Chris Fettes
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And you still, no matter what, only have a chance or two to make the same mistake. And if you make the same mistake over consecutive days, that Friday that they're doing their assessments, you're out. And if the mistake's too bad on any given day, you're out. So high stress, but I really, I did enjoy that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I made some really good friends during that time that we, you know, we all change through the team, you know, and that lifestyle and the intensity of those, that mission set and the time commitment it takes, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
it's it's harder in totally different ways they're both really hard and i also don't want to take away from you know how hard buds is you know that people have gone through it's a really profound experience but um i say is harder only because there's such a smaller spectrum of mistakes before you can get out right so you're always within that tiny little sliver of a
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
of a mistake spectrum before you're out, you're done, you know? And so with all the stressors involved in your life and everything going on, it's like really hard to stay inside of that. It's like there's a tiny ball moving back and forth. You're like, whoa, whoa. It's like a level. It feels like it's a level. And if it gets where the bubble gets outside, you're out. There's no other chance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Gotcha, gotcha. So the mistake spectrum, I think, in buds is a little more lenient because you don't know anything yet. You just got to not quit. It's really hard physically. But even third phase, when we're learning our skills, I had a hard time. So it's not to take anything away from that. It's just that level is very fine with selection and green team. It has to be that way. Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, but I'm grateful I got through. What's the retention like in training? I think it's comparatively a little higher retention for that because, you know, you start with less guys, so we started with around 60 guys or so, and you finish with 20-something. Oh, shit, it's that much? You lose that many dudes? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's also hard because you're competing with other SEALs that are experienced, you know? Yeah. What are the phases? There's no phased numbers, but it's, you know, assault is all CQB at first. That's the first part. And our bread and butter is that. So if bread and butter for, like, the Delta guys is a land warfare navigation stuff and all the stressors that go with that, that's ours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then... A couple locations for that, you know, Mississippi being one. And in the middle of the summer, that shit's hard, you know, sleeping with brown recluses. Nice. In the barracks, you know. Yeah. Trying not to get bit by spiders. I had my roommate and it was like a sleepwalker.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So that was a little stressor for me too because you wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with full-blown sentences. You know, and one night he woke up in the middle of the night. He must have been thinking about spiders. And he was like, ah, there's a spider. There's a spider. And he's like, eyes closed, but sitting straight up. And he ended up going to Red Squadron.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then I woke up startled, like, where the fuck is it? Where the fuck is it? And only to like fucking, now he's just sitting there quiet to realize that he's not even awake. I go, motherfucker, dude. Go back to sleep. You know, every spider trap in that house was full of, it's just legs everywhere. Oh, damn. They were full of brown recluse spiders.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There's a, you know, I hope they fix that problem. Damn. I don't know how many people have been bit, but so anyways. You lose the majority of the guys in the site? Yeah, in that first six weeks. That's like the kind of hell week per se of selection. Yeah. Is there any diving? Uh, no diving, no diving. Not at least when I was there. Um, you kind of do that with your team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Um, you know, but then we have our land warfare, which is all, you know, a lot of helo based work, getting used to all different types of helos and all the etiquette and procedures that go with getting all of that stuff to, to a lot finer detail than, than, than, than ever before, really, you know? Um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, all kinds of scenarios with those things on different types of terrain and buildings and different things. And jumping after that, that's probably the first or second most challenging, in my opinion, because it's just so dangerous.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There's so much focus, you know, all the way from getting your shit on, knowing the plan, getting on, and it's just one after the other after the other after the other after the other and trying to stay on point all day with that and not make... not just small mistakes, but you know, how jumping goes major.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's just, you know, I ended up being a tandem bundle guy later. So I became an air subject matter expert also on top of my recce sniper specialty, which is my primary. But the detail of the gear, everything from your handles to your malfunction procedures, you've got to memorize what to do in every little thing that could go wrong with a parachute.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It could mean the difference between life and death.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
in those moments and so it's just it's at night the jumps are you know most of them or at least a good majority of them are on night vision goggles and so i hadn't experienced that much before not at all i haven't done any night vision jumps before that a lot harder when you can't see the other guys you know until the very end you know and we're jumping through weather and sometimes it's like dude i don't even know if i'm the right place
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then right before you land, you kind of see, oh, there they are. Or you're in it, you know. And do your best to land together. So are you navigating up there? Yeah, you're navigating. You've got your attack board, you know. What's it look like? Just a little plastic, hard plastic thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
plate that goes into the Velcro and ties in, and then a flat part that goes out, like, it's like a little breakfast table. And it's got, you know, a compass and whatever device, whether it's a GPS or, you know, we use our phone devices or whatever, tablets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
on there and chem light and uh that's it you're driving with this thing and using your your eyes too and all your senses and you're just it's just like it just takes a lot of focus for a really long amount of time so it's just pretty draining when you're doing it over and over and over again every day Starting from before the sun comes up to the sun goes down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's taxing, but also you get so good at it. So by the time we get out of that, you're just really good at it. Just from all the repetition of it. And jumping like that on real-world missions, it's so... It's difficult already.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You've got environmentals, you've got wind, you've got weather, you know, and so everybody's skill set has to be at least to a baseline level in order to trust, you know, that we're going to succeed on the mission if somebody's not going to fly off and this shit still happens. Like how much... How much air time is it? Dude, I don't know. It's got to be a lot of hours, like hours and hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I mean, we've done some really high ones in training, but real world typically is going to be just a few minutes. How high?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
15 15 000 feet you know something something like that um and there's some other higher capabilities but um that's a different got it sort of capability so you've jumped in on on a on a real world op i did so you go through all that and then the story of that op was pretty it's it's kind of funny how i ended up being there i wasn't supposed to be there but
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
is the last thing and you know so i had the opportunity to to do uh a tandem jump into a hostage rescue so it was pretty it's pretty epic you know but it also changed my life yeah well we'll get there we'll get there so you made it through green team first time yep correct you know i had a rough time in assault for a little while but i pulled it together It's kind of that. It's part of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Hey, no matter how good you are, if you're the top or bottom guy, there's going to be stressors that they put on there just to see what happens, see how you react. And if you snowball, you're not going to make it. If you can bring yourself back enough, then that's what they want. It's just...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then the adaptability piece to be able to change to different tactics that we come up with based on things that happen. And that can be very immediate. We come back from a deployment or even during the deployment, we go, man, this is happening. What do we do? Change it. You don't have to wait for some...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Approval, you know, and then if we write it into doctrine that trickles down into the end of the teams and becomes doctrine you know, so that's the that's the glorious and cool part of Development group in my opinion
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's a draft, like a true draft, a list of names with performance evaluations on it, and then each team gets an order of the draft based off of the previous year, just like in sports. And there's also... some influences on who knows the guy. He might be sort of a known, at least reputation-wise, by other guys, maybe even guys that preceded him from their previous team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That's what happened with me. I ended up in a team where I had a bunch of guys from Team 10. It was awesome. Right on. Do people know what round they got picked? I think you can find that out later. I don't ever remember... caring much about that. I was just happy enough to get, you know, to finish and get on a good team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But I mean, I think you can go dig and find into that, but it's kind of like, you know, I don't know if it's unnecessary, but it's like, you know, it just wasn't something I thought about. I mean, I think you can probably, you can go, if you know anybody that was cadre or you go back to it, like, hey, where did I rank? You know, it's not hard to see those rankings.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. Yeah, there's like a picture. And then you kind of vote. Okay. You can put a vote and once you are an operator vetted into the team, you do that every year as well. What do you think about that? I don't know. I think that there are certain things there that need to be the way that they are because they work, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then there's other things that I've, you know, I've obviously learned through my life that I hope change or continue to change, and that's more culture related. But those kind of things, I think that's, you know, well, I change what works. Yeah. So, you know, and if I didn't know a guy or anything about him, I just, you don't have to vote. You just go, you don't have to say good or bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just go move on to the next guy, you know? Do they want an explanation for why somebody would say yes or no? Yeah, I think that that's invited. If you've got an explanation about something, you should put it in there. Okay. And there's been some occasions where that was a little detrimental in the future to not do that. And, you know...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
not necessarily guys that slip through their cracks per se, but a little couple, you know, some red flags that should have been at least talked about, you know, to work on with, you know, things that you can develop in a guy. It's just, you know, you don't have to be legends when we come through selection. You have some space to develop just like the G League and the NBA or whatever it's called.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, I think that's legit. You know, you reach a baseline of, you know, in selection that's enough to get you through. And then, of course, you have guys that are well beyond that. And that's where you go, you know? Where did you go? I think I was somewhere, I've always been in the middle. I mean squadron-wise, excuse me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Silver newer? Yeah, it was only, got commissioned only a few years before I got there. Yeah, so it was great. I knew a lot of guys in there because they were my mentors and peers from Team 10. And, you know, it felt very welcoming. The personality of that team was the right team for me, I felt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's awesome. I mean, it's like it's just such a release of energy, you know, and some of the later things that you do are sort of gentleman courses. You're starting, you know, you're learning some cool things. You're doing some surveillance stuff and, you know, a little bit more of the trips are a little bit more fun and not so taxing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So you get a little bit of a phase to kind of get ready to go check in and do all your things, because that can be intense. You've got so much stuff to do. You've got all kinds of gear to get. And you get in and you start running immediately. And it's fast. You get there and you get in the kill house and it's fast. You're like, holy shit. It must feel like what...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
an athlete feels like going to a pro team, you know, that has a little bit of development to do and is like, it happens quick because you got to keep up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's fast. Were they welcoming? Yeah, definitely. Different kind of vibe than going to the teams where it's like, okay, new guy, you know, like, yeah, you're a new guy, but it's a little like, I don't know how to explain it, but they're just a little bit more mature-y.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
about it like less of a thing being a new guy over there more yeah a little bit like you already know and then get them get them up to speed yes you kind of already know but it's just more important to get them up to speed cool yeah to get them integrated and functioning in the team immediately so the goal is not to humiliate you no that's i didn't experience i think it was just that part of it is just non-existent in my opinion there there's no time for that that's cool that's cool
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, so typically you got to spend a couple rotations as an assaulter before the recce team selects you in is the way that I experienced it. So after my first...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
uh deployment with them um i was interested in that and i had some really good experienced snipers that were cool with it so they brought me in and that became my my specialty let's talk about let's talk about your first deployment with uh with silver how long were you there before the deployment um it's a lot quicker rotation so it's probably about uh, eight months from what I remember.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So it's a little bit of a blur. It was about eight months, you know, um, I won't get too much into the details of the cycle, but it's like a lot quicker than what we used to call ProDev and SIDEX, all the pre-deployment stuff. It's only like really like four month increments. So it's a year instead of 18 months. It's not nearly as long. And wherever you fall into that timing. So, yep.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then deployment was Afghanistan. How was the deployment? It was good. It was a good, steady pace of operations. By that time, we started to have to use some of the trained-up partner forces a little bit more. That whole thing started with the ERU in Iraq.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, training them and not necessarily having to bring them on operations to gradually over time, the whole Afghanistan war evolution was like, all right, we're going to start turning this over to them to fight for their own country. And you guys got to start taking these guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we ended up having to work a few of them in and, you know, just navigate around that whole problem of bringing guys that aren't, at your level, trying to teach them or whatever. Oh, shit, you guys were running around?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, we would put them in different orders of patrol, and, you know, over the years, this is not my first deployment, but maybe by, like, my third, you know, we're going like, hey, all right, certain targets, they're going to go try to do it. Gotcha. But that was just such a messy thing, you know, because your operations are so precise, and you're now like, it's like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, we're, let's say we're on a high level, not high level, but we're on a grown-up, an adult basketball team, and now they're like, hey, you got to actually try to win the championship, but you got to bring these kids, your kids, and try to figure out, you know. All right, guys, we got two kids. How do we win this championship?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Maybe that's a bad analogy, but it just got frustrating over time as the war evolved to go, guys, this is like hard to do. It makes you less efficient. I get it. Yeah. I get it. One. And there's more danger involved with it. And they don't understand when shit happens, who's to blame when bad shit happens. And you're like, dude, we're trying our best to follow these rules and play by these rules.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
guys started to get frustrated over time and go like man this is bullshit and you know the ROEs over time got so restricted you know because of the political climate around the war that they were like hey it's win hearts and minds time and officers actually you know pretending to believe all of that and even over there and convince us yeah everybody I think experienced that I did not I didn't know that yeah um
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's all related to that. And then that's a long answer to that question. But when you get out, You don't have that there anymore. Where do you get the validation from? You've got to figure out how to self-validate. You've got to go clear all of the reasons why you needed that in the first place. You have to reinvent. Yeah. That's what you have to do. You have to reinvent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So over time, it just became that. I knew quite a few guys that got out because they were like, I just don't want to operate like that. And then other guys, you stay more positive. You just do the best you can. I want to say that from that second deployment or so for me around 2012, every deployment after that was partner force. You got to bring them. You got to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, and it's not easy to operate like that. Not because we didn't want to. We want to, you know, do our best. But you're like, God, it's hard to do your job when you got to bring these other guys that are just not even close, you know, and also kind of sort of report on it to go, hey, we want to make ourselves look good, you know, to everybody that's looking at us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so we go, hey, how are the guys doing? They're great. They're, you know, they're close to being SEALs. They're not close. They don't even use their night vision goggles because they're uncomfortable. They don't understand. And just drilling with them and spending all this time, it distracts you from training yourself. And yeah, it helps to go be a cadre in selection.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You actually become better probably from instructing other high-level guys. But now you go down levels and you're you're going to lose you're losing something from just sort of bringing your level down to go train these guys on on basics that we're actually going to go operate with it's like it's like being on a fucking ducati and then going back to training wheels on a
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, not like, I don't mean it in an ego, arrogant kind of way, but yeah, it feels like that. It's like, man, gotta go, you know, teach him how to ride a bicycle when we're on Ducatis, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, and it's tough to go back and think about that, too, and not hold resentment for how the whole thing with Afghanistan evolved. And then we saw what happened with everything and the whole exfil of Afghanistan shit show. And then just going like, man, how long were their intentions long?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, to restrict how we operate in order to get this done and then not, you know, feel like the force was misused and this and that. And you don't have time to think about it when you're doing it. You're like, there's a mission and we do the mission. It's my job. So you don't really, I didn't really have time to think about any of that until I was done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then now I go back and think about it and just try my best not to to hold anger and resentment for it. But when I see some of these stories, especially with the Xville and guys like, you know, you had on here, Andrew, I'm like, fuck, dude. You've got so many guys coming on here, shows like this and other awesome shows, just... didn't want to just tell the truth and things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It was like, as a society, I'm like, fuck, we've moved so far away from being okay with the truth, right? To a point that like everything just feels like there's bullshit piled on top of it. And we just want to see just the baseline of truth so we can make decisions on how to do things better, you know, and get better. You know, man, that happened, but next war, can we learn from it this time?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It didn't work. in Vietnam, didn't work in other wars, didn't work in Iraq, didn't work in Afghanistan. Are we going to do it again? Where we have some conflict that we don't just, when you commit to war, You know, war, yes, war is hell.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
For me, going back to myself, like you said, was all the way back to my seven-year-old self before... things start to happen for you, you know, start to realize that it's hard or traumatic or whatever the memories that you know, each one of us knows are in there that have been causing us all of this stress through our lives.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so if they're committing to it with this willy-nilly kind of, we're going to go to war, you know, but we're pretty quickly not going to finish the job and it's going to turn into something else, you know, especially driven by societal pressure and politics and everything. It's like, dude, once that happens, now you just start...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
thinking about all the lives of 2,000 or so guys and the situations, you know, and thinking back to buddies you lost and things that happened, you know, and the way that they exfil to go, fuck, man, did they really... And then they stand up sometimes and go, we love our military, and, like, do you really think about it in depth, you know, or is it just a game?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, and if it's... War's not a game. So if you commit to it, like... let's just finish the job as quickly as possible to minimize now death on both sides for an extended amount of time in the future, right? But that's what people don't understand too. And they go, ah, cease fire and this and that and no war. And you're like, well, there's a reason for war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Here's an advantage. We're going to show up and see how it goes. Do you have any theories on this? I don't know. Yeah, I've got different theories, but it's almost just overarching where it's like the country as a whole, when we have attachments to... We have so many distracting attachments from the truth and reality and things. Everything from...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
just pressure in your, in like a normal average person's life, just the pressure, right, to, go to school, work, and now you've got a family, you've got whatever, all your responsibilities, it gets stressful, you might feel shitty, you might be coping with shit. We were talking about trauma. You've got your things and you feel it's fucking hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then now we've got so many other distractions on top of that. The attachment to celebrity is a thing for me. So now we have celebrities with opinions and it sounds like an excuse or something small, but I think it's actually having a way bigger effect than any of us want to admit where we go, this celebrity doesn't like the war and they start to speak out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And now this is the societal pressure, the buildup of social opinion now starts to affect high level leaders and politicians to now go, hey, Killing them good. Like we're getting this war, we're getting this job done like effectively, but it's too effective. So let's still do it, but you know, you know, cut, you know, die it down a little bit. You know, like take it easier on the bad guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, like we're talking about fucking war. What do you mean take it easier on the bad guys? How? Well, this is how. We're going to start making the ROEs stricter to the point of absurdity, actually, over time to where now it's like, okay, now the mission is just win hearts and minds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And you're like, oh, my God, how do we – now we've got to pretend to believe in that and do our jobs at the same time and mitigate risk. Guys still get killed because of the mitigating of the risk. Yeah. just gets watered down and war fighters, you know, if that's your role, if you do that, if you're a warrior, just fucking doesn't work that way well, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's hard to say and hard for people to understand that, like, the best way for war is as quickly and as efficiently as possible with the intention of minimizing collateral damage. Yeah. It's a very... specific ancient thing, you know, that you want to fucking draw it out. And then now everybody perceives that we lost. I'm like, we didn't fucking lose, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't like, yeah, maybe we, you can, the perspective could be that we lost, but I don't, dude, I saw what we're like. Did more enemy get killed than good guys? A lot more, I think. So I don't know what the metric is for that, but however disillusioned we might get, I refuse to believe that we lost any fucking war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We just, we did it to our, we do it to ourselves with, it's just how we extend it, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
No, I don't think we won the war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, yeah. And we're being forced to... I don't know how to explain that. It's like we're being forced to just be okay with – we're being forced to live our lives in a four-year cycle because it's all election-based, two- and four-year cycles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So every decision I see being made for some of these things is based off of whatever effect government and politicians think they're going to have within the next two to four years and nothing beyond that. I can think further than that with just my fucking ice cream, you know? And the consequences are just piling up rapidly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And there's just more and more and more and more bullshit piling up so that we can win something in two or four years. That pile of bullshit is going to take decades to fix, even if we could at least reach a level... of enough bullshit being cleared away to actually agree to talk about any of it. Can't even discuss at this point. You know, like an argument between two people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Suggestions on what to do if your skill set is way outside of your passion? Yeah. Do the skill set. You've got to do what's available to you, and you've got to have a job. You've got to work. But I experienced this. Start making moves towards the thing that you're passionate about. You've got to stop wasting time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
What are we arguing about? We got to at least agree to the thing we're arguing about. And a little bit of the truth behind it, whatever the topic is, before we can even get close to making a decision on how to get better while satisfying both of our needs. We're so far from that. In the meantime, all the danger and all the shit just keeps stacking up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then we're going to see it with some attack or some bullshit, and everyone's going to be all surprised.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's a large scale. And we all sound like kooks and conspiracy theorists until it happens and it's like, well, prevention. There's a lot of shit being prevented.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It all circles back to the same truth. It doesn't matter. The more and more people you have that are experts with some real-world experience in these things, like actual part of their life, whether it's their job or whatever they do, coming on to stuff like this with the courage to talk about it, And people still, you know, some people want to go, that's not the truth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That screen with the CNN and Fox and that stuff, that's the truth. And, you know, the movie I saw, it says based on a true story. Why don't they make that about that if it's true? You're like, I've witnessed this in my life where I go... The stuff you're talking about being true is like a movie based on a true story. That's not even close to the truth. That's exaggerated for entertainment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, dude, that's why now finally the good thing is they're starting to realize how stupid it is and go on like the Washington Post or something I saw the other day. Shows like the Sean Ryan show are now people are turning to those for their information, you know, instead of... mainstream media, and you're like, thank God they're waking up to it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But, you know, it's like right at the last minute before this election.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So it started actually kind of a cool story. wasn't supposed to be there. So I made a decision to get out when I was in the middle of my previous deployment in Somalia. I was a team leader at this outstation, and we were pretty remote out there. We were doing some cool shit. We stayed up in this mountain for 22 days. That's where the 900-yard shot happened on a big ambush. Oh, yeah. Tell that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so some people are going to get angry about this, but I didn't have time anymore to watch four hours of a football game and memorize all the statistics about some player and what college they went to. So then when we're all gathered around for fantasy football, you're like, man, that guy really knows his shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We got to hear that one. Sorry.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It was outside of our... normal operation deck but these isis somalia slash al-shabaab terrorists um had gone up into this little oasis of a village up in the mountain. It was nice. It had a waterfall, date trees. It was really green, you know, just in the middle of a desert with nothing else. And so, you know, some people have been living in this village for decades. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
