173: Fighting an Uphill Battle: The PATH w/ Medal of Honor Recipient, Ron Shurer

0:00:00 - Opening 0:03:10 - Ron Shurer. Medal Of Honor. Life, battle, Lessons. 2:34:29 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:41:17 - Support: How to Stay On THE PATH. 3:07:40 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 173 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Sure analyzed the wound.

• 0:15Jocko Willink?

  Wallen was bleeding from his neck. So he pulled out gauze and started examining the wound to assess the damage. Wallen's airway looked fine. There was no vascular damage. The medic could tell that the wound wasn't life threatening. But the blood was still flowing. You're gonna be okay, he said, wrapping gauze on the wound. He began exerting pressure to stop the bleeding. Are you sure? Wallen asked. Yes, I'm sure.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  The fire was nonstop. Sure didn't think it could get much worse. Until he heard a frantic call from Walton on the radio. Bear Morales and CK had been hit and they needed sure up there fast. Did you hear that? Wallen asked. Yeah, I heard it sure. Sure said.

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  His bleeding was minimal. I'm good, Wallen said. Go get them.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  Getting to Walton's team though posed a great risk. A medic is taught not to put himself in any unnecessary danger. He has to stay alive so other soldiers can live.

• 1:23Jocko Willink?

  But it had reached a point in the battle where he had to go. So sure grabbed his bag.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  And headed into the fire.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  And that is a passage from a book called No Way Out. A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan. By an author named Mitch Weiss and it tells the story. Of the men of Operational Detachment Alpha 3336. It's a special forces ODA team. Going after a high value target in the shock valley in Afghanistan.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  But when they got on the ground for this mission. They were. In a bad tactical position, they were outnumbered, they were outgunned. But they did have one thing that could not be beaten. And that was the will to survive and the bonds of brotherhood that could not be broken.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  And on top of those things, there was incredible courage on display from all the men of the team, above and beyond the call of duty and one of those men, the medic Ron Scher fought not only against the enemy, but fought to save the lives of his teammates. And it is an absolute honor to have Ron here with us tonight to share some of the lessons from that day in Afghanistan and from the rest of the things that he's been through and lived through on his journey through life. So Ron, thanks for coming on, man.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  No, thanks so much for having me. I've honestly been a fan of the show for a long time and you know, when you guys offered, it's kind of weird to think about coming on, but it's definitely a pleasure.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, man, it's great to meet you and you know, we'll get to Shock Valley, but you know, let's, let's figure out a little bit about who you were, where you came from, how you grew up. I know one interesting fact to start this thing off is that you were born on December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yes, born December 7th, obviously a few years later than 1941. But yeah, I grew up with that and for some reason, my parents always thought it was a good idea to like, get me news articles or, or other reporting from Pearl Harbor and just as like a six or seven year old, hey, read this. I don't know why, but yeah, it always just, you know, was, was something that, that we talked about as, as part of my, my birthday and.

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  Happy birthday. Let me tell you about Pearl Harbor, son.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  And then your, was your grandfather in, your grandfather served?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  My grandfather did serve. He was in the Navy. So he was in the Pacific for, sorry, he was he.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember, um, he was on the smaller aircraft carriers that they had around the Pacific, um, so he was on several of those, uh, aircraft mechanic.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, dodging kamikazes and

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  And other things.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  I got a bunch of books on, uh, in queue from World War Two sailors in World War Two. It's, those books are absolutely insane. And what those guys lived through was horrific. I, I, I look at that and, and maybe this is just me. I don't know how you feel. If given the option of being in an engine room on a, on a destroyer in World War Two, hot, sweating, and by the way, kamikazes, like you said, or torpedoes are going to slam into you at any time. There's nothing you can do about it versus storming the beach. I'll storm the beach all day long. Like, that's me. I don't know.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent. I would rather, you know, in, you know, land warfare combat, like, if you're going to shoot me, I get a chance to shoot you back and maybe this will work out my way. Maybe it works out your way, but when you throw water in and all those other, other pressures, like, no thanks, I'll pass.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know I owe, I owe it to those sailors to, to cover some of those books, man. Those are those books, but you know, with your, with your grandfather, I mean, just to live through that. I can't even imagine coming back from that, what your normal life is like after you've lived through World War Two as a, as a sailor in the Pacific theater. Ugh, man, crazy.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my grandfather, he, he served in the Pacific. Um, my great grandfather, uh, was in World War One, uh, shooting artillery.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  At, uh, at the Germans. Um, so we have that family history and, and, uh, we have some family history that goes back all the way to the Civil War. Uh, it gets a little, you know, a little more like cousin level and everything out there, but yeah, they, we've been, been fighting wars for this country for a long time.

• 6:22Jocko Willink?

  And then both your parents as well.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Both my parents were in the Air Force. Um, that's where they actually met was in the Air Force and.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've just had that family history of service.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  That was, so that was pretty normal. And where were they stationed? Where'd you spend most of your childhood?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Uh, I think like most military, you know, kids, um, I was born in Alaska, but then moved to Illinois. Don't really remember any of either of those places. Uh, first place I remember is, uh, Mountain Home Idaho, which is just a tiny little place about an hour south of Boise. And then, uh, from there, I kind of what called Washington State home, because I spent fourth grade on growing up in Washington.

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so a big chunk of time there.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my dad ended up retiring in, I want to say 91 from the air force and then we just kind of stayed there afterwards.

• 7:17Jocko Willink?

  And then, and you were the only child?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  So that means those, those birthdays were especially heavy. It was like pure celebration. I got four kids. I know you've got two kids. I got four kids and, you know, you get a birthday and you don't even, um, am I a bad parent? I don't know.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, probably. Yeah, because a birthday, oh, you know, oh, are we doing anything for my birthday? I don't know. When's your birthday? Today? Oh, okay. Anyways.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  My wife blows it out for our kids' birthday. She's, she's great at that.

• 7:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  I just kind of go along for the ride.

• 7:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and my wife does a much better job than I do as well. I'm the person that's looking at the whole situation saying, what is this stuff hanging up for? Oh.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  What, what did I get him for his birthday?

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, and then, so going to school, were you, were you playing sports? What were you doing? What was your gig in, in, in school?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Uh, I played the usual sports growing up, you know, soccer, baseball.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  What I really kind of gravitated, gravitated towards as I, as I kept growing up was your endurance sports. So I started, my dad was doing triathlons, so I started doing that.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, your dad was doing triathlons, huh?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did the, he did many triathlons. He did the Canadian Ironman a couple of times. And so kind of grew up watching that. So I started with the triathlons in high school. And then pretty quickly switched over to just cycling, road, road racing, cycling. And I don't know, I think, I think those, you know, four, five, six hour days on a bike got me ready for, uh,

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's just pure pain on a bike, right?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  I've never raced a bike before, but I know guys that race bike and it's just pain. It's just how much pain can you take, right?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, just you long stretch of road and you just keep on riding.

• 9:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and apparently you've gotten some kind of crash?

• 9:10Jocko Willink?

  Biking?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, several times.

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, I know that, I know that there's a little disruption in your plans because you get done with high school and you want to join the Marine Corps? Or you get done with college, you want to join the Marine Corps?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so yeah, I, I went to Washington State University, was getting ready to graduate in the spring of 2001. And so started talking to a Marine Corps, uh, officer recruiter, um, went through that process.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  How's your mom and dad feel about that?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  They were.

• 9:41Jocko Willink?

  Because that's basically, Air Force is one side of the spectrum, Marine Corps is on the other side of the spectrum.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  At least, at least I was gonna, I was talking about the officer side on there. When I later said, hey, I'm joining the Army enlisted, then they just, they just lost it then. They're like, what are you doing? You just, but, um, yeah, so I was getting ready to graduate Washington State. Um, started talking to the Marine Corps and went through the process. We basically that was, was accepted through the Marine Corps program to go to OCS starting in October of 2001.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Um, but the Navy Medical Board had seen, um, what they thought was a flag on my, my medical records from being hit by a car in 1995. And so I ended up spending a day in the hospital back then with pancreatitis, which usually would be considered or related to drug abuse, alcoholism. Just something serious or you have some serious medical condition. And, uh, so because of that, they told me no in August of 2001, that now we're, we're good. We don't, we don't need anybody.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  So yeah, kinda got left out to dry there and then.

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  So then what was your plan?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Uh, from there, I started a graduate school in economics.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  What did you get your original degree in?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  It was business economics.

• 11:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you, were you getting that degree, but you knew you wanted to go in the military? I mean, you, you, or did you get done with your degree and say, oh no, what am I going to do now? Maybe I'll go in the Marine Corps.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  A little bit of both.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  So service was definitely always a part of our, our family life growing up. And so it was definitely in the back, back of my mind, I need to give back, do something for the country.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Never quite knew what. And then, yeah, trying to go to OCS. Just seemed like something to, to do for a while and give back. And then when that didn't work out, I started graduate school to use that as kind of a reset time. I figure out, okay, that's not working out. Now what can I do? And, you know, it was a few weeks into that, that nine 11 happened. And then we had to revisit, revisit the decisions again.

• 12:09Jocko Willink?

  And so then what did you do once, once September 11th happened?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Uh, so I was in graduate school for, for economics and, um, and I'm spending, spending that first year, uh, continuing with the education and just watching, watching it on TV. And just didn't feel right to just sit there and watch it.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So tried to figure out what, what made sense at that point to, to do. And then for some reason, enlisting in the army sounded like a good idea.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  So, so that, uh, summer of 2002, I went down to an army recruiter. And of course, at that time they were like, sure, we'll take it. We can, we can scratch that.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  We don't care what medical condition you have, just sign this over here.

• 13:04Jocko Willink?

  Now, did you, did you know you wanted to try for SF at that point?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  They, they talked to me about going in with a SF contract. And it definitely sounded interesting, but a part of me just didn't feel.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Like, like, oh, that I could be an SF guy, because, I mean, I grew up, just like everybody. You're watching Rambo, you're watching other things, like, that's what a Green Beret is. Like, I certainly don't, don't fit that mold.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  But, so they, they talked about that, but I was like, well, let me get in, let me get some experience in the military. And then we'll go from there. So I, I signed up to be a medic, who did basic training.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm forgetting the name right now. Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then went off to Fort Sam Houston. And then went to airborne school. And along that way, I got, I ended up getting myself a Ranger contract. To try and go to the 75th Rangers.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  So at some point, you, you realized, all right, I'm going to step up and, and try and go to a little bit more special operations type. Something got in your head at some point?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, something got in my head.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And if I remember correctly, I think it was orders to Korea.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I think that was my, the, the first thing that came through, like, let me see what else I could do. So I, I talked to the recruiters, got, got the Ranger.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if it was a contract at that point, but I got that set up. So it might be different now, but after, after airborne school, you know, any infantry guys or, or medics, or whoever's trying to go to, to the Ranger, you, you'd go out the next day, wait on the little lines out there at airborne school, and they'd come by, they'd look through your paperwork, pick you up and then take you, take you over. So they come out, they start flipping through everybody's stuff, and they get to mine, and they start looking at my paperwork, which is still the same paperwork from trying to do the Marine Corps OCS thing. And so, it's of course, a disaster. It's, you know, not physically qualified,

• 15:27Speaker 01

  but then there's like lines through that, and waivers, and arrows, and just nonsense. But they look at that, and they're like, well, you're not, you're not physically qualified to be.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Here and so they just kind of dropped my paperwork, took everybody else and left me, left me standing there. Um, so now I had to revisit uh what to do again. So I ended up spending a few weeks sitting there airborne school, just kind of being, you know, a little, you know, whatever they needed done that sucked. They'd make me do, uh, while I waited on new orders to go somewhere.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. I did that for a little while and I finally got orders uh up to Fort Bragg to go to the 44th Medical Command.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  And so while I was, you know, packing up all my stuff,

• 16:27Speaker 01

  head up to Fort Bragg. Unfortunately, uh, my, my medical records got lost along the way.

• 16:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you say fortunately?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I mean, I'm a specialist in the army, you know, I don't want to lose stuff and show up, but it, it got lost along the way.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  So uh, got my medical paperwork redone, none of that.

• 16:49Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  None of those waivers or anything. Got all that situated. Um, reported to my unit on, I think it was a Thursday, some Thursday in, in August of, that'd been 2003 at that point.

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  That's because those, those army, the medic schools are a long time, basically. So that at this point you'd been through boot camp, army boot camp, and then you went to, or to be a medic. How long is the training to be a, uh, like an infantry medic?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Uh, the medic course was four months.

• 17:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, I did basic, I did the, the medic school. And then you had an airborne school and then that interim time while they try and figure out something to do with me. And so I showed up to my, my unit and went after you in process in August of 2003.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  You know, that first day we do PT, then the first sergeant calls me in like, hey, what do you want to do with your, your life? Plan on putting in an SF packet, try this, try something else again and.

• 17:52Jocko Willink?

  And again, the thing that's, what's driving you to do that? Like, did you see some SF guys? Did you talk to some SF guys? Did you watch Rambo again? What was the, uh, what was the persuading factor?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think it was

• 18:11Speaker 01

  a mixture of a lot of different emotions and like I

• 18:18Speaker 01

  I'd had nothing to validate my feelings because I was just some specialist in the army, but I was like, I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. So let me, let me try and push myself a little bit harder and try and

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  find something else to do. So I, I put in for SF.

• 18:35Jocko Willink?

  There's a guy named Travis Mills. You ever heard of Travis Mills? He's an awesome guy, but he, he was on the podcast and, and he's a, he's a quadruple amputee and he's like the, uh, got the, the damn spirit of, of a freaking, like the ultimate human being warrior. But anyways, when he was growing up, he played varsity football and basketball, whatever. He played every sport. He broke all these records. He was this big strapping guy, like a total stud, just, just a total stud. And, you know, I asked him, I said, well, you know, how come you didn't try for Rangers or something? He's like, uh, he's like, I, or why don't you try for special forces? He's like, I didn't, I didn't think I could make it.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  And there's like this thing where like for me, I, I'm, I'm one eighth of the athlete and the physical specimen that Travis Mills is, but I was just dumber. I was just dumb enough to say, oh, I think I can make it through this training. Bring it on, you know? He was too smart to, to say, you know, he was too smart. He was too humble, really too humble. Cause I had some level of arrogance. I mean, I think there's a difference between, cause that happens on a fairly regular basis, you know, special operations and special forces has this kind of mythical buildup where people start to think, well, I don't know if I can actually make it through that. It's gotta be so hard.

• 19:58Jocko Willink?

  Whereas I'm always looking at people like, oh, you were a wrestler or oh, you played football, varsity football in your high school? Or you, you swam on the swim team or whatever, you'll be fine. Like you can do it. But people build it up to that mythical level that you don't think you can make it. So I, the reason I was asking that is because it's, it sounds like you made a transition from, I don't know if I can do that. And then once you're there and you're looking around, you're going, you know, I think I can actually do that. You got, you either got dumber.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Let's go with that.

• 20:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, or you just got more, you know, a little, and that's what I think it is. I think it is, you know, you see, you see yourself in comparison with everyone else that's there and you go, okay, cool, I'm, I'm hanging with these guys. I can probably make this happen. So, no, that's cool. That's cool.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, in, so now we're talking, uh, that fall 2003, so Afghanistan's role in Iraq is, is going, uh, at that time, the, the unit I was in, the, it was a medical support company, they weren't even supposed to deploy, I think the calendar had them going in like 2005. So like, oh.

• 21:06Jocko Willink?

  You're like, that's a lifetime away.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  I came all the way here to not go anywhere. So, so I put in for selection. We got, uh, we got, got those medical, uh, records redone. So I go, um, so I went in January of 2004 to selection and, now we can obviously talk about that more, but when I came back, then my unit is all in desert camouflage uniforms and like, you guys, you guys going somewhere? And they're like, oh, things changed in those three weeks you were gone. We're going in like four weeks.

• 21:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang. So, so you went to special, so they send you, do they send you like T A D to special forces selection? Is that what happens? Like temporary, they don't transfer you there permanently? They just send you for a?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Correct. For the, for the three week selection process, you just get temp orders over, you do your thing. If you get selected, then you wait for orders to go full time to the Q course.

• 22:02Jocko Willink?

  And then that initial selection is just like a beat down?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, three weeks. Um, you know, probably not that different than most selections for different SOF units around the world.

• 22:14Jocko Willink?

  Bunch of.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  You know, walk in the woods with heavy bags, get lost, then we're gonna make you carry. Heavy stuff and I remember logs, a lot of logs that needed carried apparently. They didn't belong over here, they belonged over there.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do in that? Did you feel alright?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. So I obviously passed, I got selected, but I didn't feel like I was where I wanted to be for that process. It definitely beat me up more than I thought it should. And it helped reset me. So I spent the next couple of months when I was getting ready for those orders, really resetting the way I was training, was getting myself mentally prepared for it. And so once I got to the phase two of the course, I thought that was...

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  How old were you? You were a little older because you did college and...

• 23:15Speaker 01

  This was 2004, so I was at that point 25.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  Dang, was that older for...

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Maybe 26.

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  The group that was going through?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Not for special forces. I was definitely one of the oldest guys at basic training when I was going through. But for special forces, it tends to be those older guys who've been in the army for a little while, have seen stuff, got some experience and then decide they wanted to explore some different routes.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  So you come back from the initial selection course and all your guys are in Desert Cami and they're getting ready. So did they end up deploying quickly?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  They deployed a couple of weeks later.

• 23:57Jocko Willink?

  Dang. Did they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  They went to Iraq.

• 24:01Jocko Willink?

  Did they run the cache in Baghdad?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Some of them were, they're out east doing, I want to say they were doing prisoner,

• 24:14Speaker 01

  you know,

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  Detention operations or whatever.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Out there at some of the prisons. But luckily, my company commander pulled me in in their office and basically said, "Yeah, you're on these orders."

• 24:29Speaker 01

  But if you wanna, if you wanna go pursue something else, I see some value in that. So if you wanna go, you can go.

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  So your company commander took care of you and said you can go to the Q course?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. You know what's cool about that is that guy just leaves a good impression on you about the army. You know what I mean? I always think that when I was a young enlisted guy and somebody could either, you know, maybe screw you over is a hard term, but you know, some could either like look out for you or just kind of let the big green machine do its thing. And when someone actually looks out for you, it just gives you such a much better appreciation and, and connection to, you know, like I had guys that looked out for me when I was a new guy and I was that, that just heightens your commitment to the team, you know, that there's people like that. Whereas the people that try and, you know, oh, you're just gonna do this anyways, needs of the Navy. That's what they say. In the, in the Navy, they say needs of the Navy. Yeah.

