“It pays to be a winner.”

Terry Houin doesn’t speak all that much. But, then again, you don’t need to say a whole lot when your record speaks for itself. Mention Terry’s name around the Naval Special Warfare community and it illicits a certain reaction that would best be characterized as “reverential.” A career that spanned almost three decades stapled by two of our most vital missions in the GWOT should garner that reaction. But, to imagine the man as one of our most elite becomes much easier when you’ve spent some time around the community. There is the saying, “Watch out for the quiet guy in the room. He’s the most dangerous.” If you’ve been around those who served at the tip of the spear, you will quickly find this statement almost always holds true. There is, after all, a reason they are called “quiet professionals.” Houin is a representative of elite class of war-fighter that carries this mantle with the greatest measure of solemnity. He is empathetic, caring, and kind to a degree that harkens back to the days of the men who served as our “Greatest Generation.” Warfighters that didn’t desire accolades or awards. Their lives and integrity-fueled approaches to every facet demanded respect. You don’t need to say much when you carry that kind of weight with you.

When Terry speaks it’s always important. When Terry speaks everyone else listens. Those words are met with open ears because they carry that afore mentioned weight. Jessica Lynch. Captain Phillips. Just throw those mission’s names into a browser search and you will end up with thousands of links to stories of titans who stood ready to protect and rescue those in dire straits. The men who stood ready at the gate, unquestionably open to the idea that they might not ever see another sunrise. Men like Houin are what makes this nation the superpower and emblem of safety for so long. Without those men our every day freedoms die swiftly. Those men… the silent professionals. Terry Houin embodies that mantra not just then, but now. He lives a life of service through the consistency of his actions. Pay close attention as you read his words. They are wisdom. They are powerful. They are the words of a man who stood ready as our most elite. 26 years in service. Trips to the darkest corners of our known world into the realm of the most evil. His light illuminated those corners as he protected all that we hold dear. The protector. Terry Houin is that.

Terry with good friend Aaron Stech, who manages the Ciénega Fort.

Serving almost three decades, do you think about it now and how in the span of your lifetime you’ve spent more time in the Navy than the rest of your life?

TH: Yes, exactly. I usually think of it more in the context of my entire adult life, up until retirement was in the service. Running around doing deployments and everything else. So when I think about my identity, it's hard to give that up because that's really all I ever was, until this, the next chapter that I’m in now. But, that's crazy. That loss of purpose going from every single day that I wake up and my nation needs me to do my job, my teammates need me to do my job, my family needs me to do my job, my neighbors need me to be there to protect and defend what they stand for. The day you hang that up and it's not there, you don't get the phone calls, you don't get the emails, you see the news cycle of what's going on, and you still understand what's going on but you're gone, you're off that train. For me, the toughest struggle was redefining what purpose is next. How do I fit into that and how do I continue to be beneficial not just to my family and my community, but to myself? How do I keep myself on the track? That was huge. That was the hardest part for sure.

“For me, the toughest struggle was redefining what purpose is next. How do I fit into that and how do I continue to be beneficial not just to my family and my community, but to myself? How do I keep myself on the track? That was huge. That was the hardest part for sure.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

Terry working with Brady Cervantes (USMC Scout Sniper) and Mike O’Shea (Free Range American).

What was that like? Can you describe that feeling of hanging it up? Did you think it would shock you as much as it did?

TH: I was probably better prepared than most veterans getting out because in the Special Operations community you have a lot more resources. There are more programs out there on the nonprofit and civilian side that cater towards us because as bad as it is, we’re kind of the picture of the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism) forever. I mean, the grunt Marines, the regular soldiers, they all paid the ultimate price and worked their asses off just like we did. But we were sexy, we were the flash in the pan so there are more people willing to help us in that transition. So, I thought I was ready. I put on E-9 (Master Chief), left to command, and did a training job, part of our BUD/S pipeline, and ran that for three years. I finished my degree. I got all my medical stuff right. Physically and mentally I thought I was in great shape for transition. I had a plan. I went through these programs and identified that there's no way in hell I was going to fit a nine to five job. I can’t sit at a desk.

I can’t work for somebody in that position. Not that I can't work for somebody else but that fact that I’d have to ask for time off wouldn’t sit well with me. I would say one of the hardest parts about serving was I never controlled my time or schedule. Granted, we were very good in the teams at giving guys time off when they needed it. When my daughters were born I was able to trade deployments with the guys so the work still got done but I was able to have family time. We were very good at making sure the family was taken care of but I still didn't control it all. I still had to ask for days off. I still had to schedule family time and family vacation around whatever the job was. So I knew moving forward I wasn't going to be latched to something where I had to ask permission to go have fun.

You said that transitioning was more shocking than you thought it would be.

TH: Transition was shocking for sure. Not just for me, but for my wife and kids too. As I was getting out, I was like, “I'm going to be the perfect dad. I'm not going to do anything for six months. I'm not going to work other jobs. I'm not going to travel except for maybe a few hunting trips. I'm just going to be here. I'm going to be Mr. Dad.” After a couple months of that, my wife quickly let me know that I was screwing with the schedule she built over the last 20 year with the kids (laughs). So it was kind of a growth period, trying to find that balance. My nation didn’t need me so how could I still be beneficial but not be home all the time and give my wife her freedom and her space? It was tough trying to figure out those aspects of it.

I thought I'd built my off ramp correctly because personally I felt fine. As you build up in rank and time in a service, and around the community, it's not hard to see the younger guys stepping up and outpacing you on target. They know their skills, they know what they're doing, they know how to do the job. So, personally, I was fine. Once it came time to hang up the body armor, hang up the rifle and I stepped into more of a mentoring role, especially with my time at PREP (Naval Special Warfare Preparatory School). I was there to mentor the next generation. I thought that my off ramp was well designed and well built with three years to slow down. My first month or so at PREP, I was still working 12 to 14 hour days just because I didn't know any better. I would show up, stay all day just because I wasn't used to going home. To me, I thought I'd done right. Even with that off ramp from 1,000 miles an hour every single day, race car in the red, to actually hanging up and signing my DD 214 and saying I am completely done with the military and the military is completely done with me… it was still a shock.

Was there a point for you, in your relationship with your wife where you two were really struggling with the transition? A moment where she had to sit down and talk with you about how hard it was on her?

TH: Yes. I retired in July, so probably September-October maybe. That was that point where they said, “Alright dad,” and “Honey, stop fucking with our shit. We love the passions you have for the family but it's somewhat misplaced.” (laughs) I had stepped back in and wanted to be the boss or the authoritarian figure for when the kids misbehaved and needed to be disciplined. What I wanted to have… kind of the left and right limits for the kids… were probably a lot tighter than what the wife had. Which is fine because that's the mother figure that's been there for their entire lives. Now dad was stepping back in and we got heated on several subjects. It wasn't break the marriage kind of stuff but just personality conflicts. We've been together for 20 plus years but we've never been this tight together in our relationship. I met her when I was in my early 20’s and at SEAL Team Four back in '95. When I retired in 2018, we were both in our 40s and it was our first time where every single day we were together.

Even with the little stuff, the little pet peeves you see in your relationships, you kind of say, "Oh, whatever," but those things add up when it's every single day. This little thing, then that little thing, they keep building on each other until it's frustrating. We were both angry, angry at each other for no real reason other than we were trying to really relearn how to be a couple and how to live together.

So I'm going to guess that you didn't go and then start a company with her?

TH: Yeah, it's funny because I didn't even ask her to help with anything. She offered every now and then but she also knew that she didn't want to get involved with this and the side stuff I have going on—the leadership training, the outdoor stuff or even the coaching I do. She helped with coaching the kids because our daughter swims. One of my extracurricular activities is coaching kids and athletes so she'll help with that. Organizing stuff and getting messages out to parents and stuff because I'm still terrible at paperwork and emails. I hate it… like absolutely hate it. So, she helps with that aspect. Once it comes to dealing with contracts, people and the money stuff, she's fine with having nothing to do with that. She's a realtor on the side so she's got her thing too. Work wise we're essentially split.

