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Of any purchase of $100 or more. That's promo code Brian. Hi, everyone. We're keeping up to date on what's going on around the country, around the world. We'll let you know when the president's supposed to speak at some point today.
And we are finding out what the response is going to be from what could be a reigniting of the war in Iran. But war is nothing new to my next guest. He's Angelo A.J. Pescudi, Marine veteran, speaker, and author of a brand new book called Dark Horse, Harnessing the Hidden Potential in War and in Life. Angelo, welcome.
Thank you so much, Brian, for having me.
So, I mean, it's a big book about your life. You would think you were like 60 years old, but you joined the military right after 9-11. Yes, sir. Yes.
So I was a senior in high school when 9-11 happened. Technically, I was 16 at the time. Had to wait three weeks before I could talk to a recruiter. I was influenced by a high school history teacher who was also a Marine, who introduced me to my first recruiter and then joined right afterwards and then shipped off right after I graduated high school. Why the Marines?
You know, they were the toughest I saw. You know, I didn't know the Marine Corps had jobs inside of it. I thought all of the Marine Corps was just infantry. And, you know, as a young man who had. You know, ideas of self-doubt and self-efficacy issues, I thought that why not try to climb the highest mountain I could.
And how'd it go? You know, it went well. I struggled at first a lot, as anybody does. Paris Island? San Diego, so Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, because I'm from Northern California originally, and stepped into that and was able to find my footing eventually.
But what I wanted to write inside of the book itself was that failure is often the first part of the first step in success. And so I write a lot of my struggles in there to be able to be open to young men and young women who think that failure is final for them. And so I wrote about that.
So, I mean, you had two active wars going on shortly after. I mean, you had Afghanistan within months, and then you had Iraq. They were ramping up for Iraq right after. What was your experience?
So, my experience was when I went into boot camp, there was kind of rumbling.
So, I went into boot camp in July of 2002 so that we knew that Afghanistan was going on and the rumblings of Iraq began. But we're pretty isolated when we go to boot camp. And then, right after that, I graduated the School of Infantry in December of 2002, arrived. To my first unit in January of 2003 and shipped off to Kuwait three weeks later. And then from Kuwait, you were part of the invasion?
I was. I was. I was 18 years old. It was a rifleman in 3rd Battalion 5th Marines. Where the book gets its name is Dark Horse.
So it's kind of a double entendre. Dark Horse is the call sign for 3rd Battalion 5th Marines out of Camp Pendleton. And also, Dark Horse is for anyone who feels underestimated, who thinks a little of themselves, and kind of a challenger that people may not expect something from.
So what did you learn in the battle? We know about the Thunder Run with the 3rd Infantry. Where were you guys?
So we run Route 1. Our biggest day of fighting was in a place called Diwania, or a little north of Diwania. It was a Republican Guard training camp. And so also what we had, Fetayin, was their kind of tenure. We didn't know anything about Saddam Fetayin, right?
That was bad intel, not knowing that they had guys in plain clothes looking to take you out. And that confuses everyone because, look, at that time frame, we're looking for a conventional military. And so then we're fighting a conventional military. This is the first time. That's exactly right.
First person Gulf War. Exactly correct. And so then all of a sudden we. See these guys who are in non-standard uniforms who are fighting us. And it started the very beginnings of what would eventually become the insurgency.
But the Marine Corps, we fought 2003 on our terms. It was a maneuver warfare, fast-paced, striking the enemy to prevent their ability to make war. And that was war on our terms. What was the big adjustment from training to actual war? The big adjustment for me, I think, was the gravity of the situation.
So, training, you know, there is a level of, you know, understanding of what could be. And then, all of a sudden, once that first bullet snaps by your head, there's this realization of like, this is not a game anymore. And the stakes are pretty real. And I was pretty honest in the book itself. I made a lot of mistakes very, very young.
I tripped over my own rifle, jammed my rifle with mud, and there's chaos and missiles and all kinds of things going on. And I'm trying to figure myself out. I was only studied because of a very strong team leader at the time frame. And really, what I saw through Dark Horse and the thread that I pull through it is that people, you know, that we were all in this together, right? No one was coming to save us.
And so people looked to be able to help carry my load physically, emotionally, and mentally until I could carry it myself. How long until you could? And how great is it to have a leader that doesn't judge, just fixes, right? That's exactly correct. I really wanted to be able to emphasize that inside of the book.
How long did I feel that? You know, I'm still waiting on that to happen, you know, to feel confident in every decision that we make. And that's really. What I wanted to do was inspire young men and women to recognize that if you're afraid, if you're uncomfortable, you're growing and to be able to push into that. I eventually moved over into the sniper program as soon as we moved back to Camp Pendleton after OIF-1 and started to move through a sniper in doc and kind of becoming a sniper and struggled with that as well.
And so there's no secrets that I have left in. There's nothing left to hide. I've kind of written all of my failures, but really as a purpose to show people that progress is part of it. And what did you think about the operation in particular and your role as a sniper?
Well, because you're killing terrorists. Yes.
Yes.
So specifically, so is it gratifying or was it also taxing?
So the answer to both is yes.
