218: Pinned Down, Shot In The Head, Still Winning. With Ike Eisenbach

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:40 – Charles Robert "Ike" Eisenbach. Silver Star. Vietnam. 2:17:39 – Ike's son, Matt Eisenbach. 2:28:17 – Final thoughts. 2:29:47 – How to stay on THE PATH. 2:47:50 – 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 218 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  In the Marine Corps in Vietnam, first and second lieutenants made up about 65% of the Marine officers killed in action. Now, if you, if you add captains, Marine Corps captains, O3s onto that, you get to about 85% of all Marine officers killed in Vietnam were in these, these relatively junior ranking officers. These were the platoon and company commanders.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  And if you go to 1968, 1968 was the year with the highest number of Americans killed in action in Vietnam. 16,899.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  That's over 1,400 per month. 1,400 per month killed in action. Now, to put that in perspective, a little bit during the heaviest fighting when I was in Iraq, which was in 2006, there was 823 Americans killed.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  Now, obviously, every single loss is a, is a tragedy.

• 1:44Jocko Willink?

  But during the Vietnam War, the tragedy was 20x that number.

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  20 times more people killed in 1968 in Vietnam than there were in Iraq in 2006. That is just a, it's just a different level.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  Now, in total, in Vietnam, there were 14,836 Marines killed.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  1,387 of those were officers. So, that's basically 10% of the Marines killed were

• 2:28Jocko Willink?

  officers. And as I already said, 85% of them were these junior officers. Now, if you just run that math out a little bit, there's generally around, gonna be one officer in an infantry platoon. And there's gonna be around 40 guys, which means that these officers make up for about 2.5% of Marines.

• 2:57Jocko Willink?

  And then, again, just by my estimation, just some rough math, that means that these young Marine officers were about four times more likely to be killed than the enlisted guys.

• 3:15Jocko Willink?

  And you, if you think about that, you wonder, why is that?

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  How's that happen? Well, from a tactical perspective,

• 3:28Jocko Willink?

  first of all, the enemy knows what I say all the time, and that is that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. And because of that, the enemy aims to kill the leaders.

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  And then, on top of that,

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  Marine officers are trained to be the first one on the ground, the first one that's off the helicopter, the first one that's out of the vehicle, the first one in the combat situation, and then the last to leave, the last to load the helicopter, the last to get inside of an APC. So, right there, your chances go up, because you're in it longer. And that might only be an extra 30 seconds, but those moments when you're inserting, you're extracting from the battlefield, those are the most critically dangerous moments, usually.

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of all that, you add to the fact that as an officer, you generally lead from somewhere near the front of the patrol. Maybe you're behind the point man, maybe you're behind the point man in the first automatic weapons gunner.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  And since you're in the front of the patrol, well, that increases your exposure to booby traps. It increases your exposure to ambushes.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  And then, of course, on top of all those things, when the time comes,

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  you actually have to lead. You actually have to step up. You actually have to make decisions. You actually have to get your men to maneuver on the battlefield.

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  That's what your job is. And by the way,

• 5:09Jocko Willink?

  that job description is not just some theoretical job description.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  This is what the Marine, the young Marine officers in Vietnam actually did.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  And here's a, here's an example of what a young Marine Corps officer did in Vietnam.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  "The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to Second Lieutenant Charles Robert Eisenbach, United States Marine Corps,

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action while serving as platoon commander with Company D, First Reconnaissance Battalion, First Marine Division, FMF, in connection with operations against the enemy in the Republic of Vietnam."

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  On 4 July 1968, 2nd Lieutenant Eisenbach was leading a reconnaissance patrol when the unit suddenly came under intense small arms and automatic weapons fire from a numerically superior North Vietnamese Army force and the lead elements were pinned down.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  Realizing the seriousness of the situation, he immediately directed the remainder of his men to maneuver to aid the beleaguered Marines while he fearlessly moved forward to direct the fire of his men. Ignoring the enemy fire impacting around him, he moved about the fire-swept terrain, deploying his men into advantageous firing positions and directing their fire

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  until he was seriously wounded.

• 6:58Jocko Willink?

  Although he was partially paralyzed and unable to move, he continued to direct his men while simultaneously adjusting airstrikes and supporting artillery fire upon the hostile positions.

• 7:11Jocko Willink?

  Disregarding his painful injury, he resolutely controlled his unit throughout the remainder of the firefight.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  His heroic and timely actions were an inspiration to all who observed him and contributed significantly to the accomplishment of his unit's mission.

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  By his courage, superb leadership, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of great personal danger, 2nd Lieutenant Eisenbach upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.

• 7:52Jocko Willink?

  Now, when you hear an award write-up like that,

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  you kind of have to ask yourself, who

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  who are these men? Where did these men come from?

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  Where did they learn this level of courage?

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  And bravery?

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  And where did they learn to lead? Well,

• 8:24Jocko Willink?

  it is an honor to say that today, we have one of those men with us. As a matter of fact, we have that man. The man whose Silver Star Citation I just read. His name is Charles Robert Eisenbach, or Ike, as he was known. And he's here to share his story. So that we can learn some of the lessons from him about leadership and about life. Ike,

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  thanks for coming on, appreciate it.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  Great, great to meet you.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  And luckily, your, your son and your daughter put together a bunch of information, kind of a timeline of your life, which made it really easy for me to prepare for this podcast, because that's normally what I have to go back and do, but Matt, appreciate you doing that. Not a problem. And it starts off where I, where I always like to start off these podcasts in the beginning. So, sir, let's talk about your childhood. Let's talk about like, what was young Ike doing? Where'd you come from?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Well, young Ike wasn't around, but young Bob was, or Bobby, because I was Bob or Bobby to the family before I went into service and about a week into the Naval Academy plebe summer, squad leader got us all out one night and gave us nicknames. Some stuck, some didn't. Ike stuck. So that's the way that was. But when Bobby was growing up, Bobby's dad was a current naval officer. And somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun, I would say. He was a, he was a hard man. But we had an interesting childhood, moved every couple of years, back and forth, the east coast, west coast, spent a couple of years in Lima, Peru, and ended up in, at Subic Bay in the Philippines, graduating from high school out there.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  So it was an interesting childhood.

• 10:22Jocko Willink?

  Did, so was he, was he in World War II?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  He was. He was a naval aviator. He, out of the Naval Academy class of thirty-six, flew PBYS.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  As he used to say, flying used to be fun. You know, you had put on the silk scarf, go up for forty-five minutes or so, and he said, "Then somebody invented this damn PBY, which stayed alive for twelve hours." And flying was not so much fun after that, but that's, that's what he did in World War II. He was in the Ongapoe in the Philippines when the war broke with his squadron, which I think was VP 101. They kinda got out just by the hair of their chinny chin chin, worked their way south down the Philippine Islands to Java, current day Indonesia, and ended up in Perth, Australia. From there, he, I think he came back to the US for about a year and did whatever they did with the folks

• 11:17Speaker 01

  in the World War II back then. And went back, picked up command of a seaplane tender, the San Pablo, and worked his way back up the Pacific with the MacArthur's group. I think it was the Battle of Letay Gulf. Now, as a combatant, because a seaplane tender isn't, you know, one or two five-inch guns on it, they didn't go out there and shoot it up with anybody. We hope not. No, no. Yeah, and they carried ab gas and ammunition, so that wouldn't have been a pretty picture. And after World War II, you know, came back, I didn't, he didn't see me until I was a year old, I guess. I didn't know what I looked like, because he

• 12:02Speaker 01

  said my mom's pictures were just nothing but blur. So, and, and we just picked up the family from there, started moving. Sister was born a couple of years later, after, after I was born, in Arlington, Virginia. I said, we'd go, we'd come back to Coronado once or twice. Before the bridge. Before the bridge, that's right. It was, it was the ferry back then. And that was a big deal. Of course, when you're a little kid, it was, ferries are fun, you know. When you're, when you're a parent, I guess, they're just a pain in the butt, because you're trying to get back and forth to Coronado from San Diego on a time schedule. And so, how long, how long did he stay in for?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  He was in for twenty-six years, had a heart attack out in the Philippines, his last duty station, and... Back in the sixties, a heart attack was, you were just automatic medical retirement. So they shipped him back to Newport and he was retired probably up to about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years.

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  How old were you at this point?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I was in first year of college, the University of Utah, when he had his heart attack. I went into the Naval Academy the following year.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  So when you were growing up, were you thinking about, I mean, obviously if you went to the University of Utah, were you, did you want to go in the Navy at that point?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Well, my dad, being my dad, you know, he had prepped me for the Naval Academy. You know, we had visited there when I was younger and everything like that. When I was about a junior in high school, he would start with, "Well, Bobby, what are you gonna do after you graduate from high school?" And, you know, I didn't have a good answer. No answer was gonna be just right. I knew what the answer should be. But so, but eventually I started to say, "Well, Dad, I think I'm gonna go to college." That kind of satisfied him for a few months and then he came back and said, "Well, who do you think's gonna pay for that?" Well, that had me stumped for another couple of months. But finally, by the end of my junior year, I said, "Dad, you know, I think you're gonna pay for it." And so that's kind of stopped that.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  So we get out to the Philippines, graduated from high school out there, had seventeen in my graduating class, all-time high for George Dewey Junior/Senior High School. And I still, you know, I wasn't gonna go to the Naval Academy, this wasn't in my scheme of things. So three of us got accepted to the University of Utah. I went to the University of Utah because it was the one school that accepted me out of high school. Not that I had bad grades or anything, I had decent grades and good recommendations, but it's just, you know, the way things worked out in the early sixties, this was sixty-two when I graduated from high school. So, three of us went off from our graduating, from my graduating class off to Salt Lake City

• 14:53Speaker 01

  and were enrolled as freshmen at the University of Utah. There was a get-together of all the freshmen before school officially started and I don't know who was up there on the, on the stage, but he was touting the diversity back then of, of their entering class. And so he'd have you stand up and he said, "And we have three gentlemen here from the Philippines, but just stand please." So, us three gringos kind of stood up and people are looking at us like, "Who, you're from the Philippines yet?" Well, yeah, you know, technically we were. Which, you know, leads me to a really, what I thought at the time was quite a funny story. We, uh, it's, in Utah at the time, you couldn't get anything higher than a 3.2 beer.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  But, uh, and, you know, you couldn't smoke unless you were older than 18, which you'd get tickets for if they caught you, that they'd be in the Salt Lake City Police. But somehow we liberated some beer one night and we had a guy in the dorm who had a car, so we went up to Canyon Road that evening and we're drinking beer up there. Next thing we know, there's a cop car right behind us and the cop gets out and says, "All right, you guys, get out of the car." There was the three of us from the Philippines and a friend of ours whose dad was in the diplomatic corps. So he starts, uh, at one end and says, "Now, where are you from?" "Philippines, sir."

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Next kid, "Philippines, me, Philippines." And so he comes to the last kid and he says, "I suppose you're from the Philippines too." Kid says, "No, sir, I'm from Saudi Arabia." So he said, "You know, guys, if you go about half a mile up the road, we don't go that far up there." So, meanwhile, we had dumped the beer and everything, so, you know, that was, that was just, uh, that was the deal in Salt Lake City.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  And then at what point did you start thinking, "I want to go to the Naval Academy" instead of continuing with your career at the University of Utah?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  My career at the University of Utah was fading fast, shall we say. I had joined NROTC and really enjoyed that, but the, the rest of academics really, you know, weren't my forte. About Christmas time, uh...

• 17:05Speaker 01

  My parents were back in Newport, Rhode Island, so I caught a train back to there for Christmas. And that's when my dad and I had some serious talks about, you know, what I was gonna do. And I said, "Okay." I promised him, I had to promise him, that I would apply to the Naval Academy. And I wasn't, you know, that keen on it, but, you know, I gotta keep Dad happy. Happy Dad, and he kept that fifty dollars a month spending money coming, which typically was spent long before it arrived. So I applied to the Naval Academy, took the SAT one weekend, and did surprisingly well. And a couple of months later, I get this little envelope in the mail, and I'm thinking,

• 17:48Speaker 01

  you know, gosh, well, actually, it was a packet, I guess, it looked like it was an envelope. And I was thinking, I was afraid to open it, my roommate said, "You know, if it was gonna be, if it's a rejection letter, it's probably just a simple letter." And he said, "You get a packet, you're probably gonna, you're probably in." So sure enough, I opened it up, I'd been accepted, had a presidential appointment from JFK, and it went off. I had some interesting experiences as an NRPTC kiddo at Uni, at Utah. And one came from a senior enlisted Marine there, was a gunny, just an outstanding jet. And he, he couldn't do enough for you. He organized the little programs on the weekends where we'd go out and set up ambushes

• 18:29Speaker 01

  in the canyons up from Salt Lake, up from University of Utah. And it's really, so he kind of, I think that that's where I got the idea that I wanted to be a Marine, from a gunny, whose name I can't remember, but...

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  Was he a World War II guy?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  I don't think so, I think he was more of a Korean guy.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  You know, just outstanding, he couldn't do enough for you. And he, in my speech class, to give a...

• 18:59Speaker 01

  A speech that used a prop. And so we had just had a class on the Thompson submachine gun. Now, you can't imagine doing that. You couldn't do this today.

• 19:10Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  So, so I, "Hey Gunny, can I borrow the Thompson submachine gun, you know, like on Tuesday for my speech class? It'll be gone for a couple of hours." And I had a, I had a guitar case from somebody on the, on my floor in the, in the dorm that I carried it in. So I, I'm carrying, I'm walking across campus with this guitar case with a Thompson submachine gun. Didn't think a thing of it, you know, back then. And again, this was sixty, fall of sixty-two. Got to the speech class and said, you know, kind of set the class up. I'm here to talk about, you know, my, whatever. I don't, I forget what word I used, but I didn't, my weapon here, but my device here in the case. Of course, everybody thought it was going

• 19:55Speaker 01

  to be guitar. Popped up with this Thompson submachine gun. The prof nearly keels over. So I gave my little spiel. It was very well received, I must say. I think I got an A for the speech, but he, he gave me a pretty good tongue lashing about bringing such a thing to a classroom, you know.

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  Probably nervous to give you any other grade.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  No, probably not, but, you know, it was fun.

• 20:19Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, when you, when you, how long was it between when you got your acceptance letter than when you actually showed up for a plebe summer?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Showed up for plebe summer on June twenty-sixth of nineteen sixty-three. I'd probably gotten my acceptance letter in March, March, April, something like that.

• 20:39Jocko Willink?

  And were you, were you mentally prepared for plebe summer?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  I believe I was, yes. In fact, I had pretty much come to all stop academically at Utah when I got the acceptance letter because they had had my first semester grades and that was all they were going to evaluate. So I kind of ditched college for the next four or five months. There was a joke I heard later in the, in the, in the NROTC unit was later that they, they joked that the way to get in the Naval Academy was to flunk out of the University of Utah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  But I did okay there. I struggled with academics at the Naval Academy, but I looked at it more as a leadership laboratory, I guess.

• 21:25Jocko Willink?

  And then, so now it's 1963, you said, when you started there?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Started, yeah, yeah.

• 21:30Jocko Willink?

  Are you guys even thinking about Vietnam at this point?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  No, we're not. I can't even recall, you know, hearing about Vietnam. At Utah, that fall, we had, you know, heard and been, not part of, but, you know, the whole deal had been about the Cuban crisis. That was all the news that fall. We followed that pretty closely, but no, I don't think we had heard about Vietnam at all.

• 21:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, things were not really escalated there at all.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  No, not at that time.

• 22:02Jocko Willink?

  It's no surprise. And you were in a, I mean, you had some pretty notable people in your Naval Academy class.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Well, this is true. I became friends early on with a fellow who, by then, at that time, went by Larry, Larry North, he now goes by Ollie. One of my friends in the class after that was Jim Webb. He was a boxer. I was a boxer. North was a boxer. A bunch of the guys I hung out with were boxers. We had a fellow named Ray Smith, who later on became a two-star SEAL, I believe the first one to carry two stars. I'm not sure about that, but good guy, captain of the track team. I had Pete Pace in the class,

• 22:52Speaker 01

  first Marine to ever be Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four stars. Pretty heavy duty company.

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then, what about, was Staubach with you guys too?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Staubach was in the class of 65. He was two years ahead of us. But our plebe year, the first year there, was the year he won the Heisman Trophy, which of course argued well for plebes, because after a football game, if you won, you'd have carry-on that weekend, and if you beat Army, you got carry-on, meaning you didn't have to brace up in the halls and, you know, chop around in the halls. And you didn't have to sit on the last couple inches of your chair in the mess.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  And I know you got another guy that I've got some information on a guy by the name of Tex.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Tex Harkins, a fellow from Texas, needless to say. Was my roommate plebe summer and plebe year, one of several. Met him when I first came into the room with a sea bag full of gear that I now had a stencil. He'd been there a couple of hours and introduced himself as Maurice. Well, I did a double take because I didn't think Maurice was going to fly and sure enough, a couple of hours later when I was worn out from hearing about how great things were in Texas, you know, he became Tex and Tex stuck. He's still Tex to this day. Good guy.

• 24:21Jocko Willink?

