, where you're stationed, other than the jobs you do. Nobody ever wants to tell where you're going and when. That's a big giveaway. The same with the White Side Seals. A lot of the Seal stories you hear are White Side Seals stories. They have kind of a problem with too much social media going out. They're trying to put a cap on it. That's why, even at today's measure, Seal soft day. Seal is a bigger word. People know it more because it's been in the movies and books more. Not a lot of Delta, even when I say it, now that I've been out since 2010, it's like I kind of whisper it sometimes. I've actually been attacked by wives in the unit now that I'm doing speaking engagements. You said Delta. You're not allowed to say Delta. I'm like, yeah you are. When you're in, you're not allowed to, never. When you're out, it's in your paperwork. It's public information. You're allowed to talk about it.

Peter King: I'm sorry. What was the difference between Delta Force and Seals, Green Berets?

Tom Satterly: That's a trick question. People listening are going to be like, what's he going to say now? You know what I would say, it's maturity and the selection process. For Seal Team Six, to go be a Seal you go to BUDS training.

Peter King: Right.

Tom Satterly: Then you have hell week. Every Seal goes through that. That's kind of designed because the Navy comes in and their jobs are different. In the army you come in and you're a soldier first. Everyone goes to basic training. You learn how to use a gun. You learn how to do individual movement techniques and how to attack a building or how to saw through a field. It's ingrained in you from day one.

Peter King: Okay.

Tom Satterly: Seals are in the Navy or in the Air Force, things like that, that's not their sole mission. They learn a different job. They don't learn those basic tactics on the ground right away.

Peter King: Right.

Tom Satterly: They have to go through BUDS, do a lot more of that tactical training, then go through the Seal training to get their try to become a Seal. They're learning it for the first time. They're a lot younger. Maturity is one thing. Age and maturity is ...

Peter King: What about actual emotional maturity?

Tom Satterly: Right. They're a lot younger. The youngest age to go into Delta is probably 23. I think I went in right at 23. You have to have been in the army or the military, on your second enlistment. You have to show a little commitment. You have to be a certain rank, E5 to E8, to come in, or officers have to come in after their first command. I think if they come in as a captain, they're going to be majored really soon anyway. They've already had a command. They've already been out into the regular military. They've already led troops.

Peter King: Is the maturity requirement because you're dealing with other cultures and villages?

Tom Satterly: Plus the national command missions, the higher level missions that really, no fail missions. It requires a lot of maturity, a lot of being quiet, not talking about it. That's why you hear a lot less stories about Delta, less books on Delta. I don't know if there's ever been a movie on Delta other than Chuck Norris made one way back in the day. There was a TV show, which was kind of way off, the Delta Force back in the day. You'll see references in movies and it's funny when we watch movies. You'll see them, oh, we're going to bring in some special ops guys. They'll come in with the beards and long hair and they're acting kind of quiet in the corner. The crazy guy's over here. Those are the Seals, Seals bad ass, those are Delta guys. They go, oh. We laugh all the time because it's just what people think. You know?

Peter King: What's the truth?

Tom Satterly: I think there's a lot more quiet professionalism in the unit, just due to maturity level and the culture. Seal Team Six, great guys as well. Even all the other White Side Seal teams, a lot of great guys. They're younger. They're bigger. When you're bigger, you have more opportunity for mistakes in there and people screwing up. Our numbers are really low.

Peter King: Bigger in terms of numbers?

Tom Satterly: Numbers, yeah. They've got 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 on the east coast, six being the black side. Then they have 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 on the west coast.

Peter King: That's where they're stationed?

Tom Satterly: Yeah. They're huge. Rangers are huge. Green Berets are huge. The unit, very small compare to that, very, very small.

Peter King: Delta Force?

Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Peter King: Where did you do your training? I'm sorry, you trained for Green Beret, is that correct?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, six months for that, then I went to language school. Yeah, I'm going through the qualification course, the six month qualification course. There was two or three guys from the unit that went through. They were already in the unit but they went to the Green Beret qualification course to change their MOS, their military occupation specialty. When you're in the unit, when you're in Delta, there is no MOS for Delta. It's just you come over as a Ranger. You'll wear your brown beret now. If you're a Green Beret and you go to Delta, you wear your Green Beret. If you're an air born guy and you made it, you'll just wear your maroon beret. You'll wear all your same patches. There's no patch for Delta. You get promoted with your peers in that job, in the regular army.
Your packet that goes before the board is stamped secret. That sounds special to some people. You've done more. They take into consideration that you're in Delta. They know that you're doing a difficult job and you're training all the time. You still kind of get promoted along with your peers in the regular army. If somebody was over there and they were a mechanic or something, and they made it, they may want to go to the Q course because Green Berets get promoted faster than mechanics. These guys were over there going through the Q course to change their job in hopes to get promoted. I didn't know it. I just think they're guys going through the Q course.
When I made the Q course and I'm in four months of Persian Farsi on Fort Bragg, taking language school. Two guys showed up at our course and I'm wondering why they weren't in language school. They don't need a language.

Peter King: I'm sorry. Which language, Farsi?

Tom Satterly: Farsi, Persian Farsi, Iran. No, no, I wasn't fluent after I took the course. That was a nightmare. That was four months of futility for me, trying to learn that. I learned some stuff but it's all gone now.

Peter King: It's hard.

Tom Satterly: It's a horrible language to try to learn. Then to try to write it. No. One guy in the class actually learned how to write and everything. He had the capacity for it. He was just a brain. Me, I wasn't into it. When I realized how difficult it was I was like, eh. It's not happening. They approached me. They said, hey, we watched you in the Q course. Worked with them, knew them, just didn't know where they were from. They said we think you have what it takes. You should try out for Delta. They actually gave me the phone number and I called the recruiter when I was in language school and set up a time to do the PT test and take some psychological testing. I did it. They said alright, you're approved, and gave me in the spring of '91.

Peter King: What was it that they saw in you?

Tom Satterly: I guess my determination, my physical fitness, my motivation, maturity. I had already spent three years in Germany leading people. That's a whole other nightmare that you don't really get in special operations because you work around other professionals. Leading people in the unit was easy. Leading people in the Green Berets is a little more easier than leading regular army soldiers who have all kinds of problems and issues and don't care. Half of them, they might be in because they have to be in, they have no other option. It's more difficult.
I kind of learned a little bit about leadership in Germany and I guess it shined through a little bit.

Peter King: Gotcha. Take us now to, I was amazed in the research that I did that really the Battle at Mogadishu was your first real ... I guess you had taken some fire in some other battles or whatever. This was your first.

Tom Satterly: Somalian, yeah.

Peter King: Man, what an initiation.

Tom Satterly: Right. It was two years in the unit, at the time. I got in spring of '91. By the end of '92 I'm an operator in C squadron. I've got one full year on me before I have to jump out and go to Somalian. We just trained all the time, preparing to do your job, save a life, take a life, whatever. Every day. Then Somalia's kicking up. We start rehearsing months out knowing that it's coming up. Then when it finally came down and we went over it's like, okay. You're now a task force Ranger. You all have to shave your heads and blend in with the Rangers. It's kind of funny because we all had a little bit longer hair at the time. Alright, you need it high and tight. Basically guys are getting haircuts the day that they're going to the airfield to take off. All the Rangers, their heads are tan already because they've had their haircut for so long. You can see all the guys with the white heads and the tan lines on the side. Okay, I can obviously tell these guys are different.