• 25:27Jocko Willink?

  Those are the needs of the Navy. So

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Well,

• 25:30Jocko Willink?

  you're gonna get some.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And so after my company deployed, basically our, our battalion had four companies, two deployed, two stayed behind. So we kind of fell under the two that had stayed behind. And there were some people over there who had that attitude of you think you're better than us? Like I, I don't, I'm just trying something different. And so they made life interesting for a little while, but we got through it.

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and then so what did you train? What did you change differently about your training? Well, you learned from selection, like, okay, I need to work on humping a ruck more or whatever. What was the, what were the big things that you learned you needed to work on?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  More weight and moving faster. I mean, not to, um, it's, it's pretty simple, really. I mean, I'm not a big guy. I'm five, six. At the time I went to selection, I think I was about a hundred and thirty-five pounds. So you, you put on that weight and it's, it's a lot. So I, I put on some more weight. I just got a little more used to, to moving with that and.

• 26:32Jocko Willink?

  Because you gotta carry, doesn't matter if you weigh 220 pounds or a hundred and twenty pounds, you gotta carry the same weight.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. The packing list is what it is. The minimum weight for the day is what it is. Doesn't matter. If you're six foot three or, or five foot six.

• 26:46Jocko Willink?

  You're just gonna go get some.

• 26:49Jocko Willink?

  And then how was the Q course?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  QRS itself, I thought was a really, really good course. I thought it, I thought it did a great job getting you ready for, you know, things I had no experience in. So it's all, it's all changed around a little bit since then. But so for me, when I showed up, you know, through a small unit tactics portion, basically learn how to, you know, be an infantryman, which from, from being a medic, I mean, I had the basic training experience, but I didn't know anything really about that. So we spent about a month and a half actually learning how to move with, with a small unit, you know, just the basic military drills, break

• 27:32Speaker 01

  contact, initiate ambushes, those things. And then from there, we started the medical course, which for SF medics is a, is a year. Basically just learning every single thing they could teach us in a year, you know, of course, trauma medicine heavily enforced. And then, you know, just all the weird and random diseases you might see around the world. I, I actually met my future wife during the medic course. And so when I'd go see her on the weekends, I'd pull out, you know, medical manuals and be like, all right, start,

• 28:16Speaker 01

  you know, start grilling me on these things. And so she'd pretend she had whatever random disease you could get and from around the world. It was, it was pretty fun date nights, you know? I don't know why she, she put up with it, but she did. And

• 28:32Jocko Willink?

  So where were you when you, where does that chunk of the course take place? Cause that's, that's 18 Delta, right?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  You're going through the 18 Delta.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Of course, all the SF, the Q course was all, all based at Fort Bragg. So I was already at Fort Bragg. So really I just had to move across post when I started and then

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  Are they, when you're going through 18 Delta, are they still, are you still doing tactical, physical evolutions, or is it like really starting to get focused on classroom, really focused on the, the, the, the medical aspect of stuff?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  There's a lot of classroom stuff because they got a lot of,

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta learn a lot of stuff.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  They got a lot of stuff to teach you, but they do, they also do a great job of pulling you out in the woods and can't remember all the different segments of the course. We have a combat trauma lanes, you have just so many different portions where you get used to, you know, treating people out in, out in the dirt. And I remember, um, sorry, I think I started that course in Au- Au- August, September of 2004. And so we were rolling through the winter and I, I still distinctly remember being out in the woods in January when it's like 15 degrees and you're the patient and you know, like,

• 29:53Jocko Willink?

  Lay there.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Somebody's working on you, you know, to, to practice and you're like, please do it faster so I can, I can get out of this. Cause you know, you, how do you treat a patient who's wounded? You have to expose.

• 30:07Jocko Willink?

  Remove his clothes.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  So they'd be going through stuff and they'd be like, you know, you know, do you feel this or do you feel that? And like the patient's saying, yes, but no, I don't feel that because my, my feet are frozen right now. Um, but so it was, it was a great course. Um, we did two one-month blocks where you go out to hospitals around the country and work in ERs or work with, uh, anywhere in the hospital, OB, just different aspects. Uh, go to the local fire houses, ride on the ambulances, get those experiences.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  So.

• 30:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the medical training that the, and, and the SEALs used to go to eighteen Delta, our SEAL corpsman used to go to eighteen Delta.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Jocko Willink?

  They don't anymore. Now they have a separate course.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:00Jocko Willink?

  But the, the training that they got and the training that, that the, that course provided is just awesome training. I mean, it's legendary awesome training and who, who knows how many lives have been saved because guys went through that, that block of training and were just so good and at doing all this stuff under a poncho at night, stopping bleeding, working on, you know, healing people with all kinds of, you know, in inclement weather and the dirt, like you said, all that stuff. There's the, the training that they prepped our medical guys for was phenomenal.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  I was super impressed, having been a medic before and then kind of stepping

• 31:44Speaker 01

  it up a level like that. It was, it was really, really nice to see where we're going to take a year, we're going to really take our time, teach you everything you need to know from the ground up.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just to continue to build those basics, you know, from starting early on with, you know, classes, sticks and rags, like, okay, everything else is going to be great. We're going to teach you that stuff, but you know, sometimes

• 32:14Jocko Willink?

  This is what you're gonna get.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  literally just a stick and a rag, you can stop a lot of stuff. You can save a lot of people as long as you've had that experience. And then of course, moving on later to use like hemostatic agents, you know, to like QuickClot or something to really stop like, okay, this is easy now because I had to stop it last week with literally go find a stick and cut up, cut up some clothes.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  T-shirt.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Now you're giving me actual materials. Like, okay, I got this.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the Q course, the initial kickoff of the Q course, was there anything that you had major issues with?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 32:49Jocko Willink?

  Like when you were going through not selection, but through the Q course, was there anything that you were like, I'm not going to make it through this? I'm going to fail this. I'm not good enough at this. Like for me, I wasn't really good at anything. I was like, everything that I did, because basically every week going through SEAL training, you get tested on, you get a timed run, you get a timed swim, you get a timed obstacle course, and then there's usually some kind of a water evolution that they're going to test you on, whether it's underwater, not tying, or life-saving, or breath hold, or whatever. They've got these evolutions for you and they're stacked up. And that's one of the biggest pressures that that I felt going through was

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  if you, for me, like to pass a four mile timed run, which when I went through, the runs were not four miles. They were however long they happened to be that day. They might be 3.8, they might be 4.6. No one knew, soft sand, high tide, and I failed one run because I decided I was going to pace myself and that was not smart. And after that one run that I failed, I just had to go as hard as I could for the whole time. I just had to sprint as hard as I could and then I'd pass. And it was kind of the same thing for everything. Like I just had to go hard. But, you know, I was worried that, oh, I might fail another swim. I might fail. Was there anything where you were thinking to yourself, man, if I don't, if I don't pay attention, I might not make it through this training?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  I'll say any of the, any of the time we're out in the woods doing infantry stuff, because I just, I didn't have that experience.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I worked my butt off trying to learn, trying to pick up, follow the guys, like, okay, that guy has been to Ranger School. He's done this. He's done, he's already done the combat deployment. Let me, let me hang out a little closer to that guy and see, see what he does when we're setting up a patrol base, those kinds of things.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Honestly, I think like a lot, a lot of people, I have that two sides of the coin on me. Like I have that little bit of dumb arrogance, like I think I can do this, but then I also have that I don't belong anywhere near these guys, like these guys are, you know, they've been there, they've actually done that. What have I done? So I was always trying to find that balance internally of, yeah, I can do this, or, or no, I can't.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  I guess that's a big difference between when you go through SEAL training, pretty much everyone's going through training is not been, not done anything before. So even, because you might've been the regular Navy, but even most guys haven't even been in the regular Navy. Most guys are just, you go through boot camp, you go through prep course, and then you go show up at BUDs and that's it. That's, that's what you do. So there's no, you're not looking at anyone going, oh, this guy, this guy's done stuff before, anything like that. And also, you're not doing anything in, in basics SEAL training. You're just, there's no tactical, there's, there's barely any tactical knowledge being taught at all. It's like, carry this boat on your head for a long time, and it's gonna hurt a lot. And then when it hurts a lot, keep going.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Right. And I mean, SF definitely has that aspect too. Like if, if we find the right people, we can train you at any point on what we want you to do, but we just got to make sure, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna quit on us. And I don't know, I think just along the way, I was just, I was too stubborn to, to quit. Definitely, I definitely wanted to all the time, but you know, I wasn't gonna give them the satisfaction.

• 36:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And so, so then you get done with that, you get done with Q course, you get done with 18 Delta, and then, when do you get, when do they give you your Green Beret?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  So for us, I ended up finishing the entire Q course in May of 2006. So I had done selection in January of 2004, had a couple of month break while I waited on orders, started the Q course proper in June of 2004, and then May of 2006 is when I graduated.

• 37:00Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that's a long pipeline, isn't it?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  It's a long pipeline, that's

• 37:04Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it is.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  That's zero recycles, that's zero getting injured, that's just, that's just what it is. All the other jobs are, they teach you the job in about three months, whereas the medic, they teach it in 12 months. So, everybody else can be that much shorter than our pipeline. But so it was in May, that's when I got the green bra, graduated the Q course, got my orders over to a third group.

• 37:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you, were you married? Did you get married yet?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  So, graduated the Q course in May of 2006. Right, yeah. And, so I got that couple week break before reporting to my unit. My wife and I got engaged then, so I reported over to third group towards the end of June of 2006. And they say, hey, go over to third battalion, they're gonna get you slotted. Third battalion's like, hey, go to Charlie Company, and I show up to Charlie Company 33, and there's, there's nobody there, like, like, am I the first guy here? Like, what's going on? And there was one guy in there, and he was like, oh, everybody's on block leave

• 38:21Speaker 01

  because we're going Afghanistan in a couple of weeks. So I went home, told Miranda the situation, and

• 38:32Speaker 01

  So we, we need a quickie marriage, but we didn't want to have to try and plan while I was gone. And then there's also those aspects of, you know, military doesn't give a damn about some girlfriend or a fiance or anything.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  Girlfriend don't count.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And so we, you know, we decided, you know, she wants, you know, an actual wedding ring, an actual dress, you know, you know, these few things, can we get them done? We got it done. So we got married and then.

• 39:02Jocko Willink?

  So you didn't do a quick wedding, but you got married in two weeks.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  But it was like three weeks.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It was, you know, it wasn't like a, a lope runaway kind of thing. Uh, cause we'd been together a year and a half at that point. Um, so yeah, it wasn't quick, but it was, it was pretty quick.

• 39:22Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  You know.

• 39:23Jocko Willink?

  Did your, did your family, uh, how'd you tell your family?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  That.

• 39:29Jocko Willink?

  Text message?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  At that point, a text really weren't that big because you had to type so many buttons, you know, to, to send a message. Um, so we ended up bringing her parents, uh, my parents.

• 39:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's awesome. They actually came down?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually went, where do you do a non-quickie quick marriage? Vegas? So we all kind of met up there.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so, uh, so you did a Vegas wedding?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  And, and we're still going, I mean, what this summer will be 13 years strong.

• 39:59Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome, man.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Uh, so yes, we got married.

• 40:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you request permission from your, uh, sergeant to get married?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I did not. I, I didn't even meet him. I just went on.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  He wanted to let you out of the compound.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I, I just went on, cause nobody was there. So they just put me, as soon as I showed up, I went right back on leave, kind of got married and then showed back up, did some training and then met a bunch of guys for the first time and deployed for seven months with them.

• 40:27Jocko Willink?

  Dang. And, and what was that first deployment like?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Uh, the first deployment.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Was compared to my second deployment, it was fairly tame. That fall 2006 into 2007 timeframe in Afghanistan, we were, we were working with the Afghans, you know, doing that stuff, then partner with them, training them, taking them out on missions.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  I don't know, we just ended up in Gardes, Afghanistan, and for some reason it was hard to find trouble. Then, I mean, obviously, things happen, flow in different areas. And but just at that time, we really couldn't find too much work.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  So were you guys, you guys were training up these Afghan National Police and building relationships with them, and then you'd go out and do some kind of missions with them? But the AO that you were in was relatively tame at the time?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, we work with the Army and the, and the police, just training them up, trying to get them ready to take over their country. That's the SF mission is to train you up so you can do the job and I can, I can go home.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  You know, obviously, all SF guys want to be the guy to go in and, you know, blow up the doors, go in and clear it all yourselves, but the SF mission is to get somebody else to go do it for themselves.

• 41:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's it. For those of you that don't know, that's the, that is the tenant of the bit, that's the mission of the, of the Special Forces of the Green Berets is to work with the, whatever nation you're in, you build up their forces, you help them, you train them, prepare them, and, and then you advise them out on the battlefield and hopefully with the goal of allowing them to eventually not need your advisement anymore. That's what, that's what the primary mission of the Special Forces is. And well, in the SEAL Teams, we end up doing that as well. You know, we, I don't know, I'm trying to think of when we actually started getting tasked with that, but you know, we, that's what we do now, too. You know, we probably, we lean towards, you know, direct action and special reconnaissance.

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of where we lean towards, you guys lean more towards, you know, training up guerrilla forces. But there's a lot of crossover and, and all of us do everyone else's job to the best of our ability. But did you, did you feel like the deployment was like, what was your satisfac, what was your personal satisfaction level of that deployment?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I think like most SF guys, you've just gone through a long train up. You've got all this experience, you're, you're raring to go and that deployment, I mean, it was a good trip, but it was, it was a little quieter than I think most of the team would have liked. You know, if you're going to be gone and you're going to miss your family for seven months.

• 43:23Jocko Willink?

  So would you guys, would you take them out and hit targets? And there just would be, you'd capture your bad guy or yes or no, but they weren't putting up resistance?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we did villages, we would go, we caught plenty of bad guys.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Just they, at, at that point, I don't know, I think it was this kind of a weird point in the war where the bad guys really, they could quickly spot this is SF and they didn't really want too much to do with us. So they just, you know, we'll pass today, we'll find, we'll find another unit to attack.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  But yeah, it just, yeah, we caught, we caught guys, they just always went pretty, pretty quickly. I mean, we, we got in, we'd get into a, you know, a couple, yeah, just a couple contact over there, but it was, yeah, overall it was just kind of a quiet area.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  And was it winter time?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  So we showed up there in August of 2006 and we stayed till March of 2000, I want to say March of 2007. So yeah, it was, it was that winter when you kind of have that lull anyways of the, the winter time.

• 44:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and like you said, I mean, things just go up and down, cycles go up and down. People, the enemy gets agitated or they get beat down and they take a tactical breath for a few months or whatever. And then you come home from that deployment and you're, so then what happens? What's the life of an SF guy when you come home from that deployment? You're going to start a workup to get ready to play again?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we already knew when we were going again.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Basically, the.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  At the time, there was three battalions. They ended up standing up a fourth battalion in the group. So, kinda, two battalions would be on the next rotation, one would be down. And so, it just happened that my battalion had two, two, uh, back-to-back, so to speak. So, we had seven on and seven off, and then seven on again. So, we knew right away as soon as we got back, when we're going.

• 45:32Jocko Willink?

  And then, do you try and cram in a quick workup into that time period?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Of course. So, you know, you got back, so you gotta first refit, get everything resituated, make sure, make sure, uh, you know, all the stuff you broke is fixed, uh, kinda, you know, take a little bit of time just to decompress, and then start the train up. And, you know, we got, got a few new guys in on the, the team. I've got a new team sergeant. We got, got a new, uh, team leader, a couple other new guys, and, you know, just getting everybody ready, getting on the same page. Um, honestly, we, the, the team sergeant

• 46:16Speaker 01

  we got, then Scott Ford, he was great coming from, he'd come from some training, he'd come from some, some different SF teams that had been over, uh, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and had been there, you know, early on in the war when it was, it's a lot. So, he, he put us through a lot of training, got us, got us much more prepared than, we were prepared for the first trip, but we were even better for the second one. And, yeah, we finished up that training, do a little bit more.

• 46:49Jocko Willink?

  How'd the boys like that when you had the, the, the new team sergeant coming in, and he's all fired up to push you guys hard in training? Was there any pushback from that?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Of course, all of us are, you know, SF guys and a little bit like, you know, even though he's the team's are, he's been around forever. Like, oh, who's this new guy coming on the team trying to tell us all what to do? Like, but, you know, it didn't take very long to see, like, okay, he's got all this great experience and, and the training that he's putting us through was, was definitely getting us right, getting us ready.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  And how much, how much support do you guys get for training? So do they, do, are you going through organized training? Are you guys running all the training yourselves?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  It's, the company does coordinate some stuff, but most of it's just at the team level. So, you know, the team sergeant's kind of, in coordination with the team leader is kind of guiding the team where they want them to be. But then,

• 47:51Speaker 01

  you know, as SF is broken down, you have your, your weapons sergeants who are, you know, supposed to be your weapons experts. You have your engineers who, you know, handle the demolitions and, and those things. Your communications guys and your medics. And so depending on the day, it might be my day to teach. So I'm going to get two days this week to just put everybody through a mini medical course. Get them, get them ready just in case, you know, something happens, I can't get there, or something happens to me, or something like that.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  So everybody, everybody is a subjectmatic expert and just kind of tries to, tries to lift that whole, whole team up to be the best they can be. There's no,

• 48:38Speaker 01

  obviously each job is the best at their job. You want to know as much as you can about everything. So that way, you know, when things go wrong, and that point was kind of still theoretical to me. But yeah, when things went wrong, okay, I can handle this.

• 48:57Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys already knew when you were going to deployment. Did you know where you were going on deployment as well?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I don't remember when we found out what our next mission was. I can't remember if it was early on or it was late on. I think it was fairly early on in our buildup. That we knew we were going to be working this time with the Afghan Commandos, which was a fairly new thing at the time. It was right around that time that SF teams had just started, okay, we're going to go through selection. For the Afghan Army, we're going to get the best we can. We're going to train them up and we're going to start building these Afghan Commando battalions and they're going to be the SF of Afghanistan. So I can't remember exactly when, but we knew we were going to be partnering with those guys to do a little bit more of this trip.

• 49:48Jocko Willink?