  And there's some note about him trying to kill a firstie?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Nah, that wasn't Tex. That was North. I stopped North going into this firstie's room early morning when we had window closing detail in the winter. You'd have to go in and close the upper class windows. And he was headed off to this first classroom with a bayonet. Bayonet and he was going to do this guy in. This guy was horseshit beyond belief.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  North, you can't do that. You'll get in serious trouble, buddy.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can't kill someone. You're going to get in serious trouble. That's good advice right there.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Plebe year was a little different back then, I think. Not quite the same anymore.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  And then, so you talked about boxing and were you a boxer before you showed up there?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Negative. No, no.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  You just got into it when you were there?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  I was not a particularly athletic young man. But boxing was something that most of everybody started out from ground zero with no experience. So that's kind of what I did plebe summer and took it on to plebe year and boxed plebe year, some youngster year, which is sophomore year and second class year, junior year. First class year, senior year, I was in academic trouble, shall we say. So I wasn't on the boxing team, but I did run the boxing sub squad where...

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Freshmen and sophomores ended up if they failed boxing, uh, as part of the PT curriculum, uh, you'd have to go to a sub squad. This was for every sport until you could, you know, you to sub leader of the sub squad passed you so you'd get a D, uh, cause you couldn't have an F.

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  Did they make you, I, I know guys that I know that went to naval academy, they made them box for a semester, they made them wrestle for a semester, they made them do judo for a semester. Did they make you guys do wrestling and judo?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  We, uh, we did wrestling, boxing, we had some, it's part of the PT curriculum where it was mandatory. You had two years of boxing lessons, two years of, of, uh, wrestling, two years of, uh, gymnastics.

• 26:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And four years of swimming and they fed in all kinds of other things, squash and golf and track. But, uh, yeah, first two years you had some mandatory things that you had to pass as part of the, the PT curriculum. Didn't have judo.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. Well, still boxing and wrestling is a, is an awesome base to have as a fighter. And then you throw judo in there.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  You're pretty good to go.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are.

• 27:01Jocko Willink?

  And then what, um, I know you did some cornering for some of the guys, you know, uh, when, when they were boxing.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I did. That's my senior year, first class year in the north, uh, was in the finals, the boxing finals. You could win your Navy N, your letter, uh, in boxing, uh, even though it was a, not an intramural sport so much, but it was a more of a club sport, but we didn't, we didn't box against other institutions. They do now, but it was all within the brigade. Uh, and we have champion, we'd have, you know, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. And, uh, I was in north corner, uh, the year he won his N, uh, boxing against another well-known, uh, uh, naval academy graduate Jim Webb, who I think you've had on your program before.

• 27:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, indeed.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And, uh, Shall we say it was interesting? Webb, Webb had a lot of experience boxing. He'd boxed Golden Gloves, I believe, before he came to the Naval Academy, or at least city and county type boxing, state boxing, from wherever his dad was stationed at the time. But he and North never, they were two folks that were butt heads, I think, their entire careers, whenever they would run into each other, certainly at the Naval Academy and certainly when they were boxing. But it was an interesting night.

• 28:24Jocko Willink?

  So this is a legit grudge match?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I think that probably would be fair to say.

• 28:30Jocko Willink?

  And how'd it go down?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  North won, much to everybody's surprise. North was the, was the street fighter and Webb was a more polished boxer.

• 28:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, if you boxed, if you boxed certainly at the Golden Gloves level, even at like the county level, you're, you're a really good boxer.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  So that's, that's, that's a big achievement.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Well, that somehow there's been, you know, people look backwards and it, that always comes up when you start talking about North and or Webb, you know, was, was the boxing match. Everybody knew it was a.

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  Did it go the distance?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  It did, the distance being only three rounds, you know, back then.

• 29:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Are they two minute rounds or three minute rounds? Cause sometimes they have amateurs box two minute rounds.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  I think they were two minute rounds, yeah.

• 29:21Jocko Willink?

  So six minutes of fury.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Boy, I tell you, yeah. And I know wrestling can wipe you out in, you know, five, six minutes, but we were, we were spent when, you know, at the end of a boxing match, you were spent. All you could do to pull yourself out of the, out of the ring.

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  And what did you, like for, for boxing for you, since you were new to boxing and you weren't much of an athlete before, what do you think you took away from boxing?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Well.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Don't quit. I went to the semifinals my junior year, got knocked out of the ring by that guy, my opponent. Got back up, got back in the ring, took the standing eight count, and finished the fight. And I know, I met a Marine officer a year later when I was, you know, on service selection night, when I was able to select the Marine Corps. And he said, gutsiest thing I've ever seen. Well, thank you, sir. But, you know, I learned, you don't quit. It ain't over until it's over. And it was over that night for me.

• 30:29Jocko Willink?

  And you mentioned from the gunny that you worked with at the University of Utah, that you were thinking Marine Corps when you showed up at the Naval Academy. Was that, was that, did you stick with that the whole time?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  I did. You know, my dad being career Navy, I knew I could never feel his footsteps. And he was perplexed why I would want to go Marine Corps. He asked me straight out one time, I think it was a firsty, a senior, he said, Bobby, what is it that Marine Corps Second Lieutenant has that a Navy incident doesn't have? You know, they got three hot meals a day, a nice bed with sheets to sleep in. So what has a Marine Corps Second Lieutenant got that a Navy incident doesn't have? I looked at him and said, Dad, I think it's respect. Ooh, shots fired. Shut the whole man down.

• 31:20Jocko Willink?

  Wow. Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely shots fired, for sure.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  And my grandpa was not somebody you would probably want to say that to. I don't know about at the time, though. He was not the nicest guy.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  He just was, like I said, a little to the right of Attila Hun. And there was a couple of ways to do things. There was his way, and then there was everybody else's. He took me out for dinner before I, you know, got on the train to head off from the Naval Academy from Providence, Rhode Island, where I could catch the train back then. And he told me, he said, Bobby, you graduate from the Naval Academy and I'll buy you the car of your choice. Oh, thank you, Dad. Four years later, I'm getting close to graduation. I said, Dad, you remember when I left for the Naval Academy, you told me you'd buy me the car of my choice if I graduate? He looked at me and said, did you get it in writing?

• 32:20Jocko Willink?

  And as you, as the other thing that's unfolding is it's in 1963, when you show up there, "Hey, I'm gonna be a Marine," but you, there's no war going on. Now we fast forward, it's 19, well, 1967.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:37Jocko Willink?

  And Vietnam is now, I mean Vietnam really started escalating like 1965, 1966 even more, 1967. I mean, you guys now know in the Marine Corps what you're signing up for. There's no mystery.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no. We knew precisely what we were signing up for. Uh, there was a, a board, I, I think this has been referenced, uh, in other places, uh, in books and articles, a board of, you know, those who've gone before, so those have died. And it was starting to fill up with, uh, you know, pictures and names from Vietnam. So, yeah, we understood that. Uh, but you know, having, I'm sure Ben come at yourself that, uh, as you know, you, it's not gonna happen to you.

• 33:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Maybe the guy on the left or the right, but not you. You're, you're bulletproof, at least in your own mind. Uh, and so, you know, you worried about maybe getting maimed. I've, I don't think we even worried about that. You worried about possibly getting killed, but then, hey, there's nothing after that. You know, your worries are done. And, and then your family picks up on it. Uh, or you thought you might get a little, you know, flea flicker, flea flicker wounded or something like that and get a Purple Heart, but you never figured, you know, you might come back without limbs, uh, or otherwise, you know, markedly impaired. That just never entered your mind. I'm sure if it did, you would have been useless, uh, to your unit.

• 34:06Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, the guys that are all, all going for the Marine option at the academy, it's competitive, right? It's like, it's hard to get that. Is it hard to get that Marine option coming out of the academy?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I'm not, I can't speak for today because today they'll have like 250, you know, guys and gals going to Marine Corps. In, uh, my day and in the years in the sixties and before, there was a certain percentage of a class that could go Marine Corps. We had, uh, some, just about 900 guys in my class and we had 86 slots. And they were divided in half from the, they took half from the upper. Half of the class, grade wise, and half from the lower. So you could get in the Marine Corps, say, and be in the middle of the lower half of your class, when a fellow who was in the lower part of the upper half of his class wouldn't have got selected because those, you know, forty-three slots were gone.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  And I got slot eighty-six when I went down for service selection night. I was sweating bullets, but, uh, but I got it. In fact, a good friend of mine, who was a couple of numbers behind me, offered me two grand for my spot if I would give it up. And so, cause he wanted to go Marine Corps, and I knew how much he wanted to go to Marine Corps. I said, you know, I, I can't do that. You, you know that. He said, yeah, I know that. But it was competitive in that respect. It was, you know, academics played a lot, a big part in it.

• 35:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the Marine Corps does that, um, with the way they give you your jobs in the Marine Corps, too, like, coming out of the basic school. Uh, I know, like, they take, like, the class and break it up into thirds, and, like, the first, you, you pick your job. So you could be the number-one guy, and you might, or you, if you get the number-one guy, you can get your job. But you might be the top of the next third down, and you get your selection, then the top of the last third, and you get your selection. So it's a, it's, it's a way that they distribute the people, so that not every single, the, the, the top of the class goes, everyone goes infantry, and the whatever job is at the bottom, we get a bunch of people that weren't the highest performers.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 36:12Jocko Willink?

  The Marine Corps is smart. It's about the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Marine Corps understands that it's about the Marine Corps, because they haven't lasted this long without, uh, being able to put up a good fight, both, uh, you know, in the nation's wars, and back in the DC area, when the, when the time comes along for, you know, keeping the Marine Corps of the Marine Corps.

• 36:30Jocko Willink?

  And now, is, is your dad talking to you anymore about looking at you and saying, "Hey, son, there's a war going on," and he's, you know, obviously being in the Navy in World War II, he knows exactly what the Marine Corps does. And he's, is he having any more talks to you and saying, "Hey, you might want to think about this a little bit more"?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  No, not at one. You know, he, he kind of respected my decision, I guess, and, uh, just, you know, let me go with it.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Like I say, he's an interesting person. I got back to Bethesda after I was shot. Spent 12 months in Bethesda. He came to see me once, which for him was probably enough. And actually, for me, it was enough, too.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  But I, you know, I later on found out that, you know, he obviously was affected, you know, by, by my being moved. I kind of joked at him one day. One day, we were out, you know, barbecuing some hot dogs or something. And I said, Dad, you almost collected on my life insurance. He says, What are you talking about, Bobby? I said, Well, Dad, you know, you almost got that 10 ser- 10 grand, you know, servicemen's group life insurance from, from, from my demise in Vietnam. He says, Don't talk like that. That was it.

• 37:41Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's, that's the affection you got from the old man?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  That was the, yeah, that was the understanding and the compassion that I, I got from Dad.

• 37:50Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with, you get done with the Naval Academy, you graduate, and now you're going to, to basic school?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Do you remember what rank you were at the academy? What, how close to the bottom?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I think I was a, since on service selection, I went down in groups of 50, which is why I was sweating, be getting a place in the Marine Corps, because, you know, they could have all been gone by the time I got down there in the last group of 50, because I was in the last group of 50.

• 38:20Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  So, answers that question.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  You weren't Anchorman, so you didn't, you didn't collect any money?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I didn't get the dollar from everybody, but...

• 38:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, is that what the last happens with the last guy?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Allegedly. I've never confirmed, but the last person in the class gets a dollar from every classmate.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  So you can walk off with, you know, six, seven, eight, 900 bucks?

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  The, the spot of distinction, I guess. Or, or not.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, we were...

• 38:48Speaker 02

  You still graduated. So, I guess at that point, it doesn't matter. And you got paid.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  My, my class, we were kind of put out by, because our Anchorman was a, a foreign national, I think from a country that didn't even have a Navy. So we were like, do we even want to fork over this buck for this guy? And of course, we did, because that was just, that's a tradition. It's always been that way.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  So you showed up at TBS and now it's 1968?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  No, no. Graduated in June of, June 7th of 67. And I put in for the first basic school class that was forming, which is the 1st of July. That was the, the beginning of the fiscal year back then, July 1st. So, you know, I had a few weeks at home, boom, right back down to Quantico to start the basic school.

• 39:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you started in the summer, sometime in the summer of 67?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  And then what, how well did the Naval Academy prepare you for the basic school?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I think pretty well. Of course, we didn't ever get into the tactical side of things at the Naval Academy for, for the Marine Corps, but you know, you were in good shape. You obviously could wear your uniform, whichever it was, Marine Corps or Navy uniform, well, because you've been doing it for the past four years. And I had gone to jump school between, on my summer leave between junior and senior year. And the physical requirements for that were pretty demanding. You know, we got down to Fort Benning in August after cruise. And man, that baby is hot. That red clay in Georgia reflects that heat and you sweat.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  They saw those midshipmen coming.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And of course, you know, we, we were, we'd, we'd be running around with Navy chairs and any cadre fellow, you know, staff sergeant or something could pop up and, you know, halt us and drop us for pushups and everything, which we loved. I don't think there were any UDT or SEAL groups going through when we went through, but they just ate the program up, you know?

• 40:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Needless to say.

• 40:51Jocko Willink?

  I, I, yeah, I went, I was one of the, eventually SEALs stopped going to airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia and started running it in-house.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, I was lucky enough to go to airborne school. And, and yes, the, the instructors down there definitely appreciated our presence and let us know that.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Sure they did.

• 41:08Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's ridiculous too, because we're coming out of, you know, Bud's, literally a week or whatever, you know, we travel across country, we show up there. So we're in really good shape. So there was nothing that they could do to us.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  That would hurt us. And we just would, and of course, that encouraged guys to be, you know, wise asses and, you know, I'm gonna make you do pushups. You can't make me do enough pushups. So there's that, that whole thing going. And, and now, now that you're at TBS though, Well, now you know exactly what's gonna happen. You know you're gonna go to Vietnam.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Right, regardless of your MOS that you came out with. Of course, I wanted to be an O3 and most of my friends did too.

• 41:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that's a good point, sir. It's not actually guaranteed. So I'm thinking you still have to do a service selection inside or whatever, job selection inside the Marine Corps.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. You put in for your top three and you hope to get number one, of course. And the most guys did.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  You're pretty savvy about your capabilities and your, you know, likes and dislikes by the time you get to TBS, I think regardless of where you come from. You know, we had a lot of recent ROTC grads and recent OCS grads and Naval Academy grads and you couldn't distinguish who came from what pipeline. We were all pretty motivated folks back then.

• 42:26Jocko Willink?

  And I'm sure all the instructors must have been guys that were coming off of tours in Vietnam.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  They were just back from their tours in Vietnam. They were all captains or above, yeah. Very sharp guys. They didn't pick slackers to be instructors at TBS.

• 42:42Jocko Willink?

  And how, I mean compared to the Naval Academy, was it just a totally different vibe of seriousness because they know exactly what they're prepared you guys for?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  It sure was. You know, you're out on problems, daytime problems, nighttime problems. Didn't matter when they ended. If you got back and turned in any gear you'd checked out at 3 a.m. in the morning, you're still up, you know, at 11:30 the next morning. You didn't do that at the Naval Academy. You had study hour and stuff like that. Now, there was a definite heightened level of seriousness at the basic school. Again, all the instructors were giving you straight poop, you know, because they had just come back from there or recently back. My platoon commander, we had a platoon of about 50 guys. He was a captain, two silver stars, well decorated, big guy. You know, they don't take, again,

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Marine Corps looks at you all kinds of ways. They look at how you did at basic school, your height versus your weight, some other, obviously other factors before they assign you someplace. Like if you're, if you think you want to get to eighth and I and be part of that in Washington DC, you know, you've got to be like six feet or higher and taller or whatever. Because, you know, they're sending the cream of their crap because you're, you know, you're representing the Navy SEALs Marine Corps in front of the public on a regular basis. And rightfully so. All the services do that. You know, the guards at Arlington aren't, you know, four feet eight and sloppy. You know, they're all standing tall and looking good and very professional, needless to say.

• 44:25Jocko Willink?

  How hard was it to, you know, when you, when you started picking your job, obviously you said you wanted to be an infantry platoon commander. How much competition was there for that? Did you have guys that were like, oh, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that job. You can have it. Was there, was there competition for it?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Um, I think there was only, we didn't feel competition, you know. Obviously you had to do well on the O course and all the different evolutions and you had to pass the PRT and, you know, you had to do well in land navigation, daytime, nighttime, do well on the rifle range and pistol range. But that was, that was just part of the competition of TBS. You were always competing with your, with your, what do you call them?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Classmates.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Classmate. Yeah, your classmates at TBS. But, you know, a lot of guys wanted to go infantry and obviously not everybody was going to go infantry. I don't know what the selection process was, but I had a good friend from an Naval Academy, not really a good friend, but he, he was, he was the kind of guy that would go around and say, are you going to go infantry too? Also, meaning also, and of course, you had no idea. It depends on what the Marine Corps, what their selection process was and whether you made or not. He ended up not getting infantry, which was probably, probably a good move for him and the Corps.

• 45:54Jocko Willink?

  Is there any, is there anything that you had struggles with when you were going through the basic school?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Other than maybe, you know, the O course or something like that, but that was just like, you know, an eight-minute struggle. As long as you were doing the best you could, you know, they didn't beat you up too hard or mark you down, but no, I didn't really feel that there was anything that was going to hold me back.

• 46:19Jocko Willink?

  And they're training you with all the tactics, small unit tactics, naval gunfire, calling for fire, are you feeling like, were you feeling like you were getting good preparation for the battlefield?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  I did. What the basic school does is teach you everything you need to know as a company-level officer, you know, from your time as a second lieutenant up to captain. After that, there's another school, there's, I'm not sure what it's called, but, you know, for senior captains and new majors. But, yeah, I felt well-prepared. They had a Vietnam village built up in Quantico, staffed, of course, by Vietnamese, duh. And, you know, you practiced that, you know, you did helicopter operations, you did, you know, walk-in insertions, you did land navigation, daytime and night, which I'm sure you know is a different, a horse of a different color.

