Transcript: Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #252)

And it’s been six months and it hasn’t been approved yet. They won’t approve it. I’ve heard nothing. They keep slow rolling me, which to me means the DOD swamp that’s there wants to crush my story, doesn’t want it out.

And so again, that’s part of the reason I’m coming on, sitting down with you here, is to start telling the story and maybe shake the tree so people hear a little bit about what these people did do to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Geez. Well, like I said, I’m excited to do this. So what I’d like to do is I’d like to do a life story on you, starting from childhood, through your SEAL team careers into development group and then the book and everything that happened.

I know there’s a lot. Well, it’s basically two interviews in one because of the sh*t you’re dealing with now. But before we get going, I got a couple of things to knock out for you, so I got you some gifts, Matt. Here you go. Everybody gets those.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Very excited about these. I’ve got a lot of people asking for these. If I got some today, they wanted me to bring and share with them. So thank you.

Gifts and Gratitude

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll load you up and then every once in a while we give one of these out on the show. So I got a buddy over at Sig, his name’s Jason.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Got a good buddy over at Sig.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, he was really excited about this interview. So I thought it would be a good idea to present you with one of those. So that’s the SIG Sauer P365 Legion. You like that? You already have one?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yes, of course.

SHAWN RYAN: Son of a… Well, now you got two.

MATT BISSONNETTE: But the Legion 365 is my favorite.

SHAWN RYAN: The Legion’s the…

MATT BISSONNETTE: The duck’s nuts. So thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: Hey, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. And then…

MATT BISSONNETTE: Wait, I got something for you.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Eagles and Angels. You ever heard of the brand?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, dude.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Former Delta buddy of mine. He uses our old camouflage where we donated uniform. He cuts them out. I had these made with “In God We Trust,” because I knew you were a fan.

SHAWN RYAN: And these are awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Love it. These will go in the studio. Thank you. This is your uniform, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s pretty cool. They do different operators, and they borrow a set of cammies, they cut them up, and then they sell them. Kind of cool collector’s items.

SHAWN RYAN: Very cool. Thank you. Thank you.

Faith Through Opposition

All right, one last thing. So I got a Patreon account. We’ve turned it into one hell of a community. They have supported me since the very beginning, and they’re the real reason that we even get to sit down and have this discussion today.

So I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Matt Stockton: “How do you keep your faith with so much opposition? And how did you find so much solidarity after war fighting?”

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s the first part again. How do I keep my faith?

SHAWN RYAN: How do you keep your faith with so much opposition? And how do you find so much solidarity after war fighting?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I would say I keep my faith… My faith is easier to keep when I’ve been in the trenches, when I’ve been in the fight, because it’s much more… I’m in the fight, and I need to remember. Where I’ve had my biggest struggles is where I’m not in the fight. And it seems kind of quiet, and there’s not a lot of stuff going on, and that’s where I’ve struggled.

So in the most emotional experiences or when we dealt with a lot of death in the teams or whatever it was, that was where I was able to understand that my faith… And there’s a plan.

Dealing with the government stuff, I was in a very, very dark, negative place getting out of the teams. I mean, I was in a very dark place after the way the government was treating me. And I guess I realized that anytime you’re challenged in your faith, it’s God testing you. That’s the way I looked at it.

Was maybe God just challenged me through the whole thing that I’ve been through with the government to see if I was going to turn into a little b*tch or not. Was I going to man up and deal with this the right way, or was I going to fold, melt, and become somebody I wasn’t proud of?

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, man. Well, you definitely didn’t fold.

The 15-Year Payment Plan

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s been a long fight, man. It’s been a long fight. I’m still in it. I’ve got… Yeah, I’m still in it. I got a payment plan for the next 15 years.

SHAWN RYAN: Tell me about that. So give me a brief snapshot of what happened.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Okay. We’re jumping all over here. You want to jump in where the book…

SHAWN RYAN: We’re going to go… Just a brief snapshot of what you’re going through. Let’s say 90 seconds or less and then we’ll cover that in detail when we get to it.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ve been fighting my own government for 12 years.

SHAWN RYAN: You wrote a book on the Bin Laden…

MATT BISSONNETTE: I wrote “No Easy Day.” The government immediately came after me for writing that book without a pre-publication review process being done. They came after me legally with unlimited attorneys for a whole bunch of time.

Ultimately they said, “Hey, look, there’s nothing classified in the book. We just want all the book money back.”

Well, I had spent $1.5 million of that book money on my lawyer fees defending myself against these baseless accusations. And in the end the government said, “We want it all back.”

So I gave them all the money, the book money that I had left. And I said, “Look, you’re still missing $1.5 million.” “We want that back too.”

So I sued my attorney, I won, went back to the government with a winning malpractice case saying, “Hey, I relied on the advice of counsel to publish my book without a review. I know the government didn’t want to look at this, but I sued my attorney and won. Will you relook at this case?”

They said no.

I said, “Well, I can’t pay you $1.5 million in three years. Give me some sort of payment plan.”

And so they said, “Give us all the money your malpractice suit made, your winning malpractice suit.” And then they put me on a payment plan. So I pay $3,800 a month for the next 15 years.

They said if I miss one payment, they’ll charge me back taxes and come after me again. I only served for 14 years. I served for 14 years. I got a plaque with my name misspelled when I got out.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: One T and Matt. But yet they want me to pay back more money than I ever would have made in my service for longer than I ever served. I only served for 14. I got a 15 year payment plan.

So that, and the story behind that is what I wrote about in “No Easy Day.” That’s the story that the government’s trying to slow roll in the review process right now. And it’s the reason that I’m sitting here with you now is so I can start sharing this story a little bit more publicly.

I’ve been very private about it. I’ve just tried to duke it out with them the best way I could through the legal system. And it’s got me to here.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit. Here we are, Matt. We got to talk about how to set up a better straw man. Mark Owen.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, the Mark easy to find. The Mark Owen name didn’t last more than two seconds. And it was actually, it was a Fox News producer like one of their online producers who actually ran my real name.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you f*ing kidding me?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Never would have guessed that, but okay, it was an online producer. So it’s pretty easy to find people’s home addresses online these days, right? Pretty easy.

SHAWN RYAN: Figure that out.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So I’ve got some friends that they set up a whole bunch of online personas if somebody’s trying to find me. And all of the home addresses that are linked to my fake accounts are all that Fox News producer’s home address.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, that’s f*ing genius. Nice work.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Nice work. I do, I do.

The Decision to Conceal Identity

SHAWN RYAN: One other question before we get in the life story. Why did you—I mean, another famous SEAL’s come out about this raid? Rob O’Neill, everybody knows. I’m just curious. Why did you decide to conceal yourself when you came out, when you wrote the book, when you did?

I mean, 60 Minutes did a piece on you. They did it. I mean, probably a better disguise than you’ve ever seen throughout your entire career. Definitely throughout my career, I’ve never seen a disguise that well done. I mean, it was like Hollywood production.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It was wild. It was Hollywood level makeup people that came out and did it. But to answer your question, I was a kid who grew up reading books. I grew up reading books about the community. That’s why I wanted to join. I read books about the SEALs in Vietnam. Boom. Had my service.

I knew the President had authorized the movies and the books. I knew all of that was happening. Three weeks after the Bin Laden mission, we go to Leon Panetta’s retirement ceremony from Langley, Virginia. He’s going to go over and be Secretary of Defense.

He gives a great speech on stage, gets off stage, Langley, Virginia. And he literally brings over Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, Hollywood producer, screenwriter director.

SHAWN RYAN: For Zero Dark Thirty.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Panetta introduces them to us and says, “Hey, look, they’re going to make you famous.” So within three weeks, less than a month of the mission.

SHAWN RYAN: For those who don’t know, Leon Panetta was director of CIA at the time.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep. Right. So he full access for Hollywood for that movie. I knew that firsthand. Within a month of the mission, I got out of the Navy. I hurt my neck in the crash. That was the last mission I was ever on.

I get out of the Navy later that fall. I’m contacted by the author, Mark Bowden. Mark Bowden wrote “Black Hawk Down.” He wrote a book called “The Finish” about the Bin Laden raid. And he contacts me, he’s like, “Hey Matt, I’ve already interviewed President Obama. I got the White House perspective of the raid. I’ve already interviewed Admiral McRaven. I got the JSOC perspective of the raid. We would love to interview you for your ground truth perspective.”

Fascinating. I already knew the movie was percolating. “Mike, when do you want your book to come out?” “It’s like, well, we’re trying hard to get it out before the election.”

Okay, so I’m an enlisted guy. I work for a living. I’m not the admiral, I’m not the general, I’m not the President, I’m not the Director of CIA. I’m sitting in my position watching every single leader from this country be willing to talk about their heroic actions for their reelection campaign. Whatever you want to call it, pissed me off.

It made me mad because none of the 24 operators that were on the mission were getting any credit for it. It was all the heroic decision making in Washington D.C.

And so that’s when I knew I was getting out. A whole bunch of us had been to Ground Zero. I’d never been to New York City before. We went to Ground Zero after the Bin Laden raid. Crushed me. I stood there at Ground Zero and I’m pretty good at blocking out the emotions. It crushed me.

And I knew I had hurt my back pretty significantly on the helo crash. I was getting a divorce. I had done 13 straight tours at that time and it just felt like really good bookends. My very first deployment, 9/11 happened. Last thing I did is crash into his compound. I’m now so senior they’re going to take me out of the operational side of things.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And I didn’t join to be the troop commander. I didn’t join to be the officer. I joined to stay enlisted. I had my degree, stayed enlisted the whole time.

SHAWN RYAN: You were on the invasion? You were on the invasion. Holy shit. So the whole career kicked. Wow.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So my whole career, I saw it happen, I saw it evolve and then I saw it spiraling towards the end. I saw the officers, the self promotion side of things. By the time I got back from the Bin Laden mission, and I knew I was hurt at that point. We went to Ground Zero. I was like, man, I am cooked. I was done. Came back from that and called it.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn. Why did you conceal your identity?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Oh, sorry, I missed that part. Because why not? If somebody can tell me the upside of being out there and being famous or trying to be, I very much enjoy my anonymity. My neighbors, where I live, 20 feet away, have no clue anything about my background, and I like it that way.

I read all these books growing up. I served 13 straight tours, and none of it did I do by myself. So why would I then now all of a sudden write a book talking about all my heroic actions? I just never saw it that way. I was like, okay, well, if I’m going to write about it, I’m going to do it in my terms, and I’m not going to show my face because that’s irrelevant. The story is what it is, has nothing to do with what we look like.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And so, yeah, that’s when I was like, okay, I want to tell the story. I want to do it accurately, authentically, and then I don’t want to be the center line of the story. So I’m going to remove myself from the equation. And that’s where it started.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, I think it’s pretty damn smart idea. I mean, one of—how many guys were on the raid?

MATT BISSONNETTE: 25, 24.

SHAWN RYAN: 24 people out of the entire world on the raid that takes out the world’s most wanted man and pissed a lot of people off.

MATT BISSONNETTE: But I didn’t want the story to be about me. It’s irrelevant who wrote the book. It’s like, let’s hear the story. Who are these type of people? Where do they come from? Who are these guys? What are SEALs? What are they all about?

And I think Hollywood does a pretty shitty job in portraying it. They think we all look like Jocko Willink. But I’m sorry, I don’t look like Jocko. I don’t run like Goggins. Sorry.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Well, glad you’re here once again. So let’s get into it. Where did you grow up?

Growing Up in Alaska

MATT BISSONNETTE: I grew up in a remote village in the middle of Alaska. My parents were missionaries. Christian missionaries. A village called Aniak, Alaska, 350 miles northwest of Anchorage on the Kuskokwim River. 500 people.

SHAWN RYAN: Whoa.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Drove a snowmobile to school in the morning, graduated high school with three people in my senior class.

SHAWN RYAN: What?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I was valedictorian.

SHAWN RYAN: Congratulations.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Our high school mascot, and you can Google it still to this day, Aniak’s the name of the village. Our high school mascot was the Half Breeds.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

MATT BISSONNETTE: The Aniak Half Breeds. The mighty, mighty Half Breeds. The high school cheerleaders. And everybody thinks it’s a derogatory term. I say bullshit. In the village in Alaska, I was one of the few white kids that were in the village. Most everybody was a half breed. And everybody was proud of that heritage.

And what was the moral of the story? Nobody cares what color you are. Don’t be an asshole. That’s the way I grew up, man. I grew up in a village as a minority, as the white kid appreciating the fact that everybody was a half breed.

I drove a snowmobile to school. I bought my first AR-15 from my history teacher after class.

SHAWN RYAN: Get the f* out of here. What?

MATT BISSONNETTE: After class, I gave him 700 in cash. He reaches under his desk, pulls out my Colt AR-15 A2, and boom. I put it in my locker till the end of the day. School ends, I slung my new rifle, walked out of school, got on my snowmobile and drove home.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit. What’s the name of this town?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Aniak. A-N-I-A-K. Love it. So, yeah, man, it was middle school, dude.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, hold on. So you’re the only white kid in a town of—you say 300, 500?

MATT BISSONNETTE: There’s a handful. Not more than 100.

SHAWN RYAN: I guess what I’m asking is how the hell did your family wind up here?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Missionaries. I was born in California with two sisters. My parents—my dad was a teacher and had an opportunity to move to Alaska and teach for some of these remote villages. And they were always Christian and knew their faith and so moved to the village.

My dad ultimately became the village magistrate. So like the law in town. Log cabin, courthouse. 100% of the rules broken in town were alcohol related. You get drunk, beat up your old lady. My dad would arraign you to three weeks in jail.

Well, we didn’t have a jail in our town, so you’d have to fly a little Cessna down to the next bigger village, do your three weeks in the drunk tank or whatever you’re doing, and you’d fly back to our village and you’re trying to get back to yours.

Well, the weather would roll in and you couldn’t fly from place to place. So you just got sent to jail for three weeks. The only person you know in my village is my dad. So you show back up at the courthouse, knock on the door, “Hey, Mr. Terry.” “Oh, hey, Sean. I see you’re out.” “Well, yeah, well, I’m trying to get back to my village, but the weather rolled in, we can’t travel. Can I stay at your house?”

So my dad would be like, “Sure, but you got to stay for church on Sunday.” So we’d literally have a guy that my dad sent to jail. He’s back three weeks later. He literally stayed on our—slept on our couch in our living room. And then on Sunday morning, we’d have kind of a small church service at the house. And there’s my dad’s buddy.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow. That is—

Early Life in Alaska

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ve never heard that wanted to leave the village, man. I thought the village was as a young man, right? Hunting, fishing, running around. Sixteen years old, I’m taking a boat up the river for a week at a time with a fishing pole and some guns, a dog and a buddy. We’d come back a week later, right? I barely trust a 16-year-old to valet park a car these days.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Alaska, it was. It was just a whole different deal.

SHAWN RYAN: So you spent your entire childhood up there?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, damn near. Anyways, that’s it. Graduated high school and then all I ever wanted to do, right? I read these books in middle school for a book report. Found the book, “Men with Green Faces.” SEAL book from being.

SHAWN RYAN: I read that book.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Gene Wentz is the author. I’ve met him.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s really.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, yeah. That was the first book I read. And a man was hooked up. Like, man, I kept reading more and more books, more and more books, and it’s like, I don’t. I told my dad one day, he’s like, no, you don’t want to join the military? I’m like, no, this is what I’m doing. He’s like, well, would you go to college first? You know, all you know is this village in Alaska, go to college. I’m like, sure, okay, but I’m still going to the Navy.

They were hoping I’d change my mind. So I went to school in Los Angeles, same school my parents had went to. So I didn’t know anything about. Right? I went to. I went to college.

Culture Shock in Southern California

SHAWN RYAN: Talk about a f*ing culture shock.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’d never driven on the freeway. I had never worked a gas pump at the gas station. Right. Like before, ATM cars put a 20 on pump three. We had a barge that would come up the river and deliver fuel to like a 700-gallon fuel tank in front of our house that we would use for the year.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I went to college. I showed up in Southern California with a flannel work boots, like, I’m here for school. Nice. Who’s this knucklehead? Wow. Yeah. I’d never been on a date. I’d never driven on the freeway. I’d never done anything, man.

SHAWN RYAN: You’d never been on a date?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s a village of high school.

SHAWN RYAN: Class of three, got to go to the next village.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Village of Alaska. Where are you taking them? Holy sh.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve never been on a date.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Not telling.

SHAWN RYAN: To college, no girlfriend, nothing. Okay, hold on. I got to hear it first.

MATT BISSONNETTE: From down the river. The village. Down the river. Down the river. Holy.

SHAWN RYAN: What did you guys do for a date?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, okay. So we. For basketball, right. I played basketball as Matt. Miss the net. When I played basketball. We would. You’d fly a Cessna from village to village, and that’s how you, you know, compete with other schools. And so when you’d fly to the other schools, there was always like a dance that night. So, you know, whatever. So that was. That was it, man. Fly from village to village. You’re there for the weekend. Play some basketball, find the locals, make some friends.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on, man.

The Four Fs

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk about the four Fs. That sounds like that’s was. Was a something. That’s straight from my father. With you.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Straight from my father. That he demonstrated. Right. A lot of people talk. My dad demonstrated and he demonstrated. His four Fs were what guided him through life. That’s his family, his friends, his fun and his faith. And so that’s that. My dad passed last December and.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man, I’m sorry to hear that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. 30-year battle with Parkinson’s. So long, long spiral. Never heard him complain once. Not once. So that’s. That’s rubbed off on me as I’ve dealt with my situation.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Whether I was going to turn into a little and start complaining or if I was going to put my head down, get to work and deal with it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. What about your mother?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Mom still here. Doing fine.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Miles an hour.

SHAWN RYAN: You guys close?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Very close. Because you’re in a village in Alaska. Not much else to do.

Path to the Navy SEALs

MATT BISSONNETTE: I went to college. After college, joined the Navy. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Enlisted.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I thought they. My parents thought I would have lost focus on the SEAL thing. And no, I was just as amped up. I tried Army ROTC in college, so they sent me to jump school, right? Army ROTC. So kind of got a little sidetracked, thinking, okay, maybe, maybe I’ll do this ROTC thing. Was an officer in the arm, and I went to jump school as a cadet.

And I’m at the chow hall at jump school, and I’m sitting across from these SEALs. Little did I know, they just graduated BUD/S, right? But I think they’re hairy-chested frogmen and they’re making fun of my stupid army haircut. And I was devastated. I was like, f*, these guys are making fun of my hair. If I continue with this army thing, I’m going to go have to do the haircuts and boots and like, that’s a thing.

And I had read all these books about the Navy. I was like, no, man. I came back from jump school, my cadet status, I went to my little ROTC boss and I’m like, hey, man, I can’t do this. I. I’ve always dreamt about the Navy, and that’s what I’m going to go do.

SHAWN RYAN: They made fun of my f*ing hair.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m out. I’m out. This is bullshit. Yeah, that was it. Left ROTC, graduated, and then enlisted in the Navy. So you did.

SHAWN RYAN: You got your degree?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep, yep.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s your degree in?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Social science.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Waste of time. Waste, waste of time. Never use it. But I had it. I went to the recruiter’s office, enlisted. They’re like, great, you have a degree, you can join as an E3. So E3 torpedo. It’s the shortest A school I could find, right? All my buddies did Gunner’s Mate and they’re like, oh, six months. Don’t do that. So, yeah, Torpedo man, I think it was six weeks, nine weeks, something like that. And straight to BUD/S. Class 226.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And then I made it straight through. So that was.

Honor Man at BUD/S

SHAWN RYAN: The honor man. Correct. So they say, why’d you get honor man?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Do you know somebody else picked me?

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, right. Come on. You got a good inclination.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I like to work hard. That’s it.

SHAWN RYAN: You like? Did you find BUD/S challenging at all?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, of course. Of course. BUD/S is challenging. I’m not going to say BUD/S is not challenging, but I had read 6 million books and set my expectations here, and so I think I had set them so high, maybe it was a little, little down from where I had set them at. Didn’t mean it wasn’t hard, right?

One of my best friends, every morning he’d wake up. He’s like, f this, I’m quitting today. And then he’d never quit, but every morning he’d tell me he was quitting. Where me? I was like, okay. If I allow myself to think that every morning, every morning he’s like, Bis, I’m out of here. F this. And he’d never leave.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m like, listen, you got to fix this. Cause you’re really, you’re really rubbing me.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Wrong, lying to me every morning you’re f*ing with me and you’re not quitting. I was afraid if I ever entertained those thoughts, I’d quit. So I was like, no, not quitting. Never entertained him. And went right through.

SHAWN RYAN: What did your parents think?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t think they knew what to think. I think that’s the part when I started lying to my parents. Right. As soon as you graduate, it’s like what they know is what they know. And they don’t really need to know anything more for right now. Right. I graduated. Nothing going on. Still pre-9/11. And then on my very first deployment, I was sitting in Okinawa, Japan, watched it all transpire on my barracks television.

Watching 9/11 Unfold

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, I mean we were, we were like, holy shit. Like think about it. Your first deployment, brand new guy, nobody in your platoon seen any combat. Like, you know, there’s the stories of guys going around and maybe the little Grenada, Panama here and there, but nobody’s really done anything. And then now we’re. We watched 9/11 unfold on my television and.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: The rest is history.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, what did you think when you saw that? Were you.

MATT BISSONNETTE: The first one had hit by the time we had turned on the news and by the time the second one hit, you know, we watched that live and there was all sorts of speculation between the first and the second. Hey, what was this accident, whatever, who knew? But by the time you watched the second plane fly in, it was the gut punch that you were like, okay, this is real, something’s happening.

And if that doesn’t give you goosebumps and think you’re going to work, something’s wrong. So, I mean, I probably would have got out of the teams had we not gone to had 9/11 happen.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I would have done my time and got out, but now I was smack dab, new guy. 9/11 just happened. We finished that deployment, came back, did another workup, and then the next, my next deployment, we deployed right to Iraq for the kind of initial invasion up into Baghdad. Man, dude, still, still running like thin-skinned Humvees like before the IED threat. Way, way, way.