This place since has become sort of a safe haven for bad guys to go. It's like a vacation spot or something because it's nice up there. So these guys decided to just go take it over. So they go up and essentially kill all the villagers and move them out of there and essentially take over the spot. They're like, cool, it's ours now. We're going to relax here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it was such a profound sort of wrongdoing that we got approved to go up there and clear them out. So we go up there. It was a long planning process to get it all. I mean, we were getting like Humvees from Dermo and repurposing them and getting them ready and going up there and training, you know, for a long time. And we went up there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And, you know, we've had partner force vehicles in front of us and, you know, we anticipated an ambush and then there was this big ambush. To get up there was on these like really tight switchbacks. So they're taking a lot of time. And so, you know, IEDs were placed up there and, you know, one of the partner force trucks got blown up and flipped over.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we've got now our team corpsmen and medics and stuff over there working on those guys. And we're stuck on this switchback just getting lit up from RPGs and PKM and AK from somewhere. And some of them are like, where are these coming from? But we had some turret guns. We had some 40-mic guns up on the Humvees that were just super powerful weapons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we were able to suppress that pretty comfortably. But while that was all going on, we're still getting all these pop shots on the trucks from somewhere. And the guy's like, where is this from? So I'm like, fuck, I hop out of my, we're stuck. We're not moving right now. So I, the guys are just staying inside because you can see them landing around us. So I, I, and there's this big mount.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There's this big like ridge off to my left side. And we're, we're driving up around the switchbacks and, So I go, man, I go, and I just happen to always carry my 300-win mag, and I used to get made fun of for carrying it up in the mountains because it's just huge. So I had other buddies of mine, like, God damn it, that fucking thing keeps bonking me in the helmet and shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And you're like, one day I realized he knows his shit and it's a waste of time for me because I got to be making ice cream flavors and giving it to people to taste it and tell me what they think. That was the moves I was making in the background, you know, going to ice cream school at Penn State before I ever started my job. I didn't know why. I didn't even, I think my wife was probably pissed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I'm like, well, walk away from me somewhere, you know? I'm carrying this thing. And actually, there was another op where I used it, and we killed some bad guys that were launching mortars on us, you know? Four of them. And I'm like, I'm the guy who got to go do that because I had the long gun, you know? So it was always worth it to me, hucking that thing around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
This is my favorite gun, .300 Win Mag. And so I pulled that thing out of the back of the truck. I get it kind of set up. I had a big pouch full of rounds, and I go get under the hood of the thing, and I got a turret gunner up there, another guy that passed away from a brain tumor after I got out. And so, but at that time he was up there on the turret and we had suppressed a fire.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There wasn't much going on anymore except for these guys shooting pop shots. And I thought it might be from up there, 900 yards up on this ledge. So I get out and go, hey, dude, Zach, can you spot me? You know, I'm gonna shoot, I'm gonna look up there. So I look up there, I go, there's six guys up there. I can see their little heads and they're like shooting AKs over at us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Not very effective though. It's still landing around us, but it's 900 yards away, our AKs, you know? And I'm like, all right, dude, I'm gonna start shooting back. So I start loading rounds and I'm like, if I miss over the top, it's just a little, just a little, you know, heads. And so I'm like, and they're going to snap over and those guys, they're going to go off. Right. And like, that's fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Maybe that'll work. But instead I start like, I'm going to take my first shot and intentionally kind of miss a little bit low so I can mark it on the rocks. And by the way that wind, the wind was blowing towards them that they might not have heard that, you know? So, so that's what I did. And then I would kind of zero it in and then shoot at one of them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then they all duck back and I'd be like, you know, Hey, did I get them? You know? And he's like, no, I don't think so. So I kind of was like, all right, well, that's suppressed. They're good. But then every time they came back and started shooting more. So I just keep doing my best. And then eventually he's like, you got that, dude. You got that, dude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I don't like the language sometimes out of ego to go like the pink mist or whatever, but that was the sort of, He thought he saw that. I was like, okay, well, fuck, I'm looking. Are they coming back? He's like, no, they're not coming back this time. So they stopped. So I didn't know. We didn't know, really. So I put the gun away. We start to get everybody kind of wrapped up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Those guys survived in that truck. So the IED was in this plastic jug and it went low water. So it didn't explode all the way. So we get back in, we move into the camp, we take it over, take over some buildings, make it our jock, and then we spend the next 22 days doing little operations like sniper ops up there, trying to get the bad guys. We're having mortar fights and stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then eventually get enough of them to where, hey, now we're going to introduce those villagers back up into there. And so we start doing that. That was an awesome time. They were like so happy. They kind of started moving back in. And then the partner force kind of took over that spot for the next few years, I think. I heard that eventually got taken back over, but I'm not sure about that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Damn. So we did some good for a short amount of time at least. Nice. And we came back down there, and that was that deployment. So the way that that was confirmed was that— You know, you can capture with your ISR, like, some of their chatter on radios, and they're chattering about, hey, there's a sniper when we're in the firefight shooting at us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Later on that night, we're listening to Terps, like, hey, I've been listening, and they're talking about going up there and getting, what's his name, that sniper shot. So we're watching them, and they go up there, and they get this guy, and they drag him down, and that's kind of a confirmation. Damn. And so I had a really awesome platoon chief then was like, dude, I'm going to write this up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You're going to spend how much to go to this fucking school? And you haven't even started your job yet. So, but I'm glad I did. But my point is start making moves towards the thing you're passionate about. And if you don't know what that is, you know, instead of wasting time going out drinking or like whatever the things are that you know you're wasting time, you just know what they are.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's pretty cool, so I'm going to write it up. So he did that, and that's how I got that one. Fucking A, man. That's cool. Yeah, it was one of the cooler— experiences. So yeah, where were we before that story? We're moving into your last stop. Yeah, so we move in. I'm at that, in between those missions at that outstation and My kids are three and four, my two boys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I'm having a hard time getting them to FaceTime with me because my wife says, hey, Braddock, my older son, he's starting to understand what's going on. Like, you're not here. And you want to talk to him, but he's mad. And he doesn't want to talk to you until you're back. Oh, man. And so... How's that feel? Dude, it broke my heart. And I couldn't get him on unless he was crying.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we tried a couple times. I'm like, dude, I don't... He's so mad. He was crying. You know, I don't want to. talk to you until you're here, you know, like with me, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So yeah, that broke my heart and I realized what I was going to be missing, you know, cause I was only 14, I was only 12, 13 years in, um, with the intention to go all the way to 20, which meant I was going to be working my way all the way up through the team, you know? And by that time it was my, it was my turn to be a team leader, which is really kind of a,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
not the pinnacle, but a really big milestone as an operator, in my opinion, to get to. And I always wanted to get to that. So I stopped telling her, hey, just don't get him on there, you know, and I'm going to get out. And she's like, you're going to get out? I'm like, yeah, fuck it, I'm going to get out. So I kind of started thinking about that decision. I wasn't too serious about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Still had a few more weeks left at the outstation. And then I started doing some research in my off time about fatherhood. And then it became pretty apparent to me, and I don't even know where I got this from, but it just seemed like I was reading it over and over again, that as a father to sons, the most important time to imprint those validation things that we're talking about
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
and and dad being there essentially is between the ages of 8 and 12. so i was like all right i can get out and i can i can make that still you know so that was really my deciding factor and then it's like kind of got closer to that decision i started to announce the team like hey guys i'm getting out and it was like i know it's bad timing i'm supposed to be a team leader right when we get back
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And we had some great leadership then. And then our master chief was like, hey, dude, there's never a good time. So, you know, we're going to take care of you. And, you know, he got me into the NICO clinic and stuff, sort of organized. And then we came back from deployment that next day. Three months over the summer was my terminal leave. So we got back. I started my terminal leave.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I started turning my things in. I don't know what... Oh, I did one more trip just to stay current, just in case. And it was a jump trip because I was a jump guy. And one thing about being a jump guy, I was never great at it. I... I ended up going to the tandem bundle school because when my first son was being born, we were short that qual.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I was so like the whole validation thing was like, man, they're going on deployment. And there's an opportunity to jump in this course. It was the hardest course outside of any selection. For me, it was anyways, because my son was supposed to be due at any point during that three weeks. And it's intense. Yeah. So I was fucking shit up. I was distracted. I was thinking about my son being born.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I had this instructor that was a legend of a dude, you know, and I was in the green course. So it was the Delta course. And I was the only dev group guy. And, you know, the whole thing from him was like, you're going to be the best dude in this course. And I was like, okay, you know? And then I was the worst guy in the course.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
A lot of times they're related to your addictions, you know? And start figuring out what you like to really do. It could be very simple.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But that's where I made some really lifelong Delta buddy, Delta friends. One guy specifically, he really pushed me through that course. And I'm eternally grateful for it because I got through and I probably shouldn't have. You know, they were really patient with me. And, you know, since then, after that, I practiced a lot and got good at it, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So then I started to enjoy it, right, a little bit at least. So we fast forward now to this. I go on the trip. I go do my TAMs, my bundles, stay current, you know, my last hoorah with the team. And we get right back from that trip. I start turning all my shit in except for all my stuff we're going to do, you know, because now we're on standby.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We're responsible for the hostage rescues if anything comes about. So I leave those. I just take them home instead of my locker. I turn everything in except for my primary guns and my night vision, my favorite night vision goggles out of all the ones that we get. And that was it. And I was like, cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just in the team room doing emails and wrapping my shit up, you know, trying to get a resume together or trying to like – I had a job opportunity, so I was going to go for that. I was in contracting with my buddy's company I mentioned earlier. And just chilling now. And one day, I'm in there. They spin up. And I'm like, fuck, of course.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The day I decided to get out, and I missed the hostage rescue. So I'm in there, but because of... Some different circumstances, you know, there was no clue that there was going to be anything, and we had guys doing some different kind of cool training stuff they had to get done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
A lot of the recce guys and planners for, you know, when we have that, we're typically the guys that plan, you know, routes and jumps and different things like that, right? So... I had a platoon chief that not everybody liked, but I had some kind of connection with him. I thought he was a really intelligent dude. I think his intelligence was underrated.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so I was like, hey, I'm going to head out and go for a run around my neighborhood. I'm kind of also depressed because I don't get to go do this thing. He's like, okay. So I go running, get done running, get back to my house. Look at my phone, there's a bunch of texts from him. I'm like, oh shit. So I call him, hey, what's going on? He's like, hey.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We got some guys in different places trying to get back, but we could really use, you know, some planning help if you want to help plan this thing. I was like, yeah. And then just kind of joking around, you know, I'm like, hey, if I plan it, do I get to go? I'm on term leave. Of course I don't get to go, you know? But he goes, hey, yeah, hold on a second.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So he puts the phone down for a second, a couple minutes, comes back. He's like, yeah, you can go. I'm like, holy shit. all right, how long do I have to get there? You got all your shit ready? Yeah. You probably better get here in like 45 minutes. You know, if you're going to make this bird. So I'm like, oh shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So that's how much time I had to throw all my shit in the truck and tell my wife, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. Are you okay with it? She's like, holy shit, we got through all of this. Yeah, I'm not going to stop you from doing this one thing, but it's kind of that whole like Team America thing, like just don't die. You know, so I'm like, okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And well, you know, try my best and love you, you know, and squeeze the boys and go. And so now that's how I ended up on the mission. So we fly over there. And you can find this in the news and shit. There was a hiccup with the staff for Obama informing him that we were in the air ready to jump when we got there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so we got pushed 24 hours because he was asleep in Martha's Vineyard, from what I understand. I don't know the details of that. I know there's a bunch of shit that I probably have no fucking clue how it works, you know? And we come down, we push to the next night, and then we go. So I'm up there. I got a tandem medic on me. And I'm the point man for the op, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I've got three other guys too. I'm usually a team of four. And up in the point anyways. So everything goes well. We jump. Great landing. We get on this target, it's four. This is the news two. Two professors that were kidnapped from the University of Kabul days before. One was Australian, one was American. Kevin King and Timothy Weeks. And found out that they're here, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Probably being moved around different compounds on their way to cross the border in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You know, the network of dudes that do, you know, the most deviant shit with the Taliban, it's those guys, right? Suicide bombers, you know. You know, just all the worst shit you can think of that happened. You know, chopping off heads and whatever other kind of shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think that honestly actually was more in Iraq, but I don't know. So it's those guys, right? And so we're expecting a hard fight. Maybe. And we all know, if you have any experience with these guys in Afghanistan, with all the suicide bombs, the house-borne IEDs, all the shit we go really deliberate with when we go to these compounds. We're looking for, I mean, it's slow, CQB.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We're looking at every threshold for wires, for different... You know, they even started using, you know, motion sensors and, you know, light sensors like photosensitive bulbs, you know, and pillows and shit like that to just blow, right? And there's so many ops where that happens, right? So it's high tension and we're expecting this shit and we get down and they're at a compound, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Got a long walk in, everything goes well, and then we get to, you know, we see some movement around, some guys that seem to have RPGs, motorcycles moving around, and then what I believe was going on based off of what happened was that that was just normal shit going on because we were able to get all the way up to the target, sneaking up, and get up on top and get ready without anybody knowing anything, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But... There were a couple of noises, you know, that we made. The way that I go back to thinking about what actually happened on this op has a lot to do with, you know, Kevin King never spoke much about it after. Maybe he's super traumatized by it. Maybe he's living his life, whatever. But Timothy Weeks did speak up on it a bunch in a bunch of different interviews and news outlets.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And, you know, I was in my contracting work after this hop and eventually they, they were cut a deal to be turned over and traded. And with the release of an Asa Connie, which is, you know, the leader and a couple of other guys. And once that happened pretty quickly, it went around even in the news, like a little writeup that he had of like what he thought happened on those different ops.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Cause there was a couple of attempts, a couple of failed attempts. And I pieced it together over time, what I thought really happened, right? And so different ROEs for a hostage rescue, totally different. And every operator really understands like pretty in depth like what those are. You have to, right? You really talk about it. Because the mission is the hostages.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And on a hostage rescue, it's so hard to talk about, especially with people that don't understand war and those things, because one of only a couple of things is going to happen. They're going to kill the hostages if they know that you're there, which has happened. And that's a really hard thing for operators to deal with after. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Or you're going to rescue the hostages and kill all the bad guys. Great. You know? Or the good guys might accidentally kill the hostage while they're doing the operation. That's happened before too. That's hard. So as an operator, you go through your decision-making matrix to go, you're like, hey, my decision-making has to be very precise here, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And this is where, even more so than any other time, where there's no room for the soul, I think, in those. And that's a sacrifice that warriors have to make, in my opinion, to do what they do sometimes. And that's where the detachment from that is so hard afterwards to come back to. Because you've just...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
moments of detachment from that for so long over time you know and in history some have been able to to figure that to stay attached connected to that soul while they're doing it but uh that just wasn't the case for what i where i was at right and what guys around me were at and why it's so hard right now guys coming out so We get up. I'm the first guy to touch the target.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I climb up, sneak up to the roof, my spot. And my job is to protect the assaulters, right, and see what they can't see. So we have another team coming around on the other side, a little delayed because they went a different way. They weren't sure if we had been, you know, compromised at all yet. My opinion is we still weren't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So they climb up, they get set, they get ready, and in the meantime, I'm looking over down here, and there's five people sleeping in the courtyard. We knew that. And on the way, trying to figure out who they are, what they are, making sure none of them are the hostages, right? There's a lot that goes into that identification, you know? Hair color, skin color. You know, what do they look like?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Is there any chance that they're... They used to dress them up like in burkas, you know, so that we'd think that they were women, right? So there wasn't any of that. They're all males. And through a process of that, you know, getting to 100% clarity that, like, none of them are the hostages. But at the same time, you know, going, hey, the ROE... The intel...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
is saying that who these guys are and what networks they're part of, when they know we're here, they might blow up the whole fucking thing in themselves. They're willing to do that, right? And all of us. And we've experienced that before. Or they're going to fucking spray something from their little sleeping nest. And in my job, Yeah, we're on a mission. The hostages are the most important.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But if I hesitate in a decision, dude, I've gone through this so much and I'm going to try my best here. Because I went through a whole process for years of... making sure I'm not justifying, but justifying and like going back and forth with my ego, just trying to understand this thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But also for so many years, I was just coping with it with addictions and drinking my face off and just being lost with that new trauma, right? And... figuring out if the decision I made was the right one because the decision I made was we're going to kill these five males, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And eliminate any risk to those assaulters because if one gets hit because I hesitated on that decision, then I know their wives. I know a bunch of them. You know, they're all around our community, you know? And... fuck, that's my job, right? So then I started to eventually separate this into a duty decision and a soul decision, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So when the breach goes off, I'm eliminating those five, and I did, right? Thinking back now, there were some things that happened outside that I, there were some loud noises, some things, some, some mistakes that I think may have spooked those guys into stomping those hostages down into a tunnel system down below.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because when a couple of years later, when they got turned over that reading that he, the thing that he wrote was like, Hey, the first time, I woke up in the middle of the night to getting kicked down a fucking hidden tunnel and was like knocked out and came back to. And then as soon as I came back to, there was a loud explosion, which is the breach for what I think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so it wasn't like hours or days. It could have been seconds that we missed those guys, right? Maybe, maybe not. So the breach goes off, the assaulters come in, they get into a fight with a couple of guys, eliminate them, and we're waiting to hear that Got them, you know, in that room. The beds are still warm. There's still food from whenever before, you know, exercise bike, whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And hey, they're not here. And that's when essentially like, okay, we're going to clear this whole village now, which we did. And we've got other compounds we're looking at to, you know, to go look at, to go do. And As I'm doing my job, hopping from roof to roof, covering my guys, I'm going like this rush of just sort of stress comes over me because now it's soul time, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
This is what I didn't know. What I don't, what I think I didn't know, I still go through this to go, did I know? Did I not know? In that moment that two out of the five males were kids, So in the moment, it doesn't affect me too much. It's my job. You know, we wrap up that target. We get back. It's a failed hostage rescue. The team discusses like we always do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We go, hey, anybody have any issues with everything that went down tonight? Raise your hand. No. Even the guy who I told you the platoon chief was like, man, I'm, I brought it up because I didn't, you know, hey, I don't know. I think I, you know, I know I did the right thing duty-wise, but something in here is fucking me up right now, right? And, you know, I'm good. He's like, you good?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm like, I'm good. But I don't know what to say. What I feel is like, hey, you did the right thing. With that, you know, when you breach in Afghanistan, it's a blind assault. There's fucking dust. Those guys' clearance was like you can't even see your hand in front of you. So imagine that, you know, feeling your way into bad guys, you know, and making sure they're not the hostage.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So that was that. The last I ever talked about it with anybody. Craziest thing was those guys got extended for a month to do more operations around this. Rangers get involved. Other guys get involved. And I'm like, all right, guys, I got to go start my job in a fucking week and get back in time for it. So I fly back and no shit. Like two days later, I'm up in D.C.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
in this office at DITRA with a fucking suit and a tie. Thinking about these kids and just trying to figure this shit out, but not understanding how. And I'm in this fucking office. I'm supposed to be getting read-ons and badges and shit, and there's this fucking... you know, guy who's the boss or whatever, the program manager, and he's like fucking eating Twinkies and shit all over his desk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I'm like, hey, sir, what am I supposed to be, what do I need to do here? And he's like, fucking, what the, what are you talking about? Get your ass over to the fucking brief you're supposed to be in. And I'm like, okay, you know, fucking dick, you know? And then I go do my best to figure out what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing in that job the first couple of weeks, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
just feeling lost like the fuck am i you know and you know over time i got into the swing of it and it was really actually a really good experience doing that work it's just you know as i processed through this and and went through this whole phase of just these years of just fucking figuring myself out
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
just getting the bullshit, shoveling the bullshit out as much as I could while still adding more, not being able to figure out why I couldn't get it off and You know, one day I had the Ibogaine experience that cleared, that, that helped me understand a little bit better and some other things that I did as well.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then like, fuck, finally I figured out how to start leveling it out to a point where I had enough clarity in my own self to go back to that moment and now look at it instead of fucking hiding from it, which I was doing for years. And every time I wanted to think about it, I would just go fucking get drunk, you know, and I got to this point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just a few years ago, I'm eight years out now, and maybe four years ago was rock bottom where this thing plus the childhood and all the shit I was doing outside of what I really wanted to be, right? Which was just good. I fucking... You know, I had this friend in my neighborhood take his own life just in the little lake across from my front porch.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I used to go to that spot just because it made me feel good. I'd just take a paddleboard over there and I'd just kind of lay there where he took his life and go, fuck, I feel something here. And then every time I leave this spot, I don't feel anything. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because of that, you know, eventually I started to, just about a year of this seed being planted and growing in my head to where like, man, I can just fucking, I'm a burden on everybody. I'm yelling at my kids. I'm a horrible husband. I'm addicted to everything. I can't figure this shit out with these kids. So, you know, one day I found myself
