358: Out of Airspeed... And Ideas. With Airforce Fighter Pilot and Hanoi POW, Col. Lee Ellis.

Leon F. "Lee" Ellis (born October 9, 1943) is a retired United States Air Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force colonel, award-winning author, speaker, and consultant.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_F._%22Lee%22_Ellis#cite_note-1 Ellis gained notoriety when, as a fighter pilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_pilot in the Vietnam War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War, he was shot down, captured, and spent 5+1⁄2 years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanoi and surrounding areas with former presidential candidate and Senator John McCain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain (R-AZ) and others.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_F._%22Lee%22_Ellis#cite_note-Nam_Pow_Website-2 His capture occurred on November 7, 1967, and he was released on March 14, 1973.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_F._%22Lee%22_Ellis#cite_note-Lee_Ellis_Military_Biography-3 He was one of the youngest, junior members in the camps.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_F._%22Lee%22_Ellis#cite_note-Nam_Pow_Website-2 Ellis is an international speaker and consultant on the subjects of leadership and human performance. 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 358 with Dave Berke and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  It is with deep, personal concern that I officially inform you that your son, First Lieutenant Leon F. Ellis Jr. is reported missing in North Vietnam on 7 November 1967. He was a pilot on an F-4C aircraft on an operational mission.

• 0:33Jocko Willink?

  His aircraft was last seen to roll in on target. Shortly thereafter, a large fireball was seen where his aircraft previously was located.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  The fireball descended to the ground and impacted. The crew was not seen to bail out, but however, voice contact was established with your son on ground.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  Rescue operations are in progress. Lieutenant Ellis may have been captured.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  For his welfare, it is recommended that in reply to questions from other than your immediate family, you give only his name, grade, serial number, and date of birth. This is the information he must provide if captured. Please be assured, when new information is received, it will be furnished to you immediately.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  A representative from Dobbins Air Force Base will contact you within 48 hours to assist in any way possible.

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  If you have any questions, you may call my personal representative.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  Please accept my sincere sympathy during this period of anxiety.

• 1:56Jocko Willink?

  Brigadier General George E. McCord, Military Personnel Center, Headquarters, United States Air Force.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  And that was the telegram received by Leon and Moline Ellis, parents of First Lieutenant Leon Ellis Jr.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  Probably one of the most terrifying things a parent could ever hear about their child.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  But the good news is Leon Ellis Jr. Or Lee Ellis did survive being shot down. The bad news is he was captured. He was captured by the North Vietnamese and ended up spending five and a half years

• 2:46Jocko Willink?

  as a prisoner of war.

• 2:49Jocko Willink?

  But the good news is he did survive that. He went on to become a Colonel in the Air Force. And after that, a Speaker, a Leadership Consultant, and an author. He's written three books, Leading with Honor, another book called Engage with Honor, and a forthcoming book called Captured by Love. And it is a distinct privilege and an honor to have Lee Ellis with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and his lessons learned. Sir, thank you for joining us.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jaco. It's great to be with you. I really enjoyed your book, your and Life Babbin's book, Leadership Book.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I could say the name.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  I've written a bunch of them, but it's all good.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  But it was so good, and I quoted it in several places in my books. So, thank you for what you've done and are doing, and it's a pleasure to be with you. I'm excited.

• 3:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I appreciate it for sure. And, I mean, reading your books and having had a couple other POWs from Vietnam on this podcast. We had William Reader, who was a helicopter pilot, was shot down. He was shot down in South Vietnam, so he made the treacherous journey, a months-long journey through the jungle, staying in the jungle camps, which were. You know, by his account, the absolute horror. And then, of course, we've had Charlie Plum on as well. And I know you know him. So, honor to have you here. Share your experiences, the perspective that you all bring to leadership and to life is just unbelievable.

• 4:35Jocko Willink?

  And it's something very powerful. I know as I read through what you all experienced, it's impossible not to try and take some lessons from that. And improve the way I live as a human being.

• 4:50Jocko Willink?

  But with that, let's, let's, before we jump into your time in, in Vietnam, let's, let's start off in the beginning. And how you, how you grew up. So you were born in, uh, born in Georgia, right?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I, um, I was born down in South Georgia, but when I was about two years old, my parents moved back to North Georgia because my grandmother had cancer. And we wanted to live near my mother's parents on the farm. And we lived in a four bedroom, a four room house there on the farm, not a four bedroom. Uh, two bedrooms, the living room and a kitchen, and that was it. Back in, that was back in the forties. My grandmother died and then we moved in with my grandfather on that farm. So I grew up, um, in the real days of farming, we went, by the way, we went barefooted from May until October. That was a thing we were proud of. We wanted to get those shoes off and go barefooted.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Uh, didn't wear a shirt much in the summertime. And, uh, worked on the farm. And it was good. And looking back, it was good that we had that responsibility. My dad was not a farmer, but he, uh, learned to do some and worked some, but my brother and I worked a lot there on the farm. Uh, my mother was a wonderful cook and every, we had this huge garden and we would grow an acre of garden stuff. So we, my mother would can a hundred quarts of beans every summer.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And corn and peas and butter beans and all this stuff. Well, my brother and I did a lot of that work and we would sit on the front porch in the swing, shelling butter beans or stringing beans at night, listen to the Atlanta Crackers, which was like a double A baseball team before it became the Atlanta Braves. And that was life, you know, it was a good life and hard work. My brother milked a cow because my dad went to work in town. My brother would milk the cow in the morning and evening. That was good because I didn't have the same grip he did. He was bigger than me and older. But I fed the hogs, fed the chickens, chopped the wood and brought in the coals every day. So, you know, this was, the good thing was we learned about responsibility.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  We learned about being in the cold. We drove cars that sometimes the batteries were dead and you had to push them off and they were all straight shift. So it was an era when we just, as young kids on the farm, we had a lot of responsibility. But out there on that farm, during the Korean War, so, which was 1951 to 53 or 54 timeframe, I was appointed 43, so I was like eight, nine, 10 years old. And I'd be out there on the farm working and I'd keep looking up because overhead with these huge formations of airplanes going off to war or going off to prepare people or drop, you know, paratroopers or whatever. And I'd look up at those airplanes, wow.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  And all of that because when I was five, my parents took me to Athens, Georgia, which is 10 miles away, where the University of Georgia Bulldogs are about the way. And in the, in the park, the Veterans Park in Athens, Georgia, there was a World War II fighter plane. And I climbed up on that wing and it was like at age five or six, I said, this is me. This is what I'm gonna do. Well, now, I was also big into sports. My brother, my mother's brother had played football at the University of Georgia in nineteen twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He became a doctor, and his two sons played on scholarship at the University of Georgia in fifty, fifty-one,

• 8:29Speaker 01

  fifty-two. So, we would go down and watch University of Georgia football practice over on Ag Hill there. So, I got this in my mind, and I wanted to be a quarterback at the University of Georgia. So, I was a quarterback in high school, and I was above average, but I wasn't the fastest guy on the team in my senior year in high school. I only weighed a hundred and fifty-five, and they did not recruit me, which I didn't expect them to. So, I went on to the University of Georgia when I finished high school and got in the Air Force ROTC, and then I knew that was what I wanted to do.

• 9:04Jocko Willink?

  So, what year is that, that you go to college?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I graduated high school in nineteen sixty-one. Went to college then, and graduated in four years, in nineteen sixty-five. Now, I was probably the worst student ever to graduate in four years, because I just, I had never really learned to study. I was kind of ADD and focused on whatever, and I had to work to pay my college tuition and all that. Didn't have any money, so I worked and lived at home after my first semester there, lived on campus, just because I saved up money and wanted to do it. But, in ROTC, I graduated as a distinguished graduate, and went to flight school with the academy class, A class of flight school.

• 9:52Jocko Willink?

  Was it, was it hard to get into flight school?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Uh, not for me. Uh, I passed the exam, and the written exams, and I got my pilot's license my senior year in college. The Air Force had a flight indoctrination program where they kind of screened you out, and I sailed through that and went right to flight school. And I'd always been driving, I started driving cars when I was eleven, tractors when I was twelve, and I could drive them by myself. I mean, they would let me go with the responsibility to go drive them. I chauffeured for my grandfather when he was, when I was twelve and thirteen. So, I'd always been very confident about operating machinery and taking risks and being

• 10:37Speaker 01

  able to go right to the edge but not go over it. And so,

• 10:43Speaker 01

  It just was a natural place to be. And when they told me that I passed the physical to be a pilot in my, after my sophomore year, I was just thrilled and I went over and changed my major. I was in pre-med and because my uncle had been a doctor and I wasn't going to get into medical school with my grades because I didn't study. I went over and changed my major to history and sailed right on through in four years and off to flight school and flight school for me, I had a check every month. I bought myself a new car.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  What kind of car was it?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I was going to get either, uh, I was going to get a GTO. It was, they'd only come out with GTOs in 64 and this was 19, summer of 65. The problem was the GTO was bucket seats and I wanted a bench seat because back then I wanted my honey to be sitting like real close. And I said, I'm going to buy one of those stupid GTOs. I love GTO. So I bought the Cutlass Supreme, which is exactly like the GTO, except a little bit smaller engine and it had a bench seat. And I bought wire wheels on it to be cool, you know? So, uh, and my roommate bought a, his dad was a Ford dealer and he got a Mustang.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  So, uh, my roommate in flight school. So we were cool and Valdosta State College was right down there in Valdosta, 11 miles away, man. We could just roll in there and, well, we'd go to the freshman dorm and say, well, who's in there? And they had to sign out. We'd say, well, Janie and so-and-so, we'll bring them down here and let us meet them. And they would. And we liked them, we'd take them to, let's go to the clubs. So I did not study very hard in UPT. And to me, UPT, I had a check, I had a car, there's girls nearby and I was living the life that I wanted to live in college, but also doing flight school.

• 12:43Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what's UPT?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Undergraduate pilot training.

• 12:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So is that before you go to, before you go, before you graduate from college?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  No, this is right after I graduated.

• 12:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you graduate, you get commissioned.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Three days later, I was in flight school in Valdosta, Georgia at Moody Air Force.

• 13:00Jocko Willink?

  And this is 1965, right?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  What are you hearing about Vietnam? How much is that on the radar right now?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  It's starting to jump, uh, jump up and you, there's some debates. You see them if you watch TV, there'll be some debates on there and, uh, Secretary Russ could be on there. They'd be talking about it. And we'd see a lot of, um, army helicopters would come through and pass refuel and there and Moody and going on, you know, this was when the army's airborne and the army, uh, whatever the helicopter groups were called. It really got going.

• 13:30Jocko Willink?

  Air Cav.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Air Cav got going. That's right. And they would come through. But in flight school, um, we didn't have any instructor pilots that had already been on a tour. And then as I was in a T-38, which was the second stage, the advanced flights, part of flight school, uh, there was a major came in, a single guy who was a major and he'd just come back from a tour in Vietnam as a, as a,

• 13:58Speaker 01

  uh, the, what's the Navy prop airplane that's, uh, the Air Force had one too.

• 14:03Jocko Willink?

  A-1?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  A-1 Skyra- he'd been an A-1 Skyraider pilot. He's a fighter pilot, but he'd been an A-1 pilot for a tour over there. And he told us about it and he went cross-country with us and, uh, he was, he was a fun guy, a really great leader and a great guy. So he was the first combat veteran we'd ever met and he was single. So that was fun.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  But, uh, What's the, what's the training aircraft? The T-38?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  The T-38.

• 14:29Jocko Willink?

  Is that the same one you use now, Dave? It's, the Air Force is still using it, yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yes. They've been using it 60 years or so. It had just come out into the Air Force in 63, 64. And so it's a supersonic, uh, 20 engine afterburner, two-seater. Uh, the fighter version of it was the F-5.

• 14:48Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  But, uh, you know, it would go supersonic. It would, uh, it would climb great. It was a, a great airplane for us to fly. It flew, it flew faster on final than most of the airplanes do now, you know?

• 15:01Jocko Willink?

  Now, are you competing for that fighter pilot slot?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yes, but they were going to be plentiful. I was in, I was in the top 10% of my class until on my contact evaluation of T-38. My instructor had told me, well, on the single engine landing, don't worry too much about your airspeed. Well, on my checkride, my airspeed was about 10 or 12 knots high and I got downgraded. And that took me from like a third or fourth in my class down to about the 50 percentile in my class. And it, I just couldn't get back up. There wasn't enough more checkrides to get much higher back up. So I was probably in the top 40%. But technically, in my mind,

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I knew where I was. I should have been up there in the 10%. But the, in my class, which was 67A, it was in, it was in 1966, but the physical year, we graduated in August 1966. Across eight training bases, there were 500, oh, I'm sorry, there were over 800 pilots being trained that whole year. And over 500 of us got F-4 backseat. They were putting pilots in the backseat. Now, the Navy didn't put pilots in the backseat. They put Rios. But the Air Force was trying to get, get, use money to get more pilots training. Okay?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  So they said to Congress or somebody, hey, we need more pilots because they were putting pilots in the backseat. And so we had to go over there first tour in the backseat. So, and, and as I was going through my combat training, there were some of the front seaters that I knew I was a lot better pilot than they were, but I helped them look good. So most of them were good, but not all of them.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that, you get done with the T-38, and then it's into, then you get assigned to Phantom?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:03Jocko Willink?

  And how, but were you assigned backseat for the Phantom?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:08Jocko Willink?

  And then were you mad about that?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Well, I was, but there were only three other single-seat fighters in my class.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  There were one guy, got a 105, and one guy got a 102. And everybody else got backseat F-4.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  So, there was no choice. All of us, all my buddies and I went there and, you know, we were gonna go do it and pay our dues and get out and go to the front seat or go to another airplane.

• 17:38Jocko Willink?

  So that was kind of a normal pattern? You'd go to the backseat for a tour and then you'd get into the front seat?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  In fact, I was actually, I didn't know this, but my buddy Lance Sizan, who went down two days after I did, Medal of Honor guy, we and I were starting, they were starting to fly us a little bit with some instructor pilots who were check pilots. And they didn't tell us this, but they were gonna upgrade us to the front seat in combat. I found out after I came home. And I thought, that's not very wise to upgrade somebody to the front seat. Well, you didn't, in the backseat, you didn't have a pickle button. You couldn't pickle the bombs and fire the gun in the backseat. You could fly the airplane and everything, but you couldn't pickle the...

• 18:17Jocko Willink?

  So you would need further training on that before you moved up there?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:22Jocko Willink?

  The, the F-4 Phantom, it's my favorite American bird. That thing was just like a modern masterpiece at the time, right?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. It, it was a lot of power and it wasn't the sharpest turning one, but it would turn pretty, turn pretty, pretty doggone good. It would pull G's well, and it had a lot of power and it could carry a lot of stuff. The problem was, it was built as a Navy long-range interceptor, okay? So they didn't have a gun built into it, just had it with missiles. Well, the Air Force wanted it for more air-to-ground than air-to-air. So, we actually started carrying a pod gun, a 20-millimeter pod gun underneath in the center station while I was there, and we did quite a bit of that. It was the same gun that they later built into the airplane in the F-4E.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And the A, now the A-10 now has a 40-millimeter gun. They built the airplane around the gun, but, you know.

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  So then, when, when you get done with that training, how, how long is it before you go to Vietnam?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Normally, the replacement training unit, which would be like the RAG in the Navy, the RTU in the Air Force, we went to, I went to George Air Force Base, there were three different bases that were doing it, in the high desert, right near where Top Gun worked out and was filmed there in the high desert. And we go there and we do air-to-ground, air-to-air, refueling and that sort of thing, and then we deployed straight to war. My orders said, F-4 Phantom, pipeline, Southeast Asia. Pipeline meant as quick as he gets combat trained, he's going to go to Southeast Asia.

• 20:06Jocko Willink?

  And so now it's 1967?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:10Jocko Willink?

  And so now Vietnam is pretty much in full swing?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  And how's that sit with you, with your teammates, you guys just all, like, that's your goal is to get to Vietnam and fly in combat?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think most of us were, that's where we're going to go. And they changed our assignment two, three times because the weather over there and different things. So, one time they told us we were going to go to Japan, to Masawa, and stay there, and we go TDY to the war. Well, the wives and kids were getting shots and everything, getting ready to go overseas to Japan, and I thought, well, it'll be okay, we're going to take F-4 Es over to Japan. And then all of a sudden, about two weeks later, they said, that's been canceled, we're back to the original, you're going to go straight to the war. So, the main thing we did, though, was we got, we'd already had survival training before I went to George to get combat training. And so now we go to water survival, because we had a little bit of time, they said, you're not going to go till July.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  So I went to water survival, and then departed the States on about 30, or 30 June or so, headed, went to the Philippines through Jungle Survival School, about a week there.

• 21:18Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  1967.

• 21:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And then straight from there to Da Nang, which was in the northern part of South Vietnam, about 70 miles south of the DMC that separated North Vietnam from South Vietnam.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  South Vietnam.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  And so there's, that's where you end up flying out of. That's where your, your base is. You end up flying out of Da Nang.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and we flew a lot of combat sorties over the north. Those are our counters. If you got a hundred sorties over the north, you could go home. If you only flew over South Vietnam, you had to fly for a year before you could go back home. So whenever we could convert a mission in Laos or South Vietnam, get something done, and then have a little bit of ammo left, we'd go over to North Vietnam and work with the Forward Air Controller there, the Misty Fax, and get that counter in.

• 22:12Jocko Willink?

  What was the, what was the main mission that you were getting tasked with doing?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  It was, there were two missions. One was close air support for combat troops in I Corps, which was the northern part of South Vietnam, in support of the Marines and the Army. So we would do those. We would set alerts sometimes for that. We'd get scrambled and go out when they got, were about to get overrun or something, getting attacked and go out and do close air support. And that was a lot of fun. But most of our missions, I had about fifteen or eighteen of those kind of missions, but most of the missions were road recce and bombing of trucks on the road, bombing out bridges, keep the roads bombed out, so they could not, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to keep them from bringing truckloads

• 23:02Speaker 01

  of troops and war materials into South Vietnam. They would come down south, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran parallel to the coastline, and then as they got to the DMZ, they would cut over into Laos, and then go down through Laos, and then cut back into South Vietnam. Because that was the safest way for them to travel. So that's why we flew into Laos, was to blow up those bridges and roads, and if we could get a convoy of trucks, you know, we could wipe those out pretty quickly.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  And that's where, that's, so that was the main mission that you did?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. We were flying

• 23:40Speaker 01

  MiG Combat Air Patrol, supporting the bombers, fighter bombers up around Hanoi when I got there at Da Nang. Most of those, there were Da Nang and Ubon, F4s were supporting the air support for the 105, Air Force 105s and F4s that were flying combat attacks in the Hanoi area, up in North Vietnam industrial complex. But about four or five weeks after I got to Da Nang, the whole policy changed. 12th Air Force was in Saigon and we were part of 12th Air Force, I'm sorry, 7th Air Force, and 12th Air Force controlled Laos, and, I'm sorry, controlled

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Thailand. And that's where, we had four main bases in Thailand where we were flying missions out of. A lot of them were going over North Vietnam into the Hanoi area. So, we lost the bombing and the Combat Air Patrol support, MiG cap, I guess you'd call it, MiG cap. We lost that about a month after I got there. So, I did not get to go on the MiG patrol up around Hanoi. And I was very disappointed because that's what I'd always wanted to do.

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  Was just dogfighting?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jocko Willink?

  Just plane against plane. Did you ever see any MiGs?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Not from the air. I've seen them on the ground. When I was in prison up there, I saw them a few times.

• 25:10Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, do you remember your very first mission that you flew? Was it, you know, for like guys going into ground combat, you kind of remember the first time you rolled outside the wire? Was your first mission, was it monumental in your brain, or was it just like, oh, another day?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  It was just like going out to the range and bombing, really. It was kind of more like that.

• 25:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, it seems like, uh-

• 25:32Speaker 01

  We got shot at. I'd say, most all the missions, we got shot at. And we'd come home and have some bullet holes from, uh, ground fire, mostly. I never got hit by any real AAA, I don't think, up there. Didn't have any big holes blown in my airplane. But it was common to have, you know, uh, ground fire rifles-

• 25:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel like the threat when you were flying up there? How, what was the threat level that you felt? Uh, I know in the book, you, you end up mentioning you, you had, I think, three of your friends had been shot down. Like, how often is that happening where guys are, guys are getting shot down and you're rolling up there? What is it? What's your, what's your impression? Or did you have the typical young man's impression, which, hey, it's too bad it happened to someone else, but it sure is not going to happen to me. I'm too good.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Well, it was kind of that. But it was sad, too. You know, I'd lost two roommates before I was shot down and then another one after I was shot down. But there were a lot of people shot down. The summer and going into the fall of 1967, it was a huge number of people shot down because our, our combat missions increased significantly and their anti-aircraft artillery, surface air missiles increased significantly during that time. So it was pretty common for airplanes to be going down.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel like the skill level that it takes to drop bombs back in, back in your day? I mean, nowadays, it's a computer that's doing it, right? The computer's doing all the work and you're just inputting the numbers and it's going to put that bomb wherever you tell that bomb to go. Did you feel like you were getting better? Was it where some guys better than other guys? You know, in the SEAL teams, which I was in, you know, you got this guy over here, he's really good long range shot with his rifle. He's going to be super accurate. This other guy, maybe he's not so great. Did you guys have that kind of pecking order in terms of, hey, you know, Lee's getting sent out to get this bridge because we know he's good? Or, hey, don't send Lee out to get that bridge. Maybe

• 27:43Jocko Willink?

  he's not the best of our guys. Did you guys have that kind of pecking order?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yes and no. The flight commanders were generally established fighter pilots at that time. And so they were usually the best in the squadron. So they were setting the example. And, but at this time, because of the war, you know, in 1967 and by the summer of 67, all the fighter pilots have gone over and done their year, 100 missions and come home. Not all, but many, the first big chunk of them, okay? And they don't want to send them right back. So they brought in guys from B-52s, from C-130s to become F4 front seaters, okay? And fighter pilots. Well, us who had been flying, us backseaters who had just been flying

• 28:31Speaker 01

  the T-38, we knew that one of our jobs was to keep them safe and help them be fighter pilots. Seriously. I mean, they were good pilots, but they just hadn't been flying fighter airplanes. And they were a little bit more cautious and slower thinking, I think, sometimes. And so we were almost coaching. There were times I was coaching the guy in the front seat. Now, don't roll in yet. We're not, we're not close enough to roll in yet. So, you know, it's hard to say, but most of the time, when you, when I flew with the more senior guys and who were experienced fighter pilots, they were really good.