SHAWN RYAN: Just what an arc of a career. So your first deployment, you’re watching 9/11 happen, your last deployment?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, we don’t count as a deployment.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, your last, your last mission. I mean, you take that. I mean, you’re taking the guy out that orchestrate. It’s just f*ing wild to me. That’s. And you’re on the invasion. See what. So first deployment, you watch 9/11 happen, second deployment, you’re on that invasion and you’re at Team 5, correct?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep.

The Iraq Invasion

SHAWN RYAN: How did it feel going on the invasion?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, because I would imagine, I don’t want to, I don’t want to upset my Team 3 fellas that were there before us, right, they had done the oil platforms and moved up inland. By the time 5 came and swapped out with 3, we were just now taking Baghdad. And so we took Baghdad and then moved into one of the palaces and spent the next, the rest of my deployment running ops out of Baghdad, which was. Okay, like living the dream, right?

Young frogman, we got an enemy, we’re going to take the fight to them. And you’re new, impressionable and gung ho. So away we went.

SHAWN RYAN: Was it pretty kinetic?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, for that, for going from zero before? Yeah. I mean my, my first shootouts, my first everything was that deployment. There was a lot of learning happened that deployment, but it’s still learning because it’s a Team 5 platoon. It’s pretty new. Yeah.

First Gunfight

SHAWN RYAN: Well, let’s talk about what was your first. What was the first shootout? What was your first gunfight like? Was it what you had expected, reading all the books?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s never as expected, right. You can think what you’re going to think and it never plays out that way. At least that’s in my opinion. Shot through the door. Shooting through the door. That was the first.

SHAWN RYAN: First.

MATT BISSONNETTE: First. Oh my gosh, they’re shooting back at us right now. Right. We’d assaulted a target. Just hitting houses. Hitting houses. And it was at the front door and they just started pumping rounds through the front door. And that was the first time I was like, oh, okay, all right, something’s happening here.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That was it.

SHAWN RYAN: What else were you guys doing, that deployment?

Joining SEAL Team 6

MATT BISSONNETTE: That was it, right? We lived in the Green Zone. Lived in one of the palaces out by BIAP, Baghdad International Airport. Worked for the different intel agencies, kind of giving us targets and we’d go do our best to roll them up. I thought we were pretty cool at the time.

Then every night you’d see these cool black helicopters flying over. And I’d go to my boss like, “Hey, boss, why don’t we have those little birds around? Why are we in thin-skinned Humvees right now? Why aren’t we flying to these targets? Those little birds look really cool.”

They’re like, “Well, you don’t get those assets here.” So that’s when I started learning a little more about the big leagues and the different assets that came with different units. And so I had screened for my previous command before my second deployment. So I got word on the Iraqi deployment that I’d got picked up to go to training to see if I could make it into Dam Neck.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, so for those that are listening that don’t know what Dam Neck is, that’s where SEAL Team 6 Development Group is at.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So I’ve heard.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know anything about it. Yeah, you better be careful. These admirals might come after. So Team 6 pops on your radar because all the assets, such as all the cool toys that they get, you’re seeing that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And all the guys I knew at 5, right, some of the bigger studs that I knew would disappear. And then they went off to go see if they could screen. And so I’m like, “All right, well, if I’m here, I need to try this.”

SHAWN RYAN: So you got word? You got word that you got accepted?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, I’d screened before the second deployment, and then I got word, what, six, nine months later that I had been picked up. I barely passed my PT test.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious, bro?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We were doing a SR in Fort Camp Pendleton, and literally they called us two days prior, and they’re like, “Hey, your screening test is tomorrow morning.” I’d been eating MREs, face painted, living under a tree for like three days, and literally three other dudes got pulled out of the field, drove down to San Diego, and the next morning we had our PT test. And I barely passed my push-ups.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. Yeah, a little worried about that. Like, “All right, are they even going to pick me up?” Because I was slipknot and barely passed my push-ups. I got picked up and then I made sure my push-ups were good for the screening test. Day one of training, they show up and give you a hard one. So had to make sure I was ready for that.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. So you passed the screen test. You get in there. Let’s talk about showing up for training. How was that pretty cool, different?

Green Team Selection

MATT BISSONNETTE: You go to BUD/S. Yeah. I’d read a whole bunch about BUD/S. I hadn’t read much about this. I didn’t know much about this. I knew BUD/S was more of a “hey, don’t quit” check. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary now. It’s okay. Selection and training. Probably more selection than training.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So they want to know you have it or you don’t. And day one it’s shotgun blast to the face. And then it’s—I thought getting into that unit was twice as hard as BUD/S.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

MATT BISSONNETTE: BUD/S was simple enough where it was like, you get the deal. Right. Yell at you, run that way, don’t quit.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. Check. I got that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: The selection was okay. How good are you at what we’ve trained you to do? And can you make really good decisions under stress and pressure? And can you do that? Right. It’s not just about just quitting anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. You found that to be a lot harder.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I loved—was much harder. Right. Because now the selection process in which they are judging you on has nothing to do with you just didn’t quit. Now it’s okay. How good are you at the game?

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: BUD/S was don’t quit. We’ll train you some basics. Now you’ve been a SEAL for a handful of years. Now we want to put you to the test of what you know. And we’re going to put high expectations on you. And then if you don’t cut it, you’re out. So I loved it, but it was very demanding.

SHAWN RYAN: Can you say how many people you started with? Do you know?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t remember the exact number. I would say rough numbers, 50% washed out.

SHAWN RYAN: 50% washed out and went—

MATT BISSONNETTE: And no disrespect, no “hey, you’re an ahole, you don’t cut it here.” It’s like, “Hey, you just don’t cut it here. Go back to a team.” Depending on what you failed out for, you may have a chance to kind of reapply and screen again or you just go back and that’s it.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

MATT BISSONNETTE: 50-ish.

SHAWN RYAN: So when you say it’s mostly selection, a little bit of training. So I mean, are—so they, you have a baseline when you show up there that they have an expectation from the baseline that they—you know, I mean, so are you not learning in the training pipeline? You are.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And they will learn. They will teach you something new every single day. Every single day. You’re getting something new. And it’s just amazing every single day. And if you’re the guy who didn’t pick it up the day prior, the next day they’re okay, now they stack something new on top and you weren’t getting what they got yesterday. Okay, the next day, something more. And if you’re—next thing you know, you got three of these things stacked up above you and you’re not keeping up, you’re not going to last too long.

The Hardest Part of Green Team

SHAWN RYAN: So what did you find to be the hardest part of Green Team? For those who don’t know, Green Team is the training regimen to get into Development Group.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I think it’s an individual operator’s ability to identify a situation. Right. It could be an elephant, a big elephant, and be able to like, “Okay, I’m going to eat that elephant one bite at a time. I’m going to prioritize those bites smartly and I’m going to start eating.”

And the hardest part of training was that they were constantly putting big elephants in front of you, stressing you out, wanting to see how you dealt with that size of that challenge, the complexity of that challenge. Did you quit because the elephant’s too big or did you say, “Okay, check, I’ll eat that elephant. What size bite-size piece can I take? I’m going to start prioritizing those bites and start eating.”

The tactics were what they were. They’re constantly throwing something new at you. If you’re into it and like that type of stuff, it was the best training you’ll ever get. Every single day you’re learning something new and getting faster and better and better. And if guys weren’t cutting it, they were gone.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you get honor man of this too?

MATT BISSONNETTE: They don’t give an honor man in Green Team.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. All right, so what is the—I’ve never really talked to anybody. We’ve talked pretty extensively about what Green Team is, what the different cycles are of the program and all that kind of stuff. But what is the graduation like?

MATT BISSONNETTE: There isn’t one.

SHAWN RYAN: There is no graduation. How do you know where you’re going to go?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s like the last couple months of training, they’ll be like, “Hey, you guys are going to this color, you’re going to that color, you’re going to that color.” And you just—I mean, I remember guys who went to one of the squadrons. I won’t mention the color, but the guys in my class that were going to the next squadron that were deploying, they literally left Green Team two weeks early, checked into their squadron, and deployed.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So they were like, “You’re graduating and integrated into your second deck squadron.” And for them, they deployed. I waited three months and I deployed three months after I graduated.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So it’s—the pace is insane at that facility.

Joining Red Squadron

SHAWN RYAN: And you went to Red Squadron?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I went, yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Where did you want to go? Did you want to go to Red?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It doesn’t matter. I wanted to graduate and be assigned to one of the squadrons.

SHAWN RYAN: You didn’t care which one.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I think when you’re going through and you’re envisioning what the differences are and how you want to make believe that there’s something special and different, in reality, they’re not. And whichever one you land in, you’re going to be happy and content and welcomed.

SHAWN RYAN: Are there different cultures for different teams?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I didn’t think so. Maybe little nuances, but not significant enough to speak about.

SHAWN RYAN: How would you describe the culture of Red?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Put up or shut up. I don’t know. Very cut and dry. Black or white, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Like—

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, no quarter. Right. It was—standards were this high, and if you didn’t cut the standard, we’re not going to give you a break on it. Right. Here’s the standard. You either meet it or exceed it, or we’re going to have problems. I loved it because everything was very black and white and you were either on one side or the other.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And then, of course, right, the op tempo was through the roof. Right. I’d done two deployments at Team 5, which were the longer, slower ones. And then you get to that command and they’re more often and quicker. And so then showed up and then just started deploying every six months or less or whatever it was. It was just constant.

SHAWN RYAN: What was it like showing up to Red?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Everything that I’d always dreamt it would be, it was.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk—

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s a bold statement.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, let’s talk about—let’s just describe it. Day one, you go up to—

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, now it’s all different. But we went up to the second deck, right, which is where all the squadrons are stationed. You show up with your case of beer and you introduce yourself. And right, the whole squadron sitting around, they’re like, all the new guys are standing there like, “Okay, Bish, stand up, tell us about yourself and where you’re from.”

You’re like, “Hi, my name’s Matt and I, Team 5.”

They’re like, “Shut up.”

“Oh, no, no, keep going.”

You’re like, “Okay, well, I was at Team 5.”

“Shut the f* up, new guy.”

You’re like, “All right, check.”

SHAWN RYAN: All right, here’s my beer.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Next guy goes and they yell at him. They’re like, “Great. We don’t care anything about you. Welcome to the team. You’re new, doesn’t care what you used to do in the past. You’re now part of the team. Let’s go.” That was it. And then we went to work, man. And we went to work.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s the team room like?

MATT BISSONNETTE: In what way?

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know. Do they have any artifacts in there from missions?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s like this on steroids, right? It’s cool artifacts from missions all over the place. Computers around the walls of the room, right? We got a new command by the time I left. So it was updated. The one I moved into was the old school, the OG building. It’s been updated a lot since then.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Any particular artifacts that stick out in your mind?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Nothing. They’re all artifacts. Nothing that cool.

Deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. Well, Matt, let’s take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll get into some of the different operations that you were on before the Bin Laden raid. Cool.

All right, Matt, we’re back from the break. We just kind of talked a little bit about Green Team showing up over at Red Squadron over at SEAL Team 6 and kind of what that was like. So what I’d like to move into now is basically your career over at Development Group, what the pace was like, where were you guys deploying, stuff like that. So let’s just start with what was your first deployment with Red Squadron?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Man, first deployment with my former squadron was we deployed to Afghanistan. I was actually there for about a month of deployment. And during this period of time, our Army counterparts were very focused in Iraq, and the Navy team had leadership in Afghanistan. So most of the Navy guys were deploying to Afghanistan. The Army had control of Iraq.

Well, Iraq had been picking up right from the tier one perspective. So I did about a month of deployment in Afghanistan, and then I got a call that a handful of guys from our squadron were going to move over to Iraq and integrate with an Army counterpart unit.

Okay, you said it, not me.

SHAWN RYAN: Why would they pick a new guy?

MATT BISSONNETTE: My whole team went. They pulled the whole team. So my team leader, all the way down to me being the new guy, they pulled the whole team, moved us over to Iraq, and then they farmed each one of us out to a different Army team.

So I was integrated as a new guy into an Army unit, as a new guy on one of their assault elements. Other guys on my team were another team, another team, another team. We all lived together, operated together, but we fully integrated with an Army unit, with Delta.

SHAWN RYAN: Did Delta send guys over to six to integrate at that point?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It was because they were taking some heavy casualties.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this when that IED factory blew up and killed a bunch?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on. Iraq was getting hotter and hotter. I had done my Team 5 deployment there. I screened. I went to Dam Neck, and now my next point was Afghanistan. I was there a month and then they moved us over to embed and I worked out of Baghdad again with the Delta team.

SHAWN RYAN: So who took your guys’ slot in Afghanistan?

MATT BISSONNETTE: They just didn’t backfill us with anybody. They went lighter. The squadron that stayed there was light a team. A team went over and augmented the Army guys. Phenomenal deployment. I’m still very good friends with the Army guys I worked with there. Phenomenal individuals.

First Impressions of Afghanistan

SHAWN RYAN: Can we rewind just real quick? So were you guys, did you guys do anything in Afghanistan or did you get farmed out because it was just not, there just wasn’t a lot going on?

MATT BISSONNETTE: No, we were doing ops. I was out of Jalalabad and we’re running missions out of J-bad. It just, they weren’t as kinetic. It was different. Iraq, everything was just kicking off. Afghanistan was still, Afghanistan’s been through its phases. I’ve been there 10 times.

But at that time, Afghanistan felt a little slower. They were still hitting ops, they were still running missions. It was just the priority was, okay, let’s move some extra assaulters over here. I think the Delta guys had already lost a couple guys before we got there. And then while we were there, they had lost a couple more out of one of their other units. It was pretty rough.

I rode around on a Little Bird front. As much as I dreamt about the Little Bird thing, we were Baghdad SWAT, cruising around on Little Birds once, twice, three times a night, whatever. It was all over Baghdad.

SHAWN RYAN: So hold on. There’s a lot to unpack here. I’m really curious, before, let’s just keep it Afghanistan for your one month over there. So, I mean, what was your impression of the difference between regular SEAL teams? Now you’re over at SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan with Red Squadron.

Did you see anything right off the bat? We’re not talking about, I mean, you’re only two deployments into your 13 deployments, so you got 11 left over at six. What was your first month like in Afghanistan with Red?

Differences Between Regular Teams and SEAL Team 6

MATT BISSONNETTE: Great question. A lot more toys, a lot more assets. And then the guys I was working with were all older. Think about it. Our regular teams are all new age groups, younger because you’re newer. You get to Dam Neck, a lot of older guys have been there a long time.

So A, just from maturity of force, I noticed that. B, from a mission planning perspective, just maturity of force, guys who’ve been around a little bit, the mission planning, what type of targets were, just all of that. The technology was a huge differentiator. We had different toys, different assets, different stuff that we could use to target our guys that we were going after.

So that was kind of the biggest eye opening. Hey, I’m now in this big league unit that has some additional resources and tools and, wow, this is cool. I’m a new guy playing the breacher, new guy just carrying the heavy sh*t and loving every minute. But we’re only there a month and it was, you know, you’re chasing your phones and your bad guys and doing your normal thing. But Afghanistan terrain is not like Baghdad unless you’re in Kabul. I operate in the mountains of Afghanistan. So just the rural missions, the urban missions.

SHAWN RYAN: Was it everything you thought it was cracked up to be from the very beginning or were you a little disappointed?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I got to be honest, man, everything I dreamt about and read about and wanted to get to, I saw and I experienced and I was like, right away, f*ck yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It was pretty legit. The caliber of guys you’re working with are just next level.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice, nice.

Working with Delta Force

And so what was it like jumping over to Delta? I mean, you had a month taste in the training pipeline of Development Group, and then, I mean, less than a year over from, sounds like it’s less than a year from when you showed up to Green Team to deploy with an Army unit. Now you’re with Delta, the Army counterpart.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, they were phenomenal. I had a great time. I figured there’d be more, you know, the rivalry sh*t talking. None of that, none of it at the operational level that I experienced. Like I said, I’m still very good friends. Some of my best friends were the Army guys I worked with on that deployment.

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty cool, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We’re working out of Baghdad with all the sexy assets that, I’d been in Baghdad a deployment and a half before, dreaming of all these fun assets and toys and what it would be like. And now here I’m back now as a tier one unit. It wasn’t Army Navy, but it was Army unit and a whole bunch of Navy guys were still there. And now we’re hitting every night. That was a steep learning curve.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet it was. I mean, what are some things that are different? What are some things that you notice that are different between the two?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I mean, let’s just start with the assets that you’re given.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m talking the difference between Development Group and Delta. What are the differences that you noticed between?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We swim more.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s it.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And if you get honest with the Army guys, like half of them be like, yeah, if I could swim better, I would have went to BUD/S. Well, thanks for being honest.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MATT BISSONNETTE: No, great guys. I’ve worked with operators from around the globe. German, Israelis, Brits, Aussies, all very similar, like minded individuals. Their camo may be different, their technology on their gun may be a little different. The funding they got for training is definitely different. But from an individual operator, all very similar.

SHAWN RYAN: Very similar.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And I would say that for the Army guys, our Army counterparts, very similar, same mindset. Sure, they hadn’t been through BUD/S. They have a different selection of pipeline. But from the operator themselves, the way they’re structured, the way they operate, the tactics were all pretty similar. Nothing that you couldn’t assimilate into easy enough.

SHAWN RYAN: So you didn’t get over there and go, oh f*ck, I’m going to have to go through another selection?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I should have stuck with ROTC. Yeah, no, they never had to do this detour. Damn it.

They again, they were super cool. They opened me up, opened up everything, allowed me in and respected my talents. On their team, I was arguably the outsider and a new guy.

SHAWN RYAN: So what kind of stuff were you doing over there?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Baghdad SWAT.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

Combat Operations in Baghdad

MATT BISSONNETTE: Little birds to the roof, ground assault force squish them in the middle, right? Night after night after night, right? Intel finds bad guy. We show up at the house.

I can remember a good one where these little bird pilots are shit hot, right? They are what they say they do. They deliver on every single time. And we’re hitting, you know, downtown Baghdad, thousands of rooftops, right? How do you find the one rooftop in the masses that you need to land your helo on? And every single night, they were perfect. Every night, always boom, boom, boom. Nailed it, right?

Well, one night we come in and we land on the roof, but it turns out our pilot had landed one too far by accident, right? Landed one too far. We get on the roof, one house past our target building. Ground assault force hit the ground. They start coming up, big shootout in the stairs, right? One of my buddies, Jeremy, shot in the leg, right? They’re throwing hand grenades down the stairs.

Turns out there was eight guys in the top floor that me and three other dudes would have landed and made entry into that space, right? Because we were little bird team to the roof, four man team, we would have gone top down. We would have entered onto eight dudes and that probably wouldn’t have worked out too well, right?

I got a lot of “big guy upstairs” scenarios where, right, you don’t understand it in the minute, right? You’re like, “Oh f*, we landed one house too far. We should have been there.” Well, had we landed on the right roof, the odds are it would have, you know, maybe we wouldn’t be here, right? Be a whole different story.

So yeah, that was an average night in Baghdad. That mission was actually the first night I ever killed anybody.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. I’d done two, first deployment, no combat. Second deployment into Iraq, we’d done some shooting, but nobody that I had ever engaged and saw type thing. And there was, that night, there was a whole bunch of dudes trying to climb out the back window and we lit them up.

And then we ended up, a couple army guys ran in on the first floor of this building. They were all sandbagged, bunkered positions on the second floor. And so we pulled a Bradley fighting vehicle into the front door of this, right in front of the house. And literally had the 18-year-old kid behind the chain gun just start unloading into the house.

And so like 20 millimeter chain gun in the front yard of this house just blasting away. And they all started trying to pile out the back window and so shot a whole bunch of them.

SHAWN RYAN: And then how many of them?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s probably four or five that tried getting out. We ended up sending an EOD guy in on the first floor of the house. And they set a big thermobaric charge, right? Ran out of the house, right? The army guy’s like, “Okay, 30 seconds, it’s going to go. 29, 30.” No boom, right?

“All right, you’re the demo guy. You just set the demo. You just said it should be blowing up now. It’s not blowing up. What’s up? Did you dual prime it?” He’s like, “Dual prime it?” What kind of demo guy doesn’t dual prime something?

So okay, now you’re sitting there. There’s a thermobaric charge that has been actuated. The clock’s ticking.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m finding the difference between Delta and Dev Group.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Always dual prime. So anyway, we waited. We waited. We waited. And we’re like, “All right, somebody’s got to go back in the first floor and hook another initiator to that charge.” And you have no idea where that initiator’s at, if it’s hung up or what’s going on, because the demo guy said it should be off.

So the same demo guy had to run back in the house, set a second initiator to it, ran out and clacked it, and whole house fell down. That was a very significant moment for me in two ways. One, yeah, I had actually engaged somebody for the first time. But more importantly, I was pissed because we missed our landing spot.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And you do enough of these. In hindsight, you’re like, “Well, we’re very blessed we missed that landing spot.” Right. So, you know, it’s not always bad. Right. A little perspective, look at the situation. And yeah, we got really lucky there. So I probably shouldn’t be mad that we missed the target.

First Kill

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Yeah. What did it feel like to take an enemy combatant’s life for the first time?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Zero emotion. Zero.

SHAWN RYAN: Anything? Nothing.

MATT BISSONNETTE: No.

SHAWN RYAN: Didn’t bother you one bit?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Nope. To me, I’ve never had any issues with that. I’m right. I’m on the right side of this. They’re on the wrong side, and I had zero issues.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you feel accomplishment?

MATT BISSONNETTE: No, not really. Because what sense of accomplishment, per se?

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: There’s a whole bunch of people there, probably three of us shooting at the guys climbing out the back window. It wasn’t, I just, I went and did some crazy jujitsu move on him or something. It was just part of the team and part of the mission and how it goes down. So I’ve never been like, “Well, I did that, and that was me.” That’s just never been me.