Peter King: What was going on in Somalia at the time?

Tom Satterly: Starvation. Mohamed Aidid was using starvation as a tool. Using the food, keeping the food from the shipments that we were sending over there and taking down convoys. I think what caused us to pack up and start to go over was they attacked the marines, killed some marines over there on a convoy. I think they killed some military police. They attacked some Pakistanis as well.

Peter King: Okay.

Tom Satterly: It was like, okay. We need to take out Aidid. Our charter is hostage rescue or kill capture. Alright, let's go over and capture or kill Aidid, you know, and his top people. We had a list of people we wanted to go for in hopes of dismantling that clan and turning it over to a more friendly clan that wanted to help out with the starvation efforts.

Peter King: Can I ask you sort of a slightly vivid question on this? What is the US's interest in that? I know that it's a shitty situation, but ...

Tom Satterly: Probably just being the good guys. I think the starvation was going on for so long and you see them on the TV starving. I think public opinion starts spiking. Why aren't we helping these people? Okay, well it gets big enough that now we have to act and go help these people. Whether we had interest or not over there at the time, I couldn't say other than public opinion starts screaming out we should help these people. The administration decides we have to go help these people. We go to help the people and they attack us. They are stealing the food. It's not working. Now maybe it's okay, let's take a more strategic approach to it. Let's take out the leaders and see if we can go back to negotiations.
Combat is just an arm of politics. Basically I want you to do this. I want you to do this. I kind of only want to do part of this. If you come to an impasse and it has to happen, okay, combat. Reach out and smack them. Then you should pull back and go, now do you want to deal? Now do you see what's up? You can't do both at the same time, which is where we fail I think a lot. Trying to do political maneuvers while we're in combat and it doesn't really work. It's like reach out, smack them hard, pull back. Now you want to talk? Now let's talk about your survival and your future versus us still coming after you for years to come. Strangely enough people still think they can get away with stuff and keep going.

Peter King: I would not want to be on the receiving end of that. Aidid is basically being an ass.

Tom Satterly: Being an ass. Taking all the money. Taking all the food and using starvation as a tool to win the war.

Peter King: So you guys are charged to go over there to take him out?

Tom Satterly: Yes.

Peter King: As I heard, this was supposed to be a 30 minute operation.

Tom Satterly: Right. We had done five missions before 3 October, five or six missions before 3 October, limited success. We captured Osman Atto, his financier, on the hit before, which I think they showed in Black Hawk Down. He was riding the bike and then they take out the car. It didn't really go down that way. There was nobody on a bike. Definitely nobody sitting in the market. Those five or six missions, some shots were fired. Nobody got hurt on our side. We captured who we wanted to, mostly. Did it lead to anything? Not really. The Osman Atto capture I think led us a little bit closer to locations. We had people, some locals, out in the city would put a panel on top of their car if there was a meeting going on and he could confirm that people were there. On 3 October helicopters flying overhead and I guess the guy put the signal on top his car. There's a meeting going on right now. That's how little time we had to launch.

Peter King: So this was a Somali that was working with you guys.

Tom Satterly: Right.

Peter King: So he puts something on top of his car?

Tom Satterly: Just some little marker on top of his car, something that nobody else would notice but the helicopters looking for. They know what car he is, where he's at. If he puts it on top, it's time to launch. If nothings on top ... he was getting nervous. I remember he was getting really nervous. They're going to notice me. This is weird. Finally the signal went. Me and some other guys had just gotten back from a five mile run around the airfield on the beach. It was Sunday, it was about 2:00. We had just got back sweaty and tired, ready to go eat some dinner. Everybody was stirring a little bit.

Peter King: You didn't know?

Tom Satterly: No clue. They were like, get it on. Basically get it on is what you got. Run inside, put on my kit, bottle of water. No night vision because it's two in the afternoon and it's going to be about an hour, say about an hour long mission at the most. Go in, grab him, get out. I was going to fly in, rope down, assault the building. Then the convoy would drive in and would load everybody up in a convoy and drive out.

Peter King: How far away was your base from where?

Tom Satterly: Maybe three miles, three or four.

Peter King: You're that close to each other?

Tom Satterly: Oh, yeah. We're at the airfield. It would be like being at the St. Louis airfield and attacking whatever little town is about three miles away. Mostly friendly around the airfield. The other parts of town where the bad clan, the Bakari Market where they sold all the black market weapons and everything. We load up, get on. We're sitting on the bird. Birds are cranking. We're waiting on our team leaders to come out of the talk and tell us what's going on. Basically you get a white piece of paper in front of your face. We're going to go in here. Here's about 4-5 buildings. You'll run this way through the dust because you can't see. When the helicopter comes in there's so much brown out you can't see. You're roping down into the dirt. You don't see anything. Go that way. You're running until it clears. Alright, where are we? Alright, go.

Peter King: That's your whole briefing?

Tom Satterly: Right. We could have planned it better, but by the time we're done planning, they're gone.

Peter King: Sure.

Tom Satterly: Had to get there. As soon as we start infilling we're taking fire. Our helicopter had to flare and hover outside of the security zone because the Ranger's set up an outer perimeter. We would go in and hit the target. They would just keep people out. We inserted outside of that. Just due to the brownout, the helicopter couldn't see. He pulled up short. We roped down and it was like, alright, where are we now? We had to get off the street because we were taking fire already. We kicked in somebody's door. Took the family down, set them down in the corner. Told them it was okay. They had babies and everything. It's just so surreal. You're trying to be nice but you gotta go and bullets are flying. Just stay here, you know? They don't understand what you're saying so you're just trying to be nice in hand gestures with guns and helmets and bullets flying.

Peter King: That's crazy.

Tom Satterly: We finally get out and work our way down the street back to the target building. We had about 12 or 14 that we had detained. We handcuffed them kind of asking questions, looking around, searching the buildings. It's time to go. Five ton outside go hit with an RPG and was on fire. It was like, okay. It's starting to ramp up a little bit. We need to get out of here now. We're still joking like, hope we can make it back for dinner. Got some good food tonight. Still cracking jokes. Moved out of that building. Put the detainees on a five ton and moved into a courtyard of another house. I was carrying a big sack of Somalian money, a whole garbage bag full of money. I was like, I'll take this back. I found it in a safe, probably worth $5, I don't know. A lot of their money is none of ours.
I hear an RPG launch. I look up and you see the tow rotor of the helicopter start spilling out of control heading off to the north and the east. It was like, well, alright, mission just changed. They are sitting there waiting on the radio. They're calling in. Okay, we need the convoy to go here. We need you guys to move down the street about three blocks east and two or three blocks north and find the crash site. You gotta get there now because the Somalis are moving that way. We didn't know it at the time, but the reason they were so good with the RPS's that day was there was an Al-Qaeda training cell several blocks away from our target area. They were there in full force and they just came to the party. They had all their weapons. They were definitely better trained than the militia.

Peter King: Interesting.

Tom Satterly: They were hitting them. I heard they modified their RPG's to blow up in the air. I think they filled some with gas so they could try to hit these helicopters. Instead of trying to hit a helicopter moving, they could hit near it and damage it.