• 47:16Jocko Willink?

  It is, indeed.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  But, apparently it was pretty proficient. I graduated seventh in the class, not first like Webb did in his class, but that's okay. Seven was good enough for a letter of commendation coming out of the basic school.

• 47:33Jocko Willink?

  And that's seven out of class of how many?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  About 240 or so.

• 47:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So, it seems like you were better at the field craft than you were at the academics.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Well, this is true. In fact, in fact, you know, I got shot in the head, and I have classmates who said, who still say to this day, "We think that made you smarter." Because I did go on to graduate school and get a master's and a PhD, you know, after I was retired out of the Marine Corps. And maybe there's something to that, I don't know.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  So then, so the basic school is, what, six months long?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  About five and a half then, yeah, they shortened it up.

• 48:12Jocko Willink?

  Five and a half months long, you get done with the basic school, you get infantry.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:18Jocko Willink?

  And then what happens?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I got selected for reconnaissance replacement training, which was a couple of weeks in Southern California, a week at Pendleton. Again, for more supporting arms training in artillery, that sort of thing there. And then a week at Coronado for learning about naval gunfire support.

• 48:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you use the, the board, what is it called, the smoke board? Did they have the little fake terrain setup that you could call for fire on? I went to the, I went to the Marine Corps Naval Gunfire School and they had this terrain board. And it was kind of like a, it must've been built in like 1975. And when you'd call for fire, if you got in the right spot, little smoke would come up through that spot. And it was like you were looking at, you know, through binoculars somewhere. It was pretty good.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  No, I never, never saw anything like that. We were, we were actually filing, firing real live artillery at Pendleton. And at the Naval Gunfires Support School, we had this big board, but it was, it was blue. It was ships in the ocean per se. But that was interesting because I did one night get to fire the cruiser Providence in Vietnam. Which was, which was fun. You know, they couldn't use their six inch guns because they're too flat. So they used their five inch, you know, bringing indirect fire on. We had a bunch of lights below us. I think folks were trying to move, move their troops around in the middle of the night.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  But, and we, you know, this, this was on call for us, so we used it.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  So you got to use the naval gunfire?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I did.

• 49:58Jocko Willink?

  That was like a dream of mine ever since I sat there on that little terrain board.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  It was a dream bar, sir, and I got to use my Bravo Zulu term at the end of it. I like them for their fire.

• 50:11Jocko Willink?

  Bravo Zulu, the real Bravo Zulu.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  The real Bravo Zulu, yeah.

• 50:13Jocko Willink?

  That is outstanding. That is outstanding. I never even, I never even got close to even remotely thinking about calling for naval gunfire for real, so.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  I probably weren't too close to, you know, big waterways.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, there's always that thing where guys want to fire, you know, a bunch of different weapons.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  True.

• 50:34Jocko Willink?

  In combat, right? And I had one guy get shot in the chest, but it hit him in the chest plate. So I wasn't with him, but they actually had video of this. So he gets shot in the chest plate, and so he's all mad. He's mad and he shoots a bunch of machine gun rounds and someone goes, hey, shoot your pistol at him too. And he goes, he looks at him like, why? And he says, well, it'll make you feel better. So he pulls his pistol out and shoots that too. But, and I'm sure if he would have had naval gunfire, who knows? Maybe he would have, maybe he would have gone for it.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  I don't know about the pistol, you know, when we fired the 45 for qualification down at TBS, I think our instructor actually told us, you know, in combat, if this is all you've got, you know, you're probably just better off throwing the pistol at him than shooting at him because you have a better chance of hitting him, you know, the bad guy on the other end.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Did you guys not have infantry officer course back then? Cause that's like a, you know, multi-month course now after TBS.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  We did not. No, you were, you're considered good to go, you know, after graduation on TBS. Yeah, now they have a 10-week officer or infantry officer training course, which I think would have been outstanding, but we had what we had.

• 51:53Jocko Willink?

  So, so you go to this, you go to this recon course?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  And so now do you, are you getting jump, jump pay and all that stuff now?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  No, you know, even when I was jump qualified, if you're, if you're not in a unit that maintains your jump qualification in the Corps, you don't get jump pay. In fact, I got to Vietnam in first recon battalion. There was only one company that maintained their jump status. That was Charlie Company and they were the Force Recon Company. They did the same thing as battalion recon companies did, but they did maintain their jump status. So they got jump pay and every extra 75 bucks a month, which was a big deal back then.

• 52:36Jocko Willink?

  So you end up, you end up going through this recon training and then what happens? Then it's time, is it time to deploy to Vietnam?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  It's time to get on a bus and head up to Air Force Base in San Bernardino. Don't know the name of it, but, and yeah, flew over to Okinawa, spent a week there. So they kind of dribbled you in.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  Are you with, are you with all different branches of servicemen? Are you just with Marines at this point?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Just, just with Marines at this point, yeah. Going over. Flew on Saturn Airlines, I believe, you know, a non-scheduled, non-sced airline to Okinawa.

• 53:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, just like civilian, was there civilian, what are they called? Hostesses? Stewardesses on there?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Stewardesses, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. A few stewards. Flight attendants. Flight attendants. But typically you wouldn't have anything to do in Okinawa while you waited for your, for your assignment to be flown into country. But when I got to, when we got to Okinawa, there was about five of us that were traveling together. We had been to the recon replacement training together and we were just milling around the receiving area after we got off the plane. And somehow I got up above somehow, higher up than the, than the crowd below me and I'm watching. And there's this young Lance Corporal with

• 53:59Speaker 01

  a clipboard. He's going to each of the second attendants that I had, you know, my buddies and asking them some question and they're going, no, no. So I said, I said, this poor kid. I've been in this position before, so I'll find out what's going on. So he, what he needed, his, uh, his, uh, company gunny or something had sent him down. He needed a signature from an officer to run three plane loads of Marines through that little program on the, on Okinawa where they, you fam fired the M16 because never, none of us had ever seen an M16, much less fired one before we went into Vietnam. And so you had fam fire, familiarize yourself, fire the M16

• 54:42Speaker 01

  before you went in country, made sure all your shots were up to date and all, all your paperwork was up to date. So I said, sure. You know, so I signed for him. I'd have to get up every night, every other night while I was there for about a week, meet an incoming plane at about 2:00 AM in the morning, find the senior enlisted guy on the plane, form these guys up, take them over to a barracks, have them draw a mattress, you know, flop down, tell them to be, you know, had to be out next morning at 7:30 in the morning, go to chow, and then we start them through the little program that you had to go through before you could get in country. So I met my three planes in a little more than a week's time. I was desperately afraid my, my officer buddies were

• 55:25Speaker 01

  going to rotate in the country before I did. Didn't happen. We all went off together. But anyway, it was an interesting week.

• 55:31Jocko Willink?

  Would you shoot in the basics, go the M14?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  M14, yeah.

• 55:35Jocko Willink?

  And how'd you feel about the M16 when you got it?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  I loved it. Lightweight, ammo's lightweight. Unfortunately, most Marines in Vietnam found out they had pitted barrels. And sure enough, I had to trade my, you know, month or two after I got there for one, one that was a newer one with a good barrel in it.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy. You guys didn't even get, get, didn't even shoot that weapon until you got to Okinawa?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 56:01Jocko Willink?

  And then was the other training course they were giving you like basic, like preparation for Vietnam jungle navigation or something like that or?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  In Okinawa? No, you were just, you were just kind of on your own until you rotated in. K-San was getting hot then. So we used to... We used to go to some three shack, uh, operations shack of some outfit on Okinawa and hear the morning brief about K-SUN and kind of look at each other and think, geez, do you want to get sent there? No. No, no, no.

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  So then you spend, so you spend, what is it, a week in Okinawa?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  About, yeah.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  And now you guys all fly over to Vietnam?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  And where do you fly into?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Denang.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  And then when you get there, what's that process like?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  That process, we get there in the evening, it's dark, again, somebody met you, you took you off somewhere, you grabbed a mattress, flopped you down in some barracks at the end of the runway and you slept until the next morning with all this F-4 taking off above you, no sleep.

• 57:04Jocko Willink?

  Did you have that stereotypical moment that people talk about, which is, you know, the guys that are going home, the guys that are rotating home after their year, and you see that, the contrast between the, the new guys showing up with their brand new gear and the old guys that are heading home and they look like they've been through hell and back?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  No, never saw anybody that was going home, uh, you know, down at the Denang airfield. You know, didn't, didn't see them. We arrived sometime in the middle of the night and it was dark and we had no, you know, you, you have that little kind of internal feeling of impending doom or dread or something, I don't know what it was, maybe it's just your adrenaline pumping, you know, that you're finally going to get in country and, you know, what, what's going to, are you going to take incoming rounds while you're landing? No, answer's no. It's a normal landing, you get off the, get off the aircraft, you know, somebody meets you, officers this way, a list of guys that way, you know, drew a mattress, tried to sleep the rest of the night.

• 58:07Jocko Willink?

  Do you know where you're heading at this point?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  You knew the division you were going to, first or third. Third was up north in North I Corps. First was down around the Da Nang area. I was going to the first division. You didn't even know if you're going to get to the recon battalion. You went to division. The next day, we went to division. We got introduced to commanding general for some reason, and we were required to sit down. Gave us a big book, Rules of Engagement. You had to read that, sign that you'd read it and understood it. And then you got sent off to your unit. And but three of us were lucky enough to go to the reconnaissance battalion. The other two, they went off to regular grunt units, infantry units.

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  So when you get assigned to recon, and then what are you, do you guys drive up there? Do you take a helicopter up there? How do you get up to your actual unit?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  The actual unit, first recon battalion, was located just below and across the street from division headquarters.

• 59:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so it was easy?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you walked down there. And as I said before, we had the one company, Charlie Company, that wasn't with the battalion in Da Nang. It was forward based at Fubai. They're the ones that kept up their jump status. And one of my buds, who had gone through the recon replacement training, I was slated to go up there because I was single up to the force reconnaissance company. And he asked if I would mind giving that position to him, if it was okay with the Colonel, because he was married and expecting their first kiddo and needed that extra 75 bucks. I was just happy to be there. I said, sure, take it if that's what you want, you know, that's no big deal.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  So he went up to the force company in Fubai. I stayed there with the battalion in Da Nang.

• 59:57Jocko Willink?

  And what was checking in like? I mean, you're showing up there, you're a new guy. These guys have been in country, and this is something that... You know, always surprised me about Vietnam is that you guys would rotate, well, just one individual, individual replacements.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Whereas for me, all my deployments were.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Unit.

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the whole unit is going in and the whole unit's leaving. And, and so that's gotta be, it's gotta be a weird thing showing up as a new guy. And there's a bunch of people that have been there for between, I guess, between two days and 360 whatever days.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Right you are. I mean, my, my working premise when I got to Vietnam was that anybody who was there a day longer than I was, than I'd been there was a day smarter about the situation, a day more experienced, and by God, I was gonna listen to this person, you know. But interesting enough, my platoon wasn't even there. They were aboard ship with the afloat battalion. And we, Marine Corps always kept a battalion afloat off the coast of Vietnam that could jump into an operation, you know, at a moment's notice, give or take. And they always had a reconnaissance platoon with them. And they apparently used them pretty much as point for the battalion. So that was not a plum job.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  But my, my platoon with its outgoing platoon commander was aboard ship, so I didn't see them for two weeks. I just, I had nothing to do except I got tasked to sit on court marshals and, you know. I had the unit grades, quarterly grades or something, something like that were due. I had to go through all my guys' service record books and give them a grade for their performance over the last quarter without knowing them, without having seen them. And this was gonna be used for promotions. So I did the best I could, you know, I took in the service record book, how long the guy had been in the Corps in country, had he been wounded, what was the level of education,

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  you know, I assigned a few points and then, you know, like one to 10. And then I added everybody's points up and I had a grade to give them and recommended the top three for promotion or something like that. It was crazy, but I had to do it. It's what you did.

• 1:02:11Jocko Willink?

  We were just complimenting the brilliance of the Marine Corps, and then you gotta tell a story like that.

• 1:02:18Jocko Willink?

  Then, okay, so then, did you eventually get flown out to the ship to be with them? Or did they come back?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  No, they came back.

• 1:02:23Jocko Willink?

  They rotated back?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  They rotated back. They were just filthy dirty. I think they came right from the bush. And the lieutenant, I got to talk to for about 10 minutes because he was like overdue to to rotate out of country. So he just, he just wanted to get a shower, get on a uniform, and get back down to the nag and fly out.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  What pearls of wisdom did he give you in those 10 minutes?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  He, he told me who the, who the best guys in the platoon were and who I think he thought I might want to keep my eye on. And that was about it.

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  No, uh, no tactical advice on anything?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  No, no tactical advice on anything, no.

• 1:02:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's interesting, you know, I always say that leadership is the most important thing. And what he was trying to give you is a heads up on who was like, who's the best guys and from a leadership perspective. That's interesting.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  He just wanted out.

• 1:03:06Jocko Willink?

  I think he just wanted to get out.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  But, but I was in a hooch, yeah, you know, with, with other lieutenants, second and first lieutenants who'd been there, you know, anywhere from maybe two months to four months. And they were filling me in on, on, on how play operate, how the deal operated.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Was there anything that surprised you that you were hearing from those guys? Anything that, you know, you said, oh, I didn't really expect that?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Only thing that really surprised me, I think, uh, once, once I got into recon and got working with them, was that, uh, occasionally you had to go out far enough that you weren't under anybody's artillery fan. You know, you weren't under... Rarely were we under the 105 fan and the 155 fan usually. And then there was Army 175s, which, uh, were very scary things because the, the word was that they could click out a, they could, you know, bump out a click when they, when they fired these things. They were big. We flew over them one time and I looked at them, I swear they drooped. You know, 175 artillery base, they were huge. I swear they drooped. Uh, and then of course

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  if you were out past the 175 fan, you had nothing but air to call on. And that took about 20 minutes to get there. And pilots never really trusted, uh, ground officers to, you know, to bring them in correctly. So they'd always want to fly out an aerial observer, you know, in one of these little Spitkit planes, you know, culling the back. And I don't know what they were, OV10s, I think. Uh, but that was kind of surprising because...

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  But artillery over there was fantastic, great, you know. They were on call 24/7, obviously. Best thing I ever fired was Marine Corps self-propelled 8-inch. They were like, looked like a big tank with an 8-inch, you know, fired an 8-inch shell. Boy, they were accurate to the nth degree, unbelievable. But basically artillery was excellent over there. Saved our bacon many a time.

• 1:05:14Jocko Willink?

  So, when you, it's been two weeks, your guys get back, you take over as platoon commander. What's your intro meeting with the guys in the platoon? What did you say to them?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Just kind of introduced myself, probably told them the same thing I just told you. If you've been here one day longer than I have, and you've got a better idea, or I think you do, talk to me, you know? I'm here to listen. You know, I want you all to get back home, obviously, you know, intact and not tacked in, as we used to say. In fact, the five and a half months I was a platoon commander, we only took one serious casualty, and that was me. And I wouldn't have it any other way. We were extremely lucky, but we were also pretty good, you know? We didn't do dumb things. There were folks who would like harbor at night near a trail and hope bad guys would come down it, just so they could try to set up a hasty ambush. No, no, no.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Once your troops knew that you were serious about their welfare, they would have done anything for you. And of course, you'd do anything for them. I had 23 Marines in my platoon, maybe a couple of corpsmen. They rotated in and out according to the will of the Italian aid station. The finest young men ever settle, assembled. I know most platoon commanders say the same thing, but these kids were. Average age nineteen, average education, ninth grade, you know, but they were taught, they were primo. If I'd have told them that we've been tasked to fly up to Hanoi, drop in with a river raft and paddle up and free the folks out of the Hilton, they would,

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  they would, they'd have been right there. They were just great kids.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  What was the, what was kind of a normal, well, first of all, what was your first operation that you went on with these guys?

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Well, first thing that I did was turned out to be a tet nineteen sixty-eight broke on my first snap in patrol. I was, they tried to get you on a snap in patrol or two before you started leading your guys. So you'd know, you were just, you know, you're just there to observe and learn. And your patrol leader might be an E3. In my case, it was an E5, Sergeant E5. And we got up this ridge line and after crossing this path that looked like the I5 of people paths in Vietnam, it was smooth. And we got up in a bad bunch of brush and some rocks and we were looking up the ridge line and pretty soon there were four,

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  four NVA come toting down, down this highway. So four, and then there was eight, then there was sixteen, thirty-two, we stopped counting.

• 1:08:01Jocko Willink?

  And this is your first mission?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  This is the first, yes, exactly.

• 1:08:04Jocko Willink?

  And is this your platoon?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  No, I was with somebody.

• 1:08:06Jocko Willink?

  You're just tagging along with someone else?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  I'm just tagging along, yeah.

• 1:08:08Jocko Willink?

  And the leader, the platoon leader's an E5?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, the patrol leader was an E5.

• 1:08:12Jocko Willink?

  The patrol leader's an E5?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Great young man, great young man. And so his, his rule of thumb was where there's four, there's more. Because when we saw these four guys come out of the jungle down this ridge line, first thing was let's go set up an ambush. No, Sergeant said, no, no, no, no. Where there's four, there's more. We stopped counting at four hundred. And by now we had artillery coming in, we had air on the way, we had an aerial observer up there. We fired artillery all day, all afternoon into the night, into the evening. We had a Puff the Magic Dragon dropping flares with, with a... Jets coming in underneath it, dropping napalm at night. Oh, it was unbelievable.