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, it doesn't matter how much you have to do it. You know that you got it. Because there's people I've heard go, oh man, I like to make these duck collar things. But then I started selling them and I didn't like it anymore because I had to do work. And I'm like, Do you really love it, though? Yeah. You know? Get through a couple years until you can get somebody to help make those things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
uh just playing slack side squeeze you know the drill when you're dry firing um but with one in the tube and then that was the moment i'm like what the i didn't even really realize i was doing it i was just thinking And then I now think back to go, thank God I wasn't drinking a bunch there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because I think that in those moments, in that critical moment, which is the veteran suicide, like critical moment that I think about a lot, is a lot simpler than what I think we all think it is. Because there's very specific thoughts going on in that moment, right? this guy, you know, this couple of guys or my team thinks I'm a shit bag or something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like I had another friend take his own life and he was at that outstation with me and he got sent home because he was, he came in a really bad alcoholic. He was a great operator before and then he turned into this and he started getting bounced around teams but, you know, they got it to where he could like survive through it and he got to retire and then right after he retired he took his own life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And for him, it was a little different. It was like, dude, that whole bullshit of, like, if a guy's not performing for whatever the reason is in that moment, when you guys start to, when we start to jump on it and be like, that's a fucking, dude's a shitbag, and you just betray him after everything, all the good he was in those hard moments, like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, that's the shit guys are thinking about, right? So there's a much better way to do that shit. And I even participated in some of it with a different guy we got rid of. It's like, we're hard motherfuckers, but we don't have to play that game when it gets to that. We can get rid of a dude for not performing or put him somewhere where he can get a little bit better, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Take a break or whatever it is without going, oh, he's gonna fucking jump on that and be like, shit, you know? Because once that label happens, that's a betrayal. And fast forward to later. that critical moment, those little memories, like those are what they're thinking about, what we're thinking about in my, what I think. So that was a rock bottom moment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The only thing that made me fucking stop in that fucking moment and paddleboard back to my house was it was at nighttime. I knew my family was eating dinner and I started thinking about my son and the whole reason why I got out was for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And that brought me back a little bit to go like, fuck, even if I'm a shit father, like they still believe there's something in me, that thing that some people can feel or see like my wife did. She was still doing it in that moment, even though it wasn't me. She knew. They fucking know. There's something more, right? And there's a chance to get back to that before they give up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I went back and a couple days later, the wife of my friend that took his life there just randomly called me. And she was like, how you doing? And I was like, fuck, that's not good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
she goes oh let me come over and talk to you and i was like yeah that'd be awesome you know because i knew what she must what she had gone through with her husband's taking his life and how that was a whole process and she figured something out because she was not she was something better after that after some years and so she's the one who introduced me into the the medicine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Will you love it then? And think in the future, you know, there's going to be a day where I'm not running this ice cream machine all day, you know? And... once you get there, it's like, yeah, worth it. It's only to me, it's a couple of years, you know, it could commit to a couple of two, three years or something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I went, I was like, dude, I'll do anything. I don't care what it is. I'll go. And I'm, yeah, I was scared, but I was like willing to do, to try anything. And so I went that we can go through that hole as a whole nother discussion, but it just completely opened up my heart to seeing through all this bullshit that was on top to go, fuck, you can just make a choice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I made a choice and pretty quickly I was able to get rid of all that bullshit. Just shoveling it out to where it was like pretty much empty. And now I was just in full clarity to now go back to that night and go, fuck, why did that happen? How did that happen? So then I was able to go pick it apart and go, hey, I did what I think is the right thing in duty, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because I know how the universe works. If I didn't do that, we'd have all gotten blown up or somebody would have gotten shot and now I'd be dealing with that, right? We're not here. But also saying maybe that wouldn't have happened because if that's a little bit of a justification for it, then fine, but you know how the universe works, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so now going to separate duty completely from it to go For my soul, it was not the right answer. So I know that, right? And so now what I do is I've spent so much time now, instead of forgetting about those kids, thinking about them and trying to place myself in their shoes
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
childhood reality where it's doesn't matter what your environment is if you're the children of a terrorist in your role as a servant to the father or maybe you wasn't in that i don't fucking know but your job is to just is to play you know and learn and absorb everything so it it makes me it forces me to to
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
attach it to what's happening with children now and all the fucking bullshit of that and like just trying to i want to just shake some people up to go look you're your own stuff right that you're you're now you know you want people to think you're a good person right we all do most of us some people have gotten to a point where they don't give a fuck right
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I want you to think I'm a good person so bad that I'll seek validation. I'll do virtual signaling to show you how good I am, which now I'll use my children to show you. Look, especially the sexuality thing. It's so dangerously evil underneath it all, but I don't... also want to shame and guilt those kind of parents that are doing that, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because they might not fucking even, when you're not clear, you're not even aware of your own behavior sometimes, right? So they don't even fucking know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Did, did you have deep and meaningful conversations with teammates on deployments ever with guys you knew? Yeah. Like some in-depth ones to like, you remember some details about some of your teammates. Yeah. And then Just remember, wasn't there always a guy playing a guitar around the fire? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They think it's the right thing to go, look, we let them, you know, I don't want to get into it too much, but like a boy, maybe he wants to be a girl and we kind of push that a little bit or vice versa, because we need to show that we're good, inclusive, And the truth what I know is, the truth what I know is, if I teach my kids kindness, that shit's all included in kindness.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, inclusion, there are all these things, right? It's all underneath kindness, but you also teach them boundaries to protect themselves. And with children, they don't have boundaries. They don't know what that means. So they're gonna absorb and sponge and take everything. Because guess what? They just want your validation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So you might be like, hey, children, what do you think about this or that topic in front of another adult? And they're going to say what you want them to because they want... Their goal is your validation and nurturing for mom. And they're going to do whatever they need to do to get that, no matter how wrong or evil or anything it might be. Right? So... I just go through all of that over time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's always connected to these kids to the point where I don't want to forget them. And I don't know how best to explain this, but I actually find myself thinking about it so much that it's like a little, it's like a, it's some form of love for them, you know? Like, and what is their, dude, this is the hardest thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I believe that this is an experience, and just like if you're religious, I'm not even religious, but I see all these themes through every religious text that I've ever read. I try to read all of them. This is a body.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
right that contains a soul and death is just a transition into the next experience whatever it might be but that's the thing we're always fussing about and arguing about like uh you know what what uh what is reincarnation what is all you know and literally fighting wars with each other about our different beliefs about about something we can't know here yet you know and um
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I find myself thinking about where they're at, you know. Same way I think about my grandfather. Before he passed away, some of the last words he said to me, I was able to sit by him next to the bed and talk. I was like, dude, Grandpa, I want to say things, but I don't know how. He's like, you can say whatever you want, you know. And I was like, well, here's what I want to say.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You've been such a mentor to me. Everything I've done You've given me the validation. You've been so proud of me. You know, he was so proud that I made it to SEAL Team 6. And I wanted to do this ice cream thing next so he could see. It didn't happen in time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But the thing I wanted to say, I was like, whatever you're feeling, I can imagine that you must be going through your whole life as an experience. And even to include things you might not have resolved with some of your sons because there were some tensions, there were some things going on, you know, family things that always exist.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I was like, but what I think is that deep down inside you, to the core of your soul, what you really are is just little boy Jack, seven-year-old. That's what I visualize as the most authentic, the most authentic. real version of me that I ever was before anything happened to me, before any of those traumas, those conflicts, those things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so going into myself was like a hostage rescue to grab that little boy and bring him back through all that fucking bullshit. So those kids now I think about, and I don't want to forget them,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Or there was one guy, I had an EOD guy that as soon as we got back from the mission, we'd do team family movie time. We'd go watch Band of Brothers together. I'd get some ice cream. But he would always be in his hooch with a beat maker making little beats, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's what they love doing. So then when they get out and they go, what do I do? Wasn't there something you did?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. So for a long time, like I said, like coping, we talked about PTSD, you know, in the teams and soft. I like to use that word because just like other words, society, we attach too much stigma to those words. So it's like PTSD is like this thing no one wants to have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because we know that if you're labeled with it or attached to it, no matter how many, how anonymous they make the reporting system of it or whatever you do with a psychologist or whatever, you're not going to, I'm not going to because I want to be operational. That's my mission. So I like to call it coping instead.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We all cope with it in different ways that we, in our culture, we make, just like in society, we make certain things socially acceptable. Anything but, you know, encourage each other to change our lifestyles, do something healthy, you know, because it doesn't fit in the culture. And that's the thing why culture is such a powerful thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So my coping with it was I was trying my best to forget it, and then I was having these fucking nonstop nightmares. It was tough for my wife because it'd be like I'd be stuck in the dream and making these strange noises because I knew I was in a dream and I was trying to get out of it because I didn't want to look at that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
these kids and like the hardest part is like I know the image of what it looked like like even even one of them kind of like got up a little bit and like there's bullets through them and then kind of like laid back down and this shit tormented me in the dreams that every time he got up it was like my younger for some reason my younger son's face
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So then I developed this fucking belief that if anything traumatic happens to either one of them through their lives, it's because of me. And I was like, that's the message I was getting. And then I was like doing, I was like essentially shooting my own. And I think the reason it was him is because he's a little bit more of the adventurous, like he just goes for it. So it's actually awesome now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He probably has fear, but he doesn't care about the fear. And my older son is more analytical, thinks things out a little bit more. And there's going to be good things and bad things for both of those traits. But I love both of them equally as much. But for some reason, it was him because he's probably more likely to get into danger faster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't even want to say this because I don't want them to become SEALs. But he'll be the one, I think. So... After the Abagain, those went away. They did go away. And so did the migraines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Good point. Some people, maybe not, maybe we were playing video games every waking moment between or whatever, but there was probably something, whatever it was. Went on long runs or even after a long mission, I knew guys were like, you're still going on miles of a run? You love running, you know? Maybe you design some shoes or something, you know, for that. I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Talking about the ones here? No, they're all, like, you talking about on the operation?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
No, I, those, they're, I can't, oh, I see what you're saying, sorry. No, I haven't. That's a good point. I might need to pay more attention. You think you're opened up enough for that? Maybe. You know, one thing I think about is, um... Sorry, I misunderstood that for a second. I haven't gotten to a lot of the other war stuff. Much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I don't know, sometimes I go, oh, it just didn't affect me much. I don't think so. I think that there's a psychological toll on everything that happens, every little thing. If you choose, if you're a guy that chooses to go, hey, I'm good, didn't bother me much, and you hold it and you don't talk about it and you go on your, you know, it's like be with my grandfather.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I wish he told me more, but he just doesn't talk about it. And you're like, okay, that's just how grandpa is. That's okay, you know. But then there's us guys that want to, I want to tell them. I want them to feel, you know, something. Like, they want to. I think that, you know, my kids, my boys, I think they want to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I decide now to go to it instead of the effects that that shit's having on me when I try to forget it. But, you know, as far as the... You know, I meditate a lot. I've gone through some really intense meditation training and I've got some more to do. Some teachers. Get a lot of visions out of those when you get far enough and deep enough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I might not have been paying attention to what you just asked. You know, so... Maybe the next time I do that, or even some, you know, plant medicine ceremony or something, that maybe I'll lay that down as an intention to go, hey, if there's anything for me to receive from them, I'm open.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But that's my point is start making moves towards that, figuring it out, what you like doing. And then imagining yourself because as long as time you can't, your ego with that team connection is like, I can't imagine I did all this stuff. You know, I can't imagine sitting in a little ice cream truck going, hey, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But start to, you know, until you can imagine yourself doing that, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, there's some coincidences, but there's also a lot of not coincidences. You've had enough experts on here that do things, you know, that... Dude, I mean, my... to believe there's not something, dude, over time, it's just, it's in every text, every Bible. We're more than this, what's in front of us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And signals and messages, you know, can get through from here to there, to wherever we exist, you know, outside of or inside of what this is, you know? So really my opinion is that, It's like a low, I don't want to offend anybody, but it's a low intelligence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's of low intelligence for me, for somebody I think like an atheist or something, or somebody that just doesn't believe there's anything else but this. Because there's just too much evidence. Like the evidence is you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm grateful for the moment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I'm very curious on how you got these made. And they're really good. I've had them before. Oh, thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't, you know, it's kind of a blur. I don't think I really talked, still haven't talked much. She knows that that was one of the things really, you know, affecting me. But we never really got into the deep details of it. But I think it might have been a couple of years after. It took years. I think it was a couple of years. Yeah, I think it was a couple of years. Can I ask how she received it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think she received it the best she could. She's really good about receiving those things, but I know that people, sometimes they're thinking about, how do I react to it? And you're like, you don't have to react to it. But I think that she took it and really deeply cares about me And I can feel that, and I can also know she doesn't have to say anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I can feel how much she cares when I tell her those things, even in silence. You can see it in her eyes. So I think she just worried. Her goal and intention was she wanted me back, or she wanted all of me, maybe even... you know, feeling like she hadn't ever had all of me, you know, a full presence of me and who I am, you know, minus all that bullshit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so it was a really glorious moment to finally reach that person that I wanted to become for her, for myself. You know, for everything, for the business, you know, that wasn't going to work until I became the person that I needed to become to deserve to walk through those doors. Do you think your kids will watch this? Yeah, I think they'll watch it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And one, I'm grateful for more than just, you know, you calling me up to come on the show. I mean, it's also, to me, it feels like this opportunity from God, certain moments in your life that you get. And for me, I think into the future is I can imagine them when I'm older, you know, if I get there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
looking back to this and going, man, this is a marker for how I feel right now, you know, while this stuff is all still fresh and I'm still, you know, a little young and they're, you know, to, to, they're still young, you know, they're still boys. And so it's, uh, technology is cool in some ways like that, you know? So now they have it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
What do you think their reaction will be? I don't know. I think that I'm clear enough and honest with them enough about as much as I possibly can that I can go, hey, you guys don't have to react to this, but you can tell me how you feel, you know, and I know that that's going to evolve and change as they grow. So now it'll be interesting for me to see how it evolves with them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It was hard. You know, it took me some time doing that job and trying to figure out why not only did I not feel better, but increasingly worse over time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so, you know, once I finally figured out that that is correlated to understanding your purpose, you know, and sometimes when I say finding your purpose, a lot of people, I think they don't know, like, what does that mean, your purpose, you know? And you might not. figure it out until you just start doing shit, you know, until you start being like, dude, I don't like what I'm doing right now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I was born in Austin, Texas. My real father was Mexican. My mother is half Japanese and half Irish Caucasian. Oh, shit. I'm a quarter Japanese, too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So how do I get out of this? How do I start making moves towards something that I know that I like? And then the more you do it, you know, it starts to build and grow. And then you can kind of start figuring out like, well, My purpose isn't to make ice cream, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's not your job or where you live because guys will get out and go, I'm just going to move to some beautiful ranch in Montana and everything's going to be fine. You're like, no. Unless you have something you're going to, it's not just what you're going to do. If I make ice cream, that's just my medium. Part of my purpose is to serve, to serve others.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Once I figured out how to serve myself so that I can be more available to serve others, it's not a narcissistic or selfish thing. It's a generous thing in that way. to serve others, you know, I did it. Something inclined me to go do that in the military, and I didn't even know why, you know? So it wasn't just for validation, it was because part of my purpose is to serve.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So now I just get to feed people ice cream and watch them smile, and there's no toxicity. There's no ulterior motives, no agenda or anything behind it. It's just fucking ice cream. I want to make you feel good for a short amount of time. Or your purpose might be to create. Dude, the paintings, the... You know, I've got a creative mind too, so part of my purpose is to create.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, a mother's purpose is to create. And just those kinds of words, it's so hard with words because so much behind everything. We try to just, I try to find the best combination of words to describe, you know, what you feel, which is everything. If what we are and what we feel is every grain of sand on earth,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
even under the ocean, then words is like a sprinkle of sand in your hand, and you're trying to use those to tell everybody about all of the sand. So it's hard. Some people are really good at it with their vocabulary. Their vocabulary is better than others. So you just try your best, but that's what I'm saying with purpose. It's more aligned with not your fucking title. I am a...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
mother with adhd that you know is a teacher and does and all this stack of and my sexuality is this this this i'm not saying anything about sexuality they're fine i'm saying that that's not what you are yeah that's just one tiny little aspect of part of what you are You know, so the purpose thing is it's a more literal thing. Like, what do you do and why? You know, what do you want to do?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I want to paint. Or maybe your purpose is to create. Go do something. See if you love it, you know? And make some move towards that. Or, you know, maybe it's to teach. And if you're a teacher and you love – have you ever seen a teacher that loves being a teacher no matter how stressful it is?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. Cool. I used to be embarrassed about it a little bit, trying to fit into school. And I looked a lot more Asian when I was a kid than I think I do now. Now I'm very proud of it. Very, very proud of it. My grandmother immigrated here. My grandfather met her while he was on tour for Vietnam and he was in Okinawa and they've been the core of the whole family. Right. And we moved around a lot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You ever had one of those teachers and you're like, that was a good one. I remember she cared. I could feel that she cared about us all. And that shit's stressful because there's other teachers that hate it. And they might be convincing themselves that that's their purpose. My purpose is to teach and they force it, force it, force it. But why are you so miserable doing it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It might not be, you know, and then you're afraid to let that go, you know, and move into something else that might be more aligned with your purpose. So it's that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And... You might have to do some shit in the meantime. That's not a limitation. That's just what you got to do. You got to have some money. You got to put food on the table. You do those things, and you just fucking get through it. But if you can commit a couple years, you know, it's worth it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't want them, and I've told them this, and my wife, because there's just, there were so many close calls, and it's just, now I'm a father, now I know there's danger. I'm okay with danger.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
This brings me back too to so many, every time somebody was lost, it's like I go back now to those memories where I wasn't really paying close enough attention to the fathers, now that I'm a father, or even in the mothers too, of how overwhelming that feels when that happens to them. It's like, it's just, it's like the toad. It's like the toad, but worse, more overwhelming than the toad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know? If you've ever experienced 5-MeO DMT, I think that losing a child as a parent might be more overwhelming than that. Or equally. Fuck. Now I think about their faces and I missed some of that, you know, in those moments. But now I think back and go, fuck, that was, it's no small thing. And so I don't want to feel that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But if they are going to go, I got to support them so that now the support is, at least they're going to be the safest possible because they have that validation, they have that support, you know, where I'm not. I don't want them thinking about, you know, tension with dad or their validation for anything if they're going to do that, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I want them to optimize and just make the smartest decisions possible and hopefully a little luck in there from God too.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I did. It was interesting. I didn't enjoy it much, but it was interesting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm dying here. I didn't work on anything with extraterrestrials, but you've got access to lots of programs and different email systems and different things, and for sure there was a time where some traffic went around with... Regarding, you know, they've talked about this plenty, too, and it's out there. You can look this right up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There's a task force, you know, there's a task force responsible for collecting the data around all the UFOs that pilots are seeing. You have pilot buddies. I got a lot of them. There's an air base there, Oceana. Lots of F-18 friends. They see this shit all the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, the same little... The tic-tac thing? Shiny shape that zips around in these different, you know, experiences with their pods or just with their eyes. And it all, you know, it seems to be that same shape, you know, over and over again as people have seen it off of ships, off of naval ships, in their pods and out of their windows and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's not, you don't, it's now it's at the point where there's no, it's no longer like, hey, you know, don't speak up about anything because you're going to feel, you know, we're going to embarrass you. It was like, oh, you saw something, you know, like, no, now it's been enough that they're like, yeah, I saw a couple today. Oh shit. Yeah. Saw one last week, you know, just trying to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So my real father was an abusive alcoholic physically abusive alcoholic to my mother um did you see any of that so what I realized is with children and and even pertaining to some of the stuff that's going on with children these days is that you remember everything it's imprinted right up to a certain age.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
