Inside Delta Force: Afghanistan, Syria & the War on ISIS | Brent Tucker (throwback ep)

**Jack Murphy** (0:01)
Hey guys, welcome to Episode 235 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. I'm a... Is it over here? Oh, sorry guys, my phone was on, apologies.
So, Episode 235 of The Team House, we're here with our guest tonight, Brent Tucker. I'm Jack Murphy, here with David Park. Brent, again, thank you for being on the show tonight. Really appreciate you joining us on a Friday evening.

**Brent Tucker** (0:30)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I truly do appreciate it.

**Jack Murphy** (0:32)
So again, because I got a little distracted in the beginning, Brent is a 20-year veteran of Army Special Operations. He served in 20th Special Forces Group, and then he served in Delta Force, deploying to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Today, he runs the First Responder Coffee Company, and he's also the co-host of The Anti-Hero Podcast. We're really happy to have you here today, Brent, and I'll start it off from the top, asking the same question I ask all of our guests about their origin story. If you could tell us a little bit about where you grew up, what your upbringing was like, and how that took you on a path towards the military.

**Brent Tucker** (1:10)
Yeah. I grew up in a small town in Florida, Sanford, Florida, working in a family business. We own Tucker's Farm and Garden Center that my grandfather started.
I was one of the few people who didn't want to leave my small town. I just wanted to work in the family business. I feel like my path in life was already set, and I was more than happy to go down that path. I definitely wasn't an adrenaline junkie as a kid. I was a pretty quiet kid. So definitely not someone you would have pegged for anything in the special operations realm, or even leaving town at any point.

**Jack Murphy** (1:57)
So how did that happen? I mean, if you were on this track of going on, taking over the family business.

**Brent Tucker** (2:04)
Yeah. So the September 11th happened. I mean, it's crazy. September 10th, I'm 20 years old, still chugging down that same path that I was on as a little kid. September 11th happened and it changed. It changed my world the same way it changed a lot of people's world.
I knew I wanted to do something. I made a decision that day that I would make time and time again throughout my military career when I had to come to make a big decision, which was I didn't want to live a life with regrets. I didn't want to be 70 years old looking back and said, man, when I was 20, our country got attacked, almost 3,000 people died, and I felt like I should have done something, but I just played it safe and stayed in my small town. That honestly is the, there's the genesis right there, that line of thinking started it. I raised my hand. It took me till September 27th to actually sign the paperwork.
I only meant to do a four-year stint and come right back to my small town. As the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I couldn't have been any more wrong, and I continued to be wrong about my career as it progressed.

**Jack Murphy** (3:37)
What did you enlist as, as far as your MOS? What was your plan going into the military? The one that God laughed at, of course.

**Brent Tucker** (3:45)
Yeah. When I knew nothing about the military, and I mean, well, next to nothing. My dad would take me to air shows. My dad wanted to be a fighter pilot. So bad, I guess, when he was in his late teens, then eyesight got him, and so he didn't get a chance to chase that dream. So I definitely grew up in a military-friendly family. We watched war movies. My dad made us watch all the Vietnam documentaries, and I loved it. So we were a military-friendly family, but no one was talking about joining, and I had no idea what I was going to join. So a good friend of mine that I went to high school with, Jessica Butters, her dad, all I knew is that he was in the military. I knew nothing more than that. Come to find out, he was a CW-4 at a National Guard unit, a National Guard Air Defense Artillery unit out of Daytona Beach. So he was the first, he was the only person I knew, so I went to him and said, hey, you know, a country got attacked, I want to do something about it. So I came to him. He gave me pretty good advice. He was like, hey, I'm in the National Guard.