Spec Ops Commando on Military’s WORST Leader, the Nuclear Hunt & God | Johnny MF Glenn • 304
Julian Dorey · 26 May 2025 · 2h 20m
Guest: Johnny Glenn · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A retired Green Beret who served roughly two decades, including deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, walks through what ground-level counterinsurgency and human intelligence work actually looked like: building networks of informants village by village, reading body language in crowds during key leader engagements, and using leverage over families to extract information. He argues that early Green Beret operations in Afghanistan were succeeding until strategy shifted toward handing raids to Afghan forces and toward Western-style trials for captured fighters, which he says undermined deterrence and let the Taliban regain ground. He describes a raid in Iraq on a compound with cages and what he believed was a testing laboratory, offering his own account of the weapons-of-mass-destruction question. He recounts losing team members in combat, including pulling a wounded soldier from a truck as he died, and losing his brother to severe combat injuries. He also describes a traumatic brain injury from an IED strike, the disorientation of medical retirement after twenty-one years of structured military life, the collapse of his marriage during that transition, and a period of depression before he found new purpose. Interwoven throughout are reflections on faith and doubt, growing up with an illiterate but resourceful father, frustration with American political division, and his current project: an ultra-distance relay run across the country with fellow veterans to honor fallen teammates and raise money through Team Red White and Blue.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Losing a teammate, Sean Ferrell
- Recruiting interpreters and informants in Afghanistan
- Reading crowds during key leader engagements
- Building an intelligence network village by village
- Where the Afghanistan strategy went wrong
- Judicial system vs. letting Afghans handle captured fighters
- Afghanistan's natural resources and lost opportunity
- Iraq compound raid and weapons of mass destruction claims
- Faith, doubt, and losing his parents
- His father's hidden illiteracy
- Medical retirement, TBI, and marriage falling apart
- Cross-country relay run for fallen veterans
Said on this episode
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“if you hold up an American flag, everybody knows what the it is. We are the best of the best.”
“I remember he end up getting shot and killed. I remember I pulled him out of the truck and he smiled. His eyes were he was gone.”