Mr. Rich: An Architect's Journey from the 2008 Recession to Working in Afghanistan

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SPEAKER_00: And about two or three weeks later, my sergeant says, Rich, can you drive your little pickup out to the airfield?

We got some stuff for you to pick up.

And the soldier comes walking out of the back of the plane saying, Are you Mr.

Rich?

And I go, Yeah.

He goes, compliments of the Colonel.

And there were three cases of energy drinks.

SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Grip, Great and Great.

I'm out, and I'm excited to welcome you into our kind of points where your glass will never be anything other than fast full.

Now that's fine from the real top.

Oh man, hopefully, nothing less than spectacular.

Today's episode is coming out right after the conclusion of the Thanksgiving holiday.

Hopefully, you are feeling fat and happy.

And if you're returning to normal life, well, welcome back to reality.

But thankfully, today we are back again after the Thanksgiving break here to bring you another amazing conversation had with just another ordinary person but with anything but ordinary story.

Today I'm in the studio with Rich Walton.

Rich back in 2008 suffered the consequences of the 2008 recession.

He was an architect in the Pacific Northwest and he was faced with the dilemma like so many people.

What do I do?

How do I feed my family?

How do I provide an income?

And so Rich would find himself doing something he never dreamed he would do before.

And that was working in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor.

The experience I had while working in Afghanistan was something that is truly Rich's life from that point forward.

He had no clue what he was in for when he signed up for this assignment.

And yet he found great pleasure in doing his work, in being an architect, hoping to rebuild Afghanistan, building schools, doing stuff for both the US Army and Afghan army.

His story is truly incredible.

It's really exciting, funny, kind of scary, but uh it all just equals out to be this incredible uh uh story time with Rich as we get to learn about what it was like to not only be an American uh in a foreign country, uh, but to be working in a foreign country during wartime.

Before I bring you that interview with Rich Walton, I do want to remind you, we are still being sponsored by Naked Warrior Recovery, a leader in the highest quality THRC-free CBD products on the market.

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With that said, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Rich Walton as we catch up on his incredible story of working in Afghanistan as a private contract.

Rich, welcome to the podcast.

I'm so excited to have you here today.

SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.

I appreciate you taking the time to uh listen to my story and to find out about what's going on in I did in Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.

Wonderful.

Well, well, Rich, I I want to dive right into your story and in and we can kind of you know go back and forth and fill in the gaps and such, but but right off the bat, I I I have to ask the the most uh kind of obvious question in my mind is what compelled you to go to Afghanistan?

SPEAKER_00: Well, it was back in uh 2008.

If you kind of remember that, that was when we had a recession.

And at that time, I had my own architectural design business, and I had about 10 guys and girls working for me at the time, mostly doing residential uh architecture, but every once in a while a small uh motel or a little building like that out here in the Pacific Northwest.

And so when that recession started, I always kid people that uh, you know, I talked to about it.

I says, it's a recession when your neighbor's out of work, it's a depression when you're out of work.

I'd had my business for over 30 years, you know, and um actually had my middle son working for me, who had just graduated from Portland State College here in Portland area.

And all of a sudden, all of my uh contractors started going broke.

Some of them decided it was a time for them to get out and and uh retire.

And so the amount of work available just started dwindling really fast just before my eyes.

And I'd lived through the recession in 1980, which goes back a ways, and my wife and I said, well, we'll just stick it out and you know, come out the other side just like we did in 1980.

Well, this time in 2008, it was much more extreme.

And so as things got less and less and less, my wife's a stay-at-home mom.

You know, we had to try to do something.

And so I started trying to pick up, see if I could pick up side jobs, going to Costco and all these other places, just trying to keep my business going as I gradually laid off people.

And when I finally had to lay off my son, that's when it really just kind of got me down and out, just kind of kicked me in the teeth.

And and we just said, we have to do something at that time.

So my wife happened to have a friend of hers that was back east on the east coast who had a contracting business in Iraq.

And so I thought, well, I'll talk to him.

I have done work where I've sent my drawings through AutoCAD over the internet to uh Thailand and had them work on it and they'd send it back to me, you know, and I thought that was cool and everything.

So we went back there to talk to this gentleman about uh me doing architectural work for him, but I had no idea that his idea of me working for him was to actually be boots on the ground over there in that part of the world.

So that's how the whole thing started to evolve on that.

It was nothing that I ever planned or thought about.

I never thought about going to Afghanistan.

You know, I'd seen it on the news since you know 9-11, but really hadn't paid a whole lot of attention from it, just from just what I'd seen on the newscasts.

And never being in the military, this was you know completely out of uh character for me to do something like this.

But, you know, times got desperate.

And uh make it short, uh I all of a sudden after meeting with him, he looked over at my wife when we were back there and he went over and said, Is that your wife?

And I said, Yes.

And so he walked over to her and said, Would you mind if your husband went to Afghanistan?

And she goes, No, sure, go right ahead.

And so that's how it all began.

He said, Well, let me get back to you.

And within uh a few weeks, we got a phone, I got an email actually, in the early in the morning here, because he's on the east coast.

Of course, I'm here on the west coast, and it said, Okay, you're hired.

You got two weeks to close down your business and get on a plane and head for Baghdad.

And I came in, woke my wife up, and said, I got the job, but look at this, I only have two weeks.

And I had no idea what to do, how to do it.

Do I need shots?

Do I need medical?

You know, what clothes do I take?

You know, how do I even prepare for this?

Contacted him back and I says, What actually is my job over there?

And he says, I don't know.

You'll make it up as we go along, okay?

And so with$300 in my pocket and a plane ticket to Baghdad, because that's where their headquarters were at the time, I hopped on a plane and headed for the Middle East all by myself with no clue of what I was going to do.