Everybody goes through some transition and trauma in their life. One person's trauma is not another person's trauma. Your trauma might be from being on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan and watching your friends die or in the streets of Iraq, kicking down doors, watching your buddies die. But it might be from the loss of a marriage or loss of a child, which I can't imagine. Trauma exists for everyone. Do you think identity is important in getting past that?

TH: Yes… and being able to see that bigger picture. With what I do now professionally, yes, I'm a SEAL and that validates what I say and why I'm doing things the way I do things because that is what I did for 26 years. That validates the message I'm carrying. But I don't walk in and say, “I've got a trident so listen to what I say.” I'm not going to try to write a book and sell it and be a millionaire. But I do use what I did in my service because that's really who I am. My adult life was this. So as a validation metric, I still use it but it's not my singular identity anymore.

“With what I do now professionally, yes, I’m a SEAL and that validates what I say and why I’m doing things the way I do things because that is what I did for 26 years. That validates the message I’m carrying. But I don’t walk in and say, ‘I’ve got a trident so listen to what I say.’ I’m not going to try to write a book and sell it and be a millionaire.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

And it's so easy to get tied into that I imagine. You've been a part of an elite force, at the Super Bowl of what you do, but then you take off that cloak or that garb as a part of your identity, and don something else that has you watering your yard at 6am, your neighbor runs by, and then the paper boy misses your house and hits your car. You're thinking to yourself what happened? How did I get here? That would affect you.

TH: For 20 years I was a sniper but just yesterday, here in West Texas, up on the range at 500 yards I couldn't hit the target. And I'm thinking, “What in the hell? I know better.” I was just staring at the rifle trying to figure it out. Granted we only had a couple hours sleep so my brain wasn't quite working as well. But I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I have Tim here. I've got some other guys here. They're just looking at me kind of snickering and like, ‘Oh really? This is the guy that's going to teach us something?’” I’m looking at it and thinking to myself, “I know better. I should go back to square one. Something's wrong. Rebuild the foundation and go from there.” But I didn't. I was trying to half ass it. So I'm thinking, “Maybe it's this and I'm second guessing what I put in the computer.” After a handful of shots I said, “Alright, let's go back to 100 and do it the right way.” I still have to keep the skills sharp in order to do what I do well.

Now really going back to the beginning, what do you remember about growing up in Indiana? What kind of added up in your life culminating in you joining the United States Navy and becoming a SEAL? What was it about growing up in that environment with your parents and how they raised you?

TH: I would think it's probably that same small town aspect that a lot of people have, you know, there are a lot of expectations. My dad came from a very large family, all farmers, a Catholic family. There were certain expectations of the family that you just knew you had to live up to. Like when your parents asked you to do a job, you did the job. There was no talk back and half assing the job, you just did it. They built that foundation in me with that work ethic and accountability to make sure that I always got the job done. It's a small town, there's no hiding in a small town. At 15, if I ran around town screwing off and acting like a jackass, my dad was going to hear about it. There was no hiding there. I think that accountability helped and as I progressed through my teens… I got more into the outdoors. I grew up swimming, so I was very comfortable in the water. I was a decent athlete but not a very decent student. I can't blame the teachers. They knew better but I just wasn't engaged with academics.

Did you feel like you had some ADHD there?

TH: I don't know what it was. I had a really good math teacher for some of my classes, like algebra, and that interested me. I did well there but for other subjects I wasn't interested in, I didn't do very well. Growing up outdoors, in a farming community, I was used to being outside and I was comfortable in the water. I knew I wasn't mature enough to go to college. It was just going to be a waste of time and money. I wasn't going to get anything out of it even if I finished it. One of my other options was to stay in town. I was a mason at that point, working for a masonry company laying bricks and building buildings. I could do that but then looking at the people that never left the town, I'm like, “Why?” In my head I thought I had to challenge myself to do something else. I knew I had to expand my horizons a little bit and see what else was out there because I could always go home, especially as an 18 year old. So college was out and I didn't want to stay there and work. Really my only other option, the way I looked at it, was to join the military. I knew the Army and the Navy. Being a water guy, I wanted to learn how to scuba dive.

The Navy had divers, nobody else had divers. I was thinking that I should talk to the recruiter, join the Navy, learn how to scuba dive and go have fun. He saw me coming a mile away. So I walked in and got the typical recruiter response. How are you doing? What are you doing? What are your pastimes? You know, all that stuff. He showed me a picture on the wall, the classic Navy SEAL picture of guys coming out of the water, the big mustache. jumping out of airplanes, the whole nine yards… and he asked, “Do you like guns? Do you like to hunt? Do you like adventure?” Well, hell yeah… sign me up, which he did. But what he didn’t tell me was that 80–85% of people that sign up never make it through BUD/S. Which means you have to go to the regular Navy and you can't be a diver or anything else. I didn't know how much of a grind or how hard BUD/S really was so I was a complete newb. This was pre-Al Gore inventing the internet (laughs). There may have been books in the library about SEALs, but I never had an interest to see what they were. So I signed papers, went in, and got that reality check when I showed up. There were about 200 students wet and sandy and working their asses off grinding and chafed from waist down on the sand. That reality check kind of smacks you in the face, “Oh shit. Whatever I signed up for is real.”

So you got to BUD/S and that is that the first that's that first phase of becoming a SEAL, correct? Can you explain what BUD/S is for those that don’t know?

TH: BUD/S is our Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training. It's the training pipeline for new students or new candidates into the military that eventually want to become SEAL. It's kind of like our selection or a training process. In the early '90s, when I went through, it was essentially three phases. We had a fourth phase and it was essentially a pre-training. As guys filter in, class up, or they're hurt, they're in the fourth phase which is kind of a holding pen but traditionally there are three phases. First phase is the classic, just beat your ass and grind you into the ground. Physically and mentally beat you down and see what you have, which is where hell week is. All they're trying to do there is find guys that can do the job no matter what and can still think on their feet. It's to weed out all the people that can't mentally handle the grind that they're going to be put into. That's all they're trying to get. That's the first phase.

It's a suck factor 10x. It was by far the shittiest part and looking back on it now, in hindsight, I had a blast because we were all feeling shitty together. We were all miserable together. We were all getting our ass beat together, kind of building that team to defeat the cadre.

That’s something we run from nowadays, don't we?

TH: Yeah, we do. Adversity is scary for a lot of people. Life right now in the United States is way too goddamn easy on anybody, to where people have to find something to complain about. I mean, the whole cancel culture, like really, somebody says something on the internet and you're going to spend months beating them up about it. Life's too easy. Go struggle for real for a little bit wondering where your next meal is going to come from. You're not getting a welfare check. You're not getting a free handout or anything else like that. Let's struggle for a little bit so you can see how good you really have it.

So the first phase was just a beatdown. Weeding out all the guys who couldn't do it. My class started at, I think, 120-ish but after getting through the first phase we were down to 30 or 40 guys, if that. I have to look back at the numbers but that was the major weed out portion. At the end of first phase, we had a smaller group of guys that were smart enough and strong enough that could start training. We went into the dive phase and started learning how to scuba dive, dive cal (dive calculations), dive physics, pool comp, and getting comfortable underwater. We started running the draggers of all these different pieces. We were thinking, we were teachable, and we were learning. But we were still getting beat down, they were still making us work hard. So that grind factor was still there but now we were being challenged mentally as well.

We knew we were still going to lose guys there but typically not nearly at the high percentage that we were before that phase. But you know, we probably lost another 5 or 10 maybe, through that because we still do pool comp, which pushes the guys. We're underwater with scuba gear on, simulating that we're kind of in a surf zone getting thrown around, losing our mouthpiece, losing our goggles or mask, hoses get tied in knots, tanks getting jacked with… all that's really doing is putting us in a very tough, panicky position. Can we control our emotions? Can we control the situation and go through the very basic procedures that we've been taught over and over and over again? So we’d lose some guys at pool comp because they just panicked underwater. They're not naturally comfortable down there. We lost maybe one on dive physics, like the calculation part of it, the math part of it. We had some dumb guys (laughs). We weeded those out though. So that's second phase. For third phase, we went out to San Clemente Island for the land warfare phase. Now we were learning weapons, moving together as a group, communicating as a group, with some explosives and some mini missions. Cadre was giving the students a problem set. Solving the problem is how we figured out what our process was.

