Shawn Ryan served as a Navy SEAL for almost six years. He endured one of the most intense training programs known in the military world, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S. After seeing combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti, Ryan left the Navy and worked as a contractor for the CIA.
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00:00My name's Sean Ryan. I was a Navy SEAL for five and a half years.
00:04This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:09You know you're going to be cold. You know you're going to get hypothermia.
00:12But at the end of the day, going to BUDS is basically like getting kicked in the nuts.
00:17And so how do you get prepared for getting kicked in the nuts?
00:20You don't. You just take it.
00:22How do we keep each other in line? A lot of hazing.
00:31You have a tremendous responsibility being a member of a SEAL team,
00:38whether you're the communications guy or you're the lead sniper.
00:43You might be the guy planning the mission. You might be the point man.
00:46And so there is no room for jackassery.
00:50And if you're not doing your job to the best of your ability and you're clowning around,
00:54then you're going to get tuned up and maybe kicked off the team.
00:58And so it's very much a work hard, play hard environment.
01:05But if you can't play hard and work hard the next morning, you're not going to make it.
01:10When you're in the SEAL team, you are closer with your immediate teammates, your platoon mates,
01:19than you are with your own family.
01:22And so you eat with them, you sleep with them, you hang out with them, you party with them, you grieve with them.
01:28I mean, that is your family. And so you become inseparable.
01:34Home on my off time as a SEAL was a lot of happy hours and a lot of ladies nights
01:41and chasing women and drinking booze and probably a bar fight or two.
01:47On deployment, an off day looks like a really good workout in the gym and a lot of Xbox.
01:55A lot of people pose as a SEAL. I've seen it happen a lot.
01:59This is, you know, this is 20 years ago.
02:02We would have the support guys going out in town and bragging to everybody that they are a SEAL.
02:09It's SEAL Team 8 or SEAL Team 2.
02:12And then they would go to those specific bars where SEALs hang out.
02:17When those bars were empty, that way none of us were in there catching them doing it.
02:22But unfortunately, we know the bar staff, we know people that work there.
02:26And so that word would get around and a lot of times they would wind up taped to the flagpole,
02:32naked, when everybody shows up to work the next morning.
02:36The number one unspoken rule for the SEAL teams was work hard, play hard.
02:45As long as you could show up to work ready to go, pristine condition and be able to perform,
02:54they did not care how hard you played.
02:57Some of the jobs I had as a SEAL was, one, I was a point man.
03:01Basically a point man is the point guy when you're doing an infill, entering into a target.
03:10You're the navigator, navigating your route in, how you're going to get in, how you're going to get out,
03:16how you're going to lead your entire team in.
03:18My first mission as a SEAL was to go to Haiti.
03:23In 2004, there was a lot of civil unrest going on all over Haiti.
03:28We staged out of Guantanamo Bay and basically what we would do is we would fly over on a helicopter
03:35every morning and do reconnaissance in all these different towns and villages
03:40to report back about the civil unrest.
03:42We had prisoners breaking out of prison.
03:44It was just complete chaos all over Haiti.
03:48It was just complete chaos all over Haiti.
03:52Bodies all over were on the beach, but it was just a reconnaissance mission.
03:58I felt good.
03:59It wasn't enough action for me.
04:01It made me really hungry for more.
04:03I wanted to go to the Middle East.
04:05The hairiest mission I've been on was when we went to Baghdad, and this was a SEAL Team 2.
04:14There was an election going on, and we had a badass lieutenant who started farming us out
04:19to conventional units who were having problems.
04:22We would find units that were getting blown up by IEDs or being ambushed on roads.
04:29Terrorists would set up roadside bombs, set up ambushes,
04:34and they would just blow these vehicles, kill our guys time and time again.
04:40We would go with these conventional units for a couple of weeks, training them up,
04:44and then we would actually take them on a real-world mission with us.
04:48And every time we went out, we would kill the guys that were killing them within a 24-hour time frame.