So that's kind of how it all started.

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, wow.

I mean, it's it's exhilarating, it's exciting, it's something that you do, but were you scared at the same time?

SPEAKER_00: Sure.

I mean, when I got to Atlanta, Georgia, it was a direct flight from Portland to Atlanta.

I was sitting there and all of a sudden going, what am I doing?

And so I called my wife and I says, Is this something we really want to be doing?

And she goes, Well, others have done it, and if you don't like it, then just come home.

But I said, But it's a war zone, you know, it's not like I'm going to LA or or uh, you know, New York or something, you know.

And yeah, it was, it was, it was totally top.

I was nervous.

I had no idea.

I had the uh advantage of I had three sons, I have three sons, and all three of them were in the military.

Two at the time were still in.

One was in the Navy and and one was in uh in the U.S.

Army.

So they kind of gave me some advice on what clothes and stuff to wear.

But yeah, I was totally, you know, didn't know you know what was going on.

And so especially when I landed in Dubai and looked around and knew nobody, I'm just going like, whoa, man, am I out of my element here?

You know, and I had to find my own way to a hotel.

And so the adventure just started from that point on where I just had to make it up as I went along.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, that is just that's insane.

Now, so in the capacity that you went to Afghanistan, so working as a civilian contractor, so was this though, I mean, you know, being an architect, you were still going to be like working with the US Army in Afghanistan?

SPEAKER_00: Well, Kevin, that's what I kind of thought.

But their idea of working with the army was different than mine.

I had friends of mine, of course, obviously, that have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq and lived on these big military bases, right?

Well, when I showed up at the airport in Afghanistan, I had an Afghan general there meet me with two Lebanese bodyguards that soon became my personal security.

And we hopped in a car and drove to a house that had like about a about an eight-foot concrete little wall around it, and it had a nice little grassyard that was probably like 10 by 20, you know.

I said, Where's the base?

They go, Oh, that that's down way down the road.

This is this is where you're gonna be living.

And I said, Are you kidding, machine?

Uh so uh, and and these two Lebanese guys, you know, they handed me a when we got in the car, they handed me a bulletproof vest to put on, which I had no idea how to put it on.

And uh I'd been in Iraq, you know, a couple weeks before, so I'd had kind of a little minor exposure to to this, but this was nothing that I totally was going to be, you know, expecting, you know.

And so when I emailed home, I said, Well, I'm not on a military base, I'm uh actually living in a house where they have no street signs, they have no identification on the outside or anything like that.

So, and then the two Christian Lebanese, the reason I mentioned Christian Lebanese because they have both Christian and Moslems in Lebanon, but they were my security detail.

And uh that was it.

SPEAKER_02: Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

That is just totally insane.

So, so talk to me then about I mean, from from that point forward, I mean, what kind of give me like broad spectrum what you started doing?

And then I mean, I'm just so there's so many questions about just how this whole experience happened.

And but but I guess I guess let me preface all of this by asking, what year was this and what was the the status of like the war in Afghanistan going on at this point?

SPEAKER_00: This was 2008, so stuff was going, you know, full blown, you know, on that time.

You know, the war was, you know, all around us.

I could hear rockets and mortars going off all throughout the city.

The Taliban at the time were driving around the city uh in these little pickups, you know, shooting their rockets and their guns at different buildings.

You know, I covered quite a bit of this stuff in my book, but you know, I had where my Lebanese guys would say I'd hear an explosion, and I'd go, what was that?

And they said, Well, it was a mortar or it was a, you know, a grenade or different things like that.

And I was just totally dumbfounded by, you know, and I guess shell-shocked about what was going on.

I had a cleaning lady and uh a cook that came to the house every day that helped prepare meals and clean up, but they didn't speak English.

And of course, I didn't speak the two major languages over in Afghanistan are Pashtu and Dari.

So everything I had was just from what the Lebanese were kind of training me.

And of course, I, you know, I was like a fish out of water, where they said, You have no military, and I said, No experience, no, I have none of that.

And uh, so it was just like from day one, how do I do this?

You know, I had my company back in Baghdad that was kind of giving me direction.

But basically what I did was I would try to bid on contracts that the US government was issuing, and I would meet with the local Afghan contractors to try to get them to get me uh prices so that we could come up with a bid to say, like build a school or a road or a or a building or something like that.

SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's very interesting.

So now what was the mission that you were there to do?

Was it any type of infrastructure they're they're wanting you to work on building?

You know, what was the details for that?

SPEAKER_00: Typically, Kevin, a majority of it was where I would search the websites with the Army Corps of Engineers at the time was spearheading a lot of the construction over there that I would be bidding on.

So I would look online and see projects that were in, you know, maybe you know, smaller ones that were in our ability to do.

So it would be like working on military bases, it would be working out in the local uh area.

But that's where the real difficulty came in because there is no phone book over there.

There is no way to know who you know supplies concrete, who supplies wood, who supplies different materials.

So I actually had to have my Lebanese drive me around the city and just start knocking on doors, going, it looks like you're a concrete plant.

You know, how much do you sell your concrete for?

And do you go to these areas?

That's the other thing you had to keep in mind is that I was in the city uh capital of Kabul at the time.

And for all state purposes, that was probably, you know, one of the safer places to be.

Well, some of these projects were out in other areas where the people in Kabul would not even go, you know, where they were controlled, you know, mostly by the Taliban and the risk was there.

And that's when I really started to learn that Afghanistan was a tribal society.

And so you would have different people from different tribes saying, I'm not going down to that area because my tribe isn't down there.

And so this whole scenario of Afghanistan being a unified country, I realized it was more of a you know a tribal society with everybody, the different tribes trying to get along the best they can, but realizing that each one had their own agenda on what was, you know, they wanted out of the whole uh scenario.

