273: Controversial Lessons from Being Put Through The Ringer. The Making Of A Soldier, by Col. Tony Herbert

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:00 - Soldier, and The Making of a Soldier, by Anthony Herbert 2:42:10 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:59:00 - 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 273 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  I was with the Turks and we were heading south. The Chinese had entered the war a few days before. They had kicked the ass of the entire 8th Army and we were on the run. We had descended a spur of the ridge and were crossing the valley when we came to a village.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  Everywhere you looked were the corpses of slaughtered Americans. One, a captain of infantry I had met back in Fort Lewis, was strung up by the wrists between two buildings, his feet not quite touching the ground.

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  He raised his head slightly and his lips trembled as he tried to speak. His strength lay in a pool of frozen blood beneath his feet.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  I leaned my rifle against the wall and reached up to cut the ropes.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  Water, he breathed softly, then coughed once, the air gurgling through the blood in his throat.

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  I had heard it before from the coal miners back in Hermione. It made no difference whether I cut him down or not.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  He was dead.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  His chin sank to his chest and he swayed lightly like the thin frail branches of the willow trees next to the cemetery back home.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  The men captured with him were hanging too.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  Some between branches, some in doorways, one between two thick limbs of an ancient apple tree.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  They had all been butchered the same way, stripped, then strung up like Christ on the cross.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  Their stomachs had been sliced open and their guts pulled out to dangle down before them.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  Blood, flesh, and guts were trampled in the snow everywhere.

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  The Turks glided silently from body to body, cutting each down and laying it to rest.

• 2:34Jocko Willink?

  A bright Korean moon etched in silver, the horror of the scene.

• 2:44Jocko Willink?

  I can hardly remember a time when I didn't want to be in the service. Both my brothers were in. Bud was a chief torpedo man in the North Atlantic. Chuck, the oldest, was an infantry company commander in Europe.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  Bud was the more colorful storyteller. And the Navy would have been my choice, hands down. Except for Hollywood.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  Artillery barrages. Hand-to-hand combat, paratroopers, the jungles, Errol Flynn in Burma, that was war.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  I was born to be an infantryman.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is the opening of a book called "The Making of a Soldier",

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  by Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  And this is an incredible book, and I've been referencing it here and there as I've been reading it.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  For the last few months. And it's actually two books. There's actually two books. One is the book I was just reading from called The Making of a Soldier. The other is simply called Soldier, both written by Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Tony Herbert. And I first heard of these books a few months ago. I'd never heard of them before.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  And I spoke to the cadets at West Point. And the Colonel that hosted me, by the name of Colonel Pat Howell. He's the Director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. And after this event, he emailed me. And during the event, I had mentioned About Face and Hackworth while I was talking to the cadets. And Colonel Howell sent me a photograph in this email.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  And this photograph that he sent was a photograph of his copy of About Face. And it was actually signed by Colonel Hackworth. And the inscription said to Patrick, "You come from a long line of great warriors who led by that adage

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  of looking after your men. Warmest regards, Hack."

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  And it turned out that Hackworth had worked for Colonel Howell's grandfather in the Army.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  And so Colonel Howell sent me a message. And he also sent me an image of another book. And the book that he sent me the image of is called Soldier. And Colonel Howell said this in the email. He said, "Speaking of Dave Hackworth, I sent a pic of his autograph of my copy. He had worked for my grandfather years previously. I've also sent a picture of a very Hackworth-like story about a guy named Tony Herbert. The book is called Soldier. He also was enlisted in the Korean War, got commissioned, and then was a battalion commander in Vietnam, and had a prickly time with his chain of command. He also worked for my grandfather back in Germany circa 1960."

• 6:09Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean, I get that report right there. It's all I need to hear. I hunt down these books online. These two books, One Soldier and then the other one, The Making of a Soldier.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  And I ordered them both and it's to me, okay, well, great. I got another warrior that I can try and learn from. Pretty straightforward, but I should have paid more attention to the statement that Herbert, that this guy Colonel Herbert had quote, "Had a prickly time with his chain of command in Vietnam." This is actually a pretty significant understatement.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  And it makes this whole story and the lessons learned

• 6:53Jocko Willink?

  just not, not quite as straightforward.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  A lot of controversy and, and the whole, this whole story, which is a combined about a 600 pages of reading between the two books.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  As I tried, as I read these books

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  and this, this way this story comes out, it's a pretty big elephant to try and swallow. And I wasn't quite sure how to approach the whole thing for, for the podcast. I read the books and then I'm kind of stewing on them because there's the whole thing. There's war and there's war crimes and there's accusations and counter accusations and there's good leadership and there's bad leadership and it's all, it's all wrapped up around the story of one of the most highly decorated soldiers from the Korean War.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  A, a man that you're going to see how often this guy's wounded over and over again, blown up, hit with white phosphorus, shot and bayoneted multiple times.

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  So you have this completely heroic individual that is definitely a Hackworth type leader and you see

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  these heroic tendencies eventually get caught up and put through the wringer of politics and ego and the bureaucratic machine. And it just really makes it a complex story. And as I read the book, the both of them, there was lesson after lesson of what to do and what not to do and what to watch out for.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, because of the vast range of this story, it was hard for me to wrap my head around it and present it and figure out how to present it. And luckily I have a standard operating procedure of what to do when I'm facing a tough task. What you do is you put your rock on and you start marching.

• 8:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's what we're going to do here. The life and times of Colonel Anthony Tony Herbert. And I'm going to utilize both these books and kind of bounce back and forth

• 8:58Jocko Willink?

  to get some background on Herbert's life to start with. We're going to go to his second book, which is called Soldier.

• 9:15Jocko Willink?

  So here we go. Both my brothers were born well before me. Charles, 15 years earlier and Jules Paul, 11. Almost a different generation, a fact of life for which I never really forgave them. Because when World War II came along, they both packed up and marched off, leaving me standing on the front porch cursing the irrevocable fact that in 1941 in America, there wasn't a great demand for 10-year-old fighting men. I cried too when they left, not because they were going to war and might not come back, but because I couldn't go with them.

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  My mother tried to comfort me. The army doesn't want you now, Tony, she said. You've just got to learn to understand rules are rules. But I neither could nor would. All I really knew for certain was that one day, above all other things, I wanted to be a soldier and that somebody or something was ruining my dream.

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  So this guy comes out of the womb, ready to rock and roll, as they say. And I'll tell you, as I, I get into this early life, it's definitely a very cool description of America in this timeframe. Both prior to World War II when he's a little kid and then as he gets a little bit older. He says this, guns were always an integral part of my life in the Herbert family. Not because we were great sportsmen or anything like that, but simply because we liked to eat. And eating wasn't simple, wasn't a simple matter for a coal miner and his family in those days. The mines were all my father had ever known.

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  The day after day regimen of dust and dirt and darkness and penny pinching and poverty, with never enough pennies to pinch, up until John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers came along in 1939, the most cash my father ever saw for one week's work was $2. The rest of his compensation came in the form of credit at the Eureka Store where Mr. Stalls, the manager and dutiful employee of the mine, would carefully match the amount of purchases against the amount of credits. It inevitably worked out at the end of the year that my father and every other miner in town had bought more than their credit allowed. All my life, I heard my father and mother worry about paying off the company

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  store before they died. Their chief aim was to leave without passing that particular debt on to their children. They lived in a company-owned house, in a company-owned town, in a company-owned county. Neither my father nor any other man who worked in the mines could quit. How could they? The mines owned them. But none of us ever really felt poor. There were so many other families just like us that we had no standard of comparison. Everybody had to struggle to make it, at least everybody with whom we had any contact. And for all we

• 12:19Jocko Willink?

  knew, the whole world lived precisely as we did, there in harmony, 40 miles from Pittsburgh, deep in the black heart of coal mine country.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  Different kind of lifestyle. If my father ever complained about the grim cycles in his life, I never heard him.

• 12:45Jocko Willink?

  He was as steady as a clock, up before dawn, walked to the mine, back home in the evening for a glass of beer or two before supper, and then to bed. But with a wife and four children, Charles and Jules, my two older brothers, plus our sister Irene, four years my senior and me, there was never enough money, never near enough. And the income from his guide service, and I skipped ahead, he also like will guide hunters sometimes, his income from the guide service couldn't bridge the gap. He trapped muskrats and sold pelts to Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck. An average skin would bring about a dollar seventy-five, an exceptionally good one would sell for three dollars. And although he approached his trapping with all the same skill and determination devoted to his job at the mine

• 13:30Jocko Willink?

  and his hunting, it still wasn't enough.

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  There were occasions when he would have to trudge down to the welfare office. It was painful for him. I knew. He dreaded every trip he had ever made down there. And when he came back with the government commodities, a bag of rice, a bag of raisins, a bag of cornmeal, he had the look of a man who had stood in a line of men going nowhere. He was unusually grim, and for days afterwards, he would not be himself, but somehow quieter, more withdrawn. I suppose the only comfort he had was in knowing that he wasn't the only husband and father in harmony who was having trouble taking care of his family.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  All of us went to whatever lengths were necessary to get the job done. We made wine at home and sold or traded it for essentials. Charles took on an ice route, delivering the twenty-five pound and fifty-pound blocks up and down the street. We picked coal at the slate dump, a smoking mountain of coal waste deposited by the mine just at the edge of town. It was about a quarter mile across and three-quarters of a mile long. All of the childhood images I have retained, one of the most vivid is of that ebony heap rising above the houses, steaming and hissing like a volcano. We would trudge up its crumbling sides, pick up pieces of slate, knock the coal off, and put it in our burlap sacks

• 14:57Jocko Willink?

  that we carried. At the end of the day, we piled our sacks into a wheelbarrow and went downtown to sell the coal for a dime a sack. The slate pile was never one of my favorite places. There were cavernous hollow pockets beneath its contours. And we had all heard of the two people who had gone to the dump and disappeared forever into its black bowels.

• 15:20Jocko Willink?

  But somehow we survived.

• 15:24Jocko Willink?

  The town was one of several built around a collection of mines that had attracted not only the Baltic immigrants, but a lot of Scots and Irishmen as well. Sulfur Creek, a bright red steam fed constantly with a drain off from the mines separated our town from Limerick Hill, the first of the others. The social systems that were premised on that creek were as rigid as though it were the Berlin Wall. Still, despite our differences, I never knew what they were. We shared one common bond, the mines and their wailing whistles that shrieked out at the beginning and end of the workers' days, sounding for miles and miles through the hills and sometimes signaling the reality of death.

• 16:11Jocko Willink?

  My Uncle Joe Shearer, my mother's oldest sister's husband, died in a cave-in at the nearby Barking Mine when I was about four years old. Three or four other miners were also killed in that cave-in, and I remember the sound of the whistles. It was always like that back then, always some accident or cave-in that killed one or two or three men, not any major disaster, as the newspapers like to say. And so it was forgotten and ignored by those who had the kind of power that would have made some difference in the condition of the mines and the dangers faced by those who worked in them.

• 16:52Jocko Willink?

  He goes on here, he talks about the church. And he has Father Kelly there, he said, "I always loved Father Kelly, but I was never sure about the church. He was a kind old man who had been a hero in World War I and had the medals to prove it. According to my father, he had been gassed. At times, he seemed very nervous about being a priest, and maybe that why he was drinking a great deal."

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  He talks about another guy named Dr. Latimer. And, and look, I'm, I'm, I'm going into some detail here. Because as this story unfolds, you've got to try and figure out where he's making decisions from. What, what, you know, where, where, where is his morality rooted? And it's very clear as you move through this, that there's people that influenced the way he thought. Another guy that influenced the way he thought is a guy named Dr. Latimer. And this guy was, you know, like the local doctor. And he kind of got to know him a little bit. And one of the things he would do is give him copies of National Geographic. And again, this is one of those things where I, when you read this, you think, okay.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  It's when you look back, when you, when you see the way the whole story unfolds, you look back, you, you think to yourself, okay, this is interesting. He says, "It was Doc, I think, who first started impressing me with the idea that wherever people live, they're essentially the same." "Look at these natives," he would say, pointing at some bare-breasted folks from Australia or Africa. "They hunt just like you hunt, Tony. And just like your father and your brothers. The only difference is that they use a bow and arrow.

• 18:33Jocko Willink?

  They bleed if they get cut. And the fathers and mothers worry about their children. And they all worry about food and about dying. And they all want to live as long as they can, just like you, Tony.

• 18:46Jocko Willink?

  "The Doc never went to church. Somehow that impressed me. Like my father, he seemed always to be what he was.

• 18:54Jocko Willink?

  Never any phoniness around him or about him." So that's, again, you can kind of see this guy's developing a pretty strong moral character about other people and seeing other people as people and what the common ground is. He talks more here about Father Kelly. He was a good priest. Good in the sense that he deeply knew the people in his flock. He knew their poverty and their hopelessness and their frequent desperation. And above all, he knew how absolutely necessary it was that their individual family incomes be supplemented. That's why he showed no reservations at all about doctoring baptismal certificates. In 1942, when I was 12 years old, he changed mine to make it read that I was 16.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  And thus allowed me to get a work permit and start bringing home a little cash for the family. He had done the same for my brothers, I was told, and for almost anybody else in town who had sons who were willing to work. I had taken my first job when I was 10, along with Richard Nadle, the brother of a pretty girl named Mary Grace. We worked on Muller's farm right outside of town. And every morning at 4:30, rain or shine, Mr. Muller would come into town and pick us up on his little truck. We were paid a dollar fifty a week and a gallon of raw milk. And for that, we both drove tractors, cut wheat, dug potatoes, fed his cattle, and milked his cows. He knew what he was doing. Obviously, that wasn't helping much with the family financial burdens.

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  And Father Kelly's forgery was an absolute necessitary necessity.

• 20:31Jocko Willink?

  So that, so he had the like the under the table job, but you're not getting paid very much. So he gets this doctored birth certificate. He goes out and gets a job at this glass factory. He goes into some detail about that. He's, he's working in a situation where he's wearing a full asbestos suit. And you work, he's working in a place that's so hot, you're only allowed to work for 10 minutes and then it's 10 minutes break. And, and it's not like these are a lenient labor laws. This, it had to be so hot that you would like die if you don't get a break. So then he, he does that job for a while. He ends up at the Pennsylvania Railroad. He's making 85 cents an hour. And he's doing this job where once again, there's a 600 pound piston that's like above you and you'd never be,

• 21:15Jocko Willink?

  if it happened to fall, you were dead because you couldn't hear anything.

• 21:19Jocko Willink?

  And of course he liked football. He liked playing sports. But he says here, "I soon learned that the practice time required for high school athletics ate into the time I could spend in the field with my hunting and my trapping. During games on Saturday, I would tie hunting dogs to the bench and stash my gun beneath it while we played."

• 21:39Jocko Willink?

  During one of the, during one of the winters in my early teens, the cousters lost four of their children in one swift stroke of fate.

• 21:51Jocko Willink?

  And once again, the mine whistle told the story to the neighboring communities. One of the older brother Harry's, Harry was a friend of mine. His two younger brothers and two sisters were out one afternoon playing on the frog ponds in the area, ponds created by the still drainage of the mines. The near zero temperatures had frozen the water to what the kids believed was a safe depth. But the ice broke beneath them and one by one, the others plunged through and drowned too, trying to affect a rescue with the courage so typical of the area, all four dead.

• 22:26Jocko Willink?

  I had never seen Harry cry before. I caught his eye at Stater's funeral home and his tears moved me to cry myself.

• 22:39Jocko Willink?

  Again, what, just the fact that he's talking about sort of this courage. And if you think about what your job is, what most people's jobs is going to those mines every day.

• 22:50Jocko Willink?

  He talks about another buddy of his and doesn't really, well, he doesn't explain what happened because he didn't know what happened, but somehow this kid got shot with a 22 caliber, like playing around or whatever. He says he lived for some months, but then gangrene set in and they brought his body back to her, her mini.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  The funeral was set at St. Edwards, where I was an altar boy. The priest took the water shaker from me and began to sprinkle its contents on the casket. And I remember that I stood there before the altar, trying to figure out at which end of the great metal box they had placed Joe's head and which end his feet. I never really fought in terms of the dead as being punished. It had always been a matter of living, getting their comeuppance.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  But that night, my mother asked me to pray for the soul of Joe. And for the first time in my life, I did offer prayers on behalf of another person.

• 23:46Jocko Willink?

  I never picked individual fights, but I never seemed to have any trouble getting into them either. I guess because I was larger than most of the guys my age, a lot of them couldn't resist the challenge. I don't remember ever losing one.

• 24:02Jocko Willink?

  So we get a good background of the guy. We get a good feel of the situation is very tough, hard work, always behind the eight ball financially, but still nonetheless, tight community. Fast forward a little bit. While I was getting started as an adolescent, my brothers were fighting the war. Chuck became an infantry officer and a company commander in Italy, and Bud, a Navy man, served as chief torpedo man aboard a destroyer that prowled the North Atlantic. Their letters were never any aid or comfort to me. Vicarious combat like books and movies and teleplays had never been my cup of tea.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  I hadn't quite recovered from their abrupt departure from Hermione and their subsequent location in places with exotic names when they came home with medals on their chests and war stories to tell the old man on the front porch. In the spring of 1944, that's what I wanted and I wanted it badly. I still wanted to be a soldier and I knew exactly how I could do it. The military's rules be damned. The phony baptismal certificate Father Kelly had worked for me, had worked up for me was the key. Actually, I was already getting some advice from people at work about registering for the draft. They thought I was 18 years old and I saw no reason to disappoint them. I went over to Irwin with my work permit

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  in hand and told Mrs. Gongaware at the draft office that I'd just forgotten about it and I needed to register. She looked at me as if I were a lowlife son of a bitch who was trying to sneak out of my duty as an 18-year-old American citizen.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  Actually, I was a 14-year-old teenager, American citizen, that was trying to do my best to sneak into my duty.

• 25:47Jocko Willink?

  I'd like to say it was all my idea, but I can't remember whether it was me or my friend Tony Spazali. So him and Tony Spazali decided they're gonna go enlist.

• 25:59Jocko Willink?

