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S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
This channel confronts power, exposes institutional failure, and gives a platform to people willing to tell the truth when silence is easier and safer. We cover the stories the military, media, and influencers would rather bury, because reform does not happen without friction.
S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
They Tried to Break Him. He Fought Back | S.O.S. #279
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One of the hardest leadership tests isn’t combat, it’s standing up to your own institution when the truth becomes inconvenient. We sit down with retired Navy SEAL Captain Bradley Geary, a former commander in Naval Special Warfare, to talk about what it feels like to go from trusted leader to suspected scapegoat almost overnight.
Brad walks us through the BUD/S tragedy that ignited years of investigations, media pressure, and internal maneuvering. We unpack the uncomfortable details: black market performance enhancing drugs, how official findings can be re-scoped from the top, and why an autopsy decision not to test for certain substances can change everything. Along the way, we talk about ethics, accountability, and how “procedural compliance” can be weaponized when leaders are told to reach a predetermined conclusion.
The most powerful thread is moral courage. Brad explains the isolation that comes when teammates quietly step back, the family conversations that define what you’re willing to lose, and the strategic choice to go public and take the fight to Congress. We also dig into the military administrative system, due process gaps, and why “non-punitive” actions can still destroy careers. Brad closes with what comes next: leadership consulting, life after retirement, and his upcoming book, Hard Mind, Soft Heart: A Warfighter’s Battle for Truth, Brotherhood, and the Character of the SEAL Teams.
If you care about Navy SEAL leadership, military ethics, whistleblowing, and what integrity really costs, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. What part of Brad’s story challenged you most?
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What
A Decorated SEAL Faces The System
SPEAKER_03happens when a man who has spent twenty-five years inside Naval Special Warfare, commanded at the highest level and earned the Navy's most prestigious leadership award, suddenly finds himself on the other side of the institution he once served. My guest today will be retired Navy SEAL Captain Bradley Geary, and he knows exactly what that feels like. His career took him from the elite SEAL teams to command of SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One and Naval Special Warfare Basic Training Command. But today we're going to really just be going beyond the resume. We're going to be talking about leadership when it actually costs you something, about faith, loyalty, ethics, and what happens when the organization that you devoted your life to launches an investigation that threatens your reputation, your career, and everything you built. And what makes his case so unique and something that we don't hear about a lot is that he didn't just accept it. He fought back. And we're going to talk about what that fight revealed about leadership, accountability, brotherhood, and the character of the SEALs team. So welcome everybody to Stories of Service. I'm going to bring Bradley on now. Bradley, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01Teresa, fantastic. Good to see you.
SPEAKER_03Good to see you too. Thank you so much for coming on the Stories of Service podcast. I am Teresa Carpenter. And as we always do to get these stories started, we'll tell an intro from my father, Charlie Picker.
SPEAKER_00From the moment we're born and lock eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS Stories of Service, hosted by Teresa Carpenter. Here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.
Childhood Roots Of Faith And Drive
SPEAKER_03And welcome again. As I always do to start these podcasts, I always want to know where somebody is born and raised and what inspired them to initially join the Navy.
SPEAKER_01I love that intro, by the way. Ordinary people, that's fantastic by your dad. Yeah, thanks again, Teresa. So I was born, yeah, I was born and raised in Central Florida, right down the street from my wife, who I met in grade school at our local Sunday school church. And I never really aspired to be the military. It honestly did not feel like the right fit for me. I didn't like the rigidity of it. I didn't like the idea of being told where to go, what to do, what to wear, how to shave, how to cut my hair. But I was a swimmer and the United States Naval Academy recruited me at some point. And thankfully, instead of throwing that recruitment letter into the trash, my high school swim coach encouraged me, who was a history teacher, to actually do some research. Hey, Brad, this is a good opportunity here. And the more I researched, the more I liked. And at first, I'll be honest, it was somewhat self-serving, right? Like, oh my gosh, they they pay for school for four years. I get a guaranteed job. The payment, you know, back for that education is a five-year commitment to the United States Navy. But coming out of that five-year commitment, real-world leadership experience and entering a job field with something to bring to the table, a couple of resume bullets. And so it just seemed like a wise move as a young man. Through that process, I would say my patriotic sense of duty absolutely grew and took root and turned into something so much more. Because my initial plan was to do five years in out. As you know, 25 years later, I kept moving moving the goalposts to the right. So I had an incredible career. I loved, uh I loved it in whole. I'd like to say I got more than I gave. And we did as a family, certainly. So that's what got us into it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's it's interesting because there's always this moment when I talk to all of my guests where they realize that even if they went through something hard with the military or even the military itself putting them through sort of a certain trial, it doesn't matter who they are. They could be a whistleblower, they could be just somebody who's sharing their story of service, but they always do reflect back on the whole journey and and and really don't have any regrets about the people that they served with or the teams they got to be a part of.
SPEAKER_01That's right. John F. Kennedy talks about this too. I mean, looking back at a life of service, there's only goodness that comes from that. This idea that we we choose to serve, we choose to sacrifice, uh, we choose to live a life of service. And I'm a firm believer that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character bases hope. So yeah, I look back, I'm thankful for it all.
SPEAKER_03What would you say were some of the couple, if you could name maybe one or two life-defining moments in your childhood that gave you the character-building skills that carried you through to the SEAL teams?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great question. Two I would say primarily right off the top. One would be my parents, just the way they raised us. My father broke a generational cycle of abuse and divorce and on every level, in every form, all types of abuse. And he found faith on a mountaintop and committed his life to being different and to saying, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do what I can to serve my family, to love my family, to keep them intact. And so growing up, I always had that father figure to point me in the right direction, be my anchor and my mother as well, and and tell me he's proud of me all the time. Like probably too much. You know, he never had a father telling me he was proud. And he we've reflected now as he's getting older, as am I. And he said, he said, that was always important for me to know that you were proud. Or didn't for for me to for for for me to communicate that I was proud of you and for you to know that. And and it meant a world to me. I think it, I think it inspired me in a lot of ways. The other part of that was uh my my church youth group leaders, the the the these pastors who poured into me like father figures and influenced me and kept encouraging me that, hey Brad, we see something in you, we see a leadership attribute that isn't common. Pursue that, you know, cultivate that, grow that, learn from that. And so them identifying you know something in me that I didn't see in myself at the time, I think helped me gain a curiosity into that realm, into the art of leadership. And it then naturally drew me into things like where I ended up.
SPEAKER_03Right, because not everybody who joins the Navy obviously becomes a Navy SEAL. It's considered the hardest and the most challenging training pipeline within our our branch and and perhaps all the other branches as well. Was there someone in your I'd say at the Naval Academy, or who who was it that pushed you to go down that path?
Why He Chose The SEAL Path
SPEAKER_01Friends, mentors, all of the above. Guys that I respected, seeing posters on their walls saying, hey, this is what I want to do. I when I when I came in as a senior in high school to look at what the academy was, they partnered me with another freshman. So one guy, one a guy a year older than me, his name was Pete Logan. And I stayed with him that that for like a weekend. And he's got this Navy SEAL poster on the wall. I'm like, what's the deal with these guys? You know, and look cool. The classic guy coming out of the water with the face mask and the wetsuit and the gun, you know. The one that we all are just like, oh my gosh, to be that guy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so I came to the academy. He was a swimmer, I was a swimmer. We made our way through the academy together. He was swim team captain his senior year. I took the mantle from him, became swim team captain the year after. He went to the SEALs, I went to the SEALs. We we spent our careers doing very, very similar things but on different paths. Funny enough, we ended up at the same place at the same time near the end of both of us having 25 plus year careers. And I spoke at his retirement, he spoke at mine. So after all that time when we first met in 1995, we we spoke at each other's retirement. So, guys like that, my swim coach, the SEAL mentors on campus who inspired me. I'll never forget, we started our plebe summer at the Naval Academy July 4th was one of the first days there. That morning we're all mustered for PT on the Academy grounds, 4 a.m. Everyone, no one's happy to be there. We're miserable, we're missing home. And all of a sudden, to start the PT on July 4th, we just hear this Harley Davidson just cranking the throttle. And we all look up to see this SEAL senior chief, Albanetti, I'll never forget it, ride circles around the whole PT field, just gunning his Harley Davidson with this American flag flying behind his Harley Davidson. Stops at the podium, gets the flag up, walks up the podium, plants it, and just starts talking about how it's such a privilege to serve in the armed forces for the United States of America, the beacon of freedom and liberty for the entire world. I gotta tell you, like, probably one of the most inspirational moments of my entire career. And it happened on what was it, like day day three or day four. So guys like that, man, it makes it easy, right? When you see someone like that, you're like, I want to be, I want to hang with that dude.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
The Unexpected Role Of Art
SPEAKER_03I totally get it. Now, I think I remember in the interview you did with Sean Ryan. Were you also in marching band? I just have to ask. What did you do in the band?
SPEAKER_01I was a trumpet player. I I I'm pretty sure that's why my wife actually married me. It's the muscular lips. You know, she uh she can't resist. It's I mean, yeah, I was I was it was in black core. That's why I asked. Okay, nice. I was a classic band nerd in middle school and high school. I love music, my family loves music, and and I pursued it, and I and I I I tried to walk parallel paths, do marching band and swimming in high school.
SPEAKER_02I love it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was great. I had a great time.
SPEAKER_03Some of my best friends growing up were were fellow band nerds, and um Yeah, and I mean that's such a dichotomy because the people that you see who are Navy SEALs, they're kind of like the jocks or the athletes, and then the band people are definitely not the jocks and the or the athletes. And so I mean, I don't know, that might just be might have been of Bishop Watterson High School, my my Catholic high school, but I just know that those are two totally different social crowds.
SPEAKER_01And um I mixed the crowds, that's for sure. We blurred some lines.
SPEAKER_03No, I I love it. And there were a few. There were a few I went to high school with that could do that and and really were just a overall likable person that you, you know, everybody, everybody seemed to get along with and and could could kind of move between different social circles. So I found that kind of interesting when you had said that you had you'd been in marching band. I was like, oh, Navy SEAL is who actually was in the band as well. I mean, there are some who are artists uh for sure, but uh absolutely, absolutely. I think that I think art and and sports have a lot of crossover actually. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And and we're finding a lot of retired SEALs as they get into different types of therapies. The artist in them is coming out. It's really, really strange. Folks that never explored the field of art, whether it's painting, music, woodworking, skateboarding design, like like it's it's really interesting how many of my friends are actually showing an incredible ability for art that they just haven't tapped into until now. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think that the people who go into special forces or they go into any of these high-intensity jobs, they tend to be just very high-speed people and they tend to be very driven people. And to do art, you have to be very driven and you have to be very intense and you have to be very dedicated. And I think that that's why there's also that crossover because you finally have that time. You're not bound by the career anymore as much. And you have that time to just really deepen into something that you've always been interested in wanting to do, but you couldn't. And so now there's that time later on in life to do that. And I I absolutely love it. I love it, love it, love it. And you've done that same thing now with working on your book, I'm sure that has also deepened you into the art of creative writing, which is also another skill of in and of itself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's it was way more difficult than I ever anticipated. Yeah, but but it's it's so it is therapeutic. I was just listening to someone on a podcast today talking about all the things that are going in your mind. Taking that and verbalizing it changes things, it codifies things and it helps you start to process things differently. I think it was actually I was listening to Alex West on the Sean Ryan show talk about that. And I thought, oh, I wish they'd taken it a step further. Because from the mind to the voice is one thing. Now taking it from the mind and the voice to written form actually changes it again. And it's incredibly therapeutic. It's been a it's been a brutal process for us as a family to write this. We're co-authoring it as a family. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but I'm excited in I'm excited about what it's what it's turned into. It's very exciting.