“Adversity is scary for a lot of people. Life right now in the United States is way too goddamn easy on anybody, to where people have to find something to complain about. I mean, the whole cancel culture, like really, somebody says something on the internet and you’re going to spend months beating them up about it. Life’s too easy. Go struggle for real for a little bit wondering where your next meal is going to come from. You’re not getting a welfare check. You’re not getting a free handout or anything else like that. Let’s struggle for a little bit so you can see how good you really have it.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

Did you believe that you would make it through from the initial entry point? Did you believe that you would be a Navy SEAL?

TH: I hate to sound egotistical or narcissistic but yeah I believed I’d make it from the very beginning. It probably had more to do with my upbringing of when you're told to do something or you sign up to do something you do what you signed up to do. I don't want to sound like some badass but I never really thought about quitting because that wasn't what I signed up to do. Was it scary along the way? Absolutely. Was it tough along the way? Absolutely. Did I ever think about the possibility of me not making it through? Absolutely. But I never really let that demon of quitting enter my mind.

What was the most difficult part for you in making it through? Do you remember one thing that was just so challenging to the point where you felt like this might be the thing that gets you?

TH: Probably not one thing but everything was a struggle. Everything was tough. The water stuff for me was kind of my saving grace, because I was very comfortable in the water, growing up in the water. So that was like, when you're yelling at me or I'm on a two mile ocean swim, I'm in my happy zone. They can't hear it. They can't touch me. They can't do anything to me other than make me stand in water. It was cold but fuck everybody's cold, right? The whole class is cold. I could do that. So I would say the water was my place of relaxation to a degree.

But the soft sand running for me, being maybe five and a half feet tall, a little vertically challenged, trying to keep up with the class, I was always in a goon squad. Every time we did a run, I knew I was going to suck because I was always going to be in the back no matter how fast or how hard I worked. Yeah, I was always going to be in the back and get special attention. I was fast enough to pass all tests, but like, not fast enough to stay up on all the conditioning rounds. So I like to think that they helped me out with the extra attention (laughs).

Terry with Logan Stark (Editor-in-Chief Black Rifle Coffee).

They made you stronger and faster. They prepared you for your future. When you made it through all three phases did you gain the Trident then or was it later?

TH: It's changed some over the years. We've matured as a force, especially after 9/11 with the OPTEMPO (Operations Tempo) we've been in. So when I went through, after we graduated BUD/S, after third phase, you didn't get anything. You got your certificate and “Hey, good job, suck it up and go to the team.” So, I went to Airborne School… that's like three weeks of Airborne out of Fort Benning just trying to stay out of trouble. But, you know, 19- and 20-year-old kids that just got their ass beat for six months are pretty strong. So I tried to avoid being in trouble there and then I went to Team Four. At that point, I started kind of like a probation period.

So that's six months of being on Team Four producing, working, learning, and seeing if I can pass that next crucible of passing my Trident board. So at that time, we were still doing what's called STT, SEAL Tactical Training, or SEAL Qualification Training (SQT) now. It's another three months or so of more advanced training. Every training cycle or selection you go through continues to push the bar forward. So that was STT training. I made it through that, then after graduating spent a little bit longer at the team. Then I did my Trident Review Board and sat in front of a bunch of scary old dudes that were yelling at me and asking all kinds of questions, like five questions at the same time, and I’m trying to figure out which one to answer. Just ramping up the stress. At that point they already know if you're gonna fit or not but now they're kind of giving that last little crucible.

Did you know by then that you were going to make it?

TH: Oh hell no, I was still scared even though it was a test. You're testing in front of your friends, your peers, especially your senior peers… it’s frightening. Still being a brand new guy, I've heard all the stories about some of the guys that are all tatted up. Like, oh, shit, here we go. At the time, when was that ‘93/’94? Yeah, there were still some Vietnam cats running around. So yeah, after completing that review board I eventually got my Trident.

What's the pride of that like?

TH: I feel like today the guys are slighted because at this point, they get their Trident after SQT (SEAL Qualification Training). So they never have to show up to a team and prove themselves that they belong on a team or that they've earned that Trident. I feel that crucible of going through BUD/S, going through jump school, STT (SEAL Tactical Training) on my probation period, working with my platoon and training staff at the command, that validated what I was doing. They believed in what I was doing. So that aspect of them welcoming me into the team was huge. Guys aren't doing that now. There's no welcome to the brotherhood of earning your Trident, in my opinion.

And that's what this is about, your opinion. So that moment has to be candescent, that moment has to be something that illuminates you, lights you up, lights a fire under you.

TH: I think there were probably two of us that got our Trident that day and we had the entire command out there at quarters in the morning. We're out there in our dress cammies. The Command Master Chief did a speech in front of everybody and then every single operator at the command came and welcomed us to the community. This was the '90s so there wasn’t a whole lot going on. At Team Four at that point, we're focused on South and Central America. A lot of working jungle tactics, water tactics, riverine tactics through workup and then deploying to Panama. From there, we spread out all across South Central America to do essentially what you would consider these days is like a mobile training team. We would send four or five, maybe half a platoon to go to a foreign country and work with our counterparts. Then train them up on whatever tactics they wanted to deal with. They were shorter, two or three week trips. So on a six month deployment, we may have done six or eight different trips around the AO (Area of Operation) and do the work.

How much did that prepare you psychologically for when the towers went down and when the GWOT began? Do you believe that time early on with the team helped build you up and prepare you for that?

TH: Yeah, I think so. When I got into the Navy and when I first showed up to Team Four, I was like 19-20 years old or something. So by the time the towers came down in 2001, I'd already been in and doing the job for a while. I was very confident in my skills, I knew how to do CQB (Close-Quarters Battle), we knew how to do jungle stuff. At that point I'd already gone through Sniper School so I was very confident in my job skills. And I'd already screened for the National Mission Force. I was on the one squadron. So even though I was still a newer guy, I felt like we were at the top of our game for what we trained for prior to September 11.

What was it like making it into that National Mission Force and being a part of that?

TH: To me, it was just another crucible, like that next level up. I told my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, “Hey, if I stay in the Navy, I'm going to go screen for this.” I really had no idea what it was, even though both my platoon chiefs were from that command. They never really talked about what it was or what they did. So there was a lot of hearsay, kind of rumor mill-ish stuff, to a degree. Through the network you kind of understand what they were and what they did, but I really didn't know what I was signing up for. So it was good. I walked in there, into the locker room, there were maybe 40 other guys that are just like me. Hungry, young, ready to go and work hard with a training cadre that was ready to test us. It was another six months for that whole training.

It was tactically harder because they're taking you up to the graduate level stuff. Once you screen and your Master Chief at the team says, “Yes, I've got confidence in this guy going there,” you're back into the crucible, back into the grind of proving yourself every single time. Now the tactics have elevated because if you're going to be on the National Mission Force, you've got to be able to operate in stressful environments, make good decisions, be fast with your communications, and be confident in whatever decision making process you go through. So, as you're going through the house for CQB, you have to have confidence that you know what you're doing, and the guys behind you know what you're doing. That's what the cadre is looking for all the time along with making sure we’re safe because we can't deal with safety issues. It's just like operating at that graduate level and continuing to push forward. How efficient, how fast, how confident, and how smart can you be? That was '98 when I went through that. Yeah, I was still new even though I'd done a few rotations. I was much more confident in the skills and I was included into the squadron, fully embedded and capable of doing my job when 9/11 happened.

We were the standby squadron when September 11th happened. At this point, I had just transitioned down to our sniper cell for the squadron and there were probably three or four of us in the gym just getting our morning workout in. The little TV was up in the corner of the gym and we saw a tower get hit. We were all wondering what the hell was going on but we knew whatever it was we needed to get back to the office. By the time we got back to the office our pagers were going off and the second tower was hit. We knew as soon as that second tower went that something wasn't right. Even though we were on standby, our bags were packed and the guns were ready. Our weapons were zeroed, comms ready, new batteries and everything.

It was another reality check. Leading up to that we were going to train for hostage rescue or we were going to train for other missions. Once that happened, those missions were there. Like, we were going on those missions. There's no more question about when or if it may happen. It was coming. My first assignment was Afghanistan. I went in July of '02. The way the cycle worked out, one of the other squadrons went first and then we kind of rotated for a little bit. So it was July of '02 by the time I got there.