  They they catch or they hitch a ride till they get outside of Pittsburgh. Once they get outside of Pittsburgh, we walked the rest of the way to the US post office in downtown Pittsburgh, where we both joined the US Marines. This kid's 14. The next day, the train Tony and I were riding southward through Virginia towards Paris Island, South Carolina. It was halted in some backwards town and we were taken off by a man who identified himself only as a federal officer. We were both impressed, if disappointed. When we when we arrived back at the Pittsburgh Depot, Mr. Gressman, our high school principal, was waiting and took us home. My father only shook his head, but my mother was glad to see me and smothered me with forgiveness.

• 26:40Jocko Willink?

  I went back to my traps and my school and my job and the railroad the very next day. I wasn't finished, however, I was only waiting. Fast forward a little bit, three years later, now he's actually the right age. He goes to unless he's 17 years old, goes to the Marine Corps recruiting office and gets told the quota's full.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Because, by the way, the war's over. Like the war had been over, so he missed the World War II. And he turned 17, right, cool. Sorry, we ain't got nothing for you. So he gets told by the Marine Corps recruiter, sorry, nothing for you. And then at that moment, a man wearing the US Army's 11th airborne patch on his shoulder sauntered into the Marines office and noticed my quandary. "Hey, kid, you want to be a paratrooper?" he asked. "What's that?" I inquired. "You jump out of planes and fight," he said, and I joined. Period, end of story. We got you.

• 27:30Jocko Willink?

  A week later, in the early morning of May 9, 1947, I got up to say goodbye to my folks. My father, who rose at 4:30 every morning of his life, except Sundays, was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, already dressed and ready to leave. My mother was puttering quietly around the stove and the large white enamel cabinet, preparing lunch for my father to take to the mine. I sat down and poured a cup of coffee into a metal cup. I suppose my father felt it was absolutely necessary that he give me some parting advice, although he, like I, had no idea what being a paratrooper meant. But it was good advice, as I recall, it went something like this. "The uniform doesn't mean you're a soldier. Whatever you do, don't get disgusted. Stick with it like you stick with it here at home.

• 28:14Jocko Willink?

  Remember what your brothers did. Nobody ever quit. It won't be any harder than hunting, than waiting in the creek in the wintertime. Nothing is as hard as just getting started."

• 28:27Jocko Willink?

  It's like in the coal mines, every step takes care of itself. Then we walked out together. My mother didn't cry. I wouldn't have expected her to. Stoicism is a virtue that a coal miner's wife develops. I never remember my mother as a young woman, not that day or any other. And when my wife is 60 years old, she will be younger than my mother was at 30. My mother waved from the porch as my father and I descended the 20 steps to the road.

• 28:57Jocko Willink?

  His ride to the mine came by and they disappeared into the darkness. I walked to the eureka store, caught a bus to Irwin, took a train to Pittsburgh. And then on the morning of May 10th, 1947, I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I recall that moment as among the happiest in my life. The moment I stepped off that train.

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  And knew I was on my way to my dream. I was going to be a soldier.

• 29:25Jocko Willink?

  So we kind of get an idea of what we're dealing with here. I think that's some important background to grab. And then um.

• 29:35Jocko Willink?

  We're going to go back to this other book. So we're going to go back to the other book, The Making of a Soldier. And what's, what's.

• 29:44Jocko Willink?

  What's interesting about this is he originally wrote this book.

• 29:49Jocko Willink?

  He originally wrote this book. So, so the, the, the big book, the soldier book came out in, I think, 19, I think he wrote it. Came out in 1973 or something like that, maybe a little bit later. But this other book, he had written it, he'd originally written a book called Conquest to Nowhere. It was just about his experience in Korea. And he wrote that in 1954. And he was young when he wrote it and he, he explains this in the kind of the, in the preface to this book. He explains he was young. He had a co-author, the co-author kind of. Kind of ran with it a little bit more than he did. And so it ended up really not reflecting what he had been through. So he rewrote this book later. So we're picking this up where he's at basic training. So.

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  In basic, we were interviewed periodically for school assignments. My choice was infantry. And I kept asking for it. I was advised each time that only an idiot would want to go infantry. But there's no way to discourage me, although I got pretty mad at being told that a soldier who wanted to fight was crazy. One day, I was about to tell the captain and a couple of lieutenants just what I thought of leaders who attempted to sell men on every profession in the army, except the one it had been created for, when my friend Bob Heisey took me aside. Look, Herb.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  Don't let the bastards get to you. If you don't accept a school, they're gonna have to let you go infantry. But frankly, I think you're nuts. He was right. Not that I was nuts, but that if I held out, they would have to let me go infantry. I did, and they did.

• 31:23Jocko Willink?

  So after basic, because it goes through basic training, there's some stories about that in here, and obviously I'm fast forwarding through a bunch of this stuff. You have to get these books to get the full details. After basic, I cooled my heels for a couple of weeks with the 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Washington, until my papers were processed. Then I was sent to jump school and was graduated as an infantryman and a paratrooper. I served a year and a half, was discharged, and returned to finish school at Secwickley Township High in Herminy. No one went anywhere in the US Army without a high school diploma, so I earned mine, then re-enlisted in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.

• 32:00Jocko Willink?

  Four months later, while I was studying radio repair at Fort Monmouth, the North Koreans invaded South Korea. I was shaving when my friend Harry burst into the latrine with news that the United States was going to provide combat assistance to South Korea. My head whipped around, and I sliced a notch on my chin that passed for a dimple for a good two years. Harry and I talked it over. We made our decision. Then we made our pitch. We asked to be released from school early to go to Korea. The commanding officer laughed. Korea, he explained, was a zero, a big nothing. Our troops in Japan were quite capable of handling things over there, and he said it would all be over before our request could even be processed.

• 32:41Jocko Willink?

  He's crazy. I later insisted to Harry, it can't be. I wasn't gonna be cheated again. I tried to go over his head. It was useless. I tried to flunk out of the course. It was impossible. The only way was to graduate. So I bore down. I took night classes. I applied myself. I was gonna get out.

• 32:59Jocko Willink?

  I was going to get out of the Signal Corps completely. I was gonna get out of the 82nd, I was gonna get out of the United States, I was gonna get to Korea. And I was going to get back into infantry as an infantryman and to fight in the war.

• 33:16Jocko Willink?

  And he makes a good attempt. He makes a good attempt. He makes it happen. He graduates from the school and now he is on a troop transport which take 10 days to get to Japan. Those are the longest days of my life. On the 8th, I was assigned KP. Refused to pull it and got busted from private first class back to private. It didn't matter. I was on my way to war and I wasn't about to arrive with dish pan hands. Besides, who the hell cared whether I got there as a PFC or a private?

• 33:51Jocko Willink?

  He's just full on, man. He is full on. "We were briefed by some of the evacuated veterans of Korea who were being used to give us the real scoop before we went in. Some of it was bullshit, most of it was true. A sergeant, a vet of both WWII and Korea, told it best. "Winter is coming," he informed us. "Most likely you will find it more severe than any winter you have ever seen. It's high, rugged country and bitter cold and you'll be out there in the weather 24 hours a day for months." He explained how the enemy were. "They were not cowards," he said. "They were well armed and they could fight."

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  "Yeah, sure, Sarge," some smart ass heckled from the back of the auditorium. "Tell us a war story." His glance swept over us. "I'm not gonna tell you any war stories. You'll have your own soon enough. And some of you won't live long enough to tell them."

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  Three days later, I was sitting ashore with orders assigning me to the 20th air-ground signal liaison in Pusan, as far south as you could go.

• 35:02Jocko Willink?

  But I hadn't come to Korea to repair radios, and I wasn't about to sit out the war in Pusan. There had, there were plenty of guys around who would be happy with those orders, they didn't need me. I went up to see the captain and explain that I was an infantry paratrooper, and I expected to go to the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, or back to the 2nd Infantry Division. Both were in country. He scarcely heard me. He said what I'd been hearing ever since I had joined the army: impossible. I was humiliated and furious, and stormed back to where my gear lay piled on the wet ground. I was surrounded by troops who had been wounded, and who were now returning to their units. Artillery pounded to the north. I wasn't going south.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  The next day, when they loaded trucks aimed north, I picked one with 2nd Division on its bumper, and leaped aboard. I was AWOL in Korea.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  You know what AWOL means, right? Absent without leave. So he's just got this cushy job repairing radios, and he randomly selects a vehicle and jumps onboard.

• 36:12Jocko Willink?

  You think that's like, you go, that's, that's kinda crazy. Well, look, get this: the truck was a mixed bag of vets and replacements from a half a dozen different countries. A Korean was driving. I soon discovered that I was the only American aboard. I also learned from one of the Koreans who spoke English better than I did, that the truck belonged not to the US 2nd Infantry Division, but to the Republic of Korea Army 2nd Infantry Division. So I first saw combat in a Korean division. But at least I was in battle.

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  And look, there's, I could, I could have easily just turned this into an audiobook and read the entire freaking thing. Like, I, it's, there's so much, there's so much interesting things that happen. You, you, you kinda have to read it yourself. And I apologize, I just don't wanna do a full audiobook of this. Because he, I'm reading this things and I'll be like, well, I, I can't read the whole book. And then you read something crazy.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  This could never happen nowadays, right?

• 37:11Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:13Jocko Willink?

  Like, I mean, I guess, I guess, it kind of could, it kind of could, actually.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Under what circumstances?

• 37:20Jocko Willink?

  Hey, man, you're in country. You know, uh, you could, you could, you could get away with a lot. You get away with a lot because

• 37:29Jocko Willink?

  they don't have, they don't have, you know, you could, you could kinda make things happen, right? Just like, you know, you're sneaking into a concert. You kinda act like you know what you're doing and you kinda walk past the doorman like you're going to, you got some task that you're supposed to do.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:43Jocko Willink?

  No, no one says anything to you.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, you throw your name, "Hey, can you put me on that manifest to get this flight up to Baghdad?" You know, someone will be like, "Well, where are you from?" "I'm from a SEAL team that's supposed to be up there." You know, name's Willink. "What, what happened?" "Oh, no, I, I was late, my, you know, I, I was, uh, my kid was sick and I got here late. I'm just trying to get up with my unit." And they're like, "They're just gonna hook you up, right?"

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. That's surprising.

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  Remember when we were talking to Tilt?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:09Jocko Willink?

  It was either Tilt or it was, it might've been Dick Thompson, who was like, "If you volunteered to go to Vietnam," I was like, "Yeah, cool. Yeah, you're good, you're in." It wasn't like, "Hey, can I please go?" It was like, "Oh, yeah, you wanna go to NOM? Cool. Oh, you wanna go to Special Forces? Cool. You wanna, you wanna go to, you wanna go to SOG? Cool, no problem."

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:29Jocko Willink?

  So it's sort of a little bit of that.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Still, like nowadays?

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  I think you could get away with some of this. It'd be a little bit trickier.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:36Jocko Willink?

  Man, occasional strap hangers roll around country.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Doable, though. Yeah. It's surprisingly influential when someone just sounds like and looks like they know what they're talking about.

• 38:46Jocko Willink?

  Hey, man, you know what? You know how you, you know, you know how you know what someone's rank is? They have a little patch that's Velcroed onto their thing. So, yeah. Freaking Andy Stumpf talking about that. Andy Stumpf would like, make himself a, make himself a lieutenant commander. And he's a, he'd make himself four ranks above what he actually was.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, yeah, and I guess, right? I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if they chose to look into it, then it's like, yeah, they could eventually find out. But if you're just, you know, raising no suspicion because you look like you know what you're talking about, like, you're not gonna look into every little thing that happens to you, you know?

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  Especially there's a war going on, you're like, oh, your replacement? Cool.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:24Jocko Willink?

  You're not like, let me see your paperwork.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:26Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, when they ask for your paperwork, you say, oh, yeah, you got blown up.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  And it's not like you're trying to do something that a normal person would be thinking is advantageous for you. It's not like you're saying, hey, I need to get on a plane to go to Japan.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 39:41Jocko Willink?

  Then people are probably saying, hey, what do you mean? What do you need to go to Japan for?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  What's he talking about?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:46Jocko Willink?

  That's not happening. But if you're saying, hey, I want to go to the front lines?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:50Jocko Willink?

  Hey? And you're gonna see his whole tour, basically, he's AWOL. He's AWOL this whole tour, just, and he does exactly what you said. He kind of shows up and gets with the company and starts working.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  So he's, in a way, it's almost like a crazy irony where he's AWOL, but he's AWOL because he's not AWOL. You see what I'm saying?

• 40:09Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  He's, he's B-WOL. Like, I'm going to get some, he's get some wall.

• 40:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you could, you could get, I think you could get away with some of it. I mean, I know that we definitely did some, let me give you an example. We did things that were not normal. You know, maybe not a fish, you know, not official maneuvers.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, my, my CBs, so I had CBs that, which is construction battalion, so they're Navy guys that do construction, and they've got a really awesome historical story in that they would build airfields in World War II, and they did, and, and there's part of the, part of the underwater demolition teams that use some of that experience from the CBs. So there's a, there's a connection there. Anyways, CBs are CBs, the CBs that worked for me. They did some stuff that was not above, that was not 100%. Let's say authorized, right? For instance, we need a piece of equipment. We need a piece of gear. We need a bunch of lumber to build something.

• 41:19Jocko Willink?

  Basically, my CBs would figure out how to get that stuff that we needed. And you know, they might be trading stakes or whatever, captured weapons, whatever, just whatever random things. And here you go. Yep. Make stuff work. So there's, there's definitely, it's a little bit more, it's Wild West, right? You ever heard?

• 41:41Jocko Willink?

  Like Iraq or Afghanistan described, oh, is the Wild West out there?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hear people say that.

• 41:46Jocko Willink?

  It takes a little while for the administrative things to catch up. So when it's, when you're waiting for administrative things to catch up, there's some shady activities happening. You're making some things happen.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Who was the guy? And there's a movie about it. He, he, he was like a young kid and he'd go and he'd be a pilot and he'd really like do stuff.

• 42:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know the name of the movie, but I know what you're talking about, but I never watched it either. But would he like get and fly a plane and stuff?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, he would. Apparently the story, I didn't see the movie either, but he, I remember seeing, uh, no, it was an interview. He was on like a, like a podcast, I wanna say. Yeah, the real guy. And he's older or whatever, but he was saying like, yeah, his main thing, you just act like you know what you're doing. That's all you gotta do. And so he could be like this young kid, even though like straight up, like someone that young will never be a pilot. Like it just doesn't, you know, happen like that. And he'd just act like he knew what he was doing and they'd be like, yeah, cool.

• 42:42Jocko Willink?

  That's why they call it a con man, right? Cause you have to have this confidence, this level of confidence. So he's got a level of confidence here just to jump on with a bunch of North Koreans. The reason that I went off on this tangent about not reading everything is because he jumps in, he's in combat with these guys. He says, uh, uh, the first guy I was sure that I had shot bounded into the air, then dropped over a ledge before us. It was my first sure kill, but I felt neither revulsion nor a sense of power, just indifference. I had had more compassion for rabbits and deer. A guy with a rifle in his hands coming to kill me did nothing to stir my sympathy. Subsequent years of combat in Korea and Vietnam served only confirm and strengthen that feeling. 10 minutes later, I was out of ammunition. This is his first scenario. 10 minutes later, I'm out of ammunition.

• 43:28Jocko Willink?

  Everyone else on my side had already taken off, so I picked up a wounded Korean and helped him back to where I had joined the unit. Now, look what happens. He, he, he finds a Jeep with four American GIs. And just kind of rolls with them because he doesn't want to be, he's with Koreans. He's with people that aren't speaking. There's a few people that speak English, but most of them aren't. And then he jumps in with them, um, ends up going to this replacement depot. And load, he gets loaded onto a box car that's, that's heading south. And then a couple of days later, he ends up where he's supposed to be. Okay. So a couple of days later, we were near enough for me to make my move. Oh, he gets to Pusan. So he gets back to Pusan because he's with the Korean unit. He doesn't want to be with the Korean unit. So he goes back to Pusan to figure out like,

• 44:13Jocko Willink?

  okay, how can I get with some Americans? He gets back there. And a couple of days later, we were near enough for me to make my move. I stole a Jeep. And drove over to the 23rd. They were preparing for, to jump off for the Yalu River, a push north. Designed to end the war. Headed home was the modded motto, home by Christmas, MacArthur promised. Rumor had it that the 7th Infantry Division and the Marines were already rolling north. The Rocks already have more men on the Yalu. On the Yalu than the Chinese on the mainland to put it together. Someone swore, hell, it's as good as over. I felt a pang in my heart, but what the hell? A short war is better than none.

• 44:52Jocko Willink?

  Besides, life is full of sprouts. So he steals a Jeep to go and again, right? This guy's just getting after it. Uh, the temperature plummeted to 20 below. Again, you, you, I, I'm trying to figure out what to read, but you read, you see that the temperature is 20 below. Like, let's make sure everybody knows. Extra equipment and ammunition were issued. We began to feel a fever for conquest. We were going to end it. The big attack was on. Not by us, but by the Chinese. One million strong. They came at us across the Yalu River. Out of Manchuria, surrounded by more than 30 full divisions. Our attack turned into a rout.

• 45:37Jocko Willink?

