Matt Griffin

Early Life and what led you to go to West Point. 

Matt Griffin [Right] 

Photo Credit: BBC.com

So I’m a military brat of divorced parents. When I was three years old I started having conscious memories of where I was at and I remember we used to have cadets over my house. And I recall in how much high regard my parents held them in, and I remember them being really cool people. So I thought to myself “Damn, I kind of want to be like that when I grow up.” So that led me down the road of wanting to go to The Academy. And then I’m not from a family of means, so if I had to go to college I had to pay for it on my own. No one in my family has ever had their parents pay for college, so I thought West Point was a rad full ride scholarship and that was kind of it.

Military Experience

I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the artillery in 2001. I graduated from my officer basic course in February of 2002. I went to Ranger School between March and May of 2002. Then I landed in Fort Lewis, Washington, at 5-20 Infantry in June of 2002. And that was cool because that was the first Stryker company in the Army. So we were the first ones to get Strykers- the new combat vehicles, and we took the liberty of the first eight that the Army had. So we were the poster children for the US Army for about a year.

Then I applied for the Ranger Regiment and was accepted in August of 2003. And I was in Second Ranger Battalion as a Company Fire Support Officer, so I was an artillery guy in an infantry unit. And then I did my first deployment to Afghanistan in November and December of 2003, so just a few months after I had gotten there we deployed. Then I did my second deployment to Afghanistan between March and May of 2004. I did my third deployment to Afghanistan in between June to September of 2004. And then I did my first deployment to Iraq between March and September of 2005. And then I transitioned out of the Rangers to a core artillery unit and then I left the military in April of 2006.

What was the most rewarding part about being a Combat Officer?

It’s the same thing for running a company now, it’s when you’ve put the right people on the team, you’ve planned all of your contingencies, executed and rehearsed, and then as soon as you step off the line- not doing anything. Watching your entire team execute the plan as planned. It’s like the A-Team quote “I love it when a plan comes together.” That’s what it feels like. You’ve trained up for months, you’ve watched it, rehearsed it, and you just watch your guys go and kill shit and it’s awesome.

Photo Credit: The Seattle Globalist 

As a successful business owner what did you take away from being an officer and being in the military as a whole?

One is clear communication. Setting the task, conditions, and standards for anything that you’re doing. So, establishing the task, the conditions you’re under, and then the standards you expect of your team. So you don’t just tell someone to do something and expect them to know how to do it right, you have to establish that and you have to communicate it clearly. And then I’d have to say the idea that you can accomplish any goal if given enough time, planning and rehearsals.

 

 

Did being in the military change you? If so, was that change positive or negative?

I’d have to say that it did and that it gave me a sense of empathy. If that’s one thing that I’m really thankful to the military for is that it created a sense of empathy. It was interesting, in my psychological evaluation going into the Rangers that’s what they identified from me. I’m an only child, divorced parents, and a rough childhood where everything that I got, I got because I earned it. And I never really understood anybody that didn’t have that same mindset, and I kind of looked at everybody through that scope. Like if you suck or you fail it’s your own fault because you’re not working hard enough. Nobody gave me anything, nobody gave you anything so you should just work as hard as me if you want to be successful, otherwise don’t fucking bitch about it. And the military identified this as a weakness in me and when you’re having Special Forces doctors and psychologists tell you that’s a weakness in you- that’s a weakness in you. And so I spent, I’d say, about a decade really learning about it and trying to hone that skill, and it has changed the course of my life in relation to the people around me.  

What are the psych evaluations you mentioned like?  

They’re a test and they screen you in. The military is kind of like the coolest spot because they have hundreds of thousands of applicants where they can just draw the data from every year. They have millions of people they can draw a sample set from. And you are not a unique, special butterfly. You are not a unique snowflake. As much as you think you are, you fall into a pretty fat category really quickly, and it’s proven by the data that the military has collected over time. The realization through those tests and evaluations was that they were able, with a couple thousand questions, to break me down to the core of my being and tell me shit about myself that I wouldn’t know for another decade.

Photo Credit: The Spokesman-Review 

What was the most difficult part of transitioning out of the military?

Coming out of a SOF unit you expect everyone around you to have the same sense of motivation and high standards for execution. When you’re in the Rangers or another special operations unit everybody is an alpha-plus male, everybody wants to be the best, everybody is constantly trying to beat one another, and it’s all done in the hopes that it will make the organization better. So going into a civilian unit or civilian job where people just show up because they want a paycheck or they’re fulfilling a role just to be there- that didn’t register well with me. I lost my shit often when it came to that.