“We were the standby squadron when September 11th happened. At this point, I had just transitioned down to our sniper cell for the squadron and there were probably three or four of us in the gym just getting our morning workout in. The little TV was up in the corner of the gym and we saw a tower get hit. We were all wondering what the hell was going on but we knew whatever it was we needed to get back to the office. By the time we got back to the office our pagers were going off and the second tower was hit. We knew as soon as that second tower went that something wasn’t right. Even though we were on standby, our bags were packed and the guns were ready. Our weapons were zeroed, comms ready, new batteries and everything.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

What were the challenges of that deployment? Did you feel ready when you got over there?

TH: I think so. Kind of the benefit of not being the first squadron over there, you get to learn. We had a really good communication system from the guys forward—what they're seeing, what tactics they were seeing, what gear works, what gear they need—so we could prep. We were continually prepping for another six months or so before we got over there. Understanding what the environments are going to look like, even though we weren't there, we kind of had a good feel for what we were walking into. It was the first combat deployment that I'd been on that was real. At this point, we'd already lost guys at Roberts Ridge. We've already had funerals. Knowing the potential for what we were walking into was still kind of there. Butterflies in your stomach as you're flying in and you step off, there it was. It was time to get it on.

What was that first action like for you? Did you feel ready?

TH: There were still butterflies in my stomach when we were sitting in the helicopter taking off for the first time with live ammunition in the gun ready to go, understanding that something may happen. I probably got lucky. We launched on many dry holes where they saw a ghost somewhere and they were like, “Oh, Bin Laden is over here,” so we launched on something and it's these farmers that were pissed off at each other. I think launching on those ghost missions, or those dry holes, kind of took that edge off a little bit. We were more relaxed, kind of getting into the rhythm, into that cycle of being able to think clearly as you're walking off the helicopter and stepping on target. The butterflies were gone and here we go again. Let's be ready but who knows what we're gonna find. However, that whole deployment I never fired my weapon. There were a lot of dry holes. We spent a lot of time doing missions in the mountains, up and down, back and forth.

This is important, though, because this is the thing that people really don't understand about deployments.

TH: It's like, “Oh, you're a SEAL.” Or “You're a sniper, how many people did you kill?” In reality for a lot of guys going overseas, they tell us it was 2003 Iraq for the first time. For me, it wasn't really up close and personal, face to face combat until '06. I had gone through a couple cycles before it was like right here. Shooting across a field or into the treeline or something, that's one thing. When you're inside a room with another guy, that's a completely different story.

For me, the learning was about how to deal with the potential threats that we were walking into, understanding and learning our enemy's tactics on how they do things, staying two or three steps ahead of them, and being ready to go and that communication with everybody as work transitioned. We’d turn that information over to the next guys. We'd tell them here are the targets we hit. Here's where they are. Here are the people that were there. Here are the people that weren't there. So that knowledge we were building over time was very beneficial because that turned over to the next squadron and they turned it back over the next one, then they gave it back to us. We were building that knowledge base of areas, of targets, of personalities, of tactics that they were using against us, which ones that they were adapting to counter our tactics. As we're adjusting our tactics to stay ahead of them, they're adjusting their tactics as well. That constant wisdom and knowledge transfer was probably what set us ahead of everybody. Same with our Army counterparts, you know, they're doing the same thing and we're sharing back and forth with each other as well. At that tier one level, we were adapting much faster than the enemy could adapt to us.

When you got over Afghanistan for the first deployment where were you guys operating at the time?

TH: We bounced around a lot on that deployment. It was my third or fourth to Afghanistan. I was primarily down in the southwest Helmand area. We would get recalled back to go do a mission because we had a smaller footprint there. Of our squadron, we had some of our guys in Iraq as well so we were covering both theaters. We had a much smaller body pool so we would get pulled back, go do missions, then go back to our outstations and do our work with the other groups with the other characters that were in the area. But for our squadron, there was probably two thirds of us in one country and a third in the other country. So now with only two thirds of a squadron, we had a lot less firepower, a lot less bodies to prosecute targets. We had to pull back from our outstations, go do some missions, and then move forward and back out.

Afghanistan, Helmand Province, 2006. The British mainly operated in the area right at the time. Was this before American Marines got there? Was this right at the time?

TH: We were outside of Kandahar Province, but not far west. Far West was the Wild West. I don't think the Marines had pushed in there very much at that point. The Brits were down there, the Canadians were down there. We would just kind of cycle through and help whoever we could. Just two or three of us running different operations and helping them plug in. Primarily, if we were going to plug it in with the CANSOF guys (Canadian Special Operation Forces), we were essentially plugging in with them because we could bring an asset. Some of those guys can't call an AC-130 on target but I could.

So if I'm working with them or some of the Green Beret guys or plugging in with some of the other characters there, we would bring assets to the table that they didn’t have. Information and intel that I was able to get that they didn't. So they kind of used us as a force provider for a lot of issues. Not necessarily, “Hey, Terry, come with us because we need you to shoot people. No, you've got plenty of guys with guns, you don't need me for that but here's how I can help you with my two man team.” The body count for the task force we were part of was probably a 100 plus. We were dealing with the action but you know, some of that stuff is calling for fire and dropping bombs on guys, because it's a lot easier to do that. Yeah, things were starting to get ramped up. It got hot and heavy down there as we went from ‘07 to ‘08. I feel blessed that every deployment where I was physically overseas with the guys nobody was seriously hurt. We had some injuries and stuff but I just happened to be there at a time when nobody was hurt. But being home when guys get killed, it was just as serious.

You said there was a time when you realized the combat got real. Can you talk a little bit about that and what the situation was?

TH: At this point, it was less personal because we had been at war for a while. A lot of combat, a lot of guys got killed. It's not like retribution where they killed so and so and now we're going to do whatever we can to return on that. It was more of a job. This one time, Tom and I, we were snipers leading in a very small assault cell into a typical compound that everybody has seen over there. The big adobe walls were a little higher than usual so we threw a ladder up. Again I'm very vertically challenged, so I get up the ladder and I can't reach the top. I'm like, “Well shit.” So I went back down and Tom's a little bigger so he was able to climb up. Then I went up and he was able to help me up, basically just straddling a wall because we couldn't stand on the ladders or anything else. So as we were straddling the wall, there were two guys on a second deck right by us. Okay, no big deal… they were sleeping. In the compound, a big courtyard was down off to our right. They were going to breach the gate to the right, then go in and deal with whatever the reason we were coming to knock on the door that night. So Tom and I, we were covered now, we could see there were more rooms, there were darkened rooms that the guys outside didn't know were there. So we were covering those rooms.

There's action, people in a courtyard, in rooms sleeping, but we know the enemy is down there and something with the breach made some noise. The guys we were watching literally ten feet from us, just below our legs, maybe eight feet below the top of the wall, in their beds right next to us, woke up and decided that they were going to pick up their guns. That was our first kind of in our face like, “Shit, here we go, do the job.” We took care of that issue. The breach went off after that. Then, we bailed off the wall and cleared the rooms upstairs because the guys in the courtyard couldn't see us. We had to make sure that threat was clear and that nobody else was in there. We then came back and prosecuted a target, collected intel and all that kind of stuff. I personally didn't feel any remorse that I had to take the actions I took. I was perfectly comfortable with the fact that in the situation we were in, they chose to escalate to the point that we had to deal with it. I don't know if it was my way of reasoning with delivering death or it was the fact that I was just doing my job. At that point it was 2006 so I'd already been doing the job for about fifteen years.

“The guys we were watching literally ten feet from us, just below our legs, maybe eight feet below the top of the wall, in their beds right next to us, woke up and decided that they were going to pick up their guns. That was our first kind of in our face like, ‘Shit, here we go, do the job.’ We took care of that issue. The breach went off after that. Then, we bailed off the wall and cleared the rooms upstairs because the guys in the courtyard couldn’t see us. We had to make sure that threat was clear and that nobody else was in there. We then came back and prosecuted a target, collected intel and all that kind of stuff. I personally didn’t feel any remorse that I had to take the actions I took. I was perfectly comfortable with the fact that in the situation we were in, they chose to escalate to the point that we had to deal with it.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

There was an earlier mission and one that gets brought up all the time with you, the Jessica Lynch mission in Iraq. Can you talk a little bit about it and describe the situation for those that don't know it, especially now that it's many years down the road?

