312: Black Hawk Down. Night Stalkers Never Quit. With Mike Durant

0:00:00 - Opening 0:05:15 - Mike Durant 3:05:47 - How to stay on THE PATH 3:28:49 - 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 312 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Something slammed into my helicopter. We didn't know what it was or where it had impacted, but the Hilo bucked hard like a small sports car going over a large speed bump. We'd been passing by the Olympic Hotel for the third time, doing 50 knots at about 75 feet when an RPG round rocketed into the tail section. But that was 35 feet behind me. The aircraft was 18,000 pounds of metal muscle and it certainly wasn't coming apart. At least not yet. I looked quietly, I looked quickly around the cockpit while Ray did the same, both of us testing the controls and checking the gauges.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  Everything was in the green. No flight control problems, engine malfunctions, or weird noises. No one in my bird said a word. And then, "Super 6-4, you're hit bad." It was Matthews up in the C2 bird. "You better put it on the ground." From his position high over the battle, he had seen the rocket impact just below my tail, raking pieces away and pinwheels as it detonated. "No shit," I thought as I rolled out of the turn. Just ahead, maybe a mile off, was what appeared to be a clear area, certainly large enough to land a Blackhawk. But the aircraft seemed to be flying normally and I was facing the decision to crash in the

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  middle of a firefight or fly just two more miles to the safety of the airfield. I didn't hesitate or discuss it with anyone. It was my decision to make. We'd go for the field. Still, I kept my eye on that midway point. It sort of looked like a city park, which was what it had been long ago when the place was prosperous. Now, as we closed on it, I could see that it was covered with tin shacks and huts. But none of that mattered because within a few seconds, the world went completely to hell.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  The RPG had smashed into the rear gearbox, a fixture the size of a big watermelon and full of oil and gears, where the driveshaft came in to have its speed and direction ratios altered for the tail rotor. The bottom of that box had been blown off, the driveshaft bent and twisted. I heard a rapidly accelerating whine and unearthly building scream, and then the tail rotor assembly completely disintegrated into vapor with an ear-splitting bang. The nose of the helicopter immediately started to spin to the right, the tail rotor on a Blackhawk counters the torque created by the main rotor system and the pedals control the pitch of the tail rotor.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  As we passed through the first ninety degrees of rotation, I instinctively countered with the left pedal, and I knew we'd lost it. I'll never forget looking down to make sure I was pushing the pedal and seeing my boot jammed all the way to the floor. My body was reacting properly, but my helo was not. I keyed the mike. Six-Fours lost the tail rotor, we're going in hard. I looked over at Ray and said, "I guess we better pull 'em off." I was referring to the engines, because the only way to counter that spin was to shut them down and eliminate the torque. But just as the Blackhawk manual describes such an emergency, if you don't kill the engines right away, the force will make it physically impossible to reach up for the

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  power control levers. I'd always thought that sounded a little extreme. It wasn't. Super Six-Four started to spin so fast that the sky and ground became nothing but two blurred stripes of blue and brown in front of my eyes. It was like riding a merry-go-round looking straight out from the side of your horse while the teenage operator goes nuts and hauls it up to fifty revs per minute. I was hurled against my harness, my hands desperately yanking and twisting the controls, and I looked over at Ray to see him fighting the force with every muscle, his gloved hands quaking as he tried to reach up for the power levels. I knew I was going to die.

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from the book called "In the Company of Heroes", which was written by retired Chief War Officer Michael J. Durant, who was a member of the legendary Nightstalkers, and who was shot down during Operation Gothic Serpent, and was held captive during the Battle of Mogadishu. That operation was documented in the book Black Hawk Down by author Mark Bowden, and the book was eventually adapted into the movie Black Hawk Down. But it is an honor tonight to have Mike Durant with us

• 5:07Jocko Willink?

  to discuss his lessons learned, his experiences from the Army, from the Nightstalkers, from Somalia, and beyond. Mike, thank you for joining us.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  My pleasure, Jaco. Good to be here.

• 5:21Jocko Willink?

  It's a rough way to start off this podcast, I guess, putting you through those moments.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I wrote the book over 10 years ago, and I tried to go back and read it again a couple of years back, and honestly, I just don't want to relive it. So, it is kind of hard sometimes, because those were pretty rough times, but I'm glad we got it all down on paper, and it's certainly a story worth telling.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  All right, so I like to start at the beginning, so we're going to jump into a little bit of the childhood, where you came from, how you ended up being you. You say in the book, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a helicopter pilot. Sure, other dreams flash by when you're a kid in a small New England town, firefighter, policeman, sports hero, brain surgeon. I never had the brain surgeon one myself."

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we made that up. I don't think I ever thought that.

• 6:13Jocko Willink?

  "But the idea of flying for a living had always enthralled me the most. My father was a full-time first sergeant in the Army National Guard, and many of my uncles and cousins served there as well, but I didn't have fantasies about flying off into battle and coming home a hero with a chest full of medals. I grew up during the Vietnam era, when none of the kids around me wanted anything to do with wearing a uniform. So it wasn't about patriotism, or flag waving, or anything like that. My feelings about duty, honor, and country would evolve over time, but back then, the Army was just a way for me to get the best flight training without having to pay for it."

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  I got asked this question the other day. I was on the special operations now has their own podcast and they asked me, they set me up with this really nice question, you know, can you tell us about when you realized that service was going to be a part of your life? And you wanting to be, you recognize that you wanted to be something bigger than yourself? I was like, hey, I appreciate you thinking I was like that when I was 17 years old, but I just wanted a machine gun.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Right. It's the same thing, you know, and I just, I just tell it like it is. That's just, that's the reality. It was, you know, we were in a paper mill town and nothing against folks that work in the mill, but that's it. I mean, you either, you're going to go have a career working in the mill or you gotta go find something somewhere else. And when I found out the army had a helicopter program and I could sign up and get trained to do it, I'm like, that's me. And fortunate one that, you know, one of the guys that it worked out for.

• 7:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You say, I was barely 17 when I sneaked off to a briefing at the local recruiting office. The army sales pitch was slick. I'd be attending all these advanced and top secret training schools and have all sorts of incredible adventures. And I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. I wanted to get into flight school right away, but the recruiter told me that was not possible. I would have to join up and then apply for flight school while in service. Still, my test scores were pretty high and I was confident that I eventually would make it. College was not an option for me. I only wanted to fly and I signed that commitment paper on October 25th, 1978. So you did that your junior year?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see. So that would have been the fall of my senior year.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jocko Willink?

  A year later, shortly after my graduation from high school, I found myself in basic training. So you go to basic training. How's that?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. All those wonderful adventures all quickly become reality. No, it was, it was, I think, you know, for me, having grown up the way I did.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  It was a shock. I mean, it really was. Now, basic training, looking back now compared to a lot of the other stuff that went on through my career, was probably nothing. But for a kid who, you know, didn't do a whole lot, had a couple of fairly easy jobs, and, you know, it was a dramatic change of lifestyle.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  What sports did you play growing up in New Hampshire?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Actually, mostly hockey. I played a little football. I was horrible at baseball. I still can't throw a baseball. I don't know what the problem is. And then, you know, a lot of outdoor activities, skiing, a lot of snow skiing, actually. My dad was a big hunter and fisherman, so we did a lot of that. You know, his job, other than being a National Guard, he actually was a surveyor for a forestry company. So he got out in the woods all the time. And for him, that was his dream job, because he's a hunter, so now he can go recon where he's gonna go hunting while he's getting paid to work for the paper company. So it was a win-win for him. But the end result was a lot of time outdoors and awesome place to grow up. But, you know, northern New England is just

• 9:50Speaker 01

  a fantastic place. And, you know, every memory I have of it is a good one.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I grew up in Connecticut and Maine. So, yeah, New England has definitely has a lot of nice things about it, that's for sure.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, as soon as you get away from the cities.

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  That is also for sure. So you end up going to DLI, Defense Language Institute. How, what, did you just get a good score on the D-Lab or something?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  So, you know, the recruiter, like you just said, told me I couldn't go straight to flight school.

• 10:19Jocko Willink?

  Is that true or not?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It's not. So you've heard the line, right? You know, when a recruiter's line, because his lips are moving. I mean, that's pretty much, they have a quota, they're trying to fill slots, you know, they're gonna push you in that direction. I guess they were just short Spanish voice intercept operators that particular day. So he convinced me. And, you know, I talked to a couple of folks and they said, they're gonna send you to school for a year to learn a language? That's a great deal. You should take it. So I agreed and I did it.

• 10:47Jocko Willink?

  So you went to Spanish school. You get done with that, and then what? Did you get stationed down in Panama after that?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I did, I did.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing? Flying up and listening, listening in on comms?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  No, we actually had a station there. Actually, there were two. There were one on the east side and one on the west side. And we were listening to comms throughout Central America. There's a gigantic antenna array, and we kind of sat right in the middle of it, and we just searched for communications and... Uh, my job was to find it and then like write a summary of what they were talking about. And then it would go to the analysts and they would decide whether or not it was, you know, worth really documenting. So I'm, I'm recording it and I'm making notes, basically. So it wasn't exactly the glamorous, you know, James Bond career that I thought it might be as described. Yeah.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  And you start putting in for flight school as soon as you get there?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Very soon afterward. I still remember, you know, I'd already wanted to fly and I was on the beach one day. I mean, Panama is a pretty nice place to be. Don't get me wrong. It was a good assignment. And these two Hueys came low level right over the beach. And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. I, I need to go pursue that because it, you know, it's just, there's something about, I don't know. It, helicopters, if you get involved in them, they get in your blood, you know, there's, there's nothing better. And, uh, when, when I, when I had that moment on the beach, I said, I'm, I'm getting this going again. People don't realize now, you know, everything we do is on our phone, on, you know, go log in the internet. Back then, I mean, you're filling out forms and, you know, making copies and, and putting it in an envelope. So it was a, it was a little bit of an adventure, applying for flight school from overseas, but I made it happen. I got accepted.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  How, how, what was like the acceptance rate? Was it hard to get accepted?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know if it was super hard. Uh, the, uh, the hard part actually came in flight school. A lot of people washed out or, or, uh, you know, again, they're trying to get certain numbers through. So like our class started with 80 and we ended up graduating 40. Now they didn't all get washed out, but they got pushed back to other classes. Yeah. So.

• 12:50Jocko Willink?

  And that's like going right back into boot camp when you, when you go to Fort Rocker, Alabama, as far as they're gonna tighten you up and.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, they shave your head again and you know, you're doing square meals and you got five minutes to eat and you know, they're yelling at you from the moment you wake up. They're inspecting your bed, but it's all, there's a purpose and I'm sure some of it doesn't accomplish much, but a lot of the stuff, when you look back at it, it's about attention to detail, right? I mean, if, if you're pre-flight in aircraft or you're flying a mission, you gotta be focused on what you're doing. I mean, you, you know, you can't be, you know, off in la la land. You gotta, you gotta be, you know, that, that's exactly two inches. It's supposed to be two inches. Okay. It's good. Move on to the next thing, right? But, you know, at the time you're like, why are they inspecting my bed? You know, it doesn't, it doesn't seem to make sense, but it weeds out the people that, that can't do that sort of thing. They don't have that discipline.

• 13:42Jocko Willink?

  So you start off in a TH-55, which I thought was funny you say in the book, they had those things painted bright orange. Like, hey, stay away from this student.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 13:54Jocko Willink?

  Like student driver side.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, because they were dangerous. My roommate had a midair, just to put it in perspective, yeah. I mean, we had, see, you solo with less than 10 hours in the aircraft. So can you imagine 10 hours of flight time and you're given a helicopter, go take it around the pattern?

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  Oof.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And he and another classmate crashed into each other because you're flying multiple runways that are parallel to each other. So they're like opposite direction in the pattern and they both overshot and they ran into each other. Now fortunately, it was minor damage, but again, you got seven, eight hours in a helicopter and you suddenly had a midair, what do I do? One of them thought he had an engine failure, which is not even close to what the problem was. So he did what's called an auto rotation, thinking, you know, but his engine's working fine. He just, but he got it on the ground somehow.

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  How do you, how do you collide helicopters and not have a catastrophic event?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It's your lucky day. I mean, go straight to Vegas because I mean, they should have both been dead and neither one of them actually even washed out. They kept, they stayed with the class. It was amazing.

• 14:58Jocko Willink?

  What part made contact?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  So the rotor blades of one impacted the landing gear and underneath of the other. So it like chopped part of the landing gear off and chopped some antennas off.

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay, then I guess it makes sense.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exciting times right out of the gate.

• 15:16Jocko Willink?

  And then you go from that bird to a Huey?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you think you were in NOM when you were flying the Huey?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Actually, it feels like you're getting in the space shuttle. I mean, because you know, it's, it's like a, maybe you get into a Ferrari if you drive a Toyota every day, you know? I mean, just seems very advanced. There's just a lot of stuff in there. And, and then of course that happens again when I ultimately end up in the Blackhawk. But you know, each, each leap forward is, you know, there's a lot more systems to know and a lot more gauges and it's, it's just incredible. You know, the first time you fly it, it's like, wow, okay, I'm really here. This is, this is where I wanted to go, you know? And then you keep going beyond that.

• 15:55Jocko Willink?

  It seems like, again, from my rudimentary knowledge and from being in, you know, being, flying around in a Huey, it seems like when you're in a Huey.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  You're in like a 1965 muscle car? And then when you go into a Blackhawk, you feel like you're in a, in a brand new, you know, Tesla, like electronic everything. Is that accurate? Or am I just dumb?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  No, you're, you're absolutely right. And I have to be careful here because my wife is actually a Huey pilot. So I, I can't, I can't say any disparaging things about a Huey. It's a great Eric. She always jokes around and says, you know, the last, when they fly the last Blackhawk to a museum and they fly the crew out, they'll fly that crew out with a Huey because it'll be around longer than the Blackhawk ever will. But no, you're right. It just, it, it seems, I, I have a picture of the first flight I took in a Blackhawk from behind, you know, it has digital gauges and things like that that you just, you know, don't have in those legacy aircraft. They're all steam gauges or needles. So, uh, you know, again, it's, it's like flying a spaceship. I mean, it really, it's intimidating at first, but after a while it's just an extension of yourself.

• 17:02Jocko Willink?

  And then what was your, so you get qualified in the Blackhawk and then you go, you end up getting stationed over in Korea to be a, to be a medevac pilot?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Right. And when I first got that assignment, I'm like medevac, you know, I don't want to go fly medevac. I want to be, you know, in the 101st or, um, you know, one of the, the real, you know, go to war kind of units. But in the end, being in medevac was the best assignment I could get because you're by yourself. You're, you're constantly flying single ship missions. You, you graduate to pilot command status very quickly. So you start being forced into that decision-making process and, you know, owning it and the responsibility and all those things that go along with being in charge of something. Whereas if you, if you go to a, a more traditional unit, you're, you're just kind of a duck in a row. You're not, you're not doing a lot of things on your own. You don't have a lot of decision-making put on you.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And I flew a lot. We flew a ton in that unit. And as a brand new pilot, you need those two things. You need experience, you know, moving the sticks around and you need to be put in situations where you have to make decisions. That really helps you grow.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  And you've got life and death situations happening because you're going to pick up guys that are injured in training operations and what have you. So you and I haven't said this yet, but obviously I'm not reading this whole book right now. You know, there's so much detail and you talk about the lessons you learned there. That's some of the stuff that's in the book. The book's incredible for all kinds of lessons, incredible storytelling. And that's what you talk about, some of those, some of those situations that you were in where you had people's lives on the line and you're making decisions as a, as a young warrant officer flying those birds. Definitely a lot of lessons learned there.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I look back, I mean, I was 22 and I look at, you know, I've got kids that are much older than that. And I, I'm like, I'm not sure that I would put them in that responsibility. Nothing against them. It's just, you know, you, you, you think about how green you are. You know, I mean, that's, that's fairly young to be taking on that kind of responsibility. But that's, that's how you evolve and become what you, you really can be. If you don't, you don't push the limit, you're not ever going to get where you might go.

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  So you do that, you do the medevac for two years in Korea?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a one-year tour, but I was getting so much flight time and I liked it there so much. I said, Hey, I'll stay longer. So I extended my tour, not quite two years, but almost.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  And from there, you head back to Fort Campbell. When you're there, I'm gonna go to the book here. January 1986, I reported back to Fort Campbell and with another pilot from my medevac unit in Korea, bought a house off base. I remember it well because I was, as I was unpacking gear, the television was on and I stood there open mouth, watching the explosion of the space shuttle, shuttle Challenger. It was a national tragedy, but considering how long the space program had gone without a fatal mishap, I wasn't at all surprised. It's a reminder that if you spend your career in the air, you can't get complacent.

• 20:00Jocko Willink?

  The next day I was ready and raring to audition for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. How had you heard about the Night Stalkers prior to this?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  So they were still kinda undercover at that, undercover is not really the right word, but not, not really spoken about publicly, certainly not by the military. I actually heard about them in a bar in Korea, you know, some guy talking about, hey, they got this unit, you know? And I'd read Tom Clancy books, I mean, I was, I was, you know, very intrigued by that sort of thing. Uh, never really been exposed to, to the real world part of it, but knew it all existed and, and thought, you know, that could be the next level for me, you know? And, and, uh, as soon as I heard about it, I was very, very intrigued and thought, yeah, that I'd like to end up there someday. Uh, and, you know, naive at the time in terms of what it would take to get there, but that's when the, the seed was planted.

• 20:55Jocko Willink?

  And it was, it was a, it was almost like a little mix-up when you went there, cause you went and you signed into the 101st and sort of checked onboard? And once you checked onboard, the guys at the 160th were like, you already checked onboard with the 101st, sorry.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Right. My, my orders were to the 101st, I signed in and at that point they got their claws on me and I can't get out of it. In the end, good, you know, sometimes things in life happen and they end up being good, even though it's not what you wanted to have happen, but I got more experience. Went to the instructor pilot course, you know, got a bunch of night vision goggle time, all things that really helped before you make that leap to, to the soft world.

• 21:33Jocko Willink?

  And so then you spend that time at the 101st, um, and you're, you're, are you figuring out more about the Night Stalkers at this time? You learning more?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's when I, uh, run across Clay Hubmacher, who I know you know. And, uh, he actually at the time, when I first met him was a W-2, so he had been a Marine, I think you know the story. Then he was a W-2 when I met him and then he got commissioned as a second lieutenant and ultimately retires as a two-star general. So he just couldn't hold a job. I don't know what the problem was, but when I met him, he, he, you know, he knew about the unit and in fact, he had, uh, gotten into the unit and brought me over there to look at the aircraft. So not only is now the mission. A seem, you know, very, uh, full of intrigue, but the aircraft themselves have got this sexy equipment onboard that I didn't even know existed. I mean, we had forward-looking infrared

• 22:26Speaker 01

  systems. I mean, this is 1988. Most people didn't know FLIR even existed, you know, and, and it's already on the aircraft. They've already got it. They have a digital cockpit. I mean, it was, it was very rudimentary from today's standards, but again, you know, this is just stuff that was unheard of. And I'm thinking, so it's a super cool mission, flying for these super cool customers with these super cool aircraft. I gotta figure out how to get over here. So that, that just kinda amped me up a little bit more, actually.

• 22:55Jocko Willink?

  And then what was the selection process once you got over to, to the 160th?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  So I actually ended up being in the first formal green platoon that the unit ever did. Before my class, you basically just get assigned to a company and then your green platoon was informal. You did kinda the same things, but it wasn't a dedicated class. And, you know, modeled somewhat after BUDs and some of the other training courses, the unit realized, we need a, we need a dedicated course to get people through because it's too much of a burden on the unit. The unit needs to be focused on executing, you know, missions and, and training, the, the train, the, at the unit level. The training of new people should be done by a dedicated training organization. So they created this, uh, you know, green platoon as it's called now, and it includes, you know, all the typical stuff.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  The land nav, physical fitness, swim test, psych eval, lot of flying, you know, life-saving, shooting, you know, not at the level that, that you went through, but, uh, you know, our focus is more on the aviation part, but you get a fair amount of all that other stuff just so, you know, if you end up in a situation where you're not a pilot anymore, you're on the ground, you're at least not a burden to the ground force. You can do something besides just sit there and say, you know, you know, help get me home, you know? So, so I think that's the main idea. You know, you can do some life-saving stuff, you can shoot a weapon, that sort of thing. Uh, and it lasted.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I'm thinking it lasted nine months. So I mean, it's a pretty long time, a lot of flying. And that's the flying is usually what ends up weeding people out because, and I think this is still the case today. The, the philosophy was, yep, global positioning system is great. But when it goes down, you still got to be able to get your customers on the target. So we really focused heavily on land nav with a map, you know, planning, drawing lines on the map. And being able to hit that target, even if your systems go down. And that's hard to do because especially when you start relying on the technology, because then you, it's like getting over here today, you know, I didn't even think about where I was going. I hit Uber, put the address in, you know, I didn't even know how long it would take until I, I punched all that stuff in. But

• 25:05Speaker 01

  if you rely too heavily on that, you know, and, and things really matter, like, you know, getting, getting soft operators on a target, you gotta be able to do it no matter what. So there's a lot of, a lot of focus on that manual stuff. And some people just aren't very adept at that. And I'm not a great navigator. I, I know some great navigators. I mean, these guys, the map, like it jumps out at them. They, it, they, they see it different than I see it. For me, it's a bunch of lines. And if it's not an interstate highway or major body of water, I, I can't identify it all that well. But these other guys are just unbelievable. And, and so you always want to be paired with one of those guys because they can, they can help you. But I mean, I, I do it obviously well enough because I, I made it through the training, but

• 25:46Speaker 01

  it, uh, it was, it was just fantastic. You learn all the special mission equipment, you know, like things like fast rope. At the time, the army didn't do fast ropes. I don't, I don't know that they do it widespread even today. So you gotta learn how to do that. You gotta learn, you know, just all these different things that you learn that you didn't learn in your previous experience is all part of Green Platoon. So when you show up, you're at least a co-pilot. You're ready to jump in and, and serve that co-pilot position.

• 26:12Jocko Willink?

  And just to give people some, some background, because we're kind of talking about it, because you and I know about it. But you say in the book here, to clarify what the 160th is, which is their, their nickname, their call sign is the Nightstalkers. You say this, "The Nightstalkers were strictly a special operations outfit. They had the best helicopters, the latest equipment, and an unlimited acquisition budget. They flew mostly at night, using the latest technology, night vision devices, deep behind enemy lines, racing just above sand dunes, ocean waves, or jungle canopies to deliver special ops teams. Their missions were hostage rescues, snatching grabs of bad guys, even liberations of enemy equipment.