keep, you know, record them snapshots or whatever and enter it into this, you know, into the database of evidence of UAPs. So, you know, they're having hearings about it, congressional hearings and different talks about it. And like, it's just true at this point. There's no conspiracy theory around it. There's things going on, including, and that's just one of them. What do you think it is?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You think about this stuff? I do. And it's tough to talk about because when I say I think into the future, I also go... into the far future and the far past and go all the way into physics and I've read a couple of Stephen Hawking's books and things and different folks like that and astrophysicists. I just love watching that stuff and I love all of the ancient aliens and everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That's the stuff I watch if I do watch something. It's just too apparent that one, physics and all of these researchers and scientists are telling us that time is not linear out there. It's based on gravity. So if time is not linear, then in different places, the past, present, and future could all be existing at the same time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And in spirituality, I think that a lot of monks, a lot of people that practice meditation, spirituality, believe that too. which means your childhood and being an old man is happening already right now. You just only can experience this moment in this time, right? But five seconds from now, if I move this bottle, that's the future. And if I make that decision right now, then I can see the future.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's going to move, right? Nothing's going to change that. Maybe some, you know, Boom. That moment exists at the same time as I was just saying, that in five seconds, that's going to move. So I do think about it. And if that's the case, I also think about technology and AI. We're battling about how to use it, what to use it, and
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think that it's inevitable that we're already starting to integrate AI consciousness into our consciousness in different ways, whether it's a chip or whether it's going to start with your iPhone is just now implanted. You don't have to do anything. You just go...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, and do shit, and it'll evolve from there and to the point where now we can access artificial intelligence in combination with our own intelligence, and maybe that becomes the next species of humans. Because it's going to evolve. We've already had several species of humans.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It just makes sense based off of the evidence that already exists that we're going to evolve into another type of human. We're going to, unless we destroy ourselves. You know, but so just like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
If you ask me if I believe in aliens or extraterrestrials or any wording or language around that, to me, it's unintelligent to think otherwise because I can only base it off of my own experience so far, which is being alive. So there's no belief that I can have. There's no evidence to prove otherwise that there is life because I'm alive. I've never experienced nothing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, so when Stephen Hawking is like, you know, he's a genius with what he was doing with physics and theories, but he's not an idiot. But sometimes I'm like, he's also kind of an idiot because he was an atheist. So how do you do all that? And then believe once we die here, there's just nothing. A lot of those guys believe that. Yeah. It doesn't make sense based off of the evidence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't think I remember much from like three or four maybe, but I didn't think I remember much from four or five. And then I realized one day that I do, right? So I've got imprints in my memory of my real father, his face, and for sure his energy and what it felt like to me that I've only been able to get to actually recently, like in the last decade of my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I mean... There's like layers of matrices.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But to not be able to speculate about it because of people who want to be ignorant about it and shut it down with conspiracy theory or whatever is like, now we don't even get a chance to have fun and even talk about it. To not believe in it, to be honest with you, is boring. Yeah. Like how fucking boring. So, but, you know, people ask,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
think there's aliens, you know, and stigma attached to that word too, because of Hollywood has fucked it up, you know, but everything we've created in Hollywood is based off of something we saw here. A dragon is a lizard and a bird, you know, and you just, I go into it and think, dude, We're just accustomed to everything. You become accustomed to everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So an octopus looks like crazy, but we're just accustomed to it. It's been here ever since I was born, and I learned what it is. Or a giraffe has this fucking – if I saw that, if we didn't know what that was and we weren't accustomed to it and we saw it on Saturn, we'd be like, fuck, there's these –
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Creatures with these necks that reach up so they can eat shit that's high up, you know, and they have spots like fucking alien. And why is it so out of reach? Like, we're so fixated on what it might look like. And like, just like humans, once you realize in yourself that it doesn't fucking matter what I look like, you have so much more freedom in your life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And now you can be done with all the costume shit all the time, you know? And yeah, have a little personal style or whatever. But it's like, same thing with aliens. It's like, I don't give a fuck what they look like. I just want to know if it's what it feels and, you know, how it communicates. And it's like, it's level of awareness and consciousness, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's more interesting to me than just shutting it down or arguing about what it would look like. What do you think it is? How deep do you think into this stuff? Pretty deep. You know, and I actually, you know, I enjoy my medicine ceremonies too. Now I'm at the point now where they're just fun, beautiful. I have some intentions for it. The trauma, dark shit, I've gone through all that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's usually not that, you know, anymore. I've gone through so many repetitions of that. Now it's like, hey, my intention now is just to feel gratitude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know and you know have a have a good experience and and it always is that and then at the same time then i go hey i want to receive some signals to help me understand what what consciousness might be like you know elsewhere because the the what i always get in those is that we're all connected in consciousness and then we might all be from the same source of consciousness whatever that is if it's god to me
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
If God, then, and not even in a religious way, it's just, you know, there is something more than what's in front of us. And whatever it is, including vacuums of nothingness, you know, or whatever we were before the Big Bang Theory is also part of it. You know, any of those periods of nothingness or voids is also part of God. So it's everything. God is everything, right? So God, love, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Different words for that. You know, joy, pure joy are here or up here in the spectrum of consciousness. And suffering, evil, dark, you know, shit, Satan is down here in the bottom part of the spectrum. And that's infinite. And everything in between is where we all choose to exist. And it's just an infinite circle of consciousness with those things being on the outer spectrum of it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But because you block them, right, if it doesn't feel good. So, you know, memories of violence, of him beating my mom. And, you know, she was working three jobs to support us. She was a seamstress for a long time. And just remembering the faces of just different women that were not my mom, you know, coming over. Damn. Like, I remember that shit, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Collective. And we're all just little branches of the same consciousness of God, in my opinion. And that evolves over time, my understanding of it. So hard to explain with words. I really want to improve my vocabulary.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
spiritual entities that's that's hard to explain because it's just the different variations of spirituality vice science that people want to separate right but in a lot of ways it's it's very similar language around the same concepts right and
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
If it's inevitable that I believe that we're going to integrate and become another species of humans, right, then inevitably we're going to figure out how to harness gravity. And maybe we've already done that because out there where you can harness gravity and we learn that time's not linear, now we can sort of bounce around and probe ourselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So maybe we're probing ourselves with these little things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, and maybe we've found, now we can expand. That's what Elon Musk is doing. He's an explorer. His purpose is to explore. So in the meantime, he's down here being Batman. Thank God we've got a guy like that, you know, that's not fucking an evil billionaire, you know, like Soros. He's like the archenemy of Batman, you know, Musk. Yeah. And God, I hope we get more of them, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But his purpose, I think, is to explore. He's doing it. He saw the fucking thing land in the chopsticks the other day. Fucking amazing. And as we evolve...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
we're going to reach places outside our solar system eventually, and we're going to find something, and then we're going to meet them and find out that their consciousness is from the same source as our consciousness, but we just look different, and then we're going to become accustomed to each other, and then the next thing you know, it's going to be a fucking Star Wars bar.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Why isn't everybody freaking out about each other? Because they are accustomed to each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That came from childhood. So we went through all that, but you know, from the point that my stepfather came about, I had a great childhood still, you know, I still perceive that I had a wonderful childhood. My mom, you know, she's, she's heaven of a mom, you know? And, um,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, she did everything, they did everything they could, provided everything they could, and one year I got a, you know, I was always in the kitchen with my grandmother and my mom, so I cook a lot, you know, I have the creative mind, and I, you know, I love to like make wontons and different stuff when friends come over, and It's been great for the cafe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So now the ice cream cafe is more than that now. Now it's a legitimate bakery. I've got two chefs. They're wonderful. They're just, they're my heroes with this. And we're going to go so far with this and they're going to reach all their dreams too. You know, pastry chef and chef couple. And they, they're awesome. They're a couple? Yeah, they're a couple. No kidding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, they met in culinary school. Damn, that's cool. When I was selling ice cream out of my garage, struggling to make brownies and shit because I'm not good at baking. They had just moved here recently from up north to get out of the kind of hustle and bustle of that stuff. Started working down here at some restaurants, and they hit me up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They saw my earlier Instagram and said, hey, are you looking? You need some help with baked goods? I was like, absolutely. And once I started sourcing it from them, I started realizing, holy shit, she can do anything. And she can. She can. So it's just amazing. So now fast forward, everything that goes in the ice cream, plus now we've got the bakery part of it with all the pastries.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So when we are going about the environment we create for our kids and whatever all these parents are doing is like, I think there might be a little bit of an assumption that like, oh, they're just not going to remember all of this because they're kids, you know? But it's all in there. So... That... you know, realizing that that was my real father.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's a bakery, creamery, where I do all the formulas. He does all the spinning and flavoring. And coffee shop, coffee house with some really good baristas. And it's been working out really well. Nice. But it all started back in childhood when I was just cooking. You know, playing around, and ice cream was just my favorite thing. So fascinated with ice cream, became fascinated with how it's made.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, fast forward on only one or two of my deployments, I took a machine and messed around with making ice cream out there, but I didn't know how to formulate or anything, so it was kind of a mess. But it was fun. I honestly, my creative outlet, I sort of suppressed a little bit out of, you know, that need for validation. This isn't cool, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
This is going to be, you know, they're going to perceive this as, you know, weird or strange. So I kind of like just wasn't creative for all those years. You know, I just kind of like hid it away, you know. So once I got out... I had that job, but a year, not a year, but as soon as I decided to get out, I started looking into how do I learn how to make formulas for ice cream?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because I know there's something with that that I want to do. So I started making moves before I was even ever out, right? When I was at that out station making that decision, you know, there's this 150-year-old ice cream school at Penn State that's been there that's pretty renowned for it. Like Ben & Jerry's, I think, went there, a couple other big company founders to learn how to make ice cream.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so I went there, I signed up for it. My wife's like, you're going to spend this much money on what? I'm like, I'm going to go to college. So it's a short course. It's a food sciences course there. You get full semester credits for this course. This thing, you go around the dairies, you formulate ice cream, you do tests. You got to do it on paper just like sniper school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And pass the test, you gotta pass. You know, you don't just get through. And also learning the business side of things. They've got all kinds of cool keynote speakers and people coming in from big companies and small shops. And it's for everybody from the beginner to somebody that's building a fucking ice cream factory. So great experience.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then I went right into my job and kind of forgot about it for a while. So as I evolved through that transition and sort of self-transformation, I started to feel good enough to go, man, I can visualize myself doing something with ice cream. And then COVID happened. That's when I really started making ice cream in the kitchen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I kind of converted our kids' baby playroom into a little ice cream lab. I started testing out samples, created my chocolate flavor that my wife loves, and it's still that formula. And Eventually, COVID cleared up. I had time then to get on YouTube, start learning how to make a business plan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it was a joke at first, you know, but you'd laugh at it if I showed you my, hey, Chris's idea and all the things I went through, you know, with the whole branding of it and the naming and everything. Do you still have it? Yeah, I still have it. Nice. Definitely. I've shown it to a couple people and, you know, I'm like, see, I told you to laugh, you know. Can we put it up on screen?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, you could. Let's do it. Send us a picture.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I'll send you. I'll pull it up. It's funny. It just looks like a little cheesy PowerPoint. Now it's a thing I can pitch to any bank, to anywhere, and it's nice. It's a full model for the next three, five, ten years that is modular. We can pull things out of it and go, hey, what's the next shop look like? What's the warehouse for pints to go in a store look like when it's time for that? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, I'm going to need some logistics for when it's time to start getting ice cream, you know, into a store and stuff like that. So right now we're just focused on the headquarters and getting everything we can possibly do out of there. And then, you know, sometime after next summer, probably start looking at the next location. Nice. And you brought some. Yeah, I brought some.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then in the future, seeing some of those things coming out in me was a big kind of awakening moment, right? To realize- What age did he leave? So my mom finally divorced him. You know, I try to talk to her about it. I think it's a traumatizing thing for her as well, obviously. And my grandfather, a really strong man, he passed away a couple years ago in my mom's home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm always ready for ice cream, man. See, hopefully they're softened up a little bit. We'll see. If not, we'll... All right. Dark matter. It's my wife's favorite chocolate of all time. Might need to wait a little bit. It's pretty hard. Oh, all right. All right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Then I got a little fun flavor. My chef came up with everything. everything bagel cream cheese with crunchy croissant pieces. That was yours, it's pretty hard. Holy shit. That one's probably the best seller, one of the best sellers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. All right. Then Tim, you gotta tell me what you think about this. Everything bagel flavor. I mean, it's really weird, but it's really good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, it was like we were messing around with it one day and we're like, hey, let's try some savory things. And, you know, dude, I did a hot ribeye steak with this and I put a scoop right on the hot ribeye and it just like melted into it like a butter and it was delicious. But it's also just good to, it's kind of like a, I don't know how to explain it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's interesting, right? I love it. What else you got? Dark matter here. This is my wife's crack. When I'll be at the shop working, she'll always make me bring her home a scoop of this. It's Dutch cocoa. Dutch processed dark chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate chips that we grind up. How many flavors do you guys have?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think that doing the drops that we were doing before we had the cafe, we probably got a couple hundred. But it's gotten now to a point where, dude, when I first started making it, I was like, man, what flavors am I going to do? I don't know. It was strawberry season, so I got some strawberries from the farms right down the road, and that was my first ice cream drop.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just, hey, I announce it on Instagram, I hype it up, I make it, you know, however many I thought I could sell, like 50 pints, and schedule pickups through DMs, and that's how I was doing it for like a year or so. And people were coming to my house to pick it up, and it got pretty popular. I figured out I was pretty good with the social media part of it, which is fun for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And that's kind of how the story developed. Fast forward to the chefs coming on board. I started outsourcing it so it got easier. And I would go pick up the baked goods from her, chop it up, throw it in the flavors, come up with flavors just based off of how I felt and moods. And it started to flow. And then fast forward a year and a half or so, I said, hey, guys, I want to get this more serious.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Let's move this into... you know, a commercial kitchen. So we did, and we struggled through finding the right one. We had to move in and out of one. That was hard. And then we found one that worked really well for another year or so. And then I intended on us, we'd meet up a couple times a week, make up to 150, 200 pints of ice cream, drop it. Sometimes they'd sell out, sometimes they wouldn't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was there during his hospice. He was an orphan himself, so he experienced a really tough childhood. Him and his brother were orphans. Their parents abandoned them. And then they grew up with, you know, a couple different foster parents. But they both became very successful. They both, you know, he spent a long career in the Army. He retired as a colonel, did two tours of Vietnam.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we'd put the some of them in freezers in different locations. And we had multiple pickup locations to cover different towns. And so it kind of grew and we started having a business and I found a better software system for organizing those. I didn't have to use a spreadsheet for pickups all the time. It just kind of did it for me, and people were picking up ice cream.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Um, you know, costs right now, you start doing business. So, you know, I found, you know, I thought we were going to be doing this for a couple more years and then an opportunity for this space popped up and I just knew it was the right spot. Everything about it was right. I could afford it. And the area that it's in is not typical there. And this landlord, he gave me a chance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So he gave me a chance. My best friend in Chicago helped me. He's a business guy. That's huge because he's in the logistics business. Nice. So knowing the long-term goal, he was like, hey, he committed to jumping in, and that's not easy to do. He's already busy as fuck. So our families, our friends were tight. He's my best friend. We... built this thing last year, and it was hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
A lot of things, a lot of delays happened, a lot of struggles. Got through it, opened the doors, and it was like before I opened the doors, it was just nightmares of like total failure and everything I've committed up to that, all of our money. our home equity, you know, to make this beautiful shop that I had in my mind for years. You dumped everything into it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, and so then we opened the doors, and it just hit right from day one. And I was on my knees at home just thinking, God, you know, hey... It's working. And then it kept working, you know, and the cold months slow down, you know, certain days, Monday, Wednesday, that's typical for everybody. But now we're going to start having some lunch menu items.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
My shit, the chef is just a genius back there. He just, I don't even, we don't have to meet about things to make. They just, and that was the beauty of working with them too for two whole years is like the trust and everything was already there for that part of it, you know? Yeah. But they came along. They had to trust me to get this thing open.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I had to trust them that they were going to, you know, be committed to the dream, which is going to lead to more dreams for them, you know. And, you know, them knowing my full intentions is to help them to that through me. And it's working out. There's hard things going on. The hardest struggle is probably the culture of it all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Assuring that the customer experience when I'm not there is similar to when I'm there. And you can't get anybody to care about it as much as you, but for sure they do. You know, but now it's everybody else. My manager, you know, does. And now it's the teenagers and they're awesome. They're all kicking ass. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's just keeping all of us aligned into that culture and brand of like, of what, you know, what it needs to feel like for us and for the customers. And so that's the... That's the challenge I learned immediately. And then of course, like costs are expensive when you get going and you got to find ways really quickly to bring those down. So that's what we're doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But I think we'll get those things fixed pretty quickly. And we still got more things to add. I still got to get merch online. I got a lot of cool ideas for that coming. T-shirts, hats, all kinds of cool shit. Shipping the ice cream. So we'll get back into these drops where we go hype up special flavor products You know, like once a month, limited supplies, you know, sells out, sells out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then when he got out, he started, worked his way up through a company called Airframe that manufactured and sold airplane parts and components to Japanese companies. And he became fluent in Japanese. So When that was all going on with my mom, I believe that there was some influence from him to go, I need you to leave this guy, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We're not making that flavor again, you know. And start shipping it at least regionally, you know, probably East Coast at first. This was a good test to get this here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't know about franchising, but for sure I'm already looking at the next location. We know we need to get the data for a full spring and summer. That's the best months for ice cream stuff. You know, the stuff the chefs are doing for the cold months with pastries and our coffee is great, too. You know, so we didn't just add those things to make more money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, you know, I really got the right people in and we're doing our best at all of those things at the same time. And it seems to be working, I think, customers, especially locally. Dude, we have such a good local following of people that have been buying it since day one, you know, and also now regulars and people just coming in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And our community in that southern Virginia Beach area has just been, God, it's like the best. That's awesome. So I think within five years, we'll have multiple stores is my plan. And we'll be ready to start looking at, you know, building a warehouse and a continuous freezer system or something to start getting some pints and a couple other ideas I have into a store like a distribution.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, like a public start locally, you know, pitch it in. My partner will probably activate for that because he's a logistics guy. And then we'll start figuring out how to get ice cream in stores. That's the goal, and that's the longer tenure sort of goal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, I've met some cool people, but I'm just, the thing about ice cream too that people always say is like, hey, there's so much ice cream around. How are you going to, there's so much doubt, so much doubt, you know, how are you going to make money in ice cream? There's so much, there's so many brands. I'm like, that's with anything that you do in a business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You can't, I had to not think about that and go, no one can do it the way you're going to do it, you know? You've got your style. There's so many coffee shops. They're all going to be a little different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, don't create limitations. Just try to break through those. I've met some really cool people already, but I respect everybody's ice cream. So anybody that wants to give me any advice from any of those companies or any of those CEOs and owners about stuff based off of what I just said, like, hey, here's something they learned or something, that would be super valuable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But also, like I said, we are gonna start, we're gonna become a brand of ice cream, right? So I'm gonna need some distribution and some logistics for that. So it'd probably be good to start talking to some of those people soon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And almost, I don't know if there was ever an ultimatum, but she finally made the right decision. And divorced him. How old were you? I'm not quite sure. I think I was about five, almost six years old, maybe. Shit, so you do have memories back to that young. Yes, absolutely. And they're very specific little memories, you know? Like, what's your first memory? You know what I mean?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, it's a little gift. A little gift of mine. It's very simple. There's so much bullshit going on and having to figure out, each one of us, how do you do it? Day to day, there's so much, you know, So many boundaries being broken from, you know, it's the battle, the never ending ancient battle between good and evil going on right now. You can feel it. This election's coming up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's like, dude, the information. So in my job, there's a lot of, I didn't like it because it was all based on the military deception, information operations. I know how that shit works. You know, it's an operation. And it's working against people. So, you know, it's a machine. You hate this guy. You hate Trump, right? Can you really explain why? Can anyone really explain why?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They're going to say things that they've been getting fed for years and years and years. And you say shit through the screens. So often we know. from research that people will start to believe that, right? And vice versa, same thing. You know, it's not an operation, I think, in defense of it, but you start finding, you know, the good guys start doing the same kind of thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, hey, here's some information about, you know, the Harris campaign or whatever. And it's like, dude, just outside of all the bullshit, really it is the battle between good and evil. So you know what's good and you know what's evil, right? And you might be sort of attached to like one little topic, one thing, you know, abortion or the transgender issue or like the border, like whatever it is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But dude, if we can just see past, that stuff's all important. But right now, it's all underneath a grander importance of good and evil going on. And it's happened over and over again over time. Some of the same patterns. So my opinion is that understanding and misunderstanding is like at a max right now. And if people change their minds to the good side,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