TH: It was '03 so there are even a lot of people in the military now that probably are not aware or were very young when the Jessica Lynch mission happened. Jessica was part of a patrol that got separated. I may have the facts mixed up, but their patrol got separated from the main supply patrol, took a wrong turn or whatever happened. They got into a bit of an ambush/accident and she was knocked unconscious and taken hostage. The rest of her patrol was all deceased at that point. She was taken hostage and we got called in, “Hey, there's an American missing.” At that point, there were probably six or seven of us, some recce (reconnaissance) guys and some leadership guys. We launched from our staging base that we were at into Nasiriyah. We landed there and jumped off the AC-130, got in the back of a Marine 6x6 that was going in the direction we needed to go.

Eventually we made our way up to where there was a Marine one star general already launching artillery into Nasiriyah. He had his crew there. I got out of the vehicle and said something like, “Is that a fucking star on his uniform?” Rarely do you ever see an Admiral or Generals out there in the muck of it. But, there he was dirty, grimy. I was like, “Oh my God, I love this dude.” I didn't know if he was a good Marine or not, but it was fucking awesome to see him out there on the ground with the guys. He was living in a trash pit on the outskirts of Nasiriyah and just fucking doing work all day long.

Anyways, we got in and debriefed him. He kind of knew we were coming even though we weren't really stepping into his territory. We checked in with him and made sure he was good. We let him know what our plan was because really we didn't have much of a plan other than a couple reports that Jessica was somewhere in that area. Then we just started hitting a few vehicle patrols, hitching rides in Humvees just checking out the area to see if we could see anything or find any kind of intel that led us to where we needed to be. It felt like we were there for a week but those initial couple days that we were there, nothing really spoke to us like, “Hey, there's something going on in this area.” So, we launched back to our base. From there we went and did another hit on another target and about that time we got a human source that had good intel on where Jessica was in the hospital. So the entire force went back to that spot. We rigged up a camera, did a walkthrough, and we knew where she was at. We launched probably the biggest operation I've ever been part of. We had our squadron, we had Rangers, we had Strykers, we had Marines on the other side of town, acting as diversionary forces. It was huge. It was justified, right? We had a missing American, we were going to do whatever and the intel we had at this point was that there were a lot of bad guys using that hospital as a base. So we weren't really sure what we were walking into. This was way before the constant ISR (Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance) where you could see everything and dismantle information like we do now.

We were told there could be 200 enemy in this general area that were still fighting us. So we launched a massive campaign, well not campaign, it was just a mission. Like the Army guys are laughing, like, “That's not a campaign.” Anyways, we flew in and landed some assaulters in a courtyard to go right to a room where we knew she was at. Recce guys, myself and some of the other guys, landed on a rooftop blocking anybody from coming out and using the high ground against us but we were able to move down through the stairwell if we needed to and also guide people in. While we were up there Rangers, Strykers, some of our ground force guys were coming in as well to secure the outside as we were taking down the hospital. Right away she was exactly where we thought she was going to be. Guys got to her right away, got her secured, got her taken care of, stabilized and off to the helicopter and out of there. But before that happened, we were watching Strykers roll in, out in front of the hospital. I could make out like nine little berms, which were essentially dugout grave sites. We knew we were missing nine people. The Strykers were rolling up and they were almost to the point where they were going to drive over them to take their overwatch position. So we were trying to get their attention, and eventually got them on comms like, “Hey, don't go any farther.” They were able to recover those remains and send them home. We were able to bring Jessica home and complete the mission. There were no shots fired as far as I know. At least not at the target because nobody was there besides the hospital staff and some other patients. We went through and cleared the whole hospital and found, essentially, a workstation that had radios and a little sand table setup. So they were using it, they just weren't there at the time.

When you're getting into a moment like that, you have no idea what might happen. How fulfilling was that mission?

TH: Oh, absolutely. Of all the missions, after 26 years and everything I've done, those two missions—bringing her home and Captain Phillips—being a part of something bigger and bringing Americans home, that's exactly what I signed up for. It's very meaningful to me. I mean, we sign up for this, and we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for that bigger purpose. The guys that went in on the ground level, they had no idea what they were up against. Their mission was to get to her as fast as possible so they were running past all these threats, putting themselves in a high risk of danger to go secure the target.

Terry stands with Michael Shea, Taylor Canfield (NASCAR), Brady Cervantes.

You talked about '06, '07, and '08 and things becoming more frantic as you're going over there. Afghanistan's environment is changing. Are you seeing some of the writing on the wall as far as how we are going to maintain this? How are we conducting ourselves in warfare? What does this look like long term?

TH: This was probably after my first or second deployment there, I had this conversation with my dad, who was a Vietnam vet. I remember saying, “Until we educate them, or they become educated, Afghanistan is never gonna change.” What I noticed over there is that the village cares about the village and the family cares about the family. If there's a village in a valley and 30 miles away there's another village, they could give two shits if each of them had power or each of them had food. If they had a room, had a roof over their head, and had food they were winning. So I came back and had that conversation, I said, “Until we fix education it's never going to get better.”

Just dumping billions of dollars into corrupt politicians. Yeah, that doesn't work. Granted, the U.S. military is not designed to build nations. I think we've proven that over the last 100 years or so. That's not our job. That's not what we're good at, obviously. We're here to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Freedoms around the world, our partners, our friends. That's what we're here for—bad guys, get rid of them. Building roads, structures, schools and political parties, fuck no, that's not what we do. It's so far out of scope of what we're designed to do. Granted, most soldiers are smart enough to figure out whatever you tasked them to do. But again, nation building is not our job.

Pretty early on I saw this, understood this, and saw the problems that existed. Where it went recently though, there's no reason under God's green earth for why you speed up the timeline and do it like it was executed. I was fine with us leaving. I just don't understand the process of why it had to be like it was. Over the last year, there weren't any problems. The deal was done. We were going to leave. There was a process in place. We were going to work through the process and continue to slowly pull back. Those guys over there were fine with it. They didn't bother us. We were good. Everybody was happy until the mess happened with Afghanistan and the pull out.

In my opinion, there's two ways to approach it. One, right off the bat, we go in smash, kill everybody and get rid of the Taliban. Go home. We're not here to make Afghanistan a better place. We were there just here to deal with the problem that led to the 9/11 attacks on our soil. I don't care about internal strife. I don't care about the heroine. All that crap we were dealing with, that's not my business as a military guy. So that's option one. Option two is if we decide to do that long road that we did, you have to have that presence there just like post-World War II Germany and you know we're still in Germany. If that's going to be our play then we have to own that play. It can't turn into a political hot potato where an administration did this so we have to change it or another administration did this so we have to go back to what they originally said.

“In my opinion, there’s two ways to approach it. One, right off the bat, we go in smash, kill everybody and get rid of the Taliban. Go home. We’re not here to make Afghanistan a better place. We were there just here to deal with the problem that led to the 9/11 attacks on our soil. I don’t care about internal strife. I don’t care about the heroine. All that crap we were dealing with, that’s not my business as a military guy. So that’s option one. Option two is if we decide to do that long road that we did, you have to have that presence there just like post-World War II Germany and you know we’re still in Germany. If that’s going to be our play then we have to own that play. It can’t turn into a political hot potato where an administration did this so we have to change it or another administration did this so we have to go back to what they originally said.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

While we're on the subject of that, how did you feel about what happened in Afghanistan?

TH: Oh, it's heartbreaking, because I know even though nothing's been reported, there's probably been thousands of people killed since we left. Anybody that helped us is gone. Let alone all of our industrial and military technology that Chinese have, now Iranians have or Russians have, that we just dumped along with all the taxpayer dollars that are there. All the strife that we put into it for a potential political move didn’t need to happen. So it was very heartbreaking to see how it went down for absolutely no reason at all. I don't think anybody expected it to go quite that way.

We had spoken a little bit about the Captain Phillips mission in April of '09. Can you briefly talk about it?