Mentorship And Suffering As Training
SPEAKER_03So as we move down the kind of the trajectory of your career, tell tell me a little bit about like some of some of the highlights. What would you say were like uh if you could kind of summarize, you know, a couple of the the big ticket highlights of that career. It's hard, it's hard to encapsulate a 25 career, your career in an hour-long podcast. But what I want to do is I want to touch on kind of some touch points, some places where you think were probably instrumental in getting you to where you knew you were gonna be the person that was gonna fight back, like were there some sort of like career-defining moments that said, okay, I'm gonna be ready for this because I had this experience in the SEAL teams, or I had this experience, you know, in my at my 10-year mark or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's such a good question. And I thought a lot about this before my my fight with the Navy because I got promoted to captain on our SEAL grinder, where it had all started, you know, at that point, about 20 years prior. And I remember thinking, like, how did I get here? How did this happen? Uh there's nothing you can really plan for, and it's nothing I ever aspired for, yet it happened. And and I thought back and I remember thinking at the time, like, it wasn't one course, it wasn't one platoon, it wasn't one operational experience that kept me in and kept me moving and kept me progressing through the SEAL teams. It was the people that poured into me. It was the senior enlisted advisors that that as a young JO mentored me, sometimes aggressively mentored me, right? Like grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, like, yo, yeah, yo, Brad, yo, sir, I need you to be better than that. Like, like, come on, man. We we expect more of our officers. And it was, and it was the other senior officers and even the peers that poured into me and gave me the time of the day when I didn't know what I was doing, when I was making mistakes, when I failed, or when I succeeded. And leading coaching and mentoring me in all the right ways and all the right places. The the Jay Hennessy's, the Steph Basses, and the countless other dudes who just invested in me was really what built the collective man and beyond the professional, it's the personal side as well. My wife and kids, their choice to continue to serve by my side. Every time we faced a difficult career decision, whether we stay in or to get out, what what we do, we sat around the table as a family or the or the leather ottoman as a family and weighed out the pros and cons and made collective family decisions. We gave our kids buy-in into our lifestyle choice every time. We said, hey, we can get out of the Navy right now if we want. The decision's ours. We have the leverage. Here's the pros, here's the cons. What do you guys think? And and giving our kids that buy-in, it was a game changer for us as a family. And it always emboldened me once we made that family decision. Let's stay in for one more tour. Let's move to Hawaii, Dad. Let's move to Coronado, Dad, let's do this. It emboldened me because I knew that I had their backing at that point. And I knew that when the tears came, when the struggle came, which it which is always going to come, when the suffering comes, I had their support as a family, and I had the support of my mentors before me. To answer the other part of your question, it's all the same thing when we when we think about suffering, back to kind of what I opened with. We know that when we break down our muscles, we're causing them to suffer, we're causing them to strain, and we break them down. No one jumps on the bench press and does 315 and reps it out the first time that they sit down. They start small, they break down the muscles, they feed it with nutrients and rest, and then it grows back stronger. And then we we break it down again and it comes back stronger. And so it's a process. Well, the same thing applies, I think, to every form we're talking about, whether it's the physical, the cognitive, the spiritual, whether we're talking ethics and morality, whatever the case is, it takes suffering, it takes stress, it takes strain, and oftentimes it takes failure to realize like I got to do better next time. And so I couldn't point to one thing through a career that that like emboldened me to the moment where we decided to take the stand for truth. But it was a series of small things. It was a series of small choices over a career where I decided, hey, I'm gonna push back on that, or hey, I'm gonna stand up and say something here. And then more importantly, the times where I failed. You know, I love one of my peers, it was so great. He used to go teach this ethics class to our all the young junior officers. And he told me one time the what he what he taught. And I loved it because it was, it was raw and transparent and real, which is so what they normally don't get when you have a a JA come in and have a whiteboard and a PowerPoint on ethics and like the laws of war. Like, okay, we're not having a meaningful conversation. But he'd come in and say, hey, gents, let me just break it to you. And this is in the height of the wars, and he said, Let me just break it to you completely honestly here. You are going to compromise your integrity at some point.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01As a man, as a leader, as a SEAL, as a warfighter.
SPEAKER_02Everybody does.
SPEAKER_01You, yes, everybody does. Welcome to the club. Now, when you do it, you'll feel gross, you'll feel slimy. Let's talk about the tools you can, you can, you can embrace right now that are gonna help you recover from that, help you to learn what to live with regret and not let that morph into guilt, and help use it to make yourself a better leader moving forward. And and people like that, those are the people we should be best friends with.
SPEAKER_03Those are the salt of the earth. I mean, those are the people that I respect the most. And that's the problem, and that's kind of where we're gonna lead into what happened to you at BUDS because that's the whole kind of crux of that issue, and and not being able to take a good, honest look at ourselves and and and break down what really happened.
The BUD/S Death That Changed Everything
SPEAKER_03And your case is very public, and so we'll I want you to kind of touch them on the wave tops just for the people who who have not heard uh what happened, because there are gonna be people who are listening to this for the first time and they don't know who Bradley Geary is. And so I really want to give them that that that grace and and and give a little bit of color to to what happened. You were the Bud's commanding officer and you had an incident at your command. And I'll just leave it there and let you and let you take it from there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great. I appreciate that. Let me let me back up though, because to frame this out, which is very interesting part of my career, it was bookended by being unwillingly thrust into the limelight, which is very strange because we were Buds class 234 when I started on my SEAL training in 2000, which many people know was filmed by the Discovery Channel. Naval Special Warfare decided we're gonna up our recruiting effort, we're gonna up our PR. And reality TV was just catching on in those times. So, so yeah, they brought in these cameras and they filmed us from start to finish on BUDS. We we protested as a class. That doesn't go well. Anyone in the military knows protesting senior officers' decisions very rarely works out for you. Nope. But but but it was good, and it ended up being a good thing. In fact, I heard recently someone tell me it's actually widely recognized as one of the most successful military documentaries made. They think it's gained somewhere upwards of a billion views at this point. So that was the beginning of my career, and then I went into the shadows. And it's funny because these these podcasters out there would say, like, hey, where are they now? Where's this class now? And they'd always look for any information they could find, and I'd always laugh because they never could find much on a few of us, myself included, and I took a lot of pride in that.
SPEAKER_03So you were never a public guy. That that's that's that's what you're establishing, is basically you were on camera because the Navy wanted you to be on camera for recruiting, and then like a you know, a good quiet professional, you stayed out of the limelight.
SPEAKER_01I stayed quiet for 20 years. Yeah, absolutely. And and never wanted, never wanted anything like the path I find myself on. And now I struggled with that and I wrestled with God on that a lot. So very ironic that then at the end of my career, I was unwillingly thrust back into the limelight. And so, to give your readers the brief version of it, while I was finishing my tour at BUDS, very successful tour with lots of awards and accomplishments and accolades for what we were doing at the time, powering through a very, very difficult season during COVID and figuring out how to train through this global pandemic with no real guidance, right? It's like, hey, follow the CDC, but train through this. Okay. Those are hard to do. And we were doing it. And we were doing it imperfectly, admittedly, like we were making mistakes, but we were learning very, very quickly as an organization. And I'm very proud of our leaders who who fell forward every opportunity we had through that through that season. Unfortunately, near the end, as I came to the end of my tour, we had a young man, a young candidate, finish our Hell Week, which is our crucible five-day crucible. Uh it's redundant, but go through our normal med check. Period. Yeah, that's right. There you go. We we had when we do that, we secure everything, no more training. We we do thorough head-to-toe medical checks. We have multiple physicians and medical professionals check these gentlemen out. As you can appreciate, there's always aches and pains, there's always complications, there's always things going on, but but relatively speaking, everyone in that class got a pretty good up check from multiple physicians. At that point, we leave Navy certified watchstanders in place. We leave instructions to call our medical professionals if there's a problem, call 911 if it gets worse. At that point in the program, everybody knows if you make it through Hell Week, there's a 94% chance you're gonna make it through our program. We are invested in you. And you've shown us that you have what it takes to manage the stress, to manage the chaos of war, and to not quit. And so there's very, very little risk of getting medically dropped from our program post-Hell Week. There's no reason not to come forward with, hey, I'm having a medical issue at that point. In fact, I ran the stats on my tenure. I medically dropped from training 0.0024% of the entire candidate population that served in my two-year tour. So, so this notion that students were afraid to come forward with medical issues is just statistically untrue. Either way, the young man unfortunately decompensated and died very quickly after getting three physicians giving him a head-to-toe upcheck on his health. And uh, we went into absolute panic mode at that point. We go into crisis control mode, and you know the process being in the military. We have to notify the family, we have to bring in NCIS, all these things. And our priority of effort at that point was take care of the family. We'll figure out what happened later. But but as a commanding officer, ultimately responsible for everything that happens at our command, in my mind, I'm already racing. Like, what did we miss? What did we what happened? How does this happen? How does this happen? Now, you Yeah, and the the the short version is that we recovered a ridiculous amount of black market performance dancing drugs in his vehicle. I'm talking injectable steroids from Pakistan, you know, with with with Arabic writing on them. Injectable HGH from the Netherlands, anostrobil, sildenophil, other diluent liquids with used and new syringes. It was a plethora of drugs that was clearly more than what one person was using. So immediately we went into lockdown mode. We got to solve this problem, our other candidates' health at risk here, and began tons of investigations. Long story short, all the initial investigations came back as hey, these drugs contributed to his death, undeniably. My initial safety investigation came back that nothing you did is a command did or didn't do contributed to this death. It's a very, very safe command. It's worth noting that the year prior, my command, under my predecessor, won the CNO's Expeditionary Safety Award. And we changed or degraded zero safety regulations from his handover to mine. And by the way, I received the same award from my time at SV Team 1. So very, very safe commanding officers running this place, and no major changes took place. The initial Bureau of Navy medical uh medicine investigation found that all medical professionals met the standard of medical care expected of them as professionals. So all things were pointing toward, hey, this was an unfortunate and tragic incident. The drugs were the variable that likely pushed his body over the edge, combining that with Hell Week, and then an unwillingness to come forward with what was going on as he started to decompensate.
Steroids, Contracts, And Candidate Safety
SPEAKER_03And just to just kind of preface this too, what were what were some of the ways in which you guys educated about steroid use? Because I would think, I would think that there would be kids who would say, okay, I need to take if all these other kids are taking steroids to keep up, then then I need to be taking them too. So I'm curious if you knew going into this, was there any indication that this was the way, the way that people knew that they what they they had to do what they had to do to get by?