the right thing to do is not go, ah, I told you so. You know what I mean? Fucking all that time and shame and guilt. It's like, just let that shit go and welcome. Welcome to the good side. The side of good, you know? Forgiven for the side of evil. Depending on what you did to, you gotta, you know, deal with the consequences of certain shit and certain actions, but welcome to the good guy side.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's okay that you change your mind, you know? But the only way to change people's mind is not... this fucking constant, it's just not gonna work, right? So this is something I learned in meditation training. It's called a Tonglen exercise. Probably take three minutes, three, four, five minutes. It's a meditation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's my way of sort of proving what might work for changing your mind as a little gift. Because I know you're into that a little bit, a little meditation stuff. Bringing the nervous system down, which is the goal of my shop, part of the brand. Come inside. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you did right now. Fucking bring your nervous system down. Get some sweets. Get some ice cream.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Get some good shit. Bring it down. Enjoy yourself. Chill. And then when you're ready, you go back out into the bullshit of the world. Like that's the brand of the cafe. That's cool, man. So I'm just going to talk you through it. Just close your eyes and breathe. That's all you got to do. Just focus on breathing. Breath in, breath out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And as you're breathing, just imagine the perfect beach for yourself. It could be one that you've been to before. Maybe you haven't. Whatever it is, it's a perfect day on this beach. The temperature of the air is perfect. You start walking down towards the water. For my beach, it's a dune. I come down through the cattails, feeling those cattails between my fingers.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Walking down the sand, feel the grains of the sand between my toes. I start making my way into the water. The water is the perfect temperature. As I continue down into the water, I'm breathing. I get waist deep. And when I start to get stomach deep, I stop there and breathe. And as I feel the ebbs and flow of the waves against my body and the ocean supporting my weight,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That's hard for people to think right in the moment. But if you sit down, you meditate maybe, you think about it, you can go back like, oh, yeah. You know, there's a memory I had from when I was probably five years old or four years old that I slipped on like a slippery concrete, bonked my head, and I must have gotten knocked out because the next thing I saw was my mom's face.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I look out into the distance. It's a beautiful sky. It's a beautiful horizon. I notice where the color of the water meets the color of the sky. And I just breathe. I'm going to slowly turn towards the beach. And I'm looking at a beach. And there's somebody there. This is somebody that you love. Somebody that you really love. It could be yourself. It could be your mother, your son.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just somebody you really love deeply. For me, it's myself, my seven-year-old self. And I'm just there playing, just watching myself play. As I take the next few breaths, when I inhale, I'm going to inhale all of the stuff, all of the suffering, all of the bad experiences, any trauma, any ignorance. And I'm just going to breathe it in in the form of black smoke through the air into my lungs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Gonna sacrifice myself for just a moment to absorb all of this dark smoke. And then as I exhale, I'm gonna breathe it out through my fingertips, out all of my pores and into the ocean. Mother Earth is just there to absorb all that shit from us. I'm just gonna do this for the next couple breaths. Now when I'm ready, I'm going to turn back towards the horizon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm just going to breathe a couple of breaths. Look at the horizon again. And I'm going to turn back to the beach again. This time, there's somebody there that you despise. You might even hate them. Maybe they hate you. Somebody right now in your life that you despise and that despises you. Same thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Every breath in, you're going to breathe in in the form of black smoke all of the ignorance out of them, all of what you know has caused all of that ignorance, all of the trauma back to their own childhood, all of the things, all of the bullshit that they just can't understand how to cut through right now. And they're taking it out on everybody else around them and themselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You're just going to breathe all that shit in. I'm just going to breathe it out into the ocean. So you know this is the only way that you have any chance of changing anybody's mind. They feel some validation for why they ended up that way somehow, whether it's your energy Whenever you communicate with this person or not, it's a choice they have to make.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I remember that, you know? And there's another memory before that where I was getting like, I was playing in an ant pile. I might have been four years old during this time. And I got covered in fire ants and I was screaming and my mom grabbed me and threw me in a bathtub to drown all the ants. And those get imprinted because they're sensational memories outside of your everyday playing as a kid.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And when you're ready, turn back to the horizon and you're going to look at the beautiful horizon again. Now you slowly turn back to the beach. Now every person, every person on the planet, every creature, every animal is there on the beach. And you're going to do the same thing. Breathe all that black smoke out of everybody, through yourself, out into the ocean.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Now when you're ready, you can start making your way back into the beach. There's nobody there now. It's just you and your perfect beach. You feel the water lower as you walk out. You feel the warm sun hit you. Start to warm your body immediately. Make your way back up the sand. Back up the dune. And now you're walking off into your life. Back into a normal day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And when you're ready, you can open your eyes and come out. That's it. Nice. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to do when we're doing this every day, all the time. But... It's not to say that you can't have boundaries, right? But the more that I think that, the easier it is to deal with the bullshit. People's bullshit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I hope that more people can change their mind and not feel some kind of shame and guilt about it and not change their mind just because they've been doing it for so long. Like, man, I voted for them. I did this. I can't. I'm going to look dumb, you know? It's okay. Just change your mind. All right. So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yes, sir. Yep. I'm grateful. Thank you. Thank you for the moments to be able to do that. Thank you, brother. I wish you the best of luck. Thank you. God bless.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But I also have those memories about my father and him, the way he grabbed me to talk to me, to like, you know, I just have memories of him sitting next to me. You know, he had a thick mustache. And the energy that I remember was not good. You know, that... biological connection between a father and son I felt I don't think was there, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because when you're drowned in your addictions, when you're, you know, when you're that, it's blocking you, you know? And then I saw this in Afghanistan, you know, with different, I kind of correlate it together because I go, how, and it even relates to the story, is how some fathers don't have that for some reason, whatever it is, whether it's the ideology that they're,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
practicing, you know, where we know in some of that terrorist culture, some of that Taliban, you know, and different types of those, you know, extremist cultures, like what I witnessed was, and from talking and eating with Afghans is that the wife and the son or any children are servants to the men and that's their role, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
not like here in a healthy father-son relationship where you go, they're not my servants, I respect them. They're people with choices. And I've made a decision to try my best to create the best environment for them. And even that's not gonna be perfect. There's gonna be some resentment about something. But you just try your best.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so I think that goes missing in today's society sometimes to go to realize like, You do what I say because I told you so. level past that, but... Do you... Do you have siblings? Yeah, I have two sisters. One's my half-sister from my stepfather, who... The next part of my childhood is that my mother met him and remarried, and thank God, because he's a good man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I didn't know that growing up. We were at ends. You know, I said and did things like, you're not my father, when I got angry as a teenager, and I... go back to that now and like, I want to apologize. I have apologized for that because everything that he did, He's a very quiet guy, very stoic. He grew up on a farm, also with a very difficult childhood, but at least was able to make a decision.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
How do you take, I have so much more respect for stepfathers that actually take on or adopt someone's kids that aren't theirs for the woman that they love. Because that's a hard thing to do, to be a father without that biological connection. To teach them how to ride a bike, to teach them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I didn't realize until I became really out of the SEAL teams that I received all of that, even if it seemed like I wasn't listening. Because I was a little shit. I was a rebellious little shit. But I'm so grateful because it all went in there. Yeah, man, that's...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's hard to do, especially when they're pushing back on it all, when it doesn't seem like they're getting it. It can definitely be a challenge.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, my biological sister. Courtney, she was an amazing person and one of the most kind souls. And, you know, one memory I have is my mother being pregnant with her. So I must have been, you know, we're only a couple years apart. So two, three years old.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I remember something about her getting hurt while she was pregnant with her and then asking, I asked my mother these questions later in childhood. She told me, you started to ask these questions, you know, because I didn't know my stepfather was not my father for a while until you get to seven, eight, whatever age, maybe before that, and you start to go, hey, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Is that, you know, you start asking questions because I remember somebody else, you know? But yeah, he, my real father kicked her down the stairs one day in an argument while she was pregnant with my sister. And she fell down a flight, like went down a flight of stairs in front of the apartment. And so, and I think about my mother. Like if I could just go back as myself now to that,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And fucking, you know, my future self, just go grab that motherfucker, you know? Because what happens when we, trauma turns us into something that we aren't really, any of us ever are to start with when we're children. Now you go so far, you still can always come back. It's never too late, in my opinion.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It doesn't matter how far it goes, the deepest, darkest serial killers, pedophiles, all these fucking people going on can still make a choice. But in this life, you still, whatever boundaries and lines you cross, you still have to live with and deal with the consequences of what you did, right? And I didn't feel like he ever got to do that, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Maybe part of the consequence of it was the suffering that people like that have every day, you know. The self-hate, the just the muck is part of it. Because they're not happy. Some of these politicians, some of these people, they're not. You can just see it. You can just see the bags in their eyes. You look at this George Soros dude, and you're just committed to evil. And some of them it shows.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Absolutely. One thing that surprised me was how much about myself I did not even know or understand, like to the core, with my identity as Special Forces guy, SEAL, and how much effort it was going to take for me to learn that. That's one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It doesn't look like a healthy... 80-year-old whatever he is, dude, looks like a demon. And then there's others that appear or look healthy, and that's the most sinister of them. But my point about my dad is that some of my family on that side, he actually died early somehow in 2009, and my mom found out about it. And I asked him questions, you know, how'd he die?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, I still don't, not very clear. I think it was some medical issue with his leg or something like some weird thing. But my side of the family, the Mexican side of the family tried to contact me after, and I just, Because of that, what I just said, I just didn't have any interest. And my real father was my father, right? So it would have been a disservice in my mind to go explore that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I just didn't have the intuition or the need to go explore that. And my Japanese side of the family, my grandparents and my father, I had everything I needed. And so the energy of them contacting me just didn't feel right. My intuition was kicking off. Like, there's some reason behind this, whether it's money or something. They've heard about me. I've been a SEAL for a while.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so I just pushed it. I just didn't do it. Do you believe in generational trauma? Yes, absolutely. Because... I don't think that it's as genetically predisposed as we might think it is. Addictive traits and things like that, maybe a little bit. What I think is that generational trauma is because the traumatized, you have kids, now you're responsible for the environment you create for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And if you haven't healed that shit and you haven't returned to what you really are, the soul that's inside of all of us, When we're children, and back to the fucking George Soros thing, he was just a five-year-old kid once, and no matter what his environment was, he was just playing, just doing his job as a kid, wholesome, innocent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Whatever the environments were, to then make him what he is now, he hasn't made a decision to change that for his own kids, right? And I guarantee you now, they're all fucked up too. So that's a choice that any one person can make, but you can't see through the veil of that conflict and trauma and bullshit. I call it bullshit. It's just the easiest way for me to explain it is stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's just piled on top of us over time to where that soul right here and here is just covered in bullshit. And you can't, how do you see through? You gotta, it's like being stuck in mud or quicksand. And the decision is, it's like a shovel. You got to do work every day to get it down, at least to where you can see something, you know? It doesn't have to be perfect.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
To find a way, and there's different ways of experience. Plant medicines for sure work for me. There's other ways. Native Americans do sweat lodges, you know. Ancient people did different things. Rites of passages to becoming a man, you know. But the point being some way for you to just stop and realize, I feel like I'm full of shit, right? And
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
For me, when I got out of the military, it was like, I couldn't figure it out. When I talked to my wife, you know, when I was fucking things up constantly, it was like, I just crying with her. Like, I just feel this creature inside of me, right? Just this like little dark creature. And, you know, that's just how I visualized it. But one, identifying that and then going, what caused this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because I think that every one of us in the world
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, from the very healthy of us all the way to, you know, the bent over fentanyl addict, you know, in San Diego, the memory, the very specific memory of what somebody did to you or what happened to you, whether it was a collective over time or a very specific thing or a whole bunch of very specific things, but you know, you know what it is, you know, and you just
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think that I realized it, you know, that's hard to put a finger on because it was almost like a collective knowing all of a sudden, but it only came the day that I was almost at rock bottom, that I was at rock bottom, that I realized, holy shit, I can just make a decision right now, right? And just the collective memory of the first couple of years of being out, just like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You don't want to admit to yourself, you know, that it's that that started it, whatever the trauma is, whatever the things, you know what I mean?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's different for everybody, but going then to that thing and spending time like looking at it, we don't want to, but just fucking something to put your head in place to then not just look at it, but go like all around it and go figure out like, yeah, that memory, that's it. You know, for me, for example, there was one and like sexual stuff's embarrassing for everybody to talk about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That's why it's one of the most sinister addictions, in my opinion, compared to like, you can say all day long, like I'm a drug addict. I'm like alcoholic. I beat my wife. I do this really hard for people. But it's also ironic because there's so much sexuality bullshit going on right now. It's all focused on that all the time of like constantly having to prove or portray or, you know, explain
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
your sexuality isn't even now gone to the extent of just displaying it openly in an effort to make it feel normal. Because your subconscious, your ego is like, you know already, it's inappropriate, you know, some of these things you see. Like I can't, and I have no judgment against anybody's sexualities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But from California, I can't take my kids to San Francisco during Gay Pride Month because, and it's not because of the sexuality, it's because of, all the traumatic sexual shit they're going to see, you know, out in public. And it's just not okay, but it's also not going like anything against your sexuality.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's just, you know, but for me, just as a, because it's hard to talk about, I'm going to use it as an example. One of my earliest traumas was You know, my mom was working a lot. My dad, so that's part of the childhood story. My dad was in the Air Force. So then when she remarried, I became a military kid. So I'll go back to that. We moved around a lot and that became another kind of trauma.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Super cool, but also a little bit of a trauma. A big trauma. But back to that thing, you know, I had a good childhood after my mom got married. I really feel overall like, man, I had a great childhood, but there was these little things because they were just doing their best. He was working, she's working, and I had freedom around the neighborhood. We lived in Japan at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Got stationed there. Super cool. We lived there for four years. But I had free floating reign around the whole neighborhood as a six-year-old, right? So I was friends with this other six-year-old, and there was a specific... few days where we ended up in his house down the road, but he had older siblings, 12, 13, 14, whose parents were also gone all the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And they were watching porn in the living room. So now I go here, I'm a six-year-old and they, you know how, you know, I see it with kids now, they influence each other. They go, hey, they think it's a good idea to take the six-year-old and go like, look at this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And you're like, and I'm sitting there looking at this scene that I remember the very, this is what I'm saying with, you know what it is. I remember the very specific things that I was watching in that scene, not knowing what the fuck they were to go. I don't know what it is, but it's fascinating in some way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's like this, like something I've, you know, and then all of a sudden you're a six-year-old kid trauma, right? Yeah. affects the rest of the path of your life with this sexual bullshit, right? That you saw too soon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because you don't even need to be thinking about it until your body matures into that, which was the original purpose for sex in the first place is to reproduce and like, you know, yeah, it feels good. Whatever, we figure that out. That's an intimacy thing, but not as a six-year-old. You're supposed to be playing, you know? You're supposed to be looking at bugs. And... Coloring, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So in one of my plant medicine experiences, I was able to go back to this very closely and like almost float around it like a spirit and go, holy shit, I'm looking at my face. I'm going around looking at my reaction to it and crying for myself to go, what? Like, you know, just want to pull him out of there and fucking stop it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
right so but it went on for a couple of different days we're in there and that became a porn addiction for later okay um and i'm not embarrassed to say really because i know how many people in america are addicted to porn if you watch it every day or even every week you've got some sort of some level of addiction you know there's a spectrum for different addictions and now when i think about it i go
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
One of the worst things we could have ever done as a society, and it just gradually happened, just like everything else does, just like AI, just all the things. The internet, we create it. We can't figure out or agree to how to use it the right way or how to kind of regulate it so it's healthy, right? And then it just explodes into this infinite realm of deviant, dark shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
knowing that i wasn't what i was supposed to be right and that i was not even close to to figuring that out like it just felt like it was getting worse over time and it was um so there wasn't really like a pinpoint moment but you know there was things i was doing there was you know in my marriage, with my kids, and the addictions that I had just compounded on each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We all know what's in there. We can be embarrassed to say, like, oh, I can say what's in there. And you go, like, wow, are you watching? You know, right? Because if you look at any of those fucking videos and like any of them, there's millions of views, you know? More than the Sean Ryan show, you know? So I know. It's a collective, it is global at this point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You can just go in there and click, yeah, I'm 18. Some 10-year-old can do that. How soon do they get these things now? They have them when they're children. I know everybody's not going in there and being responsible to block that stuff. I promise you, they're looking at it and creating these little traumas that they don't even realize.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And now we have exploded into this generation, these generations of sexually addicted people. And dude, some of the most brave people I've ever seen doing some shit are like ex-porn stars. There's this one guy, I don't remember his name, but he's now an advocate against it and how toxic and terrible it is. No kidding. I don't know about that. And he's a big Christian.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I can't remember his name right now, but he was a very famous porn star. And now, imagine that's all recorded. It's all in there. You can always go back to that. So talk about, you know, you do clear some shit. You do heal. You do find a way to move forward. But it's recorded. Talk about your past coming back to haunt you. It's every day for that guy, but he still is telling the truth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And God, that must be, it would be so interesting to talk to him. I'll find him. He goes, yeah, he's a big Christian. His family looks amazing and healthy. He's made a decision, you know. But my point back to that is that was one of my traumas. And I always knew it was there and what it was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I just always avoided that it was connected to anything that I was doing, habits-wise or addictions-wise or anything. You know, and then we go into a culture like the teams and, you know, we almost, we don't encourage addictions, but it's like, hey, man, it's okay. Like, we're all, it's a safe environment sometimes, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, and then you get a DUI and you're like, fuck, kept me out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, so it's a toxic loop. Part of the thing you asked me earlier is what's the solution? I'm like, how do you change culture, you know? Shaming and guilting is not going to change it. So if you have a commander, somebody that's like, you know, zero tolerance shit doesn't work, you know? It's just some level of acceptability for the guys that do want to fit in, desperately want to fit in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They have to. They don't want to participate, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. It definitely changes with the ebbs and flow of operation tempo and combat, I think. It feels like it gets more toxic when you're not busy. Because in between all that shit, you've got camaraderie. You guys are out having to trust each other every night. So I talked about this the other day with my kid's baseball team. we just merged two travel baseball teams from two teams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And we had this like separation of parents and kids going like, we're better. They're better. We should play. And finally I was like, God damn it. We're all on the same team. We're all trying our best, you know? And it's, it's that, you know, concept of acceptability. and just stopping with the bullshit so much. Like we're supposed to be focusing on a mission and we do all this bullshit stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The fitting in part and the reputation barge is really, really, really hard and a hard thing to change. But I think that it's happening naturally because you can't deny... how good it works to optimize guys. And they're starting to do it. There's like this program called Virginia Human Performance where they actually can now go do this once a year.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It has a compounding effect that I think that once you sense that you've lost your purpose of what you were, you can feel those a lot more now because there's not some outlet for it at work anymore. And that's when it got bad. So I'd say in the first year or two, the first two years, because I was focused on my new job and what I was doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's a whole collection of modalities and providers and things to sort of set you back on the path of health and optimization, which doesn't include alcohol and cheating on your wife and fucking porn and whatever the fuck else you do. get off all that shit for four weeks, you go back, you're optimized. And then you integrate that. I'm like, that's a good one.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, but I can imagine how hard it was for them to accept that guys are going to go spend four weeks to do this. And then teammates not judge them and go, well, he's going to go ride horses in Montana for fucking five days instead of go to Shaw's for the 25th time. Like, he doesn't know the drills. He can just go to the kill house all day and get, you know, for a week and do those. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I think it's starting to happen where the acceptability part of it is happening. So you're like, you're not shaming the guys that are, drinking or doing those things, but they're being more okay with you not participating to go, hey, we just jumped all day. It's stressful as fuck. You want to release all that stress, but you go out drinking all night.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You're going to feel like shit the next morning and then just compounds over the trip. And then you're like, oh, when I get home, I'll fucking, you know, I'll catch up when I get home. But you never do because you get home, got to be in the kill house all day. You're breaching. Never catches up until you're done with your career and you're
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
testosterone is zero and you're just, addictions have destroyed your body, you know? So I'm happy to see that that's starting to happen. Man, that's great to hear. When did that get implemented? I think it's been pretty recent, like the last few years. I just got into it. It's been eight years. I've always been meaning to go and I've just been on my path of self-discovery. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I finally got in. I'm doing it right now, actually. Oh, really? Yeah. Good for you. My second week, I had to get my food and my workouts for this couple of days while I'm here. Right on, man. It's awesome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Absolutely. They see people they look up to being optimized. They're like, fuck, I got to do that too. Yep. Back to your childhood. Yeah, so my father was in the Air Force, and we started moving around every two to four years. That was awesome, lots of cool different experiences, but then I developed this problem with validation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
One, because my stepfather, doing the best he could, but it's not the same as... It's not quite the same. He's doing the best he could, you know, but he's also a very stoic guy, right? So maybe... Part of the trauma was I resented boys, boys especially. I got two boys. I don't know, I have experience with daughters, so I can't speak to it much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
aside from nurturing for mom, they need validation from dad every day, right? So there's a bucket to fill every day. And it doesn't mean like, oh, I got to be at the baseball games, every single one of them in the bucket. That's not what does it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's not time around where, you know, because if I could be at those things and I could just be doing this and he does something and he looks over to see if I saw it and I miss it, The bucket goes down. Your dad's not really there. But now what's happening is that I'm paying attention, right? And maybe between stuff, I do some work shit or whatever. I make my ice cream posts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
but they do something, and just for that split second, they look over, and you're like, it's just a signal, you know? I saw, you know? And their bucket fills all the way up for that day. It just took that split second. So if I'm consistent with that, I can feel it in them that they're okay week to week, you know? And when I start to
