Introducing The Debrief: Seven Blood Samples new special forces fiction series

0:03 Welcome, everyone. Today's a special podcast. It's a little different from our normal episode, but today we're introducing our new Special Forces fiction series called The Debrief. Over the years, we've spoken with a lot of Special Forces operators, Green Berets, Rangers, SEALs, Delta, and from Special Forces operators around the world, over 200 in fact. And there's something I keep hearing, often near the end of an interview after the recording has been running a while. It's not the firefights only, which a lot of people like. People can talk about those. It's the moments around them. The decisions made in two or three seconds that someone has carried for years, and the things that happened that never made it into the official report.

0:47 Those moments have stayed with me, folks. So I've started something new, which I've been kind of thinking about and mulling over for over a year. It's a fiction series that I've decided to create called The Debrief. I've done some other ones now. because of my experience in criminal law as well, in criminal psychology, one called Striker at Homes, and the other one's called The Necessary Evil, which is based on moral ambiguity. But this one is called The Debrief.

1:13 Every story is invented. The names, the missions, and the places are all fiction, mind you. But the questions they ask are real. What happens when an operator knows exactly how to accomplish a mission, but isn't sure the mission is right? What happens when the truth about an operation surfaces 17 years later? At the center of the series is Thomas Kessler. He's an Army CID special agent. He's a former infantryman, quiet and methodical and very hard to lie to. His job is to reopen operations that everyone else considers closed. The first story in a three-part series is called Seven Blood Samples. In March 2009, a six-man team raided a compound in Kunar province, Afghanistan. Their target wasn't there. There was a brief firefight. One man was wounded.

1:57 All six came back, and the report was filed. Seventeen years later, though, a lab retests the archived evidence from that night and finds a seventh blood sample. It's American, and it doesn't match anyone on the team. Kessler sits down with the man who led the assault, retired Master Sergeant Daniel Hale. Hale has told the story of the night many times, and his count is pretty consistent and convincing, except for four minutes. Hale can't account for them, and he doesn't know why. I won't say more than that.

2:26 There's no rogue general, no global conspiracy, no lone hero taking down an army. This is about memory and loyalty and reality. The people who make decisions in the dark and the people asked to carry those decisions. I hope you'll like this show. I think Debrief will feel familiar. It takes the realism you hear from real operators every week and ask what happens when the mission is over but the story isn't. And that's what the show will be tackling. A lot of real stories or experiences, I guess, transform into fiction. Seven Blood Samples, again, is three episodes, about ten minutes each. Part one is out today already, so go check it out in the debrief. Part two is tomorrow and part three on Wednesday. So search for

3:07 the debrief or Special Forces Fiction Series wherever you're listening or tap the link in the show notes. And then I'd generally like to hear what you think. Every mission has an official story. This is what they left out.