Captain Phillips Rescue

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk about, before we get to the bin Laden raid, let’s just talk about any significant events that happened at Dev Group prior to the bin Laden raid.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You covered it with Pete pretty good in your last couple episodes. I was on the Captain Phillips rescue with him.

SHAWN RYAN: You were on there?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep. Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s hear your perspective. How’d that go down?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I thought Scabell did a great job describing it. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t one of the shooters. I’ll say there’s way more than three shots, right? Anybody who saw the movie and believes it was three heat-seeking sniper bullets, I got an island to sell you, I would say, right?

Other misconceived notion is right after the guys took the shots, there was one AK-47 round fired inside the life raft. I don’t think that’s in the movie either, right? So talk about hero to zero status, right? The shooters thought, “Okay, well we just missed and they offed the captain.”

So I think probably the sexiest move that night was a couple of the snipers that were on the back fantail of the ship, right? They put their long guns down, they still had their pistols, but they climbed off the back of the ship, right? Ocean waves, little rope that goes out to the life raft. And they did the commando crawl like the oak horse, right, down the rope on their stomach all the way to the life raft, you know, climbed to the back, stuck their handguns in and everybody was dead.

So that’s the piece that I always share that’s not in the movie. Other than that, right, I wasn’t one of the shooters. I wasn’t intimately involved in it. I was there with the almost 100 others that if, right, if they got their captain to shore, we would have had to go hit some of the training camps or some of their facilities on shore. A lot more booger eaters than the three we were.

SHAWN RYAN: No shit. So that’s how that would have went down.

MATT BISSONNETTE: There was almost 100 of us that jumped in, right? We didn’t need 100 to deal with four booger eaters on the life raft. But had they got to shore, and they were within 100 yards of shore, right, but they realized that that stretch of beach was a different tribe. They would have made landfall, they would have offed them, taken their captain.

So we were able to literally convince them to tie a rope to the life raft and tow them south. The fourth pirate, right, had got wounded in the hand during the initial assault. So they had pulled him off the life raft and he’s literally standing on the back of the Bainbridge with a buddy of mine there. He’s got his hand bandaged, right? They’re smoking cigarettes, he’s lighting a cigarette for him.

And they were trying to get the pirates in the life raft to see, right, “I’m lighting cigarettes and he’s got his hand bandaged.” And then my buddy’s like, “Hey,” tells one of the Navy guys, “Go in and get a soft serve ice cream cone. I guarantee the Somalis never eaten soft serve ice cream.”

So literally, there’s the Somali with his hand bandaged with a cigarette and a soft serve ice cream on the back of the ship. And that was us trying to say, “Hey, look, you know, look at your guy. He’s getting treated very fairly. He’s got medical attention, smokes and ice cream. You know, give up the captain and you can have some too.” That clearly didn’t pan out for him.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man. And arguably, what other tricks?

MATT BISSONNETTE: He’s the lucky, he’s the luckiest out of all four of them if you think about it. Because he’s in federal penitentiary in New York right now. Right. The others are dead.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: He never got air conditioning in Somalia. He certainly didn’t get heat. I guarantee he’s got free college, eye care, dental care, three meals a day. He’s living the dream in the federal penitentiary compared to where he would have been.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, shit, up there they probably have his whole life planned out for him and donations and everything for when he gets out. Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: For sure.

SHAWN RYAN: So wow. Wow. But what else? What else?

MATT BISSONNETTE: That was the only real, there’s the standby where something happens, you go. That was the only real spin up for a true standby mission, which was, “Hey, you know, okay, boom. Go, go, fly away. Do the jump package in.” That was the only one of those I did during my time.

Loss and Faith

SHAWN RYAN: Did you lose anybody throughout your career?

MATT BISSONNETTE: A lot.

SHAWN RYAN: Anybody close?

MATT BISSONNETTE: If I go through the contact list of my phone, yeah, 43 names in my contact that are dead.

SHAWN RYAN: How many operational?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Almost all.

SHAWN RYAN: Almost all of them. Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: A couple suicides, but yeah, almost all.

SHAWN RYAN: Who’s the first person that you lost in combat?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Mike Koch. He’s in my Green Team class. Then the Badger. There’s a list. All guys I went through Green Team with. Different squadrons. Red did pretty well. Right squadron I was in, we dodged a lot of bullets and a lot of different situations. Right. A lot of my friends in different squadrons, not so much. Yeah, right.

I mean, it’s all fun and games and these deployments are great, but they’re not the most safe. And right, guys get zipped just about every deployment. Every other deployment. Right. Yeah. That was, talk about faith and my journey. Right. From 9/11, for everything though, all of basically the global war on terror, I saw a lot of it grow and change and I saw a lot of really good people not come home through it.

And the way I dealt with that, right, without going crazy was I chalked it up as that was God’s plan.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I knew that if I got shot in the face tomorrow going to work, that was it. That was God’s plan. It was what it was. I had done enough of these deployments, had seen enough of, you know, guys not coming home for one reason or another, being bad luck or whatever.

And so I think the more I dealt with the death, the closer I was with the God connection of like, “Okay, that justified it for me in some weird way.” That was the peace, the band-aid I put on it in the moment. To chalk it up as, “Okay, well, it is what it is. And I got to get back to work.”

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. So you never really lost faith going, you know, within the SEAL teams?

The Weight of Loss and Faith

MATT BISSONNETTE: I lost most of my faith when I was challenged when I got out by our own government and when I didn’t understand it and I was confused and I didn’t have a community. I’d been cut off right when I was in.

Dude, how do you deal with death? You’re the same job I did. You know the deal, right. It’s part of the job. And certainly you’re going to keep deploying and do this for as long as I did. If you’re not absolutely comfortable with where you’re going, if you get shot in the face tomorrow night, maybe you’re not going to be as good of an operator as you should be.

And so for me, in those moments, I always was much more. I tried to place my confidence in, okay, well, that was. I don’t understand it. But that is, since I don’t understand it, somebody else must. I’m hoping. I’m betting on it and hopefully I’ll have some understanding of this at some point.

SHAWN RYAN: Were you married during this time?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How was your wife handling the operational pace?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m divorced. It’s tough. Before I got married, I was like, hey, look, just so you know, if work isn’t my first priority, I’m probably not going to come home to deal with any of the other priorities you and I may have.

And so I was married for nine years, home for less than one. Both my kids are born three years and a week apart. So I was clearly home on the same deployment cycle. Divorce rates through the roof in the community.

The Extortion 17 Tragedy

MATT BISSONNETTE: I think everybody does fine with, oh, your husband’s in the Navy. Or there could be stuff happened after Extortion, right? A couple months after the bin Laden raid, everybody’s on the high. Then Extortion goes down. 22 friends in one night.

You talk about, we call it Pink Squadron. That’s the wives and girlfriends. And you want to talk about some social pressure of it’s time to retire, time to get out, time for you to move on. Think of that. The amount of loss. Think then the pressure from the wives to the other husbands that are in the command.

You know how many RPGs I’ve seen come by a ramp on my 47?

SHAWN RYAN: A lot.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Every single one, you’re like, oh, man, glad that didn’t hit. And then one hits. So it puts it in perspective really quick, certainly for your loved ones.

Family and Sacrifice

SHAWN RYAN: How about your kids?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Too young to understand.

SHAWN RYAN: How’s your relationship with them now?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Good, because I got out, right? I got out. They were young enough that they knew Dad went on long trips. Those were deployments or short trips, were training trips. I’ve done the math. I never put them to bed for more than 14 days in a row without another trip. Never home more than about 14 days for 14 years plus.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that, I mean, this is, I’ve done 250 of these now at this point. At least 50% of these interviews have been military. Guys talk about the same things every single time. There’s, I mean, every story is obviously unique to that individual, but the arc is damn near the same every single time.

I mean, what are, would it even be f*ing possible? Especially in a command like that, to where you can be home for more than 14 days in a row to put your kids down, you can be home for more than 14 days.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Those options, you could raise your hand and say, hey, I need to come off the speeding train. But think about it. There’s only a handful of people on this job doing this job, and the numbers are not good. The year I left the SEAL teams, the SEAL community had a net gain of one new operator.

SHAWN RYAN: So that’s going well.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I know that.

The Retention Crisis

SHAWN RYAN: I know the operator, the individuals are going to be like, hey, guys, I need to take a break because I didn’t get to put my kids down last week. But I mean, when you see the, I mean, you just said it. Net one, net plus one that year. That’s it. In the middle of the longest war that the US has ever been in. We got a net one. That’s a problem, plus one.

And so what I’m kind of getting at, somebody that was over there and just, my own career in the regular SEAL teams, which was, you’re still f*ing gone all the time. And the retention sucks. People are getting out left and right. I mean, how, I guess you see what I’m getting at. It would have to come down from the top. Do you think there is a way for the sake of retention that guys can give more time with family, with their kids?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ll give you an example. I never asked for anything. The longest break I had in my career was selection and training to get in my former command. That’s not a break. That’s nine months of just kicked in the nuts. That was my longest break. I had 13 straight tours. Raised my hand every time. Volunteer, volunteer.

At the end, post bin Laden mission, hurt my neck. I go to my master chief and I’m like, hey, Master Chief, I need a break. My family’s imploding. Medically, something’s wrong. I can’t drink a beer without my arms going numb. Something’s off from the crash. I don’t know, but something’s off.

Look, will you send me to go be a Green Team instructor or something so I can take a wrap off for 18 months? I’m like, look, I’ll even go, I’ll go get my master’s degree. I’ll pay out of my own dime, professional development, whatever. I just need to be home. I need to do something for me. I’m getting divorced. I’ve got to figure out how to slow down.

He’s like, listen, I’ve got to move somebody to this other squadron. And I got your name on that billet. I’m like, I know, but that’s not a stay at home billet. That’s a deployable billet. He’s like, I know, but I got to put somebody there and we don’t have enough people. And I’ve got your name earmarked for that.

I’m like, well, Master Chief, look, I’ve never asked for anything. My family’s melting, my neck is broken. I got some shit going on I need to figure out. Can you please find something? He came back a week later, was like, no, it’s the only option you got. So part of the reason I got out, man.

So can it be fixed? I hope so. Could it be fixed? I think so. The priorities at the time were mission success, not Sean Ryan’s mental health, Matt Bissonnette’s personal wealth and any of that.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you think that worked out in the long term? You think that worked out?

MATT BISSONNETTE: You always take care of your people first.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: They didn’t take care of the people.

Leadership Changes and Rules of Engagement

MATT BISSONNETTE: 9/11. I saw a lot of changes, a lot of changes between here and here. I saw the tactics change. I saw the leadership change. I saw, by the time I got out, every major officer I knew was writing themselves up for their own awards, and they were going to get promoted off the number of missions they ran, not off the number of bad guys they caught or doing the right thing.

It was, okay, number of missions, amount of awards, all this nonsense. And then I saw the rules of engagement slowly starting to change, making things more dangerous for us.

So you’d have the Admiral McRavens coming in saying, okay, well, you can’t use your dogs anymore. You can’t go at night. Wait a second. We only go at night because it’s safer to the force. We bring our dogs because our dogs save our lives nightly. But now the leadership saying, don’t bring your dogs because the locals are complaining about dogs being unclean. What? Are you f*ing kidding me?

SHAWN RYAN: That was Admiral McRaven.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We had so many different officers and congressional delegations. We’d have congressional delegations come over, they would ask us, hey, are these new rules of engagement prohibitive, costing you more danger on target? And our officers would be like, nope, nope, all good.

Our senior enlisted master chief, I can remember a master chief, I’m not going to name his name, but he stood up in the meeting with the congressional delegation and said, well, with all due respect, I don’t believe what the officer over here is telling you. I’m the one going on the ground. And yes, it is making it more dangerous for us.

Nobody was communicating those things. I saw that slowly happening over and over and over as we’re sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan, risking our lives. Well, the leadership is making it harder and harder for us to do our mission. And all of that was adding up to part of the reason why I was like, I’m no longer signing my name on the dotted line to work for the idiot.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, man. I thought the leadership over at Dev Group was…

MATT BISSONNETTE: Oh, it has its strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m not saying it’s shitty, but I’m saying we’ve definitely had our less than stellar.

When we get into talking about all the book drama, when that all hit, I reached out to my commanding officer that I had just left the squadron. I known him for eight years. I’m like, sir, the only thing I’ve ever been taught, if there’s an issue, you communicate with leadership immediately. And that’s exactly what I did.

You know what that SEAL officer in charge of the SEAL community did? He replied, “Delete me.” That’s the only conversation. That’s the only correspondence I’ve ever gotten from any leadership in the SEAL community since I wrote my book or anything, period.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So talk about leadership issues. I’d say the community has a few.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. I’m not going to argue that. Jeez.

Planning the Bin Laden Raid

SHAWN RYAN: All right, well, let’s move in. Let’s go to the bin Laden raid. Let’s talk about when did, I mean, just from the, when did that pop up on your guys’s radar?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We just got home from a deployment. Just got home from Afghanistan, eight days prior. They pulled 24 most senior of us in the squadron and briefed us up today. Look, we think we found him. We want you guys to plan the ground assault option.

SHAWN RYAN: Eight days after deployment.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. After eight, ten days, something like that. Just come home. I should have been on leave. They pulled us in from leave and pulled the 24 most senior in the squadron.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you have any idea that’s what they were going to talk to you about?

MATT BISSONNETTE: No, no, I had no idea. And I actually had a medical appointment that I couldn’t miss the morning that they were pulling these guys down to this other facility to read them in. And I’m like, hey, guys, I’ve got this medical thing at the doctor I’ve set up. Is it cool if I miss this, or do I need to miss the doctor’s appointment to hit this brief?

And they’re like, no, you’re good. Just drive down when you’re done. So I finished my appointment and drove down, and then when I showed up at the facility, they’d already given the guys the brief and said, hey, look, we think we found the guy. We want you guys to plan the ground assault option. Boom. So then we got to work.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you plan that?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Just like we’ve done any other mission. The enlisted guys at the bottom who actually do it start coming up with the courses of action we’re somewhat limited on, on the way we could tactically action the target based off where it was.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

The Helicopter Approach and Mission Planning

In Afghanistan, we’d grown very comfortable with not flying the helicopter to the compound, landing 20km away and patrolling in. So we’re going to pick the lock on your door. We’ll get you while you’re sleeping. Don’t wake up anybody in the neighborhood. That’s much more of what we like to do.

But because of where his compound was in the city, the odds of us landing 5km away, patrolling through the city, remaining undetected, was low. So had we been compromised on that patrol, he would have left the building. So based off the building, everything we were seeing, that drove us to say, okay, well let’s go straight to the target, fly the helicopters. And that’s where that plan was started.

SHAWN RYAN: Right now that you had those, the new, latest and greatest Blackhawks.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t know anything about the crazy Blackhawks. What? Okay, you can talk about them all you want, but I’m not saying anything.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you know you were going to get fancy helicopters to fly in for the mission?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Not immediately.

SHAWN RYAN: Walt’s not going to come after you anymore after this release. Not immediately to you that or any of these other guys, but so you had no idea. When did you have an idea those were coming in?

MATT BISSONNETTE: During the mission planning, they told us about certain assets that we could use that had certain skills that we needed. And so some discussion whether we truly needed it or not. And ultimately it was yes.

Two Weeks of Rehearsals

SHAWN RYAN: So how long did you guys have to plan the operation?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Two weeks.

SHAWN RYAN: Two weeks.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Longest I’ve ever rehearsed for any mission. 13 deployments. Never rehearsed for a single mission. Every deployment, every go, go to your plan, brief the team, roll out the door and go. The only mission I ever rehearsed for was Bin Laden. Now I ever had time.

SHAWN RYAN: So can you talk about the two weeks from when we did briefed to execution? I mean, what was the pace like?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We came up with our plan and then just started rehearsing our plan. We had a mock up that we trained on, but again, even rehearsing on a mock up where you don’t know the inside of it is kind of irrelevant. We knew kind of the outside layout and so you could go get a false sense of security running a dry run on a compound for time.

But if you don’t know what’s in the house and what’s going to happen in the house, you’re getting a false sense of security of, oh, we ran this in three minutes, we cleared it in three minutes. You’re clearing a structure with paper targets and without any interference. So yeah, we spent a week, week or two doing that, went out to another state, did some more rehearsals with the helicopters and then came back.

SHAWN RYAN: I could remember, is this like you wake up, rehearse all the way through the night, rehearse just all hours of the day?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Just rehearsing day, night, day, night. And then when we weren’t there, we’d give the people like, hey, can you update this on the mock up? They’d update it. We’d come back the next morning and hit it again or whatever it was. And just constant rehearsals.

SHAWN RYAN: What did it feel like to get that brief? Especially not have no idea. You come back from a medical appointment and it’s, look at your buddies, the 24 that are going on and they’re like, hey, we’re f*ing hitting the number one guy.

The Previous Bin Laden Spin

MATT BISSONNETTE: That doesn’t get you excited, something’s wrong. That’s what I’m saying. I guess that’s, you’re like, holy, let’s go. I’d been involved in one other spin for Bin Laden years prior, so this one felt much different. The one years prior, it was flowing, white robes were seen on ISR feed. And he’s coming back into Afghanistan to make his final, you know, take the fight to the Americans.

And so it was this whole, it was a big shit show is what it was. All the officers, everybody wanted to get involved, to be involved. It was the closest spin of any intel they’d ever had on Bin Laden. So they just delayed, delayed, delayed. This big force got built. They flew in like B1 bombers from the States. They bombed the shit out of an empty hillside like three days before they’re going into the mission. They’re going to take out Bin Laden.

They send me and another guy over to Pakistan to do some stuff there. So I’m literally on the Pakistan side of the border dressed in Pakistani uniforms with a Pakistani element. And my guys are on the other side of the border, they’re dropping bombs on a whole bunch of empty mountains. And you know, two weeks later they’re like, okay, Bin Laden wasn’t there and they called us all back.

That was the previous spin. This one felt much different. This one was a lot more under the radar. It was quiet. It was like, okay, whoever lived there was significant. None of the intel that I saw was 100% proof positive it was Bin Laden himself, but it was somebody significant. So, okay, whoever lived there was going to have a bad night, but we would figure it out.

I remember in one of the intel manuals, I don’t even know who put these together, but I’m breezing through it the first couple days. On page one or two, I see a statistic where it says you have up to a 70% chance being shot down on the helo ride in or the helo ride out.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And I don’t know who came up with that statistic. There was intel people at all levels throwing out different numbers and statistics. But I’m like, I’m not a numbers guy here, but 70%, that’s just the helo ride. That’s not dealing with the guys with the guns once you’re there.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you guys think it was a suicide mission?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ve never thought any of my missions were a suicide mission. I refuse to think that way. I don’t care what. I’m not allowing myself. It’s like my buddy in BUDS who every morning was like, f* this, I’m quitting. I can’t allow my mind to go there because I’d actually quit. So I’m like, I’m not going to allow my mind to go anywhere other than we’re going to move through this target and figure it out.

The Plan and The Crash

SHAWN RYAN: Can you run through the plan of what you guys developed for the night that it happened? And then we’ll…

MATT BISSONNETTE: I love my Mike Tyson quote. Somebody interviewed Tyson after a fight. They’re like, Mike, didn’t you have a plan going into tonight’s fight? And he looks at the reporters like, yeah, everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face. I love that quote.

We had a great plan. Super simple, like we did in Baghdad. Top down, bottom up. We’re going to squish them in the main house. That was the plan. Pretty straightforward. We got punched in the face as soon as we got there.

These helicopter pilots are amazing. I cannot say enough good about them. Rehearsals, everything perfect. Everything to the second. I’m sitting in the left door of the helicopter. I’m going to be the first one out. Chalk one on the left side. My buddy’s on the other side.

SHAWN RYAN: Rope’s hooked to the helo.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Forty feet up, we come to a hover. It feels like four hours. It’s probably two seconds, and immediately the helicopter goes 90 and starts going in. I’m sitting in this door. Helicopters crash very ugly. A plane maybe can come skidding in. My little chicken legs are hanging out the side of the helicopter. And we’re going in this way to the side. Buddy of mine’s holding me in. I’m literally falling out of the side of the helicopter as we come in and we hit.

Nothing goes boom. Clear out your shorts. Whatever you need to do to get back in the game. Holy shit, man. The way we hung up on the wall, the helicopter propped up against the wall, there’s a wheel on the back section of a Blackhawk, and that wheel is the only load bearing for the back half of the helicopter. That wheel landed on the wall. Had that wheel been 10 inches this way or 10 inches this way, tail section would have broke. I wouldn’t be here.

The height of the wall was 10ft. Our helicopter hit. If you watch the Zero Dark Thirty movie, the main rotor hits the ground, comes snapping off. That did not happen. We hit. I jump out this door and run away. Turn around and look, and the main rotors are still turning. They’re within about a foot of hitting the ground.

You want to talk about the big guy? When your time’s up, your time is up, and it was not our time. Inches. Inches landed perfectly. Helicopter didn’t roll. Main rotor blades didn’t snap off, nothing. 40ft up. You tell me how that happened.

The White House Correspondent’s Dinner

SHAWN RYAN: Why did the helicopter crash?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Great question. Okay, so do you know what was happening in Washington, D.C. the day before the mission that the President would have wanted to be at? I don’t remember a White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

So the day we had originally planned to launch our mission was the day before we actually went, a weekend, zero illumination. So good time to go. President got involved. Like, hey, can you guys push this one day to the right? Push to the right. I want to hit my dinner. Okay, so we moved the op to the right.

SHAWN RYAN: So…

MATT BISSONNETTE: Not me. It’s well above my pay grade. The op was moved to the right. The next day, the temperature was roughly 8 degrees warmer than the day prior. You know how weight and temperature affects density, altitude, how a bullet flies over a mile? It affects how much lift a helicopter can have.

So hypothetically, if, hypothetically, if our, because I’m not speaking in real terms of weights, if our helicopter could carry, say, a thousand pounds. Say we were at 800 pounds of load. That’s fine. We operate within those margins normal. The next day, 8 degrees warmer temperature. We didn’t have the lift.