Peter King: Interesting. You didn't know about these guys until after?

Tom Satterly: Not until years later. Didn't even know they were there. Didn't even know Al-Qaeda really existed. It wasn't public opinion. They were that old.

Peter King: So the bird goes down. You guys are a few blocks away. You're tasked now to go basically check for survivors?

Tom Satterly: Right. Try to go get survivors and defend the helicopter site. Get the wounded out and then head back. As we finally start just getting ready to push out ... over there they have those cinder block and rock wall courtyards. The gates are just thin metal. I remember standing there watching a Ranger sitting against the metal gate, just taking a breather, leaning up against it. His neck explodes. He just took a bullet right through there. I was like, we gotta get out of here. We gotta get out of here. They load him up on the convoy. The convoys going to go back. First they try to make their way to the crash site.

Peter King: If I could just pause you for a second. Since this is your first real shit storm, basically, what's going through your mind? How are you processing? Did the training just kick in and became second nature? Are you ...

Tom Satterly: It is. It's muscle memory. My mind shuts down, even years after that when I'm in charge and people are getting hurt and people I know are getting hurt, my mind shuts down. I have a job to do. I can't care about that right now. If I care about that, then my jobs going to suffer. I remember thinking that guy got shot in the neck. I'm like, uh, man, glad that wasn't me. Dang. We gotta go. Load him up and we start heading down the street. Every intersection we cross it was just a volume of fire. I remember looking up as we crossed one and there's just hundreds of Somalis paralleling us. They're heading to the crash site. They're already closer. They're a little bit north by a block or two. We know we have to give up security and use speed to get there. We drop a lot of security where we'd normally lay down weapons, clear the street and then send guys across. We just went. We just had to go. Nobody really got hurt or hit until we turned north.
Right at the corner from turning north we got held up a little bit. That was a crash site street. There was already a lot of people down there. Unknown at the time, there had already been a couple of our guys that got out of the helicopter and had launched out to shoot at these guys. They were approaching the helicopter and gotten killed. They took a little bird and landed it right there at the intersection. You could see.

Peter King: Our guys?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, our guys, task force guys. Little bird right there. The pilots were shooting out the window. It can only hold about 2-4 guys. One of our assaulters went over and grabbed the guy who just got shot, a friend of mine, and was dragging him to the bird. As he was dragging him to the helicopter, he got shot through the shoulder. Finished dragging him. Threw himself in the bird and that bird got out of there. That's about probably the time we turned the corner to head north. Started taking a large volume of fire. We're out in the street spread out trying to suppress that fire so we could push forward. Shooting 2-3 grenade launcher, 40 millimeter grenade launcher, shooting those down the street. That's when I looked over and saw a couple friends of mine on the other side of the street shooting. The east side of the street was more lit, I think, with the sun and everything. They seemed to take it more than we did on our side of the street, at the time.
I looked back and I see two of my friends dragging another guy, lifeless body. Earl had just got shot in the head. That was the last movement he ever made. That's as far as they push forward. They had to hold up there they took so many casualties. Our side, we pushed down further, all the way to the crash site. We took the house. There was a four way intersection. Helicopters crashed on the eastern side.

Peter King: I'm sorry. Is this residential area?

Tom Satterly: Residential, yeah. People everywhere.

Peter King: Militia everywhere?

Tom Satterly: Militia, people, women, kids just popping in. I'm like, what are these people doing? If I hear gunfire, I'm getting out of here. I guess they're so use to it.

Peter King: Yeah. Is it just a way of life?

Tom Satterly: Yeah. That's the weird stuff, the things that aren't natural. It's natural to see people get shot in combat, I guess. It's not natural to see people calmly walking around and see what's going on. You gotta deal with them too. You just don't have time to deal with them. You have to just get them out of the way. Those are the people that get you killed.
We had to take those two houses down. Our house had a family of probably six kids, up to low teens, two adult females and one adult male. We cuffed the adult male, put him in the corner and left all the women sit with him in the living room as far back from the shooting as we could. Now they're under our protection. We have to keep them safe. That was the only rest position you had that night, was guarding those people. That's where you got rest. Everyone else was in a window or door outside around the building. That's where we spent the next 16-18 hours basically, just keeping people away from the helicopter. The convoy can't get to us. They keep trying to get to us but they don't know where we're at.
The helicopters calling down on the radio, turn right now. By the time they got that communications, they were already passed it. Now they're getting lost over and over again.

Peter King: That's the other thing we take for granted. Today I'm sure it's way better.

Tom Satterly: Yeah, or navigation. You go straight to it. Everybody's got a little blue force tracker. You know where everybody's at. Back then I had no idea where anybody was.

Peter King: That's crazy.

Tom Satterly: So before you shoot you have to figure out, okay. You do anyway, but you had to take a little extra care back in the day. Are those our people, before you shoot back. I spent the entire night there.

Peter King: Just for the listeners to understand, again, this was a 30-60 minute op that's now turned into a multi-hour. Your gear, you have hardly anything, right?

Tom Satterly: Nothing. I had a little bottle of water. We were light and fast. Plastic helmets. I had sewn my own Kevlar. The army, you get Kevlar. I had taken it apart, went to the sew shot and sewed it the smallest little, like a Kleenex on my chest, just to have it. Plastic helmets. No night vision. Just your weapon, ammo that you needed and med supplies.

Peter King: I'm assuming you don't have a ton of ammo for that long of a fight.

Tom Satterly: No. We ran out.

Peter King: How did you guys last that long?

Tom Satterly: Little birds, mini guns and rocket launchers. They were keeping people at bay. We were very selective in our fire. We had a lot of ammunition from the wounded that couldn't use it, we were taking. We still ran out. Then they resupplied us midway through the night with water and ammunition. Back in the day we didn't prepackage it. We didn't have the packaging magazines and water and rugged containers that they threw out. Here comes a black hawk hovering right over us throwing stuff out. They start taking fire from the house right next door to us, from the second floor. That's when a friend of mine got shot in the face throwing stuff out. As it hits the road it's exploding into the dirt right in front of our building. It's like, okay. I'm the younger guy on the team. Hey, Tom, you gotta go get that. I'm like, great. Can't wait.

Peter King: When you say exploding you mean just pieces?

