Former Green Beret medic securing a base in Afghanistan during Coronavirus | Vance Crowe Podcast

About this episode

Dax, a former Green Beret medic turned private military contractor guarding a forward operating base near Kabul, gives Vance a ground-level view of the early pandemic from a genuinely unusual vantage point: a small, controllable "ecosystem" (his words, drawing an explicit analogy to cruise ships) trying to keep COVID off a compound populated by American, NATO, and Afghan local-national workers. He describes concrete containment measures (removing shop workers, closing the chow hall, cutting non-essential local contact) and the specific danger vector for Afghanistan — mass deportations of Afghan refugees from a COVID-ravaged Iran walking back across the border. The episode's most distinctive material, though, is media-diet analysis: Dax's exposure to American news is filtered entirely through Armed Forces Network, which cycles Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC back to back, giving him an unusually clear comparative view of how each outlet frames identical events — and he identifies the core incentive problem directly: 24-hour news makes money on political conflict, not information. He and Vance also trade observations about American civic fracture (Vance's guests-with-controversial-opinions experiment drawing hate mail from both directions), the value of exposure to disagreeable opinions from his own genuinely mixed social network (art school to Green Berets), and grounded, practical advice for civilians: stockpile prescription medications rather than toilet paper, prioritize wound-cleaning supplies (alcohol, iodine) over sutures, and — his sharpest point — that the U.S. trajectory would likely mirror Italy's roughly three weeks behind, a prediction delivered with striking clarity for early April 2020.

“In that 10 years you learn a little bit about medicine, but you learn a whole lot about who to listen to... I have to be able to look to those people that know what they're talking about, the pathologist, all those people.”

“You'll watch a story from Fox and it of course has that right lane, and then you watch the story from CNN and it has that left lane, and then you get MSNBC... it plays an hour of a news station... and it rotates back and forth.”

“The 24 hour news stations... make their money on a political lien, not on actual news... everything has to fit into that us-them, that one thing that we could still argue about.”

Key moments

• early ~5-10%: Dax's account of the deportation pipeline from Iran into Afghanistan as the primary vector spreading COVID into a country lacking basic testing infrastructure.
• middle ~44-52%: The Armed Forces Network news-rotation description — a rare, literal side-by-side comparison of Fox/CNN/MSNBC framing of the same stories by someone without a a priori loyalty to any of them.
• middle ~62-68%: Vance's candid admission of receiving hate mail from both political directions after deliberately booking guests with opposing pandemic-policy views, and Dax's response about losing the habit of respecting differing opinions.
• late ~72-78%: Dax's Italy comparison — the U.S. having a similar per-capita hospital-bed/respirator infrastructure but roughly a three-week lag, a specific and ultimately largely accurate epidemiological prediction.
• late ~90-95%: The concrete civilian medical-kit advice — prioritize prescription refills and wound-cleaning agents over dressings or toilet paper.

Notable quotes

“You'll watch a story from Fox and it of course has that right lane, and then you watch the story from CNN and it has that left lane, and then you get MSNBC.”

“The only thing different from them was they had about a three week head start... I think you can look at them and get a really good view of what the United States is gonna look like.”

“I would rather be made fun of by someone who's alive than have to go to a funeral when this goes away.”