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  And what about like, so you deployed in 1967, you're over there. The political thing in America of, you know, the war protests, they weren't really strong in 1967.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't going strong yet. It was just starting to roll in certain parts of the country. I think the thing for me, I realized very quickly, and most of the pilots realized very quickly, that we were not fighting this war in the right way.

• 29:40Jocko Willink?

  And you saw that even from your time, you're a first lieutenant, you've been in the Navy for, or sorry, you've been, you've been in the Air Force for a short period of time, and you're already seeing, as a first lieutenant, on your first deployment, this maybe doesn't make the most sense.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I did see that. I said, why don't you let me figure out how to pick the targets? I mean, I did.

• 30:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because the targets are getting picked by like Washington DC and stuff, right?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And I'd say, well, here's how we need to do this. We need to go up there and bomb out the roads, you know, just bomb them out in certain specific places intentionally about an hour before dark. And then as quick as it gets dark, the trucks will back up and we'll go in and strafe them all and wipe them out. Well, that took me about a month to figure that out.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  And sometimes we did that and sometimes we didn't, but it wasn't part of the plan. There was no plan to do it. You had to fly sorties to some degree to when Saigon said fly them. And to a large degree up around Hanoi, you could only fly them when they told you to. And of course, the enemy knew exactly when we were coming. So it was just ridiculous that so many decisions about what to bomb and when to bomb it was made in Washington DC by civilians who knew nothing about warfare.

• 31:06Jocko Willink?

  And even you as a first lieutenant, you're what, 23 years old, 24 years old?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I was 23 when I got there.

• 31:13Jocko Willink?

  23 years old, you're just driving around a muscle car in America as a knuckle dragger. And even you figured out, hey, you can't micromanage this thing from Washington DC.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yes. And I was, it was kind of down. It was kind of a downer for me. It's like, why can't somebody stand up and fix this, you know?

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  At this point, are you seeing the POWs, any of that propaganda stuff that would come out over the years? Are you already seeing that, some of that stuff?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  You mean in our culture?

• 31:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, so in other words, you're there, you're flying. At this point, obviously pilots had been shot down, pilots had been captured, soldiers, sailors had been captured. And, and that propaganda, you know, as POWs, is it not really out in 1967 yet? They weren't really pushing that hard, the Vietnamese, to get that propaganda out?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  No, we had not, I had not heard any propaganda from POW camps. I didn't know anything about the POW camps of what was happening. I'm sure some folks did, but I knew some of my buddies had been captured, but I did not know what was happening there, other than it was a, they were probably prisoners.

• 32:29Jocko Willink?

  So how many, how long had you been there before you ended up getting shot down?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Well, I got there around the 3rd of July and I was shot down the 7th of November. And at that point, I had 53 missions over North Vietnam and another, I don't know, 15 or 16 or so over South Vietnam and Laos only.

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  Alright, well, probably a good time for me to pick up this book. The book is called Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Honley Hilton.

• 33:02Jocko Willink?

  This is just out of the gate, we're starting it off from the book. It says this, "November 7th, 1967, 4 o'clock PM. Captain Ken Fisher and I rolled into a dive bomb pass in our F-4C Phantom jet. As we swooped downward, our bird with turned up wingtips, elevated tail and deafening roar must have resembled a high-tech version of a prehistoric pterodactyl. Tracers from the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery flashed by our canopy like giant Roman candles. Their explosions encircling us with ominous puffs of gray and black smoke, each representing hundreds of shards of shrapnel designed to mortally wound our beautiful beast.

• 33:45Jocko Willink?

  As our jet plunged toward the artillery positions at 500 miles an hour, the earth enlarged in our windscreen as if we were adjusting the zoom on a telephoto lens. It was eyeball to eyeball stared down with the enemy, with each side expecting the other to die. When you face enemy fire, you are at the point of the sword. Ken and I had been around long enough to know that the sword of combat cuts both ways. We had lost three close friends in similar situations in the prior two months. We released our heavy payload of bombs and our lightened plane lurched upward. Suddenly, an explosion rocked our aircraft. A terrifying sound like marbles in a blender alerted me

• 34:28Jocko Willink?

  that the metal of our expensive flying machine was ripping apart. The cockpit was still intact, but it was rapidly filling with smoke. The control stick was frozen at full aft right and we were tumbling end over end through the sky. Just before bomb release, we had been at 6,000 feet, descending rapidly in a steep dive. Now, on fire and out of control, there was only one option: eject."

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  But that was impossible. I was upside down, floating out of my seat with my head pushed against the top of the canopy. If I ejected while we were in negative G's, I would suffer severe injury, even death. But time was running out. At our rate of descent, we would soon be out of the envelope for safe ejection. Suddenly, the cockpit flipped again, and I felt pressure in my seat. Positive G's. It was now or never. I sat upright and pulled the ejection handle. An explosive charge fired, blowing away the canopy. Still strapped in my seat, I was blasted free of the aircraft, like a carnival stunt artist shot from a cannon, at an acceleration

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  force eighteen times the force of gravity. Now, if this expensive, one-time-use Martin Baker ejection system was going to save my life, it would have to flawlessly execute a remarkably complex series of events. A half a second later, the man-seat separator worked as advertised, firing a blast of compressed air to the open lap belt connecting pin, freeing me from the heavy seat and triggering the appropriately-named butt-snapper. A folded nylon belt under my seat that mechanically snapped tight, thrusting me into space. As the ejection seat moved away, the attached lanyard pulled out the D-ring, deploying my parachute. The F4 Phantom's marvelously

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  engineered James Bond-like escape system had snatched me from the jaws of death in less than two seconds. But, much like Bond's adventures, escape from one danger only brought another.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  So, when you're in negative G's, you can't eject. That's the rule?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Well, if you do, you might just smash your head on the canopy.

• 36:48Jocko Willink?

  And then it'll just break your neck and kill you?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  It could, yeah.

• 36:52Jocko Willink?

  So, you're going 500 miles an hour, and you're 5,000 feet. How many seconds is that? How many, how far are we from impact?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Two or three at the most, I guess. It would have come very quickly. Now, once the airplane blew up and was tumbling, it wasn't going 500 miles an hour. We were probably between 450 and 500 miles an hour when the bombs came off and we blew up. And then, within another second, we're tumbling. And so, it's slowing down. And, you know, that part, I can't remem-- it all happened so quickly. This is within, you know, less than a second. It happened so quickly, I don't remember exactly, except I knew I had negative Gs and I needed positive Gs. I'm gonna wait a little longer. And it flipped, and there it was.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  And I pulled that handle and tended it too. And it was, uh, it's just unreal that we got out, to be honest. I will, let me tell you one thing. We were the first, I didn't know this till several years later. We were the first, probably, to be blown out of the sky by the FMU-35 fuse. Because when it came off in less than two seconds, when there were bad fuses. There, it was a new fuse with a new type, uh, chemical reaction or whatever. But some of them were bad.

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  So what is this FMU-35 fuse?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  It goes into the head of the bomb. It screws in. And it was a timed fuser. So you could drop it and it would lay on the ground and wait for 10 seconds to blow up or wait for an hour to blow up. Okay? Well, we didn't even know this. We were the first ones to ever fly with that. And we were not supposed to be flying with it. We had not been told. We had been told they were coming, but we had not been told that we had one. So I wouldn't know, when I did the bomb inspection, the armament inspection, I wouldn't know an FMU-35 fuse different from another one. There was just a fuse. But ours blew up. It, they blew up in 1.8 seconds after they came off. And boom.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  And most of the people that had that happen died.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  My roommate died two weeks later from that.

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  And this is because he's shooting the missile and it's detonating 1.8 seconds later and it's not far enough away, is that?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  No, it was dropping a bomb.

• 39:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  And when it comes off, it detonates in 1.8 seconds after it's released, which is maybe 100 feet from where you are. It's paralle-- see, it's going to parallel you to some degree.

• 39:36Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Okay? And it blew up maybe 200 or 300 feet under us and all that shrapnel out of the-- out of one blew up all the rest of them. And so all these bombs blew up and it blew our air-- normally when you get hit by anti-aircraft artillery, it doesn't blow your airplane up. It might blow off part of the wing or it might blow off part of your tail or shoot a hole through your fuel tank and-- or your engine and blow out your engine, but it doesn't blow your airplane apart. So that in itself is very unusual for an airplane to be blown up by anti-aircraft artillery. Well, we found out several years later, a POW, I was put in another cell with a POW,

• 40:21Speaker 01

  and he was telling me about how he was blown out of the sky by his wingman, his flight lead's bombs going off. And he said, "At Da Nang, we had lost like 12, 10 or 12 airplanes over a period of about six weeks and almost all of them died. Very few of them were recovered."

• 40:38Jocko Willink?

  So is that what happened to your bird?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yes. And we didn't know that.

• 40:43Jocko Willink?

  You just thought you got hit?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there was a lot of AAA, you know, tracers going right by the cockpit. So what else would you think? Nothing else. It had to be that until we found out that what it was like to be blown out of the sky by the FMU 35 views. And it happened, Lance Seijohn, my buddy, two days later. Doug Condit, my roommate, two weeks later. And neither one of them came home, so-- and they were great guys, great pilots, incredible men.

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  Wow, that's horrible. Man, talk about a lack of communication. That's just, that's crazy to think about.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Well, they never really solved the problem and, uh, you know, between the industrial and military.

• 41:38Jocko Willink?

  No one takes ownership of the problems and no one solves the problems.

• 41:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay, um.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  They finally, the, the wing commander, General Colonel Busse, Boots Busse, uh, was a pretty famous guy being ace of Korea War. But he went down to Saigon and said, you can court martial me, but we're not going to fly those anymore.

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  Wow, um.

• 42:04Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here. I had ejected from the womb of the F-4 into a very unfriendly world, hanging in the parachute without my shallow protection. I felt exposed and vulnerable. Gunfire cracked below and bullets whizzed by me. Instinctively, I followed the procedures ingrained by regular refresher training since entering flight school. Check for a fully open chute. Activate the emergency beeper. Decide on deploying a life raft. Pick a spot to land and steer your parachute. Prepare for the parachute landing fall PLF.

• 42:37Jocko Willink?

  So you're going through the motions. You're, you're thinking through your training.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  I had one goal and that was to invade capture. And I was going, my training, it was unreal. I, I couldn't believe that I was so focused on my training and what I was doing. Here are the enemies still shooting at the wingman and bullets are going by and I'm just focusing on what I'm supposed to do.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Could you see Ken Fisher?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  No. He was about a half mile away.

• 43:04Jocko Willink?

  When you eject, do both of you get ejected? So one person, so you, you each have to pull your ejection.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, some airplanes are that way, but ours wasn't. You know, the F-4 wasn't.

• 43:15Jocko Willink?

  So you don't know if he made it out at this point, you don't know if he ejected or not?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I'm looking down and I can see the ocean just a few miles, two or four miles away. And we were attacking the gun protection for the Quonkey ferry. That's what the, the Fort Air Controller put us on to bomb those gun areas. And so I know where I am, I've flown to this area a lot. And so I, I made a radio call as quick as I got on the ground. I did my parachute landing fall and I hit all the points, jumped into an old bomb crater, pulled out my radio and on guard said, "Hey, I'm on the ground, 200 meters north of the river, start strafing at 300, I'm headed south." Cause I thought if I could get in that river, I could evade and get picked up out by the

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Navy out. Well, I saw the flight lead after I came home at a fighter pilot reunion. He said, "Hey, man, I heard your radio call, but I decided I couldn't shoot that good. I didn't want to hit you." And I said, "Very wise." Because they surrounded me and captured me within 90 seconds.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say in the book, "In less than 60 seconds, the militia troops formed a semicircle about 30 yards away and began moving toward me. Survival instructors had taught us the best chance to escape is immediately after capture because frontline soldiers are typically the least trained in handling prisoners. Deciding to try a bluff, I drew my 38 caliber six-shot revolver, Smith & Wesson combat masterpiece, which was loaded with two rounds of tracer and three of regular ball ammo. Could these, could these rookies be scared off? I would challenge them and find out. The first three stepped out from chest-high bushes and pointed their rifles at me. I raised my revolver, motioned for them to get back, and fired a tracer round over their heads.

• 45:08Jocko Willink?

  Without flinching, they shouldered their rifles and pointed them at me. I, why they didn't cut me down right then, I'll never know. I can only assume God had other plans for my life."

• 45:20Jocko Willink?

  So you took a crack at these guys with your thirty eight? I'll tell you what. How you survive that, I have no idea.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  I just wanted to scare them. I fired it over their head. Tracer, you know, I mean, you know, in the heat of the battle is just all I was thinking.

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, please, anyone out there, if you point a weapon at me and you pull the trigger, actually, if you point a weapon at me, you're gonna die.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 45:44Jocko Willink?

  So the fact that you just, you just shot a tracer at these guys to try to scare them off, but they must have been there clearly, the value of a captive, of a prisoner must have been so high to them and they knew that. And that's why they said, oh, no, buddy.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:01Jocko Willink?

  You're not getting out that easy.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:04Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, you say, one of the militiamen pulled, and by the way, I'm reading this book, I'm reading some excerpts. You gotta get the book. I'm skipping a bunch of stuff. There's all kinds of awesome details in here of what's going through your mind. Like, you gotta get the book. I'm, I'm just trying to, uh, give the high, some of the highlights. They're not even all the highlights, just some of the highlights. One of the militiamen pulled out a pamphlet. I recognized it as a pointy, talky, a tool of the Vietnamese, Vietnamese military devised that showed drawings of American pilots being captured along with Vietnamese phonetics for English commands. Referring to his booklet, he began to shout, "Hand chop, hand chop, surrender, no die, surrender, no die." Aviators have a number of expressions for being in deep trouble. One of the nicer ones is, "Out of airspeed

• 46:49Jocko Willink?

  and ideas." That precisely described my situation. I figured you'd like that one, Dave. Out of airspeed and ideas.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Still use it.

• 46:59Jocko Willink?

  Not a good place to be. I tossed aside my pistol, raised my hands, not knowing what to expect. Immediately, my captors grabbed me and began tugging at my survival vest, anti G suit and flight suit, the last, my last vestiges of protection.

• 47:14Jocko Willink?

  And here's the psychological view of what's going through your mind. Up until the time of surrender, I had operated like a computer, calculating and processing at nanosecond speed. My training programs had translated into almost flawless execution, a credit to the military way and those who did the training. Now, out of control and with no power, this cool, somewhat cocky fighter pilot felt all alone and very scared. Captured and in enemy hands, what lay in store? Would I be tortured, killed? The shock of my predicament made the whole affair seem like a dream. I knew this was happening to me, but I also felt like an observer, as if participating in an out-of-body experience.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, this nightmare was real, and I would need to adopt a new mindset, a new game face, to fight a different kind of battle, a battle of minds and wills.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  All, you were in enemy hands in 90 seconds from hitting the ground?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:19Jocko Willink?

  Is that just bad luck? How does that even happen?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  That was, uh, that happened quite a bit. Because usually we're in more populated areas and there were going to be militia, farmers with, farmers came with, you know, axes or shovels or whatever to capture you. So it was good to be captured, but if you're going to be captured, better by the militia than the farmers.

• 48:47Jocko Willink?

  Is there, is there a massive relief of just survival? I mean, the fact that you made it out of the aircraft that blew up underneath you and now you're on the ground, you gotta at least feel good that you're alive, or was that not there?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I guess I was just focused on the moment.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  I didn't, at that point.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  This is just part of my day that I'm dealing with, you know, I wasn't thinking that, I guess, I don't know, maybe I was thinking I'm glad I'm alive, but that only lasted for a second.

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Now I'm dealing with the realities of what's gonna happen next.

• 49:28Jocko Willink?

  And I suppose that just overshadowed any sort of, like, for lack of a better word, celebration that you left. Although you did mention in the book, as you were under canopy, you were kinda looking around like, oh, it's kinda nice up here, you saw the ocean, hey, if I can get to the ocean.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  And then you heard them yelling and shooting.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  It didn't take but a second, I looked back over and I knew up the river there was disappearing cave, cuz I knew about that. It was, the river went into the cave, and they would hide their sampanes and ships, boats up there at night, during the daytime, and bring them out at night to ferry, the ferry boats to ferry these guys across the river, the trucks across the river. So I was looking over that way, and then I looked over here, and there's the ocean, Dong Hoi, the city was over there. So, it was beautiful, but that took about a split second.

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  Dave, did you ever grab your ejection handle?

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I, I never pulled, I reached for the handle, I thought about it once.

• 50:31Jocko Willink?

  What was going on?

• 50:32Speaker 02

  It was, um, just a mechanical problem that I had with an airplane, very similar, it was actually, um, in a dive, and it, back up, I don't wanna even draw a comparison between what you just described and what happened to you and mine, but the feeling of going really fast downhill, I really like the way you described, the way the earth comes up as like a telephoto zoom lens, as you're rotating that lens, how quickly it comes up. Uh, when things don't work going downhill, you're much more inclined to leave the airplane when things aren't working going uphill. And, God, it's, it's hard to listen to, because in my brain, when you say you see the ocean and that airplane, I just wish, you just want the airplane to climb up, even if it's out of power, you just want it to get up into the air, and it's such a better place

• 51:15Speaker 02

  to be, the fact that you're going downhill is such a heartbreaking thing to hear, cuz you have such few options, so, uh, I guess my answer is yes and no, nothing like that, but that feeling of, I got a problem going downhill, you're much more inclined to leave. I remember thinking about it for a split second, going, no, I can actually solve this problem, unlike, your problem was not solvable. Uh, but going downhill is not cool, when you got a problem.

• 51:35Jocko Willink?

  You ever heard the term ground rush?

• 51:38Speaker 02

  I have heard that term.

• 51:39Jocko Willink?

  I don't. Okay, so we only, I know it from free fall parachute.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  So it's a thing for pilots as well.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:46Jocko Willink?

  Ground rush.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Yeah, it's like, uh, it like the, the ground is coming, but then all of a sudden it starts coming really fast. The lower you get, the faster it starts governing. I have one parachute cutaway, meaning my main parachute failed. And I had to get rid of that parachute and, and pull my reserve parachute. I've, it only happened to me one time. And for me, it was very mechanical mind. My mind was just, oh, you know, I'm looking at my altimeter, trying to clear the problem, looking at my altimeter, trying to clear the problem. The parachute's not good. Okay, I'm at the cutaway altitude, supposed to be 2,000 feet. I got to 1,900 feet, I was like, yep, you need to cut this thing away. And I just did it. My reserve parachute came out and I was fine. Very mechanical, you know, very, yeah, that's just, just robotic.

• 52:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's how we were trained. That's what I got trained to do. That's what I did.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  And do I have this right, sir? You were in the backseat for this?

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  How frustrating was that? That you were not flying the airplane? That sense, I mean, I, I certainly know what it's like to be a fighter pilot. Your description of going backseat at fours as part of the standard continuum to cycle up front. And I'm sure the guy you were with was a great guy, but that pilot in command sense of who's got the controls? How much of that were you thinking about in real time? That frustration of, or was there any of you not being the one flying it? Or you just recognize it was going on?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It didn't occur to me at all because he was a really good pilot.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, I trusted him and no problem there. And it all happened so fast.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  I mean, we're talking about second, two seconds at the most.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Dave's the single seat fighter for his whole career.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, just that, that sense of, of wanting to be the one making the airplane do what it's supposed to do. I just think in my, for me, and I'm sure it was for you, that it sounded like it was much more standard. We never had that pipeline, but going in the backseat of an airplane, the one or two times in my career I did it, there was a small sense of, I'd really rather be in front.

• 53:45Jocko Willink?

  Dave Berke has this feeling, if you ever go fly on a civilian flight with him, he's frustrated that he's not flying the civilian bird.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Well, I can understand that, but you had to, I had to live with what it was, you know? And, and it's kind of like, in a way, some of the things you said in your previous podcast, talking about, you know, when you.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  You become the boss of your peers, you sorted that out quite well. Well, I had to sort out not being the boss.

• 54:14Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  In this case. Now, and some of the guys I flew with, though, I had to help them fly, I think, a little bit. Not that they were bad pilots, they just weren't fighter pilots yet, that much. But some of the fighter pilots I flew with were like you, and they didn't want to give up the stick. And I had to almost fight them to say, "Give me that stick." You know, it's like, you know, they were upset that they had to fly with somebody else in the airplane with, had a stick, you know, because they'd been single-seater so long. So, we were friends, but, you know.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  One thing about me is I was always pretty able to be straightforward with people in a respectful way, most of the time. But, I score thirty-four on the fast-paced, impatient side. So, being able to confront people has never been a problem. I confronted a four-star general one time. I knew him, and he was a really good guy. And he said, "I think we should pull this guy's wings." And I said, "General, I don't think so. It'd be a mistake." I said, "Here's A, B, and C." And sure enough, the guy went back and flew one forty-ones. In fact, he was the aircraft commander of the one forty-one that flew my war college class up to Carlisle Barracks

• 55:35Speaker 01

  to meet with the other war college classes, Navy, Industrial, Army, and Air Force, all together.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  What'd the guy do that was, had his wings at stake?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. He became the aircraft commander.

