Ssgt Don Tran (MARSOC, OIF, OEF Veteran) & Ssgt Prime Hall (MARSOC, OIF, OEF Veteran)
“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Left: Don Tran, Right: Prime Hall
Water is fluid, it is hot, it is cold, it waves, it ebbs, it flows, it brings life, resurgence, it crashes, it destroys. It is formless apart from the container that holds it. If you harness its power properly, you can bring a renewable source of energy to millions of people. If you harness its power properly, you can bring a renewal of millions of minds. At least that’s the philosophy that Don Tran and Prime Hall have carried with them since the genesis of their two organizations, Deep End Fitness (DEF) and Underwater Torpedo League (UTL). Like so many other successful training programs, their ideals are not carried through a conduit of “rest and relaxation.” The major mantra is still that adversity will find you at some point, crash you, destroy the idea of who you thought you were, reshape those ideas, and if you pass the testing phase… bring you back through mental resurgence. As you examine the culture around Underwater Torpedo League and Deep End Fitness, you soon find that its principle stakeholders are humans that are looking for resistance, learning, growth, an emotional advent, something more than your average “humdrum” way of life.
Still, with all the commonalities shared with other thriving programs, DEF and UTL are completely unique in the way they get to this shared proving ground. Their model of implementation is aqueous by nature, and the tools utilized bring humility to even the most battle tested of the warrior class. And, trust us, warrior class is the best way to describe those who partake in either program. It would stand to reason that the men who carry both organizations are both paddle holders as Special Operations Marines, otherwise known as MARSOC Raiders. Their foundations, although uniquely different, forged their paths as combat tested Marines and now the Co-Founders of two successful organizations. But, rather than explain the rest of how this all came together, we will let Prime and Don take it from here.
We’d like to extend a special “thanks” to our sponsors Rifle Supply, Ten Thousand, and Elevate Weekly.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
PH: I grew up in South Texas, in Corpus Christi. It's down on the coast right next to the ocean. I grew up swimming. My grandmother was a synchronized swimmer who'd competed in college. Since I was two years old she would take me to the pool. I was still kind of young when my parents got divorced and then my mom moved away from Corpus. I think I was about 14 when my mom and my sister moved away. My dad stayed there but he moved out with his girlfriend, so I ended up living by myself at a young age. One summer, my grandparents came down, picked me up, and took me on a summer trip. We would always go on summer trips, my entire childhood. They took me to San Antonio this one particular summer. We had a week-long trip with our cousins. While we were in San Antonio, I'd seen some kids from Texas Military Institute. Right in that area. I saw some kids in uniform at the mall or something. I made a comment to my grandparents that I wished I could do something like that. Whenever we got back, they dropped me off at my apartment. Again, I was living by myself at like 15 years old. They pulled me aside and were like, "Would you be willing to go to go do a tour at the military school down here in Harlingen called the Marine Military Academy?"
I want to preface my story about the Marine Military Academy with the fact that when I was young I had a peeping Tom. There was a guy that watched me in my window while I was growing up, and I actually lived in my closet because I was so scared. That went on for years. My parents eventually caught on but by then they were close to getting divorced so nothing really came from it. I was in survival mode at that point. I mention all of this because you can imagine how difficult that would be for a kid to go through and navigate. I had to live in the shadows until I was 13 years old when they finally caught him. When I started living by myself at 14, I kind of freaked out that this guy would come back. I just didn't have a lot of security at that point and then I had no rules. I'm a parent now with two kids and I realize how important rules are. Kids need rules because that's security for them. I didn't have any consistency of authority and there were no rules so that was harmful in my upbringing.
Let’s talk a little bit about your life growing up, Don. You grew up in Southern California, right? Can you tell us your parents and what you remember? What led your path to the Marine Corps?
DT: My parents came over from Vietnam in 1975 after the war. They were refugees coming over here and they were both sponsored—one by a Catholic family, my mom by a Christian family. She lived in Connecticut and my dad lived in Iowa. They didn't meet until they were actually over here. My dad came over here in the early or mid 60s, to the OCS (Officer Candidate School) program. He was a naval officer for the South Vietnamese Navy. He was like the Riverine guys that would get in fights in the Delta in Vietnam. He went over to school in Rhode Island, OCS or whatever it is. It was his second time coming back to America after that. My mom and dad met in America, they moved to California and then travelled around a little bit because my dad became an electrical engineer for Teledyne and Raytheon, some defense companies. I was born in Orange County, Orange County Hospital, but then we lived on the north side of Long Beach. My parents were super strict and super traditional Vietnamese parents, or Asian parents for most of the Asian people out there. Curfew for the kids. Always eating Asian food, so we’d bring Asian food to school, which was super awkward. People thought it was really weird, it smells different (laughs).
We lived in northside Long Beach for a few years and that's where I started going to public school. I always used to get in fights or get beat up so my parents were scared. They sent me to a private school from first grade to eighth grade, private Catholic school. It was pretty intense. After that, I went to a public high school in Long Beach. It's on the east side, called Wilson High School. That's where I had my real first time interacting with adversity because the private school was pretty chill. Going to public school, I didn't really know that much. All the kids that went to the private school with me went to other private, all boys schools, or other things like that. So I was going there on my own but I found a group of friends that were going around and kind of exploring different types of groups as well. That's where I got into a lot of trouble, and I kind of lashed out. My freshman and sophomore years I did pretty well, took AP classes and stuff like that. But my junior year, I pretty much bombed. I hung out with the wrong crowd, got mixed into a lot of drugs and partying, and then got in a lot of trouble. I was arrested and went to juvie a few times for stealing clothes and cars. I wasn’t living right.
I think it was a combination of strict upbringing, trying to find myself as a man, and trying to fit in. Coming from a private school, everyone thought I was the “goody-two-shoes” kind of dude. So I was like, “Man, I'm cool, too.” That's kind of what it was. My parents didn't grow up with a lot of money and we didn't grow up with a lot of money. So it was my way of finding my own source of income to do the things I wanted to do.
“That’s where I got into a lot of trouble, and I kind of lashed out. My freshman and sophomore years I did pretty well, took AP classes and stuff like that. But my junior year, I pretty much bombed. I hung out with the wrong crowd, got mixed into a lot of drugs and partying, and then got in a lot of trouble. I was arrested and went to juvie a few times for stealing clothes and cars. I wasn’t living right.”
So you were there for four years?
PH: The Marine Military Academy is a prep school for the Marine Corps. I felt like in a lot of ways, it was actually tougher than being in the Marines. You know, we got into a lot of fights. A lot of those fights were just on the spot, dropping the gloves, and duking it out. There wasn't much talk, just action. It wasn’t that we necessarily wanted to fight, but you have to realize that’s just how things get worked out in that environment.
I was only at the academy for my junior year and then I went back to Corpus Christi for my senior year of high school. I kind of questioned my own decision to leave for awhile. But, being free to make my own choices and live on my own I decided to go home for my last year. I lived at my grandparents house on a golf course, when they were in Spain and then I ended up living at my girlfriend's house but I was pretty independent. It probably would've been a better decision for me to stay at the academy but everything happens for a reason, right?
What do you think it was that turned the corner for you, as far as deciding to join the Marines? Obviously, you came to a point where there was a lot of trouble and realized you were headed down a bad path.
DT: I think it was my oldest sister. She was like, "Hey, you have to get ready for college.” She was a class older than me, but a year and a half in age, and was about to go to UCLA. She's like, "Don, you really need to do something. What do you want to do?" Then she actually put in a whole bunch of college applications for me to a few California state universities but I ended up not going because I wanted to do something else. I didn't want to go to school because I was a horrible learner at that point. I knew I needed some type of structure in my life. So, I went out to the Marine Corps recruiter. Even before that, I saw the Marine commercial where he’s fighting the dragon. As a 17 year old kid, I thought that was the coolest shit ever (laughs). I thought to myself, “I'm gonna go fight a dragon, or my own version of the dragon.” So, I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. His name was Sergeant Powell. He was this African American recruiter, super awesome, and just real with me. He started the process for me. Throughout that process, I was still getting in trouble and I remember one time I went to jail in Ontario for stealing a whole bunch of DVDs. The cop called my parents like, "Do you want to come grab your kid?" My mom was like, “I'm done. I'm not picking him up anymore.” So the police officer was like, “You’ve got one more call. Who else would come pick you up?” I called my Marine Corps Recruiter Sergeant Powell and he came and bailed me out of jail (laughs).
Before that point, I was like, “Oh man, do I really want to go to the Marine Corps? Do I really want to do something that rigid and tough?” Then, he showed me there was some type of brotherhood that was already there. You know, because the recruiter didn’t have to bail me out of jail. Maybe he needed to hit his quota. This was in 2006 and everybody was going to Iraq. Maybe he just needed numbers, I don't know man. But, I do know he didn’t need to come rescue me from that jail cell.
So that's why I felt that call to the “brotherhood.” When you join the Marine Corps or when you go to the Marine Corps recruiting station for the first time they have like these 13 little metal placeholders. They said something like, “Why do you want to join us?” Then, there were these reasons listed. “I want to be a leader. I want to travel the world. I want to have financial freedom. I want an education…” all that stuff. One of mine was always "brotherhood. I didn't grow up with a brother. I grew up with two sisters, one older, one younger, so I always wanted a brother. I think that's why when I got to high school, I was looking for other male figures to lead or follow, either an older brother or a younger brother. I was looking for somebody to mentor or learn from.