• 1:08:54Jocko Willink?

  And this is your first night. Were you doing the call for fire?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  No, no, no, a sergeant.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  A sergeant was?

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was there to learn and to the pucker factor was like this. You know, guys would go on one or two snapping patrols and never see anything, but and they

• 1:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to Vietnam.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they maybe have a little too laissez faire attitude, but this was my welcome to Vietnam and I thought it was great. I mean, we were dropping artillery on these guys. They're running down the path toward our position, you know, and, and they're in, they're in the brush. They're not on the path, but they're in the brush. We had brush, we had rocks on like our north side and our, or east side and west side. East side and south side. West and north, we just had brush and there's, you know, North Vietnamese, they're in the brush coming toward us. They're crying, they're screaming, you know, they're yelling for mom, whatever, whatever you do if you're North Vietnamese

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  soldier and they were, they were gonna run right into us. So sergeant brings in artillery behind us, real close, you know, danger close. So we got shrapnel flying over our heads. And of course, this, this dissuades these bad guys from coming toward us. Also, we had a kid sat up when he should have been laying flat like a mooshu pancake, took a piece of shrapnel right into his face and knocked out a few teeth and cut open his lip and everything. And the shrapnel was dropping down. It burned right through your, through your utility shirt, burned your skin. You just, you just endured it. It was a, it was a little hairy.

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  So danger close rounds coming your first night out in Vietnam.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Oh, well, welcome to the war.

• 1:10:45Jocko Willink?

  And you guys, and you guys maintained your, your clandestine position the whole time?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. How many guys were out there with you? Uh, probably about 10, 11.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  That was a heavy patrol.

• 1:10:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Wow. Alright, so now, at how many of those snapping patrols did you do?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Two.

• 1:11:04Jocko Willink?

  What was the next one like?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Second patrol, the next one was even, wasn't that interesting from a tactical point of view, but it was gonna be led by a lieutenant who had got a little tanked up at the O Club the night before. Hadn't given the patrol a patrol order.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  So, we're down there waiting for, on the LZ, waiting for the insert helicopters to get ready to take us off. Come down the hill was the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel. He comes over to our patrol, points to the lieutenant, says, "Pack, get back up, pack your gear. You're going to the grunts, you know." Boom, he was out.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Colonel says to me and his Lance Corporal Assistant Patrol, "You think you guys can run this patrol?" "Yes, sir, no problem." So we did. It was great. But, you know, shit cam, this guy's just right there on the spot, and you could do that in recon. I had to do it once to one of my guys.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  What'd the guy do that raided you, firing him on the spot?

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Um, I had, my patrol was like cut in half. I led, my platoon was cut in half. I led half of it. You know, anywhere from eight to 10 guys, depending on who was not on R and R, who wasn't sick, that sort of thing. And my platoon, I had a platoon sergeant, an E6 staff sergeant. He ran the other platoon. We flip-flopped about halfway through my tour, when I was about five, five and a half months. And, so, you know, my, the guys I led, we were, our code name was West Orange. We had excellent.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Reputation of battalion, they were fast day. They felt like they were kind of distant cousins in the platoon, but I got a guy, we had a pep talk that night with the patrol order. So, you know, you guys are, I mean, you guys are just like West Orange, no different. You know, again, ninth grade education, same age, you know, same skills. And so I went through my little spiel and you know my reputation, I'm a platoon commander, you know, administratively or stuff, you know how I operate. Anybody doesn't want to go a fast day now, one kid raises his hand, I say, okay, you don't have to go, pack your gear, get out of here, don't, you're not sleeping the night with these guys, you know.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  And I don't know whatever happened to them, because I never came back from that patrol, you know, but I'm sure it was taken care of.

• 1:13:39Jocko Willink?

  So when you start getting into, what was the kind of typical mission that you guys were doing?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Typical mission was, you know, we'd go on a six, seven day patrol, we're just snooping and pooping, that's what we called it, finding trails that the enemy would use.

• 1:13:57Jocko Willink?

  Would you guys insert on helicopter or would you guys just foot patrol?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Always helicopter, yeah, always helicopter.

• 1:14:04Jocko Willink?

  Pick out a spot and, and get dropped off, and then what was your SOPs once you guys got inserted?

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  We got off the helicopter, we start, hopefully it was where the insert LZ was where, you know, the operations officer or the operations shack said it was. Sometimes it wasn't there, but you know, that's why, you know, as a patrol leader, I, first thing I did when I got in the helicopter was dump my gear, get out my little map and insert myself between the pilot and the co-pilot, because if you didn't know where you were when you started a patrol, you weren't going to know where you were for the next six, seven days.

• 1:14:42Jocko Willink?

  Would you guys insert in the daytime, in the nighttime, in the pre-dawn, in the dusk, when would you guys go in?

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  We'd go in in daytime.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  We'd be down in LZ waiting, you know, by about eight o'clock in the morning. Birds would come in if they weren't being used for medevacs and stuff on some operation that was going on. About mid morning, they'd go up and get a brief from the intelligence folks at first recon. We'd be sitting around there and then they'd come back down from their brief. We'd pop on the aircraft and off we'd go.

• 1:15:14Jocko Willink?

  So like midday you're getting inserted?

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Midday, yeah. That was pretty much probably about usual, yeah.

• 1:15:19Jocko Willink?

  You hit the, and then what? You hit the ground and what would you guys do as soon as you hit the ground? What was your, what was your standard operating procedure?

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  SOP was the DD and get out of that LZ as fast as we can. Nothing says, uh, rains are coming in here than a bunch of helicopters coming in and landing.

• 1:15:34Jocko Willink?

  Would you be on two, two Hueys?

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  No, we'd be on two forty-sixes.

• 1:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Army had Hueys, you know, transport troops. Marine Corps didn't. Anytime in the Marine Corps, they probably had about sixty helicopters in Vietnam. On any given day, about half of them would be airworthy. So, we had Huey gunships. Hueys, I guess, uh, carry the brass around, but we didn't use much troop transport. We had all forty-sixes. So.

• 1:16:02Jocko Willink?

  Big old forty-sixes.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Big old noisy forty-sixes.

• 1:16:07Jocko Willink?

  And then would you guys just, like, we always used to do something which was sit, look, and listen. So like, we would, you know, go two or three hundred yards away from the LZ and then we'd all just stop and just listen.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Get down, yeah, yeah. Pretty much the same way, yeah.

• 1:16:21Jocko Willink?

  And then would you guys have different, uh, areas where you were headed to specifically?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  We did. We had a patrol route that was pre-planned, uh, and a, and an extract point that was pre-planned. Now, patrols rarely went, you know, according to the pre-planning, which the, you know, the operations shack did. You know, we, we didn't do that.

• 1:16:40Jocko Willink?

  So they were actually telling you where, where you were gonna go?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Where we were gonna go in at, but they had a recommended patrol route, which, uh, we'd stick to if we could. Uh, couldn't all the time. And then we'd get out at this point where they had recommended. Yeah. Uh, and again, sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't.

• 1:16:58Jocko Willink?

  What was it, how often would you guys, uh, be contacted by the enemy?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  You know, it wasn't all that frequently. Cause I, you know, we did, we were good. We, we were, we snooped and pooped with the best.

• 1:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Your purpose of being there was to not be.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Right. You know, in recon, your job wasn't to, you know, find them, fix them and foxtrot them. You, you didn't get online with nine or 10 guys or 11 maybe and say, charge. Your idea was to gather information. But if, if the situation was to your advantage, you could, you could, you know, if, if, if the leader felt that it was worth the effort, set up an ambush, but narrowly we'd bring artillery on if we saw groups. And I probably ran 21 patrols and I'd say probably a good three quarters of them. We, we had, we had fire missions on, on top of bad guys.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that, well, that's, that's, that's a high percentage.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't anything like, I think what you got through when you were in Ramadi.

• 1:18:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, but there was, there were some of my guys in Ramadi that would get contacted a lot. There was one, one group over in Eastern Ramadi and they did, I was, I was actually briefing a, uh, I was briefing the Siege Sodaf commander, who's the, the colonel that was in charge of all special operations. And I said, you know, sir, the, my, my group that's, you know, six SEALs that are over in Eastern Ramadi. I said, they've been, uh, they've been in enemy contact 23 straight operations. And I'm not kidding. I didn't plan this for dramatic effect, but my intel officer who's running the tactical operations center comes walking in and says, hey, sir, just, just want to let you know that the guys out east are in contact right now. And I looked at the colonel and I said, make that 24 missions in a row.

• 1:18:51Jocko Willink?

  So there was definitely some, some hot, hot areas. Yeah. It was pretty much expected if you were going out in Ramadi that you were going to get in, in contact by the enemy. And I don't know what the percentage was, but it was, it was a vast, it was very rare that my guys would come back and hadn't, hadn't shot their guns, you know, very rare. Yeah, but, but seventy five, but I also, what was interesting when I came home from that deployment and would talk to some of the Vietnam guys, depending on the platoon, depending on the SEAL platoon in Vietnam, there's guys that shot their weapons on a, on a six-month deployment, shot their weapons three times, four times.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Jocko Willink?

  And there's other platoons in Vietnam where they shot their platoon, shot their weapons a hundred percent.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Every time where they went, yeah.

• 1:19:34Jocko Willink?

  So it all depended on, and my first deployment to Iraq, I think I shot my gun, we got in like four or five firefights, so really not, not that big of a deal. And then in Ramadi, the number is, the number is just very high for, as far as the, the whole task unit, getting into, getting into big gunfights. But three quarters of the time, you know, that's, that's a lot of fire missions.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Well, but yeah, but they weren't gunfights per se. You know, they'd be, you eyeballing somebody or some place or some trail crossing or some little village you might come across in the middle of nowhere. One time we came across a, a cornfield in the middle of the jungle. I mean, it was, it wasn't jungle per se because there was no high tree canopy over it, but it was just a field, a clearing in the middle of the jungle with rows of corn. This is not your typical jungle plant. So we'd get up a little higher ground and we'd, we'd watch to see if anybody come, you know, came in there and settled down. There was a few hooches there too.

• 1:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Whereabouts were you guys operating in Vietnam?

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  We are operating north, south, and west of Da Nang. First reconnaissance battalion's mission was to, to, to patrol the rocket belt around the airport of Da Nang, but that wasn't particularly that far out, so we ended up a lot further out looking for, you know, main, mainline NVA forces. And, or, or where they, where they camped out, the trails they used, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  But gunfights were relatively rare, which is a good thing. You can't see anybody in the jungle anyway. You're typically just firing blind. So that was one of the nice things about the M16. It would put out a lot of fire for you. And that's what you needed over there. You know, you didn't need a heavy bullet necessarily to knock guys down, but the 7.62 or 5.0 whatever was just fine. And I went a 7.62. That was the big heavy.

• 1:21:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the M14. When you were, when you would get these mission taskings kind of from above, above, from the battalion, would they give it to you, then how long would the planning cycle take for you guys to come up with a plan and do your briefing and all that?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  About 24 hours. It wasn't hardcore boilerplate, nowhere near the detail that I know that you all went through in Ramadi, but you know, it was just, we were out six, seven days, back two or three. So that was a regular schedule. You knew. I mean, the kids were all ready. Marines were all ready. You know, their weapons were clean. If we had done things that we needed to do administratively, like, you know, go down to the gas tent and check all the gas masks and stuff, that had all been done on kind of the 24 hours in between.

• 1:22:32Jocko Willink?

  Were you carrying the radio?

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  No, I had a radio man. Primary radio man was right behind me. And I had a secondary radio man toward the end of the patrol.

• 1:22:42Jocko Willink?

  And you've taken what, 7, 8 guys, 10 guys, something like that?

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  10 guys. I usually went heavy, you know.

• 1:22:47Jocko Willink?

  So you got 10 guys. How many damn batteries did you have to carry for an eight day patrol? Would you get resupplied? Because were you using the 77, the Prick 77 radio?

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:22:59Jocko Willink?

  Were you using one prior to that?

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  We were prior, I guess. Prick 25.

• 1:23:02Jocko Willink?

  The Prick 25. There you go.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Not necessarily the best thing, but it was pretty good.

• 1:23:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  As long as you were line of sight.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. But you must have had to carry a lot of batteries for that thing.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  We didn't. I mean, I guess the radio man had extra batteries, but we didn't typically, you know, go through that much battery.

• 1:23:19Jocko Willink?

  Man, I was a radio man and it was ridiculous, the amount of batteries in the early days because we got much smaller radios later on. And then how about water? Would you guys just refill canteens on rivers and whatnot?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  We would if we could find water, but we went out with eight to 10 canteens. Uh, because you didn't know whether you were gonna find water. And if you found it, you didn't know whether it was gonna be potable or not.

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Uh, but uh, we were typically often, I say, more often than not, in the mountainous type area. Mountainous being, you know, thousand meters or higher. And if we came across running water that, you know, was moving along, I thought it was fine, safe to drink. Until I went to this little one-day school put on by a, a chief corpsman. Who talked about how the, the leech larva could be, you know, expelled into the water and just rub, bubble down with the water. Yes, after that, iodine tablets every time we refilled. Never had any problems.

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  How about food?

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Food? We had Korean-era sea rats.

• 1:24:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you say Korean air?

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  It, Korean era.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Korean era.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, 1954, it would say on there. Just plain sea rats in cans. Uh, MRAs were brand new when I was there and, and we occasion, on two patrols, I think, that, uh, we managed to steal some MRIs from somebody in the army. Fine dining.

• 1:24:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  But see, they used water, so that was, it was a, it was a, they were a better meal, but they would use water. Uh, so it was a, you know, six to one, half a dozen to another.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Would, and then would you guys patrol during the day and then lay up at night?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  That's, that's affirmative, yeah. We'd find the nastiest, meanest vegetation at night and crawl in there. And harbor. It'd be in a harbor site.

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  Did, uh, did they use dogs to try and find you?

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Uh, nope, never saw a dog in Vietnam, or in the jungle, anyway. Apparently, uh, recon had taken out dogs and handlers in the early days. And, uh, the dogs just couldn't handle the, the heat and the, the terrain, so. The, the handler would have to carry the dog out. So, that was a...

• 1:25:29Jocko Willink?

  You guys, would you guys bring claymores to set up around your perimeter?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  We did. We bought claymores, claymores, and sometimes little anti-personnel mines.

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Uh, which sounded like a great idea until the next morning, when the guy who'd put them out.

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  Gotta go retrieve them.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta go retrieve them. You got, maybe you had six mines out and it ended up like, what, five? Ohhh! So, we would be moving out in the opposite direction.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Claymore was a good weapon.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  It's a, it sounds like your, your, um, your op tempo was like, go on a patrol, you're out there for six, seven days, you come back, you, you rest, you refit, you spend three, four days in camp, something like that?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Two or three, maybe.

• 1:26:15Jocko Willink?

  Two or three?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a pretty, pretty quick turnaround, you know? You didn't have time to settle in and get comfortable anywhere.

• 1:26:25Jocko Willink?

  And then it's back out. Were you guys just skinny as could be?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  We were. Yeah. I went over there weighing a hundred fifty pounds, a hundred fifty-five pounds, which is my weight at the Naval Academy. Came back, I was a hundred and twenty-three when I got back. But part of that was the previous, like, nineteen days or something after I was shot, till I got back in the States, I didn't eat too much. I was being fed for one thing, and most of the time it was red jello, and that wasn't real appealing. I couldn't look at red jello for about five years after that.

• 1:26:57Jocko Willink?

  Did you, uh, did you guys have any night vision at all? Like a starlight scope?

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had fixed positions that we would go to for sometimes longer, as much as two weeks, and they were essentially high points, like a hill, eight hundred meter high hill, and they'd have a permanent radio, we have a permanent radio relay station on there. And, and patrols would just rotate there every couple of weeks to provide security for that guy. Because he was up there for like three plus months. And, uh, on those, we would take, we had starlight, you know, and we'd watch the valleys and stuff below us. But, uh, never, never used them that much, no.

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  You know, going out in the field that much, you guys must have really been, I mean, you guys must have been really good and really efficient out in the field after doing a field op after field op after field op for six, seven, eight days every time. Did you feel like you guys were kind of part of the jungle at that point?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Never, never felt really part of the jungle, but it certainly got more comfortable in it. Uh, one thing that you always had to be very careful about in, in the work that recon did was heat casualties. You know, you took a serious heat casualty, that's an emergency medevac, which is again, you know, announcing to the whole world that there's Marines out here and one of them's, you know, down with a heat casualty. As a consequence, the days we were back in the area, uh, first platoon, Delta Company PT'd every day. People thought we were crazy. I took my heat casualties on Freedom Hill Road, you know, running two and a half miles down, two and a half miles back, including myself, you know, stopping to barb. Never had a heat casualty in the five and a half months I went on patrol, something

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  I was very proud of.

• 1:28:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta carry enough water for that though. Really, right?

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  You just had to ration yourself, you know, and, and each individual was-

• 1:28:55Jocko Willink?

  So you said eight canteens, you're bringing eight canteens of water?

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Eight to ten canteens of water, you bet.

• 1:28:59Jocko Willink?

  And that's gonna last you eight days?

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Six or seven.

• 1:29:02Jocko Willink?