• 55:46Jocko Willink?

  But why was he in trouble?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Oh, he was not instructor pilot. He was there, they sent him from a one forty-one copilot to be a T thirty-eight instructor pilot. And he was a good pilot, but he just couldn't fly and talk at the same time, catch it all. And I said, "He's already a trained pilot. I don't think we should take his wings, send him back." And he did, so, but, you know, I didn't mind confronting the front-seater if he was doing something. I was, no way, my life was at stake. I would tell some of those guys, "Roll in now. Don't roll in now." And one of them told me, "Just shut up, boy." And I said, "Okay."

• 56:28Speaker 01

  He was one of the more experienced ones, but, you know, you have to take ownership for things and sometimes you can be wrong, but most of the time, you know you're probably right.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  All right, I'm gonna go back to the book here.

• 56:47Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Again, you gotta get the book for the rest of these details, but I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. "The journey from the southern panhandle of North Vietnam to Hanoi was a long, grueling ordeal. For the first few days, they moved me from Hamlet to Hamlet during the daylight. At night, they tied me down to boards and bomb shelters. As I contemplated what suffering might lie ahead, I found encouragement in the words of the Apostle Paul. Quote, "We also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope."

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  "On three occasions, American fighter jets flew in low and attacked trucks parked in the trees alongside the road. We took shelter in foxholes and bomb shelters and watched the fireworks, a front-row seat to the terrors of war. Foot-long chunks of red-hot shrapnel sometimes landed not more than six feet from me. The sights, sounds, and smells of the bombs and anti-aircraft artillery explosions are indelibly etched in my memory. War attacks the emotions in a way that's impossible to describe and difficult to erase. More threatening than the bombs were the attacks from angry peasants. A mob of old women and teens furious over the destruction American pilots had wrought rushed toward me wielding rocks, sticks, and rice-cutting sickles.

• 58:08Jocko Willink?

  My young North Vietnamese escort and the guards under his authority formed a cordon and ushered me to safety, even absorbing some of the blows. Several times during the week-long journey north, this soldier saved my life. In following his orders to transport me safely, he displayed a remarkable balance of toughness and kindness, not only to me, but also to his men and to the civilians we met along the way. Strong character is remarkably apparent, even in your enemy."

• 58:39Jocko Willink?

  Again, they must have placed a huge level of value on you pilots. On capturing Americans for this guy to do such a good job protecting you from the civilians.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yes, they did, but this guy was special. I found out because a guy who lives uh near where I was captured went to the village. He gotten to know a lot of the forward air controllers who flew over there, Vietnamese guy. He went to the village, found the person, uh the wife of that person that we're talking about. And he investigated a little bit about this guy. He stayed with the militia. He wasn't uh gung ho on the communist. And he was known for being tough and a really good man.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  And this woman, because the uh the bombing out of the road and the we had a hurricane, what do they call them over there come through?

• 59:42Jocko Willink?

  Typhoon.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Typhoon comes came through and we had to stay at his place for two nights. And he had moved out of his house with his wife and daughter and his father. And he had dug into the sand dune right away, just up some beach. And they were living in a cave and they took me in that cave. And I slept between his father and his two-year-old daughter tied up. Slept between them in the back of that cave. And at night, when it was time to eat, they saw I couldn't eat with chopsticks. And they brought me a spoon and I had a bowl of rice. And they started talking to me and they were treating me like I was a really nice fellow and just a visitor to their house, even though most of the time I'm tied up

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  and the guards are right out the front door there. And this guy went back and interviewed that lady and she told him about me. She said, she's speaking Vietnamese, but he has a video of it. And says, "Oh, yes, I remember him. He was nice. He smiled and he had eyebrows that went all the way across." And they did back then. My eyebrows were solid all the way across. And this woman, she's got a, I think she's eighty-two, or eighty-one or eighty-two. And her daughter, the one that was two years old, that slept on one side of man, his father, of course, is dead. But they were wonderful people. And they treated me like I was a guest. And then the next day, he loaded me up and took me off to Vin, to the camp up there. But still, he

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  protected me a couple of times on the way up to Vin, because the Communist Party would get the, they would get a party leader in the local village, would get a bullhorn out, and he'd get them all fired up. You know, "Work harder, suffer more for the fatherland", kind of thing. "Look what we've done", you know, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And, and he'd get them all fired up, and then they'd come after me. And they got, the guys would, they would get hit sometimes, trying to protect me.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  And one time, he had the driver of the truck that we were traveling in, normally you'd travel in the back, but he had the driver drive up to the door, open the door, push me in, told the driver to drive on off, through the crowd. And the driver's just pushing the crowd back. And one guy jumped up on the hood of the truck and started beating on the windshield, cussing at me, pointing at me, cussing me, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And the driver told him to, he's Vietnamese, "Get off." He had his hand, "Get off, get off, get off." The guy didn't do it. The driver just looked over at me and said, "Oh, well", you know? He started speeding up.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  And finally, the guy looked over and he saw how fast he was going. The driver was going, and he jumped off and went rolling down the hill. And the driver kind of looked over at me and grinned. It was just bizarre. My trip to Hanoi was bizarre. It's unreal that, you know, nobody, none of the POWs I know had that good, protected experience I did. Now, I joined up with some, with Miller and Fisher and Warner at Vin, and from then on, we were the, tied up and bouncing along in the back of the truck. But that was special. That was unique.

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  You end up here in the book, you say, "My escort deposited me at the collection prison near Vin, which was nothing more than a bamboo pole, barn divided into individual cages, each with a pile of straw on the floor for sleeping. Ken had already arrived." So that's the first time you see Ken?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Actually, right after I was captured, they took, yeah, the first time I saw him, we were both blindfolded. They took me to a bomb shelter, right after I was captured. And I heard this guy breathing heavily. Now, Ken had been a wrestler. He was a New York State Wrestling Champion, and wrestled in college, and so his nose had been smashed. So when he breathed hard, you could hear him. And so, I said, "Is that you, Ken?" And the guards went out, had gone outside of that bomb shelter. He said, "Yeah, you okay?" And I said, "Yeah, you okay?" He said, "Yeah." They came right back in, dragged me out, and I didn't see him again till we got to Vin.

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Colonel Ted Minter and First Lieutenant Jim Warner, whose Marine F-4 Phantom jet had been shot down a few weeks earlier, were also there. We were kept isolated from each other and fed a small bowl of rice topped by a few greens twice a day. A day or so after my arrival, the camp commander, whom I derogatorily nicknamed Madman, summoned me for my first interrogation. According to the Geneva Convention, captured soldiers are required to provide name, rank, service number, and date of birth. Our code of conduct says that we should resist answering other questions. When I tried to stick with these big four, Madman went berserk. He called me a criminal and threatened to kill me on the spot. After I still refused to answer, he shouted at Command in Vietnamese. A nearby

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  guard jammed his AK-47 barrel against my head and chambered around. Still in shock of capture and unsure of how POWs had actually been treated, I decided to talk a bit more. Spying my F-4 aircrew checklist on the table, I admitted that I had been flying the F-4 Phantom out of Da Nang. Madman asked me several more questions about my unit and command structure. I stalled, then gave bogus answers to a couple, and did not nose to the rest. That was sufficient to end the interrogation without giving up any meaningful or accurate information other than the big four. The next evening, under the cover of darkness, the V... And this is what, this is your shorthand throughout the book for the Vietnamese captors. You call them the V. Shove the four of us back into the back of a truck.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Accompanied by several armed guards, we headed for Hanoi on a bomb crater-pocked Route 1A, the primary coastal route from north to south. With blindfold on and hands and feet tied, we crashed up and down on the hard steel truck bed like helpless pigs going to market. Market. Words cannot adequately describe the agony of that journey, which was heightened by the mental anguish of knowing that every bounce brought us closer to an uncertain fate in the infamous prisons of Hanoi.

• 1:05:59Jocko Willink?

  You end up there. Our section of the Hanoi Hilton was known to POWs as Little Vegas, because most Air Force fighter pilots had done some training at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The various wings of Little Vegas were appropriately named after some of the popular casino hotels of that era. The Desert Inn, Stardust, Golden Nugget, Riviera, The Mint, and Thunderbird. Our cell block. Four-man cells were typical, except for The Mint, which had three-and-a-half-foot-by-seven-foot rooms used for solitary confinement. Our cell in Thunderbird was six-and-a-half-feet-wide and seven-feet-deep, about the size of a small walk-in closet, and had masonry walls 16 inches thick.

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  One wall faced the central courtyard of Little Vegas, and its opposite wall fronted the main hallway. The side walls of our cell were separated from the walls of the neighboring cells by narrow hallways, so we could not tap messages through them to other POWs. Camp rules tacked to the inside of our cell made it clear that anyone communicating with another cell would be severely punished. Armed guards constantly patrolled the halls to ensure compliance.

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  The heavy door of our cell had an eight inch by 10 inch peephole with a hinged cover, which guards occasionally would flip open to threaten us and make sure we were behaving ourselves. There were four beds, about 30 inches wide, made from two by six boards that were bracketed to too high to the walls on either side of the doorway. The walking space between the bunk beds measured about 18 inches. From the high ceiling hung a single dim light bulb that burned night and day. Iron leg stocks at the foot of the beds gave this dark and depressing cell the ominous feel of a medieval dragon, a mid medieval dungeon. At least three times a day, seven days a week, the V piped in propaganda through a

• 1:07:55Jocko Willink?

  soapbox speaker, also called camp radio, attached high on one wall. That's a rough, uh, that's, that just sounds off, sounds horrible. What are you thinking when you get into this place?

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  You know, I think you're just wondering what's gonna happen next. And the fact that I'm with three other guys, I'm a extrovert, outgoing guy, so that was pretty exciting to me to be with three other guys. And I was the youngest guy and the junior ranking guy, so I'm thinking I'm just gonna hang on, you know?

• 1:08:43Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you go on to say, "Just before bedtime, Hanoi Hannah, the North Vietnamese version of the infamous Tokyo Rose of World War II, shared communist half-truths and outright lies. She typically closed her broadcast each night in a sympathetic and sisterly tone by saying, 'G.I.s, why should you die 10,000 miles from home? Lay down your arms now and cross over to the people's side.'"

• 1:09:07Jocko Willink?

  The afternoon broadcasts were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Hanoi or Moscow. Tom Hayden, founder of the socialist front organization Students for a Democratic Society, was a regular speaker. Later in the war, the V welcomed the aid of Hayden's anti-war activist wife, film star Jane Fonda. "Isolated in that tiny cell, the four of us had plenty of time to get to know each other." Captain Fisher told us how he had endured brutal torture during his initial interrogation back at VIN to avoid answering any questions beyond the big four. At Madman's command, guards had tied his arms behind his back, tossed a rope over a

• 1:09:48Jocko Willink?

  high beam, and pulled Ken's arms up behind, lifting him until he was suspended with the weight of his body pulling and tearing at the muscles, ligaments, and nerves in his shoulders. "A star collegiate wrestler at New York State High School and New York State High School champion, Ken was mentally and physically one of the toughest men I'd ever known, but eventually the pain transformed him into a screaming idiot. As we all learned to do so, he had to fall back to the second line of resistance. At times, some POWs prayed for death as a relief, but the V, who were experts at torture, rarely obliged. Upon hearing Ken's story, I felt embarrassed and immature.

• 1:10:31Jocko Willink?

  He had suffered so much trying to follow the strict letter of the code, while I had given in after threats and a rifle jab to the head. When I shared my interrogation encounter with him, he said with sincere kindness, 'You did the best you could under the circumstances. We ended up at the same place, giving them something that was nothing.'" That experience gave me a glimpse of the character of this man, who would be a cellmate and inspirational leader for the next five years.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that little piece of leadership right there, you know, uh, here's this guy that withstood this, I mean, the description horrible torture. And you tell him, hey, I, but they put a gun in my head and I told him, you know, to get, you know, I told him some information and he just looked at you and he said, yeah, you did the best he could. That, that, that had to have left an impact on you with that, with him as an individual and him as a leader.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  It did. You know, and then the next time we got tortured.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Was the same thing. He went a lot longer than I did. I went a lot longer than somebody else did.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  You know, because Ken didn't have any experience with any of the other POWs who had been there. Uh, he was a very level-headed guy. He's just a great leader. You know, he was a really good thinker and even some of the things that he did after we came home. Like one time he had two squadron commanders when women first started flying in the air force and one of them was in charge of the flying squadron and the other one in charge of the student squadron. And they weren't handling this flying squadron very appropriately with the women there. And so Ken realized that he needed to do something and he didn't fire them. He switched them.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  He put the guy in, running the student squadron in charge of the flying squadron and the guy in charge of the flying squadron in charge of the student squadron and they both did great and they both got promoted to colonel. And it was just a brilliant move of how he saw what the situation was and what would be the best solution. And I think in, in the POW situation, he was a great example and, you know, I didn't have the choice of being put in the ropes or being hung by the ropes like he was in that case. My situation was, uh, you know, was death in my case and I think he saw that, you know, I didn't know that they wouldn't kill me. Why wouldn't they? You know?

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  So, um, I think he took all that into account in a really good way, but he realized. Probably at that point that I probably needed to be more confident. And when leaders are able to help their people believe that they let them know they believe in them. They become more effective and more confident and next time they're going to come through stronger. So that's a really important leadership point. And I've been very fortunate in my life, growing up in high school, college days and in the military. I've had leaders that believed in me. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't have leaders that believed in me.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  And and helped me become the person I am today. So I just think it's, he said, he showed me that in a great example there. And of course, later he relieved the Lieutenant Colonel of Command in that cell.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  So he was just very wise, not perfect. It, I remember after a few months and I finally decided, well, he's not perfect. I can forgive him for that, but for a while I thought he was just perfect.

• 1:14:34Jocko Willink?

  No, that's a question we get asked a lot is, you know, how can I get this individual to step up into a leadership and start becoming a leader? Put them in a leadership position. When you put someone in a leadership position, you're telling them, hey, I believe you should be in this leadership position. I believe that you can lead. And guess what they start doing? They start acting like a leader. Most of the time, occasionally you'll get someone that's not ready for it. They have, they don't have the right attitude yet, but oftentimes you just take someone, a junior individual and say, hey, I want you to run this operation or I want you to run this project. And they, they see that you believe in them and that makes them believe in themselves. It's a, it's a good move. You know, speaking of this relief, we'll get into this because I think it's an important, an important and bold move

• 1:15:18Jocko Willink?

  that happens here. So there's a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Minter and it's actually. Not his real name, it's a made up name to be gentle, I guess, with the situation.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Well, he had five sons and I thought that when I wrote that book, I wrote that for his sons. I didn't want to put his name there.

• 1:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Right. So Lieutenant Colonel Minter was summoned to more interrogations than the rest of us. That seemed natural at first as the senior ranking officer SRO in our room. He was potentially the highest value target for exploitation, but over time we realized that Minter's views were not aligned with our, ours or the policy of our government. A soldier has the obligation to do his best to uphold the code of conduct, which includes resisting exploitation by the enemy. What might be acceptable for a civilian back home in our free society is totally out of line for a military person, especially a POW. One day, Minter came back from an interrogation with pencil and paper and began writing an extensive description of the organization responsibilities of a Marine air wing.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  We cautioned him that his cooperation was a violation of the code of conduct, but he said he didn't see any problem. Later, when he was called out of the room for an interrogation, we looked at the paper and saw that it contained information that appeared accurate and of value to the enemy, a clear breach of the code. Captain Fisher, as the next senior officer in the cell, told Lieutenant Warner and me that he felt compelled to remove Lieutenant Colonel Minter from command. He asked if we agreed. It is a very serious and risky step for a captain to relieve a lieutenant colonel of command. If competent authority did not support Ken's action, he would likely face a court martial for insubordination.

• 1:17:01Jocko Willink?

  We also risked court martial for our involvement, but we knew Ken was right, so we gave him our wholehearted support. When Minter returned to the room, Ken said, "You're willing cooperation with the enemy in writing this paper as a violation of the code of conduct. I am removing you from command and ordering you to destroy that document and cease cooperating with the enemy. If you disobey these orders, I will personally seek a court martial against you after the war." That's friggin awesome.

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  Minter said he did not believe the code of conduct applied in this case because we were not in a declared war. In his opinion, everyone was free to do as he saw fit. That was a shockingly irresponsible attitude for a military officer. Only a few months previous, he had told friends that he hoped to make general. Now, his comments made him look like a selfish survivor who would forsake his beloved corps, his friends, his roommates, and even his country to save his hide. That evening Lieutenant Colonel Minter ripped up the document and threw it in the waste bucket, but his behavior over the subsequent years indicated that he never had a change of heart.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  So that's a bold, that's a bold move to make. You're the, you're more junior than the, than the senior officer, and you say, "Hey, you're not in charge anymore. I am. And by the way, I'm going to court martial you after the war if you resist this."

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it takes courage and believing, you know, it was obvious what was right, and there was evident enough evidence for him to make that decision. And so, he courageously stood up and did it. And that's the kind of guy Ken was. So I had this courageous role model, living with 24 hours a day, actually for five years. In fact, we'd been home a couple of years, and he'd only been married for two and a half years when he was captured. And his wife, we were, his wife and him, and my wife and I were at a social event, and she came up and says, "Lee Ellis, I want you to know, I've lived him with Ken Fisher longer than you have now."

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  But he was a great cellmate and a real, he helped me mature. You know, I, I needed maturity in lots of different ways. And watching him, learning from him, helped me to grow and to be the person that I needed to be. And so, I got tougher, I got wiser.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  And I would say, I don't know to what degree, you know, I would say this, but my own courage grew. I thought I was pretty courageous, but I think it, I gained courage. Because I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to live up to the code of conduct and be a good American and be faithful to my teammates, do my job. And so, I was willing to take risks. I was a pretty good risk taker. I'm in the camp, I was, found it easy to take risks in communicating and things like that, because I'm, I know I'm good at it. So, I figure I can do it and get away with it.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  So, they brought this three-page biography questionnaire for us to fill out, and we filled it out and put name, rank, service number, date of birth, except for a mentor who filled it in. And then they hauled the other three of us out to interrogate and threaten us. It was funny, because they had a new interrogator there, and he came in and he would say, "I don't want to, I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to bother you, but you're, you're a good person, you should do this, it'll be alright," you know, dah dah dah dah dah. He was a nice guy, okay? And then, we say no, and then the bad guy comes in, "We're gonna torture you." And they would go back and forth for an hour or two, and then when we didn't fill it in.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  So then we, they put us in handcuffs and tied our feet, and put us on our knees up against the wall with our hands over our head, which, you know, no big problem. But after six or eight hours, you start falling over, and then they start coming in and start kicking you and beating you, and you get back up, and after six or eight more hours, you've been up and down and been kicked and beaten and all of this. So finally, after, I don't know, the next day, probably thirty-six hours, I decided, "Well, I'm gonna give in. I'm gonna give them something. Ain't gonna be nothing, but I'm gonna..." And so I told them I would do it.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  And I filled in the three pages, and everything on it was a lie, except for my dad's first and last name. And everything else was just made up, you know? Education, money, what, everything was just totally made up.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Well, I get back to the room and I wasn't the first one back, but after a while, but, but when I did that, when I did that, when I agreed to do it, I laid there and cried. I was so sad because I was not tough enough to beat him. I felt so ashamed. I felt like the most worthless piece of crap that had ever won a uniform because I wasn't able to beat him. My duty was to beat him and I couldn't beat him. Now, I didn't give him anything, but the fact that I'd filled it in, that was the first time I'd ever really come to grips with the reality that at some point, you know, you gotta fall back to a

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  second round. Now, when they put, put the gun to my head earlier, I had, but that was a little different than just being tortured and being painful, uncomfortable, and being beaten and kicked and all that.

• 1:22:59Jocko Willink?

  And then when you got back to, how'd Ken Fisher do?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Well, he came back too, and he said he had done the same thing, but he was three or four hours longer than me. He survived, so he was tougher than me. And then-

• 1:23:13Jocko Willink?

  I'm laughing because that's like, you know, in the SEAL teams, you know, everyone's always competing with everybody else. And here you guys are competing to see who could take horrible torture longer.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, as quick as we got communication though, we found out that everybody had been through it and done the same thing. Everybody had filled out that biography. So then I thought, well, I guess I'm not quite as worthless as I thought. But Ken was good about it too. Again, he helped me understand that he didn't go much longer than I did, and he had done it too, but we didn't give him any information.

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, given a little bit more about your life there. The, for the first two years, the feeling of hunger never left us. Food was the most popular topic of conversation, especially when it was cold and our bodies needed more calories just to stay warm. Upon awakening in the winter months, I would realize I'd been dreaming about walking down a cafeteria line, selecting a breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, orange juice, and coffee. But in reality, our typical meal was a bowl of thin, greasy vegetable soup accompanied by either a cup of rice or an eight-inch baguette of bread. We joked that the menu had lots of variety. It changed three times a year. Since the V cooked outside in big pots, small bugs and white worms would regularly drop into the soup from overhanging trees.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Every August, weevils would hatch in the flowers, so the bread would be peppered with black buggers. Having nothing better to do one afternoon, I counted forty-four in one cubic inch of bread. There were too many to pick out, so we just ate them, figuring they were a good source of protein. Winters in Hanoi were surprisingly cold, with temperatures often in the low forties Fahrenheit, sometimes lower. The chilly air blowing in through our barred, open window, covered only with a rattan mat, made our unheated cell feel like an icebox. It was also cold because our meager rations provided insufficient energy to stay warm through the long nights. We survived by putting every bit of clothing we owned, two pairs of thin pajamas and a cotton sweater, and wrapping ourselves in our blanket.

• 1:25:22Jocko Willink?