How was boot camp?
PH: I got pushed a lot at MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) and definitely on the ruck marches. Just getting adjusted to hiking at Camp Pendleton was tough. That was just the "learning to crawl" phase in boot camp. Adjusting from the terrain of South Texas to Pendleton was pretty tough at first.
Did you know about the world of Special Operations at the time?
DT: I had no idea what Special Operations or anything was. I thought the Marine Corps was the coolest thing ever. Every marine is a rifleman. I'm like, “Oh shit, I want to be a rifleman.” So, I went to boot camp like three weeks or a month after high school. I graduated in October or something like that and went straight to the School of Infantry since I had that infantry contract. Then midway through Infantry School, you get to pick your MOS (Military Occupational Specialty). You had a chance to be a machine gunner, mortarman, a tow gunner at the time still, or assaultman. But the instructors were like, "Oh, this guy's Asian. He's definitely going to be good at using a plotting board and math one day." That's why I became a mortarman first (laughs).
I actually learned a lot and it was extremely helpful for later on in my career. I got to my unit, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines around December 21st, right before they went on Christmas leave. We were in the field and it was my first night out. Our battalion commander called the whole battalion in at the same time and said “Hey, boys, we're going to Iraq.” Everybody in the battalion, as Marines, was cheering, “Yes we're going to war, we're going to war!”
One the deployment before, 1/4 went on a MEU but the trip before that they went to Najaf. The guys that went to Najaf, from the 18 day firefight in Najaf, all those senior guys were still there. No resupplies, just like on the ground, cramping, no food, no water. But the newer guys were like, “This is our chance to prove to those guys that we've got what it takes.” So everybody was super pumped. But me, I just turned 18 and I was so fucking scared (laughs). I was like, “Oh man, I'm definitely going to die. What the hell is going on dude? I've only been through like three months of training on how to shoot this gun.” (laughs) I was maybe 130 pounds, soaking wet at the time. I was just scared dude.
My parents didn't want me to join the military because they come from a war-torn country. My dad always told me, when he came over to America with one of his sisters and his dad, they had the opportunity to be sponsored, go to school and get enough money to sponsor the rest of his family to come over. He has nine brothers and sisters, and his mom. So he always said, “Although we don't want you to go to the military, one day someone in this family has to repay the country for what they did for us” which is amazing to me.
My dad always said, “Don't tell your mom you're in the infantry. Don't tell her that stuff. Just tell her that you're in the Marine Corps and there's other jobs you could be doing. Tell her about police calls, tell her about all the weird working parties you have to do.” So, I had her thinking, "Oh, Don is just doing work, like he’s in construction or mowing lawns.” She didn't really know what I did at all (laughs).
When we went over to Iraq at the end of '06, beginning of '07, we had no cell phones or no internet. Calling back home, our platoon had one satellite phone that we could make a five minute phone call on every two weeks. Whenever you called home it always felt amazing. It was just a short, “Oh, I love you," and all that stuff, “I don't know when I'll talk to you again.” You didn't know if you'd run out of minutes on the sat phone or the worst could happen or whatever it was.
So you make it through, and where do you go from there?
PH: I went to infantry school after that and I was initially supposed to be artillery. When I was finishing boot camp, I met with the admin people and they'd switched my contract to 0311. So, I thought that whenever I was getting to my next station that I'd be checking into infantry school. When I went, I ended up in Marine Combat Training still as artillery. I was trying to get that changed over even when I was there in school. I kept telling my instructors that I wanted to get switched and that I was supposed to be infantry. I finally had to say that I refused to train and I remember sitting on my bunk and just refusing to train. They finally decided to switch me at that point (laughs).
Don and Prime at a stop on the way back to Los Angeles from Austin, TX where they’d been establishing a new chapter of Deep End Fitness.
How was your first deployment? You were young and nervous going over there. Once you got there did the nerves kind of settle?
DT: We went over to Al-Qa'im, Iraq, which is on the northern border of Iraq near Syria. I was part of a weapons company at the time, a mobile assault platoon. I think we called it a CAAT (Combined Anti-Armor Team) platoon. We were pretty much rolling around with .50s (heavy barrel machine gun), .240s (automatic weapon) and then driving over IEDs (Improvise Explosive Device) and trying to find the bad guys in these Bedouin camps, in the small villages throughout Iraq.
The nerves settled I think after three, four weeks going in but then that's when we started hitting the IEDs. Just like IEDs after IEDs after IEDs. Some of them were small enough just to pop a tire. Some were big enough to blow off the front end and some of them killed some of my friends. That's when I was like, “Fuck dude.” Then, we didn't get a lot of contact. Just small arms fire here and there but that's what you go over for you know. You go through one IED class before you deploy and you're like, “This is what I'm dealing with every fucking day.” It was ridiculous. No one signs up to go drive over bombs.
It was crazy dude. We were probably in November. We had a lot of guys get MEDEVAC’d but no one actually died until my friend Jeremy Burris. He died over there on my first trip. We drove over a big IED and he was a lead truck driver. We had to ride with seven ton trucks in the front because there were so many IEDs. All the humvees were getting trashed. At least the seven ton trucks could take an impact. It launched the gunner out of the turret and then the vehicle commander too. His name was Abner and Lee Mendez was the gunner. It launched him out, he got all fucked up. It was actually down towards a wadi, a dry riverbed, so there was really one way in and one way out. You couldn’t just move to the side, it was a cliff. So, we hit that and we MEDEVAC’d those two other guys out. Then Jeremy went back to his truck, looking super cool. He's like, “Oh man I think I left my glasses in the truck.” He goes back to grab his glasses and when he jumped out of the truck he stepped on the secondary device.
I thought it was my other friend, Tyler Jones, in the back because he was right behind the truck doing the secondary sweep with the metal detector. I just remember being like, “Go get him… go!” I was stuck in the turret so I couldn't do much. I was like, “Go get him, go get him,” but the smoke was crazy. The second one was even bigger. I think it was like 50 pounds of HME. It wasn’t good.
Prime and Don at the EXOS Facility in Scottsdale, AZ.
So where did you go from there? What unit were you with?
PH: I was with 2/1 at first and I went on a training deployment. It was a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) and it was actually a year long. When we got back from the MEU we went to Iraq. I think we started in Mosul and then worked all the way down, where we ended up just all over the Syrian border down south. That was 2009. We were turning everything over to the Iraqis. That felt kind of like a training deployment as well because we were just turning everything over but there was still combat going on at the ground level. Right before I left for that deployment, I was supposed to be going to Force Recon, to try out so I could get a Recon contract. At that time though, I'd realized they set up trailers for a new Special Operations unit called MARSOC (Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command). So my commander said, “Hey, instead of going to the Recon thing, why don't you go try out for MARSOC?” He was the one who gave me the nudge to go do that so hats off to him. I met the requirements on paper, so then I could go to selection after Iraq. And so right after Iraq, I went to selection in North Carolina. That's actually where I met Don (Tran).
“I was supposed to be going to Force Recon, to try out so I could get a Recon contract. At that time though, I’d realized they set up trailers for a new Special Operations unit called MARSOC (Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command). So my commander said, ‘Hey, instead of going to the Recon thing, why don’t you go try out for MARSOC?’ He was the one who gave me the nudge to go do that so hats off to him. I met the requirements on paper, so then I could go to selection after Iraq. And so right after Iraq, I went to selection in North Carolina. That’s actually where I met Don (Tran).”
How do you move past that as a Marine? Everybody deals with it differently. How do you move past that when you had a job to still do? Was morale pretty low at that point?
DT: It was the end of deployment and we got extended for two months. It was two weeks into the first extension and it just rocked everybody. Jeremy played the guitar for us every night. I'm an Asian dude, I don't really listen to Country that much but I still listen to “Settle for a Slowdown.” He used to play that amazing song for us all the time. We had about a month left. We got home right before Christmas. I think that was the biggest transition because I was still so young and my mind was still molding. Coming back and transitioning, thinking in my head, “I'm back to the real world and people have no idea what I went through,” but that was a selfish way to think of it. I made that decision to join the Marines and go overseas but I was kind of in the victim mindset after that deployment. I remember thinking, “Man, I just lost my friend and no one even knows or cares.”
I was going through lows and just dwelling in it way too much. I always try to find the positive now, but back then I was just super depressed. I drank a shit ton and I wasn't even 21 yet. I remember coming back from the first deployment and all my friends from Long Beach that I was used to hanging out with were greeting me and stuff like that. We went up to my parents' garage. They have a two-story garage, a little floor that my dad built on top for storage. We were up there drinking and we made up some dumb ass shot because we're trying to get so fucked up. It was called “monster balls.” It was four shots of Jager and then four shots of Hennessy. It was just a dumb, stupid, 18- or 19-year-old thing to do. I threw up all over the place, all over my dad's garage. He was so fucking pissed.
“I made that decision to join the Marines and go overseas but I was kind of in the victim mindset after that deployment. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I just lost my friend and no one even knows or cares.’ I was going through lows and just dwelling in it way too much. I always try to find the positive now, but back then I was just super depressed. I drank a shit ton and I wasn’t even 21 yet.”
How difficult was that selection process for you?