So, and I would meet with the different contractors, they would come to my house and you know, talk to me about different things.

And I had one of my uh contractors, Afghan contractors, one of the first days there, he was an educated gentleman, he graduated from the university there, and he told me, Mr.

Rich, because that's what I went by.

A lot of the people there only have one name.

And maybe we'll get into this a little bit more.

But I used to tell people that I sometimes I felt I was back in biblical times.

And so my first name is Rich, my last name is Walton.

So they all began calling me Mr.

Rich.

And then, of course, since I was from America, they just assumed that I was rich, so it all kind of played into each other, you know, that you know, this is Mr.

Rich.

And he told me, he says, there's four things I want you to remember.

He says, uh, you know, even me.

He says, uh Afghans will lie to you, cheat you, try to steal from you, and possibly try to kill you.

He says, you base all your decisions upon those four things, and you should do okay in Afghanistan.

Of course, I'm just sitting there with my mouth open, you know, you know, this is what I have to deal with now.

And so, and then the other thing he always said was, Do you have enough guns?

I go, What?

He said, Do you have guns?

Because if you don't have enough guns, we'll bring you some more guns.

And I thought, wow, this is nothing that I would have in a general business meeting in you know in the United States.

So uh it was just one, you know, shock after another.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Well, that kind of brings me to a question that I I wanted to ask you when you talk about, you know, here you are, this American over there trying to organize job sites and working with you know concrete plants and stuff.

What was the interaction you had?

How were you treated?

Was it a welcoming thing to work with you or not when you're you know approaching these you know companies and people there in Afghanistan?

SPEAKER_00: They were um really welcoming.

Of course, you know, they wanted, you know, to get the job and get paid on something like that.

But no, they were all real helpful to me.

Going back to those four basic principles, though, I had one day where I had several contractors come to meet with me and they handed me, of course, their brochure.

And I realized that after two of them, it was exactly the same brochure with the same photos of the same equipment, everything exactly the same, except just the title on the uh brochure was their company name.

And so when the third contractor showed up and handed me the same exact brochure, I pulled out the other two and I go, Well, I've already got these two.

And I said, Yours is exactly the same, you know, with just a different name on it.

And he goes, Oh no, Mr.

Rich, mine is the real one, you know?

And so I began to realize, you know, that uh, you know, things are done a little bit differently over there.

But as far as meeting with all the people, they were all real cordial, friendly, kind.

You just had to learn that the way that they were doing things.

And and that was the biggest thing, Kevin, for me was this huge, huge cultural and uh religious learning curve that you know I had no preparation for, had no courses that I took on to it.

Of course, I had uh courses in architecture that helped me out down the road tremendously.

That was about Alexander the Great and his influence and everything over in Afghanistan and the Brits and the Germans and the Russians and the Persians and all that type of thing that I had to study in architecture school.

But it was just a complete, you know, eye-opening for this type of thing that was going on and how business was done.

But yeah, to answer your questions, they were great to deal with.

You just had to be cautious of what they did.

And I actually had one businessman tell me, Mr.

Rich, it's your responsibility to decide if I'm lying to you or not.

It's not my fault.

It's your fault if you don't figure that out.

And I went, whoa.

Wow.

That's not generally how I do business in America.

But, you know, that was another wake-up call.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

Oh my gosh.

So so speak to me a little bit more about what you you kind of preference about some of these cultural differences and and how that impacted just not only doing business, you know, trying to do your job there, but just living.

SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the first things that happened, it was the the second night I was there, I had an Afghan general show up there who soon became you know good friends with me.

But at the time, he was just talking to.

Me about working with me on helping find, you know, contractors, because how do I find contractors over there?

You know, I had to find somebody that was, you know, fairly well reliable that I could talk to.

And I was sitting there with my legs crossed and the bottom of my foot pointing towards him.

And my two Christian Lebanese guys kept pointing at me, you know, kind of erratically, like, what's with your foot?

You know?

And so finally they came over and said, Put your foot down.

You're being really impolite by pointing the sole of your foot at the general.

And I went, Oh, wow.

Okay.

I I didn't I didn't know that.

You know?

So that was kind of a first reaction.

The next day I had an Afghan show up, and he told me that the company I was working for owned him$35,000 because the guy that was in the position before me had never paid him.

So that became a real, you know, exciting moment when he's, you know, was demanding the money and I had no idea.

And so he said, basically, you know, I want this money by the end of the week, or or else.

And so as I walked in the gate, I looked out in the street, and here was probably about 50 Afghans, all with AK-47 rifles and stuff that were part of his bodyguard contingency out there.

And so to make a long story short, we ended up, you know, getting him the money, and and that was all you know taken care of.

But, you know, just everything that is is different over there that you can imagine.

I I felt very fortunate that I came out the other end of it because certainly things could have gone sideways on a lot of uh situations over there.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.

How long did you end up staying over there for?

SPEAKER_00: Okay, for this first time over there, I was over there for about three and a half, four months.

And that was living in the house there.

SPEAKER_01: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: And one of the first things I realized was when we would go out to different job sites, we would ride out in a car, and I would see military all around me out on the streets of Kabul, you know, in the big militarized vehicles with armor and stuff like that.

And we're driving around in a little car.

And so they said, Well, we need to make you fit in, so you need to grow a beard.

And I said, Oh, okay, but you know, my skin's kind of you know light-complexed.

I'm from Scandinavian descent.

My grandfather immigrated from Sweden, and I have blue eyes.

And all of a sudden I remembered from my architectural studies that there was a group in uh northern Afghanistan in a place called Nuristan that were descendants of Alexander the Great.

And I mentioned to them, I said, Is there still that group up there?

And they said, Yes, and they look just like you.