Tom Satterly: Just boxes going, yeah the boxes tearing apart. Ammo laying everywhere. The water just hitting and dumping. Now it's my turn to go out in the street. I go out there and I'm scooping up ammunition, running it back in. Go back out, scoop up more ammunition, run it back in. Water, run it back in. Okay, the team across the street needs water. I'm like, okay. I'll run it across the street now.
So here I am waiting with two five gallon jugs of water like, alright. One, two, in the streets regular sized, dirt, probably 1 1/2 lanes wide maybe, in a residential area. I'm looking at the front door waiting to leave the gate. Take off running as fast as I can carrying two five gallon jugs of water. It's like, slow motion up until I get to the doorframe of the house that I'm running into at full speed. My mind's like, what if I get shot by our own guys as I run in? I run in there yelling, "Eagle, eagle, eagle" and I don't hear anything. I'm like, am I in the right house? I have no gun. My guns on me but my hands are full of water. I'm going through this house trying to find the team.
Finally, I find them in the back. They're dealing with some people coming out the back alleyway. Here's your water. I dump it off and I go back. Now I gotta go back across the street again. This sucks. Made it back. Yeah, all night just different instances that happened. The Rangers out in the corner of the building got hit with an RPG. Had to go out and drag them in. Then they sent me back out to go get their weapon. They had an M60 out there. Go find their weapon so nobody uses it. I'm like, I'm pretty sure it's destroyed. That RPG did a number on that building. Got that weapon in there. Took care of those Rangers. Just picking at us all night long.
I remember my buddy sitting in a room pulling guard out the window towards the crash site and north. I just got up off the bed. He sat down and I was rotating in to guard the family. I turned around to ask him if he needed any water, there was a little pipe dripping water out of the building, you know. I was like, I'll throw some iodine tablets in it and I'll fill it up with water and hand it out to people during my break. I turned around to ask him a question and the wall just exploded. It was full of dust and I saw this red rocket spinning in circles, bouncing off things in the room and then lodge underneath the couch. I was just standing there covered in debris.
My two IC was sitting on a couch in the hallway looking up at me as I was covered in this stuff. He was like, what was that? I go, I don't know. Then it hit me and I yelled, "RPG", and I went running into that room. That rocket had hit so close that the rocket hadn't burned down. It was still spinning around the room. It caught the couch on fire. I'm trying to find my buddy in this debris, this dust filled room in the dark. I found I thought was his leg. I went to pull it and he comes up, wind knocked out of him, just whaling. I drug him out, put him in the other room and shut that door. Now we have this huge hold in this house. I just shut the door for a bit.

Peter King: Did the RPG?

Tom Satterly: It knocked the whole wall down.

Peter King: Did it explode?

Tom Satterly: It exploded, blew the wall. RPG is like a shave charge. It's designed for metal. It will punch a hole through metal. When it hits concrete or dirt it does some damage, but it really absorbed it all. He just got a little shock knocked into him. He wasn't injured. He laid there for an hour or so and recovered and he was back at it. I shut the door and I'm standing there. I notice twenty minutes later there's a red glow coming underneath the door. I'm like, what's going on in there? I open the door and the couch is on fire. The whole room's full of smoke. I'm like, this is not good. I was worried about the light drawing attention to where we were anyway.

Peter King: Was the family in there still?

Tom Satterly: The family is in the living room, just across the hallway, that was going to the house. I'm trying to find water, flower pots, pouring it on this couch that's on fire. Every time I go in there I'd breath in that smoke and the chemicals from the couch. Who knows who even makes that over there. I'd go outside and throw up, come in get some more water. Pour it out. Go outside, throw up. Come back in. Finally put that fire out. That's when I started walking around the house laying mattresses up against the walls. I knew that it stopped it, but now it stopped the debris. I just finished laying a mattress up on one of the other walls that a buddy of mine was sitting at. He was like, what are you doing? I was like, it's just a little more protection, you know? I turned around and walked out and that wall got hit right after I put that mattress up. He came in and was like, that worked like a champ. It stopped everything from flying in.
They were just nit picking our house all night long, just destroying it little by little. Trying to sneak up on us all night. I literally had one guy, as I was pulling guard, sitting on a bed, looking to the west. There's a house about three feet across, just a little dirt way between. Every now and then I'd hear men in there yelling. You could hear them with their weapons and stuff. I'd just shoot through the wooden shutters trying to keep them away. I was sitting there and there was bars on our windows as well.
I heard this clicking and dragging noise, like metallic and wood. Then I'd hear a dragging noise. I'm like, I didn't have ear protection in. I'm half deaf anyway. I look out and without night vision I saw this guy in man dress put his AK in front of him and drag himself. He's creeping up on my window. I'm like, oh, this is not cool. I couldn't get my M4 out the window to shoot at that angle. I'm thinking, okay. It's pistol time. I finally get to use my pistol, you know? I pull my 45 out and I stick my arm through the bar and I'm going to get rid of this issue. I pull the trigger and the hammer falls and it's so full of sand from the rotor wash that the hammer only halfway falls. I'm like, okay. What else can go wrong? I re-cocked the 45 and put it on the bed. We got these little Austrian grenades, these little small ones, you know? I pulled it out and showed the guy at the door. I pulled the pin and he's going, no. I'm like, yep.
I stuck my hand out the window again and he's right underneath it now. I dropped and I hit him on the head. As it hit him he looked up like, what is that? It rolled down into his little scarf area. I just laid over on the bed and boom. Everything just kind of hits the ceiling inside. Everything blows in our room. It's funny. It wasn't the first person I'd killed, but it's not funny. That's a bad word. It's odd that when you do your job and you take a life, the first thing in your mind is I'm in trouble. I'm going to et in trouble. People came running in the room, what was that? What was that? I'm like, it was a flash bang, just a distraction device. The guy in the room with me standing there going, no he's not. He's lying. That was a grenade. I'm like yeah, you're right. It was a grenade. Look at this dude. Oh, hey, good job.

Peter King: What's your reaction was to tell a white lie?

Tom Satterly: Yeah. I'm going to get in trouble for that, you know? It was weird. That went on. It became the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam, at the time. I think there's been one longer now in Afghanistan, maybe, or maybe Iraq. Not sure, but 18 hours, it lasted a little over 18 hours.

Peter King: Oh, man. You're not sleeping at all during any of that?

Tom Satterly: No. We were dehydrated, suffering from severe sleep depravation.

Peter King: How did you guys finally get out?

Tom Satterly: They finally made it to us just before light out. Two or three of the Pakistani armored vehicles had made it and they were using one. The tenth mountain group was with them, so we had more numbers now. They kind of secured the area. They were out there walking around like it's normal. I'm like, you guys, trust me. We've been here all night. It's not cool to be walking out in the streets. They're in force. Maybe they pushed everything back. They used the vehicle to pull the helicopter off of the pilots. They had been thrown through the windshield and they were underneath it and we couldn't get their bodies out. We weren't leaving without them. Finally pulled that off. Got the bodies on top, go the wounded inside. It was time to leave. Threw some thermite on the helicopter to destroy it. Then we had a cobra and apache that was going to also fly it and hit it with rockets on our way out, to keep everybody back.
Opened up the back of the armored personnel carrier to get in and it was just so full of wounded. A guy just actually grabbed the door and pulled it shut again. You see the latch go and shut it. Well, there's no room in there, man. We were going to have to follow them, just follow along the vehicles on foot, whoever didn't get in. We'll use their vehicles as cover. We'll run back that mile to where everyone else is. Those vehicles took off. They just took off. Miscommunication. We're like, alright. Let's do this.
We just start running back in the same direction we came. All along the way, we were passing our vehicle. It was an old Humvee that we had built. It was just a cargo Humvee, not armored or anything. We had taken sandbags in the back and lined up a wall and put 3/4 inch plywood on both sides of it to hold the sandbags in, and used zip ties to hold that together. We sat inside that and we built a bench inside for either wounded or to sit on. We're sitting on that facing out. I saw that sitting on the side of the road with a hole in it. It was burned out. I remember thinking I wonder what happened to my buddy that was driving it? He's dead. I didn't know it at the time.
Turned the corner to go back west and I remember stopping at one point to watch the cobra or apache or whatever it was, launch a rocket at the helicopter. I wanted to see what that did, you know. He was hovering, didn't really do it. I'm like, I gotta go. I don't know what I'm doing. I turn around and everybody's gone. I had this sinking feeling of, now I'm here. Now I'm all alone. I just took off running down the street.