  So then this happens, so he's this, they're, they're starting to kind of get beat up. And sergeant comes off and says, we gotta get more troops up here. The Turks are somewhere off close to the east. Do you know where they are? Sarge, I don't even know where we are. He ignored it. Well, I know where they're supposed to be. But I'd hope maybe you know for sure. He dropped a finger on my shoulder. I've got to send you after them. I don't have anyone to spare. It's another lesson of war. If you don't belong to the unit, you can be spared. So he's just tagging along with these guys. And so the sergeant's like, okay, well, I need somebody to go do something to you. Sure, I'll go. I heard myself volunteer. That was all. He didn't know any more about the Turks than I did. If I found them, okay. If I didn't, that was okay, too.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  Two hours late, later, I located their lead element. They were still heading north, looking for more Chinese, which said just about all there is to say about them. Every other unit was heading south, running from the Chinese while the Turks were moving north, looking for Chinese. And the Chinese were desperately trying to avoid them. I couldn't talk to the Turks and they couldn't talk to me. I tried to get across what I wanted, but it was useless. They had their orders. Attack north. Night closed in and I stayed. So he's supposed to go figure out what they're doing. And, and he can't even communicate with them to get them to do what he needed them to do. So he stays with them for a while. Then he decides, and fast forward, he decides he's got to leave and go back and at least tell them, hey, this is where the Turks are.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  I don't speak their language and what do you want me to do next? And in order to leave, he heads off to the north. He thinks it's going to be the best way to go. And here we go back to the book. I looked ahead and spotted about 200 Chinese coming across the valley. Not more than 100 yards out. I dropped down behind some rocks and fallen timbers and stretched out on my belly in the snow. Recalling the dead captain, that's what I opened up with. I eased my rifle off safe. I wasn't about to be taken alive. They came straight up the finger toward me and passed. I was safe. I was ready to move again. I put my hands down to push myself up when all hell broke loose. The Turks had opened up with everything they had and Chinese swarmed back down the hill. I was halfway to my feet. It was too late to drop back down and I couldn't just stand

• 47:49Jocko Willink?

  there. I spun the rifle around and opened up on three or four nearest to me. Weapons flew in the air and bodies went sailing past me ass over heels. I snatched up one of their burps and squeezed the trigger. A long, sharp rip rent the air and more bodies tumbled by. As fast as I emptied one weapon, I scooped up another. I had them by the balls. I could fire at anything in any direction. They couldn't fire without hitting their own troops. Running and milling around in confusion, some headed back up the hill and the Turks opened up again. When they came back down, I dropped another couple dozen. Suddenly it fell silent. It was no time for me to move. I got back down and waited. At first light, the Turks sent a patrol to see what the score was. Between us, we had

• 48:30Jocko Willink?

  accounted for almost 200. My foxhole buddy convinced them that I had gone out after the entire group alone and I became an Arkadush, their brother. Later, when I stood before their president, the only foreign soldier ever received the Turkish equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. So now, now he's in position with the Turks. And here we go again. And I'm probably gonna be saying that a lot as we read through this. Here we go again. They're in position and shit just gets crazy. The major assault came from the west and it wasn't too swift since we had the sun at our back. Some men fought, some just froze, but the Turks rose

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  as one man with fixed bayonets and met the charge head on about 20 yards out from the column flanks. Steel clashing against steel, screams of pain and terror intermingling, but not a sound from the Turks. A Turk private who I came to know well and who later died, slashed across the faces of three Chinese with one great sweep of his blade. Another, a master sergeant who would later visit my home in the States as a hero of his nation and as an honored guest of ours, gutted two more at my side. They loved it, but the Chinese I saw already had no stomach for it. They routed quickly and fell back, abandoning their dead and wounded. The wounded, the Turks finished off. They gave no quarter and asked none.

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  By the way, just FYI, just so everyone knows, we're talking about bayonet battles. Jumping ahead a little bit here, now they're in a column, so they've, they've kinda, they've kinda been roughed up, and even though they've done some hard fighting, they're heading south. They got lots of casualties, they're in rough shape, he's back with Americans now. "As dark descended, we saw Chinese troops perch like buzzards on the heights around us. Our column froze to a halt, ammo was low, there was no ration handout. The few men who had sea rats mostly passed them to the wounded. With no wire for setting up a defense, the column had to move. A truck passed close to me and I fell behind it, letting my ass drag a little. Suddenly my feet flew out from under me and I cracked my chin on the ice. I

• 50:47Jocko Willink?

  bound up fast like a novice boxer embarrassed by a sudden unexpected knockdown in the first round. My hands were sticky with blood. I glanced up and saw it sluicing from under the tailgate of the truck, load of wounded and dead before me, and freezing on the surface of the road. I remembered running behind my brother's ice delivery truck as a kid, watching water drip out as the ice melted in the summer sun. What a waste of water. Then it hit me, war, what a waste of blood. Glancing back into the darkness at the hills crawling with Chinese, I realized that sometimes the alternatives were worse, so I straightened myself up. Fourteen miles wasn't that far. Two men came beside me in the darkness. One

• 51:29Jocko Willink?

  of them had one arm gone, the other both. They needed space in one of the trucks. Myself and another soldier climbed aboard and sifted through the wounded for the dead. We unloaded eight bodies and laid them at the side of the road. Helped the two wounded climb aboard, then dropped back again behind the truck. Word came back again, keep the column moving, or stop in place and die."

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  So like I said, they're, they're in tough shape as they're, as they're extracting in this situation. And again, they, he explains how they end up there, but I can't, I'm not gonna read, not reading the whole book.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  "A feeling of confidence and well-being washed over me. I'd make it, and so would most of the others if they'd fight. We were breaking through. Some men were beginning to rally. One, when one truck driver bought the farm, someone else jumped in to take up the slack. The column was moving. It was make contact, pull back, regroup, fight again and again, but we were moving.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  Many died needlessly. Tanks and trucks plowed over them in the dark and confusion, crushing dozens beneath wheels and tracks. The sounds of battle and the powerful roar of engines drowned out the screams. In the light of a flare, I saw a man's face frozen in horror, his mouth open in a soundless scream as he went under the treads of a patent tank. It was unavoidable, and it was ghastly.

• 53:00Jocko Willink?

  Three men were stretched out beside the road, white phosphorus searing into their dead flesh. An incoming round struck halfway between us and I hit the dirt. When I raised up, they had disappeared and a small crater hollowed the snow where they had been. More artillery followed and I dove into a hole made by an earlier round. There was another guy in there.

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  "Go ahead, you yellow bastard, shoot me," he screamed.

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  I still had dirt in my eyes. "I'm not a yellow bastard," I fired back, "and I'm not gonna shoot you." "He was an asshole," I figured, still brushing dirt from my eyes. "Look," I said carelessly, meaning, "God damn it, can't you see?" "I can't. I can't," he sobbed. "I can't see anything." My eyes cleared and I saw his face, a mass of searing white phosphorus.

• 53:51Jocko Willink?

  He might have been one of the three I had thought was dead or someone else who'd been hit in the same, by the same round. I scooped up chunks of ice and snow and tried to clean, clean his face. I led him out of the hole and over to a medic. The medic lifted him onto the truck and began to tend to, to his injury before the driver threw it into gear and lurched back into the column.

• 54:13Jocko Willink?

  I was still watching and wishing him well when the truck took a direct hit and disappeared.

• 54:21Jocko Willink?

  My throat was on fire. I needed water. I reached out and broke off an icicle from a passing truck. I stuck the end in my mouth and sucked on it. It was sticky, dirty, and salty. It was frozen blood.

• 54:40Jocko Willink?

  It dropped from my hands. I moved out farther, onto the flank again, deeper into the darkness. Only a candy ass really needed water.

• 54:50Jocko Willink?

  Just before first light, I ambled toward the head of the column and attached myself to the lead unit. We came upon a unit that had gone before us, all of them dead, and many disemboweled, like the men in the village.

• 55:04Jocko Willink?

  A young lieutenant lay in a ditch with his leg blown off above the knee. I tourniqueted it and loaded him onto a passing tank with some other wounded already aboard.

• 55:14Jocko Willink?

  A couple of hours later, I found him alongside the road with a bullet between his eyes. The back of his head was gone, and his brains were splattered all over his vest.

• 55:25Jocko Willink?

  We attacked some more, took some more casualties, took our wounded, and mostly left our dead behind us.

• 55:33Jocko Willink?

  We had lost 3,000 men in one day of the 7,000 remaining in the division.

• 55:48Jocko Willink?

  So, eventually,

• 55:53Jocko Willink?

  they make it back, and he gets shipped to... He gets assigned once again to a rear unit. And, and, they're probably trying to take care of him, thinking this guy just went through all this hell. And he requested to get transferred. Like, "No, I want to go to a frontline unit." And what do they say? They say that's impossible. So he waited two days, slung his rifle, and went back on AWOL. And reported to a replacement unit handling hospital returnees. I teamed up with a couple of men from the 38th and returned to the unit then on down to its second battalion. At battalion headquarters, we were asked which company we were from. This is what you're talking about. So he gets to battalion headquarters, not a battalion that he's even a part of,

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  and they say, "Which company are you from?" And he says, "E Company." I said, "And was loaded on the back of a deuce and a half and delivered." At company headquarters, I was assumed to be a replacement from stateside and was turned over to Dave Bernstein, a wonder from Brooklyn, whom I came to cherish. "You see that bridge up there we're gonna have to cross?" He asked. "Yes." "Well, we've crossed it at least four times already. Two times south, two times north." I noticed him studying me out of the corner of his eye. "They'll, they'll more than likely shoot us back across it again tonight." He glanced at his watch. "Usually the shit hits the fan about 10:30." "They lay on the artillery for about 15 minutes, and then follow up with Takasan chinks."

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  "Takasan? That means a lot." He studied me when he said it.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  I felt myself flushed. "Come off it, man. I'm no damn rookie." "I made it to Coonery with this outfit." He brought me up short. "You were at Coonery?" "That's right. What outfit?" "Who the hell knows? I was a radio man. I was a radio repairman." I lied. I didn't have time to explain being AWOL. So he meets these guys, this, this E Company here. Bernstein signaled again. Now he's, now he's with these guys. And this scene, as you read this, it just gives you that. I had to read this part, just so you get a kind of a, a sense of...

• 58:05Jocko Willink?

  Sense of who he's with and who these guys are. So he shows up.

• 58:11Jocko Willink?

  Bernstein signaled and I stood up and followed him into one of the huts. Inside it was a little casino. The mud walls were covered with tapestries and silk blankets E Company had liberated when they moved into the town. There was a small fire burning in the fireplace. The mud fireplace. There were three fifths of whiskey on a small shelf and five half empty bottles in front of five soldiers playing poker on a silk covered table in the middle of the room. One of the men, a sergeant, kept calling for Bug. That's Bugs Hoover. He's always calling for the bug, aces, straights and flushes Bernstein explained. He introduced me to the, to the men with whom I would serve until I left Korea or until they died or captured. Some stood up and shook hands, others just nodded.

• 58:56Jocko Willink?

  We watched for a bit. Then left.

• 59:00Jocko Willink?

  What are their jobs? I asked. Call me Dave, he said.

• 59:05Jocko Willink?

  McPherson's the platoon sergeant. Used to be in 82nd Airborne, I think. We kid him about the time he went AWOL, came back and the old man said he'd never be a soldier. That was in the States. In four months he's been here. He's gone from PFC to master. He was the same old man who promoted him. Max tough, but he's a hell of a good guy. Crandall's a squad leader. He hates war and he hates the army, but he fights. Billy Joe Buckholz is a rifleman, a PFC from Atlanta. He's kind of new here too. Brinson's a draftee. He's got kids. One of them signed some of his letters, though I don't believe he's even old enough for school. Brinson's a bar man.

• 59:49Jocko Willink?

  Bugs is a goddamn tiger. He does anything and everything that needs doing. Sometimes he's a squad leader, sometimes he's a platoon sergeant. He's everywhere and anywhere, wherever there's gooks. If you're a fighter, you'll like him and he'll like you. If you're not, stay the hell out of his way.

• 1:00:06Jocko Willink?

  Who's got the squad homicide to? I asked. King, forgot to mention. He's a good Joe too. Hell, they all are, he said, flinging up his arms. No sense in trying to say who is and who isn't.

• 1:00:18Jocko Willink?

  He looked thoughtful. The amazing thing is the age. Average is less than 21 and that's including the World War II vets. So there's a little introduction to the guys.

• 1:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Says the Chinese didn't attack that night, but neither did we. Bugs lost his ass at poker. 10 years after Errol Flynn in Burma, I was an honest to God infantryman. I felt damn good. I slept well.

• 1:00:48Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, well, here we go. God, they just roll. They just roll.

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, the, um, you ever heard that adage, I'm sure I've said it here before, that war is a lot of waiting. There is not waiting in this book. There's very little, because every time he seems like he's gonna have to wait, he just goes AWOL and finds out he's fighting.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  No time to wait.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Late, the next afternoon, we were briefed by the company commander. Still later, we were briefed by our platoon leader, Lieutenant Malinowski. I was to go on patrol. He said he was sorry to have to send me out on my first full day in the platoon, but no sweat, no real sweat, he assured me. It was only a listening post. At 1800 hours, Dave, Sowers, Crandall, Tate, a guy called Self-Propelled. That's, that's one of the top nicknames I've ever heard in my life. The guy's name is Self-Propelled. Freaking legit. Uh, he had come to E Company from an artillery self-propelled gun unit, so his name was Self-Propelled. And myself were briefed by King, who would lead? We're gonna, we're going a bit north for tonight to LP5.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  Nothing big. There shouldn't be any trouble. We'll lay low and listen. We've all been out here before, except for Herbert. He glanced at me. All you have to do, Herbert, is listen and watch for unannounced company, okay? Okay, I replied. He continued briefing and made it simple, clear, and complete.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  It's kinda crazy, right? Simple, clear, and complete. That's, that's my definition. Uh, my definition is simple, clear, and concise, and this one is simple, clear, and complete.

• 1:02:23Jocko Willink?

  We moved out later. Each of us knew exactly what was expected of him and everyone else in the patrol. So there you go. That's a, just a beautiful briefing. Everybody knew what was expected of themselves and of everyone else in the patrol. These men were all business. He goes out in the field now. All these men were all business, no scuffing about, no talk, no bullshit. So these guys are squared away. And fast forward a little bit, these patrols continue. He briefs on some of these patrols, what they're like, what's going on. Uh, the weather's getting even colder. The, the frontline positions start to stabilize a little bit.

• 1:02:59Jocko Willink?

  Now, and it fast forward to a point they're on the e-company, Easy Company is in a position, they're on like the knob of a hill.

• 1:03:11Jocko Willink?

  And we'll go to the book. "The moon rose full and bright, and the hills to the north glowed in sharp relief. A trip flare rocketed into the sky from the base of the hill before us and burst like a bomb of light across the heavens. We could see the enemy, a line of gray-white ghosts floating forward over the snow about 250 yards away. The flare drifted in its chute across our entire front, shadows climbing back around us as it disappeared then went out. Hold fire.

• 1:03:44Jocko Willink?

  "Hey, Easy Company, why don't you go home? This is home, you fucker, go back to China!" Someone yelled right back.

• 1:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Still neither side fired. That's freaking crazy, right? They're calling you by your company name? "Come down and fight!" Someone on the other side blew a bugle. And like a cavalry charge, they swarmed up the hill. The moon came out from behind the clouds and lit up a sea of humanity racing over the bright snow toward us. They picked up speed. It was the banzai charge of the Japanese in World War II all over again. We waited for their front ranks to hit the 75-yard line and squeezed our triggers. Nothing happened. A few muffled chinks. Our weapons were frozen, firing pins immovable.

• 1:04:35Jocko Willink?

  "Piss on them!" Someone said, and word came down the line. We pissed on them, and it worked. The urine melted the ice and the troops all along the line began to fire. Men shifted positions to fill where individual weapons had not been pissed on yet. I ended up in a hole with a soldier from 3rd Platoon. "Herbert," I said by way of introduction. "Johns," he replied without looking up. I was, I took up a firing position and he continued to work on his rifle. A second later he dropped down beside me and jerked two quick shots into advancing troops. "Good," he said, "now let's drive the little bastards back to China." I didn't know where Johns was from or where he was going, but he had style. "Yeah," I said, "let's do that." The other men in the line apparently felt the same way.

• 1:05:20Jocko Willink?

  We broke the assault at more than 50 yards and drove them back down the hill to lick their wounds. A kid to our right clambered out of his hole and started down the backside of the hill. McPherson was on him like a cat. "Where in the hell you think you're going?" he asked. "To the aid station," the guy answered. "I've got the chills." "Kid," Mac told him, "it's thirty below zero. We've all got the chills. Get back in that hole." "I'm going back to battalion," the kid shouted, almost crying. "I'm freezing." Mac leveled his carbine. "Get back in your hole. I don't have time to argue." His finger squeezed the slack from the trigger. "Get back in that fucking hole. Now." The kid turned and, with head hanging, moved off in the dark.

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  We heard the thud of his boots as he jumped back down into his hole. The bugles sounded again. This time, they came up the hill in battalion strength. But this time, all of our weapons worked. Whoever had come up with the piss technique deserved a Congressional Medal of Honor. We piled the bodies on top of one another all along the front. My bar began to overheat. And the smell of cordite and urine seared my nostrils. Flares popped overhead again, lighting up the slope below and the valley beyond. The Chinese were everywhere. Like ants, they were coming in in waves. It was a standard tactic with them. The first wave was light. It was meant to draw fire so they could note and pinpoint our positions of our automatic weapons.

• 1:06:48Jocko Willink?

  The second wave was to knock out our automatic weapons and overrun us, or at least wear us down, so the third wave could finish us off. This time, however, three waves couldn't be enough. And they seemed to know it as well as we did. They'd come prepared. Their leaders were pros. And seldom underestimated who they were up against. They knew that any unit prepared to pay the price could overrun any position. These guys always came ready to pay that price. Johns was killed in the third assault. I laid his rifle and ammunition beside my own on the edge of the position. Then, as an afterthought, I extracted his bayonet from his scabbard and fixed it to his rifle. I was ready.

• 1:07:31Jocko Willink?

  I tucked my boots beneath his body to keep them warm, but he was already cold. It was gonna be a long night. By the fifth wave... The Chinese had paid the price. The hillside before us was littered with their dead and wounded. We had sustained about forty percent casualties ourselves. Ammunition was almost nonexistent. The artillery had ceased to fire in our support. The last of our wounded were already on their way toward the rear, walking wounded, carrying the dead and incapacitated.

• 1:08:05Jocko Willink?

  The sixth wave hit. And the order came down to fall back to cover the wounded.

• 1:08:14Jocko Willink?

  I leaped out of my position. No one had come by to pick up Johns. I checked his body. The round had caught him smack in the forehead above his left eye. The back of his head was gone. I slung his rifle over my shoulder, locked his cartridge belt above my own, and joined the rest of the men. At the base of the hill, we came to a road which led back across the bridge. Our battalion commander, Colonel Skeldon, was rounding up units and reorganizing them for a counterattack. His driver was beside a trailer, tagged onto his jeep, passing out ammo. When we were ready, Skeldon led us back up the hill. He had done so efficiently and so quickly that we caught the sixth wave not yet ready to defend. Within minutes, we were back in our positions, consolidated, and ready.