So a lot of times they would dress me up in the different kinds of outfits that they would wear up there in Nuristan, and they would try to pass me off as a Nuristani.

They'd say, just don't talk as we drove down through different parts of traffic and would be challenged by the police, you know, and they'd want to look in the car and they'd see me sitting in the back seat because kidnapping was a huge issue during those times, also, you know, where they'd kidnap you and want ransom money, and didn't matter if they were police or not.

But so then I became, you know, Mr.

Rich, the neurostani.

But what really impacted me a lot was I had a couple people that, you know, my cook and my cleaning lady that lived in the house came to the house to work with me, and that's where I really began to realize what the culture was about with those different individuals.

And realizing that I was told 80% of the people in Afghanistan can't read or write.

So there became the other challenging uh issue, especially when I got out to job sites with the workers and stuff.

You know, how do you explain to somebody how to do something, let alone in a different language, if they cannot read or write?

SPEAKER_02: It's almost like truly going back in time.

SPEAKER_00: It was, and that's what I would tell people.

And and one time I they thought I maybe uh my bodyguards thought I'd been in the sun too long because I started laughing.

And I go, it is just like biblical times.

I says, all these different people I'm meeting with have one name.

They don't know what day they were born on, they don't know how old they are.

I mean, kind of approximately.

And I said, in the Bible, nobody has a last name.

And that's what I was laughing about.

So there's David, Saul, and you know, all the different people in the Bible, Moses, none of them have last names.

So that I started laughing to myself.

I am back in biblical times, especially when you get out of the capital city.

You know, there's nomads running all around out there with their sheep and their uh goat herds, you know, just like 2,000, 3,000 years ago.

And once you left the big cities, uh and and and later on, I ended up staying in bases and villages that were underneath the shadow of some of Alexander the Great's castles that were built in 300 BC, still standing there.

SPEAKER_02: Wow.

Wow, how fascinating.

How fast.

So you said that the first time that you were there, you're only there for for roughly like four months, and so so you would end up though going back more times.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I ended up going back a final time for for four years.

That was a that was a different kind of situation there with with that, in that uh I came home and tried to get my business going again.

And uh, you know, it was still recession type of times.

And and so then another opportunity came up for me to go back, this time working for the U.S.

government.

So I kind of flipped to the other side where before I was the contractor out doing the trying to do the work.

And this time now I was the overseer with the uh U.S.

government, overseeing the projects that were being done to make sure that you know things are being built the way they were.

And of course, in Afghanistan, that's a whole thing in itself, you know.

So then I went back for the next four years and I spent two years working with the uh uh U.S.

Air Force in their engineering department, which was called uh the 577th, and their nickname for it is prime beef.

And then I spent the next two years with what was my dream job.

I would still be doing it today if they needed me over there.

It was called the PRT, and it was called the Provincial Reconstruction Team, and that's where I really got out into the villages and the uh locals and got to you know really interact with them much more than I did when I was, you know, attached to a regular military air force unit.

So I spent two years doing that, where actually I don't want to get ahead of myself, but when I joined them, I ended up traveling all around Afghanistan, basically with a backpack and a sleeping bag and hopscotching all around the country working on projects.

And uh it was just awesome, you know.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Now, now tell me, I'm curious why why was that so appealing and so memorable for you?

SPEAKER_00: I think because I felt like I was making a difference.

I had basically kind of two missions, Kevin, with that.

I when I worked for both those organizations, both with the Air Force and with the PRT, I helped with building US facilities and buildings, you know, like small camps, tents, small buildings, that type of thing.

And then also on the reverse side of it, I was out actually building schools.

And you got to keep in mind that a school for them might be, you know, 25 feet by 50 feet, you know, because it's in a village made of brick.

I mean, it could have several functions, but for them it was a school.

And I had the opportunity to build a few girls' schools, which in Afghanistan with the Taliban, they did not want girls educated over the age of eight years old.

And so that became, you know, really important to me to be able to do those.

And then one of my final projects over there, kind of leapfrogging way ahead, is that I got to work on the uh University of Harat, which is over on the Iranian border, women's dorm, which was a huge facility over there for allowing girls to be able to go to college and stay there locally in a safe environment.

Now, I don't know today if those are even being used or been repurposed for something else with you know with the political situation over there now.

But at that time, even in the Harat, my interpreters told me that there was a$500 bounty on me for you know anybody building girls' schools.

And so I kind of laughed at that amount of moment.

But yeah, so and then, you know, I couldn't have planned anything that I did over there, Kevin.

It was probably the most unpredictable experience I ever had and an adventure that was like a movie, an ongoing movie.

I had one time where I was sitting in my in my little office, and uh this is when I was working with the Air Force, and a colonel came in.

He says, Do you know how to draw some drawings?

Anyone in here know how to draw drawings?

And the sergeant at the front door said, Yeah, old Mr.

Richard's back there.

And at that time I was 58.

And so I had this gray beard.

And uh he comes back there and he goes, I hear you can draw.

And I go, Yeah, I can draw.

I said, Let me send it up to the headquarters, you know, for the engineers and architects to do it, because I was basically doing construction management at the time.

And he says, No, I need it right now.

Okay.

And I said, we just had a base overrun uh outpost, and we got to get the stuff up there and refortify and put the buildings back up and everything like that.

And I said, Okay, what do you need?

He says, four buildings.

I said, Okay, I can draw those up on AutoCAD and you know get you copies of it.

And uh I said, when would you like it by?

And he goes, tomorrow.

I go, four buildings by tomorrow.

Now, granted, they were simple buildings, they're wood-structured buildings.

He says, But I have to have all the material not be over eight feet in length because we have to put it on the helicopters and fly it up there on top of the mountain to uh construct everything.

And I said, Well, Colonel, I'll give it my best shot.