TH: Captain Phillips is a person, obviously, but everybody references the whole mission as the Captain Phillips mission. A ship was taken hostage by some Somali pirates. Whatever happened on the ship happened and they ended up launching a lifeboat off the side of the ship and took Captain Phillips with them. Now we, as a nation, have another American hostage in somebody else's hands. Which is kind of unique because now we've kind of gone full circle from the early '70s, '80s, and '90s. We as a tier one force were designed to do hostage rescue and our focus was hostage rescue at sea but we got sidetracked with all of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the GWOT going on. Now we're in '09 and we're back to hostage rescue at sea, exactly what we're designed for. We had a small team forward staged in Africa and happened to be close enough to where we could begin to affect a desirable end state. So we jumped in, got linked up with Bainbridge and Halliburton, began negotiations, and began resolving the situation as best we could until we had more people from the state side. The standby guys came in and jumped in with more assets and more capability to kind of step in and resolve that. Which we ended up doing by getting Captain Phillips back and eliminating the threats. He got sent home to his wife and kids and it was happily ever after for him.

It was very fulfilling and what was unique on that one, and what I feel very, very, very grateful for is, after the mission, after all the medical happened and debriefs happened, the other guys jumped in, stayed on one ship, we headed back to Africa so he could fly home. That whole ride back, which was a day or so, it was just me and him kind of hanging out in a room playing Monopoly, chit-chatting, talking about life, kids, family. I didn't talk to him about what happened but kind of helped him vent and get back into being a real person again. I'm very grateful to have that one-on-one time with my small team there but it was kind of essentially him and I chit-chatting and hanging out for a while. A couple dudes hanging out on a boat.

Once we got onto the boat and started going back I could physically see in his face what he was going through. He was trying to process it and go through it mentally. At that point, I’d already seen combat. I’d already lost friends. I wouldn't say I was callous to it but I was able to recognize it and helped him talk through it. Even though I'm not a psych, by any means, but I kinda had things figured out. So I could see he needed somebody to talk to. So I was chatting with him. We got him on the phone with some other people that could help him. We had some different people roll through, including medical staff that kept checking on him to make sure everything was good. We were able to step up and kind of help him start healing through that and kind of letting go of some of that stuff. From my experience, the longer you hold on to trauma, injury, mental fatigue or whatever, the harder it is to let go. It's kind of like a rot that just keeps eating away. So I wanted to help him start offloading as much as he could. That summer he came back and went to our SEAL reunion. We go to it every year with my wife and kids and happened to see him. He was there with his wife so I went over to chat and talked to him for a couple hours. He got to meet my wife and kids and I got to meet his wife. Just a super, super humble person. He seemed to be in a pretty good place.

“We had a small team forward staged in Africa and happened to be close enough to where we could begin to affect a desirable end state. So we jumped in, got linked up with Bainbridge and Halliburton, began negotiations, and began resolving the situation as best we could until we had more people from the state side. The standby guys came in and jumped in with more assets and more capability to kind of step in and resolve that. Which we ended up doing by getting Captain Phillips back and eliminating the threats. He got sent home to his wife and kids and it was happily ever after for him.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

So you make it through a 26 year career. You get to that point as a Master Chief in the United States Navy. What's the thought process for you in getting out? Was it just your time? Did you know leading into that 26th year like this is it, I can't do this anymore or I don't want to?

TH: It was really not that I didn't want to do it anymore because I enjoyed my job and really felt like I flourished in that mentor role, helping guys through the BUD/S prep program, not just the students but also professionalizing the force, the people underneath me and explaining how the military works. I was in a mentorship role. What you're really supposed to do as a senior enlisted is be a mentor to the younger guys. So I really liked that. My only real issue was we moved from Virginia. We were in Virginia forever. The kids grew up, we moved. They stayed in Indiana while I was in Chicago and that was a very tough move for them. Now they were getting into their teenage years. So if I was going to stay in, we would have to move again to go do essentially one last job. Really you have about 30 years unless you're in specific positions. You know, 30 is kind of the drop dead for everybody. I would have had one more job, which would require a move to one of the coasts, probably back to Virginia. Move the family, which we had already agreed not to do to the girls again. Our best choice as a family was to go ahead and call it a day and move on to the next chapter.

It really wasn't hard making that decision. I felt very fulfilled with my career. I would say no regrets on any of that. I was very happy with where I was at and very satisfied with where I was in my career, all the way through. It would have been nice to be a CMC (Command Master Chief) in a team, to kind of go back but it wasn't worth the strife for the family just for that little benny for myself, my ego check. I was fine with our decision as a family to say, “Okay, this is done.”

I would come back from every single deployment and my kids were three or four months older. and more mature. I think, really, the biggest ones were once they hit their teenage years and started gaining that independence and now they didn’t need dad every day. I'm retired now, so let's be a family and you know, they're teenage girls. They've got friends, activities, sports, and everything else. So that reality check was, “Oh, man, they really don't need me as much being teenagers and young adults.” But now I'm home all the time. It's a hard path to walk sometimes and it can be difficult to navigate. I was a perfect father (laughs). You know, Alicia, and I, we did as best we could with what we had. I've got two incredibly talented young ladies that are just killing it with whatever they do. I think we succeeded. I feel like we succeeded. I mean, they're teenagers. So they have little hiccups here and there. We keep them in reality, but they're both respectful enough and mature enough to make the right decisions on the big stuff.

With your daughters being older when you got out, did you have to redefine what you thought your purpose was going to be?

TH: What I realized was I had lost that purpose of my nation, my teammates, that mission we were doing. It took me a little while to figure out what my next purpose was. Obviously, the family was there but my wife had got the family dialed to where it may have required 30–40% of my bandwidth. So what could I do with the rest of it? I didn't want to be an asshole. I didn't want to be hovering over her and everything else. I had to figure out where I fit. Obviously it wasn't nine to five. That's not my personality or what I wanted to do. So I started laying down what I'm good at, what I enjoy. I absolutely enjoy and love being a coach or mentor. How can I do that? How can I do that and actually make a little bit of money? Money is not the end all be all, but it's a benefit for sure. Okay, I can be beneficial to my community by mentoring, coaching, and helping businesses. Coaching is one thing for youth athletes but how do I give back to my veteran community, which is very important to me? Being a Master Chief, I knew I had something to give back. I've got a ton of experience, knowledge, a little bit of wisdom, to continue to help the veterans go through the situations they're going through.

Whether it's an E4 that's just coming into the Navy, somebody that drops out of BUD/S, somebody's getting ready to retire, or somebody dealing with strife, I can be a benefit to them. Leading into what we're doing now, I know getting veterans into the outdoors is therapeutic. It was absolutely therapeutic for me. Every single deployment, I would come back and go to the mountains for two weeks. When I didn't do that, I was not a good dad, I was not a good person. I didn't have that time to decompress from work Terry to dad Terry to just citizen Terry. I knew that was a benefit so I wanted to continue to do that. Like what we did last week, a little deer hunt camp. We brought veterans in, let them tell their stories and rebond. Because what I noticed in my hometown, I have great people there but I don't have any Special Operations veterans that have experienced anything close to what I've dealt with. So I can't have those conversations, I can't have that connection with guys. By hosting these little get-togethers it's a perfect opportunity to blend two things I love—helping my veteran community and the outdoors. This is why we're here. So you and I, prior to this, we were trying to archery deer hunt, which didn't turn out too good, but we had a ton of laughs and had a lot of fun and connected with a lot of good people. Now we're out here in Cienega, where I hope to run more of these types of things and also teach people skill sets they can use. Like, the long range course we were doing the other day. This is kind of what's leading into the next chapter, how do I keep giving back? How do I benefit my community, both on the military and civilian side, and still have fun doing it?

There's nothing I hate worse than, “Hey, come in and have a good time for a day and I'll never talk to you again.” Yeah, it’s the same thing on the leadership side. I want to teach leadership and you could pay me a ton of money to come in and get you all hyped up for two hours. But, there's no lasting benefit to that. In two weeks, you guys are going to forget that. You're going to have the internal dialogue that doesn't work, you're going to have the communication systems that don't work, a structure that doesn't work. So if I'm going to get involved with something, whether it's trying to help veterans, or trying to help businesses, or coaching kids, it's going to be a long term, lasting benefit to everybody. I've only got so much time because, hell, I'm 48 now, it's slowly ticking away, and I can see that. I want to make sure whatever I'm involved in is beneficial.