• 26:56Jocko Willink?

  Their customers were the elite of the elite, and strictly classified, meaning Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, or other special mission units. The existence of the Nightstalkers was officially denied, and their pilots had reputations as the James Bonds of the community. If a mission was regarded as impossible, the Nightstalkers would get it. And impossible had always been seductive to me." So that's a little bit of what, what, what the Nightstalkers do, what their mission is, what their mission set is. So you end up, obviously, you, you get there.

• 27:35Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to fast forward through the book a little bit, pass some of those experiences. And here we go, "On Sunday, December 17th, I was packing up bathing suits and suntan lotion at my house in Clarksville, when my pager beeped and hummed. At the time, Clay Hotmacher had become my platoon leader, but he was already more than that. Clay lived right above Lori and me, in our two-family house, so we'd spend a lot of time together on and off base. He was my boss, but he was also my friend. I called into Fort Campbell, and he picked up on the first ring. Hotmacher, Durant, come on in." Roger that. I did not experience even a twinge of surprise and I quickly switched my vacation suitcase for

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  my combat duffel. Like many special operators, I was a news junkie, watching and listening international flare-ups the way stockbrokers scanned the ticks in the market. I knew that Manuel Noriega had already pushed the United States over the edge. On Saturday night, four young officers had been driving downtown in Panama City in the search of the perfect pizza. Outside Noriega's military headquarters, they had been stopped at a PDF roadblock. When members of the National, the police began beating on the car with batons and hauling the hauling on the door handles, the young Americans concluded that they were about

• 28:58Jocko Willink?

  to disappear into one of Noriega's notorious dungeons forever. The driver hit the gas pedal as the Panamanians opened fire, killing Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz. It hadn't ended there. An American Navy Lieutenant, Adam Curtis, had witnessed the shooting incident along with his wife. Both of them were dragged off for interrogations. While Mrs. Curtis was forced to assume the position against a prison cell wall and repeatedly threatened with rape, her husband was gagged, pistol-whipped, and kicked in the groin right in front of her. This had gone on for four hours until the battered young couple was released to collapse into a public street. Noriega's message had been clearly received in Washington:

• 29:43Jocko Willink?

  "Come and get me, gringos."

• 29:47Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you're getting called in for. And an interesting side note here, the officer, the Navy officer that you talk about here, Adam Curtis, he was actually a SEAL. And I worked with him. He was my task unit commander in a platoon, and I think it was 1995. So, five or six years after this happened, he was my, yeah, he was my, my task unit commander.

• 30:15Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  It is a small world, especially in the soft world.

• 30:19Jocko Willink?

  So, talk to us a little bit about Panama and what you did there.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  You know, I've, I've said multiple times lately, as I've talked about, you know, my, my background and everyone knows me by Black Hawk Down, you know, one day in a 22 year career. And if I could pick what people knew me by, I'd actually probably pick Just Cause because when you think about what we trained for at the macro level, I mean, this was, there was a hostage rescue on that mission. There was an airfield takedown on that mission. SEALs disabled airplanes that Torrijos was gonna, or Noriega was gonna try to get out on. There was the largest airborne drop since Vietnam down at Rio Hado. Apaches got used for the first time, F-117 got used for the first time.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, this was about as complicated an op as it get, and it was, it all went down in like 36 hours. I mean, that moment you just described, when I'm in my living room, we're launching on H-hour a day and a half later at 1 o'clock in the morning. I still remember looking at Donovan Bryley, who I flew with on that mission. He ends up, Donovan loses his life in Somalia. Like, is this real? Cause you know, we, we'd been to, to Prime Chance, which was technically a combat op, but no hostilities really when we were there, when I was there.

• 31:38Jocko Willink?

  Where, where was Prime Chance?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  In the Persian Gulf. The Iranians were mining the.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, on the barges and whatnot.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we lived on the barges and that's actually the first time that night vision goggles were used in combat. One of, one of the guys from the 160th, Little Bird guy, shot a bog hammer that was dropping mines into the sea and used a flakette, actually. And one of the Iranians, after they captured him, has, it's still got a flakette in his cheek. So obviously, Brown's on target. But, you know, for Donovan and I, 1 o'clock in the morning, flying on this mission with two Apaches to go down to Rio Hado to support this airfield seizure, I mean, we're, we're sort of in disbelief, you know? Cause how many times you get spun up and spun down? You know, they were gonna go, we're gonna go, and then, no, we're not going.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  And then that 2,000 pound bomb goes off at precisely 1 a.m. You know, we all bash our, our, the other services, you know, they're nowhere near as good as us. But I will give the Air Force credit, that bomb hit. Precisely at 1 o'clock in the morning and it was a pretty big splash. I mean 2,000 pound bomb makes a heck of a flash in the middle of the night. So at that point, we realized, you know, this is real. But over the next, you know, several days, you know, just amazing missions, just complete success, highly complex op and just that to me was the the ultimate

• 33:05Speaker 01

  special operations mission. Just so many facets, all done well. Now, we took some losses. You know, we we we lost a couple pilots in a firefight in in Cologne daytime, you know, that's always when we end up in trouble. We're in close, trying to take on people that you can't see. There's a lot of ways to shoot a helicopter down and unfortunately, this little bird got shot down a couple of days later and both pilots were killed. But but overall, just an incredible mission. And, you know, ultimately, we do end up getting Manuel Noriega and he gets flown out actually by Cliff Walcott, who was flying with Donovan Briley in Somalia when he lost his life. So they were all one, you know, just one band of brothers, you know, and being able to participate in those kinds of ops. And

• 33:50Speaker 01

  I actually ended up supporting SEALs on the on the Cologne side. That was that was my mission. We were, you know, trying to find Noriega. We called it the hunt for Elvis, you know, because there were Elvis sightings all over the place, you know, we get people would call it and say, yeah, he's over here. And we'd go, it wasn't quite that, you know, helter skelter. But there were several missions where we thought, okay, this is legit intel. He, you know, it's legitimate enough to launch and we would take a place down and he was never there. But finally, you know, as as most people know, we found him hiding and he eventually gave up and we flew him out. What was the what was the total time that you spent down there?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Well, oddly enough, I departed early because I had to go teach Green Platoon. I had got to the point in the unit where I was now teaching others, scary, scary thought. But, uh, and I had to go back and start the training, you know, things were starting to wind down. I think Noriega had been located and the number of direct action missions was, was scaling back. Uh, you know, we had control of the whole country, so there wasn't any need to really, uh, you know, keep flying as many missions that we had been flying. So the commander decided, hey, go back, teach Green Platoon. So I was only there probably a week. I mean, you know, to get all that done in a week. That's why I say, if there was something that could be known for, I wish it was that mission. Cause it really was amazing, but that is just a footnote in history for most of us.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, the good thing is in the book, you detail, you go through a lot of those details. Talk about what those missions were like. Um, yeah, it's, it's really good for me to read it. Cause I, I only ever got debriefed on like what the SEALs specifically did. So it was very cool to hear from your perspective and see what a bunch of the other units, including, you know, your unit.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:34Jocko Willink?

  Good to see.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  By the way, I wanted to say something, and if I forget to say it later, I really appreciate how complimentary you, you were in extreme ownership about the conventional army units that you worked with. Cause you know, a lot of times we, at least in my era, there wasn't a lot of combat experience. So for us, the special ops guys kind of looked down on those and that was wrong. And I, I always felt, you know, after the fact that it was immaturity on my part to kind of look at them that way, because they just didn't have the experience. They just hadn't done it, you know? But, you know, to hear your perspective on, you know, battle hardened conventional units out there kicking ass, just like everybody else. I was just really appreciate that. That was good stuff.

• 36:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'd, I'd love to take some kind of credit for, for that, but when we were, we were lucky enough to be in those situations where, I mean, I was just working side by side with those guys. And, and there was just no doubt in their, in their professionalism, in their bravery. And it was, it was an honor to be able to serve alongside them and not even just active duty army and marine corps. But you know, when we got to Ramadi in 2006, it was a national guard, national guard on the ground and they were, they were doing an incredible job, taking the fight to the enemy. And, and they, you know, I told Colonel Gronski, he came on this podcast.

• 36:49Jocko Willink?

  100% my, some of my guys are alive because the lessons that we learned from the National Guard when we showed up there. And then when the 111 AD showed up, 100% some of my guys are alive because when we called, they came. The 111 AD, whatever battalion came, and there was multiple over and over again. So, we owe so much to those guys and we won't ever forget them. But I think you're right, you know, when I was in the SEAL Teams in the 90s, you know, we definitely were, I think, partially just ignorant and, and, and partially arrogant.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Right. Well, they just, they hadn't been to war. So, you know, in our minds, we're the, we're the real world guys and they're just practicing.

• 37:33Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  But they, and you think about National Guard in particular. I mean, most National Guard units had not deployed, you know, prior to 9/11 for decades. And to know that they ramped up like that's amazing.

• 37:44Jocko Willink?

  They did indeed. It's a tribute, it's a testament to the American warfighter.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit more.

• 37:54Jocko Willink?

  You end up in the first Gulf War.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:57Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "The war had been ramping up since the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in August. Those of us who had been invited were pleased to be there. No one was happier about it than Cliff Walcott. His innovative concept, the direct action penetrator configuration of the Black Hawk which had missed the party in Panama, was finally going to see some action. However, while Charlie Company and its, and its DAPs, that's the direct action penetrator, had drawn us the assignment to provide four of the gunships for scud hunting, they didn't have enough qualified pilots for this operation. So, five of us from Delta Company, myself, Cliff, Clay, Hotmacher, Eddie Mole, and Stan Wood have been called upon to complete the package." So, this is kind of a new deal. They outfitted these, these Blackhawks with more weapon systems so they

• 38:40Jocko Willink?

  could, they could bring some firepower, more firepower.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Right. You know, the unit doesn't have Apache. So, what we were trying to do is, is provide Apache-like capability, but not have to have a dedicated platform. Because that's the issue, right? If you can only put so many birds on a C5.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  If you could put one on there that could do both the attack mission and the assault mission, that gives the ground force commander a lot more opportunity to, you know, to react. So it was a brilliant idea and I'm actually shocked that it hasn't kind of taken on more of a life, certainly with international Black Hawk operators, because it's essentially two for one. I mean, you're getting an attack helicopter and an assault helicopter. And having been there, you know, on day one, when this whole concept was put together and Cliff was the godfather. I mean, he, he was a Cobra guy and he just, you know, from the moment he started flying Blackhawks, I think I gotta figure out how to put guns on this thing. You know, this is a waste of my time. And, and we finally did it today. I mean, the

• 39:42Speaker 01

  thing has got, I mean, it looks like EC 130. I mean, it's got stuff all over the place. Yeah.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I'm going to fast forward a little bit here. You're out on an operation, you're Scud hunting. Zulu 32, this is Charlie seven, Charlie four seven. It was Lieutenant Colonel Doug Brown, Battalion Commander of the First Battalion of the 160th, making contact from the Jock in Arar. Roger four seven, I answered, go ahead. I have a mission change for you. Three, two, he said. Colonel Brown's voice was usually cold as ice water, but on this night, he actually sounded a little keyed up. Copy these coordinates. Roger that, I said. As, and as Lance continued the lazy orbit over the activities below, I repeated the coordinates back to Brown. You are cleared direct to the target. Three, two, the Colonel

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  ordered. Target is a possible, and you couldn't hear him. Transmission had broken up on the last word. Four, seven, I said, say again, all after coordinate. Roger that, Brown answered. I say again, it is possible. And the satcom failed again. I fumed, I keyed the mic button once more. Four, seven, you are breaking up. Please spell all after. And he said, Sierra, Charlie, uniform, Delta, Brown growled.

• 41:00Jocko Willink?

  And then you knew it was a scud. And again, this is interesting because the individual that you're talking about Lieutenant Colonel Doug Brown ended up being the four-star SOCOM commander in charge of all special operations. And when he was in that job, I was actually the admiral's aide for Admiral Joe Maguire. And we would see General Brown all the time and did a bunch of trips with him and got to know him. Just what a great guy he was as well.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  He really is.

• 41:31Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, you know, you say he's usually cold as ice water. He's super, I mean, just super unemotional, very, very calm, laid back. And here you are, have this opportunity to get these scuds. And

• 41:46Speaker 01

  So I gotta tell you, it just reminded me, I'm actually writing this down on my knee board because we have a knee board. And, you know, he sent the coordinates, I gotta write those down. And then he's, I'm trying to figure out what in heck is he saying? And then he does it phonetically. And I still remember, S C. And it's like a game show, you know? Oh, yeah, I got it.

• 42:07Jocko Willink?

  Scud for a hundred dollars?

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  But the first one that you went to go attack, your weapons didn't work, right?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:17Jocko Willink?

  Talk us through that.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  So.

• 42:19Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta be just a little bit frustrating.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Oh, because it's

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  The scuds at the time, because I was, I was in the Navy now, but the scuds were this huge threat. Like this was the major threat that they had. They could arm them with chemical weapons. It was this, that was the big focus. You heard all the news all the time was scud, scud, scud, scud. We gotta get these scuds. We gotta stop these scuds. And they had launched scuds. And so here you are, you finally get one of these scuds, and you got your, your new aircraft with all of its weapons on it, and you roll in to shoot that thing. What happens?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Ah, I guess my powder got wet. I don't know what happened. No, we know what happened. So I'm flying and I push the trigger and nothing happens. And I come around again and I'm flying with Lance Hill, who you mentioned a moment ago. And I'm like, check the switches. So he checks the switches because you know, there's a lot of stuff you gotta do. And you can do something incorrectly and it's not armed technically. And I come around again, I push the trigger, still nothing.

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  What are you trying to engage with?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  So all we had was miniguns, 7.62, which are formidable, but you know, I mean, that's not a typical attack helicopter weapon. But we used them in a fixed forward mode. So you're diving fire on the target. And then rockets. I mean, so normally our profile would be you start shooting the mini first. And then you fire, now the rockets, they're, they're free fire, uh, free flying aerial rockets, FFAR. So they're not guided and they come out of the tube moving kind of slow. So they're hard to hit, uh, you know, a precise target with. So we always use the minigun first and then we'd follow that with rockets. Once we knew, you know, we were kind of aligned on the target.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  And if you did it enough, you got pretty good at it. You could, you could hit a point target like a vehicle fairly often, not every time. So I'm trying to hit, you know, obviously minigun first, and then I'm going to go to rockets. And I try them both and neither one works. So I look at Lance and I said, Lance, it's one effing switch. Arm it, you know, I figured it had to be him, you know, it can't be the aircraft. So we come around again, it still doesn't work. I mean, I'm so upset. It's like equated to if you're a hunter, this is the biggest buck you've ever seen in your life.

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  Biggest buck, the entire nation is wanting you to hunt this buck.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  And he's standing there just chewing, you know, stationary broadside. And you can't shoot. I mean, it was unreal. I got so upset again, you know, should I have been? Probably not. But I, I think I said something like, I'm crashing this freaking aircraft into the ground.

• 45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're going kamikaze mode. That's what you say in the book.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  I just was that upset. And unfortunately, you know, we're in a flight of two aircraft. So the other aircraft is just making these same orbits and shooting. And not only is it that I can't shoot, but I'm watching him shoot and he can't shoot nearly as good as me. And he's not even hitting the target. So it's making me more furious. But in the end, you know, no damage done. There's some speculation that they were actually decoys. I don't know if you're going to mention that later, but which it didn't really matter. I mean, we want to blow the shit out of this thing, no matter whether it's a decoy or not. And that was a long flight home. I mean, that was a painful flight home. And of course, you know, all your buds, what do they think, right?

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  You dorked it up.

• 45:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  There's nothing wrong with that aircraft. You know, you guys screwed it up.

• 45:58Jocko Willink?

  What was wrong with the aircraft?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  There was

• 46:00Jocko Willink?

  Just some little technical problem?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we sort of threw this thing together. I mean, it hadn't been through rigorous testing or anything like that. And, and it was a electronic component that was overheating and failing after being turned on for two hours. And we just didn't know because we'd never flown long missions with it before. We'd always crank up, turn it on, go shoot, worked fine. But if you flew for two hours, it overheated and didn't work anymore.

• 46:26Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, you guys did get a SCUD. They talk about that in there. You talk about that in there. The war ended over pretty quick, obviously. But at the same time, you know, much like in Panama, you, you, the Hilo went down. You lost Mike Anderson and Chuck Cooper, Chris Chapman, and Mario Vega Velasquez, and another special operator. And they went down, lost those guys.

• 47:02Jocko Willink?

  You get done with that, and then it's redeployed back to America after that one. You got, I mean, going in the 90s, 80s and 90s, getting like, real world experience in both Panama and then going over to the Persian Gulf, that's That's freaking legit for back then.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it was. That's why we were arrogant. You know, I mean, that was the unfortunate effect of all that because even in the unit, there were guys that just didn't end up on the on the rotation. So they don't have, they might've been there 15 years, but they don't have the combat experience. That that was painful for them.

• 47:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. I, that's, that's a nightmare.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:43Jocko Willink?

  That's a, I got very, very lucky my whole career. I got very, very lucky my whole career. And I, I was always on the, the, the lucky side, not the unlucky side, you know, standing around going, I wish I would have been there for that. Not including the first Gulf War, which I missed because I was still in training.

• 48:00Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, that had to be an interesting, uh, dynamic in the locker room. I know the, uh, the Vietnam guys. So we used to call new guys, if you hadn't been on deployment, then you were a new guy. And as soon as you went on your first deployment, didn't really where, matter where you went, then you weren't a new guy anymore. But the Vietnam guys, unless you were in combat, you were a new guy. So you could have been a new guy in their mind for 10 years.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Your whole career. Yeah.

• 48:26Jocko Willink?

  Cherry boy.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:28Jocko Willink?

  They would bring it to some of those old Vietnam guys.

• 48:34Jocko Willink?

  All right. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit.

• 48:38Jocko Willink?

  Somalia, October 3rd, 1993. It was a perfect day for prayer, a bright and tranquil Sunday morning. The skies and seas were polished blue, soft winds bore seville, see silver edged clouds and the coastal sands gleamed white like ribbons of salt. It would have been easy to believe it in some sort of heavenly power. But for the most of us in Task Force Ranger, the helicopter pilots and our crews, the eager young Rangers and the squint eyed special forces, the muscled armorers and whiz kid intelligence analysts, the all, these autumn mornings in Mogadishu all ran together. A Sabbath day felt hardly different than any other bleeding into the work week like the steamy bleached

• 49:23Jocko Willink?

  uh, hues of the African vista. Sure, a few guys knelt before the army chaplain with heads bowed praying for salvation. The rest of us prayed for another mission.

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  How long had you been in Somalia at that point?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  So we got there at the end of August, so we'd been there about six weeks, I think.

• 49:41Jocko Willink?

  And, and what was your op tempo like?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Pretty heavy. I mean, we flew, most of the time we're flying every day, every night. Now, it wasn't ops every time. We were flying these things called signature flights because we're trying to desensitize the enemy. You know, because obviously if you're the bad guys and you're watching the airfield and a flight of 25 helicopters takes off, that's a clue, right? But if you're flying every day and every night, then they become sort of more oblivious to it. And, and that was the theory. So, and then, you know, a lot of the operator guys wanted to see the city from the air. And, you know, the more you fly around an area, the more familiar you get. So you're more likely to get on target the way you need to. So all that combined, we were flying just about every day and every night.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  Going into 3 October, when you, how often would you conduct an actual mission, like a hit?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  So October 30th is my eighth real op in six weeks.

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  How often were the guys getting contacted on these previous operations, like enemy contact, firefights and whatnot?

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Uh, it started to ramp up, you know, on the first couple, nothing, because we had the element of surprise. But after the first few, like on, I think it's mission five, we're, we're trying to capture the number two guy, guy named Oz Minato. And daytime mission again, and we're going into the compound where he was, he was actually there. And RPGs are exploding in the air as we're on the way in. And there was enough firefighting going on on the ground that we actually didn't go back into the compound to pull the operators out. We went to an alternate pickup zone because it was just too, too hot. So, you know, I would say about halfway into the sequence, the, the Somali started to get a little bit more belligerent.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  You know, plus the, the big difference is if you hit a target 2 o'clock in the morning, you're in and out, you're probably not going to get a whole lot. But if you go in the daytime, when everybody's up and around, that's when you tend to get in a little bit more of a scrape and that's the kind of how it played out.

• 51:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was trying to get a feel for, you know, like I only did two deployments to Iraq, but, you know, my first deployment, obviously those are my first real missions and...

• 51:56Jocko Willink?

  Like the mindset of how long it took to where we as a platoon felt like, yeah, this is what we're doing. Sort of like this is our job. This is, I don't want to say mechanical, but we just were well rehearsed and we just, we were just doing our job and it was like doing any other job. It didn't take that long, you know, we, because we were doing a lot of operations. We were basically going out almost every night and doing another hit, another hit, another hit. So you do that five, six, eight times. All right. What's the next target? And you kind of get in that mode. And it sounds like you were, you all were getting, getting in that mode where this is what we're doing. We know how to do it. Lessons were being learned and you make little adjustments and you were there.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we got there pretty quick because we'd rehearse quite a bit back at Fort Bragg. I mean, we had role players and compounds built and all kinds of stuff for, you know, what we thought it was going to be once we got there. Some of that was on target. Some of it was not, but by the time we actually deployed, we were, we had it pretty well down.

• 52:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. In the bustling jock, the mission was developing very rapidly. We couldn't wait to see if our targets would just hang around drinking tea and bullshitting about women and weather. We couldn't hope to have a CIA asset wander into the target building, snap a covert photo of the party and hustle back out with a 100% confirmation. We had to go on information and belief and faith. But in a special op, special ops environment, no element leader can afford to be shy about offering solutions or raising dilemmas. I was a combat vampire who loved the night, but I held my peace about the risk of a daylight op because there was no other option. Yet a number of other officers quickly voiced issues to a background score of distant

• 53:36Jocko Willink?

  Hilo turbines winding up and desert combat boots thumping across the tarmac, tarmac like heavy hail. Sir, someone said to General Garrison, I've got some exfil issues. What's on your mind? Okay, air exfiltration is not an option, so we're forced to use the ground convoy. But I think we might wrap it up long before the vehicles are in position. We'll be there when you're ready, said Colonel McKnight. His lightly armored Humvees and five ton trucks were already assembled to move to a rendezvous point near the Olympic Hotel. I wondered if the hotel had a single client this year or ever. But that but the place is nasty with skinnies today. Someone else said, using the nickname for hostile Somalis. We might get boxed in on the return.