SPEAKER_01In any industry that values physical performance, there's always going to be a temptation.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_01So we always know that it's in the background of our minds. It it it always a sine wave where it'll bubble up as a problem, we'll discover it, we'll we'll deter it, and then it goes back down and it kind of reduces in in scope and severity. We had heard rumblings that this might have been a growing problem at the time. We were starting to look into it, but we're very limited in our authorities to be able to really, really dig deep. And and there's a reason the black market exists and it's staying ahead of industry's ability to catch up and test for these things. Gotcha. That's interesting. That's important to note. Oh, it took, I mean, it took Lance Armstrong, it took seven years to catch Lance Armstrong, I think something like that. So, so the information is out there, and that's the other, that's the other, I think, side effect of social media, all these Reddit threads, and and and the ability to pursue knowledge and information on how to get away with these kinds of things. So, so we knew it was potentially a problem. We absolutely do things to deter it. We make candidates sign a written agreement on a piece of paper that says, I agree not to take anything like this other than what is prescribed by Navy professionals. And our whole point there is that our doctors have to understand the full clinical picture of what's going on with your body. Hell Week is crazy. No one else has tried this. No one else has ever tried to replicate what we do, and they could. They're too afraid to, I think, because it does all it does a lot to the body. It's incredibly difficult, and it is it is a massive tax on your organs, on your physiology, on everything. And so we have to know clinically what's going on with you. So we tell them you can't even take Tylenol unless we prescribe it. You can't even take vitamin C unless we prescribe it. And so we are that meticulous and careful with how we are how we educate these young candidates on these things. And we hold them to it by making them sign a contract that I sign as well. So every single candidate that comes through that command signs it and it is co-signed by the commanding officer at the time. So it's it's not ambiguous, right? It's not.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There's no wiggle space here. There's no room for like, well, I interpreted it this way. No, you didn't. No, you didn't. It's crystal clear. So
Pressure From The Top To Rewrite
SPEAKER_01fast forward, we are now through the the early investigations, and and we know now that that made its way up to the Navy chain of command. And under the Biden administration, Secretary Del Toro was the Secretary of the Navy. And we know from insiders who testified that he said, hey, this sounds like victim blaming. We're not going to victim blame. Go back and change it.
SPEAKER_03Wow. So that that is that is really that's so heavy in my mind. I just want to I just want to anchor on that for a second.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Here, here, here, here you've got a investigation that is being done by the people who are the closest on the ground who saw firsthand what happened. They write up the truth of what happened, and then that truth goes all the way up, and someone at the very top level. And I and I know I know that I might be just belaboring the point, but but this is this is a pattern in a lot of these cases. This is this is exactly what happened with the Theodore Roosevelt.
SPEAKER_01It's so much more insidious than that, too. I'm skipping a couple things, and I'll to briefly add to what you just said. Our admiral at the time, Wyman Howard, brilliant, brilliant man. He had an he had his IG rep do the independent investigation. He was an aviator helicopter pilot, so zero bias associated with naval special warfare, do the entire initial line of duty investigation, which found these these determinations. Then he took that investigation, had the three-store, three-star Surface Forces Pacific commanding officer, Admiral Kitchener at the time, independently review it. So a guy that outranks Wyman Howard and our community, and again, has no bias toward naval special warfare, independently review it. They verified and agreed with all findings and even doubled down on some of them. Then they sent that to the CNO and to the Secretary of the Navy for review. So this thing was like double triple stamped to reduce bias and increase objectivity. And yet, even with all that, the Secretary of the Navy said, no, change it. And so the Vice C know at the time sent word back to Naval Special Warfare. Basically, I'm paraphrasing, my word's not his, but but functionally speaking, bury the old investigation. Don't even mention it, bury it, start a new one under the presupposition that drugs were not a causing factor in this young man's death, and begin from there. And so uh, and we have we have actually email traffic which indicates these things. Like we know these things happen, we know they took place, and unfortunately, can I ask what the medical how the medical examinator squares that?
SPEAKER_03Okay, because I that I mean to me that's the most interesting part because it there, if there's a medical examiner who's looking at the the body and what happens to the body when somebody passes away, there must be a science, some sort of scientific certainty of or possibility. I mean, I'm not a scientist and I'm not a doctor, but there must be some sort of an objectivity that goes into how what could have caused this person to pass away. So how okay, yeah, one would hope. So tell me how the medical examiner square uh investigation was initially conducted and then how that could have been re-scoped based on how the findings were then brought back down to your level.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So
Autopsy Decisions And A Missing Test
SPEAKER_01the autopsy pathologist began the autopsy, and we know for a fact, based on testimony, that an NCIS agent was in the room with her. She's an Army doctor. That NCIS agent provided her the list of the drugs that we'd recovered in his car. So, so confirmed, validated, stamped official, that autopsy pathologist had that information about potential causing factors in his death. Regardless, that pathologist decided, made a deliberate decision during the autopsy not to test him for any of the drugs we found in his car. Even though all of his physical symptoms were absolutely undeniable peer-reviewed side effects from long-term use of many of these drugs, he had a heart enlarged to 63% larger than it should have been. It had internal restructuring. The symptoms go on. I could list them all, but but I'm not a doctor and it might confuse some viewers. So the point is that that pathologist decided not to test. Then they cremated the body and moved on. So so when that autopsy pathologist was questioned later, and I have this in her writing, she replied to an email why she decided not to test. In her words, well, we had already determined cause of death, therefore, there was no need to test his body for those those chemicals. It's like, wait a minute. The entire point of the autopsy is to determine cause of death. What you're telling us now is that you predetermined cause of death. Therefore, you decided deliberately to ignore relevant evidence that might have contributed to his death. That sounds like fraud. That sounds like dereliction. That sounds like malpractice.
SPEAKER_03But why would she do that initially? Like why if if if if the first part of this investigation was, let's just do this objectively and see what we find. Why would why would somebody of that professional caliber not consider something so important? That that just blows my mind.
SPEAKER_01It's a great question. I've asked that one. My lawyers have asked that one. She's been protected and has never been faced or forced to answer that question. So we just don't know. We can speculate all day long. I think there was already political pressure to bury some of the use of the drugs before we we have it on record of what actually happened. I'd also offer that, and you probably know this being in the military. I'm sure you've done a couple of these types of things or been a part of them, where there is a very strong desire. And I think this is an honorable desire, and I think it's an honorable intent to find someone who passed in the line of duty through their passing, right? And so in the line of duty now provides families benefits, it provides an honorable, you know, record as they as they move on, and it allows us to kind of honor the dead in no matter the circumstances. And there's an absolute bias to try to get to that determination one way or another. Well, if you insert illegal black market picture drugs into that analysis, there's a chance that the determination would be that he died not in the line of duty. And so I think there was an initial cultural bend to just lean away from that before the manipulation took place, before the malice makes sense. Yeah, it's just it's a natural bend. And I think like that's that's there's goodness in that. That's a goodness.
SPEAKER_03There's a goodness that can be taken from that too. There can just not want to make things harder for the Mullen family. That's right.
SPEAKER_01And I think this is why one day our case will be studied at the Naval Academy and at West Point in an ethics case study, because it might have been a small, well-intentioned lie at the beginning.
SPEAKER_03Right, turned into a mirror.
SPEAKER_01It turned into institutional corruption. That's right. That's a fascinating case study.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely, Bradley. And that's the kind of conversation that I love having on the Stories of Service podcast. And that's the kind of conversation that I don't see on any of these other podcasts. And I get pretty frustrated about that because this is the bigger picture is why are we lying? I mean, we're lying to do a good thing, but then the good thing turns into a bad thing because it's now become this bigger lie that everybody has to protect. And now all these institutions and careers are on the line because we've started with a small lie that turned into a big lie. And I and I can't even tell you, like as I listen to your story, which is a highly publicized media case, I'm just I'm just drawing so many parallels in my mind to what happened on Roosevelt because it was such a similar situation where the the they did what they could to try to separate the crew, they couldn't do it safely. They they tried to put out a warning call, they tried to do all these things. And then at the end of the day, even the CNO didn't want to relieve the CO, but because he never stepped in and did anything and stepped up, the SEC NAV, acting SEC NAV took over and it just turned into something that it never should have had to turn into. But somebody at the top said, you know, Brett Crozier had to go. And so that's what they did. And they rewrote an investigation to make it so that he could go away. And I mean, it's just unfortunate because the truth just gets lost when this almost like there's it's almost like there's nothing new under the sun.
SPEAKER_01Like these things just keep happening, right? And that's that's part of human nature. I get it. We're flawed human beings, and and our flawed human beings run organizations, which thereby means we have flawed organizations. But we we've got to be better and we've got to be honest with ourselves. We have to be honest, brutally honest with ourselves, and we have to aspire to be better as as humans, as leaders, and as organizations for sure.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
How Scapegoat Hunts Actually Work
SPEAKER_03So the next thing that happens is it goes all the way up. They say, Nope, this is victim blaming, even though we do believe that this could have played a part, but because we don't want this to be the narrative, how they do a new re-scoped investigation. And then is that around the time that you realize, oh shoot, that now I'm I they're going to start trying to make somebody a fall guy? Like, how did that start to happen?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I started to see indications of warnings before this, but but it was it was all starting to build for the sake of brevity, though. Yes, and I didn't know this at the time. We know it now in hindsight as we started getting evidence and pulling information. But yes, you started to get that weird feel on, you know, when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you're like, hey, like what's going on? Like, why are we reinvestigating this? Like that was a pretty, pretty loctite case before. It's like, like again, Admiral Wyman Howard was brilliant in how he built that first set of investigations just to protect ourselves from from the accusations that we're a mafia, right? That we were self-policing, that we were covering up our errors. Like he was a guy, a lot of respect for that man. But so yeah, when you start a new investigation under a false presupposition, well, if drugs didn't kill him, what did? Because we shouldn't lose a candidate in in training for no reason whatsoever. So thus begun a scapegoat hunt.