04:55I wasn't actually a schoolhouse-trained sniper.
04:59I was just really good at it.
05:02And so when we did all these sniper missions,
05:04I was basically aiding the lead sniper and teaching the conventional guys how we do business.
05:11It was one of the biggest responsibilities I've held.
05:14There was a very small village outside of Taji that was considered black.
05:20And so what black means is no U.S. troops or personnel are allowed to drive through, walk through, fly over.
05:28You'd basically just stay completely out of the town because it's so dangerous.
05:32This one was out in basically farm fields.
05:37And so we took four teams, and four teams of two to three guys each, and we'd set them up along this road.
05:47So towns here, black town.
05:51My OP was the first one right outside of the black town, so it was the most dangerous spot to be in.
05:57And then we had our command and control type observation point kind of hidden back in the rear where they could do comms.
06:04And about halfway through the day, we got compromised.
06:09We were in weeds that were probably about chest high.
06:12And so I'd padded down this little hallway, and I was laying in the grass looking at the town, like I should have been,
06:20probably about 30 meters off the road.
06:24And I saw a man walk right by me out of my peripheral.
06:31And I noticed when he walked by me, he noticed me.
06:35I could see him looking off the side of his eyes through his peripheral.
06:39I thought, maybe I'm supposed to kill this individual. He's going into a black town.
06:44I wanted to pull us out.
06:46I wanted to do an emergency extract because I had compromised the team.
06:50The rest of the sniper OPs decided they wanted to stay.
06:53They wanted to see how things went.
06:56Ten minutes later, we got mortared, probably four to five different impacts right on top of us.
07:05I wanted to emergency extract again because I knew the next thing that was probably going to come was the fighting-age males in the village
07:14would have walked online through the field and just killed all of us.
07:18The next thing, the search party did come, but it came with vehicles.
07:22We were so well hidden that goats were actually eating vegetation out of our ghillie suits with goat herders seeing this.
07:33And so everybody was scared to move when that was happening because you didn't want to alarm one of the goats,
07:39and one goat goes crazy, then the whole herd goes crazy, then the goat herder knows something's going on.
07:46So we didn't move. A couple of goat herders had passed.
07:49What we noticed was five guys coming out of the village, the black village, carrying AK-47s, carrying 105 rounds,
07:58carrying wire, shovels, everything you need to basically make an IED explosive.
08:06So they walked right past me, and we radioed to the rest of the team that these guys were coming their way,
08:12but nobody answered our radio.
08:16They started digging. They planted the bomb.
08:19All I heard was just shots over and over and over and over.
08:25It sounded like a gunfight.
08:27It sounded like the bad guys were, the terrorists were killing my guys because all of us were suppressed,
08:35meaning quieter shots, no muzzle flash.
08:39It seemed like forever, but it was probably less than a minute.
08:43And we kept calling our guys,
08:46Hey, what's going on? Hey, what happened? What happened out there?
08:50Is anybody out? Are the guys alive? Give me a head count.
08:53Nothing.
08:55In my head, I knew everybody was dead.
08:58And so it was me and two other guys, and we just got back to back,
09:03and we said, All right, this is it.
09:07We're just going to take as many of these people out as we can before they get us.
09:11First thing we hear come over the radio maybe five, ten minutes later is,
09:15Holy shit, we just killed the fuck out of those guys.
09:19They let the Army guys take the shots.
09:23They were not suppressed.
09:25So I thought their gunshots were the enemy's gunshots,
09:29but it was the Army guys, unsuppressed, shooting alongside with our snipers who were suppressed.
09:36Hearing my guy come out saying that they had just killed those guys
09:40was one of the best-sounding voices I've ever heard in my life,
09:46knowing that my guys were still alive and that we had defeated the enemy.
09:56SEALs use a lot of weapons.
09:58We use .300 Win Mag sniper rifle.
10:01We use a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
10:03We use a 7.62 sniper rifle.
10:05We use a 5.56 sniper rifle.