So what I’ve been told is we got into the target area, our pilot was at full throttle and we settled with power because he didn’t have enough power to keep the helicopter in the air. So why did we crash? Because President Obama needed to hit the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve got to be f*ing kidding me.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, that’s portion of it.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Unf*ing believable, man.

Meeting the Politicians

MATT BISSONNETTE: The only political shots I take in “No Easy Day.” I make two political shots because I hate all politicians. Biden, he was VP at the time. We meet him after the raid and he’s literally, hands, he’s trying to rub guys’ shoulders and tell them bad jokes in their ears. We’re not teenage girls with ice cream here, dude. It’s like, who’s the drunk uncle that showed up at Thanksgiving? Oh, that’s the vice president. Okay, that makes sense.

And then Obama. Obama was great. Super smooth. We all stood up there, got our photo with him, you know, gave a great speech, and then he invites us all to the White House to the residence for a beer. Okay, I’m very apolitical, but if a sitting president invites me and my team that just risked our lives for whatever, to the White House to have a beer with the sitting president, you go. You’re going to go. He invites the freaking Women’s World Cup soccer team, whatever. Everybody goes to the White House.

Here’s a sitting president inviting us to the White House for a beer right after we probably got him reelected. Do you think he ever followed up with that invite?

SHAWN RYAN: Probably not.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Nope. And so I put, “I bet you voted for change too.” That’s my only one liner in the book. Yeah, I bet if you’re still waiting for Obama to invite you to the White House for a beer. I know you just risked your life for him and probably got him reelected. He invited you for a beer, but you think he’s ever going to follow up with that?

SHAWN RYAN: No. Wow. Not surprising though. Not surprising.

The Helicopter Crash and Regrouping

MATT BISSONNETTE: So yeah, all my buddies are jumping out the other side of the helicopter and going to work and I’m like, they’re going to f* make fun of me later if they see me over in the corner. So I couldn’t run around the front of the helicopter. The main rotor blades are still turning.

I literally had to run down along the wall underneath. There’s like three or four of us on our side, but we all ran underneath the helicopter, joined with the team and reached one gate, and we were back in the original compound that we would have fast roped into, what, about a minute delay?

So our plan had gone sideways, right? Our plan was top down, bottom up. Plan had gone completely sideways. We crashed into the compound, second helicopter. There was no radio call between dash one and dash two that we’d gone in.

SHAWN RYAN: Were you going to be on the top or on the bottom?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We were fast roping 40 feet down into the compound. My team was clearing and securing one of the southern buildings and then we’d all wrap into the bottom floor and go up. Chalk Two was supposed to go to the roof and work down as Chalk Two came into a hover, right?

You’re flying a really expensive helicopter, looking through toilet paper tubes. Night vision, right? And that pilot looks and he happens to see we’ve got a parked helicopter in the compound. He doesn’t know if we’ve been shot down, a mechanical, what’s going on. He just knows there’s a parked helicopter in the compound.

So he makes probably the best decision of the night that nobody will ever talk about, right? He could have pushed a bad position, tried to do the game plan and land on the roof. The odds are he would have crashed.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you say that?

The Second Helicopter’s Critical Decision

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, I’ll explain why we crashed. Our hover was at 40 feet. The compound was mostly 50 feet, right? That second helicopter would have had hold a hover with the same weight at 15 feet higher. If we couldn’t hold a hover at 40 feet, there was no way Chalk Two was going to be able to hold a hover at 60 feet and lip land to let his crew off onto the roof. The odds are they would have crashed.

So that pilot immediately sees, says, okay, I’m going to do the safe thing. And he hovers his helicopter outside the compound into a field across the street and lands him out there. They thought they were going to the roof. Now they’re outside the compound, outside the wall, in a field across the street.

SHAWN RYAN: Shit.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So, yeah, we ran. Somebody ran to the door. Let him.

Breaching the Southern Building

MATT BISSONNETTE: My team was tasked with securing this building. To the south of the compound was one of the other, he had. Bin Laden had two facilitators that lived in the compound and one of them lived in this southern little building inside the compound. So my team was tasked with that. While the rest headed to the first floor of the main building.

We got to the door, a little bit. Southern building door was locked. I know we’d made a little noise, crash in our helicopters, but we’re professionals here, right? We didn’t want to make too much noise if we didn’t have to. So my buddy that was there with me carried a sledgehammer, right? He starts banging on this metal door, trying to get it open up, and it’s not going to open.

So, okay, we’re not going to spend five minutes banging on this thing. We got to get in. So I was going to use my explosives. I commented, one of the first times I ever got shot at was through a door.

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ve had that happen multiple times now. We just crashed into their compound. We just beat on their front door with a sledgehammer. The last thing I’m going to do is stand in front of their door, setting my charge there. So I literally got on my knee as low as I could, setting my charge. And as I’m setting my charge just above me, AK-47 through the door.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit. Are you serious? Wow.

Close Call at the Door

MATT BISSONNETTE: I picked up a little bit of frag in my shoulder. Nothing crazy, but I carry a set of bolt cutters and a pouch on my back, right? Each handle can kind of come up. I can pull it out. Cut my little bolt cutter set up. We got back from the mission. I was going through my stuff. There’s a bullet stuck in the handle.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

MATT BISSONNETTE: So we got lucky with the crash. We got lucky with 30 seconds later at the door. Myself and my partner returned fire through the door blindly, and everything goes quiet.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

MATT BISSONNETTE: All right, I got to go back up. I got to get my charge on the door. I got to clap this thing off. We got to get in here, right? We got a time. Time’s ticking. My buddy spoke Arabic, right? So he starts calling into the house in Arabic, and I swear to God, not five seconds go by, and you hear the metal latch on the door inside, and they’re getting ready to come out.

Why didn’t we try this when we got here? This would have been way simpler, right? Come on out, guys. Door opens up. It’s a female holding the baby, two kids behind her. Her husband laying dead just inside the door. Perfect Arabic to my buddy, “You killed him. He is dead.” Talking about her husband. Wow.

Pulled her out, right? Women and kids away. Cleared the guns, cleared all the area, left them there. Left the dead guy there, and then we rolled into the main house. While all that was going on.

SHAWN RYAN: Did you guys know where he was going to be?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Who?

SHAWN RYAN: Bin Laden.

Entering the Main House

MATT BISSONNETTE: The assessment was assessed that he most likely lived on the third floor of the compound. Assessed. Right. Assessed was Khalid, his son, lived on the second floor, and another facilitator on the first and another facilitator in this outbuilding. That was the lay down of what they assessed. Right.

The guys from Chalk Two had landed outside the wall. They came and got let in the compound. Now everybody’s hitting the bottom of the main house, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Are you guys hitting the main house simultaneously, or did you want one door on the house?

MATT BISSONNETTE: The way the house was rigged, it had multiple doors to go in, but it had been configured on the inside to secure the stairwell going up. Right. And we got in one side of the house, and there’s a reinforced metal door at the bottom of the stairs.

Sean may be hiding somebody upstairs. If you have a reinforced metal door at the bottom of your staircase, right, maybe a sign that you’re hiding somebody upstairs. Right. So all of these things you’re thinking through, you’re like, okay, shots fired at the first building. They want to get jiggy.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We’ve got reinforced metal doors at the bottom of their stairs. That’s odd, right? A couple charges and that went away. No power, pitch black. Good night vision. It’s not like you see in the movies with, you know, Team America here to kick your ass. And clear left. Clear right. Right.

We’re very calmly and quietly clearing the space. Got up to the second floor. There had been an adult male and his wife engaged on the first floor in the stairs up to the second floor.

SHAWN RYAN: What I remember, right?

The Khalid Encounter

MATT BISSONNETTE: SEAL in front of me that just shot Khalid up the stairs, right? Khalid was bin Laden’s son. We’d been told we think Khalid lives on the second floor. We’re literally standing on the second floor there. Set a ladder, stairs that go up to a landing and up a little head pops down looking at us on the ceiling.

SHAWN RYAN: How did he hear you guys?

MATT BISSONNETTE: He had to have, right? I mean, anybody inside the house had plenty of time to wake up. They heard helicopters, hovering helicopters crash. They’d heard muffled gunfire, some explosions right outside buildings, first floor of the main building. And then now we’re in the house. So they had had more than enough time to go to assume there’s somebody here.

SHAWN RYAN: Is it true that somebody yelled to Khalid in Arabic, he came out and then was popped?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Didn’t yell. Whispered. It’s the sexiest move I ever saw in the SEAL teams. Whispered Khalid’s name. You’re on the second floor. You see a head peek down the land, peek down the wall, look down at us, try and see who’s down there. Couldn’t tell, right? Pitch black. More quiet. We’re not, “Hey, it’s America.” None of that.

And that same SEAL, right, sat right next to me in the helo crash, right in front of me on the stairs. And he literally whispers Khalid’s name.

SHAWN RYAN: Khalid, Khalid.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Khalid had heard gunfire, all this stuff. Then he hears somebody whispering his name, not yelling it, nothing aggressive. Peeks around the corner, gets popped in the head.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit.

The Genius Move

MATT BISSONNETTE: Falls down, rolls down a couple sets of stairs. AK-47, right? He was literally right around the corner of the stairwell with an AK-47. Had we made our way up the stairs, all right, he would have popped the point man point blank as we rounded the corner, maybe the rest of us.

More importantly, he would have slowed our assault down. Right. We’d given ourselves 30 minutes on target with a 10 minute window to spare. And yeah, had he stood at the top of the stairs shooting down, that would have slowed our assault up the stairs.

I had to assault years ago. There was a guy at a top of stairs shooting down at us and literally we threw a whole bunch of hand grenades up the stairs and then ran up right behind him. It’s not the prettiest way to assault a fixed position. Yeah. So thankfully, right, from a historical move standpoint, that was epic.

SHAWN RYAN: Was that rehearsed or that just happened?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Pull it out in the midst of stress and pressure and send it and that is what I love.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That’s amazing. That’s just, come on. Who think I wouldn’t have thought of that? I don’t want to say anything. No, I wouldn’t have thought of any of that.

SHAWN RYAN: That was genius.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I didn’t think of any of that. But you got to think right now.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re just.

Moving Through the Target

You just heard some guy answer to the name Khalid, right? We’ve heard all the guys downstairs got guns, right? I got shot at at the first floor. So, okay, whoever is in this house is putting up a fight and trying to hide, right?

So, okay, significant. At least chalk that up in the back of your mind as you’re moving through the target. Okay, maybe the intel folks are correct for once, right? There was a ton of different intel people involved in this.

The girl from the Zero Dark Thirty movie, she was always 100% right. She wasn’t a hot redhead, but she was always 100%. There was other intel people we had there, some of them be 50%, 70%. She was always 100%.

So, yeah, you’re thinking, okay, all these little pieces, these are all little signs that are adding up in the back of your head. Step over Khalid and head up to the third floor.

SHAWN RYAN: How much interaction did you guys have with the woman?

MATT BISSONNETTE: The CIA chick?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Tons. Tons. She was there when she briefed us in. I sat next to her on the flight over. The movie does a great job portraying how feisty, smart. She is. Wicked smart.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ll leave it at that.

Third Floor Engagement

SHAWN RYAN: All right, so you’re moving up to the third deck, third floor.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Point man in front of me again, same guy. Same guy, whispered glee. Head pops out the door at the top. Point man takes a couple shots, and the head disappears into the room.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We kind of skipped over my 13 deployments. Right? One of the biggest things that we had learned and evolved through was, right, the tactics we were taught. CQB, right? It’s hostage rescue clearance when you’re in a building, right. It’s all about speed.

Well, over time, we were using these old school hostage rescue tactics to assault buildings where there was no hostages in, right? So why do we need to throw a flash crash in the room and then immediately run in here and do our clear left, clear right. You know, old school CQB stuff. When there’s no hostage in here, wouldn’t it be much safer to stay at the door of the room and pie the whole door from the space where you’re much safer and less chance of getting shot back?

So we had started evolving our tactics, right? It was no longer hostage rescue clearance. It was combat clearance. And combat clearance meant slower, much more methodical. There was no reason to just run in the room and clear things.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes a hell of a lot of sense, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Much safer. And trust me, the swamp in the community didn’t want to evolve to those tactics, but over time it was saving lives nightly by not rushing into the room. Right?

The Swamp and Tactical Evolution

SHAWN RYAN: Who do you call the swamp of the teams? I’m just curious.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Any of the old school guys that are still there.

SHAWN RYAN: Is the swamp at dev group as well?

MATT BISSONNETTE: There’s a swamp everywhere. Yeah. I think there’s a swamp or just the, so there are bureaucrats.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, that’s where all the teams tactics come from is from development group. But I mean, well, at least when I was in. When we went, when you go to assault, all of that come, it just comes down from you guys. And so, I mean, it’s just f*ing shame to hear that there are people over there that are delaying.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Not everybody, but any organization, there’s the old school guys in the organization that don’t want to change, right? And they want to do things the way they’ve always done it. And what they’ve always done is fine. And that’s fine by them. No judgment.

I’m somebody who likes to evolve and adapt. And when there’s people dying because of a tactic, I really think we should evolve that tactic. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: I would share that sentiment.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Kind of makes common sense.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah. Where did that change come? Where did complex combat clearance come from? Was that guys like you?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Guys like me and other operators that were operating and we just continually go to our leadership, right? I did eight years at the command, and you’re just deploying, deploying, deploying. And so I wasn’t a senior guy yet, kind of middle management.

SHAWN RYAN: And so I mean, it’s just so different than, you know, it’s completely different than everything that I’ve been trained. I’ve never done combat clearance. I was out before that got to, you know, the vanilla side. But one of the missions we did.

MATT BISSONNETTE: With my army counterparts, right? And a concealed friend of mine was right there when it happened, right? They blew the door. As soon as the breach goes, you run in, right? First four guys, four man entry, right? Breach, first four, first three went in, they had a sandbag, bunkered PKM at the end of the hallway, just so everybody ran right into the PKM bullets, right?

My buddy, I won’t mention his name, but he was literally standing there at the door and all three fell right in front of him, man, right? So you tell me how many times you need to be like, hey guys, it’s this tactic of blowing the door and running in. If there’s not a hostage in there that we need to save, why are we taking that risk to force? Yeah, simple question.

So we had evolved to that, right? So this, the bin Laden mission, we knew there was no hostages, right? They’re not holding somebody on the third floor. So there was no reason to rush, right? To do the old school tactics of run into the room.

So cleared to the door of the room, looked in, and he’s basically twitching at the foot of his bed. There’s two women in the room.

Target Secure

SHAWN RYAN: Bin Laden’s just twitching.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Headshot from the guy coming up the stairs. There’s two women standing there in the room, right?

SHAWN RYAN: So is he still alive or is this just nerves?

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s pretty, pretty, pretty twitchy, I’d say. He’s done headshot. Cover the headshot, right? We didn’t want to shoot him in the face. Nobody wanted to. We wanted the photo. Right.

The rules of engagement were capture or kill, right? None of this was going and kill everybody. I’ve never been on a mission in the SEAL teams where they said, go in and kill everybody. Never. It’s always capture or kill. And we had 30 different lawyers show up and brief us on this.

Why was he engaged while we were coming up the stairs? Because the only thing he exposed was a head. Stuck his head out the door to look at the guy coming up the stairs and was engaged within the rules of engagement for that point man. Why? Because he could have produced a gun around the corner, right?

Khalid down the stairs had a gun in hand. Guy in the first room I cleared had a gun in hand. So third floor had more time to set up a defense than anybody on the second and the first. And everybody else had got a gun on the first and second. So for the point man to think, okay, bin Laden’s armed, well within the rules of engagement.

We’d been briefed. Part of the intel packages was, hey, they have the house rigged to blow or they’re all wearing S vests, and when you get in there, they’ll martyr themselves and kill you guys, too. So again, rules of engagement. Point man coming up the stairs only sees the head, well within the rules of engagement to take that shot.

Now he’s laying the foot of his bed. Two women in the room, right? Same point man grabs the two chicks and pushes them back against the far wall, right? Had they had a vest on or something, he would have taken the brunt. Turns out they didn’t push him back against the far wall. And that’s basically target secure, right.

Finished clearing the third floor. Then it’s okay. Question the women and kids, right? Trying to get a name for the guy. The women gave us an alias. Did you shoot bin Laden on the ground? Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: You did?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How many times?

MATT BISSONNETTE: A couple.

SHAWN RYAN: Where?

MATT BISSONNETTE: At the body.

SHAWN RYAN: In the body. How did that feel? Don’t tell me I’m just doing the job. You just killed.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You never said I killed.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m correcting myself. You shot him as he was twitching at the edge of his bed, and you didn’t feel.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t know what that counts for.

SHAWN RYAN: Come on, you didn’t feel anything? No sense of accomplishment, retribution.

MATT BISSONNETTE: This guy. F*ing long way to get home. So still, right? I think everybody was still very focused on, okay, right, we’ve got one helo down, right? Let’s think big picture here, where we are in this situation. Yeah, we got knucklehead down, but…

SHAWN RYAN: Did you know it was him, man?

Confirmation and Documentation

MATT BISSONNETTE: Looking at him, it looked like him, right? The women gave us an alias. The kids confirmed it. We went back to the women. The women confirmed it. We all carried photos of him, right? And all the photos we carried, his beard was gray and his little gray hair.

I searched his bathroom on the shelf just above his sink, just for men. Hair dye. Get the f* out. His beard. That’s why his beard’s pitch black in all the photos.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So, yeah, right? We got a helo down. We got a lot of stuff going on. We’re very far from home, right? You got an hour and a half helo ride into a country that’s got surface to air missiles, and they’re way different than what’s going on in Afghanistan. And so, okay, we got the clock’s ticking. 30 minutes on target.

So I started taking the photos. A buddy of mine was there. We literally, he had a camelback. He took the hose of his camelback, dripped water on his face. We took the sheets off his bed, washed all the blood off his face.

I had bought, I was the supply guy, so I bought everybody in the squadron digital cameras, right? Because we knew, right, if we had the body going out in our helicopter and then we got shot down on the way out. How do you have proof on your helicopter, right? So did multiple digital cameras taking photos, DNA samples, different helos.

And then they were like, all right, you guys bag him up. So we had the body, dragged him down the stairs by his feet.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I can shut my eyes and I can remember the sound of his hollow skull bouncing down the stairs as we dragged him down, dragged him over his son’s dead body down to the first floor and shoved him in a body bag.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice.

Preparing to Exfil

MATT BISSONNETTE: At that point, right? Officers getting on the horn, saying, hey, confirmed, we’ve got them. There are EOD guys. We have one EOD guy on the mission. He starts running around. He gets on. Somebody gets on the radio, says, hey, prep it to blow.

So our EOD guy starts running around the house setting thermobaric charges in all these rooms. What are you doing? Well, they said, prep it to blow.

SHAWN RYAN: The house?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the helicopter. It’s like, what helicopter? Dude, you need to go look in the courtyard. We had crashed so quickly. There was no radio call between Chalk One and Chalk Two that we’d gone in. The whole target gets complete. And then some of the people in Chalk Two found out that we had crashed in the assault. They did not know.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you…

The Aftermath and Escape

MATT BISSONNETTE: Everything was happening so quickly that that hadn’t been communicated. So our EOD guy grabs his thermal bear, charges, right? Runs out to the helo, starts rigging that to blow. We’re moving all the women and kids around the compound to safety. We’re doing the 30 minute or 30 second shopping spree at Walmart, whatever, you know, running around, grabbing anything we could. Thumb drives, computers, anything you can find.

I remember our master chief getting on the horn. Be like, x, fill the building now. Like, no more. Hey, two minutes. Like, everybody out now. Wrapped everything up. I remember running out of the building. I’m carrying a whole bunch of stuff. And I look over, and it’s the most uncomfortable, weird thing you’ve ever seen.

These helicopter pilots that are never on the ground, and they’ve got these big, like, aviator helmets, these big, black, dark helmets. And there’s, like, two pilots and two crew chief, and somebody had handed them suitcases of, like, intel. So they’re a big helmet. They’re looking around. No guns, They’ve got suitcases. I’m like, come on, guys, let’s go. Pulled them out.

We were down a helicopter, right? So leadership called one remaining with two backup CH47s with backup seals and backup fuel. One of the CH47s flew into the compound, right? Landed, picked up the other guys. Since we had the body, they sent my team out on the one remaining Blackhawk.

So we Hilo lands, we go booking out through this field carrying the body bag. Get to the Hilo, throw the body in, we jump in. And I may be a little sensitive because I’ve already been in one helicopter crash that night. And the whole cockpit is flashing red.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, shit.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Whole thing’s flashing red. I’m like, I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think that’s healthy, right? So our gas gauges. So we’d given ourselves 30 minutes on target with 10 minutes to spare. When I lifted off, we’re at 38 minutes. So we were running on fumes.

Our helicopter still had to fly 8, 10 minutes to our other refueling helicopter. We landed, we got gas. Right. Everybody thinks it was the 24 seals that pulled this off. There’s some army refueler out there who joined the army to refuel helicopters, right? Not be Delta Force or anything crazy to refuel helicopters. Probably for college GI Bill.

And that night, that army kid refueled us up, right? None of us would be back if it weren’t for the army kid who refueled us. We got gas for 20 minutes right now.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ve.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We’ve blown up our helicopter. So now all the radars are coming up, right? Everybody’s looking in Pakistan for what’s going on. And, you know, you still have a hour, hour and a half kilo ride to the border.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So sat on his body the whole way, cleared into Afghanistan, landed, turned over the body to McRaven and the crew. Then we all flew up to Bagram, turned over the body. We were all still in our uniform when President Obama came in and gave his whole spiel on the TV. Like, we’re literally watching Obama. The body’s laying right there.

The Debrief

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s keep going with the debrief. There’s a lot that’s about to come out that’s important in the debrief on items that were kept. I mean, this is all rolling into what you really want to talk about, so I’d just be as descriptive as you can.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I mean, we did our debrief, and that was it. Right? Did our debrief, flew home. On the way home, they’re like, guys, really good job tonight. You get two days off. Like, what we showed up at the. Landed back at the beach, right? Nobody ever meets you when you come home from deployment, but half the command was standing there with pizza and beer and, of course, the Navy bus. Get on the Navy bus back to the base.