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I was really confused about that, to be honest with you, too. I learned pretty quickly that that job, and it wasn't that job specifically I have anything against. It was just that... I knew I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing. And that's a really shitty feeling. And trying to go, you just feel lost. So what am I supposed to be doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
be unbalanced because of my own addictions, because my habits or whatever comes back during stress, then that's the sign. Time to balance myself back because I just fucking missed this week. And he's acting up now. He's talking back. He's not listening to mom. And you just can see how it works. So the decision to get out of the Navy was right for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it was because of them, which I can get to that after the childhood. But fuck, I'm so... grateful to myself just five six you know eight years ago to one make the decision to get out but then working towards understanding that for the next few years you know i'm so thankful that i decided to do that how was this is interesting because i moved around a lot as a kid too every two to three years
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That's right. So I'd show up, and I got so tired of I'm the new kid. You go into the classroom. I remember all those memories of... You know, the new kids, spitballs come flying your way, you know? Or the teacher goes, welcome, Chris Fetis, whatever. And they're like, ha, ha, ha, make fun of your name, whatever, all the little things kids do. You know what I mean? It's not bullying.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's just kids, you know? But when you do that over and over again, and then you do whatever you got to do to fit in, Mom, can you buy me these clothes? Can I do my hair this way? You know what I mean? Can I do this? Can I do that? You make some friends. And then, boom, you got to go. You cry. You leave your friends you worked so hard to fit in with, get to the next school, new kid again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Same thing. So now I think back, like, dude, how many times did I change and conform myself to go fit into? And it was so different every time it was Japan to South Carolina to South Carolina. And then when you show up, they're going to make fun of what you look like because of where you just came from. They're not used to seeing it. They're unaccustomed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then you've got to change that to be more normal, right? So, you know, in South Carolina, I got made fun of a lot for the Asian shit. Like, you know, I just remember memories of kids like, you know, hoi, hoi, hoi. And it's so funny now, I wish I could go back to some of those people and go, where are you at now? What are you doing, man?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, you know, and... Doing that, then it was, you know, North Carolina. And then it was, we got to California. And then by the time we got to California, Monterey, beautiful place. I loved it there because my grandparents were there. You know, my father found a way to get stationed there as a recruiter and just kept extending it because my mom's just, we were happy there, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He didn't want to do that, but sacrifice. So he was teaching me a lesson about sacrifice without even teaching me anything. He just did it. You know, I was like, I knew he loved being an F-16 mechanic, but he was doing this recruiting job so we could stay there and visit. I was always at my grandparents' house in Pebble Beach, the best memories.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But then I was also in this school with different crowds of people and gangs and different stuff going on. And same thing, trying to fit in with somebody, you know. Now you're a teenager and it gets even harsher, right, trying to fit in. And so, you know, I made some friends. Got one of those friends I still keep in touch with, Filipino guy, good friend of mine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We don't talk too often, but he's off living his life, but I think about him a lot. And yeah, then I sort of started to attach where I'm from to there. So when people say where you're from, I don't have time to explain all that other stuff. I go, I went to high school there. I graduated there. You know, I'm from Monterey, California. And it was my favorite memory, my favorite place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So, you know, my dad used to have tickets for recruits to go watch Giants games in San Francisco, and they never took them up on it, so we were always going to watch games. So that's how I became a Giants fan. Those games were awesome. I loved going and eating popcorn and ice cream and watching baseball games. But I realized later on,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
after my whole career was over, that the original reason 9-11 happened. So my parents moved one more time after that. It was their last station before they retired and they ended up back to North Carolina. So I stayed when they moved. I tried to live off on my own. I was bouncing around people's houses, trying to knock out some community college classes. But really, I was just fucking around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was going to parties. I was going to raves. I was trying to fit in. I had a girlfriend that was really bad, cheating on me all the time. So I was learning that lesson, too, that that's normal in a relationship. and just a pretty toxic lifestyle with no purpose.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so, you know, my grandparents sensed that in me and my grandmother really cried for me one day and was like, you're not good here, you know? And I was getting sick all the time and she was taking care of me. So she said, you should go back home for a couple of years. And I was like, okay, so. Went back to North Carolina for a couple years.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Felt better because I was living at home again, you know? And then 9-11 happened when I was about 19.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was randomly working at a bank as a teller and bouncing around different jobs, watching this thing on TV while I was working. People coming in just distraught, going like, what the hell is happening? That's where I was at. I remember thinking, I don't know why I feel this, but I want to go join the military. Because now I know. There was no way for me to have any more validation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was in school anymore. I was just doing random things. And I was like, man, when we were teenagers, I remember this group of friends. We were always talking about Navy SEALs. I didn't know what it was. Never saw Navy SEALs, the movie, never read a book. I just went, I remember we talked about that one time. So I'm going to go to the office. So I ended up...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
moving back to california first just to go explore you know just to move out again you know same thing i was living with some friends um and i started training just running and doing push-ups and Then I started to read what I needed to do to get in. That book Warrior Elite came out, and that's the one thing I read. And so I just went for it. I went to the office. I said, hey, I want to be a SEAL.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They laughed at me. They're like, you need to pick a job too. I was like, cool, whatever, that one. They're like, you sure? That's what you're going to be doing. And, dude, every selection so far has been that. You sure? You're not going to make it. You want to start a business? It's going to be hard. I don't think you know what you're getting into. And it just happens over and over again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I actually enjoy it now. So, hey, I'm going to have an actual ice cream brand in store someday. I love those reactions. So I get this seal contract, I go to Buzz, get through. Now I'm in the seal teams. And then realized later after my career, holy shit, I didn't go to serve my country. It developed into that for sure. Now, for sure, you know, I served my country. I served the guys next to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Service of others is part of my purpose. But I realized that the truth was I did that for validation. I wanted to go be part of something that I knew was like the most, the highest level of validation if you can get through. And it was like, there was always this concept, like this conceptual dream to go, if I make it, I made it. Now I'm in this world of validation. I'm accepted for good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I don't have to keep doing it over and over again. Well, that's not true. You do have to keep doing it. Keep seeking. Yeah, but it worked. I found my place in the SEAL teams. I kind of figured out what I was good at. I'm grateful that, and I don't mean this in any kind of arrogance or ego way, but I was never the best guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But I was able to make it through every hard course, every selection, SEAL Team 6 selection, all that stuff on the first try. Damn. So I'm proud of that. And now I know I originally did it, but now I can also appreciate all of my experiences and even the bad ones. I'm not coping with them anymore and trying to forget them. I actually can remember more about them now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
after having found a way to just clear all that bullshit, you know, off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think it was, I don't really remember what age, but I just, I think it was like six or seven. Just having that conversation with my mom and her sort of breaking it to us. Like, this is not your real father, right? And this is not, you know, my younger sister was born then. She's your half-sister. And having to explain that truth must have been really hard for her. But...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, if you ever talk to your kids when they're younger too, they kind of like, it's hard to go too in-depth because they just kind of listen and go, yeah, yeah, you know? It's hard to go, how do you really feel about it though? You know, like, I don't know, you know, can I go play? And it was kind of like that, I think.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So it develops over time into more of an understanding of what was going on, you know? And knowing now that, My mom was just trying her best. She was just doing her best. So any resentments I had afterwards, like, oh, I got accepted into some colleges. I couldn't go. We didn't have the money. You know, the validation thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Oh, my dad wasn't my real dad, but I didn't get enough validation from a father that I needed. All those resentments went away. once I realized myself again and that they were just doing the best they could and they were good parents.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They use that. I think that the best thing I can say is just, it's hard, but if you even sense that your parents are doing the right thing, so like you want to go do this thing, you want to go to this party and your dad's like, no, there's danger there. And he tries to stop you to get mad. You know, if you, I want, I wish that they could just kind of sit down and go, are my parents good people?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
if they're good people, that's all it takes. Now it's like, you're going to go through hardships. You're going to fight, you're going to battle, but at least know that they're just doing their best with what they have. Right. Because there's always, even if healthy families, you know, Oh, you know, my sister was always the favorite of the family. She could do no wrong, you know? And, and,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
just realizing that like, that might not be true. It's just, you have a defense mechanism and it might be true. You know, there's some parents that seem healthy and some families that seem healthy and even some in my own family that I've recognized, my in-laws family and my families, that you could still, you could be seemingly a good father and go, hey, if I am making my two sons
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
or either one of them and not the other, especially, compete or they have to prove something, they have to earn my love, that's going to turn into something, right? Especially if you're not... telling them that they have it. I'm trying my best to tell mine what I've realized is like, we're struggling with baseball things. Hey, be aggressive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then I have my other son who's overly aggressive and I'm like, relax a little. And it's awesome. They're so good, both of them. But I got to tell them in between, because I get amped up. I'm like, God, don't, you know, it's like, I can't tell them like, don't be a pussy. But I'm like, here's how you're aggressive. You can use dark thoughts sometimes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You can pretend, you know, and I'm like, I just, we've gotten to that where I'm like, how do I get him to be aggressive? Like pretend like the dog, he's got a French bulldog that sleeps on him. Pretend somebody is going to like take him. And the only way to save him is for you to like throw the pitch as hard as you can, just go for it and not care. And now he is, he's like throwing faster.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Now let that go, because those are dark thoughts, but that's what you're supposed to use that part of your ego for, for good, right? To help, to protect, you know? But being careful to go as often as possible, no matter what we do, My love for you is infinite, and it's already there. You already get that just from being born. You're born into it. It's like nepotism for love.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Not money you're born into. Not yet. But the love is just there. I love you. It's infinite. You don't have to ever earn that shit. You're everything I need you to be, whether you become a janitor or a Major League Baseball player. It's there. I feel like that's working a little bit. Good. Good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So that would be my advice to those kids is like, you know, and if you don't feel that that's true from your parents, maybe don't be afraid to ask them, hey, dad, do you love me already, you know? Or do I got to do this shit? Do I got to become a lawyer now? and a doctor like my brother or like, do I got to become an athlete, a tennis player, whatever to get that love, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
My dad, when I apologized and I went through this, you know, this was after my, my first Ibogaine experience that just worked for me to, to open up my heart, to go look at all this stuff. Right. Meditation now works for me. Um, There's other ways. Therapy works for people, you know, different things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But when I went and had that conversation with him, it was the first time he ever cried really hard. First time he ever cried that I remember, you know, and it was over the phone. So I couldn't even tell he was crying, but I could hear in his voice, like he said, you know, I appreciate that, son. And it was in his voice. So I know it was the right thing to do to make him understand that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
How could he have reacted? I think if I asked him as a kid, he would have answered me and said, I think he would have said yes. He would have said, I'm talking about my stepfather father.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Oh, when I threw it in his face, I think that it was super anger. It was very, those were bad fights, you know, like trying his best not to get physical with me. really anger you know and understandably because he was trying his best and here I am entitled to it going like if he wasn't there who knows what the fuck would happen to me you know where I'd be yeah
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Um, they say addictive personalities, but I don't think there's addictive personalities. I think it's based on your environment and what, what you, the amount or like the, the level of bullshit you have to cope with so that it becomes your default. Um, it becomes your default in the future for when you have problems or stress and you go to an addiction.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That morphing back into yourself, I think what I've learned is that the consequences of doing that are going to make people mad and angry. Because you now, it's almost seen as a false betrayal in my opinion. Like you're betraying the code. Mm-hmm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Going to Bud's. Yep, I went to the recruiter. You know, those guys, I don't know if they ever take anybody seriously, but for sure it was... rough going through there, you know, hey, trying to convince me otherwise. But so I took a, you know, back then it was like you, if you make it through Bud's, you get $2,000. So, you know, and I was broke.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Then I would have had $4,000 in my bank account because I did. Because after I finished, there was a guy who got orders to the East Coast that really wanted to be with his brother on the West Coast, and he traded me. And I was like, is it worth $2,000? And he was like, yeah. And yeah, we swapped orders. Nice. Yeah. So yeah, I went to boot camp in Virginia Beach.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So the other side of the base from Dev Group. And did some training. We were waking up early in the morning, doing some of that training, you know, with the guys that were going to go to the program. Then I get over to Bud's, I check in, and it's just game time from there. So my mental state really was just, I knew I wasn't going to quit anything because I needed that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I needed that acceptance and that validation so bad that I would, you know, die for it, right? So that's strong.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
from my imagination of just any somebody important your ego yeah absolutely 100 ego yeah absolutely okay yeah and you know maybe some of my authentic self that i just didn't understand yet then too because i was lacking that right i didn't understand that at the time i just knew for some reason i know i'm not going to quit i don't know how i know i just know
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I didn't read into what was coming up each day. I didn't know. I wanted to, I prefer just minimizing the anxiety about some hard thing I have to do even now today, you know, and just do as much preparation as I can for it. Right. But not
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
anticipated so much like man that 50 meter underwater swims coming up in five weeks now i got five weeks of stress and anxiety to think about right i know it's some time coming so i'm just gonna just gonna practice it when we're supposed to be right so that's kind of how i operated in buds and it did me pretty pretty well you know like all those hard things they're scary you know standing with your back to the pool
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I've moved past this, so I don't dwell on it too much anymore, but it used to bother me a lot because I really think that that dark, dark side of this brotherhood, which is a beautiful thing, but also has this, is connected to the veteran suicide problem. Because I... Maybe we'll get into this, but I remember the thoughts, the very specific thoughts that I was having in my moment, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
hearing guys going, getting yelled at to get in, get in, do that underwater flip and just start cruising across, hoping you get, you know, you get to the, back to the side. The 50 meter? Yeah, that was one of the scarier ones, right? Did you know any of the evolutions that, I mean, before you went in?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, because as we started to go through our in-docs and, you know, preparing for first phase, guys are talking, so. What were you worried about?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I read that, but I wasn't going back to it each day. Gotcha. I just didn't have anything. So... Yeah, I just remember going through it. I had to stay in the barracks for the first two or three weeks before first phase actually started. And they move you into the main side to where the Budd students live. And it was all surrounded by the guys who quit. So they're all going out every night.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They're all talking about it. And they're playing that whole game of like, hey, welcome to the barracks, new guy. And you're like, but these guys all quit. You know, what are they making me scared and nervous about this? The shit they quit, they quit for. So that actually fueled me a little bit. It's like, that's how I knew I was coming, you know? And I was like, well, I'm just not going to quit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So, um, yeah, then we got moved over. I got into my class. Um, Yeah, honestly, I remember it was a good memory up until third phase. In third phase, I struggled because I had this little fuck-up, and it almost caused me to fail out. What was it? You know when you're doing the push-ups or the pull-ups to go into the chow hall to eat? You got to do 50 push-ups.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You got to do a bunch of pull-ups with weight and those rubber magazines. Well, one of the days, I was the last dude, and... To be honest with you, so I didn't have any magazines in the pouches. So I was light. Nice. So I go, man, do I go stop somebody? And I don't want to, honestly, I didn't want to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I didn't want to go feel the embarrassment and get yelled at for breaking away to go, hey guys, because I was the last day. Everybody ran inside. Now it's just three instructors waiting for me to do my damn strict pull-ups. And I didn't want in that moment to go, hey, guys, I need some magazines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then them all break out to what the fuck and just send me to the ocean and all the shit you're going to have to do for anything. So I just went, fuck, I'm just going to get up there and do them and hope they don't, you know? And so I went up and instructor, I don't know exactly who he was, is like, Fetis, stop. And I'm like, stop hanging, fuck. How many magazines you got in your pouch?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then in that moment, I made the wrong decision. Instead of saying, I have none, I was like, I got six. And he was like, get off the bars. And I'm like, fuck. Show me. I show him they're not there. And he's like, you motherfucker, you're fucked. And it turned into a nightmare for a couple of weeks while I was the dude. Oh, man. Carrying the giant trident and the huge helmet thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And sleeping on the beach. And you're already smoked. And so I started to fuck up other things because I was smoked. There was another guy that was with me, but he ended up getting dropped. He just, cause he just, he wasn't going to quit, but he just could not perform close to good enough. So they eventually like, yeah, we just got to let him go. Stop fucking with him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I had all that fear, like, fuck, I'm going to be, I'm there now, you know? Until every day, the extra shit I had to do, I was like, I just remember how...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
low energy like dude i had nothing you know in some of those days and so we had big things to do on some of those days that i that i had that going on like uh this monster mash kind of thing around the island remember where you like do the oak horse rep around the island go to a shooting range shoot i was like so smoked i didn't remember the brief i was probably doing this during a brief
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And they were like, hey, when you get to the range, pick a number. That's the lane you shoot in. So when I got there, I was like, fuck, I don't know which lane I'm supposed to shoot in. So I go, okay, God, please let me pick the right one. I just lay down and start shooting. It ends up being somebody else's lane. So he had double shots on his target. So we get through the whole thing. I finish it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I get a decent time for how smoked I was, and then we go back through the brief, and they were going through the shots, and now we're sitting in class. And they're like, hey, something weird happened. And I'm like, I know it's me. Oh, man. And they're like, Meckling, why did you shoot six shots on your thing instead of three? And I was like, what? I didn't. And I'm like, that was me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And going... it's a lot simpler than I think that we really think. The actual specific thoughts that are going through our head at that moment. And whatever the buildup was to get to that moment, it's different for everybody. We have different addictions. We have different coping mechanisms for what we feel. But what I know is that for most of us, there's no betrayal going on. Mm-hmm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And they're like, what the? can't get it together, dude, you know? And I'm like, dude, I'm just not going to make it, you know? So I just, I tried my best to keep plugging away.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I think what happened was they finally let me out of that or, you know, to rest up with the other guys a little bit and kind of give me the talk like, hey, you need to show us something this next week because, you know, we're keeping you because we talked to everybody and And there was only like 13 guys from my original Hell Week finishing. They were in that class still. And we had like 45 dudes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They all rolled into our class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So they kind of took over our class, and there were some really good dudes, like really high-performing dudes, right? So I used to get first on the O course all the time, and I went to third, you know? And things like that. But they talked to, I think, specifically the 13 guys, said, hey, what do you guys think about this guy? And they were all my bros.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And we all went through Hell Week together, you know, and they looked out for me. Nice. So they came through, and they're like, you got to keep this guy. So they kept me, and then I finished. Damn. It was hard. It was a rough time. How did it feel when you graduated? I felt pretty guilty. I didn't know if I belonged there. I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But one of the instructors, who I honestly didn't think liked me very much anyways, was like, hey, I just want to say this, everybody that finished this shit deserves to be here. And so that kind of cleared it for me, you know, because I had some guys for sure in that class that were like, hey, this fucking guy doesn't deserve to be here, you know, that rolled in or whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But all 13 of those guys that I originally started with didn't think that, so that's all I needed, you know. That's cool, man. We started calling ourselves the Peer Bloods after that. Nice. So we still have that. The guy I ended up working my contracting job for was one of those 13 guys that started his business after his enlistments as a SEAL.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And we were at Team 10 together, so I ended up working for him as a contractor. Nice. He's still running that and very successful. Where did you head to after that? What team? I went to Team 10 after switching orders and getting my couple of grand. And... I don't know why I wanted to be on the East Coast. I just did. I was just over bouncing around California.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
most of us who are doing our lives especially the guys that figure this out and turn and make a decision the right path right and don't don't give up um are doing it respectfully not disrespectfully the programming we get in the code is that once you're done living your life by that code
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I had some inkling that Debrut was a thing. I didn't know much about it. But selection was in my mind. And I was like, if this selection is going to be anything harder than Bud's, I want to make it as... I just struggled through this fucking third phase. I want to make it as... comfortable as possible and not have to be living in a barracks and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I was like, maybe I'll get a house I can afford soon. You were thinking that right out of Bud's? Yeah, I knew I wanted a family. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, and I didn't know when or it wasn't like a very specific thing. It was just like, I know I want to have a family for sure, you know. And so it just seemed like the East Coast environment was better suited for that. So I was just thinking in the future. Gotcha. And that worked out. It was the right decision for sure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So, you know, with all the stuff that happened in between, it still worked out, you know. We're really happy. We've got everything we need to be happy. I've got my business there now. Yeah. You know, so it was the right decision. And then it actually, it did make selection for Depp Group great, you know. It was a couple minutes, well, 30 minutes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I had to commute across town, but I was there, and I saw how hard it was for those guys from the West Coast to, you know, be living in barracks just, you know, for that time. It's so hard going through that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I got to Team 10 in the end of 2005, and then we started that. I had a whole full workup. There was a lot of challenges there. So you showed up pretty much right after Red Wings. Correct. Those guys were on their way back from that. When I was at the team doing new guy stuff, waiting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And yeah, and my first platoon and my first deployment was one of the most intense and profound deployments I ever had with a really great team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
know two platoons of guys and what i believe to be the best seal leader and operator that i ever was anywhere around some of the things that he was and did specifically for me too um he might have saved my career i got in trouble right off the bat doing too much trying to get validation by acting up, you know? And he must have seen something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The way he described it to me was like, hey, I'm pulling you out of this jail cell, right? And you owe the man, but there's something you got that that's what I want you to do and not this shit. What did you do? One of the first trips we went on was diving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