So there is a humanity side that you understand that we are out there and we are killing other human beings. The hard part for us is we also do want to do our job well. The way that we look at ourselves as snipers is: yes, we have a bolt rifle. Yes, we have eyes and ears and we can see further and touch farther than a lot of the conventional infantry. We saw ourselves as protectors.
So since we could reach further than conventional infantry could, what we wanted to do was be able to be angels on their shoulders effectively.
So we went into the Battle of Fallujah. I was a sniper in training in a sniper platoon during the Battle of Fallujah. And then eventually, after that battle, became a sniper, like a school-trained sniper.
So was it amazing? It's amazing for me as an outsider how underappreciated the military was in adjusting to the battlefield. We also said, avoid urban warfare.
Well, it happened. Yes.
We got to take this town.
Well, how do you do that? You cordoned off the whole thing. You gave people ID cards. Found out who they were, and then you found out who the terrorists were. That's a difficult taxing.
People's lives were lost. I mean, it's amazing what you guys learned on the fly, how you adjusted. I think it's totally underappreciated. I do appreciate that. You know, thank you for saying that.
Really, what we come back to the Marine Corps is: it is, we are the sum of all of our parts. And we come together. Every single person is integral to making sure that specifically with Fallujah, that Fallujah happened the way that it did. No person was more important than the other. And the only thing that mattered was the man and woman to your left and right.
And that really carries us through.
So, writing a book, you know, how do you write a memoir without sounding like a narcissist? What we tried to do with Darkhorse was use my story as a through line to tell all of these individual Marine stories through the entirety of the book. Were you taking notes at the time?
So, instead of taking notes, so my mother is a plain air pastel and oil painter, and so I grew up with kind of an artistic background.
So, instead of writing normal letters like, hey, mom, my feet smell, I'm hungry, I wrote stories of what. What I witnessed along the way. And being a good mom, what she did, she saved all of my letters. And I've included the majority of my letters from combat in the book. And so you can actually see where I'm at in a mental snapshot at 18 years old in OAF-1, 20 years old in Fallujah, and then 21 on my third tour in Iraq.
And what do you think about the operation overall?
So overall, I think what happened was we, in some aspects, what we did was the dog caught the car, right? We did everything that we needed to do to be able to have a military victory. And then I think what happens is I think we kind of lost the plot at some point. It became about nation building, and we ended up kind of being mired into a place where we were no longer fighting the war on our terms. We were fighting it on other people's terms.
Insurgency. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, having to push back. But no, it also is underappreciated because the economy collapsed right after was the surge. We had 2008, we had the market crash.
But prior to that, despite all the pushback, General Keene. David Petraeus, a lot of other MVPs came up with a plan. George Bush greenlighted it and even lost a lot of his party in doing it to combine with the tribes and give them back their country. And it worked to the point where Barack Obama basically said, Why do we even have any troops there? I promised to end this war.
Let's just pull everyone out, which ended up being a mistake because in comes ISIS afterwards. But having said that, Do you find that people just want to say, oh, the Iraq war was a mistake and they don't understand the victories that were there and that they've had, I don't know, 15 elections since? Correct.
So that's a fantastic question. I write about that as a young man sitting at, you know, the idea for me is democracy. What we wanted to do was provide a fledgling country who was with an autocratic dictator. We wanted to give them the opportunity at democracy. What I always say is that any form of revolution has to be, you know, born from within.
The people have to want it and they have to earn it. We provided the stability. I write a letter in there in 2005 where I'm sitting, I'm sleeping in the election or in the first election site in Iraq in 40 years. They actually had their fingers up in the air. That's exactly correct.
And the gravity was not lost on me as a 20-year-old. What we were fighting for, what we felt we were dying for, was the opportunity for democracy. At that point, it becomes Iraq's and the Iraqi people's decision of how they want to go. That was our job was to provide them the space, and it was up to them to be able to decide where they were. And they're doing that now.
And now they have a situation. Where we have a presence there in the area, and there's no longer Saddam Hussein. When people want to run down the Iraq war, go ahead. But when people say things like stupid war, I think about the people that fought it. And I just ask you, go back to that time.
Go back to 91 and the criticism on Bush 41 for not finishing the job. And Bush 43 finishes the job and they say, great. And all of a sudden the insurgency happens. They go, well, this whole thing was a mistake. And then afterward, you can't have it every way.
And then you got to say, what if we did leave Saddam Hussein in peril? What if we did relieve all the sanctions? Do you think that he would have just wilted into the woodwork? No. He would have been the menace of the Middle East.
And we would have had two. Crazy terroristic powers instead of just one, leading Iran being the other. In 1991, Saddam's military was the fourth largest military in the world, backed largely by the Soviet Union as far as the weapons systems. And so, for me, what I've been able to study through a lot of my own historical research is Desert Storm was a huge success because that was the right type of enemy for the right type of military that the United States had at that timeframe. We had professionalized our military since the ending of Vietnam, and 1991 was this perfect opportunity for us to be able to overthrow within four days or 96 hours, take down the fourth largest military in the world and pacify them for a very, very long time.