 

What is one thing that makes the War on Terror so complicated and do you think that Combat Flip Flops help solve any of those intricate problems?

It’s the most profitable form of warfare. Eisenhower warned of the industrial military complex and you’re talking about a five-star general who came in, was president, and one of the last things that he said was “Hey…Fucking watch this thing. Be careful” Of all the things he learned in his entire life experience, the one warning that he gave this country was about that.

Photo Credit: Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire

Think about it- you can hold an entire country hostage and contribute billions of dollars to security, manpower, labor, airport security and everything else, with an operation that would cost you eight guys, maybe twenty or thirty-thousand dollars, and a couple of AK’s. Look at Paris. They held that city hostage with a couple of idiots with AKs just running around. Which caused airport delays, shutdowns, security procedures, protocol, contracting, on and on and on. It is the most profitable form of warfare.

I love Sebastian Junger’s quote of “We shoot a javelin missile, which costs about eighty-thousand dollars, and it’s fired by a guy that doesn’t make that in a year, at a dude that doesn’t make that in a lifetime.” Think about all the places we are waging warfare, or all the places we could wage war on poor, destitute brown people that have no choice. And we can wage war there with little regard for ramifications because, to be honest, people in our country don’t fucking care. And companies are making billions of dollars doing it. So there’s no motivation for the government to stop it because it isn’t very complex or hard to do. You just use a fear technique- a couple of guys, a couple of nasty videos, a couple dudes getting beheaded, and you’ll spend billions, if not, trillions of dollars trying to defeat a threat that is an idea that is impossible to bomb into submission. And the more you try to bomb it into submission, the more it grows, and the more money you make. It’s this fucking stupid cycle.

And we are the exporters of war- we are the country that profits from all of that. And unfortunately in the media, all we see is the fear of what has been perpetrated to us, and the justification as to why we need to spend millions of dollars, and the idealization of warfighters, special operations and navy pilots- the good guy with the gun mentality against the evil terrorist. It’s like Jack Bauer 24, that’s all we see in our news, media and entertainment so people in our country, we just don’t know any better. We’ve been assaulted with this media- stand up and salute the flag, do all this stuff, be all that you can be- for years. And I’m guilty of this too, I stood up and raised my right hand in front of the flag and I just wanted to kill fucking terrorists. But then when I was there I finally started to see the pieces unfold and now I get it. The reason why it is so complicated is because there is so much money involved. That’s the issue, and it doesn’t take a lot of human capital of people in Western Countries to make that much money to wage war in non-developed countries.

Does Combat Flip Flops work to help solve this problem?

If it was some tree-hugger hippy in Southern California doing what I’m doing- I don’t think it would be relevant and I don’t think people would care. But because we’ve served where we served and we have the street cred that we do and because we execute with that same level of proficiency and professionalism in what we’re doing, people go “Wait a second, maybe this is a better idea, these guys are legit, look at where they came from. And if they got out of the military and leverage everything in their lives to get in this course of action and they’ve been helping these people for a number of years and they’re growing, maybe this is a good idea. Look at those videos of the kids that are really nice and the people they’re hanging out with while they’re skiing and all these other things. Maybe it isn’t what we’ve been told the whole time.” And the only thing we can do is persistently show over time the gains that we’re making and the people that we’re are helping. And because of social media and the way things are the more I pay into Facebook to show those advertisements, the more people that are going to see them and be educated. So it’s just a matter of time.

What is your proudest moment at Combat Flip Flops?

Photo Credit: Combat Flip Flops

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About last June or July, Aid Afghanistan for Education forwarded us their photos of graduation with all their girls standing there in their graduation uniforms and they’re throwing their caps in the air and holding their diplomas. And you can’t help but swell and tear up.

This has been fucking brutal- we leveraged everything. We sold everything. My wife and I moved with our kids into an 800 square foot apartment for years, because we were just scraping, scraping and scraping. And this was all to drive this mission, which has been sucky, hard and everything else. And then you show those photos to your wife and she cries. And you show those photos to your daughters and they cry. So I’d have to say that’s been the proudest moment.

What is Combat Flip Flops end goal?

I want to be the largest, most dominant, philanthropic brand on the planet. Pretty simple.