• 1:08:59Jocko Willink?

  First light was breaking, and the Chinese pulled back. We gathered up the rest of our dead. Johns went back down the hill in a mattress cover. Sowers and Tate, dead, went along with him. The Chinese had outnumbered us at least ten to one.

• 1:09:19Jocko Willink?

  They had weapons and guts. They had been willing to pay the price. But so had we.

• 1:09:31Jocko Willink?

  You know, when they get to wave number five, you're thinking, wow.

• 1:09:37Jocko Willink?

  And that's not it. Here comes wave number six. And the reason that you can't stay there is because you're out of ammunition.

• 1:09:51Jocko Willink?

  Forty percent loss had cut us down far below combat strength. We were ordered into reserve. Reserve. It's a powerful word in a combat zone. It's a full night's sleep in a couple days, you're almost certain to live through. It's time to catch up, to get your bearings, bearings, and a time to find out how the war is going for the rest of the division, for the rest of the army, since a man in combat doesn't have much opportunity to look around him. We had fine weather, the sun broke through, and the frozen earth became a quagmire. Replacements came in and were assigned to fill the gaps. Day after they arrived, E Company went into heavy combat

• 1:10:31Jocko Willink?

  training. We reviewed attack formations and procedures, defenses, withdrawals, marches, and counterattack. We practiced until every one of them understood what was expected of them under all conditions. We laid down the standard operating procedures which had worked for us in the conditions of this war. Good training cuts losses, and we intended to cut our losses to a minimum. We trained, and we trained hard.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  We got a few supplies by airdrop. Sometimes those came in with mail from home, and all training would grind to a halt. Mail was considered a morale builder. Personally, I disagreed. I didn't write much and didn't expect to get a letter. I got them, of course, but they didn't mean much to me. Home was too far away. What happened in Easy Company, Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment was more important. If you kept your mind on where you were, the war was easier. If you let your thoughts drift to things that no longer existed for you, then you were in trouble. Letters I read quickly, sometimes skipping entire paragraphs, and I got rid of them.

• 1:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Packages I broke open immediately and shared their contents on the spot. I consumed my portions on the hoof and forgot them. It's good advice, man. It's good advice.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  My, like I was in a platoon and it was before the war, it was just like a normal deployment. And uh, I remember there was a guy, you know, like, you know, one of the guys was married or, you know, had a girlfriend or whatever. And I remember seeing him, he was just, he was staring at a picture of her.

• 1:12:22Jocko Willink?

  And I just remember thinking that he was torturing himself, right? And driving himself crazy. And it made no sense to me. And I remembered that. And I was like a young, you know, single guy at the time. So I made a mental note that that's not a good way, that's not a good thing to do, right?

• 1:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Then suddenly and simply, Malinowski notified us that third, first and third battalions were caught in a pocket. And we were moving up north to give them a hand. And the good news is this time we ride. He assigned us trucks by squad.

• 1:13:05Jocko Willink?

  Malinowski deployed us squads abreast, each squad to maintain, this is when they get, obviously they get to their fighting positions. Um, each squad set to maintain itself and calm until we closed in for the assault. Then we'd move up shoulder to shoulder, side by side to take up marching fire. We topped the ridge and descended toward the valley that separated us from the burning, smoking mass that was Hill 554, our objective. The planes banked off and away as we started across the valley.

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Artillery screeched in to take up the slack. Small arms fire from the hill cracked overhead. And Mao gave the order to pick it up and get a move on. Chinese artillery came alive now and the ground beneath my feet rolled and heaved like the deck of a ship on a raging sea. Smoke, fire and steel split the air like a tornado. And the kabrak of heavy artillery pounded my ears. Suddenly I was through it and on the height of the near bank of a small stream, facing a 40 foot drop to the far side. A machine gun opened up from the hill ahead. The rounds whizzing past my ears and splitting the air above me and I leaped. I sailed down onto the far bank, my boots driving through the frozen crust into the deep cold mud.

• 1:14:22Jocko Willink?

  Pulling myself free, I bounded forward into the next heavy cloud of smoke.

• 1:14:27Jocko Willink?

  The ground heaved, the ground sloped steeply upward. I had reached the base of Hill 554. I shoved my BAR selector to automatic, finger on the trigger, my eyes straining to pierce the smoke. I began to ascend the hill cautiously. Somebody broke through to my right. My finger tightened and I damn near dropped him. It was Dave. Without a glance toward me, he crossed in front of me and disappeared into the smoke. The cloud blew away for a second and I saw him clearly. Both sides called off artillery and shouts came along the hill to keep it moving and keep going forward. I hadn't fired a shot yet. Someone yelled grenades as they began to burst below and around us. Bug shouted, "Open up."

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  And the line came to life sporadically at first and then with a marching steam, stream of steady fire as men found their places in the line. Anything in front now was enemy or dead. I squeezed off one shot, then waited. Firing blind went against the grain. My father had taught me too well. I held fire, but then I saw that the tactic was sound. We were driving them back. Bodies tumbled out of the smoke above, down, the hill below, past me. I switched the selector to automatic, rapid. A wisp of smoke cleared in front of me and there he was, burp gun, the works. His face was a mask of shock. He fired first and rounds plowed into the ground in front, on both sides of me and over my head.

• 1:15:54Jocko Willink?

  I dropped the butt of the bar until the barrel aligned itself with the slope of the hill, the muzzle level with his gut and squeezed the trigger. Little puffs of smoke and dust billowed from his uniform and drove his body back against the hillside. The weapon he carried flew from his hands, passed me down the hill. Chinese voices above were screaming in the smoke. I continued forward and picked up the pace. As I stepped past the body, I had just dropped that glance down. He was dead, all right. I had emptied an entire magazine into him. I wasn't as cool as I had figured. I released the empty magazine and was inserting a new one when one of his buddies broke through the right front. I swung around, he was a kid.

• 1:16:37Jocko Willink?

  He dropped his rifle, then changed his mind and made a dive for it. But he was too late. I seated the magazine with a crack on my palm, slammed the bolt forward and squeezed the trigger. His head disintegrated. I grabbed his rifle, pointed it up the hill and emptied it into the smoke. Then I smashed it against the hillside and dropped the pieces. I re-studded my rifle in both hands and continued up. This time, I knew I had fired four rounds. There were still sixteen in the magazine. I had calmed down. Another body broke out of the smoke above me. My finger tightened on the trigger. It was Bugs. "Let's go!" he shouted. "We're almost there." I caught up with him. King had been hit. Who else

• 1:17:20Jocko Willink?

  didn't know, who else he didn't know yet? There were about six of us still on the line, but the enemy was pulling out. The hill was ours. Shoulder to shoulder, we marched those last few yards. We were the first two to reach the top.

• 1:17:35Jocko Willink?

  Within minutes, the remainder of the platoon moved up alongside. Our squad had been cut down to four men. Not a major action. It was just another hill, for which we had paid the price.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  But it had cost the Chinese dearly too. Their dead lay scattered all around. We had done well.

• 1:17:56Jocko Willink?

  We had won.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  Then, suddenly, as if turned by the hand of fate, our own artillery seemed to bounce back in flight and began falling onto our own positions. It was impossible for the Chinese to have spotted and called in counterfire so quickly. But ours or theirs, death was the same in a world of lightning bolts and thunder clapping around us. The earth underneath our boots blew up like a volcano. McPherson, a few yards in front of me, rocketed up into the sky like a doll, like a doll in a hurricane, and came down hard. And that was it. As suddenly as it began, it was over. I crawled over to Mac. Chunks of ice and debris raining down on us, and my mouth tasted

• 1:18:42Jocko Willink?

  like copper pennies. "Bastards!" he grimaced. "Dumb, stupid asshole bastards." Those were our tanks.

• 1:18:51Jocko Willink?

  He was shaken, but his only real wound was a chunk of shrapnel behind his right knee. He was out of it. He was stateside for sure. Carboni, and Carboni's the medic, came up and we tied a compress around the wound with the shrapnel still inside. "You're going home," Mac, Carboni said softly. I lifted him across my shoulder, careful of the knee, and we made it back to the platoon. There'd be no evacuation until their artillery let up, and we already had eight wounded besides Mac. The platoon was down to 21, and Carboni was the biggest, busiest man in it. We called back for litter teams and blankets, but it was no easier getting things up than it was getting them back. So we waited.

• 1:19:35Jocko Willink?

  Night came.

• 1:19:37Jocko Willink?

  And the incoming stuff lifted. We said our so longs, told Mac that he had made it and was headed home for parades and kisses.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  "Just to get home to see the family will be enough. You guys have my address. See ya." Two of the walking wounded picked up his litter and fell behind the others headed down the slope. We sat down and watched them wind their way towards the trail in the valley below. Six walking wounded, Mac and the other guys on litters.

• 1:20:09Jocko Willink?

  It was all we could spare. In November, even the walking wounded would have had to stay on and fight. So things were improving a little. They disappeared in the rocks below

• 1:20:20Jocko Willink?

  and into a minefield. Seconds later, Mac and three others came running out of the rocks and back up the hill. Men ran to help them. The other five were dead.

• 1:20:33Jocko Willink?

  They left the bodies and brought Mac and the others back up to the ridge. The wind picked up again and it began to snow.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  Everyone was too tired to waste energy digging in. We shielded the wounded with our bodies to keep them warm.

• 1:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Halfway through the night, a Chinese unit passed us by. By morning, we were surrounded again. By afternoon, the tanks had gotten through to us and we were able to evacuate the wounded. So Mac was on his way once more.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  But our destinies are cut elsewhere.

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  There was no escape, at least for Mac. He had survived the shrapnel. One light piece behind the knee from a hit close enough to destroy a tank. He'd escaped the minefield. We were no longer trapped. He was on his way again, and home was but a short way off.

• 1:21:26Jocko Willink?

  Then our tanks made another one of those errors, so common in war that most people never hear about. One tank had not received the word and fired one shot by mistake into the small band of wounded men.

• 1:21:44Jocko Willink?

  It was a direct hit.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  And Mac, the other three wounded, and the two we had sent to carry the litter were blown to bits.

• 1:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Bitterness swept through me. I sat down in the snow and stared numbly into the distance. The hills here, still white and blue, but they looked dirty. The sky was a swirl of muddy clouds. I let my head hang for a second or two and just stared at the frozen ground between my boots. Just little ridges of frozen mud with a light, dirty snow coating the edges.

• 1:22:28Jocko Willink?

  The war had lost its glamour.

• 1:22:32Jocko Willink?

  Vader, at the base of the hill, I raised hell with the tank commander out of frustration and grief. It had been a legitimate mistake on his part.

• 1:22:42Jocko Willink?

  One of the sergeants came over and apologized. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was my fault."

• 1:22:49Jocko Willink?

  "It's war," I interrupted.

• 1:22:52Jocko Willink?

  "It's nobody's fault." I had lost my first true friend in Korea.

• 1:23:03Jocko Willink?

  So the horrible blue on blue.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  Something that everyone in the military, everyone in the police should think about all the time. I promise you.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  When things get crazy, it is way more likely than you might think.

• 1:23:30Jocko Willink?

  This is an interesting part here. He says, "The army introduced rotation. Individuals with time could go home, replaced by new men, quote, 'starting their tours.' There was a reward before the end of the rainbow, a way out of war short of winning.

• 1:23:51Jocko Willink?

  It was the worst plan the army had ever put into effect.

• 1:23:57Jocko Willink?

  Men became cautious. They did their time and stayed alive. Soldiers no longer belonged to a unit. They served in one until they completed a tour, then served in another.

• 1:24:11Jocko Willink?

  It was the beginning of the end.

• 1:24:15Jocko Willink?

  "The purpose of all living is death," I had read once. "Loyalty, courage, and comradeship lent nobility to that purpose. In a very short time, our army and our country would come to reap the fruits of depriving their soldiers of that nobility of purpose.

• 1:24:41Jocko Willink?

  Those of us who were stuck with the old principles began to view ourselves as different and counted each rotation as a loss."

• 1:24:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, in World War II, you know, when you came home from war? When we won. And some guys were two, three, four years. And I mean, just think about what that does to your mindset. Just think about what that does. I only got, I only got four more months, only got eight more months. One day at a time, I could get through this day.

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, a couple of days later, I got nicked in the wrist. Six of us were on patrol down along the bank of a river. Spent one night in the aid station where they sewed me up and filled me with drugs to prevent infection. The next morning I returned to my platoon. Mao, the officer, wanted me to go back to the MASH for a couple of days to make sure I was okay. We compromised if complications set in or I began hurting, I'd go back. That was that. He's just getting wounded and just doesn't care.

• 1:26:02Jocko Willink?

  Um, this is a little later. I was going to, I was going to do, get some shut eye. But I never had the chance. Heavy stuff whistled in right on us in the middle of my sentence. I, a large gob of white phosphorus landed on my left forearm and began sizzling on its way to the bone. So we both spent the rest of the day packing my arm with cold mud to prevent the phosphorus from getting oxygen while we dug out chunks with our knives. Then I went to the aid station to have the wound cleaned and sewed. Getting wounded was becoming an annoying habit. The good news was that I got another night at the old aid station. To sleep in a tent, fairly dry, on a litter, which kept, kept my ass out of the mud.

• 1:26:46Jocko Willink?

  It was almost worth getting hit for a night of uninterrupted sleep. No posting of outposts. No being awakened every 30 minutes or so because somebody wanted me on the radio or the sound power. No taking turns. War has a way of reducing life to the basics and bringing home what the true comforts in life are. Uninterrupted sleep is one hell of a comfort. Cool water to drink is another. A dry bed, a hot cup of coffee, a cigarette if you're a smoker, I guess. I'd seen enough dying men ask for one to make me believe it was. For some, a shot of whiskey.

• 1:27:26Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, Chinese troops were reported massing about 2,000 yards north of our positions and armed recon patrols needed to check it out.

• 1:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Approximately 1,500 yards out, a sniper's bullet caught me in the upper right arm. Slug went in, wrapped around the bone, it buzzed like a hammer blow to the funny bone, but it didn't do much damage. Medic put a compress on it, we dropped down off the hill to put it between us and the sniper. This time, they sent me all the way back to the mash. By late evening, a surgeon had removed the bullet and told me I'd be evacuated to the rear in the morning. Get a good night's sleep, he said. Shortly after midnight, I AWAL'd from the mash and hitched a ride on a truck convoy back north to the unit. I reached the platoon at noon, just in time for C rations. He's using AWAL as a verb now, like I AWAL'd.

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  There's gotta be a better term for that, for what he's doing, like.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Carboni's replacement, a medic named Ryan, had been assigned to the platoon and Pickens, a new sergeant, had joined us. Again, I was like, you know, you get to these points, you're saying, ah, do I really need to go over the, you know, should I, should I read this part? And then it just teaches you, teaches you.

• 1:28:50Jocko Willink?

  Pickens, a new sergeant, had joined us. No one was certain whether he had served in combat yet or not, but he was a master sergeant that outranked me, and I figured he must have had something on the ball that made to make rank. I went to meet him. He looked like a sergeant, neat, trim, and in shape. He wore his uniform well and his gear was in order. He talked like a sergeant, no bullshit, and he gave orders like a man who knew his stuff.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  Dave didn't like him. "One more gun is one more gun," I told him. "Not always, Herb," he replied, then changed the subject. He didn't want to talk about it. It was an odd remark and an odd way for Dave to act. He was no dope, and when he said something, it was worth listening to. What had he observed that I had missed? I studied Pickens carefully. For the next few days, nothing occurred to change my evaluation. In fact, everything he did just seemed to confirm it. He had bearing, command presence, intelligence, training, the works. He was going to be a real asset to the company. Dave was wrong. Anyone could make a mistake. Pickens and I supervised the digging in and the preparation of the defense. He was great at weapons and placement. By the end of the day, we had a tight line

• 1:29:57Jocko Willink?

  that could throw up a wall of steel on command.

• 1:30:02Jocko Willink?

  Something big was brewing on the Chinese side. Pickens decided we needed more tactical wire to our front. He went to the rear himself to go pick it up. It was dusk and the sky was calm and beautiful. Isn't that kind of interesting? Right? Like you feel something brewing on the Chinese side and this guy decides he's gonna go to the rear? Dave is thinking, hey, this guy might not be all he's cracked up to be. He seems a little, seems a little too, little too, maybe a little too squared away, right?

• 1:30:36Jocko Willink?

  Little while later, Jennings whistled to me, "Hey Herb, Mal wants you on the sound power." I went over and took the phone from Jennings. "Sergeant Herbert." "Sir." "Herb, get the troops back in their holes. All hell's gonna break loose in a minute." With my other here, I could hear planes coming in on the dive. Men started running for the positions. Before I even had time to shout, the planes dropped their ordnance right overhead. I watched the canisters tumble down through the sky, out over our heads and crashing through the trees only a few hundred yards before us. Malinowski was still talking. "The valley is loaded with gooks." He was saying, "Get the men ready. Full alert. Notify the OP to be ready to pull in fast when they get the word. Where's Pickens?" "Wilco." "Pickens went back for wire and hasn't returned yet," I said.

• 1:31:19Jocko Willink?

  "Okay, it's your baby. Stay in contact. Roger that. Out."

• 1:31:25Jocko Willink?

  This time, we had the men and ammunition. We had wire and we had landmines and booby traps out. Our fire sectors overlapped along the entire front. This time, they wouldn't be able to afford the price. I looked up at the planes. "Lay off, guys," I muttered to myself. Let him come in and give us a chance. I felt good. I went along the line briefing in each position. Dude, I just like underline this section here. This is his brief to the troops. Nobody moves out of position unless I give the word. Know who's on your right and left. Keep all gear on, fix bayonets. No one throws grenades until you're certain they're in range. Remember,

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  you can hear a lot further than you can toss a frag. Make shots count. Don't waste ammo. Keep up a good rate of fire. If word comes down to fire, each man lays his rifle against the stake and we put it in and fires steady at a rapid rate on that line. All fires interlocking until I pass word to fire at will across the entire sector. Don't forget the tendency at night is to fire too high. Keep aim low. We'll cream them. We have fast resupply from the rear. When ammo starts to get low, don't panic. There'll be more coming. Tonight belongs to Easy Company.