  So your expectation was that things were going to be a little bit hotter on this second deployment?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 49:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you believe that as a, as like a one cruise wonder, a guy that done one deployment? Are you like, things are going to be hotter? Or were you just thinking, hey, it's going to be the same as last time?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  I think we all thought it was going to be a little bit more this trip, just because my first trip, it was, you kind of had a little bit more of a region that your team was, so it just depends on what your region is doing.

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Whereas the Commandos could go anywhere.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  The Commandos, they were still fairly new, so there wasn't that many. So over the course of the second, my second deployment, we spent time in Eastern Afghanistan, we spent time down in Kandahar, we spent time just going wherever they needed another battalion because, like I said, there wasn't very many. They were training them up, but it takes a little while to get, get guys trained up.

• 50:45Jocko Willink?

  So you go on deployment, you show up there and you start working with the Commandos. How was your relationship with the Commandos? How, how, how good were the Commandos as you trained them?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  They were, they were much better than, than, you know, a non-selected force. I think that's just, you know, as to be expected.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  You're still gonna have those you know, variances in your troops. But definitely felt more comfortable.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  So they were, they were fairly capable crew.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  I

• 51:23Speaker 01

  they were better.

• 51:25Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 51:28Jocko Willink?

  Understood. And so you're out there working with these guys. What type, what types of missions were you doing? Just basically going after high value targets?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would, would get intel on a high value target. We'd

• 51:47Speaker 01

  you know, trying to, again, going back to trying to train them to do the job for their country. So we'd work with

• 51:55Speaker 01

  their, the, the team leader for the team would start working with the, you know, the, the command level over there. Okay, this is the objective. How, how do you, would you take it? And then they would kind of coordinate on a battle plan.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  For me, you know, I'd make sure their medics, you know, were, were training up, getting, getting ready. And then, you know, when it came time for an actual mission, then each one of us would have a squad or, or maybe a few extra.

• 52:26Jocko Willink?

  Which is how big is an Afghan commando squad?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  They were, they're built around the same premise as a, as a an army, you know, light infantry unit. So you'd have, you know, nine, 10 dudes.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Just depending on what, what kind of squad you had with you on any given day.

• 52:48Jocko Willink?

  And so then you would be running your squad of Afghan commandos. Once you're out in the field, you would, whatever, whatever, just from a, you're no longer just the medic. You're now a, a little squad advisor for these Afghan commandos.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the, the medic piece is always there for, for 18 Delta. But, you know, best medicine is superior firepower. So if we can, if we can, if we can go in, we hit them with overwhelming force. Everybody's good. We win. Talk about how tough we are and then we go home. And so, yeah, the primary role is to, you know, advise that squad leader on.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  On how things are going and then, you know, we also bring all the other assets that the US military comes with all that, you know, whether it's helicopter coverage or aircraft coverage. So we can, we're getting those, you know, that, that extra intel that we can then push to these guys and be like, hey, this is going on, this is not going on. Let's, let's fix this.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, for me, I think I just wanted to kind of bring that out because it's, it's pretty cool when you think about it, you know, you're a, you could be this young soldier and you're out there and all of a sudden you're working, you're, you're an element leader. You go from just being a medic or just being a demo guy or just being a communicator. All of a sudden it's like, hey, you know what? Now you're doing that thing, but you're also going to be advising, which in oftentimes means you're actually leading this squad of commandos and you're making sure that they're making the right moves. So that's a very cool aspect of the job, in my opinion, you know?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, when you could see them getting better, it was definitely very rewarding. And as, as you see them start to take more initiative and start to, to, you know, be upfront with you, like, okay, that's, that's cool to see because I've been working with this guy for a while. And I remember one mission we were doing down in, in Kandahar, they, we ended up getting infilled and we start looking at our, our GRG, the grid reference, or the, you know, our little map to see where we are. And we're looking at it and it's 1 AM, 2 AM, whatever it is. And I'm like, I have no idea where we are. We're not on this

• 55:03Speaker 01

  map. So, well, we hear some gunfire and like, I'll just go that way, you know? So, so I have one, one of the interpreters with, with me went by Blade, because they all want to not give out their real names in these situations. But, you know, I'm like Blade, hey, let's get this, let's get the troops, let's get moving towards gunfire and see what happens. Then we start moving, we're doing our thing. And at one point I look back and Blade's right there on my shoulder. He's doing his thing. And like, Blade, where is everybody?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  And they had hunkered down, kind of a couple terrain features back like, well, we gotta go get them.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  So, but so you start there and then, you know, over time, the gap shortens a little bit to, yeah, ideally where they're leading.

• 56:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What was the op tempo like? How often would you guys go out and, and hit targets?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Um, it would vary from time to time, but with that, that's training and advising piece, we, we weren't going out like every night because like, we gotta take these guys from, from ground up on mission planning and everything. So we're going out several times a month to,

• 56:30Speaker 01

  on bigger missions and then other little things as they came up.

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  And when you, so, so it starts off, these guys are not wanting to get anywhere. They're not wanting to get shot at their, if there's rounds fired, they're hiding a couple terrain features away. And then you're slowly progressing them, building a relationship with them, getting to know them. They realize that they can actually do better and that process is going on. And you arrived, this was in 2007, you guys had arrived in October in 2007, is that right?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 57:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then, and then you're doing one, two, three missions, getting these guys, trying to push them each time, uh, to, to do a little bit more, to take on a little bit more responsibility. And, and this is just sort of the way it is. What, and then what kind of training are you doing? On top of that, you're, when you're back on base, you're running them through immediate action drills. You're teaching them how to shoot, move and communicate. That's basically what's going on.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Teaching those, those basic, you know, infantry skills, um, take them out to the range, teaching them how to clear buildings, teaching them, you know, just all the things you need to continue to reinforce. And then like I said, once you got a mission, like, okay, then we're going to start going through those, those, uh, tape drills and we're going to build out a little village here as best we can with our, our budget, which was, you know, tape.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  And, uh, start building that stuff out. So that way, like, okay, we're going to fill here, expect to walk this way. Start, you know, going to those choreographed rehearsals to get everybody, uh, get everybody ready.

• 58:05Jocko Willink?

  So now as you guys got ready to go in the, into the, uh, shock valley, what was?

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  Did it seem like just another mission? Did it seem like, oh, this one seems like it's gonna be a little bit heavier? What was your, what was your assessment of it getting ready to do it?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  There were definitely a few red flags that came with this mission, but there's red flags with, with, with most missions. Like, they give us a gun in, in training for a reason. Like, they don't ask you to go to tickle fight with somebody. Like, you're always expecting something. But, but, you know, it was just, it was, you know, we'd gone after high-value targets before. We had intel he's over here. We had intel on kind of what to expect. So,

• 59:03Speaker 01

  you know, was our, the plan that we ended up going with, nobody was super excited about. The idea of infilling at the bottom of a, a mountain and then walk up, that, that does not sound fun.

• 59:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  But it comes to the point where, you know, like, hey, this is the mission?

• 59:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  All right. Cool. We're gonna do this mission the best we can and we're gonna...

• 59:29Jocko Willink?

  And what, what hap- why did you guys have to insert at the bottom of that hill?

• 59:35Speaker 01

  I think the decision was made that, you know, the Afghan command was still being a little bit new. Like, they, they knew how to fast rope. We had done that stuff, but how many people do we want to risk injuring on that, on that? And then just, you know, if there is resistance, you know, what's gonna, what's gonna come of that? And, I mean, I tried, tried not to get too caught up in, well, maybe it would've been better if we'd... We didn't fill it in on top. Maybe we would have caught an RPG to the forty seven right away.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, you can't play that game. You can't play that game. I I've played that game with myself and it's not a good game to play. Now, it doesn't mean that you don't look at it and you go, oh, yeah, okay, here's what we saw. This is why we made the decision. This is something that you, my brothers that are out there, that could be in the same situation where you're gonna make that decision. Consider how it worked out for me, right?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  And and, you know, this is, well, a couple, a couple of weeks ago was eleven year from that battle, but I was actually talking to some SF guys not too long ago and they're like, we still talk about that mission. We still talk about the the good, which was the teamwork, the, you know, the everybody coming together, get this, get this job done as best we could. And we talk about the the less ideal parts as well and and make sure that we don't

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  learn from somebody else's mistakes. Don't don't repeat those. And I think that's the great part about SF is you have that humbleness like, hey, we did not do this right.

• 1:01:09Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Please learn. We did this right. Please learn.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And and, yeah, and and again, the other side of that is like, you could look at this thing all day and say, well, you should have gone and fast roped on. And like you said, you take an RPG into one of those helicopters and there's nine dead guys or whatever and you go, okay, well, I guess that wasn't a good plan.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:26Jocko Willink?

  So you can make the best, you can make a horrible decision. And it can work out well. You can make the best decision. It can work out horribly. So whether that that's like a, that's the way it is. So what you do is try and learn from it and look at what you did and say, okay, well, what could we have done better? Could you tell from the the imagery and or the maps of the area, what that terrain feature was like?

• 1:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Cause I'll tell you what, I was, you know, I was in in getting ready for this podcast, I read a bunch about the operation. And I kept reading steep terrain and, you know, this, that and the other thing. And then, and I kind of calculated in my mind, you know, what that looked like in my mind. And in my mind, it was, it was pretty bad. It was like, okay, it must have been pretty challenging. Then I went and looked at actual footage, because there's a bunch of actual footage, because you guys had a combat photographer and you had a bunch of overhead cover. I saw that terrain. Brother, I could not believe it. I was, I was, I was saying, oh my, like as bad as everything sounded, it was 10 times worse. When I saw that terrain, I was like, I can't believe that this, that these guys did this.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I don't just mean that from like, I can't believe you inserted there. I was saying, with the fact that you guys went up there, that everything that you had to do on that operation, because the terrain was so steep, I couldn't believe that you guys got out of there. I mean, it was just crazy.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Like, you know, I mean, you get used to, you see the Predator imagery beforehand to kind of get a feel. You've seen satellite imagery, get used to seeing that stuff and you kind of, you, you learn to build in that variance of this is what it looks like there, but I know it's not going to be like that. And so you kind of, you're building your right and your left limits. Like, this is kind of what I think I'm gonna see.

• 1:03:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  And it was still a little bit more than, than at least for me, what I was expecting.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was no joke. It's, it's a borderline cliff. I mean, it is steep and anyone that's listening to this, you can go on YouTube and you can Google Battle of Shock Valley and you'll, you'll start to see what I'm talking about. It's, it's, it's some heavy, steep terrain with a damn fortress on the top of it. I couldn't believe that either. I was like, oh, that, that is a fortress. How many Afghan commandos did you have with you?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  We inserted with right around 100.

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Of them. And then so my team, you know, so I, I go through it in my head. About 12 dudes. When you, when you add it all up, we had about 100 commandos. And then we, we had a, another SF team that was kind of further down in the valley, trying to act as a blocking position down there. And so, but our main assault force.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, it was about 12 dudes that kind of were that that main assault.

• 1:04:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  On it.

• 1:04:26Jocko Willink?

  So, so you guys, you you look at the plan. Everyone's kind of like, hey, it's gonna be steep. It's gonna be tough. This is what we do. Let's go get some.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we made, we made some, uh, like accommodations for that, like, given what we're doing today. Obviously, you you always want your secondary, but, you know, if if that Beretta doesn't walk up the hill with you today, like, we understand. We gotta, we gotta cut some weight.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  So you guys pared yourselves down a little bit, got a little bit later.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  We did pare down, um.

• 1:04:58Jocko Willink?

  What about body armor?

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Oh, we still went with with the plates, still went with, still with the helmets. Um, and when you're doing those pre combat checks with your, your, your Afghan commandos, that was always, the fun part is, they're super motivated to to be there. And I remember one time where going, doing the pre combat checks with a two forty gunner. So he's got a belt fed machine gun. You you carry this. This is your job. I start going through and I find, you know, the first M four mag on him like, all right, dude, I mean, you don't carry an M four, but I get it. And we ended up finding, I think, eight or nine M four mags on this dude, like, ca- carry, carry more seven six two for the belt fed.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Like, I I appreciate the, you know, you wanna, wanna be ready, but focus, focus in where I need you, buddy.

• 1:05:51Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of crazy. So, so you guys, uh, so how many, you, you, how many helicopters was it that was bringing you all in there? It must have been a big package. And did you go in all at once? Like one giant lift?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  It was, it was, yeah, one lift. I, it was a couple, a couple Chinooks, a couple Black Hawks, um, everybody going in. And then, uh, like I said, there was another team that kind of infilled down there with a smaller commando package. Um, and, uh, we had, you know, some, you know, medical QRF and stuff up in the air, a few other things, you know. So we definitely had.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  What seems like enough going in.

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  So you land in there and how long does it take before you realize like, well, okay, this is, this is, we, we took a big bite?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'll, I'll highlight. So I was the first guy to get on the Chinook. So that, that when the last guy to get off, you know, you know, just having that responsibility to make sure everybody gets off, gets up safely.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  And so we hit the zone, we hear the go and everybody's getting off helicopter so incredibly slowly. And, and I'm at the, the front. So I'm in the back of the line and I don't know what's going on. I'm just yelling at commandos like, get off of this helicopter now. Like the more time we're sitting here, the more,

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  if, if there is a bad guy watching us, we're just giving him more time to watch us.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  So it's just taking forever. Uh, and I finally get to the back of the Chinook and I look out and I'm like, oh, we're like 15 feet off the ground. The, the, the valley that we're in is just so rocky and so such horrible terrain, even there, like they, they didn't land. Like, oh, okay. This is why it's taking so long. So like everybody else in front of me, I very carefully, you know, sit down, try and shimmy off the backs. I'm not breaking a leg before I even start.

• 1:07:57Jocko Willink?

  Off to a good start.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It, it started strong. So, so we, we get off the, the Chinooks fly away and then you just kind of get that, that cold, quiet of an Afghan valley.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  You know, there's that little bit of ice in, in the water there, you know, it's just,

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  you know, you want to use the cliche like it's too quiet, but.

• 1:08:27Jocko Willink?

  Scooby doos in the house.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, we just kind of, we get out there.

• 1:08:33Jocko Willink?

  How far did you have to patrol up the valley before you were, you know, perpendicular to the target building?

• 1:08:41Jocko Willink?

  Or the target castle? Cause that's what it looks like.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  It, I mean, it, you know, in hindsight and you know, you seeing up there, like, I mean, they, they had fixed fighting positions ready to go. Like they were.

• 1:08:51Jocko Willink?

  It looked like a castle.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  They were, they were set. Um, I would guess.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Four hundred meters, six hundred, somewhere. And we, we got, basically we infill, just basically uh, trying to use angles just to make sure like, we're not that far away.

• 1:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  So if we have some element of surprise, we don't waste it all.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  But not so close that, you know, we're already in it before we get off. So yeah, it wasn't that far.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  So you weren't on the ground very long before you started to, you start, you took fire from these guys, from the castle?

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't tell you how long before the castle started shooting at us. Uh, it could have been five, 10, 15 minutes. I don't think it was that long. So I was in the, the, the trailing element, basically, cause I was the only US medic on the ground. There, I had my Afghan commando medics, but I was the only, only a, a team medic there are. You know, SF, you were supposed to have two of this job, two of that job, two of the next. Unfortunately, the, the other medic on the team had been hurt um, on a previous mission and then

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  while he was recovering from that, he was in a vehicle rollover, which didn't help. Um, so he got pulled out, so.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, alright, well. Uh, I'll still do it, so.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was 10, 15 minutes maybe at most. Uh, we start walking, walking up there. You can see the, the, the lead assault force starting to work their way up. And

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  yeah, everywhere it's super steep, um, on both your left and right as you're, as you're kind of looking at it. And they find one little area where you have those kind of terrace, like farm terraces kind of working up and that's where they'd figured out, okay, well, we're gonna work our way up there. And so you can see them starting to make progress up the, up the mountain and then I distinctly remember I saw one dude dressed in blue, you know, blue, uh, just Afghan guard. Sprint across the top of the hill with a, with a rifle. And I don't, I mean, I don't think he's the dude who started shooting at us, but I saw that and then within a few seconds.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Everything just kind of opened up on us. And

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  the day started.

• 1:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, one of my little sayings is always take the high ground or it'll take you. And this was just a situation where you guys, you guys do not have the high ground at all. You guys are literally in a valley. How long was it before you took your first wounded?

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Uh, it was pretty quick.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  So we start taking the, the fire. I, my first job is, is to my squad, Afghan commando squad. So I started getting them situated. There's not much cover in there. It's just smaller rocks, bigger rocks. Um, with that elevation and

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  at various points, I mean, both sides were kind of shooting at us. So I started getting them situated and then very, very quickly I heard the first call for a medic. One of the Afghan commandos had been shot. Luckily it was a fairly minor wound. So I ran over to him, started treating him. And while I was working on him just assessing the situation. That's when I remember watching many RPGs coming down, but one RPG in particular come down, hit right in front of our lines that, that guys were starting to form down in the, in the in the valley.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  And then I hear the calls for Ron coming down and

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  so I know right away, like, um, Ryan Wallen had just been hurt. Like, I just know that right away because before every mission, Ryan would come take his squad of the day and stand in front of me and, and hold them and be like, this is Ron. Something happens to me, find Ron. And then you get the next one. This is Ron. Something happens, find Ron.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Good insurance policy.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And so they, you know, when they're, when they're not calling for medic, they're just calling for Ron. I, okay, I know whose squad that is. So.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, kinda did that quick math like, okay, this guy, he's fine. He's, he's really not gonna live or die based on anything I do. Suck it up, grab, he had a saw, like grab your saw, start shooting back. Good luck. And ran over towards, uh, where I had that, that next call. And like you'd read earlier, I find Ryan, uh, bleeding pretty, pretty profusely from neck and of course now you got a neck injury.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  And you gotta go through those quick calculations like normally, how do you stop bleeding? Lots of pressure. Like, well, I can't choke him to death.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  No tourniquet's gonna work out here.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  So, yeah, just, that kinda started the, my day of improvising, like trying to figure out how to, how to get pressure. And I don't even remember exactly what I did.

• 1:14:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you get shrapnel in the neck?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he just caught, caught shrapnel. I had several shrapnel wounds and, and there, but, you know, you're just doing those quick, quick assessments. Okay, there's no bubbling, which means pride didn't hit airway. You know, it's, it's bleeding a lot, but not bleeding that fast that I, I think it caught a carotid or something like that. So.

• 1:14:55Jocko Willink?