  For the first two years, we had no socks, so our feet never got warm in the winter.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  The POW experience produced severe mental and emotional stress. Hour after hour, we found ourselves battling an army of oppressive feelings. From fear about what might happen to us, to anger at our captors for the way they treated us, to disappointment for being shot down, to guilt for leaving our families in the lurch and in the dark. Maintaining a positive mental outlook was crucial to survival. Military leaders expect life to be difficult, yet they tend to be optimistic about their ability to suc- their capability to- They are trained to make the best of the situation by solving problems instead of stewing about them, and they place a high value on cohesive teamwork. Fortunately, that's the kind of leadership we had in Hanoi. A few of our buddies who had more pessimistic

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  temperaments occasionally needed extra measures of encouragement from the rest of us. In return, they frequently contributed a healthy dose of realism that balanced our optimism with objectivity and discipline. Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale insightfully captured the importance of this dynamic tension in what Jim Collins called "The Stockdale Paradox." Quote, "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

• 1:27:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, just a critical way of thinking, right? Having the positive mindset that we can overcome whatever this challenge is, but not being Pollyanna and saying, "Oh yeah, we'll be fine." No, there's going to be struggles and we have to face our reality for what it is.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. It was very, very important. You know, I remember, I was shot down in November 67. In early 68, I said, you know, there's going to be an Olympics in Mexico City this summer. We'll be home because I knew that President Johnson really would have to do something with the war to get reelected. That was my thinking. I didn't know it, but that was my thinking. I said, "They will end this war and we'll be home by the summer. I'm gonna go to Mexico City and go to the Olympics." Well, July comes and I moved to Sante, and still there, and I said, "Well, I've made it seven months. I can make it for another year."

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Well, that was one more year, the summer of 69. I said, "I can make it two more years." But it was really three, three and a half. So, you know, you, the POWs, it became our way of life.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  And the fact that we had great leadership, the fact that we did get communication, we communicated covertly, but we were able to fight as a team with a common enemy. And to care about each other and look after each other, we would risk our lives to get to somebody and say, "Man, we're proud of you. Hang in there. We ain't leaving without you." So it was just, the leadership, the teamwork, and the commitment of our leaders, that they got tortured all the time. And they would do things much worse than we would do, and actually, but they would bounce right back and come back because they did the best

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  they could. And they bounced back and they put out good policies and they lived by them. It was an amazing experience. That's why I wrote that book, is I think that just the principles that we learned and lived by there are good everywhere, you know? Yeah, no doubt about it. And here's the thing about it, you couldn't hide, you couldn't pretend, because somebody was going to be watching you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There was no way you could hide anything, so you just confessed it all up front. And I think there's a pride piece

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  in, you know, confessing, coming back to the cell and saying, "I did fill out that three-page biography, but I didn't tell them anything honest, nothing real, no true facts, except for my dad's name." But it was still painful at times. But I think we realized that that was the way of life.

• 1:30:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's, you capture some of that in here. You say, "When you are at the mercy of an enemy who has the power to force you to do things against your will, "the psychological impact can be unimaginably depressing and debilitating. "His goal is to break you and you must constantly fight to maintain your self-respect and optimism. "Most of us did this in two primary ways. "First, we fought to maintain our belief in ourselves and our competency by resisting the enemy "and exercising our autonomy at every opportunity. "In order to demonstrate that our lives still had worth and we were not just helpless, "we had to find ways to get our licks in, often using tricks and subtle acts of rebellions as weapons." "Subtle acts of rebellion as weapons. "Every time a POW outsmarted the V, no matter how trivial the incident,

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  "the other POWs were encouraged and emboldened." And I really like that idea. You know, in the modern era of working out, of lifting weights and doing workouts, "they have something they call scalable workouts, meaning if we're gonna do "a weightlifting exercise, if we're gonna deadlift, "and I can deadlift 300 and you can deadlift 500, "we both do the workout, but I'm just lifting less weight than you, "but we're still both gonna go and do our best." And I wrote down here a note that said "scaled victories", "because anything that you could do to just get a shot at the V "was like a victory that y'all could celebrate."

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's so good for morale. And the fact that, the fact that you've got all kinds of jokes in here. I mean, you guys would fill out information and, you know, it'd be the, "Lieutenant Clark Kent was the person you talk about." Just all these like jokes that you would play. Or every time someone would sneeze, or there was a guy that would sneeze, that would sneeze, "you know, every one of his sneeze would be, 'Horse shit.'"

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Jocko Willink?

  You know, and everyone would hear it, all you guys would hear it. There was a guy that had to, you know, talk about the, "when they talk about ho Chi Minh, they call him Horse Shemin." You know, so Lieutenant Paul Galante.

• 1:32:17Jocko Willink?

  You know, he's, he's in this, he's getting forced to take a picture, a propaganda picture. And in the picture, you can see he's, he's got his middle fingers up on both hands. And, uh, I've got this, at some point in my life, I'm going to get all these, well, certain black and white photos that mean a lot to me, hung up. And that's one of those photos I'm going to put up there. It's just, you can see him, it says neat and clean. I don't know why they have that word up there, but they have neat and clean above him on the wall. And he's sitting there and he's having his photograph taken and you look at his hands and he's flipping off the camera, both fingers.

• 1:32:56Jocko Willink?

  And those were little victories, little scaled victories that you guys had to, to keep the positive attitude, even when things are horrible.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to, you have to find a way to fight back and keep, and doing, fighting back in that way, gave us some victories and made us feel like, well, you know, they may be in control, but we still control some things. And that, that made everybody feel good. It made the individual feel good. And, uh, it just became a way of life. We're going to look for ways to make them look bad and us look good.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  You know, they're the enemy.

• 1:33:38Jocko Willink?

  You were able to do it a lot. Uh, you know, in the book, after you talk about that, that torture that you went through for the document, you go in there and you, you talk about John McCain. And, you know, just a powerful story about John McCain. And at one point, you know, they're trying to get him, you know, his dad's an admiral. They're trying to use him as a propaganda piece. They're torturing him, but not only they're torturing him, what even might be more effective is they're saying, hey, you can go home early. They're saying, hey, you, you should go home. They tell him that the president's telling him to go home. They're just trying to get him to break ranks.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:20Jocko Willink?

  And at one point, uh, he, he's like answering as loud as he can so that everyone can hear, he's saying, I'm not going home. I'm, I'm not going home until it's my turn. How, how impactful was that for you guys to hear?

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Well, it was huge because.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  You know, when to think about going home when you're a POW, I mean, that's a hard place to be put in. You know, he had wife and kids back home. His father was an admiral. He'd been had broke arm, both arms were broken when he was captured when he jumped out of the airplane. The injury from the ejection was so bad, he couldn't even feed himself. So he'd been through a lot of suffering. But for him to yell out, you know, it was it was a double whammy. Because in one way, he's saying to the guys, I'm with you guys. And the other way, he was saying to the enemy, I ain't gonna do what you want me to do. So it was a double whammy, and it was very powerful, very powerful. And, you know, he

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  was always kind of a quick thinker to make trouble. That was part of his reputation.

• 1:35:29Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't he like last at the Naval Academy in his class or something like this?

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  And I was reading his story, it's being written right now, his first marriage, about that story and all. And he was always kind of a wild and willy guy, you know. So he played that role there. He was courageous, but also willing to take some risk.

• 1:35:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's something about the guys that are gonna go fight in war. And there's a decent chance that if you want to dedicate your life to going and fighting wars, there's a decent chance you might not be the best follower of rules, you know. That's just the way it is. You might be a little bit, have a tendency, you know, I talk about the SEAL teams, like, there's a, there's like a criminal element to your brain for a lot of guys in the SEAL teams. Just, hey, what do you want to do? What do you want to do when you grow up? I want to go and shoot machine guns at people. That's not a normal thing to be thinking. So you got these guys, you got, you know, it's like, it's like a good attack dog, right? A good attack dog, you don't want as a family dog, right? You

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  don't want to, you don't want an attack dog in your house.

• 1:36:39Jocko Willink?

  You want them on the battlefield, but you don't want them in your house, so you don't want them in your neighborhood.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:44Jocko Willink?

  You can have them really, really well-trained, then you can have one in your house, maybe, but you're still gonna watch it. So, you know, if you get a guy like McCain, who's the last in his class at the Naval Academy and, you know, has a reputation for kind of causing problems, that's exactly the kind of guy you want in these cases.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Yep. It was, um, we needed all different kinds of people there, but we're all similar in a lot of ways. Because you can't go through flight school, you know, physically, mentally, go through all the requirements of flight school, go through the training and then become a fighter pilot, uh, without having something similar to the other people. In fact, uh, there's a book I have, I brought with me today, I wish I, uh, showed you that, but there are five categories of similarities between fighter pilots, and one of them is that they're, they're very aggressive and risk-takers, but they're also affiliative. They like to be around people, so they can tell their war stories too, you know?

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  And so it made a, it made a good team, the fact that we were team players, but we were also capable of operating on our own and being confident about going and executing a mission. Uh, I think that was consistent. Our guys were willing to take risks and, uh, yet they wanted to be together and take care of each other. It didn't, it wasn't okay to be not concerned about your teammates.

• 1:38:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know, it's, uh, when people ask me what makes a good SEAL, it's a very easy answer to give. It's the, the one that's gonna take care of his team and put, put the team ahead of himself.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a good SEAL.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you give a really... Crazy and horrific description of um, who is it? Reisner, Lieutenant Colonel Robbie Reisner. Yeah. And he had like a picture, a picture of his family or something and, and they, the V wanted it to use it for propaganda. He, he ripped it up and threw it in the bottom of the, of the, of the shit can that you had in the, in the cell. And so they are, they want to get this picture. So they torture him. Here you go. Go into the book here. In an effort to force him to produce the photos, the guards severely beat Robbie and put him through rope torture. The ropes, or pretzel, as it was some, sometimes

• 1:39:10Jocko Willink?

  called, was a terrifying and brutal method for breaking POWs. After the prisoner's legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torture would push the bound arms up and over the head while applying pressure with a knee to the victim's back. During torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs go to sleep, but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the dead limbs, causing excruciating pain. When the V eventually learned what Reisner had done with the photos, they furiously inflicted more torture upon Robbie, until he agreed to sign a confession and an apology for committing,

• 1:39:55Jocko Willink?

  quote, grave crimes. Under such severe torture, no POW could resist signing, signing these four statements. We took some comfort in the fact that they invariably sounded phony because they were dictated by the V using awkward sentence structure and expressions that no American would use. Sometimes they were so ridiculous that they made the V look foolish. After torture, the guards boarded up the window in Reisner's cell, making it so dark that he couldn't see the walls. Robbie had never been afraid of the dark, but he immediately began to have panic attacks. In later describing this episode, he said, "It was as if I had an animal on my back. Absolute panic set in. The fact that I could not control this thing driving me caused me to be even more panic-stricken. Sheer desolation

• 1:40:39Jocko Willink?

  permeated the miserable dark cell I lived in 24 hours a day."

• 1:40:45Jocko Willink?

  Reisner's only relief was to keep moving and praying. He would walk around his cell, often covering as many as 20 miles a day, and do pushups and situps until he was exhausted enough to fall asleep. If he awakened during the night, he had to resume exercising until he was again exhausted enough to sleep. It was a maddening existence. At times, he wanted to scream, but since that would bring more torture, he would hide under his mosquito net, stuff something in his mouth, wrap his blanket around his head, and just holler until the anxiety eased. Often, he had to talk himself into making it through one more minute, and then one more minute. As he put it, quote, "I literally lived one minute at a time." After 10 months of darkness,

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  the night finally passed. In June 1968, the V removed Robbie into the Golden Nugget section of Little Vegas. From our cell, about 40 feet away, we heard him moaning and screaming and nightmares throughout the first night. The next day, when Robbie's shutters were opened, I saw his tired, but smiling face for the first time. During siesta, while the guards were generally less alert, Reisner and I made contact. Over the next few days, he shared his story in basic guidance by writing with his index finger on his open palm, one letter of the alphabet at a time. It was clear that he had a lot of fight left in him. His courage served as an inspiration for the rest of us in the months and years ahead.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  I mean, solitary confinement is one thing, but solitary confinement in complete darkness for 10 months?

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  300 days.

• 1:42:30Jocko Willink?

  And the first time you see him, he's got a smile on his face.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  He looked like an old, old man. He was 44 or so by that time, but he looked in his 60s. He was so wrinkled and pitiful looking, but he smiled, and I could tell he was exercising. And it was just amazing, you know? He was positive.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  You know, he, I use, when I'm speaking, I use three of our senior leaders, Reisner, Stockdale, and Denton as an example. And they were all different personalities. Stockdale was a very introverted, results, mission-focused guy, stoic. Denton was a very outgoing politician kind of guy. And Reisner had some of both. He was, you know, kind of a mixture of that 20% of the population had some of both. But Reisner was just an incredible guy. He was so honest. And he was the senior ranking officer there, except for when we had some,

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  three colonels captured in late 1967, but they kept them isolated from us. So Reisner was the acting commander of all. Denton was, I mean, Stockdale was a senior naval officer. But these three guys, they supported each other, and they just provided a great example. Reisner had incredible ability to bounce back and be positive, and do the shameful things he did, like take all that torture and then write that confession or whatever it was, and then bounce back again.

• 1:44:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and, and part of it, you know, when you talked about this, taking ownership when you do something, and the fact that you say, hey, look, this is what I went through, and this is what I did. And, and the fact that everyone just kind of was honest with each other. You know, I've always told people, when you take ownership of something, it's like overcoming an obstacle, but once you get on the other side, you go, I feel so much better. You know, you get caught in a lie, you're making something up, you're not telling your parents the truth, you're not telling your team the truth about what's going on. You feel that heavy burden. And the minute you say, hey, listen, everybody, I got to talk to you. The plan that I came up with, it's not working, and we need to change it. Like, it's so liberating to do that. And, and you know, I often talk about,

• 1:44:57Jocko Willink?

  you know, if you want to get through some trauma that you've been through. You gotta own it and say, hey, this is what I did. Here's what I think I should have done, you know. When you're in combat, things happen in combat. You know, a lot of veterans suffer from this. You're in combat, things don't go the way you want them to go.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:16Jocko Willink?

  And you look at it and say, hey, this is what I think I could have done better. This, I should have made this move. I should have moved left instead of right, or right instead of left, or whatever the case may be. That I think helps you get through these things. And it seems like that helps so many people in the camp, both when it's happening, right after it happens. And then, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, the way that you all came back. I talked about it with, with Charlie Plum and, and William Reader as well. Psychologically, for the absolute hell you all had lived through, psychologically, you were actually, you actually were, were, did great in comparison. And I think a lot of that, in my, my assessment, as I look at it now,

• 1:45:59Jocko Willink?

  had to do with the fact that you all took ownership of what you did. You, you took ownership of your limitations, right? Hey, I can only take so much of this and I signed that paper.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Yep. You know, I think it, it really did help us to be okay with ourselves. Gave us actually more confidence in the long run of dealing with things. And the other thing that happened was the fact that we lived together. You couldn't hide things, you know? People are gonna see you. You can, it's gonna come out. And so we knew that. And so therefore it just, we lived totally transparently, completely transparently with each other. And so it was just, that made us really so much stronger and healthier. It increased our teamwork and our trust for each other.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Because if something went bad, we knew we'd find out right away. And of course, then being locked up like that, and we could talk about this later, but I want to make sure to mention it now, is that because of what the wives and families did back home, they got our torture stopped in late 69 and early 70. Changed the policy, the US government changed the policy to the communist government. And so, everybody in the world was putting pressure on them about our treatment. And so, when Ho Chi Minh died in September 69, as soon as they quit celebrating his funeral, and the new leaders

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  came in, they started rearranging the treatment. And so, the last three years we were there, it was more live and let live. And we had time to decompress and get over our trauma with people who had been through worse than we had. So, I feel bad about what I went through, but you've been here two years longer, and you were tortured with the ropes three times, and I didn't go through the ropes. Now, I can't feel bad about what has happened to me. I gotta feel bad about what happened to you. And we got so much healthier that

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  POW PTSD is like 4%. POW PTSD is much lower than combat veterans, because we had people to talk through who had been through worse than we had for years, locked up with them 24 hours a day. See, we didn't just get on the airplane and come home, and your buddies died over here today, and tomorrow you fly back home and you're having dinner with your family, and you're thinking about the trauma that. We had a totally different situation. So, we came home very, very healthy because of that, and because of many other things we did while we were there.

• 1:48:51Jocko Willink?

  You talk about Reisner here. You say Reisner's first camp, first stint as camp SRO did not last long. The V found a written note that contained his guidance and connected it back to him, determined to squelch his leadership in the camps. They pulled Reisner out of the zoo camp in Hanoi and returned him to Heartbreak Hotel in the Hanoi Hilton and began extensive torture to break him. Because the process for selecting SRO leaders was clearly established, Commander Jerry Denton, the next ranking officer at the zoo, immediately stepped into the line of fire. As part of the dramatic change in treatment in the fall of 1965, the V were now torturing men to extract propaganda statements. Denton reformed Reisner's policy and added, "No writing,

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  no taping. Take torture until you're in danger of losing mental faculties and then give a phony story. Die before giving classified information. If broken, don't despair. Bounce back as soon as you can to the hard line. Remember, unity above self." Denton's simple motto of unity above self provided a strong cultural bond for all of us, even when we were isolated or shuffled from one camp to another. When Denton's strong leadership became evident to the V, they ushered him off to the torture chamber, followed by solitary confinement. Fortunately, James Bond came to the rescue. James Bond Stockdale, that is. Bouncing back from one of his extended

• 1:50:14Jocko Willink?

  periods of abuse in solitary confinement, he took command from his cell in Little Vegas, Thunderbird Cell Block, in the spring of 1967. One of his first tasks was to update the policies previously disseminated by Reisner and Denton using the clever acronym, "BACK US." And so here you go through the acronym, "BACK US." B, bowing. Resist bowing in public in front of outsiders. Make the V use force. And this was because the Vietnamese, that was a show of respect, so we're not doing it. Air. A, air. Stay off the air. Make no recordings for radio and no tapes. C, crimes. Don't admit to any crimes.

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  K, kiss. Don't kiss the enemy goodbye. If POWs were released, Stockdale did not want them to be overly generous in their comments on the way out. And the last is, is us. Unity over self. Stay united. Take care of each other. The big three, Reisner, Stockdale, and Denton, established the code of conduct as the goal, while recognizing that not even the toughest men had been able to live up to a purely literal interpretation. Over time, a somewhat loose tight culture evolved. It provided strong, clear guidelines, yet allowed each cell SRO and even each individual to exercise some judgment in dealing with various situations.

• 1:51:41Jocko Willink?

  These goals and expectations empowered a common cultural mindset that allowed us to operate with unity across half a dozen camps over a period of several years, whether we were in solitary confinement or locked in large cells. When there was disagreement about local interpretation, we had discussions that sometimes turned into passionate arguments before decisions were made. When necessary, SROs changed or adapted policies as a result of lessons learned.

• 1:52:12Jocko Willink?

  So, this is just a, you know, I, one of the laws of combat that Dave and I talk about a lot, it's in Extreme Owners, it's what we're talking about all the time, is decentralized command. And this, this decentralized command, where this solid guidance came out and it allowed everybody in prison camps, in 12 different camps, the frontline person may not communicate with anybody for, for extended periods of times, but they understand what the goal is and they can all move in the right direction towards that strategic goal. And they even know there's flexibility in that, in the way that they get there. This is a very powerful lesson here.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. You know, the new chief of staff of the Air Force is pushing that right now is to set the boundaries, the big picture boundaries, and let people at the lower levels operate. And I think he sees that. But yes, it was powerful for us because communication was hard. We were separated. We were moved different places, different camps. They were always, they'd pull out some people in one camp and move them to another camp. And for various, you know, anytime you have a bureaucracy, they make decisions up there. The communists were the same. We can never could figure out some of their moves. But the reality was that we understood what our mission was, what our goals were, and what the, the few

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  boundaries and rules that we needed, and within that, we're gonna go for it.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, good example of that is you, you talking here about receiving care packages, which you were occasionally allowed to receive these care packages. Was that from your families or sending these?

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were like, they were like packages from family, yeah.

• 1:53:50Jocko Willink?

  So, your first one that you get, you know, you had to apply this, these principles, because in it, you had to make, in order to get the package, and this package is like, I mean, heaven sent, for all practical purposes. It could have food, it could have clothes, it could have, I mean, just not to mention communication from your loved ones. And yet they wanted you to sign something, some kind of confession.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Uh, was, uh, basically a paper, a little one pager that said, in accordance with their lenient and humane policy.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  And that was too much for you?

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Too much.

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  And so you decided, no, don't want the package?

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54:31Jocko Willink?

  And the next time, another package came and they actually removed that statement?

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  No more statements. Never had one again.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  And you got, you took your package?

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54:41Jocko Willink?

  What was in the package?

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  Oh, let's see, there was some coffee and there was some candy and there was some socks.

• 1:54:50Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  That's what I wanted, some socks, uh, maybe a piece of fruitcake. Just little things like that.

• 1:54:58Jocko Willink?

  I was on deployment and, uh, you know, my wife, I, my wife's at home with three kids. They're all under the age of like six. So it's like six, four and two. I mean, she's just overwhelmed and so she's not worried about me. I'm overseas. Like she's got bigger, she's got bigger problems to solve on a daily basis. And, you know, guys in the platoons are getting their packages from their wives and from their parents and stuff. You know, big, nice, beautiful packages. Finally, like three months into deployment, I get a package from, from my wife. And it's got, I like honey roasted peanuts. And so, and so there's a, there's a little can of honey roasted peanuts, but they'd already been opened. Half eaten and they were taped back shut.

• 1:55:43Jocko Willink?

  And I say, God bless her. She's doing the best she can.

• 1:55:48Jocko Willink?

  One of the kids got into it or whatever. So she said, I'll throw some tape on it. We'll be all right.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. You gotta give them credit.