  Six or seven days.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Unless we got extended, which was not unheard of, you know, the Marine Corps helicopters would be, you know, some operation would start while you were on patrol, they'd be tasked for medevacs and you couldn't get out the day you were supposed to. You just, you prayed, I guess would be the nice thing to say, that you got out the next day. Because by then your food was exhausted, your water was either gone or real short.

• 1:29:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we used to have a lot, we used to have a heat casualties in training out here in California, out in the Imperial Valley where it's 120 degrees. And it's tough. And like you said, a guy can go from, he's fine, to all of a sudden, he's like a legitimate, like a legitimate casualty.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Let's go to July 4th, 1968. What was going into that operation? What was the overall operation that you guys were looking to do?

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  We were looking to find an old LZ in a place called Charlie Ridge. You said you had neighborhoods and areas that were hotter than others in Vermont. We had the same thing, of course, in Vietnam. Some places were known as hotspots. You had almost guaranteed, you know, somebody was gonna shoot a few rounds at you coming in or going out if they didn't find it during the... or you didn't find them during your patrol. But we were supposed to flip-flop. You know, we'd go in and another team would come out on the top of this mountain. And the team had gotten lost. They didn't know where they were. So they finally somehow, you know, scraped their Sierra together.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  And we went out and we flip-flopped with them. But we were way far away from this thing. They were 3,000 or 4,000 meters away from this mountaintop where we were supposed to flip-flop with another team. So I really pushed the patrol to find... I thought, this place must be really hard to find. These guys couldn't find it. No, no, they just were lost. But we found that thing on the second day. An old fire base on the top of this mountain, you know? Like, 3 years of sea rats on the side of the mountain because we had NVA walking trail below us that'd stop and have lunch there. Eat old seas. Ham and lima beans, I think, supplied half the NVA in Vietnam. Because Marines just always pitched those things. Nobody ate... We call them ham and mothers.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Nobody ate them. But, so, we had to flip-flop. So I didn't want to get too far away from this LZ because there would be another LZ within, you know, 3, 4 clicks.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  So we were gonna, you know, we harbored that night, moved off into the jungle outside of the LZ, harbored that night, had some big rocks around us. Thought we were in a good position. And at night, I would pre-plot fires, you know, artillery, uh, targets, north, south, east, west, around our position, in case you had to call them in the middle of the night, you know, you didn't have to figure out what the, what's our six, you know, numbers here? No, these, these targets were already plotted in. So we woke up the next morning, and we were just gonna kinda lay low all day long in that area. Wasn't something you really wanted to do, but, uh, you know, since we were scheduled to flip-flop, and Battalion really wanted us to do that, because it hadn't worked, you

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  know, when we had gone in, we weren't, we should've gone in where we were going out. Uh, but they want, so they wanted to flip-flop, so I said, "But we're just gonna lay low for this day, and then we'll be outta here the next morning." Well, that morning, I guess some, you know, twelve-man NVA recon patrol walked close aboard, or came by close aboard, uh, we never heard them, but just, they either saw a flash of motion, it must've been, we were eating breakfast, uh, or they heard us, which I don't think they did, 'cause we were super quiet. But all of a sudden, it just, you know, all this automatic fire opened up, and fortunately it was over our heads, you know, because that's pretty typical, happen in the jungle, you shoot high.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  But, uh, I had a big rock kinda behind me, so I'm getting guys, uh, maneuvered around, starting to call the artillery in, when, uh, a bullet apparently hits the rock behind me, comes about, hits me in the head, from behind, goes forward, I'm boom, I'm down. And, uh, I'm almost history. Next thing I know, my, uh, corpsman is doing a pat-down on me. Apparently, the bullet had gone through my floppy cover, and didn't knock it off. And it wasn't until he saw a bullet starting to run down the side of my face, that he realized that the wound was up here, but, 'cause there was nothing visible, so he's doing a pat-down, and I knew what that meant. I knew I'd been shot, and I knew he didn't know where it was.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  But, uh, I never did figure out it was in my head, or in the head. I concluded sometime that morning, 'cause we were in it, we were on the ground for about another four hours before they tried to get us out. That I had been bitten by a centipede, had some nasty centipedes over there. Whose venom apparently attacked your central nervous system. So that was my working theory that morning was that I had been bitten by a centipede. Which really pissed me off.

• 1:34:16Jocko Willink?

  How long were you unconscious for after you got hit?

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  I was unconscious just for a few seconds because, you know, one minute I'm kneeling, I'm a lean, green, mean fighting machine, the next moment I'm lying down, I'm a lean, mean, green stalk of broccoli.

• 1:34:29Jocko Willink?

  How much time, how much, how much time had passed between the, the initial fire, incoming fire, and you getting hit?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  It was really just a matter of maybe of three to five minutes.

• 1:34:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  You know, I'm trying to get guys positioned. In recon, we did not want to fire back. If somebody, you know, started firing at you, they didn't really know where you were, especially with this fire going hot. And the last thing you wanted to do really was fire back, because now we know where they are, and then they, you know. So the deal was not to fire back. Just bring in supporting arms as quick as you could. But eventually, of course, the guys started to fire back because it was just a little too hot.

• 1:35:15Jocko Willink?

  And I just thought of this, I'm guessing you guys wouldn't carry a, like a heavy machine gun with you, like an M60 or something?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  No, we didn't. Too heavy, and, and then we had two, two more guys tasked with ammunition. And you can't really, you know, get one of those things set up quickly, you know, in the jungle, but occasionally we did. Occasionally, you know, the, the warning order that I would get from battalion would say, you know, you're taking an M60 on this patrol because we've had, uh, reports of X, Y, and Z in this area, and you might need it. So, great. Obviously, somebody had to volunteer to do that, and my littlest guy, his nickname was Mouse, he would always want to carry the M60. Great kid, great kid. Never really had to use it, uh, in the jungle, which was good, but occasionally we carried

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  it.

• 1:36:07Jocko Willink?

  So here you are, you're five minutes into this gunfight, you get hit, you're unconscious for a, a very short period of time, and then you come back too, and how do you feel when you come back?

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  Again, didn't know what had happened. Again, my first thought was the centipede thing, but sounds were muffled, color was gone, things were moving in black, slowly in black and white around me and sounds were very muffled. By now, the artillery started to come in. We had a brand-new second lieutenant with us. He was on his first nap-in patrol. He apparently assumed command, along with my experienced corporal, who was my, normally was the patrol leader for this patrol. And together, they managed the situation. And we got everybody out. I was the only one wounded. Take that back. Crew chief on the

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  helicopter that picked us up was wounded. He was on a 50 caliber and got hit in the hand. But we were the only two wounded. I was the only guy on my patrol wounded. My corpsman, outstanding, second-class hospitalman, he kept me alive for the next four hours until I could get me to the day.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  How bad were you bleeding?

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Apparently, I bled out. There's a cavity down the center of your head called the superior sagittal sinus. It's like an upside-down triangle, and it drains blood, your brain, and that was nicked by the bullet. It was just close enough to midline to nick the superior sagittal sinus. I can remember my corpsman just kept putting battle dressing after battle dressing on my head.

• 1:37:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Ruined my whole day, needless to say.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  Were you, like, passing back out and then waking back up?

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  I was. I was. I remember, I knew, I could hear the helicopter coming in, and I knew we were about to break out of the jungle, to run to the Z that the helicopter was coming in, that we had been on the day before. So I took all the strength I could to open my eyes and look up, and all I saw were tracers converging kind of over us from all points of the company. Damn, this is serious.

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  I got some information that your kids gathered up. And one of them was a note from Captain Frederick Rick J. Wilson III. And he wrote this little kind of description of what happened. He says, "I was the pilot of the CH46 YT-TAC-13 MMH-164 that rescued your team. What you couldn't know was that a lot of people, including your recon team, were responsible for getting you to the hospital. I vividly remember the mission because my crew chief was wounded." That's the guy you just talked about. "He, like you, also survived and prospered. He and I received Silver Stars for our actions that day. You tend to remember things like that.

• 1:38:59Jocko Willink?

  I flew 928 missions in Vietnam, and that one was my hairiest. I first heard that your team was in trouble and you were wounded when I was landing at Da Nang Hospital with another medevac. Because of your head injuries, I was able to get a corpsman at the hospital before I headed out for the rescue. It turned out to be the corpsman Terry Daley was from my hometown of Wakefield, Rhode Island. I found this out 20 years later when Terry's wife showed up at my sister's house with an old copy of Stars and Stripes that covered the mission. Your team evidently ran into an NVA base camp that no one knew was there and was greatly outnumbered. Because of your wounds and the combat situation, an extraction was requested, and I was the closest to the action.

• 1:39:39Jocko Willink?

  The problem soon became apparent that the team needed to move about 200 yards to an old bomb crater where I could land. I called for gunship support and some fast movers. What I got was four flights of Phantoms dropping bombs pretty close to the team and four Huey gunships. I was circling overhead for about an hour before the team got to the only feasible landing zone on the ridge. They did a good job suppressing fire until I was landing. Fortunately, the bomb crater also protected me somewhat, and we were getting, we were able to get everyone onboard. I was a little short on fuel, but that worked on my favor because I was also about 2,000 pounds over gross, according to my copilot, who was wondering if we could lift off."

• 1:40:23Jocko Willink?

  In the meantime, your team and my gunner were engaged in a firefight. Your team knocked out all the windows on my bird, but I didn't object because they were covering my butt. We managed to take off and took a few hits out on the way, but thanks to the Hueys escorting me, I was able to dive off the ridge and get out of range. Long story short, we were able to get everyone to the hospital and the NVA got a beating. So he had to like just take off and just fly over this ridge, right?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, apparently he just kind of dove off the ridge and, you know, came back up. I heard that this, that this thing was so riddled with bullets, this helicopter was that, the Marine Corps helicopter facility was across this highway from the hospital to NAG. They wouldn't fly it over there. They called for a tug to tow it over there. I think we're going to try to put that thing back in the air that day.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 1:41:22Jocko Willink?

  He continues on, this was a nice, I'm, I'm, I'm taking like bits of this from a nice letter that he wrote, but he says, "I understand that you count that day as, as an alive day, which is a very good thing to celebrate. I was probably one of the few Marines who enjoyed their tour in Vietnam, primarily because I was saving lives and rescuing recon teams. I also love the flying since they would never let you fly like that back in the States." "One of the best things to come out of Vietnam was the improvement in medical care." You're proof, you are proof of that as the survival rates from Afghan, as are the survival rates from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hope you have a wonder, wonderful 50th rebirthday. Happy birthday, Marine. And that, once again, that's Captain Frederick Rick J. Wilson III.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the command pilot that day and that bird that pulled me and the team out saved all our lives. No question about it.

• 1:42:11Jocko Willink?

  We did, uh, were you guys under the threat of being overrun at some point soon?

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  I tell you the truth, Jaco, I have no idea really. My memory of that day was pretty sketchy.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  I, I talked to him on the phone, uh, last year and he said they had to circle overhead for an hour because they just couldn't set it down. There was no possible way and they estimated probably 200 NVA on the ground. And that's part of the reason why they weren't able to fly it back to squadron because small arms fire through rotor blades.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  You know, as an infantry officer, I always felt very comfortable on the ground and very exposed on the helicopter. I just figured those were things were flying magnets that made a lot of noise. But of course, the aviators felt just the other way. They were felt safe in their birds and were never wanted to be on the ground, never.

• 1:43:04Jocko Willink?

  I feel the exact same thing as you. I don't, I didn't never liked any sort of machine. I didn't, I didn't like any of them. I wanted to just be on my feet.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:43:13Jocko Willink?

  You know, so, and, and yeah, that feeling that you have an helicopter where you're up flying and all you see is, all you, all I see when I'm flying in a helicopter is threats, you know, and you can't even come close to cover them all. At least on the ground, I can, I can cover some of the threats. When you're in an aircraft, it's like, oh, I'm, I'm waiting to get shot down. That's what it feels like to me. When you, when you remember coming to, or when do you remember what they do with you once you got in the hospital? Do you remember much of that?

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  No, I, I remember the, I remember the helicopter landing because my head bounced on the metal. I was like, damn, couldn't I put something underneath my head? And I remember them picking me up and putting me on a stretcher because they grabbed my belt and picked, picked up my middle and it felt like, it felt like a grog just going right through me. I faintly remember the sound of hearing this guy that sounded like he was on the other side of a football field saying, "Negative vitals, negative vitals, negative vitals." And then the next thing I felt was crush on my chest and I thought, that's okay because, you know, they're getting the heart back up, checking, you know.

• 1:44:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so they were like doing CPR?

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, I was apparently resuscitated three times just after the helicopter landed at the NSA Denying the Hospital, but my corpsman had been straddling me the whole time in the helicopter and was pushing on the heart to keep, keep blood flowing.

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  It was, it's uh, it's uh, not my best day, but you know, hey, well, I'm here talking about it, so.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'll take it.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  That makes a huge difference, believe me, because there's no reason I should be. When I left Bethesda after a year, my attending physician was the chief of neurosurgery. And he called me into his office and said, hey, Ike, you know, he said, I wish that medicine could take credit for this, but nah, he said, we can't, he says, I don't know, it's whatever you want to call it, you know, karma, luck, God, whatever you want to call it, I wish it was medicine, but it wasn't, so. I figured he was a pretty leading expert on head injuries.

• 1:45:20Jocko Willink?

  How long did, so you, you get, you get to the hospital and you're there, at some point, they must have gotten you stabilized?

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  They must have, yeah, as I understood it, the, the chief neurosurgeon from the hospitalship just happened to be there that day, like giving an in-service or something like that, and boom, they were on me like flies on stink.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I just remember waking up, being extremely cold, and hearing a baby cry, cry and cry and cry. And I said, this can't be right, maybe I'm not here, you know? But sure enough, it turned out there was a, a corpsman told me later, you know, a couple of days later, that there was a baby that had been burned, you know, due to US force action, who was, you know, this was like a ward, that was an intensive care ward, apparently. And there was a baby in there with a couple of mamasas, and the baby did cry almost all the time. That's what I remember, my troops came to say goodbye, twenty-two of them, they let them in in groups of two.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  All I could do was cry, I just, I didn't have words for them, other than say things like, keep your head down and stuff like that, because I knew by then that I had a head injury, and I knew. It just slowly dawned on me. No one told me, you know, that this left side was paralyzed along with my right leg. No one told me that. It just came to me over time when I would try to do something. The only way I could get attention, so I had this perfect left paralysis down the side of my face. I'd raise my hand. They tied it down, the bed rails, because that's all the IVs were in the right arm. Boy, I was helpless. I was, I'd never been so miserable as that moment when they tied that arm down.

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  And it's just the trauma to your brain that it caused you to be paralyzed in your left arm and was your left side of your body?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Left side of my body and the right leg. It was a, the bullet had blown away, about a three by seven centimeter defect in my skull. It had penetrated the meninges, nicked the parietal lobe and the frontal lobes, and tore the superior sagittal sinus. So, that's a wound that's incompatible with life as we know it. But here I am telling you about it, so.

• 1:47:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, one of your, one of your guys, once again, your kids did an awesome job getting, gathering some information. One of your guys, Robert Wood Daly Baird, the third.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:47:57Jocko Willink?

  And you're a third too?

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  I'm the second.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay. I, I, I thought, for some reason, he says, he thought that you were third, but yeah, so he's the third. He was a Lance Corporal in First Platoon, Delta Company, First Recon Battalion. And he, he talks about, and he, he starts off kind of telling what it was like for him to meet you and how impressed he was with you as a leader and actually felt what you talked about earlier, it's like, you know, that he could tell that you cared about the troops. And then it gets to this point where he's coming, they're coming to that, this journey to, to say goodbye to you. And so, here's what Robert Wood Daly Baird the third says. He says, "Then that afternoon, the team made a solemn journey to the naval

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  hospital to see the lieutenant. Everyone watched the scenery without really seeing it as we rode along in a six by truck. We were too worried about him. We arrived and went to neuro ward Bravo two."

• 1:48:56Jocko Willink?

  We could only see him two at a time, and since I was new, I was last. I waited. When my teammates came out, they looked pale. Then it was my turn. I was nervous. I entered the world ward. It was lengthy with empty racks here at the near end. Each rack was covered with a crisp white sheet, ready for its next visitor. On a long shelf on the right, there were plastic models of planes, ships, and cars that the patients had made. I walked onward. One of the healthier men was putting together a model plane. On the left was an ancient papasan with white hair. His beard, a dirty gray, contrasted with his hospital tunic. A nurse with an angelic voice attracted my attention.

• 1:49:39Jocko Willink?

  I noticed her face, firm with conviction, and wondered how I, how she could work in such a tragic place. She was feeding a baby. Seeing that struck me deeply. The baby was burned over seventy percent of its body. I pressed onward, but paused, wondering what I should say. Patients filled the beds at this end of the ward. Unhealed wounds, burns, scars, and vacant stares stabbed out at me. Half of a face there, no eyes and no arm legs here. Bodies covered with gauze, seemingly mummified. The morbid display made me realize how truly bad war is, but the worst was yet to come. I passed Harry Mundorf and Rudy Seville.

• 1:50:21Jocko Willink?

  They were coming out. Somehow, they didn't look the same as when I'd seen them a short time ago. There he was, in the last rack on the left. He lay on his right side and glanced up with glazed eyes when I approached. A turban of bandaged, bandages covered his head. His pale face showed no emotion, except sadness, and his eyes were red from crying.

• 1:50:45Jocko Willink?