  It was a pretty lucky neck wound.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you have to catch some shrapnel to the neck, he did it pretty well.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  So, yeah, as I was working on him, everybody's trying to just figure out what's, what's going on.

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Was the mindset, we're still assaulting this thing?

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:15Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Oh, we, we didn't.

• 1:15:16Jocko Willink?

  You just trumped me in, uh, in mental attitude. Cause I would have been, oh, we just got launched. By the way, you used, you said, we got launched many RPGs. When I get launched many RPGs at me from an elevated position, I'm done assaulting that target. We're going somewhere else. And I got a wounded guy, I got two wounded people. Yeah, we're, we're not, we're not going any further up this hill.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  And we were, we were shooting RPGs back at him. We had, I, I, I legitimately could not tell you our Afghan commandos' real name, but he just, he knew his name was Joe Pesci. Uh, that's, that's what we called him. He looked like Joe Pesci. He was, he was our Afghan commando RPG guy. And so he was kinda like looking at all of us and looking at the mountain and pointing up there and pointing at his RPG and like. Hell yeah dude, launch them.

• 1:16:02Jocko Willink?

  Go get some, Joe. Make it happen.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And so yeah.

• 1:16:07Jocko Willink?

  Let's see some goodfellas right here.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Joe Pesci started shooting back, so we started getting, giving back as good as they were. But so yeah, all that's kind of starting to go on.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  You know, working with Ryan, trying to figure out what am I, I need to go back and get my squad, what needs to happen? And that's when here on the radio, the call from up on the mountain, that multiple guys were now wounded.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure the call was that, you know, the three guys at that point were wounded, so basically told Ryan, "You're good, have a nice day." And grabbed my stuff, just started working towards the mountain.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Our team sergeant, Scott Ford, and one of the weapons guys, Matt Williams, they started organizing a response for us to get up there and start flexing a little more muscle up on the hill. So they're organizing that. My focus is, "Hey, I need to go." So, you know, we hit the mountain, start working, starting my way up, the same terrorist features that I talked about before, and you know, it is climbing hand over, you know, hand over hand, you're literally climbing, get up to the next terrace,

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  figure out how much are we being shot at right now, where is it coming from, where is the next place I can go up? And just start working our way up. As we went up, you know, the other support element kind of got with me, and we all just started taking that terrain together.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Took a while to get there. I don't know. They put out their estimates, but I don't know how long it took me to get there. Got up to the little outcropping that had become, you know, where the command element was, what it was, and started processing the situation that we had. Right as I'm looking at it, I can see one of our interpreters, CK, he

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  appears to be KAA. Two of the team guys were down with different wounds. And so I started just trying to go through the fastest triage that I can to figure out what I need to do. And honestly, even at this point, I don't think the call's been made quite yet that we're done for the day. But it was going to be called very soon after that. So, yeah, trying to remember the full sequence. It was a busy day. So I think I started working

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  on Dylan first, just because he looked the worst off. He had a gunshot wound to his right arm and another one to his hip pelvis area. His arm wound, I joke with him now because he's fine and it's okay to joke about getting shot after the fact. But, you know, joke with him, that one bullet that hit his arm, it was just a lucky bullet for him. But it went through his...

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Uh, speaking words is tough sometimes. His rifle strap, it went.

• 1:20:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, sling.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  It went through a sling, cut that, then went through his arm. And then, he chose to keep his pistol on that day, but at the time we were still kinda running a pistol on the front of your body armor. And so it had actually lodged in between his plate and his pistol. It hit the inside of his pistol. That, just slightly different angles on that bullet.

• 1:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  You know, so, his arm wound was basically just a very minor bleed, didn't worry too much about that.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  But, didn't take me long to figure out his other wound was gonna gonna be

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  literally a pain in the ass for him all day. Figuratively for me.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  But it was, you know, you could just see the way it's bleeding, and it's just, you know, those very small wounds entry. So I made the made the, I would say dumb call, for just a few moments, I don't even know how long it was. I didn't wanna roll him any more than I had to, to to see what was going on. So I, for a little bit, took my helmet off, set it to the side, so I could just roll him, just to see the downside wound, how bad was it.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Didn't end up being that bad. So, kinda rolled him back over, hopefully I put my helmet on right away, or I think maybe somebody yelled at me.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  But, so just started working on, trying to figure out how to get pressure on there. You'd mentioned, we had the combat cameraman out there with us. By that point, his camera had already been shot. So, he, he just became an extra set of hands for me to to help. So, I'd be like, "Okay, let me go triage the rest of these guys real quick. Just hold pressure here for me, I'll be back in a second." And

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  you know, when I say I'll be back, like, the area we're working in was not

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  that big, it was...

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Maybe 20 meters across and it's just that that slight slope you get on a hillside before it falls off the cliff, so to speak, and everybody's just

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  Tucked up in there.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Hanging on that tiny little bit of a slope, trying to not fall off and not get shot.

• 1:22:39Jocko Willink?

  And the the guys had been shot, were they on that slope when they got shot, or were they pushing up a little bit? Were you were you somewhat safe in that shot where you're in that spot where you're somewhat protected? Were guys still getting, I guess they weren't, because you still guys were getting shot, right?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  No, guys were still still getting shot the whole time.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  So we're basically you're just trying to use that tiny bit of an angle to minimize how much you can be shot at. There was there was no place where you were safe on there at all.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  If you kind of picture like from from from that little outcropping where we were, if you're looking at the main village, it was almost like a like a hockey stick kind of in front of you. It's the way the mountain kind of wrapped around. So you had that long wall, kind of on what I'm considering my left, but then it still wrapped around. So the whole village, if you got a little bit of cover from this side.

• 1:23:43Jocko Willink?

  You were exposed to the other side.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  The other side still had you. And then there were some people on the other side of the valley who were shooting at us too. But it was much, it was insignificant compared to other problems we had.

• 1:23:55Jocko Willink?

  Was your mindset at this point totally focused on just getting to get working on the guys? Did you go into that mode like of, okay, this is what I got to do? Or was any part of you going, uh, this is not good? Did any, was there any part of you that was saying, hold on a second? Look what's happening situationally. We're surrounded, they have the enemy has the upper ground. I got three wounded guys. What calls being made? What was what was like your tactical assessment of what was happening?

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Or were you just straight up working on guys trying to save their lives?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  From my perspective, it was straight up working on guys. At that point, the trying to get my commandos and you know, leading them anywhere that was over for me.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  I would, I would find them hours and hours later and they were like, they were still down in the valley, just hanging out, trying to use a little bit of cover and they all kind of saw me and they're like, we thought you were dead a while ago. Like, welcome back.

• 1:24:58Jocko Willink?

  And you're like, well, thanks for the support. Appreciate it.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. So like I said, we were working on closing those gaps with them, but

• 1:25:05Jocko Willink?

  weren't fully there.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Sometimes the other band still broke.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  But so, yeah, I was mostly focused on just trying to treat these guys. And

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  you know, it's, you need to convey information to the team leader and you need to tell the guy, you're, yeah, you're, you're fine, buddy. Don't, don't worry about that. So at one point, you know, I'm telling Dylan, you're good, dude. We walked this off and then kind of looking over the team leader being like, no, seriously, he needs to go now.

• 1:25:40Jocko Willink?

  We need to cas back right now.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  He, he needed to go a while ago, but now we'll be fine too.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  So, and I didn't, I didn't really think about his perspective on it, but you know, later he's like, yeah, I was hearing it all to me like, sorry about that.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a, a rough way to hear things. So, so you had three guys wounded in that position as well?

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  So there was the, the, the three kind of, the two, two Americans initially critical and the one again, and I, so I started working on Dylan, went over to Luis, saw what, what had happened to him, Luis Morales.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  And he'd been shot through the thigh and through the ankle, both on the right side. And luckily it didn't hit any of the major vessels, but it like for this, his thigh, it just ripped it in half. Like you could look all the way through his thigh, it looked like you'd cut up a fish and you were gutting it. So while he wasn't.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  He didn't hit a major artery, it's just so much tissue damage that this could still form compartment syndrome, could still kill him many different ways. So, I start working, you know, assess him. And, you know, just doing those first sweeps, like, I'm not trying to do anything definitive yet, it's just like, let me figure out what all's going on, and then I'll come back through. So after seeing Luis, I still felt like I owed CK an actual check.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  This was the interpreter?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  The interpreter, he was... He was dead, but I still owed him, like... Unless I know what killed him, maybe he's still alive. So I went up, did a check on him, he'd been shot just behind the left ear. And, yeah, it was, it was an unsurvivable wound. Yeah, so I checked on, checked on him, and then, you know, we just... Unfortunately, with as little cover as we had for anything, like, he couldn't take up space where we had cover, so we, we just kinda had him off to the side a little bit, but

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  exposed to the elements because, you know, unfortunately, the living guys didn't have enough space. So, after checking on him, I kinda go back through, and obviously, this entire time, we're still getting shot at, you can still feel those bullets going by, you can still feel the dirt kicking up.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  You know, there's, there's just, everything's so tight in there, and so little space, like, I'm trying to kneel over these guys to do the best I can for them, and and as things are just falling on us, trying to cover them, as things, you know, just rocks are coming down, explosions are happening, just trying to...

• 1:28:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because at some point, they start calling in for fire. Is that, is that happening yet?

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Uh, the...

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  The calls for fire came in. They started pretty quickly. Zach Reiner was our Air Force combat controller that day. He got the Air Force cross very deservedly. So, you know, all of us are alive because of all the stuff that he called in that day.

• 1:29:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He's dropping bombs, danger close, dropping 2,000 pounder. I mean,

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  He's dropping the stuff and.

• 1:29:18Jocko Willink?

  Again, you know why I'm talking about this? As if I knows what it looks like? Because I saw, you can watch these videos and you can see the bombs hitting and massive hitting that castle and massive bombs hitting that castle. And even, even the bombs that hit that castle, they, they do damage, but that castle was massive. Crazy.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  You know, we ended up through the course of the day, one, one of our Afghans broke his leg. The, the wood framing on a building that got blown up, broke his leg. So we got to, we got to deal with that. You're getting just all the other wounds that are coming with those.

• 1:29:54Jocko Willink?

  Because, because massive debris is coming down on you guys from those danger close hits, bomb drops and like debris is coming down on you guys because you guys are below it, down a cliff.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Right. At, at one point, I don't remember exactly where in the sequence of events.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Basically, like I say, we kind of had that wall on our left that went straight up and there was, there was a, a building there and they were getting in that and starting to just shoot down at us. And so that had to go away. So Zach ended up calling in a strike, hit that and

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  I don't go hunting too much for footage online, but I don't have seen it through, through the military side. You can, you can actually hear the pilot come on the radio after he drops that one. He's like, I do not feel good about that one.

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  Yep. That's how danger close it was. It was so danger close that the pilot comes on the radio afterwards and says, he goes, that was real close. I don't feel good about that one. Meaning you can hear the, the sickness in his voice thinking how, you know, did we just kill our own guys?

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  You just killed everyone. And of course for us, you know, we're covered and we're getting covered in debris. We're getting just rained on stuff, but we're like, thanks dude.

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  Totally insane. So at what point did you guys decide, okay, we gotta get out of here?

• 1:31:22Jocko Willink?

  Or were you still thinking, hey, maybe we'll just continue with this assault up the hill?

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  At that point, we were pretty much, we were pretty much done at that point. Um, so Scott Ford, the team sergeant, he comes in, like I said, he, he was, you know, right there with us moving up the hill, uh, bringing on those, those extra guys. And he started, like, I'm working, I'm trying to keep these guys alive. And he starts working that, let's get them out of here piece. Um, so our lead element had actually made the edge of the village. Like I think, I think they got into at least one building. And so they're starting to, we got that foothold, like we, we made it, guys. We won. Uh, but so he makes that call. Okay, we gotta, we gotta pull those guys back to start getting.

• 1:32:10Jocko Willink?

  Which is actually incredible to even have gotten to that. And, and to be honest with you, if things, now that I'm, you know, I'm talking about how much I would have just, you know, bailed out of there. Once you get a foothold in that situation, now it's, you know, it's going to be CQC us against them. Like you, you actually have a pretty good chance, you know? Well, you got a hundred commandos or we get them up that hill. You get a foothold in that building. It's like, okay. Or in that, in that castle, we can start taking it out. So that's, that's impressive, man. Props to you guys for sure.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, fortunately, as bad as it started, for quite a while through the day, it actually, it kept getting worse. Like it never stopped. Um, I think we started to get some lulls after we'd done so many airstrikes. But, uh, so the, the side of the, the mountain that I went up, a little bit later in the day, like it was just no man's land. You didn't go over there if you wanted to not be dead. Um, so the logistics of trying to get an actual fighting force up, even though we had a foothold, it, it just, it became an untenable position. So.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  You know, I'm working on these guys. I'm, I'm trying to get some kind of hemorrhage control, bleeding control on, on Dylan. You know, with Luis, I didn't, quick, um, quick treatments on him, got his wound bandaged up as well as I could. So that way, you know, just with all that trauma, he didn't end up, you know, still, still dying on me on the mountain, just from, from some, something. Started working on Dylan and said, based on what he was describing to me, like, I didn't see the point of like, you know, in the medical, as they teach you, like, oh, you can, you

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  know, you press on a pelvis down and then you squeeze it and then that's how you'll see if it's broken or not. Like, I didn't see the point in doing that to him. Just where the wound was, like, something in there's broke. Uh, he's not going to benefit from me jumping up and down on it, on it to, to find out, again, dude, your, your pelvis is broke. Sorry about that. Uh, so, but he was also describing like, oh, my, my foot doesn't feel like it's straight. Like, nothing feels like it's lining up right. And it wasn't because the, we'd find out later, you know, the bullet had gone through his femoral head. Um, so shattered that, uh, did a bunch of damage to the, the pelvis itself. Um, so,

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  I'm just seeing this and like, looking at what I, what I can physically see. I'm like, I don't think it hit an artery, but if it hit the pelvis, and it's been a while since I was a medic, but, you know, I remember having those, those numbers in my head, like, okay, a pelvic fracture is going to cause this much bleeding and a femoral fracture is going to cause this much bleeding and trying to process those things. Like, okay, he's not, he's not bleeding out, but he's still going to bleed out. Yeah. On me. Uh, so it was so high up, you couldn't put a tourniquet on it, couldn't really, uh, do anything. So I just came up with the idea that I had, uh, Cellox, a hemostatic

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  agent, it was designed to stop bleeding. I had a-

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Powder of that. So what I did is I just kinda started pouring that on the wound and then taking my fingers and shoving it into the wound because the wound was so small, entry wounds are yeah, not big. So just started shoving that in there, trying to get as much in as I could, just repeating that process over and over until it felt like I had enough. I don't know. Just, it was just Scientific. Just, just kinda gut call, shoving fingers in your body to be like, hopefully this will help. Uh, then wrapped them up as well as I could. And so while I'm doing this, that's when the, the lead element started to get back towards us. Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  And they were gonna help us start to get these guys out of there. And within

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  moments, minutes, whatever it was of them getting, getting there, that's when we took our next American casualty. John Walding had been hit, right, right leg, just below the knee, basically just amputated his leg right away. Was hanging on by a little bit, but it, it just amputated it. Uh, so the hemostatic agents that are out there, they've gotten better now, but at the time it was, you know, you have to hold pressure for five minutes. Otherwise, maybe the clot will break and then now he's gonna bleed inside there and you'll never see it. So started yelling at somebody, get a tourniquet on him. Uh, they do. And now he's

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  just stacked up, you know, taking up more, more, uh, real estate for us. Uh, so our team sergeant, Scott, he's trying to figure out, okay, now we have You know, another casualty, so we, we added another negative and we lost a positive because now it's, that's a dude who can't help move. And so, you know, at that point, he's very, I know at this point, it's very clear, we're, we're done with the mountain, we just need to go home. So, you know, we're still, still working them.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  I know, I know I was working on, on Dylan and Scott ends up getting shot for the first time in the chest plate. And so I run over to him at this point, check him, you know, hesitate to say he's fine, but he's fine. The chest plate did its job, he's, he's obviously going to feel that for a few days. So I go back, keep trying to package up these guys a little bit more and we're just, you know, it's, it's tough not to gloss over like minor wounds, like, you know, this guy

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  just got more shrapnel wounds, like, quick check, you're fine, move on. One of our commandos at some point in all of this, another one of our commandos got shot in the head and he dropped instantly and like, that dude's 100% dead. But later we pull him back over and like, no, he's actually still alive. He was, he just decided to take a little nap out there on the edge of the, on the amount, but it, you know, it, there's weird things bullets do, it dented the, his head, but it didn't, didn't kill him. So we're just, you know, continuing to just accumulate these problems.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  And so, working, Scott ends up turning around to say something to us and that's when he got shot again, this time in the left arm. And it almost amputates his left arm, but not, nothing compared to the visual image that John said had.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  And I think it was the same bullet. Was it a bullet right after on a burst? I can't say for sure, but it was at the same time that he got shot in the left arm, I got hit in the head. And so I'd had my helmet back on at this point, so I got hit in the head. And so I'm working on Dylan and I'm, you know, trying to ask him like, am I alright? Like, I, I don't know.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, trying to do like blood sweeps or trying to figure out, I have so much blood.

• 1:40:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you can't even tell.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Everywhere. I don't know if I'm bleeding, so I'm asking, you know, I'm asking him what I'm working on. Like, how am I, am I okay? Can I, can I keep going?

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  But he's like, yeah, you're, you're fine.

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't remember exactly what he said, but it conveyed, yeah, you're fine. So I grabbed a tourniquet.

• 1:40:50Jocko Willink?

