20 Years at War: A Ranger Regiment Story | Luis Saucedo

**Jack Murphy** (0:01)
Hey guys, welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with our guest tonight, Luis Saucedo. He served in a number of different infantry units, WURSS, and then went to the 75th Ranger Regiment, served in 375, went over to snipers, lots of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and some other interesting stuff too. Before he went over to the SFAB, which was a new unit, a trained and advised unit that we'll get into.
But, Louis, first off, thank you for joining us on the show.

**dee takos** (0:34)
Hey, man.

**Luis Saucedo** (0:34)
Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. I love everything about your books.

**dee takos** (0:39)
Oh, thank you.

**Luis Saucedo** (0:40)
I need to get it. Yeah, awesome. I really like the genre and everything. I know you, I've met Jack Carr a couple of times, and that dude's an awesome guy too, but just how y'all writes, fantastic.

**Jack Murphy** (0:53)
Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that, man.
So let's start at the beginning. If you can tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how that took you into the military.

**Luis Saucedo** (1:07)
Man, so yeah, so that's a funny story. So I grew up to my dad's a cop in Dallas. He's like a 37-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. My mom was a dental hygienist of all things, and kind of middle class. But we had the, I always tell people, it's like we had the, me and my brother had to picture us like growing up, kind of American experience where we went to high school. I played soccer, I played a ton of sports. Me and my brother got into wrestling roughly about the same time, and we did wrestling all through high school. And so that I think, especially the wrestling portion, because you hear a lot about guys, I think I ran into mostly guys in regiment that had, they were all wrestlers, every single one of them. And so it's, I kind of laugh about that, is like I think the same amount of suffering that you did in wrestling kind of translated into suffering in other parts of your life, so you could do it real well. Like when you were, a lot of the times we were running around, not eating, sitting in bags, and wearing trash bags while we're doing everything. So it's like, it was a level of suffering you put yourself through to attain a goal, to just get out and fight on the mat, to get to that wrestling match. And that, I think, really, really translated into the type of suffering that you would do later. Past that, like my dad had had a lot of aspiration, big aspirations for us. He wanted us to be an officer, or one of us to be, he was like, hey, if you're gonna go into the army, I always knew that I was gonna go into the military. And so he had always had big aspirations for, he was like, you're gonna go in the officer, we're gonna try to send you to West Point or Annapolis, or this is, I wanted to be a pilot until I found out I was dyslexic, and that doesn't work real well with pilots.
So I've gotten into all of that, wrestling and everything, kind of knew that my path was gonna be in the military, and then 9-11 happened, and I was a junior in high school when 9-11 happened. So, and everybody, you get the same kind of response from everybody, where they're like, hey, where were you during 9-11? And I can remember exactly where I was, and then the thought process of, okay, now I know I'm going into the military.
I didn't know how long I was going into the military for. I thought I was going to do a four-year stint, and I was going to follow my dad's footsteps and go to the Dallas Police Department. So that's kind of really like the growing up portion that led me into going into the military. Had there not been a war, I probably wouldn't have stayed as long as I did. But definitely the way my father and my mother raised us, we were Americans. We lived in a place called Little Mexico for a little while, and then we moved to Carrollton. And my dad was always like, you're not a Mexican. Don't listen to what everybody says. You're not Mexican, you're an American. So me and my brother pretty much raised on that, took that into heart. And then we just liked doing the hard stuff. I had the risk factor that was always there, I think with all guys that do what we do.