Charles Strange, Freedom is Not Free the Story of His Son Michael Strange

Success Champions

Donnie B.: All right, guys. So I want you to strap it in today. So we're going to get pretty deep and heavy on this one. This is a hell of a story from a hell of a guy and my buddy, Patrick Mudge said, “Donnie, you got to sit down with Charlie and let him tell you his story and everything they're doing.” So just strap it in, guys. It’s going to be a really good episode.
So I'm Donnie Boivin. This is Donnie’s Success Champions. Charlie Strange. Welcome to the show, my friend. Please, tell us your story.
[Music]
Donnie B.: Hey, before the show starts, I wanted to jump in here and let you guys know that I could not do this show without the support of Point Blank Safety Services. Stacey and Michael McGovern over there have been a huge asset for the show, the Success Champions Family and everything we do and it's because of their support, we're able to bring you such awesome guests and such awesome stories.
So do me a favor. Go check them out. Man, if you're in Texas and you need security officers or you need active-duty police officers on off-duty hours, protecting your sites, construction, security sites, commercial offices, whatever, go check out Point Blank Safety Services. You'll be glad you did.
Now, guys, I'm not kidding. Strap it in today. This is a hell of a story. Here comes Charlie Strange.
Charles S.: Thank you, Don. My name is Charles Strange. I'm the gold star father of Michael Strange. Michael was killed in action in August 6, 2011 along with 38 other men and 29 Americans and Bart, The Warrior Dog. It was the biggest single loss of life in Iraq and Afghan War and it was the biggest loss of life in the history of America. 22 men from DEVGRU, Navy Special Warfare. And it was the worst day of my life.
Michael is my oldest son from Philadelphia. He grew up in Philadelphia. Not too far for your audience. From the Rocky Steps, the famous Rocky Steps. Michael ran the Rocky Steps before he went in.
“Adrian!”
We're Philly and cheesesteaks and Michael joined the military right out of high school and he took off. He took off from there and went to the Great Lakes. I flew out, seen him graduate boot camp. From there, he went to Pensacola, Florida. And from there, he finished first in his class for cryptology. Michael was a code breaker.
They actually gave Michael the National Intelligence Medal of Valor. Only 17 have ever been given out in the history of America since World War II and the windtalkers. Given that at the NSA with Admiral Alexander under about five floors underground. But he went to Hawaii because he was a crypto and Admiral McRaven was there and he loved it. We flew out to Hawaii, spent 15 days with Michael in Hawaii and he became a surfer and he got really into the intel there and he started getting deployed on different missions.
His buddy, I also don't want to forget about, who died with him, John Douangdara was there. John was the dog handler for the Gold Team DEVGRU. And from Hawaii, he spent a little over three years in Hawaii and then they put him on DEVGRU in Virginia Beach where he had to buy a home and he was with SEAL Team Six, the Gold Squad. His call sign was GY4, Gold Yankee 4 and I said, “Michael! How are you affording a $300,000-house here, Michael? You're 21 years old.” And he loved it and he had to be by the secret base and we still take the train down, drive down.
He drived back to Philly because he missed his family, his friends and I'll tell you what, like yesterday was the day we killed Bin Laden and a lot of memories going by one night and Michael called me before that, before the Bin Laden raid. Two weeks prior, he said, “Dad, everything's getting shut off.”
I'm like, “What?”
He said, “I'm not going to be able to talk to you, Dad.”
And I tried to get information out of him and me and Michael had a little code. Even if it was January, he’d ask me, “Are the Phillies winning?” That means, “Don't ask me any more questions, Michael.” Because they would give them a lie detector test every two or three months.
And the first question on the lie detector test was, when was the last time you lied? So he wouldn't have me ask any more questions.
And he said, “Look, Dad!” He was getting mad. He said, “Dad, look, if something happens, I'm sure you'll hear about it.” And that was the Bin Laden raid and yesterday was, every day is emotional. But he loved what he was doing. He loved protecting and serving his country and his family and August 6th, he came home from the Bin Laden raid in June and it was his birthday, June 6th. It was his birthday and we had a big party, his friend, Kevin and Danny and all of them and the girls. They had about four kegs and a hundred bottles of Jameson's in the pool.