  All the time we talked, he stared at the airborne parachute wings on my chest as if they were something he wanted very badly. He had told me, when I'd first joined the platoon, that he hadn't gone to jump school yet, and that he was looking forward to it. He started by saying, "Hello, Baird. How you doing?" I said, "Good afternoon, sir. I'm fine." His voice was weak, like a child who was afraid. At times, I could barely hear him. He added again to the conversation by thanking all of us, and I replied that it had been the least we could do.

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  Then I asked him if he'd be back at recon in three months or so. A tear came to his eye and he said he would never be coming back. You see, he said, "My legs are paralyzed." I choked up and my skin crawled and I was unable to speak.

• 1:51:34Jocko Willink?

  A silence cold and heavy, a silence cold and heavy prevailed. Finally, he broke the silence, saying, "Baird, you're a big man and there's something I want you to do. Keep your head down there, keep your head down when you're out in the bush." This statement hit me and grabbed at my heart and I screamed inside myself, deep, deep down somewhere that I never knew existed. I promised him that I would, would, and bid him my fondest farewell, turned and walked away. I wanted to run from him, from them, from the whole world. I wanted to run past those helpless men in those metal beds, out to the street and far, far away. But I kept my control and walked at a brisk pace.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  The echoes of that scream resounded inside me again and again, threatening to tear me apart. Suddenly, the anguish melted away as I stepped out into the brutal, tropic sun. But the feeling that I had still ran like hot lava through my veins. The ride back home was the same. No one looked at the scenery or at each other nor talked with anyone. Each was involved with their own memories of 2nd Lieutenant Charles Robert Eisenbach II. He was a man with such brilliant mind and exuberance to be alive. Now he lay in a hospital, suffering a far worse fate to him than death. His once healthy body was now frail and flimsy, like a person who had always been an invalid.

• 1:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Left only was his mind and he had too much time to think and reflect upon what had happened and what was going to happen. It was a great strain and shock to see him. With hope, he will work his way back, because he does have guts.

• 1:53:19Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting about that, that's a, that's a heavy, you know, rendering of what happened, but that's actually from his personal journal that he kept while he was in Vietnam. Those are the thoughts of a, whatever, probably a 20-year-old kid seeing this unfold.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, needless to say, Lance Garobert, I think he had a year of college. He was kind of a platoon spokesman. He became a writer and a poet. So he, you know, he obviously had a great command of the English language and maybe saw some things or invented some things that weren't necessarily there, but that was his reality. And that's fine with me. I can't, can't argue with it. Nothing he said in there I don't think was untrue. I was what we call a hurting gator.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  In fact, I remember they, they told me that I was going to an army hospital in, in Japan. Well, only thing I knew was that Marines, when they got wounded in Vietnam, they went to a naval hospital in Yokohama. So I just pissed a little hissy fit and said, "Why are you sending me to an army hospital?" Not knowing that this army hospital in Camp Drake outside of Pechicahua Air Force Base in Japan was where all head injuries went. That was their specialty was head injuries. So they finally got a doc in there to calm me down and, and tell me how this, this was the place I needed to be. And one hospital was just as good

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  as another, which of course you don't believe when, when it's not your, your services hospital. But hey, you know, I was a 23-year-old kiddo and, you know, I had been in naval hospitals before and had, had always gotten great care and that's what I was expecting. And it turned out this general support hospital that I ended up at was first rate. I was there for like 10 days before I was stable enough to, to make the plane trip back home and... Interesting place.

• 1:55:17Jocko Willink?

  So for 10 days you're there, are they doing any, are they doing surgeries on you? Or are they just trying to let you heal up?

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Uh, they're just kinda letting me heal up and they've started physical therapy on me. I had tremendous spasms in both my legs and my, in my left arm. So they had physical therapy, make some braces that they put on my feet and they made a hand brace for me with my thumb sticking out like this and on my arm with spasms, this thing come and beat me in the eye. I have to hold this arm down. I was miserable. There was just a young kid to my, to my right who'd lost an eye, was an air force airmen and had lost an eye in Denang and that was his, that was his problem. That was his major problem and he had been tasked to be my feeder and my smoker.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  You know, I was a smoker then and, and I would just crave a camel and he'd have to be around to, to handle it because I couldn't deal with it. But terrific kid and it's, and they really, they took excellent care of me in this hospital just like it did everybody else.

• 1:56:19Jocko Willink?

  So the spasms in your arms and legs, which we were all, admittedly all of us just laughed when you told that story, which is pretty disturbing, but uh, that had to be a little bit of a good sign because some kind of spasm means that there's some nerve signal getting there.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Well, exactly and, and what it was, was a screwed up signal, you know, it wasn't, you know, telling the thing to do anything useful. It was just, you know, telling these muscles to fire. You know, again, from the, from the damaged area in my brain, as I understand it, you know, looking back on it.

• 1:56:52Jocko Willink?

  But that was your, was your mindset that you're going now from, hey, I mean, when you said you were paralyzed, when you initially got hit and now, you know, you can't move your leg and you can't move your, either one of your legs or your left arm.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  And did you, in your mind, did you think, okay, I might be, this might be it, you know, I might be paralyzed like this forever?

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  Well, of course. You don't know what the future holds. I mean, none of us do. But the, the better you become, the more aware you become of your limitations and yeah, you start to think. You know, how long is this gonna last? Is this forever? What am I gonna do for the rest of my life? You know? Uh, you know you're not gonna be a Marine. Uh, because you, you know, you don't have a job description of Marines for, you know, in wheelchairs or something like that. But, uh, the one saving grace I always thought was, well, I'm single. At least there's not, you know, a wife involved and a child on the way like most of my contemporaries had. Uh, but conversely, the guys who were, you know, as I found out later on at Bethesda,

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  the guys who were married felt it was much better to be married because you had this, you know, direct support system that you were coming back into and, you know, you knew this woman was gonna be there. They all, they weren't, of course, always. Uh, you know, things don't last a lot of times when you get big changes like that in your life, unfortunately. But the guys who were married thought it would be much better to be married and those of us who were single thought it was much better to be single. But, uh, sure, you say, you know, that's the first question out of your, your mind is when you get to your final destination, which for me was Bethesda Naval Hospital, was doc, how long am I gonna be here? Well, they don't have any idea. They don't know how your recovery's gonna unwind. So finally, my doctor said to me, hey, you could be here for two years and I can't guarantee

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  that you'll walk out even then. I thought to myself, well, damn, he doesn't know who he's dealing with. My plan, I got shot on the 4th of July. My plan was to be back in Vietnam by Christmas with my guys. You know, that didn't work out, but that was my plan. And I worked hard to make it happen. It didn't happen. You know, a year later, I walked out of there under my own power with a leg brace and a cane and got on an ambulance and was driven down the road in ninety-five to, to the VA Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, where I stayed another four months. But, uh, you don't know what's gonna happen. You're just, uh, it's a, it's, it's a slowly evolving, you know, kind of mental process you go through. You, you hit a point, I, I did, and I know other guys did too, because we talked about this. Well, you'd say, why me? You know?

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Why, why, why me, God? Why'd this happen to me? And I don't know if other guys got their, got an answer to that question, but I did. I, over time, this answer evolved, you know? And the answer was, why not you, Eisenbach? Who are you? You're no better than anybody else I put down that little blue planet, but you're no worse either. So you're just gonna have to go with the punches. And that's the answer. Why not you? You're no better, no worse than anybody else. I mean, that's a little hard, I think, for some people's stomach. But that was the answer I got. And, you know, it's, it's served its purpose. Okay, why not me? This is it. This is the way it is. I guess I'm what I, I just have to take it a day at a time.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Do my best to get better and, and see where I end up. And, and when I get to that point, uh, you know, I'll, I'll make decisions about what I'm gonna do for the future. Which I, you know, I did. And now I had a lot of vocational counseling from the VA. When I got flushed, you know, out, out of the service and out of the VA system. Uh, I got a lot of, like I said, vocational counseling. I got interest tests that I take, you know, because the question now is, okay, what am I gonna do for the rest of my life? Well, not surprisingly, I scored highest on military officer. Hoorah! Uh, gee, I just was one of those a couple of months ago. Second highest was FBI agent. Huh, that sounds good, but again, they don't have job descriptions for guys who limp, you know?

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Uh, and finally, I scored third on teacher. I said, well, that's interesting. And that evolved into thinking about becoming a therapist. Uh, and specifically a speech therapist. I had a speech defect, uh, that I just kind of overcame myself, uh, at Bethesda by slowing down and trying to think about what I was gonna say before I said it. Uh, and I got the nickname Spock because my speech became very deliberate. But when I was just spontaneous, apparently, and I never heard this, but my roommate would say, I said, Spock. I said, what? He said, what was with that language? I said, what language?

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  You know, we maybe had some visitors, a couple of gals from people I knew who were overseas in Vietnam. He said, it was terrible, it was filthy. I'd say, really? I never heard it. And he said, yeah, so I I started to slow down myself and try to think about what I would say. But speech therapist kind of stuck in my mind after this vocational counseling that I got. And that's eventually what I became was a speech language pathologist.

• 2:02:01Jocko Willink?

  So when he's saying your speech was filthy, you mean that you were like swearing?

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just using every filthy word.

• 2:02:09Jocko Willink?

  Like, like a, what's that, Tourette's syndrome? Is that what it's called?

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:02:12Jocko Willink?

  Like a Tourette's syndrome scenario?

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  And I I had no idea that I was doing that. I didn't hear it.

• 2:02:18Speaker 03

  Cause what? You just did it naturally? Like, that's how you talked kind of thing? Or like, why didn't you remember it?

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it wasn't how I normally would speak. It was just, it would just come out in totally the in a totally inappropriate situation, you know, not amongst the guys, but, you know, amongst visitors. You know, and like I said, I didn't know what was going on. But.

• 2:02:40Jocko Willink?

  You, uh, you kind of glanced over the fact that, that, you know, you got the feedback, hey, you can't, you can't stay in the Marine Corps anymore. And you, it sounds like you, you figured that out yourself, but at some point that's, that's got to turn into a harsh reality. Where that's what you wanted to do. You're in Vietnam, you're a platoon commander, you got the best guys in the world. And all of a sudden, in one day, it's gone.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  That's right. It's gone. And you don't know what's going to replace it. But yeah, eventually you get before a physical evaluation board. And what I had hoped for, because most of, most of my roommates and most of the guys there I knew had Marines, they had orthopedic injuries, you know, they'd gotten stitched up with a machine gun in their legs or whatever. They got put on the temporary disabled retired list. That allowed you five years to regain your ability. Uh, and, and if you could, you, you, you would get the chance to go back into the Marine Corps. Uh, on the other hand, if you got better, the VA could.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  Drop your disability rating down. So it was kind of a double edged sword. Most guys just wanted to get out. But for guys like me that they call lifers because I wanted I wanted a career in it. And I argued that I could fly any desk. Well, that was fine, but that wasn't gonna that wasn't that wasn't gonna fly. I was gonna be retired. But as long as I was on the TDRL, the Temporary Disabled Retired List, I thought, well, I got a chance. But I get a I'm at the VA hospital now. I've been through my physical evaluation board. They've asked me questions and I've got a transcript of it. My doctor submitted statements and stuff like that. And they said, Well, we'll we'll get you on the TDRL. And I said, Great, because I'd have five years to work myself back in the Corps. Came

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  through my orders for retirement orders came through one day when I was in the VA hospital. Permanent Disabled Retired List, no chance of ever getting back. Boy, I was pissed beyond just talking about. I was on the phone to the Secretary of Navy's office, which I got through to, and I had some nice older woman right there who obviously had heard this story before. You know, I was promised the TDRL, but I've here I've been permanently retired. She said, Well, Lieutenant, you've got to understand that, you know, we've done this a few times before, and we kind of know the the history of these kinds of injuries.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  And your board did recommend the permanent retired disabled list, not the temporary. So, you know, we have to go with what they say. And of course, they were right. But again, you know, I was, you know, I'm by now, I'm old man at 24, right? And I'm being retired. Excuse me. That didn't that's not the plan. But that's how it all worked.

• 2:05:25Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to realize? How long did it take you to accept that? So you you kind of got through the the why me, why not me?

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:05:34Jocko Willink?

  How did you? How long did it take you to get through this fact that, okay, now the Marine Corps, your your sacred Marine Corps has has made this decision?

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  You know, I'm still thinking about that. I'll tell you the truth.

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  So fifty odd years.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah, I'm still, now I've got a new why me questionnaire. But no, I, I adjusted. I went down to graduate school, got a master's degree in the speech department at the University of Florida and they weren't quite sure what had walked through the door. When, apparently when I arrived, I wanted to know where the coffee mess was. And they're all looking at me like, the what? Well, you know, the place where you get, just drop in in the morning, get a cup of coffee, pay a dime or whatever. Well, we don't have anything like that. Well, we're gonna get one.

• 2:06:24Jocko Willink?

  We do now.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  We do now, that's right. And most of my classes were on the third floor of this building, which had an elevator that went up to the third floor, but it didn't work, hadn't worked in years. And so I went to my advisor, I said, look, this three flights of stairs has killed me two or three times a day, you know, we gotta get that elevator working. He said, oh, can't do it, Ike, no way, hasn't worked since I've been here, the prof said. I said, well, we'll see about that. He said, well, what are you gonna do? I said, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go talk to the president. The president? What president? President of the university. He said, you can't do that. I said, really? Watch me. So I did. He wasn't there, but his, his like chief of staff was, who happened to be a guy who had kind of a, an arm injury from World War II.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  And he said, oh, it can't be repaired, can it? I said, well, that's what they're telling me, sir. He said, I'll take care of it. Well, the next day it was working just fine and worked for the next three years during my master program, didn't have a down day.

• 2:07:23Jocko Willink?

  How, uh, we kind of, we kind of jumped over this part. How long were you in Bethesda for, total?

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  I was in Bethesda for a little over twelve months.

• 2:07:30Jocko Willink?

  And, and throughout that time, you know, when you showed up, when you got wounded, you couldn't move your, your legs or arm. What was the progression like getting you back to, to, you know, the, the best state that you got to?

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it was, uh, physical therapy, occupational therapy, you know, once a day, which I decided if once a day was good, twice might be better. So I argued for that and pretty soon I got that. By November, my right leg had started to get remarkably better. My left leg still wasn't real useful, but you put a brace on it and, and I could, by November, I was walking. Now granted, I had a A crutch on one side, on the right side, a lostran crutch, you know, the metal things called polio crutches back then, but I don't know what they're, I call them lostran crutches because that's the guy who invented it. And a corpsman on my left side, but I was walking, you know?

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  And of course, I went back to, I finally dropped the corpsman and went to two lostran crutches, dropped the right, the left one after a while, back to the right one, then dropped that to a cane and a leg brace on my left and I did fine for about forty-two years that way. About eight years ago, my right leg decided to take an early retirement on me and so I had to start wearing a brace on that leg and I was falling too much, so they put me into a, to an electric wheelchair, which is what I scooted around the house and around town in. That scooter over there is what, it flies, my wheelchair doesn't fly, it's two hundred and forty-seven pounds and it doesn't fly, but that flies, that breaks down into four

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  or five parts and my wife can do it usually by her own. Of course, this weekend, we've had the kids to help her, just throw it in the back of the.

• 2:09:17Jocko Willink?

  I know some of the notes, speaking of you falling down, some of the notes had you wearing a football helmet while you were down there and it sounded like that made quite an impact on some of the places that you'd visit with your football helmet on and.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I was falling, when I started, you know, walking independently at the hospital, I had a left foot drop, which means the brace was supposed to bring it up, so it clears all the little obstacles and that are, you don't ever pay attention to when you've got two good feet. But I would fall into elevators because they wouldn't be exactly aligned and I'd fall into everybody in there. So eventually I started, they say, you need a football helmet.

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because you got the.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Right, right, I have got, I've got a defect up there, you could put your hand in my defect and take it, take my pulse, just like this, before I squeezed hard, the thing would pop up.

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  When'd you get a titanium plate in there?

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  Oh, that was after about a year, at the end of my year, they waited a year before they put a plate in your skull because it was considered a contaminated wound. I'm not sure what that meant to the medical people, but it meant, to me, it meant you waited a year and put the plate in.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  But so this football helmet, my dad got it from the University of Delaware where he worked and it was blue with like a Michigan thing with you know, yellow stripes. So in occupational therapy, I got a can of Olive Draft paint with my, they'd make it, we'd do everything with my left hand. I spray painted this thing, Olive Draft. My roommate at the time, he had been there longer than I had and apparently I was the perfect roommate for him because I had lost my sense of smell and taste. And apparently he'd been in a body spica cast from here, you know, down to his knees for like six months and he stunk to high heaven. So, and I didn't smell it, so I was apparently the perfect.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  His sister got this button book where he had a blank button and a bunch of things you could put on the button and, but it also had some, you know, bullet holes with the shattered glass type things. So I put one of those on the front of the, front of the, of the football helmet and, and I had a, a little badge, you know, maybe three inches around, said my head is a pressed area. Said and I'd wear that on my, my bathroom around the hospital. I, I, you know, people would stop and look at me and they'd read that and they'd look at me and they go, oh. And they just, they kind of move out, out of the way. They didn't want to mess with this guy. He might've been crazy.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  Dark, dark humor's popular in our family.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  It was, well, dark humor, you know, at Bethesda at that time, there was probably all, always about a dozen of us young lieutenants, you know, between the eighth floor and the fourteenth floor of the, what do they call it, Roosevelt's erection the tower at Bethesda. Anyway, and, and we had a, we didn't know it at the time, but we had a great group dynamic going on. There was always someone who was worse off than you. So when you started to feel sorry for yourself or started to get down, your buddies would come in and say, hey, what about, you know, what about Eisenbach over there or what about Vatucci over here or so and so, Smitty? And, and sure enough, there was always somebody better off than you was putting up the good fight. So, you know, you never got too down on yourself.