• 1:32:43Jocko Willink?

  Good to go.

• 1:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Tonight belongs to Easy Company and it did for six waves.

• 1:32:52Jocko Willink?

  The first five, we chopped to pieces. We would have done the same for the sixth, seventh, or 10th. Except that some asshole back at Company rear hadn't done his job. Ammunition was running low by the fifth wave. More was supposed to be on the way, but King called back to Malinowski and learned that the Company headquarters had withdrawn. There'd be no resupply tonight. The Chinese had broken through on the right flank where the Dutch, who had been tied in with us, had already pulled out. We were on our own. Then the phone went dead. A round had severed the wire or had been cut. I told King to alert the platoon to be ready to pull out back down the hill to the point where we had previously designated in case we were overrun.

• 1:33:36Jocko Willink?

  I picked up Bugs from the hole to my left and we moved east along the back of the ridge to make contact with Malinowski. Or to find out what had happened to the wire. We were still moving when all hell broke loose as the sixth wave hit and came in over the wire and over their dead. Next thing I knew, I was fighting hand to hand for my life. The little mothers were everywhere. Bugs and I killed about 12 of them before, between us before we got enough opening to get the hell out. "Let's go," he shouted. We were bound, and we bounded down back the side of the hill like two fat bears toward where our Company command post had been. There was nothing but fog. Either we were the last ones or the first.

• 1:34:19Jocko Willink?

  We dropped down behind a log and tried to assess the situation. From here on, we'd play it safe. There was no telling who was behind us. Even our own troops would be edgy. And friendly fire kills the same as enemy. The rest of the platoon had either gotten out or they were dead or captured. "Let's get going," said Bugs. The Chinese had pretty well halted the ridge. Halted at the ridge. It was unlike their previous attacks when they had to be stopped by fire. The shooting petered out behind us. We moved off into the fog. Approximately forty-five minutes later, we tied up with the loose troops from other parts of the company who had assembled at the designated spot. I tried to find out about the platoon. The company commander had been hit and evacuated.

• 1:35:01Jocko Willink?

  Malinowski had been catching grenades on the right flank and throwing them back at the Chinese when one of them had gone off in his hand. He was in serious condition but alive and had been evacuated. Nobody knew about Dave, Anis, Jennings, and the rest, except they had been ordered to pull back. That made me the platoon leader and Lieutenant Canning, the commanding officer.

• 1:35:26Jocko Willink?

  They eventually make a move to get out of there and it goes relatively well, except for the fact that as they're approaching friendly lines again, they realize that they're in a minefield.

• 1:35:42Jocko Willink?

  They make it through the minefield and then they end up going back out and they're in another hill, on another hill, again.

• 1:35:54Jocko Willink?

  We sat waiting silently. Dawn lit up the sky and the sun started up over the hills behind us. Light crept across and down forward of the slope. Now we could see movement.

• 1:36:08Jocko Willink?

  There were hundreds of them. They had evidently come in right behind us when we had been driven from our positions the preceding night. Now, they were halted, regrouping. I tried the sound power to notify First Battalion Headquarters, but just couldn't raise anybody on the other end. I sent Jennings back as a runner. Some 60mm mortar light stuff started a puff in the air around us. The Chinese suspected that someone was on the hill. They might have spotted us, or the men we had relieved. We continued to watch, and held our fire. For the next two hours, they dropped 60mm on us, but did no damage. Our air came up out of the sun and made one orbit overhead.

• 1:36:53Jocko Willink?

  Jennings must have gotten the message back to Battalion. The planes peeled out of orbit, diving one after the other. The Chinese below held formation. Canisters of napalm tumbled down, scattering flame and twisted metal among their ranks. Still, they held. A bugle sounded, loud and clear, from the midst of the carnage, and they came charging up the hill. "Now!" I shouted, sighting along the barrel, and squeezing the trigger of the AR. Rifle fire cracked in my ears from both sides as the rest opened up with me. Our planes banked from east to west, and the remaining canisters fell, cutting deep swaths in the ranks of the Chinese.

• 1:37:39Jocko Willink?

  But they kept on coming. They had manpower, and they had guts. We were butchering them, but from their front line, it kept getting closer.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  When one went down, another replaced him. Our planes, empty of ordinance, banked off south. Bugs passed word that ammo was running low. By sight, I measured the distance to the nearest line of Chinese, and squeezed the trigger in one last burst before giving the order to move out. The teams pulled out from right flank to left on order, each following in, falling in behind the one passing from its right. Crandall and I went last to bring up the rear. My calculations had been accurate. We were able to pull back down the hill, across the saddle, and up into first bats positions without drawing fire. What's more, we had done a lot of damage to the Chinese. As we passed through their lines, the men of first congratulated

• 1:38:35Jocko Willink?

  us and asked our names. I felt like one hell of a tiger. The major congratulated and thanked us. You guys can serve in this battalion anytime. It was a top compliment. I shook his hand, saluted, and reminded him we had to get back to our own unit. There was no transportation available as yet, he told us, but tomorrow. I said we could hoof it, and I moved the patrol out behind me without waiting for an answer or looking back. Jennings met us down the road, and he had been nicked by a piece of shrapnel, but he could walk, and he didn't relish staying behind. We hitched a ride with a deuce and a half headed southwest.

• 1:39:18Jocko Willink?

  Had I known the outcome for us, I might not have been such a hurry to get back. Canning was the only officer left alive in the company. Counting us, he commanded exactly ninety enlisted men. Pickens was gone. This is that sergeant we were talking about. Pickens was gone, according to Canning. He had been avoiding combat ever since he had arrived. I was the only one who hadn't noticed. The day after we had come off the hill, Canning forced him to take out a patrol. They were creamed. Pickens came back ranting about being thrown needlessly into the jaws of death and sank to the ground babbling. Canning had him evacuated. Combat

• 1:40:00Jocko Willink?

  fatigue, he laughed. Isn't that a pisser? Anyone in the patrol dead, I asked? Eight. Any of my men? Ah, third platoon. He ticked them off. Kyle, Fritz, Moon Song, Donovan, Shoemaker, Benson, Condeen, and Davis.

• 1:40:22Jocko Willink?

  Kyle and Moon song, "The old ranks were cut down by two more. You're the platoon leader of second now." Until an officer gets in, I acknowledged. I understood it was temporary. "As long as I'm here with some say-so," he declared. "We'll see," I thought. I was no officer. Malinowski had told me he was, I was a sergeant, but I had never seen any promotion orders. I led whatever men I was assigned, wherever I was ordered to. I was still an AWOL, and it would be funny as hell if I were still a private. There were no paydays for me. My name was never on the payroll. "The records were delayed in the rear," they said. "I never contested it. What would I have done with money?" The platoon numbered eighteen men, counting me. We had one machine gun operating,

• 1:41:07Jocko Willink?

  no rocket launchers, and amounted to no more than a heavily reinforced rifle squad. But what the hell, ninety men wasn't a company either.

• 1:41:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep, still AWOL.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and like replacements are coming in, but they're not getting there fast enough. Hmm. Now, we're gonna fast forward a little bit, and, once again, they're on another hill.

• 1:41:37Jocko Willink?

  All the chatter on the other side ceased about at the same time. There wasn't a sound for a few minutes. Then rustling, and a few whispers. Some rocks broke loose and tumbled down the slope. They were crawling up the hill. No bugles this time. Psychological warfare between the 2nd Division and the Chinese was over.

• 1:42:03Jocko Willink?

  We had become a seasoned unit. They knew it, and we knew it. They were determined to get in close and destroy us. We were just as determined to let them get in close so we could destroy them.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  In a very few minutes, both sides would face the moment of truth. This was Burma. And I was better than Errol Flynn. No blanks, no bullshit. I was not an actor, but a US infantryman. I could beat any enemy that lived. We sat and we waited. I could hear myself breathe as I strained my ears to measure the distance. Then bam. The entire slope beneath us was lit up. Beams bounced off the clouds above and ricocheted down the hillside. Artificial moonlight. I glanced hurriedly around and discovered Buck Dixon and myself to be in the keyhole

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  of a long finger leading up from the valley at the crossbar stem of a junction of tea. I glanced down the stem. And there they were. They moved forward towards us in the eerie light, like Walking Dead in a cheap horror film. I pulled the pin from an M17 frag and sent it sailing down the finger. The explosion drove four bodies up and forward into the air. Arms, heads, and legs flailing like marionettes whose strings had parted. The light of the explosion went out. And I didn't see how they landed. A second later, we could make out about 10 more towing a machine gun on wheels.

• 1:43:44Jocko Willink?

  Buck let fly this time, taking out both gun and crew. So far, the score was US about 14 or maybe 20, counting the advance element. Chinese, nothing. A shutout, which didn't hold for long. But the next group that broke out of the woods to our front wasn't any lead element or single machine gun crew. It was a whole damn army all along our front. Our men opened up all along the line, bodies tumbled along the entire slope before us. A whistle blew once, and just as suddenly as we had poured it onto them, they returned it to us. A wall of solid steel drove into our own positions now.

• 1:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Two grenades landed in our hole, and Buck scooped them up and flung them back down the hill. Three more landed and he did the same. "This hole's too damn big," Dixon shouted. And they got us spotted. Another grenade came sailing through the air towards us. "Bail out," I yelled, and all three of us cleared the position as one. Two seconds later, the grenade went off inside with a loud whoop. Buck and Dixon had gone right, me left. I rolled over on my stomach, smack up against self-propelled. He had a shelter half-stretched out on the ground and was fieldstripping a machine gun on it methodically and unheardly, as if he were giving a demonstration. He hardly glanced at me. "Keep 'em off me, Herb, until I get this mother working."

• 1:45:10Jocko Willink?

  Three Chinese raced up and emptied their weapons into the hole we had just left. Buck was reloading his carbine.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  "Get 'em, Herb," he yelled. But Dixon fired first, blowing the head off the guy on the right. I dropped the other two, then ran my bayonet into one as he tumbled by me. A grenade exploded among us and I felt myself flung backward down the hill. Chinese broke over the top of the ridge. A bayonet slashed my upper right arm. "Down the hill," men screamed all along the line. Buck grabbed me and yanked me to my feet. "Let's go, man," he shouted. Another grenade went off behind us, propelling the three of us ass over heels down the rear slope. Buck jumped back to his feet first. A body broke out of the smoke above us. "Self-propelled," I shouted. "Son of a bitch," the figure shouted back, a grenade in his hand.

• 1:46:01Jocko Willink?

  Buck tore his head off with a burst of about twenty. "Motherfucker," he said, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. "Visit your ancestors."

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  We fought our way down the valley. As far as we could tell, we were alone, but the Chinese were all around us. In the melee, we got separated. Bruce and Dixon went one way, me another. I rounded a bush and stumbled into Ryan and King. "Let's go," I said, and started back down the valley toward the town. "We're heading the wrong way," Ryan argued. "Uh-uh," I fired back. "This is it." The artificial moonlight went out suddenly, leaving us in darkness with much of our night sight shot. I held us up for a bit to let our eyes accommodate. A bullet passed through my left leg just above the ankle. I could walk, but my arm was getting a little stiff. I noticed King was limping. "You hit?" I whispered. "About three times. No broken bones, though."

• 1:46:54Jocko Willink?

  "You, Ryan?" "Nothing," he whispered. "Halt!" A voice snapped sharply in front of us. "G.I.s," I whispered back. "Okay, come on in." There were seven of them. That made ten.

• 1:47:07Jocko Willink?

  So, just to debrief what just happened, freaking insane mayhem is what just happened. These guys are getting attacked by the Chinese. They get pretty much overrun. They all bail out of the positions. They kind of fall back in the direction of the last known area that they think they could go to, which is this town. On the way, they're getting separated and re-linking up with other guys, and then finally they re-link up with seven other guys, so now we have ten of them. One of them suggested we take off down the riverbed. Ryan wanted a hole up in the brush until daylight. I nixed both suggestions. We'd go into town as a patrol. There had to be other elements of the regiment there.

• 1:47:48Jocko Willink?

  The decision made, I moved up front to take over. We had one more contact with a Chinese machine gunner whom we bypassed in the dark, either because he was dead, at the gun, asleep, or confused. Three members of the patrol dropped off on their own and headed down the riverbed. Ryan disappeared and showed up three years later as a returned POW. The remaining six... So they're just losing, guys. Guys are just dropping off. The remaining six of us made it into the town, out of the frying pan, into the fire. We had just broken through to battalion headquarters, which was surrounded. A major was in charge. I recognized him as a regular Heller. He talked tough, looked tough, and was tough. How many of you are there? He asked crisply. Six.

• 1:48:32Jocko Willink?

  It's a help, not a division, but a help. A radio, crackling nearby, informed us that there was no way to break through to us until daylight. They wanted us to hold. The Major returned. We don't have enough ammo left in last, to last an hour. A flare burst above us caught, caught us standing there in the open. Here we go again, the Major shouted, and rushed past us toward the paddy on our east. For lack of any place better to go, we followed, dropping down into firing positions just in time to catch about three or four hundred enemy crossing the paddy toward us at a trot, guns spewing.

• 1:49:12Jocko Willink?

  Three or four hundred.

• 1:49:15Jocko Willink?

  We were next to a machine gun, and between us, we laid down a field of fire that cut them down like a skith mowing wheat. Not a single one of them reached the perimeter. How long has this been going on? I asked one of the gunners. All night. We let them pull back their dead and wounded. In the lull, we introduced ourselves to each other. Their names were La Rock and McLeod. Neither one seemed any more distressed or nervous about the situation than I was. They went about their business coolly and professionally, making adjustments in the headspace of their weapon, getting more boxes of ammo ready, and joking with each other and with us.

• 1:49:51Jocko Willink?

  Remember the message out of Baton in World War II? When the, when we were being overrun, La Rock joshed? Send more Japs.

• 1:50:00Jocko Willink?

  A young lieutenant came up behind us and introduced himself hurriedly. Name's Benkowski. He made a quick pitch. We can break out, and some of us will make it. He looked me in the eye. Are you for it? I nodded. The rest of you guys? They nodded too. So there's the plan. We can try and get out of here, and some of us might be able to make it.

• 1:50:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay, Benkowski said, "We're gonna muster at the south edge of the village on order. When they make the next assault, we'll meet them head-on." "Got it, got it," McLeod echoed. The rest of us nodded. He turned and raced away. I sat down to think. I'd always heard that when your time came to die, your life flashed before your eyes. I tried to summon it, but got nowhere. My mother, father, all those things were too far away. I thought of some things I should've done differently, but not too many. I should've kicked some asses, I didn't. And I should've said some words to some people that I didn't. If I made it out, I'd never make those mistakes again. If I made it out. If not, then I'd take as many of them with me as I could.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  My thoughts were interrupted by the word coming down to assemble at the south end of the village. No sooner would we be there, when a flare broke overhead, lighting up the entire column. A machine gun opened up from the road directly in front of us. "Son of a bitch," said Benkowski mumbled. "We gotta get that gun. Gotta get that gun," the words echoed through my brain. Two, maybe three lousy guys, weighing less than 150 pounds each, holding up the entire US Army. Bullshit. Life was okay, but not that okay. I scrambled to my feet and raced forward. Another guy came up with me, step for step, and we headed south down the road together, covering for the first 30 yards, side by side.

• 1:51:48Jocko Willink?

  Then there was this sickening thud of high-speed metal whacking into flesh, as I, as my companion went down beside me at just the moment I spotted the gun position. I was 20 yards off, 20 yards out and slightly off to the right, and I managed to get within five yards of the gun before they spotted me. And into the hole with them before they could squeeze off around. They were kids. My bayonet ripped through the chest of the gunner, driving him up against the back wall of the position. Pulling it loose, I beat the second man to death with my rifle butt. Bayoneted the third, then took a bayonet in the side myself, from the fourth, as I drove the butt down into his skull, which jerked the rifle from his hands and snapped the bayonet off inside my chest.

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  "Bastard," I hissed, as I pounded his skull one more time for good measure. My buddies were streaming past me. I leaped out of the hole and joined the rush. A second later, two Chinese flyweights pounced on my back. I reached back to grab some hair and picked up a fistful of teeth. I stumbled and fell, and the three of us went down helter skelter. I bounded back up alone and was off again. Flares burst off above us, lighting the sky with flame. Grenades were exploding all around. Men were screaming on both sides. Then we were in the midst of the Chinese running parallel to the river. The Major tripped in front of me and went down. I reached down to pull him up. "Go on, get out, save yourself," he shouted at me, thrusting his pistol up into my hand.

• 1:53:17Jocko Willink?

  "Here, take it." He was a small man. I yanked him to his feet and threw him across my shoulder. We crossed the river, and we were out of it. Some men lifted the Major from my shoulders. There were eleven of us. Benkowski's arm hung limply at his side. Only one of us, a sergeant from the First Ranger Company, had come through without a scratch. Another mile down the road, we met the unit on its way up to break through to us. There were men from Easy Company with it. My legs were a little rubbery. Yunk Malchik, another Pennsylvanian, raced with me back to the aid station. The Doc took one look at me and said, "The war's over for you, soldier. You're on your way to the States."

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Yunk said, "Goodbye, see you back home." I waved my hand at him. "See you in a couple days, man." The Major asked me to write my name down. He was gonna put me in for the Medal of Honor. I picked up a scrap of paper from one of the field clerks and wrote "Herbert" on it, and handed it to one of the medics. I laid down on the litter and fell asleep.

• 1:54:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:35Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  I think, what's that, he's been wounded with a bayonet three times? I don't know. Including one that gets broken off? His chest.

• 1:54:54Jocko Willink?

  An ambulance left me at the 11th evac hospital unit where they took out the bayonet, took out the shrapnel, took out the slug, then tagged me for Japan and further evacuation to stateside.

• 1:55:08Jocko Willink?

  But I didn't mean to go home yet. I begged the docs to let me recuperate where I was. I swore I felt fine, but they said it was impossible. I needed rest. Besides, there were rules. There had been internal bleeding and I had lost a lot of blood. One of them suggested that I volunteer to come back in a few months. In short, the answer was no. I could stay at the 11th long enough to see Jennifer Jones, who has arrived the next day. The day after I would be evacuated first to Japan, then to the States. Jennifer came in the morning and shook hands with each of us. The doctor told her my story as if I were a hero, and she invited me for steak when I got back home. She was beautiful, she was real and down to earth. She was gonna have dinner with the wounded men that night.