PH: MARSOC Indoc really was an ass-kicker for me, or kick in the nuts… whatever you want to call it (laughs). When I came into the Marine Corps, I was maybe 180 pounds, like after boot camp. Once I started lifting weights, I'd just gotten bigger, so it was hard for me to lose that weight. Trying to cut down from 240 lbs was tough. That weight was a lot to run with so I suffered because of that. That was the hard part. But I'd been training and doing really challenging stuff for at least three years and I had been doing mental focus training down in San Diego where I'd be working out for six to eight hours straight doing different stuff. After those training iterations, we would finish with holding a seven-pound stick out for long periods of time. I remember going through all these different emotions of being pissed off, feeling impatient, and feeling like I couldn't do it. But, at the end of it I'd always end up in this focus state and able to hold this stick straight out for an extended amount of time. The focus that I reached in the mental focus training really helped me out through selection and ITC (Individual Training Course), especially in those hardest of parts where it's challenging and you still have quite a bit of time left, and you have to focus and figure out ways to process that.
Were you fearful going into the next deployment because of what you'd experienced on that first one?
DT: We were going into the middle of Fallujah on the next tour. As a Marine, all you hear about is Fallujah and Phantom Fury. So I was like, “Oh, this is our chance to get in way more gunfights and go do house clearing and shit like that.” But fuck no, that wasn't the situation either (laughs).
We got over there and I was still a part of the weapons company. They needed some mortars and stuff like that in the middle of the city. So I went over to be part of Bravo Company that was at a station called OP Burgess. It was directly in the middle of the city. Across the street we had a little Iraq KFC that got grenaded. It was pretty funny. We were in the middle of the city running patrols around, trying to meet with some of the elders from the Shia and Sunni sides. Both sides were trying to mend that kind of battle in the city. It was the North against the South pretty much.
We had an internet center so it was nicer to talk to home. It wasn't as tight because we got attached to another company. We were kind of doing our own thing. Towards the end of the deployment, we got a chance to start running our own. I became a squad leader on that deployment. I got to run my own patrols and stuff like that, so that was kind of cool. I remember the first time I was dealing with Special Operations was this deployment. We were the closest force, probably 700, 800 meters away, and the SEALs were going to come do a hit on a house. We're like, “Fuck yeah, dude!” They asked us to be the coordinating force for this mission. They came in with, what's now, MRAPs, their version of MRAPs at the time. They came out with baseball caps, Nike boots on and everything, all this stuff you’d never see on regular troops. This one dude had jeans on in the middle of Fallujah. I was like, “Who the fuck are these guys?” (laughs) It was my first ever interaction with Special Operations. We go out to do the planning, set the cordon around and they go do a hit on this house but they hit the wrong house. They sent their dog in first and the dog bit off this girl's calf. They go to the next house and they get the dude but they just bounced after that. We had to get our doc and our medic to take care of the girl and everything. It was very strange.
Where did you go from there, once you made it through?
PH: The senior guys that were with us at Raider Battalion were just the best of the best. A lot of them were former Force Recon guys that had so much experience. These were all guys who'd started our present Marine Raider units. I was coming in just at the second wave ever, right behind those guys who started it. We looked up to all those first-wave guys. They'd been deploying non-stop to the point where one of our officers that had been blown up the trip before, and came back with no legs, still deployed with us operationally that next trip to Helmand Province. These were high-level guys. There were no excuses in that unit.
Did you enjoy that deployment more?
DT: That was a good experience going there. A lot more IEDs as well. Barely any small arms in the city. There were two crazy SVBIEDs (Suicide Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device) that leveled two police stations right next to us, like mushroom clouds. It was crazy and rocked the whole area. Sandbags started falling all around us because the building we were living in was a super old structure and we’d put sandbags up to hold the walls. We ran the missions with a “three block war” approach. One street had business going on. The next street was kind of like some gangsters hanging out on the street, it was kind of sketchy. Then the next street over was a full on firefight. So it just depended on which part of the city you were in at the time. I think the southern portion was a lot more active because they got a lot more people coming into the area. Our AO (Area of Operations) for that small COP (Combat Outpost) was probably four square kilometers, from left to right and north to south. It wasn't that big, it covered maybe a quarter of the city.
Deployments before were on a truck. We got machine guns, we got ammo. In Fallujah, we were on foot and we had an M-4. That's it, maybe we had a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) or two SAWs in the squad. But that was it. So that was a complete difference. In the city, we couldn’t be shooting big guns anyways, because of all the civilians around. Out in the desert it's like, “Let's get this guy,” and you have so much more room to do whatever you need to do by any means necessary.
A lot of the situations in my first deployment, like driving over an IED, I don't remember clearly. Probably because of my cortisol levels. I was stressing out so much with anxiety, and the fear was really hurting me. I went to the Infantry Mortar Leaders Course before my second deployment. There was this guest speaker, Lieutenant Colonel Grossman. He wrote two books, one called “On Combat” and the other one's called “On Killing.” Those deal with what your mindset goes through and the whole process of how you interact with it, how you deal with it, and how normal people deal with it. It goes back to dark times where war was always a thing, but how people adapted to it. Then he taught us this box breathing method. It's four seconds in through your nose, a four second hold, four seconds out through your mouth, and a four second hold. He said, “Do it four times before you go through any stressful situation and you're going to come out with a clear mind.” I did it and it worked.
He teaches it to first responders around the world. It's such a simple method. Blinking and breathing are the only two things that you do all the time naturally that you can actually control. Although, if you control your blinking all the time, you might look weird (laughs), but breathing is such a natural thing that really touches and affects every single part of your body from your mind, how well you perform on the field as an athlete, or how well you perform on the battlefield as a warfighter. I don't think I would have gotten to be successful going through selection and in school if I didn't go through my time in the infantry. If I did another job or MOS I don't think I would have gotten the same experience, or the same leadership, or the same build going up to how I became successful in MARSOC.
The rest of the deployment wasn’t too bad. We didn't lose any of the guys on our squad or anybody at OP Burgess, but we lost a lot of guys at the other nearby posts. They had a lot more contact, a lot more than we had, and we would hear a lot of gunfire and gun fights. We weren't able to go support them right away unless we were on QRF (Quick Reaction Force), which kind of sucked as well.
We had I think 16 months or something when I got back, so we had a long time to think when we got back. Iraq was really dying down and they were trying to pull guys out. 1/4 probably didn't perform as well as we should have overseas. We had some blue on blue incidents and some other things. At that point I was thinking I had gotten a lot of experience there and had a lot of fun being a squad leader and leading dudes, so I was like, “Hey, I want to go do something cooler within my unit.” That's when I tried out to go to the STA platoon, the Sniper platoon. I made it through the Indoc and I became a PIG. In the Marine Corps, if you're in a sniper platoon you're either a PIG or HOG. If you're a HOG, you're a Hunter of Gunmen, you've been through the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. If you're not, you're a PIG and you're just like the new guy all over again. So you got to carry a PIG egg. It's a 35-pound, duct taped sandbag that you carry in your bag. You've got to run everywhere—to chow, to class, everywhere. The battalion commander made it a thing where it was like, “Hey, it doesn't matter what you are doing, these guys have to run everywhere.”
What did you learn from your first days in combat?
PH: Those first days in combat it's just about learning how to move in relation to what's happening around you. You learn why you need to do everything with a heightened sense of urgency. You really learn how to make shit happen, research everything, find every possible shooting position, look at everything on the battlefield, and really go the extra mile to get information from the locals. You learn how to build better relationships with the 'terps (interpreters), like, whatever it is, because we lived in the middle of an enemy village, basically, for seven months. Our team got hammered. I remember we were on a VSO mission. A VSO mission meant going out on security patrols or going out on ambushes and stuff, just because you don't want the enemy to be coming to you. You have to stay on the offensive. So, you have to go out on patrols. But within that mission, we're out there with objectives that we're hitting. We had other missions than just defending our position. We were setting up local police forces and things like that. During that deployment my mentor and team leader Derek Herrera was wounded badly. He was paralyzed from the chest down. My buddy, Ricky, who is one of our top instructors at Deep End Fitness these days was shot through the neck and so that was insane. We had really good senior guys with us on that deployment so that was a real plus and we had amazing medics. We had two guys in particular named Toland and Ginger (Jordan) who were great SARCs. They saved a lot of lives, both American and afghan. My buddy Hafeez, Jacklin, Simpson, and Buck were all there. So when our captain was hit, and Rick was hit, Derek called over the radio that we needed a medic because he'd been hit as well.
So then, we broke out of the treeline because we were in the treeline about 300 meters away. We started bounding back to the compound and it was daytime and they’d been looking for us around the village for like three hours. We were in the village of a bomb maker. We went out there to support an Army SF team that was coming out to do an OP, but they hit an IED and ended up returning to base. So we ended up being out in this new area that we hadn't been to supporting this mission, that we ended up on by ourselves. So, inevitably, we got surrounded. The enemy always starts freaking out in the middle of the night, whenever they knew that we were there. They started running around trying to find us frantically and we could hear them on the radios. It was interesting (laughs). It was very challenging.
