SC: Well yeah, it was definitely a big ask, but you gave it a good shot? What was it like over there in Afghanistan?

S: It was not like what I expected. I kinda didn’t know what to expect, but I thought it would be chaos with people trying to kidnap us all the time, but we were actually able to get around Kabul without drawing too much attention to ourselves.

SC: Well yeah I remember you saying you walked around Afghanistan like you owned the place:

S: (laughs) Well yeah man, it was pretty amazing. I mean I never thought I could do that but there we were, walking around in suits in downtown Kabul and didn’t seem to be in any danger but you gotta remember you’re in a place where you’re an infidel – where people are gonna want to kill you – and you never want to let your guard down and just feel comfortable. So yeah, every time I would get to the stage where I was like ‘we’re walking around like we own the joint’ I’d remind myself ‘hey you’re in a dangerous spot here, so you know, keep your eyes peeled.’

SC: So what else happened while you were over there?

S: We were meeting with contacts, we were procuring all the logistics, all the supplies, all the weapons and then the second half of this trip was basically the hunt. I would get these tips and they would tell me to go to a certain place. One of them was a cave. They didn’t want to let me in the cave. They were like ‘dude, you’re not muslim you can’t go inside’ and I was like ‘well I’ve got an AK47, I think I’m going inside’

SC: I guess you can’t argue with that.

S: Yeah and then they wanted me to say a prayer, because we all have one god apparently and I was like ‘seriously, you want me to pray?’ and they were like ‘yeah seriously we want you to pray. Just pray to god for safety.’ So I bow my head, clasp my hands and say ‘dear god please keep us safe amen. Alrite let’s go climb around in some caves!’

SC: And it worked yeah?

S: Yeah I mean they were kinda shocked that that was my prayer but they didn’t make any problems for us so it worked out pretty well. We didn’t find bin Laden there though. I wasn’t really expecting bin Laden to be in a cave but all you would hear about was bin Laden being in a cave so it made sense to at least check it out.

SC: Yeah I mean over there are there a lot of people who when you ask them where he is they’re like ‘oh yeah, he’s in that cave?’

S: Yeah, we were told that he had been in this cave for the last couple of weeks, that he had been seen there and that nobody really knew how far the cave went. This wasn’t a natural cave, it was a man made cave and the tunnel could have gone on for ages – one person told me that it went underneath a mountain. It’s like this super duper long tunnel and I got to the end and it got to be so small that I didn’t think that I would survive if I went through it. I thought I would probably suffocate if I went any further. So that was the end of the cave expedition.

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SC: So was that the highlight of your time over there?

S: No, the next day we went to this observation post and somebody had already dug a foxhole. I was there by myself with a motorcycle and an AK47 and I was in this foxhole waiting for what was apparently the Taliban to make their move coming across this river and as I’m waiting all of a sudden gunfire starts going off and it’s headed in my direction. Now, I returned fire, jumped on the motorcycle and took off because I didn’t know how many people these guys had, I mean I was by myself…..

SC: Yeah that sounds pretty scary

S: Yeah it was pretty scary – like if I died nobody even knows where I’m at. So I went back to where the rest of my crew was and everybody was like ‘dude, we gotta get the hell out of here this is crazy’ and I pretty much concurred that that was the smartest thing to do. So we got back on the road, made our way back to Kabul and everywhere we went we would encounter all these checkpoints – Afghani police checkpoints – and they kept on searching us and looking for identification for the rifle and for this and that but luckily our identification lined up….

SC: That is lucky

S: Yeah, you get the feeling when you’re there that this is not a place that you want to go to jail or get arrested or end up on anybody’s shit list because things could go really bad. But we made it out OK

SC: OK, so were you planning to go back before all this went down with bin Laden?

S: Yeah, the plan was to go to Pakistan.

SC: Well that’s where he was. Good plan.

S: Well yeah, that’s always been my plan. The problem was I couldn’t get a visa…

SC: Yeah I read that, the only way you could have got in was coming in through some silk route from China right?

S: Yeah the Korokoram Highway. That was the plan, we were gonna go, fly in through China and make our way on land through Pakistan. And yeah I was planning to do that, had bin Laden not been caught I would be there right now.