Peter King: What time of day is this again?

Tom Satterly: It was light out, maybe 7 or 8 in the morning. I just took off running. As I got running along these walls, there's walls everywhere. You could never get off the street unless you lived there. There's gates and walls. You're just kind of contained into the street. I'm just running, hoping if I get up and look down at an intersection I'll see a group of guys running, you know? As I run up there's one little alcove that I didn't see. One of the guys that was with us on the team jumped out, grabbed me and threw me in there with the rest of the team right as an RPG hit the wall. He didn't do it because the RPG was coming, he saw me coming and he jumped out to grab me.
He pushed me in there and the RPG hits the wall. The shrapnel cut his ear and deafened him a little bit. That's all that happened to him. We finally made it all the way back to where the other vehicles were. It was just kind of chaos trying to figure out who's going to get in where. The plan was, I didn't know it at the time, I just knew I was going to get in a vehicle and go somewhere, was to go to the Pakistani Stadium, which was maybe another mile away, closer, downtown. Two guys from my team and two guys from another team loaded up in one Humvee with some tenth mountain guys who were just shooting, ducked down shooting into the city. What are you guys doing? Aim at something, you know? Tanks are shooting down the street at people. Our two Humvee's took off. I'm thinking they know what they're doing, right?
They take off and we're taking fire and everybody's just engaging back all along the way. There's tires burning. They start to slow down. I'm like, don't stop. Don't stop for anything. Just ram that. The second you stop or they try to divert you to where they want you to go, just go through it. At some point along the way the shooting just kind of stopped, you know? You're in good clan area now. I think it was 4 October Road, was a demarkation line between good clan, bad clan. Yeah, it was weird. We just crossed that line. Everybody's still looking for things. Nobody trusts anybody now.
We drove all the way back to the back gate of the airfield. We get in the back gate, we stop and we sit there. Our radios are dead. They've been on all night so they're dead. No radio traffic. We're waiting to see if a convoys coming behind us. I hadn't seen the convoy in a while. We sat there maybe 20 minutes, nobody came. I was really worried, like what happened? We drove around the airfield. Got back towards our hanger. That's when I noticed, I don't know, 10-12 US soldiers lined up in the side of the street covered up. One of them had an RPG sticking out of his side that wasn't detonated. He was sandbagged around him because he got shot at such a close distance it didn't have time to arm. It's kind of like getting shot with a harpoon.
I didn't look at faces. I couldn't do it. I was looking at boots so I could tell uniforms. I'm like, man, it's not good. I don't know where anybody's at, at all. Got back to the hanger. Nobody was there. There's vehicles everywhere covered in blood. There's blood all over the ground. I remember the smell of bleach and heat and sand mixed together. They used the sand to try to soak it up and the bleach to clean it out. It was everywhere. I just went and started loading up my ammo, getting some water, grabbing my night vision in case it went longer again. When are we going back out? Who do we gotta go get? Just stand fast. The other guys went to Pakistani Stadium. They're supposed to take helos back. Why did you come here? I'm like, I don't know. I got in the back of a vehicle and it took off. I didn't have the plan. It was like six guys on our team. I was number five. I had just gotten there. Number six was with me.

Peter King: I'm sorry, you said you're at the hanger right now?

Tom Satterly: I'm at the hanger where we've been the whole time and we've lived.

Peter King: Okay. You're back at ...

Tom Satterly: Back at home, kind of safe. We waited and maybe an hour later helicopters started coming in, started bringing in guys from Pakistani Stadium and dropping them off. Came back and that's when we started getting the numbers of dead and wounded, something like 98 wounded and 18 KIA.

Peter King: What's the mood? It's so hard for me to even fathom how you even ... what do you do? Do you go to bed? Do you eat?

Tom Satterly: You clean weapons. Usually it's high fives and, hey, that was awesome. Everything went great. Did you see that guy run? Did you see what I did? This time it was quiet. It was a lot of angry people. A lot of people were cleaning their weapons and getting ready to go back, loading up ammo. Then we started asking questions like, where's so and so? Have you seen so and so? He got wounded. He's in the hospital. He's dead. He's over here. We don't know. Find out Gary and Randy's missing. There was another helicopter shot down. I was like, what? Then we started watching the news. That's where I learned a lot was from watching the TV. We had a little room with a TV in the back of the hanger. I started watching the news. Ooh, I bet the wives are freaking out right now. No conversation. Back in the day we had one satellite phone. You couldn't really use it to call home at all anyway. Just trying to figure out how do I tell my wife?

Peter King: I am surprised we got the news out that quickly?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, there was a lot of news crews over there running around. I don't know what country they were from, definitely not US. It was already on the news.

Peter King: Are you in contact with family back home? Can you?

Tom Satterly: No. What they were told was no news is good news. If you don't hear anything, that means your husbands probably okay. Years later, and with my wife working with other people, you find out like Carmen Gordon waited for days to find out what happened to her husband. He was missing. Is he dead or not? We don't really know, so he's missing. My wife's got a book hopefully coming out, talking with Carmen and other wives. What they went through. Sitting on her front porch every day. Somebody would show up and bring her a McMuffin and a coffee and sit and just talk.
I guess finally one day she got guys in uniform show up. To hear her story, they delivered a couple of them back in garbage bags. You saw on TV, I think, the day of the dragon, bodies in the street and stuff. They burned them. Chopped them up. We got them in garbage bags. For years, I think, in one of her stories she talked about how she didn't throw any of this items away until maybe a couple of years ago. Her point was I never wanted anything of him to go in a garbage bag, because that's what he was in. It was just sad.
Yeah, it was horrible. I finally got to call home days later, just to say everything's alright. It was horrible. You can't say anything, anyway.

Peter King: I'm sure just hearing your voice was enough.

Tom Satterly: Just I'm good. Don't worry about it. I don't think we're going out again. We don't have enough people to go out again. There's another squadron on the way.

Peter King: We went a lot longer on that whole story than I initially thought we would. That was so compelling and you kind of walked us through. Again, it's hard to even grasp what you guys went through. Now, you're in a place where obviously you've dealt with a lot of trauma. When did you find out that you were really struggling with some PTSD stuff?

Tom Satterly: Oh, you know, probably after I almost killed myself. I just figured it was normal. I was angry. Time had gone by. It had been about 20 years.

Peter King: You were out of the service at this point?

Tom Satterly: I'm out of the service. I spent 20 years in the unit, 25 total in the army. I just did my job. I was more angry. I didn't know it at the time, but talking to people that knew me back then, that know me now. They are like, you're so different. Your face has changed. Your whole life has changed. Your body's changed. Your personality has changed. I guess who I was before, but they met me after that. I was angry, very serious. Everything's a life changing event. There's a dish in the sink, I freak out. Somebody's going to die because of that. I'm only finding out here recently that that's my coping mechanism, to be rigid. Rigidity to chaos is where I feel safe. I'm rigid about everything. That's my form of control. That's how my brain, which perceives everything to be a threat, feels safe, is to control everything.