• 54:20Jocko Willink?

  Exfil by airs a negative, another pilot stated firmly. The plan called for the helos to hover at about thirty feet, uncoil fast ropes and let the D-boys and Rangers slide down them like firemen on slick poles. But there was nowhere to land our choppers and pick them up. We could do a rooftop extraction, but like we saw in the last mission, hovering up there like sitting ducks makes us very vulnerable to RPG gunners. And there's an antenna tower on the target building. An SF officer jabbed at a video monitor with his gloved finger. We'd have to blow it before the helos came back in and it'll take time. Don't sweat it, boys, McKnight said to his Ranger officers. Your convoy will be there. And if it's not, Garrison grinned around his cigar stub. The helos will come in and pull your asses out like they always do.

• 55:06Jocko Willink?

  And that was it. We'd been there for all of ten minutes.

• 55:13Jocko Willink?

  Was this like TST, time sensitive target where it came up real quick?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. In fact, we were planning a training op. We were gonna go shoot. Because we had the DAPs there, but we hadn't used them yet. And, you know, ammunition gets old, Lisa, that's what we told the commander. It's like beer in the fridge, you know, if you don't consume it, it's gonna go bad. So, so we were gonna do some shooting and that's why I was in the jock. We were planning that flight. And this thing developed so fast, I actually didn't have time to go back to my bunk and get my kneeboard. I just went without it because we've flown this thing so many times, I didn't need it anyway. But, yeah, so from the time we found out that, you know, these personnel were identified to off, off the ground was, you know, definitely less than an hour, maybe forty minutes, to get the whole entourage up and going, crank all those birds and brief everybody.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, it seems like a lot of time, that's not a lot of time.

• 56:05Jocko Willink?

  No, that's not a lot of time at all. The

• 56:10Jocko Willink?

  You were, you were, the daytime portion of it, the fact that you're going out in the day, you say you like going out in the night, um, but it was the target that was driving you to do this during the day. They were there, you had a pretty good confirmation, not a hundred percent, like you said in the book, but a pretty decent confirmation and that's it. They're there, we're gonna go get them.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was a guy on the ground and he gave the signal that meant, you know, positive ID. And at that point, your decision is, you know, we take the risk and go, or we wait and then they move and we lose them. And that's, you know, that's the commander's decision. I don't, I don't question it. I probably would have made the same call. But, you know, unfortunately, it's three o'clock in the afternoon and, uh, and we can't use, you know, the advantage that we have with all of our night vision technology.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a crazy advantage. It's a crazy advantage. I know we did a lot of daytime opera, my, my second deployment did a lot of daytime operations. My first deployment, we did limited daytime operations for that rare reasons. We'd go at two o'clock in the morning, there's no, no, no factor, no resistance. But sometimes same exact thing, we'd get, hey, this guy is here now in this market, in this village, in this building. We just, we would go. Um, so there's, there's definitely an elevated risk during the day. And the tactical advantage that you have at night can't be, cannot be understated at all.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Right. Actually, there were four risks. I talk about these all the time. Because I was a flight lead, so that means I'm, I'm in, I'm actually in the planning, you know, and the final decision-making process with, with General Garrison and all the, the element commanders. And the four risks that at least from a helo perspective identified as, as, you know, for first and foremost daytime. Second one, we can't land the helos like you, you just talked about. So we can, we have to fast rope in and we can't do an easy extraction. The third one is, uh, that we've done this six times before. And the fourth one is it's in the worst part of the city. This is right where all the bad guys hang out. They call it the Black Sea area. So all four of those things were identified and people ask me, cause there was a lot of criticism after the fact, you know,

• 58:18Speaker 01

  should have gone, shouldn't have gone. But, you know, when you're in the moment, it's, it's like, I often use quarterbacks as an example. It's easy to criticize that quarterback for throwing that interception. But when you're in the moment and that receiver's open and, you know, there's a lot on the line, this third down, you know, you need a touchdown bad and you throw that ball. You can't, you can't criticize that decision. I mean, that decision was made in the moment and you don't know, you know, that the receiver's gonna fall because he slipped on a slick piece of grass. You know, you're making a decision based on what you know at the time and, and I would never criticize General Garrison for making that call. And I always tell people, none of us felt great, but I think we all felt comfortable enough. We went out there saying,

• 59:00Speaker 01

  alright, you know, this is not gonna be probably like most of the other ones, but we're comfortable enough.

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  And you had done a daytime operation, or other daytime operations?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  We had.

• 59:10Jocko Willink?

  And so you had thrown those passes before and they were caught by the receiver like you intended and hey, we're gonna do it again, cuz we've done it before.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Hindsight is always 2020.

• 59:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is.

• 59:25Jocko Willink?

  And again, you gotta buy this book because there's, there's more details in there. Obviously, I'm not covering, covering the whole thing. I'm fast forwarding a little bit here. The Rangers and the Delta Force guys being inserted. And here's your perspective. "I brought Super 6-4 in as low as possible to a 20-foot hover using a utility pole straight down through the chin bubble as my reference. Ropes, I called over my, the intercom. My crew chief, Tommy Bill, echoed me loud and the thick green hausers were deployed. It was a well-rehearsed routine. All I had to do was keep it steady, holding the forward left box position with chalk two right behind me, chalk three a beam to the right and chalk four right behind him. But the pilot of the last chopper, Super 6-7, had been flying C-2 bird until today, just

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  up there boring holes in the sky, and this was his first encounter with the, with the brown monster. The dust cloud was more than 100 feet high and he felt his way down to it like a waiter tiptoeing into an ice cold lake. He deployed his ropes too early and they were 30, only 30 feet long. A Ranger went out his door, lost his grip on the rope and fell into oblivion. It was right there and then that the mission started to unravel, like the hem of an old sweater as you tug on one loose strand. But I didn't know any of that at the time. I was having problems of my own. Right ropes hung, hung up on a wire. It was Bill's voice in my ear, dead calm and steady, telling me we'd snagged on

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  probably the last telephone wire still intact in Mogadishu. Of all the damn phone lines in the city, I thought. Forward 10, Bill offered a correction as he peered down past his minigun at, at the snared hauser."

• 1:01:05Jocko Willink?

  And I carefully nudged the Hilo forward. Hold, he sang. I could tell by his tone that the rope was dangling straight and free. And I held it steady while our 18 Rangers leaped for the lines like comic book heroes. I could hear Steel's chocolate barbuck, go, go, go. And the butt plates of M16s and M60 light machine guns scraping and banging against my floor as the troops dove into the dust storm. Within seconds, they were all gone. Good luck, guys, I whispered, as Bill and Tommy tripped the releases and the ropes fell from their mounts like limp cobras. None of us had a clue that those young Rangers were in for the fight of their lives. Ropes clear, Tommy announced, and I hauled the Hilo into a rising left bank as I keyed my mic. Super 6-4 is out. And that was it.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  I thought it was over.

• 1:01:57Jocko Willink?

  You go out into a holding pattern now. And like other operations that you've gone on, that's you go out in your holding pattern and everyone, the boys on the ground do what the boys on the ground do.

• 1:02:08Jocko Willink?

  Didn't take them very long. Seemed that they were getting the target secured, getting the principals, you know, taken, getting them controlled, getting them blindfolded, getting them cuffed.

• 1:02:20Jocko Willink?

  That Ranger that had fallen, he was critically injured. On top of that, you, you learn that he, they weren't near their designated area either. And I was watching some video. Though that brownout situation was cra- I've been in a ton of brownout. I guess it was because it was in the city brownout. Is that what made it worse?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, because if you land in the desert, there's a technique that we learn where you almost like land like an airplane, right? You come down and you get a little bit of ground roll and you stay ahead of the cloud. But you can't do that in the city. I mean, you're in it.

• 1:02:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  So you got to find some kind of reference. And like I was talking about, my reference was, there was a pole right there and that's about all I could see, but at least it was enough to maintain the position. But, you know, the further back you are in the flight, the worse it gets because you got yours and everybody else's in front of you that you're dealing with, so. In that guy's defense, he was, he had the worst of it and unfortunately he's a little bit inexperienced.

• 1:03:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and in the open desert, the, the dust has somewhere to go, you know, it'll, it'll expand out to the, or expand out to the sides and you could see on these videos I was watching, that dust has nowhere to go, so it's going straight back up into the air.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:29Jocko Willink?

  There's the biggest dust clouds I've seen, massive.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  It was, it was pretty rough, but we had, we had gotten the technique down pretty well at that point. Unfortunately, he hadn't had much experience with it.

• 1:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Um, you're in, you're now monitoring radios. Were you on one net? Were you on, monitoring the ground net and the air net? Was there multiple nets or were you on one net?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Oh, multiple nets. Yeah, we, we, I always, I didn't make up this phrase, but we call it a helmet fire. When things go really crazy and every net is just, you know, lit up, we've got five radios in our head. So it, it gets pretty ugly because there's a, there's a, there's a command net, there's an air to air net, there's an air to ground net, there's a fires net. And sometimes you can even listen to the tactical commander's net if you want to. Uh, so that's a lot of stuff to keep track of and, and you know, as long as there's not much going on,

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  It works.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Things are quiet, but when crap starts happening, it gets, uh, it gets pretty hard to decipher.

• 1:04:28Jocko Willink?

  I had in my platoons, in my task unit, you weren't allowed to talk on the radio. Like you weren't allowed, like everybody knew, they wouldn't say something on the radio unless there was no possible other way of communicating it for this very reason.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:41Jocko Willink?

  Cause when things would go sideways, everyone, if they think they can just start talking about what's important to them, the, the nets get cluttered up. Then you put five nets of that.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  There was another one that I would have never thought about before, but there's a thing called the CEOI, you know, for those who aren't familiar with it, which basically gives you the call signs and frequency and all that stuff. So like in the CEOI, your unit would be one designation and then your role in that unit would be another. So let's just say X-ray six, seven. That means that's X-ray unit and six, seven is the commander. Well, in another unit, it might be Zulu six, seven. But what people started doing in, in, in the chaos was abbreviating. Six, seven. So what freaking six, seven is this? You know, and, and it really kind of exposed the weakness, at least from my perspective. And that's probably not a great way to do this. And, you know, it needs to be structured differently.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  And I don't know whether that ever got resolved, but it's the only experience I ever had where people started just abbreviating who they were and you just lost track because it's just too much going on.

• 1:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And especially pilots, they talk real smooth and quick and fast. And they're almost immediately they'll dump the first part of their call sign when you start talking to them.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:05:52Jocko Willink?

  That's just habitual for them.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  You gotta get the crew to get their tray tables up before you land, you know? So you gotta be able to get it out.

• 1:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book. "The Exville convoy was starting to take heavy murderous fire. We've lost a five-ton truck. I heard that and Ray and I glanced at each other. The ground transmissions were broken and hard to understand. We switched radios for better reception. Things were starting to heat up down there, but we just sat there and breathed and flew around and around waiting. I knew Cliff Walcott and his co-pilot Donovan Bryley were back in there with Super Six One, giving fire support from three SF shooters onboard and their crew chief's miniguns. From what I could gather, as I squinted, straining to hear, the Somalis were coming from every doorway and from behind every wall.

• 1:06:43Jocko Willink?

  But all we could do is sit up there in our safe haven, feeling helpless while our people were in deep shit. And we knew it."

• 1:06:51Jocko Willink?

  "Super Six One is going down." It was Cliff's voice. He was talking about himself and his own helo, something had hit his bird and he and Donovan were going to crash. I swallowed, disbelieving what I'd heard. "Super Six One is going down." Cliff Walcott and Donovan Bryley were real good friends of mine. We were all from the same platoon and we were close. We'd been together for a long time, traveled on the road together, partied together. Our families knew each other very well." I shook it off. They'll be alright, I decided. They'll have to land, maybe a hard landing or something, but the sarbird will fly in and pick them up and we'll all go home. The possibility that Cliff and Donovan might die didn't cross my mind. I couldn't see them from my position, so I painted it the way I needed to see it at the moment.

• 1:07:32Jocko Willink?

  As it was, an RPG round had blown a big chunk off their bird. They started spinning out of control while Donovan shut down the engines and Cliff tried to get the aircraft on the ground in one piece. But those damn narrow streets, the helo smacked down on a reinforced concrete wall, pivoted and crashed nose first. In those few seconds, everything changed. The radios, which up till now had hissed the occasional code word or updates, went crazy. Sure, we'd all prepared for the possibility of a bird going down, but the timing and location were about as bad as they could be. The ground assault element with prisoners already in tow was ordered to regroup at the fresh crash site. The ex-vil convoy suddenly had a new and even more deadly labyrinth to fight through.

• 1:08:17Jocko Willink?

  Air elements were being summoned for support. It was now constant chatter back and forth, the voices still steady, but ominously urgent. On this mission, the worst had happened. We had a bird down and the survivors were surrounded.

• 1:08:39Jocko Willink?

  Are you aware of casualties at this point?

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  I'm not. In fact, the part that's still tough for me to process is I did not know that Cliff and Donovan had died until I actually got released from captivity. And I'm laying there in the field hospital and all the guys come over to see me and I'm looking around, I'm like, where's Cliff and Donovan? And Commander started crying. I mean, it was just, you don't think it can happen, you know? And I think back to some of the other ops you were talking about it. You just look over and there are bunks there, you know, and they're not there anymore. It's just, I don't know, it's hard to describe if you haven't lived it, you know, to see the impact that that has.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  And then you come back and you see their families, you know, we're still in touch. I just saw Donovan's wife and daughter about a week and a half ago and, you know, the hole's never filled. It's gone forever. And just amazing, great Americans and honored to have served with them.

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you compare your mindset at the time, clearly you know that things are going bad. Was it possible for you to tell how bad they were going with the, with the situation that the ground force was in? I mean, they were getting smashed. Were you aware of that?

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Well, there was a lot of talk on the net, but you know, with a bird down, that's going to happen anyway. So, and I am a bit of an eternal optimist and I'm thinking, yeah, all right, the speed bump, you know, I mean, we, we'll get through this. We just got to clean this up. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that, you know, Cliff and Donovan had already been killed, or the things that were going on on the ground, the fatalities had already been taken. There wasn't a lot of talk about losses yet on the radio that I, that I had heard anyway. But, uh, you know, obviously it ramps up pretty quick here in a few minutes.

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, Colonel Matthews called me on the net. Six four, I need you to go and take six one's place over the target. I was expecting that call to come. We had practiced this exact contingency just a few days before the mock shoot down of six one, and I was rolling in, I was rolling out of holding even as I answered Roger six four going in. Even with everything I knew, now my mind's eye flashing me unholy images, my hands and feet didn't hesitate. We broke formation. No one in the helicopter said a word. Ray, Tommy, Bill, and I all knew what had just happened to our friends. One bird was down in the city, another was hit, and the ground force was decisively engaged. We were playing for keeps on this one. I broke silence on the intercom. It may get a little

• 1:11:19Jocko Willink?

  sticky in there. Let's all keep our heads in the game. There was no response. I headed back for the target site at full power, running right along the rooftops. We were going to provide fire support for the ground elements, but I realized that everyone had been told now to consolidate at the crash site. Platoon, squads, and sections would be racing door to door toward that new position. It would be very hard to distinguish friend from foe in such a melee.

• 1:11:44Jocko Willink?

  We couldn't just cowboy in there spewing 4,000 rounds a minute. Tommy and Bill's electrically controlled miniguns could be armed only by me throwing a switch in the cockpit. I spoke to them very carefully. "Okay," I said, "I'm arming your guns, but we're not doing any shooting until we figure out where everyone is." "Roger that?" They grunted. "Rog." Within seconds, we were back over the target area, flying a wide circular pattern, trying to locate Cliff's crash site, and clearly spot the enemy before we opened up on him. We were in a hard left bank with me up high in the right seat, so I was peering past Ray and down into total confusion. It was just smoke and dust and indistinguishable sprinting forms.

• 1:12:26Jocko Willink?

  I tried to raise Super Six Two, Cliff and Donovan's wingman, but the air-to-air net was jammed up and the AMC kept telling us to vary our pattern and minimize exposure time. I jinked it up and down, getting high, getting low, trying to make us hard to hit, all too aware that the Somalis were now shooting at us from every rooftop and street corner.

• 1:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Something slammed into my helicopter, and that's where we opened this up. That's where we started the podcast.

• 1:13:05Jocko Willink?

  This, I was, again, I was watching some videos, the, the actual videos, and there's freaking Somalis everywhere. I, I, because you're seeing different angles, and there's just Somalis everywhere. And they were just lighting up everyone and everything and all the birds.

• 1:13:22Jocko Willink?

  What's crazy about this whole thing, you know, again, you have a picture of the map in, in this, in the book. It's like a mile away, two miles away, this whole thing. Is all, I mean, you, you're out at sea, hovering in your safe spot, and seconds later, you're over the target. How long were you over the target for before you got hit?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Not long. We made it around about three times and you know, you touched on it, but the hard part for us is trying to figure out what's going on on the ground. I mean, you can't just hose everybody down, right? So, and, and I don't think people can appreciate how hard it is being in a helicopter because, so I, I tell them, if you want to get some perspective on what this is like, go to a big city somewhere and drive down through the heart of town in the middle of the night going 90 miles an hour and see how much situational awareness you can get on the side streets as you go by them. That's essentially the same thing. So you can't really tell. You didn't get, you didn't get a look at it long enough because the angles are constantly changing and you see a person here, but then by the time you get a chance to figure out, is that a threat? Is that a friendly?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  They're gone. I mean, you're, you're, you're past them. So we, you know, how long does it take to get around about three times? I don't know. Maybe two minutes. And we were not even close to the point where we felt like we could shoot. I mean, that's a, that weapon, you know, it's going to tear the place up. So we, we never fired around.

• 1:14:43Jocko Willink?

  I, have you been to Fallon, Nevada flying up there?

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:46Jocko Willink?

  So I was like a new guy and I was a radio man when I was an enlisted guy. And so I was always calling the helos for extract and stuff. And I was calling him helos. It was daytime. I'm calling in helos. We're in Fallon, Nevada. So this is a desert environment. It's open desert. And there's some little shrubs, but not much. And I'm calling this helicopter and I'm looking at them and they are not far away. And I have like probably a little, uh,

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  three foot or maybe four foot by four foot aircraft panel. And so I go, hey, you know, I mark you identify. And I'm sitting there looking, they, they couldn't been more than 200 yards away, maybe 300 yards away. I, it's a freaking giant helicopter. I'm holding up this aircraft panel, bright orange aircraft panel for them to see me. And they're like, uh, we, we don't see you. And I'm thinking to myself, what are you, you're kidding me? There's two aircraft. I got a squad of seals out here. There's eight seals. Sure. We're wearing camouflage, but we feel completely naked. I'm thinking, if you would have asked me to put money, I would have bet, you know, two months pay that this, that this, these helicopters can see us a hundred percent. And I'm going to hold this aircraft panel up. They couldn't see us. It is so different when you're up there.

• 1:15:55Jocko Willink?

  So different when you're up there and we, they didn't find that, those two helos didn't find us until we popped purple smoke. And then they were like, oh yeah, we got you. It was crazy. So what you are seeing when you're in the air and you're moving, it's really hard to figure out what's going on down there.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was impossible. We probably could have orbited for 20 minutes and would have not had full situational awareness, which you gotta have, because I mean, you know, the fratricide is not acceptable, no matter what. I mean, and when that was our biggest concern.

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  So you go down.

• 1:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward. I woke up in the silence of my own grave. At least that's what I believed in that first moment because the last flash of consciousness I had clearly seen the clawing hand of the grim reaper. I did not know where I was. I did not know who I was. It was like emerging from an altitude chamber with a case of hypoxia as my mind began to stagger slowly through the dark, darkened hallways of my concussed brain. When my eyelids finally fluttered open, I was stunned to take in light. The chopper's windshield was almost completely gone, pierced and disintegrated by a slab of corrugated metal that had stopped only inches from my face. Yet my first sense of emotion wasn't relief, but a fury at the disfiguring of my helicopter by that rusty blade.

• 1:17:16Jocko Willink?

  I reached up to shove the thing from my cockpit and then pain swept over me like a wave of molten lava. My back was broken. Two of my vertebrae had smacked together on impact displacing the discs between and pulverizing each other. Every muscle on my back must have tried to prevent that catastrophe and been ripped apart in the effort and it felt like some evil giant had a grip on me. I stopped moving and just tried to breathe without passing out. I sure as hell was fully conscious now, although my thoughts and reflexes seemed to trudge through a sort of syrupy fog. Slowly I moved my aching head and glanced around the cockpit and found I was sitting level with the floor.

• 1:17:57Jocko Willink?

  The seats in the Blackhawk are designed to stroke downward in a major crash and mine had done that and more. My right leg felt strangely numb. And as soon as I tried to move it, I knew that the femur had been broken clean in half over the edge of my Kevlar seat. My M9 pistol was still strapped to my right thigh and it and its weight shifted. I could feel splintered ends of my bones grinding against one another. But it didn't hurt all that much. My crushed vertebrae were monopolizing my pain centers. I was dead sure that I couldn't get myself out of the cockpit. A Black Hawks, hard enough to get out of when you're healthy. You have to contort yourself and maneuver your limbs around the seat and the controls.

• 1:18:37Jocko Willink?

  I could barely move. I saw my MP5 submachine gun lying on the floor near my left foot where I had left it. As I reached for it, I made sure it was cocked and locked and laid it across my lap. I could hear some thin muffled shouts in the distance. The Somalis would surely try to overrun us and it looked like I just have to fight it out right there where I sat. And then I remembered I wasn't alone. I looked over at Ray. His helmet was gone and he was slowly edging himself off his seat, which had collapsed to the floor just like mine. The acrid smell of spilled jet fuel mixed with dried dust was in the air and I heard someone moaning unintelligibly from the back of the chopper. It was Bill Cleveland's voice, but nothing he muttered made any sense. There wasn't a sound from Tommy Field. Ray looked at me. "I tried to pull them off."

• 1:19:22Jocko Willink?

  He meant the injured, engines. "I know it. Couldn't do it." I glanced up at the power control levers. "You got him halfway." He didn't say anything for a moment and then, "Left tibia is broken, I think. Right femur here and ba- and my back too." "Yeah," he said. And then he slowly maneuvered himself until he was sitting in the door sill with his back to me. "I'm moving, Mike," he said. "I'll be right here." Ray nodded and then he gripped the sill with his hands and carefully lowered himself to the ground. I couldn't see him any- anymore and I would never see him again.