But he was different. He was different after the raid and something was going on. A guy by the name of Joe Biden opened his mouth and after the Bin Laden raid at the Ritz-Carlton in Delaware and told everybody, “SEAL Team Six killed Bin Laden.”
Nobody ever heard of SEAL Team Six before that. And I don't know if that was one of the things that was bothering Michael after the raid. But he was different. He was different in June when he came home. He talked about a will. He never talked about a will before.
A couple of other parents were telling me about the guys in Michael’s crew and they talked about a will and something was going on. Something was going on, Don.
He calls me up. He goes back and he's getting deployed back to Afghanistan. I still have his voice on my cellphone here and he said, “I love you, Dad. I'll see you for Thanksgiving for Eddie and Maggie.” That's my sister. We always do Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, in Fishtown and, “I'll see you for Thanksgiving.”
And I knew something was up, something was going on and he was completely different. He had just told me about the will. He told my sister. He told his buddies, his brother, his sister and he got deployed in the worst day of my life, Don.
August 6, they came knocking on the door. There was like four or five different guys, CAOs, Casualty Assistance guys and they didn't really say much about what happened. They didn't know. Some of the parents said, they ran into a mountain. Some people say, you know. The guys who came to the door, God bless them. They were very nice. They said, “Your son passed along with a tragedy on a helicopter in Afghanistan.”
A couple of the parents I know, when you hear that, that's a piece of your heart.
Donnie B.: Right.
Charles S.: You get rushed to the hospital and I was screaming and yelling and crying and it's like a nightmare. It's a nightmare that actually really don't stop. You learn to walk with a limp the rest of your life, Don. And there was a lot of questions about that August 6, 2011 and the Taliban, actually, after they killed them guys, it was on the internet a half-hour later, bragging.
“We just killed SEAL Team Six.”
How did they know who was in the Chinook? And there's a lot of questions and we did the ceremony in Arlington. 17 to 30 men were in Arlington. In October 2011, we went down to Little Creek and a guy by the name of, Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt did the investigation on what happened and we were in the auditorium, the 60 parents and he was explaining about the pilots. God bless the pilots and some other things. He seemed like, it took a while due to the presentation, but he was only over there for two weeks to do this investigation for 30 men dying and I know and I still don't know today, Don, about the black box which is really orange.
And General Colt put his hands up in the air like theatrically and he said, “A flash flood came and washed it away.”
I said, “Oh, you didn't find it?”
And they said, they never found the black box and there are some people who say, there is no black box in them CH-47. These are some kind of recording device.
Then he said, “An RPG hit the helicopter from 200 yards in the pitch dark and it was a lucky shot.”
So I stood up and the Philadelphia in me came out and I said, “Did you just say lucky shot and all our sons are dead?” And I threw a couple of F-notes out there and a couple of gentleman from the military grabbed me.
Yeah. So it was, you got to be kidding me? And I asked questions. I had some of the other parents asking questions.
When we left there, Donnie, they gave us a folder, a binder and you don't look at it. Just hearing about how your son died. They told me, my son burned to death because of the fire, the fuselage which was all a lie. My son wasn't burned at all. I have pictures of him. Four months, I called Dover and asked for the autopsy and a whistleblower in Dover, God bless his soul, I still don't know who it is, sent me a disk and the paperwork and my beautiful wife, Maryanne, she took the disk.
She said, “Don't look at it. Don't look at it.”
And she looked at it and I said, “Pretty bad?”
And she says, “Well…”
I'm like, “Well, they said he was burned beyond recognition.”
And it was in all the papers. All over the world, 38 skulls, 38 c-spines. No identifiable remains.
So I said, “I want to see. I want to see.” And not that bad and I looked at the pictures of my son and he wasn't burned at all, Donnie. He jumped out of the helicopter or got thrown out of the helicopter. They weren't that high. They weren't that high. I have pictures of the helicopter where they gave us this binder in October after Jeffrey Colt got done doing the thing and there was 25 pages in there.
In the first page, you can look at, as you open it up, you can't read it. It ran out of ink. I know the government's doing bad, but they didn't have no ink. So I called Admiral Sean Pybus. He was Commander-in-Chief and God bless him and I said, “I got a bad copy here, Admiral Pybus. Can I get another copy?”