SPEAKER_03Right, to try to find anything, and and no organization is perfect. And there are going to be flaws, and there are going to be things that you're gonna see when you start under that supposition. And my understanding is, and I'll turn it right back over to you, is that that's pretty much what happened. They started finding anything that they could pin it on, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, yeah, right. And but this is how I know, and I'm so I'm so proud of my instructors and our medical professionals. Teresa, you know, and any any command, if you come in the way they came in and look for something, deliberately looking for something while ignoring truth, you're gonna find something. You know, my my my attorney said it really well. He said, at this day and age, with all the amount of the amount of administrative policies, procedures, instructions, and laws out there, pretty much most human beings are walking around committing felonies without even realizing it. Yes. And this is one of my problems that was highlighted through this this case was that we have we have slowly but but surely institutionalized the concept of leadership to where so many leaders out there have to be more concerned with procedural compliance than they are with actually making judgment calls as leaders.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_01And so the problem with that system is when you lift up the carpet and start looking, you will find errors in procedural compliance. And if you're looking for them in order to meet a predetermined end state, then it's very easy for the IG or for any other investigating officer to be like, aha, we found it. We found the reason why, right? And literally one of the things they accused us of was the equivalent of from the movie Office Space, like you forgot to put a cover page on your TPS report. Like it was that absurd. Like you did the report, you just forgot to put a cover page on it. Right. The problem was they actually messed that up. We did put the cover page on our TPS report. And so every criticism they tried to levy against us was actually untrue. So for them to look that hard, and by the way, like having led seals for two and a half decades, man, we have our rougher on the edges, you know, our skeletons in the closet. Like we are not, I like to say that people that are attracted to our community are already on the fringes of societal norms, right? We we're not quite right in the head, we make mistakes, we are, we are rough. And so for them to come in and look, deliberately look for something and find nothing substantive, to me, is just proof right there. In fact, that initial investigation, as flawed as it was, Naval Special Warfare had an independent team of attorneys review it. The I can't remember their name, there's an acronym for it, but they're basically like the Navy's team of prosecuting attorneys who look, look for opportunity to be able to prosecute. They came back and said, hey, there is no evidence at all of a crime here by Brad Gary or any of his instructors. And not only is there no evidence of a crime, there is no evidence to suggest that they ever stepped out of the limits of curriculum execution, the left and right limits. They were clean. They were within curriculum execution. Despite this, the narrative persisted and was perpetuated by the Navy deliberately releasing that false investigation to the press that my instructors were out of control, that they had ramped up the intensity of training so much that it had inadvertently caused Kyle Mullen's death, which was just untrue. Back to the opening parts of this talking about COVID. We were suffering massive attrition to the COVID era. And there's tons of data that supports this. But they used that attrition to conflate the issues and say, oh, the attrition is the evidence that training had intensified. Therefore, attrition equals higher intensity by instructors equals death of Kyle Mullen equals you are all culpable as instructors, leaders, and staff. Just not true. It's just not true.
SPEAKER_03So
COVID Attrition And A Bad Narrative
SPEAKER_03what was the attrition during COVID? Like what was that really?
SPEAKER_01Much, much higher. I mean, normally SEAL attrition, normally in any kind of SEAL class, the average is 18 to 24% success per year. So of 100 candidates that show up at the door, 18 to 24 will graduate. We fluctuated quite a bit through my two years. There were times where we're meeting the average, we were actually on target, but there were other seasons as new policies came out where our attrition rose and spiked. We dealt with those issues. It was a very dynamic graph if you look at it. But basically, our attrition at some points dropped very, very rose very, very high. So I think my worst class was we had 8% graduate a Hell Week from those that started. So 8% to 18 to 20 is a massive delta. There's a big difference there. Interestingly, though, during post-op analysis, we looked back and just went through every email, every data point, everything we could find, when that spike happened, which is the major spike they all reference when they say, ah, see, this is the evidence that your attrition ramped up. A couple different things happened, which actually contradict that narrative. One, we had the first female ever to make it to day one of first phase, classic, what's considered buds. And so this notion that at the same moment we had the first female ever, we just decided, send it. Let's just ramp up the intensity training of training. It doesn't, it doesn't make logical sense, especially considering our training is on Coronado Beach in full view of the Hotel Dell and the condos, uh, where we know people sit up there with binoculars and high def cameras. Like, like this is preposterous, guys. Like, you know, seals, you know, you know, we make a living based off of getting away with things, right? Like we, like this is what we do overseas in in foreign nations. We get away with with sabotage and with surreptitious ideas and methods. So this idea that we would just do this in plain sight at the very precise time and moment where we had the first female ever make it into first phase, because that's the other part is like, hey guys, all eyes are on us right now. Like this is the time to cross every T, dot every I. This is not the time for shenanigans. This is this is not the time to bend any rules. This is the time to be above reproach. We knew that, I knew that, I know my cadre knew that. So it's preposterous to suggest that that is the very moment we throttled it up. The other thing that we know happened, the only other variable that changed during that time period was that specific class was given the COVID vaccine literally days before they started Hell Week.
SPEAKER_03So uh it's it's which uh obviously can make people sick.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, it was safe and effective, is what we were told. So, so to then conflate that data later by saying, Oh, clearly you guys were out of control, clearly you ramped this up, clearly this was associated with Kyle Mullen's death. It's just untrue. It's it's it's provably untrue.
SPEAKER_03And and and to put a finer point on this, and and I'll talk to this, is that, and I've done some research on it, the Mullen family was also very public in the media, and they wanted to, they wanted answers, and rightly so. They they wanted to know what was happening and and why this happened. And I think it when tragically a death goes down in the military, because the military has such a horrible reputation, and I'm not just talking Navy, but in general, of cover-ups. As a public affairs officer, I know that the military does cover things up and and oftentimes does hide the truth. So if you've got that type of reputation, then no wonder the families of of someone who has passed is going to they're going to be understandably skeptical and they're going to use any resource they can, whether that be Congress, whether that be the media, they're going to use every resource they can to try to find out the truth. And that's right. They were facing the military, the Navy was facing that pressure and that pressure to have a narrative. But that pressure to have that narrative does not excuse them of delivering the truth. And that's what makes your story, in my opinion, so remarkable is that you said, okay. Okay, you and your family made a very deliberate decision to do what many won't do. Many would quietly retire. Many would just say, okay, this fight is too much for me. I will not take this fight on. But you made a different decision. And tell me a little bit about what went into that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
The Moment He Decides To Fight
SPEAKER_01We've said from the start to double down on what you just said. Uh Kyle's not the villain in the story. He is a 22-year-old young man who made a bad choice. Welcome to the club, right? Like your brain isn't done developing at 22. You're still making terrible decisions, accepting risk that you should not accept. And I'd offer that Kyle's family is not the villain in the story either. They Kyle's mom did exactly what mom should do, try to protect their son's legacy, try to honor his memory in all the right ways. Grief does does crazy things to people and is very unpredictable on how people respond to such tragic grief. The villain in the story is that the Navy chose to lie. And I and I wish I could say from the beginning, I was like, let's go all in on this fight. I I tried to, Teresa, I tried to resign. I offered, I offered my career to my boss. I said, hey, listen, I get it. I was in command. I'm responsible. No matter what the facts and circumstances are, I own this. So if my head needs to be chopped off for the sake of our community, I love us so much that do it. Well, I didn't know you did that.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Oh, yeah. Full conversation about it. Walk me to the guillotine. Like I walk away from this whole thing.
SPEAKER_04Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01And initially they said, no, no, no, Brad, we're all into the boat with you. It's so clear what happened. Like, like blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone was on the right narrative at first. Ultimately, there was a series of things that changed our calculus on why we decided to fight Teresa. One of them was seeing the Navy overtly lie. When they released a press statement that that I think it was like October, October, November timeframe, and releasing this press statement which said definitively, and I'm paraphrasing it, but drugs did not contribute to his death.
SPEAKER_03Well and that was the one where Admiral Ryan Perry was quoted, if I remember correctly. He was the current Chinfo at the time.
SPEAKER_01He was the Chinfo who released that press statement. And I knew that he knew better because, as you and I both know, he was the prior Naval Special Warfare Public Affairs Officer when this happened. So he he had the details. And what and what you and I both know also, which has never been publicly revealed, but will be in the book. But I'll I will reveal it right now for those who bothered to tune in tonight. The CNO's office, a particular admiral, called the current Naval Special Warfare Public Affairs Officer, Ben Tisdale, at the time and said, Hey, we want you to release this press statement from Naval Special Warfare saying drugs didn't contribute to his death. And Ben refused. Right. And he said, No, that's unethical. We know that's not true. Uh, because not only did you not test his body for the drugs, you cremated him. So you actually can't definitively say one way or another now whether they did or didn't contribute to his death. So to say they didn't definitively contribute is an absolute lie by the laws of logic.
SPEAKER_03And for Ben to do something like that, a a career naval officer, somebody with such an outstanding stellar reputation within our community. I mean, I can tell you he's one of the he's one of the good ones.
SPEAKER_01He's one of the ones I always admired. Great ones, Teresa. And I've said it for years. It's not what you wear on your chest that makes the person. It's the character. Um it's the character within. And I will tell you, I would roll with that guy any day of the week, whatever the task. Oh, me too. Because he's loyal to the truth. So not only did he defy a direct order from an 06, so it's an 06 first that called him, when he when he refused it, then an admiral called him and tried to coerce him into telling a lie. He refused to the admiral, and then the Chinfo posted it himself from the Sec Nav's page. Yeah. I remember so when I saw that, I was genuinely confused. Like, wait a minute. At that point, I'd done 22, 23 years in the Navy, like, like, and plus the Naval Academy. Like, how many classes did I have over that time talking about ethics and the need to be above reproach and the need to be, you know, like like instill public confidence in us?
SPEAKER_03And that's the one time that I can say that there was somebody in our community who has retired now and has moved on to greater and greener pastures who who stepped up and did the right thing. And he did the right thing when nobody was looking. He did the right thing behind closed doors. Yes. And, you know, I'll always I I mean, he's he's well loved and well regarded in our community, and he always will. And he's a hero. This and this story that you share with me is is indicative of his character. And he's a hero of our story. And the kind of person, and and it's it's unfortunate that Admiral Ryan Perry took a different path. I'll just leave it, I'll just leave it at that. And it it is very unfortunate. But the the the machinery and the gears of our community are strong. And unfortunately, there are a lot of others who are still serving, uh, even to this day, who quietly watch me and watch what I do online and cheer me, cheer me silently and and feed me information, but we'll never come out and do the same thing. And I understand, I mean, there's livelihoods on the live lines, there's careers on the lines. And like you said too, and I want to bring this out and anchor on it, we've all compromised our integrity. Yes. At some point, we have all broken ethical boundaries, we've all done things, we all have skeletons, we all have dirt. And so this idea that somebody out here is perfect and has never done anything wrong. Well, you know, take one look in the mirror, and I'm sure you'll find some things that you've done wrong too. So it's not the human condition. It's the human condition, so it's not even a real uh, I'd say an attack on Admiral Ryan Perry either. But it's just not at all. It's just basically to say, wow, you know, that's amazing that uh Commander Ben Tisdale uh stepped up the way that he did. And I just wanted to commend that as a PAO myself.
SPEAKER_01I I love that, and that's my favorite part about this book that we're about to release. It's not about it's in fact, we're not even naming the people who failed, we're naming the people who succeeded, we're naming the people that had the moral courage to stand up like Ben Tisdale in the face of immense opposition, pressure, sure, conversion, and say, no. I and this is this is why I have hope for America. I mean, it's this simple, Teresa. Right. These kind of stories have people that believe in honor, courage, and commitment. Right. They're they are out there. We have patriots who bleed and live by these ethics and these codes, and they will absolutely resist coercion and tyranny. It's a story of America, and I it's what we love. And so we should raise people like that up at every chance we get. We should prop up the Ben Tisdales of this world and say, dude, you are exactly who we're looking for. You are exactly who we need. So unfortunate that that's the exact guy that we ran out of the Navy. And he told me, he said, Brad, I've seen this happen to more people than you. And he's like, I'm fed up, I'm done, I'm over it. It was one of the reasons why he left the Navy was he told me the same fed up. Yeah. It's uh it's tragic. It's tragic.
SPEAKER_03No, I agree. Well, I think that now moving forward, you go to your, you say to yourself, Okay, this is they're gonna come after me.