• 1:19:58Jocko Willink?

  I knew we were about to be in the battle for our lives. We were down in the middle of Mogadishu and there was no doubt in my mind that the Somalis were coming for us.

• 1:20:14Jocko Willink?

  You can't, there's no way for you to get out of the helicopter at this point.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  No. Like I said, you know, to get in and out of a sixty, you gotta, gotta twist and bend and, you know, sling your leg over the cyclic and I can't, and there's just no way. So I decided that I'm gonna fight it out from right there.

• 1:20:32Jocko Willink?

  And your femur's broken, your back is totally jacked up.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  Can you hear Somalis in the distance?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  No, it was, you know, I think when the aircraft first hit, it, obviously, quite the event in this neighborhood, you know, this twenty thousand pound machine crashes from the sky. So I think they all ran initially and then, you know, over time, they started to kinda sneak their way back in, trying to figure out what was going on.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you know where you were?

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Generally, but I mean, if, you know, if you'd have asked me at that moment, put my finger on a map, I wouldn't have gotten all that close, I don't think.

• 1:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Just then, Randy Schuchart and Gary Gordon appeared on the right side of our chopper. They were Delta operators and although I didn't know them personally or by name, I certainly knew who they were. More than once, I had briefed them and the other members of their teams prior to assaults in the city. Since they were wearing no helmets, I recognized them instantly. Randy was carrying a high-tech sniper rifle and Gary had a Car-15, the short-barreled version of the M16 assault rifle, and their load-bearing harnesses were slung with ammunition and grenades. Randy and Gary didn't say very much. They knew the situation was critical and they were there to work, not chat. They asked me about my injuries. "Well, my leg, my right leg's broken," I said, "and I think my back." "Uh-huh."

• 1:22:01Jocko Willink?

  They nodded and set themselves in position to lift me out of the cockpit. They raised me up gently. So they take you, they carry you out of the cockpit and put you in a, in a position...

• 1:22:15Jocko Willink?

  Where you're gonna have to stay cuz you can't move.

• 1:22:20Jocko Willink?

  You say, "Super six-four sat in the pale dirt, its belly smeared into the ground, its big rotors dead still and drooping like wilted palm fronds. I couldn't see anyone in the cargo bay. Tommy, Tommy Field's minigun had swung around hard and struck him full in the chest upon impact. It was a very heavy weapon and crushed his entire rib cage. Something else inside the chopper had torn up Bill Cleveland really bad, just in front of him, and to my right was a long shack and a large tree. Its high leaves rustling in the hot wind and throwing some shade into me.

• 1:22:53Jocko Willink?

  The only open area was between, between me, that shack and my helo, my helo's cockpit, a clear field of fire. Randy and Gary knew what they were doing. They handed me my MP5 and the single spare magazine, a total of sixty rounds of nine millimeter ammo. But they didn't say a word as they walked off around the nose of the helicopter.

• 1:23:19Jocko Willink?

  I heard Bill's voice again and twisted my head around. Shootgarden Gordon had placed him on the ground behind me. He was still incoherent and in great pain. Some of his flight gear had been removed and his trousers were soaked in blood.

• 1:23:35Jocko Willink?

  I suddenly missed my family very much, especially my young son Joey. I did not want to die here, and even as I fought it, the fear began to well up. I was badly injured and scared, and there was no doubt about it. I did not want to fall in the hands of the Somalis. Just a few weeks before, they'd overrun some Nigerian troops and rumors about what they had done to them were too gruesome to believe. And the Somalis had done that to fellow Africans, so I couldn't even imagine what they might do to us. The image of mutilation that flashed into my mind terrified me.

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  Randy and Gary came back around the nose of the helo. I wasn't sure what they were doing, but they assumed, but I assumed they were looking for an area large enough to land an aircraft and get us out of there. They were calm and deliberate, talking to each other like a couple of surveyors planning a new parking lot, but I knew they were frustrated.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  They had four badly injured men on their hands, and it was impossible to move even a short distance.

• 1:24:39Jocko Willink?

  So there's a little calm almost before the storm at this juncture.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  There is. Again, I don't think, the Somalis hadn't organized yet. They were still just kind of coming back in onesie twosies. And I think the people that lived in that area may not have been, you know, part of the Habrigeeter Clan or weren't armed. They just happened to live there. But once word got out that there was an aircraft down that was lightly defended and surrounded, then they got an organized group to come that way.

• 1:25:11Jocko Willink?

  You say, "From the other side of the tin wall to my right, I heard a Somali, I heard Somali voices. It sounded like they were trying to get at us, but I didn't think, you know, but I didn't think it over for more than a second. My MP5 was set on single shot mode and I put it to use, firing four quick rounds right through the wall. I didn't hear the voices anymore. When I stopped shooting, Randy and Gary looked at me as if surprised that a badly injured chopper pilot might actually be useful in a firefight. They didn't speak, but they moved around to the front of the helo again until they were out of sight.

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  And now things start to build. And you know, you detail this in the book. You start hearing more AK fire. On top of the AK fire, you also hear double taps from Randy and Gary as they're engaging these enemy fighters.

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  You're firing through the wall. You got, your gun starts jamming from time to time.

• 1:26:06Jocko Willink?

  You actually emptied your first magazine. Get your other magazine in. You're firing at these people that are approaching you, approaching the helicopter.

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  You talk about your weapon. The thing was stressing me out. It had fired just fine at the range, but it was clear the damn gun needed a good cleaning. I couldn't claim that I had had time for some basic, that I hadn't had time for some basic maintenance. And I could hear the ghostly echoes of so many drill instructors. Keep your goddamn weapon clean. MP5s are like, so reliable too.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:26:43Jocko Willink?

  You think it was, it must have been jacked up from the landing.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but pretty frustrating when, you know, that's the only thing you got.

• 1:26:51Jocko Willink?

  Could have been your magazines too.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes if your magazines are messed up, like they won't feed properly.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  You know, I hadn't thought about that. Maybe just the impact itself, you know, dislodge the bullets or something, or messed up the spring, or who knows what.

• 1:27:05Jocko Willink?

  MP5s are so reliable.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  I've shot thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds. And sometimes we would just purposely not clean them to see if they would ever jam. They, they never would jam. I bet your weapon got jacked up. So you don't have to feel guilty about your drill instructors.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  I feel better now.

• 1:27:27Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Cause it was just sitting there. It wasn't, it wasn't in any kind of mound or anything. It just, amazing it didn't fly out of the aircraft, actually. I just had it sitting on the floor.

• 1:27:41Jocko Willink?

  You get some grenades, go get a grenade thrown at you. Uh, you say at first I'd been happy just to survive the crash. Then I accepted that I'd fight to the death. Then swelled with elation at that promise of rescue. Now we were taking heavy fire. We'd almost been overrun and they were throwing goddamn grenades in here. I was dripping with sweat, pain, half paralyzed and out of ammo. The stench spilled, the stench of spilled jet fuel and gun smoke and rotting garbage. Were the, would be my only escorts to my death. Randy and Gary were out there somewhere on the other side of the chopper desperately trying to hold off the engines. The burst of AK fire was starting to roll together like a thunderstorm. I was alone. It was turning into the freaking Alamo. Damn, I'm hit.

• 1:28:27Jocko Willink?

  It was Gary's voice from the other side of the chopper. A Somali bullet had found him. Yet he wasn't so much as what he said, but how he'd said it. He sounded almost irritated, like this was just going to make things harder for him. It wasn't a scream or a plea, just a statement of fact, like someone who'd nicked himself with a vegetable knife.

• 1:28:46Jocko Willink?

  At that point, I'm sure he realized how desperate our situation had become. No one was coming for us.

• 1:28:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, because of your sort of awareness of the whole situation,

• 1:29:06Jocko Willink?

  you had some thought in your mind that, hey, look, I mean, we crashed, the Kazakov bird will be in here soon. The ground force will be, someone will be, we'll be okay. We just gotta hold them off for a little bit.

• 1:29:19Jocko Willink?

  And that wasn't the reality. The reality with everything that was going on, you guys were on your own.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, because this search and rescue bird had already been shot down. And we had asked for a tank, actually, because as you mentioned, we're only two miles from the airfield. So our thought was if we have a tank, it can get out there and do extractions just as well, better than a helicopter. And it's one of the things that I always, you know, stress when I talk about this at the macro level. That was denied by, at the Secretary of Defense level. And, you know, first of all, Secretary of Defense shouldn't be making decisions like that. But it was, it was based on political reasons. They didn't want to throw more assets into a place that, you know, they'd been advertising, you know, was basically wrapping up and put, basically hung us all out to dry.

• 1:30:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just in case anyone's wondering, a tank can go through that area with absolutely no factor whatsoever.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  I mean, this is just small arms and RPGs. That's no factor at all.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Bounce, bounce right off it, yep.

• 1:30:21Jocko Willink?

  Only minutes before Randy and Gary had jumped from a hovering helicopter, rescue us. They'd fought their way through a maze of paths and shanties, driving off seamless, seemingly countless Somali gunmen. They'd already done more than any two men could be expected to do. They'd put their own lives on the line to try and help their fellow American soldiers. Gary Gordon died on the other side of that helicopter. I don't know exactly when and I don't know exactly how, but I never saw or heard him again.

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  He died before I even learned his name.

• 1:30:53Jocko Willink?

  I will never forget him.

• 1:30:56Jocko Willink?

  Randy Schuchart came back around the cockpit, striding toward me and showing little more than professional concern in his expression. "They're throwing grenades in here," I told him, but he didn't seem too worried about that. He was focused on our critical shortage of ammo, and he looked at my now-useless MP5. "Are there any other weapons in the aircraft?" he asked. "My crew chiefs keep their M16s in between the seats." He went off to the helicopter without a word, climbed in and started digging around. Moments later, he returned, carrying the longer M16 and a Car 15, the short-barreled submachine gun I had seen in Gary's hands. He handed me the smaller weapon, and for some reason, it felt much better in my grip than my own MP5. He held up a PRC-112 Survival Radio. "What channel's the fire net on?" It was odd.

• 1:31:41Jocko Willink?

  He didn't even have to shout. There was gunfire echoing from the far side of the aircraft, but in hesitant ones and twos. "Channel Bravo," I replied. Randy made a call on the fire support net, which gave him a direct line to Little Bird Guns and Fire Support Officer. A Little Bird was flying high over our position. "A reaction forces en route," came the return call from one of the helicopters. The voice sounded familiar. I was sure it was one of the Little Bird pilots named Chris. Now, that was encouraging. All we had to do was hold out a little bit longer. We needed help, but it was on the way. "We just gotta keep them from overrunning us. We gotta hang in there just a little bit more."

• 1:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Randy probably knew right then and there that a little while more would not be soon enough. He squinted out the radio, stuffed it into his combat harness, hefted his weapon, and moved off around the nose of the helicopter. He left without saying another word.

• 1:32:41Jocko Willink?

  "I would never see him again."

• 1:32:49Jocko Willink?

  So... That's, uh...

• 1:32:56Jocko Willink?

  Master Sergeant Gordon, Gary Gordon, um, you know...

• 1:33:05Jocko Willink?

  Received the Medal of Honor.

• 1:33:11Jocko Willink?

  For his actions that day. And also Sergeant First Class Shoot Guard.

• 1:33:19Jocko Willink?

  And both those guys, you know, when you read their citations, they requested

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  multiple times to be able to go in to your position and try and help the situation that was on the ground.

• 1:33:35Jocko Willink?

  They got denied, they got denied, and finally they got permission to go in and do whatever they could. And, you know, I can, you know, we already talked about what things look like from the air. And you can only imagine.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  You know, actually, that these guys knew exactly what they were getting into. They knew the situation they were going into, they knew the risks that they were taking. They knew that no one was going to be able to get in there besides them. They had much better situational awareness than you did because they were up there watching it.

• 1:34:13Jocko Willink?

  And yet.

• 1:34:16Jocko Willink?

  They still rogered up. And went in there.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  It's the most selfless act I've ever. Certainly ever witnessed, probably the most selfless act I've ever heard of. Because it's a little bit different to be told to go in versus, you know, the way it went down. I mean, as I understand it, of course, I'm on the ground, so I don't, I don't know, I didn't hear this personally. But as I understand it, you know, I mean, Garrison himself said, no, you're not going in. And then they finally got directly on the radio and said, hey, look, sir, if you don't let us in, these guys are gone. And after two or three different conversations like that, he said, all right, put them in. And, you know, I.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  I, I just, you know, you think about if that was you, well, I don't mean you, but just in general terms, would you be that committed to your comrades to, to go into that situation? I don't think you'd ever say, do you would or you wouldn't, you know, but they did it and they did it without hesitation. And I think they'd have insisted on it for, you know, the rest of the mission if, if, if he hadn't finally said yes. And they're absolutely deserving of the Medal of Honor. We just did a, a memorial dedication for, for Gary Gordon this past fall, actually, in his hometown of Lincoln, Maine. And again, it's another example of when you see the family and you realize, you know, how, what an impact losing

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  someone like that has had on that whole town, actually, and, and his family, you, you, you understand what these sacrifices really mean. They're just, it's, it's, it's impossible to describe. And, and I mean it when I say I wouldn't be here without those two guys. I mean, no question.

• 1:36:09Jocko Willink?

  There's no doubt about that.

• 1:36:20Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, you say, suddenly it grew very, very quiet. Up until this point, there had been quite a bit of gunfire ebbing and flowing in volume, some from us and from some from them, but for some reason it all stopped for a few moments. Maybe they've given up, I told myself. I could hear my own lungs rasping at the air like sandpaper on plywood. Maybe the reaction force is coming and driving them away. I had no idea if this might be true, but my fantasy was encouraging. My mind worked hard to suppress the rising panic, but my thoughts weren't remotely clear or focused. I couldn't move. I couldn't hide. I couldn't make myself invisible. My body jerked and clenched, and I clenched my fists as a huge volume of gunfire shudd- suddenly shattered the silence. It came from

• 1:37:03Jocko Willink?

  the far side of the chopper and it rolled in like a hurricane of the worst sounds that Satan could conjure. Volleys of AK-47 fire hammered at our helpless bird echoing off the clustered channies. The heavy rounds piercing the chopper's steel skin and ricocheting everywhere. The only thing armored on that Blackhawk were the seats and I watched helpless and horrified as it was punctured over and over again and it bucked like a downed elephant under a hail of poacher fire. Flying bullets plucked shorn metal and glass into the air and kicked up klotzadort all around me. It went on for maybe an entire minute, a short span of time that stretched into an agonizing eternity. I couldn't see anything through the hulk of the smashed chopper, so I can't say for

• 1:37:44Jocko Willink?

  sure, but Randy Schutgart was probably the only American left fighting over there alone against a countless number of enemies. He couldn't fight them all. It was only a matter of time before he went down. And when Randy finally fell, the shooting stopped. The last volleys of gunfire echoed off the sparse trees.

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Then the most terrifying minutes of my entire life began. I doubt there is a more horrific thing one could experience. I still lie in bed at night and feel the flood of suffocating anxiety. Time seemed to stand absolutely still. My skin crawled and every vein in my body throbbed with terror. What did they really do to those Nigerians? I couldn't move, I could barely breathe. How much pain can a man endure before his mind shuts down and retreats into the sanctuary of unconsciousness? I knew they were going to kill me. I just didn't know how. Death was on its way, I could hear it.

• 1:38:40Jocko Willink?

  They were a mob of hate-filled men and women and I couldn't see them yet, but their voices grew louder and louder, yelling and screaming, and the sound that really made my blood run was the clatter of debris being thrown out of the way as they advanced. It was like some multi-limbed Hydra stomping toward me, thundering on the ground and furiously tossing away shards of metal and wood as it drew near. It was the sound of approaching death, just overwhelmingly terrifying, and I knew that as soon as they came across the nose of that helicopter and saw me, they were going to chop me to pieces. That's what they had done to the Nigerians, that's what they did to everybody. We had heard eyewitness accounts of them playing soccer with the skulls of their enemies.

• 1:39:23Jocko Willink?

  The howling racket of the mob's rage grew louder and louder, and I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do to save myself.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  You had to be 100% sure you were about to die.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still remember the cloud. There was a cloud going over and I just looked up at it and I thought, you know, this is it. It's absolutely over. You know, there's no scenario here that you could think of that ends up in survival.

• 1:39:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the thing that you're talking about with Nigerians, they had overrun a position and just just murdered and butchered these Nigerians.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they took no prisoners.

• 1:40:06Jocko Willink?

  Out of control mob.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  I could think of no other course of action. I put the empty weapon across my chest, placed my hands, my open hands on top of it and stared up at the hazy blue sky. In seconds, the Somalis would come for me. Not an organized military enemy, but a mob of enraged civilians and militia with only one thing on their minds, vengeance. A few clouds drifted by overhead that were no helicopters in sight. I heard the rising victorious cries as the Somali swarmed around Super 6-4, the poundings of hundreds of fists against her battered hide, a rattle-like swarm of feeding locusts. I did not sob. I did not pray. No tears coursed down my cheeks. For me, in that

• 1:40:53Jocko Willink?

  one frozen moment in time, all that I could do was wait for their arrival. My Joey will never know his father.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  So surprisingly, when they get to you,

• 1:41:18Jocko Willink?

  well, they grab and they start beating you and they start assaulting you, but you don't get killed immediately. You say, "I can't remember how many times they struck or clubbed me," but it was many, many times. A snarling face bent in and a man ripped the green badge cord from around my neck. That badge gave me access to Task Force Ranger compound and taped to the back of it was my military identification. My metal dog tags went with it and as soon as he saw the green badge in his hand, he stuck it in my face and shouted, "Ranger, Ranger, you die Somalia."

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  His scream curled my blood, but it shocked me even more that this man could know so much about our security and our procedures. There was nothing on that green badge but a number. I wondered how many of these were now hanging around the necks of our enemies. But I didn't wonder for long because two men began to work on my boots. They barely tore the laces open before bracing their feet in the dirt and twisting and pulling. I watched them tear my left boot off. I closed my eyes when they went for the right. The pain of my broken femur shot up through my shattered spine like a high voltage electrocution. I looked up as a man raised something high above his head. For a second, the sun haloed around the object, and then he swung it down on me like a club. It smashed into my face, breaking my right eye socket and cheekbone.

• 1:42:37Jocko Willink?

  For many years, I have held my peace for the sake of the survivors, the men who were killed, not refuting the can't claim that I was struck with the butt of a rifle. But the truth is long overdue. That object was not a rifle. It was soft and very heavy. It was the severed arms of one of my comrades.

• 1:43:00Jocko Willink?

  I did not cry out or try to defend myself. My assailant was poised for another blow and obviously preparing to beat me to death, but I stared into his eyes with such hatred and defiance and disgust that he froze, backed away, and dropped his club.

• 1:43:15Jocko Willink?

  Someone fired a shot in the air. It didn't exactly bring things under control, but it must have stilled the bloodlust that was surging through the savage crowd.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Someone threw a handful of dirt in my eyes and mouth. The grit blinded me and I choked and sputtered it from my throat. Someone else wrapped a filthy rag around my head. I felt many hands clutching at my legs and shoulders, and then they hoisted me high up in the air, my crushed vertebrae ground hard against each other as they stretched me out like a prisoner on the rack. My broken femur cleaved into the back of my leg, the sharp bone puncturing right out through my skin.

• 1:43:54Jocko Willink?

  I left my body. The human mind has some defensive talents that only the dying or near dead can relay. And mine took me to a place high above my tortured form. I looked down on myself and the surging horde watching it all in perfect detail. The sea of howling triumphant inhumanity in those thousands of hands passing me aloft like a bloody sacrifice to their unholy gods. For those brief moments, pain was swept away. And then so was I.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  So now you know I haven't read this in a long time.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Man. The, um, this whole thing is, what's weird is about this is you think about it, take a step back, like the proximity of everything that's happening, the fact that the airfield's a mile away, the fact that you were flying around at whatever, 4,000 feet in complete safety, two minutes later, or 30 seconds later, you're over the target, two minutes later, you're shot down. This is all just, and it's all happening in this compressed time and compressed space.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  And despite the fact that there's tanks nearby, there's troops nearby, you're, you end up completely by yourself.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  And that thought crossed my mind, I made, I think I say it somewhere in the book, like, is there not another American in this frigging city? You know, I mean, where is everybody? But what I didn't realize is the chaos going on at the target with the ground convoy, the other shoot downs, because all you know is you're, you're foxhole, right? You don't, you don't know the big picture. And once I, once I saw the big picture, I realized, yeah, well, certainly had we gotten the assets we asked for, it would have made a difference, but they weren't there. So we couldn't do anything about it.

• 1:45:50Jocko Willink?

  So at this point, you're like a rag doll. And they're just, this mob's got you. Did you have any indication that you were gonna survive this? Or was it just, when did they start to rip me apart?

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it's like, what's next? You know, we've already been through two or three cycles here where the end seemed imminent. And here we go again. And then it settles down when they throw me in this first location where we stop. But, you know, the threat of death was always there. I mean, they're just all amped up. You've been there. When you're in the fight, your adrenaline is so high. And you're, you know, from their perspective, I'm the bad guy. You know, I'm the guy that's causing all this problem.

• 1:46:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're the bad guy that caused all the problems. Every, you're the one guy that they've got to take it all out on.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:46:47Jocko Willink?

  So they eventually get you. They take you and put you in a closed space of some kind. You can't really see what's going on because, you know, you've got the, the, um, whatever, your eyes are blindfolded. The continual chorus is Ranger, Ranger, you die Somalia.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:05Jocko Willink?

  Freaking nightmare. Now, once you get, once you sort of you're into this closed space, you kind of, you know, you say this in the book here. Those first few minutes of capture critical don't piss off your captors. So you went into like the seer mode instinctively.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Right there at the crash site. And you know, it wasn't like, you know, I made this conscious decision. You know, the game is different now. It's just sort of, it just happened naturally. You know, it became obvious the fight was over. You know, I mean, I got, there's nothing I can do. And now I'm in their hands. So I gotta revert to what they taught me to survive a situation like this. And most of it actually worked pretty well. Surprising, yeah. Well, I shouldn't say surprise. How do you know?