So at that time I was drinking coffee, and they had uh, for any of your listeners that uh been deployed, it was an energy drink called Rip It.

I think they still sell it at Dollar Tree or General General Store.

It's a horrible energy drink.

But so I was drinking those thinking I was gonna give myself a heart attack by pulling all night or doing these drawings.

And so the next day he comes in, and I'm just you know, literally, if you stuck my hands out, he'd look like I was playing the piano.

They were shaking so bad from being up all night long.

And he says, Oh, awesome, I got it.

Okay, we'll go.

I said, But unfortunately, I uh burnt through all my energy drinks, you know, and he says, Oh, that's too bad, you know, and he left.

And about two or three weeks later, my sergeant says, Rich, can you drive your little pickup out to the airfield?

We got some stuff for you to pick up.

And so, just like right out of the movies, here comes this big giant C-130 with the four engines, you know, coming down, landing.

And I walk out there and the tailgate drops down, and the soldier comes walking out of the back of the plane saying, Are you Mr.

Rich?

And I go, Yeah, he goes, Compliments of the colonel.

And it was three cases of energy drinks.

And so I don't know where they came from or where, you know, how that worked out, but uh I just thought, wow, this is uh this this I can't make this stuff up, you know.

And so when I drove back to the uh to my little office, my tents on this base, the particular one we were on, you know, the sergeant and a couple of the military guys were rolling over laughing because they knew what was up and they saw that I had these energy drinks and everything like that.

But uh so that's the way it works.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.

Oh my gosh, that is too funny.

But but how cool, and and and I guess what what's kind of neat about it when you think about the irony of the situation is here you are, you're over in this this country, this afternoon you know, uh almost beyond third world country and war zone on a you know army base.

Yeah, here you are, you know, you can still have some humor, still this relationship among you know co-workers and generals and stuff, you know, of doing something like that is is that's just pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, going back to the when I lived in Kabul, the lady that was my planning lady there, she didn't speak any English.

And of course, she her husband was killed by the Taliban, and she had to come to our house in her burqa.

You know, those are those are those all blue, you know, outfits they wear, so you can't see anybody and see who they are.

You know, she was not supposed to be working, but how was she going to you know feed her her family without working?

So she would come and clean up.

And so here's a typical naivety on my part.

So I happen to be at a base, and I went into the store and I found this cleaning brush, you know, and I thought, well, hey, this would be great for her to be able to clean, you know, my toilets and different things like that, right?

And so I gave her the brush and I had my interpreter up in that house.

There was the two Christian bodyguards, uh, Lebanese bodyguards, and then I had an interpreter that was a young gentleman that would live with me during the week, and then on the weekend he would go home to be with his family.

But you know, he went everywhere with me to you know be able to interpret for me.

So I thought, okay, explain to her that this is a cleaning brush for the toilet.

Well, so he did.

So one day, and I was always sick over there, Kevin, for a long time.

My wife was sending me cases of Imodium.

I mean, I was, you know, had all kinds of dysentery and diarrhea and stuff like that, just from you know, the water and the food and different things like that.

And so I come by the uh bathroom, and here's Armina cleaning, and she's just coming and singing to herself, and I kind of watched her and she took the cleaning brush and she wished it around in the toilet and did that.

And I go, Oh, good.

She she kind of got the idea what it was like.

Well, without rinsing it out, she went over and she cleaned the mirror.

And and then she went over to the cup that had my toothbrush in it.

Yes, and she pulled out my toothbrush and cleaned out the cup, and then carefully took the brush and cleaned off my brussels on my toothbrush.

And uh I thought, wow, you know, there's a little bit of a cultural gap here.

And so, you know, I couldn't get upset.

You know, when I went and told my interpreter and my my bodyguard, they were like upset.

Well, we're gonna tell, you know, when I said, no, no.

I said, she doesn't know, you know, it's my fault for not understanding, you know, what is common knowledge and common sense to us in America is is foreign to them.

And if I can just tell you one other quick little story about the cook, I saw him in there one day scrubbing the floor with this rag.

I came back a little bit later, and he had that same rag sitting on top of the rice pot because we ate a lot of rice there.

And the idea was that when the steam came up off the rice, you know, the lid on the rice pot would rattle.

So he put this rag on there to kind of, you know, muckle it.

And so I got my interpreter and told him, I said, you need to tell him that you know, you can't just put the dirty rag on top of the rice because all that stuff goes down into the rice and I eat it, and I'm not like them.

I don't have quite the antibodies that they have, and I get sick.

And so they all agreed that they understood what it was.

The next day, like Kevin, I'm sitting at my dining room table there, and I'm eating this rice, and it tastes off to me, tastes kind of funny.

And I go, it tastes like bleach.

And so I go back into the kitchen, and uh, Cook looks at me and all excited, and I said, Sophie, what's going on with the rag?

And he goes, Oh, no problem, Mr.

Rich.

You know, he spoke a little English, clean rag.

And so he takes the rag off the pot and he goes over to the sink, and we had some bleach that I bought again at a U.S.

military base, poured it over the rag, rinsed it, kind of wrung it out in the sink, and then put it back on top of the rice pot.

So when the steam was coming up, all this bleach was dripping down into my rice.

And uh I told my interpreter, I says, you need to tell him that, you know, he's gonna kill me before the Taliban do.

But there again, you know, things that we would just take for granted.

It was just like, you know, uh it was a huge learning curve for me.

And and you had to look at it, you know, being friendly and and kind and that type of thing.

And these people, a lot of them weren't used to that.

Yeah, they were used to people just yelling and screaming at them and that type of thing, which I found out, you know, and so I was kind of like different, you know, for them.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Well, I I couldn't help but just sit there and think, oh, poor Mr.

Rich.