Why Moral Courage Is Harder
SPEAKER_03I'm gonna have to make this fight. And you're like, what do I do now? Like I you you know that you know the wheels, the writing is on the wall. You know, I remember this from the Sean Ryan podcast. You talked about how people that were, you know, you could just sense you, it's like almost like a culture change happens around you where everyone goes from, we're we're under the boat with you, we're we're there, we're we're we got your back. And then all of a sudden those same people are starting to, you know, slowly distance themselves from you. And is that at that point, are you like, oh, oh shit, me and my medical officer and some other people, we are now the the dead the fall guys? I mean, and is that when you started to say, Oh shit, I got a lawyer up, I've got to go public? How did that happen?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's uh you're right. It it's like going, it's like all of a sudden becoming the kid at grade school who has cooties on the playground. Like no one wants to hang with you all of a sudden. And before you were like the hotness, you know, and everyone just wanted to be a part of what you were doing. So there's that, there's that shift, and you can sense it and feel it. And it's very isolating, very ostracizing, very demoralizing uh for doing so much time. But yeah, we started to see, we started to feel it. I started to see it on the medical. Because again, if you're if you're if you're excluding the evidence and the answers but looking for new answers, you're gonna find them somewhere. You're gonna rationalize finding them somewhere, and it's gonna feed your confirmation bias. Uh, leaders should study these things, the art of what makes me human to human, why we make decisions the way we make them, when we feed that confirmation bias versus when we make sure we are looking at things objectively. And so, yeah, it started to build and we started sensing those things, starting with that lie. I could see that was gonna go nowhere. It's almost like the ends justify the means has been disproven as a viable philosophy for years and and centuries before this, but but so many people just went along with it. Ultimately, a couple things happened. One, I finally, once I was charged with NJP for a second time, we defeated the first one with an argument. They came at us from a second angle on the second one. And once I saw that, I realized the full scope of what they were doing. And they were recommending that that many of my medical professionals and instructors get taken to NJP as well. So at the time, I was only charged, as was my boss and our and our senior medical officer, but there was no guarantee other people weren't going to be charged. And frankly, even if they weren't, their reputations were at stake. And so we sat down as a family and we weighed the costs. And we said, hey, man, if we're going to erode the very values the SEAL Trident is built upon and the Navy anchors are built upon, well then what do those symbols mean? And and really it means nothing if you erode those values. If you betray those values that they're built upon, it erodes those, it erodes the entire meaning. The sealed trident becomes nothing but a piece of cheap stamped metal that you can buy the NEX for $14.95. And having done two decades of a of a career and having lost, man, into the dozens of friends through through massive tragedy in the war on terror against our enemies, I could not, I could not take a knee anymore and walk away. Well, I'd offered to walk away before I could no longer do it in the face of everything they died for becoming worthless, becoming meaningless. And then watching those entrusted to my care get vilified by the press and naval special warfare staying silent when they knew it was untrue. The Admiral at the time said, Brad, I know this investigation was deliberately manipulative. And yet he let that investigation get released to the press and he let the press have a feeding frenzy without submitting any official statement that would contradict the narrative because he knew that narrative came from the sec nav. And so I had these men who I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have known men now who are quicker to l risk their life in combat than risk their reputation by standing up for what's right when it matters most.
SPEAKER_03Isn't that crazy? It's do you ever want do you ever wonder like like like how why and how that happens? And I've thought about that too. I mean, you you're not the first person to say that. And I and I wonder, because you know, I'm one of those people too that, as you know, is a truth teller and I can speak up and even at the face of of of of lots of odds and risks, I'll I'll I'll still do it. And but I often wonder, like, if I was in a battlefield and getting shot at, would I would I be that same person? And and I have no idea because I haven't been in that position. And and and sometimes I wonder, like, is it because when you're on a battlefield, it's about your buddies and it's about the teamwork and it's about that camaraderie and saving your friend? And then when your ethics and and other things and your judgment and all those other things are at risk, well, then you're losing that buddy. I mean, I'm I'm being kind of deep here, but I'm just trying to understand kind of the psychological cost and why someone's willing to die on the battlefield, but they're not willing to die for an IG report. And I and I you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Like not die, but I've wrestled with this so much. I don't I don't have an answer for you, but but but it's all it it's why we should be talking about it. Because I will tell you, between physical courage and moral courage, moral courage is way more difficult. And so what I'd offer is to answer your question, I think you'd be fine on a battlefield because you have shown moral courage, and that's way, way, way harder. So, so it's fascinating to me, and this is what I tell leaders is I now do leadership consulting, and I we talk about these things. I say, hey, listen, you guys are so enamored with the SEAL culture and the things we do on the battlefield. Uh, and you should be, it's awesome. Like we do these amazing things, it's great, we're a great community, but moral courage is way more difficult. You don't necessarily deal with life and death day by day, but I know for a fact you deal with moral dilemmas every single day, and you have to navigate those as leaders. And so the fact that I'm telling you from experience now, like I have a voice of experience here from seeing and doing both, this one is way harder, way harder. And you're dealing with that as leaders every day. Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_03We that's a great, that's a great anchor.
SPEAKER_01Yep. We need to be talking about that.
SPEAKER_03We do, we do. And I think, like I said, the only way I can square it in my mind is the idea that on the battlefield you're you're part of that team. You have that cohesion, you one team, one fight. And then when you're a fate, you're a whistleblower who's getting ostracized and the team turns against you. Well, the team is a tribe, and and a tribe behaves the way a tribe behaves. And and and and what will happen is you'll you'll get that two percent, Bradley, that'll still stand by your side. They're thick and thin, but then the 98% will follow the herd and they'll be part of the tribe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and so the uh the ash conformity experiment. Have you have you looked this one up?
SPEAKER_03No, what's that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, you gotta look it up. Ash A S-C-H. All right, the Ash Conformity Experiment. There's a there's a 10-minute YouTube on it. It's fascinating about the the human back to human condition, the the desire we have to conform to the norm. Where's the group going? And especially, by the way, this is like uber amplified in the SEAL teams because all you want to do is be accepted by the team. Your entire self-worth in the SEAL community is does the team value me? So if the team is going a certain direction, well, I want to assimilate. I want to be a part of that because I want to be valued by the team and I want to contribute. And so let's go. Right. And so, so it's it's very dangerous this idea of conforming to the social norm, especially, especially when the social norm is untrue or pointing us in a direction that's unethical. It's a really, really interesting case study. Every single leader should understand this because as they make decisions designed to either incentivize or disincentivize behavior, we have to understand the psychology about what makes humans behave the way we behave in the first place. What are our temptations? What are our proclivities? Why do we bend certain directions and go with the flow so often? Well, there's a lot of reasons why we should look into that.
SPEAKER_03I agree. All right, I'm gonna take a look. So let's go back to your story.
Going Public To Move Congress
SPEAKER_03The next thing that happens is you are you're at you're at the kitchen table, you guys, you're you as a family decide this is the this is the hill we're gonna die on. And then and so, and so and I like to say, and so the fight begins.
SPEAKER_01And so the fight begins.
SPEAKER_03So what what made you start? How did the fight start and when did you decide to take it public and how?
SPEAKER_01It was a progression. We followed a biblical model of pray for your leaders when they're acting unethically, appeal to them on the basis of of values, shared values, and ethics, confront them with what you have, and finally defy them. And so it was it was a series of small steps. Obviously, the praying part was was very, very early on. But then we started appealing to them and I started having conversations with captains and admirals. Hey, help me understand this. Like, why would we why would we endorse a lie? Why would we go this direction? I I it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to me. And then finally I started showing them some of the evidence I had that insiders were sending me, like Ben Tisdale and and insiders from the Pentagon who were sending me emails saying, like, hey, by the way, this is happening and it doesn't seem right.
SPEAKER_03Ultimately, and by the way, I just want to put a point on this. People want to speak up. You said you had insiders at the Pentagon. I have insiders now who who feed me information and tell me about things. People, people, we have some good men and women in uniform and who are still currently serving. And they they they know that their livelihoods are on the line talking to people like me. And and thank God they trust me.
SPEAKER_01But uh as Jocko says, in 2026, uh Jocko's a good friend of mine, in 2026, there's no getting away with something like this, right? So you have to understand as a leader, there are people working for you that that are truth seekers and truth speakers. And so even if you think they're loyal to you, if you're trying to betray the values of organization, even well-intentioned, like we discussed at the beginning, hey man, they're going to they're going to do something, right? Whether it's publicly or privately, they're going to sabotage your efforts. So just don't try. Just tell the truth.
SPEAKER_03Do the right thing. Do the right thing tell the truth so that they don't have to send me emails.
SPEAKER_01It's it's so simple to say and so hard to do. So yeah, so so ultimately what happened in the end was I I sat down with our force master chief at the time. And we sat down with uh two team guys over a fire pit and a glass of whiskey. And I said, Hey man, here's how I'm seeing things. Here's all the evidence people have fed me. I showed all my hands, I showed my cards. It was the stupidest move ever in any kind of fight, but but I had to do it because I had to make sure I exhausted every effort to get them to do the right thing for the right reasons.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I said, I said, I've got a path mapped out. I've got a plan and a backup plan. I think we can map a path to fix this, to correct the narrative without embarrassing Naval Special Warfare or the Navy. Keep us out of the limelight. I I have an idea on how to do this. I've worked with my lawyers. We've got an idea. Uh, please, please see if we can get the Admiral over here, just me and him and you, three glasses of whiskey, three team guys like men, hashing this out as leaders and coming up with a plan to salvage the situation. Please, I do not want to go thermodynamically on the other.
SPEAKER_03I love that you did that. I mean, how many people would would do that behind the scenes and say, you know what? And I mean, like, I love it though. It's kind of like when like officials with the certain branches reach out to me and and tell me things. I'm like, I'm more alive apt not to say anything and to let them do their job and and to let them tell, you know, put out the good news and and and and fix problems because I I we want this organization to succeed. And that's what we were doing. You were basically saying, hey guys, I know you kind of are are about to try to chop off my head, but you know what? I I I this is a plan that could work, that that could hopefully make everyone happy and and make this make this be a peaceful and and and and so somber experience and and just be truthful. And so you tried to do that.
SPEAKER_01And there's always a way to de-escalate. Right, right. And and he's a good friend of mine, and he's still a good friend today, and he said he would do his best. And I and I I know he tried his best to make that meeting happen. Ultimately did not. And and I told him too in that meeting, I said, hey man, listen, and this is gonna be a little maybe it may sound over the top, but it's exactly what I said and is what I felt at the time. And I still believe. I said, Hey, dude, I don't know how I ended up here. I like, but I'm here, and I feel like I have been called to this time and place for this purpose to stand for truth, to defy these lies, and to defend those entrusted to my care. And I said, Does like this is my life's purpose? Everything, everything has built toward this moment. I said, Does it sound like I will back down? And he's like, No. And I said, Okay, I'm glad you see that and hear that, because I will go thermonuclear. I will burn the ships to the bottom of the sea for these principles I believe in, if I think we've strayed from them. And he tried his best, but he couldn't make the meeting happen. And so it was shortly after that that we we decided we've done everything we can do inside the left and right limits and the leverage they had on me, other than going public. Even prior to that, we'd had three congressmen submitted an official congressional inquiry, which undeniably exposed the corruption and the lies. They ignored it. United States Navy still has not answered that inquiry. They showed absolute disdain to Congress.