  It's just a flesh wound.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, luckily, I mean, the helmet, the helmet did its job, so it wasn't, wasn't, didn't do anything to me. It felt like I got hit with a baseball bat, like, that's just how I describe it. It feels like what you would think it would.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  So I grabbed a tourniquet, run out to Scott, put a tourniquet on his, his left arm.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  There's just, like, we're full. There's nowhere to put people.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Luckily, he's, of, of the serious injuries we were accumulating, he's the only ambulatory guy. So basically, he self evacuates down the same side of the mountain that we had come up and, you know, where the fire was continuing to get worse, but there was, there were some guys, Seth Howard and Matt Williams, they're doing good work over there. And so basically, he kind of got down there and they see him with his arm and they're like, we'll get you, we'll get you taken care of. So they, they worked him down, down the mountain on that one side.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  But that really only, only worked for him because he could, he could move. Everybody else is, is not that mobile.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  So, Dave Sanders is kind of coming through and now he's, he's trying to figure out a route for us. And so in my mind, like what I just considered behind me now, there's basically, the cliff kind of just goes straight down. But like any cliff, there's, there's a little terrace over here, there's a little terrace over there. So he, he's exploring that route and he comes back up and he just comes to the simple like, he's like, this'll work. And we're like, is everybody gonna, can these guys do it? And he's like, they probably won't die. Well, that's

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  It's better than where we're at right now.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  That's, that's a good plan. So

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got this one section of one other article I pulled out. This is, it's somewhere around here. And again, it's, it's like, but I just, this, this left a really good picture in my mind of what was going on and kind of the, how critical the situation is. Walton, Captain Walton was the, was the element commander. He's the, and he, this is, this is talking about him and he's got some quotes in here. But this is from the Stars and Stripes, which is like a military newspaper overseas. And it says Walton feared his force was on the verge of being overrun. With the insurgents nearing his position, Walton reached for

• 1:43:40Jocko Willink?

  a grenade and called in a massive danger close strike, expecting it could take out his entire team. They were all prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, he said. The bomb dropped. And then he saw an image he would remember forever from that fight. Schur's body draped over the injured men he'd been working on through the fight. In that moment, the strike that we had called in on our own position detonated just above us and blocked out the sun. As the dust settled, Ron Schur was the first thing that I saw on top of his wounded teammates, protecting them even to the end, when we had all fully accepted

• 1:44:24Jocko Willink?

  that we were going to go down fighting. Ron Schur was still thinking of others.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, like he says in there, it definitely, it definitely got to the point where like, okay, this is, this is the day.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  I don't know how everybody kind of just processed that.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  I know for me, there was a point where I just said a quick prayer, just asking God to help my wife, Miranda, and our, our son, who at the time was a couple of days shy of three months old. Uh, just make sure they're cool with, with, uh, what's about to happen. And then just go back to work and just,

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  you know, taking it in little chunks is, it's too big to try and think of a week of over the course of the day. I mean, I had the four US critical, um, three other US wounded, two KIA, about

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  thirteen, fourteen, fifteen Afghan commandos interpreters wounded.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  And so it, you know, in just terms of those numbers, that's, it's too much to deal with. But if I just, you know, this is the worst thing going on right now. I'm going to deal with this and then come up for air or look around. That's, that's now the worst thing. So I'm going to go over there and I'm going to deal with that. And so, you know, just keep taking it in little chunks, keep working, working through it.

• 1:46:13Jocko Willink?

  And then at some point you started working towards, okay, we got to get these guys down. We're going to start lowering these guys down.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  So, uh,

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Dave Sanders figured it out. Okay, this is, this is the least bad option. So, I just started getting everybody ready to go.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Kind of started with, of, of these guys who were up here. Luis has a really bad injury, but.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  He's stable enough. I gave him a fentanyl lollipop, so he's not feeling too bad. Like, you're going first. So we got him. I'd just do a double check on the guy. And then go over to the edge of the cliff and start working him down. And depending on how bad their wound was, like, Louis could help himself a lot. So like, I'll just get him ready, get him over to the edge. And Dave and, why am I forgetting our combat camera guys? Hey, Mike Carter. They'd kind of take him the rest of the way down the hill. And then I'd go back up to another position.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  All right, next serious one was Dylan, okay? Getting him ready. He had, I got an IV, started on him, got a few different things going. Got everything as ready as I could. Sent him over. All that stuff was ripped out and just mangled by the time we got into the bottom, but...

• 1:47:46Jocko Willink?

  It is what it is.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  That's now what we're dealing with later. So then it came time to, got over to John Walding, started doing an assessment on him. Just through the variances of battle and everything. His tourniquet had been placed properly. Which is vessels sometimes will relax or tension or tense up. So he was, at that point, he was actually bleeding quite profusely. So we had to make some adjustments on his tourniquet, get him restabilized.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  Just had him...

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Hold his leg, just give him something to do. And, you know, we started lowering him down the hill. And as we're, we're kind of finishing that up, like all of the ambulatory commando and interpreter casualties, they're kind of working their way down through all this as well. Seth, Howard, and Matt Williams, who I had kind of mentioned earlier, like they came through right behind us, just kicking off everybody else that hadn't got the message it was time to go, or like CK who had, you know, been killed. They got, they got him off for us.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  The, the Afghan commando who we, you know, just didn't really have a great plan for. We got him off and we just got everybody down, started setting up another casualty collection point down there at the bottom of the hill. You know, hallway, you're climbing down, stuff's still exploding, you're still getting shot at. But by the time we got down to the, the valley again, it was, we had a little bit more cover. It was, you know, everything that day was just, this sucks less than that, so I'm gonna,

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do this. So at that point, you know, we got everybody off, got to go through, recheck everybody now, because we've now moved, moved all the patients. Long since out of most of my supplies. So then it comes down to, well, you do need a bandage.

• 1:50:24Jocko Willink?

  But he needs it more.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  But you're, you're gonna be fine without one. And just kind of keep making those calls.

• 1:50:32Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take for Casavac to show up?

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  So, we'd never really got like a dedicated Casavac to come in that day. We had some Blackhawks that were supporting the mission up there and those pilots were awesome. They were like, there's wounded, we're gonna come in, it's hot, they're fine with it, they know what's going on. So they came in, we got.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  The first group loaded up and out and then they came in again, got the next group. So basically, we got all the critical and all the non-ambulatory people out of there. And then everybody else, you just gotta walk out of here. There's no other thing else gonna come for you.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  It was at some point around this time when I'm down, down in the valley, working.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  It's that point that I can notice my arm is starting to hurt a little bit. And I just look at my arm, my arm's there, it's fine, whatever. Just, you know, if you bang your elbow on something, you just kinda shake it out and you move on with your day. It was later that night, you know, get back to the base. After we went and saw the wounded guys go take a shower. I noticed I had a cut on my arm and bruising around my elbow. And I was like, that wasn't there earlier.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Went and found my uniform and it's got that bullet hole in it. And I was like, oh, I don't have any idea.

• 1:52:25Jocko Willink?

  At some point, you took a round.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  When, when that went through.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just, it's one of those days, like as bad as it was. You know, you, you adjust an inch this way. I mean, I think we'd done the math before and it was like, we came up with like eight inches or something. Like if the enemy just could move a bullet eight inches over the course of the day. Like move this bullet one inch this way, move this bullet this way.

• 1:52:58Jocko Willink?

  Everywhere they'd done.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  They, you know, would have just killed everybody. Like one of the guys got shot through the, his camel back. You know, it burst that, it hit, like he had a flare in the back there, he'd done that. But that, he just inched that. Dylan, who had the bullet skimmed between his armor and his, his gear, he moved that.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  But that's how combat is, you know.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Millimeters and inches.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  You, you train, you, you get as good and proficient as you can and then you hope for a little bit of, a little bit of luck as well.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  You, you guys, and you, I know you lost two, well, you lost your, one interpreter killed.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  Uh, CK.

• 1:53:46Jocko Willink?

  And then one Afghan soldier killed.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Jocko Willink?

  But none of the Americans were, were killed.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  No, none of the Americans.

• 1:53:55Jocko Willink?

  That's like completely, that's a miracle. It's incredible.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bob, uh, Baradine, he was the Afghan first sergeant. He was on that SF team that was on the blocking down the valley. At some point, they came up to kind of help us do that final policing up of everything. And he was, he was, he was a great first sergeant for them. He was leading from the front like you should. And he caught a round just below that chest plate. Hit his, at your orders, it doesn't much matter. But he dropped and

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  that was it. So as, as rough as the day was and as much as you kind of go through after the fact, like, what could I have done better? What could I have, you know, been here a little faster, done that, shot that guy a little bit quicker. The only two KAs, there was just, there was nothing to be done for. So eventually got comfortable with it all because of that.

• 1:55:06Jocko Willink?

  And then what, when your team, what did they even do with your team now? You guys come back, you got all these casualties, did they stand you guys down? Did they send you home? What'd they do with you?

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  No, we, so after we got everybody, all the, the wounded guys out, eventually we kind of regroup, we go down, back, back to the infill point, get on the helicopters, leave, we ended up landing at some fire base. I don't even know where it was.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  We don't know if we're going back. There's another SF team there. We still got a lot of commandos. So we're like,

• 1:55:43Jocko Willink?

  Back in the game.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Are we gonna go?

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  I linked up with the, the, the medical support that was there, refit my bag, got, got everything ready to go again. Like, we were gonna go right back, um, but we didn't. Uh, which was probably the right call for that day. Um, so then we ended up going back to Jalalabad, which is where we were operating out of at the time. Uh, a couple of the wounded guys were there, so we went and saw them. A couple of the wounded guys were already at Bagram. Uh, we took care of them. We got a, that senior, you know, listy guy Carl, became our new acting team sergeant. We

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  just went about better day. I mean, we still, we still did another mission a few weeks later.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  It's just funny to remember. So one of the, one of the guys, um, Dan Plants, he's now sergeant major,

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  out there. Um, that was his, his first mission with us. And of course, you know, he's like, are they all like this? And of course they are. Like, some of them are worse.

• 1:57:03Jocko Willink?

  Welcome aboard. Stand by to get some. Dang. And then how much longer was that deployment? You guys did a few more operations with your new team sergeant. You guys went up. How did you feel going back out?

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Obviously, that, that fight was, was different than anything we'd faced before. You know, that, when, when we left, whatever it was, six weeks later, that was, that was my last combat deployment. So I didn't face anything like that again, but it was, when we went back out, I mean,

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  We're ready to go again. And I remember on that, that next mission we went out on.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  We're going through the village and

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  our, our interpreters are just, yeah. They would talk with the bad guys on walkie talkies. Sometimes they just talk, talk shit back and forth to each other. And so at one point they were like, oh, these were the guys that we just, we think these are the guys we just messed up a few weeks ago. Like, let's get them. And then a Kiowa came in and did a run and took out a few and they're like, second thought, let's, let's call today a, you know, a draw and that was, that was the end of that day.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  But so, yeah, I mean, it was definitely a day we'll never forget and, but I'm just glad that, you know, the team came together, they got the job done. We didn't accomplish the mission. We didn't find the bad guy. We didn't get to bring him back, but

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  you know, some days the win is, is just, we got everybody that we could out of there alive and you know, we certainly gave them worse than we got that day.

• 1:59:05Jocko Willink?

  Estimated enemy killed was like 150 to 200. And, um, and that, that, that ended up being the most decorations, highest decorations handed out for a single day battle since the Vietnam War. It was for this, for this, uh, operation that you guys went on.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  And then, so when you came home, what made you decide, because you ended up getting out of the army? What made you decide you were going to get out?

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  I ended up getting out, uh, May of 2009, so just over a year later. Um, it was.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  A lot of different factors. Like I said, my, my older son was actually born in January of 2008. So I came home, saw him born, and then went right back to Afghanistan. And then, you know, we had other missions in this mission afterwards. So that, you know, that priority factor starts, starts to go in there.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Another part of it was just,

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  I think I always felt like there was something I was supposed to do.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  And that seemed like as good a, good a thing to check a block with as, as I could, I could think of. I don't, it's, there's so many different like factors that come in that, like I, there's not a day that goes by that I don't still miss the team, I still wish, whenever I hear they're out there, like I wish I was there with them. I wish I was, you know, still doing it, but, you know, I felt like I'd done whatever it was I was supposed to do. And,

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  you know, I think, I think it's tough for any special operations guy, CEO, Green Beret Ranger, whatever, at some point you have to hang it up because time is going to, it's a young man.

• 2:01:09Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna hang it up whether you want to or not at some point.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's that game. So I felt like, you know, I'll go out on, go on my own terms, so to speak.

• 2:01:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then how did you end up getting into the Secret Service? Like what, what made you look at that and think that seemed like a good call?

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  So I think I started applying for them when I had about six months to go in, in the military.

• 2:01:38Jocko Willink?

  What piqued your interest on them?

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  So, full disclosure with them, I, federal law enforcement just seemed like a good next transition. So I shotgun blast out, you know, the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, Marshals, Air Marshals, everybody. And very quickly on, I really just liked the personality that came with the Secret Service. The, the attitude that the people had, the, the dedication of the job, the, the focus. In a lot of ways, you know, like, like SF, like, you know, you have a super important mission. Sometimes you have all the resources you need, sometimes you don't, you're still gonna figure

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  it out, you're still gonna, you're still gonna make it work. I really liked that personality that came with it. So, while everybody showed interest in me, I, I kinda focused there and ended up getting hired, then a couple of months after I got, got out of the army.

• 2:02:43Jocko Willink?

  And what, what's, what's that onboarding like? Do you go through like a boot camp scenario with them? Cause they must take kids out of college, right?

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  You're supposed to have, I can't remember what the book answer is, like three years of real world experience after college.

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  So, for my class, you had a mixture, some people had military backgrounds, some people had law enforcement backgrounds, some had, one was a lawyer, just any different background.

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  So is it like a gentleman's course boot camp scenario?

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Uh, for the most part, you know, coming from, from the SF background, like, I don't know who we need to kick out, but you gotta kick out somebody, right? Just to make sure that everybody else who's here knows, like, you know, it could happen to you. But our, we had a good class, so everybody, everybody got through. And, uh, but it was, I'll say it was about three months of training in Georgia at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, kinda basic information on criminal investigator training programs, basically.

• 2:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Legals, law stuff, how to handle evidence, all that kinda stuff.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the basics every law enforcement person needs. And then you continue on with four more months at the Secret Service where you learn. The two aspects of our agency, both the financial crimes investigations and the protection aspect.

• 2:04:18Jocko Willink?

  And most people don't know about the financial crimes investigation of the Secret Service. They don't think about that arm of it.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Well, and that's, I mean, that's why it was created. You know, President Lincoln signed the Secret Service into, into existence to fight counterfeit because at the end of the Civil War, I can't remember the statistic, like two thirds of the currency in the country was counterfeit. You can't rebuild when half of everything is fake. So he, you know, he signed that and it was soon after that, you know, he went to a play, didn't work out for him. But then it was 40 years later that we kind of took over the full-time protection

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  of the president. And of course, that's our, our main mission now. While, while the majority of people in the agency are, are out there keeping the financial system secured and intact. Obviously, the number one mission is the president, the vice president, other heads of state or heads of government that come in to the country, we protect them. And, you know, obviously, there are all no-fail missions. Like, you cannot let something happen to the president, or if you have some country come in that maybe nobody's, you know, nobody's

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  ever heard of this dude. Well, we still can't let random street violence happen to this guy or, or something. So you just, there's that whole spectrum that you have to work around.

• 2:06:00Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with the training and then where did you, where was your, where'd you get stationed? Did you go to the president's detail or did you go to the crime fighting part?

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  So the typical career path is, is you go out to one of the field offices around the country and, and fight crime for a little while. So when I got, got the offer, they offered me a couple of different cities to start in. Phoenix, Arizona sounded like the best option. So I took that.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, my wife and son moved out there right away. We bought a house. You know, while I technically live there, I was off of training for several months and then joined them as soon as I finished up. And I spent basically the next four years in Phoenix from May 2010 to May 2014.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Doing whatever financial crime or computer crime.

• 2:06:59Jocko Willink?

  Financial crime includes what?

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  You have, you know, your, your credit card fraud, your counterfeiting.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  I need to get your number because credit card fraud people are all about, you know, coming after me. They, they, it's like open access. And that's what, and, and when I talk to people like, yeah, it happens. It's happened to everyone. That's like the main crime right now. When I say, hey, there's credit card fraud on me, he says, yeah, that happened to me two weeks ago. It's happening to everyone now.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  It, yeah, it's happened to me. Um, yeah, it happens.

• 2:07:27Jocko Willink?

  Dang. Okay, maybe I won't call you.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's one of those things. I mean, there's so many different uh, levels to it. Like you can, you know, there's the, the prudence that, you know, you'll, you'll see the things like, oh, check a ATM to see if you see a skimmer attached to it. Which is great advice. It's definitely something, you know, if something looks weird on an ATM, don't use it. But you go to a store and I mean, even like Target or these bigger stores.

• 2:07:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that's right. They had the massive.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  You, you get hacked.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  You didn't do anything wrong. Like you use the machine. The machine was secure, you thought, but at some back level. So there's those two aspects of the crime that we end up chasing now because there's a person who stole all the, the card information. But they're almost never the person who's using it. They, they sell it to somebody else. So you, you gotta pick which side do I want to chase today? Do I want to figure out who stole it? Or do I want to figure out who's using it? And. It kept you pretty busy.

• 2:08:34Jocko Willink?

  And then eventually you get called back to DC. Is that where you got stationed next?

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  Uh, so I'm stationed in DC now, um, um, with the counter assault team for the secret service. It's.

• 2:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Which is like the cool, like the coolest job, right? I mean, in the secret service. Let's be straight up, right? There's nothing cooler than saying I'm on the counter assault team of the secret service.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  It does sound cool. Yes.

• 2:08:59Jocko Willink?

  And what it really means is sitting in the back of a vehicle somewhere for long periods of time in a motorcade or something.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the full body armor on, everything. So you're uncomfortable, you're miserable, complaining about it. Like, why did I sign up for this? But.

• 2:09:11Jocko Willink?

  And there's like eight thousand, uh, pieces of security that someone would have to overcome for you guys to get the call.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  But someday.

• 2:09:20Jocko Willink?

  And it does sound cool. So we got that going for us.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  But what I, what I loved about that, just like with SF is, you know, to be there, you have to, you have to volunteer. You have to go through a selection process. You got to go through another school. We washed out between selection and the school itself, washed out about half, maybe a little more.

• 2:09:38Jocko Willink?

  How tight are they, are they on shooting in that school?

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Standards are much higher than the general secret service.

• 2:09:46Jocko Willink?

  Cause you might be taking shots around the president. You don't want to throw that round.

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  No pressure.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it adds a little extra level to the, you know, law enforcement, every round counts aspect. Obviously the military, you know.

• 2:10:03Jocko Willink?

  Most rounds count.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Most, most, most rounds count. You can't just fire indiscriminately, but you know, if he's generally in that area, that's why they gave me more than one bullet. Um, whereas, you know, the secret service, yeah.

• 2:10:16Jocko Willink?