SHAWN RYAN: Why was bin Laden’s body thrown into the ocean?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t know who made that decision. It was somebody way above my pay grade. I agree with it. I like it.

SHAWN RYAN: You agree with it? Yeah. Why?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We turned over the body to some army counterparts, some Army Rangers, and they’re the ones who flew it all the way out to the carrier and dumped it. I like it because it’s. There’s no shrine, no memorial. He’s just simply gone. There’s no. But even Al Qaeda has not said, hey, he’s still alive and we’ve got him. Like, prove you’ve got him. He’s gone. Done, Erased, deleted. Never to be seen again.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I kind of like that.

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: If there was some memorial or you know, shrine where they buried him.

SHAWN RYAN: Maybe that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That would be a little different.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know. Makes sense. But it also created a lot of conspiracy theories. But, you know.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Government’s got the photos. They can release them. They can do whatever they want. Was that that photo?

SHAWN RYAN: There was a photo that was circulated that was. You didn’t take that photo. All right, all right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: All the. All. Yeah. Any of the stuff online is not accurate. So.

Processing the Mission

SHAWN RYAN: So we were talking about, you know, the Hilo ride back, where you had to think about. You got to think about putting a bullet in bin Laden now.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I think everybody processed it when we landed in Bagram, right? We landed in Bagram. We did our debrief, and then we left the hangar, right? Downloaded all our gear. Like, we were flying back a couple hours later. So literally, download, debrief, download. Okay? All that was done, and we had a couple hours and we went to some of the old area that we could hang out at Bagram and hung out there, and there were some TVs that guys were turning on, and that’s where the story was breaking in the States, right?

Like, bin Laden or Obama had given his spiel, right? There’s the stuff. University guy, universities going crazy. There was some, like, ticker tape at, like, a baseball game or something. All these things were breaking. And I would say that was the first time everybody sat in the room and was like, take a breath.

I hadn’t had a chance to do that until then, right? We still getting back. We still had something to do. We just got done, like, now it’s out. Only thing you’re waiting for is a plane ride home, and you got a couple hours to kill. And we all went into, like, this area and just hung out, watched some TV until, like, all right, guys, plane’s ready.

And then we hopped the flight. They, you know, you typically stop in Germany. We air to air, refueled on the way home, flew all the way back to the beach, landed, and good job, guys. Two days off. I went to work both days because what do you do when the world has just exploded in such a way, right? And what, you’re going to go hang out at home and feel like you’re normal? No way. Everybody showed up at work, right?

I see one of my good friends, I went to green team with him, spent eight years. I saw him more than I saw my family, right? I see him the day after, two days after the mission, in our cage area at the command, like, hey, Pat, are you. He looks at me. He’s like, hey, man, can I ask you a question? Yeah, what do you got, dude? He looks around, makes sure nobody else is there, and he’s like, hey, are you sleeping? Like, no, I’m not sleeping. I haven’t slept in days. He’s like, okay, all right, good. I feel normal.

That was the single most emotional conversation I ever had with any teammate in 14 years.

SHAWN RYAN: No, that was it.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Are you sleeping? Nobody ever got. Nobody talked about it. Nobody talked about mental health or how you were doing. There was none of that. It was. So that was two days after the mission, one of my best friends like, hey, man, are you sleeping? Because I’m not. I’m like, f*, no, I’m not sleeping. He’s like, okay, good, good. I feel normal, too.

SHAWN RYAN: F*, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It was a lot. It was a lot. It was crazy, right? And the media just hypes it up and makes it want to be crazier, and it was us just doing it. Yes. It was a very historical significant event. I get it. I’m more proud of the Captain Phillips stuff. And I wasn’t even one of the shooters.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We saved somebody, not just killed a whole bunch of knuckleheads. I get that. Bin Laden’s a significant figure. I’m not knocking it, but it was. Yeah, it was a lot. All the stuff SEALS training gives you. Right. We can go sniper, shoot, you know, homemade bombs, all the stuff we’ve been trained to do. Not one second, and, hey, what do you do if your friend gets shot in the face? What do you do if you do a bin Laden mission? And it’s f*ing you up at home and you can’t sleep, nothing. So, yeah, it’s tough.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You’re always going to revert to your training.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: In a bad situation. There was no training to revert to. It was just. And the. Right from my first deployment to that. Lots of missions in between and. Right. Woody, how are you evolving? Adapting? What was changing in between that? I saw it all change, man. I saw from the beginning to the end. Yeah. Yeah, it was tough. Not any of that. Not any section, not any second in there was any leadership ever worrying about the individual Operator. Brand new. Everybody was excited to be there.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

The Toll of Continuous Deployments

MATT BISSONNETTE: Okay. Eighth deployment. Ninth deployment. Tenth deployment. Nobody was ever checking in, like, hey, Sean, are you okay? Another three 12 divorces in the squadron last year. Your family okay? Nobody ever asked that. Nobody once ever said, hey, your family okay? Your kids okay? Are you home enough? No way.

And then if you did mention, hey, I got some stuff going on at home, it was like, oh, boy, we’re losing bets. So it was the expectation and the pressure, certainly at my former command, grew and grew and grew. And with the success of Captain Phillips and then with the success of bin Laden, all of this, the expectation was, okay, you’re going to be fine.

And if I’m the officer in charge, we’re going to do all this great stuff, I’m going to look good, and I don’t have to worry about the side effect it’s having on my crew. But, yeah, the. And then shortly after the bin Laden raid and all the high of that, we had extortion. And you want to talk about a gut punch, right, that was crushing.

SHAWN RYAN: How long after the braid was extortion?

MATT BISSONNETTE: What, August. The May to August, a couple of months. Yeah. Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy. And yeah, I mean, that was kind of one of the final straws for me. Right. I knew my enlistment was coming up in December. I had been talking about I didn’t like the decisions being made in Afghanistan. Taking away our dogs, saying no night missions, all this nonsense.

I had joined and stayed in because of 9/11, and I did all these deployments. And I saw all this change happening throughout this stretch. And as the longer I stayed in, the more I saw our leadership. Right. Was promoted based off writing their own awards and the number of missions they ran, not how they took care of their guys or evolved what we were doing. Right.

Name a general or an admiral in Afghanistan who said the way we were doing it was wrong and survived. There aren’t any. There’s not one. There’s no leadership in our military who said, hey, the approach we have in Afghanistan is wrong. We should be doing this. No, you’re relieved. And we’re going to bring in another yes man to deliver my policy of what I want you to do.

And so I just kept seeing more and more of that. And yeah, I knew that the leadership, whether Panetta, Admiral McRaven, President Obama, all giving interviews and all their stuff for their own hype, and that’s what finally hit me, and that’s where I was disgusted.

SHAWN RYAN: You?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What was McRaven’s position at the time?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t care about that guy. I could give two shits about McRaven.

SHAWN RYAN: Was he. I mean, what was he, though?

MATT BISSONNETTE: He was commander JSOC.

SHAWN RYAN: He was the JSOC commander. Okay.

The Decision to Leave the Navy

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. You know, I’ll just put it this way. McRaven was at the command years ago, right before he was the commanding officer. He was not well liked at all. Everybody always saw him as a horrible boss, at least from my level, my perspective.

When he left the squadron, he had this big plaque made that hung in the team room for years. Years later, he becomes the position he was in. Nobody liked him. Nobody liked the position he was in. He was very involved in trying to take away the dogs and the night missions and all the stuff that helped keep us safe on these very dangerous missions.

So I may or may not have been there when his plaque was removed from the team room wall. We cut it in half. We shipped it overseas to a forward operating base in Afghanistan that we were working out of, and we burnt it in the fire pit.

Now, we can keep going with the McRaven references here because I’m not a fan. You know, I wrote No Easy Day.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on. Before we get there, I’m just—we’ll get there. I know, I know. We’ve got a lot to cover there, so want to rewind just a little bit. You know, when you—how long was it after the bin Laden raid? Where did you—you were—you left the Navy?

MATT BISSONNETTE: The raid was in May. I got out in December. End of December, January 1st.

SHAWN RYAN: Onto terminal leave, seven months. When did you decide you were getting out? How fast did you know this is it?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’d been talking about getting out before my last deployment. I told you we came home from the last deployment, and 10 days later, we’re spinning up on the bin Laden thing. So I’d been talking to a lot of my guys on that deployment because that deployment had slowed down. All the new rules were kicking in that were making it more dangerous for us.

And I, as somebody who’d been there this whole time, was looking at this and thinking, this doesn’t seem right. We’re going backwards here. And I was getting very frustrated with how we were going backwards. I’d lived through the beginning. I’d seen all the ups and downs, and here we were at the end, and I felt like we were going backwards.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I was not an officer. I was an enlisted guy who stayed there and operated the entire time. Our officers bounce in and out and in and out and back and forth. I was there. So I saw a lot of changes.

And the more changes I saw, the less—and the more senior and the more mature I got and the older I got and the more dead friends I earned or gained—I was thinking, man, maybe I’m not putting myself in the healthiest position here, being sent to war by some of these idiots.

And so I was very open and honest with my team that, hey, I don’t know about this. So when I got back from that deployment, probably after the bin Laden mission now, but that’s when I went and sat down with my master chief, and I was like, hey, I need a break. I was done and operational in the squadron. No longer staying there. I’d done—very few guys stayed there that long.

They’re like, okay, you got to move out of the squadron and go do something different now. I’m like, okay, well, I need a break for 18 months. If I’m leaving the squadron, give me a break. And that’s when they were like, no, the only other billet we’re going to give you is an operational billet at a different squadron.

I was like, okay, well, if those are my options, if you’re my master chief telling me my only option is this, okay, thank you for that clarity. I already knew what was going on at the senior ranks and in the military and what was going on in Afghanistan, and I saw them making it more dangerous for us doing our jobs. I was like, why? Why am I going to continue to volunteer for these knuckleheads?

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, what did the other guys think? Were they on the same page as you?

Weighing the Decision: Retirement vs. Getting Out

MATT BISSONNETTE: Depends on where your enlistment is. You know the deal, right? Are you at 16 years? Are you at 20? How close are you to that retirement?

I never joined for retirement. I joined because I wanted to serve, and then I stayed, and then I just stayed and stayed and stayed because there was a war going on and very few of us were doing it. So I stayed. I didn’t stay for the paycheck. You know, there’s not much paycheck there. Retirement, right?

I could do 20 years and retire at the same amount. The trombone player in the Navy band does 20 years and retires. So it’s not about the money. Like I said, I got out with a plaque with my name misspelled. That’s all I got. So it’s never been about—I don’t know what it’s been about, but it hasn’t been about—it was just, it was time for me.

The other guys, other guys that I worked with, you know, maybe they’re sitting at 16 years. I was at 14. Maybe they have two years left on their enlistment. That gets them to 18 and then, you know, they were trying to get us all with the big enlistment bonuses at 19 years. If you stay to 25, we’ll give you some big money tax free. So they were definitely courting a lot of the guys at that level.

And the hook is if you do pass 10, well why not stay till 20 and get your retirement? I was at 14. Why not stay six more? Well, what are the odds I make it six? It’s pretty good odds I made it at 14 based off the amount of friends that aren’t here. What are the odds I make it another six?

And then these six years I’m not going to be operational where I like. You’re going to put me in the leadership with all these clowns that I don’t trust and respect. Now I’m out.

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Did you have any aspirations to write the book before you were out?

The Movie and the Book

MATT BISSONNETTE: I had talked to—well, we knew the movie was being made within three weeks of the mission. So the movie idea and everything that the movie was happening was—everybody knew that.

SHAWN RYAN: You mean, what do you mean within three weeks of the mission? You mean the movie was being discussed before Bin Laden dies?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Three weeks within the mission we go to Panetta’s retirement ceremony and he has at Langley, Virginia, full access to Langley, the screenwriter, producer, director. So we all knew that. Very, very loud and proud that, okay, they’re making a movie out of this.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude. How the f does the government sue you for $7 million for writing a book or whatever the f they—whatever you call it, prosecuted you. They took your money, they took your—they took $7 million that you earned from the book. But the director of CIA has given full access to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia to make a f*ing movie.

MATT BISSONNETTE: They gave the female CIA woman, they gave her permission to talk to the producers to give them the movie. That’s the reason the movie’s so accurate. So we all knew, plain as day. We knew this was happening. We knew this was coming. And honestly, it wasn’t much of a surprise.

SHAWN RYAN: Did your team know you were going to write the book?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Not everybody. But I talked to a crew that I respected and said, hey, here’s what I’m doing.

SHAWN RYAN: What was their take?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Mixed. Mixed results. A key piece to explaining what I was doing was, hey, look, I’m not putting my name on it. I’m not getting out in front of it. And I think they were like, okay, that makes sense. We can do that. We get it. Because everybody else we’d seen was beating their chest, taking credit.

And I was like, look, I don’t want any of that. I’m not using my name. I don’t have any plans on showing my face. I want to tell the story. I’m a kid who read a book. I read a whole bunch of books growing up. And it’s because of those books that I voluntarily did 13 tours. It was those books I read about.

So, yeah, I don’t think writing books is bad. You know, I think if you’re a SEAL who’s done—and there’s some out there that have done very little and written about it a lot—those kind of give a bad. But those are also guys saying, hey, look at me at the same time.

So I took a very different approach. I’ve been there, did it. I don’t want the press publicity, and I’m going to tell the story, and I’m going to do it under the radar. At least that was the approach. That was the plan until I got punched in the face.

SHAWN RYAN: Where do we go from here?

Finding Legal Representation

MATT BISSONNETTE: The book came out. Well, let me back up. Next question, right? So I get out of the Navy, I’m going to write a book. I’ve never written a f*ing book before. Where do you—how do you do this?

Okay, I met a literary agent who does the book stuff. Talk to her. I’m like, hey, how do I do this? I need an attorney. Whatever. She had represented a former Delta Force author by the name of Dalton Fury. That was his pseudonym. Delta Force officer, wrote a book called Killing Bin Laden.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, interesting, but, okay. He now died of cancer. So Dalton Fury writes this book. Literary agent had represented him. So she’s like, hey, I can help you. I helped him through the whole process. I’ll get you in touch with the same lawyer we used to do his book. Amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: Great.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That’s exactly what we need. So former SOCOM JAG, now civilian practice, represented other military authors. Okay, great. I think I’ve got the perfect—I got a lawyer, I got my literary agent. We go get a publishing deal. And I’m like, okay, how do we need to do this? Lawyer? How does this work?

Okay, well, I can review the book. I’ve got my clearances. I’ve done this for other people. I’ll review the book and set. That’s how it works. Okay, check. Did I know anybody who’d write a book could create some waves in the community?

SHAWN RYAN: Sure.

MATT BISSONNETTE: But as long as my lawyer was telling me I was legal, and I’m referencing that against the movies and everything else coming out from the administration, I’m like, okay. Seems to make sense. This guy’s a former SOCOM JAG. He’s represented a former officer who wrote a book about Bin Laden and did a 60 Minutes episode. Yeah, I’ve got the right legal advice.

SHAWN RYAN: Seems like the perfect fit.

The Book Release and Government Response

So, boom, knock out the book. Books finishes, right? We get it published and the book comes out, right? And as the book comes out, that’s when the government hears it, reads it, whatever, and they go high and right.

Now, mind you, my book came out before the presidential election and it came out before Obama’s movie, right before the Zero Dark Thirty movie. And I want to say it might have come out before the finish, which was the book that they’d all given interviews for. So my book was a surprise to the White House and everybody else.

So the DOJ is sent after me, man. Holy shit. You think getting in a gunfights bad? I’ve never seen anything. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know this world existed. And then my real battle started, right? Three years.

SHAWN RYAN: So this really happened because Zero Dark Thirty, the presidents in Panetta’s movie wasn’t out. Their book wasn’t out.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Interesting timing to all of this, right? If I look at somebody who’s running for president for a second term, right? Who’s going to run very much so on his movie that he’s promoting, that’s promoting his heroic decision making to take out bin Laden. Right? You want to make sure that narrative is out there.

Well, if nobody presents a narrative that could counter yours, whether you’ve read it or not, what do you do? You crush the competition, right? If you have a Hunter Biden laptop weeks before a presidential election, that could upset the election, what do you do? You have 100 former intelligence officers write about the fact that this isn’t a real laptop and this is all fake and they crushed the other news. Same difference. I was just a nobody, and so they came after me. And legally, right?

Legal Battles Begin

So legally, lots of lawyers throwing all sorts of threats. My original attorney, right, the guy had given me all the advice and says, look, I can review it. He’s like, look, they’re wrong. There’s nothing classified in the book. He’s like, wait till they read it. They’ll leave you alone. There’s nothing wrong. My God, they seem pretty angry here. It’s like, what’s the deal? You’re good. I don’t like that vibe from my attorney when I got a whole bunch of pit bulls over here yelling at me.

So I hired a second attorney. First attorney continues to tell my second attorney that we had no obligation to get the Book reviewed that he had the prior authority to review it, to vet it, to make sure there was nothing classified in it and check the box. New attorneys, like, I don’t know that that’s accurate.

So remove attorney one, bring in attorney two and go to the pit bulls at the DOJ and say, look, I’ll give up attorney client privilege. I didn’t do any of this maliciously. I’ll answer anything you want. Please don’t be so mad. Look, this is exactly how we got here. I’ll go through my emails with my attorney. For the past nine months, this attorney’s been guiding me through this process to this moment. So if there’s a, if there’s a legal problem here, let’s all sit down and discuss this, right?

That was when all this hit, right? All the drama and the press hit when the book came out. I’ve been taught, right, communicate with leadership. If there’s a problem, communicate with leadership. I’ve done that every time in the teams, right? There’s a problem, go hit up leadership and communicate. So our single biggest asset is our ability to communicate through the issues.

Leadership Abandonment

I text message my former commanding officer, commanding officer of my squadron, who’d moved up to be commanding officer of the whole team, said, “Hey, sir, this has gotten out of hand. I would love to talk with you about this and explain what’s going on. Open up communication.”

He responds back with two word text, “Delete me.” That is a perfect example of the leadership inside NSW.

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Delete me. No, didn’t want to talk to me, didn’t want to ask what happened, didn’t want to say, “Hey, Bis, you’re one of our top performers. You’ve been here for years. You just left. What’s going on?” There was none of that. It was an immediate, we’re going to f*ing crush this dude.

And so I had done some, when I first got out, I did some video games. I helped with a video game company, shoot some advertisement type content. Well, I’d hired some buddies that were still in. They went after them, the command did. They went after any one of my friends. They absolutely. One of my friends, they told them not to even come back into work for his last year in the Navy.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Officer. One of my officer friends that I had actually emailed a copy of my book to before it had come out. And when they, I gave up attorney client privilege so they could look through my computer and see the advice I got, they went through my computer and dug up everything they could and they saw that I’d sent a copy of this book to an officer friend who was enlisted and became an officer in the community.

And they went to him and were like, “Hey, why didn’t you report him?” He’s like, “Report him for what?” “Well, he was writing a book and you should have reported him.” And they screwed over probably 12 other of my friends.

SHAWN RYAN: What do they do?

MATT BISSONNETTE: They say, I don’t know. I didn’t know this was wrong. I mean, we just had the president, Leon Panetta, the director of CIA f*ing have Hollywood and open the door doors to Langley.

The Hypocrisy

They didn’t care that the hypocrisy is so in your face and sick when you’re sitting through it. I’m like, “Hey, what about the movie?” They’re like, “Well, you’re not Panetta. You couldn’t authorize that.” I’m like, “Okay, what about Admiral McRaven and Obama giving interviews for this book? The finish? Did anybody approve what they could talk about or not talk?” “Well, they know what to talk.” I’m like, “Okay, well, what’s the review authority? We’re all operating off the same.” Come on, guys. Right?

SHAWN RYAN: For three years.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Three years, they came after me. I’ve never written. Thankfully, the book made a ton of money, right? The book, all the book money went into a savings account. I’ve never written a $50,000 check in my life. I was writing $50,000 checks a month for my attorney’s fees. Because if you’re the government and you have unlimited attorneys, what do you do? You outspend them.

So immediately, they’re like a felony. Felony for what? All sorts of threats. Every threat under the sun. I’m like, I gave up attorney client privilege. They called me in for two separate, I’ll call them interrogations. They weren’t questionings. They were 12 hour sessions in the basement of the NCIS headquarters in San Diego, right where they. No seals in the room, Just some NCIS guys and literally going through every step in my book.

“Well, right here. Right here, you talk about you guys launched the mission out of Jalalabad. Did you know there was a mortar attack in Jalalabad a week after your book came out and an American service member was killed? That blood’s on your hands.”

Oh, my God. I’m sorry, did you just say Jalalabad was mortared? Have you ever been to Jbad? No. Okay, well, I’ve been there 12 times. Do you know how many times it’s been mortared? Every Time. I’m like, hate to break it to you, but we have Russian contractors cooking our chow and we have Afghans pumping the shitters. It’s nobody’s surprise that we have an American base in Jalalabad, right? Didn’t matter. That was them just trying to poke me.

They pulled up a picture of my book of the four tube night vision goggles, like right there. “Highly f*ing classified. How could you. You’re such an idiot. How could you leak this stuff?” I’m like, “Do you get Internet down here in the basement? Please, please. Google GP NVG night vision goggles. And the manufacturer’s website will pop up with all the specifications.”

SHAWN RYAN: In fact, you can buy them for 40 grand.

MATT BISSONNETTE: They’re on sale now. Anybody can have them.

SHAWN RYAN: The Canadian Tier 1 unit tried to pull that shit with us.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That the four tubes were.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that the quads were classified. So we sent them the article. Actually. They said all of the equipment that was used to take the world record sniper shot was classified. So we actually sent them the article in ballistic magazine that I believe was 2 years old, Tim, 2 years old, said, “Oh, you mean all of this equipment that you guys had ballistic magazine put in the article about you?”