SPEAKER_03Well, they that is that is also a pattern. I want to anchor on that really quick. I'm sorry to belabor this with my audience, but I I this is another pattern that I see in all these cases. Congress has no teeth, has no power. If they don't want to hold the military accountable, the military just ignores them and says, go away.
SPEAKER_01We won't answer your congressional. What we're ridiculous. It is. And we we we looked at this whole fight like a battlefield. Okay, how do I how do I establish firing positions? What are those positions? How do I provide mutually supporting fires? How do I maneuver? How do I sign? When do I strike? When do I wait? When do I take a knee and watch for a response? And we started over time doing a bunch of recon by fire, so to speak. And and we could tell when we struck a nerve. Oh, they care about that. I thought they'd care about this, but they didn't. But now they care about this. Okay, let's double down on that. And so we figured out very quickly exactly what you're saying. Like, A, we need more congressmen on our side because three of them isn't enough. B, turns out they don't really care what Congress thinks, but they do care what the Senate thinks. Why? Senate Armed Services Committee? No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, that's that's way too benevolent, Teresa. They care what the Senate thinks because one single senator can stop their promotions instantly with an objection.
SPEAKER_04I never thought about that. You're right.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. When you come down to again, human nature, human decisions, what drives us, what motivates us, it's oftentimes greed, it's selfishness. And so these admirals are terrified of getting a call from a senator because they know that senator can block their promotion from one to two, two to three, three to four stars.
SPEAKER_02Makes sense.
SPEAKER_01And so we started maneuvering to get senators and we started maneuvering to gain more congressmen. Now, in the political realm, what we learned very quickly, and I'm not cynical about this, but a congressman or a senator, even if they care about your case, altruistically, most of them aren't going to expend their political capital to defend you unless they're Constituents care. Well, the only way to get constituents to care is to go public. And so that was the reason why we ended up going public on Sean Ryan as an active duty service member, which I don't think I don't have done.
SPEAKER_03Unprecedented at that level. I mean, there might be some that have written an op-ed. There might be some who have gone on LinkedIn as an active duty service member, but nobody has ever gone on a platform such as the Sean Ryan show.
SPEAKER_04I mean, there's a lot of risk.
SPEAKER_03There's so much risk. And the only thing I can think that's even comparable is perhaps there have been some active duty service members who have spoken up about sexual assault while they were still serving. That's that's about it. But and then there was Eddie Gallagher. Like, like honestly, like I we all remember the Eddie Gallagher case. And I mean, he was fighting to not be in the brig for the rest of his life. So he had that he had that on you know to weigh as he fought took on his public fight. But if I remember correctly, I think it was only Andrea, his wife, who who who initially was in the media. I can't, I I'm and please don't point me out.
SPEAKER_01She went public before he did. I mean he was in a brig, so he couldn't go public. Um she is she's a beast of a woman. And I mean, we know now, hindsight, what whatever happened downrange is almost irrelevant with Eddie because what we know is that the system, the Navy, absolutely violated his rights, his American rights. Absolutely. I mean, they openly spied on him, they they put malware on his computer to fish through the emails between him and his attorneys. Like, and and in my mind, and in, I mean, there's a reason why we have this legal press in the United States of America built on Judeo-Christian beliefs, by the way, that you are innocent until proven guilty. There's a reason why we do this, and and it's an important reason. And when something like an institution as big as the United States Navy or the Department of War in general violates those due process rights, cheats at the very game that they designed, well, they now become the larger enemy. And that infraction, I think, becomes way worse than anything we're even investigating from the beginning, because it subverts the entire process and it pits the David versus Goliath scenario where you're going against a system that has unlimited resources. And now what's is shown its willingness to bend the rules and break them, overtly break them for the sake of coming to a predetermined end state conclusion. Correct. It's horrific.
SPEAKER_03It's terrific, Bradley, and it happens to so many of my guests on so many levels. And it's why we have to keep talking about it. And I will keep talking about it until I'm, you know, buried six foot in the grave one day.
SPEAKER_04As we need to.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I think that at some point there might be small wins here and there. And like I said, maybe there won't be very many, but if you're on the side of right, you're on the side of right, and you just keep on keeping on. And I think that's the thing to take away from all of this. Sometimes you gotta take a break from it a little bit and have some fun somewhere and go do a New York City SEAL swim or something else that's fun and patriotic. But at the same time, this is important stuff, and we should never stop fighting. I I that's how I feel about it. As Christians, as as as American citizens, as patriotic people, as culture people who love our nation, love our world. This is the kind of stuff we should be doing. So that's when you also decided to do this because you knew that this was a fight and this was something that was so much bigger than just you. It was bigger than your family. It was, it was, it was an institutional, you know, disease that you basically were uh subject to and said, Okay, this is what I'm gonna do. So you go on,
Sean Ryan Show And The Turning Point
SPEAKER_03Sean Ryan. Let's go to that. Tell me a little bit about what happened. Tell me about the show, the experience. I'm curious at what it was like being on a show.
SPEAKER_01It was the scariest thing I've ever done because everything I was doing was in defense of the trident and the navy anchors. And yet everything I was doing was about to potentially cost me my reputation with everyone that served within the trident and the Navy Anchors. And so it was this supreme irony, and and uh it was really, really hard threshold across. But every time I'd go back and revisit all the decisions we made that led us to that point, I was left with the same inescapable conclusion. This is the next step. It has to be. There is no other option. I've exhausted every other effort to the max. This has to happen. And so we we flew into Nashville's. I took leave, didn't tell them what I was doing, but but took leave. And I got to back up too, though, it's amazing how God works. He had, so as you know, as a public affairs officer, you're only allowed to talk about while you're active duty, things that have already been publicly released to the press and to the public by uh authorized officials. You can't disclose anything that could come back at you as, hey, you put American national security at risk. And so leading up to Sean Ryan, we this was never the plan, but over the course of the year or so, prior to that leading up to it, thankfully we had one of our congressmen who was working with us to get information released to various small news uh publications around the country. And they were all small ankle biter places. I know that when these stories popped, the Navy and Naval Special Warfare were probably laughing behind closed doors. Like, like, what does he think he's doing? This is not like, oh, this got like three clicks and likes, you know?
SPEAKER_03Right. You do get a New York Post story. I do remember that.
SPEAKER_01But Caitlin Dornbose first broke that for us, but but even that, they largely just disregarded. But what over about a year, we actually compiled a pretty solid chain of evidence, all released through a U.S. congressman, which gave us that foundation to now talk about on Sean Ryan. Smart, strategic and spark. I wish I could say it was like our brilliant strategy from the beginning. Again, this was this was God ordained and he he provided that path slowly and surely. So when Sean first contacted me, all of a sudden we we look back, we're like, oh my gosh, we can actually talk about quite a bit of this without getting ourselves into trouble. That said, you know, Ben Tisdale, a good friend of mine now, has been like, hey, Brad, never go on a free form, like long form podcast. It's nothing but risk. You're gonna get tripped up, you're gonna make a mistake. We always advise against these types of things.
SPEAKER_03So you didn't ask permission to anyone. Like you just took leave and and just I just took leave.
SPEAKER_01I just took leave.
SPEAKER_03You you you as an active duty service member, there is no like that's right. There's you're not breaking a UCMJ violation by by talking to the media because we all have public platforms, we all have social media. So you going on Sean Ryan is no different than me put technically by the rules, going and putting a Facebook post out. I mean, it's still it's public consumption, so you have to be very careful.
SPEAKER_01There's very tight left and right, which is why I had two lawyers flanking me on either side.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, Jason Ward Wardham and uh Jason Wareham and Davis Yowns. David's yep, I remember.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, good friends of mine today. So yeah, so terrifying, terrifying. And we we got into Nashville as a family. We stayed at the Gaylord right there in in downtown Nashville as a family. My mom and dad flew in to watch the kids. Amy and I drove into Franklin the next morning. I was on about two hours of sleep and uploaded on coffee, couldn't even couldn't even put anything in my stomach. I was so nervous.
SPEAKER_03I bet you were.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh. Such a risk.
SPEAKER_03I mean, that's your first time ever public in front of a camera, like other than when you were, you know, back in the day, and but official. But now you're doing this as a whistleblower. It must have it must have been surreal, too. Like it must be being in Sean Ryan's studio under those kind of cameras. I mean, podcasting, as we know, has become the new media, and this is pretty much the number one podcast. And even back then, it was a very rising podcast to becoming the number one podcast.
SPEAKER_01And so you're like around that time, he was starting to close the gap between him and Joe Rogan. And yeah, depending on the day, it's one or the other. But yeah, it was very we were very blessed, very fortunate that I mean a close friend of ours, DJ Shipley, had been one of Sean's earliest episodes. I yep, I know who he is. Yeah, DJ's the yeah, DJ's the one who called Sean one day and he's like, hey, dude, something's going on with my boy Brad. This is legit, you know, give him give him the time and figure this out. So I'd never met Sean, but I will tell you that he's everything, he's everything he presents himself to be. He's just a he's a genuine truth seeker. And like all truth seekers, you know, he makes his way through all that and and asks a lot of questions and brings people and he goes deep and he talks for four.
SPEAKER_03I'll be honest with you, Bradley. I did not listen to all the first two hours of that episode.
SPEAKER_01It's a long one.
SPEAKER_03Goes into like your whole past, except a couple times. Like I said, I got some of the wave tops, but then I got right into where he talked about the case. And he he does a beautiful job of asking very deep analytical questions, listening, making sure he asks that second level, third level, fourth level questions. I mean, I watch his show all the time to kind of get tips for my own show.
SPEAKER_01So that's very good because he would just he would ask a question, I'd give him an answer, and he would just sit there.
SPEAKER_04I know and wait. That's one of his tricks.
SPEAKER_01And then I found myself being like, What do you talk more? Yeah, and so he was this is this weird way he likes to do things.
SPEAKER_03He loves, he's got that whole CIA thing, or I don't know what you want to call it, but he just kind of like he did it to my friend Michael Lester, too. Michael Lester wrote, Oh god, oh god, Michael's gonna kill. Um he wrote this very, very amazing book, We Are the Bad Guys, and uh Oh, it's a great book. And he and and Sean Ryan had him on actually twice and said the exact same thing, Bradley. He's like, Yeah, he just does that. He'll yeah, he'll ask you a question and then he'll just be quiet. Yeah, and then as you like, and it gets you to talk more and to think of more things to say. So yeah, it does.