  I got, I got in trouble one time during, during CQC training for putting down cover fire in a building. I was like, you know, someone was trying to cross the hallway and I'm like, okay, I know there's a bad guy in there. I'm just gonna start shooting at him. And, um, you know, the instructor is like, Chaco, wh- wh- what were you doing over here? And I was like, where? And he's like, in this, you know, you're holding this hallway and then you just started shooting. And I was like, I was putting down cover fire for the guy that was moving. He goes. He's like, I get it, but you're really not supposed to do that in CQC. And I'm like, okay, fair enough, you know?

• 2:10:45Speaker 01

  But if the guy come around the corner, it might have worked.

• 2:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he wasn't coming around the corner when I was cracking rounds at him.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  So you're, so you, and so you're just, that's, do you go on, is there a rotation that you're going on for that? Are you like on all the time? Or do you three months on, three months off? Do you just, are you just in a certain area and that's when you're live?

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  So they break us down into, we call them, we have teams and then two teams make up a company. And then, and then so we have basically four different elements. So one's on training, one's on your days, one's on your evening, one's on your, your meds at all time. And so, yeah, your downtime is to train and then the rest of the time you're out protecting, protecting the man or, you know, president, vice president, other people as, as need, support, just always working.

• 2:11:40Jocko Willink?

  And at some point during, during that job, you, you got, you, you went to the hospital and figured out something that wasn't going too well.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  I'd say it at least. So, you know, if you kind of go through the, the, the full story,

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  what was that? Late spring, early summer of 2016, I kind of started getting a little pain in my, my right hip. Little pain in my back, but of course I have some pain. And I was running around with kit for the army for six and a half years.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  You know, at that point I'd been doing it with the counter assault team for two and a half years.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Just, you know, you're not supposed to do that to your body. It's not, it's not good for you. Everybody knows it.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  So I was actually in California hiking with the Obama family in Yosemite, doing a Father's Day weekend trip with them. And, you know, my hip was hurting, my back kind of seized up. I'm like, this is, this is not right, but I go see my doc and he's like, just stretch some more.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  Or stop doing your, your job. Like, well, I'm not gonna stop. So I'm gonna stretch some more.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  Pain all kind of kept getting a little worse, little,

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  you know, just a little more annoying as, as it went.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Since the doctor didn't give me a good answer, let me try chiropractor. Got some relief for a little while from that and it, but it just kept getting, getting a little bit worse. And so

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  he came up with the, the differential diagnosis, to use medical terms, that he was like, you probably tore some cartilage in your hip at some point. And I was like, I don't remember doing that. And he was like, well, as active as you are, it can just happen sometimes. So we do an MRI in February of 2017. And then the next day, waiting on results, I still fly out to, I actually flew out to San Diego to do, to do some more work. And that afternoon, after I got here, he called and he was, you know, telling us, well,

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  uh, you have a few different, uh, he used the word lesions, he didn't want to say tumors, but he's like, you got a few things going on in your hip that are not normal. I need you to go talk to this doc, like as soon as you can.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  He didn't, uh, didn't even tell me like what the, what that doc did, but like, okay, he's at this hospital, he's this doc, I Google him like anybody would. I'm like, oh, he's an oncologist. Like, so this, like, of course, that call is bad, but you know, now we're getting more information. Okay, this is really not good. Uh, I took the red eye back home and next day I get a CAT scan. And that's when they find tumors just everywhere.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  What they decided was the, the primary tumor is about the size of a, a little bigger than a baseball in my left lung.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  And by that point, like I started thinking like with all the work that I've been doing like I'm just getting out of shape like my run times keep getting a little worse but at no point did I think that's what it was. So we find out like through that MRI like I'd actually I had a fracture on my pelvis. So I had a baseball in my lung and a fracture in my pelvis and was still working. So yeah, we go through the process of trying to figure out what's going on, find a doc, don't really care for him, fire him, go find another doc

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  at Johns Hopkins we really like, we're still working with him. Yeah, we've been fighting for just over two years now.

• 2:15:59Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of that, you're, you're, well, as I mentioned, you guys, your ODA team got something like, I don't know, 12 or 13 Silver Stars amongst them.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  It was 10 Silver Stars, three or four Bronze.

• 2:16:18Jocko Willink?

  Though the Air Force Cross for the.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  Air Force Cross.

• 2:16:22Jocko Willink?

  And you were one of those, you were one of those Silver Stars.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I was.

• 2:16:25Jocko Willink?

  And they, the, the government or yeah, the military, basically, I forget what year it is, maybe 2015 or 16, they started doing a, a service wide review of all of the awards that had been handed out or awarded to see if they all, all kind of matched up and were where they should be. And I know actually, three of my guys who had been written up for Bronze Stars, they got, they got advanced or they got raised to Silver Stars, but they,

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  they reviewed your award as well. And they came to a conclusion that it should be upgraded. And how'd you find out about that?

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  I of course had heard about the review process that the Secretary of Defense had ordered.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  Never gave it a second thought. Just was going about my, my day-to-day life. I mean, honestly, I think like most soft guys, like just a atta boy and here's your next mission. That's all any of them expect or want or, or anything. So in August of last year, I get the first call on, on my home phone.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  You know, we still have a, it's part of that triple play package, you know, they get you with the home phone. Like, I don't want a home phone. They're like, it costs more to not have it. The landline? Yeah.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So somebody, somebody calls, they left a, they left a voicemail on that. Is it even called a voicemail when it's on the answering machine? I think so. They answering? I don't know. But they, they called and left a message and they claimed that they were from the Pentagon. And they, they said, we needed to talk to Ron Scher. And I was like, this is, it almost sounds legit, but it's definitely a scam. I'll call him back and just... Speaking of credit fraud, here we go. So I call him up and they're like, we need to set up a call between you and a higher ranking DOD official. And I'm like, who? And they're like, we can't tell you. I'm like, why we can't tell you?

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  I'm like, well, that doesn't sound right. So go to, send me an email from your... Official. Dot, dot mil to my Secret Service email. Launch it over there. We'll, just, just to verify who you are. Cause you say you're from the Army. You're at the Pentagon, you're G1. I get calls from them all the time.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  You know, the IRS is always calling me saying, I'm about to be arrested.

• 2:19:28Speaker 01

  So they, they, they sent me the, the message confirming who they were. And so I'm just not going to tell me why. And they're like, no. I'm like, well, that's cool. I got a family vacation I'm taking next week. Have this person call me after that.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  But like I mentioned, we're in this cancer battle. And so just before we went on that trip, I started getting some new pain. So we do some scans, we find out I got a little bit, a little bit of stuff growing. And we make a plan to deal with that as soon as we get back from our trip. So I go on my family vacation. We come back and we start radiation basically the next day, just trying to get control again. So this person in the Army, they start calling me again, like, hey, we're gonna set up a a date for this person to talk to you. And it's like, okay, cool.

• 2:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any idea right now, or are you just?

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  No, we, my wife and I were trying to like brainstorm. Like, I knew about the review process.

• 2:20:42Jocko Willink?

  Did that even click in your head?

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  I think at one point, so with the, the email, like the, the, not subject line, but like your name, and then this is my job, is how important I am.

• 2:20:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, the signature line.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  Signature line. Uh, I see that and I see, I see what it is, so I Google that, because I don't know who this person is or what it is.

• 2:21:09Jocko Willink?

  Investigator.

• 2:21:11Speaker 01

  So I started going down that chain. And at one point, we actually found out that they're in the long process of the Medal of Honor. They're, they're one of the many tiers. But my wife and I kind of look at each other and, you know, just kind of chuckle it off, like, that's ridiculous. But, so we're like, well, maybe, maybe, you know, I-

• 2:21:36Jocko Willink?

  You got a witness for somebody or whatever.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  I got a witness for something. I'd signed up for the, you know, the burn pit registry that's out there, like, I'll sign up for that. I'll, maybe it's something to do with any of these numerous things. So, uh, the day that I'm supposed to get the call, I'm, oh, uh, teleworking that day, because I just finished up some radiation, feel awful. And so, um, I get the first call from the military saying, are you gonna take your call later today? Like, yes, I'm good.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  Then, one of my friends ends up calling Miranda and says, basically, "Stand by for Ron's boss." And so he gets on the line to talk to Miranda, and he's like, "Is Ron good for a phone call today?" And she's like, "Yes, Ron's fine for a call." "Is this the call that we've been talking to other people about?" And he's like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Why are you calling? We just can't process." Like, "Why is he now calling us?"

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  So, he's like, "Are you good for your call?" "Like, 'Yeah, we're good for our call.'" "The Army calls me back again." "You good for your call?" I'm like, "Yes, I'm still good for my call." "I'm gonna run out of battery, though, if you people keep calling me to check if I'm good for my call or not."

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  So, a little while later, my boss calls back again, and he's like, "Your call is canceled." Like, "Why are you canceling my call?" And, you know, just trying to run through all the scenarios in your head, like, "Why are you doing anything with this?" And he's like, "Trust me, it's good." And I was like, "I don't trust you."

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  But, but, okay. Like, I have no choice in this matter. So, he ends up calling, and he's saying, "Next Tuesday, I need you to come into the White House with Miranda, and you need to talk to the boss of the President's detail."

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  And that makes even less sense than anything that's been happening so far.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  So, Tuesday, it's September 4th. We end up, he comes by our house, gets us, brings us in into the White House complex, and we go over and we start in the boss of the President's detail. We start off in his office. And so he meets us in there. He's like, you know, "Hi, Ron and Miranda. Thanks for coming in. Really appreciate it."

• 2:24:22Speaker 01

  John Kelly wants to talk to you guys. So, of course Miranda and I are kind of looking at each other like trying to do like hand signals like in kind of where we landed is like, okay, I think I'm gonna get upgraded to a cross, which is amazing honor, I think, and I think the Secret Service found out. And since John Kelly, the Chief of Staff at the time, you know, former general, we had that connection, like, he's gonna, he's gonna bring me in to tell me. So, we spend some time in that boss's office, and they bring us into the waiting room in

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  the West Wing itself, and so we're sitting there just continuing to wait. And then, John Kelly comes by, and he's like, "Hey Ron, hey Miranda, thanks so much for coming in, I just want to talk with you guys for a little bit." And so, he's like, "Follow me back to my office." So, we start following- This is crazy, dude. So, we start following him down. Miranda doesn't know the White House, so she's just tagging along, like, we're walking down the hallway, and I think, I think we pass Sarah Huckabee's office, and she's like,

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  "Oh, look," like, she's just, you know, getting kind of starstruck by the, by the office and all of the things, but in my mind, I'm like, you know, I don't want to interrupt the Chief of Staff to the President, but I'm like, "Sir, your office is, is that way." Like, "Do you know where you work?" But, I'm just along for the ride. So, we walk down the hall, we make a couple turns, and then, he makes that left into what I know as the Oval. And so, I get to that threshold, I see the President sitting at his desk, and as soon as I hit that threshold, I can see there's cameras, so there's video, and there's still

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  cameras just going crazy, just White House internal stuff, just clicking away, and at that point, it was definitely like- Oh shit. This did not go. Today kinda got out of hand. So the president gets up, he shakes her hand. You know, you did not expect to see me today, did you? No, I wasn't, I wasn't planning on it. Honestly can't remember everything, you know, just the usual platitudes. Thanks for your service. I heard you were in Afghanistan. Yeah. And he's like, did you know you're getting looked at for Afghanistan? I'm like, no.

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  He's like, well, just want you to know, I just approved you to get the Congressional Medal of Honor. And honestly, at that point, it all just kinda went to white noise. I couldn't, I don't know what else he said afterwards. We have the pictures and you can, you can flip through and you can see the moment where he tells, cause I have a definite, what the are you saying? And my wife is starting kinda that happy, happy cry. But yeah, so we had, had no, no idea that I was getting. I mean, I knew generally that things were getting looked at, but I had no idea that my packet would stand out

• 2:27:54Speaker 01

  or not stand out or, or anything. Yeah, we, we got out of there. The, the, the boss that had basically found out it was, you know, government efficiencies, like that day I was supposed to get the call. They kinda went down the hall and like, does this guy work for you? Like, I've been emailing you from a secret service email address for weeks now. Uh, but so it was at that moment, they were like, does he work for you? And they're like, yeah, he works for us and he's here in DC and he, you know, he has a White House badge. He can walk in the White House anytime he wants. So.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  So they coordinated that, they made sure the counter assault team for that day, they were all, you know, marine, green beret, some more army and then marine, just all army guys who all kind of got it and then they found out, like,

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  as I was finding out and so went and saw them and, you know, the whole, whole thing was just super surreal trying to figure out why me, why, why now, why any of it?

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  I remember it was soon after that, the, the Colonel from the Pentagon, she called, she's like, so you've obviously now talked to him, you know, you know why we're being secretive now, like, yeah, and then she said a lot of stuff about like,

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  you know, how the process is going to work and other things. And at the end of it, it got to the point where I was like, ma'am, I don't remember a thing you just said,

• 2:29:39Speaker 01

  but I don't have a uniform and like, I don't know why that-

• 2:29:43Jocko Willink?

  Because you've been out for seven, eight, nine years or something like that?

• 2:29:47Speaker 01

  May of 2009 is when I got out, so this is, I mean, that's nine and a half years. Yeah, next month will be 10, so it was nine and a half years since I got out.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  So yeah, it was the last thing that I thought was, was coming and I'm obviously super humbled by, by it, but it was definitely the last thing I thought would come my way. I still remember feeling almost guilty calling my teammates to let them know, so like, hey, can you, can you come to DC on October 1st? Because I'm getting them out of order and like, felt like I had to apologize to them, like, the team was amazing that day, the team did everything and a lot of these guys, you know, kept going for years and years after I got out, like.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  I don't know why I'm getting this.

• 2:30:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's awesome. And I'm sure they all thought to themselves, well, uh, that maybe the fact that you saved my, my life and kept me alive might be the reason. So, yeah, that's unbelievable. Awesome story. Um, and it sounds like there was definitely some good, smooth government operating in there as well.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  In the end, they, they worked out. It worked out to be a pretty good secret.

• 2:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's pretty awesome that they kept it from you.

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  They kept it, you know, after we stepped out of the Oval, you know, John Kelly is like, sorry, I had to pull a trick on you.

• 2:31:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's like such an honest guy that he felt guilty about that.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Like such a good guy. He's like, hey, I'm really sorry I had to do that.

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  It's okay, sir. I forgive you.

• 2:31:27Jocko Willink?

  And then, um, how, when, when you go, talking about the cancer a little bit, when you go in for radiation, when you go in for chemo, like, I, I, you know, I've known people that have gone on chemo, it's like crushing, uh, physically.

• 2:31:45Speaker 01

  Uh, so with, with my treatments, we're, we're in a reassessment phase right now to figure out what we're doing. But for the last couple of years, I've been on, uh, it's a, okay, it's super far out in the weeds, but it's a targeted therapy for my, for my very specific kind of lung cancer. And so I take one pill every day and, you know, it's got me two years down the road. Uh, so it, the, there's ups and downs with it. Um, some, you know, definitely some side effects. I think generally speaking, it's better than what you think of as chemo.

• 2:32:30Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  I know it's, uh, pissed off a lot of, uh, keyboard warriors and, and sergeant majors out there in the world. Like I didn't shave for the, for the ceremony. And it was like, well, it's because I had a rash from, from my treatment. So I, I physically couldn't shave at the time, but some people took offense, like. Sorry.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  I want, I, I, I want, I want.

• 2:33:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  And it was, you know, I.

• 2:33:05Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. That's, that's only in America could you say, oh, that guy got the Medal of Honor? You might want to shave next time. That's, that's professional jealousy at its finest, right?

• 2:33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I baited it.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  Try not to chase down too many people, but a few of them are like, oh, just so you know, like, this is why. Have a nice day.

• 2:33:30Jocko Willink?

  And then what are you doing day to day now? So are you still, do you, are you working right now? Secret Service? Do you have to put any time with them? Are you on like some medical leave right now? Did you stay in the Secret Service?

• 2:33:40Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I'm still, still with the Secret Service. Some, a few people have asked me now what the medal, like, is Secret Service just a cover? That's what I do.

• 2:33:49Jocko Willink?

  I have to admit that when I was talking to my wife, you know, my wife has been talking to your wife and um, I said something along the lines of like, oh, you know, we'll, we'll talk about, you know, using the secrets, he's in the Secret Service. And my wife said, and my wife's a Brit, so she doesn't like fully comprehend American government like an American does. But, you know, I said, you know, we'll probably talk about, you know, him being in the Secret Service. And my wife, of course, literally says, but isn't that a secret?

• 2:34:21Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, good cover, a cover for your covert operations that you're now conducting.

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah, no, it's, so once I, once I was diagnosed a couple of years ago, I just switched over from being operational, counter assault to, when I'm going to say operations again, but now I'm in the operations section.

• 2:34:40Jocko Willink?

  Got it, got it.

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  So I just send emails to people and I'm, I'm a keyboard warrior myself now. Like, you are not working hard enough. Work harder. Send.

• 2:34:50Jocko Willink?

  And you might want to shave while you're working harder, by the way. Yeah, and, and that's, and then you got your, your wife and your kids, and how old are your kids?

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  Uh, our, our boys, our older son Cameron, who, like I said, was, was three months at the time of the battle. He's, he's 11 now, and our younger son Tyler, he's, he's eight, so, you know, my wife has, you know, multiple full-time jobs, trying to keep those kids, you know, where they need to be, when they need to be there, like, with the Secret Service.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  I can't remember the exact day count, but the last year I was like fully able to travel and everything. I traveled like 130 days or something, and, you know, at least for like the military time deployments, like, you're gonna leave in August, like, okay, that's in the future, I know when it is, you're gonna be gone for seven months, whereas, you know, the Secret Service, we're dependent on people. Does the president want to go over here? If he does,

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  We're going.

• 2:35:55Speaker 01

  Guess what, it doesn't matter what we had scheduled next week, it's going to happen. So, you know, in that 130 days, doesn't sound that bad, it's two days here, three days there, a call at 8:00 PM tomorrow morning, you're on a plane, at 6:00 AM, get packed. So, you know, she's, she's been, she was amazing at balancing all of those things that came, came with the job, and then,

• 2:36:25Speaker 01

  then I threw in a monkey wrench with the whole, I have cancer everywhere, let's make it more about me now.

• 2:36:34Speaker 01

  So, it gets the kids were, um, what was that? Kindergarten and third grade, I think, were the ages. I had diagnosed, like, they were just starting to get a little bit easier. And, you know, she's kind of coming out for air, like, you know, hold on, I need to, I need to challenge you a little more, sorry about that.