Peter King: Because everything's ...

Tom Satterly: Gotta be perfect. It has to be perfect, just right, the way it's supposed to be. There's a reason for it. It better be that way. The dishes are supposed to be on the counter. They're supposed to be rinsed when you're done. I was a horrible person. I was angry. Then maybe four years ago we were still doing some training in Ohio. I was divorcing. It was evident. I was separated. I started living in another bedroom in my house for six months, then moved to a hotel for six months. Then finally got an apartment for a year. Just a slow break up of just, I was miserable. Just sticking around for my son at the time, which was worse even for him, probably.
We had done training in Akron, Ohio and we were finished. We were supposed to meet in the hotel lobby and talk about it later and have some drinks. I parked in the parking garage and guys jumped out of the car. I'll be in a minute. I'm just going to go through some paperwork. I don't even know what, I didn't plan it. I didn't think about it. I was done.

Peter King: Just an instantaneous ...

Tom Satterly: This was it. I was miserable. The day was one of these days, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? I had my pistol with me. I put it in my lap and I started thinking about alright, do I put it in my mouth or do I put it on the side of my head? I've heard stories like shotguns you put in your mouth. The pressure pushes your face back before the bullet actually hits you. You blow back and you hit part of your face. Now you're a vegetable and people have to take care of you. I don't want to screw this up. Do I do it on the side of my head? Do I pull it away an inch or two? Do I put it right on there? Then my phone vibrates and kind of scared me. It was a text saying, "Hey. We're all in the lobby. Are you coming?" It was from one of the camera crew. I'm like, oh God, I'm late. Now I'm back to me. I'm late. I put my gun away. I'm like, what was I doing? I didn't really think about it.

Peter King: Were you on any kind of medication or anything at the time?

Tom Satterly: Probably.

Peter King: The fact that you went from just being another typical miserable day to, I'm out, I'm done, to, oh, I'm late. That's ...

Tom Satterly: I was miserable. I was probably on Prozac at the time. Maybe I had stopped taking it. I don't remember anymore. I was doing a lot of drinking, a lot of drinking. Obviously, not during the day, but every night. It carries over, your performance. I was gaining weight. I was unhappy.

Peter King: Not in a good place, clearly.

Tom Satterly: No, no. I go down to the lobby. Met up with everybody. The person who texted me is my wife now.

Peter King: I love that story. Your Facebook page is great. It's just you and her. I'm like, man. For somebody who's been through as much as you've been through, you're living a love story right now and it's pretty cool.

Tom Satterly: It's all her. It's not perfect. Everybody on Facebook is perfect. It's not perfect. I have a lot of issues daily that I still work with. I get a lot of flack from some of my friends, who just are resistant to culture change, but they don't realize they're still in the culture of killing and hate and anger and holding onto it. I get a lot of messages on there like, oh, are you hanging out with a lot of your hippie friends? Man, you sure have changed. Are you drinking the kool aid? You know what? I see all these posts from friends of mine that are the same job as mine, whatever. They are like, you snuff like liptards, blah, blah, blah, you flock of sheep just following. I'm like, you know what? Aren't we all just sheep in a different flock? We're defending our own flock. Can't you step outside of that and think that there's other ways to solve problems to think, that you haven't been taught yet?

Peter King: Just a different perspective.

Tom Satterly: Right. Stop attacking each other because of what you believe in, this and that. The fall on your sword for everything, every day, is just ridiculous. It's just that anger. I just got back from Fayetteville. I was doing some business there. I got back yesterday. The night before last I'm in a restaurant where we used to hang out. It's like a bar/restaurant. The place is packed. I'm looking around the room like, I used to know people here. Now it's just all young kids. I went to the bathroom. I'm listening to this song in the bathroom playing. I remember sending my wife a text, the words to the song were like basically kill, I'm going to die. I'm going to rocket tonight. It was just hard, heavy metal. This is the culture that they live in. It's perpetuating it, off duty, on duty, after hours, it's always there. I never would have noticed this before other than this is going to get me motivated to go out and kill people. Man, this song is violent and evil. It's just weird.

Peter King: That's quite a change of tune from where you were. What do you attribute that to?

Tom Satterly: My wife, literally my wife making me realize that I was that screwed up. Everything I held dear, and the fact that my brain thinks everything's a threat, which means I attack it. When I do talk to people, even when I work sometimes, if I get a little resistance back and I don't agree with it, I'll start elevating my voice. I try to take over the situation and command everything. She's like, what are you doing? I'm not your soldier. You yelled at that guy on the phone. I'm like, was I yelling? I wasn't yelling. It's just business. No, I was elevating it without need really.
It's just respect, respect for yourself and other people. I've started learning that. You have to respect yourself first, which I did not. I did not respect myself. I didn't like myself.

Peter King: Prior to military service?

Tom Satterly: No, after.

Peter King: After.

Tom Satterly: The PTSD is basically you don't like yourself. You don't like who you're becoming. You don't like your symptoms. You don't like anything, which means I can't like anybody else.

Peter King: Right.

Tom Satterly: I started letting go of that. Started appreciating what I did more, which made me want to change and be better, and do more. Everybody I talked to now that's healthy, and helping other people, went through the same process. They are like, why are we always fighting and arguing? Killing people is not normal. It's what I did. If somebody ever comes and tries to mess with my family, they are gonna find something very difficult in the way. I don't need to argue every day and put on that persona every day. It's ridiculous, really.

Peter King: Was it really Jen then that sort of cracked that for you? Part of the reason why I'm asking you this is because people who might be listening who either have PTSD or have loved ones that have it. My brother was hiking in the mountains not too long ago and had a friend slip and fall to his death, or women who have dealt with rape. That's incredibly traumatic. There's a lot of people out there, outside of just the military. Sure, a lot of times I think of PTSD as military related, but trauma's trauma.

Tom Satterly: Right. I read that in a book, like an audio book called "Heal your PTSD" I was listening to yesterday for five hours at the airport. Exactly what you just said. It's always been that way. Trauma is trauma. Pain is pain. People are like, I'm so sorry about your back. You have so many back surgeries. I'm like, it doesn't matter if I got blown up or picked up a quarter and pulled a muscle, it's pain. It doesn't matter how you got it. PTSD is just a normal reaction to an un-normal experience.

Peter King: That's such a great definition because I think a lot of people ... I've talked to some of the guys down at Asymmetric Solutions, or whoever else, we've had these conversations. It seems like they think that it's this unique, special thing, or that they're wrong for it, or it's some kind of disease.

Tom Satterly: No, it's absolutely normal.

Peter King: It's a total normal, I would dare even say healthy coping mechanism for something that is almost in processable, an experience that is outside.