He said, “Well, Mr. Strange, we had a lot of complaints about that.”
I said, “Okay, good. Send me another one.”
He said, “We can't. We burned it.”
I said, “You burned it? Already?”
But in that packet was a disk and I put the disk in the computer and as you can tell by earlier, I'm not super suave. And there was like a hundred little blocks on this disk and I'm like …
My wife, Maryanne, she says, “Let me look at that.” And she took it somewhere and she printed out 1,364 pages, Don.
Donnie B.: My God.
Charles S.: Which was encrypted with a virus. And the Taliban knew. The Taliban knew. Don, I'm going to read something to you from these 1,364 pages. I wasn't in the military. But in Jeffrey Colt’s investigation, he says, “For the Tangi Valley,” he says, “The next piece of reporting that I have that fits within the timeframe comes from May 11th, 2011.”
And it's late May. There's no date on this and it's going to be, I'm reading it. There was a couple of blank spots. It's very brief. Again, it’s out of the task force and it says something to the fact that over 100 Talibans planned to travel from the Blank Province through the Tangi Valley to possibly shoot down the coalition force aircraft.
They knew. A 100 Talibans were going to the Tangi Valley. I got it right here in front of me, Don. Right in front of me.
Donnie B.: Wow!
Charles S.: So these 1,300 pages, some of the other parents started asking questions and they're like, “How did you get that information? How do you know that?”
And my wife wrote a letter to the gold star parents down in Florida, telling them how to download the disk to get the 1,364 pages. And then our phone got tapped and our computer got tapped and we won the first case in the history of America for the NSA when we went against the NSA and Obama down in Washington, DC.
Judge Leon was our judge. You might remember, he called it, “Aurelian state that we live in.” And so we went to Congress. We went to the Senators. We went to President Obama when he was President.
I met President Obama in Dover and tried over and over to try to get answers. I met President Obama in Dover. He came up to me and he said, “Michael changed the way America lived. Michael could do this and Michael could do that.”
I grabbed President Obama by the shoulders and I sort of shook him and I said, “I don't need to know about my son. I need know what happened.” Then the Secret Service guys grabbed me.
Donnie B.: I see a theme with you, Charlie.
Charles S.: Yeah. And President Obama whispered in my ear and he said three times. He said, “Mr. Strange, I want to look into this very, very, very deep.” And we tried going back and not just me and my wife. We had other gold star parents. We’re just asking questions.
We had a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. We had like 12 of the gold star parents. We had Allen West. We had General Boykin, General [inaudible] and this needs to be a congressional hearing. And we never got anything. We never got any answers and even if nobody's going to take accountability for the biggest loss of life and my son getting killed, just don't let it happen to someone else's son.
Who put 38 men in a Chinook helicopter? 8 of the Afghans, Don, right before they took off, got off and no one's got on. Their names were never on the manifest.
I'm like, and they told us this and then I think they wanted to not tell us that but, who were they? Who were they? They told us in Dover. They brought the Afghan bodies back to Dover and they had their flag over the coffins.
My daughter said, “What's this?”
I said, “That's the Afghans.”
She said, “What the eff are they doing here?”
That was our question. And they had to call the families from the Afghans and tell them they had the wrong people. They didn't know who they were. You don't know who they are getting on the helicopter? Their names’ not on the manifest? Who okayed all this?
And then it was supposed to be a rescue mission for the Rangers and there was no … the Rangers, I’ve talked to personally, who were coming out said, “We didn’t need a QRF. We didn't need a Quick Reaction Force.” They had eight of the Talibans locked up. It's in the 1,300 pages. I got their names. I got their names.
And then they said, “Well, we were after Qari Tahir.”
Qari Tahir is a high-level guy. He was a big target. Qari Tahir, in the 1,300 pages, knew. Knew. He moved from village to village. Somebody was giving him all the information.
Here you go, Hamad, I can't talk. I don't know these Middle Easterners. Harad, Hamad, Hamaz, Zaha, Guli, Nabi, Al-Qazar. The raid in Khawatir Village was targeting Qari Tahir, Ismael, Qali, Tahir had been located in another village during the raid, at the house of Habibur Rahim in the [inaudible].