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  Those are, those are important lessons for life, right there.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  You bet, you bet.

• 2:12:32Jocko Willink?

  I mean, we can complain, I'll be the, I'll be the person complaining about, oh, I, oh, I, I, I jammed my finger and I'm all mad about it because I can't do something. It's like, no, what you need to do is be quiet and as I always say, do what you can, you know, do what you can. So you get down, so now we'll go back to college, you've got the elevator working, you've got a, and how long does it take, how long does it take to get your doctor, what'd you get your doctorate in?

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  I got my doctorate in speech-language pathology, you know, with a minor in psychology. But at first I had to get the masters, and I, I'm not sure how the University of Florida looked at my transcript from the Naval Academy and how they factored in, you know, weapons and navigation and courses like that that I took. But I had to do a whole lot of undergraduate courses before I could, you know, move into the graduate level courses. So it took me, I think about three years to get the masters degree, going to school full-time, and the VA was, you know, picking up the tab for that. VA has been very good to me, very good. And I know there's a lot of complaints out there about the VA, and I'm sure some of

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  them are warranted to some degree or another, but you've got to understand with a VA, you know, it doesn't happen yesterday, it doesn't happen five minutes from now, it happens, it'll happen down the road, but as long as you, you know, check every box and go from A, B, C, D, instead of trying to jump from A to F, you know, it'll all work for you. Great outfit.

• 2:14:04Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you meet Sherri?

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  I met Sherri after I had my masters degree. I worked for a year down in Orlando at an Easter Seals community, and it was a great experience. My, one of my old profs at the University of Florida invited me to come back up to the medical center there and become one of their staff speech pathologists at the medical center. And I said, "Great," which, so I did that. Sherri was a staff occupational therapist, had an office kind of across the hall from me. We met, we met, and being dull, normal about these things, like most men apparently, I didn't catch on fast enough. So, we had a mutual friend who was the other master speech pathologist there, and she had us over for dinner one night, great.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  And I still, I still didn't get it. So, we were at a convention one time, one summer, and we were having lunch together, myself and the other speech pathologist, who was also a friend of Sherri's. And she said, Ike, what do you, why do you think I invited you and Sherry over for dinner?

• 2:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Uh, uh, you like us?

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  She said, listen, if you don't, when we get back from this convention, if you don't ask her out within two weeks, she's gonna ask you out.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, God.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  So, you know, I asked her out and we went out. We did it for a while and eventually, you know, everything fell into place and we got engaged. Meanwhile, I had kinda given up on marriage. I had dated a fair amount and, you know, I was just running into wall after wall. So, but I decided, you know, I wanted to be a dad. I love kids. I've always loved kids. So I went to the Children's Aid Society of Florida and told them, you know, I wanted to adopt a kiddo. Well, back then, and this was now the late 60s, early 70s, they looked at you like you had a hole in your head, of course, which I did.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  So, that was okay, but I'm, but they said, look, they gave me all this stuff to read and all these exercises to go through and said, you know, you come back in a couple of months and if you still wanna pursue this thing, we'll talk about it. Well, so I did and this process took about nine months, but eventually I was approved. I mean, they, my, everybody in my family had to submit letters and all my friends and they just, they sliced and diced me one side, up one side and down the other, cause they weren't gonna let one of their kiddos get in a home with some kinda freaky guy, you know? And which you totally understand, uh, but getting engaged, all that went away.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  You know, if you're gonna get married, that's what they'd want. They wanted, obviously, a two-person situation for their kids and a stable, so,

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  if you got engaged or something like that during this process, uh, it was over. But I had been accepted and sure enough, as soon as we got engaged, I called my caseworker and told her, just great, Ike, way to go. And boop, the adoption's off, though. I said, okay, that's fine. We'll do it the old-fashioned way, which we did.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  And then, and at this time, are you still, uh, pursuing your doctorate at this time?

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  I am pursuing my doctorate at this time, that's right, you know? And that was about seven years going to school halftime and working halftime. You know, I'd get a fellowship at the VA and, you know, halftime research fellowship or, or clinical fellowship and stuff like that and go to school halftime. Uh, my VA money had run out by then, so I was funding this, which was fine with me.

• 2:17:41Jocko Willink?

  And then, uh, at some point you get, you finished with the, uh, marriage, you get married and you start having kids.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 2:17:47Jocko Willink?

  Matt.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Matt, he's the third kiddo.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  Here we go.

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  My time to shine.

• 2:17:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is your moment. What, uh, what was it like for you growing up with a dad?

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  You know, uh, I, I don't think it was a typical childhood compared to my friends. Um, he would, uh, charge in early and it probably felt like four in the morning. Um, but it was probably more like seven o'clock. Wake us up, we'd all be out like in the hallway, in line, like formed up, ready to go prior to school and he would, you know, do what he called belly busters.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  Belly busters.

• 2:18:23Speaker 02

  It was basically morning PT, uh, with the family, um, you know, and obviously like it was very limited, but we did like pushups, situps, jumping jacks. Um, what else you have us do?

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  That's about the one thing I was thinking of.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it was just like, I don't think anybody else's kids did that at the time.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  You have my mind.

• 2:18:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Oh, there you go.

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  Uh, he would wake us up by like playing revelry. Uh, you know, I knew what revelry was before I joined, uh, the military. Um, it was, it was.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  They couldn't chew gum.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  It was somewhat controlled chaos. There was a lot of discipline there that, uh, you know, maybe other kids didn't have. We got a, we got put on restriction, um, which I didn't know what that was until I went to NAPS.

• 2:19:10Jocko Willink?

  Like opposed to being grounded?

• 2:19:12Speaker 02

  As opposed to being grounded. We got put on restriction. We got put on restriction and that's just what it was called and we had to like explain what it was to our friends and.

• 2:19:19Jocko Willink?

  Can't go to the movies now, I'm on restriction.

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  Right. What is that? Um, so we have to explain that's being grounded. Yeah, he was kind of like this, uh, this, uh, hero to like a lot of our friends though, because he was, like, he was really good with our friends and he was just like, kind of like a wild man. Uh, he was notorious throughout the, uh, school system of, uh, not being a guy to mess with if you were like a school administrator. I think the, uh... You mess with my kids, I'm gonna be talking to you, you know? This is not in the notes, but, uh, I'll tell the story. I think it was like sixth grade and, uh, I had a friend who would get in trouble in class regularly and, you know, like, you know, I'm the youngest kid, so a lot of teachers knew who I was and my sisters

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  were probably better at school at that time than I was. And so, you know, the teacher pulls me aside one day and she's like, "You need to stop being friends with Chino. Um, he's just a bad influence on you." And so I go home, tell my dad that. He goes, "Well, we'll see." Next day, like, it's, you know, the school that has like the loudspeaker that like clicks on from when the office calls and I think, you know, one of the, one of the office staff is like, "Uh, you know, Mrs. Schneiderman, uh, I think, uh, Mr. Eisenbach is here." She's like, "Oh, great. I'll send Matt down to the office." And you get to kind of hear it in the voice of the, uh, the office staff and they're like, "No, no, no. He's, he's here to see you." And the whole class was just like, "What is happening?"

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it was, it was clearly different. You know, it's, uh, you know, the, growing up with like somebody that is like the essence of the ring or like discipline, kind of like iron-fisted, uh, is what people think. But fair. Sure. Yeah. That's what we're calling it these days. Uh, most of the time, like, you know, there were things that, you know, you just have to do because that's the way I want them done or that's what I said. That's how we do them in our house. Right. Which is like, that's what he wants. So, you know, you kind of had to grow up, uh, learning just to like, you know, roll with that sort of stuff, which is, you know... A lot of what you see in the military is like, we do things this way just because it's

• 2:21:32Speaker 02

  the way we do it. Or it's because of the way I want it. But, you know, not everything is like that in the military. You know, you get, you know, input, which, at like, eight years old, I didn't have a lot of input in, in things.

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  So at what point did you decide you were going to the Naval Academy?

• 2:21:48Speaker 02

  Uh, like him, we would schedule trips around the Annapolis area to go visit friends, and we'd wind up, uh, you know, at the academy, or...

• 2:21:57Speaker 01

  Psychological warfare.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  Right. We'd go, uh, we'd go to San Diego for spring break and, uh, go check, check out the naval station, uh, things like that. Uh, and so, you know, I had kind of known for a while, like, you know, I want to be a pilot, this is kind of what I want to do. Um, and I think the best way to go about that is probably go to the Naval Academy. Um, and so I'd probably, like, early high school, kind of had that idea in mind. Um, like him, I probably wasn't the best student ever. Uh, I got better over time, but at that time, I didn't really, like, put a lot of effort into, uh, school and homework. So I had to go to, uh, what was called Naval Academy Prep School, which is just, you know, basically an academic year to get you ready for the Naval Academy. Um, I found out about restriction

• 2:22:45Speaker 02

  there.

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  What restriction were you thinking about?

• 2:22:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you, if I can, my, my, one of my favorite stories about Matt was when he was, uh, getting ready to apply for the Naval Academy, you know, I thought, he had taken the PSAT or whatever that is, the preset, and I thought, well, we gotta bump this up a little bit. So, you know, I'll, I'll challenge him. I, I, so I made a bet with him. I said, "I bet I can score higher on the SAT than you can." And he looks at me like, of course, that I got three heads and 14 ears. "Oh, Dad."

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  So I meanwhile had strategically bought some of these prep books that I was leaving around the house.

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Cause we played a win over here in the Marine Corps.

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  And hoping he would buy into those, you know, he didn't. But we scheduled the SAT and we took it and the results come back and you know, you gotta be careful what you wish for. I outscored him and I had like a six fifty or seven fifty out of eight hundred on the English side. And he's like, no one ever gets seven fifty in English. So that all just came back to haunt me, you know, I beat him on that. But he, you know, he had a lot of things going for him. He was an Eagle Scout. He'd lettered in a couple of sports at high school and he did, he had a good interview with a blue and gold officer, fellow who kind of recruits for the Naval Academy and you know, around the area. They got him all over the country.

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  Probably helps that he knows all those people too.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think so, but I didn't know anybody on the, on the admissions board and it wouldn't have helped if I did, you know, you got in there yourself.

• 2:24:21Jocko Willink?

  And you ended up being a submariner though?

• 2:24:24Speaker 02

  Uh huh. Uh, yeah, the Naval Academy, like any selection program is going to be tough and there's only a limited number of spots and there's, you know, physical requirements that you have to meet. Uh, you know, I don't have 2020 vision anymore, so probably being a pilot was not in, in the, in the works for me. So I just went, uh, you know, I think I got selected as a surface warfare officer and then, you know, I didn't necessarily want to do that. I wanted to do something different, uh, or more challenging. And so I went and asked to be a submarine officer and you have to, you have to ask to get an interview with the, uh, the naval reactors, uh, personnel.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  And so, uh, you know, I went and saw the, the captain on the yard, who was the, the head submarine officer there and, you know, he looked at all my stuff and said, You picked the wrong major. I was an econ major at the time and again, probably didn't have the best grades ever, but I was good enough in math and science that he let me through on to the naval reactors interview. So went from there. You gotta go still kinda like old school where you used to have to go interview with Admiral Rickover and he'd play mind games with you. They still, they keep that tradition alive. You still go interview with the four star that's head of naval reactors, but fewer mind games, more just, you know, technical interview and then go.

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  And how, how many years did you end up doing?

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  I did six. I got out in 2012, July of that year. So just a little over six years.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  And so Ike, what are you doing now? I am what I call fully retired and enjoying it immensely. After, after my speech pathology career kinda, it just kinda petered out here in the Pacific Northwest. It's a whole different atmosphere and ballgame for allied health professionals than it is on the East Coast, which was okay. But so I, in about, in 95, I went into selling life insurance and mutual funds, which, which I enjoyed, but wasn't wildly successful. That was successful enough

• 2:26:36Speaker 01

  to, you know, pay the bills and keep some income coming in. But finally, I, I ditched that and decided to live a life of leisure, shall we say. But, you know, every day is a little bit different. You know, getting up in the morning is not typical. You gotta get braces on and, and make sure you don't fall out of bed. You know, my, my, one of my theories is gravity always wins and it always does. So everything's just a little bit more difficult, but it's okay. It sure beats being at Arlington kinda looking up at the SOD, which is where I theoretically should be.

• 2:27:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, we are certainly glad that you didn't end up there.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  Likewise.

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  And that you ended up here. It's a, it's a probably a good place to wrap it up. Just awesome to sit and talk with you.

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Well, likewise, Jaco.

• 2:27:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any closing thoughts, Matt? Anything that I missed?

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  I don't have any closing thoughts. Well, just one thought here is something that we almost always miss in the service and frankly, in any kind of industry or stuff like that. And that's the, the part that your spouse plays for you. My wife has been terrific over the last 41 years. She's A, the love of my life and B, the mother of my children. And, you know, I, I just, I don't think I could get through a week without her. She, she helps me. She points out where I'm, you know, turning left when I maybe should stay the straight and narrow. You know, she's a good cook. She's pretty good at managing money.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  And I love her dearly.

• 2:28:24Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's, that's awesome. And, yeah, like, we, we can often overlook the, the, the families, you know, whether it's the husband, the wife, the kids, they all make a huge sacrifice. But for those that are still in the military, you know, they always make the sacrifice to, to support, you know, their spouse. So absolutely to the families out there that are out there supporting the spouses. Thank you to you all. And sir, you know, it's, it's just been an honor to sit here and talk with you and, and.

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:28:58Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for coming on the show. More importantly though, obviously, thank you for your, for your service and your sacrifice.

• 2:29:05Speaker 01

  You as well, Jaco. And also you, yes.

• 2:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we're waiting on that echo.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Everybody serves in their own way.

• 2:29:17Jocko Willink?

  There we go. You just got a fist bump from Echo Charles.

• 2:29:22Jocko Willink?

  We, you know, the sacrifice that you made, the efforts that you made, you know, that's what allows us to be here today as a free people doing what we're doing. So, thank you for, for

• 2:29:38Jocko Willink?

  putting your, your own safety and your own life on the line for this country and we deeply appreciate it.

• 2:29:45Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for your service again and for all those out there who have served and are serving, you know, get some.

• 2:29:53Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Thanks. I appreciate it.

• 2:29:56Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Charles Robert Ike Eisenbach has left the building and honored to have him on to talk to, hear his perspective, kind of a crazy life, starting with growing up in the Philippines.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:15Jocko Willink?

  His dad sounded like a character.

• 2:30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  A character.

• 2:30:20Speaker 03

  He's like, yeah, the, he's like from the Philippines, right? But not technically Filipino. So, you know, so they say, oh yeah, you're from the Philippines. It's like not computing. It's good.

• 2:30:31Jocko Willink?

  Interesting stuff. And this is awesome for us to sit here and of course get to, get to talk with another hero, another individual that just steps up and overcomes.

• 2:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Reminding me, reminding us, right?

• 2:30:55Jocko Willink?

  That we need to do more.

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  That we can do more. Is there anything Echo Charles that you recommend that we should all do?

• 2:31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:04Jocko Willink?

  What is it?

• 2:31:05Speaker 03

  Jiu Jitsu. Of course.

• 2:31:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  I think of the many reasons to do jujitsu, I think we've concluded number one is that it's fun.

• 2:31:17Jocko Willink?

  That should be, however, I don't know if it's the biggest reason, I'm not sure. It's the reason that will keep you with it.

• 2:31:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:25Jocko Willink?

  There's so many strong reasons, though.

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  We'll just say fun slash beneficial.

• 2:31:30Jocko Willink?

  Here's the weird thing, like on social media, somebody asked me all these different questions. All these different questions about what would you do if, what would you do if you have trouble controlling your temper? Do jujitsu. What do you do if you have trouble detaching or what's a good way to learn to detach? Do jujitsu. What's a good workout to start getting in shape? Jujitsu. What's a good way to let off steam and not get stressed out? Jujitsu. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:31:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:31:53Jocko Willink?

  It's just answer, answer, answer, answer, answer. So, pretty much across the board, what we are saying, do jujitsu.

• 2:32:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  When you do jujitsu.

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  You gotta have a gi, for sure. You're gonna need a gi. So, when you do gi, this is the gi you're gonna get, Orjin gi. It's not just one Orjin gi, get as many as you want, but you have different selections, is what I'm saying. See what I'm saying? So, one of the reasons to get an Orjin gi, not that it's fun. It is fun to get an Orjin gi, for sure.

• 2:32:26Jocko Willink?

  It is fun to get an Orjin gi, oddly enough.

• 2:32:28Speaker 03

  They're factually the best.

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Is that how a normal person feels when they shop?

• 2:32:32Speaker 03

  Yes. You ever thought, what do they call it, like some therapy, like shop therapy? Shopping, or is it, is that what it's called?

• 2:32:38Jocko Willink?

  Shop therapy, yeah, it sounds like what it's called.

• 2:32:40Speaker 03

  Or some, no, well, yeah, I don't know if, but it's that situation where it's like therapeutic to go shopping. Some people just go window shopping.

• 2:32:47Jocko Willink?

  I think what I, have you ever heard my, me rage against consumerism? Cause I'll do it right now.

