Q&A Jonathan Gilliam INTERVIEW OF
PART 1
FORMER SEAL, FBI SPECIAL AGENT, FEDERAL AIR MARSHAL, SECURITY CONTRACTOR FOR HOMELAND SECURITY NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST
Jonathan T. Gilliam KEYNOTE SPEAKER 35TH ANNUAL MUSTER
6
November 2020 / ISSUE 118 / Vero’s Voice
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Interview by
’m talking to an American hero, Jonathan Gilliam. Great to have you, and thank you for serving our United States. Listen, that’s one of the reasons why I’m coming down there to give the speech for the Annual Muster, is that we should all be serving the United States.
outside of North Little Rock, and within several months got offered everything that I’d been trying to get for three years. Rhett Palmer So I got a slot, a SEAL slot for the Navy, which doesn’t mean you’re going be a SEAL; it means you have a slot to go to SEAL training. And I went through Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, and started in ‘97, and then was at BUD/S by 1998.
You attended the University of Arkansas with a double major in Political Science and Psychology, became a police officer in Arkansas, received a commission in the US Navy and you went to Officer Candidate School? So after I graduated college, affirmative action was big in ‘95 and I could not get on with the police department, and finally got on with Camp Robinson Police Department right
through? Was it where they tie you up and nearly drown you? You know, everybody sees that on television, where we have our hands tied behind our back and our ankles tied together, and we’ve got to bob up and down and kind of float in the water. They think that’s scary, because the image is kind of claustrophobic, but the reality is that it was probably one of the least scary things we did.
Wow. And so after graduating, you became a Basic Underwater Demolition Specialist with the SEALs. It’s very hard to get into the SEALs. Like one out of 35 guys that try Now, Jonathan has been a SEAL, he’s been out for it make it? with the FBI. He’s sat in for Sean Hannity on No, it’s way over than that. We have over 75% Fox, he’s been on NewsMax, MSNBC, CBS, fail rate on average. My class started with well ABC, BBC, and he’s the author of Sheep over 130, 11 finished with the original class, 21 No More: The Art of Awareness and Attack overall that started, finished; the other guys Survival. He will be live and in person here got recycled for various things, and so overall and everybody within the sound of my 21 guys graduated from over 130. There’s voice is invited to come out to the Navy even been a class that never was, a class that SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, on nobody graduated from. November 7th to hear him speak. So the good thing about the SEALs is, Tell us a little bit about your history. Where America can count on them, even with some of the changes that have happened. The training did you grow up, sir? is so difficult and the water is so cold that it is I grew up in the Ozarks, in Arkansas, just on still the place where you have to prove yourself the Missouri border in a town called Yellville. Then we moved down by Little Rock to a town in order to be the tip of the spear, and that hasn’t changed. Thank goodness. called Bryant after that, and that’s where I graduated high school. What was the scariest training you went