First, we had a jump trip in Destin, Florida, and I got arrested right off the bat in a bar fight for just nothing except for guys looking at us from across the bar. That night, that football player from the Cowboys, Jason Winton, it was his birthday, and he was celebrating with people that same night. And so we were drinking with them and having fun.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then it ended up in this bar fight thing where one of my buddies looked out for me. I was going to get sucker punched. He ended up going to jail. So now, and he was a new guy, all the new guys are now in trouble right on the first trip because of me. So. platoon chief, he's the guy I'm talking about, best SEAL I've ever known.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you can't, I couldn't conceive that any SEAL or guys in a unit could then go out in the world and live their life by any other code but that. And then we sort of connect it to integrity or like whatever the words might be, but That code, it has to be that way for it to work, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was like, you guys are now in the spotlight, so you better do the training and not even a single, you guys do anything else, you're fucked, right? So we were like, okay. And I did the wrong thing. They asked me like, hey, how'd this happen? I didn't take the blame for it. I didn't say, hey, it all started because of my fault.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It was like, oh, hey, we got into a bar fight and then, you know, my buddy came across and knock this guy out that was going to sucker punch me. So it just, it wasn't, it was not the right level of accountability. It wasn't, it wasn't enough accountability. It wasn't the right accountability for that right off the bat. So I had problems already. So we go to the next place, Key West. We're diving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm out at the bar with another new guy, um, That guy ended up quitting after this because the hazing and the shit we had to deal with just got so bad. He quit? Yeah, he turned into a bird. Holy shit, I don't think I've ever even heard of that. And then I went through Captain's Mask by myself, you know, first thing, you know, as a new guy. And so we're there in a bar fight.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm hanging out with him. We're getting a fight about some girls. And we decide to run and try to get to the water and swim around to the barracks. And, dude, cops were chasing us around Key West for like over an hour. Jumping fences and, you know, trying to block us on streets. And it was like a full-blown chase and locking down of Key West, Florida. So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
One cop, like, one of those fences that sticks up with the sharp wire, like, jabbed it into his leg trying to catch me flying over a fence. Eventually, we got rolled up, and I'm in jail. So it was terrible. So I'm sitting there like, oh, my God, I'm done. This is done. I just did too much. I was just, like, acting out too much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Glad I changed that, especially for selection for team six, which was a lot smoother. So I wish that would change to meditate, optimize your performance, breathe, you know what I mean? Optimize, you know, be the best operator you can possibly be. Rahab. The platoon chief comes in, he's like, hey, that's what I was talking about. Hey, I'm gonna get you out of here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We know these guys, but you're gonna have a hard workup. We got a long workup still. We still got- Is this in jail? Yeah, he's talking to me in jail. While you're in the cell?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Incredible. Yeah, he comes into my cell and he has this talk with me, come to Jesus. And he's like, anybody else would be losing their bird right now, right? This is not, this is unheard of to get in trouble like this this fast. He's like, but we know the police chief and they've had this. And he's like, this is the worst one they've had for a while.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And some grown ass men for the next foreseen future and other teams too are not going to be able to go out after work. And they're like, they're not going to be happy with you because they're going to know why you're the guy who caused that. So for what I understand, like a year, guys couldn't go out in Key West after work. So needless to say, my platoon hated me. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So it was the opposite effect. What that happened for me, though, was that I kicked in. I had to go to fucking Captus Mass. It was terrible. It was embarrassing. The other guy quit, turned in his bird. And I'm like, all right, new guy, you better show us something this next 13 months. So we go to Land Warfare, we start going on trips. I'm getting rolled up in the middle of the night, taped up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But it's like a little bubble of a reality in this whole world of infinite reality and the paths you can go on and the things you can do. And that little bubble of reality is also part of the whole overarching story. So how do you tell if you want to? And then there's the judgment of that in the first place. Well, why does he have to tell? I know why.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know, and having to figure my way out of it, get back, try to sleep at all, usually not, and then going to do work all day, right? But what that did for me was it kicked me into gear, kicked me into something like, dude, I got to perform. I got to do twice as much as anybody else. And so I did. I started waking up early. I just wouldn't go to sleep, getting stuff ready,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
helping everybody in every department out with anything I could, doing the training, just fucking everything I could think of, you know? And, you know, that 13 months went by. Over time, guys started to trust me again. I would go out with them and stuff, but I wasn't messing around, you know. They started to accept me back into the circle. How long did that take? It took 13 months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It took 13 months. Yeah, just all the trips you go on through workups. That's a long fucking time for a team to be hating your guts. Yeah. Yeah, it was a long time to be trying my best to do twice as much effort, you know. than other guys, but that's not to say that I outperformed anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We had some really good dudes, like other new guys I was with or just amazing guys, still best friends with a couple of them. Um, so we go on deployment and that's where I really make up for it. What do you think that they saw in you? I don't know. Um, my wife's told me this before. I have a way of connecting with people. Sometimes I don't even realize it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And maybe those guys felt how important, uh, they were to me, or at least their validation. Well, for me, it was the validation I needed from them. Right. And maybe they felt something. I don't know. You never asked them. No, I don't think I ever, I never asked them. Um, We had never asked him. Maybe something I need to go do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But, you know, we went on deployment and I really, I was a JTAC and we had a lot of really hairy operations. A lot of couple of times I went, you know, we Winchestered an AC-130 and, you know, lots of different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Joint Terminal Air Control. So you're essentially, we don't have Air Force guys and CCTs, combat controllers in the teams, right? So we are the JTACs organically. So on missions, we control the aircraft, right? To include the surveillance, like everything they can see with their pods. And then you got to know...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
all of the weapons you got in every stack and how to order those guys in an efficient way so that when something goes south you can get um you know you can get guns down on bad guys as quickly as possible so that we can either get out of there or or continue the mission so That became my specialty during that time. I ended up going to sniper school after that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But for that deployment, you know, I was like a roof team guy, like our version of a recce team for the first quarter of the deployment. And then got switched on to be the JTAC. And I just, I feel like I had this talent for it that they trusted because I stayed that. And I got a lot of experience doing it. Um, and I, and I enjoyed it, you know, might've been like one of those communication things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I've done a lot of work to figure out why I need to do anything. And not enough time to explain to every single person still within that code on why. And it might be a waste of time because they won't understand. Right? Some of them might, but... That's what it is in my opinion. And I think about the solutions towards that, and it's really, solutions are more conceptual to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like I enjoy communication now. Um, so I got a bronze star for, um, a couple, like I, It was for really the collective operating as a JTAC that I got that for, my first Bronze Star. So the guys used to make fun of me. The gun case. that I had been issued, whoever had it before me in the teams was named Billy. So it was on there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And, you know, you don't get to know a new guy's name so quickly, so everybody assumed that that was my name for a while. And there's still some guys out there that still just know me as Bronstar Billy. So it was kind of a joke that actually Nick Cech started.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
who ended up, you know, he was on that deployment often the navigator in our Humvee in the front seat while I was the JTAC in the back seat. And then fast forward in the future, we ended up at Denver together in different teams. But during that time, He's the guy who nicknamed me that. So we came back from that deployment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I came back as Bronze Star Billy, and I kind of recovered my reputation and was validated for the indefinite future. And it was really one of the best feelings I ever had in the teams. Nice. And some really hard things happened on that deployment, too. We lost Jason Lewis. In an IED, I was the JTAC for that. I performed the medevac.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That actually ties into a story that I meant to talk about with this helo pilot. Dude, just one of the most incredible heroes of anything I've experienced in my operating career. that night. You didn't tell us where you deployed to. Yeah, so this was Baghdad and all around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we were almost exclusively operating in Sadr City, really hairy nightly operations every night, sometimes six nights a week. And then occasionally we'd go out to other areas like Baqaba or Alamara for operations. But we were pretty focused on that during that deployment. What kind of operations? Counter-terrorist operations, just going out after... DAs, sniper work? All DAs, all DAs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So my first appointment was just purely DAs every night. We had the luxury of... Being able to utilize the 160th Hilo Squadron with some of the dead group guys that were down the street for Task Force 17, they kind of opened it up to the teams because there was just so many bad guys in the networks and so much to do. I think that they kind of trusted...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
the teams, the East Coast teams at that time to conduct DAs, you know, using their assets and stuff for that deployment. So it was like a, it was a special deployment for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Kinetic being a JTAC or kinetic shooting? Just any kinetic. Whichever came first. Yeah, so the very first night was kinetic. We went out on our first op after turning over. And at that point, I was in the back of a Humvee. I'm an assaulter. And we go out for a guy. And... I end up switching into the driver's seat after the op.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So the op was pretty quiet, but there's always shooting on the way in and the way out, just both for the bad guys to sort of recce where we're at. So they would, you know, shoot up in the air just to kind of like identify where we're at in the town, right, to each other. So that was an experience like, oh, shoot, you know, they're not shooting at us, but they are...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's just finding some way, which is happening actually, so I'm very grateful, where no change happens until a leader can validate that the change is acceptable, right? So some guy, some captain, whatever, until they decide,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know they're shooting and it's the first time sort of hearing it so yeah and that that target was pretty quiet but on the way out we for sure caught some shots off of roof towards the humvees and stuff and we're like oh shit you know and then by the third night You know, on our way in, we're driving really fast. And on those infills, you know, there's a couple IEDs going off that just miss.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I'm like, oh, shit. So now every time we're driving, I'm looking at trash. I'm looking at everything. I'm like, man, any of this shit can explode at any time. You're just kind of sitting in there going like, let's fucking get there. Hopefully we don't blow up. And it's just a really strange feeling as a new guy on my first, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, when we land that plane to get on deployment, you come off that airplane, that air is just so pungent filled with just smoke and whatever the smells are and the humidity of it, the heat of it. And you're like, wow, I'm in a whole different world right now, you know? And so that's, that only took two, three missions to just kind of get used to, to that, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
kind of a a little bit of a shock you know to go all right we're in it you know um because when you're going through training and all you're just visualizing it you're just imagining it and then you get there and you're in it and you're like wow okay i'm in it just there's nothing else to do just try to focus on what you're doing you know so it was only a matter of time before we
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
got hit by an id i think collectively we had a little bit of an ego as a team like oh hey these keep missing they can't get us a little bit of arrogance going on you know and that got shut down real quick when we uh caught a flat tire on the way back uh one night and you know instead of you can go back and forth with the men in the arena stuff and armchair quarterbacking but we
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Instead of pulling off, holding security and trying to fix that thing, we just rolled with it, but we were so slow. We're rolling so slow, so the vehicle in front of me made a turn, right turn onto one of the main streets to get back to, you know, the little sort of highway going back, you know, out of Sauter City.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And an EFP blew up, an explosively formed penetrator, copper plate, which they had started using recently. It sort of blasts this shape charge towards you so it's not like a blast from underneath like a traditional IED, but it forms these...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
the copper breaks up and it's so hot, they turn into little plasma bullets and it just melts through everything like Swiss cheese, you know, even vehicle armor and people. So they caught that, um, Four guys in the back of the Humvee got killed, including Jason Lewis, was the SEAL. Ended up naming Camp Lewis after him. Combat cameraman and, sorry, three guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Combat cameraman and a TSE guy, technical surveillance guy. And then one Terp was back there, but he survived everything. So the turret gunner, his, his gun got completely sheared off the barrel and a chunk of the barrel, um, I think went essentially either a piece of plasma or that chunk went through Jason Lewis's chest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
hey, I got to do my fit reps, I got to become an admiral someday, and go, this is a big problem, this veteran suicide thing, that for sure, this code and this place is part of that story, of what gets to that. So what can we do that's not going to, is so afraid of doing anything because they're so afraid that it's going to sap bandwidth from the mission, right, or the operator, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And so one of my first experiences doing this medevac was assessing what was going on. And that was, that was hard seeing those guys. um, Bobby, the combat cameraman, was still alive, essentially, but he was bent over because his face was just splayed open with blood coming out of him trying to breathe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So when we eventually got the medevac, he didn't make it on the 20- or 25-minute ride back to the medics on our medevac. So those were the—he was the—him and those guys were the first to go on the first load. Because the driver of that vehicle got a piece of that plasma lodged into his leg, like right onto a nerve.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I think that it cauterized the nerve, so his leg actually survived for a while after that. But he— Badass just continued to drive. He didn't swap out. He said, fuck it, I'm driving, right? So we get off the X. I'm dropping, you know, 40 mic mics and 105s on bad guys shooting at us from rooftops on our way out. And I start working a medevac. We've got two Apaches overhead.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
we get to this little Marine outpost in the middle of solder city. They just like, dude, I can't even imagine their experience daily, just getting rockets and just all kinds of shit at them. And they're just hunkered down holding this, manning this post. Right. And we get inside of that and, uh, My platoon chief's calling out what's going on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Got Nick Chek up in my vehicle navigating us, you know, to get there with the, you know, the downed vehicle sort of hobbling, right? And we get in there. Everybody gets out. We get the guys laid out. I'm getting a medevac ready. It lands, gets those guys, and I'm looking. I see, you know, I can see Jason Lewis there, and I can see the dirt on the other side of his chest, right? Just this big hole.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Um... And I'm just trying my best to get a nine line going. Like, hey, we've got two that are done and one guy still alive, critical, right? So he's the priority. And the second bird gets the other two guys. Now, the incredible thing is we still got one guy fucked up with that thing lodged in his leg. And I'm like, we're so nervous. Like, if it moves... And he bleeds out of the artery, you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So trying to keep him stable. And then we got to wait for the birds, right? And we're taking fire. We're shooting. We got fucking RPGs people are seeing. And so there's a fight going on while we're doing this medevac. So these two Apaches come over. And I just remember thinking, fuck, I don't know if this is doable or anything. But I start calling them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Hey, guys, we got one guy who needs to get out of here before this thing starts. you might save his leg and his life, right? Can you guys, and I just remember my platoon chief was like super into helicopters. So he always said like, hey, study them. You know, they might have capabilities you don't think of often. So I said, hey, what are the chances you guys can
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
get the co-pilot out on the wing to clip in and get him inside in the seat and medevac him to Biop right now. And they're like- Yeah, in Apache. And they're like, oh shit, hey, we could do that. So we're like, all right, cool. We're going to try to call out shit if we see anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, like one of y'all, one of you guys, you know, do a tight circle so you can fucking put guns on anybody while the other one's landing, right? And we got an AC-132. and let's do this so start getting it ready and they they go hey we need a second to go call this and get get you know an approval so he's like okay cool i'm waiting it goes off A few seconds later, he comes back on the horn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But I think that the hate stuff actually uses more manpower and bandwidth than the solution, which would just be, in my mind, some... We figure out some really hard problems at that place. That's a damn good point. I've not thought of that, the bandwidth thing. Yeah, we figure out scheduling and things like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He's like, they're saying we can't. They're saying we can't do it. And I'm like, fuck. Okay. Okay. So a few more seconds goes by. He comes back on the horn, calls me. Hey, fuck it. We're going to do it. And I was like, okay. All right, let's do it. So we do it. The first attempt goes bad because somebody calls out an RPG, so they come down, RPG, and they peel off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm like, fuck, all right, it was a false alarm. Somebody thought there was an RPG because there had been some flying around. So cool, come back around. They come back around. They get down. They do it. They get him in there, and they fly him back. Holy shit. And they save his leg and his life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Do you have any pictures of this video? No, and actually, you probably should go back and look. I don't even know if there's a step there, like a little bird or anything. I think he just sat on the fucking wing. Whoa. Yeah, and so I wish I kept in touch with these guys. I didn't, if they're out there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But what happened was he got reprimanded after that for disobeying the order, right, and subordination. So now we're like, hey, they call us. We go through the rest of the next couple nights because the next night we got to stay there and we got to get all these trucks back. So we leave. We're going to leave the next day. Snipers are making sure our route is clear.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we're doing watches, making sure nobody's putting down IEDs. There was actually a couple guys. I can't remember if they got shot or not. We're engaged, but we get back safe. You know, you can imagine during watch, we're all down there. We just lost all these guys. It was one of the more difficult moments.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Looking at each other's faces, trying to figure out what we're supposed to be doing, how we're supposed to be feeling, and really just, like, sitting there, you know, waiting. So snipers are doing overwatch. Gets quiet. We get out of there, and the next night we get home. go into the talk and find out these guys are getting reprimanded. So we're like, God damn it, dude, that sucks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, I think some of our leadership probably did some work on that. I'm not sure. But what ended up happening was somebody on their end of their chain of command said, what the fuck? These guys are heroes, right? And these big awards, you got a silver star for it. Nice. So in these big awards, you end up getting a silver star from what I understand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
These big awards, like, those are the moments that those happen in. But if it goes wrong, then it's like, well, you fucked up, you know? But it takes certain people to make that decision in those moments. And that's where those things happen, I think. So I believe you end up getting a silver star.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Very hard. Very hard. You know, I got this huge tattoo on my back for it. It ended up becoming like the emblem, sort of the symbol of our platoon, of our troop. And a couple of some of the other guys, one of the platoon commanders, even guys on the next rotation after that deployment, You know, getting that in his memory. And so that symbol's still there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Everyone knows what year and what operation it came from and who it was for. So there was some legacy there on that. And I'm happy about that. But it was tough for a few years. It still is tough for a couple of the guys that I know were a lot closer to him than I was as a new guy. I was too busy focusing on...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
scheduling in some things or just even infusing some level of acceptability for what guys are going to do when they're done, right? And maybe even some kind of rule set besides just it being this free-floating sort of non-acceptance thing, like that if you do or say anything that anybody knows about, like what are... we supposed to do, go to some ranch and live?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
getting myself out of trouble to, to sort of, um, get close to, to guys, you know, I was just, um, so, you know, I didn't have the, uh, as deep of a connection with him as some of the guys did, um, still affected me, especially seeing him, seeing him there like that. And, uh, you know, he was a mentor. He was a great guy at all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He was one of the guys that was really great with all the new guys, um, And his kids are grown now. I see them around, you know. Really? Yeah. I see his wife around. I know his wife. Do you interact with them?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Not the kids as much, but for sure his wife. I see her, you know, I see her around. I'm still in that community there with my business and everything. So, yeah. Yeah. That was the first deployment. Jeez. That's heavy. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, like a couple nights. They gave us a night off. Hey, you guys need to take a night off. Of course, we're all doing heavy drinking, you know, shenanigans around the camp. One of the new guys I'm friends with still Thought it would be a good idea to do these baked bean mortars on the officers' doors. Because they thought we could get away with it in that moment, and we did.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So they set up these little poles, and we had these fucking endless baked beans. I don't know why they kept coming, but, like, dude, we couldn't eat enough baked beans. And turn them and sort of get them on the duct tape into the poles and then get, you know, from the campfire, like a little torch...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
and just create pressure behind the can to the point that they exploded and then blasted onto the little hooch doors of the head shed. What the fuck? Yeah, so the next day, all right, guys, you're not going to get away with this shit anymore. We had to spray those doors off, but there was just baked beans blasted onto everybody's fucking doors. Let them get it out. Wow, nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, so I think the next night after the baked beans, we were out again, you know. Damn.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, the last mission on that deployment, I was doing a turnover with some Team 2 guys. One guy ended up being in—their JTAC ended up being in Silver and my team at Denver with me. And it was a hairy night. We were just walking our way into Target, and there was this tree line, this big, thick tree line. It was supposed to be sort of an easier target, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Hey, easier target, it's going to be pretty easy. Of course, it wasn't. So we go, and they had a sniper nest. somewhere around those trees. And we're just walking. We can't see anything. I'm talking, you know, I can't see anything in the trees. Hey, check those trees out, you know, because we got to go through those trees to get to the target right on the other side where the town was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we're out in the open. And all of a sudden, a crack, right? A crack. And we're like, what was that? Everyone kind of takes a knee. And someone comes on the radio and is like, hey, I don't remember his call sign. We're like, Ben just got shot in the chest. But actually, I think it wasn't the first shot. There was a couple shots and then like a pause and then another shot.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And that's when it came over because we had all gotten down after the first couple. So he had gotten down and wherever it was coming from, we're facing it. His plates are here and a shot comes in and goes like at this angle over top of the plates as he's laying down and goes out the back. So he's shot in the chest. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
One of my best friends now, I was the best man at his wedding, was the guy next to him. He was a corpsman, and he starts reporting immediately, like, fuck, we got to get a medevac now. So we start, and then we just start getting lit up from the trees from all over, like multiple spots. And it's just like, shh.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Dude, and so now we're on the ground, like my head's sideways, because I can just, you know, when the rounds are going off, you can hear gunfire, but with some experience, you know if they're close to you or not and whether you need to get down or not. And they're snapping over our heads. You can hear that snap, and so you know they're hitting, right? Now they're hitting the ground.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You're like, fuck, now it's really hairy. It's hitting the ground all around everybody between our steps, and so we're on the ground. And they're like, get some fires down. So I'm like, fucking pop that thing up. And I'm like, hey, we're already ready. I'm already preset on those because I just felt weird about that tree line.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And they're like, I'm like, hey, the fastest way to do this is you see where we're at with the strobes? Can you confirm that? Yes. All right. Now I got a laser. Hey, they're coming from all over there. They're like, yeah, we're already on it. We're ready to shoot. We're ready to shoot. I'm like, all right, just...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, the quiet professional thing is what they attach it to, but you're a quiet professional there. You have to be, right? When I'm now in my life, I'm not that, doing that anymore. I have other things to do, you know? And it's not a disrespect thing. It's just, it doesn't apply anymore, right? Respectfully, not, I promise you, no guy you talk to, their intention is to go,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
confirm you confirm the bad guys by sparkling them right now so that's where they flash that IR light and like alright you're on the right spot clear hot and they just the AC-130 just starts dropping just smoking these guys And we're like, all right, as soon as they start landing, we're bounding back. So now the teams start bounding their guys back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then the same time I got medevac helos coming in from the other direction I'm talking to. And that corpsman is now running off to the side of the firefight where we're all sort of bounding back, right, in front of the treeline.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
just directly back so i'm going i'm feeding off of my he actually was the rxo at the time great awesome guy and he's like he knows i'm talking so he's like i can't pay attention to the gunshots and i'm just going off of him he's like we're up and i'm i follow him we're up we run he's like when he goes down i go down and i'm dropping dropping dropping Now we got the Apaches involved.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They're like, hey, there's more nests over here to the north that we can see those guys are moving around now. They're like setting up and they're moving. We can fire on them right now, rockets. And I'm like, cool. Sparkle, clear hot, right? And I'm just controlling, trying to visualize the best I can this whole situation. And it's clean. We smoked all those guys. Wow. And we finally get back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