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  It is surprising. It's a little bit surprising because you hope it works. But you know, when you're in seer school, it works. But when you're dealing with a freaking crazed mob of Somalis, I mean, I'm surprised, you know, I'm surprised. I, even reading it, you know, I just. I guess I keep referring back to the fact like you just knew you were gonna die. Cause if I was in that situation, I'd be like, I'm 100% there's no way I'm getting out of this. Not against a thousand crazed mob. Like it's not, you're not gonna get out of that. It's a freaking miracle. So you get into this room, they, they're, they're arguing about you.

• 1:48:35Jocko Willink?

  They're yelling at each other, like you can see there's some kind of,

• 1:48:40Jocko Willink?

  it seems to start to take some kind of shape, right? It starts to take some kind of shape like they have another purpose for you. They end up, I mean, I guess, once you get away from the mob, you must've felt a little bit better.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Things did settle down. And one thing I didn't know is that I was actually taken by a rival clan. And then Mark Bowden is the one who discovers this when he writes Black Hawk Down. Of course, this is according to Somali's, I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes sense. If you think about the dynamics of those few, few hours, because I did get moved a couple of times and the characters did change. So it's, it's, it's very likely I was in fact, you know, basically stolen by a rival clan and then negotiated to get back to the Haber Gitter clan. If, if it's not bizarre enough.

• 1:49:30Jocko Willink?

  You get chained up, but they change you in such a way that you could, you could like get your arm out. So they weren't great at, I guess, chaining people.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  I don't think they were great at very much actually, but fortunately, no. Yeah, I was able to squeeze out of it.

• 1:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Another guy comes in eventually, again, look, by the book, I'm fast forwarding through a bunch of detail. That's, that's fascinating to read and it gives a lot of the granular detail of what's going on. Eventually you get a guy that comes in that's a little less aggressive, not as angry and offers you some water.

• 1:50:06Jocko Willink?

  So you're starting to see a little bit of, you know, maybe there's a little bit of light, a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

• 1:50:15Jocko Willink?

  This happened, suddenly my captors outside were engaged in a battle. I could hear rounds being fired from the other side of the wall and yelling and chaos grew to a fevered pitch. Bright flashes from their spitting gun barrels pierced through the ventilation holes above my head and lit up my cell like a lightning storm. I could feel the mighty, the might of the US Army approaching my door. It would all be over in a few minutes. And for the very first time that day, I prayed, I prayed to God to spare me and spare the lives of my comrades. I prayed for just a bit more of the mercy that had kept me alive until this moment. I'd been a casual Catholic before, but I would become a faithful servant forever if I could just have three more minutes of protection until I was onboard a Night Stalker Hilo and we were all flying off to freedom.

• 1:50:59Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, that was just another, another firefight going on out there.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  I think it was the ground convoy actually passing by close to me. That's the only thing I can come up, because I could hear what I think were 40 millimeter rounds actually flying through the air and then, you know, pretty sizable explosions when those things hit. And, and it, you know, was marching toward me and then it gets a fever pitch and then it starts to fade. And, and that's all, that's the only thing I can come up with is that I was actually fairly close to where the ground convoy, or a ground convoy, you know, because there was a couple of different efforts involved there in getting to the target site on the ground. And just kind of demoralizing when it just starts to fade away into the distance.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  And you'd been shot, where you got shot in the arm?

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  I did, yep. It was superficial.

• 1:51:45Jocko Willink?

  Superficial?

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:46Jocko Willink?

  Like, all this shooting is going on. I mean, even when they were shooting up your bird that was on the ground, like, it's a miracle you didn't get shot just by stray rounds.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Right. And that was a deflection, actually. It didn't hit me directly. It went off the floor and ended up in my left arm.

• 1:52:02Jocko Willink?

  Finally, you meet this guy. This guy comes in. His name is, he says, "My name is Mohammed Gate." He offers you a smoke. Now, what's the deal with Mohamed Gate?

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  So, he was probably the most sophisticated character that I dealt with. He was basically trying to convince me that, you know, the Somalis were the victims and all this and then General Aded was a righteous man and I think I put in there that he was telling me bedtime stories, you know, he was because if you go back in history, you could see how that version of the story from some perspectives could be believable. I mean, where things go south on Aded is when he starts stealing all the food that's there from the relief organizations, you know, that's where he kind of loses my vote. But before then, you know, leading the overthrow of what was described as a pretty difficult prior government, he's a hero.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  And this is what Mohamed Gate is telling me about. He's telling me about the history of Somalia and how he's a great man, he led his people to freedom, and we really got this all wrong. You know, we're chasing the wrong guy, right? So, and again, having gone to survival school and understanding that this is something you might encounter and probably will, certainly in a long-term situation, I had my guard up, you know, but the reality is, and I am no expert on captivity, there's people that spent longer in captivity than I did. But over time, if you repeat a story often enough, it starts to creep into your mind and I think it gains credibility over time through repetition. So,

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  it's a long practice technique and I wasn't there long enough for it to work, but I'm sure they would have tried to do that because for them, getting an American to say, "Hey, this guy is really, you know, we shouldn't be chasing him, this is all wrong", that's like gold. I mean, yeah, that's worth a fleet of jet fighters to them, you know, so that's what they're after.

• 1:54:05Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, you end up, you know, it gets dark, you go to sleep, you wake up, and you start going into your first kind of day of captivity here.

• 1:54:19Jocko Willink?

  He says, "How are you Ranger?"

• 1:54:23Jocko Willink?

  "I was not a Ranger, but I didn't bother to correct him. I formed the recognizable symbol for okay with my fingers." "Your friends," he began, and then paused like a surgeon emerging from the operating room with bad news. "You are the only one." "I waited for the rest of it, hoping that he meant I was the only one captured." "Gate came up with a pack of cigarettes and offered me one." "I heard the voice of one of my instructors from SERE School, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape." "You don't have to be subservient to your captors, but you do have to be cordial. Politeness is a tactic, not a surrender." "No, thank you," were the first words of my day. And he goes on to say,

• 1:55:01Jocko Willink?

  "I'm sorry, but it's only you. Your friends are not living. We thought maybe one alive under your helicopter had run away by night, but that is not true."

• 1:55:14Jocko Willink?

  "You know," he continued, "many Somalis very angry with the UN and Americans. Many, many Somalis die in this fighting. Our women, they are the most angry."

• 1:55:24Jocko Willink?

  "They are also the most cruel." "A Somali woman must take her revenge upon a person who kills her son or husband. She must take something from the guilty person. There's no trial, no jury. This is justice in our world."

• 1:55:38Jocko Willink?

  So again, this guy's educating you on what's happening.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  And I will say that I did feel that that was the case when the mob was taking place, that the women were the ones screaming the loudest and kind of breaking through and, you know, taking a shot here and there. And, you know, I guess that's why. I mean, I'm assuming it's correct.

• 1:56:01Jocko Willink?

  You say, again, fast forwarding.

• 1:56:05Jocko Willink?

  At this point, a new character entered the drama. He was preceded by four bodyguards, and as he swept into the room, the other Somalis, gate included, retreated a bit and nearly bowed with respect. He was middle-aged, wore a pencil-thin mustache, and the wide fringe of hair surrounding his bald head looked freshly cut. His colorful short-sleeved shirt spotted pastel palm fronds, and his beige trousers were crisp and clean. He reminded me of a Miami Beach tourist. He seemed well-educated, and his mannered English was delivered in soft tones. My name is Mr. Abdi. Is that right, Abdi?

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Abdi.

• 1:56:40Jocko Willink?

  Abdi. My name is Mr. Abdi. And yours? It was clear that this man held some kind of higher position, well above the tactical lever, level. It was time for me to give up one of the big four. Name ranks your service number and date of birth. Durant. Michael J. Durant. Is there anything you need, Mr. Durant? I need a doctor. Yes, I can see that, Abdi said. The Somali surrounding him to be lit, seemed to be listening very carefully, trying to understand his nearly whispered English. And is there anything else? I need to be set free. Of course, he nodded, as if expecting me to say that very thing. We will provide you with medical attention, and I will make sure you are treated as well as possible.

• 1:57:18Jocko Willink?

  So what's the deal with this guy?

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know where he was in the food chain, but it's pretty high up. And, uh, he, uh, you know, the Somalis at this point, I don't know, maybe this might be a little early for them to reach this conclusion. But, but this didn't play well for them. The things that they did with, uh, with, with the bodies of, uh, of the, my comrades from Crash Site 2, that made it into the media, and just the perception that, you know, the US in the end was really there to try to help them. I mean, you know, put everything else aside, put, you know, the, the specifics of that battle to the side. The mission was to help the friggin Somali people. And in return, they're killing us and dragging our remains through the streets. I mean, that doesn't play well, anywhere.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  So I think he realizes this, and the deed realizes this, and they, they gotta do some damage control. So they're not gonna be perhaps as, uh, as hostile toward me as they might have otherwise, because they don't want to be perceived, foreseen as, seen as the, uh, the savages, I'll use that word. You know, that, that in some cases, they, they acted like, I mean, there's just no question about it.

• 1:58:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, one of the...

• 1:58:32Jocko Willink?

  One of the, I guess, most critical points, most painful points for you was when they show up with a video camera. And you kind of talk about in the book, you know, your, your knowledge and recollection of those type of situations occurring in Vietnam, in the Gulf War, in Iraq, and you kind of know it's coming, that you're gonna get, you're gonna get this propaganda opportunity for them.

• 1:58:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna go to the book here. "There was a man with a video camera on his shoulder and two more with tripods, batteries, and floodlights. Why you come to Somalia? Why you kill innocent? Will you answer these questions?" And they're, they're interrogating you in this methodology. They go on and on. Questions began again. "In those next few moments, I would utter responses that would change the rest of my life. Why you come to Somalia?" "I'm a soldier," I said in flat, expressionless tone. "I do as I'm told." And again, that's kind of like a standard SEER answer. "Hey, I'm just doing what I'm told." "Why you kill innocent people?" "I glanced at my interrogator, then back at the camera, so that at least someone out there could see I was responding against my will."

• 1:59:44Jocko Willink?

  "Innocent people being killed is not good," I said. Someone snapped his fingers. They turned the camera off and shut down the lights. It was over. They had what they wanted. Within minutes, the room had been cleared of everyone, and I slumped down on my back. I lay there reviewing every second of it in my mind and decided that I'd done all right. The only thing that video accomplished was to tell the world that the Somalis had an American in captivity. I didn't second guess my decision to answer, and I believe then, as I do now, it was the right thing to do."

• 2:00:20Jocko Willink?

  And that, I mean, I remember watching this stuff when it hit the air. It's kind of freaking crazy that I'm sitting here talking to you right now, actually. You know, this is 1993. Like I said, I was coming back, I was back from my first SEAL deployment, and, and was thinking to myself, you know, "God, look at what's going on."

• 2:00:38Jocko Willink?

  Was that, was that, you know, they're trying to get you to say the best they could get out of you is innocent being killed. People being killed is not good. That's like the best propaganda they could get out of you.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  So I don't think they knew what I said. I don't think they completely understood it. I think they just thought, oh, okay, we got it. You know, because if you analyze it, I mean, it's worthless for that. Yeah. And, and again, the, the, the credit there goes to the, to the training, you know, without the training, I don't know what I do. Probably revert to the big four, but you know, it was proven in Vietnam. That doesn't work and, and you gotta have some guidelines to go by beyond that. And, uh, you know, I was fortunate that I had gone to the training and knew, knew kind of how to handle it.

• 2:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you have a great sentence. I won't read it, but as they started interrogating you, you started using, you know, in like big words, you know, multi-syllabic words that they just couldn't understand. It's, it's a freaking classic sentence. Uh, that's the kind of thing that you learn in, you know, in SEAL school. Hey, talk to them in a language that's elevated above what they actually know. So, um,

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  you end up with that. Again, it's kind of crazy that I was sitting there watching that as a young SEAL. You know, clenching my fist saying, how can we, how can I help? How, what could I do?

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  It had that effect on a lot of people and I think part of it is it came out of nowhere. I mean, nobody thought anything like that was going to happen in Somalia. I mean, this was a relief operation and all of a sudden we're going from handing out bags of food to this, you know, I mean, it just, it was, it had a shock and awe effect, I think. And, you know, and, and everyone's reaction was pretty much the same, you know, we need to go in there and just

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  devastate this place because this is just, you can't treat Americans this way. And, uh, it motivated a lot of people.

• 2:02:29Jocko Willink?

  You end up in another, you get transported again, they take you to another spot. You say, I looked around at my new digs now flooded in the early daylight because this is now several days in. The door was closed to fix with a cheap lock like the one in my previous cell. When the window shutters were open, I could see another building not three feet away. There are no birds chirping and I could hear more street traffic. I concluded we had moved to a more densely populated part of the city. Now you got another guy that is in the scene now, Farimbi. Am I saying that right?

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Farimbi? What's the deal with this guy?

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  So he's kind of a big goofy guy, actually. He was, uh, he was assigned the responsibility to, uh, make sure that I stayed alive. Basically that was his and that another clan didn't get me. And, and, uh, he had a few handful of guards, you know, and they, uh, but he was kind of a goofy guy and initially he was very, uh, aggressive, I would say, but over time he became much more personable. To the point where I, I think he'd have really struggled if his orders were to, to kill me. I really do. Uh, you know, and I, again, it goes back to just the stuff you learn as a kid, you know, you treat others the way you want to be treated. You, you don't act like a jerk, you know, they're, they're Muslim and when it was prayer time, I was respectful.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  I didn't, you know, I, I let them do what they need to do and, and that goes both ways, you know? So it just, it wasn't really a strategy necessarily as it was just kind of common sense combined with some of the training that I'd gotten. You know, why would you want to make this guy do anything other than want to help you, right? I mean, there was a couple of times that things happened to me physically and, and I needed some help getting cleaned up and, uh, and he did it. And I'm like, man, I'm not sure I'd have done this for you, but I appreciate it.

• 2:04:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You said he earned his combat pay.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:04:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that sounds like a rough duty. Even I didn't want that duty, that's for sure. What about the doctor? How do you say his name? Dr. Kadai?

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, Kadaya.

• 2:04:24Jocko Willink?

  Kadaya.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Kadaya.

• 2:04:25Jocko Willink?

  Kadaya.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Jocko Willink?

  And what was, what was going on with Dr. Kadaya?

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  He had actually gone to school in the U S. He went to med school in California, I believe, at USC, I think, if I remember correctly. And so he spoke decent English, but he had nothing left. You know, this was a big fight. People don't often realize how big the fight was from the Somali's perspective. I've heard numbers as high as 2,000 wounded on their side, and 700 or 800 killed. So, you know, he's got limited resources to begin with, and he's now dealt with all that, and he doesn't come to see me for a couple of days. And I, you know, I describe it as a tackle box. He had a box of Betadine, Gauze, and a couple of instruments, and that was in some aspirin. That's all he had. But he tried.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  And he splinted my leg. And unfortunately, the fracture was so high, I mean, it's way up high. It's probably like 2/3 up the femur. All he really accomplished was stabilizing my knee and my ankle, so the only pivot point was the fracture. So when they moved me, my leg is like this big thing, and it's pivoting around the fracture site. And I finally said, "Man, you gotta get this off." And I finally convinced him to get it off. But, you know, he cleaned me up, and he, you know, he did what he could. And you never know. I mean, he could have saved my leg, because, you know, open compound femur fracture in a nasty crap hole like that, the chance of infection is really high, and it never got infected. So, it's kind of amazing.

• 2:05:57Jocko Willink?

  They bring you some MREs. They start bringing you some water. At this point, you must be thinking like, "Okay, I have a decent chance. They're trying to take care of me. They got the doctor trying to give me guidance." Here we get another character rolls in. Again, get the book, because you get to get a better introduction. I'm just kind of hitting the wave tops of these things. General Deeds, Minister of Internal Affairs. He tells you, "Your face has already been televised around the world." He continued almost with pride, "Everyone knows that you are a prisoner. Inshallah, you will see your family again." Perhaps you would like a radio. Yes, I nodded graciously. A radio would be fantastic.

• 2:06:38Jocko Willink?

  So is that your first recognition? Did you start to get a feeling for the fact that everybody knows what's going on here?

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, at that point. And at that point, it becomes, how long is this gonna last? Because with those injuries, after the fact, the doctors told me they thought I probably had 30 days to live, you know, without proper care. And so it's a time, it's a battle against time at that point. But it certainly felt much better than the first, you know, 24 hours, for sure.

• 2:07:07Jocko Willink?

  You've got a section in here that I think is just good to read because it's good lessons learned for life. You say, "It was my fourth day as a prisoner of war in Somalia. I knew I couldn't deal with captivity in terms of years, but I had to mentally prepare myself for a long haul. So as I started crumbling, stared at this crumbling ceiling of Hotel Nowhere, and listened to the furious buzzing of the black flies, I told myself that I would survive just one day at a time. I would not imagine my captivity as years of tortured waiting, because if I really believed that, I would probably die. My mind could not accept being in prison for that long and those kind of things, those kind of thoughts would break me. Like any major challenge in life, you have to take it in bits and pieces. You don't

• 2:07:51Jocko Willink?

  try and tackle the whole thing at once. I remembered how I reacted at the crash site when it was overrun, and I had focused on surviving for just five minutes and then making it through the next five. And so as day four dawned, and I ventured further into the black tunnel of captivity, I needed a limited point of reference, or that darkness would just overwhelm me. You just need to make it to tomorrow, I told myself. If you wake up tomorrow, you'll figure out how to survive another tomorrow. Today, you've got to figure out how to survive today." So that's the, that's the mode you're going into. Good lesson for freaking life in general.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  Really, it's any challenge, yeah. Any big challenge, it's just one day at a time. That's all you can do.

• 2:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, Abdi shows up again, and you're gonna get a visit from the Red Cross. Red Cross.

• 2:08:51Jocko Willink?

  And you get this radio that's working.

• 2:08:57Jocko Willink?

  Once you're on the radio, you start hearing the reports. And that was, that had to be, that had to be crazy.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  It is, it is crazy. I mean, like, they're playing music. I mean, there's requests for me because they found out that I had the radio.

• 2:09:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  So now, now guys in Task Force Ranger are requesting songs. And Donovan requested, "Whoops, there it is," or something like that.

• 2:09:25Jocko Willink?

  You have, um, yeah, they're, they're giving a report. Before you get to the radio request, they're giving reports of what's going on. This is sort of your first indication. You know, you hear this report on BBC on Sunday, October 3rd, around 4:00 PM. Quick, US Quick Reaction Force detained 24 suspected ID'd militant members in a search and seizure operation. We believe several key militia members were among them.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Three of the 24 detainees died of wounds reserved, received during the operation. One detainee is being treated. Key militia members we have detained were not among those who died or wounded.

• 2:10:03Jocko Willink?

  As the, and then he goes into this, as the operation was in progress, two US Army Black Hawk helicopters were lost due to ground fire during this time. The troops evacuating the detainees came under fire and returned fire. About 70 Rangers surrounded one down helicopter at dusk. They formed a perimeter

• 2:10:22Jocko Willink?

  to protect the wounded members of the crew while awaiting a medical evacuation. And they too came under fire.

• 2:10:28Jocko Willink?

  The task force was organized consisting of two US Army infantry companies, 24 Malaysian armored personnel carriers, four Pakistani tanks, two Pakistani armored personnel carriers, a Ranger platoon, and a company of armored Humvees. The task force reached the downed aircraft at 2:30 Monday morning and evacuated the soldiers.

• 2:10:47Jocko Willink?

  I realized that I had been in a furious battle. That had been the furious battle I'd witnessed on my first night of captivity. Yes, no matter what injuries Cliff and Don had sustained, I was certain now they'd been rescued. And then the report continues, regrettably, there were a number of US casualties in these engagements. As the Pentagon has already released, five US soldiers have died. In addition to a number have been wounded. It wasn't good news. The major's tone was cautious and I knew that his announcement of casualty figures was preliminary. I had no doubt that the numbers of our dead and wounded would increase.

• 2:11:26Jocko Willink?

  So you're hearing all these reports of, of what had unfolded. Um, and you're, like you said earlier, you're an eternal optimist. And to you, you hear these reports and you're painting them in the best possible light.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What about the Black Hawk flying overhead with Plan ACDC? What was that all about?

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  Well, it, it is somewhat sensitive. There was, uh, uh, there was a method to the madness. It wasn't just to make me feel better. Um, and I guess we'll leave it at that. And then, uh, Dan, uh, Dan Gelato, who's a real good friend of mine, just got inducted in the Army Aviation Hall of Fame. Actually, just recently was flying, uh, not flying, but it recorded his voice. And he's calling to me from the sky, Mike, we won't leave you behind. I, and I just gotta chill up my spine. I mean, I still do, just thinking about that moment because you, you know, you're not gonna be left behind. I mean, you know that, you know, the unit you're with is the unit that's gonna get called upon to rescue people in situations like me. And you know what they can do.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  So it's just a matter of time, but to hear your friend calling you from the sky, just incredibly powerful.

• 2:12:42Jocko Willink?

  You end up getting that Red Cross visit. This is like, how do you describe incredible angel of mercy is what you see this woman as Suzanne Hoffstetter from the Red Cross. And she's there to kind of check on you. Your first look, she can tell a look in your face, she's like, oh, your face is all I'm getting out. She's like, you're not getting released today. She wanted to give you that news up front, but she was there to check on you.

• 2:13:10Jocko Willink?

  And she actually gives you a chance to write a letter to your family.

• 2:13:17Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "I decided to keep it personally and mostly informative so that at least my family would worry less."

• 2:13:24Jocko Willink?

  This is what I wrote. "Dear Lori and Joey, I know you must be worried about how I am doing. They are treating me well. The Somali doctor comes every day and cleans my injuries. The people are taking care of me are also treating me well. They get whatever kind of food I asked for, but there's no pizza available unfortunately. I want nothing more in the world than to be with you and Joey again. I see his face and I pray this will all turn out okay. Please tell everyone else in the family that I hear their prayers and things will work out okay. Nothing else matters more to me than to see my family again. I think I will, I really do. You stay positive and be strong and give Joey more hugs and kisses for his dad that misses him so.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  I broke my leg, compound fracture right femur and injured my back in the crash. I think my nose is broken, but it does not hurt. I have a superficial gunshot wound in my left arm. The leg and back are the only real problems, but as I said, the medical care has been very good. I hope to see you soon and I pray for the others who are missing, Ray, Bill, Tommy and anyone else. I love you."

• 2:14:32Jocko Willink?