10:08We have M60 machine guns.
10:10We have Mark 48 machine guns.
10:12We have Mark 46 machine guns.
10:14We have Mark 19 grenade launchers.
10:17We have M203 grenade launchers.
10:19We have .50 cal machine guns.
10:21We have mini guns.
10:23We have pretty much anything you can think of that fires a bullet.
10:29The main weapon I used was a M4 10-inch barrel with a Nightforce suppressor,
10:36and secondary was a P226.
10:39A suppressor is not a silencer.
10:41A lot of people think it's a silencer.
10:43It does dub the noise down a lot.
10:46You don't need to wear ear protection when you're shooting with a suppressor,
10:50but it's not like what you see on the movies where it sounds like a sewing machine.
10:56The main point of a suppressor is to suppress the flash that comes out of the end of the muzzle,
11:01whether it be a pistol or rifle,
11:03because if you're shooting at night and you're in a combat scenario,
11:06every time you fire that weapon unsuppressed, it's going to leave a signature.
11:11The enemy combatants will wait for that flash,
11:15and then they'll aim at where the flash came from.
11:18So if you have a suppressor and you're on night vision,
11:21then they can't tell where the shots came from,
11:24so they don't have anything to actually shoot at.
11:27Most fun to fire was definitely the Carl Gustaf rocket launcher.
11:33I can't remember the exact millimeter of the rocket,
11:36but it is about this long, packed full of high explosives,
11:43and they will take just about anything out that you point it at.
11:48So one thing that we would use them a lot for are terrorist hiding in caves.
11:54It's good to be familiar with as many weapon systems as you possibly can be.
11:59Two, we were in the Middle East, and that's the type of weapons that the terrorists were using,
12:04and so we trained on all the Soviet-style weapons as well,
12:09which are what the enemy combatants, the terrorists, were using at the time.
12:14You might be dressed up like a local or somebody from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan,
12:23wherever you're operating, Syria.
12:26You might be dressed up in the local garments, and what does everybody have there?
12:32An AK-47.
12:34So you could be undercover, and that's the reason you need to be familiar with it.
12:38You might run out of ammo on a direct action or some type of a raid.
12:43Where you have to pick up an enemy combatant's weapon
12:46and be very familiar with that to continue on with the mission.
12:51When you see SEALs in the back of an old Toyota Hilux truck,
12:55a lot of times what that is is those are many times up-armored,
13:00but they blend in with the local vehicles as well.
13:04So you can't get Hiluxes here in the United States,
13:07but everywhere else in the world is running around with diesel Toyota Hiluxes,
13:12especially in the Middle East.
13:14A lot of times we're attached to some type of a partner force,
13:17whether that be a force of Afghan commandos or Iraqi commandos or wherever you're at.
13:23A lot of times in special operations you're going to be attached to a partner force,
13:28and those partner forces use Toyota Hiluxes.
13:33If you're in a 100-vehicle convoy with a partner force
13:38and there's only four vehicles that actually have SEALs in them
13:41and the rest of them is a partner force,
13:43you don't want to be the guys that are standing out
13:46because if you do get ambushed, it's going to be a dead giveaway.
13:51You don't want to make yourself a higher-profile target than anybody else on the battlefield.
13:56We did a course that was actually put on by the British MI6.
14:01We were actually going to go into Eastern Europe,
14:06Eastern Bloc countries in Europe and hunt down warlords
14:12and people that have committed war crimes.
14:15They put us through a course that taught us how to break into cars,
14:18how to hotwire cars, how to blend in, how to surveil somebody on foot,
14:23how to surveil somebody in a vehicle, how to surveil somebody in a boat,
14:29how to follow them into 50-story buildings
14:34and blend in in every type of environment that you can think of
14:39and be actually comfortable doing it.
14:42I would say the most important piece of equipment that you need in combat is a radio
14:47because radio gets you out of there, it gets you in there,
14:52it's your communications, and it is actually the biggest gun on the team
14:58because you're calling in the biggest guns.