• 1:55:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Like I said, I, she was dealing with three little kids and not, not worried about, definitely not worried about me. Um,

• 1:56:07Jocko Willink?

  we talked a little bit about communication and the importance of communication and the communication. I mean, we're, we're, we're sitting here talking about it, you know, about you, they're putting out word and, and how the information, you knew this person, respected this person and you got guidance and all these things are happening. This is all happening in the most restrictive imaginable communication environment. And so I'm going to go to the book here, you say, it would be safe to say that in the early, early years in small cells, 50% of our waking hours were spent in covert communications. Later in larger cells, fewer people were needed and with our newer technologies and a less threatening environment, communications were much more efficient.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  Over the years, we used tap code, hand code, flash code, Morris code, cough hack spit code, sweeping code, voices through the walls, notes over the walls, notes under the doors and more.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Because they knew it was our primary tool for resistance, the V tried hard to stop us, but they never could.

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  Because of our poor treatment, now I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. So you had all these different methodologies for communicating. And the fact that you, you, you, you mentioned this in here, um, you got this tap code, the, the matrix, the five, five by five matrix, which is a way of communicating. And when I was a young SEAL, I was a radioman and we had to learn Morse code.

• 1:57:42Jocko Willink?

  And I was probably pretty close to the point where I could kinda do it without thinking about it, but I never quite got there. But you know, you're talking in the book at, at some point you could just do it. I mean, it was like without thinking. The letter A was just, you could immediately just get it done.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  And there was a whole group of you that could, that could communicate on this high level with these tap codes. And that's how all this information was passed. It's just incredible story.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  And that tap code tapping through to somebody on the other side of the wall, especially in the early years where there were a couple of guys in solitary confinement and had gone through torture and all. It was like, uh, it was the most incredible thing to keep them, uh, motivated, inspired, connected, emotionally, uh, mentally going. And you know, in fact, one guy was in solitary confinement and he wanted to know about, uh, he wanted, he wanted to know about Shakespeare. So some guys next to him knew of some Shakespeare stuff. And, and they got them all through, gave them all they could remember.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  And then they just made it up because they didn't want to tell him, we don't know anymore. So whatever it was, we were gonna share it and make it interesting. Guys would share all sorts of information.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  I remember I at times, you know, you you're in a cell with four or five guys like I was at a Sante and so you know them, you've been locked up with them for a while and so you get off on your own project. So one time I farmed for two months and there was a farmer from Kansas living next door Leroy Stutz and so I got whenever I needed a question answered about farming I wasn't quite sure about I'd ask through the wall I would ask Leroy and he would tell me what a how many feet of barbed wire when a roll of barbed wire okay and how much a roll of barbed wire normally costs and then I'd go back and

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  calculate so I was fencing in a hundred and twenty acres of farm there that day. So you go through doing all these kinds of things and one time and other time I was gonna be a lawyer when I went home I was just decided okay what if I wanted to do something different I'd be a lawyer and it took me a month and I mean I would think for this for hours every day so I had to find out more about different kinds of law so I'd ask the guys questions and so finally I decided I'd be a tax lawyer and I'd go to the University of Virginia.

• 2:00:22Jocko Willink?

  And all this is done through tapping?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  But some of this was going back you know I was finding a lot so much with tap code and then we rolled up the blankets and we could talk through it because a blanket would be a muffler like a little donut or like a horse collar you put your face in it real tight and you could talk real loud and they couldn't hear you out there and the guy on the other side could hear you everything you said and I would ask questions that way so I could get information to you know work on my project.

• 2:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of the tap code you say because of poor treatment Smitty Harris and Fred Flom First Lieutenant USAF were fighting losing battles with debilitating gastrointestinal disease through a crack in our door we watched Smitty and Fred stagger across the courtyard to the bathhouse their emaciated bodies reminiscent of survivors of Auschwitz and Bataan. Smitty's POW weight had dwindled from a hundred and thirty pounds to about ninety Fred had dropped from a hundred and forty down to about one ten. Sante SRO Lieutenant Commander Render Creighton realized it would take drastic action to save the lives of these men. Using the tap code, he sent an urgent message that

• 2:01:33Jocko Willink?

  was transmitted across the entire compound. "Tell every English-speaking Vietnamese you meet that the camp commander must do something for Harris and Flom, or his superiors in Hanoi are going to be very upset with him about what is going to happen in this camp."

• 2:01:51Jocko Willink?

  By threatening to make trouble, we were virtually inviting reprisal. This ploy was especially risky because it revealed that we had a cohesive team with good communications. Once the enemy realized we were organized as a military unit with a functioning operational leader, they just might try to break us. Nevertheless, the seriousness of the situation justified the risk. The next day, POWs across the camp delivered the bold, agreed-upon message in rapid-fire succession. If only one or two guards had received the message, the V would have downplayed it. But our over-communication resounded across the camp like a string of firecrackers that couldn't be ignored. Evidently, the V cap commander, camp commander, a fearful flitter's job, was convinced we had the will and capability to carry out

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  our threat. Three days after the message hit, Smitty and Fred were taken to a field hospital a few miles away and given fluoroscope. This was followed by two shots twice daily that were apparently vitamins and antibiotics. Their improvement was slow but steady. A year later, they were back to their normal POW weight. It's superbly fitting that the code was instrumental, that the code that was instrumental in saving Smitty and Harris's life, because Smitty was the man who saved all of us by bringing the tap code to the POW camps. In fact, he was known to us as the code bearer. When Smitty was in survival school, he alone stayed after class one day to learn about the code used by POWs in World War II. Then, as one of the first POWs in the war, he passed

• 2:03:19Jocko Willink?

  this precious gift on to his fellow prisoners. Now, four years later, the code had come full circle and saved his life.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Amazing. And you, the first time you got like the little bit of the code someone's telling you through your window, but you didn't get the

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Missing letter.

• 2:03:37Jocko Willink?

  The missing letter, that C and K, there's no K.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:40Jocko Willink?

  It's just five by five, 25 letters in the alphabet, you remove K.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, Smitty's 93, he'll be 94 next April. He was a POW for almost eight years. I think he was number five or six. And his wife was, had two little girls, five and three, I think, and she was six months pregnant with their son. But incredible guy. I lived with Smitty for a couple of years and in the same camp with him for probably close to five years. But we stayed really close friends and he has a book out, Tap Code, that came out three years ago, and I wrote the foreword to it to talk about Smitty and what a great guy he was and what a great example he was for me.

• 2:04:23Jocko Willink?

  You, you mentioned the, the being at Sante for a while, and I, that's how we originally got connected because I had Terry Butler on, who is a Sante raider, and he's the one that connected with me, with you. How, when the Sante raid happened, how did you guys hear about it? What did it do to you guys? What did you think about it?

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  Well, we were, we had moved to this new showplace camp because they wanted to show the world how well we're being treated. And we heard the bombs going off, there was a bomb attack to kind of distract attention. And some, we knew something was happening that night. And then the next day, we could tell by the guards, the way they were acting and the turnkeys and guards were like, uh. And then the next morning, we moved back to Hanoi. They loaded us all up and they'd built this camp and put 205, four quadrants of about 50 each in one camp. We're in separate quadrants, but we're all in one location. So it was 205 of us there.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  And they, 48 hours, within 48 hours, they moved all of us back to Hanoi and put us into the cell, the large rooms, cells where the Vietnamese had been back for the early years. We had never been in there. And so we went into these big cells and went into this 1800 square foot cell with 52 guys in there. No walls in there, just 1800 open bay barracks type thing, concrete slab to sleep on. But back to Sante, hearing it, hearing it that night, we heard it from that showplace camp, we didn't know what was happening. And then because they got scared and moved

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  us back, we started listening and one of the guys heard on their propaganda, something about that Barry Goldwater had said that we could drop men in downtown Hanoi or something like that, and they couldn't stop us or something. And that sounded strange. And then the next time we really found out was when some of the guys, a new shoot down, told us. And that was a while later, maybe about a year later, that we really found out for sure what had happened.

• 2:06:47Jocko Willink?

  How exalting was it to be in a room with 50 other people and have all these other people to interact with?

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was a celebration because we had, I mean, there were some hard parts to it, but they, the good things overwhelmed the difficult parts because within a couple of weeks, a senior ranking officer looked around and found the one guy who had been a college instructor in the, in the group. He'd been recalled on active duty in 1962 and stayed in the air force. And Captain Tom Story, he said, Tom, I'm putting you in charge of the education program. I want to make it happen. Tom found a piece of broken brick tile out in the yard, brought it in and went over on the concrete slab floor

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  over in the corner and started writing down subjects to study, math, German, French, Spanish, Russian, art, and had us go by and put a mark under the ones we wanted to study. So he took a survey and then he recruited teachers.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  And so, within three or four weeks, we had Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays classes, three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. We had Toastmasters, informal on Tuesday nights on one end of the room, formal on Thursday nights, and we had every kind of class you can think of. I was studying Spanish, French, and German, teaching beginning French. I took differential calculus from a Naval Academy guy, and we were writing problems over in the corner with that piece of broken brick tile, and he was teaching me. So, I mean, we got busy, man. We were so busy. You talk

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  about Paul Galany. Paul Galany and I, when they're together, and we would speak Spanish, French, and German for 10 minutes each, three or four days a week. We got to the point where we were dreaming in foreign languages. I'd be speaking Spanish to somebody in a foreign language, I didn't even have to carry on a conversation with them in my dreams. So, that's what our life became.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the amount of effort that you guys made. In the section here, you say, "A number of officers developed a rigorous curriculum and volunteered to teach you the various components of the course." This was, you wanted to teach an officer candidate school for the three Air Force enlisted guys. So, you guys put together a course of instruction for these enlisted Air Force guys, and you say this, "When the three men returned home, the US Congress approved the program and offered the candidates commissions as second lieutenants in the US Air Force. One was so close to retirement, he declined. The other two men accepted their commissions and enjoyed successful careers."

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:09:41Jocko Willink?

  Unbelievable. You go on to say, "The lack of books or outside resources did not limit our continuous learning in the POW camps. We relied on recall of past education, and there was a lack of clarity..." When there was a lack of clarity on the subject, we tried to get a consensus of the best minds. Eventually, many areas were codified into what we called Hanoi fact, meaning it was accepted as true until we were released and could verify the information. The in-house joke was that some men whose education had been slighted before capture and now proudly posed as experts had been totally educated by Hanoi fact. Fortunately, it turned out our facts were amazingly accurate. Our investment in developing and development has paid big dividends in the years since. I kid, I believe they took guys just, yup, yeah, you guys learned.

• 2:10:24Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna give you guys your commission. Incredible.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, similarly, in the same group, I think it was a group like them, if not the same group, there were four of them, four or five of them were married and about seven or eight of them were bachelors. And so the married guys did marriage counseling. Two days a week, they would teach a marriage course to the single guys. And one of the single guys said, well, some of what they said was true, but some of it was probably not the best in the world. But you know, they were listening, they were trying to learn about what it's like to be married when we go home.

• 2:11:02Jocko Willink?

  I want to go back to the code of conduct here again, or to back to the book here, talk about the code of conduct. You say, "We found that the code of conduct had to be interpreted in light of specific circumstances. How long a person should resist under torture before completing a biography or agreeing to read the propaganda news into a tape recorder, to be played over camp radio? Under what conditions should we try and escape? How much torture should someone take to avoid meeting with a peace delegation? These were not hypothetical issues that a detached executive made in a remote, top-floor, corner office would address for implementation by the rank and file. In the POW camps, the decision-makers knew they were likely to be the first to follow their own guidance."

• 2:11:47Jocko Willink?

  Reisner, Stockdale, and Denton made it clear that we were to refuse to participate in propaganda broadcasts, but under extreme torture, it was impossible to totally resist. As we learned from the experience of several men who did not come home, at some point, mind, body, and spirit break, causing loss of rational coherent thought and the ability to effectively function. Therefore, Reisner further clarified this policy by adding that we should, quote, "take torture indefinitely, but stop short of losing life, or limb, or mental faculties by falling back to a second line of defense." Having been pushed beyond his endurance several times, he knew that sometimes temporary submission

• 2:12:29Jocko Willink?

  was the only way to preserve the ability to fight. Because some POWs were simply tougher mentally and physically than others, local RSOs had the freedom to interpret resistance policies to suit the circumstances. Major Larry Guarino, am I saying that right? Guarino. Guarino, who heroically stood up to some of the worst treatment during the darkest days of the Zoo Camp, demonstrated wise discernment about how to effectively balance accomplishment of mission and care for the men. He said there are wide differences in people. A very few men, like Jim Kassler, Major, US Air Force, have the stamina and courage to stick to a hard line during severe punishment and continue to hold out.

• 2:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Most men, although they want to do a good job, will gamely resist the cruelties, but not for very long. Although our leaders were often tortured first and most, they did not pretend to be macho John Wayne heroes. On the contrary, they openly shared the pain and despair of their brokeness, helping us understand the enemy's tactics and the realities of what was and what was not possible. It would have been disastrous for the mission and for their credibility had they been less than totally honest with us about their experiences in the torture chambers. Mutual accountability and transparency in the face of a cruel enemy bonded us together tightly.

• 2:14:00Jocko Willink?

  An analysis conducted after the war by Headquarters US Air Force reflects the sacrifices and commitment made to achieve the mission. Nine faithful warriors died before they could return with honor. We lost eight brave men due to extreme torture and deprivation in the earlier years and one died of typhoid fever. More than 95% of the POWs were tortured. Approximately 40% of POWs were in solitary confinement more than six months. 20% were in solitary for more than a year. 10% were in solitary for more than two years. And several were in solitary more than four years.

• 2:14:42Jocko Willink?

  Considering the length of stay and the crowded conditions, our survival record was remarkable. Most of us made it back and our mental and health, mental and emotional state exceeded the predictions of most of the mental health professionals advising the DOD. The overall determination and devotion of this group to our mission was impressive. Of the nearly 500 POWs in our network, fewer than 10%, sorry, fewer than 10, only 2% willingly cooperated with the enemy. And it's, you know, again, from a leadership perspective, all this leadership was done tapping on walls and setting examples, just like, it's from a leadership perspective, it's incredible story.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Well, when you don't have a lot of news and no radio and no TV, you don't get a lot of news and what you get is usually focused on what's happening, how we're resisting, and that becomes the headlines. And you know where you are, you know what's gonna happen, and you've just gotta be able to face up to it and walk, walk that line one step at a time. I think that was...

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  Every day was an unknown and yet somehow we had to step out every day and be ready for whatever came our way and respond to it in a way that was honorable, that was courageous, that we would be willing to stand up to our boss and say, here's what I did and here's why I did it. And the amazing thing about this situation, I think one that made it so strong was that the bosses got tortured the most and they had to stand up and say, here's what I did and here's why and here's what happened. So the fact that our bosses were so vulnerable, they're very courageous and very tough, but they were vulnerable

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  about sharing what they had been through and what they had done. It set an example and it created a culture that was very special.

• 2:16:57Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of leadership and, you know, as I, as I, as we've gone through this book, this is a book about leadership and, and a book about, you know, what the human being can come up against. But it's absolutely a leadership book. I've been, we'll, we'll get to some of the leadership a little bit later, but I did want to jump into this point on leadership right now. You say this, leaders who balance the competing demands of results and relationships are able to push for the achievement of goals while eliciting the best from their people. It's as if they have two bank accounts. They make their, they make deposits in their results account by consistently accomplishing their goals and they build up capital in their relationship account by caring for their people as individuals of

• 2:17:42Jocko Willink?

  worth. In the first instance, they earn credibility with their superiors and in the second, they earn loyalty from their followers. Occasionally, leaders will need to make withdrawals from these bank accounts. For example, a leader who is being pressured by unrealistic expectations from above may need to draw on the credibility she's accumulated with her results bank account and say to her superiors, we need to adjust this timetable or we'll burn out our people. At other times, she may have to make a withdrawal from the relationship bank account and say to her team, "We'll have to work over the weekend to get this job done." With regard to balancing mission and people, Admiral Stockdale wisely said, "A leader must remember that he is responsible for his charges.

• 2:18:27Jocko Willink?

  He must tend to his flock, not only cracking the whip, but washing their feet when they are in need of help." Balancing results and relationships is a major leadership challenge. Some leaders are naturally gifted with the head, logic, and not very good with the heart, feelings. Others are the opposite. Only about 20% of the population has a natural ability with both. Even those with this tightrope walking capability often end up tilting toward a results-oriented style because results are typically what get noticed and rewarded. If your leadership style is unbalanced, the good news is that you don't have to reinvent yourself. To gain better balance, you simply have to develop some of the skills you lack.

• 2:19:12Jocko Willink?

  Simply put, you may either need to toughen up or soften up. This may sound artificial, but with practice, your adapted behaviors will feel more comfortable. They will never become totally natural, however, so you'll have to consistently and intentionally work at keeping your balance.

• 2:19:30Speaker 01

  I make a living on that right there. I've coached CEOs. I coached a CEO who was a West Point graduate, Army Ranger, had a Harvard MBA. And when I told him, when I confronted him, so to speak, I said, "You don't, you don't give any positive feedback to your team." He had a really good executive team. He says, "Well, you know, that's just not me." I said, "Wait a minute. You know better than that." I said, "Your people, they're all different kinds, and some of them need a lot more affirmation and feedback than others, but they all need to know that you believe in them, that you care about them, that you see how well they're doing."

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Well, we actually wrote him out a three-sentence affirmation for one of the VPs on his team. And I had him stand in front of the mirror and practice smiling, to the point that he felt, I said, "I want you to go to the point you feel almost ridiculous, smiling and energetic and enthusiastic when you say this." And he practiced, and he did it. And his team performance really went up. But I've coached him for two months, and when I finished, he said, the last day I was with him, he said, "Hey, can you stay five minutes after we finish today?" And I said, "Sure." He said, "I got somebody I want you to meet." So we finished.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  He jumps up, runs out in the hall, brings in a lady, and introduces her as his wife. And she said, "Well, I just wanted to meet you and say thank you, because we have one son, we have one child, one son, who's 13-years-old. And in the last two or three months, his relationship with our son has totally changed. He sits down and asks him questions, and listens to him, and smiles, and encourages him. Said, "It's just wonderful. Thank you." And I said, "Well, he did it. You know, he courageously learned how to do things." Well, 10-years later, I saw that CEO in a meeting in Atlanta. I said, "How are you doing?" He said, "Fine. How's your son doing?"

• 2:21:41Speaker 01

  "Oh, he graduated from college, and he's working at a bank now, and says, 'He and I are gonna run a half marathon together on Saturday.'" It just totally changed him. Here was a guy who was so results-oriented, he could not even think anything about feelings or relationships, or what people's needs were. But once he started letting people know that he cared about them and believed in them...

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  It totally changed his leadership and now he's the CEO of another company and they think he's the best CEO they've ever had.

• 2:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 2:22:18Jocko Willink?

  Leif and I wrote another book, which is called The Dichotomy of Leadership. And what the dichotomy of leadership is about is this. And there's all kinds of different dichotomies we talk about. The first chapter is about, hey, you've got these guys that you love more than anything else in the world. And you're going to send them out on missions that may get them killed. And how do you balance that? You gotta balance that.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:22:42Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta have, you gotta care about the men, but you've got to also accomplish the mission. Ultimately, if you don't take care of your men, you're not going to have anyone to execute the mission. So you have to prioritize taking care of your team, but you know, you've got the, the same exact theory here. It was just awesome for me to read it in, you know, different vocabulary, but the exact same message and holds true in any situation. And you know, that, that, that chapter or that title, Dichotomy of Leadership, was the last chapter in the book, Extreme Ownership. Because, you know, we said, hey, listen, you're going to be pulled in multiple different directions. You gotta stay balanced as a leader. That's the thing you gotta do. And there's a bunch of categories, you know, you could be a micromanager. If you go too far in management, you could be too hands off.

• 2:23:27Jocko Willink?

  No one knows what's going on. So communicating, you communicate too much, you communicate too little. So you want to be balanced. But we wrote that as one chapter, but as we went out and continued to work with companies, the biggest problem companies have, the biggest problem leaders have would be finding that balance. And then like you say in here, you know, people have what they tend towards, right? Some people tend towards, I just need to take care of everyone. And they take care of everyone to the point that they don't get anything done.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:23:56Jocko Willink?

  And you have people that tend towards, "I'm just gonna get the mission done and I don't care what happens. I don't care who's back I step on to get there." So.

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I quoted, I quoted your book Extreme Ownership and a couple of times in my books too, by the way, because I, I saw your mindset said what I wanted to say and I said, "Let Jaco say it."

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we, in the dichotomy of leadership, we pose all kinds of these opposing forces that you have as a leader. And the, the opposing force that you, that you phrase very succinctly is results versus relationship. Those are two things that are pulling you in opposite directions.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Mission and people, same thing.

• 2:24:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep, and you gotta stay balanced.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've been working in assessments of human behavior for 32 years. And the one thing I know is that 40% of the population is wired toward results, mission, focus. And 40% are wired more towards people, patience, relationship, social focus. And 20% have some of both. But to be a great leader, you have to do both. So you're gonna have to learn to adapt in certain situations to be either tougher or more affirming and kind. The thing that, the thing that everybody needs to understand, and this goes to the

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  POW, it goes to fighter pilot world, it goes to everywhere, is that every human being wants to feel valued and important, worthy. And when you as a leader are able to let them know that you value them, that you appreciate them, that you believe they have a future, you believe in their future, and that you're gonna help them develop, it totally changes their loyalty, their commitment, they're gonna work harder. They don't wanna let you down. But that's not easy for results, mission-focused leaders. That's just not part of their natural

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  mindset. You know, Richard Boyatzis, Dr. Richard Boyatzis, who was one of the co-authors of the Big Emotional Intelligence book that came out in 2002 or 2003, I have a video, two and a half minute video of him talking about the brain, the, the networks in the brain. And he said, "There's the task-focused network and the social network," which is very similar to what we're talking about here. Mission, people, results, relationship.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  And he said, "They can actually see with the MRIs of the brain, that when a person is working a problem, that the social network goes quiet and shuts down. And it's all focused on results, results, results, solving a problem." And he says, "But the problem is, you have to do both. And you have to learn to switch." And he said, "In our schools, our business schools, our MBA programs, so much of the time is spent on results, results, results, results. And they don't teach them much about learning to deal with people and let people know you care about them. That you appreciate them and that they're valuable, they're important."