• 1:55:52Jocko Willink?

  But I missed dinner. When she came back, I slipped out a different exit. I talked the sergeant at supply into letting me have some fatigues and a rifle. Then I hitched a ride north and returned to my unit, wounds still draining. I told them at battalion that the docs had to, said to have the medic change the dressings periodically and give me shots when I needed them. The wounds were to be bound and stitched after they had drained. No one questioned it, and I was given a lift down to Easy Company.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Technically, is that AWOL? No, right?

• 1:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it is actually AWOL because you're, you're being ordered to do something and then you're not doing it. You're being ordered to go to Japan and you're not going there.

• 1:56:41Jocko Willink?

  The company was on a sort of low-level reserve, not anything we hadn't been, not anything like what we've been on back in the spring, but rather regimental reserve. We were in defensive positions short of the front, ready to reinforce whatever regiment needed. Or to be ready on call to spearhead. The company had a new CO. Canning was the executive officer again. Three new lieutenants had come into the first...

• 1:57:08Jocko Willink?

  Third and Weapons Platoon. Command of Second Platoon was still mine. Canning had been true to his word. I'd only been gone for a few days, but barely recognized the unit. Everyone treated me like something special. I was told I'd been submitted for an entire shit pot full of awards.

• 1:57:25Jocko Willink?

  But Dave wasn't about to get me to bite on any of that bullshit. Me and who else, I said. I met Captain West, the new CO.

• 1:57:34Jocko Willink?

  And the new, three new lieutenants. Tim's an ex marine lieutenant Dubois from Dubois Street. In Dubois, in Dubois, Pennsylvania. And lieutenant from the sovereign state of Texas. Who wanted to know why if I was such a damn good platoon leader, I wasn't an officer. I have pull, I explained.

• 1:57:54Jocko Willink?

  Captain West was a down home type. He was tall and lanky and served as a commander in World War Two. He had been recalled out of Korea for the reserves. He made it clear that he would fight, but he wouldn't take jackass chances. He talked real clear and plain.

• 1:58:08Jocko Willink?

  We also received our first black replacements. There were rumors that battalion headquarters had balked at it. And that there had been a knock down, drag out brawl at regiment. That ended when our CO was told there would be no more rotation until we accepted black replacements. So the regimental CO had softened. We'd try a couple. If things didn't work out after a month, it would be discussed again. Easy Company got one. He was a super soldier, probably one of the finest sergeants in the whole damn army. The men were more than satisfied with him from the day he arrived. It was the officer corps and the ass kissing senior NCOs at regimental and battalion headquarters who opposed the idea of integration.

• 1:58:53Jocko Willink?

  Most of the troops didn't care one way or the other.

• 1:59:00Jocko Willink?

  The entire tenor of the war had changed and this is fast forward a little bit.

• 1:59:07Jocko Willink?

  Things were much better. We had broken the Chinese Spring Offensive. The 2nd Division was credited as having destroyed more than 92,000 Chinese regulars, more than 36,000 of whom were dead in that one 3-day action. Word was that the North was ready to commence peace talks.

• 1:59:25Jocko Willink?

  Bugs was MIA. He was last seen standing on a paddy dyke, out of ammo, swinging an entrenching tool as he went down under a pile of Chinese. Jennings was missing in action. Most of the replacements we had gained and gone down, and gained and trained, had gone down fighting. Some no doubt were MIA and might show up as POWs later. There were men to be trained. This part of the country was new to me, so I had maps to study. Our unit was not going to sit on its ass for long. We were going to push north.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  This is where you start to see, you know, a different part of his character, maybe not a different part, but you start to see some of his character come through again that defines some of his future. I mean, one of it was him looking at the black replacements going like, "Yeah, no factor. Let's do this." And the other one is, well, another good indicator of his, let's say, his character and his mindset was, they're having, started having some issues with some guerrillas. And so the guerrillas stepped in again and we started to take sniper fire daily. The unit was ordered to burn out some villages to deny them a base of operations. "West assigned me the mission, and I refused. I tried to explain

• 2:00:47Jocko Willink?

  that I hadn't joined the Army or volunteered for Korea to fight civilians or burn their hooches." The discussion was getting sticky when Carlson volunteered and got both myself and West off the hook. It was a fatal error for Carlson. He took one through the chest from a sniper and went home in a body bag. I had hardly known the man, yet I felt the same terrible emptiness when he died as I had when Mac had bought the farm. "West asked me if I'd like to go out and burn the villages now." "No," I said. And he didn't push it.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  What exactly is a guerrilla?

• 2:01:26Jocko Willink?

  A guerrilla is a non-uniformed fighter. So if it's a, it's someone that's dressing up like a civilian and they're maybe acting like the civilian, but they're not in an organized military, so they don't have a uniform. They have a chain of command, but it's, it's underground. So for instance, in Vietnam, there were the Vietnamese regulars, the NVA. They were army soldiers with uniforms. But then there was also the VC, right? You've heard that expression? That's the Vietcong. So they might live in a village and act like a farmer, but then at night, they have AK-47 hidden and they attack. That's a guerrilla fighter.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  So are they independent or are they like working, you know?

• 2:02:14Jocko Willink?

  A little bit of both. They're gonna be, they're gonna be less organized than a traditional military unit would be, a conventional military unit. So they're gonna be a little less organized than that, just due to the fact that, you know, they're, they're spending some of their time as civilians.

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  Gotcha. But they don't, but do they answer to like, let's say, you know, in Vietnam, like do the-

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so the Vietcong has a chain of command and a structure and things like that, and they're senior Vietcong and they're senior guerrillas in this situation.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 2:02:47Jocko Willink?

  But they're not, they're not fully uniformed. And I'm sure like, there's probably a more technical definition than what I'm giving.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Jocko Willink?

  But that's the general principle. Is a guerrilla fighter is not in an organized, uniformed situation. And probably is more or less a part-time soldier, even though like Vietcong, there was professional Vietcong, meaning they didn't have some other job, but and this is, you could say the insurgents in Iraq, same thing. And, and you could say that once the insurgents became ISIS and started wearing like black uniforms and flying a big flag, that was, it's almost like they're not guerrillas anymore. They're an organized military unit.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was kinda their uniform, right? The black.

• 2:03:34Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so, um, once again, they're on another hill.

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  I had left, you know, it's so crazy to think like that story of him attacking that machine gun nest where he saves the major and all that, that kind of, that, that kind of could be the end of the book, right? I mean, he's stabbed. Yeah. He's got a bayonet in his chest. He's been shot. You can kind of say like, okay, that's probably a good place to go home for him and maybe end the book and all that. And that, it's just not even close. So they're on another hill. I had left a listening post, three men above and forward of the original positions. When the Chinese moved

• 2:04:25Jocko Willink?

  in, they came around midnight at about company size. The, the listening post picked them up and phoned the word, about a hundred of them, right on positions. Get down in your hole, sit tight, I answered. Then I called back to company and radioed two concentration numbers. Roy alerted the, the patrol to be ready to open fire on the old positions on command, which would be immediately after the first round of artillery exploded. Figuring we must have pulled back. The Chinese began to chatter carelessly. Suddenly there was one loud whoosh, followed by three more, and the world blew up in their faces. Fire exploded the entire finger and draw, lighting up the night in red, yellow, and orange flashes. Silhouettes of bodies shone against the blaze, winging through the sky, smashing up against

• 2:05:08Jocko Willink?

  trees and rocks. I gave the signal and the platoon opened up. When it was over, we had destroyed the entire company, or rather, the artillery head. There was no question about it. Artillery destroyed more enemy in combat than all other services combined, including the air force. Death was sudden, ripping, ripping, violent. Most of the time, however, we used it badly and it was a waste. Tonight, we had worked well together and the Chinese had paid the price. I radioed back the results. West wanted me to take the platoon out across and verify. I told him I would at first light. He told me he wanted to do it now, so he could notify battalion. I told him I would do it at first

• 2:05:49Jocko Willink?

  light and signed off. He called back two more times trying to raise me. I whispered for Sykes to turn down the volume. Quiet settled over the area once again. At first light.

• 2:06:01Jocko Willink?

  So there's a little, little leadership, you know, little leadership scenario, getting told to do something that probably doesn't make a lot of sense right now. Hey, just kind of turn down that radio a little bit. Don't answer. At first light, I moved the patrol back across the draw and we verified our three men were unscratched. The entire Chinese company, including parts of their officers, were present and accounted for and dead. I radioed the results to West. Good, good, he said. Great. And then with a pause, come on in. We'll send a replacement platoon down. Not necessary. We don't have any casualties. I'll just send a party back for more ammo. Then as an afterthought, we'll have to move, though. It's gonna smell pretty bad down here after the sun comes up. Sure, certainly,

• 2:06:43Jocko Willink?

  he said. Whatever you feel is okay. Just give us your coordinates and we'll, when you get settled in. We'll go, sir. Out.

• 2:06:53Jocko Willink?

  And I just highlighted that part because you can see even though West was pushing him to kind of go out there and check, but at the end of the day, he trusts what, he trusts what his guy on the front line says. We don't need to pull out. May need some more ammo. Have to adjust our position. And it's just a, a good thing to see.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I was called down to regimental headquarters and offered a battlefield commission to second lieutenant.

• 2:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Next time we were in reserve, I was to receive what Dave had called that shit pot full of decorations. The colonel commanding the regiment explained that many advantages I would have as an officer and a gentleman. But it was crazy. I didn't even have an education. I told him I preferred being enlisted man for the time being. Then he said, you deserve to be the highest ranked one over here. And he promoted me to master sergeant on the spot. He broke out a bottle and offered me a drink. At the time, I neither smoked nor drank, but I thanked him and sipped it while he discussed the possibility of my coming back for a commission when I changed my mind. I thanked him for the promotion and the drink again, and then went back to the platoon.

• 2:08:02Jocko Willink?

  So he almost got the battlefield commission and said, no, likes being an E dog.

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  West picked up a piece of shrapnel. Actually, the next day, Fox company passed through our lines into the valley. They swung east on a road and meandered through the wide, low, flat farmland to a major terrain feature behind, beyond Hill 868 on the map. They fought and died for that peak for the next two days and nights with us just sitting there, listening to the battle rage.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  West picked up a piece of shrapnel from an incoming 81 mortar round and we received a replacement for him.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  A tiny, wiry, redheaded Irishman with a waxed handlebar mustache. That was the pride of Korea. "Any man who can best me at Indian wrestling is a better man than I and can run the company," he announced. None of us knew what the hell Indian wrestling was, so he ran the company and he ran it well.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  I like put nine stars next to this. Here's a good leader. He joked with the men. He carried more than his share of the load. He took his turnout watch in the command post bunker. He carried an M1 rifle like the rest of us. He cooked his own rations and shared his water and coffee. He was the best we'd had, Canning accepted. There was no difficulty in getting the men to follow him or do their damnedest for him.

• 2:09:31Jocko Willink?

  And he sure did his damnedest for us. So there you go, man. There you go.

• 2:09:37Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. So this one point, look, I was.

• 2:09:42Jocko Willink?

  There's a, there's a part that I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna summarize a little bit of it. So basically what happens is there's these four Chinese deserters.

• 2:09:51Jocko Willink?

  That, that end up with the company. They basically they capture them. They're not, they don't capture them, but they're deserters and they come over and say, we surrender, basically. And then they say that there's going to be a 30 man combat patrol. That so a, a, a North Korean patrol is going to go down this particular riverbed. Due north of the positions at the red. And Canning, the officer didn't believe him. Sounds like a setup, right? Oh, you're trying to get us to go down there and set up an ambush. So he doesn't really believe him. And.

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  Herbert does believe the guys. He kinda talks about how he psychologically was trying to figure out, "Why would these guys do this? They're really surrendering, like, why would four of them surrender? Why wouldn't you just send one to surrender? Why are you sending four guys to surrender?" So he kinda goes through his psychological profile of the guys and he believes them. So I tried to talk Canning and the new CO into letting me set up an ambush for them, but Canning had prevailed and the best the new CO would do is let me drop one machine gun team down to the valley on the river.

• 2:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Turns out that the Chinese guys had told the truth. The gun crew, and so now he did get one gun crew down there. The gun crew opened up a couple minutes short of midnight. They had caught the patrol in the riverbed, but the patrol was larger than anticipated and now they, the machine gun crew, was under attack. The new CO called me on the sound power. "No, I couldn't pull my platoon offline and go back to reinforce the gun crew, but I would take or send six men to do the best they could." I rapidly ticked off the names of my six best men as to the squad leaders. I told them to have them on the trail behind the positions and I picked them up one by one and moved toward the junction that led down to the valley below us. We tried to hurry and busted our asses slipping and falling over each other in the mud.

• 2:11:41Jocko Willink?

  We hit the flats and started across the battalion heavy mortar section was in position. I asked the CO to have Canning notify them we were on the way and to be on the lookout for us. So I'm gonna say that again. We asked the CO to have Canning notify them that we were on the way and to be on the lookout for us.

• 2:12:01Jocko Willink?

  One or the other had failed and their guards opened up with small arms fire without bothering to challenge us. Dumas went down, dead. We dropped into a small gully and maneuvered toward the riverbed. Our gun crew was still pouring the lead. We broke out of the gully 75 yards east of them, caught between their fire and the Chinese patrol. I yelled for the gun crew to hold fire and they did. Now it was us and the patrol in the riverbed. I cautioned my men to play it cool, to use bayonets where they could. No automatic fire under any circumstances. All automatic fire would be considered enemy. We spread out and moved ahead slowly. The Chinese were in a panic. They broke out of the niches and crevices in ones and twos and we dropped them with singer file or laced a bayonet through their guts.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  First light broke and we had the sergeant and the platoon leader trapped.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  They came out with their hands up. We marched them onto the valley road and had them hunker down with their hands clasped across the tops of their head. I left a man to guard them and went back to take the tally. We had wiped out the patrol, except for our two prisoners. The deserters had told the truth. There had been thirty of them heavily armed, but now twenty-eight of them were dead. There were sporadic shots up ahead, but nothing to get excited about. I returned to the road, then moved up to where I had posted my guard over the two POWs. They were all dead. The men from the mortar crews had opened up on them with small arms. I saw bloody red.

• 2:13:36Jocko Willink?

  I swung in the direction of the mortars and aimed my rifle from the hip. One of their sergeants popped up. "I'm sorry, Herbert, we didn't know." He dropped his carbine and raised his hands. "We didn't know," he apologized. "No one told us." I lowered my rifle. "My fault," I said. "Not yours." So, if you didn't quite catch that, the mortar company did not know that there was friendlies around there. And he had actually, they had captured these prisoners and he'd left a guard with them and the mortar team killed them all.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Both the captured enemy people and the, and the guards. So, and there you go. I mean, that's a, that's extreme ownership, right? My fault, not yours. Blue on blue. Fast forward a little bit. We had received two replacements. One was named a lieutenant named Manning. The other, a sergeant, was killed by a single artillery round which dropped into our positions that morning. No one in the unit, except the CO, had even heard his name. Life was that dumb. War was stupid.

• 2:15:04Jocko Willink?

  If there was a God, then he was stupid. There was neither rhyme nor reason to that man's death, and he meant no more than us than a chunk of clay when we passed him on the way out.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  Now, I mentioned like for a split second that Fox Company was heading up to this hill 868. And now these guys, they didn't get there. Fox Company didn't get it done. They took massive casualties. And now, Easy Company is heading up there. And they get pinned down in this one particular spot. And, well, here they are. Manning caught up with me. "What's happening?" he asked excitedly. "I was in a crater, my back against the wall. There was no sense in doing anything until the mortars let up."

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  "There was no sense in getting excited either. I don't know Lieutenant, why don't you pop your head up and take a look and then tell me?" I joked. And he did it. "The machine gun ripped off a volley and he dropped back into my lap, two rounds through the mouth. In one cheek, through the tongue, smashing some teeth and out on the other cheek." "He was okay considering what it could have been." "The CO was next. He moved into the position with his radio." "With his radio man. "What do you have up there, Herb?" he asked. "Mainly the machine gun, sir. We'll get it after it gets dark." "That's not good enough," he said. "The regimental CO is watching through the glasses. He wants it now."

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  "Kameen turned to look at us. "Then let that fucker come up and take it," he said. "Come on, sir," I interrupted. "Fox Company's been up here for weeks without moving. All we need is a few more hours." "The 23rd is moving. Is moving up," the old man said. "We've gotta have that hill today."

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  I rolled over on my gut and gave Kameen the signal to get ready. In the next four hours, 61 of us rounded that junction. 11 of us made it, two-thirds of the way to the top along the final bar.

• 2:17:06Jocko Willink?

  The machine gunner at the top of the hill got the rest.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  So Knight found 11 of us almost at the top and the rest of us either cut to ribbons or unable to move. At 3:00 in the morning, the Chinese launched a counterattack down the ridge to drive us back, weeding us down to 8. We still had radio contact with the CO and he wanted to know if we could hold out. "We're not backing up," I replied. "Hang in there, Herb. I've got a .57 coming up. Hang in there." He was referring to a .57 caliber, a 57mm recoilless rifle. "It could take out the machine gun, alright, but it would have to be a direct hit." Every half hour or so for the remainder of the night, he called to check on how we were making out. Just before daylight, he joined us with the .57

• 2:17:59Jocko Willink?

  and before we could stop him, he was through us and made a one-man attack on the position. And he almost had it. We gave him as much covering fire as we could, but just short of the position, he went down, pulling the trigger of the .57. The round plowed into the sandbags right of the opening, 2 feet off. Total victory and blew the old man back down the hill, ass over tea kettle, which saved his life. A call came in from the regiment. A platoon of Fox Company would push through us and take the final bunker.

• 2:18:31Jocko Willink?

  Private Ervin Stern, from North Dakota, took 2 rounds through the chest. He never even asked to be evacuated. He apologized for being a problem. I could have hugged him.

• 2:18:47Jocko Willink?