Everything's written out here, Don. And I can't get no answers on who killed my son? Who made the call? It's crazy.
So we went through all kinds of stuff.
Donnie B.: Here's the crazy thing, Charlie, is one, God loved you, and I mean this wholeheartedly. I mean, I'm sorry for the loss of your son. It’s tragic. It sucks. No parent needs to go through that, right?
But God loved you, man, because somebody's going to pick the fight, right? When something goes like this and I love your Philly freaking attitude, your vibe for you. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes in that room. But I love the way you've handled yourself all the way through this and fucking kudos for just picking the fight because I mean, I'm hearing your side of it. So I've got to go with what I'm hearing. And from what I'm hearing, man, shit, why the hell isn't there a further investigation? Why isn't there more people asking questions?
And I get it, man. Some of the parents that have tragically lost their kids in this, they're like, “Okay. We just want to move on and get past it.” But I'm thinking, man, if I'm in your shoes, I'm still asking fucking questions. I want somebody's ass to fry because they made a bad call or they're a traitor to the freaking country. One of the two.
Why the cover-up? And what dumbass put the disk in the freaking binder to you guys?
Charles S.: Right.
Donnie B.: Somebody's ass should get fired just for that stupid mistake on that side of things. So wow. What a shitty thing to go through, man. My heart hurts for that kind of stuff but fucking kudos for your boy for stepping up and doing what not many have the courage to do and fucking defending our country, man.
Being a veteran myself, that dude is just freaking awesome. That's just awesome.
So now, you guys are doing a lot of cool things for gold star families and you guys are holding events and bringing these families together and helping them get through some of these tough times they’re going through.
Tell us a little bit about your foundation, your organization and what you guys are doing.
Charles S.: Well, there's a lot of support at the funeral and after the funeral, everybody goes back to work. Everybody goes on vacation. Everybody is still going on. I'd be looking out my window saying, “My son died and everybody is still moving on.” And I was, the five stages of grief. Like I didn't know nothing about the five stages of grief and the first one is denial.
No way. He was just sitting on my couch. We were just at a party and the second stage is anger. I was shopping in a food market and some guy had a towel around his head and he had to call the police on me for that one.
My wife was at my back. Somebody was going to get it, Donnie. You know what I mean?
The third one is bargain. And God don't bargain. And the fourth one they say is depression. I don't like to use that word. I think it's the Grim Reaper and the fifth one is acceptance.
But like any other ones, what I learned is, with the loss of a son or a daughter or burying a child, it don't stop. It just keeps coming. I buried my father. I buried my cousin. I buried good friends. Not even in the same circle is burying a child and I ran into another gold star father named, Grant Smith. His son Tristan Smith was killed in an IED from Philadelphia three years prior.
So I got in touch with this guy and we met for coffee and he started crying and he was angry and I felt good, Don. I was like, “This guy's just like me. We’re both fucked up. All right!”
And I came home. I told my wife. I said, “We should bring more parents together.”
And my wife, she started reaching out to some gold star parents and we did it. I said, “Let do …” in Philadelphia, we call it Beef and Beer and some guy named Drago, a Navy SEAL named Drago came along and him and his wife, great wife, Rachel and their two kids came down and we had an Irish band, of course, Blackthorne, donated their time and we raised some money and we brought like 20 gold star parents in for a weekend and we had a grief counselor there and we get the parents to talk.
I want to hear from the other dads and moms. How do you get through the birthday? What are you doing in the holiday? How do you get through every day? And from there, the other gold star parents started telling other gold star parents.
“When are you doing that again? Are you doing that again?”
And I was like, “Well, okay. We'll do another one.” And we went to Wildwood, New Jersey and we did Thursday to Sunday and we brought some gold star parents from Michigan, Heath Robinson’s dad, he was on Team 6, Heath was a sharpshooter and we brought Debbie Anne who lost her son and they never seen the ocean. They never seen the ocean.
So it was really cool and we did a lot of healing in Saturday night, whatever area we’re in, we ask the VFW or American Legion or [inaudible] Club, the hostess for dinner. We get the motorcycles, the cops, the...