• 2:36:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's, you know, it sounds like when I met her today, she seems like awesome, awesome woman, awesome family. And, um, I mean, just incredible story from, from everything that you've done and what you've been through, what you're going through and the perseverance that you're showing is just, um, perseverance that you showed. And the perseverance that you continue to show is just, it's awesome, man. And, um, probably a good, probably a good, as good a place of any to, uh, try and wrap this up. Um, but, you know, man, thanks for coming on and, and really thanks for, thanks for giving an example to everyone of, you know, how to, how to train, how to fight and how to live. It's, uh, it's awesome.

• 2:37:36Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate you saying that. And, you know, I'm not just saying this because I'm on your show. Like I, I've been listening to your, your podcast for a long time. I, I've listened to many different episodes, but there's one in particular where you, you know, you do the book views and, um, A Man's Search for Meaning. You did that one, I think, like two or three months after I diagnosed. And that was, I mean, I like to think I'm a determined guy and like I can focus through stuff. But, you know, the cancer battle is definitely very different than an army battle. Like, again, we get discussed earlier, like, if you can shoot me, I can shoot you.

• 2:38:18Speaker 01

  We'll see. This is that kind of behind the scenes unknown enemy. And so just, you know, hearing about like that book and then I immediately went out and got the book, read it. Like just stuff. So, you know, your podcast is definitely, you know, not only on those long, boring nights where you can't sleep because this, this hurts or that hurts, like something to listen to. But it's definitely been very meaningful to me in, in those respects. So I really appreciate it and.

• 2:38:50Speaker 01

  Hopefully, hopefully with someone you know, interesting today.

• 2:38:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. No, it's awesome. And we'll, we'll keep doing it. Echo, speaking of the podcast, speaking of, you know, taking the fight to the enemy, seen and unseen.

• 2:39:09Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, big time.

• 2:39:11Jocko Willink?

  I know you like to, you know, give us some ideas, some, some help along that path. Yeah.

• 2:39:17Speaker 02

  I have a question first.

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:39:19Speaker 02

  So when you got hit in the arm, that time that you didn't realize it or whatever, like, what was that? Like a ricochet or something?

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  Just the bullet, dude.

• 2:39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, what was, you know, what happened with it?

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it's the tiniest little scar. You can barely see it.

• 2:39:35Speaker 02

  Like, like, like it just barely grazed you kind of thing?

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, grazed. I mean, when I, when I got the uniform off, I mean, there was, there was, there was cut, there was bleeding, there was bruising. Like I said, I couldn't.

• 2:39:48Speaker 02

  Cause it's like so much stuff is going on that like boom, yeah, you get hit, but then it kind of gets blended in with all the, all the rest of the chaos kind of thing.

• 2:39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so much with, with the, the airstrikes and stuff that we've been talking about, like, stuff was, stuff was just hitting you, stuff was just falling on you, stuff was, it was just, stuff was always going on. So.

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  You just sort of get shot, you know?

• 2:40:15Jocko Willink?

  It's, you know what else is crazy? Is I just, you know, like Echo doesn't ever write anything down during these things. And you made that statement like probably like 45 minutes ago, but Echo has just been sitting there thinking like, dang, what happened?

• 2:40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Jocko Willink?

  Can we expand on that?

• 2:40:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:31Jocko Willink?

  When my time comes, I got that question. I'm coming at you, Rob.

• 2:40:36Speaker 02

  No. Well, yeah, you sort of wonder because you just sort of mentioned it, you know, like, oh, kind of like on, you ever watch Terminator one, the first one, where they kind of recover from the shootout and then they're under the bridge and then, and they got, she, Sarah Connor goes, hey, like, what's up? You know, he goes, oh yeah, he got me right there. And just sort of glosses over it. She's like, you, you got shot? Like, oh, what's up? That's how I was feeling with you. You know what I'm saying? Well.

• 2:41:02Speaker 01

  Luckily, it was, I did a shot, but luckily, you know, for my sake and for the other people, just not knowing when it was.

• 2:41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:11Speaker 01

  It wasn't worse, because

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  No big deal.

• 2:41:14Speaker 01

  Let me keep, keep going about, about, uh, about the job.

• 2:41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's crazy now.

• 2:41:22Jocko Willink?

  Millimeters and inches.

• 2:41:24Speaker 02

  Millimeters and inches. But yeah, so yeah, if we're staying on the path, speaking of which, okay, let's start with Origin. Origin, up in Maine, American-made company, American-founded company.

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Just an American company, I think, sums it up nicely.

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

  But they go deep with American-made, though, that's the thing.

• 2:41:44Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:41:44Speaker 02

  So, anyway, so you're doing jiu-jitsu, which we all are, you want a gi, you get it from Origin, all made in America, new gi out, by the way.

• 2:41:52Jocko Willink?

  Out.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  A real good one. Have you used it yet?

• 2:41:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:41:56Speaker 02

  I know you're kinda off the jiu-jitsu for a little bit.

• 2:41:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I got a little, uh, got a little ding up in the knee area.

• 2:42:03Speaker 02

  But you used it.

• 2:42:04Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:42:05Speaker 02

  Good assessment, solid, legit, as we say in the industry.

• 2:42:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, also rash gardens on there, um, even the, you know, the existing gis are good, are exceptional, actually, they're the best in the world, factually, made by jiu-jitsu people in America with American-made products.

• 2:42:26Jocko Willink?

  How much combatives did you do? How much rolling did you do?

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  We did, uh, we did a fair amount, and then, at some point, like I mentioned when that dude, Team Sergeant showed up and kinda reset the way we were training, uh, we did a little less rolling, and he found some guy just outside Fort Bragg, who's like, "I just been in fights in," I think he was from Miami, he's like, "I've been in fights in Miami for, for years and years," and he was really good at it, apparently, uh, so we did a little less rolling with him, because he, you know, he kinda brought up the point, like, with all the stuff you're carrying, if you end up on the ground...

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  That's not a good day for you.

• 2:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, if you end up on the ground, then you better know what you're doing, even with all that stuff on.

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, we, he, he kinda just taught us a different way, you know, of fighting it. If you get on the ground, yeah, get back up as quickly as you can.

• 2:43:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, I, I always say like the primary, the primary purpose of jiu-jitsu in self-defense situation is to get up and get away from them, not to put a triangle on them, or put a, some kind of a, you know, pull guard.

• 2:43:34Speaker 02

  Pull guard on the guy, like, yeah.

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  That's not smart.

• 2:43:37Speaker 02

  Negative.

• 2:43:37Jocko Willink?

  So, no, and the other funny thing is,

• 2:43:41Jocko Willink?

  like, I always, you know, I always talk about jiu-jitsu being important and all that stuff, but, like, in the SEAL teams, people would get really into combatants, which is cool. I'm down with being in combatants. I am totally into combatants. I'm totally into MMA and jiu-jitsu and wrestling and boxing and Muay Thai and whatever else I can find that is effective. But if you have a choice between being really good at shooting your guns and being really good at arm locking people, if you're in the, if you're in the military, it's better to be good at shooting your guns. Now luckily, I'm here to tell you, you can get good at both.

• 2:44:15Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:44:16Jocko Willink?

  Prioritize being able to shoot really well.

• 2:44:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  Well, most of my workouts now with, with the whole cancer thing are just walks, but maybe I'll check out one of these gees and just walk around the,

• 2:44:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, we can get you a ghee.

• 2:44:29Speaker 01

  The lake and, uh, we'll look weird at all.

• 2:44:31Jocko Willink?

  Get you gees for your kids too, because your kids should be doing jiu-jitsu. That's for sure.

• 2:44:36Speaker 02

  Yes, agree. But also on there, they have other apparel items. Fashionable.

• 2:44:42Jocko Willink?

  We don't, we don't use that word on here.

• 2:44:44Speaker 02

  Like the word, he doesn't like the concept. I get it, but the fact remains, Pete, he knows that Pete Roberts, founder of Origin, knows a little bit about fashion.

• 2:44:53Jocko Willink?

  Pete, my partner up in, uh, up in Maine, he's got like a little, he's got a little fashion sense to him.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little, a little sprinkle of it.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  Which I have zero, so there's a contrast there, you know?

• 2:45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  Pete will talk about, uh, color.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  Why you gotta say it like that? Yeah, color is good.

• 2:45:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, as long as it's black.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, or gray, or I get it.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  So anyways.

• 2:45:15Speaker 02

  Anyway, also supplements, what best kind of supplements? Joint supplements, apparently. When we were young, we're about the same age, I've estimated. When were you born?

• 2:45:24Speaker 01

  Seventy-eight, I just turned forty.

• 2:45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're one year younger than me. Nonetheless, back when we were young, we thought, what? Protein supplements, right? Creatine, remember when creatine came out? Everyone's like, oh yeah, that's the creatine.

• 2:45:37Jocko Willink?

  Drink so much of that stuff.

• 2:45:38Speaker 02

  No, as it turns out, it's not even as important, not even nearly as important as joint supplements. So, Jocko, of course, makes supplements. Jocko Joint Warfare, for what? Anti-inflammatory stuff, glucosamine, chondroitin, super krill oil. Krill oil, very important for your joints. Keeps you in the game, even at our age.

• 2:46:02Jocko Willink?

  I am tripling up on joint warfare right now to help the recovery process of my day.

• 2:46:07Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, man, the joint war and the krill oil combo, whatever. When you're consistent, I mean, you could stay consistent, so I get it. But I have experience with inconsistency. So, when, uh, when I get consistent, man, it's like you're on this like road, like, you know, you get dinged up or whatever, but like you go, it's like, they heal up so quick. And I don't want to make like, oh, you're like, uh, what's the guy, the X-Men guy? Who heals?

• 2:46:32Jocko Willink?

  Wolverine.

• 2:46:32Speaker 02

  I'm not necessarily saying you're like Wolverine, but you feel like you kind of are Wolverine. Like you, when you get, you know how like, me anyway, when I get hurt or like dinged up, I'm like, dang, how long am I out now? You know, a week, two weeks, whatever. Like with this, I like, I don't even worry about it.

• 2:46:48Jocko Willink?

  You're just in the game.

• 2:46:48Speaker 02

  Just in the game consistently taking it. So I dig it, is what I'm saying.

• 2:46:52Speaker 01

  Well, since you mentioned Wolverine, I'll say that with my, you know, SF and then cancer, like... We spent more time, my wife and I, talking about the possibility that that phone call, was somebody gonna enroll me in the Deadpool program? Than with any medals. We legitimately had conversations.

• 2:47:13Speaker 02

  Giving it everything, you know, yeah, you might be a good candidate for this, this new program we're putting together.

• 2:47:19Jocko Willink?

  My little, my little daughter, she watches, uh, those, what is it, Avengers? Is that what it is? So she watches that stuff. Does that have Wolverine in it?

• 2:47:28Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, no, right? No, that's X-Men, X-Men is Wolverine.

• 2:47:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, she watches those things. But the other day, and she's also kinda gullible, right? Cause she's nine and she kinda lives a little bit in a bubble, you know what I mean? And she's nine. But the other day, I started, I started this whole like thing with her where I was kinda telling, I was like, yeah, you know, cause I was saying, oh, my knee, I was like, you know, my knee, it'll heal up quickly. And I said, then I said, then like I got the little idea in my head of something creative to play, a game to play.

• 2:47:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  And so I said like, yeah, you know, it's weird, sweetie, cause whenever I get injured, it heals up really, really fast. It, it's really weird. It's always been like that. Well, not always. And then I started saying, well, you know, one time it's really weird, but I, I had this weird memory of like, when, when I was in the Navy and I went to the doctor and then I didn't remember things for a while. And I remember like them putting things in me. And, and her eyes were so big, she was so stunk for about another minute. And she thought I was Wolverine. Yeah. Cause I started up, when you start on, when something comes from them, right? So it was her that said like, oh, how long are you gonna be hurt for? So she initiated this whole conversation.

• 2:48:42Jocko Willink?

  So that gives me a massive advantage in this trick I'm about to play. Cause I'm playing the trick based on, on her reality.

• 2:48:48Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, it's not like you just came out of the blue with some trick.

• 2:48:52Jocko Willink?

  With some trick or some conversation. No, it's part of what she, she randomly asked me out. You know, I wasn't just sitting there plotting on it.

• 2:48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Jocko Willink?

  Kind of.

• 2:49:00Speaker 02

  So that's kinda like your thing, how you make, like when you, um, When you come up with a plan or a correction to a plan or whatever, like how you lead people. And I see what you're doing when you do it, but it still works by the way. So you lead people to think that they made the plan. See, I see that you just did that to your daughter. She's nine, by the way.

• 2:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Practiced on her.

• 2:49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's how I see it. I get it now. I get it fully.

• 2:49:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, supplements, milk as well, additional protein. See, I still don't neglect the protein, don't get it wrong. I just find the joint supplements to be.

• 2:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Somebody asked me on Twitter if I was on growth hormone because of the way I looked. And.

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  Reasonable though, reasonable.

• 2:49:41Jocko Willink?

  I said, I was actually, it was actually supposed to be a derogatory comment because it was one of those little clips that someone put up of me talking about something and, and then someone with the, the shot came in and said, that why would I listen to this guy who looks like he's been on growth hormone his whole life?

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:49:58Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and I just replied back like, I've, I've never been on any kind of growth hormone. Unless you count steak.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, I have fun, fun on Twitter.

• 2:50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how.

• 2:50:14Jocko Willink?

  Twitter is, Twitter is, I know you have Twitter.

• 2:50:18Speaker 01

  I don't use Twitter that much. I'm trying to, trying to figure out Instagram thing.

• 2:50:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  Twitter just still doesn't make sense in my brain.

• 2:50:25Jocko Willink?

  Instagram is also, can be fun, but Twitter is basically just a bunch of one-liners. It's just a bunch of one-liners. That's all it is. One-line zingers and it's just 24 hours a day. If, if you want to sit there and make one-liners all day long, you know, that's what you can do with that thing.

• 2:50:42Speaker 02

  That's a good way to put it.

• 2:50:43Jocko Willink?

  It's just one line. And then what's, what's lame about it? Or good about it, depending on your perspective, is if you and I are having a conversation and you say something and I zing, like I, I hit it, that took a little quick thinking. With Twitter, you could actually sit there and look at it for 12 minutes. You could look up words in the dictionary if you wanted to and you could say, oh, this is going to be really witty. And you can plan it out and you can do some research and then you can respond. And for all anyone knows, you just looked at that and just threw it out there.

• 2:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just got the notification.

• 2:51:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you just saw it and I'm just throwing out this advanced shot back at you. Whereas the reality is that's not what happened. So it's a really interesting. Now, I will say sometimes because you I I go on the Twitter and I reply like a lot at once because I don't sit there and look at Twitter all the time. So then I go back and I just reply really fast. So a lot of times I will do things that are, you know, just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And occasionally I make mistakes. You know, there's someone on Twitter called the, there's a Twitter thing called grammar police.

• 2:51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. What do you, what do you mean like an account or just a phenomenon?

• 2:51:49Jocko Willink?

  It's an account.

• 2:51:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:51:51Jocko Willink?

  I used, and I was an English major. Ron, I know you're an economics guy. So you're in the numbers. I'm in the letters. So I I put your, and again, I'm tweeting at a forty seven tweets a minute. It was boom, boom. And I used your Y O U R instead of Y O U R apostrophe E.

• 2:52:18Speaker 01

  You missed that apostrophe.

• 2:52:19Jocko Willink?

  Apostrophe R E. Yeah. And so then, and so then up pops, like probably an hour later, up pops grammar police. And it says, and it's, it's really, I actually love the way they do it. They don't, they don't, they don't, they're not disparaging to you. They just say, for your information, you used the wrong your, the proper. You know, the proper grammar in this scenario would have been to use Y O U apostrophe R E. Thank you, and please correct yourself next time. Signed, Grammar Police. So I like the grammar police. That's a good account.

• 2:52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, dang. So it's an actual like account, account, like a person. It's not a bot that's in there.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, it may be a bot. It may be a bot, but it's a grammar police account. You can follow them. I should probably follow grammar police. I'm going to.

• 2:53:09Speaker 01

  What are the pictures they share though? Just.

• 2:53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:11Jocko Willink?

  See Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.

• 2:53:14Speaker 01

  I thought you said Instagram. Okay.

• 2:53:15Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I guess Instagram, you could just, they could have, they could have blown up a picture, an image of my incorrect, you know, usage of.

• 2:53:22Speaker 02

  Or no, it would just slide in the comments, right? Because you wouldn't really, you don't need a picture for comments. So it'd be like.

• 2:53:28Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:53:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You post your, you know, thing. And then they just slide in the comments.

• 2:53:32Jocko Willink?

  But they should know that hurts because like I was an English major.

• 2:53:37Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It's the only way you'll learn though. So there you go.

• 2:53:43Jocko Willink?

  We gotta get you some Warrior Kid Malt for your kids, Ron.

• 2:53:48Jocko Willink?

  Do you, when you were a kid, did you ever drink Strawberry Quick?

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:53:52Jocko Willink?

  Did you like it?

• 2:53:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:53:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay, what about Chocolate Quick?

• 2:53:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:53:56Jocko Willink?

  Did you like it?

• 2:53:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:53:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:53:58Speaker 02

  Alright, there you go.

• 2:53:59Jocko Willink?

  Well, for me, Strawberry Quick was kinda like a big thing for me when I was a little kid.

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  Fake strawberry flavors, it's so hit and miss.

• 2:54:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, either one, if you happen to like Strawberry Quick, basically, our, this kid's protein drink tastes exactly like that. It's delicious. It would be, it's delicious to me, it wouldn't be delicious to you. I guess you'd spit it out.

• 2:54:24Speaker 01

  I wouldn't spit it out, I'd be polite. I'd still drink it, be like, oh, this is good, thanks for.

• 2:54:31Jocko Willink?

  So you'd be cool about it. Well, your kids, hopefully, they have better taste buds than you.

• 2:54:36Speaker 01

  They definitely do.

• 2:54:36Jocko Willink?

  Whoa, this stuff is amazing. So anyways, that's Warrior Kid Malt, and it's, doesn't have any sugar in it, it's actually good for you, it's got protein and vitamins and probiotics, it's awesome. So anyways, that's that.

• 2:54:46Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco has a store, it's called Jaco Store, that's where you can get apparel, Jaco Apparel.

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  Cause he's so fashionable.

• 2:54:53Speaker 02

  Yes, well, you know.

• 2:54:54Jocko Willink?

  You see the dichotomy in this, don't you?