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, that’s classified.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: So we put four dildos over the NOD tubes and sent it back to them. We said, “Here you go. Canada.”

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep. The hypocrisy.

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

They kept saying, “Look, it’s tactics, techniques and procedures. TTPs, it’s the same.” They just went after Pete Scobell, right? Who’s that? Who’s the guy?

SHAWN RYAN: What’s the guy’s name? That I’ll say.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I won’t say his last name, but his first name is what?

SHAWN RYAN: Walt?

MATT BISSONNETTE: And he had the.

SHAWN RYAN: Walt Allman, he’s an admiral, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: Is Walt Allman an admiral, Tim? Yeah, Walt Allman. He’s the guy. Yeah, he went after. He went after Pete Scobell and threatened him and said that he’s going to ruin his reputation in the SEAL teams because he came on the Sean Ryan show and talked about an operation. Look, I love.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I love Walt, but I think people change when they get into positions of leadership. And I think that’s why I left the community, is because I saw these great officers moving up into a realm where they became politicians and sorry, I’m not a fan of any politician.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you know, Walt came, he got in touch with my attorney, you know, who’s sitting right over here and is telling him that Pete needs to. They. Sean, needs to take the episode down or whatever, because Pete released classified information about the weight of the boats. He said the wrong way to the boats.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s like, well, here’s what I would say to that, right? The leadership has the balls to call Pete, who absolutely bared his soul on that episode and crushed it. Right? But NSW has the balls to call a guy like that and harp on him. But right. Recently there was a Netflix documentary, right? A Netflix documentary that came out in the past six months on the bin Laden raid. So this is a great story.

SHAWN RYAN: On the bin Laden raid.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Specifically about the bin Laden raid, only about the bin Laden mission. Netflix special six months ago, same raid.

SHAWN RYAN: That you were on and wrote a book about. Yeah. And then took $7 million from you.

The Netflix Documentary

MATT BISSONNETTE: Producer of the show calls, gets a hold of me, says, “Hey, Matt, we’re doing this. We’re doing this interview. I’ve already interviewed Admiral McRaven. We’re doing this whole bin Laden thing.” I’m like, “Listen, hasn’t this been done already? He dies in the end. Let’s get over with the story.” They’re like, “No, but Netflix has never done it. And we’re going to do our version.” “Okay, great.”

He’s like, “Listen, we’ve interviewed all the intel folks out of DC. We just sat down with Admiral McRaven at his house for four hours. And look, we’d love some of the operators on the ground to come in and share their story.” And I’m like, “Really? Admiral McCraven just talked about it. What authorities? Any clearances, anything that we went through to that it’s okay to talk about this?”

And that’s when I explained to the producer. I’m like, “Listen,” I explained my situation, how the government came after and we got to finish it, but how the government came after me and put me in debt and all this stuff. I’m like, “Look, I got a payment plan for writing a book and talking about this mission. Now, it’s been 10 years and it’s supposed to be okay for me to go sit down next to Admiral McRaven.”

SHAWN RYAN: Well, this story didn’t go through, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, no, I talked to the producer. I’m like, never allow.

SHAWN RYAN: Walt Allman would never allow this to happen.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So I’m like, “Hey, can you get me in touch with the admiral?” Right? Nobody inside the seals has ever talked to me about anything. But I’m like, “Can you put me in touch with the admiral?” And the producer does I get a call set up with Admiral McRaven? “Yeah, let’s do this.” Call McRaven. He’s in his car. He’s driving. “Okay, sir. Hey, Bis, how you doing?”

SHAWN RYAN: What are you up to?

The Netflix Documentary Conflict

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m like, well, you know, I’m a little conflicted. Little bit of conflicted here. Sir, let me explain my situation. I wrote a book, hired a lawyer, wrote a book. Government came after me for that book. I now have a payment plan on that book for the next 15 years. And the government just can f* kill me if I say anything about this book.

But now they’re asking me to get on a Netflix documentary next to you. He’s like, oh, Matt, Matt, don’t. Don’t feel obligated to be on that. Like, what do they want you to do? We’ll take all the credit.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m like, well, don’t worry.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Don’t feel obligated. I’m like, sir, they want the operators to get on and tell our version of the story. And to be perfectly honest, sir, if you’re okay doing it, then I guess it’s okay for us to do it. You could literally hear him shitting himself through the—

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet you could.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Right?

SHAWN RYAN: Look.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Oh, Matt, Matt, no, no, you don’t need to. Don’t feel obligated. I’m like, sir, don’t. Don’t worry. I’m not. I’m not going to be involved in this. I still got a payment plan for talking about it. Like, was there some authority that allowed you and other people to participate in that interview? Well, Matt, I know what to talk about. And what. I’m like, okay, great. I’m sure you do.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, he knows. He knows. Yeah. Oh, okay.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So he then switches gears. He’s like, well, Matt, maybe I can connect you with somebody who can help with your situation. Like, oh, sir, that’d be amazing. It’s so thoughtful of you. It’s amazing that now all of a sudden, been thinking, admiral, when you don’t want to go in the Netflix documentary, you want to now try and help me?

So he sets me up with a civilian, former SEAL. He’s now a civilian aide to the sitting admiral. So I’m like, great. I get on the phone with this guy. This guy takes my call. This guy’s actually was phenomenal. Former Team 6 commander, older guy, now a civilian. Long conversation with him. Broke down the whole thing. Everything I’ve been through. He’s like, man, can you back this up with documentation? I’m like, absolutely. Stand by. Blasted them. All the documentation with everything to back up everything I’ve been through, and everything goes quiet.

The Double Standard

SHAWN RYAN: Why would Walt Allman allow Admiral McRaven to do a Netflix special?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, that’s my question.

SHAWN RYAN: Wouldn’t let Pete Scobell come on and talk about—

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’ll get a call after this interview. Pete Scobell got a call after his. And they’re trying to smack us on the wrist. But who’s calling Admiral McRaven and telling him to shut the f* up?

SHAWN RYAN: I bet Walt isn’t calling.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I bet Walt’s not calling him.

SHAWN RYAN: Wonder why.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s further up the food chain, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yep.

The Congressman with an Eye Patch

MATT BISSONNETTE: So unfortunately, right. I’ll give you another example. In the height of my issues, I contacted a former SEAL. I won’t name names, but he has an eye patch and he’s a congressman out of a—

SHAWN RYAN: You mean Dan Crenshaw?

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m not naming names.

SHAWN RYAN: Another one of my favorite people, sir.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Here’s my situation.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, Dan. Dan actually sent me a message. I should read this to you. But basically he tells me I brought something up about him and I never even met. I gave him the courtesy of not even mentioning his name. It was about his birthday party where he hired Steve Aoki to DJ his birthday. I mean, that can’t be cheap, right? Especially on a congressman salary.

And I brought that up. And Dan sends me a message that says his boys over at 6 are really upset with me that I brought that up and they’re going to. They might come beat me. Boys at six, Boys over at six.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Well, to infer he’s got—

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t know why a congressman would be threatening me with SEAL Team 6, but I’m still fing waiting. This is actually a couple years. Still have not had my ass kicked by a couple of guys over at 6. But Dan Crenshaw, he fits with all these fing people you’re talking about.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I called him, right? He’s a sitting congressman. He’s a former officer, and drumroll, please. He was getting ready to release his book. So I call him up, I get a conversation with him. I said, sir, here’s my situation. I hired an attorney. The attorney gave me bad advice. Book was published. I’ve given up attorney client privilege, cooperated everything I can to fix this. They’ve still come after me. We can get into all the other stuff that I’m dealing with.

Said, sir, can you help me out with this? He’s like, well, you know, I’m about ready to publish my book and I’m not getting it reviewed. Like, well, sir, same letter of the law that they came after me for failure to seek pre-publication review. I didn’t get pre-publication review because my lawyer told me I didn’t have to and he could do it.

Like in your case, you know, you have to get it reviewed. I’m here telling you, confirming, you have to get reviewed or the government’s going to come after. He’s like, yeah, but I’m not going to write anything classified in my book. I’m like, there’s nothing classified in my book. They said there was. They went through it. They said, no, there’s nothing classified in it. You just failed to seek review.

Like, so if the only thing I failed to do was seek review, you’re willingly going around that obligation and you don’t give a shit. He’s like, yeah, but I’m not going to write about anything classified in my book. That was the answer. Never talked to him again. So he published his book, no review, nothing’s happened. He’s kept his money. He’s a sitting congressman. I got a payment plan.

So to say I’ve been alone, I guess—

SHAWN RYAN: I guess you’re not one of Dan’s boys over at six.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Definitely not Dan’s boys at six. That’s a pretty ridiculous statement if I’ve ever heard one.

Targeted and Isolated

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you have been targeted, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So the first two years, right, it came after me. I signed an agreement called a proffer agreement. And the lawyers can explain what that is, but it’s basically like, hey, listen, I’m going to, I’ll give you full disclosure. I’m not lying about anything. And unless you find some sort of smoking gun, like, we’re good.

So they’re like, okay, cool. So I full everything talk. What, anything they wanted to answer, anything they want to hear about whatever went through it all. Lie detector tests, two interrogations in the basement where they’re accusing me of all this nonsense. And they finally come back after about two and a half, three years. They’re like, okay, we’ll leave you alone, but you. And there’s nothing classified in the book. You just failed to seek pre-pub review and we want 100% of the money back.

I’m straight suicidal at this point, right? I’ve got a gun in my mouth over this. I am f*ing. I’ve lost my community.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve legitimately had a gun in your mouth or this is a figure of speech?

MATT BISSONNETTE: No, legitimately in my mouth.

SHAWN RYAN: Got that bad? Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I got out of the teams. My whole community, my world, everything was ripped from me. Right? Every single one of my friends. I didn’t have friends outside the SEAL teams gone boom. And if you talked to me, I was getting comms from guys on their wife’s phone or some prepaid 7-Eleven phone saying, yo dude, when I get out I’ll come up for air. But if anybody’s hot even talking to you from the command, they’ll kick us out of the command.

So it was this big. This big. Hey, anybody connected to Bis got—

SHAWN RYAN: And what the—

MATT BISSONNETTE: You know, I mean this is just—

The Recruitment and Retention Crisis

SHAWN RYAN: An hour ago we were just talking about retention and recruitment and how Development Group had a. What plus was that Development Group or—

MATT BISSONNETTE: The entire NSW wide.

SHAWN RYAN: And it’s out of the entire SEAL team. We had a plus one SEAL for the entire year. And now they’re just. Now that now they have allowed. They’ve allowed a movie, they’ve allowed books, they’ve allowed everything. They target you, they target you for whatever because your book went out before the President’s movie.

And they are going to. They are going to lynch people and the SEAL teams just for associating with you.

MATT BISSONNETTE: So—

SHAWN RYAN: All right. Over, over.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Over.

SHAWN RYAN: What they say is classified, but there was nothing. You can’t even run the classified operations because they don’t have the manpower because there’s. Their egos are. So it’s just. It’s just. And they’re going to burn dudes for even associating with you. All the headline when the exact same material went out and all these other avenues.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And they’re going to destroy the Navy’s Tier 1 unit over making a f*ing example out of somebody.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That’s—

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a double standard.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. So—

SHAWN RYAN: So I think you made the right fing call. Getting out at 14 years. What a joke. What a fing joke.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You saw, you saw what I saw, right? I saw that shit makes me so f*ing angry.

He Who Dares, Wins?

SHAWN RYAN: Do you know? Oh man. And nobody fing, Nobody fing said. Nobody f*ing. And nobody, nobody challenged it. This is like, this is like this. Oh man. Dude, what the. Like do you know who this J. Cal guy is that I’ve interviewed? He’s an SAS guy. He’s being charged with murder. You know it. I thought it would be a good idea to cover it. Maybe we’ll get this. He’s really good buddies with DJ Shipley, works at GBRS and you know he’s. And he can’t do it.

So I thought it’d be great to expose it all. Do you know how many SAS guys have come out and spoken up for this guy? Yeah. Zero. You know what they’re. This is, this is the best part. Do you know what their motto is at SAS? “He who dares, wins.” How hilarious is that? They can’t even stand up for their own guys. They can’t even stand up for their own guys.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s, it’s, it’s the same in their—

SHAWN RYAN: Motto is, “He who dares, wins.” What a joke. Like, what a joke.

The Dark Place

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m not smiling because I get it. I’m smiling because I’ve been. I was in a very dark place, right? I got out. I had everything ripped from me. Zero. I got divorced. Everything gone, right? Any community I ever had gone. Like, if you talk to me. No, can’t talk to you. Bizarre. They’re going to get me. I can’t. Nothing gone.

And that’s when I was absolutely. I’m like, f* this, I’m out. I’m like, right, okay. So they’re like, okay, we want all the book money back. Like, okay, great. Here. Here’s all I got left. I had spent close to just under a million and a half dollars in my legal defense in about three years. I don’t have that money, right? I got a plaque with my name misspelled. No retirement, no pension, nothing.

So the only way I could defend myself was with the millions of dollars the book had made that was sitting in my savings account. So I’m writing checks to my lawyers.

SHAWN RYAN: Three years later, right?

The Government’s Financial Demands

MATT BISSONNETTE: Interrogations, all this nonsense. They’re like, you didn’t leak anything classified in the book. The only thing you failed to do was seek pre-publication review. But we want all the book money back. Like, fine, take it. I don’t give a f*. Wrote him a check.

They’re like, whoa, you’re missing some. Like, yeah, here’s my receipts. You’ve never charged me with anything. Never charged me with a crime, never anything. Like, we want it all back. Okay? Like, we want it in three years. Like, okay, I don’t know how I’m going to go make a million and a half or $2 million and pay taxes on it to then give you assholes the rest.

So I was like, hey, I’m going to go sue my attorney. He gave me the advice. I gave up attorney-client privilege. Go through my emails and look at the advice I got from counsel. This was not me maliciously going around my legal obligations. Like, we don’t care.

So I wrote them a check, every bit of money I had, and they gave me three years to pay the rest back. I sued my attorney, okay?

The Truth Gets Lost in Lawsuits

I figured this out. When you sue somebody, the first casualty of a lawsuit is the truth. And that’s f*ed up, right? The first casualty of a lawsuit is the truth. The truth is irrelevant. It becomes about statute of limitations and where did you file it?

And so for two and a half years we fought all this nonsense until we get to a court date. Two and a half years in, we get a court date. And the day we get a court date where we’re going to go to court, I’m going to actually get a chance to sue my attorney. He settles, says, okay, you won, I gave you bad advice, we’ll settle, okay?

So problem is, the lawyers make all the money in that space, right? He writes me a check, okay, I got to pay my attorney and then I got to pay taxes on it. So I don’t have the million and a half that the government needs.

I go back to the government with my half a million dollars and my winning malpractice case and I say, hey, look, I got a winning malpractice case. I know you assholes, right? And through the malpractice case we did discovery, right?

Discovery Reveals the Truth

And in this discovery process we were able to question my attorney. Did you know that the DOJ, right, they came after me. Two 12-hour interrogation sessions, three years long. They had one phone call with my original attorney, one phone call, 15 minutes.

The DOJ called him once for 15 minutes and my attorney was like, no, I told him he had to get a book review, lied to him, never looked in the emails, that hundreds of emails with all of his advice, none of it. So the government took that, didn’t care.

The malpractice case went back to the government. I said, hey, will you relook at this?

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: This proves I’ve got a winning malpractice case that proves I relied on counsel to publish this book without a government review. And if this is the only thing they got me on is I failed to seek pre-publication review then. And he told me, I like, look, here it is. He’s culpable in that decision making.

Government was like, we’re not opening it up again, so wouldn’t touch it.

The Payment Plan

So then I went back to them and I said, okay, I can’t pay you a million and a half dollars in three years. Will you give me a payment plan? So they disappeared. They wanted all my tax returns. I sent in a whole bunch of junk.

They came back a couple months later and said, okay, this is just this last January said, okay, give us all the money that you made from your malpractice, and then we’ll put you on a payment plan. So $3,800 a month for the next 15 years.

I only served for 14. There’s no way I made over a million and a half dollars in my service. So I’ll pay back more money for longer than I ever served. They went through my computers. They deleted every photo from my career. Gave me back a computer with no photos on it. Basically zero eyes. My whole career.

Dark Times and Faith

That is when, right? And I’ve been very, been in some dark spots through this, right? That’s why I said, my faith, my journey of faith has been much more locked in. When I was in the fight with friends and people and whatever, and it was like, I understood, hey, SEAL, shit’s going to be hard. And it’s going to, I never expected the civilian world to be this hard and to hit me this way.

And I got freaking jumped. And I was not ready for it. I didn’t have a community around me to help me. I was alone and in a dark spot, right?

The VA Fails to Help

I went to the VA, right? Bad neck and back issues. All through this time, I’m going to the VA for my medical care, right? The DOJ is trying to kill me. And I go to the VA, I’m like, hey, man, I can’t drink a beer without my arms going numb. The pain meds, pain meds, pain meds. Never even got an MRI in a year and a half.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit, dude.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Right? My final trip to the VA, I came back with a bag of pain meds, no MRI. My parents were in town visiting. I remember showing my parents the pain meds, and my mom just broke down. She’s like, what the heck?

So I wasn’t, here I am, right? Getting no help from the VA. And I don’t know if it’s because they said, hey, don’t help this guy. F* him. I have no idea. I just know they, I was getting no help at my only medical help that was there to, I have no, I pay for my own insurance, right? I served. So I get my VA, and VA is doing nothing for me.

Dr. Robert Bray Steps In

So, yeah, I met a neck and back surgeon in California, former Air Force guy. Dr. Robert Bray, Disc Surgery Center, former Air Force trained surgeon that started his own practice. I met him, and he’s like, Bis, come on out. He gave me X-rays and MRI, and I met him in an hour and a half.

He’s like, listen, man, you need to clear your schedule. Your neck’s basically broken. Like, what are you talking about? He’s like, yeah, your C4 and 5 are like 8 millimeters offset, and if you hit a speed bump the wrong way, you’re never walking again.

He’s like, clear your schedule. A week later, he operated on me. Fusion. He’s done five surgeries, hasn’t charged me a penny. I’d still be going to the VA for help.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a hell of a dude.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep. He’s operated on probably, he operated on the guy who held me in on the helicopter on the crash.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: He’s probably eight other of my friends now he’s operated on.

SHAWN RYAN: No. Yeah. What’s his name?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Dr. Robert Bray.

SHAWN RYAN: What a badass. That’s awesome, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Matt, we’re back from the break. So it sounds like there’s, it’s not just one investigation. There’s a second investigation coming. So how does this happen?

A Second Investigation Begins

MATT BISSONNETTE: Right? The first one went three years. That was over “No Easy Day.” That was getting that money back. Okay? That finished, I started suing my attorney. And while I’m suing my attorney, one of the days I’m, we’re doing our stuff with him, I get a call from my ex-wife, and she’s like, hey, some FBI agents just showed up at the front door as the kids are leaving for school.

SHAWN RYAN: Cool.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Real good. Real nice. What are you talking about? She’s like, well, they confiscated your old computer you had that we had when you were in. I’m like, okay, what? They’d say, what? And they’re like, yeah, something about your consulting gear, consulting work you did when you were in. Like, oh, my gosh.

So, okay, up starts another investigation. Gear consulting, gear and equipment. Okay, so this new investigation is out of the Department of Justice Norfolk field office, not the Department of Justice San Diego field office that we’d been dealing with for three years. Right? This was all new.

Oh, surprise, surprise. Now they’re pissed at gear consulting I did when I was in it, right? I was always a gear guy. I mentioned that earlier. I love my gear development stuff, and I was very involved in that.

The Gear Consulting Approval

My, actually, my former commander that ultimately said, delete me. First name Wyman, last name rhymes with Coward. Wyman Coward came by one day and he’s like, hey, you’re really good at this gear stuff. You know, you ought to go talk to the JAGs, get some approval so you can do it the right way. But a lot of your designs have some good crossing. You know, maybe you design this flashlight, the Marines can buy it, whatever.

So, okay, I went to our JAG at the command, got approvals to do consulting for companies on the outside. Shoes, hats, guns, whatever. Just any stuff I was into outside of work. The very little time I had at home, that was outside of work, and it was approved by the command.

So here we are. I hadn’t done any gear consulting for years. I’ve been out of the Navy, and now all of a sudden, I find out they’re coming after me for gear consulting. So, okay, soul spin up again. Now instead of the 12-hour interrogations in San Diego, 12-hour interrogation in Norfolk, new set of assholes run me through the rig.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, you.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You did all these things. You broke the law. Whatever. You need to plead to a misdemeanor.

SHAWN RYAN: Like.

The Legal Battle Continues

MATT BISSONNETTE: A misdemeanor for what? Like prove any of this you’re throwing at me. Prove that I made money off any of my designs through. I had the. I’m not the purchasing agent. I can’t affect anything that I design, I can’t buy. We have contracting departments, so there’s no conflict of interest there.

But they’re like, “Oh, no, you made money off this stuff. We’re coming after you.” So for another year, they came after me. They kept trying to throw anything at me to get me to. They were like, “If you don’t plead to a misdemeanor, we’re going to try and push a felony.” I’m like, where? What? How?

So about a week before they’re trying to get pressure me, I go to the shot show in Vegas and the press hits and all across the press said Matt Bissonnette retained photos of bin Laden. I had photos of bin Laden. I told him about it in my. All of my interrogation stuff. Nobody knew that but the government.

So then the government leaks that the same week that they’re trying to pressure me into taking a misdemeanor because they wanted so bad to get me on something. And I just kept saying, “F* you, prove it.” Now granted, I have to pay legal bills to get that to work.

So that’s when I’d written my second book. I’m paying. I’m out of money from the first one, right. Given all that back, I’d written “No Hero.” I’m using that money to continue to pay my legal defense. This goes on for a year.