But again, I can sit here and be in victim mode about it or I can look at it and realize that it definitely shaped us into diamonds due to the pressure. We were getting wrecked but at the same time handling the situation as well as we possibly could. There were also a lot of insider attacks at the time. Everything has second and third-order effects, right? Over here in the United States, I don't know if you remember, but some priests had burned the Quran. Then, they came out with a video about the Prophet Muhammad and made him look like a joke or something like that. That came out like a month later, ish. Both of those things hit that summer. So, all over the villages even at the lowest level, everybody had that information. So then, insider attacks started.
Two days before this, we were on a mission and one of our other teams in our company had an insider attack where they had an Afghan policeman who ended up shooting up some of our teammates. It was pretty insane where we were because we lived in an enemy village. We were in pretty constant firefights with the enemy. We had Afghan Special Forces that lived with us. It was me and maybe three or four other Raiders that lived there. I think we also had an EOD tech and then a SARC (Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman). There was also an Army infantry squad with us and some interpreters. One morning, I woke up at like 7 a.m. and someone told me that someone was at the gate. They wanted to talk to me. So, I got one of the interpreters and I walked outside and someone from the village was interested in becoming an Afghan local policeman. We had been training with them. He started acting super dramatic for some reason.
So, I told him to go away, because he was creating problems and he didn't really want to be a policeman and I could tell that. So, I walked away and I went and I got a bowl of cereal, and I sat down outside. I had my pistol on me and I was wearing board shorts and a shirt. My sunglasses were on top of my head. It was hot already at 7:30 a.m. or whatever, but it was probably like 110 degrees. This policeman who I'd been talking to turned an automatic weapon on us in this reinforced position. He also had a pistol and around twelve RPGs. He shot that first RPG and then after that he just started hammering us, and hitting all areas where my teammates were. He was hitting their barracks room and their bunker. The first RPG hit near my feet and blew me off the ground. I was unconscious. I was delirious when I first woke up. My initial thought was that one of our four-wheelers had exploded because there was a four-wheeler right next to the table I was next to. And I thought that like, you know, we got hit with maybe an IED because anything can happen in Afghanistan.
It's just a crazy place in general. But so anyway, I was lights out to where I couldn't see but I was fully conscious. My vision was blacked out. And, I remembered my sunglasses were on top of my head and I thought I was blind for a few minutes. Suddenly the light flashed around me and I could see again. It was a weird series of events. One of the Afghan Special Forces soldiers just randomly ran out the gates and into the village. You don't do that, especially during the day. You don't leave the walls of the compound. Things were chaotic. We were getting hit with RPGs every 30 seconds or so and we felt like we were under mortar attack or something. It just didn't register with me psychologically that it could be coming from inside our camp. I rolled over quickly into the interpreters' living space and they're in there and I looked at them and they were like, “Big problem, big problem.”
I was like, “Oh my God, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get somewhere else.” So, I made my way into the operation center, and my two teammates were in there. Everything was being destroyed, and things all around us were exploding. As soon as I made my way into the operations center the guy started hitting it with RPGs. It was crazy. We were all delirious, but we were kind of laughing even though the situation was completely serious. We were still trying to figure out what the situation was. And I mean, some people are not or weren't doing so well. About that time, one of the army soldiers came over the radio and let us know that one of the interpreters had told him that one of the Afghans had gone crazy in the tower and needed to be killed. So then we cleared out and cleared our way around the building. We linked up with the other Afghans Special Forces soldiers and they ended up clearing the tower. The Shooter in the tower was very committed, and he definitely had a vote that day. He voted when he woke up and he chose violence. You just think about the backblast alone from shooting RPGs out of a partially-enclosed tower and you realize how committed he was.
“He shot that first RPG and then after that he just started hammering us, and hitting all areas where my teammates were. He was hitting their barracks room and their bunker. The first RPG hit near my feet and blew me off the ground. I was unconscious. I was delirious when I first woke up. My initial thought was that one of our four-wheelers had exploded because there was a four-wheeler right next to the table I was next to. And I thought that like, you know, we got hit with maybe an IED because anything can happen in Afghanistan.”
That has to be a little shot to the ego, right?
DT: Then I was trying to go to sniper school and I was trying to perform as well as I could on that platoon. I thought I did pretty well and they're like, “Yeah, I think we're gonna get you a chance to go before you go on deployment.” I was like, “Yes… fuck yes. This is my opportunity.” But then we had three new Security Forces Marines check in. All senior to me, senior corporals and one about to be a sergeant, so they sent those guys instead. They just got to the unit and I felt even more shitted on. All that time you just spent running around with that PIG egg. Because if I would have gone on that deployment as a PIG and come back still a PIG, that's just not a good look.
There was this trailer across the street in Camp Horno right next to the Subway over there that had all these cool guys with unauthorized boots and velcro on their pockets. I was like, “Fuck yeah, what is that dude? Let's go check that out.” It had no signs outside so I just knocked on the door, “Hey, what's this or what's going on?” He's like, “Oh, what's going on is like...” I don't know if he's still operating so maybe I shouldn't say his name. He recruited me and I was like, “Yes, this is my opportunity. This is my chance to go. What do I need to do?” And they said, “You need to fill this out,” and they gave me a packet of like 30 pages. I needed to go get a dive physical, and a bunch of other stuff. I was like, “Man, my unit is not going to sign off on this.” So, I told the sniper platoon I was going to do that and they kicked me back. They tried to kick me back to my old mortar platoon because they thought I was trying to go behind their backs. But, luckily one of my XOs from my first deployment, he was another platoon commander named Van Horn. I don't know if he was a Captain or Major. He's probably out now. When he went through selection, he didn't make it. But he was over at the regiment and I was telling him my situation, and he was like, “Dude, I got you.” He signed off on all my paperwork and got me out the door within two months.
I don't think I was prepared as I should have been. But, I’d been in the sniper platoon so I could run. I could run, I could ruck. That's pretty much all I was good at. I probably weighed a buck forty at the time. I was still pretty light compared to where I am now. It was always the upper body stuff that fucked me. One of the events was to carry 40 gallon water jugs, I don't know for how far, with your ruck on and everything like that. But being a small dude, I completely lost my grip strength. All of it. I had a whole bunch of other guys on the team come help me pick it up. And that's just the worst, when you can't hold your own. In the other events I did really well. Land Nav (Land Navigation), I did really well. So that's what made me get through it. But… I actually got boarded too.
So the guys that make it through, if you're a stellar dude, you'll make it through all the way and you don't get boarded. If you're borderline, you get boarded. I was like, “Oh, fuck, what did I fuck up on?” I didn't give up on too much stuff. There's a lot of things like stress management skills and I thought it was one of those scenarios that I didn't do well enough. But, what it turned out to be was that on the test they asked you like, “How many times do you drink?” They do a whole bunch of psych evals. “Have you ever done drugs,” and things like that. I was getting nervous. I was like, “Man, how much do these guys know about me? If I write this down, will they know? Is it a lie detector test? Are there cameras in here?” This was my first experience with Special Operations.
I just turned 21 a few months before that. And they were asking, “How many times do you drink a week? Oh, shit, I need to be honest because these guys might know.” So I wrote down, “Six times.” And then they asked another question, “How many times have you blacked out in the last six months?” Fuck, dude, it's probably been like six or seven times, so I wrote that down. I was being real. We were typical young Marines in the barracks and we lived in squad bays, too, which sucked. You just wanted to get blackout drunk so you didn’t have to deal with everyone's bullshit. That's why they boarded me. They said something like, “Son, do you have a fucking drinking problem? What the fuck is going on? You just turned 21 four months ago and you blacked out seven times?” (laughs) I was like, “Oh my God they got me.” I was sweating dude, there were like six Colonels on me (laughs). I was thinking, “I don't even know what to do. Jesus. These guys caught me.” But, somehow they let me through. I tell everybody alive that “controlling your drinking” is the moral of the story (laughs).
Did you feel like you guys had a really positive effect over there?
PH: I feel like, in a lot of ways that we had a good effect in just working with our counterparts, you know what I mean? Because, it's pretty much an impossible situation, where we were working with the least amount of flow. In a lot of ways, it was like creating Las Vegas and taking all the materials out to the middle of the desert, except we're going out to Afghanistan, an area that's been contested since pretty much the beginning of time, and then we are attempting to make a positive shift that endures. So, that being said, it was very hard to sustain. We knew that when we left, the money would not be there, the support, the ammo, and also the security that would keep our allies functioning properly. Without the support, we knew it would be super hard to sustain any victories.
Prime and Don with world renowned trainer, Roadie, of The Donegym.
Obviously that's just one part of it. You had a long way to go before you were a Raider. What happened after that?
DT: After that point, the monitor asked, "Do you want to go back to your unit and deploy on this MEU?" and I was thinking about it like, "Fuck no." I have to go as a PIG or to a mortar platoon. I didn’t even know what the fuck they had for me at that point. I wanted to get the next school slot available so they set me up for class 3 TAC 10 originally. Then about a month later they told me the class was filled up and I had to roll to the next class. I was like, "Oh shit," because I thought I was going to leave in a month. I started checking out of 1/4.
I met Prime at Selection. He actually helped me carry the water jugs when I went down on one of the training exercises. He was like, "Hey why don't you come over to the pool? We could train together, work together and then we'll get ready for ITC (Individual Training Course)."