He thinks he's having stomach problems from the food.

No, it's because he's brushing his teeth with a toothbrush that's just been clean from the toilet, you know.

SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.

And you got to remember that the the homes and the villages where they were coming from, there's no running water, there's no electricity, there's no indoor plumbing.

And so to be thrown into an environment with all these uh different amenities, it's like, well, how does all this work?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Now we we've talked about the Taliban.

Did you have any situations like you that you know I would say were scary, any close encounters with the Taliban?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I did.

I can give you a couple examples.

We'll go back to the to the house in Kabul.

That's where they first came about, and that's where I first started wondering what am I doing here?

And one day I had, I was slaying in bed and a rocket came back, came, was shot from the Taliban right behind my head by a window that was in my bedroom and hit the house next door and blew it up.

And my two Lebanese guys that had bedrooms right next to mine came running in there and said, Are you all right?

Are you all right?

And I stood up on my bed and I just like, what's going on?

What's going on?

Well, we talked about our different religions and stuff.

I happened to be a Christian, and so we we we kind of had a bond there of talking about, you know, the difference between their uh Christian faith in Lebanon and mine in America and whatever.

And they just they said, you know, what's going on?

And they said, Well, I what's what's happening here?

And so when they're we'd have sometimes have Lebanese, other Lebanese come over.

They're like spent a lot of uh Lebanese over there doing security details, and they go, Oh, brave Mr.

Rich.

He was sitting there, Jesus, please help me, Jesus, please help me, sitting on the end of his bed when the rocket hit the house next door and blew it up.

And they they thought it was all funny.

Now, the thing you gotta keep in mind is uh for these different individuals, they're both probably in their 40s, but they've been fighting the war in Syria since they've been 10 years old.

And so, you know, it was a whole different lifestyle of them growing up, you know, than us here in America type of situation, and what the horrors of war that they've been seeing since that age.

One day I was out talking with this general that was kind of helping me with security because we had, whenever I'd go out to the house, I had to have a security detail with me because it's just not like in America where you drop in a car and you take off and go.

You got to see what the uh threat assessment is, uh, what's going on out there, is there a chance of attacks, these type of things, where are the bombs being placed, uh, on what roads, and this this thing's that I was just totally like, are you kidding me?

And so he was sitting there telling me how safe I was.

At that point in time, a car bomb went off just on the street outside of our little house that we had.

And the shockwave came over the wall, hit me, knocked me down, and I remember kind of looking and seeing like the ground almost like rolling.

And the way the shockwave went and blew all the windows inside uh the glass inside my house.

And then, just like out of one of those movies where you see the atomic bomb after shock, where it kind of goes the other direction, it sucked the two doors off our house into the front yard.

And I looked up and it looked like a little atomic bomb going off with the mushroom cloud.

And later I found out that there was like 17 people killed and 92 injured.

And as I got up and the general got up, I kind of brushed myself up and he looked at me and goes, What, Mr.

Rich?

Ho, ho ho ho, we're still alive, aren't we?

And at that point, I realized, you know, I had no control over what happened in my life over here.

You know, I, you know, and and that's when I had kind of a real awakening of like what it's like to live over there.

A couple weeks later, we had to go out to this place, and you might have seen it in the news.

It was called Bogram Air Force Base.

It was about a two and a half hour drive from where we're at.

And I had to meet with a contracting officer out there for the U.S.

And they asked me, Mr.

Rich, what day do you want to go?

And I said, Well, let's go Wednesday, not thinking anything about it, right?

And so Tuesday, there was a car bomb going off on that road out there and killed five people.

Wednesday, we drove by that exploded area and saw the remains of the cars and everything else out there.

Came back.

Next day, on Thursday, the same thing happened again.

And my Christian bodyguards came up to me, Lebanese, and they said, Mr.

Rich, you picked a very good day to go out to Bagram.

And so after that, we kind of had this little joke going amongst us.

And this is where you know you start to get a little weird sense of humor.

Because I'd ask them, I said, okay, next time I asked them, I said, We're going out to this place, how dangerous is it?

And they said, Mr.

Rich, I think we're going to see Jesus today.

And I said, Well, I don't mind seeing Jesus, I just not meet today.

So that became kind of the uh the the meter on how bad a place I was going, is if they would make that comment to me about, you know, we might not become bad.

Uh, and we were probably gonna see Jesus.

So it it's just amazing that how all this stuff evolved.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

No, since you have been there, and obviously we've had you know crazy things with pulling out of Afghanistan and such.

Do you know how it is, what it's like there now?

SPEAKER_00: Just from what I see on the news, and then I do have a few interpreters and people that I work with still there.

Uh, I had you know several of them that were asking, you know, to help get their families out of you know, Afghanistan.

And so they email me.

I I'm surprised that you know, sometimes I wonder if the emails are true or not, but it seems to be from them asking for aid and help and that type of thing.

One, I just found out that.

The French helped get his family out of the country, and but he's still there.

So, you know, it it has changed.

I I heard they closed down the girls' schools and supposedly they're supposed to open them back up.

But you know, for a lot of these people, it had to be unbelievable because if you think about it, we were there for 20 years.

And so a lot of these people, like the kids on some of the basic stuff, started out at 10 years old, working on the base, maybe picking up garbage, maybe doing different things like that, and then got educated and worked their way up to, you know, having a fulfilling job on the base over a 20-year period.

So that's all they knew.

And then all of a sudden, when we all leave, what happens to all those people and what jobs do they then go to try to find to support their family?

Exactly.

To answer your question, I I have communication with a few people there.

I have a communication, most of my interpreters were able to get out and they're like in places like Texas and Sacramento and back in Virginia.

And so I I can communicate with them, you know, on what's going on.