After a year, they’re finally like, “Okay, you didn’t do anything criminal. Just give us all the money back you ever made.” So it became a financial shakedown. So I wrote them a big check and they went away. That was the last I heard from them. And then I’ve just been dealing with the trying to get to the financial closure of paying them back for “No Easy Day.”

That is why I wrote “No Easy Way.” Now what’s crazy about that, right? I’ve submitted that book for review. That book has been into the government for six months. So what is it? What is that book about? Everything we’re talking about right now.

SHAWN RYAN: So you have to get.

MATT BISSONNETTE: This all takes place since me getting. I’m a civilian writing this whole book, but I have to get it reviewed based off the agreements that I’ve signed. Now the guy with the eye patch doesn’t. He just blows it off. But I have to because they came after me for the first one.

So I’m going to submit this one for review, but now they’ve sat on it for six months and they don’t want it to get out, right? They don’t want my version, this story that we’re telling, right? They don’t want this out in written form because it makes them look bad. And so six months they’ve been sitting on it.

SHAWN RYAN: But there’s nothing classified in the book, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Unless they don’t want me talking about something that they don’t want me talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: So what if you were to write a book on, I don’t know, fixing.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Have to submit it.

SHAWN RYAN: 1950s truck.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Have to submit it. Based off how they’ve come after me, I wouldn’t dare not get it submitted. Think of all the drama I’ve been through because my book did not get submitted.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

Government Obstruction

MATT BISSONNETTE: So I’m not about to submit another book or to publisher without getting it reviewed. Well, but now they’re sitting on this. Why would they sit on this? It’s not because it’s leaking tactics, techniques and procedures. It’s because it’s exposing their hypocrisy and they don’t want it, right? They don’t want the story of. So how would they come after you?

SHAWN RYAN: How would they come after you if there’s no.

MATT BISSONNETTE: They just won’t review the book. They’ll just sit on, let it die. And they know I owe payments every month and if I miss one payment, they’ve told me to my face they’ll come back and charge me back interest and f* me. What would they.

SHAWN RYAN: What could they get you on if.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You have no idea.

SHAWN RYAN: They get you on anything.

MATT BISSONNETTE: If they mean.

SHAWN RYAN: I know they can f*.

MATT BISSONNETTE: If they could get me on something, they would have. Yeah, if they could have got me on something. They tried for four years straight to get me on anything. And the only thing they could do was break me financially.

And so I’ve got to this point and now I’m like, okay, I’m telling the story. Nobody’s going to believe it. I’ve shut up. I’ve fought my battles with the government. I fought the legal battles. I thought the Justice Department was going to be just. It’s not.

I’ve waited 12 years now for some sort of adult supervision to step in and be like, “Hey, this is f*ed up. We need to fix this.” Now I will say, I will say we may have some potential, good momentum.

Literally last week, my attorney got a call, and there’s some potential that this administration is getting involved, and hopefully. I don’t want to speak. I don’t want to think too optimistic because I’ve been shot in the face every time an opportunity comes up. But there is an opportunity that the current administration is getting involved and going to help fix this. So we’ll see. Well, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that would be great. Let’s bring on. Let’s bring on our attorney and see if we need to clean anything up here.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Great idea.

SHAWN RYAN: Cool.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Tim.

Attorney Tim Parlatore Joins the Discussion

SHAWN RYAN: Tim Parlatore. How are you, sir? It’s always good to see you.

TIM PARLATORE: You too, man. So are you representing Matt? So I have represented Matt for a number of years, and I want to be clear, I’m here to talk about his case. I don’t represent him on his current dealings with the department, and that’s a decision that we made because as he goes to try and negotiate a better deal with the department, it made sense for me to take a step away from it.

Because since I also have represented the secretary, we want the decision to be made based on the merits as opposed to having anybody sit there and say, “Oh, well, they just made a decision based on how his lawyer is also the secretary’s lawyer.” So for that reason, I stepped away from that piece of it.

However, look, I maintain long relationships with all of my clients, so I consider Matt a friend and a client, and anything he needs, I would help him with.

I mean, Tim, we met under similar circumstances here, so we met through the Dallas Alexander, the Canadian sniper. When they came at me saying that, “Oh, there’s all this classified material in there.” And then we found out what it really was, is they’re f*ing humiliated because they fired one of their legendary snipers over COVID vaccine and not wearing a mask, and they didn’t want that out there.

So we gave them. We gave them, very politely gave him the finger and said, the episode’s going back up. You were very polite about it, though. But this just keeps happening. Matt was actually, I think, the first person that I’ve heard about this s* happening to. Now it’s happening again, obviously, with a new book.

But, you know, look, I mean, it was. We’ve just seen so much corruption from the government. You know what I mean? I mean, I was going to bring up Eddie Gallagher and the and the Blackwater guys and Brad Geary, but I think those fall under different circumstances, all just as, you know, even probably even more f*ed up than this.

But it’s Dallas Alexander. I mean, a couple weeks ago, we had a couple of Delta guys reach out, wanting their episode pulled because Delta made a statement, basically scaring the s* out of all their guys.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Oh, you can’t go on here.

Standing Against Intimidation

SHAWN RYAN: We’re going to come after you legally. And I had to tell him. I’m tired of playing this game. Yeah, I am tired of playing this game. And they’re freaking these guys out. They’re not allowed to talk about. They think they’re not allowed to talk about their own life, and I’m not pulling it. I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not playing these stupid games.

So it’s, you know, it was Chris Fettes. We had to get involved with Chris Fettes because we had people telling us that they’re going to sue Chris and they’re going to do this and they’re going to come after him and they’re going to ruin his reputation.

And it just got to the point where, I mean, on that one, nobody even knows this, but that one. I called you and I said, I want to fund Chris’s legal battle and I want him to fing whoever is making this s up about him and coming after him and trying to ruin his f*ing life, we are going to sue them. Them, and then we’re going to sue them again, and then we’re going to sue them again, and then we’re going to sue them again.

So they don’t have anywhere to live, so their kids can’t go to school. So they’re. I’m just. I’m so tired of people with these guys for coming on here telling their story. And because they tell their story, it jet launches their business and they’re able to get out of the of the of the Navy SEAL operator mindset and move on with their lives.

This is a problem that we keep seeing, and a lot of it is viewpoint or content based because we are treating people differently based on what they have to say, whether people like it or not, and also, quite frankly, what their rank is.

TIM PARLATORE: Yeah. And, yeah, I do want to clear up one point, if you don’t mind. Walt Allman has only been an admiral for a few months. Okay. And he was, you know, he was the commandant of Midshipman at the Naval Academy before he recently put on one star and then he became the acting WARCOM Commander when Jamie Sands got fired.

So a lot of the things that you were talking about with Matt that involved, you know, where you were talking about Walt, the reality is that was before he transferred to that position. So it is the WARCOM commander that you were referring to. But a lot of that was Sands, Keith Davids, Wyman Howard, you know, Matt’s good friend who said, “Delete me” and some of it even going back to Colin Graham before.

But, you know, what you have here is you have these people that once you get above a certain rank, it does become political. And they are doing things, you know, not all of them, but a lot of them are doing things to just try and get another star and to try and move up the ladder.

And so anybody who puts out information that may make them look bad or may upset somebody, they want to try and crush that. It’s not right. And what they’ve done. I think Matt’s case is one of the most extreme of this, where because his factual, unclassified book embarrassed President Obama, that created this situation where they had to crush him.

And you have these people, you know, making decisions, saying, “I want to hurt this guy. I want to crush this guy because he embarrassed me.” These people have never been to any form of combat like Bissonnette.

MATT BISSONNETTE: That’s what I’m.

The Vindictive Nature of Military Prosecutions

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, is that they have, but they don’t care. And this is the common thread that I see, you know, that I am going to pull back, you know, to Eddie Gallagher and Brad Geary and Jay Cal and all of those things where they pursue these vindictive prosecutions because they are angry at the individual as opposed to thinking about what is fair.

And so because they’re angry and because they have power, you know, they will have NCIS go after people and do these type of things or Air Force, OSI or CID or FBI, whoever, or whatever the, you know, the British equivalent is for JCal. And ultimately, you’re unleashing complete incompetence from these investigative agencies to try to pursue, you know, what is a political persecution.

You know, NCIS was so bad years ago, it used to be called NIS, Naval Investigative Service. They had to do a whole rebrand and restructure because NIS had become such a politically driven organization to go out there. And anybody that the admirals didn’t like, they would, you know, trump up these investigations. You know, usually trying to accuse somebody of homosexuality, because that’s the easiest way to get rid of somebody you don’t like. Used to be called the “Admirals of Gestapo.”

Okay? They went through a reorganization, a rebranding, and yet in a lot of ways, they’re still doing the same thing. They did the same thing to Matt. And I sit here and I look at it and I say, you know, they take a guy who has given his entire life to this. He’s given his youth, his health, everything, put it out on the line to try and keep us safe, to try and go out there and continuously deploy, and when he gets to the end, they try and throw him away.

Expendable vs. Disposable

Something Eddie Gallagher and I talk about all the time, where you sign up knowing that you’re expendable, but they treat you as if you’re disposable. And so what Matt went through of being excommunicated from the community, and you know this better as well as anybody else, when you go through that training, you become a SEAL, that is for a lot of people, that’s your identity, that’s your tribe. That’s, you know, what you are connected to.

And when you’re then removed from that and excommunicated from it, it has so many more negative effects. You know, PTSD is something that is exacerbated through a feeling of abandonment. And yet the command, the military as a whole, the leadership is taking not just a feeling of abandonment. They were creating actual abandonment.

And so many other clients that I’ve represented that you’ve never heard of that, because the command is angry with them, they will not only kick them out, but they’ll take their trident on the way out, and they’ll say, “You were never a SEAL.” Okay, guys who’ve done plenty of deployments, and I have clients like this where you look at their DD214 and they’ve done, you know, 15 deployments. Purple Heart, Silver Star, no trident, not a member of the community.

And so when they then go to try and go to a veterans event or something, you know, they want to go to Navy SEAL Foundation for help because they’re having difficulty. Navy SEAL Foundation says, “Nope, you’re not a SEAL. You’re not a part of us.” You can’t even attend reunions.

And you know, Matt is lucky that he got out and then they got angry at him after he already had his DD214. Because had his timeline been a little bit different, I have no doubt that NSW would have wanted to take his trident away from him. So he’d be out there as one of the guys that put bullets into Bin Laden’s body. But they could say, “Oh, he’s not a SEAL.”

They tried to do with Eddie Gallagher, they tried to take his trident away. It is bad for our people. It goes right back to what Matt was saying about leaders should be taking care of our people and not focusing on writing up their own awards and, you know, chasing their next promotion.

Career Advancement Over People

And what they do is they see these people as an impediment to their next promotion. And so if somebody makes them angry or embarrasses them in any way, well, we have to destroy them because they hurt my ability to get another star. So that, that’s kind of thematically, how did Matt hurt somebody’s ability to get another star?

Ah, because his superiors now have to answer to Obama of why did you let your guy put out his book before my version of events? It’s that petty. Yeah, yeah. And when it comes down from the top of, “I want you to take care of this.”

MATT BISSONNETTE: Okay.

The Double Standard of Classified Information

SHAWN RYAN: So if that’s true, how were all these other people, Leon Panetta, Obama? I mean, I mean, I get it. I know what it is. I know what it is. It’s the content. It’s the content. It’s the rank. It’s the rank. Only f*ing thing that matters. It’s the rank and it’s the content.

We like what their rank is and we like what they have to say, therefore we’re going to let them get away with it. John Bolton, perfect example, former National Security Advisor, he goes out and writes a book, he doesn’t get the pre-publication review, they start to go through, putting him through the exact same process that they did to Matt, investigations and everything.

But the election happens and so all of a sudden the White House turns over to Biden. Well, Biden liked what Bolton had to say because he wrote that Trump was bad. So therefore all of a sudden the Biden DOJ puts the brakes on and says, “Oh, so we’re going to let Bolton go? Let his book that has classified material in it, go right ahead, let him carry, let him keep all of the revenue from his book that has classified material in it.”

But at the same time, we want to make sure that we still crush Matt, whose book doesn’t have classified material in it, but has content that we don’t like.

The Attorney’s Betrayal

You know, when his attorney, you know, Kevin Podlowski was the attorney that had given them this bad advice when he settled that lawsuit. One of the biggest impediments that Matt had during this process was that the attorney had lied to DOJ. He lied to and he said, “I told him he had to get it reviewed,” and that was their linchpin, because his whole defense is, “My attorney told me this is okay.”

And they could say, “Well, we talked to him and he said that’s not true.” So now they have a witness against him. They get him to take this settlement. And I didn’t represent him at the time, by the way. He then gets this malpractice settlement.

And in the malpractice settlement, yeah, I got to give him a lot of credit. I didn’t handle it. But whoever handled it got him a great settlement where Podloski actually admitted in the settlement that he had given him this advice. Usually settlements have one of those, you know, neither side admit that they did anything wrong, but he actually admitted what he did.

And that was something that, you know, I then came into this and I was able to take that back to DOJ and say, “See, you brought this whole thing based on a false premise. You had a witness who lied to you, which is a crime, by the way. You have a witness who lied to you, and now you have proof that everything Matt did was on the advice of counsel.”

The Legal Battle

And one thing to understand is that the consent decree that he entered into on this, the cause of action was breach of contract. He breached the contract that says, “Before you submit something or before you publish something, you have to submit it for pre-publication review.”

If he was relying upon the advice of counsel, that’s a defense that he would have had had it been litigated at the time. Because we finally had this information, I went to the court and I tried to file a motion to vacate the consent decree and to change, you know, the result to match the actual facts.

DOJ opposed me. They said, “Too much time has passed. You know, this should have been done, you know, within, you know, whatever it is, six months of the consent decree being entered,” even though the statute does say, yes, there’s a timeline, but it says, “And it can go after that for good cause shown.”

The good cause shown from my perspective is this is something that he didn’t have at the time. As soon as we had it available, we brought it to the court. But the problem is that the courts don’t really like to change things. You know, they like finality in the judgments.

And so ultimately, DOJ opposed us, not factually, just on, “Well, they should have done this earlier.” And the judge agreed and said, “Well, too much time has passed, so we’re going to leave this judgment in place.”

The Financial Burden

That at that point, that left me with no real options other than to try and negotiate down for him. And the only way that we could really negotiate down at that point was based on an ability to pay.

Now, there’s a key aspect of this financial settlement that you need to understand, which is taxes because, and when he got the money from the book originally he paid taxes on it, portion went to his attorney. Now you have, you know, $1.5 million. As he said, he’s got, you know, a little bit under $4,000 he’s got to pay back a month, but he’s not allowed to claim that as a deduction or an expense on his tax return.

So in order to make the $4,000 payments, he’s got to earn $6,000 a month pre-tax just to pay that. So that $1.5 million figure, he really has to earn, you know, more like $2.5 to $3 million just to be able to pay it. And that’s not something, you know, the IRS is not going to give them any break on that.

He’s essentially paying tax on this thing twice. He paid the tax on it when he first got the revenue and he’s paying tax on it a second time to try and pay it back. And all of it goes into the U.S. Treasury. So between the taxes and the forfeiture, the Treasury is making a ton of money off of this guy.

Damn. Why are they holding his book up? Pre-publication review is a messed up process.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Okay?

The Pre-Publication Review Process

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve done it with other clients and he’s right. Anybody who has signed one of these agreements has to have their book submitted. Now if it’s a cookbook, nobody’s going to really throw a fit over it. Some guys do actually are that careful with it, but for him, I would definitely be that careful with it. If he’s going to write a cookbook, he should submit it.

What happens is it goes to the main office at Department of War that does a pre-publication review. They do a first read of the book. They then decide, okay, how many different agencies have a stake in this? And then they’ll send the portions off to those agencies.

And so a big portion of this obviously goes to Naval Special Warfare Command. Some of it may go to the CIA. For his portion of it will definitely go to NCIS because of the content of this third book. There’s nothing classified in there. There’s nothing that NCIS has to be concerned about.

And the government is not allowed to edit your book in any way. The only two things that they’re allowed to object to is classified material and a misstatement of government policy. Those are the only two things that they’re supposed to remove.

But the way that they do this, where they farm it out to all the different agencies, and yeah, I don’t want to defend them on this and say that they’re not holding it up, because I think that they probably are. But the reality is, when you send it over to Naval Special Warfare Command, there are just so many SEALs writing books that they have a backlog there. I mean, it’s just a fact.

That actually doesn’t surprise me. You can publish a Green Beret book a lot faster than a SEAL.

Does anybody read those, though?

Well, they’re not as interesting. I’m just kidding. I know there’s at least one person out there. You can publish, I’m just f*ing around. You can publish a surface warfare book really fast.

So there is that. Yeah. I do think that there’s probably some element of dragging their feet. And once you get it back, they’ll have a whole bunch of stuff blacked out. And some of it’s silly. Like, some of it, if anytime you see a number somewhere between five and seven, that’ll be a little black box. Yeah. Green Team is something that’ll be blacked out. Things that are certainly public domain, that they’ll still black it.

The Eddie Gallagher Book Example

Eddie’s book, when Eddie Gallagher submitted his book, they tried to redact out portions of it because they were embarrassed about the name of the Iraqi unit that his unit had been assigned to. And they tried to say that was classified. And I went back to them, I said, how is that possibly classified?

Well, that’s what they said. So, yeah, here’s the transcript where the prosecutor said the name of that unit seven times in his opening statement in front of a courtroom full of media. So if that’s classified, you need to prosecute the prosecutor. Okay, you can put that in the book.

So there is still a negotiation process at that stage, but yeah, it does take a long time, and it takes even longer when somebody doesn’t want this book to come out. And that really goes back to the original problem that Matt had. His publisher wanted his book out before the election. That’s why the publisher gave him a lawyer who said, “I can help you do this so it gets out before the election.”

Because if he had done it the right way, if he had been advised by a different lawyer who said, “This is what you legally have to do,” the book would have been published after the election. It would have been published after the movie. It would have been published after the Mark Bowden book. He wouldn’t have had any problems, and he would have been able to keep 100% of the revenue.

But it wouldn’t have been timed the way that the administration had wanted it to be timed.

Makes sense, unfortunately. Do you think anything, do you think Matt has anything to worry about with the new book?

No, no, not at all.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And.

SHAWN RYAN: With the second book, with the third book, he’s got nothing to worry about there because he’s following the process. He’s not doing what the original lawyer said. And so as long as you follow the process, you have nothing to worry about.

Is there any time limit or can this just drag on for years and years?

At a certain point, if it is clear that the government is dragging its feet, you can file a lawsuit at that point. How can you know what amount of time will go through, will go with Matt’s book before his attorney advises him to file a lawsuit?

Filing Lawsuits and Government Delays

It’s no specific timeline. There’s no specific deadline. But if it’s sitting there for 12 months and it hasn’t been acted on and he decides to file a lawsuit, here’s what’s going to happen. He’ll file a lawsuit. DOJ will get it. DOJ is the agency that defends every other government entity. They will all of a sudden spit out the fully reviewed book before their deadline to respond to the lawsuit comes.

How did I know you were going to say that?

And then they’re going to put in a response saying, “We don’t know what he’s talking about, Judge. We’ve complied with our obligations, so therefore, we move to dismiss the lawsuit.”

So why couldn’t he just file one right now?

It’s still a little bit early. File the lawsuit with the, by the way, if this isn’t done next week, I’m going to sue you. It’s difficult because, again, the timelines for SEAL books are so much longer just based on the volume.

Now, it would be worthwhile, potentially, because I don’t think that they publish these numbers. It would be worthwhile potentially to file a FOIA to find out what is the average length of reviews. And then once you can, and through the Freedom of Information, I get what the timeline statistics are on books in general, SEAL books, Green Beret books, compare those.

And then once you have that timeline, you can see, okay, if it takes an average of 2 months for a Green Beret book, 6 months for a SEAL book, and 8 months for a Matt Bissonnette book, now you know that they’re delaying you.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

But ultimately, the people that are administering this are career GS civilians. This process is not something that any of the political appointees really have that much visibility on because it’s something that’s kind of, it’s administratively handled at that lower level, which is, of course, where all of the deep state lives.

And so it’s the kind of thing that once you kind of bring light to it, then maybe people up above say, okay, maybe we need to fix this process. And I’m just so tired of people with these guys just for telling their story.

Yeah. I’d have to go back and look. I think it took Eddie about seven or eight months to get his book reviewed. And everything in his book was stuff that had happened in an open courtroom. Now we thought, this book will take two weeks to review. All you have to do is read through real quick and see that he’s not talking about any operations. Everything happened in an open courtroom. So, yeah. But no, still took a very long time.

The Problem with Silencing Veterans

Man, that is pissing me off. I mean, Matt just said it. I mean, me and you have talked, especially with the Chris Fetta stuff.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: That really pissed me off. Yeah. And we had had discussions. I was like, this is a reason why these guys are killing themselves. Correct. Because they’re not allowed to share their story. And if they do, they get ostracized by either the leaders of the command or the operators of that command.

And when that happened to Chris, I just want to clarify because I was pissed and I don’t think I said it properly. But first the first thing was, oh, the CIA is pissed because they don’t want that getting out. Then it was some of the operators over at Dev Group. Then it was, then we knew exactly who it was. Right.

And it’s always these people who are lurking in the shadows who never want to be revealed.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: We found out who that was and it was, if you, if there is any defamation, any non-truths and whatever is going to come out about Chris, I’m going to sue your a for defamation. Right. And then magically we never heard another f*ing word about it.

Correct, correct. I’m just sick of this s. And then we get fing Walt Allman coming on about Pete, about Pete Scobell talking about some s* that happened 15 years ago on about equipment that they don’t even use anymore.

It’s another thing that I’ve seen where people that leave before they retire, when I left the first time, I left as an O3 and I see a lot of veterans that leave and they kind of mentally freeze at that rank. And so what happened with Pete is very consistent with what I’ve seen with other people where they’ll have a high ranking officer reach out to a veteran of a certain rank and treat them the same as that, as if they were still a lieutenant or a junior enlisted guy and use that positional authority over them.