We went through patrol phase, communications, and we went through SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school there. Then, we went into the amphibious phase and did a lot of small boat stuff. Phase three was shooting. We did a lot of shooting, I think it was like an eight week shooting package. And then the last one is IW (Irregular Warfare). We did a lot of FID (Forgeign Internal Defense), training other foreign defense and then the culminating event called Derna Bridge. Oh, but before the shooting phase, we went through this event called Raider Spirit. That's our version of Hell Week.
I think ours was 11 days and we pretty much went on a mission. We were inserted on the small boats in the middle of night. It was around February when we inserted, it was cold as fuck. The water temperature was like 50 degrees and the air temperature was like 32 or 34. We started hyping out on the boat and then everybody started cramping up from shivering so much on the insert. When we got to the ground we had 9 or 10 days to go and everyone's cramping, I was thinking, "Holy shit, how am I going to make it?" Yeah. It was bad. Very little sleep. Depending on how we performed, I think our team got a total of six or seven hours of sleep total in those 11 days.
We walked 184 miles in 11 days. Yeah, it's on my medical record. I don't even know but we did honestly track on our DAGR, or little GPS system. And when we looked at our route, the path was supposed to be semi straight. But we were so tired, so sleep deprived and hungry. We were carrying an extreme amount of weight. It was horrible.
How did you feel about working with your counterparts?
PH: I actually did like working with the Afghans. They were pretty entertaining (laughs). I did enjoy working with them and the interpreters. A couple of those interpreters made it back to America which I'm happy about. I mean, of course, there are great people in every culture. I've met some incredible Iraqis as well. And, you know, it's really awesome, because I remember meeting an Iraqi in a university setting back here in the states, you know, he was crying and he shook my hand, and he thanked me for my service. In those moments it feels worth it. He had a chance at an American education because of the war.
“... I remember meeting an Iraqi in a university setting back here in the states, you know, he was crying and he shook my hand, and he thanked me for my service. In those moments it feels worth it. He had a chance at an American education because of the war.”
Did that experience build your confidence, going through that and making it all the way through?
DT: I think it did because there were a lot of guys dropping on my team and it sucked. But I was still there. Everybody rotates being the team leader to check your decision making process. I was the team leader for the last mission and I did really well. It was my chance to shine. A lot of people were getting dropped that were in charge of me at the time. So yeah, it was amazing to be able to persevere. Raider Spirit is the halfway point. It got a lot more fun after that. Each phase we switched instructors. The second phase was like the thrash phase and at the time MARSOC was still pretty new. So our instructor staff was not made of all Raiders. There were some Scout Snipers in there or something of the like. Some of them were extremely unprofessional (laughs). They’d thrash you to the point where it wasn’t necessary. Like if someone fell asleep in class you had to swim across the New River then right back to class in full cammies.
After that, most of the instructors for Phase 3 for me were all Force Recon guys or old Green Beret guys that retired and came back to teach shooting. That's where I became a decent shot. You just shoot so many rounds, thousands of rounds a day probably. We were shooting the 1911 for our sidearm at the time and then M4s. Then after that we went to Derna Bridge where we did all kinds of other Special Operations training.
When I was going through training I knew about the World War Two Raiders but I didn't really look into it until we were in Phase 4 where we learned about their lineage. I had a great proctor instructor. The motto I live by right now is, "Be humble, be hard, and always push the fight." It was just such a good thing and the instructor I liked so much gave us a Raider patch at the end of the graduation ceremony. Command was kind of tripping out because you couldn’t be called Raiders, we were just Marines. You know, it's who we were, Special Operations was what we did. That was the motto back then. But that was like the fuck you for him to us to the Command. Like, "Hey, you guys are something special. You earned something special here today and you're continuing a legacy of the World War Two Raiders." And I was like, “Fuck yeah, dude.”
Prime, Don, and Ryan with friend Grant Shaw (Owner / The Range at Austin)
What do you think was the biggest takeaway from your time over there?
PH: Being in that environment was very challenging. Those things shape you too. So, you know, being in that situation my deployment really shaped me through what I found out I was capable of even with all the chaos. That unlocked a new level of flow within me. In that chaos you're also having to perform and the whole time that was stretching my own image of myself. Then, there's this period where you start getting comfortable in that and you start finding new levels of flow. You find new levels of performance because if it's too chaotic at first, then you're not going to be feeling like you're in that flow. Do you know what I mean? It's just like skydiving. The first couple of jumps is a little bit chaotic when you're jumping. But then once you start to get a few jumps behind you you start to understand what it's going to be like, then you can move with the flow.
What was it like when you first got in because MARSOC was pretty young, right? What was it like being a Special Operations Marine early on? Do you feel like you guys got the respect deserved?
DT: I would say it depends on what theater and what capacity. In Afghanistan, of course, we had it because a lot of Marine Raiders were over there already. We started owning battle space, so we started actually being a part of the big SOCOM (Special Operations Command) picture. In Afghanistan, 100% we made our name but to the rest of the military we were such a small entity. I don't know how many MARSOC operators there are now but there were probably around 700 or something, not very many.
MARSOC's mission is always a SOCOM mission so we all always fall under SOCOM. Then Force Recon guys, they work for the MEU, the MEF, or the MEB, or Marine Expeditionary Unit or Marine Expeditionary Force so they're under a Marine command. We fell under SOCOM. We did a lot of the same stuff, like insert platform. They were way more insert qualified than we were. We were probably more focused on deploying and the mission set that we had. When you join Special Operations or Recon all you want to do is jump and dive so you get that cool thing on your chest. I never went to dive school. I didn't go to freefall either. I went to jump school. I went to jump master too but I didn't pass that though. That's the only thing I ever failed.
Did a lot of those demons follow you home? Did you feel like you had a lot of trauma in your life from that time overseas or did you feel relatively peaceful and calm about it all?
PH: A lot of the trauma I had was from my childhood. There are some weird memories that stuck with me, like, you know, the insider attack and like some of the weird stuff with mass casualties, where a bunch of Afghans got blown up at the same time. We had to deal with that. And, seeing some of the patients where we would have a patient every day, or, you know, a lot of times multiple casualties in one day. Seeing someone with half their head blown off will create a response in you for sure. It could be someone that just got blown up that you were just talking to five minutes ago. They expire and then you just have to move on with the mission almost like nothing happened. That will mess with your perspective a bit.
“Seeing someone with half their head blown off will create a response in you for sure. It could be someone that just got blown up that you were just talking to five minutes ago. They expire and then you just have to move on with the mission almost like nothing happened. That will mess with your perspective a bit.”
Was your first deployment with the teams to Afghanistan?
DT: My first deployment with MARSOC was to Afghanistan. We went to Helmand. Pretty much in the north Sangin area. It was pretty much every same mission set as any SOF (Special Operations Forces) team in Helmand at the time. Actually there were two missions but for us, it was to go to a VSO site, a Village Stability Operation site. We’d go into a town or village hall, build the ALP, the Afghan Local Police. We’d train them, equip them, and then go fight with them, trying to root out the bad guys with them. I knew everything that was about to go on in the mission. I was read in. I had access to resources outside of my small platoon to get resource intelligence information. Everything was at our fingertips. We got air assets in Afghanistan in like 10-15 minutes. That was insane. It was amazing because I felt like I was going there for a real reason and I had people backing me up for that reason. We spent seven months there.
We attacked a lot of HVIs (High Value Individuals). The first half of the deployment we were in a village. It was in Puzeh and we got a few HVIs there, some right outside our gates and in a town nearby. So we did a lot of work there, which is good, minimal casualties, but we did lose my friend, Mike Guillory, over there. We were doing an airdrop at night blacked out. Because we still had some IEDs around us, the C-130 would airdrop our food supply and we just do it in the cover at night. Everybody was wearing NODs, driving their side by side or their four wheeler, picking up all the food and stuff like that. The Afghans were building us a range out there and they dug a big hole to put up the berm. The hole was still there and Mike drove into the hole. It was pretty rough. It was right in the beginning of the deployment, probably like two or three months in.
We went to Sangin maybe once a month, with all the village elders and really connected. I think the 7th Marines were there at the time, in the district center. We were in the operations outside, helping out and building these small forces and stuff like that. I think we had a good foothold from the teams before to really set us up to actually do something about getting rid of the bad guys and building these guys up and equipping them.
That was probably one of the best teams I've ever been on. That was my first team where everybody understood their role and there were maybe like one or two guys that were semi-lazy. But, that's it. Everybody else was harder working than me. It just motivated me every day. We had success finding people with limited resources. Not going on patrols when we didn't need to and trying to be smart about every mission. We had the tools we needed to find these guys so why risk our legs when we had all these other tools? The intel guys were amazing. Then at the next spot we were at we set up this thing called a G-BOSS (Ground-Based Operational Surveillance System). It's a crazy-ass tower with a camera system that can see out to almost like 14 clicks (miles). With that thing we were just confirming a lot of things that we needed to confirm.
How did you move through your early childhood experiences?
PH: I've done a lot of healing work since I got out in 2017. A lot of that healing came in September of 2019. That's when I did my first DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) Toad journey. That was a huge breakthrough for me in healing. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about those memories and I think that really kicked it up a notch for me. I got out and I didn't immediately have a therapist. I did this thing called "Rapid Response Therapy" where they go in, and they attempt to close out those data files in your brain. It brought up a bunch of old memories. It opened Pandora's Box, basically. But, that kind of led me to a victim mindset where I was wondering why all that happened to me. Like, "Why was I the guy that had to have a Peeping Tom? Why did I live through Afghanistan?" There was weird survivor guilt attached to the situations in Afghanistan. When you have those same thoughts again and again your brain becomes like a superhighway, and it's easy to go back there all the time. You know what I mean?