  The platoon from Fox Company moved up to us. The lieutenant in charge wanted to talk until it was time for the assault, so I listened. He had a wife and kids. He never expected to make it.

• 2:19:04Jocko Willink?

  Pickens and Dubois flashed through my mind. He didn't intend to make it, but if he didn't, someone else would have to. That someone was me, with Cameon and the six we had left, and against a machine gunner with the determination and guts that that bastard had, we weren't going to make it.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  So when the lieutenant moved his men out toward the peak, I had my last troops stand, stand ready to reinforce if necessary. As he stepped out to follow his platoon, I cracked him with the butt of Jordan's carbine, and raced out through his troops. The gunner above opened fire and raked the hill, splattering dust and mud all around us. Men began to fall back. I grabbed them and pushed them back up the hill. "Get that motherfucker!" I shouted. "Get him!" One of Fox Company's men shouted, "Okay, big deal, let's get him", and then raced me.

• 2:20:02Jocko Willink?

  Cameon was leading our own six up the ridge. Men started tossing grenades from both sides, and in the confusion, one blew the gun away, and we had the hill.

• 2:20:14Jocko Willink?

  We had lost Buck, who had been sent to the rear wounded, and was captured down by the brook by a Chinese patrol. Nelson was dead. The CO, our top-notch black test case. Manning. Everyone in my platoon was either dead or wounded, except Cameon and myself.

• 2:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Word came up that we would be relieved. Cameon said it was about time.

• 2:20:41Jocko Willink?

  Then he rolled over the body of one of our troops, who had bought the farm the night before, and a grenade exploded. This war was getting to be a real pain in the ass. We sat there, him wounded now, and only me in one piece, waiting for our relief.

• 2:21:01Jocko Willink?

  When the relief showed up, Roy could still walk. We moved back down the ridge line together. One of the relief asked him who we were, and he replied, "Easy Company, 38th Infantry."

• 2:21:15Jocko Willink?

  At the west end of the valley, we caught up with those few troops from our company that hadn't been committed, and that had been moved back by the battalion CO.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Maggie Higgins was interviewing them. The battalion CO introduced me to her. She asked me to wait a moment while she concluded talking with someone else. She turned her head and I walked off. I wasn't about to wait for anyone ever again. Maggie's loss, I said to myself. Turning back toward the Kansas line, I joined the remnants of what had been Easy Company, moving back up the hill out of the valley and away from Hill 868.

• 2:22:01Jocko Willink?

  And again, you think, okay, well, this gotta be kind of the end, right? This has to be kind of the end of this, what he's going through.

• 2:22:13Jocko Willink?

  But it's not. And he kind of reflects on it a little bit. He says, "I was getting to know men.

• 2:22:21Jocko Willink?

  Types were predictable and the world is becoming less complicated. There were men and there were fakes. A man either was or he wasn't. And the rest was all play acting. I was 21 and I was already an old man. I had to shake it or I'd become a bona fide pain in the ass. So I started to listen more than I talked and was somewhat reserved with the men.

• 2:22:49Jocko Willink?

  The war felt different. There was no apprehension, no excitement. Everything seemed routine and easy. I was going to make it unless a stray round had my name on it and that was damned unlikely. I'd become a survivor. Some men lived and some men died. I would live.

• 2:23:07Jocko Willink?

  There was more than just war for me, but for now I was still in Korea. We were on the line and across the valley lay the next major objective. I was ordered to report to battalion headquarters for briefing.

• 2:23:27Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with an operation where every, you lose everybody is either dead or wounded. And you achieve your objective and you get back and they got a next objective.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Um, he does a little stint and I'm gonna skip past this part, but he does a little stint with, as a Marine Corps liaison and does an assault with the Marines and loses nine of the Marines that he's with. And then after that, he goes back to Easy Company again.

• 2:24:04Jocko Willink?

  "We returned to the same positions we'd been pulled off of. This is back with Easy Company, and rain began to fall. I'd been in Korea one year. Most men were rotating stateside within nine months, but I was still AWOL. With no records, I might be here forever. It was okay with me. I knew the country. I knew the war. And I was well on my way to knowing myself.

• 2:24:25Jocko Willink?

  One day, the war would end, or else I'd go stateside with a million dollar shot. Either way, I'd be thankful. I'd never again waste a moment of life.

• 2:24:36Jocko Willink?

  And no one ever again would be able to take even a second of it from me.

• 2:24:42Jocko Willink?

  I felt terrific. Screw rotation. Life was my oyster. Korea was my pearl."

• 2:24:57Jocko Willink?

  Going back out on another patrol.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  "We crossed the road and started up a hill, complex beyond the fog lifting beneath, behind and beneath us. The world was still calm. We picked our way carefully silently. I stopped once and glanced back. I felt damn good. I felt proud. I felt American. God damn it, we were the best. Just off the peak, they had a major gun position. A Russian heavy machine gun. Two crew members were standing outside, shooting the breeze, having a smoke. I gave a signal for the patrol to fan out on both sides of the trail. I wanted those two taken silently and alive. I motioned for the two scouts to cover me. Then, just as I was about to start forward to take them, someone triggered a booby trap. Both crew members made a break for their bunker and I had to drop them. So much for surprise. We still had shock action."

• 2:25:48Jocko Willink?

  And we were at the top in their positions with their key guns and most of their ammo. In effect, we had the hill.

• 2:25:58Jocko Willink?

  We could hold it as long, we could hold it long enough for George Company to reinforce. Then nobody was going to take it back. So I had to skip some stuff because it's a pretty detailed explanation of what's going on. But basically they were kind of heading up this, this into this position and they almost get fully in the position. They get close enough to where they're going to be able to actually capture the people that are in that gun without any, without giving themselves away. But somebody, you can hear somebody hits a booby trap.

• 2:26:28Jocko Willink?

  But once the booby trap goes, they just kind of continue with the assault. They don't get, they kill the guys instead of capturing them, but they get there. And they capture this freaking hill and this hill didn't really go too much into it, but it's a very prominent terrain feature. And so it's like surprising that they get there.

• 2:26:45Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and he says at the end there, we could hold the, the hill long enough for George Company to reinforce. And once George Company was there, they would have the hill and known to be able to take it from them.

• 2:26:59Jocko Willink?

  But George Company never showed. By late afternoon, there were six of us still alive and we could hardly see over the dead around us. Every time I called battalion, I got word that George Company was almost to us. Hang on. Randolph was reloading magazines into the BAR. They're not coming, Sarge. We're almost out of ammo. Get the old man on the horn. I'd give it one more try. He wasn't available according to the radio man. I glanced back down the trail. We'd come up so skillfully, so easily, so damn sure of ourselves. The Chinese must find it unbelievable that we hadn't reinforced yet. They didn't know we were down to six, almost out of ammo. If we made a break now and ran like hell, we might be able to make it before they would

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  close in on us. I sent one final message. Tell the old man we're pulling out. Then without waiting for a Roger or any other bullshit like I'd been getting all day, I gave the word to saddle up.

• 2:27:55Jocko Willink?

  They stared at me in disbelief. What about George Company? There isn't any George Company. Now goddamn it, pack up and get ready to move. At a dud run down the trail, nobody stops until he crosses the road. Then hold up and provide cover for the rest of us. Ready? I destroyed the Maxim and picked up our own LMG. I began to tick off names. Keith, go. Nick, go. Daniels, go. Thompson, go. I turned to Randolph, go.

• 2:28:26Jocko Willink?

  And we were halfway down the hill before they caught on

• 2:28:30Jocko Willink?

  that it wasn't a diversion or another tactic, but that we were bugging out. I took a round through the fleshy part of my calf. Randolph took one through the chest and a second through the head. He was dead before he hit the ground.

• 2:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Everyone else made it across the road without a scratch, then held up and covered for me while I got Randolph's body out. I was puffing like a winded horse.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:28:58Jocko Willink?

  Four of them. I'm just fucking sorry. They would have to be crazy to ever trust me again. Thompson patted me on the shoulder. You ain't George Company, Sarge.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  But it wasn't George Company either. They had never been alerted for standby. No one had believed we could ever make it to the top. And then when we did, they didn't think we could ever hold out all day. The new S2 at the battalion tried to explain to me that George Company would get the hill back tomorrow. If a patrol of 24 could do it, it would be a cinch for a full company. And he was green, so he really believed it. It wasn't even worth explaining. I'd been dealing with assholes like him on and off, on and off for almost a year now. I went over to the aid station and had them tend to my wound. The regimental CO had me back to the rear again the same night and apologized.

• 2:29:56Jocko Willink?

  No one had notified him that we'd made it to the top. He was sorry about my troops.

• 2:30:02Jocko Willink?

  But I had brought back valuable intelligence. Now the hill would be easy.

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  I tried to explain what was really on that hill that neither George Company nor the entire battalion was going to take it now. We had blown our chance. You're just hurt, Herbert. You'll see.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  And we saw. George Company was chopped to pieces.

• 2:30:26Jocko Willink?

  The battalion failed. The 38th Regiment failed. They had to bring in the 9th Regiment, part of the 23rd Regiment, the French Battalion, and part of the 14th Regiment. The battle raged for four weeks. We lost nearly 5,600 men, 1,900 dead, 3,700 seriously wounded before it was secured.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Heartbreak Ridge.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  We could have had it for free.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  And it would have gone unnamed and unremembered, except for one commander who had not believed in his troops.

• 2:31:07Jocko Willink?

  A couple of days later, halfway up another hill, I was ordered to turn my platoon over to my assistant and report back to Company Headquarters, where I was provided with a jeep to regiment bypassing Italian, another jeep to division, and on to Seoul, 8th Army Headquarters.

• 2:31:24Jocko Willink?

  So, you, I'm sure you've heard of Hamburger Hill. I mean, just like a crazy battle and you got the casualties right there. 1,900 dead, 3,700 seriously wounded. And they had taken the hill before it had been reinforced.

• 2:31:44Jocko Willink?

  So you can see he gets this, now this is a, provided with these jeeps, back to battalion, back to regiment, back to division, and then all the way back to Seoul, where the 8th Army Headquarters is.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  This is what happens. We wheeled into Seoul and into the compound. Everyone was in Class A's except myself and the Jeep driver. I'd never been this far to the rear end in my life, not even in the States.

• 2:32:16Jocko Willink?

  The MP at the Gates checked our identification, then stood back and saluted.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  What the hell gave him the idea of us? Were officers? I couldn't figure, but to save time, I returned it. "Your quarters are at number eight, Sergeant Herbert, over there." He pointed at a building across the compound. Well, at least he knew I was a sergeant. I hadn't asked the driver for his rank. "Thanks, Corporal," I replied. Then turned to the driver. "You staying?" I asked. "Uh, uh-huh, Sarge." "Uh-uh, Sarge, gotta get back." "Save you time, then." I jumped out of the Jeep and lit next to the corporal. "Take your bags, Sarge, don't have any, son." I was 21. I turned back to the Jeep driver. "Thanks, it's an honor, Sarge." He saluted me offhandedly, spun the Jeep around in a cloud of dust and brought it back through

• 2:33:04Jocko Willink?

  the gate. He disappeared up the road in a second. Later in the afternoon, after a good bath and washing some of the filth out of my fatigues, I sought out the NCO club. It wasn't open yet, so I went back to my room, took another back-bath and fell asleep.

• 2:33:19Jocko Willink?

  I had a terrible dream. It was one which would reoccur for years. I was charging a machine gun nest, not a bunker, but one in a hole. Like the one at Kun Mun Gao.

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  Then, with bayonet fixed, out of ammo, right on the edge, the earth gave way beneath my feet and I was going backwards, my guts unguarded, my rifle flung up in an attempt to regain my balance.

• 2:33:52Jocko Willink?

  But I was going over backwards.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  And I woke up in a sweat.

• 2:33:58Jocko Willink?

  I got a hold of myself in a second, saw where I was, and laid down and went back to sleep to be awakened next by light footsteps at my door. It was a young lieutenant. "Everything satisfactory, Sergeant?" he asked cheerfully. "Great, sir, but why all the service? What the hell is it all about?"

• 2:34:18Jocko Willink?

  It was just what he needed to trigger him off. The UN Command had decided to send two outstanding soldiers from the Command on a goodwill tour of Europe, stateside, God knows where else. "Our best," he said. "Another Soldier of the Month contest," I thought. I remembered the MP at the gate in the Class A's and glanced at myself in the mirror.

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  I was ragged-assed and tired. I didn't have a chance and I didn't much give a damn. I was beyond that. I rushed the lieutenant out, took another bath, dressed, slung my BAR, and closed the door behind me. All I had to do was hitch another ride north and I'd be back to Easy Company within two days. The corporal was still at the gate.

• 2:35:05Jocko Willink?

  "Where are you headed?" Sarge, he asked. "Home, man." "Home?" "Back to my outfit."

• 2:35:13Jocko Willink?

  "But Sarge..." "Hey, man, do I look like Soldier of the Month material?" I asked. He shook his head in the nicest way any human being ever had before or since.

• 2:35:25Jocko Willink?

  "Uh-uh, Sarge. You look like the toughest mother that's over here and our most decorated soldier."

• 2:35:33Jocko Willink?

  He had tears in his eyes. "You're going out, man. They're picking a guy to go with you." He lifted the rifle from my shoulder. "And you ain't gonna need this anymore."

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, that is a good place to stop for this particular book. For this, pretty much where, you know, there's an epilogue that you should read. But the story ends there for this book, but it's the end of the book, but it's not the end of the story. And I won't even crack open this next book yet.

• 2:36:23Jocko Willink?

  Which is gonna pick up with what happens throughout his life and his career in the Army after Korea.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  After some mayhem in Vietnam where we're going to learn a lot about leadership, a lot about life, a lot about human nature. And we're going to learn some lessons. So we will save that for next time.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  To prevent having a seven hour podcast at this time. Until then, Echo, speaking of life.

• 2:37:00Jocko Willink?

  Crazy story, right?

• 2:37:02Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 2:37:02Jocko Willink?

  I mean insane.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like unreal.

• 2:37:09Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  Like it's not real. Like it's so crazy and unbelievable.

• 2:37:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like time and time and time and time again. You like, how many, nine lives for a cat?

• 2:37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  What's he on? I think he's on seventeen.

• 2:37:25Speaker 01

  It's crazy how he has like that much. I don't even know what you'd call it where he's just down for the call for the fight just to be like, I guess though, right? Like when you're, when you grow up, just hardcore mining town, no, like, just, just hard.

• 2:37:47Jocko Willink?

  You see your brothers go off to war? You see them coming home telling stories about what's going on?

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  Just embedded in your head.

• 2:37:54Jocko Willink?

  There's right, there's like embedded desire to be in war for many young men, right? And I can't say everybody, I don't want to make that statement. I can't talk about females because I don't, I didn't interact with females as much, but like when you're in a SEAL platoon, you're with a lot of guys that what they wanted to do growing up was go to war, myself included, like,

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  that's what, that's what you grow up with. So there's got to be some kind of instinctual thing.

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, maybe oversimplifying it would be like, that's his hundred percent purpose in life.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  So, yeah, whatever, I get bayoneted, a million times, shot, blown up, shot again, fail, this guy lets you down, this group lets you down, higher ups letting you down, shot up again. And, okay, like, let me, let me literally break the law.

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  Many times, by the way, to get back to war.

• 2:38:57Jocko Willink?

  You know what else is crazy? So he's there for a year.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  Now imagine this, well, the one guy that he talks about, the sergeant shows up, his first day gets killed. They didn't even know what his name is. So, so here's a guy that's going 365 days of frontline. Someone else shows up and they're dead in an hour.

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. I mean, you can't, I'm listening to the book and I'm like, bro, this guy's gonna die soon. You know, obviously he doesn't die, but you get, that's how it feels, you know? It's like, man, he just keeps going back. That's crazy, man. Um, in the beginning, it had a, you know, that graphic tale of the guts, you know? Bro, who does that to, to somebody? I can, you know, they, they obviously capture him and they just, what? Cut him open and let their gut, and then hang him up? Like, bro, how can you even do that?

• 2:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  Baffling.

• 2:39:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, well, it's humans, it's human beings.

• 2:39:58Speaker 01

  Yes, right?

• 2:39:59Jocko Willink?

  The darkness.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, I don't know, man. Straight up. Yeah, I know, but you know, as far as like our perspective, you know how like, I guess maybe you could get talked through it, like, you know, you hear about these crazy things that people do, right? Whether it be to each other or whatever, and you kind of hear everything, you're like, I can see how he got there. I would never do that kind of stuff, but I can see how he got there. You can kind of be like, I see, I see.

• 2:40:27Speaker 01

  It's hard like that kind of stuff to be like, yeah, this person, we captured him already. I mean, maybe certain angry, like if you're angry enough at somebody, maybe, but.

• 2:40:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's interesting, here's a good, here's a good example of thought processes when he is, when he gets told, hey, go burn down that village. And he goes, no, I'm not doing it.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:48Jocko Willink?

  Now, think about this. He says, I'm not doing it. And another guy's, all right, I'll do it. So the other guy goes out to burn down the village and he gets shot in the chest and killed.

• 2:40:58Jocko Willink?

  And now you can see Captain West is like, hey, now do you want to go burn down the village? And you would think you could, you would think Captain West is sort of trying to take advantage of the anger

• 2:41:09Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:41:09Jocko Willink?

  That you would have, yeah, like, let's get some revenge.

• 2:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:12Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, no. So that's, that shows what his character is like. And again, the idea of this character, and the reason I talk about it a lot is when you see, when we get to what happens in Vietnam, there's a lot of, you know, his character, you have to try and understand his character. Because of accusations that are being made in all different directions. It's, yeah, yeah. And it's weird too, like, any one of these actions that he did is so far off the charts of what, what's, what's expected.

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  To like, to, to like a normal award writing above and beyond with complete disregard for his own safety, like all those things.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:58Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's what he's got going on.

• 2:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Crazy man. Well,

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  back to the path.

• 2:42:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was gonna say, speaking of human nature, we know that we as humans have a tendency to drift off the path.

• 2:42:15Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 2:42:15Jocko Willink?

  So maybe we need a little

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  Little, yeah, little nudge.

• 2:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Little boost.