  I signed with my full signature, Michael Durant. A particular scribble that would assure anyone reading the letter that I had in fact written it. When I was done, I was in tears to think that this document would soon be in the hands of my family was just overwhelming.

• 2:14:51Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting is that, uh, you know, people, like everyone got to see this letter, the whole world, including the intel people that were looking for the, looking for the coded information that you had in there, trying to figure out what you meant by a pizza, because your favorite food was actually spaghetti.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  And there was a spaghetti factory in Mogadishu. So, yeah, they went down a lot of rabbit holes. They took down every Domino's in the city.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  Those are some motivated friends, man.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  And then you, so Suzanne, the Red Cross girl, ends up going back to Task Force and debriefing them. And she, she gives them information. And one of the information, as you mentioned earlier, was that you had a radio. And so, so now, now these guys, everyone knows that you're actually listening to the radio. And they start freaking sending songs to you and whatnot. Just, uh, again.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  You can't make this stuff up.

• 2:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's crazy to even think about. Um, you know, you get thunderstruck. Uh, you end up with Willie Nelson and Meatloaf. And these guys are just said, you know, they're dedicated to you.

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Jocko Willink?

  They play Rooster by Alice in Chains, which, again, when I was on my first deployment overseas, you know, that Alice in Chains album was so big. And that song was obviously so big to anybody in the military. And here you are freaking actually living out the Rooster scenario yourself.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  They sent me a, a signed copy of the CD and a note after the fact.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  No way. Oh, that's epic.

• 2:16:37Jocko Willink?

  "On my seventh day as prisoner of war, I found religion. It's often been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, meaning that even a non-believer will begin to pray when faced with his own mortality." But I'd never been given, but I'd never been a Catholic of convenience who only prayed when times were tough. Admittedly, as a boy, I attended church regularly with my family. While I was an adult and full-time Army helicopter pilot, I'd allowed that tradition to lapse. Yet my absence from the pews hadn't broken my bond with the Lord. At times, I would offer my Sunday prayers from the cockpit, or say a silent grace over an MRE between missions, or ask a chaplain for a quick blessing as I ran to my Hilo. It didn't require the threat of death for me to recall the sacraments. So when I say I found religion, I meant it literally. So in this red

• 2:17:22Jocko Willink?

  box, you end up getting a box from the Red Cross. They got a razor, and they got toothbrush, and toothpaste, and a writing tablet, and pens. A fresh roll of toilet paper, which, for those people that haven't been in the field or experienced life without toilet paper, this is a big deal. Some playing cards, and then you say the very last item was a US Army Bible, about the size of a small paperback, its cover and binding in desert camouflage colors. It was then that I realized some of these items had come directly from Task Force Ranger. Of course, then you do the same thing that they did, which you start thinking, there's gotta be some kind of a weapon here, some kind of a radio. This is how I'm gonna

• 2:18:06Jocko Willink?

  get out. Where's the file? So I can file through some bars. Then you start taking notes inside, you start taking notes inside the, you know, the blank spaces inside the Bible. You still have that? I do. I should have brought it. I have to come back.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  And again, we talk about how much of this story is crazy, this part. My wife spoke to me at dawn. I had woken up and turned on the radio, hoping to hear some more encouraging news and maybe some rock and roll to start the day off right. My pains for my leg and back, which didn't seem to keep me awake, at night gathered force the minute I opened my eyes. I lay there with my eyes closed, the radio tight to my ear, hardly taking in the voice of AFN's female DJ until she started talking about me. On Friday, the Red Cross delivered a letter to Durant's wife in the United States. She chose to answer him on camera on CNN in hopes that her husband would hear her reply. My eyes snapped open and I blinked hard, thinking I might still be asleep and dreaming.

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  But no, it was Lori's voice, her light southern accent, clear as a bell, and I listened. And as I listened, the emotions flowed through my veins and flooded in my chest. And she said, "I'm making this statement in hopes that it will reach my husband. I want him to know that Joey and I are doing well. I received your letter from the Red Cross, Mike. I was very happy to hear that you are okay and that you are being treated well. Clay and the rest of the family are taking great care of us. Everyone is praying for you. I know you can hear my prayers and the prayers of your brothers." As she took a breath, my own breathing was quick and shallow, my ears burning as I listened with every pore. "Everything with the new house is moving along fine. We'll be living in our dream home soon. I hope they're taking care of you and feeding you right. I'll have a big pizza waiting for you soon.

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  Joey is waiting for you to get back before he starts walking. He wants his father to see his first steps. Take care of yourself, don't worry about us. We'll be fine. And remember, babe, as you've always told me, NSDQ, Night Stalkers, don't quit. Take care of yourself. I love you very much with all my heart." The DJ cut back when Lori was done, but compared to my wife's voice, her drone sounded cold and lifeless.

• 2:20:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's...

• 2:20:26Jocko Willink?

  It's like unprecedented, right?

• 2:20:30Speaker 01

  And all in 11 days. You know, I mean, that's the, that's the roller coaster of it. And that was really why I decided to write that book, because Black Hawk Down doesn't get into any of this. You know, the Black Hawk Down story ends basically when the battle ends. And this book really picks up at that point and keeps going. So that was, that was sort of the catalyst, because it's just bizarre. And as you've implied, I mean, there are a lot of great lessons in there. And, you know, some I learned after the fact, some I, some I applied, but there's, there's a ton in there.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  You start getting word that the former American ambassador to Somalia, Robert Oakley, had showed up to sort of start moving this thing forward.

• 2:21:12Jocko Willink?

  Oakley, this is, this is good to read. Oakley made his position very clear. There would be no deals. There would be no exchange of prisoners. Either a deed would release me immediately and unconditionally, or a rescue attempt would be made. He framed the rest of his message as speculation rather than a threat. "I imagine that such a raid will come sooner rather than later," he said. "And with massive US forces gathering here each day, fighter aircraft and tanks and so forth, it will certainly be a tragedy. A large portion of your city will no doubt be destroyed, and perhaps Mr. Durant along with it. But the US is not going to sit idly by and let the clock tick any longer."

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  We need about a thousand Robert Oakleys. The guy was, I mean, he's legit. I met him. I could tell you the way they reacted as soon as he came back on the scene. He just changed the whole dynamic. They trusted him and he was, they called him a shoot straighter.

• 2:22:09Jocko Willink?

  And that's, you know, this is the type of threat that they understood.

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:22:15Jocko Willink?

  They believed, they believed that he would back it up, and it worked.

• 2:22:21Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Minister Abdi, I'm saying that wrong, aren't I?

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  Abdi.

• 2:22:27Jocko Willink?

  Abdi, sorry. He comes in, "I have some good news for you, Mr. Durant," he said. "I'm all ears, Mr. Minister," I said. He smiled slightly at that, "but actually, I was all nerve endings. I could feel them twitching under my skin. The elders of the Somali National Alliance have convened." He folded his hands behind his back. "They have made a decision. I did not say anything. I just watched him waiting. You will go home tomorrow, Mr. Durant, unconditionally."

• 2:23:01Jocko Willink?

  Next day, October 14th, today is the day. That was the entry I wrote in my Bible that morning. So, that's it. You find out that you're going home. It's...

• 2:23:16Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit anticlimactic because it's almost surprised. It surprised the guards when they when they found you.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the US.

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the US.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  No one knew I was coming. They just sort of showed up as like a FedEx delivery or something, you know.

• 2:23:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  By the way, I fell out of the back of the truck when they first took off. So it's a little bit of the Keystone Cops here too.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, you talk about that. They load you to van as they the you were too big to fit in the van and close the doors. So they just leave the doors open and then they start pulling away and you start flying out the back and they grab hold of you as you're falling. I mean, it's yeah, like you said, it's Keystone Cops. Eventually you show up there at a task force ranger or at the compound.

• 2:24:05Jocko Willink?

  And this this jag. This jag is looking at you and he looked stood there, looked at me for a moment and shocked and then yelled, holy mother of God, it's Mike Durant, medic. Then all hell broke loose. There's an army field hospital right there at the UN compound. Medics and nurses and doctors charged across the tarmac as UN soldiers pulled me out of the van. A gurney appeared and they set me on the litter. As faces crowded around me, everyone shouting and barking orders at once. People were yelling for instruments and medical equipment and it was like a scene out of ER as they rushed me toward the large green tents of the hospital. I looked around, but Farimbi was nowhere in sight. He'd faded away into the crowd and I left his world much in the way I'd come into it, carried aloft and engulfed by a mob.

• 2:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Then the doctors, the nurses.

• 2:24:56Jocko Willink?

  They go to work.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  You, you know, you talked earlier about finding out this is this is when you find out about found out about Cliff and Donovan. Obviously, just freaking.

• 2:25:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, horrible. And and you're finding out about everyone else. I mean.

• 2:25:24Jocko Willink?

  Just to kind of close out the book here again, we've skimmed the wave tops of this. And it's so many good, just incredible poignant points in it. You say this, just to kind of finish it out. "There was a C-141 waiting to take me to Germany. But between the landing pad and the jet, all 400 men of Task Force Ranger had come out to form two long rows, a corridor of sunburnt faces and desert uniforms. Someone handed me a borrowed maroon beret. And Dan Gelada and Stan Wood, Mark Bergamo..." Am I saying that right? Bergamo. Bergamo. "...and Trey Williams lifted my litter and we walked toward the ramp of the waiting transport. Every man in the task force was holding some kind of a cup. Every cup had a shot of whiskey in it.

• 2:26:09Jocko Willink?

  The men spoke to me in murmurs as I passed. They wished me well and offered me thumbs up. When we reached the cargo ramp of the jet, my friends held me there so I could look out over this honor guard of my brothers, this company of heroes. General Garrison stepped up onto the ramp. He handed me a shot glass of whiskey while he raised his own and all the men raised theirs to the ice blue African sky. 'To our fallen comrades,' his voice echoed. 'We shall never forget them.' 'To our fallen comrades,' 400 said in unison. We downed our shots. As from a speaker somewhere came a recording of 'God Bless America.'

• 2:26:52Jocko Willink?

  When the men joined in to sing it, their voices were like thunder and I could feel the earth tremble. They carried me onto the plane. At last, I was really going home. Soon I would inhale the sweet sense of America. Soon I would be holding my son. Yet so much had happened. So many of the best pieces of my life had been torn away that I felt empty and hollow. As the cargo ramp closed, I looked at my hands. The only things I had left were that coveted Nightstalker beret and the Bible. And something I had always taken for granted before.

• 2:27:29Jocko Willink?

  My freedom."

• 2:27:38Jocko Willink?

  So you go into some of this in the book as well, what happens after that? You know, there's a, that's a whole nother, there's a whole nother dynamic that takes place, you know, you're getting back to America, you gotta get surgeries, you're getting, I mean, you had to be one of the most popular human beings in the world at that point, certainly amongst military personnel and government people and, you know, they, some of them wanna get their picture taken with you so they can post or whatever, write about it, or have it in the newspaper, or whatever you do back in the 90s, I guess you don't post it.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  Stone tablets.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:17Jocko Willink?

  You enter into, you know, starting to get surgeries, I mean, your femur must have been all jacked up at this point.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it actually, the muscles shrink, so it had a seven centimeter overlap from the shrinkage, so they had to put me in traction, which they did in Germany, and I actually flew from Germany to the US in traction, and they didn't set the femur till I got back to Fort Campbell, so it had been, when it was all said and done, close to a month before they actually set it. And it's interesting that your bones get really sticky if they've been broken like that for a while, so they, it actually doesn't create a significant problem, I mean, you can wait that long to set it, I was shocked, but, you know, in terms of recovery on that, it's like nothing ever happened to it, I mean, it's, the only thing they kinda mess up sometimes is they don't get the angle right, or you know, it's rotated slightly,

• 2:29:05Speaker 01

  but I guess my doctor had a protractor or something, I don't know if he got it right.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  Lined it up, and then your goal at that point came, became to get back in the seat, get back and become, become a fully qualified pilot again for, for the Nightstalkers, how long did that take?

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  It took a little over a year, because, you know, the femur rod stayed in for a full year, and then they had to take it out, and then I had to prove after that that I should be able to get back in the cockpit, and the nice thing was... Things had started to change about that timeframe where the military recognized the investment they have in soldiers, sailors, and Marines. And unlike previous generations where I would have been just say, you know, thanks for your service and sent home, you know, that's why you have, it was the beginning of this thought process where limb or no limb, you want to stay in, we'll find a way to make it happen. And I was sort of, it was happening right in real time as, so I got a lot of help and

• 2:30:07Speaker 01

  support in trying to stay in and get back on flight status.

• 2:30:10Jocko Willink?

  And you ran the Marine Corps Marathon. Had you run it before?

• 2:30:15Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Is that like a normal thing for you?

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  I've only done two. I did one before.

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  One before and one after?

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  One after. And I ran faster after, by the way. So that was, that's because they're going to take away my flight pay. So I had to, I had to get moving, you know. But that was the, you know, my part of the battle is convincing the Army, hey, look, I just ran 26 miles faster than I could before this all happened. I should be allowed to fly. And I got a waiver and I got back in the cockpit.

• 2:30:42Jocko Willink?

  And did you like take a, what was your rank? What were you doing? What, did you take like a platoon and go?

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  Uh, there were, there was like six of us that went. Yeah. We, we all kind of did it in honor of, you know, the guys that couldn't be there with us because Cliff, Cliff Walcott had run it the first time. I don't think Donovan ran it. But anyway, we had all, you know, we weren't like elite runners or anything, but we did races together. So we kind of did it for them.

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  So you end up just going back into full flight status at the 160th?

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  Well, there was kind of a handshake done that I really didn't need to be operational again. I mean, you know, back, they never did anything to it. It's still deformed.

• 2:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:31:30Speaker 01

  So, you know, I can't, I can't spend three hours in a seat.

• 2:31:33Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  But the, the leadership recognized that, you know, it was sort of a moral victory for all of us if I got back on flight status. And, and so I, I basically became a staff officer. I still flew, but not operational.

• 2:31:45Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:31:47Jocko Willink?

  When we, when we fast forward a little bit, 1999, the book Black Hawk Down comes out. Like, how does that impact your, your life, your world? Or was that, was the, was the biggest, uh, let's say, blip on the publicity radar when you got home?

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  For me, the biggest blip was when I got home. When we found out that Black Hawk Down was being written, because it first came out as a series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That's, that was the original documentation that led to the book. And, you know, the, the paper was okay, because everybody was like, okay, it's just a newspaper, it's got limited distribution, it's not going to get that much attention. But when, when it started to turn into a book, scared the crap out of all of us, actually, because, you know, you don't know what they're going to do with it. They could just turn into a ridiculously stupid story, or something highly critical, or inaccurate, or whatever. But in the end, it turns out okay. So, you know, we were all, now, the ground, I know some of the ground guys don't like it a lot. You know, I wasn't there on the ground, I can't speak to it, I don't know.

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  But from an air perspective, it's accurate enough.

• 2:32:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's so, it's very difficult. Um, you know, I got a, a friend of mine that was in SOG in Vietnam. His, his name is John Stryker Meyer, and he has his own podcast that he does now called The SOG Cast. And he just, just has guys from SOG on, from Vietnam. And those guys, like, two of those guys that were on the same mission will tell different, different circumstances of how they saw it go down. And they're not, neither one of them's wrong, they just saw it from a different perspective and/or remembered a different way. So, I can't even imagine trying to piece together the perspective of however many guys were on the ground in the battle that day,

• 2:33:38Jocko Willink?

  and have it, have every person be satisfied with what was said. That's a very tall task. And, and you know what? I, I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm saying... You know, a reporter could be on the ground with you and me entering a building and could report exactly what he saw and you might think it was the worst story ever and I might think it's great.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  And, and we would both be right because you know, he could miss. So that's a very big challenge, but yeah, I mean, obviously all of us in the special operations community read that book, you know, when it came out and tried to get the lessons earned and, and definitely thought that it was, uh, you know, I mean, I thought it was a great book and, um, but again, I wasn't there.

• 2:34:23Speaker 01

  No, I think he did a good job. He put a lot into it. He did a lot of research and I think his intent was to tell it as truthfully as he could, and I think he accomplished that.

• 2:34:31Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then the movie comes out in 2001, December of 2001, the movie comes out. So, I mean, I think as far as combat movie goes, combat movies go, again, is there some Hollywood stuff in there? There sure as hell is. Is there some stuff that's like not even close to accurate? Yes, there is, but that does a good job of conveying a lot of the chaos, a lot of the mayhem, a lot of the pressure that guys are under. So, um, I don't know what you thought of that movie, but.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  No, I think the same thing and it humanized some people, you know, and it didn't portray everybody as the Avengers, you know, that are invincible and you know, they're humans, they make mistakes. They, they, there, there are some that are just rock stars and others that, you know, whether it's inexperienced or, or what, you know, maybe aren't at that level of performance, but that's just reality. So I think generally speaking, yeah, I think most people are fairly happy with it and it's, it's the reason I wrote my book.

• 2:35:26Jocko Willink?

  Right. I was about to ask you that. So your book come, came out in 2003.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:31Jocko Willink?

  So you must've started writing that after those, those book or was it the movie or the book that made you write it?

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  It was the movie. I mean, I went to see the movie and I, I didn't go right away because I wasn't sure. I mean, what's this going to feel like? You know, I'm going to watch my friends essentially die on, on screen. It actually seemed fake to me because of the actors. So it didn't have the emotional impact that I thought it might have, uh, for me. And once it was over though, because like I said, you know, Black Hawk Down, the, the, the credits are rolling and I'm just basically waking up on my first day in captivity. So I thought there's never been a better time to kind of push this out than now and you know. Writing books in our world is a bit controversial to begin with, right? And, and, and that's why I hadn't done it yet. But I thought, look, there's been a book, there's been a movie, actually, there were multiple books.

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  And it's all out there and you know, Command, you're the one that let it all out, not me. So I'm just going to tell my part of this story because if I don't tell it, it's never going to get told. Cause I'm the only one that knows it. And so I felt good about doing it at that point in time, you know, from an operational sensitivity perspective that, you know, the stuff is all 10 years old, there's nothing there. But it's still, you know, it raises eyebrows here and there when you write a book and I understand. But I, I still feel to this day that it was the right thing to do.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's impossible to write a book and trust me, I've written millennia. It's impossible to write a book and, and, and say, well, you know, I'm doing this. I'm, I'm humble and I'm doing this because you're right, no matter what you, you're writing a book, it's about you.

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  And so there's that, there's that hypocrisy of doing that. And I certainly like had, you know, my gut in knots because like you, when I joined, like you didn't talk about being in those field teams for damn sure. Uh, one of, one of my Admiral friends helped me out, get through that. And, you know, he said, hey, we're supposed to be quiet professionals, but that doesn't mean silent professionals. And the stories and lessons learned need to be carried on and you're doing a good job of that. And I was very thankful to hear that. Um, and I think that's accurate. What year did you, what year did you, or what, what time, because you retired in 2001, right?

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:37:45Jocko Willink?

  And what month did you retire in 2001?

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  February.

• 2:37:50Jocko Willink?

  So, okay, but you know where I'm going with that. So September 11th comes and you're.

• 2:37:56Speaker 01

  Sitting on the bench. And that's how I felt, I mean, really. But could, could I have gone and flown a, you know, 18 hour combat infiltration in Afghanistan? I couldn't have done it. I'd have been asking them to drop me off somewhere in the mountains halfway through, you know, because my back, it just, I can't sit that long. Not, not in those seats. So it, it was hard because I knew, you know, the things that have gone on and this, where as you know, you personally experienced in the last 20 years, you, you can't even begin to describe at all. It's just unbelievable.

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  And, uh, I did feel like I was, I had missed, missed the boat because it, you know, it's our Superbowl. I, I, I don't think people who don't serve in the military really understand why you want to go do that stuff, but. It's, it's, it's your Super Bowl. I mean, this why it's you strive your whole career to get involved in that kind of stuff. And it was tough, but I also knew there was a lot of very capable guys that could do it better than I could. So.

• 2:38:56Jocko Willink?

  So once you retired, you went in the corporate world for a bit?

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  I did. I went to work on a brand new helicopter for the Army. The Army was buying a Comanche. And it was pretty cool. I mean, it's, you know, fast stealth, the high tech, but it was a train wreck. I mean, you know, we don't do very well with major acquisition programs. We it's, it's, when you think about, you know, a hundred years ago, we could do things with a slide rule or whatever. And today we have all this technology and we can't keep anything on track. It's somewhat mind boggling, but that there's a whole list of reasons why that program was, was in bad shape by the time I got there. But it was a good exposure to getting involved in a government program, office and how things work and how most of

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  them actually don't work. You know, and as a taxpayer, pretty frustrating to see what was being spent and what we were getting for it.

• 2:39:51Jocko Willink?

  It's horrible to see that. And during that time, you also wrote another book called, just called The Nightstalkers, which is like more of a historical account of the Nightstalkers.

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  Right. It's just a select series of missions that were kind of from that same timeframe and a little before. And the whole idea there was to sort of articulate that it's, it's not just the same unit. It's the same guys. I mean, there are people that have been there, you know, 24 years and have been involved in all these real world ops. And, and again, I don't think the average person can even get their head around that, that, that, you know, those individuals contributed so much over such a long period of time. It's just unbelievable. And it did fairly well, did nearly as well as, as in the company Heroes did. But, you know, I think it gave just some more insight into. The DNA of this kind of unit, you know, from an aviation perspective, it's essentially a SEAL team.

• 2:40:45Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, you know, it's from a culture and commitment to mission and all that stuff. The mission's different, but the personalities, we don't lift weights nearly as much, but.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  And we don't have, we don't have toys anywhere close to as big as your toys or as expensive as your toys. We always joke about the fact that like our budget is so small compared to, you know, the aviation community because of freaking Blackhawk. What does a Blackhawk cost?

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  Well, the special ops configured ones are probably in the 45 range. Yeah. So, and that's not a thousand.

• 2:41:18Jocko Willink?

  So I had an awesome Huey pilot from Vietnam on and he was talking about, you know, those guys were just flying the hot LZs. Like it wasn't like without a second thought, they were rolling in there. And he said something like, well, you know, here, here I was, you know, 18 years old and flying in. And I got a, whatever it was, I got like a hundred thousand dollar aircraft. That's all mine. And I said, you know, and we started talking, I said, is that why it's more cautious with the Blackhawks? Cause they're so much more expensive. He goes, yeah, I guess they must be more careful. Those things must cost like $250,000. I didn't, I, I, I knew it was more than that, but I said, I think it's quite a bit more than that, sir.