Tom Satterly: It absolutely is. I keep saying PTSD. We're trying to switch to PTS because to call it a disorder means there's something wrong with you when it's a natural reaction. Even I do it. My wife is like, no, it's PTS. Don't call it a disorder. Some people are worried about calling it a disorder. They are going to take my guns away. No. It's not a disorder. It's a natural reaction to an unhealthy event, whether your friend sees his buddy slip and fall, or you see a car wreck or a kid get killed. Anything. Fire fighters, all first responders, nurses, doctors, they see it every day. You don't get used to it. You don't get used to it. It's not natural.
It's your brain, PTS develops when you are put into a situation where you feel you can't control it. You can't control the situation so your brain wants to defend itself. Your sympathetic nervous system starts pumping in cortisol and everything else to deal with stress. Then it happens so much that it's a habit. Now I'm angry. Now I'm grumpy. Now I think everything's a threat. I perpetuate that every day. Now it's a habit. Now I just taught myself to stay this way for years, versus whenever the thought enters my head, or something and it's just wrong or I know it's wrong, I start to act a certain way to stop. Remove myself. Go to something totally different that's healthy and happy. Do that for 5-30 minutes. Just change those brain patterns.
Some guys that don't know. I read a statement yesterday that when people tell you to get over it ... you have PTS, get over it. Basically what they're really saying is I don't know enough about PTS to help you. You can't get over PTS any quicker than you can get over strep throat. Just get over your strep throat. It's the same thing. Your brain uses the most energy in your body than anything else. What do we do with PTS? We start drinking. We start eating unhealthy at the bar. We start going out. Everything's unhealthy. Your brain gets all that from your gut. Now your brain, with the healthy food and not as much drinking or drugs, is healthy, you can deal with it. We perpetuate it by drinking more, by eating poorly. We stop working out. We feel depressed. Now your brain's like, everything's a threat. I'm going to defend you by putting up this wall.

Peter King: How do you break that pattern? What's the quickest, most efficient way to?

Tom Satterly: It's not quick. It's not quick. I'm still trying it. Basically, eat healthy. Stay active. Become part of the tribe again, so you feel relevant.

Peter King: Where can somebody get connected to the tribe? Are there different?

Tom Satterly: There's actually a book called "The Tribe" out there. A congressman gave me it in DC when we were up there in November. The author had given it to him. He gave it to me. Basically the tribe is about that mentality of you belong to something. You're productive. You talk abour rite of passages earlier, a lot of tribes have a rite of passage to become a man. You have to do something. Now your job in this tribe is to contribute here and there. When you don't feel like you're part of that tribe, you start to feel worthless and you don't belong, therefore, you don't need to exist. Then you go down that hill.
Talking is really the only way to get it out. It's like dumping poison out of your body. Maybe eight months after I got the text from Jen we started dating. I flew here to St. Louis from Savannah. We were at a street side café in town somewhere and she's like, tell me about Somalia. It's been twenty years, you just wanna know about it? She's like, yeah. One of the guys I work with said you were in Somalia. I don't know much about it other than when she was growing up as a kid she remembered standing in her mom's kitchen watching it on TV just with her hand over her mouth, what's going on. Little did she know that she would meet me and I was there. She wanted to know about it.
I started talking about it and just started bawling, just literally started bawling on the street. I'm trying to hide my face. I'm like stop it. What are you doing? People are looking at me. She's like, that's fine. I'm like, no it's not. Crying is wrong. I just kept crying. The more I talked about it, the less it bothered me. Even when i first started speaking events and engagements here recently, I would cry on stage trying to get through some things and reliving memories. The more I talk about it, the easier it gets. You're letting it go. I kind of equate it to dumping the poison out. I tell everybody, get over that cultural suicide, the drinking, the chasing women, living the lifestyle that you think you're supposed to live. It's just all wrong. It's lack of respect for yourself and other people. Cut down the drinking or stop altogether. I'm not saying stop drinking altogether. It's a whole other world right there for people. Cut down. Eat healthy. Move. Do something to be a part of something else. If you don't, it's your fault.
Anything in the world you can do, like Tony V, we were talking about great speakers, Tony Robbins and Tony V. I saw a billboard in Denver recently. There's three great speakers. It was Tony Robbins and Tony V. and a third one. That's gotta be expensive. Those guys know that just do it. Just go out and do it. The only limiting factor is yourself. We start to limit ourselves. We don't realize it's our brain doing it to us and we're allowing it.

Peter King: I think it's a really healing message too, to let people know that it is okay. They are not wrong for feeling those feelings in the first place.

Tom Satterly: Absolutely, yeah.

Peter King: Yes, there is a point where you can sort of exhale and go, is this really serving me anymore? Is this enriching my life? Finding other people who have gone through that, or are still feeling through, finding that brotherhood and that tribe. This is kind of silly for me to say. Just in my own experience, in my own ups and downs, there's a radical difference between trying to face it alone. As men we typically do that.

Tom Satterly: Right.

Peter King: Versus seeking out some other brothers of the process.

Tom Satterly: It's like asking for directions. Just do it. You're going to drive around forever until you do it anyway.

Peter King: Have some humility.

Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Peter King: You talked about the rigidity. When I think of rigidity, I think of a dead branch, a stick. How easy is it to break that? It doesn't take much to break it. If you get a live, bendable branch, that's tough as a mother fucker to pull those things off. I think that's a good metaphor for people to think about, especially as men, especially as military veterans who have dealt with God knows what, but are in that rigid state where anything outside of that control becomes a threat and they're angry. It's too easy to break. Whereas, when you learn the flexibility, you learn the vulnerability, you learn the processing and the crying. There was a saying in a personal development program that I went to. It said, "Crying is cleansing." It's like the cleaner on your oven. Get all that shit out.

Tom Satterly: It really is. The more I cried, the better I felt and the less I started crying. I was still to a point where if I watch home improvement shows where they fix people's houses up, at the end they reveal it. I'm like, I start to get emotional. What am I doing? I literally posted that a week ago and I had a lot of people hit me up. I do too! Give me a call. I'm like, yeah, I'll call you. Everybody's going through it.

Peter King: We're human beings. We're mean to be emotional and that's okay. You're Delta Force and saying it's okay to cry. Who else would be a better spokesperson to say this is part of life. It's okay. I think that's an important message. We are getting a little bit short on time. I know you need to get going here. Tell the listeners here a little bit about your foundation that you and Jen started, and how people can help support that.

Tom Satterly: Yeah, absolutely. We've got two things going now. All Secure Foundation is our non-profit. We filed our paperwork. We're waiting, getting back our 501C3. It should be pretty quick since it's for veterans. They say they push them through quicker. Then we'll be able to take donations. We've got a lot of ... that's allsecurefoundation.org. It's on Facebook as well. A lot of people lined up to donate. People are donating land, houses, their services, money as well. I'm obviously not taking money yet, because it's not a tax write off yet. We're a resource library to help veterans find help. When you're sick and you need help, your wife needs help too. Your family needs help too.
When Jen was trying to find me help, it was so difficult to find the right doctors, or doctors that take Tri care. Where do I go? Who understands this? Especially here in St. Louis where it's not a big military presence. Tri care's a little bit hard to find, which is what I have coverage. I went to a couple and they just didn't have it. They just didn't really understand where I was coming from and I don't really know why. We've teamed up with a lot of other organizations like Warrior's Heart or Station Foundation or Reboot Colorado, all throughout the nation. What's your problem? They'll call us up. What's your issue? What's going on? They are always the same anyway. They are literally always the same. The family issues. I know I mistreat my kids, my wife, I'm angry. I hurt. I'm out of shape. Okay, let's get going.
We'll place them where they need to go, that way they don't have to do the work. Then, only after you get help, you're doing better, and you in turn come back and help us help other people, then we look at giving you a vacation for it. Instead of just bringing you in and go fishing or hunting or shooting, whatever, send you and your family to Disney, which is probably the worst thing to do with a guy with PTSD, send them to Disney. Get them help first, then give them something. If not, it's just a vacation and you come back home. Now you still have the problems to deal with.
It's not like ... a friend of mine got a $70,000 grant to go to Warrior's Heart, big addiction place. He had more addictions than I knew about. Heavy drugs. I worked with him for years and didn't know it. Alcohol, everything. He had just reached bottom. Got him some funding from a local company here, actually Colb Grading. Jeff Colb footed that bill with his foundation. Sent him to Warrior's Heart for, I think 12 weeks. Got him detoxed, cleaned up. Got him a whole new set of teeth. He has been nothing but a pit bull in helping people get better now. He stuck with it. A lot of people want to relapse. He hasn't and he stays with it. He helps other people. I think that's the difference. I call him up, put him on a mission and he's on it. He'll get somebody where he needs to go as well.

