Ep. 248 | George Mills | MARSOC JTAC, 4th ANGLICO, Infantryman

George Mills (0:00)

I do miss me some San Diego, man. I consider it my alma mater. I went to TACP School there at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, so I definitely miss it.

Justin Cramer (0:10)

I went to TACP School on the East Coast. It's kind of crazy how on the East Coast... Oh, I remember, yeah, we spoke about that.

Well, a little bit, yeah, we talked a little bit about it. It's kind of crazy how on the East Coast, you get no live munitions, really. You get guns, obviously, and then you get the, what's the Mark 76, like dumb bombs and stuff like that, the little tiny trainers. But on the West Coast, you guys get... Do you guys go to San Clemente or just out to 29 Palms?

George Mills (0:33)

I did mine at OP Left at 29 Palms, and I'll tell you, for my final check ride, dude, like my final section, it was a Type 1 Control, low altitude tactics with a pump, right? And I had a section of Harriers, and Harriers are really freaking hard to see, dude, especially that gray little tiny plane, and it was just a bright clear day. But they were loaded with Mark 77 fire bombs for my final control. We had live artillery, yeah, it was a Sea Admission, like suppression of enemy air defenses. So we got the RD cooking on the C2 node in the battery, right? And you know, or the SAM site, whatever, whatever it is, we were simulating, but it was live fire artillery.

And then simultaneously, we had the Harriers come in and bomb the C2 node that was there. So I'm sitting here waiting to see like some kind of Vietnam, you know, of a big fireball. And it was just, it was so, so yeah, man, there was no big red fire, like no big black, it was just dark smoke. But I was told that, you know, hey, look, you know, when I was in JTAC school, they were like, you know, we don't, the United States doesn't inventory napalm anymore, just so you guys know that, like politically, right? We, we carry a different type of essentially napalm now called fire bombs, but it burns hotter and it sticks better.

So yeah, we don't have napalm. Yeah, we don't have napalm, but what we do have is better than napalm ever thought about being.

Justin Cramer (2:03)

Which I knew it was a new formula, but I've never employed it. I didn't. You might be the first person I know that has employed it.

George Mills (2:11)

Yeah, dude, it was pure Mark 77s. I got luckier than, luckier than heck. And when they checked in with that ordinance, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. This is so rad. The problem though, dude, I got, you know how you get a yellow page when you're being, when you have your evaluator over the shoulder before you become a JTAC. And I'm this close, man. It's my final, final, final control, my final checkride control.

So I can't see the, I can't see the harriers, but I can hear them and I know to look ahead of the noise, right? So I'm trying to trace my, with my finger, like, okay, got it, got it, got it. And I didn't have it, man. And at that time, my vision was, like, 20, 25, 20, 30 It was, I had LASIK a couple of times, I'll have to explain that one to you.

But the guy who was over the shouldering me, you know, he knew, he's like, yeah, he's not, he's not tracking on these aircraft, dude.

Justin Cramer (3:04)

He's like, you're actually over there, what are you talking about?

George Mills (3:06)

So he just taps me on the shoulder, he's like, hey, abort. I'm like, okay, you know, whatever flight name, abort, abort, abort.

So he's like, all right, man, you got enough gas, set it up again and run it. He's like, but you need to assess the nose geometry of that aircraft or your Type 1 control. He's like, otherwise, man, you know, I don't know what to tell you.

Justin Cramer (3:24)

Yeah. It's like, okay.

Good on him though, man, you know, for not, not just going, okay, fuck it. You know, it's safe. Like even if he saw it and was like, that's safe, even if he doesn't, you know, good on him for making you do it because some people will, there's nothing worse than getting like an evaluation or something from somebody that's afraid to like tell you, you fucked up. You know, it's like, tell me I'm doing something wrong. Don't let me just continue down the road of fucking things up. You know, because then at the end, I feel the same way, man. Especially in this job, that kind of job, you have to be like blunt with people and be like, hey, listen, man, you messed this up. You got to do this to fix it. And then if they don't fix it, they don't correct how they're doing it, then this isn't the job for you.