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  And he said, oh, really? How much? Over a million? I forget the conversation, but it was funny, but yeah. For, I mean, a normal, I ended up looking it up, a normal Blackhawk, not even a spec ops one is like 20 million, 24 million. So yeah, the prices went up a bit and, and you actually, once you got done, you know, working with that first company, you founded your own company.

• 2:42:25Speaker 01

  I did. There was one other company in between, but it, it just got me a little bit more experience in the corporate world. And then 2008. I was working for a publicly traded company and you know, I know you've worked with a lot of different companies, but in terms of culture, the biggest disconnect for me personally as a former special ops guy is a publicly traded company because it's, it's all about the profits. I mean, you know, there's good companies out there, don't get me wrong, but when, when you're reporting financials every single day, I mean, we got to the point where we're not doing it quarterly, we're doing it every day. Are you people insane? I mean, I can't do what I'm supposed to be doing for the company if all I'm doing is looking at the numbers. So I got very, very

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  disgusted by it and I thought, okay, I've got enough experience, I can do this myself. And I started Pinnacle in 2008.

• 2:43:15Jocko Willink?

  And then what's that, what's the focus there?

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  So we're an aerospace company. We, we initially, you know, I mean, it was me and one other guy. So we started out with nothing other than a good idea and a PowerPoint briefing and it's, it's kinda hard. I mean, you know, a true startup like that in the defense contracting world is very difficult. I mean, most fail because it takes a long time to get contracts. And if you have no past performance, then you know, why is anyone going to give you any work? But we got some and we built on it, built on it, built on it. And now today, I describe us as a, we do everything in the aviation industry except build the aircraft. So if you think about maintenance, flight operations, engineering, logistics, technical publications, you know,

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  all of it. We do all of that for predominantly helicopters, but we, I mean, we do the tilt rotor for the, for Air Force Special Operations Command. We do some fixed wing work for the Air Force. We get some international contracts. So we've really gone way beyond what I originally, you know, because you write the business plan and where am I going to be in five years? And, and it's, it's a fairy tale, really, in most cases, especially a true startup because you don't know if you're ever even going to get any traction. So, but we're so far beyond that now.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  How big are you now in terms of employees?

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  So we'll, we'll have a workforce of close to 600 by the end of the year. And, you know, again, in five years, what did I think we would have? I don't know. I probably put, I'd have to go back and look at it, you know, 25 people, something like that. So it's enough people where we got a, we have a, a human resources problem pretty much every day.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  That's the fun stuff.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:53Jocko Willink?

  So here you are, how many, how many years you end up doing in the army?

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  Twenty-two.

• 2:44:57Jocko Willink?

  So you did twenty-two years in the army. You are a damn POW. You flew the best, you know, helicopters for the best unit in the world. As far as aviation goes, you end up retiring from that. You work in the civilian sector for a while. You build this business up to a significant business. I would think maybe you're, you're saying to yourself, okay, maybe it's time to, you know, pump the brakes a little bit and take a little time for myself. But it turns out you're actually doing the exact opposite.

• 2:45:27Speaker 01

  I'm doing the exact opposite and, you know, it's, it was a tough decision because I was, the runway I was lined up on, as I would describe it, was retire. Our youngest is graduating high school this year. You know, the company's done well. I can do whatever I want, you know, and the, and the famous words, was it Elon Musk who said, I could be on the beach drinking Mai Tais every day, but you know, I want to make a difference. So I decided to run for senate. And I, I think you're getting that sentiment from a lot of veterans. Because, you know, veterans have seen the sacrifice that people who serve this nation have made. And then you see things like the way Afghanistan was thrown away and you see the way the southern border is being handled and, and you see this mandatory vaccine mandate and, you know,

• 2:46:13Speaker 01

  you in particular, where you hear speculation that SEALs are going to have to pay for their tridents and turn them in if they don't want to get the shot. I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous. And it just, you know, you can sit there and complain about it, or you can actually try to do something about it. And I thought, I feel the same way today that I felt in 2008, when I was working for that publicly traded company and I couldn't stand the way it was being run. Said, I could do this better myself. So I kind of have, I feel that same way. I can do this better than other people that are doing it. And I've met a lot of folks recently through trips to DC. And, you know, initially, when you look at them, some of them sound intelligent and, and a lot of them are, don't get me wrong. But if you meet them and you find out what's really behind the curtain, it's, it's a little scary.

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  We need, we need more people with true life experiences, not career politicians, people who, you know, this is not for me. I'm not going there to, you know, be in office for the rest of my life. I'm going there to, to try to make a difference. And I really don't think you can understand.

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  Military policy and business policy unless you've actually done it. And a lot of these people have not done it. I mean, they they've studied it, or maybe they think they know it, but but they really don't. I mean, you look at some of the dialogue going on right now about Ukraine, you know. Some Congressman said yesterday, you know, we would use nuclear weapons.

• 2:47:36Speaker 01

  These people don't know what they're talking about, you know, and you got to have somebody that can maybe apply the voice of reason. Now, you know, Alabama is a very red state, so in in our state, it's all about winning the primary. And, you know, that's in May of this this coming year. And if that happens, it's pretty much a guarantee you win the general and then start serving in February of 23.

• 2:47:58Jocko Willink?

  What was the how how did this start off in your brain? But also, how did it start off? What do you do? Do you do you call 1-800? I want to run for Senate? Like, how does how does that work?

• 2:48:09Speaker 01

  You can, and some people do, and it doesn't go very well, you know. But no, I was asked to consider it. And the reason I was asked to consider it is because I do have that real world experience. And I have it. It has to be dusted off a little bit, but I have name recognition. I mean, there's a lot of veterans in Alabama. There's a lot of people that remember this story. There's a huge aviation presence. And having that resume plus the business resume is a real it's it's very, very appealing to the average Alabama voter. And the fact that, you know, I'm not a career politician, people are looking for a different answer. I mean, you look at Glenn Youngkin, you know, a big part of why he won is he's he's a fresh

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  face with a new idea and real world experience. It's the same thing. Tommy Tuberville, our current Senator, who I would serve with, coach of Auburn football, you know, same thing. Never been a politician before. I think initially, when he announced, people were like, Coach T? I mean, but I've met with him. He's doing an awesome job. He really works hard to understand the process and he cares about the state, you know. That's what it should be all about. It shouldn't be about trying to further your own political career. It should be, I'm here to serve the people of Alabama and the nation because as a Senator, there's a lot there. I mean, you know, the things that you vote on matter across the board. And I think we've got to have people there that have, you know, integrity and are there for the right reasons, and that's why I'm doing it. But.

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  I could be nuts. I mean, it's not fun.

• 2:49:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I definitely think you're nuts. You know, when you were talking about the meeting these politicians for some of them that are up there. We did a probably too long of a podcast. I did a series of like five or six podcasts about this book that I've read called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. And it's written by a guy that was a psychologist, but he was also a guy that served in World War II. The book was published in maybe nineteen seventy four or five or something like this. But one of the key points in it that it talks about is one of the reasons why, and he does the same thing that you just did, which is not, he's not talking about everybody. He points that out over and over again in the book. There's plenty of military personnel that are awesome, that are great leaders, they're outstanding.

• 2:50:25Jocko Willink?

  But there are also people that are in the military that are horrible leaders and they're toxic leaders. And one of the key components that he talks about is the authoritarian mindset. So what the problem is with the military is it can attract people. If I'm, if I have an authoritarian mindset, authoritarian psychology, I want people to listen to me and I want things to be in order. So what better way to to make that happen than to join the military, become an officer, people have to listen to me and things will be in order. And and then inside the military, as we know, if I never go into combat and all I have to do is keep the, keep the, the, the, the the uniform squared away and keep my area clean, I'm going to get promoted because I'm going to run things like an authoritarian.

• 2:51:09Jocko Willink?

  Now I'm horrible in combat because I can't control everything and it drives me crazy and I freak out. But it attracts that kind of person. And then, you know, just as you were talking about being in the government and being in a, uh, being in a position where you're in control of things, it can unfortunately attract the same kind of deranged authoritarians that want to go in there and control everything. And so I think that's coming to, I think we're seeing a lot of that right now. A lot of the government that is looking around going, oh, wait, this is an opportunity for, for us, for me to become even more authoritarian about what's happening in the world. I can control more, we can mandate things. And I think you're in a position where I think a lot of people are starting to push back against that

• 2:51:52Jocko Willink?

  and want to go through life and have freedom, individual freedom, which is the thing that makes this country great in the first place.

• 2:52:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, how did your wife feel about it?

• 2:52:03Speaker 01

  So she is obviously the first person I spoke to.

• 2:52:06Jocko Willink?

  That must have been a fun conversation.

• 2:52:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know, she's not a very public person and, and I thought she's going to shoot me down right there. I mean, I, I was shocked at her reaction and she said, you know, if you think you can make a difference, I'll support you all the way. And it kind of reminded me of the conversation about starting the business. I brought the kids in because they were still young and you know, you're giving up your job. You have to put your house up for collateral. I mean, the bank doesn't, doesn't write you a check and say, good luck, you know? And so I brought the kids and I said, I'm going to go do this. Now you gotta understand if this fails, we're going to be living in a box. And, and they still remember it. They remember they're living in a box conversation. So, you know, I, I think as long as you understand the risks, you understand,

• 2:52:50Speaker 01

  you know, when, when it gets near the end, the negative ads are going to come. I mean, people are going to bash you on social media. You can't avoid it. I mean, it doesn't matter who you are. If someone is going to be against you and unfortunately there's lots of ways that people can communicate that today. And I had my first hate mail in the, uh, in the, the letters to the editor this weekend in our hometown newspaper. And I didn't read it and, and my campaign team said, that's a victory. He said, you're getting free publicity, you know, you're never going to get everyone to say that they align with you. But, uh, you know, it doesn't bother, it honestly doesn't bother me. But I, someone asked me, what's the biggest difference? And I said, you know, in the world that we come from, which is always going to be me.

• 2:53:35Speaker 01

  I will never not be that person. You can trust everybody on your team. I mean, there's A players and there's C players, but you still trust them. They're not going to turn on you. In this world that I'm getting into, you can't trust anyone. I mean, even, I mean, my own team tells me, don't trust anyone. If you have a conversation with somebody, assume they're going to go and stab you in the back with whatever information you provide. So it's a very different world, you know, your guard's up all the time. But, you know, I mean, somebody's got to do it and, uh, there's a lot less qualified people than me.

• 2:54:14Jocko Willink?

  That's the understatement.

• 2:54:16Speaker 01

  That have been successful, so.

• 2:54:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. So for people to support you in this, I know I looked at your, you got Mike Durant dot com. That's, that's where people can go. They can learn more about you. You also are on all the various social media, which, were you on social media before?

• 2:54:35Speaker 01

  LinkedIn.

• 2:54:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:54:37Speaker 01

  If that qualifies as social media.

• 2:54:38Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna have fun. You're gonna have fun. I mean, people are, it, you know, I, this is the world, right? This is the world right now. And people are, people are crazy. And they're not even crazy. They're just gonna say things to you to see if they can get you to, get you to respond one time, or get some viral tweet, or whatever. So I look forward to watching you navigate this.

• 2:55:02Speaker 01

  No, thank you.

• 2:55:02Jocko Willink?

  This horror show. You're on Twitter, Mike Durant A L. So Alabama, Mike Durant A L. Instagram, same thing, Mike Durant A L. Facebook, Mike Durant A L. You have your own YouTube channel, which is Mike Durant for Senate, where people can learn more about you as you, as you go forward in this crazy place, which again, I think at some point, you're at least gonna think to yourself, maybe the joining Elon Musk with my ties on the beach would have been a better call.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure there will be several moments like that, for sure.

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  But, but to your point, listen, this, this country, you know, again, we've, we're, now all of a sudden, we're talking about, we're talking about fighting Russia in Ukraine. That's, that's, that's discussions that are happening right now. We've got the problems at the border. We've got problems with our, our unrest in the country. There's so many issues that I just, for you to be stepping up to this place, uh, thank you. Thank you for stepping up. I know it's a terrible drag and. But somebody's got to do it.

• 2:56:14Speaker 01

  So there's a, there's a man in the arena speech in my book, which from the moment I first read it, it, to me, really defines why I'm doing it. You know, I don't want, and again, it goes back to 2008, why I started the business. I didn't want to sit on my porch at 75 thinking, what if, you know, you gotta, you gotta take the leap, you gotta, you gotta take the chance right at the edge of what you're comfortable with. And I'm, you know, succeed or fail, I'm not gonna have any regrets.

• 2:56:40Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Awesome. Echo Charles.

• 2:56:43Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:56:44Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any questions?

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You, you mentioned your back a few times. Um, like, what, how is it now? Where, where on your back was it jammed up?

• 2:56:52Speaker 01

  So it's L3, I think it is. It's anyway, down, kind of like a third of the way up. It's, it's kind of a miracle, actually. The only thing I can't do, and you guys don't bust me on this, is I can't pull weeds at the house.

• 2:57:05Jocko Willink?

  Brutal. Something about- My back hurts too.

• 2:57:13Speaker 01

  But, uh, pretty much anything else, you know, I, I stay active because I'm a big believer that you, you gotta keep the juices flowing. As soon as you stop, first of all, I'm 60. So, you know, things, things start to deteriorate pretty fast when you, when you reach that point in life. So I still, I run, I lift weights. I was playing hockey until just recently. Uh, and, uh, you know, staying active, uh, got into climbing some mountains this year. I think I climbed five 14ers in Colorado this summer. So, you know, just, you just gotta stay moving. And, uh, staying strong is the key to a back issue, no question. But, you know, every now and then, I'll get, I get some kind of muscle problem, it'll lock up and, you know, last three or four days. But, you know, I try not to overdo it. And, and

• 2:57:58Speaker 01

  so far, it's, uh, it's hanging in there.

• 2:58:01Speaker 02

  Brother, it's so crazy because there are people who have not broke their back, who have major back problems when they're 60 or 50, whatever. See what I'm saying? It's crazy.

• 2:58:11Jocko Willink?

  Got to stay on the path.

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  Got to.

• 2:58:13Jocko Willink?

  In all forms. Mike, look, we, we covered, you know, again, the wave tops of your book, the wave tops of your life. Um, is there anything else, any other closing thoughts?

• 2:58:26Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I very much enjoyed reading your book. I agree with it. I mean, and it's funny because I think I mentioned when I first walked into the building today, some of the lessons learned in there, I applied this morning, you know, because we did a management meeting over the phone, over Teams. We do a bi-weekly where we just get everybody up to speed on what's going on and, you know, it's all about just simplifying the message, you know. Because if you think about it from a worker at the point of the spear's perspective, that really helps. You know, that's where the message needs to resonate. And if, I might understand it, or the legal guy may understand it, but that guy or gal out there

• 2:59:08Speaker 01

  are like, what the hell are they talking about, you know. So, and I think because of my background, that's just natural for me. I mean, I'm a blue collar guy. We lived in a trailer, you know. I mean, my parents are both working-class people. I left home with $70. You know, I was a private. I've mopped the latrine, you know. I don't have to pretend to understand that perspective. I've lived it. So, I think that really helps. And I don't know how you could get everyone to experience that, because I think it's invaluable. And there's been some great leaders who never experienced that, but I think more often than not, having that humbling, sort of meager beginning really, really gives you a better

• 2:59:51Speaker 01

  perspective on how to, how to lead people. Because as you say, it's all about trust, it's all about respect, it's all about, you know, keeping it simple, all those things that, you know, if you've come up from that part of the ecosystem, may become natural to you. By the way, Doug Brown, you reminded me when you said about your commander who told you about, you know, we're the quiet professionals, not the silent professionals. He is, and he probably doesn't remember this, and would likely deny it. But I talked to him about writing this book. And he said, no one's going to give you a hard time writing that book. You know, at that, at that point...

• 3:00:31Speaker 01

  The movie's out, book's out, I'm out, I'm retired, you know, and, and so if he, if he gave me the endorsement, that was good enough for me. Cause at that point, he's a four-star general, right?

• 3:00:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I mean, I've read so many books on this podcast from, from some private soldier that fought in Korea, from a guy that served in Vietnam, it just, and, and there's so many lessons to learn, and not only is it lessons to learn, but it's also capturing the history and the, and the stories of the service and sacrifice of all these people. So I think that's probably where General Brown was coming from, you know, looking at you, thinking about what you've been through. I mean, how, we don't have, we don't have any other buddy that, we don't have anyone else that can tell that story. They don't exist. So for you to, for you to be able to put that word out, I'm sure General Brown was thinking,

• 3:01:20Jocko Willink?

  look, it's not just, not just people won't say anything, in 30 years, in 40 years, people are going to be so thankful that you wrote that book, because now we have a document that's, that can explain everything that you learned, and explain the incredible sacrifices of, of the, the troops that served alongside with you and, and fought and sacrificed their lives for their team. And I think that's, not only is it, that, that needs to be done.

• 3:01:51Speaker 01

  And it was a healing process. I don't think I touched on that earlier, but when it was over, it, it, it felt like I just did something I was supposed to do, you know, and, and it felt like just getting it all out was, was part of a recovery, which, which I don't think you ever fully recover from this. I mean, it depends on how you define recover, but you know, to think that emotionally, I'm not affected at all by what happened there is a, is a fallacy. I mean, I, you just can't help it. Every now and then, there's a wave that comes over, that's grief, you know, I mean, these are your, these are your, your family, and they're gone.

• 3:02:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I had a, I'm, I'm, I'm the same way, you know, losing my guys, and it's just horrible. And, you know, sometimes I think, well,

• 3:02:32Jocko Willink?

  How long does that last for? And I had a guy on the podcast named Colonel Tom Fife, who was, he fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And he received a Purple Heart in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And we were on the podcast, we talked about World War II, we talked about Korea, we talked about Vietnam, and he was a battalion commander in Vietnam, you know, infantry battalion commander. And we were talking about their op tempo and operations, that what they were doing. And, and I asked him about, you know, the casualties that he took in his battalion. And as I asked him that, I saw, he, he almost immediately started getting choked up and emotional. And that's when I realized to myself, I thought to myself, oh, I'm always gonna feel like this. It's

• 3:03:16Jocko Willink?

  always gonna be there. So like you said, I, you know, I don't think, you don't get over it. And it's probably not healthy to get over it. Like, how can you forget your friends? It's never gonna happen. And I do think that writing about these things has helped me a ton. And talking about them has helped me a ton. The, the, the act of writing, when you write something, you de facto detach from it. You know, you, you, you read the words that you wrote, and it, you get a little separation, and you can kind of process it more. So I think the writing is therapeutic and does help move people forward and helps you process what you've been through in, in, in the most positive way that I can think of. Because then other people get to see and, or get to read and hear and understand

• 3:04:01Jocko Willink?

  more clearly what you've been through, and also the sacrifices that were made.

• 3:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, it's like, some books are critical of, of the military or whatever. There's nothing, there's not a bad thing in there about, but, and yeah, there's some bad things that happen. By the way, some of that language is kind of flowery.

• 3:04:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 3:04:21Speaker 01

  And that is Stephen, okay? That is not me. None of those flowery words came from me.

• 3:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's good to have, you know, somebody that helped you out, write it and kind of clarify some stuff, and add some words that, you know, you didn't learn when you were living in a trailer in New Hampshire.

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I know, my mother would probably cringe if she knew I said we lived in a trailer. It was a short period of time, you know, that we were just, and I didn't know the difference. I mean, I was a happy kid. Everybody lives in a trailer, right? So it, it was, my upbringing was fantastic. I, I really had a great family. It's a great part of the country to grow up in. Winter sports, you know, it's a

• 3:05:01Speaker 02

  I miss it a lot. That's where the hockey comes from. I started playing hockey when I was a kid.

• 3:05:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, people don't understand. You drive through Massachusetts and there's hockey rinks all over the place up there. They're playing their hockey, that's for sure. Well, like I said, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for, for sharing your stories, sharing your lessons on us. Thank you for what you're doing right now to, to step up into the arena. That's a, to be a US Senator. That's a, a whole new battle, a whole new different type of battle. And thank you for doing it. And most important, thank you for your service and your sacrifice for our great nation. And finally, and most important, we honor and salute the sacrifices of the brave men who fought alongside you

• 3:05:49Jocko Willink?

  and who made the ultimate sacrifice for their brothers and for our country. Thanks for joining us.

• 3:05:56Speaker 02

  It's been my pleasure.

• 3:05:59Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mike Durant has left the building. So,

• 3:06:06Jocko Willink?

  pretty, pretty, all kinds of craziness going on there. Crazy for me, as I sat there and was looking at him, you know, and I was, I was talking about the, the video that came out of him. And that was everywhere. And I was in the SEAL teams, in special operations, was hearing all the rumors and of everything that was going on. And here I was watching him on TV. Was that 28 years ago? And now we're sitting here talking to each other. He lived. He went on with his career. He lived. He did everything that he did. And now he's sitting in this room talking, sharing his story with us. That was...

• 3:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember feeling that. Not quite all that, but feeling that with, um, Bill Reader. And he was like, when, you know, you go through all this experience and you're like, look at this guy. He's just sitting here right now, just talking to me. And that's what he went through. And here he is. There he is right there, you know? But yours even more, because you were, you remember that actual time when you were watching it. That's crazy.

• 3:07:14Jocko Willink?

  It is very crazy. And then when you have all those names that overlap, you know, whether it's General Brown. Like, that's crazy, right?

• 3:07:24Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:07:24Jocko Willink?

  General Brown was his battalion commander, who's talking to him on the radio. I was an admiral's aide, sitting on an aircraft with General Brown, flying to some other country. Going into meetings in the Pentagon with General Brown. It's the same guy.

• 3:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:41Jocko Willink?

  It's the same guy. Adam Curtis, who was the guy that got rolled up in Panama with his wife.

• 3:07:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:49Jocko Willink?

  I worked for that guy. He was my task unit commander when I was an E5 in the SEAL Teams. The same human that's in that book.

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:00Jocko Willink?

  That caused the invasion of Panama to take place, kind of.

• 3:08:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:05Jocko Willink?

  One of the, one of the primary causes.

• 3:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and kind of goes back to something that you said before a while ago, where it's like, those aren't just characters in a story.

• 3:08:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:15Speaker 02

  Or in a movie or something made up.

• 3:08:17Jocko Willink?

  And I said that early on on this podcast. I said, hey, remember that when we're reading this book, these people, these characters that you hear, they're not characters, they're people. And I guess you're right, that's such a absolute clear connection to the fact that they're not just characters. They're people.

