Constant Combat: Standing up against crime and evil with Craig Sawyer
SNIPPET #143
Some people run from combat their entire lives. Others run to it. They attack the attack. Craig “Sawman” Sawyer has been stepping into combat for years. First as a Marine, then as a Navy SEAL, Craig sought service that allowed him to pursue his childhood vision.
“In my mind I was a great warrior, and I wanted to do great things,” says Craig. He grew up learning about biblical battles and those who fought for their faith. Larger than life warrior figures that crushed the nation’s enemies and made the world a safer place for their people is the vision Craig pulled from the Bible and what he envisioned he was meant to become.
At first Craig Sawyer thought he’d fulfill his drive by becoming a United States Marine.
When that turned out to be the wrong fit for what he sought, Craig made the leap over to the Navy, where he went on to become a member of what is now known as SEAL Team 6.
Craig loved his time in Special Forces – but then something came along that he realized he loved even more. The moment his first child was born, Craig knew it was time for a change.
Being deployed 300 days a year is challenging enough as a husband. Craig and his wife made it work, though. Who knows how long he would have remained in the military if fatherhood had not knocked that thought right out of his mind.
Craig wanted to be home more. He wanted to be present in the lives of his children, so he made another career move. This time it was into the Federal Air Marshal Reserve.
What should have been a downward leap from danger and life disruption, and allowed Craig and his wife to enjoy more family time together, turned out to be an even bigger time of stress and a different kind of danger.
All was well until it wasn’t.
It was at the time Craig was among the top people in the hierarchy of the Los Angeles field office that things took a turn for the worst.. The person at the very top, says Craig, was a “corrupt bureaucrat” who was unqualified for the position he’d landed and determined to keep it at all costs.
At least three of Craig’s men came to Craig to warn him about the senior executive. “Wear your armor in the office. It’s hostile out there,” said one agent. “Watch your six around here,” warned another. “Someone is going to go postal.”
At first Craig tried to ride out the 2 year contract that person held. He encouraged others to do the same. However, it became clear that the senior executive had no intention of stepping down and was, in fact, systematically “hunting his own agents” with the goal of protecting his own position. If he could discredit or even ruin the agents qualified to step into his role, says Craig, there would be no one to replace him. This would allow him to continue collecting two paychecks under the guise of fulfilling two roles which he was either not performing or was actively sabotaging.
Finally it reached the point that Craig could no longer sit back and let it play out. He realized that as a top executive and leader he had a responsibility to take action. Inaction, he knew, would make him complicit in the unethical and damaging actions the senior executive was actively engaged in.
He had a duty to report this activity and that’s what he did. What should have happened after that, says Craig is the Inspector General’s Office should have conducted an investigation into his claims. Instead, the Inspector General called the senior executive and gave him a heads up about Craig’s claim.
It was game on from there.
That phone call triggered a series of events that ultimately led to Craig Sawyer resigning without a pension.
The retaliation was swift. Craig had inadvertently stumbled into a deep state group of bureaucrats scattered among the five entities that should have had his back. He was a national security whistleblower and they were supposed to investigate the claims he made. But, says Craig, it was not in the personal best interest of those in power to do so.
“I didn’t know how far spread the corruption was,” says Craig – but he soon found out.
Pressure was applied to fellow agents to sign fabricated complaints against him. His phone was tapped. His wife was followed. His home email was illegally monitored.
“It was ugly. It was stupid. It was gross mismanagement,” says Craig.
Craig had a newborn baby battling an illness in the hospital. His wife was suffering postpartum depression as a result of hormonal imbalance and he was in no mood to continue being the whipping boy of a,”…wormy, balding, potbelly disheveled man” who’d dodged the draft for Vietnam and dug himself deep with fellow corrupt bureaucrats.
They’re’ cowards- weaklings who abused their positions, and they should all have been prosecuted, but that’s not what happened.
When they tried to transfer him to a DC field office with other draft dodgers, says Craig, is when he made a tactical retreat from that job and began a new career working for fellow Delta Force veterans in their corporate mobile security company.
Overnight, Craig spirited his family out of Vegas and into Tuscon. He stayed with a friend while wrapping up his business there, and enjoyed seeing the “crooks” from the vegas field office panic, wondering what their foe was up to.
Craig enjoyed the game he made of popping up long enough for them to know he was there and disappearing again. Leaving them to scramble to locate him. “I just wanted them to do their jobs and quit ruining my best agents’ careers,” he says. Because they chose to come after him instead, he continued to toy with them. Finally, the pressure Craig continued to apply led to the senior executive being fired for gross mismanagement.
Craig moved on and is working on a book about the entire experience.
Since then his life and his career have continued to include combat, or a combat theme. From going up against deadly rhino poachers in Africa, to appearing in popular shows like the History Channel’s Sniper: Deadly Missions, and Top Shot, to being named Maxim’s “Maximum Warrior,” and launching a Hollywood combat consulting company he named Tactical Insider, Craig continues with his drive to harness combat for his life’s work.
No mission, however, is as personal as the one Craig Sawyer is on now.
Veterans for Child Rescue (V4CR) is the non-profit organization Craig founded in 2017. Its mission is to help raise awareness of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking and create a non-permissive environment for child exploitation in the United States.
One way he’s doing this is through his explosive new documentary just released. Contraland is an in depth walk into the world of child sex-trafficking. It takes viewers along as Craig and his team of veterans assist law enforcement agencies on pedophile stings, scouting along the border, into Thailand sex clubs and, through brief interviews, into the hearts and lives of survivors who come forth to share pieces of their stories.
It is raw, real, and shocking. It is also deeply personal for Craig, whose own daughter is a survivor of an abduction and sexual assault, and is now determined to be a part of her father’s work. She’s even worked as a decoy on stings, something which Craig is both proud of and worried about – but his daughter has proven, time and time again, that,” She’s got the heart of a lion… “the heart of a warrior,” he says with pride pouring forth in his voice.
His daughter managed to survive her attack at knifepoint, by a man who told her he killed his other victims and did not understand himself why he hadn’t killed her. The investigation revealed he was a repeat rapist who’d been in and out of prison.
That a predator like that managed to attack his own daughter – that he was allowed to roam the world at large at all after being convicted of rape – makes what he does now all the more personal to him.
[clickToTweet tweet=”If you’re out there preying upon children, we’re out there looking for you, Craig Sawyer” quote=”If you’re out there preying upon children, we’re out there looking for you, Craig Sawyer” theme=”style5″]
Craig’s life is one packed with twists, turns, dangers, disappointments, and the unexpected – and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I think God’s got a plan,” he says.
That plan led him to be right where he is today, doing right what he first envisioned himself to be doing as a child. He is a warrior at heart, fighting to rescue and defend the defenseless from evil.
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