SPEAKER_01It's very good, very good. So yeah, it was it was a great experience, incredibly stressful, yet euphoric. Once we sent it, you know, it's like you fired those round those rounds downrange, like, okay, there's no pulling those back. Let's see what happens. And it it did exactly what we hoped. It was the pivot point because constituents started caring. I think we got like 1.6 million views in in like a week. It was uh it was a quick, it was a quick interest piece. And all of a sudden, people did what we asked. They started calling congressmen, they started reaching out to us, they started using draft templates to just email congressmen and senators. And before we knew it, we had a coalition for truth, is what we called it in DC growing rapidly. And then that was really what ended up catalyzing the end of our case was finally we had enough congressmen and senators on board calling the Department of War at the time, Department of Defense, saying, Hey, and what I would tell every congressman and their staff, because you know they've got professional staff members, is hey, listen, don't believe me because I'm a compelling storyteller or you like me. I will give you all the evidence I have that's like black and white, slam dunk, crystal clear on what happened here, this corruption. And then you make your determination. And if you walk away from me and say, hey, I'm just not comfortable, fine. No, no harm, like no hard feelings at all. Every single one of them who bothered to look at it came back with, hey, oh yeah, we're all in on this. This is ridiculous. In fact, I had some senators tell me to the face from the SAS, senior members of the Sask, hey, we're not going to expend political capital on this because it's so obvious you're going to win, that that would be like throwing away our money for something that's already a predetermined outcome. Like your case is so rock solid here. There's no question in our minds you will win in the end. We had the White House Presidential Personnel Office review every single file. And they came back with, hey, you guys are clean. It's so clear what the Navy did. So it was inevitable. It was just a matter of when.
SPEAKER_03And bottom line, and getting that pressure. And then, oh, by the way, I saw you on LinkedIn around this time too. You made another very bold move that I want to point out, and I'm sure it's in your book, but you actually walked the halls of Congress. And and and I at the time, that was one of the things I asked you the hard question on. I said, How how did you weigh what to do when it came to walking the halls in Congress to advocate on your own behalf in uniform? And that was a very risky move, but it was not an illegal move. And it was not you again, that's not something that's in the rule books or that that anybody will tell you to do. But if you show up out of uniform, there is a very big difference in the attention and the and the visibility that you're going to get on your case, as opposed to and I remember when we talked on the phone, you made a good metaphor. You're like, this wasn't like somebody who had like a minor pay issue. Right. Uh you have to weigh the consequences and the cost of what it is you're willing to stand on and you're willing, the hill you're willing to die for. And at that time, that it was worth it for you guys to take that road. Yeah. Correct.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So two things to answer your question. One, while we had tons of congressmen that supported us through the process and senators, the one that that kind of recommended that move was Brian Mast from South Florida and his chief of staff, uh, Stephen Leighton, good friend of ours today, both of them still. And he said, Hey, here's the deal. It's one thing to send emails, it's one thing to have phone calls. We need to get you here in person, and we need to, we need to run through the the Capitol and just get you in front of these people and get your elevator pitch down. And if they ask, we'll tell them we've reviewed the evidence, we'll give it to them if they want, but but we've got to get this into just tangible outcomes. So they helped us, we helped them draft a letter to be co-signed by as many congressmen and senators as we could get. So that was one thing. The second thing, which you and I talked about prior to going live here, was that as a family, as we made these pivots, as we made these shifts, that we decided to start fighting, as a family, we started weighing the consequences. Okay, if this is what we are called to do, if this is what we believe in, if these principles are what we truly believe in, what are we willing to pay to defend them? And just like downrange, when you're in war, you know, you've got you've got the laws of war, which provide very clear left and rights. Well, what always happens is a battlefield commander comes in, some admiral or general out there and says, Okay, yeah, but let's bring him in here. And then the guy under him is like, let's bring him in here, let's bring him in here, let's bring him in here. And we saw that in Afghanistan and Iraq countless times, where sometimes the rules of engagement were so thin and restrictive that that we were actually ineffective against the enemy because everyone was worried about getting in trouble with their boss. And yet, and yet we wouldn't have been outside of ethical boundaries or or acting illegal or outside of the laws of war had we broken those. We would have been obviously breaking a lawful order. But the rules of engagement get restrictive, is the point I'm trying to make. What we realized as a family was that our rules of engagement were actually pretty wide and pretty broad on what we could do ethically and legally as citizens of the United States of America, even wearing the uniform as an active duty Navy sailor. The problem is that mankind had leverage on me. My pension, my rank, my retirement, my seal trident. So all these were additional restrictions on my rules of engagement to maneuver against this enemy, these lies. Well, as a family, when we weighed that out and said, okay, if this is what we're called to do, what are we willing to pay to do it? What's the worst that can happen? They can take my trident. Okay, got it. They can demote me in retirement. Okay, got it. They can give me something less than an honorable discharge, general or other than honorable or something. Okay, got it. Okay. That's the worst. Well, I mean, it's it's hard to think about after investing 20-something years in the Navy, but you're like, well, in the end, we said, well, our principles matter more than all those things. And we are people of faith, we're a family of faith. My God doesn't need me to have a sealed trident to make use of new. My God doesn't need me to have a pension or a rank to use new for his purposes. And if he's calling me toward this, we're gonna take that step in faith and we're gonna pay that cost emotionally right now. And and we looked around the room, and my my wife's like, send it. She's like, send it.
SPEAKER_03I I like I told you, it's it's too bad. I I should do a whole nother podcast just with Amy's actually really interesting. I I really think that that's the next show we need to be doing because she's the calculus that she went through as a family member to just be this military spouse that goes with you and takes all these sacrifices and then says, Yes, go forth and conquer this battle.
SPEAKER_01I had people telling me at some points, good friends counseling me, hey dude, stop. You don't know what you're putting your family through. Like, oh, I'm sure you're gonna you're gonna break them, you're gonna drive yourself to divorce. Like, stop, stop, dude. You're you're crushing Amy and the kids. And I'd have this crisis, and I'd come home like, Amy, we have to stop. Like, this isn't fair to you and the kids. And she would look at me and be like, put your big boy pants back on and get back in. Like, she's like, What's a great wife? Who got in your ear? Like, stop. She's like, We're in, like, we're never stopping. I was like, I want to be in okay. Oh, she's man, I I don't deserve her. I don't deserve her, Teresa, for sure. That's what but so when we when we when we measure those costs as a family, all of a sudden we thought our ROEs were this, and we realized, oh, we have so much more maneuver space on this battlefield to do things like Sean Ryan, to do things like go to Congress in my summer whites and start asking for help. And so we exercised and executed every one of those as if, again, it was a maneuver element and a flanking position. And and we just kept poking and prodding until finally, finally, the Navy buckled when they realized, and we we we don't know fully what the moment was that made them break, but we suspect it was a it was a combination of all those things. Plus, what we found in the end, after after three years of this, almost three full years of this fight, as we were preparing my defense at a at a board of inquiry, we we again discovered, we verified that NCIS had never even tested the contents of the drugs that were found in his car uh procured on the black market. And so we demanded them to be tested. Like, wait, you're telling me that that law enforcement officers, those who are who are taught how to collect evidence and test for evidence, when when you find something like that, which is so clearly the most obvious culprit in what might have caused this young man's death, and you chose not to even test the contents of the vials that were from Pakistan and the Netherlands, like that is investigational malpractice on another level. And it was either deliberate, which shows malice, corruption, deceit, and and evil, I think, or it's incompetence at the highest level. And so we suspect that the Navy realized at that point hey guys, there's no win here. You know, either either we are guilty of malice or we're guilty of competence. And either way, there's a no-win here if we take this thing all the way. We have got to drop the charges. And so they they finally did that. I think they measured it as this is just my my my opinion on it, looking at it from the optic, obviously now with hindsight, but I think they looked at it from risk assessment here. What's the best way to preserve face and manage this risk as best as possible? And at that point, it was we just had to drop the charges. This has been such a disaster from the start. Uh, it has been nothing but a scapegoat attempt. And so finally, stop. And and thankfully, they stopped.
SPEAKER_03And but they dragged it out. I mean, they and then they I remember talking to you many months later, you were still serving, and I'm like, what's going on with your case? And you're like, yeah, it's it's still they're still processing and figuring out.
SPEAKER_01This is yeah, they they even after all that, yeah, they they were trying to when I submitted for retirement. Well, I I had hoped that somehow, miraculously, naval special warfare would call me up and say, hey, let's get you back on leadership track. Like, sorry about all this, you know, our bad. They didn't. In fact, my good friend, I mentioned earlier, Pete Logan, confronted our admiral at the time and said, Hey, you owe Naval Special, you Naval Special Warfare owes Brad and his family an apology. And he said, the Admiral replied, Well, the only way Brad can ever reconcile with our force is if he goes to mast with me. And Pete looked at him and said, Under what charges? They've all been dropped. There's no, there's nothing, there's nothing to hold mast about. And and they couldn't reconcile these concepts in their brain. They were so bent on this institutionalized need for accountability that they they could not reconcile this break in their system, in their process that we had done. And I and I've talked to a couple attorneys. Funny enough, I found out recently, ours is the only case they know of where we finally got the Navy to dismiss all charges prior to the BOI. It's the only one that's ever happened like that. So, but they couldn't reconcile that break. So then they they I submitted for retirement, realizing that, hey, this there's nothing here. There's there's no there's no path for me here. Well, then they tried to use an administrative loophole to once again administratively demote me. And we know now from Hung Kao, the current acting secretary of the Navy, who told me as he was getting ready to become the under-secretary, he found out they were trying to demote me two ranks down to lieutenant commander, all administratively, all under the guise of being non-punitive.
SPEAKER_03Do you think this is because they were getting pressure still from the family?
SPEAKER_01At this point, it's so far beyond pressure because Trump had already won and they were getting ready for his inauguration. So, so there was no more pressure, other than now I think there was institutional ego. So I think it started off as again, well-intentioned lies turns into institutional corruption, turns into pressure, turns into institutional ego.
SPEAKER_03And it just becomes a game. And that's what's so sad. Like instead of just letting it go and saying we made a mistake, it's like, well, and and I mean, I think that there's also this phenomenon that, and I've read about it a little bit in some of the work that Walk the Talk Foundation does. Yeah, more Susco. Yeah, and right. Yeah. They uh in fact, I know you partnered with them about a really good newsletter piece regarding the way the administrative system will will punish you, even if you refuse court martial. And and that is and and and or demand a court martial. They have ways in which they can make it so that they'll they will send you down a different road. So that you can't fight fight what it is that's being leveled against you.