“There’s nothing I hate worse than, ‘Hey, come in and have a good time for a day and I’ll never talk to you again.’ Yeah, it’s the same thing on the leadership side. I want to teach leadership and you could pay me a ton of money to come in and get you all hyped up for two hours. But, there’s no lasting benefit to that. In two weeks, you guys are going to forget that. You’re going to have the internal dialogue that doesn’t work, you’re going to have the communication systems that don’t work, a structure that doesn’t work. So if I’m going to get involved with something, whether it’s trying to help veterans, or trying to help businesses, or coaching kids, it’s going to be a long term, lasting benefit to everybody.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

How important is following through in that role?

TH: It's absolutely important. Just follow through with everything. Whether you're shooting a pistol, shooting a bow, or mentoring somebody on skill sets that they don't have, like dealing with emotion, dealing with panic, dealing with stress. You have to follow through. Otherwise it's pointless. Why take your time to go do something if you're not going to follow through and make sure that lesson is learned. No stress, no expectations of anything other than having a good time. Taking time and making sure we build it right and build a space. I'm not a nonprofit. None of that crap that you have to deal with being a nonprofit, which you know very well, is a pain in the ass. I want to have opportunities available where we don't have to worry about nonprofits and we don't have to worry about anything else. If you have the time and a desire to get outside, learn new skills, experience something with your friends, relatives, fellow teammates, or fellow veterans, we're going to have stuff set up for you. So what we're doing out here at this place, we got a full lodge. It's an incredible, awesome lodge. They call it the bad side of the ranch, but it's fucking incredible. We're going to create a space and environment where people can come in and ask questions, not have any ego in the way.

They might never have shot a rifle at a mile, never killed an animal, or never cut up an animal. We're going to eat animals tonight that people think you can't eat. So we're going to disprove that fact on the outdoors and have the full circle of everything we can do from the time you show up and start laughing until the time you go home four or five days later with something for the freezer, an experience, some pictures, and hopefully something for the wall. But you're going to carry that lasting memory of your experience here. Being able to let go of some of those demons we can hopefully work through even though we're not necessarily in the therapeutic space. But you can let those demons out by discussing them. Either myself or some other people here running this thing have probably experienced just about everything that's out there for other people to experience. Working through that, having those laughs and good times, and also the network. If we bring in ten veterans to do an event, they may or may not have ever met each other before. We get to share common bonds, share knowledge, share experiences, so you can have those conversations with guys you may not have ever met before now. You're going to go home with nine more friends that you can call if you need to.

I love hearing that because I really do think that's a bridge building item that brings our communities better together and is therapeutic for everyone.

TH: Absolutely. Besides the veterans specific ones, when we run civilian ones, they have that opportunity to come in and experience a little bit of what military guys do. Just like you alluded to before, I shot that Aoudad last night and the whole experience was fun. We had five guys out there looking, with a bow trying to get one and when these things blew up over the mountain top, we were able to get a shot at 500 yards, high winds, awesome shot. I felt great with it but then as soon as that happened a hailstorm opened up. I love that, climbing a mountain and getting pelted by hail. That's adversity, that stuff that normal people are like, “Oh, crap, it's hailing, it's raining. We better go back to the lodge and we'll come back later.” Hell no, I thrive in those very rugged environments and rugged experiences, because that's as close as I can get to what I did for three decades. Getting my ass kicked on a mountain, chasing elk for ten days and never getting a shot. It sucks, but God, I love it. Physically pushing myself into those positions where I have to give myself a mental check. I looked around a little bit. I'm like, “Alright, the bushes aren't going to do anything for us. So screw it, might as well keep on walking up there.”

Terry prepares the next meal at Sky Fall Reserve in Trinidad, Texas with Steve Rokks.

I just want to describe that as a first timer being out here, seeing that animal was just beautiful. There was nothing ugly about hunting it. Watching the process and the respect shown to the animal. These animals die in nature in terrible ways, I can't even fathom how awful.

TH: She was old. I mean, she probably didn't have much longer left. She was at the end of her life. So from a conservation aspect, that's the perfect animal we want to get. I don't know if it's because I'm older and more mature, but I get a lot of enjoyment from going out and pursuing a ewe, a female Aoudad, for the people that don't know what that is. From a conservation aspect, the Aoudad breed twice a year so you have to manage them. Otherwise, they're just going to wreck the landscape. This is a cattle operation so they're obviously mostly focused on how to run cattle here. To manage that Aoudad herd, you have to take out a certain number of animals through hunting. It's just the most effective, efficient way. There are no predators out here. It's technically an invasive species from North Africa and it doesn't belong here. It was brought over here and they're thriving in this environment. For me as an outdoorsman/conservationist, I absolutely get more out of the bigger picture aspect of it, then trying to get the biggest horns or biggest antlers out there. Knowing that she was probably 10 – 12 years old, at the end of her life cycle, that's exactly the kind of animal you want to be able to pull out of the herd. Yeah, we could have shot a big ram because they were there too. But my goal is to make the place a better place then when I showed up.

“To manage that Aoudad herd, you have to take out a certain number of animals through hunting. It’s just the most effective, efficient way. There are no predators out here. It’s technically an invasive species from North Africa and it doesn’t belong here. It was brought over here and they’re thriving in this environment. For me as an outdoorsman/conservationist, I absolutely get more out of the bigger picture aspect of it, then trying to get the biggest horns or biggest antlers out there. Knowing that she was probably 10 – 12 years old, at the end of her life cycle, that’s exactly the kind of animal you want to be able to pull out of the herd. Yeah, we could have shot a big ram because they were there too. But my goal is to make the place a better place then when I showed up.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

Similar to the same goals you had in the Navy.

TH: Yeah, essentially. Trying to make people better off than when they started, whether it's through training, or through coaching, or just listening. That's kind of defined my purpose now. Once I saw those first couple of times, I was like, “Okay, perfect. This is what drives me now. This is my tribe now.” Through meeting you, through Winter Strong and the Sorinex experience, having these conversations, now I found my next tribe—a mix of veterans and just good people doing the right thing. I can affect a positive change in that and be a positive part of that tribe.

Here's the funny thing, I felt like an asshole yesterday morning on range because I couldn't hit a steel target at 500 yards. Now, I ranged the ewe at 525 or wherever she was and as I'm dialing up my scope in the back of my head I'm like this is the range I couldn’t hit anything at four hours ago and now I've got a live animal at that range. I have confidence in my weapon system because I did figure out what was going on and we got to figure it out. But in the back of my head I'm thinking, “Oh my God, this is a shot I couldn't make before.” Now here she is, a live animal, wind's blowing 15 to 20 mile an hour, whipping down through the valley and she's moving. She's getting ready to crest the ridge and I’m in a terrible body position, kind of laying downhill on a bunch of rocks. I'm propped up so my gun is angled up, my feet are above my head. Getting into that zone of knowing the range, seeing her, and knowing what the wind is doing. I quickly calmed down and I flipped that switch into knowing what I had to do to get the job done in a very respectful way. The last thing I want to do is injure her. I'd rather miss her outright but we had known we were going to take the shot because she was in range and the conditions were good enough to do this. Once I squeezed through and that trigger broke I knew it was a good shot before I saw anything else. That was a great shot and she dropped where she was supposed to. Yeah, it was very satisfying for me.

It was your first animal kill. Aaron's right next to me, a friend of ours that runs this place now. He helped set us up and invited us out to do this experience. They're doing an incredible job here. So yeah, just including that into the group aspect. We had Brady and Mike with us too. Sharing that experience with everybody is what I love about it. Then adding that layer of struggle by getting pelted for an hour with hail. I love the suck. Telling stories, grabbing a beer. Man, this is so cool. I can't wait to see the pictures because from an artistic standpoint, they're great. But from a photography standpoint, they're probably going to suck, right? Because everything's going to be out of focus, wet, and there's raindrops on everything. For me personally, that added a layer to the experience you could never pay to do. It’s priceless. Just all that combined into one day, one experience, that made my week.