15:00You're calling in A-10s, you're calling in fast movers, you're calling in Apaches,
15:04you're calling in Spectre gunship.
15:07So I would say that the radio is by far the most critical piece of equipment for a mission.
15:18I grew up in a small town in Missouri, about 6,000 people.
15:22I was a s*** disturber, troublemaker.
15:26I liked to party, I liked to raise hell, but it was a good childhood.
15:30I had a really good childhood, very close with my family, my brother and sister.
15:37I tried to go into the Marine Corps first,
15:40but they wouldn't let me in to go force reconnaissance at the time.
15:44They told me I had to go infantry.
15:46Then I went to the Army, told them I wanted to be a Green Beret.
15:50They kind of laughed me out of the office.
15:52I didn't even know what a Navy SEAL was at the time,
15:55and the Navy recruiter stuck his head out and basically said,
16:01Hey, have you ever thought about the SEAL teams?
16:04And gave me a pamphlet.
16:07So I went home and went to the library,
16:11checked out every book I could possibly find on special operations,
16:15and Navy SEALs watched all the documentaries on National Geographic and Discovery
16:21and decided that's what I was going to do.
16:25I wrestled in high school.
16:28I wanted to do the most grueling thing I could possibly do
16:32in the small town that I grew up in, which was wrestling.
16:35So I cut a lot of weight, did a lot of running, really had to work on my swimming.
16:39That was the biggest challenge for me, was the swimming.
16:43And so I did a lot of laps in the pool.
16:47You can't prepare for it mentally.
16:49A lot of people never believed that I could make it.
16:53I wasn't a superstar athlete.
16:56I really wasn't much of an athlete at all.
16:58I didn't make good grades.
17:00I wasn't the most popular kid in school by any means.
17:04And so I think a lot of people thought that I would just go and fail.
17:08The only reason I didn't quit is because I didn't want to disappoint my old man,
17:11and that's because I felt like I disappointed him a lot as a child.
17:15And I wanted to prove to him that there was more than what he saw for the previous 18 years.
17:28BUDS is the very, very beginning of the pipeline to becoming a Navy SEAL.
17:33BUDS stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training.
17:37They want to know how tough you are.
17:39They want to know what you can take.
17:41They want to know that you are a team player.
17:44They want to know what your physical endurance is like, what your mental toughness is like.
17:48And I knew it was going to be tough.
17:50I didn't know it was going to be that tough.
17:52First phase is very structured.
17:55Usually, you'll wake up, you will have some sort of a PT event,
18:00meaning you're either going to do a four-mile timed run or a two-nautical-mile swim,
18:05or you're going to do an oak horse, or you may go to the pool and do a pool workout.
18:10But you always start off with some type of a physical exercise.
18:14Then you'll be getting your ass kicked on the grinder by the instructors
18:17with calisthenics, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, flutter kicks,
18:21getting sprayed with the hose, getting sand kicked on you.
18:25Nice little wake-up in the morning.
18:27And then that will filter into more beatings until lunch.
18:33At lunch, you probably get about 30 minutes.
18:36You run back from lunch. It's about a mile and a half to and from lunch.
18:39You run everywhere.
18:41And then beatings commence after lunch, well into the evening.
18:45Usually, you're done by about 9 o'clock at night.
18:49You'll probably do some type of rock portage.
18:52Those are the little boats that you see out there,
18:54those rubber boats with the guys with the paddles and the life jackets,
18:57and they have to land those boats on the rocks with the surf.
19:00Sometimes the surf can get up to 12, 15-foot swells.
19:05So it makes for a very challenging experience.
19:09Hell Week is famously known as the most grueling week of SEAL training.
19:14It's five days, five nights, no sleep.
19:18Maybe you might get a little nap here and there,
19:20but you are constantly moving.
19:23You are constantly in the water.
19:25You're freezing your ass off, fighting hypothermia.