I was always thinking about my childhood because my son was like five at the time. So, I started kind of having flashbacks and I got into this weird victim mindset. When I did that toad journey, I had been in a bad mental state and I had TBIs (Traumatic Brain Injuries), and I think I'd had other concussions too from car accidents and fights I'd been involved in, and having a fractured skull. I was starting to drive myself crazy. I was also in business school at the time. I was at USC and I was doing an incubator accelerator program at San Diego Sports Innovators. I was pretty busy. I was running the Marine Raider Challenge with my buddies Derek, Don, and Rick. We had just launched UTL (Underwater Torpedo League) and Deep End Fitness. In 2018, we got contacted to do an offseason NFL package at one of the pools, the one that we were at earlier in La Jolla. That was pretty cool. We had an Olympic swimmer train come and train before that and I think he'd been with us for like six months. So, word of mouth was starting to get us noticed. Then, all these NFL guys came in… a few who were top of the food chain at what they do.
They really got an amazing value out of what we provided for them over six weeks in their offseason, and so we trained them every Wednesday for like an hour and a half in water confidence. Then, we would do some different drills underwater and then we would also play Underwater Torpedo League as well. UTL is an underwater sport with five on five and this game is held in the deep end. So you have five swimmers on one side, and five on the other side with miniature hockey goals that are sunk in at the bottom of the pool. Imagine water polo, if you shrunk the nets, and you put them at the bottom of the pool. It's five on five with substitutes, and that's how we play and we're using what's called a "torpedo." The torpedo can glide underwater 10 to 15 feet in one pass. We just came out with our own torpedoes, because the main company that made them for 25 years stopped manufacturing them. So, we started our own little manufacturing operation overseas, because we had to find the proper tools that could do it and the only place we could find them was overseas. So, I mean, that has got to be a difficult sport. I mean, you're dealing with adversities, right? Including having to be underwater, What we've found is that anybody can... as long as you screen them and train them in a very systematic way like, crawl, walk, run building block approach.... learn how to do this.
We don't move them to step two, without confidently completing step one, then you're constantly developing them and grooming them from there. So, everybody goes through different fitness levels to get into UTL. You first have to go through that screening process that you've seen a couple of times in the last few days, but it consists of a ten-minute water tread, a 25-meter brick tow, holding a five to ten-pound brick above the water as you tow it across. That simulates a rescue situation where you'd have to pull someone through the water. The last task is goggles retrieval. You go down to the bottom of the pool, with your hands behind your back and you retrieve the goggles or mask with your teeth.
Did a lot of that affect you, what you saw over there and the difficulties they faced every day? Did that make you more grateful for your life and the things you have?
DT: Oh, 100% for sure it made me grateful for so much. Having the opportunity to tell people about it is amazing as well. Hopefully someone can learn from my experiences. I want to bring a positive vibe because it’s not always smart to relate everything to war or the military. I mean, some people get it but that's not the goal. It’s important to use your experiences and the things that you know, really push it towards other people in giving positive feedback, constructive growth modules, how to learn, how to grow, because I was given so much when I was in the military. Like, “Hey, you're doing this wrong, but here's how you fix it.” In the infantry they’re just yelling at you for no reason a lot of the time. But, I just had so much constructive criticism, every single mission, every single training operation that we did, there was always a debrief. These guys went hard on you at the debrief. You know, like, “Hey, you fucked up here. You're on a mission here. You didn't reload fast enough, you're slow on your way to fire.” Whatever it is, like just real shit. That made me comfortable talking and giving positive feedback too and now I'm trying to do that for other people. Just that alone, because people are not real people in this world with real feedback anymore. Everyone sugarcoats everything. Everybody is so soft and sensitive to getting feedback or giving it. I try to give direct feedback but do that in a very tactful way.
“Hopefully someone can learn from my experiences. I want to bring a positive vibe because it’s not always smart to relate everything to war or the military. I mean, some people get it but that’s not the goal. It’s important to use your experiences and the things that you know, really push it towards other people in giving positive feedback, constructive growth modules, how to learn, how to grow, because I was given so much when I was in the military. ”
How do you describe your work now?
PH: Flow. That's one of the things that we really practice and coach a lot in our classes, is flow versus drag. It's about applying a full economy of motion where everything's working for you. And usually, when you break it down, you need some level of chaos or challenge in your life to create and unlock a flow state. And so we had a lot of challenges, you know, especially with COVID lockdowns, and everything else. “Obstacles equal opportunity,” is a saying we use a lot.
Prime hanging out with good friend and 3X UFC, 3X WEC Champion Dominick Cruz.
You went through the JTAC school, became a JTAC, and went to the Philippines. Being a JTAC, having those air assets and having to focus on that while you're focusing on other things, how much did that prepare you for the adversity of training elite level athletes?
DT: I think it prepared me pretty well. JTAC, for those that don't know, is the Joint Terminal Attack Controller. It’s controlling aircrafts for them to drop bombs, but that's only half the job. The rest of it is controlling ISR all the time, running feeds and figuring all that stuff out. All that is multitasking and I'm horrible at multitasking. Horrible. But it taught me the skills I needed to understand that world and have one thing going on in my mind but be aware of what was going on in every other mind. At JTAC, the most I ever stacked was like ten aircraft in the Philippines. From top down, ISR platform, intel platform, fighters, fighter jets, helicopters, drones. It was putting one thing in one part of the airspace, leaving that there, worrying about something else, and then coming back to it. You couldn’t control everything at one time. That was the biggest lesson. You couldn’t control everything at one time. Put one thing aside, focus on the task at hand, drop that bomb or run that ISR feed, whatever you needed. Put that to the side, let it go out on its own, do its thing, and then focus on that next task at hand.
My last deployment was crazy. We went over to the Philippines thinking we were just going to kind of deal with the anti-piracy operations down in Southern Mindanao, on those islands close to Indonesia and Malaysia. We went over there and then ISIS took over this town called Marawi. So we got to help take it back. It was nuts. That was a full out war. There are quite a few terrorist groups that operate around the Philippines like MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front), the BIFF (Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters), there's a lot down there and they all have their own small beliefs. It was an amazing deployment because it was a real experience of going through what Special Operations does. Going into a place that didn't have U.S. Forces, or anything really set up at a huge war capacity and then kind of setting that up. Then going in there and using American assets to really help them and train them.
How do you keep a sense of flow?
PH: I think it's a lot about being present with whoever it is that you're coaching or training with. We put as much into that individual as we can in the short amount of time we have with them. We call it "fire hosing'' with information. We work with all different types of individuals and skill levels. Every one of our coaches works to see a positive shift in the individual and their mindset. Because of the stress of the water environment we've seen quantifiable breakthroughs within the hour. I don't know that we could do that with individuals in a regular gym environment.
The feedback loop you’ve spoken about before is actually such a strong methodology. When you think about it, if you really care about somebody, you're going to let them know you because you want that situation to get better if it’s messed up. How are you going to fix it if you're not talking to them?
DT: I think that as a community for what we're doing now, with Underwater Torpedo League and Deep End Fitness, I think that we really provide a great example of a solid feedback loop. It's a good segue to kind of get into that. We always start off all our training sessions with what we call “the circle of trust,” where we go around and give a quick introduction about who we are. We talk a little bit about our background and then our personal goals and expectations. That's like the first place that people are like, half naked, you know, and you’re already having to tell something about yourself (laughs). At the end of the session, we close it out with the circle of trust again with what our biggest takeaways were and then we provide feedback. We kind of built that in because we felt like that's what people are missing nowadays. In the work environment, you're always going to get feedback, whether they're passive aggressive with it, or they're not, that feedback is wildly important. But hearing that feedback and accepting that feedback in a positive circle, that’s so powerful to help people become better leaders and become better followers.
Master Instructor, Rick Briere. Rick served with MARSOC and was combat wounded when he was shot in the neck in Afghanistan.
We were in Prime's kitchen at his old house when we started this journey. He was already out of the Marine Corps and I was getting out soon. We thought we should do something together and we were like, “Hey, let's do something we both love.” We explored some security contracting stuff in Mexico with some of his friends down there. That didn't work out so we started exploring what we both like to do. We both like to work out, we both like to swim, and we both like to teach people. So that's how it kind of got started. We were like, "Hey, remember that game we used to play with our football in the water? Let's start a league and see what happens." So we started at one pool in San Clemente, first to kind of prove the concept that we could get into the pool. At the same time we were working with MRC, which is a Marine Raider Challenge nonprofit endurance race that we were doing with veteran and active duty Special Operations guys to build community camaraderie. It was easy for us to get that kind of pool access and to provide a positive light within the work we were doing. That was a good thing for us. We got into that pool, started a team there, started playing and we kind of took over their scout swimming program. San Clemente is just on the north side of Camp Pendleton, which is where all the infantry units are. A lot of guys were getting ready to go to Recon or MARSOC selection. So, it was an easy segue. They already had a program that was run by an ocean lifeguard, jiu jitsu guy. He was a pretty cool guy but he didn't know anything about the military. We kind of came in and helped him out with that. They gave us a space to really go in there and start instructing. We were like, “Oh, man, this is pretty cool.” A lot of people were coming in and we started putting stuff up on Instagram. It kind of blew up on its own so we were like, “Hey, we need to start this at another pool.” We opened one in Oceanside and got our boy Ricky on, Rick Briere, who was part of the team with us and then it kind of just blew up from there. Prime pushed South and I pushed North, so we got some pools in Oceanside, down in San Diego and then up North some pools in Orange County, all the way up to almost Malibu.