• 2:32:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 2:32:55Jocko Willink?

  You have people that buy everything, right?

• 2:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  I think what happens is there's a certain level of gratification that you get from building something, making something, right?

• 2:33:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:33:04Jocko Willink?

  Whether it's a brick wall, whether it's a re, hang in drywall in the kitchen, like it. There's a, there's a satisfaction that you get from it, from creating something.

• 2:33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, I hate to say it, but sometimes for some people, shopping starts to kinda replace that.

• 2:33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:22Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know, they wanna create something cool, they can just click on Amazon and it's coming and they kinda get a little dose of it. A little dose of it, feels good.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:33:30Jocko Willink?

  So, there is that. When you buy an Orjin gi, I will say you feel a little bit, what's better though? Is when you buy an Orjin gi. What you kind of feel, you look, when you buy some uh random thing off of Am- Amazon dot com, you don't know where that thing came from, right? It, you're not connected to it.

• 2:33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're not.

• 2:33:48Jocko Willink?

  When you buy an origin gi, you know what, you know exactly what's happening, you know exactly where it came from, you know what it means.

• 2:33:54Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 2:33:54Jocko Willink?

  You know what it represents.

• 2:33:56Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  You know that it has soul.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  So, sir, heck yeah, so.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  So get yourself an origin gi.

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  Well, what you're talking about is completely correct. Well, so I had both. So you know, you're taking, saying making something or doing something.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Creating something.

• 2:34:09Speaker 03

  Creating some, so this may or may not count. So I, I switched the door, some doorknobs in my house.

• 2:34:15Jocko Willink?

  Big time.

• 2:34:15Speaker 03

  Right? You see what I'm saying now?

• 2:34:17Jocko Willink?

  But you got gratification, right?

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly right.

• 2:34:19Jocko Willink?

  Satisfaction. You felt good about it, especially you shut that door because.

• 2:34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23Jocko Willink?

  Shut solid.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  Heck yeah. Well, one of them, the locking thing was like jammed up. You had to, it was a thing. It was just giving me issues. Like given.

• 2:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you overcome?

• 2:34:35Speaker 03

  The state of my doorknob, that was like, that wasn't an acceptable state.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:34:40Speaker 03

  This is my room. Fixing that whole situation was like that, something that needed to be done and I did it by myself. Same thing with the, a different doorknob. It needed a lock. It didn't have a lock.

• 2:34:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:34:54Speaker 03

  So there's three altogether with different issues. See what I'm saying? But okay, so I did it. Yes.

• 2:34:59Jocko Willink?

  Universally, you overcame these challenges.

• 2:35:01Speaker 03

  Did it gratification, but on top of that, I shopped for the new doorknobs on Amazon and I got gratification from that too. See what I'm saying? But, so that fact does remain. But with the gi, you have the addish, the additional gratification. That not, of course, they're the best gis in the world, but they are made in America.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  Imagine that, like, you know, when you're a kid, you want the best car, right?

• 2:35:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:35:26Jocko Willink?

  But it's hard to afford that car.

• 2:35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:29Jocko Willink?

  Origin gi, it's like, oh, you want the best gi? Cool, you can afford it.

• 2:35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:32Jocko Willink?

  You can make it happen.

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Or you could go get the, the, the not, the not best gi up to you, but I mean, it's, well, that's on you though.

• 2:35:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  Let's face it, that's on you.

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  That's not encouraged behavior.

• 2:35:43Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, man, come on. And the last, get your gi. Origin at origin main.com

• 2:35:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the good thing is if you need other clothing items outside the realm of jujitsu, outside the realm of geese, outside the realm of rash guards, then you can get other clothing materials such as t-shirts, such as hoodies, such as, yes, jeans.

• 2:36:07Speaker 03

  American made denim.

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:10Speaker 03

  Same deal.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  And you might be thinking, well, why stop there? Don't worry, we didn't stop there because you can get, you can get boots too. You can get origin boots made in America, but what you know where the leather's from though?

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Where?

• 2:36:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's from America. You know where the stitching is from though?

• 2:36:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:36:24Jocko Willink?

  It's from America. But you know where they're actually assembled though, to be honest with you? America.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and then there's some, uh, some supplementation.

• 2:36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  Yes. The most important kind of supplements, by the way, the ones that work and well, in the sense, in the case of milk, the kind that tastes like dessert. So yes, that is the best kind of supplements in my opinion, but, but joint warfare, krill oil, these are for your joints, keep you in the game. That's a big deal. Like, doesn't matter how much.

• 2:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Actually, that is the deal.

• 2:36:57Speaker 03

  It's the deal, right?

• 2:36:58Jocko Willink?

  If you're not in the game, then.

• 2:36:59Speaker 03

  Then you're just sort of not in the game.

• 2:37:00Jocko Willink?

  The game at all.

• 2:37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, you know how like, you know, the kind where you like, you're super strong, but like your elbows are, are jamming you up so hard, like, Brad, you're not strong.

• 2:37:08Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:37:08Speaker 03

  Anymore because your elbows can't take it. See what I'm saying? So yeah, joint warfare, krill oil, also discipline. That's for your brain.

• 2:37:15Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:15Speaker 03

  Brain and body. It's a brain body sort of scenario.

• 2:37:18Jocko Willink?

  Look at you.

• 2:37:19Speaker 03

  That, that is becoming everyday one for me, by the way.

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're on the D.

• 2:37:23Speaker 03

  D train all day or wait, wait, D plane, discipline, plane, the D plane. Who said that? I think Dave Burke.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, is that really?

• 2:37:30Speaker 03

  Good.

• 2:37:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, he is a, wait, good dude, but?

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  I think, I, I'm pretty sure I'm not sure. Um, let me confirm that later, but nonetheless, discipline for your brain every day. It helps. Totally does help.

• 2:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Milk helps every day too, especially when you got that, that little post dinner. You want a little something. Let's face it, you, let's face it, steak is awesome.

• 2:37:52Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:53Jocko Willink?

  We all know that.

• 2:37:54Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:55Jocko Willink?

  But let's just face the facts. Sometimes you get done and you got that little craving.

• 2:38:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  That little, that little want. You want something called dessert, but you know, it's not part of the plan. Do you know, you know, it's not on the program. You know, it is not on the path, certainly.

• 2:38:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:38:11Jocko Willink?

  Cake is not on the path.

• 2:38:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:38:13Jocko Willink?

  But that's okay. We got you. You can have dessert. You get yourself some milk.

• 2:38:19Speaker 03

  Yep. Also for the kids, Warrior Kid Milk. So same deal, same, same deal, but more engineered for the kids. Would you say, is that safe to say engineered for the kids? Speaking of engi- engineering for the kids, um, you know what? I'm not even going to mention it. But there was an artif- uh, not artifact, artifacts is the wrong word, a product.

• 2:38:38Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:38:39Speaker 03

  That I, we sampled at the Vitamin Shoppe situation.

• 2:38:46Speaker 03

  Are we allowed to talk about this because it might be like against some big reveal plan? You see what I'm saying?

• 2:38:51Jocko Willink?

  Are you talking about milk bars? It's, it's been revealed.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. There you go. Well, nonetheless, look, that is gonna be like another level even. Another layer of post dinner dessert situation. See what I'm saying?

• 2:39:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I do know what you're saying.

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  About big time, right?

• 2:39:08Jocko Willink?

  It is a candy bar.

• 2:39:09Speaker 03

  Straight up.

• 2:39:10Jocko Willink?

  Straight up, good for you.

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Legitimately good for you.

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:39:14Jocko Willink?

  Think about that.

• 2:39:15Speaker 03

  Doesn't taste like.

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  This is not normal. This is, this is good.

• 2:39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was different than what I was used to for sure. Nonetheless.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  You know how many, you know how many I have of those right now?

• 2:39:24Speaker 03

  How many?

• 2:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Milk bars? I have two hundred.

• 2:39:27Speaker 03

  Oh, you grabbed them all. See, that's where they went. So I was, I was wondering, shoot, where did those go? Cause you know, I kinda wanted some or whatever.

• 2:39:34Jocko Willink?

  I never want anything. Like, I'm always like, oh, no, keep it. No, you can have it. No, you know, cause.

• 2:39:38Speaker 03

  Oh, right, right.

• 2:39:39Jocko Willink?

  That's just my, kinda my personality. Like, I don't even wanna have the other stuff.

• 2:39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:43Jocko Willink?

  No, I, they were like, oh, oh, I took them all. I put them all right in my car.

• 2:39:47Speaker 03

  Ah, okay. All right.

• 2:39:48Jocko Willink?

  So I got all those.

• 2:39:49Speaker 03

  No, man, you did the right thing.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're building a plant to make them, by the way, cause no one could make what we wanted.

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:55Jocko Willink?

  So it's like, okay, cool. You can't figure it out? Cool, watch this. Milk bars.

• 2:39:59Speaker 03

  As many milk bars as you need. Anyway, so yes, so milk bars, not, not currently available, but on the horizon.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  On the horizon. Jocko Whitey's available right now.

• 2:40:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:40:10Jocko Willink?

  If you need something, uh, organic in your life, cause you wanna feel like one of those people that is, you know.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  Healthier.

• 2:40:18Jocko Willink?

  All healthier than you are.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  Now you can come back at them. When someone's like, is that organic? Actually, yes, it is. Otherwise, I wouldn't put it in my body.

• 2:40:26Speaker 03

  Certified, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  Certified organic. What? Step.

• 2:40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:31Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. And by the way, this stuff is all available at the Vitamin Shoppe nationwide.

• 2:40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:37Jocko Willink?

  Which is pretty.

• 2:40:40Jocko Willink?

  It's convenient, bottom line.

• 2:40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:42Jocko Willink?

  And normally that's not, I, I'm a little troubled with convenience, right? Cause convenience, all of a sudden, you know, what, is there a slippery slope to McDonald's?

• 2:40:52Jocko Willink?

  There's not, no, there's not. Don't let that happen.

• 2:40:55Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. Also, we have a store called Jaco Store. They always said that. I said, we have a store.

• 2:41:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we do. But it's not just you and me, it's all of us.

• 2:41:05Speaker 03

  We, the whole group collectively.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  Everyone here has a store, your own store.

• 2:41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Our own store. We could have called it that, but we didn't think of that back then.

• 2:41:13Speaker 03

  A store.

• 2:41:14Jocko Willink?

  Could have just, you know, our store, the trooper store. For people that are just getting after it. Anyways, if you, if you're getting after it, maybe you need a rash guard. Maybe you need a T-shirt. Maybe you need a hat. If you're Echo, you don't need a hat, cause he doesn't wear a hat.

• 2:41:28Speaker 03

  No, very rarely.

• 2:41:29Jocko Willink?

  I've never seen you with a hat, not even for one second, not even in the cold weather. No, I don't think, wait, maybe I seen you in an Origin beanie.

• 2:41:36Speaker 03

  I, I think you've never seen me in cold weather. Oh, yeah, yeah, Utah, that was cold weather. Nineteen degrees is cold.

• 2:41:42Jocko Willink?

  You must have had a hat on out there.

• 2:41:44Speaker 03

  I don't know if I did or not. Yeah, I had a beanie on. Yeah, you're right. Nonetheless, jacostore.com, yes, represent while you're on the path. That's where you get all this cool stuff. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. I think it's important. Varying levels of importance, but yeah, do it. Leave a review if you're in the mood.

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of cool. It's kind of a cool thing to do, to kind of like just confirm where you're at in your mental space.

• 2:42:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so, sure.

• 2:42:13Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about the grounded podcast, which is part of the Defcore Network. You didn't know about that, did you? We got a whole network called the Defcore Network.

• 2:42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:21Jocko Willink?

  We're building a network.

• 2:42:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  We got three podcasts on it. Jocko Podcast, Grounded Podcast, and Warrior Kid Podcast.

• 2:42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:30Jocko Willink?

  You can subscribe to all of them if you want, or none of them, whatever. You can also check out Warrior Kid Soap. At Irishoaksranch.com. There's a kid who's been a warrior kid since day one in the game. And guess what? He makes his own soap from goat milk, goats that he raised. And we have a new soap, a new soap. It's called, well, it's got some active ingredients that help fight against bacteria. I don't even know what I'm talking about.

• 2:43:00Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:43:01Jocko Willink?

  Bacteria, uh, microbial.

• 2:43:04Speaker 03

  Microbes?

• 2:43:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those funguses.

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, fungi.

• 2:43:08Jocko Willink?

  Fungi, yeah, all these things, all these things. All those things need to be defeated. So we have a soap. And it's called Killer Soap. And if you use it, it will help you to

• 2:43:22Jocko Willink?

  stay clean.

• 2:43:23Speaker 03

  Yep. And also YouTube, YouTube channel, if you're interested in the video version of this podcast. Or excerpts from the podcast. You don't necessarily want to watch the whole thing all at once, all the time.

• 2:43:39Jocko Willink?

  Or let's just say you might think that the world would be better place. If as the world unfolded and things happened. That part of the world exploded or caught on fire.

• 2:43:52Jocko Willink?

  Cause Echo, because he has command of virtual reality, he can make my words make things explode. He can make my, my kettlebell make things blow up.

• 2:44:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  He can make his own, uh, magical powers be revealed in forms of like sparks.

• 2:44:17Speaker 03

  If I'm so inclined, yeah.

• 2:44:18Jocko Willink?

  So that's Echo Charles. He may not be able to control everything in the world, but on the Jaco YouTube channel. He can make things happen.

• 2:44:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. And video wise, sure. I mean, he's explosions in a while, but you know, yeah, we, we're going to continue that from time to time, I think. I hope.

• 2:44:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh, we also got, got an album called Psychological Warfare. It's a little psychological hitter. If you need a little bump to get you over a bump. You can check that out on iTunes, Google Play or any MP3. We got flipsidecanvas.com where Dakota Meyer is making visual representations of discipline, pure, distilled onto a canvas. That you can then hang on your wall. And it will keep you on the path. Also got a bunch of books, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual.

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Way the Warrior Kid, got three of those books.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  Got Mikey and the Dragons.

• 2:45:18Jocko Willink?

  For the little kids, got the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. The audio version of that is on iTunes and Amazon Music and Google Play as an MP3. We got Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership, the fundamentals of combat leadership that I wrote about with my brother Leif Babin. We have Echelon Front, which is our leadership consultancy and what we do is we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com if you need help in your organization with that. We got EF Online, which is online leadership training to get you up to speed as a leader. Go to EFOnline.com for that. We've got the muster, which is our live conference gathering

• 2:45:59Jocko Willink?

  seminar. I gotta think of a better word because it's better than all those three things. Everyone that we've done has sold out. This year, we are doing Orlando, we are doing Phoenix, and we are doing Dallas. If you want to come, go to ExtremeOwnership.com. Every one of these that we have done has sold out and these are going to sell out too. So get there early. And also, if you need leaders at any level in your organization, check out EFOverwatch.com for executive leadership. Check out EFLegion.com for frontline

• 2:46:35Jocko Willink?

  leadership. These are our platforms to connect the vets that have experience leading with companies that need experienced leaders. Go check out those platforms. Also, wanted to say, talking to Ike, asking him about any charities he wanted me to mention, and he said the Semper Five Fund, which does a bunch of stuff for Marines, for Marine families, for Marines that are transitioning outside, out of the Marine Corps, and also helps them out with their health and wellness. So that's SemperFiveFund.org. And also,

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  He wanted you to check out the Fisher House, which is when troops get wounded and they're in the hospital for an extended period of time. The Fisher House provides them with a place to stay, provides their families with a place to stay in the area. So it's fisherhouse.org. Both these organizations are great organizations, so check those out. And if you feel like you want to hear more from Echo and I, you know, for whatever reason, if you want to throw a correction at us, if we made a mistake, which is entirely possible, we probably need it. Well, we're there, we're on the interwebs.

• 2:47:54Jocko Willink?

  And we're also on, that means we're on Twitter, we're on Instagram, and we are on the frozen book. And you can find Echo at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Charles, Robert, Bobby, Bob, Eisenbach, Ike. An absolute honor to meet with him today, to talk to him, and to hear his incredible story of service to America and the rest of the veterans out there that are on active duty.

• 2:48:34Jocko Willink?

  The ones that have already retired, that have left the service, all of you that have put on the uniform, thank you for your service. And of course, the same goes out to our police and law enforcement, and firefighters, and paramedics, and EMTs, and dispatchers, and correctional officers, and Border Patrol, and Secret Service. You take care of us here on the home front, and you are appreciated as well. And to both those groups, thanks to your families for the support that you give to the folks that are wearing the uniform. And everyone else out there, you know, when you think about...

• 2:49:16Jocko Willink?

  When you think about the challenges that you face, that I face, that we all face, what challenges are we up against? What, what external power is trying to hold you down?

• 2:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Going through your little battle, your little battle in the world?

• 2:49:36Jocko Willink?

  And then, if you can, you can remember,

• 2:49:41Jocko Willink?

  you can remember someone like Ike.

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  And you can remember what he did facing these challenges, shot in the head, wounded,

• 2:49:54Jocko Willink?

  paralyzed, hospitalized.

• 2:49:58Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? Any one of us can fold

• 2:50:02Jocko Willink?

  under those challenges of life.

• 2:50:06Jocko Willink?

  You can do that. You can fold. You can give in.

• 2:50:10Jocko Willink?

  Or you can do what Ike did.

• 2:50:14Jocko Willink?

  And what Ike does every day, which is take on those challenges by getting out there and getting after it.

• 2:50:22Jocko Willink?

  So, until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.