There's like this ditch, and we kind of get back in the ditch. Now we're calling the exfil at the same time as the medevac. The medevac comes during that fighter fight, and they don't know what's going on. They start flying right through where all this shit's coming down. And so that was one moment where I was like, hey, everyone abort, everybody stop. We stop all fires for a few seconds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I go, you guys need to turn, just take a 90, just take a 30 degree right turn. So they do, and then they fly out of it and over to the guy's buzz saw. The buzz saw is that chem light where we're spinning it around, right? And they land perfectly on that. They get on, those two are gone to the hospital.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And now we're back at the ditch calling for exfil, and we get out of there, everybody's fine after that. He ends up being fine. You know, he had some complications with his chest for a few years, but he healed up pretty good, I think. And he's still kicking around Virginia Beach. Good deal. You know, I haven't seen him in some years, but I know we're still friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
you know yeah um and that was the last so that was the last one we get back to the hooches and i talked to their jtac guy who ends up being later one of my teammates in the team all right that's the turnover bro holy that's a hell of a turnover op wow yeah yeah um did you
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Did you kill anybody with a rifle or with... I did one on the roof team for a teammate of mine. He was climbing up, and these guys woke up, started pointing their guns around, and I had to shoot that guy. Was that your first kill? Yeah. Yeah, that was... Actually, it wasn't a kill. Actually, that was a hard time for me. Besides the JTAC ones, that guy ended up, like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just he ended up being paralyzed and then later he did, I believe he died later, like some time later, like I don't know when, you know. Like I don't even know if it was during that deployment. I was kind of using one of our translators to kind of update me. But he found some way to find out, like, this guy wasn't dead.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So we ended up fucking taking him with us after that because he was still breathing. So we dropped him at the biop hospital, and I think they essentially recovered him. So it was just a guy on target that woke up and started pointing towards one of our roof team guys. That guy ended up passing away in the future.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He went to Denver also, and he passed away from a brain tumor, unfortunately, which I've got my opinions about that stuff too, on how so many young guys are developing brain tumors after that. And I think it's just talking with EOD guys and understanding the...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
the levels of of radiation out of those jammers that we were sitting next to for all those hours all the time in order to block those signals was just just vibrating through our brains right and the ones that i trust the most believe that it has something to do with it so i hope that you know somebody can look into a little more these days because there shouldn't be
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
30 and 40 year old dudes popping brain tumors suddenly and passing away another guy in my team that happened to and within a year of of finding out once when he was clear before that passed passed away so um damn it hurts a lot to think about those guys with brain tumors yeah yeah that uh and uh
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. Yeah, it was like, was the juice ever worth the squeeze for how many preventative stuff? And I think about it now with the active shooters, you know, things and the hesitancy to prepare or prevent things. especially when it comes to money. We're like, are we going to spend how much on a couple of guards or some ballistic capability or something? Just whatever. Training, for sure, training.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, fuck them, and I'm going to go do this because of that. Like, they're not, they're just trying their best. They're just doing their best. It's a fight for survival. But those experiences, yes, those experiences are very, they're profound experiences to each person.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Active shooter training, all these good things, all these guys out are doing these companies. But there's hesitancy to fund it because if you prevent something, there's no evidence that you prevented it. Just nothing happens. Mm-hmm. So it's just a hard thing to prove to people. So it's a similar thing as like, did those jammers, how many IEDs did they actually stop?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We don't know because if it was a preventative measure that worked, then just nothing happened. And then trying our best to prove that it did work, You know, but there's so many of these brain tumors from guys that, you know, he was a turret gunner and that antenna was right there, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The rest of us inside might have been a little bit more protected, but that thing is like, if you can see the diagrams for the frequencies and radiation these things put out, it's fucking not good to sit next to for hours.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's completely different, in my opinion. It's... It's not the same as doing it up close and personal. But all the, you know, the times that I did do it, and I got a lot more at Dev Group than I did in the team. I didn't think about that so much. And so when guys, you know, talk about this question, you know, I understand when they say, I didn't think much about it, you know, because...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Thank you. I'm not pissed at all. I'm grateful. And I need to go catch up, and I didn't catch that, but now I need to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
we intentionally are desensitized to it. We're more attuned with the actual identification of the target and who it is. Like, is it a man, you know, male? Is he armed, is he not armed, whatever? Than taking the life itself. Because to be honest with you, the taking the life itself thing is another, it falls, it aligns again with that validation thing it did for me anyways, where it was like,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I didn't think too much about it because if I was the guy that got the kill that night, it was like, felt good. It's like your buddies are like, cool, this guy, we can trust this guy to do his job, you know, and not be affected by it too much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, the special part of Special Forces, to me, is our little hearts inside of each one of our guys, each one of, like, the individuality of the guy next to you. We always say that. You know, the capabilities, the cool stuff, the night vision goggles, the guns, the support, the money, all the stuff is cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And the same sort of theme comes out of it the more guys that I study and the more guys that I think about and look at, you know, I think about these things now that I have the space to do it. That's now where it kind of comes back to go, those moments I can now go back to just the same way I did with my childhood memories. And now go sort of analyze it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Just try my best to see the truth in every one of those moments, you know, for what it was. And then with no other goal than just understanding it the best that I could for me. Do you remember all of them? Some of them were a blur, especially if it was during like a firefight. But the ones that were close up, you know, I've got some sniper ones. I think about them sometimes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But, you know, in war, you know, they're trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them. And so I think less about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
than i do with the last mission that i did and who i killed that's the one that i think about the ones with men or men or fighters you know there may or may not be some mutual respect as fighters for sure these ones that are going on like these hamas guys and palestine and israel like man the whole world
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
is on fire about Israel right now because of the collateral damages and like, how do you fight a war? How would you fight a war if the bad guys, let's just say it was in your neighborhood or a community in the future or something, some war, they're there to kill you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And instead of fighting from what we do in the military, an outpost, a planning center or whatever, you go there, you put your uniform on, you go fight. Put your uniform on so we can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys and civilians. And you assume that the good guys or the bad guys, you know, they have some level of moral compass, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
That we don't train to kill anybody other than the bad guy that we're after. Collateral damage is just, it's a hellish thing. It's part of war. But now pretend that the enemy or even pretend that you are the one doing it. That you go, I'm going to take advantage of the moral compass of those guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I'm just going to go, I'm going to shoot the rockets and missiles from my backyard and then go inside where my family is. And then go, we're good. Fuck them because they have morals and they're not going to kill me here because I got my wife and my kids and my family. And then it just, you can even escalate it to go, now I can even go do atrocities now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, we can go do an attack in their territory and go door to door like they did, you know, raping and pillaging and just the horrific things that everybody wants to deny actually happened. Take the hostages, all this stuff, and then bring them back over. And we're good again, because... We built all these tunnels under the hospital, and the hospital's functioning. That's fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We want that to be that way because it's a deterrence for us. It's a capability. And then now when your enemy or who you see as your enemy is now attacking you and killing you and having all this collateral damage, you're choosing the battleground there. And it's such a hard problem to think about. And I hope there's some better solution, some thing that they can figure out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I don't want to make anybody mad, but the special part of Special Forces is the guys, the individual person, right? Like, not the call sign part. Once we light cigarettes on a quiet target, we start calling each other by our names part, you know? And we know a little bit about, you know, the closest guys anyways, where they grew up from, what their childhood was like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But we're not there experiencing that shit. And they're having to make decisions on some of these high-level Hamas guys that are using... intentionally using civilians as cover, as a capability, a deterrence capability on purpose. Right. And then it's just a terrible way to fight war, you know, and, The extremists, Al-Qaeda does it. Terrorists tend to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's not even, in my opinion, guerrilla warfare, really. It's kind of a newer concept, maybe. I'm not even sure if that happened in Vietnam or not. I need to read more, but it's happening right now. And we've faced it too. And we try our best and then we change our ROEs to the point where now we're in danger because as the war evolves,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
we lost the ability to the point where it became, hey, you guys aren't even going to do any shooting until somebody's already shooting at you. And you're like, that means some of us can get killed before we even engage. That's a hard problem to have, especially if that's happened. You know, now there's families out there that are like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They couldn't engage those guys because they weren't allowed to until they were getting a shot at. So just hard things to think about outside of more than just pro-Palestine, you know, Israel and, you know, the things that we attach to sensationalism when we see it on the screen, you know. And some of those people that are attaching to those causes, I think...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
is more related to their own validation. They might be lacking something in their own life that goes further than just this thing, and then every time something happens, people in their environment are now attached to these protests and these things, and everybody wants to feel like they are a part of something important. So they go demonstrate, they go do it without even really understanding it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
what it's about or what they're doing, they just go, yeah. And validation from all the other people that are doing it in their environment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So it's like whatever's the most accessible thing in your environment to attach to as a cause, doesn't matter if it's bad or toxic or terrible or evil or good, you go do it, I think, for some of the same reasons that I am talking about with this lack of purpose and validation that we all need. Yeah, that's a good point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Because it's at least like that. To know that they're at least mindful... I think and truly believe that the Israelis are doing their best to think of ways to target the bad guys without the collateral damage, and sometimes they have to make hard decisions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And they're all similar stories. Yeah. You know, the thing they, I know that they've studied with psychologists at different units, and they've been doing this for a while, probably, I mean, at least since I was there over a decade ago, 20 years too, I think that they started to
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But at least that is more direct towards the enemy than going through whatever's on top that they're fighting under, the hospital or the school or the house or whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, like what gets in between the decision? And this is where it gets difficult and more when social opinions and the energy of the social community
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Come back to the States. You know, you just remind me with the shit tunnel thing, though, if I can interject a quick story that's actually more on the lighter side. I saved somebody's life on that deployment in a way that you wouldn't think. You'll know, too. So we're coming back from one of those targets. This is, like, later on in the deployment, too. And this is one of my buddies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He's got, like, sensitive skin. You know, he gets like rashes easy or whatever. I don't know. And we're walking back from a target in Iraq and out there in the open, I don't know if you ever experienced this, but those... like ditches sort of carved out that go from the shithole of every house in the whole town. They all go out somewhere out into the open. To the main shed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And then they collect into a big pool, right? And there's... We were walking through one of these collections and there's like different ones and we're just navigating our way through. But you don't know because over time, like at night, especially on night vision goggles, they collect, they crust over and they just look like regular dirt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So at this point, quiet target, we're walking out to the helos. A lot of distance between each guy because, you know, they're just spaced out. The guys in front of them would have never known that this happened, but I'm the guy behind him. So I was there. he just steps into one of these pools of just shit quicksand and then like goes, oh, oh shoot. And then no big deal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
But then it's like, he's in it. And it's now rapidly going, you know, oh, it's no big deal. Now I can get out. But then as I approach, I can hear his breathing is so loud. Like, and it's like, like water coming up, you know? And he's starting to freak out now because he can't get out. And I'm going, oh shit, this is like kind of serious. So I like fucking run up there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I'm like, hey, you all right, dude? And he's like, ah, I'm good, you know? And I'm like, fuck, are you sinking? So I just, I grab my helo lanyard and I kind of just go. And I'm like, grab it, you know, and I'm pulling him through this sludge, you know, this nasty, and it's just black all the way down. Oh, man. It's shit. Nice. And I get him crawled out, and I'm like, oh, my God, that sucks, dude.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We're trying to figure out what is that thing, what's the thread that's in common between us guys that causes us to get through those selections without quitting, right? And just keep driving through all the suffering and have that. It's not just this, oh, it's mental fortitude, you know, is that...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He's like, oh, thank you. I thought I was going underneath that shit. Oh, my God. Yeah, and we get up. He's got now this long walk, and I'm like, all right, I'm going to stay closer to you, but get behind me because you smell. So we patrol back. He's got to get on the helo right all the way back. It's a long ride.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's just... And he's just had this, like, full-body nasty skin rash for, like, some weeks after that. Yeah. But then it was funny because... Did you nickname him Hepatitis? Yeah. I did. Did you really? Hurt dog, I think. Holy shit. Something like that. So... I ended up in the team with him at dev group too. Nice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We're still, still friends, but it was funny because we'll joke with our wives and stuff like, Hey, you saved, you saved Dave. He saved his life one time, you know, like I didn't save somebody's life. Oh man. Yeah. So fast forward to the, um, you know, after that deployment, did you do another deployment? Yeah, I was an augment JTAC for dev group. That was a great deployment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
A lot of operations happened, a lot of JTAC work. And the guy that I was with was such a great guy, such a legend of a dude, in my opinion, that he was like, you know, you should come over. You should screen. So I didn't have any intention then to do it, but we got back, and then I screened. So... Between that screening, it's about a year process or whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You screen, you know, you get then either a yes or no to go to the actual selection, you know, a year or so later or whatever your timing is. And then between that, I had a deployment. Second one was to Europe, and I was, you know, doing training exercises for different types of units, partner forces all over Africa.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
to include a lead vehicle type security detail for the Secret Service for Obama's visit to Ghana when he became president. So that was actually pretty cool. Really? Yeah. He was bouncing around different places doing speeches and talks. And coincidentally, I didn't meet my wife. We were dating and we weren't married yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Years later, one of our family members, one of her cousins' husband is a retired Secret Service guy, was on that detail. And we realized that we were working together there. And I'm like, how do I recognize you at the Christmas, the family Christmas? That's your wife's brother? My wife's cousin's husband, so my cousin-in-law.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And I ended up staying with them for a while when I was doing my contracting work. I had to stay up in DC for a little while. So they housed me, but it was just funny because I was at this Christmas party for my wife, who wasn't my wife yet. We're just girlfriend and boyfriend. And we go, how do I recognize you? Dude, a couple of years ago,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was on a security detail that you guys, you SEALs came along, and he was the guy in charge of, you know, organizing, like, their convoy, you know? Wow. So it was just a crazy coincidence. But that was a good time on that deployment. It was kind of the highlight of that deployment. I just didn't, you know, we were training, so. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
we all experienced some sort of adverse childhood thing, some trauma, some hardship, some thing, right? That instead of some people would go become drug addicts or some level of coping for that, whatever was missing, and I could go through a whole list of that stuff. instead decided to just go do shit and never quit, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, one thing cool that happened was I've Googled this since then because I wasn't sure. was Obama a smoker? And it's all over the internet, he was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
He self-admitted, you know, like, hey, I had to get rid of that addiction, you know, for stress, but, because it was kind of a shock to see that when we were in the hotel, we're in the same hotel as these guys, we're hanging out, he's coming down with his detail, going out to the balcony like every five minutes to smoke. You know, like he was a chain smoker. No shit. Yeah. I didn't know that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I didn't know that. Yeah, so that was that deployment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, I came back from that first deployment. I met her right after that. How did you guys meet? Through a mutual friend that just randomly invited me out. I was living in my own condo by myself and invited me out to dinner. I think it was sort of a little bit of a matchmaking kind of thing, but I showed up not ready. I didn't shave. I didn't get dressed up, nothing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Didn't really know she was going to be there. Hey, she goes to the restroom. I said, hey, you didn't tell me this beautiful woman was going to be here. And he was like, well, she said the same thing about you when you went to the restroom. So you probably should exchange numbers. So we did and started dating and she became my soulmate. She was already that, but she became my wife.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
What was it about her? I don't know. The energy about her. She's just like a clean soul. She's just so pure and wholesome and just amazing. I just knew. I don't know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah. And just like anyone, I've gone through a lot of hard times. A lot of things. Everything. And That's strength when they don't. Just like when we don't quit, we don't give up, and they don't on us, and they see something, you know, just the same way. I think that, like, you asked me what the guys felt.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Maybe my platoon chief was like, dude, you just sometimes feel something about somebody, and she... She did that and she held, she stuck with that for a really long time, a really long time. And I'm grateful. I'm so, you know, I'm so grateful because here we are, you know. How long have you guys been married?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And it's just like anything else. It takes a lot of work. Don't give up. Don't quit. You know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
We had our kids right as I was a new guy at Dev Group when we had our first. No kidding.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Yeah, they're the reason I got out. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
About three-ish years. How'd you propose to her? I took her to this spot in Pebble Beach just off my grandfather's house. You could walk over to Spanish Bay on Pebble Beach where he retired. And... She loves doing fun things. You know, she's all about that. So, hey, we got to get up early one morning, like 6 a.m. But she's not a morning person. So she's like, ugh.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And my opinion about that is that it has a little connection to validation as well, right? Because our reputation is that's all it is. We just need constant validation from each other in order for our reputation to be good, right? And we fall outside of that. That's the most stressful thing. That's even more stressful if you ever get labeled, you know, that's,
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Like, we have to because we got to go see the whales. The whales migrate through. We can see their spouts. And it's like, it's awesome, right? And... That was my only excuse to get to go over there. So it had to be in the morning because that was the only time I knew that you can catch them, you know? So I convince her, we go over there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And like around like 7 or 8 a.m., I propose to her at my little spot just overlooking... It's called the never-ending sea or the endless sea, where waves kind of crash from all different directions into one spot, and it's just this crazy spot, you know, that tourists can kind of go look at and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And a little ways down from that, there's this little quiet old bench that I used to just go sit at, you know, growing up. So I took her there, and that's where I did it. She said yes, so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Dude, I just collectively, I think about the whole story and it's just keep, it's so hard. Even now, when we get disconnected, we have, you know, understanding each other's love language for sure. And then if it's not the same one, um, just learning how to be okay with doing things for the person towards it, towards what they need that, you know, like for her, it's like acts of service.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So the more chores I do, the more getting the kids where they need to be, all that stuff. She loves that. You know, for me, it's like affection and connection and intimacy, you know? So you go through times where it's so busy and you're like, man, we're so busy. It's so chaotic. And we don't put any effort towards giving them what they need. You start to blame each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You go, oh, I don't feel, I feel disconnected. And then you go, well, I feel disconnected because you haven't been doing these things. And you're like, all right, well, we got to reset that and then try our best to sustain it over time. But there's always going to be times where it gets off balance. You just got to, just like your soul, you got to bring it back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
You know, you start doing, start getting stressed out because it's what I want. It's what I'm asking for. I want the business, you know. I want my kids to thrive. They're busy. They're not sitting around. They're always busy. And that's stress. So you want that, but that means you got to put in work in between that with each other also as much as you can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
And especially when you start to feel that, you know when it's going on, you know, it's like, oh, I'm starting to feel like resentment or anger, even just a little bit. You're like, hey, and being able to talk straightforward about it. Like, here's why I feel this. And it's, you know, trying your best not to just like blame the other person. We can definitely figure it out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Nighttime's not the best time to do that. You're tired, you know, you just want to go to sleep, you're exhausted. The morning is a lot better for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
It's worse than if I'm getting shot at by a PKM. That guy, yeah. And you have little moments where you fuck something up and for a little while you might be that guy and you're like, that's the worst feeling ever. I got to get out of this at any cost. I'll do anything for validation to be out of this and be successful. in the good, in the green.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Right. So come back from that deployment, it's time to go right into selection prep. Right around that time, the human performance sort of aspect of the concept started to come about. So I was lucky enough to get into some programing where we could get prepared for the selection and then sort of be rested, you know, for a week or so and then peaking a couple weeks into the selection.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
So I'm grateful for that because the guys that did that with me from Team 10, we all did pretty well through the physical test and all the first week type physical stuff, right, performance-wise. Overall, selection for me was... It was a much smoother ride than Bud's was, especially because of the stuff that happened. But, you know, same thing. Lucky enough, I got through. It was really hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Honestly... difficult in totally different ways than Bud's. You know, the physical part is there. You're doing some crazy things. I mean, there was one day we did this. You run seven miles at a seven-minute pace, you know, with one of the cadre to the Mississippi River, swim across that motherfucker with logs and just current crazy with a swim buddy. Wow. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
Get across, having drifted down like a mile or so, run back up, do it again on the way back, and I think they stopped doing it after that. I got one of the last ones. It's one of those legacy stories. Sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Yeah, it's not very safe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
They've got safety boats and things too, but it was as safe as they could make it, just like swimming around the island in shark territory. Yeah, yeah. Just got to find the balance with hard enough things, you know? Yeah. And somebody not getting eaten alive by a great white shark. Yeah. So then seven miles back. So that was probably the hardest day for me. That's when I started...
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
I was so depleted that day, my legs started cramping and I got to a point where guys in my team were carrying me back to the house because I couldn't even stand up. They were so cramped. It was super painful. A couple of the cadre were having fun with me. They were firing me, carrying me. It was a good time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare
The hardest part of that selection being the first six weeks of assault, all CQB-based stuff is really intense and very... very detail oriented, you know, with the goal of figuring out, you know, pliability and trainability, you know, like here's the rule set for this day. with all of the stressors. And then the next day, it all changes.