“In the work environment, you’re always going to get feedback, whether they’re passive aggressive with it, or they’re not, that feedback is wildly important. But hearing that feedback and accepting that feedback in a positive circle, that’s so powerful to help people become better leaders and become better followers. ”
Do you see a lot of similarities between what you did in Special Operations and what you’re doing now with UTL and Deep End Fitness?
PH: I do see a lot of similarities with Special Operations and startup organizations and going into various expansion and pilot programs and everything else that we do within Deep End Fitness and Underwater Torpedo League. We are creating a new sport, building the network into the Olympic pipeline which we've done, to an extent. It all feels like being in the world of Special Operations, to be honest.
What are the adversities you guys faced early on?
DT: So, Prime and I both knew about this little concept. I can't remember who created it, but it's the four stages of team performance—forming, storming, norming, and performing. In the beginning stage, we were forming and when we were storming we were clashing all the time about ideas. I was kind of passive aggressive about it. We just started working together again. Prime and I went to Selection together, we were super close and then he went to a different company. I went to Alpha, Prime went to Charlie and then to Delta. I was always replacing him on deployments. So trying to get back into it, that was kind of crazy. He had Brittany, his wife, who is amazing, way smarter than me. I was just being stubborn. I didn't want to be the one that was wrong, I wanted to stand my ground. I was new to this entrepreneur thing we were trying to start so we had a lot of clashing ideas about what direction we wanted to go with the company. But that was extremely beneficial for us because that's where we kind of found our roles. We were both trying to play the CEO, both had ideas. I was leading and thought I was right all the time but by now we’ve kind of figured what works. We both have our strong points. Prime was better, a lot better at the business development side, and talking to people. I was good at the operational side, running stuff, still talking to people but on a different level and a different conversation. We kind of balanced that out with both of us and we have a lot of other guys on the team now. Ricky, Manny, Jess is our marketer, that really helped out with the whole process and going into it.
Some other things in the beginning stages was the money. Money is always a problem, especially as a startup. Bootstrapping as much as we could and then like, "Hey, why are we spending the money here? Is it too much, too aggressive right now?” Just trying to figure out that whole process was difficult. I don't think we figured it out until just now. It was just always the constant like, "How far do I go in this?" or "Hey, should we save some more money on this?" It was a good learning process and we got it down now, which is amazing. What always brought me back was the positive feedback we got from our athletes and the people that we trained. When we were together and people gave us positive feedback, I was like, "Damn, we're doing something that's making a difference for these people." Whether they're an athlete, whether they're trying to overcome their fear of the water, or anything else, the positive feedback was awesome. There are a lot of times that people have to change a little bit about their demeanor depending on the situation and in the environment that we are in. For me and Prime, in this environment, this is who we are, this is what we created in the image of us and what we want to portray. So it's easier for us to be natural and more comfortable in being who we are in this type of environment; because we created it to be who we are.
“There are a lot of times that people have to change a little bit about their demeanor depending on the situation and in the environment that we are in. For me and Prime, in this environment, this is who we are, this is what we created in the image of us and what we want to portray. So it’s easier for us to be natural and more comfortable in being who we are in this type of environment; because we created it to be who we are.”
So you do it today in such a systematic way to make it a lot easier by providing these foundational materials that they can work off of?
PH: We show people how to do it all with their particular body type. If they're negatively buoyant we'll show them how to do it with that body type. If they're positively buoyant, we'll show them how to do it a different way. It's all about whatever way that will be most efficient for whatever they're working with. Are most of the people in this league? Are they former college athletes? Or are they just coming in off the street? What is the population? We call this a "warrior class" of person and it's all types of present military or former military or future military or UFC fighters. Olympic swimmers, CrossFitters, freedivers, surfers, kind of all these different types of warriors, you know, in their own way. We even have synchronized swimmers that train with us. We have a professional acrobat. That's one of our instructors in Vegas. It's a very diverse community but a lot of folks with the same mindset. There's an article that was written by "Outside" that was called "The Wild World of the Underwater Torpedo League" and they kind of detailed how we've had people move from across the country to be in our league. It was pretty cool.
One of them even lived on Don's couch (laughs). He's actually in Army Basic Training right now. We mentor a lot of kids and we coach a lot of individuals and different types of people. Everyone from, you know, MMA fighters that are in their fight camps, or these NFL players or pro surfers, just working with different athletic populations. Lately, we've been spending a lot of time over the last year training and coaching CEOs and different business leaders. I want to go over the principles of F.R.E.E. (Focus, Relaxation, Economy of motion, Efficient breathing) and how that relates to life. Don and I wrote a book called the F.R.E.E. Your Mind Guidebook. One of the athletes that we train is Liz Carmouche and she was one of the first female UFC fighters. She's the fourth-ranked flyweight female in the world. She's currently with Bellator and she recommended that we write a book because the free operating system that we created has really helped her transform in a lot of different areas in her life, even with her relationships and other stuff like that. She's been having breakthroughs because of the training. It's awesome to see how much the principles have helped her. When she told me how much it helped I started to think about how we could put this in a book or curriculum.
Would you call it foundationally authentic?
DT: I think that's the easiest way to explain it. We tried both ways, to be 100% ourselves, kind of be jokeful, but you have to know your audience. Sometimes big investors don't like that type of environment. They just want a straight pitch deck, they don't want any jokes. Some investors love the personal interactions, the real stories, and they rather invest in the person than how much revenue you've made. Just understanding that and doing your research is a big part of growing your ideas.
This all kind of started off in the summertime of 2018. We did an offseason package for the NFL with some pro bowlers. That really sparked it like, "Hey, do we have the capacity for us internally? Do we have the capacity to train these guys? What's it like to train pro athletes?" A lot of people put these pro athletes on a pedestal, they're rich or whatever it is, they're the professional at their own game. Coming from a MARSOC background, we might not have the money they do but we do certainly carry a status of being at a high level. Like… they're a lion and we're a tiger. We're pros in different aspects in different areas of the world but we're both almost at the top of our game in that perspective. So they respect that and game recognizes game.
How’d you develop a curriculum?
PH: At the time, I was doing this pilot program with Don, where we were coaching a lot of CEOs and individuals that had never trained within a water environment. I started just sending these individuals different questions each week about things in their life that created drag or resistance. These questions were like, "How many tabs are open on your computer (brain)? How do we close out those tabs that don't matter? How do we eliminate drag and noise from you being on your phone for extra hours that you don't really need to be or want to be; or anything else, like you're going and doing this one activity that you know always drains you? How can you shift your energy and your focus on something that is going to serve you and unlock results?'' As a performance coach, I hold accountability and guide individuals and groups in this role but they are the ones making all the changes. I don't have any attachment to it as long as the individuals I am working with are unlocking results. But, where you're going is up to you. A lot of it is finding out what's working, what's not working, what's serving you, what's not serving you. So we took all that feedback that we'd been getting with these different clients over the last six months. This was right when we went into lockdown. When we went into lockdown we did a SWOT analysis, Don and I did, which included figuring out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So, we went through all of our strengths first. We'd just gotten put into quarantine. This was in March of 2021. A lot of our investors had fallen out because the market had crashed at that point. I came back from Vegas where I was in a coaching clinic. I got back and Don and I met in San Clemente, and we figured out our strengths.
One of those was our network and all the relationships we'd built. One of the major weaknesses was something we couldn't control, which was the lockdown. They were going to lock all the pools down. Our opportunity was to finish the F.R.E.E. Your Mind Guidebook because we had been talking about it for a couple of weeks at that point. So that was an opportunity because we were going to be on lockdown. We really built out the internals of our team, you know, and then really started to map out our expansion in the trainer program. That was where we put all of our bandwidth since lockdown started. They shut down the pools as I said. We have private pools with friends and then we go to Airbnbs sometimes. There's a Swimply app now, which is like Airbnb for pools. But, the way we work is that we have a lot of pools on our insurance. So, we'll find a good aquatic center or a big pool facility, and we'll look to put that on our insurance. We will link up with the pool owners then put that pool on our insurance. So, right now we have locations all over Southern California. We're also putting in two locations that you saw in Arizona, Austin, and then we're launching in Miami and we have a couple of pools there.
How does it change? How does it shift between different populations? In Scottsdale, you weren’t talking to high level athletes, you were talking to lifeguards. You're just talking to different populations in different areas. When you're dealing with high level athletes, how does the training change?
DT: It's always about making it relatable and relevant to them. When we went to Scottsdale we talked to a whole bunch of lifeguards and pool managers. What was the focus—safety. When we trained with the NFL athletes, what was their focus—to be able to breathe properly and be able to think clearly in their seconds of play. The average play in the NFL is like 19-24 seconds. So we max them out underwater within these 19-24 seconds, have them come up with the same amount of time they would have in a break between their plays, then put them back in a stressful situation and have them solve a Rubik's Cube or some type of mental drill. It's like, “Hey, I can perform under pressure. I don't have oxygen now…” which translates to next week, on the field and it's the fourth quarter and, “I have to make this catch. I have air now, I'll be fine. I got my feet, I know how to move well. I've moved this way a million times before.”