Peter King: Yeah, I think that's a real light of hope for a lot of people that have PTS, is that it might feel crushing, but if you can just have a glimpse of how you can rise up and learn to cope and learn to live with that, and eventually be free from it. You can turn around and help somebody else.

Tom Satterly: Absolutely.

Peter King: What greater purpose could there be to help lift somebody out of that?

Tom Satterly: It's like AA. If you go to AA, you're there for life. You have to do it every day, every week, whatever they do. Some people have to do it every day. Some people stop going and they're okay. You have to do what you need. We've recently started All Secure Mission, it's a for profit, but it's very low. It's online courses for reintegration into the family, or PTS.

Peter King: Like video courses?

Tom Satterly: Video and documents. You can download it. Getting fit, getting healthy. Diets, things like that. We have psychologists and people contributing to help with papers. You can save between $59 and $200, whatever course it is. Then you come in, you take the course. You can download it. I don't care if you share it. We don't care. Other people are like, do something so they can't share it. You're going to lose money. I'm like, it's not really about that. I have to offset some costs here, but it's to get cost effective ways to help people. They can take it on the road with them. They can deploy with it. They can share it with their friends. I don't care.
We just wanna help people. We make other money doing other things. Writing a book, doing speaking engagements, plus I have a job. Just staying busy. We just want to help and we want to recruit more people along the way to help us help other people.

Peter King: What can the average person do to help? They can donate, obviously. Are there opportunities to talk with people, to help talk through things?

Tom Satterly: Yeah, absolutely. I've got friends from different states and people I don't even know that are interested. I wanna open up a chapter here. I'm like, okay. We have to vet you first to make sure that everything's good to go. Make sure you're preaching the same mission. I've seen some organizations make money selling t-shirts with booze on them and guns and girls. Okay, you're still pushing the same culture. I wanna get away from that. I wanna get away to a healthier, happier kind of thing. If I sell a shirt, it's going to be something different, not a shirt with skulls and crossbones on it, which the military likes because it looks cool, but you're still staying in the same culture.
I've told a couple companies, no, I don't like the message you're sending. I don't like the masagonistic cultural message that you're sending. We wanna go down a different path of respect and healthy, happy people. I know it's weird to say it, for you killers out there that think that being a man means I can go kill, I can go on a mission. I don't have emotions. That's not what a man is. You had asked me earlier, talk about what's it like to be at war? What's your definition of a man? That's probably the toughest question with the easiest answer. You were born a man. You did nothing to become a man. That's science. I'm more down the path of, what does it take to be a good person? Respect, understanding, listening, giving in. I'm not always right. I'm never always right, never. I'm quite wrong a lot of times. I will spit some things out that sound good and somebody will tell me something different. Okay. You're right. I'm wrong.

Peter King: I feel like that's Jen coming through a little bit.

Tom Satterly: Yeah. I've learned to have no problem with being wrong. Everybody's wrong. I tell people in rooms, raise your hand if you've never failed before. My message is the greatest failure is the failure to try. Raise your hand if you've never failed. That is what you need to do in life to get better. You have to fail. You learn how to fix it and you keep going. The greatest failure is the failure to try. You never quit. You can be anything you work hard at. Growing up your parents, you can be anything you want to be. They didn't tell you the difficult part. You have to work at it. You can't just grow up and be something. I wanna be an astronaut. That's great. Okay. There's a lot of work to do before you can become an astronaut. You have to work at it.
People can hit us up online or on Facebook, or find me on Facebook, if not, All Secure Mission or All Secure Foundation. Hit us up and tell us your ideas. I can't be everywhere. I'm going to start bringing in other people to help speak. Open up other places. It's that close knit community the veterans have, that they all say they miss. Talking to someone who understands them. Everybody would understand you if you didn't tell the story like, "There I was shooting this guy in the face and stabbing people. Blood everywhere." Of course people are like, whoa, whoa. You don't need to glorify it because there's nothing glorious about war. It's horrible. All the loss and the families that are affected that live over there. All the innocent families that have to deal with that, 10-20 years after that fact. I don't know how long it took to build up Germany, 23-24 years to even start getting construction back up.
Think of these other countries that aren't as squared away as Germany was back in the day, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Peter King: Somalia.

Tom Satterly: Somalia, they're still a crappy place to be. Maybe they just got a government, maybe just recently.

Peter King: Yeah. Well, we are just about out of time. One of the things that came to me as I was watching your videos online in preparation for this, was that you're really still in service. Thank you for your service as if it's done. You're still in service. I don't mean just the All Secure Foundation. I mean still dealing with the PTS stuff, still working through that. Obviously, you've gotten to that point where you're now reaching out and helping others. I say that to anybody that's listening who may be just dealing with PTS themselves, thank you. Thank you for your service. Thank you for going through all of that shit to give us the opportunity to live our lives the way we want to live them. I try not to take that for granted. It's a true blessing to be able to live in this country and to have people like yourself and all your brothers that have given their lives for it.

Tom Satterly: I appreciate it. I think veterans need to know that ... I read it a lot. I did this for you. I did this so you can live free. You also live here. As a veteran, you also live here. You did it for yourself, as well. People yell out hero. I'm like, nope, servant. I'm not a hero. I did my job. I did what I had to do. I was trained well so that training took over. It's horrible for anybody to go through. You have to move on. You have to push past all the bad. You have to want it. You can't sit back and just live in the glory days. I threw that high school pass, man, I was the man. People are like, what do you do? I don't start with I'm a retired Delta Force sergeant major. What do I do? I work at Asymmetric Solutions. I'm working on a book. I'm trying to help veterans. What did I do to get here? Okay. That's my past. Need to move into the future and the present. You can't do that stepping sideways or backwards. You have to move forward.

Peter King: Absolutely. Thanks again, Tom. It's been an honor to chat with you here for a little bit. I, again, so appreciate your, given your experience, your ability to shed a lot of the heaviness and the poison, as you mentioned, and give people a light of hope.

Tom Satterly: Awesome, yeah. I appreciate you having me here.

Peter King: Excellent. Thanks again, man.

Tom Satterly: Thank you.