But overall, I I really don't know much more than what you know you and everybody else sees on the news.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

For for those, if you if you don't mind me asking, for those who who you know who the interpreters who came to the states, how has that been for them?

I mean, that's it's a big transition.

I mean, talking about you going there to Afghanistan, equally, I mean, is is dramatic for somebody who's lived there all their life to then come to America.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, all of them had some kind of formal education, you know, university education.

So they came from like, you know, one of the three major cities, like Kabul, Kandahar, or Harat.

So they're, you know, kind of uh knowledgeable and they work with the different engineers from the Army and the Air Force and different groups like that, and like with people like myself.

So we would talk about things.

One of the things I got a kick out of, though, is over there we have pallets of bottled water everywhere, right?

Um, because it's so hot and and and you don't know you can't drink the local water.

Well, I had to explain to them how much a bottle of water costs in the United States because they're used to just grabbing it off the pallet for free, you know?

And I go, it could be three or four dollars.

They go, What?

Are you kidding me?

And at that time the exchange rate was 50 to 1 in for Afghanistan over there.

Yes, I kind of sidetracked that a little bit.

I had one Afghan general one time try to sell me a money printing press for$10,000 because he said that I could print my own Afghan money.

And he thought, what a wonderful thing that would be.

And I said, uh no, Mr.

Rich doesn't need to be making counterfeit money.

He goes, Well, no, it's not counterfeit, it's it's the same machine they use for making the regular money.

And I go, No, I think I'll I'll I'll pass on that.

So I mean, uh there's hundreds of stories like that, Kevin, where I would just sit there and go, I can't make this stuff up.

This should be in a movie, you know?

And it's like, but um so that but yeah, so that was you know some of the things that happened with that.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So now at what point did you decide to write a book about because your book is about this entire experience, correct?

SPEAKER_00: Yes, and so what what I started realizing was, you know, just watching the movies on TV and the different things like that, that you know, most of people's idea of people going to Afghanistan was either the military or there were the private security details, uh, like Blackwater and these different types of people like that that, you know, ran protection for people.

But nobody ever really talked about all the other contractors that went over there that helped with, you know, everything from medical to construction to business to you know help educate, just all kinds of other aspects of the contractors that were over there helping out.

And so I decided I wanted to explain to my friends and relatives because they'd always ask me about what was it like over there?

What, you know, were you scared?

Were you in danger?

You know, and I kept repeating the stories over and over again.

And when I came back from Afghanistan, I um didn't know what I was gonna do.

I didn't want to do architecture anymore.

I'd kind of lost the taste for that after, you know, having closed down and lose my business.

And so at that point in time, I got a call to go operate some projects over in Kazakhstan, which is north of uh Afghanistan, along the Russian border.

And it was just building little uh bases and different things like that up there.

And there would be times where I'd be stuck out in the desert by myself for like, you know, a couple weeks, you know, uh or whatever, and with nothing to do.

And so my wife said, Well, why don't you start writing your book?

Write a book about it.

And I said, I've never wrote a book.

I, you know, I my grammar is terrible, you know, you know, I don't even know what an adjective and a pronoun and a verb are, you know.

And she goes, Well, just start off from the very beginning, from the the first place you went and each base that you traveled to, and just write all the stories down from each one of those bases and those locations, which I probably went to 30 or 40 different bases over there.

Uh I lived on probably 15 or more.

You know, some of the bases were big, like Bogram, where they had linen and forks and real stuff, to where I would be up on top of a mountain where, you know, we would have nothing but one meal, a hot meal a day, and maybe 25 soldiers sitting up there, you know, as an overlook.

So it was the full extremes of those areas.

So that was kind of like the experience I had over there with those type of things and all the different people that I was, you know, running around with over there.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.

And so so basically you just started then just writing all of this down and creating the book, huh?

SPEAKER_00: Right.

And so I just went from base to base and wrote down all the stories that happened.

Some, you know, are you know laughable and and and entertaining, and some of them are unfortunately, you know, sad, and you know, where there was people killed.

And then you begin to wonder, like you see in some of these different shows and people talking, why was that person just hit by a rocket where I was walking yesterday and killed, you know, and not me.

You know, one day makes a difference.

Yes, you know, on that.

Just like going back to that decision to go out to Bagham on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday and Thursday, all of a sudden I had the rude awakening, like people's lives depend upon the decision I make, you know, and that was a sobering thing to happen to realize that if I made the wrong decision, then you know, somebody could die.

And one of the first missions I went out with a particular military group, I asked the the sergeant there, I said, How long do I have at this site?

And here's 20 guys standing all pointing in different directions with guns, where old Mr.

Rich is walking around with a tape measure and you know, and a pencil and pad and paper making sketches of what we're gonna build there.

And he goes, Mr.

Rich, we're here for you.

You take as long as you need.

And all of a sudden, I it hit me wow, all these guys, 19, 20-year-olds, maybe 30-year-olds, are all putting their life at risk so I can do my job.

And that was a really sobering uh uh awakening for me at that point in time.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, absolutely.

I wanted to ask you upon like returning home, after after those four years, did you experience any type of like the uh the PTSD symptoms?

SPEAKER_00: Well, and you can see where the the humor gets kind of the dark after a while, but uh Okay.

I af after I uh I came home the first time, I had that car bomb explosion, you know?

And my wife said to me, she says, Well, now that you're home, let's go to a movie and maybe you'd like to see this movie kind of about like where you're about what you're at over there.

And I was still kind of like in a daze coming back, and I said, Yeah, sure, sure.

And she took me to Hurt Locker, and that was about these bomb packs in Iraq.

And I sat in the theater, and when that first bomb went off, I don't remember much of the rest of the movie.

Literally.

And she kept looking over at me, kind of saying, Are you okay?

You okay?