And then, yes, eventually this thing starts to percolate. And instability is something that we as a nation like to fight. We want to be able to provide an opportunity again for democracy. Iraq is, when we look back on it, it's always easy to look back on with rose-colored glasses or with the clarity of 2020. When you're in the situation, you know, again, I was a young man.
I was a Lance corporal, E3, you know, in all of these things. I was really just trying to be able to save my friends' lives and get out of it alive myself. As we went into Fallujah, you know, there's an old saying that as soon as the first bullet passes by your head, politics goes out the window. And, you know, I write a lot about that in this book. A friend of mine said, this book is deeply, deeply political.
It's nonpartisan. What I do is I show the world that through my experience as a young man fighting for democracy, fighting for his country. You know, I've read a lot of your work and specifically one of the books that I enjoyed the most was on The Secret Six, right? Nathan Hale, right? You know, my only regret is that I have but one life to give to my country.
The majority of the Americans who join the United States military believe that and they want that and they will that. And they're very proud to bring that forward to defend the values that the United States carries forward. We've all heard the radio ads about the IRS. They tell you to be afraid and they try to frighten you into calling. I'm here to tell you that tax relief advocates Is different.
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Right.
So, what leadership lessons did you learn now? You said you're always a learning progress. I understand that. The humility is important, but you've learned a lot, right? Yes.
And you're still young. You're still, how old are you? I'm 41. 41.
So, what did you take out of that knowing putting your life on the line? Most of the four or five years, right?
So I ended up doing 21 years inside of the service itself. But in a hot war, how long? Until 2000, my last combat deployment was 2014. I moved into special operations at that timeframe in Afghanistan and North Africa. You know, what I learned was that for me, learning has to be central to your core.
You have to be able to teach an old dog new tricks. But the core message inside of Dark Horse is make them better than you. Here's what I want people to take from the book: I want them to understand young Americans who suffer from their own ideas of self-efficacy. First, you have to be able to do hard things. If you're uncomfortable, you're growing.
Second is that failure is often the first step to success. And the third thing is that when you achieve your own individual success, whatever that looks like in any walk of life, the job, now your obligation is to turn around and make the next generation better than you. I tell people all the time: if you want to know what I learned over 21 years of service, the very last page of the book. Is called Letter to the Leader. And I write an open letter to anybody who wants to be a leader from any walk of life.
If you want to know how I learned that or what I did to be able to learn that lesson, those are in the pages of the book itself. Right.
And by the way, Angelo A., it couldn't be, you're all Italian. Oh, super Italian. Angelo A.G. Pascudi. Yes, sir.
Okay, I got it right. Marine veteran, speaker, and author of a brand new book, Dark Horse, Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and in Life. Just let me bring it to today before we go. What would you like to see happen in Iran, knowing so many of your people that you serve with were killed by EFPs? As well as the insurgency with a help finance and fuel?
Yes, great question. You know, I sat and I had a long conversation with Sean Ryan about this. We talked for eight and a half hours, and he asked a lot of these things. Eight and a half hours. Yes, sir.
Is that all online on a podcast? Wow. It is. And so you kind of get to understand. Here's what I say as a service member is that the social contract, when we sign up to join the United States military, we write a blank check to the United States, payable with our lives.
What I want to understand, what I want people, politicians, regular everyday Americans to understand, that bond that we share with one another has to be protected. And that sacred bond, it has to be wielded carefully. Whenever we go anywhere in the world to be able to defend the values or be able to stabilize country countries for the sake of democracy, we have to have, I would say, clear objectives, a sound mind, and a clear heart before we do that.
So do you not think this is clear enough? In my personal, now I understand I don't have a clearance anymore.
So there's two things. I understand I am no longer the man in the arena, and I'm never going to talk poorly on the men and women who are in the arena. I have turned in my back. But you are more qualified than 97% of the people in the country to comment. That's correct.
That's correct. I do appreciate that. Yes, I think that the objective needs to be clearly laid out. You know, as far as a battle plan, we have to have a North Star, an idea of what we want to accomplish through there. And I think as a regular everyday American now, I don't see those.
Now, I'm never going to argue that Iran is not an issue. I'm never going to argue that they have not fought us through proxies for the last, you know, three to four decades at this point. Never going to argue that. But I think that there are some professional military agencies who have a pretty good idea of what to do. And I think that what I've written in the book is sometimes that our policymakers need to let our military men and women make some of the decisions on the ground and not get in the way.
Right.
So let them finish the job. Yes, sir. Right.
Especially because if you look at the Middle East. You actually have a shot at so many of these countries care about their economy more than their religion. You know, I'm saying I'm more than being a zealot or a fanatic. I look at the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, look at Oman. They're looking to grow their society for the first time maybe in my lifetime.
And it seems like where you turn, Iran just sits in the way. You know, it does, and it is a cultural center for it. And maybe not yes to finish the job. I think that having a very clear outline of what needs to happen and allowing our military makers to work towards that, to work towards those goals. Pick up Dark Horse, Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and in Life.
Angelo, great meeting you.
Sorry we don't have eight and a half hours, but this has been great. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. And thanks for serving. The pleasure was mine.
It was my honor to serve.