• 2:42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, a wise man once said, um, it's hard to stay on the path. And once you slip off, it may seem hard to get back on.

• 2:42:30Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  But you can do it. Yep, heard that.

• 2:42:33Jocko Willink?

  What do you recommend?

• 2:42:34Speaker 01

  Uh, well, there's good news. Cause you're not alone on the path. It might feel like it, but you got some help. See what I'm saying? Help through supplementation. Yep, I said it. So, okay, so we're working out. That's a big one. We already know that it, it helps every element of your life.

• 2:42:54Speaker 01

  Not just getting in shape, being in shape. It's funny that I keep getting reminded, and I think I mentioned this before. Obviously, I'm not going to go too deep into it because it really pales in comparison to pretty much anything we've ever talked about ever, but it doesn't mean it's nothing. Very close. So, you know, the water jugs, right? I said, I told you about this similar, similar situation, but same thought process. So you know, water jugs, right? The big five gallon ones you put on the cooler and stuff like that. So I was replacing mine at home.

• 2:43:25Jocko Willink?

  And you got bayoneted?

• 2:43:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:43:28Jocko Willink?

  You had a bayonet snapped off in your chest?

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  No, I did not.

• 2:43:31Jocko Willink?

  You had white phosphorus burning you to the bone?

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  I did not, but I had to grab it off like this shelf. It was kind of high.

• 2:43:41Speaker 01

  See, bro, when you put it like that, you're going to take away the juice of the whole lesson.

• 2:43:44Jocko Willink?

  You got shot and the bullet wrapped around your bone?

• 2:43:47Speaker 01

  No, no bullets hit me actually that day, but I, so I, and the thing is like, what, like 40 pounds? I think it's like eight pounds per gallon, right?

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:57Speaker 01

  I think. Anyway, so 40 pounds, boom. And I, and you have to kind of let it drop. And so I got a

• 2:44:03Jocko Willink?

  You were in a minefield.

• 2:44:06Speaker 01

  No, so you can't just like, oh, I did it with one hand because I had something else in my hand because I was doing some other stuff at the same time. So it drops and I swing it almost like a kettlebell. You know how you got to catch the momentum and swing it and boom and boom, 40 pound, big thing too, by the way. So I bring it up and I'm wa- I'm walking with it in one hand and I think, I forget what I had in the other hand. I was doing something else. And I walked it over and I was thinking to myself,

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  it's kind of good to have this kid.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  You're over here making like, making the comparison even more contrasty. So it's making it like, sound all lame, but when you think about it, I'm telling you, when you think about it, it's way better to have that capability than not to. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:44:49Jocko Willink?

  To be able to handle the 40 pound thing.

• 2:44:52Speaker 01

  Under like, I don't want to say harder circumstances, but harder than normal. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:44:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's almost like, you know, having to grab a wounded major as you're being overrun and having to throw him over your shoulder.

• 2:45:05Speaker 01

  Good point.

• 2:45:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's that capability.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  Or just keep a water jug from.

• 2:45:10Speaker 01

  Or what have you. Okay, perfect. So that's the point. The point is, hey, sometimes you gotta.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  Why do you do this to yourself, man?

• 2:45:17Speaker 01

  No, you're doing it to me.

• 2:45:18Jocko Willink?

  I'm not doing anything. I'm just pointing out what every single other person is thinking.

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Anyway, if you gotta save somebody, you know, and you gotta put them on your shoulder and run them.

• 2:45:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:45:30Speaker 01

  Whether it be across the street or whatever, it's good to have that capability rather than, oh, shoot, I can't do it by myself. I gotta ask for help. Same thing.

• 2:45:38Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:45:38Speaker 01

  Same thing with the water jug.

• 2:45:40Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:45:41Speaker 01

  If someone needs some help, like, hey, you know, you know, the kind of your grandma or whatever. It's like, hey, can you help me? Can you grab that thing up there? You know, the water jug from on the shelf? You want to be the guy that they ask to help because they know you can do it. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:45:54Jocko Willink?

  Yes, bro.

• 2:45:55Speaker 01

  Hey, look.

• 2:45:55Jocko Willink?

  I'll let you out of this. Here's your out.

• 2:45:57Speaker 01

  We're not in Korea.

• 2:45:57Jocko Willink?

  Carry on, bro. Here's your out. You can take it. Hey, man, I totally respect that. You want to help grandma.

• 2:46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and whoever else needs help. And that's not to mention when you're by yourself, you don't gotta ask for help because you can do it. You see what I'm saying? I'm just saying, if you have that option, like, it's better to choose the option where you have that capability is what I'm saying.

• 2:46:17Jocko Willink?

  I agree.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  So that's why one of the many infinite reasons why working out is important.

• 2:46:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  I'm correct on that one.

• 2:46:27Jocko Willink?

  You are correct.

• 2:46:28Speaker 01

  Anyway, when you're working out, sometimes you get little, little pains in your joints, which is no problem when you know the technique.

• 2:46:38Speaker 01

  That would induce pain as well, for sure, for sure. But no worries, Jocko has supplements for these things, not the bayonet thing, obviously, but, you know, little pains in your joints, that kind of stuff, joint warfare. It's called Jocko joint warfare, super krill oil.

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  I think pretty much people know what we have. Hey, check this out. If you want some of this stuff, which you should.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, if you subscribe to it. Because you don't want to miss it. If you don't want to miss krill oil, you don't want to miss joint warfare. You don't want to miss, you know what like, you don't want to run low on whatever

• 2:47:12Jocko Willink?

  supplementation is making you strong, is giving you that freaking capability if needed. To catch that water bottle, bro. You're good.

• 2:47:20Speaker 01

  Or what have you.

• 2:47:21Jocko Willink?

  Or whatever. I mean, this could be a bag of groceries. This could be, you know, a cantaloupe rolling off the counter and you want to be, you don't want your joints to hurt as that's happening, right? This could be mayhem. This could be mayhem.

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Okay, see, see, I see what you're doing right now.

• 2:47:34Jocko Willink?

  If you go to jockofuel.com and you subscribe, then shipping is free, which is cool.

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. So you, you, I kind of shy away from assuming everybody already knows. But you bring up a good point from time to time that what if like 85% of people already know? See what I'm saying?

• 2:47:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:54Speaker 01

  And then I'm like, okay, I'm accommodating the other, the, you know, the 15% and kinda in a way, in a way, kinda ignoring the 85%, the needs of the 85%.

• 2:48:03Jocko Willink?

  Could be.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying? Making them go for that ride as well.

• 2:48:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:07Speaker 01

  No matter how good or bad that ride is. Yeah, exactly right.

• 2:48:10Jocko Willink?

  And right now, let's face it, that ride is not fun.

• 2:48:12Speaker 01

  Bumpy. It's a bumpy ride. Yeah, I understand. I understand.

• 2:48:16Jocko Willink?

  What else? So we got joint warfare, krill oil, discipline, discipline go, Molk. What else? Anything else?

• 2:48:23Speaker 01

  Warrior kid Molk.

• 2:48:24Jocko Willink?

  Warrior kid Molk.

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  Uh, some vitamin D in there. Hey, so here's, here's actually the thing. Here's, here's an effective thing for the 85% of us who do already know, estimated. Go to jockofuel.com, boom, everything on there. Choose like what you want. You want the additional protein? Boom, grab that one. You want the joint stuff? Boom, grab that one.

• 2:48:44Jocko Willink?

  You want a dessert?

• 2:48:46Speaker 01

  You want a dessert that happens to have the protein in it?

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, yeah. So yes, jockofuel.com, the discipline go energy drink scenario. These you can get, of course, at jockofuel.com, but you can get them at Wawa Vitamin Shop.

• 2:49:03Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yep.

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:49:06Speaker 01

  There you go. Booyakasha. Also, what a vitamin shop. Yes. Also, Origin Maine or Origin USA.

• 2:49:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:15Speaker 01

  Dot com.

• 2:49:16Jocko Willink?

  Caught yourself.

• 2:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, um, originusa.com. That's where you can get the stuff as well. But you can also get, or should I say, you will notice when you're on there that you can also get American made jeans, boots, jujitsu stuff.

• 2:49:33Jocko Willink?

  As in geez.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  Geez.

• 2:49:35Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:49:35Speaker 01

  Rash guard, gee bags. Yeah, some good stuff on there.

• 2:49:40Jocko Willink?

  Check, check. I like it.

• 2:49:41Speaker 01

  It's true. Also,

• 2:49:45Speaker 01

  Jaco the store. It's called Jaco's store. That's where you can get Discipline Equals Freedom stuff.

• 2:49:49Jocko Willink?

  You get hardcore Ricondo stuff.

• 2:49:51Speaker 01

  Stuff is true. It's very.

• 2:49:53Jocko Willink?

  I need more of those shirts, by the way, and more of these shirts, by the way.

• 2:49:56Speaker 01

  All right. You got it. I know the guy and.

• 2:49:58Jocko Willink?

  The X flag.

• 2:49:59Speaker 01

  Can hook you up with a discount and everything.

• 2:50:01Jocko Willink?

  X flag.

• 2:50:03Speaker 01

  Yep. All good. Also.

• 2:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if you were attacking a, an enemy position and it was flying this flag, would you hesitate a little bit more? I don't think I would.

• 2:50:12Speaker 01

  It would induce some hesitation.

• 2:50:13Jocko Willink?

  You would look at this flag and you'd say, wait a second, these people look like they are gonna bring the heat.

• 2:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:19Jocko Willink?

  They look like they have discipline.

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:50:23Jocko Willink?

  If, if everything ever goes like crazy in this country or in the world, you will see me like, let's say, revolution war, say, civil war, whatever, whatever, whatever mayhem, I'll be flying this flag.

• 2:50:38Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's a unifying symbol of discipline.

• 2:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Good idea. I'll, I'll join your, your thing.

• 2:50:46Jocko Willink?

  What do you mean? Group. You just don't get to join because you want to.

• 2:50:51Speaker 01

  I have, I have capability and I'm highly trained.

• 2:50:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, if I need someone to catch the water bottles, where are you gonna go?

• 2:50:57Speaker 01

  I will be an asset to your team. Anyway, dracostore.com. There's, there's a cool, uh, scenario on there called the shirt locker. That's if you want a, the new designed shirt.

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever get props to the guy that came up with shirt locker? On Twitter, wasn't on Twitter?

• 2:51:13Speaker 01

  Oh, directly. No, I have not.

• 2:51:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, whoever you are, mystery human. Good job.

• 2:51:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:51:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you see it or did I see it and told you about it?

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you told me about it.

• 2:51:22Jocko Willink?

  I told you about it.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 2:51:23Jocko Willink?

  But mystery human, I was gonna blame you. You should have tracked his name, but you didn't.

• 2:51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:29Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't even you that did it. See, blaming never works.

• 2:51:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:51:32Jocko Willink?

  My fault.

• 2:51:33Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 2:51:34Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:51:35Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, that is what's going on on jocko star.com. So yeah, check it out. If you like something, get something. It's a good spot.

• 2:51:42Jocko Willink?

  Also, subscribe to this podcast if you want to.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:51:45Jocko Willink?

  If you haven't yet, if you just listened to three hours and you haven't subscribed yet. That's your choice. But if you wanna provide a little bit of support, you can subscribe to it. You can leave a review.

• 2:51:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:52:00Jocko Willink?

  We also have some other podcasts. We have Jocko Unraveling, new episodes out. Daryl Cooper from Mardi Gras. We have the Grounded Podcast. We have new Warrior Kid podcasts.

• 2:52:10Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:52:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes, we prioritized and executed on those.

• 2:52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, Uncle Jake came through on those ones because they're actually, they're pretty good. Very good.

• 2:52:22Jocko Willink?

  Check, check. You don't have to.

• 2:52:24Speaker 01

  Legitimately good.

• 2:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Made an adjustment there. Uh, new Warrior Kid Podcast, you can check those out. Also, we have the the, the, the Jocko Underground podcast, which is some amplifying information, some behind the scenes, kind of.

• 2:52:41Speaker 01

  Kind of.

• 2:52:42Jocko Willink?

  We got some Q and A stuff coming. If you're a member of the underground, if you're a member of jocko underground.com, you can actually ask questions. And yeah, go to jocko underground.com if you want to. What is it? Subscribe. You have to pay money. Well, you pretty much have to pay when it's eight dollars and 18 cents a month. A bunch of reasons why we're doing it. We're doing it because we don't wanna actually have somebody injecting uh advertisements into the middle of the podcast. We don't wanna have that. So there you go. You can pay. And if you can't afford it, look, we're not trying to hold back information. If you can't afford it, no problem, no factor. If you can't afford the eight dollars and 18 cents a month, email assistance at jocko underground.com.

• 2:53:28Jocko Willink?

  And we also have a YouTube channel. Which, where Echo, like, he just.

• 2:53:36Jocko Willink?

  He he bludgeons us with videos.

• 2:53:41Speaker 01

  What are you even talking about?

• 2:53:42Jocko Willink?

  I'm just talking about how some of the videos that that you that you're solely responsible for. A lot of people don't like them.

• 2:53:52Jocko Willink?

  They like the videos where I'm the assistant director.

• 2:53:55Speaker 01

  Okay, all right.

• 2:53:58Jocko Willink?

  Youtube channel, what's it called? Jocko Podcast. And it's a fish. It's official.

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you said it's a fish. No, Brad, it's not a fish. But yeah, it's official verified.

• 2:54:09Jocko Willink?

  Verified.

• 2:54:10Speaker 01

  Verified.

• 2:54:11Jocko Willink?

  Also, check out Origin USA. They're putting up stuff if you want to know the story that's happening up there. And there's zero explosions in their stuff. Whereas and there's a very limited number of explosions on long videos. That's what Charles makes.

• 2:54:25Speaker 01

  Origin USA, that's main tie, right?

• 2:54:28Jocko Willink?

  That's main tie.

• 2:54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he's hooking that up. He's doing some good work up there.

• 2:54:31Jocko Willink?

  You approve of main tie?

• 2:54:32Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 2:54:33Jocko Willink?

  How come he doesn't make anything explode?

• 2:54:34Speaker 01

  Well, we're we're working on that, but.

• 2:54:37Jocko Willink?

  He doesn't have the skill set.

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  Steps. Steps.

• 2:54:39Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it's because he maybe it's because he is.

• 2:54:45Jocko Willink?

  Uses some discretion when he make his videos.

• 2:54:48Speaker 01

  Very possible, yeah.

• 2:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Jack, all right, there we go. It's getting late.

• 2:54:55Speaker 01

  Also, psychological warfare, if you don't know what that is. It's an album with tracks. So when you hit moments of weakness, you got Jaco to help you.

• 2:55:03Jocko Willink?

  I just realized, since I just got done with the Warrior Kid, I just realized probably a year ago, I said, oh, make some more psychological warfare for everybody. Haven't done it.

• 2:55:12Speaker 01

  Dang, yeah, well, you gotta kind of collect or think of or kind of mentally get a like current weaknesses.

• 2:55:22Jocko Willink?

  The thing is, though, is people like people were so stoked on that on that album and gave such good feedback. And I think I was just like, oh, yeah, well, people were asking like, hey, can you do anything? And I didn't really, I was like pumped, you know? And then the prioritize and execute.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  Oh, damn.

• 2:55:37Jocko Willink?

  Started to started other things started to.

• 2:55:40Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, what'd you lose motivation on that one?

• 2:55:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, motivation isn't gonna get it done.

• 2:55:47Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:55:47Jocko Willink?

  Literally motivation will not get that done. It's only discipline.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:55:52Jocko Willink?

  Maybe I need to make a, maybe I need to make a psychological warfare track of what to do when you don't feel like making a psychological warfare second album.

• 2:56:01Speaker 01

  Exactly right. Exactly.

• 2:56:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, check Flipside Canvas, flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, my brother, who's making cool stuff to hang on your wall, got a bunch of books, got a novel coming out, but maybe it's a novel, we're not really sure what it is, but I wrote something that's not a leadership book and it's not a kid's book, it's a story. Well, we'll say that for now. I think I'll read a little sum of it, some, at some point.

• 2:56:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:56:28Jocko Willink?

  So, the book is called Final Spin, you can preorder it right now and you can get that first to dish.

• 2:56:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:56:34Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code, The Evaluation, The Protocols, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, The Way the Warrior Kid Four Field Manual. I just tapped out my mic right there. Sorry about that echo, Charles, you'll have to fix that in post.

• 2:56:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:56:47Jocko Willink?

  Way the Warrior Kid Four Field Manual, Way the Warrior Kid One, Two, Three, Mike and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy and Leadership, Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy, We Solve Problems Through Leadership, go to echelonfront.com. If you need help inside your organization, we do live training all the time and we have courses online available, efonline.com if you want to check that out. We have some live events that we're doing called The Muster. The Muster, go to extremeownership.com if you want to come to The Muster. We also have EF Battlefield coming up. We've sold one out and so now we're gonna see if we're gonna do one more.

• 2:57:28Jocko Willink?

  If you want to learn lessons from the Battle of Gettysburg, if you want to walk the, if you want to walk the battlefield and, and see where General Lee and Longstreet and AP Hill and General Meade and, and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. You come to that spot on Little Round Top where Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine.

• 2:57:51Jocko Willink?

  Talking about bayonet charge down the hill, you can, you can go there and you will feel it. So go to echelonfront.com/events if you want to come to that. We already sold out the first part. It's only like, it's 35 people per. So it's two days. You, me, 35 of you, 35 of us, 36 of us, whatever. So come and check that out. If you want to help service members, if you want to help active duty and retired service members, if you want to help their families, if you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got a charity organization, Mama Lee. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved,

• 2:58:31Jocko Willink?

  go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my wearisome readings, or you need more of Echo's uncoupled inquiries, inquiries, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram. When just so Echo knows what I'm talking about, he only knows that as The Gram and on that Facebook. Echo's at Echo Charles, I am at Jocko Willink, and thanks to all the people out there in uniform, maintaining our proud, our proud traditions of military service as you also protect our way of life.

• 2:59:14Jocko Willink?

  And to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all first responders, thank you for protecting us as well. And everyone else, remember what Colonel Anthony Herbert's father told him before he left for boot camp. He said, "Nothing is as hard as just getting started." So don't wait, don't hesitate, don't ponder anymore, just get started. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.