19:31I believe the water there is a brisk 58 degrees.
19:34I was so miserable when I was on Hell Week that I almost quit.
19:40My buddy slapped me in the face and told me,
19:42there's no way you're leaving us here.
19:45What you don't see on TV and in the documentaries and everything is,
19:49like I said, you are constantly wet.
19:51You're constantly sandy because 90% of the course takes place on the beach.
19:56And so the instructor staff, they know that sand gets into every crevice of your body,
20:04and they take advantage of that.
20:06So they might have you do a five-mile run after you go get wet and sandy,
20:09and that rubs all the skin off your crotch, off your armpits.
20:14Anything, any skin that's rubbing together, it's going to be raw.
20:18Then when that dries, they have you hit the surf, meaning get back in the salt water,
20:22which is like dumping hydrochloric acid on your skin,
20:25and it's just a constant vicious cycle of doing that over and over and over and over.
20:31Everybody that quits has to ring the bell.
20:34It's a very humiliating experience.
20:36You have to ring the bell in front of your entire class.
20:39Most classes, at least what I went through, were right around 200 to 250 people,
20:45and then place your helmet in a line right under the bell.
20:48So after Hell Week, you will just see a line of 100-plus helmets all under that bell.
20:56The first time I heard that bell, I was thinking, I hope to God that's not me one day.
21:01I did not want to disappoint my father and call him,
21:06letting him know that I had quit and didn't have what it took.
21:11And once I got that in my head, it never crossed my mind again.
21:14They just want to see that you can overcome just about anything.
21:17But it's not near as grueling as getting shot in combat
21:21or having a limb blown off or something like that,
21:24and they want to know that you're going to fight through and still be with the team and not give up.
21:28When Hell Week's finished, it's one of the best feelings in the world.
21:32They bring the American flag out.
21:35It's a big ceremony.
21:36You haven't slept in five days,
21:39and they basically just give you a big congratulations
21:42for completing the toughest military training in the world,
21:46and then they offer you a pizza.
21:54Then there's phase two, which is dive phase,
21:57and that is learning how to do scuba.
21:59That's learning closed-circuit breathing apparatuses known as a dragger.
22:04The first thing you do is you go through dive physics and dive medical
22:08so that you actually understand dive medicine
22:10and how deep you can go for how long, things like that.
22:14Then once you pass that, then you move into open circuit,
22:18which would be what most people consider or call scuba diving.
22:22It's called pool comp.
22:24It's the last big, big obstacle that gets people kicked out that they can't pass.
22:29It starts with very, very minimal tasks.
22:32It might be just, hey, put your tanks on underwater,
22:36and then it's, all right, your tanks are malfunctioning.
22:39You need to take them off, figure out what's going on,
22:41all the way up to you'll be fully jocked up with all your dive equipment minus fins,
22:47and you'll just be crawling on the bottom of the pool.
22:51Then a group of instructors will come down.
22:54They'll give you what they call a surf hit,
22:57which is basically beating the shit out of you underwater.
23:01They'll punch your gut, make sure your air is gone,
23:04tie your hoses up so you can't breathe out of your breathing apparatus.
23:08They'll tie that in knots.
23:10They will make your tanks malfunction, turn your air off.
23:14Basically what they do is create mass confusion and take all of your air away.
23:19What they want to see is that you can remain calm.
23:22You're not going to jet to the surface for air.
23:25Get your dive rig back to a functioning way and continue on that track.
23:32There's no secret to staying calm down there.
23:34You have no air. You just got the shit knocked out of you.
23:38You can't figure out what's wrong.
23:39You have water in your eyes.
23:41You can't really see, but it's not supposed to be easy.
23:48Open water is a whole new ballgame.
23:51Nine times out of ten if we're diving, we're diving under a ship to plant a bomb,
23:55and then we're kicking back out.
23:57Sometimes these can be eight-hour excursions.
24:00They want to see that you're comfortable underwater
24:03and that you can handle yourself and not only yourself, your buddy.