And some veterans, they still fall into that. I mean that’s one of my beliefs when it comes to our friend, the one-eyed congressman.

Is that when Warcom wants him to do something like stay out of the Eddie Gallagher case, they’ll send a flag officer to talk to him and tell him, “Hey, Lieutenant Commander, this is what it is.” And he just nods and salutes and says, “Yeah, oh yes sir.”

A video of him committing murder. Yes, sir. I won’t, I won’t support him, sir. I mean that’s my belief is that just seeing how he blindly parrots whatever the senior leaders want him to. Yeah, I think that they take advantage of that. I think there was an element of that, of hey, if we call up Lieutenant Scobell and just tell him, hey, you need to do this.

Harass him. You mean harass him.

Yeah, there are certain things I want to get someone to. There are certain things just like they’re trying to make an example out of these guys. I want to find one of these f*ers and make an example out of him.

What Should Actually Be Protected

There are things that we don’t want people to say. There are obviously classification issues. We don’t want people going out and revealing secret missions and things like that. I get that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: But you know what we’re talking about?

SHAWN RYAN: People aren’t even clearing rooms anymore. They have drones for this. Now we’re talking to dinosaurs in here. Right? This is no different than me talking to Don Graves about Iwo Jima, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Like.

SHAWN RYAN: Good job, you cleared a house. We don’t do that anymore. We have robots that do this for us. But let’s still attack them for that.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We don’t even.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s, let’s still attack them for giving up tactics.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Tactics that we don’t even do.

SHAWN RYAN: We don’t even have humans on the battlefield barely anymore. Give me a break.

And part of the problem is that the people that are trying to hurt these guys are ones that they don’t really fully understand the rules themselves.

Yeah, because they’ve never been on the battlefield.

No, there’s that too. They don’t understand, they may not fully understand what the law is on these things, what the regulations actually say that people can and can’t say.

When, for example, while you have to get review to talk about operational stuff, any military member can go out there and talk about their personal experiences. And so the morning after the verdict in the Eddie Gallagher trial, Eddie went on Fox and Friends and did his first ever media interview. I was with him, and it was Pete Hegseth that did the interview. And he talked about his personal experiences of going through this trial, all of which happened in a room that was full of media.

And wouldn’t you know it, within an hour I get a call from the Warcom JAG saying we’re thinking about charging him for having done this interview. And I said, “Really? Okay. What do you think he did wrong?”

“Well, he didn’t get approval. He’s talked about…”

“No, no. Okay. Why don’t you pull out the Warcom public affairs instruction? We’ll read it together. What paragraph are you looking at?”

“Well, no, no, you pull up the instruction. I’ll wait.”

“Well, it’s not really in…”

“Yeah, exactly. It’s not in there. So you’re threatening him for violating an instruction that you didn’t even read before calling me up and threatening that you’re going to charge him with.”

MATT BISSONNETTE: I read it first.

The Ongoing Battle Against Intimidation

SHAWN RYAN: I know what he was allowed to say, and I set up the interview so he could talk about the things that he was allowed to talk about and so he wouldn’t talk about the things he wasn’t. So take your threat and go f* yourself. That happened. And that’s what happens frequently. But people maybe aren’t able to push back at the introductory stage like I was.

And so they’ll call Pete Scobell and threaten them. Somebody may be dumb enough to try and threaten Matt here. They’ll send threats to Chris Fettis, Tom Satterley. You called me up about him, that somebody was telling him he should try and take down the interview from three years ago, talking about what he did in Mogadishu back in the 90s. “It’s classified, Tom.” No, it’s people that are just trying to control. And they don’t even know what the rules are themselves.

I don’t think there’s more to cover, is there? With me and you right now. Is there anything else we need to cover then?

MATT BISSONNETTE: What.

SHAWN RYAN: What I want to ask you is, I mean, because it’s my podcast that is getting everybody in trouble, so it’s my f*ing podcast. So, you know what.

MATT BISSONNETTE: What?

SHAWN RYAN: And all these guys watch my podcast. And so, for anybody who’s wanting to tell their story or share their experience or document history or get their business off the ground or whatever, whatever their motivation is for coming out and sharing their story, when these fing assholes come after them, whether that’s their former colleagues or the head shade of the command, I mean, what steps should they take? If, for the next guy that comes on my show and gets harassed by some other fing admiral or general or whoever, I mean, what steps do they need to take?

I wish I had a better answer than this, but the reality is that the best answer is to get a lawyer who knows the system and push back. Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And.

Creating a Guide for Veterans

SHAWN RYAN: You know, now you’re giving me an idea that you and I should sit down. This could have been a better advertisement for yourself, Tim. I’m just saying I’m not here to promote my business. I’m here to help out a friend and a client. But you know what? You’re giving me an idea. Why don’t you and I sit down later and pull all the public affairs instructions and all the rules from the various services, and we could put together a little bit of a guide.

It’s something that I had actually suggested to Walt Allman as an idea. People need guidance. If they don’t know the law or the rules, they need to be trained on it. But you know what, just simply what they did in the wake of Matt’s first book where they just started going out with the whole, “Oh, we are supposed to be quiet professionals. I do not advertise the nature of our work.” That’s bullshit, okay? It doesn’t help anybody.

You need to give specific, actionable guidance. This is where, this is what the law is. The law says you’re allowed to talk about these things. The law says don’t talk about this. Okay? So maybe, maybe you and I should sit down and I’ll create a little guide on this. Because if the commands are not going to properly train their people on it, and the reality is, so many of these guys are out. They’ve been out for 10, 15 years, and so they’re not going to work. Comm is not going to be sending a training PowerPoint to Pizzico back at this point.

But maybe it’s something that we should do and to educate people, because the reality is these stories are important. They’re important not only for everybody who watches this and listens to this, but they’re important for the people telling the stories because it’s therapeutic for them. And then it’s also therapeutic to other veterans who listen to this and watch this, and they see their own story reflected there. And it’s probably the biggest recruiting tool in the fing country to come on this show and talk about all the badass s you did. So the answer is, I need to do some homework for you, Sean, and I’ll write something up.

Well, I appreciate you, Tim. It’s always good to see you. You too.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You too.

SHAWN RYAN: Do I get gummy bears here? Because I’ll definitely, we will load you up. I was going to say, don’t look like you’re eating any of the gummy bears lately, though, Tim. I’m not for my wife. My wife gets mad at me if I don’t come back. We will load you up. We got some other stuff, too, so. But thanks for coming on, man. Thank you.

All right, Matt, we’re back from the break. Just got done chatting with Tim, but I got.

The Trident Threat

MATT BISSONNETTE: I got to interject here.

SHAWN RYAN: He.

MATT BISSONNETTE: He said, you know what the SEAL community does very maliciously is they try and go after your SEAL Trident after you’ve served and you’re now out. They did that to me, too.

SHAWN RYAN: They did.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Of course, I’d been out five years, and they came back and were like, “Hey, as part of this, we’re going to, we want to take your Trident.”

SHAWN RYAN: It.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Like, my lawyer represented me at the time. I don’t even think they can do that. You’re out of the Navy. How do they retroactively go back and take away a warfare insignia that you earned and you got out of the Navy with? He’s like, that’s not even legal.

SHAWN RYAN: You still have it, right? Yeah, well, still have it. Yeah.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I don’t care. But in the Navy paperwork, do I have my SEAL Trident? Yes. Did they try and take it away retroactively to be spiteful and little bitches? Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: So they just literally just spew out whatever bullshit they feel like, whether they have any legal recourse or not to try to f*ing scare you, piss you off, ruin your day. What? I mean, whatever. They just, they’ll just spew it all out there.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s the SEAL mindset. Win at all costs. Right? And if it doesn’t, you know, crush the other guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, man.

Life’s Biggest Struggle

MATT BISSONNETTE: So, yeah, it was, it’s been my life’s biggest struggle for sure. Right? Getting into buds, making it in the seals is one thing. I thought that was hard. Getting out kicked my ass. Not the getting out part, because I was ready to get out. I was cooked, I was done. But what came after getting out was single handedly my biggest challenge.

And again I talk about faith. I was in my lowest when I got out and didn’t have community, didn’t understand why I was being put through everything I was being put through. And that’s where I was furthest from my faith. As I’ve got through this experience, it’s really reminded me that hey, there is a reason behind this. I may not understand it, I may not know it right now. It may take me years to understand why.

And so it’s really been more like, hey, I’m going to trust that this is all part of God’s plan, right? I dealt with a decent amount of survivors guilt, having done what I did and getting out. And then I dealt with a ton of questioning why I went through everything I went through. And again, the only way I sit here and smile and think about it now is thinking that okay, maybe this was God just challenging me yet again, right? Maybe he wanted to see if I was going to turn into a little bitch. Maybe he was going to see how I acted, how I let my actions. And so I’m big on my actions over my words, right? So yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Has this entire experience changed your opinion of the teams?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah, for sure.

SHAWN RYAN: How so?

A Changed Perspective

MATT BISSONNETTE: Man, I would have given anything for that team, for the teams, the community, right? I was that guy that they had hook, line and sinker. I would have done anything, died for them. No questions asked, easy check, had Friday done. Then I get out, I’m like, well, wait a second, this isn’t the, where’s the, this brotherhood? It seems more like a school of sharks and if there’s blood in the water, they’re coming after you. Like, this isn’t the brotherhood I remember or was sold, right?

Now that communities, the seal community, whatever it is, it’s, it is, whatever it is, I care very little about it now, right? My community that I’ve gotten reacquainted with or all a lot of my favorite operators that I worked with, they’ve now gotten out, right? And I think we all collectively have a perspective that we respect each other for what we did. But it’s not about the seal community or about this world. I guess the delta guys I worked with, they’re saying the same thing. They’re like, f* the leadership. I’m over it.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re over it, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We were sent into harm’s way by leadership for what?

SHAWN RYAN: Right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We got sent a lot. Right. A few of us didn’t come back. And that same leadership that arguably left millions of dollars of military equipment, Afghanistan, they’ve got promoted in retirement and everything. And somehow I have a payment plan. It’s hard to process, it’s hard to justify in my mind. The only way is knowing that, hey, there’s a plan.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s got a plan.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I may not understand it right now. Keep the faith.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a good way to be, man. It’s a good way to be. So what else is in the new book?

No Easy Way

MATT BISSONNETTE: The new book is me telling this story. The new book is me venting about this because I haven’t. I’ve kept my mouth very shut and quiet. I’ve been very private about it. I tried to fight this battle as best I could through the legal system and when that ran its course, like I’ve got to tell the story.

But then through the story, I don’t want it to be a Debbie Downer and woe is me. And this is over there just bitching and moaning. I can’t have it. Right. I try to be very optimistic in some sty situations. And so we talked about the four Fs earlier, right? I learned that from my dad, family, friends, fun and faith. I sprinkle some of that into the books. I don’t want it to come across like it’s just some former SEAL bitching and moaning. Right. It’s some former SEAL who’s been through some s and is going to share a little bit of what helped him out when he was in his nice darkest times.

SHAWN RYAN: What is in there about the AAR?

MATT BISSONNETTE: The AAR of the Bin Laden made. Only thing I put in there is, is that there’s an audio recording of it. And that’s, I mentioned that because that’s, that’s where my flow of the mission comes from.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

MATT BISSONNETTE: My what I saw, what I experienced and then what I sat through in a debrief and what I remember hearing on that debrief and what was audio recorded. And I’ve confirmed with other people what they heard on that radio on that recording. So that’s the only thing I get into. Just that there was existence of it and that that’s where my version comes from.

SHAWN RYAN: And the name of the book is no Easy Way. No Easy Way.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It’s a playoff. No easy day. Because turns out today is not long enough. Right? You’re going to get kicked in the nuts. Life’s journey’s a little longer than that. That takes more than a day. Well, we’ll.

SHAWN RYAN: We will, we will help you promote it.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And I’m not, I’m not using a publisher on this one, Right. I used the publisher on the last two. Guess who kept all their money in the process.

SHAWN RYAN: Go. Go figure.

Publishing and Direct Sales

MATT BISSONNETTE: Publishers, literary agent, go figure. Everybody kept their profits except me. So this book, I’m not using a publisher. I’m going as most direct that I can.

If people want to help me, they can go to my website, mattbissonet.com and order a book. And that cuts out all the middlemen, that cuts out all the fluff, that cuts out all the nonsense. And then when the book finally gets reviewed, it goes straight to you.

SHAWN RYAN: Good for you, man. Good for you. What are you doing with the YouTube channel?

Hollywood and SEAL Team Show

MATT BISSONNETTE: YouTube channel, that’s an interesting one, right? I kind of parachuted into Hollywood for the SEAL Team show on CBS, right? I had an opportunity to sit down with the president of CBS. He says, “Hey, Bis, what does Hollywood do wrong with military content?”

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty easy.

MATT BISSONNETTE: You don’t hire enough veterans to make sure the veteran content actually gets across, right. I said, “Look, I did 13 deployments. And it’s not about the Rambo sh*t. I did plenty of that. I was married, I tried to have kids, like all of these things. And it’s a balance. It’s not just the shoot ’em up stuff, right? There’s way more to being a SEAL than what’s in combat.”

He’s like, “Okay, would you help me put this together?” Sure. So started hiring a handful of vets. Then Hollywood stepped in. They’re like, “No, no, no, no. You got three involved.”

SHAWN RYAN: Like three.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We need like 300. So I went back to the president, CBS. I’m like, “Sir, this isn’t the deal. We got like this. You have to put a lot of them in here, right? There’s only three of us so far.”

And of course, right? What he wants and the lieutenants below him, they always change what he wants. Like the military. So I kept butting heads, but every time I’d go back and talk with the President, he’d say, “Okay, Bis, okay.” And I’d win. And by season seven.

SHAWN RYAN: Right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: What’s seven seasons?

SHAWN RYAN: Seven seasons of this?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Seven season. 200 vets employed on the show.

SHAWN RYAN: Congratulations, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Directors, editors. We had two former SEALs and a former MARSOC guy in the writer’s room writing the episodes with the crazy Hollywood types to write the episodes, right? Otherwise we’d be throwing nuclear hand grenades. Episode Two. Right. It doesn’t work.

They clearly pulled a whole bunch of stuff from my books and put it in the show. We talk a lot about mental health. We have veteran suicide. We have an episode where we had a veteran shoot himself in the VA parking lot. Right. Mental health was never brought up at all. Ever during my time. Ever was dirty word, right?

So to have the ability to have an effect on a show that can tell a real story. That was it. So SEAL Team 7. Seven seasons. Learned a lot. It’s super expensive. It’s slow and it’s a dying breed, right?

The Farm and YouTube Channel

So I’ve got a farm in North Carolina, which is where I am moving to in my next phase of life. I’m going to be a farmer. Grow raising some wagyu beef.

SHAWN RYAN: Nice. And some of that up here. I’ll trade you gummy bears for wagyu beef any f*ing day.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Deal. So, yeah, through that process, right. It’s an old cattle farm that my wife and I bought 10 years ago. We’ve been cleaning up and we’re like, “You know what? We should share a little bit of the story of where our food comes from.” Right.

I’m a little bit of a prepper, so we’ll be getting off the grid with some solar and whatnot. And so we’re like, let’s put a little show around this. And then I bring buddies out and bring them through the show.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s go, man.

MATT BISSONNETTE: We’d set up a thing called the Farm Olympics with my son. Now, when you come, we’ll have you do it. But it’s shooting out of an ice bath, sporting clays. Right. Paddle boarding side by siding with ax throwing with Winkler. We got a whole bunch of stupid, fun stuff to do around the farm.

SHAWN RYAN: Dude, that’s awesome. Yeah. Sounds like a total man camp. That’s amazing.

MATT BISSONNETTE: It is.

The Most Important Thing From SEAL Teams

SHAWN RYAN: Well, congratulations, Adam from Bob. Really happy for you. And so a couple more questions. Send it one. What is the one thing that stuck with you the most out of your career in the SEAL teams?

MATT BISSONNETTE: A positive one. A positive from my time in the SEAL team?

SHAWN RYAN: All the bullsh*t happened, happened.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Man. And you’ve lived it, Sue. So I’m speaking to the choir here. There’s something about working with a group of people. I’m not talking about the officers and all the people around the operators that you worked with. Right.

And the fact that each one of them, right, would give of himself for the team, right? And I loved that, right? I loved the fact that I worked in an environment where the team was all rowing in the same direction. And it was great. I absolutely loved that.

I loved the black and white nature of it, right? There’s very little gray area. You’re either all in or you’re not. And I was all in. So I loved all of that. Problem is, you get out and you miss it.

I have a Delta Force buddy who’s on the SEAL Team show. Delta guy playing a seal.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s weird.

LTSD: Lack of Traumatic Stress Disorder

MATT BISSONNETTE: But Tyler Gray, and he’s like, “Look, Bis, we don’t have PTSD. We have LTSD.” Have you heard this one before?

SHAWN RYAN: No.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Because I’m like, “Tyler, what’s LTSD?” He’s like, “We have Lack of Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Okay, explain it to me. And it’s the best way I’ve ever heard it explained.

“Okay, Bis,” he’s like, “for a decade straight, our day job, Monday, Wednesday, Friday on average, was to creep into the house, pick the lock on the door and come deal with you and 10 of your friends with me and 10 of my friends, right? We’re going to be very calm in that chaos because that’s what we do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And for a decade, it’s kind of our normal night. That’s our norm. That’s our baseline.

I don’t get adrenaline rush in a shootout. I slow down and make smart decisions. Adrenaline will get you killed. So that becomes our norm. I turned in my ID card, I left the base. I never got shot at again. I haven’t been skydiving. I haven’t. I’ve had lack of traumatic stress in my life.”

SHAWN RYAN: Life.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And Tyler’s like, he explained that to me. I’m like, “Holy sh*t. It’s the best way ever. I have LTSD. I don’t have PTSD. I have LTSD, right? I did it long enough that that was my happy place and my norm. It made. It gave me purpose. It gave me all the things I needed in life. And then one day I turned in my ID card, I left, and now I have Lack of Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

Now why do vets step into drug and alcohol issues? Maybe they’re trying to recreate the chaos single handedly. The best way I’ve ever heard it explained to me.

SHAWN RYAN: Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. A lot of other symptoms going on while in service. Like you saying you’re not f*ing sleeping while in service.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Yeah. I didn’t sleep for more than four or five hours a night for almost a decade. Right? There’s a lot of combined stressors that add up and add up.

And you think about it again, I was at the command for eight straight years and that pressure never got relieved for anybody. I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about the command in general. That pressure just got more and more pressurized. More and more pressurized. More and more pressurized.

Well, big success have been laden Russian. Okay, Boom. We got gut punched with all of our friends died.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, right.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Right. Like.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man.

The Crossing Guard Stolen Valor Story

MATT BISSONNETTE: I got one other crazy story for you.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you got?

MATT BISSONNETTE: So when my kids were little, I would go volunteer at their school, right? They use their mom’s maiden name. So there’s nobody know, they’re just trying to stay under the radar. Certainly nobody at the kids school knows my background.

But there’s a program called Watchdogs. Dads of good students. Dads can go to the school, volunteer for the day and whatever. So I’m going to be a watchdog. I show up at the school like, “Yeah, you know, I’m Ava dad. You know, I’m here for my volunteer.”

Like, “Okay, well, you know, here’s your T shirt. Would you go work the crossing guard? As the buses show up, here’s a reflective vest and a stop sign.” I’m probably overqualified for this, but it’s going to be a really safe intersection. I got my Navy SEAL hand and arm signals, right?

I’m working the intersection, reflective vest, stop sign. In the middle of this, I see this guy walking up with a couple kids and he’s got a SEAL Team 6 hat on. The type we don’t sell.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, sh*t, right?

MATT BISSONNETTE: We have squadron hats. We don’t have Team Six hats. So he walks across the intersection. I give him a look, you know, he gives me the tough guy nod and walks into school. Holy sh*t, I got to talk to this guy. Maybe he’s at the command.

So I let him come out. I get out of the street, I let the traffic go. And I’m looking, I’m like, “Hey, man, see the hats? Were you in the teams?” “I was.” I’m like, “Oh, no sh*t. Team 6. Those are the guys that got bin Laden, you know? You weren’t a part of that, were you?”

This guy looks around. “I don’t like to talk about it, but I was.” Oh my God, I can’t believe what he just said. I just keep staring at him. I’m in my reflective vest. I got my stop sign. I’m like, “No, so was I.” And that’s all I said. I just.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, my gosh.

MATT BISSONNETTE: And he’s looking at me. I’m looking at him.

SHAWN RYAN: The two crossing over guards are out there beating the sh*t out of each other.

MATT BISSONNETTE: I’m like, I’m going to kill him with my side. My wife’s texting me. She’s like, “You know, the kids are at school. Don’t kill them with the stop sign.” Choice words.

I’m like, “Who is the master chief on Chaquan? What BUD/S class were you in?” All right, this guy had nothing. “Listen, I got a lot of dead friends who’d be really upset that you’re coming in here acting like you are once you beat it. How about that?”

What are the odds of that, man? 24 dudes in the world, and he’s lying to the wrong crossing guard at the wrong time.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, wow, wow. People never cease to amaze me. Well, Matt, we’re wrapping up the interview. Last question.

MATT BISSONNETTE: Send it.

Closing Recommendations

SHAWN RYAN: If you had 3 people to recommend for the show, who would they be?

MATT BISSONNETTE: Three guys to come on this show. Great question. They probably wouldn’t want me dropping their names on this right now. I could think of a couple operators that I worked with who would be phenomenal to help round out a whole bunch of stuff for you.

Whether they will come here and be on the show, I don’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t going to do any of this until I talked to, you know, knowing you, knowing what you’ve built and the type of person you are, that’s why I was willing to come sit here. So I appreciate that and I think there will be some others that will follow suit.

Well, and so I won’t drop names, but they will be phenomenal interviews if I can encourage them to come out.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Thank you. Well, Matt, it was an honor. I wish the best for you. Hope that book gets the blessing soon. So appreciate it. God bless. But it cheers.

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