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  And you know, there's another thing I've watched. There's a guy out in California, he's a PhD psychologist, and he talks about the monitoring of the child's brain. A baby six to nine months old, an MRI of a baby six to nine months old. When somebody smiles at them and cuddles to them, their prefrontal cortex develops in a healthy way. And so, the whole concept is that for a small child, unconditional love is the most positive thing. And people that have had a lot, their prefrontal cortex develops in a more healthy way.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  They have less problems working with people and doing their job too. But every human being wants to be cared about. And the more that... And I have a model now. It's called insecure, secure. Now, the left side is insecure. Excuse me. And this model, on the left side is insecure. On the right side of this continuum is secure. Secure is confident and humble, okay? Insecure has doubts, fears, shame, guilt. All these things that cause us to be insecure. Now, we all can be insecure in some places. So, we slide back and forth on this model.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  But healthy people spend most of their time over on the secure side. And as a leader, my goal and your goal should be, how can we help our people become more secure? Because the more secure they are, the more confident they're going to be in them be able to do things, but also they're going to be more humble and admit when they do it, don't do it. Okay. So how can you do that? You have to help them believe in themselves. What can you do to help? So I came up with a simple, the four A's, acknowledge their existence, accept them for who they are, show some appreciation and affirmation.

• 2:29:10Speaker 01

  And find, those have to be legitimate affirmations for something they've done, but make an effort to do that. One CEO coach, I had him put all the people's names across the top in a spreadsheet and all the things he needed to get to know about them down the side. Cause he said, I don't do that. I don't go down their office. I don't talk to them because that's not my job. And I said, well, I think it is. So he had, he was so results oriented. I had him check them off. Every time you go to that person's office and do that, you check it off. And he, that was how he learned how to do it.

• 2:29:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome stuff. Number one for me, a lot of times, you know, when you talk about how to build people's confidence and the four A's, great. Well, one of my favorite tools in leadership is leadership. My favorite tools in leadership is leadership. So I went through my whole career to this day, when I want someone, when I want to show someone I appreciate them, when I want to show them I trust them, I'm going to put in charge of stuff. I'm going to put them in leadership positions and that's going to elevate the way they feel about themselves. They're going to know that I trust them. They're going to know I appreciate them because I'm giving them more autonomy. So, so that's just totally in line. Another thing that we talk about at our company is, is something we call the leadership loop. And it's just things to think about as you're leading people and

• 2:30:39Jocko Willink?

  The heaviest weight when I'm making a leadership decision is what is this going to do to my leadership capital? So if I, if you know, Dave's got a project that's due and it's gonna, hey, look, the client wants it by, by Wednesday, and I know it's going to impact the way Dave's, you know, his weekend is going to ruin his weekend. I'm actually gonna weigh out, hey, is this worth the impact it's going to have to my leadership capital that I have with Dave? And maybe I say, you know what, I'm gonna call the client and say, hey, listen, we're gonna have to push this back a few days. Or I call Dave, you know, if it's, if it's gonna ruin the relationship with the client. Hey, Dave, this is, you know, I gotta cash in some of these chips, man. We gotta get this thing done. Um, where do you want to meet to get this thing worked on this weekend? Cause we gotta get this thing done. So, so that's again, just in line, different verbiage.

• 2:31:25Jocko Willink?

  And then the other thing is when it comes to results oriented, and I'm saying to myself, you know, man, for me to put some, for me to give Dave this project and give him some more autonomy.

• 2:31:38Jocko Willink?

  He can't do this as good as me. And so a lot of times, you know, people say, I just want to get it done. I want to get it done right. The problem with that is it's a short-term win because over time I haven't developed Dave into a, into a better leader that understands how to get these projects done. So I need to think of things in a strategic manner. So my goal becomes not the result, immediate results for this particular project. The goal becomes winning in a long-term strategic way where I've trained up not just Dave, but three or four other of his peers that can all step up and get this stuff done. Now we can win on a much broader scale and we're going to get much more profound strategic results.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Then if I just get stuff done myself, because that's what the result-oriented leader often wants to do.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  You believed in him.

• 2:32:30Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  When you did that, you believed in him and he don't want to let you down.

• 2:32:34Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it works.

• 2:32:37Jocko Willink?

  I had to read this part. You said, over at camp, over at plantation camp, Charlie Plum, Lieutenant JG, United States Navy, was the resident inventor, an engineer with a strong background in electronics. He developed more than a dozen devices to measure time, temperature and weight. He was well on his way to making a radio when the V discovered his stash of razor blades, nails, wire, spools and tin foil. Plum also scratched a keyboard on his bedboards and went over the notes until he could hear them in his head. So we had Charlie Plum on this, on this podcast, number 76 and number 95.

• 2:33:14Jocko Willink?

  So when you're in camp, you're memorizing each other's names, right? We're memorizing all the names of everyone. Do you remember Charlie Plum's name? When you were in camp?

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Jocko Willink?

  And then you met him afterwards?

• 2:33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:26Jocko Willink?

  Crazy, crazy.

• 2:33:30Jocko Willink?

  When you're in there and, and people, do you, do you sort of get to know people even though you've never even seen them?

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  Yes and no, because sometimes you might be with someone who does know them and they tell you about them.

• 2:33:45Jocko Willink?

  That's another thing Charlie Plum mentioned to me. He said, you know, you're in a cell with four guys. He said it was around the three month mark. You knew absolutely every detail of their life, every movie they'd seen, every TV show they watched, who all their teachers were, what their, you know, every girlfriend that they ever had, their family, their, their brothers, girlfriends, you just knew everything. And he said, when a new person would come into the cell, it was like all ears.

• 2:34:14Speaker 01

  Nonstop.

• 2:34:15Jocko Willink?

  Just like, tell us your entire life story.

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy.

• 2:34:23Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward here again, I'm gonna fast forward through a bunch of stuff, but,

• 2:34:30Jocko Willink?

  we're getting towards the end here. Early on our final day of captivity,

• 2:34:36Jocko Willink?

  the V issued each of, each of us a pair of dark blue cotton slacks, a long sleeve blue shirt, a gray windbreaker and a small gym bag and a pair of shoes. We didn't waste any time getting dressed. For the first time in more than five years, we would be wearing something other than black or maroon striped pajamas. My feet had become so accustomed to rubber tread tires held on by straps across the toe that I wondered if I would have trouble putting on real shoes. It was not a problem. Yes, this was the day, the long awaited day, and we were functioning as if it was just another day at work. To be honest, I was more curious than excited. I had grown to be so cautious that my emotions were flat as a table. After five years, four months and two weeks,

• 2:35:18Jocko Willink?

  1,955 days of captivity, I was going to walk through this exercise and see what happened. As our names were called, we stepped forward and saluted the senior US Air Force officer who was receiving us. We were then escorted to three waiting C-141s, a bird never, a bird ever after to be known as the Hanoi Taxi. When we were all loaded, the walk-on tailgates were closed and the windowless aircraft, which felt inside somewhat like a cave, began taxiing out. The lack of visibility brought to mind a trip I had taken less than a year earlier when we were transported under a tarp to the back of a, in the back of a truck from the Hanoi north to Dogpatch. On today's journey, though, there would be no

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  blindfolds, handcuffs, guards, or bone-jarring bounces. The revving of the C-141's four big engines caused my heart to race. Pilots loved the feeling of power during the run-up and takeoff. This time, it was almost surreal. As the brakes released and our Hanoi Taxi accelerated smoothly down the runway, we held our breath, waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, the wheels broke ground, we were airborne. A bedlam of cheers, yells, whistles, and foot stomps erupted in the cabin. Our destination was the big hospital at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. As the primary Air Force staging base in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, it was a familiar place to most of us. A few minutes after

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  takeoff, the aircraft commander came on the intercom. "Gentlemen, we are feet wet and over international waters." A roar went up. The captives, indeed, were free. On the flight to Clark Air Force Base, we smoked cigars, circulated, shook hands, looked at the latest magazines, visited the cockpit where I was taken aback to see that the aircraft commander was a captain about my age, still under 30. We also took turns hugging the three nurses onboard. Other than a couple Vietnamese kitchen coolies, we had not seen a female in all those years. As the Hanoi Hilton, as the Hanoi Taxi rolled into the

• 2:37:27Jocko Willink?

  VIP parking space at Clark, we were surprised to see a large crowd waiting with welcome signs and banners. As we deplaned, the cheers and tears of the crowd warmed our hearts and calmed our anxieties about our re-entry into a radically altered world. It was a shock to be treated like returning heroes. We did not see ourselves as heroic. We had simply done our duty.

• 2:37:56Jocko Willink?

  So, that's a...

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Can't even imagine what that was like.

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  You know, we were, as I said, emotionally, we were so flat. It was like, okay, what's next? What's next? But we were thrilled with the crowd and it was exciting. But it was always thinking, okay, this is good. What's next? That was mine, and I'm sure most people, because I didn't know what to expect.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  What was the biggest... And you look, you talk, you talk a lot in the book about, you know, what you're actually doing, you know? You talk about one guy that he must have made three or four rotations through the chow hall line, getting sausages and eggs and steak and ice cream and everything. You talk about some of that stuff. I mean, you got captured in 1967. As we mentioned, this was before the, like, the hippie movement had really come out.

• 2:38:59Jocko Willink?

  What was your view as you came back to this radically changed world? That's the term that uses radically changed, and it was pretty, it wasn't, it was a radical change.

• 2:39:10Speaker 01

  I was protected in that, going back to Georgia and small towns, it wasn't as extreme as it would have been maybe in San Diego or San Francisco or somewhere around San Diego, but San Francisco, LA. So I was somewhat protected. But I think

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  there were several folks that threw parties for me, high school, college friends and that sort of thing, and family. And there was a young lady who was my age, college, went to college with her. But she was an anti-war person. She'd become a college/university professor, I think, was anti-war. But she was my friend, and I did not show any disrespect for her, and she didn't show any for me. We were friendly and treated each other respectfully. I think it was some of the extremists, though, that...

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  Spit on soldiers in uniform and insulted them. I didn't encounter too many of those, but a lot of people did. And POWs, we didn't because the war had ended. It was over and there was something to celebrate and we kind of became something to celebrate that the war was over. So I think both sides, at least the anti-war people tolerated us, at least when we first came home. And so we didn't get any of that negative stuff. And I think that made it a lot better for us and a lot easier for us to make that transition.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, again, we kind of touched on it already, but just the unity that you had as POWs, the time you had spent together, the fact that you had bore your soul to each other and to yourselves, this sort of absolute ownership, this extreme ownership of who you were as people, that you all came out of this shockingly, shockingly well, shockingly well.

• 2:41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. When you look at what we did and where we've been and all as a group, it is shockingly, shockingly well. It's the way we came home. And I think, you know, here's one example in looking at my own self, is I realized after I retired, I never worried about getting promoted. I did my job as best I possibly could. I just wanted to do a good job. And I came back and went to work. And I didn't want any special treatment. I just wanted to prove I could do my job and to be successful with it. But I didn't worry about getting promoted to be,

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  I didn't worry about getting this job or that job, you know, I just, it's coming, it's coming nice and whatever happens is gonna happen, you know. So it, because I didn't have insecurity, going back to the insecure, secure. How can I be insecure when I've got a good job flying airplanes? I'm a flight commander, I'm a section commander, I'm a chief of standardization, I'm a chief check pilot on the base, I'm a squadron commander. I mean, I have had it so good. And I don't think they gave me those jobs because I'd been a POW, you know, I had to prove that I could do it. My, my units got high ratings.

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  They didn't give them high ratings because of me. They, the IG or the inspectors would come in and the standardization evaluation that come in and because I had good guys doing good jobs, okay? My team was doing their job really well. Well, okay, I think I helped them. In retrospect, I didn't think about that, any of that at the time, but now I say, okay, I guess I was doing okay.

• 2:43:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the other thing is, you know, if you're going to be the, let's say that the senior check pilot on base and you are looking at your skill set and you say, oh, you know, I could, I could get a little bit better at this. You're the type of person that goes, well, I'll go work on it and I'll improve on it. So I can be better at this. And those are the kind of people that ultimately get to a higher level because they're being honest with themselves, taking ownership of their shortfalls and then making corrections.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  Yep. I, I, you know, that, that leads to debrief. One of the most important things a person, a leader can do is debrief. And when I make a presentation, I debrief afterwards and say, what did, what did I do well to myself and what did I, could I have done better in this situation? And when I go to a meeting, okay, and I walk out of that meeting, I say, what did I do well? What could I have done better? And I coach myself, okay, next time you need to do this or this or a little bit better. And I do the same thing when I am at home with my wife.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  There are times when I mess up, guys, and I debrief myself after that and say, oh, what could I have done better? Let's, what can I take ownership for?

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes my wife even debriefs me for me, you know, which is a bonus.

• 2:44:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I, I mentioned this earlier. So in, in the book, this is a leadership book and it's a leadership book filled with stories, with a bunch of stories and examples of leadership. And at the end of each one of these sections, you go through what you call foot stompers and it's a very common term. I don't have to, I don't know if civilians use the term foot stompers, but in the military, we certainly, all branches use this term foot stompers, which is when you're learning something from an instructor and they hit a point that's gonna be on the test, they'll, they'll stomp their foot on the ground like, hey, listen up, you better pay attention. Right. So you have these, these sort of leadership foot stompers at, at the end of the book and they're throughout the book, but you, you summarize them here.

• 2:45:24Jocko Willink?

  So I just wanted to go through these, uh, to, to close out this. Uh, number one, know yourself. Authentic leadership flows from inside out. You will be most successful and fulfilled when you clarify who you uniquely are in terms of purpose, passion, and personality, and then lead authentically from that core. And by the way, everybody can tell. And if you're pretend, trying to pretend to be someone you're not, people can tell it. I, I, I always say intent has a smell. So if you're, like you just said, you never tried to get promoted. I never tried to get promoted either. It's like, oh, I'm gonna work hard. And I kind of, I had an advantage that I was a prior enlisted officer. So

• 2:46:09Jocko Willink?

  if I didn't get promoted, oh well, I was still in the Navy for 20 years. They couldn't do anything to me. But that intent has a smell. So like you say here, uh, be authentic. Number two, guard your character. Authentic leaders intentionally guard their character, clarify your values with specificity and total honesty, then structure a support team to help you live them with courage and transparency. Number three, stay positive. A positive attitude is one of leaders' greatest assets and it's one of the best ways you can influence and lead others. Keep your chin up because when it goes down, you do too. And many others will follow right behind.

• 2:46:47Jocko Willink?

  And I don't know if there's any examples throughout history stronger than you all have from being in this POW camp for positive attitude. So.

• 2:46:58Jocko Willink?

  Everyone can learn from that. Confront your doubts and fears. Authentic leaders develop courage as an act of will. Choose today to do what you know to be right, even when it feels unnatural or unsafe. Trust yourself, honor your values, lean into your pain, and intentionally engage issues with strength and humility despite your fears.

• 2:47:23Jocko Willink?

  Number five, fight to win. Successful leaders believe in their mission and fight to carry it out successfully. They don't quit. They expect to win. They take others with them, and they give the others the credit. Number six, bounce back. Authentic leaders know that life is difficult. They expect to get knocked down, and they have the proper attitude and outlook to enable them to persevere. You have a choice about how you respond to difficulties. Confront the brutal realities of your situation, but never give up hope. Develop your plan, connect with your support team, and bounce back. And then you get into a section, leading others. Clarify and build your culture. Authentic leaders intentionally define and build cultures that further the mission, vision, and values of their organization.

• 2:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Assess the culture of your organization and take the appropriate steps to make sure it is well-defined, soundly structured, and effectively communicated. Number eight, over-communicate the message. Effective communication requires intentional effort. To overcome noise, distractions, and misinterpretations in the workplace, you must develop a clear message and comprehensive communication plan. Then you must over-communicate your message multiple times through multiple channels. And I don't care what environment you're in, whatever communication methodology you have is not as hard as tapping on walls with the threat of being tortured or killed. So you can improve the communication inside your organization. Number nine, develop your people. Authentic leaders engage in continual development.

• 2:48:51Jocko Willink?

  Knowledge alone is not enough. The only way to grow as a leader is to do things differently. That requires change. Go first and then take your people with you. And again, I don't think there's anybody that has to work harder to develop their people than creating college courses inside of a prison camp.

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  No books.

• 2:49:08Jocko Willink?

  No books. Tune it all from memory. Number 10, balance mission and people. Outstanding leaders balance accomplishment of the mission, results, and care for the people, relationships. However, the styles of most leaders are naturally biased towards one of this end of the spectrum or another. To enhance your leadership effectiveness, find out which type of skills you need to develop. Then leaning into the pain of your doubts and fears, adapt your behaviors to do what you know a good leader should do. It's another thing that's weird about these tendencies that we have is when we go against them, we think we're wrong. You know, we think like we're going to get in trouble. We think that, I better not do that. I better not, I need to focus on results. That ego

• 2:49:50Jocko Willink?

  will start chiming in. Number 11, build cohesive teams. Build trust by helping teammates gain understanding, acceptance, and respect for each other. The resulting unity and cohesion will enable them to engage in creative conflict, which in turn will build the commitment and loyalty necessary to overcome the most difficult challenges. Underrated way of building a cohesive team, listening to what the team has to say. There's a lot, I didn't, a lot of examples you give in the book about this is how much discussion and input the SROs would take when coming up with a decision. It wasn't

• 2:50:30Jocko Willink?

  like the SROs just created the ideas in a vacuum and then imposed them on the team. You all would have discussions and you describe it in the book as often passionate discussions about what the course of action was. Number 12, exploit creativity. Think futuristically and innovate to stay competitive. Everyone has the capacity for innovative ideas. The leader's job is to draw them out, harness the ideas of creative folks, and allow them to pull you ahead of the competition. And yeah, I read that one little section of Charlie Plum, but that's, there's a whole section that you're talking about all these different individuals and all the things that they did to improve life in the camp.

• 2:51:11Speaker 01

  You know, most of the creativity comes from the bottom up. And leaders need to be aware of that. They're not saying you have to adapt to every idea that comes up, but quite often the people doing the work have the most creative ideas of how to do it better and fix it.

• 2:51:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about that. The, you have to be paying attention to what the people on the front lines are saying.

• 2:51:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Number 13, treasure your trials and celebrate your successes. Effective leadership is forged in the crucible of struggles and fueled by the celebration of accomplishment. To promote teamwork and achieve success, treasure your trials and celebrate your victories.

• 2:51:50Jocko Willink?

  And the last one, free the captives. Authentic leaders proactively identify the shackles that hold them back and lean into the pain to break free and grow. As you gain your own freedom, begin helping others to do the same. Start by avoiding bitterness, connecting with your emotions, and doing the right thing even when it's difficult.

• 2:52:13Jocko Willink?

  So, those are the, uh,

• 2:52:18Jocko Willink?

  the

• 2:52:20Jocko Willink?

  foot stompers. And, and to get like, uh, more of the details around those and great examples, everyone that's listening, get the book.

• 2:52:33Jocko Willink?

  Now, you have this next book. The, the, this book is called Engage With Honor, and we're not going to do it today, but at some point, hopefully you can come back and we can cover that book and the ideas that were in that book and the stories that are in that book. But I wanted to just quickly, just to kind of introduce people to what I thought was a, a really outstanding part of the book and also kind of the crux, or one of the cruxes of the book. Cause the book is called, the book is called Engage With Honor. So I'm skipping to this section here. It's called Learn To Engage. It says, "Collaboration requires engagement. Unfortunately, many leaders respond out of unhealthy emotions. Instead of

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  engaging to collaborate, they let negative emotions drive them to either dominate or withdraw."

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  And again, going back to the dichotomy of leadership, these are two, two extremes that are bad. Dominating a conversation, dominating ideas, or withdrawing from conversation, or withdrawing from ideas. And this is presented in the leadership engagement model, which is something that you created. All of us have made this mistake at home or at work, and usually in both arenas. It's the easy way out, but it's not honorable, and it never works in the long run. In uncomfortable situations, most people have a natural default to either dominate or withdraw, based on their natural DNA.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Negative emotions, so that's like, you know, you get confronted, there's a, there's a plan that needs to be made, there's a scenario that's unfolding, and what most people tend to do is either dominate or withdraw. So if something's getting uncomfortable, they either dominate or withdraw, depending on your DNA. Negative emotions come from the limbic system of the brain that can be quick and strong, making it easy to go left or right side responses. And you've got a chart here that I'm gonna explain. Moving to the engage column. So this is, this is, instead of trying to dominate, or instead of withdrawing, what you want to do is you want to engage. This is the engage column of this chart, which again, I'll describe in a second. It requires you to slow down and use the prefrontal cortex of the brain to rationally consider the issues

• 2:54:47Jocko Willink?

  and what's at stake. Engagement takes a willingness to respect, listen, share logic, discuss mindsets, and stay engaged to work through a healthy solution. Most of all, engagement requires setting aside or walking through your fears, and that takes a great deal of courage.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  And then you get into this, this, this chart that you've got here, the leadership engagement model. So on the one side, you got withdraw. So this is in an uncomfortable situation, this is how people respond. One response that people have is to withdraw, which means they retreat, they hide, they avoid, they abandon, they quit, or they go passive aggressive.

