Army Special Mission Unit Operator | Erick Miyares (throwback ep)

David Parke (0:00)

Tonight, we are here with a special guest, Erick Miyares. He served as a Army Special Mission Unit Operator.

Just as a way of introduction, I'm just going to tell a little bit of a funny anecdote myself about when I was a young Ranger, and we went out to the border of Pakistan in 2004 And when we got out there, there was already an American where we were there to set up camp, up on a hilltop, out there by himself, an American with an Afghan interpreter. And they're looking down at the border control point with Pakistan. And when we'd go up there to bring him some food and water, this dude had a big beard. He was wearing, I think, blue jeans and maybe a camo top, had all these hip necklaces on and everything. We were just, as young Rangers were looking at this guy, like, who is this dude, what in the world is he doing up here? And he was super chill, like, hang loose, my dude. But it was clear that he had been left out in the sun a little bit too long. It was like, hey, maybe this guy needs to be brought back to chill out in the FOB and watch some DVDs, like a normal soldier deployed to Afghanistan. But I always tell that funny little anecdote there to allude to the fact that JSOC has these operators who are deployed sometimes in singleton missions in highly compartmentalized operations. And even within the military, even in the special operations community, oftentimes very little, if anything, is known about those guys or what they do.

So I'm very pleased to have Erick on the show tonight and just pull back the curtain just a little bit and tell Americans about what it is that some of these guys in these programs do. So Erick, thank you for joining us tonight.

Jack Murphy (1:49)

Absolutely. Hey, it's fun. I'm excited to be here.

You guys are great. I love watching your shows. I love getting into the spec ops and the intel side of this world. So thank you very much for having me.

David Parke (2:03)

Yeah, absolutely, man. And could you start off with telling us, as we ask all of our guests about their origin story, about your origins growing up in Miami as a kid and the path that eventually took you, well, first into the Marine Corps, right?

Jack Murphy (2:17)

Yeah, absolutely. So I came to America, if you would, in my mom's belly. My mom is pregnant and her, my grandmother, grandfather and her siblings left in, I want to say it was May of 1971 They were able to catch essentially the last flight, one of the last flights that was leaving Cuba into the US. So very fortunate that we got that plan and that we got welcome to the United States with open arms. Since essentially like most Cubans, either go to Hialeah, Miami or they head up north, I want to say it's like New Jersey somewhere. But we ended up obviously in the Hialeah area. So born and raised there until I was 18 Essentially, I went to private school, which was a bilingual Cuban-American school. So my upbringing was all this sort of that dual US-Cuban heritage, speaking Spanish in the streets of Hialeah.

Then just to mention raised by essentially was my stepdad. My mom never married, but for our intensive personal column, Mr. Clean, he raised me and instilled this level of patriotism and this vision of wanting to do this unique sort of cloak and dagger type work to keep it simple with what he had done in sort of the Bay of Pigs aspects of it.

And so in 1991 on the year earlier, I joined the Marine Corps. Originally, it was supposed to be active duty to go into infantry. I think I also had seen that force recon video, and that's what I wanted to do. But I wanted to leave Hialeah or I would have ended up either in jail or in trouble or and so I went off into the Marine Corps to do infantry. So I'll go ahead and stop there.

David Parke (4:15)

Well, you spent quite a bit of time in the Marines too. Did you serve as a scout sniper if I recall correctly?

Jack Murphy (4:22)

Yeah. So I ended up doing just shy of six years, which I'll cover for why I didn't finish that full contract later on as we talked to the reasons going into the Army.

So I got finagled by my recruiter, which 29 years later, I've learned from other folks that I've talked to that they also got host by their recruiters. So my contract ended up being in the reserves with the promise that once I came back from basic training or from school of infantry or my trade that I would then go on active duty. So for those five and a half years, I spent just about every day trying to get back get onto active duty or do as much active duty schools or floats or whatever I could be part of in order to kind of earn a spot to be able to bring the Marine Corps to bring me back on. And so essentially, I was a tow gunner in Miami, which I didn't even know we had that capability. Interestingly, those guys had just came back from the Gulf War. So my first checking in was to being a tow gunner, which the highlight was I did get to shoot a Hialeah kid who got to shoot a tow missile. That was really cool.