Administrative Punishment Without Due Process
SPEAKER_01That's precisely one of the things I advocate for now. And people have misheard my narrative at times and been like, well, Brad's asking for more, more due process, you know, more policies, more instructions. Like, no, no, no, you misheard me. I'm asking for the opposite, actually. I think the NJP system and the court martial system is good in its conception. The problem I've seen is that the administrative tentacles have now grown so large and strong that the administrative system has now learned to punish all under the guise of being non-punitive. And so the Navy will now use that, and and corrupted leaders will use that system to non-punitively punish. And we know they did that with us because we requested court martial. The beautiful thing about court martial is it's a court of law, and we get full discovery of all evidence, and it gets aired out into the public light. Like my attorney says, the antiseptic of sunshine. Correct. They knew they didn't want that. And so, so while going through this administrative process, like so, for instance, one of the charges was that I failed to provide adequate oversight to my medical professionals. Okay. Well, I knew that there was a Bureau of Navy Medicine investigation which said all medical professionals met the standard of medical care. So we requested access to that investigation to refute the charge against me. Denied. Because it's an administrative process that's non-punitive, Brad. So we're not required to give you access to that investigation. That is privileged information. Okay. Well, you also allege that I let my instructors get out of control and unsafe to the point where it created, you know, detriment to Kyle Mullen's health. Okay, so I know that there's this safety investigation out there that showed that we were a safe command and nothing we did or didn't do contributed that. Let me get access to that to defend myself against these charges. Denied. That's privileged information. You don't have access to that. So again, using the administrative system, they can levy charges against our service members and then deny them the access to the information they know exists, that they need to defend themselves, all because it's administrative and non-punitive. But it's really punitive in nature, and you and I both know that. That's the corruption. That's what needs to change. I keep talking to Secretary Cow, acting Secretary Cow, and I'm like, hey, sir, like we're friends. So I usually call him dude or bro or something, but but acting Mr. Secretary, my friend from long ago. Go to Nav Purse, go to the Chief of Naval Personnel, Chief of Naval Personnel, and obliterate them of their authorities to do this. We have got to cut their instructions and their policies by half. We've got to strip them of the authority to punish under the guise of administration because it's subverting the NJP process. It is. It's subverting the court martial due process that our service members are allotted and allowed as American citizens. And frankly, it's corrupting the whole system.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's making it so that the truth doesn't get out. It's making it so that so that nothing can be properly litigated and and aired out in a court of law where where where the rules of the the the rules of evidence uh exist. And so because we don't have that in the military, military members are not protected. And and it's it's a very unfortunate situation. And why I devoted a lot of airtime on my podcast to people who've been sadly wrapped up in into that system. So so yeah, they they still, as I said in your story, uh to get to go back to to just kind of closing your case out, they they basically still kept trying to come after you, even even up until they finally allowed you to retire, correct?
SPEAKER_01That's right. That's right. We I think I set my retirement date and my party, our celebration. And I think it was about we we didn't finally get word till about a week prior to that that I was going to be allowed to retire as a captain honorably from the United States Navy. It was it was ludicrous. I mean, because especially, I mean I think you highlighted in your intro. As a commander, I received the the James Bond Stockdale Award for Inspirational Leadership. So they were trying to demote me as from a captain, past commander back to lieutenant commander, all under the guise that I had failed at a leader, as a leader. And yet they're the very ones that acknowledge me as an inspirational leader, the highest leadership award our Navy even authorizes. It was just it was so contradicting.
SPEAKER_03It it just it blows my mind. It blows my mind what the institution will do once they've labeled you as a pariah and or as a troublemaker or as whatever. You could be the most, you know, shit hot sailor that did so many amazing things, but when they've now uh d decided that this is going to be your path, and and and and to your credit, I mean, this is this is the path that you chose. And now, I mean, we're now what has it been a year since this has happened? Two years.
SPEAKER_01I I retired last June. So it's been
Life After Retirement And The Book
SPEAKER_01a year and some change now since I finally retired and have been free. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So tell me a little bit about what it that's like, because this is a whole nother part of the conversation that I never really get to have with people because now you're you know one year post from a lot of this stuff. And and your whole, and I think we talked about this before the com podcast, your whole life now has to look different because this is now, you know, any government job, any corporate job, anybody that sees what you have done in your life are are is now gonna know that you've had the you know this very public battle. They're gonna see you on the Sean Ryan show. This is all out there for the public to see. And so what is it? How how how would have you and your family kind of squared what the rest of your lives, your lives together and this next chapter looks like as a as a as someone who has spoken up and become a whistleblower? So tell me a little bit about what that looks like.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was terrified. I never wanted to leave. I wanted to keep serving. I miss my community, I miss my people, but it was so, so crystal clear that God was putting us on a different path. And so when we finally shifted over, I'll tell you, uh I did a program called the Honor Foundation, which is a phenomenal program that I think it's about a 12-week long, teaches you as a prime member of SOCOM how to translate what you did into what will be useful in the private sector. And one of the coaches in that process told me, you've spent your entire adult life defending the freedoms you have yet to taste. And that was the first time I started getting excited about the opportunities to come and what this next season of life might look like as a family. I still didn't know and I was terrified, but we took that step and embraced it. I've always felt we need to look back with fondness, not with longing. And while my season as a SEAL was incredible, and I'm thankful for every minute of it, the highs and the lows, I don't want to go back to that. We should never want to go back to that. I said in another podcast recently, we can't be Uncle Rico, right, from Napoleon Dynamite. Just reimagining the high school football game that that could have, would have, should have been the moment of our lives.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so we very much believe in looking forward and embracing the next season. We tried to do that a couple of different ways. I took a couple of different jobs. Actually, funny enough, I was appointed by the Trump administration to be Hong Kao's chief of staff. Uh, he offered it, went through the interview process. I accepted, got appointment, my appointment letter, and unfortunately, uh that job got killed by one of our enemies, the father of a candidate that went through when I was a C the CEO. He quit training. That father blamed me, and so he was a major GOP donor. So he rallied against me. So we we yeah, yeah. The the the the trickle-down effects of our That's what I yeah, I wasn't sure you were gonna talk about that.
SPEAKER_03I knew I knew about that story. I didn't know how to know if I told you or not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you told me that you didn't get the job, but I didn't know how or why. And I was that was also what I was sort of alluding to when I asked the question. I was like, this whole thing, it's it's it has tentacles and it has little ways of continuing to uh impact you. And and that and and and I felt bad when you told me that because I thought you were I thought that was that was gonna be your path. You're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I have I still have I have the signed appointment letter from the White House. You know, it was the most bizarre thing to get preemptively fired. Ultimately, as much as I'm I'm a big fan of what President Trump is doing and Secretary Haig Seth, in the end, it's still politics. And in politics, money matters sometimes, sometimes more than principles. And I'm okay with that. I'm not cynical about it. And and like I talked about on social media after that happened, my God is so much bigger than than those maneuvers. Yeah. And and what what man means for evil against us, God uses for our good. And and the path that that put us on has been so good. And and I've I've I've I don't want to be anywhere else where we're at. We we we started diving into writing this book and we started doing it.
SPEAKER_02Tell me, yeah, what's the name of the book?
SPEAKER_01Oh, Hard Mind, Soft Heart, A Warfighter's Battle for Truth, Brotherhood, and the Character of the SEAL teams. And it's it's really a it's a more than anything else, it's not a sealed book. It's not a traditional sealed book. I just happen to have been a seal. It's a memoir on faith, leadership, and suffering and how these things are intrinsically linked. And I mentioned earlier that we're co-authoring it as a family. Uh, my wife and I are going back and forth through the whole book. My kids and my entire family have portions in the end where they insert their thoughts and opinions and perspectives as a military family going through a career of suffering. Uh, and our hope is that the next generation can take this in and move forward. And we hope that people who are suffering out there find solidarity and we hope that leaders read this and pull out incredible leadership nuggets, uh, not because I'm so wise, but because I learned them sometimes the hard way. And I'm being transparent about it through this book. So it took us down a path. We're very happy. We're doing leadership consulting, some keynote speaking on the side to make ends meet. And life is pretty good. I'd say we've never been better. It's chaotic, it's unpredictable, but we're taking each step and we're enjoying it.
SPEAKER_03I love it. I love it. And I really can't meet wait to one day maybe meet like your whole family. Like I said, I think you guys are great people, and perhaps we'll all get together at the swim next year or something along those lines. Because we we definitely have a lot in common in terms of our our love of country and our love for the truth, and and just to keep on keeping on. I I love to hear what what you guys are up to. When does the book come out?
SPEAKER_01We are gonna start pre-orders very soon. We're hoping by October. The Pentagon is about halfway through their review process. Okay. So we're hoping to do full release publication by January-ish is our goal, but we'll see.
SPEAKER_03And then my understanding is if you are if people are interested in your public speaking, they can go here. I think I have it right here. Keynote agency. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01That's right. That's correct. Yep.
SPEAKER_03Okay, perfect. So if anybody is interested in having Bradley Geary on as a speaker, um, as you can see, it's an incredible, incredible, inspirational person. I very much admire you. I look up to you. And I I love, I absolutely love what you're doing. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Is there anything else that you wanted to add or or or or just kind of touch on again with our audience?
SPEAKER_01I
Leadership As A Lifelong Discipline
SPEAKER_01I appreciated. Let me see my battery's doing here. I'm getting low. So I appreciate this opportunity. Always, always precipitate to have these conversations about hard topics. Yeah, the the feelings are mutual. I appreciate what you're doing with your voice and your platform uh on behalf of those who have no voice. And what I would tell people out there is that, man, leadership is an art and it must be studied. It's it's a tradecraft in and of itself. And like any tradecraft, it must be studied, it must be practiced, it's a discipline. And we have to, as leaders, remain humble and introspective as we constantly evolve. You know, a teammate reached out to me recently. He's about to become a commanding officer. He was one of my young JOs years ago, and he's like, hey, he's like, hey, sir, do you ever did you ever struggle with imposter syndrome? And I laughed. I'm like, yeah, dude, welcome to the club. You know, because because once again, we're imperfect humans leading imperfect humans toward impossible aspirations. So if you think you've got that figured out, well, you're the village idiot. And everyone should run as far away from you as possible, as quickly as possible, because it's a constantly evolving art because we deal with humans, and humans are messy and unpredictable. And by the way, by the time you have the humans figured out, well, guess what? The next generation rises up into the ranks and becomes the largest workforce, and you have to relearn all those humans.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god, you're so right. Like, I'm doing this campaign right now for these social media people that are not maybe doing the nicest things online. And I'm not sure. I've watched some of your stuff. Yeah, and it's it's going. It's it's it's definitely a very spicy topic to take on, but I'm getting some really good feedback, even on the inside from people and and and people on the inside who are working policy. So I'm very I'll just leave it at that. But it makes me feel good that things are are are moving in hopefully a better direction on that end. But the thing that I'm getting out of that, this is what spirit, you know, I saw my story in what you just said, is the fact that I am getting the younger generation now following my content and and all these young kids. And I'm seeing like how they post and how they communicate, and it's a whole nother world out there. And I have to constantly check myself about it and go, am I just an old 50-year-old woman looking at this from a bat from a different generation, or are they truly being unprofessional online? And and it's a hard, it's hard.
SPEAKER_01I mean, like probably a little bit of both, right?
SPEAKER_03I think there is.
SPEAKER_01There's some give and take. We have to adjust a little bit to the new social norms for sure, but but we also have to hold a standard.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so it's it's a constant learning game. My old mentor Jay Hennessy says it be a lead learner. So so for the leaders out there who are still curious about people, uh, man, you have job security forever. So let's get together, let's talk about these things. You're not on an island alone. We all struggle, we all feel like impostors from time to time. Let's just keep learning together.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Bradley, I'll say back I'll see you backstage just to say goodbye very, very quickly, and I'll go full screen. But thank you so much for coming to us as well.
SPEAKER_01Appreciate you and what you do. Thank you. Keep doing it.
SPEAKER_03Okay. All right, guys, that's a wrap. Sorry, it was a little long, but definitely worth it. Sometimes these uh conversations just have to take their course and they have to be a little bit longer. But please, please, please tell your friends about the podcast. Please follow me on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and this will also be uploaded where you find where you may listen to podcasts. And then there will, of course, always be four reels and a blog. And I'll be back at it next week. I hope you all will enjoy the rest of your evening. And as I always close out these calls, please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other and enjoy the rest of your day. Bye bye now.