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  The other side, the other extreme on this spectrum is to dominate, which is they control, they dictate, they force, they bully, they manipulate. The, you've got a list of the emotions that kind of trigger these two responses and they're both the same.

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:55:46Jocko Willink?

  Right? Fear, anger, distrust, pride, ego, hubris, pessimism, shame, guilt. Both those, you got both those and both, all those descriptions, both those columns. So, and you know, when some people are afraid, some people just hide, some people attack, right? When people, when people's ego gets in the way, of course, some people, some people shy away or they, they turn people off, they don't say anything, or some people jump in and try and dominate. The correct response here, that you've got in the middle, which is engage, a balanced response, is believe, initiate, dialogue, clarify, connect, collaborate, celebrate.

• 2:56:30Jocko Willink?

  And this is driven by the emotions of courage, of respect, love, trust, humility, optimism, self-respect, confidence. So this is a important thing for us to think about, an important model for us to think about from this book, Engage with Honor, is think about what you're doing when it's time to respond. Are you responding out of fear? Are you responding out of anger? Are you, are you retreating? Are you hiding? Are you avoiding? Man, that avoid one, people like that one, don't they? I'm just gonna avoid this problem, pretend it doesn't exist, hopefully it'll go away. Uh, or are you gonna try and get in there and impose your, your plan, impose your will, and force things down people's throats? None of those are good. Instead, go out and talk to people.

• 2:57:16Jocko Willink?

  Collaborate with them. So, powerful stuff inside that book.

• 2:57:22Jocko Willink?

  And a ton of, ton of other information.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  I think you may have one of those. That's the courage card on one side, the courage challenge. And on the backside, it has the engage model that you were just talking about. So that we give these out to our clients so that they can actually learn to coach themselves. Okay. Ah, yes, I was withdrawing there. I should have engaged. You know, we had a, one client, it was a large hospital. And I, at the workshop, we were offsite retreat and I said, okay, I want somebody to tell a story of how the hospital has done one or the other of these.

• 2:58:05Speaker 01

  And so they thought about it for a minute and somebody says, well, you know, we're working with the doctors from that clinic over there. We tried to dominate because we're the hospital and they're the doctors. And they withdrew. And then a year later, they came back with something and they tried to dominate and we withdrew. And what we needed to do was sit down and work through all that with them.

• 2:58:28Jocko Willink?

  Engage.

• 2:58:29Speaker 01

  Because they need us and we need them. Engage and work through it.

• 2:58:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:58:37Jocko Willink?

  Again, maybe next time we'll, we'll go through that book and some of the leadership in that, inside that book. But for now, that gets us up to date somewhat. Where can people find you? Let's talk about that. I know you've got leadingwithhonor.com.

• 2:58:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:58:54Jocko Willink?

  So that's the main page for your consulting, for your speaking, all that stuff can be found there.

• 2:58:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:59:01Jocko Willink?

  You have an Instagram.

• 2:59:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:59:05Jocko Willink?

  Your Instagram is leadingwithhonor. You have a Twitter. So you're on social media, @leonleeellis. Facebook page, Leon in parentheses, Lee Ellis. And then you LinkedIn, Lee Ellis came up pretty quick.

• 2:59:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:59:24Jocko Willink?

  The books we talked about today, Leading With Honor, both these books are available. We'll, we'll, we'll put them on, yeah, we'll put them on our website so people can just easily find them and link through. I just gave Echo Charles, who's sitting in the corner right now, the look of confirmation. There are times where I, as a leader, fail to correctly impose the idea that when we say something should be on the website, it should be on the website.

• 2:59:51Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 2:59:52Jocko Willink?

  So, I think by the big affirmation nod I just got from Echo Charles, I think we should be good. But, that's where we can find you.

• 3:00:03Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you. And there are a lot of free tools on our website. Lot of things, the things we're talked about here, the Engage Model and everything, those are all free on the website. We even have one on voting. And it's totally non-political, but it's on how to think about who you're gonna vote for, and it emphasizes character. But there's a few questions you can check off, but there's just a lot of free tools on there.

• 3:00:29Jocko Willink?

  What kind of scores are our politicians getting on the character right now? Are we talking about the point, the guy that scored a .01 beats the guy that scored a .001?

• 3:00:40Speaker 01

  You know, I think politicians get very insecure when they're afraid that somebody's gonna publicize something negative about them, and then they fight. And what, you know, talking about character earlier, once you step over the line and do something that you're not proud of, then you have to cover it up, especially if you're a politician. And so you start covering up, and then you do something, that covering up causes more, and it just cascades, really.

• 3:01:10Jocko Willink?

  That's why when you mess something up, you say, "Hey, that's what I just messed up."

• 3:01:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:01:17Jocko Willink?

  "This was my mistake, here's what I was thinking, here's why I did it, wasn't right." Dave, what do you got for questions? You've been, you've been quiet over there.

• 3:01:26Speaker 01

  At least.

• 3:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Let's get an F4 Phantom, let's get an F4 Phantom question, come on.

• 3:01:31Speaker 02

  I don't have any questions. It's, it's actually very easy to be quiet when I'm listening to you tell your story. So, please don't take my lack of verbal engagement as anything other than just being really captivated. And this is, um, probably the second time in a couple of months I've had a chance to sit here and talk to a fighter pilot, tell his story. We listened to Bud, Bud Anderson, a couple of months back, and then of course now you and... What I've been thinking about more than anything is it's it's just it's so remarkable to me that you're you're talking about these names and and as as a naval aviator,

• 3:02:13Speaker 02

  you know, McCain, those names like that, you know, Stockdale, they're just they're just in the vernacular. There's just the names that naval aviation knows. I have a picture from my T2 Buckeye intermediate jet training class, sitting on the wing of the exact same T2 Buckeye that John McCain sat on as an ensign. But when you talk about Lance Seigen, Robbie Reisner, and if you have any connection to the Air Force, which I was very fortunate growing up to have a connection and didn't exchange with the Air Force, those names are the same names for the Air Force as the ones I talked about on the Navy. But those were I only knew them from books. I only knew them from lore and from stories. And to hear you talk about them in a way that really humanizes them

• 3:02:58Speaker 02

  because you didn't read about them, you didn't hear about them, that you actually knew them has been just incredibly incredibly powerful for me because those guys shaped what I did in my life. But I was removed from them because they were just they weren't even people. They were just put up on a pedestal like they were they were elevated above there. But to hear you talk about that, I hope you take a little bit of I hope you take some pride in knowing that there's an opportunity now for a whole other generation of people and the thousands upon thousands of people are going to listen to this podcast and hear those names are going to Google them, they're going to look them up, they're going to read those books, thoughts of a philosophical fighter pilot, those type of books and then

• 3:03:39Speaker 02

  hear about what Lance Seigen did to earn the Medal of Honor. They get to they get to do to another group of people what they did to me. And I think the reason that happened is because I got to sit here and listen to you tell that story and tell those stories of them. So thanks for letting me be part of this. This has been incredible.

• 3:03:56Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dave.

• 3:03:59Speaker 01

  Those guys inspired me too. They were exceptional people because going back to things, some of the things that Jaco's been talking about was they believed in themselves and they weren't afraid to, they weren't afraid of failing. They knew, they were committed to what they were doing, they stayed with it and did the best they could, and they did not worry about what somebody else would think or anything like that. They just did their best. And that's what made them so special to us and everybody else and the rewards and, you know, that they, Ryza would have won a Medal of Honor also, but they'd

• 3:04:42Speaker 01

  already given two or three out to POWs and they didn't want to give anymore, but he should have probably have had one too. It's Silver Star, but they were amazing, inspirational. Lance was an inspiring teammate. We played golf together and dated girls together, but I always kind of looked up to him.

• 3:05:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, when we, you brought up Lance and you talked about Lance, but we weren't on the podcast. Can you, can you go through again, you know, your, your experiences with Lance and, and what happened with him?

• 3:05:14Speaker 01

  Well, we connected in survival school. Right after we got our wings, we were assigned F-4 pipeline Southeast Asia, both of us were, and our first next assignment was to Fairchild Air Force Base to survival school up in Washington, and we went there and went through that. And I watched him in class and out in the field as we were going through, and Lance was paying so much attention, carefully and asking questions in class, and he sat on the front row, and he was so focused on that survival training because he knew we're going to war and should be important. Well, I was too, but not as much as he was. And then

• 3:05:56Speaker 01

  we got to know each other and started playing golf together and dating girls together and partying together and that sort of thing. We went to war together on a chartered flight from San Francisco over to the Philippines, and as quick as we got leveled off and they fed us and all that, Lance and I went back to the back and met the two flight, met two of the flight attendants and got dates with them, okay? And if you read the book about him... Into the mouth of the cat, that girl in there is the one that we met and I still keep in touch with her. But in the situation when his airplane went down in Laos, he evaded capture for forty,

• 3:06:41Speaker 01

  forty-three days or so and was dying. No food, just eating bugs and leaves and that sort of thing. And his back was broken, so he couldn't stand up. He was crawling backwards and he had a skull that was bashed open. So incredible courage and then tried to escape. And he was just an amazing guy that did everything he could to be the soldier he was committed to be. And so that was, and a really good guy. Came from a really good home. You know, I think the one thing I want to say on this podcast because it's so important. Lance grew up in a family where his father, he and his father had a great relationship.

• 3:07:26Speaker 01

  His mother and father, he had a great relationship with both of them. He had a lot of unconditional love. Lance was an artist and a fighter. Hand-to-hand combat type fighter and an artist and a football player and a fighter pilot. But he was incredibly gifted artist and he was an actor. He played in high school, he played in the Great King of Siam or whatever, in one of those plays. He was so incredibly adaptable and so talented in so many areas, but he had incredible amount of unconditional love from his father and his mother.

• 3:08:08Speaker 01

  He had very little insecurity from shame or guilt from growing up. And as a parent, the more that you can provide that to your child, the healthier they're going to be, the tougher they're going to be in battle and the more forgiving and accepting of others they will be. It's just a healthier person. So to me, that's one of the most important lessons I've learned in all of my POW experience, my leadership, is that help people be more healthy, believe in themselves, so they'll be more healthy and they're going to be better performers at work, they're going to be better people at home, they're going to be better parents and that sort of thing.

• 3:08:49Jocko Willink?

  And you two ended up...

• 3:08:52Jocko Willink?

  In prison camp together, but you didn't know it.

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  I didn't know it was him.

• 3:08:55Jocko Willink?

  So, what was that experience?

• 3:08:58Speaker 01

  Well, we were both in the Hanoi Hilton there in the same cell block. And I didn't know he had been shot down. He went down two days after me. And he was about thirty or forty feet away in another cell with two other guys. And he was delirious and he started screaming and it was obvious he was delirious. Because you weren't supposed to make any noise. They'd come in and beat you up. But they knew he was delirious and badly wounded and injured. So they didn't come in and beat him up. They tried to quieten him down. But the English speaker came by checking on all the other cells in there to see what, everything going okay. And he opened our cell and I said, "Why don't you help that man who has a problem? Sounds like he needs some help."

• 3:09:43Speaker 01

  And the English speaker said to me, "He'd been in jungle a long time. Have one foot in grave." And I did not know it was Lance for two years that they was talking about. He died two days later.

• 3:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Any other closing thoughts, Lee?

• 3:10:06Speaker 01

  There are some great lessons that we learned in the POW camp that apply to love and marriage. And so I've just finished a new book called Captured by Love. Inspiring true romance stories from Vietnam POWs. And we have a website, POWromance.com and it'll be out there where you could sign up to learn about it. But we have twenty stories of guys who are POWs more than five years. Two of them more than eight years. Several of them, six or seven years. Who have had incredible love stories. And the romance is in there, but the love is there. And at the end of each chapter, the chapter's about nine or ten pages long, end of each story, we have some love lessons.

• 3:10:51Speaker 01

  And, but those love lessons of commitment, of caring,

• 3:10:59Speaker 01

  were some of the same lessons that helped us survive five, six, seven, eight years as POWs. It's amazing how similar those lessons are.

• 3:11:11Jocko Willink?

  When you know the way broadly, you see it in all things. So these lessons apply everywhere. Well.

• 3:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. Uh, thanks for your service. Thanks for your sacrifice. Just unbelievable what you, what you all went through. Thanks for continuing to pass these lessons on, these leadership lessons on. Uh, I want to close with a section of your book that so, so to set the stage, you get back home, you're, you're getting your life and your career back on track and that meant flying again. Meant flying again. And so you wrote about what that was like. I'm going to take it to the book to close this thing out.

• 3:12:00Jocko Willink?

  You say, "Like most of the POWs, I had decided to continue my career in the service. The Air Force had instituted a plan called Operation Homecoming to requalify returning pilots. So on August 7th, 1973, under the watchful eye of my instructor pilot, I launched a T-38 out of Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. As we cleared the end of the runway, I rotated the white rocket into a max climb, pressed the mic button and made the call to the tower. Freedom 34 airborne. This captive was really free.

• 3:12:42Jocko Willink?

  I had slipped the surly bonds of earth once more." That's freedom, sir.

• 3:12:51Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jaco. Thank you for having me on. It's been wonderful to be with you and Dave and to meet Echo here. And, uh, I appreciate what you're doing to help all of us think about leadership, about service and about just being good humans. So thank you guys for what you're doing.

• 3:13:09Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's an honor, sir. Thank you.

• 3:13:13Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Lee Ellis has left the building.

• 3:13:19Jocko Willink?

  And once again, we can look at our lives and see how ridiculously lucky and blessed are we are to be doing whatever it is we're doing.

• 3:13:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:13:35Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, I mean, how much, I'm going through the book, like, what part am I actually gonna read? Right?

• 3:13:43Jocko Willink?

  There's so much in there to read, and it's all just overcoming the worst possible challenges on a day. You know, we barely even talked about, I mean, I put, I read a little bit.

• 3:14:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're, you're on a trip and you didn't bring any food.

• 3:14:08Jocko Willink?

  And so it's been like nine hours since you ate and you're all bummed out.

• 3:14:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:14Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 3:14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do, yeah.

• 3:14:16Jocko Willink?

  Or, or you go like, hey, we're on a road trip and we're driving and we pull over. There's no food anywhere. So we finally pull over at like a rest stop and they got a bunch of junk. And you're mad, right?

• 3:14:31Jocko Willink?

  Dude, we're talking five and a half years of like a little piece of bread with, with bugs in it.

• 3:14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:43Jocko Willink?

  That's every day. That's what you're getting. That's what you're getting.

• 3:14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:48Jocko Willink?

  We barely even, we touched about that.

• 3:14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14:54Jocko Willink?

  It's insane.

• 3:14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not to mention just all the little details we take for granted where, you know how he's like, oh, I really wanted those socks.

• 3:15:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:02Speaker 03

  Have you ever tried?

• 3:15:03Jocko Willink?

  Pair of socks.

• 3:15:03Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 3:15:04Jocko Willink?

  One pair of socks.

• 3:15:05Speaker 03

  Coming from me is different than coming from you, but I was gonna ask, you ever try to sleep when your feet are cold? And you can't get.

• 3:15:13Speaker 03

  I know, wrong crowd, but I'm just saying, most of us.

• 3:15:18Speaker 03

  Shit is hard, can be, I'm just saying in our, in our daily lives today. But yeah, he, you know, he barely mentioned that or whatever, but consider all that put together. You know, and not to mention the stuff he didn't mention, by the way.

• 3:15:30Jocko Willink?

  But it's like, okay, your, your feet are cold, you can't sleep, you don't have any food. The food that you do have is bugs in it. That's your baseline. On top of that, you're getting tortured, you may get killed, you may get dysentery. All these things are going on. You may have a bomb dropped on you. An American bomb, right?

• 3:15:50Jocko Willink?

  And for, you're going at this for five and a half years. The keeping the, this is what, this is where I started like assessing myself in this, as I was reading this. Is I'm just thinking, I just am slacking in like nine different categories.

• 3:16:06Speaker 03

  Unappreciated.

• 3:16:07Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean? These guys are putting through such effort to improve themselves.

• 3:16:14Jocko Willink?

  In a prison camp, they're trying to learn a new language in a prison camp. They don't have food, like I'm mad because you know, I didn't, my, my, my steak isn't ready yet. I'm kind of mad about that. My rib eye steak is not, you know, the, the, when I got home, my rib eye wasn't fully defrosted. So I'm gonna have to like eat something else besides a rib eye steak tonight and I'm mad about it. Meanwhile, these guys are in a prison camp. And they're making courses to learn and improve themselves. As they're resisting and fighting. I like that little thing that I talked about, like scaling the victories.

• 3:16:58Jocko Willink?

  That's a good thing to do with life. You know, you gotta scale your victories.

• 3:17:04Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, we're lucky.

• 3:17:08Jocko Willink?

  We're lucky.

• 3:17:09Speaker 03

  Hey, what is, uh, what, so I keep, I get these mixed up, which, what's negative G's versus G's? In the plane.

• 3:17:19Speaker 02

  Negative G's is floating.

• 3:17:20Speaker 03

  Okay. So like if you're, okay. So you know when they film, uh, movies? Some movies?

• 3:17:28Speaker 03

  And, uh, they want to do like a.

• 3:17:31Jocko Willink?

  Bro, you're not thinking straight, are your feet cold?

• 3:17:35Speaker 03

  Go through some turmoil over it, but you know, they, they want to do a zero gravity scenario. So they go in a big plane and they make that kind of the recording place and then they do a parabola is what they call it. Right? So that's a negative G's scenario, right?

• 3:17:48Jocko Willink?

  You got it.

• 3:17:49Speaker 03

  Gotcha. And then G's is obviously the.

• 3:17:52Jocko Willink?

  18 G's in the ejection seat, Dave? 18 G's.

• 3:17:55Speaker 02

  Something like that, something crazy. It's, you know, it's obviously a relatively short period of time, but yeah, it's like a massive amount of initial onset.

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  If you eject once, I heard you're grounded for life. Is that true or not?

• 3:18:05Speaker 02

  No, not true.

• 3:18:06Jocko Willink?

  What about two ejections?

• 3:18:08Speaker 02

  I, I don't actually know the, to my knowledge, I don't think there's anything that says you're automatically grounded. I imagine a second ejection, you're going to get a pretty thorough physical, but I knew. You know, a decent number of guys that ejected and went back to airplanes.

• 3:18:21Jocko Willink?

  When you thought about grabbing your ejection handle, what was the scenario?

• 3:18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty fleeting thought. Uh, I'm in a dive. I'm doing, I think I'm doing like just some, what I would consider like basic dumb bomb, dropping bombs at 45 degree dive. You're probably going out on 350 knots, something like that.

• 3:18:38Jocko Willink?

  Where were you? Iraq?

• 3:18:39Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, this is in training. This is, uh, in, in training here, like in Southern California. And, um.

• 3:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Iraq, I'm guessing.

• 3:18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Fair mark.

• 3:18:48Speaker 02

  Come on, dude. Um, I get what's called a, a flight control problem. So I get like a deedle, deedle at the jet starts making these weird noises. I get this thing that lights up and I get this little it code that says FCS caution, which means my flight controls. As I pull back on the stick, like for a second, nothing happens. Like this digital flight control thing. I'm like, whoa, I, I pulled back and like the jet didn't respond for probably a very short period of time. And in that moment, you have these thoughts of like, okay, this isn't good.

• 3:19:15Jocko Willink?

  And you were in a dive.

• 3:19:16Speaker 02

  I'm in a dive.

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  What was the altitude?

• 3:19:18Speaker 02

  I would say probably 6,000 feet. And, you know, I can't do the, the, I, I can't exactly remember the math, but I bet you you're, you're. Your rate of descent, you know, is, is

• 3:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Not long.

• 3:19:31Speaker 02

  Tens of thousands of feet per minute. So you've got, you know, probably a handful of seconds, maybe 20 seconds or something before you literally were to get hit the ground. And in that moment of, hey, I, I pulled back, nothing happens. I need to think about what are my options. Or you run through a few, one of them is, I need to, I might need to get out of the airplane. And then I think a very short period of time, you know, a button you hit and then the plane, the plane's finding you and, and it ends up being totally uneventful. But when you make a consideration of doing that, it's a, it's a significant event in your mind of having to think, should I do this?

• 3:20:02Jocko Willink?

  Did you get the little adrenaline rush down your arms? Like when you almost crashed a car?

• 3:20:05Speaker 02

  Totally. You feel it. Like, I guess as I'm talking to the story, I think, I, I feel it in my chest more than anything. Like a tightening or some, some, uh, you know, I guess it's almost like an exhilaration or something anxious, but, um, dude, like I said, man, I almost don't even want to tell a story after listening to what he's talking about. Not to mention too, I didn't fully, in reading the book, I wasn't able to piece together what, what happened until he explained it.

• 3:20:32Jocko Willink?

  No, I wasn't either.

• 3:20:33Speaker 02

  And to be honest with you, like, my pilot brain, I'm like, this, this doesn't fully make sense to me. Not that I've known what it's like to get shot down. I'm talking about, well, why did the, like, why the airplane did that really didn't make sense. Cause I, I know a lot about AAA. I've seen a bunch of videos. We study that stuff. And how the airplanes react to that is like, didn't make sense.

• 3:20:55Jocko Willink?

  The other thing is, what didn't make sense to me was, uh, like Charlie Plum talking about, you can see the surface to air missiles coming at you.

• 3:21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21:02Jocko Willink?

  Said it looked like a telephone pole.

• 3:21:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:21:05Jocko Willink?

  And you're like looking at it going, oh no, it's going to hit us. Cause I was going to ask him, you know, in boxing, they say it's the punch that you don't see that knocks you out. And I was like, did you not see this thing? And then he explained what happened. It's like, oh dang.