24:07You're not diving the coral reef down in Key West.
24:10You are diving San Diego Bay, ships, sharks, seals, dolphins that are trained to kill you.
24:18So in the early 2000s, the Navy developed the Mammal Program,
24:23and what they were doing was they were training dolphins and seals,
24:27the animal, not the special ops.
24:30They were training seals and dolphins on anti-swimmers,
24:34and I believe it was explosive detection.
24:39And so they would train these animals, and then they would send them out,
24:43and the dolphins would obviously use their sonar to find enemy combatants
24:49that were trying to plant bombs on ships.
24:52So as a BUDS student, guess who the test dummies are?
24:57Fortunately, I did not have that experience,
25:00but I did wind up in the mammal cages by accident.
25:03The only way you know where you're going is you memorize your bearing.
25:08You look at your compass, you hit your bearing, and you count your kicks.
25:12So my kick count was 66 kicks was 100 yards.
25:16It was about a six-hour dive, I believe,
25:19and my kick count was a little off because of the current.
25:23I had the wrong bearing next to the pier that you're diving off of for BUDS,
25:28just so happens to be the Mammal Program.
25:31And so if you look at the top of the water, it is chain-link fence,
25:36so you'd think that goes all the way down to the bottom.
25:38Well, it doesn't. It's more like a cargo net under the water.
25:43And they kept saying, Dive Bear 23, you are entering the mammal cages.
25:48And I remember looking at my buddy like,
25:50"[Bleep], idiots. They're going to go in the mammal cages."
25:53And they kept saying it.
25:55I was the lead navigator,
25:57and we were completely what appeared to be inside the mammal cages.
26:02I looked up. I saw the cargo net.
26:04It was going over my wetsuit hood.
26:06That's why I didn't feel it, all the way behind us.
26:10So when we came, when we looked up, we thought we were inside the mammal cages
26:15and kicked like hell to get the hell out of there.
26:18Turned out that the net was just draped over top of us,
26:23and we were Dive Bear 23.
26:27So.
26:29Everybody hits a low point.
26:31And so when you have a good guy, a good teammate that puts out,
26:35that cares about the rest of the team,
26:37when he hits that low point,
26:39the rest of the team will help encourage him to get his spirits back up,
26:45not to quit, and let him know that the rest of the team is depending on him.
26:56My favorite part was the land warfare phase,
26:59which is demolition, firearms, land navigation,
27:03basically your land warfare phase.
27:05They start to treat you like an actual human being again.
27:09And the beatings become less and less.
27:13You're learning land navigation.
27:15You're learning pistols.
27:17You're learning how to shoot rifles.
27:19You're learning how to shoot submachine guns.
27:22And the best part of all is learning demolition.
27:28You're learning how to use C4, TNT, Bangalore torpedoes, data sheet.
27:33You name the explosive, we use it.
27:36You're blowing up cars.
27:37You're blowing up buildings.
27:39Learning precision demolition.
27:41You're blowing things up in the water,
27:43like obstacles that they'll put out into the ocean.
27:46You'll dive down, plant a haversack on them,
27:50and blow it right there in place.
27:53I love to blow s**t up.
27:55The first weapon I trained on was a SIG Sauer P226 9mm handgun.
28:01I think they start with the handgun
28:03because the handgun is the most challenging weapon to master in firearms.
28:08And once you have the fundamentals of handgun shooting down,
28:12then all the other kind of shooting with all the other platforms
28:16just kind of falls into place.
28:18SEALs are such good shots because we train, train, train, train.
28:23It gets ingrained in you.
28:25And so even in BUDs, you're going to spend a week to two weeks of dry firing.
28:30And what I mean by dry firing is no bullets, no nothing, just your weapon.
28:36And so you come out just like you're shooting for real with real bullets,
28:43but you get your form down.
28:45You just want all the motions, all the grips, everything,
28:49side alignment, grip, the way you hold it, the way you present your pistol.