And I hadn't told her about what happened over there at that point in time.

And so, you know, I had that.

And so, yeah, I, you know, you have those kind of things, explosions, you know, different things like that.

SPEAKER_02: Yep.

SPEAKER_00: You you kind of react to.

One of the things, it's kind of another humorous thing, is when my bodyguards would move me around in a village or a different area, one of them would usually hook arms with me and and move me around.

And finally one day I couldn't take it anymore.

And I finally just said, Robbie, I said, would you quit pushing me around?

Why are you doing that?

And he goes, Well, Mr.

Rich, it makes it harder for the snipers to hit you.

And so when I came home, and it's it's still to this day, I have a tendency if I'm talking to somebody, if I was sitting here talking to you right now, I have a tendency to kind of weave, you know, and kind of not stand still.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: And it's it's just a matter of you you got entrenched with those type of things.

Unconsciously, I don't sit by a window anymore, typically, you know, I'll sit back with my back to a wall.

Just things that I was entrenched to to know over there, and I guess you have to kind of maybe unlearn them again.

And uh, when my wife asked me about what are you doing?

I said, Well, it makes it harder for snipers to me, she goes, we have those snipers here, which is knocking off.

And so, so yeah, there was those kind of incidents.

The one thing that I do have to say is since I have the boys that were in the military and I never served, I was in college during Vietnam, is that I now have an idea of what the deployments and stuff are at.

So when my boys, uh one boy went to Iraq and the other one went to some other places, we could sit down and talk about you know what it's like to be on a deployment and what it's like to, you know, live in the crappy environment and the different things that you know they're exposed to.

So if I hadn't had that experience, I'd never be able to say, hey, I kind of lived it, done that.

I just say, well, you know, I kind of understand.

But people that haven't been in that situation really don't understand.

You know, they'd like to, you know, empathize with you, but you know, it's it you have to actually live through it to actually see, you know, what's going on.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, well, Rich, please tell me and and in my audience, where can we find your book?

What is the name of your book?

Where's the best place for us to find it at?

SPEAKER_00: Okay, the the name of my book is uh One Brick at a time.

And you can go to my website.

It's called One Brick at a Time Press, P-R-E-S-S dot com.

And on there, if you want an autograph copy, you can order it through my website there, and I'll send you an autograph copy to you.

Or down at the bottom, there's Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and you can order through them too.

But I can't autograph a book if you wanted somebody's name put on it, you know, through those outlets.

SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay, fantastic.

Well, Rich, this has been really just eye-opening.

And uh, you know, I mean, I just have to have to say, I mean, it it's so interesting.

Yet at the same point in time, I look at this story, you know, that you've lived, and I think to myself, like, what a what a kind of uh eye-opening, you know, look on life of us, you know, here in America versus in another country, how how vastly different the world can be.

And and I feel like this conversation with you is is just a really just kind of, as I said, eye-opening realization of the differences that you know the world has in it.

And and yet there's these little common things like humor and and you know, different gestures that um you know can still bond us all together and kind of creating this, you know, a little bit more, you know, more meaningful, you know, uh, you know, like reason behind this whole conversation today.

So I just I thank you for sharing it with me.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, you bet.

And and I think, you know, like one of the biggest takeaways is, you know, that I learned so much being over there.

I was welcomed with open arms by the people over there.

And so it was, I think, really interesting to be able to see it from, I guess you want to call it a non-milleristic type of agenda.

And I went over there with no agenda.

I was just over there to build stuff, you know, and each one of these stories and experiences just evolved into something that, you know, I could forever, you know, take with me and and uh you know build upon.

One of the things that it did do for me was when I came back, I now substitute teach.

And I actually do it full time.

And uh I actually go by Mr.

Rich.

I go mostly in the middle school and the high school, but the kids get a kick out of it.

And so they, you know, are you rich, Mr.

Rich?

I mean, the same same same question I would get in Afghanistan.

And um I try to relate, yeah.

I try to relate, you know, what the pe what it was like, what the people were there, you know, the hardships that the women and girls have to go through trying to get an education if they can even get one.

And so I think it, you know, it's given me kind of a mission to kind of go out and explain to you know all the different students, you know, what different parts of the world are like, what their cultures are like, what being in business is like.

So it's kind of given me a whole new career path at 70 years old.

Everybody's saying, why are you doing this?

Why aren't you out playing golf or doing something else?

And I just said, well, this is something I feel I need to do to try to explain to you know the up-and-coming students, you know, what what's out there and what to expect.

And people in a lot of cases are no different than what we are here.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, well, Mr.

Rich, you are one incredible guy.

And I must say, those students are very lucky to have have Mr.

Rich show up in class one day as the substitute.

That's just really awesome.

I I love your spirit about you.

And uh, goodness, like I said, it's it's just been such a pleasure to talk with you today, hear your story, and and I'm just uh totally just uh inspired and and just so happy that you know here you are.

You're you're taking what you know you learned from that experience and and putting it forward, especially now to kids at schools.

I just think that's really awesome.

And uh, and again, you know, thank you for for taking the time out of your day to to be on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, I appreciate it.

I appreciate you taking the time to interview me and and uh be able to kind of get the the message out there about my book.

I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.

And for for anyone interested in Rich's book, please know that all links and information are in the episode show notes.

So you have easy access to that.

And so I encourage you to definitely go ahead and get a copy of Rich's book for yourself.

Before I end, I just want to thank you for listening to another amazing conversation had here on the podcast.

Wow, I don't know, just such insightful information that that Rich had to share with us about Afghanistan and really about life and helping us to look at life from a different view.

And you know, that's what this podcast is all about.

So until next time, I hope that you get out there and look at life from a different view, wherever in the world you are.

And until next time, just keep living and enjoying life like it was meant to be.