• 3:21:17Speaker 02

  Sam's are a totally different story too. This is a big giant missile going to, you know, mock a couple. And they blow up. Like they literally are designed to explode. AAA doesn't do that. They're just bullets. I mean, they don't have really. So when he explained it, he did it well, like bullet goes through your wing, maybe it hits a hydraulic line or goes through your engine. But you're not going to just instantly detonate in cartwheel. You're gonna, you're probably gonna pull out of it and go, dang, something's wrong. Some indicators will pop up, the jet might start to deteriorate over time, maybe seconds or minutes. But the scenario of being in a dive, being shot at by bullets and then just cartwheel, like literally up until sitting here, listening, explain it, I never fully

• 3:21:58Speaker 02

  piece that together in my head. In fact, the pilot was like, I don't understand what, and I wasn't going to ask him, like, can you explain this better? Cause I, I couldn't follow it. When he explained the, the fuse, the FMU, he called it, which I think is like fuse mechanical unit, literally just the thing that detonates the bomb. As soon as he said that, it all made sense, like a bomb literally blew up underneath his jet. He probably had a string of bombs, probably picture two or three in a row, like the old videos of bombs coming out, the bottom bomb blows up, blows up the next bomb, blows up the next bomb, probably a hundred feet away from his jet or less. Literally blows up his airplane from the bombs detonating. And he's he's talking about tumbling, that makes so much more sense and it's heartbreaking to think that in the end, he actually didn't get shot down.

• 3:22:40Speaker 02

  Um, that clarified why it was such a catastrophic event, requiring him to get out of the airplane so quickly. With such this catastrophic series of failures. Hearing him explain it made it all make sense in my mind and it sucks because you know, obviously you can't predict the future, but

• 3:22:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Were you tracking how long it took me to understand? I was like, wait a second.

• 3:23:02Speaker 02

  We were there together, you know, I have to say, I might've, I known kind of like the terminology of FMU and like, oh yeah, I got that. And, and I, you know, probably studied some of the

• 3:23:10Jocko Willink?

  I was like, wait, wait, what's FMU?

• 3:23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23:11Jocko Willink?

  He's like

• 3:23:12Speaker 02

  And yeah, of course, I understand that stuff maybe a little bit better, but in the end, like I'm there with you. And go, and once it registered, I go, oh dang. And why it's so heartbreaking is that you know this pilot or not. The water is home.

• 3:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:23:26Speaker 02

  Get me to the water. And as he, as he's seeing the ocean, like in your brain as a pilot or anything, especially in our service.

• 3:23:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:32Speaker 02

  Get me to the water. I'll be okay. I'll just hang out there until somebody picks me up in a boat. We're cool.

• 3:23:36Jocko Willink?

  Especially you're down in the, in, in Southeast Asia, the water's getting a little bit warm, you know, you're like, I got this.

• 3:23:43Speaker 02

  And if you tell me the, the water, and I think he said a couple of miles away.

• 3:23:47Jocko Willink?

  A couple of miles.

• 3:23:47Speaker 02

  Bro, that's literally seconds. It's seconds. It's not a couple of miles of walking. It's in an airplane.

• 3:23:52Jocko Willink?

  It's just like thousand one, thousand two.

• 3:23:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:23:54Jocko Willink?

  Eject now, I'm good.

• 3:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. It, and if you're, if you got hit by AAA in your jets, what we call it, kind of like, kind of falling apart underneath you, you're like, hey, man, buckle up, dude. We got about 30 seconds. You're gonna be fine. So the fact that it was catastrophic and had no choice, that was the difference. It would have been better had he been shot down by AAA because he probably could have just pulled the thing out, waffled up, motor shuts down, catches on fire. He's talking to the guy. You get 30 seconds, you're fine. Obviously that didn't happen, but I did not follow that series of events from the book until he explained it and then, and then it's just awful.

• 3:24:32Jocko Willink?

  And it happened to a bunch of people, dude. And he's telling that. I, I, I had never, I had never heard those. I did not know that was the case in my, nope, did not know that.

• 3:24:42Speaker 02

  From, you know, early Phantom days, mid to late sixties.

• 3:24:45Jocko Willink?

  Big cover up.

• 3:24:46Speaker 02

  That fuse is predates anything I ever flew with. You know, our fuses were super reliable. We knew how to program. They worked awesome. I don't think I ever once heard a story of a fuse prematurely detonating a, a, a weapon that we lost in an airplane. We had, you know, different mechanical failures here and there, but nothing like that. Certainly not an endemic thing where multiple airplanes were lost as a result. It's awful. Sucks.

• 3:25:11Jocko Willink?

  Insane. You know, I, I noticed, remember, uh, I think it was an underground podcast we do, we're talking about somebody just using the terms putting hands on.

• 3:25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:25:21Jocko Willink?

  Like I gotta put hands on them.

• 3:25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:25:23Jocko Willink?

  And it's sort of a, it's, does that remind you of when Dave says, get out of the airplane?

• 3:25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's like the lingo that kind of downplays it a little bit, just like.

• 3:25:35Jocko Willink?

  But it's still kind of like badass, but at the same time, you're like, wait a second. Like, I might have to get out of the airplane.

• 3:25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think it, yeah, very similar.

• 3:25:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, put hands on.

• 3:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:47Jocko Willink?

  So there.

• 3:25:48Speaker 02

  What's, what's put hands on?

• 3:25:49Jocko Willink?

  Putting hands on someone is like, dude, I was, you know, this guy was getting my face. I had to put hands on.

• 3:25:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:25:53Jocko Willink?

  It's like a better way of saying it. Instead of just saying like, I had to knock this dude out or whatever. Instead of you just saying like, oh, you know, you got to be jacked. You gotta be like, you know, you might have to get out of the airplane.

• 3:26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, whatever, bro. You guys always say that kind of stuff too, though.

• 3:26:05Jocko Willink?

  But like what?

• 3:26:05Speaker 03

  Putting rounds downrange.

• 3:26:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a good way. I'm probably just like so guilty of like forty seven different little statements like that.

• 3:26:14Speaker 02

  It didn't even, until you brought it up, I was recounting, like, when did I say that? Like, that's how you say it. So it didn't even cross my mind that that was a thing.

• 3:26:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, putting rounds downrange.

• 3:26:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:26:23Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing.

• 3:26:25Speaker 03

  Or even, even, even contact, when you say we contact or the enemy contacted us or whatever.

• 3:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:31Speaker 03

  Bro, they totally attacked you guys with like guns and stuff. Yeah, that's more bigger deal.

• 3:26:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, then it turns into what, what Dave's talking about. Cause like you are so, that's your vote, your, your first, there's not, there's no translation. You're just like, oh, enemy contact. That's what it's called.

• 3:26:48Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, and it seems like even that get out of the airplane, it kind of seems like, hey, let's not make it, it's a huge deal. We all know that already, but let's not make it a huge deal, kind of a thing and think about it that, so we can navigate through this scenario. See what I'm saying? It's almost like it's on purpose. Yeah, just, he just gets out.

• 3:27:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, just so everyone knows, getting out of the airplane is what you should do when you land it. Hey, I'm good now. I'm going to get out of the airplane. All right. It's like the most nonchalant pilot thing to be like, oh, I'm at, I'm at six thousand feet, closing with the earth and going five hundred knots. I'm going to get out of the airplane.

• 3:27:20Speaker 03

  Get right out.

• 3:27:21Jocko Willink?

  Not like, ah! You know, which is what it really is.

• 3:27:25Speaker 03

  Well, whatever. That's the same thing with putting rounds downrange.

• 3:27:28Jocko Willink?

  And same thing with putting hands on someone, you know? It's like, oh, you're, that means you're gonna, you're about to get in a fight with someone.

• 3:27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:34Jocko Willink?

  Blood's gonna be drawn. People are getting stabbed, whatever.

• 3:27:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:27:37Jocko Willink?

  And put hands on, yeah, I'm gonna put hands on this dude, so.

• 3:27:40Speaker 02

  He had a good one too, that I've heard a billion times, but he, in the phrase, he used the phrase, out of airspeed, out of ideas.

• 3:27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:47Speaker 02

  Classic aviator, you know, lingo of, you're done. Yeah, we're done.

• 3:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, right on. So, you know, speaking of food.

• 3:27:57Speaker 03

  Well, I did notice he mentioned he had a Cutlass Supreme with wire wheels on. I had one of those too, by the way. Nineteen eighty-five Cutlass Supreme.

• 3:28:05Speaker 02

  Did you use the same logic as to purchasing that car that he did? Cause the reason he bought that was like the coolest story ever.

• 3:28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the bucket seats versus the bench.

• 3:28:13Speaker 02

  I don't need a bucket seats. I need a bench seats so I can get that girl right next to me.

• 3:28:17Jocko Willink?

  What year was your Cutlass Supreme?

• 3:28:19Speaker 03

  Eighty-five.

• 3:28:20Jocko Willink?

  So that's the same as the Impala, not the same as the GTO, a little different. I mean, it's the same concept though. Cause the Impala is like legit. And the Cutlass Supreme is like

• 3:28:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:28:32Jocko Willink?

  A legit version, but it doesn't have quite the power.

• 3:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, and I didn't, especially at the time, not only did I not have the option, I bought it for my friend, but I didn't know that much about it. You know, I just liked the look, then I bought the wire wheels.

• 3:28:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, Good Deal Dave Berke had a Corvette, right?

• 3:28:47Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 3:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Just straight up, just like a hundred percent, just Top Gun city.

• 3:28:52Speaker 02

  I may have to post a Throwback Thursday Instagram with me and that vet here.

• 3:28:57Jocko Willink?

  Was that your dream car?

• 3:28:59Speaker 02

  A one hundred percent.

• 3:29:00Jocko Willink?

  What color was yours?

• 3:29:01Speaker 02

  The first one I got in flight school.

• 3:29:05Jocko Willink?

  What was it? What color was the first one?

• 3:29:07Speaker 02

  Black on black.

• 3:29:08Jocko Willink?

  What was the second one?

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  Uh, it was like a light, like a pewter-y, kinda like a metallic color.

• 3:29:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:14Speaker 02

  The first one was like a ninety-five black six-speed vet. It was just.

• 3:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Were they fast?

• 3:29:21Speaker 02

  They were awesome.

• 3:29:21Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 3:29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29:22Jocko Willink?

  Cause aren't there some vets that are a little bit wack?

• 3:29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the mid eighties to like the early nineties. I think I had what's called

• 3:29:29Speaker 02

  I know a, a, an aficionado is gonna, I'm gonna get it wrong. I think it was, it was the C5, like that generation was the first real, they had come back to like, it was a

• 3:29:39Jocko Willink?

  A legit vehicle.

• 3:29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and the second one I got, which was an O2, that was totally legit cruising the Top Gun in that thing.

• 3:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Have you seen the new ones with the mid-engine? Are you gonna get one of those?

• 3:29:50Speaker 02

  I've, I've probably outgrown the, the vet. That was, uh, you know, my kid, childhood dream and like young, you know, early twenties.

• 3:29:58Jocko Willink?

  But don't they just reel people back in by going mid-engine on that thing?

• 3:30:02Speaker 02

  That new one's legit. Looks awesome.

• 3:30:04Jocko Willink?

  It's like legit across the board. Like it competes.

• 3:30:07Speaker 02

  Yes. I'm not gonna get one.

• 3:30:10Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, man. I think you should.

• 3:30:12Speaker 02

  Okay, alright. Maybe I'll think about it.

• 3:30:14Jocko Willink?

  Get into the Corvette, as they say.

• 3:30:18Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 3:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, all right. Speaking of food. Speaking of food, so what time is it right now in the world? I don't know. It's been a many, many hours since I've eaten.

• 3:30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30:30Jocko Willink?

  And when I, when I took Lee Ellis downstairs to see him off, I grabbed a milk. A ready to drink milk, because I haven't eaten today. This is the first thing I'm eating.

• 3:30:42Jocko Willink?

  It's delicious. This is a ready to drink. They're out there. Uh, they're in Wawa. We're making them as many as we can right now, which is not easy. Cause the demand signal, you know, we, we had these at camp, at Jiu Jitsu camp. We got enough for like six days or whatever. They were gone in two days. People were just drinking them back to back to back to back to back to back. They're awesome.

• 3:31:05Jocko Willink?

  Get some. If you want to get some, go to Jaco Fuel dot com. Go to Wawa. Go to vitamin shop. And get yourself some. We're going to make as many as we can. And we're upping the production, all that stuff. Uh, cause people want. Things that are healthy.

• 3:31:21Speaker 03

  And we'll supply.

• 3:31:23Jocko Willink?

  One thing that we're supplying better.

• 3:31:26Jocko Willink?

  Is Discipline Go.

• 3:31:29Jocko Willink?

  The drink.

• 3:31:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31:31Jocko Willink?

  Do we call it an energy drink?

• 3:31:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:31:33Jocko Willink?

  We kind of have to.

• 3:31:34Speaker 03

  The new era.

• 3:31:35Jocko Willink?

  Is it?

• 3:31:37Jocko Willink?

  Comparable to a normal energy drink? No, because a normal energy drink is giving you type two diabetes and some other crap.

• 3:31:43Speaker 03

  Issues.

• 3:31:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, issues. So Jaco Discipline Go, an energy drink that's truly good for you. Your kids can drink it. I mean, maybe not your nine year old. But your teenage kids, look, your teenage kid's going to go out and grab one of the other energy drinks, which is literally horrible for them. It's poison. So we're not doing that. Let them drink something healthy. So there you go. Discipline Go, Jaco Fuel, Jaco Fuel dot com.

• 3:32:06Speaker 03

  Who's the, the, the, what do you call it? It's like the, a caricature of the, the teenager kid with the flat brim hat. They call him Kyle. You ever heard of this guy?

• 3:32:16Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:32:17Speaker 03

  It's not a real guy. It's like just a caricature.

• 3:32:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:32:19Speaker 03

  And he has the energy drink.

• 3:32:21Jocko Willink?

  Wait, is it Chad?

• 3:32:22Speaker 03

  No, no, Chad is different. Kyle is different, yeah.

• 3:32:25Jocko Willink?

  So who's Chad?

• 3:32:26Speaker 03

  Chad is like a, uh, not a womanizer, but a guy.

• 3:32:29Jocko Willink?

  He kind of a stud?

• 3:32:30Speaker 03

  A stud, yeah, exactly right. Got it all going for him in that way.

• 3:32:33Jocko Willink?

  And Kyle's just a bro. Is Kyle a bro?

• 3:32:36Speaker 03

  Kind of like the bro, uh, you know, flat brim hat, may or may not have sparkles on his oversized white shirt. May or may not be a gamer, has an energy drink.

• 3:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:32:47Speaker 03

  Usually a bad one. It's kind of a negative stigma, like they kind of tease him, kind of, not totally.

• 3:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Kyle's not drinking one?

• 3:32:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:32:53Jocko Willink?

  He's not drinking a discipline go?

• 3:32:55Speaker 03

  No, he's not. He's drinking a junk energy drink, but, so you need a different guy now. See what I'm saying? You gotta be, I don't know.

• 3:33:01Jocko Willink?

  Somebody's training jujitsu?

• 3:33:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:33:03Jocko Willink?

  Somebody that's working out?

• 3:33:05Speaker 03

  Getting up early.

• 3:33:06Jocko Willink?

  Somebody that's getting up early, getting after it. Alright, there you go. Uh, yeah, chocolatefield.com, originusa.com. Get stuff made in America, get shirts, get belts, get boots, get jeans, get stuff made in America. Get stuff made in America. That's what I'm talking about.

• 3:33:26Speaker 03

  But those new, uh, okay, so Delta sixty-eight jeans, there's the two new colors. What do you guys call them? The wash? Or whatever. I'm not an industry that much, but nonetheless, so I, so I use the light ones. We went out to dinner the other day. And my son really liked the light ones. He's six, but for him to point it out and say that those jeans are dope? It's one of the litmus tests.

• 3:33:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he likes Molk too.

• 3:33:49Speaker 03

  He likes Molk too.

• 3:33:50Jocko Willink?

  He's just across the board, legit kid.

• 3:33:52Speaker 03

  Approval.

• 3:33:52Jocko Willink?

  I like this kid.

• 3:33:53Speaker 03

  Approving, approving. And he's kind of hard to please too. He's one of those kind of guys. Cause I got one of these RTDs, not the, not the Molk, like the other brand that was kind of supplied at, at one point, given the, the place we were at. And he didn't like them. I'm straight up to say junk, that one's junk.

• 3:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and now he's down for the cause.

• 3:34:09Speaker 03

  Oh, he's totally down for the cause.

• 3:34:11Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, originusa.com. Get yourself some American made stuff. That's my, that's, look, we're supporting America. I think that's just as self-evident. Right? That's what we're doing. And you know, even if, let's say we're like, oh, well, I'm not necessarily, I'm sure I support America. Okay. Well, do you at least not want to support slave labor? Do you at least not want to support a thirteen-year-old girl working in a sweatshop in, somewhere in some foreign country? For three dollars a month?

• 3:34:40Speaker 03

  That could crumble, by the way, at any moment like it has before in the past.

• 3:34:44Jocko Willink?

  So, hey, look, you don't want to support America? Fair enough. Okay. But do you want to support the virtual, a form of slavery that's taking place right now? You probably don't. SupportOriginUSA.com. There you go.

• 3:35:00Speaker 03

  It's true. Also, Jaco Store, Jaco's Store. JacoStore.com is where you can get Discipline Equals Freedom shirts.

• 3:35:06Jocko Willink?

  You kind of messed it up.

• 3:35:07Speaker 03

  No, I was reinforcing it. See what I'm saying? So I say Jaco Store, that's what I'm about to talk about. URL, uh, what do you call it? Website, JacoStore.com.

• 3:35:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:35:17Speaker 03

  Discipline equals freedom. Shirts and hats and hoodies. We do have the Shirt Locker. Gone are the days of not being able to find a t-shirt in the event that you are a t-shirt wearer, which a lot of us are. But those days are gone. You always have a new one every month. Boom. All designs are good. Real positive feedback.

• 3:35:38Speaker 03

  Look out for that one. JacoStore.com.

• 3:35:41Speaker 03

  I made it to you.

• 3:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Bruh.

• 3:35:44Speaker 03

  What?

• 3:35:44Jocko Willink?

  Your feet must be cold or something, right? You're all over the map.

• 3:35:47Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't. No, that was very cohesive. You see what I'm saying?

• 3:35:50Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. Uh, subscribe to the podcast. Go to JacoUnderground.com. Subscribe to that, too. Go to YouTube channel. Subscribe to that. Get Psychological Warfare. Get FlipsideCanvas.com. Dakota Meyer. Books. We got Leading with Honor by Lee Ellis. We got Engage with Honor by Lee Ellis. Check out those books. Tons of lessons learned. Incredible books to read. Only Cry for the Living, Speaking of War, Holly McKay. She wrote an awesome book. Risked her life to write that book. Pick that one up, especially with everything that's going on in the world right now. It's good stuff to understand. You know all the books I've written. You might want to check those out, especially the kids' books. Come on. Come on. Maybe you're like, too late to save.

• 3:36:33Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you're like, Discipline Equals Freedom, it's not going to help me because I'm just too, I'm already just, just a disaster. But don't let your kids go off the path.

• 3:36:42Speaker 03

  Break the cycle.

• 3:36:43Jocko Willink?

  Break the cycle. Get your kids on the path at a minimum. Look, should you get on the path? Yes. You should get Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. You should get that for your, your, your cousin. And your dad and your mom, right? Do that. At but at a minimum, get your nephew and your kid. And well, you know, the people you know, the kids you know, get them the way of the Warrior Kids series, get a Mike in the dragon, just do that. Do them a favor, a lifelong favor. Ashlam Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. We have the next muster is in Orlando, April 3rd through the 5th. So if you want to come to that, you better sign up now. The one that we're Atlanta sold out.

• 3:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Everything we do sells out, sells out. So if you want to come to any of our events, go to ashlamfront.com. If you have a company, you want us to work with your company, helping you with leadership, ashlamfront.com. We also have online training academy. You can get better. You don't have to create courses from memory in a prison camp to get better. You can go to extremeownership.com. Can learn about leadership from us. We don't have to hit a tap code, thankfully. We can just sit there and answer your questions in a live session. Or you can go through the courses that we have on there. Learn about life. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization.

• 3:38:09Jocko Willink?

  If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. And don't forget about Micah Fink, who's up there in the wilderness. Reintroducing veterans to their soul. Heroes and horses.org. Once again, if you want to follow Lee Ellis or you want to connect with Lee Ellis, leadingwithhonor.com. He's got an Instagram, at leadingwithhonor. He's got a Twitter, Leon Lee Ellis. Facebook, at Leon in parentheses, Lee Ellis. And his LinkedIn is Lee Ellis. The books, Leading with Honor, Engaging with Honor. And of course, Captured by Love is new one. I don't know what's coming out, but it's coming out soon.

• 3:38:53Jocko Willink?

  So be on the lookout for that one. They, he wrote it with a love expert named Greg Goddick. Somehow I didn't get tapped as the love expert. But that's the way it is.

• 3:39:07Jocko Willink?

  If you want to follow us on Twitter, on the Gram, on Facebook, Echo is at Echo Charles, Dave is at David R Burke, and I am at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm because it'll grab you. And thanks once again to Colonel Lee Ellis for his service and sacrifice into all those POWs who faced such horror, but maintained their honor and therefore the honor of our great nation. And thanks to all the military personnel out there. You sign the dotted line and swear to uphold the Constitution regardless of what you face. So, thank you

• 3:39:48Jocko Willink?

  for protecting us and our way of life. And the same goes to the rest of our police force, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. You all swear an oath to protect us. And we thank you for your service as well. And to everyone else that's out there, when you're facing something tough, like life, because life is tough, remember the Stockdale Paradox. That is that you can never confuse faith that you're going to prevail

• 3:40:29Jocko Willink?

  in the end. So, you've got to believe that you're going to prevail in the end, and you can't afford to lose that. But at the same time, you've got to have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be, so that you can overcome them. So, face the facts and know you can win. And then go out and get after it. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jaco. Out.