28:53Everything has to be perfect.
28:55And then by the time that you put a real bullet in that weapon,
28:59it goes right where it needs to go.
29:01And then you'll do the same thing with rifle.
29:03You'll take your M4, you'll start shooting dry firing for a week, maybe two weeks,
29:09before a live round ever leaves that barrel.
29:13You'll know exactly what you're doing.
29:21I left the SEALs for a multitude of reasons.
29:23I didn't get enough action.
29:25I was very, very gung-ho about going to war.
29:28We did the Haiti thing, then we went to Germany,
29:31then we went to Afghanistan, did a little bit in Afghanistan, did a lot in Iraq,
29:37but I didn't want to do another six years for a very small portion of it to be in combat.
29:43I saw what 20-plus years will do to somebody, to their body, to their home life.
29:50Pretty much everybody I know was divorced or has been divorced or is getting a divorce.
29:57A lot of them didn't know their kids very good.
30:00Your platoon, your teammates, are your primary family, and the families are the secondary.
30:08And I knew that if I stayed in at the rate I was going,
30:13that I was going to be a very lonely person come retirement.
30:17I wanted to try business.
30:20I became a real estate agent and failed miserably at it and got into a fire academy
30:30and found out that I wasn't going to have a guaranteed job
30:34and that it would likely take about two-and-a-half years before I did get a full-time job as a firefighter.
30:41I didn't have time. I don't have two years, two-and-a-half years to wait around.
30:45A friend of mine gave me a call and told me that he wanted me to try out for this contracting program.
30:53He said, this is a black program.
30:55I can't tell you who we're actually working for,
30:59but I can assure you that everybody who's in this program
31:04or even gets a chance to try out for this program has to have had a special ops background.
31:11And about six months later, I got a call to show up at a specific location,
31:17what kind of gear I needed, and that I was going to be a tryout.
31:22And so I went. I did the tryout. It took about a month.
31:27When we finished the tryout, they had told us that the client that we were going to be working for was Central Intelligence Agency.
31:37The pay was astronomically higher. It was probably four to five times higher than I was making as a SEAL.
31:43The deployment cycle as a contractor is kind of on you.
31:46I like to do 60 days on, 60 days off.
31:50At the end, I was doing 45 days on, 45 days off.
31:54Some guys like to do 90, 120 days out, one week back.
31:59It's kind of all up to you and how much you want to give them and how much you want to give your family.
32:05When I left the agency, I started a tactical training company.
32:08It grew very fast. Got to train Keanu Reeves for John Wick 3.
32:13That was pretty much the height of it.
32:16Then I got really tired of it after doing the job for real for 14 years, give or take a little bit.
32:23I had grown a pretty successful YouTube channel from the tactics training videos that I would put out.
32:30I decided that I wanted to document history from the people who were there, the way it actually happened.
32:38I started the Sean Ryan Show for a couple of reasons.
32:41I really got tired of watching the mainstream media talk about all the events that I was a part of or that my colleagues were a part of.
32:50It was always somebody that had never been there.
32:54Veterans didn't have a voice.
32:56I wanted to bring that out and talk to guys like myself who had been through that and how they got out of it.
33:06Everybody that I brought on at the beginning had found some type of success through entrepreneurship and had been through the low points,
33:17the addictions to adrenaline, to substance abuse, to broken families, to suicide attempts.
33:30You have been in a fight or flight state for as long as your career was, basically.
33:37More adrenaline dumps than anybody else you could possibly imagine.
33:42Multiple adrenaline dumps a day.
33:45That's a lot of chemicals being released into your brain.
33:48It becomes an addiction for adrenaline.
33:52My coping mechanisms were finding new ways to get an adrenaline release, lots and lots of sleep meds,
34:01everything from Ambient, Valium, Xanax, Lorazepam, anything I could get my hands on,
34:08opiates, hydrocodone, tramadol, you name it, I'll take it.
34:16I moved out of the country to Columbia, South America.