It takes out one of those factors for them, that anxiety, that mental stress and really calms it down. We teach that to them, we tell them that every single time throughout the session and then reinforce it before they leave the circle of trust. The biggest takeaway is that life changing moment they can have if they make that catch. That was the number one thing they needed for that touchdown or whatever it is. So performing under pressure is huge. We like to call it “calm in the clutch.” That’s what matters the most. For warfighters that say I need to reload this weapon right now and get rounds down range, shoot this rocket, whatever it is, it's the same exact cortisol levels that your body produces when you're in that moment, that fight or flight. You have a chance to either make that clutch shot or not.
You have developed a lifestyle that is incredibly powerful. It's leading people to positivity through their own mental adversities. How much does that mean?
PH: Seeing people continue to empower themselves and reach higher levels is amazing, you know? Giving is one of the coolest parts of being human. That's pretty much what coaching is. It's a two-way feedback pattern. You learn in every situation, even if you're coaching. Someone that can't swim versus someone that's an Olympic swimmer… but both are people you're going to learn from due to coaching each of those individuals. One of my favorite parts of this job is coaching people to unlock their highest potential, to tap into self-actualization.
It's been really amazing. Don and I have done this now in a lot of places and we've learned so much. We did it in Arizona. We did it in Miami. We did it in Hawaii. We did it in Vegas and Texas. We've done it all over Southern California. You saw that Irvine session. Every session we're still having around 30 people show up, and the community is tight. It's amazing. So I got off track because I was originally talking about the F.R.E.E. Operating System, which has to do with a lot of mental focus. As coaches, we outline your top three or four goals. That's what we'll work on over the entirety of the month.
We would work with these fighters during their fight camps, and usually, those are eight weeks long. We would have three strategic goals that they wanted to work on throughout their fight camp, and then we would be training with them at the pool as well. They would get multiple things, or values out of these experiences. It's a high-level leadership and mental focus program for elite athletes. We've been able to do this as a word of mouth thing since we had the NFL guys come out. It's kind of like the concept of "If you build it, they will come."
I remember David Marsh walked up to us one day at the pool, and he started coming to our sessions. He's the winningest swim coach, Olympic swim coach David Marsh. He started coming to the sessions and then we started getting to train a lot of the Olympic swimmers that were training for Tokyo. Then, as I mentioned before, we started training UFC fighters because one of the football players Manti Te'o went to high school with Ilima-Lei Macfarlane. She ended up coming out. She was the Bellator champion at 125.
“Giving is one of the coolest parts of being human. That’s pretty much what coaching is. It’s a two-way feedback pattern. You learn in every situation, even if you’re coaching. Someone that can’t swim versus someone that’s an Olympic swimmer... but both are people you’re going to learn from due to coaching each of those individuals. You’re going to learn a lot about yourself. One of my favorite parts of this job is coaching people to unlock their highest potential, so that they can tap into self-actualization.”
Even if you’re used to the water, it's a whole new task. What is your favorite thing about the experience overall? Do you like working with the higher level athletes? Do you like working with people who don't really know what they're doing?
DT: I like both. With the higher level athletes, if you train an NFL guy, you can see him on the field. We trained Joshua Reynolds this offseason for the Rams. I can see him on the field and he's having his best career, he's crushing it. So it's amazing to see and hopefully we get to train with him again.
For the other people, those that don't know how to swim, they're getting all the benefits out of it. They haven't really performed at a high level and they're breaking all these glass ceilings. It's all so amazing. The things done in the pool can really change their everyday life. Am I going to help Joshua Reynolds that much on his real quality of life? Probably not. He's doing very well for himself already. Whether he has an amazing career or not, he's still going to be very well off. But the other people that we help out, especially the guys trying to go to the military and trying to get confident in the water, we're changing their entire future. Which is amazing and awesome to see. There is impact on both levels and in some people it's more than others.
Do you do anything personally that you feel really helps you in your own work?
PH: I have a breathing coach here in San Diego. He lives in Encinitas. He does a class once a week. I've been working with that guy for probably a year and six months now. I met him a couple of years back and he was an apprentice under Wim Hof. His name is Reis. He does all types of breathwork, but the DMT breathing is a little bit different. It definitely takes you to a different higher level and I would say… vibration. The DMT breathing is a little bit more intense for my experience, to where you feel kind of a heightened sense of euphoria. It's a gradual thing though. You'll start buzzing when you start this breathing, and then you'll start and then you'll feel like you're reaching the summit.
What's the expansion plan? You have a lot going on in California, especially Southern California. You’re starting in Miami and you're trying to work in Scottsdale a little bit. Are you trying to take this to new levels every time? What do you want to see this turn into?
DT: So just prior to COVID, Prime and I set five cities on the map. Which cities are we going to go to? What's going to be most effective? What's going to be the most bang for your buck? We searched water cities, like Miami with a big freediving community. Hawaii, of course. The jujitsu community out there is insane. It's like a cult. We have a lot of good people out there. We have some instructors out there already in the surfing community and the MMA community. Of course Ilima fights from there. It's massive. Last December we ran an instructor course out there with some of the military guys, some of the surfers, and some of the MMA fighters. As long as you have a foot in the door, you have proven value that can help everybody, and you're not a dickhead, Hawaii's going to open up for you. Other than that, Hawaii's very closed off to outsiders coming in. We're very thankful for what they're opening up for us.
What’s your overall goal here?
PH: Global impact. I just want to touch as many people as possible but I know this will develop the way it needs to. I'd love to see UTL get into the Olympics. It's a gladiator sport. We believe that. The Olympics was built off of that. It's a 360-degree sport where males and females can both compete against each other.
A lot of people starting businesses increase overhead too much within their companies when they experience a little bit of success, and that ends up destroying what they're doing. How are you guys using real applicable and practical processes to make sure that that doesn't happen?
DT: We're in the right place and the right mindset to grow this now. Back in the beginning of the business we were overachievers with so many new projects. It was a bright shiny object. But it was always about deciding the risk that was associated with those decisions and then evaluating them before you make them. I think we have a pretty good process to do that now.
Don and Prime with the Deep End Fitness La Jolla crew.
So what do you want from this life? What is Prime Hall's legacy?
PH: I want people to see me as a good dad, know that I was a good husband and that I was a good friend. I want them to know that I pushed and did everything that I could to empower those around me and make an impact. I want people to see that I took the most painful things that I have experienced and used them as leverage to transform my life and the lives of everyone around me.
I need to mention Danny Drayer and Josh Negron. They're in a rough situation right now, up against manslaughter charges with their command. They are the best Marine Raiders that you could possibly meet, highly decorated. I've known them both for a long time. I just want to give full support to them. What’s happening to them is tragic and they deserve the absolute best.
Do you have hard days, like really hard days? Do you think starting this company in this business has been helpful for your mental health as well?
DT: Everybody has hard days. It's all about finding renewed purpose. We had this mentor that was helping us when we were writing the book and trying to find the prologue and all the words to close out the book. He asked, “What's your ‘why’?” My “why” was always figured out when I was in the military. Go over there, kill some bad guys, come back, and bring all my friends back. That was my reason for serving. The whole time I had a reason to train, I had a reason to wake up and be able to spend time with my family, so I worked hard to be able to do that. Now that I’m out my “why” is kind of a deeper sense that I have to find within myself, to drive that will to be better. At first my “why” was to make this company grow. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to help people out. Everybody wants to help people out but HOW were we going to help people out? Why do we want to help people out? For us, it was to ignite a warrior class of people who would create a positive shift in the world. Everybody is a warrior in their own way, everybody fights their own battles. So it’s been really exciting to ignite that warrior within people to fight their own battles, to create a better place, and we’ve provided that through our programs. So that's my “why” now.
Water is capable of reshaping even the most resilient of materials, even changing the structure of the object in many cases. So, it stands to reason as to why Don Tran and Prime Hall would believe in the foundational value of utilizing its’ available properties to hone humans. Throughout our week long coverage of the duo, we became aware of the intense motor and the absolute drive behind their training methodology. Where one showed strength, the other backed that resolve wholeheartedly. Where one might show weakness the other was there to step in and cover the gaps. The teamwork was apparent at almost every stage of their underwater sessions and their institutional knowledge was well demonstrated at every turn. As this was our first dual project, there were certain creative challenges expected throughout our coverage of Prime and Don. But, what we found instead was a symbiotic relationship between two very unique individuals. One of the few commonalities between the two is perhaps the most important of all attributes… their willingness to adapt and overcome. It’s safe to say that the United States Marine Corps prepared them well for wherever their paths might take them.
In conclusion, we’d like to once again thank our sponsors. Rifle Supply, Ten Thousand, and Elevate Weekly made our first dual project possible. Be sure to click through the hyperlinks to learn more. Keep checking The Veterans Project socials for more updates as the accompanying podcasts to this project will be released in the coming weeks. Also, don’t forget to check out Don and Prime’s book the F.R.E.E. Your Mind Guidebook, available at Amazon.