• 3:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Um, but awesome to have him on, for sure. And, man, um,

• 3:08:45Jocko Willink?

  what a, what a, what a crazy battle. The incredible, incredible battle. Incredible sacrifices made on that day. And, yeah, makes us think of, you know, how good we have it. You know, like, like Mike Durant pointed out, you know, he would meet the families and realize, well, if it wasn't for them, he wouldn't be here.

• 3:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:08Jocko Willink?

  So, I, I think that's probably one of the things that drives him to continue to want to serve. So.

• 3:09:16Jocko Willink?

  We gotta continue. We all have to continue, continue to serve in whatever way possible. Um, also, I'll tell you what's impressive. He's in good shape.

• 3:09:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:26Jocko Willink?

  Good shape.

• 3:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, even the like, look at him.

• 3:09:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:29Speaker 02

  You're like, okay, this guy's sixty, doing it. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a good, probably a good thing for us all to think about. If you want to maintain some sort of capability.

• 3:09:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Probably a good idea.

• 3:09:44Speaker 02

  It's true. Very true. And as we mentioned before, where, hey, have you ever broke your back?

• 3:09:50Jocko Willink?

  No, I have not ever broke.

• 3:09:51Speaker 02

  Your lumbar?

• 3:09:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:52Speaker 02

  Spine?

• 3:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Haven't crashed in a freaking, in a, in a Black Hawk helicopter, in an out of control Black Hawk helicopter spinning to the earth.

• 3:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Compressing my spawn, spine, breaking my femur, having been dragged around by a mob of angry Somalis and beaten.

• 3:10:07Speaker 02

  Right after, by the way.

• 3:10:08Jocko Willink?

  But right after that.

• 3:10:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:10Jocko Willink?

  You know, so.

• 3:10:11Speaker 02

  So you haven't done that. That hasn't happened to you. Okay, okay, okay. Me neither. As you, you probably know, me neither, you know. Uh, but he still runs a marathon. Have you ever ran a marathon?

• 3:10:21Jocko Willink?

  I have not.

• 3:10:21Speaker 02

  Me neither.

• 3:10:22Jocko Willink?

  No. Mike Durant did.

• 3:10:24Speaker 02

  Mike Durant did. Yeah, for sure.

• 3:10:26Jocko Willink?

  He climbed, what'd he say, five fourteeners this past summer?

• 3:10:30Speaker 02

  What does that mean?

• 3:10:31Jocko Willink?

  Sixty, fourteen thousand foot peaks.

• 3:10:33Speaker 02

  Oh dang.

• 3:10:34Jocko Willink?

  That's tall.

• 3:10:35Speaker 02

  Oh, that's the slang? That's how you say it? Five fourteeners? You say the ERS?

• 3:10:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:39Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

• 3:10:41Jocko Willink?

  When you, you know.

• 3:10:42Speaker 02

  I've never climbed five or any fourteeners for that matter. And I haven't broken my back. So what I'm saying is the point there is there, that's, that's saying a lot. Or it's putting things into perspective. See what I'm saying? We're like, you can break your back, you can break your femur. Compound fracture, by the way. Then dragged, then captive, with no real medical attention for eleven days. And then after that, go, still lift, still climb five fourteeners, still, uh, run marathons.

• 3:11:17Speaker 02

  It's kind of like, okay, now it kind of puts into perspective. This might be a choice if we're not kind of on the path, you know?

• 3:11:25Speaker 02

  So yeah, we gotta stay on that path.

• 3:11:27Jocko Willink?

  We want to choose the right path.

• 3:11:29Speaker 02

  Choose the right path. Yes, sir.

• 3:11:30Jocko Willink?

  What do you got? How can you help us choose the right path?

• 3:11:32Speaker 02

  We want to be strong. We want to be capable. He made a good point. He was like, the thing about your back is strength is very important. Right? And that's true. Like, if you have a strong back, it like affects everything. Just like if you.

• 3:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Leif talks about that. Like Leif has a bad back. If he deadlifts, it gets better. If he doesn't, it gets hurt.

• 3:11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And even that is a crazy weird little dichotomy too, right? Because if you have a bad back and you start deadlifting all crazy heavy, it's like, that's, that's bad.

• 3:11:57Jocko Willink?

  You gotta be squared away.

• 3:11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:59Jocko Willink?

  Can't be an ego lifter, that some of us just learned recently.

• 3:12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that can be dangerous too, for sure. Nonetheless, we want to be capable, right? Regardless how much you're lifting or not lifting, you want to be capable. You want to be capable of lifting heavy things? Kind of got to exercise that kind of stuff. You want to be capable of running marathons or 14ers or whatever the case may be? Got to exercise that kind of stuff. But when you exercise, yes, it is rough. It can be rough. So we might need supplementation, but don't worry. Jaco has supplementation.

• 3:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Just lands it right in there.

• 3:12:31Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm just stating, I'm just stating the facts.

• 3:12:33Jocko Willink?

  Some people say you just press record, but I'm gonna say, man.

• 3:12:35Speaker 02

  Thanks, Jaco. Thank you.

• 3:12:37Jocko Willink?

  That was freaking poetic.

• 3:12:38Speaker 02

  I can't take credit.

• 3:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Continuity of that whole, just the way it landed in there, you know? It's impressive.

• 3:12:43Speaker 02

  Well, thanks.

• 3:12:44Jocko Willink?

  Dust storm, whatever. You're putting it down, right on target every time.

• 3:12:47Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. But I can't take credit. I'm just stating the facts.

• 3:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay. What do we got for supplements?

• 3:12:53Speaker 02

  So for, uh, well, let's start with the energy drinks, okay? So not typical energy drinks, not traditional energy drinks, not old, old, unreliable, poisonous.

• 3:13:04Jocko Willink?

  You know what they used to give you when you had a headache back in the day? Cocaine. Morphine or cocaine.

• 3:13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, cocaine was for something.

• 3:13:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like cocaine, yeah, maybe cocaine was for this or cocaine was for that. Morphine was this, morphine was for that. That's what they do. Like, I don't feel great today. Well, cool. Put you on morphine.

• 3:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Right on. That's, that was a normal thing. Oh, by the way, and smoke these, these things over here. Suck on this smoke into your lungs because that'll help you too. They were legitimately doing that.

• 3:13:29Speaker 02

  Weren't they giving you like vodka or something too for some?

• 3:13:32Jocko Willink?

  They would tell pregnant women, hey, you know, you need to relax, go have a couple. They did that. My mom.

• 3:13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:37Jocko Willink?

  My mom told me she was drinking gin and tonics like a, like a boss, you know, when she was pregnant with me, which explains a lot.

• 3:13:44Speaker 02

  Explains a little bit, yeah, for sure.

• 3:13:45Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 3:13:46Speaker 02

  Yes. But we're not doing that anymore.

• 3:13:49Jocko Willink?

  Right, but what I'm saying is you wouldn't have known back in the day that when the doctor prescribed you cocaine for your headache, you wouldn't be suspect until you were freaking crackhead three weeks later, right? So it's the same thing with right now with the traditional poisonous energy drinks that a lot of people don't even know that they're poisonous yet. They're sitting there drinking them. They think they're actually good to go. They think that that's just a little bit of cocaine and they're gonna be fine. It's not. It's a lot of bit of cocaine and it's addictive and it's killing you. So we're not down with that. What we are down with is monk fruit. What we are down with is pasteurization. What we are down with is 95 milligrams grams of clean caffeine.

• 3:14:34Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're down with. We're down with, we actually made something that's healthy for you. My kids drink it. My own children drink it. So if you want some, get some, discipline, go.

• 3:14:46Speaker 02

  It's the new paradigm of energy drinks. Stuff that's good for, good for your brain too. There's some nootropics in there. You gotta keep that in mind when you're drinking this stuff.

• 3:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Maybe that's where you get your little landings from. You get the whole story, you know, figured out, boom, there you go. That's the discipline go kicking in. Just bringing it on home.

• 3:15:03Speaker 02

  Yes, nonetheless. Sometimes when we're lifting, running marathons, climbing 14 or five, or whatever the case may be, sometimes your joints get jammed up. But we got some supplements for that as well. Joint work first, super krill oil. Get on the, the, the subscription, actually to all these things, but especially for these, because that's not the, that's not the fun one, like the malt, which I'll get into in a little bit.

• 3:15:29Jocko Willink?

  In about 30, 40 minutes from now.

• 3:15:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir. But it's true. Even me, a grown man, I have my routine, very effective. But every once in a while, I'll forget that's the the krill oil and the joint warfare, not recently, but it has happened. But yeah, if you get on the subscription, it'll uh, that'll help. But nonetheless, you want to look after your joints on these things. Don't neglect them. It's easy to neglect if you let it, let it happen, but don't neglect.

• 3:15:55Jocko Willink?

  Immunity. Look out for that too. Let them in D three. Take that every day. I take it every day. I take one in the morning, one at night, by the way. Cold War, that's there. Got your back. That's like air support, right? It's flying overhead. It can lay down some, some thunder if needed. So you go on that, you get the Cold War going. And then you were gonna say something about milk?

• 3:16:15Speaker 02

  Milk. Oh, damn.

• 3:16:16Jocko Willink?

  The milk train?

• 3:16:17Speaker 02

  So I'm, I've yet to try the banana one. I have it standing by.

• 3:16:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's good.

• 3:16:22Speaker 02

  But.

• 3:16:23Jocko Willink?

  Tulsi approved.

• 3:16:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Big time. But now you're getting the, the full on banana cream scenario, though. Creamy banana cream, right? Because as you said, the, the frozen banana makes it more creamy.

• 3:16:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:34Speaker 02

  That's what she said. That's what she said.

• 3:16:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:36Speaker 02

  So, yeah, milk, protein, additional protein in the form of a, of a dessert. That one, little bit harder to forget. See what I'm saying? Because it's kind of on your mind a lot more.

• 3:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Thinking about it. Because sometimes you're getting done with a twenty eight ounce tomahawk steak. This is about as good as the world gets, right? You eat a twenty eight ounce tomahawk steak. By the way, I got some sitting in my freezer right now. They're getting ready to get crushed. But I will finish a twenty eight ounce tomahawk steak. I will be so satisfied.

• 3:17:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Mentally, physically, spiritually.

• 3:17:15Speaker 02

  Spiritually, oh, yeah.

• 3:17:17Jocko Willink?

  And guess what I still want? A little more kidder.

• 3:17:19Speaker 02

  A little kidder. And the, and that, it makes complete sense. It makes complete sense. So, yeah, so like, you're gonna be like, it's gonna be on your mind way more and under way more circumstances. As opposed to like, you're never like, okay, so a lot of times you can be like, oh, yeah, I'm really in the mood for a little more kidder. Or let's face it, a big one.

• 3:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Or a triple one.

• 3:17:38Speaker 02

  Whatever the case may be, you will find yourself in the mood for that from time to time, pretty often, actually. But you don't really find yourself, you know what I'm in the mood for? To take some krill oil. It's like, it just doesn't work, even though the benefits of the krill oil is, are, are very significant, you see what I'm saying? So I'm just saying, keep these things in mind.

• 3:17:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Get yourself some milk. That way you can have dessert and feel good about it. Jocka White Tea, by the way, it's winter time in some places, including here. That means you transition to that warm tea in the morning with Jocka White Tea. You see that, you see that deadlift kicking back up to 8,000, you know, if you've been off the path for a little bit on the tea. Just, just, just check yourself. You can get the drinks at Wawa. You can get all the items at Vitamin Shoppe and you can order any of it, all of it. From jockofuel.com. And if you subscribe, shipping's free.

• 3:18:28Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 3:18:28Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Also, originusa.com. Or just origin USA in general. So, American-made goods, products, we got jeans, we got boots, we got wallets, belts, pants, other work pants, hoodies.

• 3:18:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Heavy hoodies.

• 3:18:47Speaker 02

  Heavy hoodies. Like, for real heavy.

• 3:18:49Jocko Willink?

  For real heavy.

• 3:18:50Speaker 02

  Not Hawaii heavy hoodies. Yeah, a little bit different.

• 3:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Maine heavy.

• 3:18:54Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:18:55Jocko Willink?

  Minnesota heavy.

• 3:18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:18:56Jocko Willink?

  Northern Michigan heavy. Montana heavy. I'm talking heavy. Heavy hoodies that are suitable for all these cold scenarios. Uh, so, originusa.com. And, and here's the deal.

• 3:19:13Jocko Willink?

  We could just leave it at that, right? Be like, cool, yeah, it's the, the really high-quality products. We could leave it at that. Yeah, go get some. We can't. Because we gotta tell you something else. They're made in America. They're made in America by American human beings with, with materials that were also made in America and born in America and grown in America. So, when you buy something from Origin, you're not just getting a shirt, you're actually rebuilding America. You're rebuilding our manufacturing, you're boosting our economy, you're putting people to work. So, look, do we want to have? Collateral benefits when we buy something? Yeah. Well, what if the collateral benefit is you're hurting America's economy?

• 3:19:58Jocko Willink?

  That's not good. What if the collateral benefit is that you're keeping a Uyghur in China in a slave labor camp? Is that good? No, that's not good. Alls I'm saying is you should shop at originusa.com for freedom, for the cause of freedom around the world.

• 3:20:17Speaker 02

  It's true. Like you ever, you ever known someone who really doesn't take pride in their work?

• 3:20:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:24Speaker 02

  You ever met someone who does take pride in their work?

• 3:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I have.

• 3:20:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so boom, it's night and day. As far as the contrast goes, at Origin, like everyone, everybody, from Pete all the way across the spectrum to everyone else, they're taking pride in their work. Trust me, I've been there and I've seen it with my own eyes. It's true. Speaking of taking a pride in our work, Jaco is a store, it's called Jaco Store. It's a good store there. JacoStore.com is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, hats, hoodies, some rash guards on there, some shorts on there. I know it's seasonal, um, Christmas season, a little cooler, not everywhere though.

• 3:21:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:03Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying?

• 3:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Out here in California, we're still wearing shorts. I'm literally wearing shorts right now.

• 3:21:09Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:21:09Jocko Willink?

  When people see me wear pants, they're always, well, when like my normal people, my local friends see me wear pants, they're like, oh, that's weird.

• 3:21:18Speaker 02

  All dressed up.

• 3:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, I remember when my youngest daughter, like the first time she saw me with a pair of jeans on.

• 3:21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21:25Jocko Willink?

  She was like, oh, why are you all dressed up?

• 3:21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how it feels.

• 3:21:29Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 3:21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. So yeah, again, you can get some good stuff you want to represent on this path. So the shirts, speaking of shirts, on, on there, we have something called the Shirt Locker. It's a good name, by the way. Jaco-approved name. Anyway, this is a new shirt.

• 3:21:46Jocko Willink?

  That came from a trooper, by the way.

• 3:21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21:48Jocko Willink?

  And you spell it S A H U R T Locker.

• 3:21:52Speaker 02

  Yep. But unlike the Hurt Locker, this is good stuff. Like this is good, good stuff. It puts a smile on your face. Yeah. Um, new shirt every month, creative designs, good ones. This next one, you might, you might recognize this next one.

• 3:22:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Any further hints?

• 3:22:07Speaker 02

  Nope, that's it. That's all you might recognize and like it, you might like it.

• 3:22:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:22:11Speaker 02

  But yeah, so we've got some new features on there as well, coming out probably in the next day or two. So be on the lookout for that.

• 3:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Features like what are you talking about?

• 3:22:17Speaker 02

  Just some more. It's like a little bit upgraded, you know?

• 3:22:20Jocko Willink?

  So more benefits to the subscribers of the Shirt Locker.

• 3:22:24Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. It's true. All upside. Good stuff. JacoStory.com if you want to represent, that's where you get the stuff.

• 3:22:30Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Speaking of subscriptions, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher. Leave some reviews. Also, we have Jaco Unraveling. Daryl and I have been kicking out a couple of those recently. We're hitting some topics, some topics that are a little bit, let's say controversial, maybe.

• 3:22:47Speaker 02

  They're heavy for sure.

• 3:22:48Jocko Willink?

  Definitely heavy. The Christmas joy one just came out about the, about total war and World War II, what that was all about. So if you want a little Christmas joy, check out the Jaco Unraveling.

• 3:22:59Speaker 02

  Sarcastic.

• 3:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Not a place for, not, not a place for joy, but if you want to know about history, so I don't repeat it, or you want to find out what's going on in the world? And how it relates to what happened in the past, check out Jaco Unraveling Podcast with Daryl Cooper, Grounded Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have Jaco Underground, JacoUnderground.com. It's our own free sanctuary, free from tyranny. So look, we don't control the platforms that are out there. We hope we don't ever have to abandon them. We hope we don't get forced off of them, but we don't know what's going to happen. So we have to have a contingency. That contingency is JacoUnderground.com.

• 3:23:38Jocko Willink?

  If you want to support our, our, our sanctuary, then you can go to JacoUnderground.com. Eight dollars and eighteen cents a month to help support us and what we're doing there. We get you a, an additional podcast that's Q and A. Going over some tangential but important topics. And if you can't afford it, that's all right. We still want you in the game. Email [email protected].

• 3:24:07Jocko Willink?

  We have a YouTube channel.

• 3:24:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:24:09Jocko Willink?

  Official.

• 3:24:10Speaker 02

  YouTube channel. A lot of good stuff on there.

• 3:24:12Jocko Willink?

  Is that like a blue checkmark?

• 3:24:13Speaker 02

  I think it's gray.

• 3:24:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 3:24:15Speaker 02

  But yes, a checkmark. Well, you know, we know it's not, we know it's not an imposter scenario.

• 3:24:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:24:21Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying? But yeah, the video version of this podcast, you'll see what everybody looks like. It's a good, good mode. A lot of people watching, um, YouTube on their TVs nowadays, what with smart TVs and whatnot. You know what that is, right? A smart TV?

• 3:24:35Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, you can watch YouTube on it.

• 3:24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go. Boom. That's one of the ways. Oh, yes, sir. You are. But yeah, man. So yeah, YouTube channel. We've got some excerpts on there. Um, you know, some other stuff, some additional stuff. We do. We're starting to put some additional stuff on there. So yeah, check that one out. Subscribe if you want.

• 3:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Also, I made a, I made an album. Well, Echo recorded it. I guess I talked. Anyways, if you have maybe moments of weakness, you want to overcome them. Check out Psychological Warfare. It's available wherever you buy MP3s. We also have flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Myers making cool stuff that you can hang on your wall here in America. So that's freaking legit. And then there's books. Obviously, uh, the book that we covered today in The Company of Heroes by Mike Durant. He also wrote the book, The Nightstalkers. So those are great reads. Check those out. Final Spin. I wrote a fiction story. Um, it's available right now. Check it out.

• 3:25:34Jocko Willink?

  Final Spin Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code of Evaluation of Protocols, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid, One, Two, Three, and Four. Get that freaking book for all the kids you know. Get all those books for all the kids you know for Christmas. That's my recommendation.

• 3:25:48Jocko Willink?

  I wish I could, could get those books to every kid. So please help me, because those books will help those kids. Also got Mikey and the Dragons. We have About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. I wrote the foreword to the latest edition. Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership, which I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. We also have a leadership consultancy where leadership is the solution. Leadership is the solution. And go to Echelonfront.com if you want to check out what we're doing there. We have, obviously, consultancy. We have live events. We have the muster. We have

• 3:26:29Jocko Willink?

  field training exercises. We have EF Battlefield. We have the Dallas muster coming up, March 24th and 25th. We also have an online training academy, the Extreme Ownership Academy. This is where you can come. You can ask me questions. And look, it's about leadership for sure, but it's about taking ownership of your life. Take ownership of your life. Do you take, do you, are you able to control your life by reading one book or listening to one podcast? Are you able to learn jujitsu by going one time to a class? Are you able to get in good shape by going to the gym one time? No, you need consistency. You need to review this stuff. That's why we made ExtremeOwnership.com to help you take ownership of your life.

• 3:27:14Jocko Willink?

  So go and check that out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, you can check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's an incredible human being. She has an incredible charity organization. And I just heard Joe Rogan talking about going into the hyperbaric chamber and how much he has benefited benefited from it. One of the key things that Mama Lee's organization does is it gets sessions, like a month worth of sessions, plus hotel, plus living expenses while you're down there, plus travel to get there to get veterans into these hyperbaric chambers for a month worth of treatment, or 45 days worth of treatment. And there's been incredible feedback from

• 3:27:58Jocko Willink?

  everybody that's done it. So if you want to help with that, it's one of the many things that she does. If you want to help or you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 3:28:10Jocko Willink?

  And of course, if you want more of my tedious talking, or you need more of Echo's questionable questions, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, and on Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink, and of course, Mike Durant, running for the Senate in Alabama. If you want to support him, go to MikeDurant.com. Look at his social media. You can see, it's gonna be an interesting ride, right? He's just getting in the game in social media at age sixty.

• 3:28:40Speaker 02

  I should have told him.

• 3:28:41Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be wild.

• 3:28:42Speaker 02

  He has a YouTube channel, too.

• 3:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:28:43Speaker 02

  So I was gonna just mention, if you didn't know already, but hey, just let's be careful in the YouTube comments.

• 3:28:49Jocko Willink?

  Be careful in the YouTube comments.

• 3:28:50Speaker 02

  True.

• 3:28:50Jocko Willink?

  On Twitter, MikeDurantAL. Instagram, MikeDurantAL. Facebook, MikeDurantAL. And of course, on YouTube, MikeDurantForSenate. So, once again, thanks to Mike Durant for coming on the podcast. Honored to have you here. Really incredible to meet someone in person that I've known about and actually watched from a distance as he went through this incredibly traumatic situation. I watched along with the rest of the nation and really the rest of the world. Honored to have you on here. Thank you so much for coming, and thank you for your continued service to this day. And to other military personnel out

• 3:29:35Jocko Willink?

  there, in the world, thank you for protecting our way of life at home. And a special salute to the Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Nightstalkers. The Nightstalkers who fly into the worst places in the world for the best reasons. And also, a solemn salute to the incredible Special Operations Forces that served in Somalia and fought and died as heroes. And to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs and dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders, thank

• 3:30:17Jocko Willink?

  you for protecting our way of life here at home. And to everyone else out there.

• 3:30:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, no matter what happens, no matter what you're facing, no matter how hard things get, remember, remember the motto of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the saying that got Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant through the worst of times. That motto is simply, "Night stalkers don't quit."

• 3:30:59Jocko Willink?

  And neither should you, no matter what. Do not quit.

• 3:31:05Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.