Can you talk a little bit about how much of your 26 years in the Navy helps you with the leadership and consulting roles you’re in now?

TH: A lot, a ton. Early in the SEAL teams, we were not very good at developing leaders. When I came in the early '90s, it was luck of the draw as to who was going to be your LPO (Leading Petty Officer) and who was going to be your chief. If you had good ones or bad ones, they developed you as a leader. So if you had good ones, that’s fucking awesome. If you had bad ones, well, it sucks to be you. But if you got bad ones and you were a young guy, you didn't know they were bad leaders and you were developing bad habits right off the bat not even knowing any better. Seeing that and understanding that, it wasn't until early 2000s we started really building a leadership program. The first leadership course I went to, I don't know when it was, probably mid-2000 or something, I was like, “Holy shit. I've been a Goddamn terrible leader.” No empathy towards anybody, no accountability towards anybody, all the stuff that goes into being a good leader. Not treating people like I want to be treated like, “Damn, I'm an asshole.” It was an eye opener for me.

Then I started overlaying that on to the leaders I have had, the good ones and bad ones. Thinking to myself, “This is why I like that guy and this is why I would follow that guy anywhere.” I knew there were guys that were great at their job but terrible humans. I'm not going to do that or become that. Like, no matter what, I'm never going to be that kind of guy. So it was eye opening for me and then I kind of developed into my own person. I'm going to treat everybody with respect because you never know when that is going to come full circle. I teach this to my new students. The kid you're in bootcamp with, you may run into him 20 years later on a ship somewhere and you need his help. So if you're an asshole now, because you think you're fucking special, because you're in the BUD/S pipeline, you're burning bridges. It takes ten times as long to build bridges as it does to burn them. It probably goes back to my childhood. I always wanted to treat everybody with absolute respect and treat them like a real person, no matter what their job was and what their role was because I wanted the same thing. I wanted to be treated the same way. I'd rather have a good honest conversation with somebody than just yell at them like, “Just go do this because I told you to fucking do it.” Of course there are times where you have to just tell the guys, “Hey, shut up and fucking row the boat. We'll get to the details later on but just do this right now.” There are those times but mostly you have time to communicate what the actual job is or what the requirement is or what you're expecting out of them. Having those conversations and communication is important. Even today, I'm terrible at communication, even though I know it is probably one of the biggest factors in success or failure in business, military, and everything else. What is your communication pipeline? How do you do it? How effective are you at it? I still struggle with that sometimes.

“I’m going to treat everybody with respect because you never know when that is going to come full circle. I teach this to my new students. The kid you’re in bootcamp with, you may run into him 20 years later on a ship somewhere and you need his help. So if you’re an asshole now, because you think you’re fucking special, because you’re in the BUD/S pipeline, you’re burning bridges. It takes ten times as long to build bridges as it does to burn them. It probably goes back to my childhood. I always wanted to treat everybody with absolute respect and treat them like a real person, no matter what their job was and what their role was because I wanted the same thing. I wanted to be treated the same way. I’d rather have a good honest conversation with somebody than just yell at them like, ‘Just go do this because I told you to fucking do it.’”

— MCPO Terry Houin

How important is it to get new people involved in the outdoors and hunting?

TH: If you get into the lifecycle of hunters, there is the new hunter experience and then trying to shoot bigger animals and the more complex situations. I think I've kind of come full circle to where I get more enjoyment out of bringing people into the outdoors that have never been there, especially in the hunting community. In Dallas, I don't think I ever picked up my bow and I was supposed to be there for a bow hunt. I spent my time just getting more people in the outdoors to share that because I just love both the outdoors and sharing those experiences with new people. Also knowing, in the long term, as the U.S. population grows our hunter number percentages decrease and the potential to lose the right to be outdoors and the right to go hunt animals is very real. So I want to make sure that I'm recruiting more people into the outdoors but also teaching them the proper way of doing it. The respectful way, just like we're doing out here. Yes, we shot some animals but we are taking animals that people would normally just shoot and take pictures of because they're inedible. And now, we're going to do a cookout and show people how you can actually eat these animals. They are edible, every single animal is edible. Some taste better than others, obviously, but there's no reason to waste any of it.

Why are we losing hunters Terry? Is it the culture, is it the landscape?

TH: I think it's probably a little bit of everything. One is that life's easy. In the old days people had to go out and hunt to feed the family. Literally, you're losing that. Life is very easy. But also, we're kind of getting bombarded with a message that killing animals is mean and wrong. If you look at all the Disney movies, the Bambis, and all that kind of stuff, our children, from day one, are being led to believe that we don't need to kill animals to eat. We don't need to kill animals to manage them. Humankind has affected the landscape. So you're out here in West Texas 200 years ago, there's probably nobody out here besides the Indians running around. Now, it's inhabited. Now, we've got people out here and species that don't belong out here. So we have to conserve them and a proper way of conservation is through hunting. So to get back to your point of why we're losing them, I think we're losing probably a percentage of the population, because the population is growing and we're not recruiting new people. We may still have the same number of hunters, but we're a smaller percentage every single year, and we're aging out.

It's so important to bring more people in, teach them the fundamentals, the respect, why we're doing it and all the benefits, not just health. I mean, just the benefits of eating pure organic meat that's never been touched by a person. You walk into the store and oh, there's meat. Somebody had to kill that. Unless you're a strict vegan, somewhere along the lines an animal died to feed you. Bringing people closer to the process of what goes into it, why it's there, and why it's important is huge. It seems like there's a bigger movement now of being in tune with where your food comes from. That's probably a good reason for the big influx of newer hunters into the outdoors, especially after COVID. Now we have supply chain issues. We can't get some of the food we thought we could get and we can't get some of the supplies we thought we could get. So a lot of people had a wake up call. I better learn how to have a garden if I have space for a garden. Or I better learn how to put meat in the freezer and feed my family, whether it's fish, meat, chickens or whatever it's going to be because you don't know what's really going to happen next.

“If you look at all the Disney movies, the Bambis, and all that kind of stuff, our children, from day one, are being led to believe that we don’t need to kill animals to eat. We don’t need to kill animals to manage them. Humankind has affected the landscape. So you’re out here in West Texas 200 years ago, there’s probably nobody out here besides the Indians running around. Now, it’s inhabited. Now, we’ve got people out here and species that don’t belong out here. So we have to conserve them and a proper way of conservation is through hunting. So to get back to your point of why we’re losing them, I think we’re losing probably a percentage of the population, because the population is growing and we’re not recruiting new people.”

— MCPO Terry Houin

Terry, you've had an incredible career. Now you're doing some awesome things on the other side of that career and I think it's important. A lot of guys get stuck in this cycle, thinking their best days are behind them. I don't believe that. I don't care how great your career was. How do you see that? Your best days are surely not behind you. Surely you have things to look forward to.

TH: Oh, absolutely. I guess it kind of depends on how you classify it. Yes, my military days are behind me but that's fine. That's all. I knew when I signed up at 18 I wasn't going to be in until I was 100. That's just not how it works. So knowing that's over, that's fine. I don't have to cling to that. Yes, it's a validation when I'm teaching leadership or whatever it's going to be but I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm not in the military anymore. Yes, I'm a SEAL, retired, and I'm always going to be a SEAL, but I'm not out carrying guns or doing stuff like that. Being able to accept that, knowing it's going to happen, and plugging into what my new purpose is by helping veterans and teaching stuff that I know is the next chapter. I know my book has lots of chapters left, family, grandkids and all that other stuff that I can't wait for. So hey, I've got Tim. Tim's another chapter, another friendship, another experience. Mike, Brady and Aaron, it's important for me to keep expanding those chapters, meeting new people, and seeing where this book goes because there are storylines all over the place. Like our storyline, helping with this and hopefully helping some veterans is a whole other piece of the pie that I never even thought about six months ago. And this ranch out here, that's a whole other chapter here to where we as a society, as a group, or a community can benefit other people.

To follow along with Terry and his journey, check him out on Instagram: @terry.houin. A special thanks to Sky Fall Reserve for allowing access to Houin on his hunting trip as well as our friends at Cibolo Creek Ranch.

MCPO Terry Houin (Navy SEALs, OIF, OEF Veteran)

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