• 2:54:56Speaker 02

  And try going there, the thing is, it's like, it's not even fashionable, but here's the thing, I snuck, I had to sneak in covertly and insert elements, sprinkles of fashion.

• 2:55:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  Pete Roberts style, not quite that hardcore, but.

• 2:55:11Jocko Willink?

  Hardcore fashion.

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  You know, like.

• 2:55:12Jocko Willink?

  That dude's like Zoolander.

• 2:55:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're mine, everybody. I'm like Zoolander in your mind. The, um, so, so Jaco's design, right? It's like his thing. It's like not even design, the font he uses is like computer font, literally not. So it's like OCR, whatever, so it's like, yeah, discipline equals freedom, you know, we'll put it on a shirt, I'm like, cool. So I look at him like, okay, I dig it, but at least I made the shirt like the shirt material. It's like, you know, a bland and all this stuff. It's not like some cheap, uh, what do you call it? Like a boxy, uh, rugged.

• 2:55:51Jocko Willink?

  I don't call it anything. I call it a shirt.

• 2:55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, see? And that's my point right there. See what I'm saying? So the designs are gonna be super basic, non-fashionable. But when you get the apparel, you're gonna be like, oh, this is really wearable stuff. It's really nice. That's what I predict you'll think, you know, if, if, or if history is any indicator. But anyway, uh, T-shirts on there. Uh, we got some lightweight hoodies on there, which Jaco, are you even down for the lightweight hood? Because so far, people, everyone now, every single person who was like siding with Jaco in real life. I'm not talking about internet. Siding with Jaco saying, yeah, hoodies are for like when you're cold. You need a, a, a heavy hoodie. Otherwise, why are you even wearing a hoodie? Just wear a shirt, right? Everybody now, everybody who has experienced.

• 2:56:34Jocko Willink?

  This is just ridiculous.

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  The lightweight hoodie have changed their mind. Every single person.

• 2:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Dave Burke.

• 2:56:40Speaker 02

  Human being, oh, good deal, Dave.

• 2:56:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:41Speaker 02

  Oh, heck, yeah.

• 2:56:42Jocko Willink?

  Last night, he's like.

• 2:56:43Speaker 02

  That was one of them. Yeah.

• 2:56:45Jocko Willink?

  He's like.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  I was wrong.

• 2:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:47Speaker 02

  This hoodie is outstanding. Oh, yeah. Actually, I already knew that. That's why we did it. Got lightweight hoodies, got T-shirts, got rash guards for jiu-jitsu and other things. And life, man. And, uh, you know, some women's stuff, hats, all the, some cool stuff. I think it's cool. People seem to think it's cool. Go on there. If you like something, get something. JacoStore.com.

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  Ron, how'd you like that? How'd you like the tea?

• 2:57:11Speaker 01

  It was really good. Definitely, uh.

• 2:57:15Jocko Willink?

  Wait, it's the best tea you've ever tried? It's better than strawberry quick?

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  It's way better than strawberry quick. I definitely would drink this strawberry quick. I mean, if it has the extra benefits of the probiotics and the protein, maybe I'll drink a little extra.

• 2:57:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:57:29Speaker 01

  But.

• 2:57:30Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 2:57:31Speaker 01

  If it's just strawberry quick now.

• 2:57:32Jocko Willink?

  Ron has been drinking. Jaco White Tea with Pomegranate anyways.

• 2:57:37Speaker 02

  Certified organic by the way.

• 2:57:38Jocko Willink?

  The good thing about it is it it after you finish this can, you can deadlift eight thousand pounds. And that's that's proven. That's proven. A hundred percent proven as a as a former former eighteen Delta medic. I can help you run through the test and you'll see it's a hundred percent.

• 2:57:58Jocko Willink?

  Make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you don't subscribe to it already, which is kind of ridiculous.

• 2:58:03Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, I mean, depends.

• 2:58:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, oh, and I just read a review.

• 2:58:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:10Jocko Willink?

  A guy said, um.

• 2:58:13Jocko Willink?

  He was going through like his top five podcasts and then our podcast came into his world as. This is the podcast that I most subscribe and unsubscribe to.

• 2:58:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:58:26Jocko Willink?

  And and he says, I subscribe to it because it's got great information on leadership and human nature and history and war. He goes, but I unsubscribe to it because. They spend a lot of times on some episodes talking about jujitsu, which I don't do. And this this wasn't a review on iTunes. This was a review that he wrote in a blog.

• 2:58:49Speaker 02

  Oh, blog.

• 2:58:49Jocko Willink?

  And tagged me in it on Twitter.

• 2:58:52Speaker 02

  His own blog?

• 2:58:53Jocko Willink?

  His own blog because people tag you in their blog. So you'll read it and repost it. This is great. So I read it and I just commented back to him. I said, it sounds like. You need to start doing jujitsu. You can thank me later. So there you go. Whoever that guy was seemed like a nice enough guy, but didn't want to do the jujitsu. That's that. So yeah, subscribe and don't forget about the Warrior Kid Podcast.

• 2:59:19Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Oh, my daughter has a question for.

• 2:59:22Jocko Willink?

  The Warrior Kid Podcast?

• 2:59:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll go over it later.

• 2:59:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:59:25Speaker 02

  Pass it on to Uncle Jake if you would. But yeah, so yeah, that's a good one.

• 2:59:29Jocko Willink?

  Warrior Kid Podcast is. Have you ever listened to Warrior Kid Podcast with your kids? I have not, no. It's what it is.

• 2:59:41Jocko Willink?

  The basic principles of life, I try and convey it in a way for kids that they can understand it, that they can appreciate it, and that they listen to it.

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  I'm always quoting you with my kids, like, discipline equals freedom.

• 2:59:57Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 2:59:58Speaker 01

  Do the right thing, and then I'll let you do more.

• 3:00:02Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? It doesn't matter who you are as a dad, your kids are not going to listen to you as much as you want them to. So it's good if you come at them from another angle. The other angle is Uncle Jake, who can tell them about discipline equals freedom. So anyways, Warrior Kid Podcast, check that out. And don't forget about that Warrior Kid soap from IrishOaksRanch.com. Aiden's making soap. He's a kid, but he's got his own business, and he's making soap on a rope right now. A little piece of 550 cord, a little piece of paracord.

• 3:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's good.

• 3:00:36Jocko Willink?

  So he's got that going on. And then you've got YouTube. Subscribe to YouTube so you can see Echo's legit videos, and if you want to know what Ron Sure looks like.

• 3:00:46Speaker 02

  Very handsome, by the way.

• 3:00:47Jocko Willink?

  Then you can watch this complete episode on YouTube. You can also see Echo's enhanced videos. He puts a lot of time and effort into them. Which means that he puts a lot of time and effort into them.

• 3:01:03Speaker 02

  There you go, yeah.

• 3:01:04Jocko Willink?

  And some of them are good. Some of them, he puts a little too much time and effort into.

• 3:01:08Speaker 02

  You know, okay, cool.

• 3:01:09Jocko Willink?

  Just saying.

• 3:01:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I dig it.

• 3:01:12Jocko Willink?

  What else?

• 3:01:13Speaker 02

  Psychological warfare. If you're having, if you're having issues, a lot of issues, or just a few issues on the path, you know, moments of weakness where you don't want to get up as early as maybe you think you should, and you don't feel like it, that's what it is. When you don't feel like it, this is a little bit of help to push you through. Any moment, diet stuff, wake up stuff, workout, skipping workout stuff, that was a big one for me back in the day, by the way. Buy this little album.

• 3:01:40Jocko Willink?

  Skipping them leg workouts.

• 3:01:45Speaker 01

  Not anymore though, right?

• 3:01:45Speaker 02

  No, sir. No, no. Not the arms work out either. So, anyway.

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  You get this albums called Psychological Warfare. Little tracks on there of Jaco telling us, helping us through our moments of weakness. Really easy, 100% effectiveness, my experience.

• 3:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Check out Flipside Canvas. It's my brother Dakota Myers. Dakota Meyer, he is taking cool images and putting them on canvas vinyl in America here. And sending them to you if you want them.

• 3:02:25Jocko Willink?

  You know, he has a straight up Jaco series now.

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  Good, yeah, the series.

• 3:02:30Jocko Willink?

  That's so epic. Anyways, check that out. Support Dakota and what Dakota's doing.

• 3:02:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:02:35Jocko Willink?

  And if you want, if you want custom stuff, just hit Dakota up on, on Twitter. Cause Dakota's like the nicest person. You seem pretty nice too, Ron. Dakota's really nice.

• 3:02:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:46Jocko Willink?

  And he's always wanting to help out. So, yeah, there you go. Check it out, flipsidecanvas.com.

• 3:02:51Speaker 02

  Also on it, on it.com slash Jaco. By the way, go there. This is where you can get your fitness gear. Whether it be for home, you got a commercial gym, whatever you like. Also some good. What would you call the elk bars?

• 3:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Snack food.

• 3:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:08Jocko Willink?

  Healthy snack food.

• 3:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like.

• 3:03:09Jocko Willink?

  You hate to even throw the word healthy on things.

• 3:03:11Speaker 02

  Cause the stigma, like the cliche, like buzzword.

• 3:03:16Jocko Willink?

  You think you're eating chalk.

• 3:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff on there. Uh, on it.com. Get something from there too. Yes, keep you on the path and in the game as it were.

• 3:03:28Jocko Willink?

  A bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. Mikey and the Dragons, that's for younger kids. Way the Warrior Kid. That's for medium aged kids. Mark's Mission is the follow on to that. The new book three of Way the Warrior Kid is coming out. It's called Where There's a Will. It will be available. Should be available right now. How you like that? For preorder on Amazon. This week goes Freedom Field Manual. Extreme Ownership, first book I wrote with my brother Leif Babin, about combat leadership and how you can apply it to your business and to your life. And then the dichotomy of leadership, which is the follow-up to that book, which is also about

• 3:04:10Jocko Willink?

  leadership, but it gets granular on those principles and on being a balanced leader, which is the best kind of leader to be. Echelon Front, that's my leadership consultancy. And what we do is solve problems through leadership. It's me, Leif Babin, JP Denell, Dave Burke. Yeah, good deal, Dave Burke, Flynn Cochran, Mike Sorelli, Mike Byma, and Jason Garner. I just realized Jason Garner doesn't really have a nickname.

• 3:04:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's a matter of time on that one.

• 3:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, go to echelonfront.com if you want us to come and help you work through whatever issues you have in your organization. We'll do it with leadership. The muster coming up, May 23rd and 24th in Chicago, September 19th and 20th in Denver, December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. These are leadership conferences, events, gatherings.

• 3:05:04Speaker 02

  Sticking with musters.

• 3:05:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so it's a muster. That's what we call it. We call it the muster. And if you want to come to it, you gotta register pretty quickly. All the ones that we've done, these are seven, eight, and nine this year, that all of them have sold out. So these are going to sell out as well. If you want to come, get there early. I won't be able to help you.

• 3:05:25Jocko Willink?

  If you contact me a week prior to the event and say, hey, I really wanted to go. Can you, you know, throw me a couple of tickets? And I know you for, I went to high school with you or whatever. I can't help you. You can't come. Don't be mad at me then.

• 3:05:44Jocko Willink?

  EF Online, that is our online training for leadership for people that can't come to the muster, or you've got a big company with 28,000 employees and you want them all to get trained in the leadership principles that we teach at Echelon Front. Go to EFOnline.com and you can get your whole organization aligned.

• 3:06:06Jocko Willink?

  And running in the right direction. And we've got EF Overwatch as well. And what we're doing with EF Overwatch is taking proven leaders from Spec Ops and from Combat Aviation and putting them into civilian jobs, civilian sector leadership. And don't always think you've got to hire somebody that knows everything technical about the situation. Hire someone for their leadership capability. It's easier to teach them the industry than it is to teach someone leadership. So EFOverwatch.com, that's what you need. It's you need leadership. And if you want to connect with Ron, he's on the interwebs. He's kind of young on the interwebs.

• 3:06:49Jocko Willink?

  You're not super advanced.

• 3:06:53Speaker 01

  I'm trying to, to learn, especially with Instagram. So I'm trying to slowly dip my toes into that.

• 3:07:01Jocko Willink?

  The toes are being dipped.

• 3:07:03Speaker 01

  Get, get that connection with the people who, who feel connected to this story at all.

• 3:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's awesome. If you do go on Twitter, it's Ron underscore three nine six. For Instagram, which apparently is Ron's, Ron's going to be the Graham. He's in the Graham.

• 3:07:22Speaker 02

  That's your main one?

• 3:07:22Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's my focus.

• 3:07:25Jocko Willink?

  That's your focus. Okay. It's got the mission focus. And that is Ron underscore Schur, S H U R E R. And then we also, Echo Charles and I are on those as well. And we're also on the Fashebook. And we are, Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. Echo, you got anything else?

• 3:07:51Speaker 02

  No. Thank you, Ron. You're the man.

• 3:07:55Jocko Willink?

  Ron.

• 3:07:55Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 3:07:57Speaker 01

  Well.

• 3:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Any closing thoughts, Ron?

• 3:08:00Speaker 01

  So again, thank you guys so much for having me today. Whenever I, I come to talk about myself, I get, I love talking about myself like I think most SF guys do. I'd rather, you know, my, my wife says that You know, I became a Green Beret and it's the quiet professional, you know. You know, you just go out, you do the mission, you talk about it. And then I moved over to the Secret Service, which is, you know, has that kind of tagline, like, standing on the sidelines of history, like, I want to do cool things, I want to

• 3:08:38Speaker 01

  be there, but I never want anybody to talk about me or look at me or do any of that. But I appreciate the chance to come here today because, you know, when I got the medal, you know, as part of processing it and trying to figure out what did I want to do with it. You know, like, right now, from the global war on terrorism, we've been fighting for 17 straight years, like, Green Berets, you know, that's where my heart is, like, they've been just out there getting it on the entire time.

• 3:09:18Speaker 01

  It's mind-boggling to me that I am the only living recipient right now, representing that group. Robbie Miller, who was in Alpha 33, he was on the same deployment as me, he earned the Medal of Honor in January of 2008, bravely taking the fight to the enemy, but unfortunately, he was killed. He was the first Green Beret in this war, and now I'm the second, but I'm the first who can actually get out there and share, I share my story, not so you can be like, "Hey, Ron's awesome." Ron's just another dude on a team who had an okay day and a bad, and a horrible day.

• 3:10:00Speaker 01

  But so I can tell people that stories like that are going on constantly, and, you know, I'm just, I'm here to represent those guys who don't care.

• 3:10:14Speaker 01

  You know, you could give them, give them an award, not give them an award, give them a pat on the back, they don't care. They just, they believe in the mission, they're out there doing the mission. They're missing birthdays and anniversaries and all those things for this country. And, you know, that's why I'm here is just to remind people about those guys, not so much myself. And, you know, to be able to, you know, just share a little bit of that story and then, you know, also to, you know, say thanks to my family for being so supportive.

• 3:10:53Speaker 01

  It's, you know, I mean, I'm, you know, I got a medal because I was, you know, taking care of other people. But I have a huge support structure behind me. My wife, Miranda, like I said,

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  was quizzing me through the Q course. Those were our, maybe not our first date, but by like week two or three, like, okay, you're in the circle now. Now you gotta help me because I can't give up a whole, I want to see you for a weekend, but I can't give up a whole weekend and not study. So just the support that she's given from then to now to, you know, having a baby or being pregnant with, with some Green Beret who's overseas. He comes back, sees the baby born, like, all right, good luck with that kid. I gotta go back and take care of people. So the amount of support that I've had there and that my kid's just putting up with all this stuff too. Just be able to say thanks to them on a, on a bigger front, I appreciate that.

• 3:11:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, I touched on it a little bit with, with my cancer story. I definitely don't want to be, I don't want it to be some like,

• 3:12:12Speaker 01

  Sad story like, oh, this guy sucks to be him, like, or anything. I just share it just because I know there were other people out there who are getting diagnosed with cancer and they're getting those phone calls. And I remember that, I remember that first call I got where it was like, you know, there's nothing you can do today. And, and he meant like, it was like a Friday afternoon. I just found out the day before and it's going into the weekend. But that, that, that crush of that, well, there's nothing you can do. Like, what do you mean? And so, you know, if I can just put out that story that there's always hope,

• 3:12:52Speaker 01

  there's always more you can do. And, you know, the cancer fight is not like combat where you get to go punch somebody in the face, or shoot somebody in the face and, and have that, like, the, the cancer fight is, you know, getting up and eating when you don't want to eat. It's the last thing in the world you want to do. Or you gotta work out. Well, let's just go for a walk, you know, like, just, just those things. So I just want to have a moment to be able to, anybody who's being affected by that, just say, you know, you're, you're not alone. It's tough. It sucks. However you got there, doesn't matter.

• 3:13:34Speaker 01

  Don't worry about, I don't, I try not to worry for myself why I got it. But it's just, it's, it's just the next challenge. Keep putting your one foot in front of the other. And, yeah, that's life.

• 3:13:52Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Well, um, once again, thanks, thanks for coming on, man. It's been awesome to meet you. And thanks to Zach, your buddy Zach, who kind of linked us up. And it was cool that he reached out to me. And it took us a long time to make this happen with everything that's going on in your world. And I'm glad we were able to do it. So thanks for coming on and

• 3:14:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely, my pleasure.

• 3:14:10Jocko Willink?

  Obviously, thanks for your service and your sacrifice for what you did for this country. And

• 3:14:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, not just for what you did for the country while you're in the military, while you're in the Secret Service, but also right now, setting an example for everyone, for everyone that's out there, for me, for everyone to follow and know that we can step up our game, that we can go on, we can do better, and we can fight harder. And that's what I see when I see you. And thanks for doing that for me and for everyone else. And obviously, thanks to everyone else out there in uniform that is defending our flag and our country. To those that are serving, to those that have served, thanks to all

• 3:15:01Jocko Willink?

  of you out there. Thanks to the police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, first time mentioned for the Secret Service, and all the other first responders. Thanks for keeping us safe here at home. And for everyone else out there, remember that you might have to fight uphill. You might have to fight against a hardened enemy that has more guns and more

• 3:15:39Jocko Willink?

  people than you. And even in those situations, remember the path of Ron Scher and the rest of Special Forces, ODA 3336. Remember to stand by your brothers. Remember to pick up that weapon. Remember to put one foot in front of the other. And remember to keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Ron Scher and Echo and Jaco. Out.