34:23I lived in Medellin for quite a while and I got really into cocaine and started going into the worst neighborhoods I could find in Columbia
34:36to find where to buy cocaine from.
34:41And when that got boring, then I would go to another country and I would start doing it there.
34:46At the worst point in my life, I was drinking two-fifths of vodka a day.
34:51I would wake up and have about a fifth of vodka in mini bottles that would be everywhere,
34:56all over my house, in my car, in my bedroom, everywhere.
35:01And then at night after dinner, I would just crack open a fifth out of the freezer and start going to town on that,
35:09wash down my pills to go to sleep, which by the end of it, they didn't even really put me to sleep.
35:17And then I would wake up with a nice pick-me-up of Adderall or some other type of stimulant to keep me going,
35:24and it just became this vicious cycle for years and years and years.
35:28When you are a SEAL, there's not much support.
35:31It's not something that they like to address. They don't want to bring any light to that.
35:36It makes the units look bad, and so a lot of them pretend like it's never happening.
35:44Nobody wanted to go to medical because everybody wanted to go on the mission.
35:49And so if you went to medical, everybody was scared that it might be some type of chronic illness or injury
35:59that would take them off the mission, so a lot of guys would hide it.
36:02I had a hernia that I got in basic training, and I refused to tell them all the way through
36:07because I was scared that they were going to pull my SEAL contract out from under me.
36:12So I went all the way through basic training with a bulging hernia in my groin
36:18and finally told them when I was done.
36:23I've had multiple concussions from explosions from being blown up,
36:27blowing cars up, shooting huge rocket launchers like Carl Gustaf's,
36:33falling out of helicopters.
36:35I don't even know how high we were because it was dark,
36:38and I missed the rope and fell out of the helo, but it was 50 feet or less.
36:44A lot of wear and tear from Hump of the Mountains of Afghanistan,
36:48a lot of wear and tear from buds, major back issues, those kind of things.
36:54I've never been shot.
36:56A lot of us have the same injuries and the same symptoms and deal with PTSD
37:02and deal with traumatic brain injury and stuff like that.
37:06And when you get out, though, there are a lot of resources,
37:09not very many government resources.
37:11The government doesn't do a very good job at treating these things.
37:20It's a dark time for a lot of guys, especially when they get out.
37:24We're not used to slow-paced environments.
37:27We're not used to not having adrenaline dumps.
37:29We're not used to integrating into a civilian environment,
37:34and we're not used to having to deal with feelings.
37:41You have a mission to do.
37:42That's the only reason you're there.
37:44And so when you get out and you have to learn patience.
37:49I guess I'll say that.
37:51And a lot of guys don't have very good patience when they get out.
37:54But what there are is a lot of veterans out there who have started nonprofits,
38:00and the focus of the nonprofit is what worked for them,
38:04whether that's group therapy or psychedelic therapy
38:09or going to hyperbaric chambers to try to repair your brain health.
38:16I did two different psychedelics.
38:18The first one was Ibogaine, which is about a 12-hour experience.
38:23It's like watching your entire life through a different perspective.
38:28And then you do what they call 5-MeO-DMT.
38:33It's basically an ego death, and it is a death experience.
38:41It was the most intuitive experience that I've ever had,
38:47and when I came out of the death experience and experienced the bliss,
38:53I could feel and see a flow of energy coming from the ocean onto the shore,
39:02into the grass, up the trees, and you.
39:06For the first time in my life, I've realized that everything is connected
39:11and everything is one.
39:14It was really intense.
39:16I came back. I didn't need any of my meds anymore.
39:19I quit drinking. I'm sober for two and a half years.
39:22I quit smoking cannabis.
39:24I quit a lot of things, and I was present with my family.
39:29It brings hope to all the guys that are getting out that hear this.
39:33They hear the low points that these guys, including myself, went through,
39:38and they realize it's not impossible.
39:42It gives them hope.
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40:22Thanks for watching.